The world shouldn't be designed for idiots, but it is. But for the love of god, don't ignore the people who can tell left from right!
It's not just not being able to tell left from right, it's not being able to memorize every single instance of where one needs to right click versus left click, since this behavior is not consistent. It is also all those people trying to use a stylus, or braille board or any alternative interface. Is Stephen Hawking an idiot because he needs to use an input for the disabled?
Are you a usability expert? I just want to know, because you spend a lot of time talking as if you are. This is not a criticism, just a question.
I've done usability testing professionally and had formal and informal education on the topic. My company ships me to a conference every now and again so I stay current. That said, I may be an "expert" compared to some people, but I've never published on the subject and it is not my primary expertise.
Tech support with GUIs is a setup. Explaining the right vs.left button is nothing compared to trying to explain scrolling to someone who doesn't know it by that name, or trying to walk someone through something that's slightly different on your screen because of a version mismatch. This isn't a mouse issue, it's an issue with the difficulty of effectively delivering remote tech support.
The problem of remote support is difficult, especially for hardware, but that is certainly not the only source of problems with multi-button mice. As I said, during usability tests, which are usually accomplished simply by giving users tasks and then recording everything they do, this is a common problem to see. There is no remote communication issue in these circumstances.
'm guilty of having to think of the difference between left and right when someone gives me directions, but I don't click the wrong button any more than I mistype my password or make other inadvertent or clumsy mistakes. I'm guessing this is the same for almost everyone. This is not a mouse issue, but a human dexterity issue.
This isn't a matter of dexterity, so much as "muscle memory." repetitive behaviors can condition a reflex. A reasonably good typist does not think "I need to type a 'Y'" and then consciously move their finger to that key, they simply think, 'Y' and move their fingers in a conditioned way. Here's an exercise, try drawing the layout of a keyboard and each letter without using your fingers. Now try it by thinking of a letter and filling in the location. You might notice your finger twitch sometimes as you do this. It is memory, but a different kind than normal memorization. The same is true for mouse clicks, except that it is not consistent enough to train properly for people who do not use the same applications a lot.
Getting rid of a button doesn't fix it, it just moves your clumsy errors to occurring at the menu bar.
Again, this is not being clumsy, it is not knowing which button to press because it is not a reflexive behavior like typing is. This is especially true because some novice users become trained to hit both buttons at once and it works most of the time with a failure rate too small to keep them from being conditioned.
If your father truly forgets which button does which, I'll be impressed in a clinical sense that his memory is so selectively bad with this, but works just fine with email addresses.
My father always beats me at trivial pursuit. He can cite all sorts of obscure financial laws from memory. His memory is above average. The issue is, he uses a dozen different programs some of which have functions he needs in the right-click menu and all of which have functions he needs via left clicking. Keeping straight which are which is a very difficult task for normal memorization. This is literally hundreds of instances to memorize, some of which he accesses less than once a year. It isn't repetitive enough to train muscle memory and it is enough individual items to challenge even a person like him with a really good memory.
Is it really that much easier for her to use a one-button mouse, or were there other OS differences she found easier to work with on a Mac?
It was not the only thing she found easier, but it was one big factor. She's one of those people with a notebook with a list of steps for every single task she accomplishes. "Click the Firefox icon, select the bookmarks menu, select e-mail, Click the OK button, click the subject line of the first message,
Uhhh, yeah it would be way too hard to have a setting in the OS that would make both buttons the same for all those "novice users."
Yes, that would be too hard. First, novice users don't change default settings. They don't know how, or even that they can and most are afraid to do anything new lest they break something. Second, because the default setting is two buttons and has been for a long time, software makers design software that requires two buttons. Novice users thus lose the ability to use these software packages properly, causing even more confusion. That is why one button, needs to be the default setup, which is exactly what Apple has done.
I can't even live without a scroll wheel anymore. As for your points about advanced users, don't you think that "optimal" number of buttons may be two or three instead of one? Why jump into mentioning four or five buttons.
The optimal number of buttons is different for each person, I imagine. The problem is, having one of those buttons an almost useless one most of the time is less than optimal for almost everyone. Using the same mouse on Windows and OS X, I have one more useful button on OS X, because the functions are assigned by me, not the guy who wrote Wordpad and had no useful things to put in that menu.
What we are saying is that one is too few.
One is too few, only for more advanced users. And those users almost always buy a new mouse that fits their needs anyway.
The very fact that I have to use my other HAND to hold down the ctrl key is proof that one is too few.
Why do you have this problem? Do you have an old mouse that does not have multiple buttons? Do you have a new mouse that you couldn't figure out how to enable the extra buttons? Do you have a trackpad and you can't reach with one hand because you have really short fingers? Be specific.
As for developer practices, the only point you've made is that there should be a minimum standard. But why should that standard be one button? Why not make a mouse with no buttons where you have to hit a key to make a regular click? That would be an even easier standard for the developers.
I'm not sure this is even deserving of a response. There should be one button, by default, because users have an easier time using one button as compared two or zero by default. Putting zero would encourage developers to not use mice at all, which is less useful in most applications. The short answer is, because decades of usability testing have show that 1 button mice are the best compromise and because if you look at Windows and OS X today you can see a lot fewer usability problems on OS X, simply because of this one item. It is not as though this is not mentioned in numerous texts on usability. It is not some new idea I just came up with, but the consensus of the industry.
Apple should ship with a fully functional mouse, and if they want they can have all the buttons do the same thing until you change the setting.
Umm, Apple does ship with a fully functional, multi-button mouse. It does have only one button in the default configuration, which you can change, in software, on a per-user basis. Get with the times.
This isn't about what MS does that's illegal. It's about what they do to make people hate them. One does not necessarily imply the other.
I agree, but the post I was responding to, confused the issue by listing things people object to, under the label of "illegal abuses." I imagine after reading "I think it is important to consider that people object to the results of both MS's illegal abuse of their monopoly and to results of them having a monopoly in the first place." from my post, that would be clear.
I launch apps by double clicking files all the time.
I think you misread what I wrote. I was arguing that action was common with a mouse (clicking). I was arguing that launching apps via the keyboard (not CLI) is uncommon.
That being said, I'm perfectly fine with both using enter to open files on Windows and command-down on the Mac. Both seem intuitive to me, so it's just an issue of switching back and forth.
Have you ever done this? Do you do it often. Do you do it over and over and over again, so that it justifies making this behavior easy at the expense of making a common activity hard?
A common task is renaming files, lots of files. On the mac this is much easier. It is one of those tasks that is ideal for keyboard use. Not using the CLI, but using the finder you select the first file, hit enter, type the name, and hit enter again. Then you use the arrow keys to move to the next file, never touching a mouse.
If you try to do the same thing on Windows, you have to use the F2 key instead of the enter key or you will be opening the files instead of renaming them. Normally, this change would be no big deal, but if you're doing it over and over for a large number of files moving your hand out of place every time is really annoying. Since I have never, ever, that I recall opened a file in windows by selecting it and hitting enter, it seems this common combination could be better assigned.
You're one of 100% of Mac Apologists who claim there's no reason people need more mouse buttons
This is the logical fallacy called a strawman argument. Had I actually said that, you could have quoted me. I didn't, however,say that, you just made it up.
Telling them they're wrong for wanting it is decidedly not useful.
If someone who is not a usability expert claims a change they think might help them is a good idea, then it i certainly appropriate to give them reasons why that change is probably a bad idea for users in general. Further, often users do not know what allows them to complete a task most effectively, because their own perspective on the situation is not objective. A lot of people who spend 10 or more seconds selecting an item from a menu tell researchers that spending 2 seconds clicking a button, then waiting 3 seconds, took longer. That doesn't mean the former is better, it means the user was factually incorrect because they did not have the proper perspective to see the issue.
I have a challenge for you. Find someone, somewhere, who sometime in the 21st century has claimed that two mouse buttons are confusing. Here's the catch; They also have to demonstrate that they can use Mac OS X for general computing tasks such as surfing the web; typing, printing and saving a document; and sending a simple email.
I don't have to go very far for that, my mother fit perfectly in that category until I got her a mac. For that matter my father, who uses OS X for e-mail and nothing else regularly clicks the wrong mouse button on his Windows box and has to try the other one. Ask anyone who has done tech support for basic users and you'll find clicking just one, proper mouse button is one of the most common usability problems with Windows. There is even a joke poster I saw printed in one support center that read something like:
"Press the right button." (Presses left button) "Ok".
"No, not that one. I said the RIGHT button." (Presses left button) "Ok"
"No, the RIIIGHT button." (Presses left button) "I DID press the right button."
"Ok. Now press the WRONG button." (Presses right button)
The truth is, I don't think you'll find a single person on Earth that can do email but is actually confused by two mouse buttons.
As much as you my disagree with it, left and right mouse buttons are very confusing to a lot of users and even in more advanced usability studies you see people hit the wrong one now and again, and I'm not talking about random college kids, I'm talking about network security experts and people responsible for some of the largest and most critical networks on the planet. For novice users, they are a huge problem and applications designed with multiple buttons in mind are often wholly unusable for people with alternate input devices like braille boards, tablets, spoken interfaces, etc.
Have a source for that statistic? Didn't think so.
It was an intentional exaggeration to make a point. What percentage of users do you think try such a task?
As for your other rant, it's without merit. As I have stated in another post, it would be easy for Apple to split-sensor the single huge-assed button so that it COULD be identified as three buttons, but by default act like a single button.
Yes, they could. The question is, is there real benefit to this, considering the additional cost and dev time it would require. As I explained elsewhere in this thread, chording with a mouse and keyboard is problematic because you have to move your off hand. Chording with a laptop trackpad and keyboard does not have this problem and ends up being faster than multiple trackpad buttons, once you learn how to do it. So you are asking for a potentially expensive solution in both dev time and hardware cost and reliability in order to reduce how hard it is to perform a very uncommon operation, that is faster to do another way once you do learn. If I was at Apple, that would be pretty low on the list of projects I wanted to do.
A simple configuration option could solve one of the largest complaints...
I think you mean a simple configuration option, the cost of whatever else that developer is not doing and the cost of creating, building, and supporting a new type of hardware.
Somehow you seem to think that giving others the option to have more than one button will somehow cause instant death for mac GUI design traditionalists.
Where did you get idea? If Apple can make a single button default trackpad button, that converts in software to a multi-button one, and does not significantly raise the cost of the laptops or reduce their reliability and longevity, I have no problem with them doing it. I just don't think it is, or should be much of a priority for them and I think I've done a pretty good job of explaining why.
