As many others, I. Can confirm this. I posted a number of videos to YouTube recently, all with the same background music licensed under a CC license. All were automatically (within seconds of posting) tagged, I disputed the claims immediately, I am still waiting for the issue to be resolved including any comment.
What angers me most is that I have apparently no way of finding out WHO the claimant is. They are accusing me of copyright infringement, i.e. a crime. Where I live, that is a serious accusation.
Anyone had any luck with this whole scam in the past? I want to know who is making the claim so I can contact the music author and support him in suing them. Because THIS is what "stealing music" looks like - making a copyright claim to someone else's work.
Uh, no, it isn't. Maybe you're trying to get a square peg into a round hole?
I use Dropbox, mostly, and it works like a charm. There are other solutions, too. Then there's iwork.com for those who want that. iTunes stuff syncs wirelessly as soon as you plug in a power cable. I really don't see where your problem is.
Also, if it ran Linux, we could have ports of every single X application to run on it.
Except that none of them would run properly because they were not designed for a touch interface. Sorry, instead of tons of possibilities for failure and frustration, I prefer a limited set of stuff that actually works.
What puzzles me is why nobody has ported Linux to the iPad.
Because things don't magically get better just because they run Linux. I'm trying to think of something, but I seriously can't figure out what a Linux tablet would give me that the iPad as it is doesn't. Plus I could always simply buy an Android tablet if that's what I want.
So, basically, nobody has an itch that needs scratching.
Are you serious when you say you can type out real emails, like the ones for work, from an iPad keyboard?
Totally serious. Now consider context: When I am at home and have a full computer with keyboard, I don't feel like sitting on the couch doing mails on the iPad. But when I'm on the road, then the iPad will do. So yes, you can type out real emails, with the on-screen keyboard. It's not perfect, but it works for me.
Aside from that, it is tons better for webpages than an iPhone, too. For a quick check on something, the smartphone will do, for anything more? Nope.
My most-often used iPad Apps are Mail, Safari, Skype and Zite. However, it is not only for those that I take my iPad with me when I go on a trip, it is also in order to have some of the lesser-used ones available. I don't need the SSH App very often, but when I do, man am I happy to have it! I could use the Maps application on the iPhone, but especially for maps, the larger screen size makes a huge difference. There's a couple games, but also iOutBank, iBooks, Wordpress and I've even been happy to have the Airport app when I needed to troubleshoot my home network. I've also taken it with me to give presentations using Keynote on several occasions, for audiences ranging from 8 to 400 people. Sure I will create the presentation on my iMac, but I obviously can't carry that with me. Having a small device to run the presentation is really great.
There's a couple other apps that I use very rarely, like the IRC and IM clients, or a mindmapping app, etc. etc.
The iPad will never replace my desktop computer. But it's a nifty little device to carry around for when I'm not at home.
Does that mean you need to get one? No. Your needs may be different. I'm totally fine with that. Is it too expensive for what it does? I don't care, I'm not living on welfare. Are most people just playing games and reading mails? I don't care what others do.
Look, not everyone needs or wants an SUV, or air conditioning, or peanut butter. People have different desires, tastes and needs.
For me, the iPad doesn't see all that much use, but I rarely leave on a longer trip without it because it's great for things that I use it for, and a laptop would not be much better, but a lot bulkier.
For you, maybe it's not what you need. So stop worrying.
It's crowdsourcing the seed capital for a new venture, crowdsourcing the design, crowdsourcing the testing, and crowdsourcing most of the software that interacts with the venture, all without actually giving anyone but the founder a true stake in the outcome.'"
So, in other words, it's brilliant.
We are witnesses to a retro dot-com boom, doesn't anyone notice? For the second time, Internet geeks are taking the business world for a ride. Ticket price: A couple billion bucks. There's a number of startups out there with completely insane ideas that get millions in VC funding. The Facebook IPO took heaps of money from the dumb "investors" who jump on every hype, it's not as wild as the early 2000s, but it's the same recipe.
Now if only I were ruthless enough to pitch a bullshit business plan to a room full of idiots with money.:-(
No support for git or Subversion, i.e. revision control. Is anyone on this planet seriously still writing software without a revision control system?
