Are people really using YouTube as an authoritative source of information for ANYTHING???
If anyone is using youtube to get medical information, I say that the best (and laziest) solution would be to just let natural selection run its course.
Halo 3 does not function with the Xbox 360, and to the contrary, attempted use of Halo 3 consistently causes the Xbox 360 to "crash," "freeze" or "lock up" while the game is being played."
Surprisingly, the study found that iPhone texters don't improve with experience. The researchers also asked users in the other groups to send text messages using the iPhone. These novice iPhone users made mistakes at the same rate as people who have owned iPhones for at least one month, the study found.
It doesn't look like users can learn to no better. And why would they. Theres no tactile difference between doing it right and doing it wrong. You can't qualify a mistake like you could with a regular keyboard.
Personally, I'm not in the least suprised that people have more trouble with a brand new interface.
Of course - here I was reading this article and the comments thinking that maybe they had valid points. Lack of tactile feedback, overzealous spell-correcter (apparently not just a checker), no support for International English even when the phone is used internationally...
Isn't apple pushing this as a highly refined phone with an interface that a 2 year old could use? Not their exact words, I'm sure, but that's their standard refrain for all their products.
Therefore, it can't be apple's fault. Lets blame the users - it's really their fault.
Is it? I look at it, and I see that it uses the GTK - but the G in GTK stands for Gimp, so thats hardly surprising. I look at the GNOME human interface guidelines, and I see whole bunches of ways the Gimp doesn't conform.
For example, the toolbox windows should have no title, should not appear in the system window list, and should always stay on top of the primary window. The fact that the Gimp's main window essentially IS a toolbox (in function if not in window type) seems to violate the HIG. "Toolboxes and other utility windows may be shared between multiple SDI documents, but closing them should have no effect on the document windows." definately doesn't apply to the gimp, as closing the toolbox ends the programme.
GNOME HIG also state that tool windows should not have menus, and that ideally, only primary windows should have menus. Gimp has two menus - one in the tool window, and one in each document/image.
If I recall correctly, Gimp also does not use any of the GNOME libraries, only Gtk ones, and other non-GNOME libraries.
I don't really see how this is a good area where linux can grow. People who *need* that kind of power and can't get it elsewhere usually already use linux (or some other unix based OS).
Maybe linux should be thought of as a way to turn your Ford Pinto into a Toyota for free?
I don't know about you, but I still wind up with a good sized price difference. This is in Canada, so YMMV, but a Vostro 200 with the hardware set to match the bottom-end iMac is $840, while the iMac itself is $1299. Actually, the dell was slightly better. The RAM was in 2x512MiB sticks instead of 1x1GiB stick, and it came with Works '08 on it. I've periodically spec'd out others, comparing them to dell and what I could build myself, and the canadian apple store has never even gotten close to the competition.
I can understand buying it as a luxury item, but don't try and say (in canada) that it doesn't cost any more.
I'm partial to the Geany code editor. It has all of the features I need, seems to support just about every language you'd like (both in terms of highlighting and running), and still seems very light-weight.
For designing graphical interfaces, it doesn't get any easier than GLADE. No auto-generated code, just an XML file that can be loaded by any language that has a port of libglade, and like that, you have a GUI for your programme.
Both can be found in the package manager, but here are their websites if you're interested.
I think that it has something to do with their use of gradients, although I can't put my finger on it either. The edges of widgets also seem to grate with me a little bit.
I've tried to introduce myself to KDE several times over the past year (it seems nice, really). I want to like it, I want to be able to use it (or atleast Qt based apps alongsize GNOME), but every time I try, no matter what theme engine/colour scheme I try, I find myself constantly cringing at the appearance of the widgets. The closest I ever got to getting rid of that feeling was with the 'Domino' engine, but even that was just somehow...jarring.
Interersting. I had assumed that this bucket analogy was referring to the number of instructions per clock that the CPU was able to do, which has traditionally been the counterpoint to the "OMG FAST CLOCK SPEEDZ!!!" argument that companies like intel made for a long time.
I suppose dual cores are sort of a crude way to try and double the IPC count for a chip, but with the added need for ambidextrous programmes.
Computer hardware manufacturers shouldn't be providing support for software products running on their hardware. Hardware manufacturers should support the hardware, and any issues it has, like bad HDD sectors, or faulty memory, etc...
If you buy an OS from a third party and install it on the OS-less computer, don't you think that its the third party vendors responsibility to provide support for that product? Not to pick on MS in particular here, but say MS makes an OS with a crummy installer, shouldn't they be the ones who have to support it? Maybe then they'll learn to do better next time.
But that underscores the problem with the PC + OS forced combination.
Why does HP provide technical support for windows? It's microsoft's product. I know that HP is a reseller, but come on.
When I have a hardware problem and call up for support, I always get the same line: "We can't support you unless you're running windows." Even when its clearly a hardware issue, because they always want to rule out software issues.
They sold me a computer that was perfectly capable of running linux - its not like i hacked the bios or added a mod chip. Its a perfectly valid configuration of the comptuer. Why can I not get support?