If people didn't want more than one mouse button, then why is it that every replacement mouse for a mac have at least 3? Hell, even the mighty mouse has more than one.
Some people, especially those who buy a custom mouse, do want multiple buttons. That does nothing to speak to the benefits versus problems with shipping one by default. I use a four button trackpad every day. I still am thankful every day that Apple ships a one button mouse by default on their systems, so I don't have to try to find a good five button trackball or lose functionality to the poor design practices in the industry today.
However, computer technology is unlike other consumer products in how much interaction and inter-reliance there is between various independently purchased components. I would argue that the reason Microsoft's virtual monopoly stands is not necessarily that they have the absolute best browser or best OS, etc. but that having a standard platform/product allows for a much higher level of integration and more reliable performance from the other pieces of software/hardware that need to interact with it.
There is no reason why standardized interfaces between products cannot work just as well as they do in other industries. No one has trouble connecting different products from different vendors using RCA jacks. Even much more complex and computer related interfaces between products work just fine between different products from different vendors. If, however, what you say is true than MS should suck it up and split the company in two, each with full rights to the Windows code. This will give both companies the ability to bundle anything they want without compromising the benefits of capitalism.
Like you said, if you write a web page, you have to test it on the various browsers your clients might potentially use, and work around any inconsistencies.
I said that to be generous. The truth is, in my experience I automate the creation of pages to the spec, test it and it works fine in every browser except IE. Then I work around all IE's problems. I'm sure other browsers have bugs, but realistically none of them are significant enough to cause me any extra work.
If you know that all (or at least the vast majority) of your clients will be using browser X, then you can build a more reliable web page and maybe even a better one if you can use particular features only supported by that one browser.
You could, if not for the fact that MS intentionally breaks things between versions in order to further promote their lock-in and necessitate upgrades. Ideally, however, you should just work to a standard. No one thinks it would be better if all consumer electronics were just designed to take power from whatever kind of batteries Energizer was making today. No, they create devices to work with industry standards and if some battery maker fails to meet the standard their batteries are considered defective and returned. It should be the same with Web browsers.
It's my position that the adoption of a standard platform (almost to the point of being a monopoly) has real benefits that aren't outweighed by the imposition of a particular set of flaws that necessarily accompanies any product.
What you're failing to see is that having only one product not only means you have one set of flaws, it demotivates companies from fixing those flaws or making improvements. Capitalism works because despite having many people all wasting resources doing the same thing, those people are highly motivated by greed. Ten companies might be making batteries, but the wasted resources involved in that still results in better, overall improvements to the battery industry than just having one manufacturer does. If your only choice of battery is Energizer, why in the world would Energizer spend money trying to make them last longer, or work in colder conditions, or be smaller? How does that make them any money? More importantly what motivation do they have to not intentionally cripple the batteries or make them last shorter times so they need to be replaced even more often? Why shouldn't they develop anti-features that profit them?
That is exactly the state the OS industry is in right now and it has resulted in horrible stagnation and inflated prices for years. Worse yet, its spreading. You can't just buy a battery in the store anymore. You have to buy a Energizer bundle including a battery, toothbrush, and nail polish, all designed to fit in the special patented trapezoidal pouches inside Energizer brand purses and fanny packs.
As Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Part of what advances knowledge is building on that which came before, and Apple would do well to understand that.
Yeah, okay. Hopefully Apple knows their UI is not perfect and is willing to borrow to make it better. They seem willing as they're incorporating virtual desktops and many other features from other systems.
Case in point - it took them *forever* to produce a two-button mouse, even though the rest of the world had long before learned the advantages of such a device.
Yeah, and by watching others Apple was also able to see all the disadvantages of such a system. Usability experts the world around wish they could go back in time and make one button mice the standard and simplify their lives. One of the most common interface problems is that people click the wrong button in some instance, or both buttons simultaneously with random results. For novice users, a single button is a much, much, much better option. More than that, the end results of the standardization on one or multiple button mice makes a big difference on the software ecosystem. Given that novice users are better with one button, lets look at advanced users. On Windows and on OS X I use the same four button trackball with a scroll wheel. On both systems the primary button does the same job and the third and fourth buttons are user assignable to tasks I commonly use. The only difference is the second mouse button. Is it more usable on Windows or OS X? On OS X, it is assigned to a series of services and scripts I chose. It is up to me to decide, on a per-app or and/or global basis what is available. On Windows, this app is full of functions that the application designer chose, many of which I never want or use. Even in applications like Wordpad, this key is assigned to functions I will never, ever use, while in OS X and textedit, this button provides me with word counts, grammar checker, translation between languages, some perl scripts I commonly apply to text, and other options I've chosen. Basically, it frees up one more button for me to assign, and I need it because otherwise I'd need a mouse with 5 buttons. My third button activates expose to quickly choose apps and my fourth button activates my dashboard widgets or my virtual desktops, depending on the context. So for me, a power user, the one button default gives me one more useful button.
And what else does this affect? Have you ever used scripting applications, or alternative input devices like tablets, braille boards, spoken interfaces, etc.? Because OS X only has one button by default, all developers code to that standard and all functions are available to users of all these devices. With Windows applications, it is not uncommon for poor developers to place functionality for an application only in a right-click menu, making it difficult or impossible to access using these alternative interfaces. It encourages poor development practices.
Okay, so now lets look at Apple's multi button mouse. They have learned from the mistakes of others. By default, it works as a one button mouse so all the advantages listed above apply. In addition it works as a multi-button mouse for power users. Better yet, this change occurs in software, so a mac in your living room can have a mouse that is one button for the kids and multi-button for the grown ups or experts all without switching and hardware around and automatically set up on a per-account basis. All the benefits with none of the negatives. The only question is what about laptops? Will they make multiple buttons and option there as well? I doubt it, but it is possible. The reason is, when you use a desktop with a mouse, you either have both hands on the keyboard or one on the keyboard and one on the mouse. In the latter configuration, having to use chording with the keyboard slows a user down as they must move their hand. On a laptop, however, both hands are already in place and once you learn how it is (according to usability studies) faster to use the trackpad button with chording than it is to have multiple buttons that make you move your off hand. They might find other ways to use the trackpad to provide this, but I doubt it will be physical buttons.
An example of this is trying to use your macbook while waiting for a flight (or on a flight). I use a number of X11 applications (xterm being the most common, because the apple terminal app is horrible) which really wants a 3 button mouse.
Congratulations. You're one of the.000000001% of people who ever used a X11 application on a mac, while not having a three button mouse available, and while kknowing about and need ing the third mouse button features. I don't think it is reasonable to redesign the system in such a way that makes it harder for the novice and average user in order to accommodate such a rarity. Also, from the testing I've seen, with a trackpad the key combinations actually save time once you learn them since you don't have to move your non-dominant hand from the keyboard or move your hands at all. As a result, adding more buttons to a laptop only helps learnability, not overall usability. If you're using X11 applications with the third mouse button option, on a portable, learnability is probably not as important to you.
Consider another location for the dock. Most of the time people who hide the dock are trying to save screen real estate and for most users vertical space is more important than horizontal. Try just leaving it open all the time on the right or left side of the screen. I, personally, find it much less of a hassle.
The best solution is probably to have Return act like double-click, which would match a lot of other GUI. This probably means it opens it, though maybe it means that double-click renames files?
Most users will never, ever launch a file using keyboard navigation. Those that do, will probably want to use this feature relatively rarely. That said, it makes no sense to make this the easiest thing to do. Have you ever renamed 50 files by hand. I have, and it is a pain in the ass. The last thing you want to do is use the mouse. With OS X it is about as fast and easy as possible. you hit enter, type the name and enter again, then the down arrow to go to the next one. This is not that uncommon of a task for some users. When was the last time you ever heard of someone wanting to use the keyboard to consecutively and repetitively launch 50 applications? When was the last time you launched an application in the currently open Finder or Explorer window using the keyboard?
I think Apple is 100% right on this one. Make the common, repetitive tasks easy. Make the uncommon tasks slightly harder. If I want to launch an application 50% of the time I'm using the mouse. 30% of the time I'm using the keyboard and spotlight is faster than selecting the application using the finder. The rest of the time I'm using the CLI.
It is hard to be secretive about an OS when you pretty much have to give copies to developers if you want third party applications to not break when you ship the new OS.
Not really. The version you give them can be a branch that includes the features that are likely to affect third-party applications and has all the new APIs, but may not necessarily include all the new features the OS will add on.
I think it has more to do with the kind of people that comprise the tech crowd. A lot of techies tend to be more anti-establishment (think open source) and often more arrogant than the average joe.
I disagree. Most people on Slashdot, in my experience, make statements of admiration for some company that is the biggest player in their market. Sure, a few people always cheer the underdog, but I don't think that is what is happening here.
1) that they already have it in for any big organization that is imposing rules or standards (in the form of file formats, DRM, etc) that are not democratically adopted by the community
You're way off base, IMHO. Most people are happy to accept product from some big company. Look at Wii, Xbox360, and PS3. All are from large, established players and all have big followings here. Microsoft isn't reviled because they don't democratically decide on features, they're reviled because they undermine capitalism to prevent people from choosing other products. Most people realistically have no choice other than to use Windows, and as a result are angry when they have to deal with the myriad flaws in the product. Think of it this way, if you choose between three different products in the store, how much do you blame the company that made the product you chose when there are problems with it? Sure you don't like it, but you realize it is partly your own choice that was the problem and resolve next time to buy from someone else. If, however, when you go to the store there is only one product because the company that makes it broke the law and strong-armed the store into only carrying that product, you had no choice, so you lay all the blame for something not working on the manufacturer. Moreover, you know the next time you buy one, you're still going to have only one choice, so there is no emotional release because you have planned a realistic retaliation. That is why people are so upset with and emotionally charged with regard to MS.
...they like to think that they know how it could be done better.
But users generally do know how something could be better for them. The problem is they don't have a choice of choosing what is best for them, because all the real alternatives have been driven out of the market or made almost unusable by monopoly abuse.
We also seem to hold them to very, very high standards; any flaw or problem is considered unacceptable.
All products have flaws, but the users lack of control over which flaws they have to deal with is what provokes the emotional response to MS.
It may also just be that we like to complain. Haters gonna hate.