No database, not even sqlite. Every non-trivial PHP application I know uses a database. How do you want to work on it if you can't at least fake DB queries?
Direct execution instead of webserver emulation. Very few PHP apps are standalone, the vast majority are written for a web environment. Frameworks and libraries do rely on webserver features for parts of their functionality (such as URL rewriting). Another major thing you can't test.
If they tried selling me this as an IDE for my Mac, I wouldn't even test it even if it were free.
But when the world over finally realizes it's collecting dust, will they buy another?
Yes.
Maybe that's because I never used my iPad for any bullshit. I always knew what I wanted it for and that's what I'm using it for. It's a great device for many things while I'm on the road or otherwise not at my desk. If I just want to check if I got new mail, the iPhone will do. When I actually want to process my mail, with replies and all, iPad is great.
Coding? Please. Be serious. Nobody sane would do that, except for emergencies.
I do a lot of PHP coding, so I've been kind of waiting for something like that, thanks for the link.
That said, there is no way in any of the seven hells that I would do my day-to-day coding on my iPad. Try writing a few thousand characters on it, in a non-linear form, and you'll understand why.
What I definitely would love is an editor that I can use for some quick fixes or updates while I'm on the road. That way the testers can get crunching already and I might be able to send it live when I get home.
Your experience is so common it goes beyond anecdotal. Many Linux users just wanted a *nix environment. They did not care about the FSF, the GPL, the free software movement, etc.
Actually, some even did that - I know I still say Free Software and not "Open Source", I've done a couple things for the EFF, talked with the FSF, etc. etc.
But, I tried out a MacBook Pro one day, fully intending to install Linux on it, and in the end I never did, because I discovered how pleasant working with computers is when everything just works and I can focus on whatever it is I want to get done.
And that's the part the Linux desktop misses - getting out of my way and letting me get my stuff done. I don't want to spend a day configuring it, I don't care what some geek moron with no background in HCI and UI design has come up with as his cute new idea that he's now shoving down my throat because he controls the upstream distribution. I don't want to fork my text editor because it's going nowhere. I don't want to patch my WM because it doesn't do something I need it to do,
I have real work to get done here, so fuck off, Gnome and KDE and whatever, because you're more of a hindrance than anything else.
Even though it is "obvious" it wasn't my money, I kept it.
In my country, that is illegal, strictly speaking. It's rarely prosecuted, but there are actual rules around lost&found items and transfer of ownership, you know?
It is no different than knowing the triangle-triangle-triangle punch in Tekken is an exploit. It's absolutely no consequence at all.
You are a total idiot if you can't see the difference between an intentional "secret" and exploiting a bug.
Maybe instead of 100 hours farming some people got away with only 20 hours farming for gold. Big whooo.
I've been playing GW2 since the beta weekends, and there is very, very little farming involved. About the only things I've even slightly farmed so far are resources for crafting.
But there is a player-driven economy (whenever the AH works) in the game, and that is being disrupted if people have infinite amounts of money. It is my enjoyment that is being damaged here, which is why I care and why I support Arenanet in their actions.
Yes, OS X did kill the Linux desktop. But not for the reasons usually mentioned. What it did was take the pressure off that had been driving Linux. You see, many of simply wanted an alternative to windows, preferably a unix-like system. There was none after OS/2 died (lots of early Linux fans moved in from OS/2, do you still remember?) and academic alternatives like Oberon went nowhere. So we worked on Linux.
And then OS X came along and gave us what we wanted and we went there. Not the story of everyone, but one you hear again and again.
At least two thirds of the Mac fans in my circles used to be Linux, not windows, users.
It feels like UIs are getting dumber and dumber...
I believe strongly that "dumb" is the wrong word. Am I a "dumb" driver because I don't want to play around with the engine for ten minutes every time I want it to start up, and prefer to have an ignition key that does whatever towards the end result I desire?
Usability is goal-driven - if your goal is to tinker with the OS and write device drivers, your requirements are different than for the other guy, who wants to watch videos and play games.
However, there are also common tasks. Both you and your grandmother are surfing the web and using e-mail. You probably use more functionality of the browser than she does, but there are common functionalities that you both use. I'm sure you enjoy that you can just click on a link, compared to, say, having to navigate to it with keyboard combinations and then manually typing a 7-digit code just because. That might sound ridiculous, but a lot of the early computer "things" are in that area of the ridiculous if you think about it from today's perspective. For example, LOAD "*",8,1 sounds as ridiculous to us today as hunting through three layers of submenus in the start menu sounds to any user of Quicksilver or Alfred.
where is that covered panel in Android? Gnome3? iOS? Windows 8?
Many versions of windows have had "advanced settings" buttons. Let's ignore for the moment that the distribution of things between basic and advanced settings seems random at best. OS X and most Linux distributions have features hidden from the GUI that you can tweak with either special software (say, Onyx) or through commandline or text file (.plist,/etc/*,...) editing.
It's like driving in a car with fixed seat and steering-wheel position.
No, it isn't. That is a matter of ergonomics, a totally different area.
Configuration has at least as much psychological effect as it has usability effects. It's an act of taking possession of the machine. Average users change their desktop background, geeks need to tweak something about the system. I'm not sure where it comes from, because I don't feel that way (I use one of the standard backgrounds on my iMac, for example), but the amount of hostility you get when you disable these options, e.g. in a corporate environment, makes it clear how important psychologically they are.
If the GUI you work with is well designed, I'm not sure you really need to tweak all that much about it. I'm speaking from personal experience here, having jumped from a heavily, heavily personalized Linux environment to OS X some years back. And by that I mean that I'd patched my WM and maintained my own branch of my favourite text editor, because the upstream was not being updated anymore.
And yet, here I am, with no desire to write my own text editor or install a different WM or whatever, because the stuff simply works and I can focus on the work I actually want to get done. It's a kind of freedom, maybe you should try it. You can always go back if you don't like it.
The problem with the Linux world is, to be honest, that all the UIs suck, and suck badly. That's why you have to tweak them. Linux is a second windows - a bunch of nerds copying stuff from all around that they like with no fashion sense. None of it fits together well, so despite being made up of really nice pieces, the sum total is but ugly. Linux lacks a Linus on the UI side of things. A strong, respected visionaire who knows his stuff and makes sure the big picture is right.
But what if you posit a God who interferes in the world not through sudden, startling violations of the natural order, but through guiding what we humans see as random chance?
Then you need to provide evidence of such guidance, otherwise it is pure speculation. I could just as well claim that aliens on Jupiter do the same. Or my cat is the true ruler of the world, through just such a mechanism.
You can't make up some arbitrary claim and demand that others either disprove you or accept it as true.
The world itself is enough of a chaotic system that even today, we can't come close to being able to explain precisely why, for instance, a bolt of lighting hit this tree instead of that power line, or why a hurricane shifted course to hit this city instead of that one. Or even why one neuron fires, and not another, leading a person to pick one out of a set of similarly likely choices.
There are various layers that get confused here. One is randomness, the other is chaos and the third is complexity.
Randomness is radiactive decay or quantum events. For all we know, they have probabilities and that's it - pure chance.
Chaos does not have to be random at all. Fractals have no randomness, and their formulas are often very simple. Chaos, in the mathematical sense, is if a system is so volatile that miniscule changes in starting conditions lead to massive changes in end conditions. This is a combination of emergence and complexity.
Complexity is when a system is so complicated and internally interacting that it goes well beyond our practical abilities to calculate. We do not know which tree the lightning bolt will hit, but we know pretty much everything about how it works and why it does. The exact path through the air depends on details in the air composition that we can not measure, and thus not predict. But nobody in the field is surprised by what the lightning does, there's no randomness involved, it's just too complicated to make precise predictions.
Notice the absence of god in all of that? No supernatural entity is necessary for any of this to work. Thus, once again, the assumption that there is one anyways fails the giggle test.
However, that only means that it's less likely that there's a God. It doesn't disprove the existence of God. I mean, that's sort of the whole problem with God in science: He's unfalsifiable.
Correct. You leave the realm of science and enter the realm of philosophy when you go towards existential questions.