Again, there are lots of products and all of them have flaws. The reason MS is more disliked than most is because they are a monopoly and an abusive monopoly at that. In a free, competative market, if I make a Web page I write to a standard and then test against browsers. If one browser is all messed up, maybe I work around it, or maybe I let people know it is broken. Either way, I have some control. In our current market, I can write following the standards, but then I have no choice but to spend extra time working around all of IE's problems. This is directly the result of MS breaking the law to control the market. Thus, I'm more angry about that extra work and my lack of control, than I would be about the same development problem if I had control and if someone were not illegally profiting from my extra work. Understand?
It's as simple as having two buffers, one for "proper" copy/cutting/pasting, and one for quick jobs, where a highlight and a middle click is better suited.
Multiple buffers are fine for power users, but they are simply too hard for normal users to understand and use, from what I've seen. I don't consider them to be a reasonable default. I'm by no means a novice user and I have successfully used multiple copy/paste buffers in the past, but it interferes with training your hands to do the right thing when you have to juggle two different mechanisms. I often want to copy something, highlight something else, perform an operation, and then paste the first something. My fingers simply don't remember that I have use an operation to copy something the first time, if I'm going to be doing that, when I normally just highlight to copy. Realistically, the time it takes for me to hit a key combo when my hands are already on the keyboard is negligible compared to a few instances of going back and recopying something because I copied it into a buffer that was then overwritten. I suspect this is true for a large number of users.
I'd much rather see both multiple buffers and automatic operations on highlight to either the standard buffer or a special buffer as an optional feature. It is one of those things like virtual desktops that is aimed more at UNIX people who don't want to change, than it is at real usability benefit for the majority. I think it is worthwhile, but should not be a big priority. I like my middle mouse button activating expose, thank you very much.
I really wish OS X worked like X.org when it came to copy/pasting. Highlight = copied, middle click = pasted. Why bother with menus and keyboards?
Here's a workflow. I want to copy some text, delete it, then replace some other text with that first text. Using X.org, I highlight the second text and delete it. Then I highlight the first text and it is copied. Then I delete it. Then I navigate again to the second location and paste. In total I have three navigations of the file, two highlight operations, and three keyboard operation (2 deletes and one paste).
Using the Apple way, I navigate to the first text and highlight it, then use the "cut" keyboard operation. I navigate to the second text, highlight it, and use the paste feature. In total I have two navigations, two highlights, and two keyboard operations.
What does this demonstrate? Simply that the Apple way is more efficient for some operations. The relative difficulty of the navigation, highlighting, and keyboard operations determines by how much the Apple way is superior in this workflow. Now I can just as easily come up with workflows for which the X.org way is superior, but I'm not even going to pretend that I know which is better for a given class of user. I know for myself, the Apple way is better. I often copy some text and then want to perform operations on other text I highlight without copying that text and complicating my workflow with multiple paste buffers. Hopefully this does, however, explain to you why they might be keeping their own way of doing things. For me, it also makes more logical sense. Highlighting is a way of selecting data. copying that to a buffer is an operation on that data. Much of the time I don't want to copy it. Instead I want to cut it, or spellcheck it, or grammar check it, or perform a word count on it, or look it up in a thesaurus, or translate it to German, or look it up in my specified online references. It makes sense to me that each of these operations is tied to a given key combo, and it is not intuitive to me that one of those operations would automatically without my launching it or specifying that behavior.
For people who only use the copy and paste functions and only in ways that don't conflict, it might make a lot of sense and save time. I'd say the best compromise is to provide custom settings so that a user can specify an automatic operation to be performed whenever something is highlighted. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do this now. For normal users, however, I think the default is correct right now.
Again, Microsoft's monopoly is not illegal. Microsoft's abuses of their monopoly position are illegal. It is those actions, not the monopoly the courts address. As for your list of bullet points:
They don't have to compete on quality (The emergence of Linux has finally forced them to put some effort there).
This is due mostly to their monopoly, not any illegal action.
They can ignore community wishes (IE between the death of Netscape and emergence of Firefox is an example),
I general, this is because of their monopoly, not any illegal action. Although, in the particular case you mention, gaining the second monopoly on Web browsers was an illegal act that indirectly lead to the situation you describe.
They can force absurd prices for their software.
Again, not the result of illegal action, just of being a monopoly.
They can prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing specs (that would allow Linux to build drivers)
Being able to prevent this is not illegal, actually preventing it is illegal.
They can ignore bugs, and know that you're not going to the (what?) competition.
Not illegal
They can do things like trying to force Israel to drop the Mac by not supporting Hebrew
Illegal
ey can completely change how the internals work...
Not illegal
They'll sometimes break things just to trash their competition.
Illegal
They can cause your system to self destruct if they decide (retroactively!) that your activation code wasn't so good after all.
Possibly illegal, but not due to anticompetitive/monopoly issues
They can make it all but impossible for you to find a distributor that also sells competing products.
Legality depends upon the means of this.
Having addressed these points I think it is important to consider that people object to the results of both MS's illegal abuse of their monopoly and to results of them having a monopoly in the first place. Monopolies are not good for the industry, but only the abuse is illegal. I am of the opinion that they are simply not responsible enough to have a monopoly. They break the law over and over and over again and the courts have failed to provide them with incentive to stop. I don't think the courts are nimble enough to respond quickly to market problems and I don't think they are honest/independent enough to avoid the influence of MS's huge campaign contributions to their bosses.
In reality the only real solution that I think will work is to take away MS's monopoly. Split the company up and give at least two new companies rights to all the code and other intellectual property. This will restore competition in that at least two places will be competing on price and features for consumers of desktop OS's. All of the above issues you list either go away or are no longer a legal issue. It will remove MS's ability to leverage their monopoly since they won't have one and the free market can act normally again.
Of course, if they did bundle apps such as that, everyone would cry 'foul' and 'monopolistic practices' and other such guff. Microsoft's biggest problem is that they are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Microsoft made the situation, they can live with it. For the most part, MS can bundle basic utilities like this without any problem, since there is not an existing market for them. For those that are illegal bundling, it's their own fucking fault. But in the case that you feel MS cannot innovate properly unless they bundle there is an easy solution. Break the company in two. Give full rights to the Windows code to two different companies and let them compete with one another. Then, both can bundle any damned thing they want and we'll never have to hear the argument about bundling again.
This was the original remedy proposed by the courts, and I still think it was the right one. The legal system can't effectively operate quickly enough, or effectively when MS keeps throwing piles of money at their bosses. Split the company in two and restore the market to a competitive one and we all benefit.
I read over this list and few of them are minor UI gripes and the like. I found myself thinking, "yeah, okay that would be a better way." For the most part, however, none of these things are subjects I really care about. Give me real features instead of these and I'll be happy. For example, the classic emulation environment does not work on newer, Intel macs. By default, I can see that being advantageous to Apple as it encourages people to move to newer software, but has anyone tried to run an OS 9 in emulation on an Intel mac? It is a huge pain in the butt. You need to extract a ROM from an old OS install, using old OS 9 utilities and then use an obscure X-windows based GUI. We're talking about a significant investment of time, mostly because of legal issues revolving around Apple's ROM files which are not freely distributed. Before I see any of the changes listed here I'd rather have Apple throw their weight behind one of the open source projects and provide an official, downloadable OS 9 emulator. For that matter, include a MAME client, a DOS emulator, and some old games and have an all-in-one emulator for old games and programs. It wouldn't be hard and it would provide a lot more real value than anything I've seen listed here.
And how about some more and more pervasive system services? I've heard they can now be easily integrated in Carbon API applications, but in addition to the new grammar checker I'd really like to see some basic translation services, statistical analysis services, and maybe an integrated reference lookup service by default so more application designers can smoothly integrate these features.
I guess my basic point is, yeah UI tweaks are fine, but there is a lot more that could be provided in OS X and I'd like to see features first.
one could argue Microsoft products are shoddy because they support a mind blowing number of hardware configurations.
True, but one would have trouble finding convincing support for that argument. Hardware vendors make sure Windows drivers exist, whether they write them themselves, pay MS, or partner with MS. In general very few companies ship without Windows support for business reasons, thus the main effort of supporting different hardware configurations is on the hardware vendors, not MS.
Apple's job is much easier...but do you want to be restricted in what kind of computer you want?
Apple's job for supporting hardware they themselves make is probably easier, since it is a fairly small set. Apple's job of getting third party hardware to work with OS X and have drivers is orders of magnitude harder than Microsoft's. As for whether I want to be restricted as to what hardware my OS is running on, no I don't want to be restricted, but I look at the overall value of the package and lately have been buying Macs.
If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light.
You're 100% right on this. If Apple did not have to compete with Dell and HP and Sony they would have no financial incentive to innovate and make hard moves that end up benefiting the customer. This is one of the main advantages of capitalism, the innovation and lower prices that benefit consumers.
And you have to thank Microsoft for at least part of that.
Hmmm, how do you figure? You see Microsoft does not compete with Apple in the computer market. The reason Apple still ships only OS+computer bundles, instead of hardware and an OS that supports more platforms is because MS has a monopoly on the OS space. In a free market, competition would have forced Apple to separate their offerings. Since the desktop OS market is monopolized, however, the only way to survive as an existing player in that space is to build a complete, bundled chain of products. Apple survives and does well because they don't sell their OS directly, but instead sell a complete chain of hardware, OS, and vital software that keeps MS from leveraging their monopoly status in the OS market from killing OS X. This is the classic strategy for dealing with a monopoly. For more info, see how well BeOS is doing these days.
You mention that Apple was forced to improve their product because of competition, and you are right. Competition forces companies to make better, cheaper products and to respond to what customers want. The reason many of us take issue with MS, is because they don't have competition and thus don't respond to what customers want. Further, they illegally leverage that monopoly to ruin other markets, destroying competition there and bringing to those markets the same lack of innovation and response to customer needs.
I'm a big fan of competition in a given market. I don't think the OS market will really be healthy again, until competition is restored. Geeks like to rave about all the new advances in operating systems, but the truth is, for most people there are as many innovations that work against the customer as for them being introduced. Progress is a crawl. Six years between real new features being brought to market in a high-tech field? That is unheard of.
My solution is simple but will not implemented because our government is too corrupt and MS gives politicians too much money. Microsoft will not stop breaking the law. It makes them too much money and they have too much influence on the courts. Years of abuse and entire markets destroyed and MS is punished with nothing at all or fines that don't even touch the profits they made from the crime. The courts should do what was originally ruled, and break them up into multiple companies. Stockholders get share splits. There should be at least one application company and at least two companies with complete intellectual property rights t
Huh? Nothing he mentioned in any way contradicts anything I've said on the matter.