Nietzsche has a great debunking there, when he wrote about the "thing per se" (Ding an sich), a famous philosophical concept of Kant, derived from the Platonic world view. Basically, the argument is that if you imagine a thing that just exists, but does not in any way, shape or form interact with the world, then for all intents and purposes, that thing does not exist, because existence is the interaction with other things. It is by interaction that the world dynamics come to be and that we experience the world.
A god that doesn't do anything, ever, does not have any existence beyond a purely philosophical idea.
This is what our god concepts are moving towards. However, one step back into reality, the actual gods we are actually talking about are very much active entities, down to the level of interfering with the lot of individual believers, if you put even the slightest, tiniest bit of trust in the stories in the various holy books, all of which are strangely personal and very much not abstract and philosophical. Saving a backup copy of your god in the realm of abstraction runs plain counter to all the older stories about him.
And this is where the practical disproval comes into play. Everything in the holy books that can be verified as having actually happened can be explained without godly interference. Given what we know about history, anthropology and mysticism, we can even trace the various ideas embedded in the stories and explain how and why people thought that way.
So you have a book full of "god did this" and "god did that" and you can demonstrate that it all can and very likely has happened without him. God being the assumption, not the causal relation, this is, in fact, the way in which you disprove assumptions - you show that a simpler, alternative assumption fits the known facts better.
I work in IT Security, and I've done some work on the edge towards usability. Actually, I've given a keynote speech earlier this year on the topic.
The geek arrogance of considering average users "dumber-and-dumber" is the biggest cause of security issues today. And I would not be surprised if the same were true for other areas of computing.
It's arrogance, plain and simple. Human beings are not so different that they really need totally different designs. And good design does take power-users into account, btw. - that's why some stereos have a cover over the switches that most users will rarely touch, for example.
That early Apple mice used only one button was not for simplification, but because the interface paradigm assumed that keys would be used as modifiers, for example. Just because you disagree with a way of doing things, mostly because you are used to the other one, doesn't mean it is bad. And just for the record: I can't fathom how to use a computer with a mouse with less than 3 buttons.
The one thing you can throw at Apple and have it stick is that in many things they only allow one way of doing things. Especially if you come from Linux, there is a massive lack of configurability. Then again, if you read todays articles, that precisely is one reason the Linux desktop never made it. See, if someone needs help with their Mac, I can sit down and go to work. On many Linux machines I first had to understand which WM on which distribution they use and what they put where.
One of the most important aspects of UI design is consistency. And it applies to average as well as power users. For the average user it means menu options don't shift around all the time, for the power user it means the same keyboard shortcut has the same meaning across different programs.
Same reason here. After almost 10 years of Linux, I switched to OS X about 5 years ago and haven't looked back. It simply beats Linux in every aspect but price on the desktop. My servers still run Debian.
I don't follow that. The reliability of memory is a question worth asking and answering, no matter what your initial assumption is. Which, btw., differs by person. Some are rarely confronted with the unreliability of their own memory and thus assume that it is reliable. Some have had early confrontations with the fact and have thus formed a different base assumption.
Interestingly, there have also been studies on the meta-reliability of memory, i.e. about how reliable people think their memory is, compared to how reliable it actually is.
Scientific people do not accept their memory as reliable. They know that it isn't. However, they also realize that with a healthy dose of care, memory is largely acceptable, and can be used when nothing of higher reliability (like a video or written document) is available.
No need to rely on faith if you have a couple facts. We can actually make fairly good educated guesses at the reliability of memory. We don't have to "believe" - we can test and measure. In fact, we've done so.
Actually, there's a lot wrong with believing in a higher power, as it makes it easier to escape from responsibility, shift blame and claim higher authorities to acts that you'd not even consider had they come from another human being.
There are also advantages, apparently mostly in the health area, as some recent studies have indicated.
So the sum total is still out. But you can't say there's nothing wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
As many others, I. Can confirm this. I posted a number of videos to YouTube recently, all with the same background music licensed under a CC license. All were automatically (within seconds of posting) tagged, I disputed the claims immediately, I am still waiting for the issue to be resolved including any comment.
What angers me most is that I have apparently no way of finding out WHO the claimant is. They are accusing me of copyright infringement, i.e. a crime. Where I live, that is a serious accusation.