No, he just lists numbers, but you'll note the number of defensive uses that prevent violence and don't result in a shooting that he lists is higher than the number of recorded violent uses.
I simply believe that society would be better off if more and better gun laws were put in place (esp. those that would reduce concealed weapons, readily available/loaded weapons, etc).
The particular law you have in mind makes a lot of difference, but concealed carry laws are statistically, very beneficial in almost every study ever conducted and those laws apply to making concealed and readily available/loaded weapons an option for the average person.
First, the data does not compare gun ownership, frequency of use, and method of use to the deaths and injuries so it tells us little about the risks on a marginal basis. By this same fuzzy rationale I might come to conclude that Russian Rulette is relatively safe because only 3 minors died of it last year (or whatever the exact # would be... certainly very small).
No, the studies I listed compared violent crime statistics in areas with certain gun control laws and without. There is nothing fuzzy about that and they are not addressing some subset, like the number of minors killed.
Second, it does not mention any study of correlation of gun ownership in general to any of the various bad things (murder, violent crime, robbery, etc).
What good would such a study do? Can you magically make people not own guns? Obviously not. You can pass legislation to restrict or ban guns, and that is exactly what was studied in relation to violent crime.
Three, it particularly does not discuss specific gun laws as it relates to specific crimes.
Two of the three studies I cited at least covered outright bans, open carry, and concealed carry laws with regard to violent crimes as a subset. Obviously it is impossible to find correlations between each of the tens of thousands of individual gun laws and no purpose in breaking them down by type of violent crime, unless your goal is to prevent some violent crime while promoting others.
As for these very limited statements you've presented, I disagree with the conclusions you are drawing from them. The mere fact that someone who studied it failed prove correlation in a particular study (or even several) does not mean that there is not a causative impact.
Actually, while the inverse is not true, the lack of correlation across a statistically significant number of sample studies does indicate that their is a negligible probability of a causative relationship. Think of it this way. Chlorophyll makes plants green. This is a causative relationship. Finding a bunch of green plants that don't have chlorophyll in them proves nothing. Finding a bunch of plants that contain chlorophyll, but which are not green, statistically indicates that chlorophyll does not make plants green, since one or two might be some aberration that is countered by other factors, but if a significant number aren't green and have chlorophyll then by definition it does not tend to make plants green, by itself.
There are a lot of other variables involved and the data collection is difficult (different places measure crime and gun ownership different) whether you are comparing two different places or two different times (before and after).
So, how does this matter? If gun control laws of any given type tend to reduce violence, that trend should become apparent across a number of different studies since they normalize on another. Gun ownership rates, are both causative in two directions, and not actionable, so it is not a useful statistic.
To address your first link from the summary of that book "Compared with other developed nations, the United States is unique in its high rates of both gun ownership and murder. Although widespread gun ownership does not hav
The guns the Resistance were armed with were equivalent to what the German soliders had.
For the most part, no they wore not. More importantly, they only had small arms, not larger weapons for the most part. Yet, they provided an effective part of turning the tide of the war.
This is not the organic and highly successful civil defence scenario you advocate. If anything, it lends support to the argument that personally owned arms for civil defence are next to useless and that we should wait for a foreign power to airdrop them to us.
You've provided no support at all for your assertion that small arms are not useful. I've shown that small arms were useful. Arguments about organization are irrelevant to that fact. You're just being contrary.
You, at least, implied as much.
No, I didn't.
"mandatory training would be of a benefit to this goal, but I'm unconvinced the benefit of that training outweighs the restriction on people's freedom to run their own lives that it would entail.". You are certainly not arguing for training.
That was in response to a comment advocating mandatory military service. It implies nothing about my opinions on a training requirement for firearm ownership.
By "poverty" I refer to the state of lacking the means (or purchasing power) to care for oneself according to reasonable standards...
Okay. Do you dispute that the cost of living in a region is relative to the mean income in that region? If not, you've defined poverty as directly linked to wealth disparity, and a functional subset thereof.
We can compare poverty by accounting for inflation within the US and relative to purchasing power across the world.
By such a comparison you either have three quarter's of the world's population living in poverty or basically no one in the US living in poverty. Both make the term pretty meaningless.
You must have never studied the issue beyond your pro-gun soundbytes then because there is a mountain of evidence showing high degree of correlation: nationally, regionally, locally, and individually. It has been common knowledge by those on the front-lines (e.g., police, school adminstrators, criminologists, etc) that people that are either employed or in-school are _far_ less likely to commit crime, violent or otherwise...
Congratulations, you just wasted a lot of time linking to three studies that don't dispute my previous statement. I never said there was not a correlation between violent crime levels and employment levels. I said that I've never seen a study that shows that correlation to be more strongly correlative than wealth disparity is, for a given locality. Please try reading my comment before you respond.
Can you show me one scrap of evidence that shows a higher degree of correlation between crime and "wealth disparity" than: unemployment, lowest median-wages, or even income disparity (a distinct concept)?
Sure. Take a look at "Inequality and Violent Crime" by Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza, or "Explaining Variation in Crime Victimization Across Nations and Within Nations" by Jerome Neapolitan. Unemployment correlates very strongly with violent crime, but many of the aberrations in that correlation are explained when you look instead to wealth disparity as an indicator. Neither of them alone explains all the numbers, but looking at just one correlation, it simply matches up more neatly.
Can you explain why the violent crime rate fell by 53% between 1993 and 2004 and property crime by 50% while, at the same time, you argue wealth that disparity has been increasing (it being the "single best" measure)?
Sure, statistical analysis is a study of trends, not individual bits of point data. You can find an exception to any probabilistic data set.
Can you explain why we should measure "wealth", which is MUCH more complicated to actually determine (much less data) and interpret (ho
his presumes such indisputable numbers exist. I have looked at statistical studies and they suggest that decreased gun ownership means less murder and fewer traumatic injuries overall for society (not just "gun crimes"). You may disagree, but you, yourself, have presented nothing in the way of the analysis you suggest.
I didn't think I had to since those numbers were presented by several different people already and modded highly in this article. Here is one of the pertinent ones that is also well written http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210866&cid =17175778. Not one person I saw in the entire discussion presented numbers indicating that violent crime (as opposed to "gun crime") correlates favorably with gun control legislation.
"the facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures. In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel "have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States." A comparison of crime rates within Europe reveals no correlation between access to guns and crime." -David Lampo of the Cato Institute
"Guns' danger in violent confrontations is such that they tend to increase the severity of injuries but reduce the chance of an injury occurring in the first place" - from 1979-1985 National Crime Surveys and 1983 FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports
"Gun laws which were examined include waiting periods, gun registration, licensing, permits, prohibition of gun possession by criminals or drug addicts or minors, dealer licensing, concealed handgun restrictions, open handgun carrying restrictions, mandatory judicial penalties, bans on types of weapons, and outright bans on handgun possession. CONCLUSIONS FOR GUN OWNERSHIP. Of the nineteen types of gun laws in the study, none showed consistent evidence of actually reducing gun ownership. Each law's effect on gun ownership was estimated seven times, but none of the laws showed a significant effect in a majority of the tests. Only two of the regulations, requiring a license to possess guns and prohibiting possession by mentally ill persons, showed an apparent effect in even as many as three tests. (Nevertheless, there is still partial support for the view that these two measures may reduce gun ownership, presumably among "high-risk" segments of the population.) CONCLUSIONS FOR VIOLENCE. Generally, the findings indicate that gun restrictions appear to exert no significant negative effect on total violence rates. Of 121 possible effects tested, only ten are solidly or partially consistent with a hypothesis of gun control effectiveness. For instance, requiring a license to possess guns appears to reduce fatal gun accidents. Requiring a permit to purchase guns appears to reduce both gun and, to a greater extent, nongun homicide rates, but, paradoxically, not the total homicide rate. There were other, small correlations like these, but a majority of the measurements found very little correlation between gun laws and reduced violence." - from S. Teresi's analysis of the comprehensive review of gun control studies in the book "Point Blank."
You need to think about it some more. One window (maximized) is the only time the mac has an advantage (because in OS X a maximize app has no title bar).
Nope, this is exactly backwards. If I have 5 windows apps open I have 5 menu sets taking up space. If I have five mac apps open I have 1 menu set taking up space. Since I have to switch apps in either OS to select ay of the menu items, the Windows setup wastes almost 5 times as much space on my screen.
And yet OS X requires a mouse and Windows does not. Remember that Windows machines always had optional mouses, so Windows always had thorough and complete keyboard shortcuts. It was a functional requirement from the beginning.
Sadly, Windows standardized on the two button mouse. As a result, they are now behind in the area of keyboard only use. Because of the two-button standard developers on Windows regularly put functionality in a contextual menu only and not in the regular menus at all. As a result, those functions are completely unavailable to keyboard only Windows users. Now that OS X has improved their keyboard support for the OS as a whole, this factor has become the main differentiator with Windows trailing.
They aren't on large displays. The mac argument (Fitt's law) was once reasonable when displays were low resolution and users typically only had one window at a time. Now, with monitors at 2560x1600 and greater (and multiple displays) large mouse movements are not always quick.
Only if you don't adjust your mouse acceleration to the proper level for your monitor resolutions. I can move from one corner of one display to the opposite corner of my second display instantly, and my settings are not even maxed out.
Fitt's law is a myth on larger displays.
Gee, it was mentioned no less than ten times at the usability and design conference my company sent me to last year. Sorry Fitt's law is still a cornerstone of UI design.
This "noob" was using computers when the macintosh was originally introduced.
Don't you think it's about time you picked up a good book on UI design then, if you're going to comment on the subject? You seem way off base IMHO and I've been studying the topic formally or informally for almost a decade now. Windows does have some UI wins over Mac OS X, but you have not mentioned any of them yet.
People are a lot less likely to die in knifings and beatings. The gun ban works.
Umm, both of these are your own assertions, unsupported by the article you link to. It cites a reduction in gun related crimes, which is common in areas where strict restrictions are enacted, but it mentions nothing about other types of violent crimes, like deaths via knifings and beatings, which tend to go up in number even more than gun related deaths drop when strict gun bans are enacted. Only a fool celebrates a law that tends to result in more net pain, suffering, and violence because it reduces the number of deaths using one particular instrument. If all the water in a country is poisoned and everyone dies, guess what you eliminated 100% of all gun violence there. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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The world shouldn't be designed for idiots, but it is. But for the love of god, don't ignore the people who can tell left from right!
It's not just not being able to tell left from right, it's not being able to memorize every single instance of where one needs to right click versus left click, since this behavior is not consistent. It is also all those people trying to use a stylus, or braille board or any alternative interface. Is Stephen Hawking an idiot because he needs to use an input for the disabled?
Are you a usability expert? I just want to know, because you spend a lot of time talking as if you are. This is not a criticism, just a question.
I've done usability testing professionally and had formal and informal education on the topic. My company ships me to a conference every now and again so I stay current. That said, I may be an "expert" compared to some people, but I've never published on the subject and it is not my primary expertise.
Tech support with GUIs is a setup. Explaining the right vs.left button is nothing compared to trying to explain scrolling to someone who doesn't know it by that name, or trying to walk someone through something that's slightly different on your screen because of a version mismatch. This isn't a mouse issue, it's an issue with the difficulty of effectively delivering remote tech support.
The problem of remote support is difficult, especially for hardware, but that is certainly not the only source of problems with multi-button mice. As I said, during usability tests, which are usually accomplished simply by giving users tasks and then recording everything they do, this is a common problem to see. There is no remote communication issue in these circumstances.
'm guilty of having to think of the difference between left and right when someone gives me directions, but I don't click the wrong button any more than I mistype my password or make other inadvertent or clumsy mistakes. I'm guessing this is the same for almost everyone. This is not a mouse issue, but a human dexterity issue.
This isn't a matter of dexterity, so much as "muscle memory." repetitive behaviors can condition a reflex. A reasonably good typist does not think "I need to type a 'Y'" and then consciously move their finger to that key, they simply think, 'Y' and move their fingers in a conditioned way. Here's an exercise, try drawing the layout of a keyboard and each letter without using your fingers. Now try it by thinking of a letter and filling in the location. You might notice your finger twitch sometimes as you do this. It is memory, but a different kind than normal memorization. The same is true for mouse clicks, except that it is not consistent enough to train properly for people who do not use the same applications a lot.
Getting rid of a button doesn't fix it, it just moves your clumsy errors to occurring at the menu bar.
Again, this is not being clumsy, it is not knowing which button to press because it is not a reflexive behavior like typing is. This is especially true because some novice users become trained to hit both buttons at once and it works most of the time with a failure rate too small to keep them from being conditioned.
If your father truly forgets which button does which, I'll be impressed in a clinical sense that his memory is so selectively bad with this, but works just fine with email addresses.
My father always beats me at trivial pursuit. He can cite all sorts of obscure financial laws from memory. His memory is above average. The issue is, he uses a dozen different programs some of which have functions he needs in the right-click menu and all of which have functions he needs via left clicking. Keeping straight which are which is a very difficult task for normal memorization. This is literally hundreds of instances to memorize, some of which he accesses less than once a year. It isn't repetitive enough to train muscle memory and it is enough individual items to challenge even a person like him with a really good memory.
Is it really that much easier for her to use a one-button mouse, or were there other OS differences she found easier to work with on a Mac?
It was not the only thing she found easier, but it was one big factor. She's one of those people with a notebook with a list of steps for every single task she accomplishes. "Click the Firefox icon, select the bookmarks menu, select e-mail, Click the OK button, click the subject line of the first message,
Uhhh, yeah it would be way too hard to have a setting in the OS that would make both buttons the same for all those "novice users."
Yes, that would be too hard. First, novice users don't change default settings. They don't know how, or even that they can and most are afraid to do anything new lest they break something. Second, because the default setting is two buttons and has been for a long time, software makers design software that requires two buttons. Novice users thus lose the ability to use these software packages properly, causing even more confusion. That is why one button, needs to be the default setup, which is exactly what Apple has done.
I can't even live without a scroll wheel anymore. As for your points about advanced users, don't you think that "optimal" number of buttons may be two or three instead of one? Why jump into mentioning four or five buttons.
The optimal number of buttons is different for each person, I imagine. The problem is, having one of those buttons an almost useless one most of the time is less than optimal for almost everyone. Using the same mouse on Windows and OS X, I have one more useful button on OS X, because the functions are assigned by me, not the guy who wrote Wordpad and had no useful things to put in that menu.
What we are saying is that one is too few.
One is too few, only for more advanced users. And those users almost always buy a new mouse that fits their needs anyway.
The very fact that I have to use my other HAND to hold down the ctrl key is proof that one is too few.
Why do you have this problem? Do you have an old mouse that does not have multiple buttons? Do you have a new mouse that you couldn't figure out how to enable the extra buttons? Do you have a trackpad and you can't reach with one hand because you have really short fingers? Be specific.
As for developer practices, the only point you've made is that there should be a minimum standard. But why should that standard be one button? Why not make a mouse with no buttons where you have to hit a key to make a regular click? That would be an even easier standard for the developers.
I'm not sure this is even deserving of a response. There should be one button, by default, because users have an easier time using one button as compared two or zero by default. Putting zero would encourage developers to not use mice at all, which is less useful in most applications. The short answer is, because decades of usability testing have show that 1 button mice are the best compromise and because if you look at Windows and OS X today you can see a lot fewer usability problems on OS X, simply because of this one item. It is not as though this is not mentioned in numerous texts on usability. It is not some new idea I just came up with, but the consensus of the industry.
Apple should ship with a fully functional mouse, and if they want they can have all the buttons do the same thing until you change the setting.
Umm, Apple does ship with a fully functional, multi-button mouse. It does have only one button in the default configuration, which you can change, in software, on a per-user basis. Get with the times.
This isn't about what MS does that's illegal. It's about what they do to make people hate them. One does not necessarily imply the other.
I agree, but the post I was responding to, confused the issue by listing things people object to, under the label of "illegal abuses." I imagine after reading "I think it is important to consider that people object to the results of both MS's illegal abuse of their monopoly and to results of them having a monopoly in the first place." from my post, that would be clear.I launch apps by double clicking files all the time.
I think you misread what I wrote. I was arguing that action was common with a mouse (clicking). I was arguing that launching apps via the keyboard (not CLI) is uncommon.
That being said, I'm perfectly fine with both using enter to open files on Windows and command-down on the Mac. Both seem intuitive to me, so it's just an issue of switching back and forth.
Have you ever done this? Do you do it often. Do you do it over and over and over again, so that it justifies making this behavior easy at the expense of making a common activity hard?
A common task is renaming files, lots of files. On the mac this is much easier. It is one of those tasks that is ideal for keyboard use. Not using the CLI, but using the finder you select the first file, hit enter, type the name, and hit enter again. Then you use the arrow keys to move to the next file, never touching a mouse.
If you try to do the same thing on Windows, you have to use the F2 key instead of the enter key or you will be opening the files instead of renaming them. Normally, this change would be no big deal, but if you're doing it over and over for a large number of files moving your hand out of place every time is really annoying. Since I have never, ever, that I recall opened a file in windows by selecting it and hitting enter, it seems this common combination could be better assigned.
You're one of 100% of Mac Apologists who claim there's no reason people need more mouse buttons
This is the logical fallacy called a strawman argument. Had I actually said that, you could have quoted me. I didn't, however,say that, you just made it up.
Telling them they're wrong for wanting it is decidedly not useful.
If someone who is not a usability expert claims a change they think might help them is a good idea, then it i certainly appropriate to give them reasons why that change is probably a bad idea for users in general. Further, often users do not know what allows them to complete a task most effectively, because their own perspective on the situation is not objective. A lot of people who spend 10 or more seconds selecting an item from a menu tell researchers that spending 2 seconds clicking a button, then waiting 3 seconds, took longer. That doesn't mean the former is better, it means the user was factually incorrect because they did not have the proper perspective to see the issue.
I have a challenge for you. Find someone, somewhere, who sometime in the 21st century has claimed that two mouse buttons are confusing. Here's the catch; They also have to demonstrate that they can use Mac OS X for general computing tasks such as surfing the web; typing, printing and saving a document; and sending a simple email.
I don't have to go very far for that, my mother fit perfectly in that category until I got her a mac. For that matter my father, who uses OS X for e-mail and nothing else regularly clicks the wrong mouse button on his Windows box and has to try the other one. Ask anyone who has done tech support for basic users and you'll find clicking just one, proper mouse button is one of the most common usability problems with Windows. There is even a joke poster I saw printed in one support center that read something like:
"Press the right button." (Presses left button) "Ok".
"No, not that one. I said the RIGHT button." (Presses left button) "Ok"
"No, the RIIIGHT button." (Presses left button) "I DID press the right button."
"Ok. Now press the WRONG button." (Presses right button)
The truth is, I don't think you'll find a single person on Earth that can do email but is actually confused by two mouse buttons.
As much as you my disagree with it, left and right mouse buttons are very confusing to a lot of users and even in more advanced usability studies you see people hit the wrong one now and again, and I'm not talking about random college kids, I'm talking about network security experts and people responsible for some of the largest and most critical networks on the planet. For novice users, they are a huge problem and applications designed with multiple buttons in mind are often wholly unusable for people with alternate input devices like braille boards, tablets, spoken interfaces, etc.
Have a source for that statistic? Didn't think so.
It was an intentional exaggeration to make a point. What percentage of users do you think try such a task?
As for your other rant, it's without merit. As I have stated in another post, it would be easy for Apple to split-sensor the single huge-assed button so that it COULD be identified as three buttons, but by default act like a single button.
Yes, they could. The question is, is there real benefit to this, considering the additional cost and dev time it would require. As I explained elsewhere in this thread, chording with a mouse and keyboard is problematic because you have to move your off hand. Chording with a laptop trackpad and keyboard does not have this problem and ends up being faster than multiple trackpad buttons, once you learn how to do it. So you are asking for a potentially expensive solution in both dev time and hardware cost and reliability in order to reduce how hard it is to perform a very uncommon operation, that is faster to do another way once you do learn. If I was at Apple, that would be pretty low on the list of projects I wanted to do.
A simple configuration option could solve one of the largest complaints...
I think you mean a simple configuration option, the cost of whatever else that developer is not doing and the cost of creating, building, and supporting a new type of hardware.
Somehow you seem to think that giving others the option to have more than one button will somehow cause instant death for mac GUI design traditionalists.
Where did you get idea? If Apple can make a single button default trackpad button, that converts in software to a multi-button one, and does not significantly raise the cost of the laptops or reduce their reliability and longevity, I have no problem with them doing it. I just don't think it is, or should be much of a priority for them and I think I've done a pretty good job of explaining why.
If people didn't want more than one mouse button, then why is it that every replacement mouse for a mac have at least 3? Hell, even the mighty mouse has more than one.