Anyone had any luck with this whole scam in the past? I want to know who is making the claim so I can contact the music author and support him in suing them. Because THIS is what "stealing music" looks like - making a copyright claim to someone else's work.
The iPad is a real pain to get files on and off
Uh, no, it isn't. Maybe you're trying to get a square peg into a round hole?
I use Dropbox, mostly, and it works like a charm. There are other solutions, too. Then there's iwork.com for those who want that. iTunes stuff syncs wirelessly as soon as you plug in a power cable. I really don't see where your problem is.
Also, if it ran Linux, we could have ports of every single X application to run on it.
Except that none of them would run properly because they were not designed for a touch interface. Sorry, instead of tons of possibilities for failure and frustration, I prefer a limited set of stuff that actually works.
What puzzles me is why nobody has ported Linux to the iPad.
Because things don't magically get better just because they run Linux. I'm trying to think of something, but I seriously can't figure out what a Linux tablet would give me that the iPad as it is doesn't. Plus I could always simply buy an Android tablet if that's what I want.
So, basically, nobody has an itch that needs scratching.
Are you serious when you say you can type out real emails, like the ones for work, from an iPad keyboard?
Totally serious. Now consider context: When I am at home and have a full computer with keyboard, I don't feel like sitting on the couch doing mails on the iPad. But when I'm on the road, then the iPad will do. So yes, you can type out real emails, with the on-screen keyboard. It's not perfect, but it works for me.
Aside from that, it is tons better for webpages than an iPhone, too. For a quick check on something, the smartphone will do, for anything more? Nope.
My most-often used iPad Apps are Mail, Safari, Skype and Zite. However, it is not only for those that I take my iPad with me when I go on a trip, it is also in order to have some of the lesser-used ones available. I don't need the SSH App very often, but when I do, man am I happy to have it! I could use the Maps application on the iPhone, but especially for maps, the larger screen size makes a huge difference. There's a couple games, but also iOutBank, iBooks, Wordpress and I've even been happy to have the Airport app when I needed to troubleshoot my home network. I've also taken it with me to give presentations using Keynote on several occasions, for audiences ranging from 8 to 400 people. Sure I will create the presentation on my iMac, but I obviously can't carry that with me. Having a small device to run the presentation is really great.
There's a couple other apps that I use very rarely, like the IRC and IM clients, or a mindmapping app, etc. etc.
The iPad will never replace my desktop computer. But it's a nifty little device to carry around for when I'm not at home.
Does that mean you need to get one? No. Your needs may be different. I'm totally fine with that.
Is it too expensive for what it does? I don't care, I'm not living on welfare.
Are most people just playing games and reading mails? I don't care what others do.
So maybe you're not a tablet person?
Look, not everyone needs or wants an SUV, or air conditioning, or peanut butter. People have different desires, tastes and needs.
For me, the iPad doesn't see all that much use, but I rarely leave on a longer trip without it because it's great for things that I use it for, and a laptop would not be much better, but a lot bulkier.
For you, maybe it's not what you need. So stop worrying.
Looks fantastic.
But - and that's a very big "but": No Subversion or git support. Thus, unusable for any of my projects.
It's crowdsourcing the seed capital for a new venture, crowdsourcing the design, crowdsourcing the testing, and crowdsourcing most of the software that interacts with the venture, all without actually giving anyone but the founder a true stake in the outcome.'"
So, in other words, it's brilliant.
We are witnesses to a retro dot-com boom, doesn't anyone notice? For the second time, Internet geeks are taking the business world for a ride. Ticket price: A couple billion bucks. There's a number of startups out there with completely insane ideas that get millions in VC funding. The Facebook IPO took heaps of money from the dumb "investors" who jump on every hype, it's not as wild as the early 2000s, but it's the same recipe.
Now if only I were ruthless enough to pitch a bullshit business plan to a room full of idiots with money. :-(
taken a *look*, of course.
full-blooded software development tool
Yeah, right.
I've taken a lot, and I'm underwhelmed.
No support for git or Subversion, i.e. revision control. Is anyone on this planet seriously still writing software without a revision control system?
No database, not even sqlite. Every non-trivial PHP application I know uses a database. How do you want to work on it if you can't at least fake DB queries?