Some people, especially those who buy a custom mouse, do want multiple buttons. That does nothing to speak to the benefits versus problems with shipping one by default. I use a four button trackpad every day. I still am thankful every day that Apple ships a one button mouse by default on their systems, so I don't have to try to find a good five button trackball or lose functionality to the poor design practices in the industry today.
However, computer technology is unlike other consumer products in how much interaction and inter-reliance there is between various independently purchased components. I would argue that the reason Microsoft's virtual monopoly stands is not necessarily that they have the absolute best browser or best OS, etc. but that having a standard platform/product allows for a much higher level of integration and more reliable performance from the other pieces of software/hardware that need to interact with it.
There is no reason why standardized interfaces between products cannot work just as well as they do in other industries. No one has trouble connecting different products from different vendors using RCA jacks. Even much more complex and computer related interfaces between products work just fine between different products from different vendors. If, however, what you say is true than MS should suck it up and split the company in two, each with full rights to the Windows code. This will give both companies the ability to bundle anything they want without compromising the benefits of capitalism.
Like you said, if you write a web page, you have to test it on the various browsers your clients might potentially use, and work around any inconsistencies.
I said that to be generous. The truth is, in my experience I automate the creation of pages to the spec, test it and it works fine in every browser except IE. Then I work around all IE's problems. I'm sure other browsers have bugs, but realistically none of them are significant enough to cause me any extra work.
If you know that all (or at least the vast majority) of your clients will be using browser X, then you can build a more reliable web page and maybe even a better one if you can use particular features only supported by that one browser.
You could, if not for the fact that MS intentionally breaks things between versions in order to further promote their lock-in and necessitate upgrades. Ideally, however, you should just work to a standard. No one thinks it would be better if all consumer electronics were just designed to take power from whatever kind of batteries Energizer was making today. No, they create devices to work with industry standards and if some battery maker fails to meet the standard their batteries are considered defective and returned. It should be the same with Web browsers.
It's my position that the adoption of a standard platform (almost to the point of being a monopoly) has real benefits that aren't outweighed by the imposition of a particular set of flaws that necessarily accompanies any product.
What you're failing to see is that having only one product not only means you have one set of flaws, it demotivates companies from fixing those flaws or making improvements. Capitalism works because despite having many people all wasting resources doing the same thing, those people are highly motivated by greed. Ten companies might be making batteries, but the wasted resources involved in that still results in better, overall improvements to the battery industry than just having one manufacturer does. If your only choice of battery is Energizer, why in the world would Energizer spend money trying to make them last longer, or work in colder conditions, or be smaller? How does that make them any money? More importantly what motivation do they have to not intentionally cripple the batteries or make them last shorter times so they need to be replaced even more often? Why shouldn't they develop anti-features that profit them?
That is exactly the state the OS industry is in right now and it has resulted in horrible stagnation and inflated prices for years. Worse yet, its spreading. You can't just buy a battery in the store anymore. You have to buy a Energizer bundle including a battery, toothbrush, and nail polish, all designed to fit in the special patented trapezoidal pouches inside Energizer brand purses and fanny packs.
At least with a larger user base, those
As Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Part of what advances knowledge is building on that which came before, and Apple would do well to understand that.
Yeah, okay. Hopefully Apple knows their UI is not perfect and is willing to borrow to make it better. They seem willing as they're incorporating virtual desktops and many other features from other systems.
Case in point - it took them *forever* to produce a two-button mouse, even though the rest of the world had long before learned the advantages of such a device.
Yeah, and by watching others Apple was also able to see all the disadvantages of such a system. Usability experts the world around wish they could go back in time and make one button mice the standard and simplify their lives. One of the most common interface problems is that people click the wrong button in some instance, or both buttons simultaneously with random results. For novice users, a single button is a much, much, much better option. More than that, the end results of the standardization on one or multiple button mice makes a big difference on the software ecosystem. Given that novice users are better with one button, lets look at advanced users. On Windows and on OS X I use the same four button trackball with a scroll wheel. On both systems the primary button does the same job and the third and fourth buttons are user assignable to tasks I commonly use. The only difference is the second mouse button. Is it more usable on Windows or OS X? On OS X, it is assigned to a series of services and scripts I chose. It is up to me to decide, on a per-app or and/or global basis what is available. On Windows, this app is full of functions that the application designer chose, many of which I never want or use. Even in applications like Wordpad, this key is assigned to functions I will never, ever use, while in OS X and textedit, this button provides me with word counts, grammar checker, translation between languages, some perl scripts I commonly apply to text, and other options I've chosen. Basically, it frees up one more button for me to assign, and I need it because otherwise I'd need a mouse with 5 buttons. My third button activates expose to quickly choose apps and my fourth button activates my dashboard widgets or my virtual desktops, depending on the context. So for me, a power user, the one button default gives me one more useful button.
And what else does this affect? Have you ever used scripting applications, or alternative input devices like tablets, braille boards, spoken interfaces, etc.? Because OS X only has one button by default, all developers code to that standard and all functions are available to users of all these devices. With Windows applications, it is not uncommon for poor developers to place functionality for an application only in a right-click menu, making it difficult or impossible to access using these alternative interfaces. It encourages poor development practices.
Okay, so now lets look at Apple's multi button mouse. They have learned from the mistakes of others. By default, it works as a one button mouse so all the advantages listed above apply. In addition it works as a multi-button mouse for power users. Better yet, this change occurs in software, so a mac in your living room can have a mouse that is one button for the kids and multi-button for the grown ups or experts all without switching and hardware around and automatically set up on a per-account basis. All the benefits with none of the negatives. The only question is what about laptops? Will they make multiple buttons and option there as well? I doubt it, but it is possible. The reason is, when you use a desktop with a mouse, you either have both hands on the keyboard or one on the keyboard and one on the mouse. In the latter configuration, having to use chording with the keyboard slows a user down as they must move their hand. On a laptop, however, both hands are already in place and once you learn how it is (according to usability studies) faster to use the trackpad button with chording than it is to have multiple buttons that make you move your off hand. They might find other ways to use the trackpad to provide this, but I doubt it will be physical buttons.
An example of this is trying to use your macbook while waiting for a flight (or on a flight). I use a number of X11 applications (xterm being the most common, because the apple terminal app is horrible) which really wants a 3 button mouse.
Congratulations. You're one of the .000000001% of people who ever used a X11 application on a mac, while not having a three button mouse available, and while kknowing about and need ing the third mouse button features. I don't think it is reasonable to redesign the system in such a way that makes it harder for the novice and average user in order to accommodate such a rarity. Also, from the testing I've seen, with a trackpad the key combinations actually save time once you learn them since you don't have to move your non-dominant hand from the keyboard or move your hands at all. As a result, adding more buttons to a laptop only helps learnability, not overall usability. If you're using X11 applications with the third mouse button option, on a portable, learnability is probably not as important to you.
Consider another location for the dock. Most of the time people who hide the dock are trying to save screen real estate and for most users vertical space is more important than horizontal. Try just leaving it open all the time on the right or left side of the screen. I, personally, find it much less of a hassle.
The best solution is probably to have Return act like double-click, which would match a lot of other GUI. This probably means it opens it, though maybe it means that double-click renames files?
Most users will never, ever launch a file using keyboard navigation. Those that do, will probably want to use this feature relatively rarely. That said, it makes no sense to make this the easiest thing to do. Have you ever renamed 50 files by hand. I have, and it is a pain in the ass. The last thing you want to do is use the mouse. With OS X it is about as fast and easy as possible. you hit enter, type the name and enter again, then the down arrow to go to the next one. This is not that uncommon of a task for some users. When was the last time you ever heard of someone wanting to use the keyboard to consecutively and repetitively launch 50 applications? When was the last time you launched an application in the currently open Finder or Explorer window using the keyboard?
I think Apple is 100% right on this one. Make the common, repetitive tasks easy. Make the uncommon tasks slightly harder. If I want to launch an application 50% of the time I'm using the mouse. 30% of the time I'm using the keyboard and spotlight is faster than selecting the application using the finder. The rest of the time I'm using the CLI.
It is hard to be secretive about an OS when you pretty much have to give copies to developers if you want third party applications to not break when you ship the new OS.
Not really. The version you give them can be a branch that includes the features that are likely to affect third-party applications and has all the new APIs, but may not necessarily include all the new features the OS will add on.
I think it has more to do with the kind of people that comprise the tech crowd. A lot of techies tend to be more anti-establishment (think open source) and often more arrogant than the average joe.
I disagree. Most people on Slashdot, in my experience, make statements of admiration for some company that is the biggest player in their market. Sure, a few people always cheer the underdog, but I don't think that is what is happening here.
1) that they already have it in for any big organization that is imposing rules or standards (in the form of file formats, DRM, etc) that are not democratically adopted by the community
You're way off base, IMHO. Most people are happy to accept product from some big company. Look at Wii, Xbox360, and PS3. All are from large, established players and all have big followings here. Microsoft isn't reviled because they don't democratically decide on features, they're reviled because they undermine capitalism to prevent people from choosing other products. Most people realistically have no choice other than to use Windows, and as a result are angry when they have to deal with the myriad flaws in the product. Think of it this way, if you choose between three different products in the store, how much do you blame the company that made the product you chose when there are problems with it? Sure you don't like it, but you realize it is partly your own choice that was the problem and resolve next time to buy from someone else. If, however, when you go to the store there is only one product because the company that makes it broke the law and strong-armed the store into only carrying that product, you had no choice, so you lay all the blame for something not working on the manufacturer. Moreover, you know the next time you buy one, you're still going to have only one choice, so there is no emotional release because you have planned a realistic retaliation. That is why people are so upset with and emotionally charged with regard to MS.
But users generally do know how something could be better for them. The problem is they don't have a choice of choosing what is best for them, because all the real alternatives have been driven out of the market or made almost unusable by monopoly abuse.
We also seem to hold them to very, very high standards; any flaw or problem is considered unacceptable.
All products have flaws, but the users lack of control over which flaws they have to deal with is what provokes the emotional response to MS.
It may also just be that we like to complain. Haters gonna hate.
Again, there are lots of products and all of them have flaws. The reason MS is more disliked than most is because they are a monopoly and an abusive monopoly at that. In a free, competative market, if I make a Web page I write to a standard and then test against browsers. If one browser is all messed up, maybe I work around it, or maybe I let people know it is broken. Either way, I have some control. In our current market, I can write following the standards, but then I have no choice but to spend extra time working around all of IE's problems. This is directly the result of MS breaking the law to control the market. Thus, I'm more angry about that extra work and my lack of control, than I would be about the same development problem if I had control and if someone were not illegally profiting from my extra work. Understand?