Direct execution instead of webserver emulation. Very few PHP apps are standalone, the vast majority are written for a web environment. Frameworks and libraries do rely on webserver features for parts of their functionality (such as URL rewriting). Another major thing you can't test.
If they tried selling me this as an IDE for my Mac, I wouldn't even test it even if it were free.
But when the world over finally realizes it's collecting dust, will they buy another?
Yes.
Maybe that's because I never used my iPad for any bullshit. I always knew what I wanted it for and that's what I'm using it for. It's a great device for many things while I'm on the road or otherwise not at my desk. If I just want to check if I got new mail, the iPhone will do. When I actually want to process my mail, with replies and all, iPad is great.
Coding? Please. Be serious. Nobody sane would do that, except for emergencies.
I do a lot of PHP coding, so I've been kind of waiting for something like that, thanks for the link.
That said, there is no way in any of the seven hells that I would do my day-to-day coding on my iPad. Try writing a few thousand characters on it, in a non-linear form, and you'll understand why.
What I definitely would love is an editor that I can use for some quick fixes or updates while I'm on the road. That way the testers can get crunching already and I might be able to send it live when I get home.
Your experience is so common it goes beyond anecdotal. Many Linux users just wanted a *nix environment. They did not care about the FSF, the GPL, the free software movement, etc.
Actually, some even did that - I know I still say Free Software and not "Open Source", I've done a couple things for the EFF, talked with the FSF, etc. etc.
But, I tried out a MacBook Pro one day, fully intending to install Linux on it, and in the end I never did, because I discovered how pleasant working with computers is when everything just works and I can focus on whatever it is I want to get done.
And that's the part the Linux desktop misses - getting out of my way and letting me get my stuff done. I don't want to spend a day configuring it, I don't care what some geek moron with no background in HCI and UI design has come up with as his cute new idea that he's now shoving down my throat because he controls the upstream distribution. I don't want to fork my text editor because it's going nowhere. I don't want to patch my WM because it doesn't do something I need it to do,
I have real work to get done here, so fuck off, Gnome and KDE and whatever, because you're more of a hindrance than anything else.
Even though it is "obvious" it wasn't my money, I kept it.
In my country, that is illegal, strictly speaking. It's rarely prosecuted, but there are actual rules around lost&found items and transfer of ownership, you know?
It is no different than knowing the triangle-triangle-triangle punch in Tekken is an exploit. It's absolutely no consequence at all.
You are a total idiot if you can't see the difference between an intentional "secret" and exploiting a bug.
Maybe instead of 100 hours farming some people got away with only 20 hours farming for gold. Big whooo.
I've been playing GW2 since the beta weekends, and there is very, very little farming involved. About the only things I've even slightly farmed so far are resources for crafting.
But there is a player-driven economy (whenever the AH works) in the game, and that is being disrupted if people have infinite amounts of money. It is my enjoyment that is being damaged here, which is why I care and why I support Arenanet in their actions.
Yes, OS X did kill the Linux desktop. But not for the reasons usually mentioned. What it did was take the pressure off that had been driving Linux.
You see, many of simply wanted an alternative to windows, preferably a unix-like system. There was none after OS/2 died (lots of early Linux fans moved in from OS/2, do you still remember?) and academic alternatives like Oberon went nowhere. So we worked on Linux.
And then OS X came along and gave us what we wanted and we went there. Not the story of everyone, but one you hear again and again.
At least two thirds of the Mac fans in my circles used to be Linux, not windows, users.
You have a gap in your logic there. Players were not punished for the error, but for EXPLOITING the bug.
Open window? Your problem. Me climbing in? Breaking and entering. It really is that simple
It feels like UIs are getting dumber and dumber...
I believe strongly that "dumb" is the wrong word. Am I a "dumb" driver because I don't want to play around with the engine for ten minutes every time I want it to start up, and prefer to have an ignition key that does whatever towards the end result I desire?
Usability is goal-driven - if your goal is to tinker with the OS and write device drivers, your requirements are different than for the other guy, who wants to watch videos and play games.