It's as simple as having two buffers, one for "proper" copy/cutting/pasting, and one for quick jobs, where a highlight and a middle click is better suited.
Multiple buffers are fine for power users, but they are simply too hard for normal users to understand and use, from what I've seen. I don't consider them to be a reasonable default. I'm by no means a novice user and I have successfully used multiple copy/paste buffers in the past, but it interferes with training your hands to do the right thing when you have to juggle two different mechanisms. I often want to copy something, highlight something else, perform an operation, and then paste the first something. My fingers simply don't remember that I have use an operation to copy something the first time, if I'm going to be doing that, when I normally just highlight to copy. Realistically, the time it takes for me to hit a key combo when my hands are already on the keyboard is negligible compared to a few instances of going back and recopying something because I copied it into a buffer that was then overwritten. I suspect this is true for a large number of users.
I'd much rather see both multiple buffers and automatic operations on highlight to either the standard buffer or a special buffer as an optional feature. It is one of those things like virtual desktops that is aimed more at UNIX people who don't want to change, than it is at real usability benefit for the majority. I think it is worthwhile, but should not be a big priority. I like my middle mouse button activating expose, thank you very much.
I really wish OS X worked like X.org when it came to copy/pasting. Highlight = copied, middle click = pasted. Why bother with menus and keyboards?
Here's a workflow. I want to copy some text, delete it, then replace some other text with that first text. Using X.org, I highlight the second text and delete it. Then I highlight the first text and it is copied. Then I delete it. Then I navigate again to the second location and paste. In total I have three navigations of the file, two highlight operations, and three keyboard operation (2 deletes and one paste).
Using the Apple way, I navigate to the first text and highlight it, then use the "cut" keyboard operation. I navigate to the second text, highlight it, and use the paste feature. In total I have two navigations, two highlights, and two keyboard operations.
What does this demonstrate? Simply that the Apple way is more efficient for some operations. The relative difficulty of the navigation, highlighting, and keyboard operations determines by how much the Apple way is superior in this workflow. Now I can just as easily come up with workflows for which the X.org way is superior, but I'm not even going to pretend that I know which is better for a given class of user. I know for myself, the Apple way is better. I often copy some text and then want to perform operations on other text I highlight without copying that text and complicating my workflow with multiple paste buffers. Hopefully this does, however, explain to you why they might be keeping their own way of doing things. For me, it also makes more logical sense. Highlighting is a way of selecting data. copying that to a buffer is an operation on that data. Much of the time I don't want to copy it. Instead I want to cut it, or spellcheck it, or grammar check it, or perform a word count on it, or look it up in a thesaurus, or translate it to German, or look it up in my specified online references. It makes sense to me that each of these operations is tied to a given key combo, and it is not intuitive to me that one of those operations would automatically without my launching it or specifying that behavior.
For people who only use the copy and paste functions and only in ways that don't conflict, it might make a lot of sense and save time. I'd say the best compromise is to provide custom settings so that a user can specify an automatic operation to be performed whenever something is highlighted. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do this now. For normal users, however, I think the default is correct right now.
Microsoft's (illegal) monopoly means that
Again, Microsoft's monopoly is not illegal. Microsoft's abuses of their monopoly position are illegal. It is those actions, not the monopoly the courts address. As for your list of bullet points:
They don't have to compete on quality (The emergence of Linux has finally forced them to put some effort there).
This is due mostly to their monopoly, not any illegal action.
They can ignore community wishes (IE between the death of Netscape and emergence of Firefox is an example),
I general, this is because of their monopoly, not any illegal action. Although, in the particular case you mention, gaining the second monopoly on Web browsers was an illegal act that indirectly lead to the situation you describe.
They can force absurd prices for their software.
Again, not the result of illegal action, just of being a monopoly.
They can prevent hardware manufacturers from releasing specs (that would allow Linux to build drivers)
Being able to prevent this is not illegal, actually preventing it is illegal.
They can ignore bugs, and know that you're not going to the (what?) competition.
Not illegal
They can do things like trying to force Israel to drop the Mac by not supporting Hebrew
Illegal
ey can completely change how the internals work...
Not illegal
They'll sometimes break things just to trash their competition.
Illegal
They can cause your system to self destruct if they decide (retroactively!) that your activation code wasn't so good after all.
Possibly illegal, but not due to anticompetitive/monopoly issues
They can make it all but impossible for you to find a distributor that also sells competing products.
Legality depends upon the means of this.
Having addressed these points I think it is important to consider that people object to the results of both MS's illegal abuse of their monopoly and to results of them having a monopoly in the first place. Monopolies are not good for the industry, but only the abuse is illegal. I am of the opinion that they are simply not responsible enough to have a monopoly. They break the law over and over and over again and the courts have failed to provide them with incentive to stop. I don't think the courts are nimble enough to respond quickly to market problems and I don't think they are honest/independent enough to avoid the influence of MS's huge campaign contributions to their bosses.
In reality the only real solution that I think will work is to take away MS's monopoly. Split the company up and give at least two new companies rights to all the code and other intellectual property. This will restore competition in that at least two places will be competing on price and features for consumers of desktop OS's. All of the above issues you list either go away or are no longer a legal issue. It will remove MS's ability to leverage their monopoly since they won't have one and the free market can act normally again.
Of course, if they did bundle apps such as that, everyone would cry 'foul' and 'monopolistic practices' and other such guff. Microsoft's biggest problem is that they are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Microsoft made the situation, they can live with it. For the most part, MS can bundle basic utilities like this without any problem, since there is not an existing market for them. For those that are illegal bundling, it's their own fucking fault. But in the case that you feel MS cannot innovate properly unless they bundle there is an easy solution. Break the company in two. Give full rights to the Windows code to two different companies and let them compete with one another. Then, both can bundle any damned thing they want and we'll never have to hear the argument about bundling again.
This was the original remedy proposed by the courts, and I still think it was the right one. The legal system can't effectively operate quickly enough, or effectively when MS keeps throwing piles of money at their bosses. Split the company in two and restore the market to a competitive one and we all benefit.
I read over this list and few of them are minor UI gripes and the like. I found myself thinking, "yeah, okay that would be a better way." For the most part, however, none of these things are subjects I really care about. Give me real features instead of these and I'll be happy. For example, the classic emulation environment does not work on newer, Intel macs. By default, I can see that being advantageous to Apple as it encourages people to move to newer software, but has anyone tried to run an OS 9 in emulation on an Intel mac? It is a huge pain in the butt. You need to extract a ROM from an old OS install, using old OS 9 utilities and then use an obscure X-windows based GUI. We're talking about a significant investment of time, mostly because of legal issues revolving around Apple's ROM files which are not freely distributed. Before I see any of the changes listed here I'd rather have Apple throw their weight behind one of the open source projects and provide an official, downloadable OS 9 emulator. For that matter, include a MAME client, a DOS emulator, and some old games and have an all-in-one emulator for old games and programs. It wouldn't be hard and it would provide a lot more real value than anything I've seen listed here.
And how about some more and more pervasive system services? I've heard they can now be easily integrated in Carbon API applications, but in addition to the new grammar checker I'd really like to see some basic translation services, statistical analysis services, and maybe an integrated reference lookup service by default so more application designers can smoothly integrate these features.
I guess my basic point is, yeah UI tweaks are fine, but there is a lot more that could be provided in OS X and I'd like to see features first.
one could argue Microsoft products are shoddy because they support a mind blowing number of hardware configurations.
True, but one would have trouble finding convincing support for that argument. Hardware vendors make sure Windows drivers exist, whether they write them themselves, pay MS, or partner with MS. In general very few companies ship without Windows support for business reasons, thus the main effort of supporting different hardware configurations is on the hardware vendors, not MS.
Apple's job is much easier...but do you want to be restricted in what kind of computer you want?
Apple's job for supporting hardware they themselves make is probably easier, since it is a fairly small set. Apple's job of getting third party hardware to work with OS X and have drivers is orders of magnitude harder than Microsoft's. As for whether I want to be restricted as to what hardware my OS is running on, no I don't want to be restricted, but I look at the overall value of the package and lately have been buying Macs.
If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light.
You're 100% right on this. If Apple did not have to compete with Dell and HP and Sony they would have no financial incentive to innovate and make hard moves that end up benefiting the customer. This is one of the main advantages of capitalism, the innovation and lower prices that benefit consumers.
And you have to thank Microsoft for at least part of that.
Hmmm, how do you figure? You see Microsoft does not compete with Apple in the computer market. The reason Apple still ships only OS+computer bundles, instead of hardware and an OS that supports more platforms is because MS has a monopoly on the OS space. In a free market, competition would have forced Apple to separate their offerings. Since the desktop OS market is monopolized, however, the only way to survive as an existing player in that space is to build a complete, bundled chain of products. Apple survives and does well because they don't sell their OS directly, but instead sell a complete chain of hardware, OS, and vital software that keeps MS from leveraging their monopoly status in the OS market from killing OS X. This is the classic strategy for dealing with a monopoly. For more info, see how well BeOS is doing these days.
You mention that Apple was forced to improve their product because of competition, and you are right. Competition forces companies to make better, cheaper products and to respond to what customers want. The reason many of us take issue with MS, is because they don't have competition and thus don't respond to what customers want. Further, they illegally leverage that monopoly to ruin other markets, destroying competition there and bringing to those markets the same lack of innovation and response to customer needs.
I'm a big fan of competition in a given market. I don't think the OS market will really be healthy again, until competition is restored. Geeks like to rave about all the new advances in operating systems, but the truth is, for most people there are as many innovations that work against the customer as for them being introduced. Progress is a crawl. Six years between real new features being brought to market in a high-tech field? That is unheard of.
My solution is simple but will not implemented because our government is too corrupt and MS gives politicians too much money. Microsoft will not stop breaking the law. It makes them too much money and they have too much influence on the courts. Years of abuse and entire markets destroyed and MS is punished with nothing at all or fines that don't even touch the profits they made from the crime. The courts should do what was originally ruled, and break them up into multiple companies. Stockholders get share splits. There should be at least one application company and at least two companies with complete intellectual property rights t
Huh? Nothing he mentioned in any way contradicts anything I've said on the matter.
No, he just lists numbers, but you'll note the number of defensive uses that prevent violence and don't result in a shooting that he lists is higher than the number of recorded violent uses.