However, there are also common tasks. Both you and your grandmother are surfing the web and using e-mail. You probably use more functionality of the browser than she does, but there are common functionalities that you both use. I'm sure you enjoy that you can just click on a link, compared to, say, having to navigate to it with keyboard combinations and then manually typing a 7-digit code just because. That might sound ridiculous, but a lot of the early computer "things" are in that area of the ridiculous if you think about it from today's perspective. For example, LOAD "*",8,1 sounds as ridiculous to us today as hunting through three layers of submenus in the start menu sounds to any user of Quicksilver or Alfred.
where is that covered panel in Android? Gnome3? iOS? Windows 8?
Many versions of windows have had "advanced settings" buttons. Let's ignore for the moment that the distribution of things between basic and advanced settings seems random at best. /etc/*, ...) editing.
OS X and most Linux distributions have features hidden from the GUI that you can tweak with either special software (say, Onyx) or through commandline or text file (.plist,
It's like driving in a car with fixed seat and steering-wheel position.
No, it isn't. That is a matter of ergonomics, a totally different area.
Configuration has at least as much psychological effect as it has usability effects. It's an act of taking possession of the machine. Average users change their desktop background, geeks need to tweak something about the system. I'm not sure where it comes from, because I don't feel that way (I use one of the standard backgrounds on my iMac, for example), but the amount of hostility you get when you disable these options, e.g. in a corporate environment, makes it clear how important psychologically they are.
If the GUI you work with is well designed, I'm not sure you really need to tweak all that much about it. I'm speaking from personal experience here, having jumped from a heavily, heavily personalized Linux environment to OS X some years back. And by that I mean that I'd patched my WM and maintained my own branch of my favourite text editor, because the upstream was not being updated anymore.
And yet, here I am, with no desire to write my own text editor or install a different WM or whatever, because the stuff simply works and I can focus on the work I actually want to get done. It's a kind of freedom, maybe you should try it. You can always go back if you don't like it.
The problem with the Linux world is, to be honest, that all the UIs suck, and suck badly. That's why you have to tweak them. Linux is a second windows - a bunch of nerds copying stuff from all around that they like with no fashion sense. None of it fits together well, so despite being made up of really nice pieces, the sum total is but ugly.
Linux lacks a Linus on the UI side of things. A strong, respected visionaire who knows his stuff and makes sure the big picture is right.
But what if you posit a God who interferes in the world not through sudden, startling violations of the natural order, but through guiding what we humans see as random chance?
Then you need to provide evidence of such guidance, otherwise it is pure speculation. I could just as well claim that aliens on Jupiter do the same. Or my cat is the true ruler of the world, through just such a mechanism.
You can't make up some arbitrary claim and demand that others either disprove you or accept it as true.
The world itself is enough of a chaotic system that even today, we can't come close to being able to explain precisely why, for instance, a bolt of lighting hit this tree instead of that power line, or why a hurricane shifted course to hit this city instead of that one. Or even why one neuron fires, and not another, leading a person to pick one out of a set of similarly likely choices.
There are various layers that get confused here. One is randomness, the other is chaos and the third is complexity.
Randomness is radiactive decay or quantum events. For all we know, they have probabilities and that's it - pure chance.
Chaos does not have to be random at all. Fractals have no randomness, and their formulas are often very simple. Chaos, in the mathematical sense, is if a system is so volatile that miniscule changes in starting conditions lead to massive changes in end conditions. This is a combination of emergence and complexity.
Complexity is when a system is so complicated and internally interacting that it goes well beyond our practical abilities to calculate. We do not know which tree the lightning bolt will hit, but we know pretty much everything about how it works and why it does. The exact path through the air depends on details in the air composition that we can not measure, and thus not predict. But nobody in the field is surprised by what the lightning does, there's no randomness involved, it's just too complicated to make precise predictions.
Notice the absence of god in all of that? No supernatural entity is necessary for any of this to work. Thus, once again, the assumption that there is one anyways fails the giggle test.
However, that only means that it's less likely that there's a God. It doesn't disprove the existence of God. I mean, that's sort of the whole problem with God in science: He's unfalsifiable.
Correct. You leave the realm of science and enter the realm of philosophy when you go towards existential questions.
Nietzsche has a great debunking there, when he wrote about the "thing per se" (Ding an sich), a famous philosophical concept of Kant, derived from the Platonic world view. Basically, the argument is that if you imagine a thing that just exists, but does not in any way, shape or form interact with the world, then for all intents and purposes, that thing does not exist, because existence is the interaction with other things. It is by interaction that the world dynamics come to be and that we experience the world.
A god that doesn't do anything, ever, does not have any existence beyond a purely philosophical idea.
This is what our god concepts are moving towards. However, one step back into reality, the actual gods we are actually talking about are very much active entities, down to the level of interfering with the lot of individual believers, if you put even the slightest, tiniest bit of trust in the stories in the various holy books, all of which are strangely personal and very much not abstract and philosophical. Saving a backup copy of your god in the realm of abstraction runs plain counter to all the older stories about him.
And this is where the practical disproval comes into play. Everything in the holy books that can be verified as having actually happened can be explained without godly interference. Given what we know about history, anthropology and mysticism, we can even trace the various ideas embedded in the stories and explain how and why people thought that way.
So you have a book full of "god did this" and "god did that" and you can demonstrate that it all can and very likely has happened without him. God being the assumption, not the causal relation, this is, in fact, the way in which you disprove assumptions - you show that a simpler, alternative assumption fits the known facts better.
I work in IT Security, and I've done some work on the edge towards usability. Actually, I've given a keynote speech earlier this year on the topic.
The geek arrogance of considering average users "dumber-and-dumber" is the biggest cause of security issues today. And I would not be surprised if the same were true for other areas of computing.
It's arrogance, plain and simple. Human beings are not so different that they really need totally different designs. And good design does take power-users into account, btw. - that's why some stereos have a cover over the switches that most users will rarely touch, for example.
That early Apple mice used only one button was not for simplification, but because the interface paradigm assumed that keys would be used as modifiers, for example. Just because you disagree with a way of doing things, mostly because you are used to the other one, doesn't mean it is bad. And just for the record: I can't fathom how to use a computer with a mouse with less than 3 buttons.
The one thing you can throw at Apple and have it stick is that in many things they only allow one way of doing things. Especially if you come from Linux, there is a massive lack of configurability. Then again, if you read todays articles, that precisely is one reason the Linux desktop never made it. See, if someone needs help with their Mac, I can sit down and go to work. On many Linux machines I first had to understand which WM on which distribution they use and what they put where.
One of the most important aspects of UI design is consistency. And it applies to average as well as power users. For the average user it means menu options don't shift around all the time, for the power user it means the same keyboard shortcut has the same meaning across different programs.
Same reason here. After almost 10 years of Linux, I switched to OS X about 5 years ago and haven't looked back. It simply beats Linux in every aspect but price on the desktop. My servers still run Debian.
I don't follow that. The reliability of memory is a question worth asking and answering, no matter what your initial assumption is. Which, btw., differs by person. Some are rarely confronted with the unreliability of their own memory and thus assume that it is reliable. Some have had early confrontations with the fact and have thus formed a different base assumption.
Interestingly, there have also been studies on the meta-reliability of memory, i.e. about how reliable people think their memory is, compared to how reliable it actually is.
Contrary to what you assume, Apple did actually do usability studies on precisely this feature.
Their result was that yes, it is less precise and takes slightly longer, but it is more fun and users preferred it. That's why they went with it.
As for accuracy - how important is it really that your alarm goes off at 7:30 and not at 7:29 ?
Someone desperately wanted to use the word "skeuomorphic" in a /. submission.
Aside from that, was there any actual content? I didn't notice any.
Scientific people do not accept their memory as reliable. They know that it isn't. However, they also realize that with a healthy dose of care, memory is largely acceptable, and can be used when nothing of higher reliability (like a video or written document) is available.
No need to rely on faith if you have a couple facts. We can actually make fairly good educated guesses at the reliability of memory. We don't have to "believe" - we can test and measure. In fact, we've done so.
Actually, there's a lot wrong with believing in a higher power, as it makes it easier to escape from responsibility, shift blame and claim higher authorities to acts that you'd not even consider had they come from another human being.
There are also advantages, apparently mostly in the health area, as some recent studies have indicated.
So the sum total is still out. But you can't say there's nothing wrong.