I simply believe that society would be better off if more and better gun laws were put in place (esp. those that would reduce concealed weapons, readily available/loaded weapons, etc).
The particular law you have in mind makes a lot of difference, but concealed carry laws are statistically, very beneficial in almost every study ever conducted and those laws apply to making concealed and readily available/loaded weapons an option for the average person.
First, the data does not compare gun ownership, frequency of use, and method of use to the deaths and injuries so it tells us little about the risks on a marginal basis. By this same fuzzy rationale I might come to conclude that Russian Rulette is relatively safe because only 3 minors died of it last year (or whatever the exact # would be... certainly very small).
No, the studies I listed compared violent crime statistics in areas with certain gun control laws and without. There is nothing fuzzy about that and they are not addressing some subset, like the number of minors killed.
Second, it does not mention any study of correlation of gun ownership in general to any of the various bad things (murder, violent crime, robbery, etc).
What good would such a study do? Can you magically make people not own guns? Obviously not. You can pass legislation to restrict or ban guns, and that is exactly what was studied in relation to violent crime.
Three, it particularly does not discuss specific gun laws as it relates to specific crimes.
Two of the three studies I cited at least covered outright bans, open carry, and concealed carry laws with regard to violent crimes as a subset. Obviously it is impossible to find correlations between each of the tens of thousands of individual gun laws and no purpose in breaking them down by type of violent crime, unless your goal is to prevent some violent crime while promoting others.
As for these very limited statements you've presented, I disagree with the conclusions you are drawing from them. The mere fact that someone who studied it failed prove correlation in a particular study (or even several) does not mean that there is not a causative impact.
Actually, while the inverse is not true, the lack of correlation across a statistically significant number of sample studies does indicate that their is a negligible probability of a causative relationship. Think of it this way. Chlorophyll makes plants green. This is a causative relationship. Finding a bunch of green plants that don't have chlorophyll in them proves nothing. Finding a bunch of plants that contain chlorophyll, but which are not green, statistically indicates that chlorophyll does not make plants green, since one or two might be some aberration that is countered by other factors, but if a significant number aren't green and have chlorophyll then by definition it does not tend to make plants green, by itself.
There are a lot of other variables involved and the data collection is difficult (different places measure crime and gun ownership different) whether you are comparing two different places or two different times (before and after).
So, how does this matter? If gun control laws of any given type tend to reduce violence, that trend should become apparent across a number of different studies since they normalize on another. Gun ownership rates, are both causative in two directions, and not actionable, so it is not a useful statistic.
To address your first link from the summary of that book "Compared with other developed nations, the United States is unique in its high rates of both gun ownership and murder. Although widespread gun ownership does not hav
The guns the Resistance were armed with were equivalent to what the German soliders had.
For the most part, no they wore not. More importantly, they only had small arms, not larger weapons for the most part. Yet, they provided an effective part of turning the tide of the war.
This is not the organic and highly successful civil defence scenario you advocate. If anything, it lends support to the argument that personally owned arms for civil defence are next to useless and that we should wait for a foreign power to airdrop them to us.
You've provided no support at all for your assertion that small arms are not useful. I've shown that small arms were useful. Arguments about organization are irrelevant to that fact. You're just being contrary.
You, at least, implied as much.
No, I didn't.
"mandatory training would be of a benefit to this goal, but I'm unconvinced the benefit of that training outweighs the restriction on people's freedom to run their own lives that it would entail.". You are certainly not arguing for training.
That was in response to a comment advocating mandatory military service. It implies nothing about my opinions on a training requirement for firearm ownership.
By "poverty" I refer to the state of lacking the means (or purchasing power) to care for oneself according to reasonable standards...
Okay. Do you dispute that the cost of living in a region is relative to the mean income in that region? If not, you've defined poverty as directly linked to wealth disparity, and a functional subset thereof.
We can compare poverty by accounting for inflation within the US and relative to purchasing power across the world.
By such a comparison you either have three quarter's of the world's population living in poverty or basically no one in the US living in poverty. Both make the term pretty meaningless.
You must have never studied the issue beyond your pro-gun soundbytes then because there is a mountain of evidence showing high degree of correlation: nationally, regionally, locally, and individually. It has been common knowledge by those on the front-lines (e.g., police, school adminstrators, criminologists, etc) that people that are either employed or in-school are _far_ less likely to commit crime, violent or otherwise...
Congratulations, you just wasted a lot of time linking to three studies that don't dispute my previous statement. I never said there was not a correlation between violent crime levels and employment levels. I said that I've never seen a study that shows that correlation to be more strongly correlative than wealth disparity is, for a given locality. Please try reading my comment before you respond.
Can you show me one scrap of evidence that shows a higher degree of correlation between crime and "wealth disparity" than: unemployment, lowest median-wages, or even income disparity (a distinct concept)?
Sure. Take a look at "Inequality and Violent Crime" by Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza, or "Explaining Variation in Crime Victimization Across Nations and Within Nations" by Jerome Neapolitan. Unemployment correlates very strongly with violent crime, but many of the aberrations in that correlation are explained when you look instead to wealth disparity as an indicator. Neither of them alone explains all the numbers, but looking at just one correlation, it simply matches up more neatly.
Can you explain why the violent crime rate fell by 53% between 1993 and 2004 and property crime by 50% while, at the same time, you argue wealth that disparity has been increasing (it being the "single best" measure)?
Sure, statistical analysis is a study of trends, not individual bits of point data. You can find an exception to any probabilistic data set.
Can you explain why we should measure "wealth", which is MUCH more complicated to actually determine (much less data) and interpret (ho
his presumes such indisputable numbers exist. I have looked at statistical studies and they suggest that decreased gun ownership means less murder and fewer traumatic injuries overall for society (not just "gun crimes"). You may disagree, but you, yourself, have presented nothing in the way of the analysis you suggest.
I didn't think I had to since those numbers were presented by several different people already and modded highly in this article. Here is one of the pertinent ones that is also well written http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210866&cid =17175778. Not one person I saw in the entire discussion presented numbers indicating that violent crime (as opposed to "gun crime") correlates favorably with gun control legislation.
"the facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures. In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel "have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States." A comparison of crime rates within Europe reveals no correlation between access to guns and crime." -David Lampo of the Cato Institute
"Guns' danger in violent confrontations is such that they tend to increase the severity of injuries but reduce the chance of an injury occurring in the first place" - from 1979-1985 National Crime Surveys and 1983 FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports
"Gun laws which were examined include waiting periods, gun registration, licensing, permits, prohibition of gun possession by criminals or drug addicts or minors, dealer licensing, concealed handgun restrictions, open handgun carrying restrictions, mandatory judicial penalties, bans on types of weapons, and outright bans on handgun possession. CONCLUSIONS FOR GUN OWNERSHIP. Of the nineteen types of gun laws in the study, none showed consistent evidence of actually reducing gun ownership. Each law's effect on gun ownership was estimated seven times, but none of the laws showed a significant effect in a majority of the tests. Only two of the regulations, requiring a license to possess guns and prohibiting possession by mentally ill persons, showed an apparent effect in even as many as three tests. (Nevertheless, there is still partial support for the view that these two measures may reduce gun ownership, presumably among "high-risk" segments of the population.) CONCLUSIONS FOR VIOLENCE. Generally, the findings indicate that gun restrictions appear to exert no significant negative effect on total violence rates. Of 121 possible effects tested, only ten are solidly or partially consistent with a hypothesis of gun control effectiveness. For instance, requiring a license to possess guns appears to reduce fatal gun accidents. Requiring a permit to purchase guns appears to reduce both gun and, to a greater extent, nongun homicide rates, but, paradoxically, not the total homicide rate. There were other, small correlations like these, but a majority of the measurements found very little correlation between gun laws and reduced violence." - from S. Teresi's analysis of the comprehensive review of gun control studies in the book "Point Blank."
Or, if you're looking for the studies themselves to be analyzed, http://www.gunfacts.info/pdfs/gun-facts/4.1/GunFac ts4-1-Print.pdf has about 200 studies cited within it, many of which you can find using google scholar.
You need to think about it some more. One window (maximized) is the only time the mac has an advantage (because in OS X a maximize app has no title bar).
Nope, this is exactly backwards. If I have 5 windows apps open I have 5 menu sets taking up space. If I have five mac apps open I have 1 menu set taking up space. Since I have to switch apps in either OS to select ay of the menu items, the Windows setup wastes almost 5 times as much space on my screen.
And yet OS X requires a mouse and Windows does not. Remember that Windows machines always had optional mouses, so Windows always had thorough and complete keyboard shortcuts. It was a functional requirement from the beginning.
Sadly, Windows standardized on the two button mouse. As a result, they are now behind in the area of keyboard only use. Because of the two-button standard developers on Windows regularly put functionality in a contextual menu only and not in the regular menus at all. As a result, those functions are completely unavailable to keyboard only Windows users. Now that OS X has improved their keyboard support for the OS as a whole, this factor has become the main differentiator with Windows trailing.
They aren't on large displays. The mac argument (Fitt's law) was once reasonable when displays were low resolution and users typically only had one window at a time. Now, with monitors at 2560x1600 and greater (and multiple displays) large mouse movements are not always quick.
Only if you don't adjust your mouse acceleration to the proper level for your monitor resolutions. I can move from one corner of one display to the opposite corner of my second display instantly, and my settings are not even maxed out.
Fitt's law is a myth on larger displays.
Gee, it was mentioned no less than ten times at the usability and design conference my company sent me to last year. Sorry Fitt's law is still a cornerstone of UI design.
This "noob" was using computers when the macintosh was originally introduced.
Don't you think it's about time you picked up a good book on UI design then, if you're going to comment on the subject? You seem way off base IMHO and I've been studying the topic formally or informally for almost a decade now. Windows does have some UI wins over Mac OS X, but you have not mentioned any of them yet.
People are a lot less likely to die in knifings and beatings. The gun ban works.
Umm, both of these are your own assertions, unsupported by the article you link to. It cites a reduction in gun related crimes, which is common in areas where strict restrictions are enacted, but it mentions nothing about other types of violent crimes, like deaths via knifings and beatings, which tend to go up in number even more than gun related deaths drop when strict gun bans are enacted. Only a fool celebrates a law that tends to result in more net pain, suffering, and violence because it reduces the number of deaths using one particular instrument. If all the water in a country is poisoned and everyone dies, guess what you eliminated 100% of all gun violence there. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.