I know that they can't support all OSes ever made, but the least that they could do is try to do some obvious tests to try to rule out hardware issues, or better yet, ship the computer with a bootable "Hardware Diagnostic CD". Whenever you call HP for hardware support, they tell you to insert the CD and reboot. That way, they're dealing with a known environment that eliminates the possibility for software problems and lets them diagnose the hardware properly. It could even have a bunch of diagnostic tools loaded to get things going. It would probably even speed up a lot of the diagnostics exercises.
Theres NO reason that PC HARDWARE support needs to be tied to the OS.
Some retailers tried to sell OS/less PCs at one time, and MS kicked up a big stink about how they were encouraging piracy, the sky is falling, woe is MS.
If you want to insist that formatting a PC's drive makes it not a PC anymore, then HP has a very clear alternative. Offer more than one choice of vendors for the OS. This would mean that the hardware (The Personal Computer) is not linked to a particular software package. To quote the last line of my post you were replying to...
The base PC models should come with a cheaper/free OS like linux, and (as much as I hate and disagree with the phrasing) users could choose to "upgrade" to windows.
Sure its a product. It's a physical product. The absurdity that the configuration of a few bits on the hard drive magically changes the thing from "not a product" to "product" boggles the mind. Its just not quite as out-of-the-boxish.
At the very least, they should give the user a choice, thereby no longer linking the hardware to that one specific piece of software. Consider one of those online confur-o-matic things. The base PC models should come with a cheaper/free OS like linux, and (as much as I hate and disagree with the phrasing) users could choose to "upgrade" to windows.
That is part of my point as well. I'm writing this in Gnome/Ubuntu. I have three window managers installed on this machine (KWin, Metacity, and Beryl), and all of them behave in the same way. I suspect that I could easily apt-get a few more that also behaved the same way. Windows also behaves the same way. Almost everything behaves in that same way.
I realize that Apple likes to be different, but sometimes it would be nice if they at least included the option for the rest of us to do things the way that we're used to doing them. I know, I know, I have no right to demand anything from them.
Thing is, Apple's big push now seems to be in winning converts from other operating systems. While I wouldn't hold some unusual default settings against them (I may very well like some of the different ways of doing things), I would very much like to have at least the option of changing things a bit.
One of the things thats always bothered me when I use OS X is the way that the maximize button behaves. I can see how its behaviour under OS X makes sense in a certain way (Only enlarging to be 'big enough'), but I maximize a window to hide the clutter behind it as well as to see some more content in the foreground window.
I've dug around in the system preferences a bit, and looked on google as well, and can't seem to find any way of changing this behaviour. Would an option to change behaviour be so hard? As silly as it may sound, its been one of the few annoying things thats really been keeping me from using OS X in any serious manner.
At this point, I don't even see how the icon could be mistaken for something relevant. kdawson calls the story inspirational - thats not the same thing as enlightening. IIRC, this isn't the first time he's done this, either. Now it seems like he's just using it to troll for comments like ours.
Hey, whatever gets people posting comments, I guess.
You're not the only one with this problem, I went through 4 (!) zen micros in 4 months. After a few weeks of simply walking with it in my pocket, the headphones would wiggle the socket loose.
I had the first one sent away to creative for repairs, and it came back 6 weeks later just as broken as it was when I sent it in.
I had a years warranty where I got it from, so the repairs/replacements didnt cost me, but it was quickly becoming absurd.
Finally i just traded up for an iPod mini 6 gig (traded up as in 1 gig more, and as in $30 more), and its lasted about 14 times as long as any one of those micros, and its still working properly.
I dont really miss the features that the creative had. The radio was weak as hell, and one local radio station could be picked up at 6 or 7 different points on the 'dial'. The removable battery was nice, and the first zen i got came with a second battery, but all the ones after that only had the one, so there was no real gain over the ipod there.
I may not be 'think[ing] different' with my ipod considering how popular it is, but i am 'listening better' with it than i was with the zen, and in the end, thats all that matters to me.
It'll be a long while before I trust creative with my money again.
Fine. You can explain to my grandparents why they shouldn't use IE anymore, if its so simple to get people to switch. They really truely did have trouble adjusting to Firefox from IE. You see, they didn't ever really learn how the thing worked, they just learned how to go through the motions of using it, and so even the change in the iconsets seemed to throw them for a bit.
"But usually it only takes a little push to send people over to the other side"
This would explain, then, why Apple has managed to capture most of the PC market with just the little push that their "Switch" ad campaign provided to people fed up with windows 98, and why the average home user is switching to Linux en masse thanks to a little prodding from a friend of a friend who uses it?
Theres the occasional person who defects from the standard set of applications, and the move to these alternatives is picking up steam, but I'd still say that Firefox is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to popularity. People will put up with a lot of inconveniences to avoid something new. The alternatives (If they're even aware that any exist) are unknown terrain, so bright and frightening, and it unnerves them. Will they break something, will they still know what they're doing?
Be better than the competition and make sure people learn that. Simple as that.
Ohh...so thats why microsoft is so popular.
Okay, maybe this is actually too simplistic a view. I don't think that its unfair to say that both sides will claim to be better than the other. Microsoft claims to be better all the time, and advertises heavily to that effect. How does the average consumer tell the difference?
More importantly, in this case, the playing field isn't exactly level. Microsoft is able to include IE with windows, so Firefox (or any other browser) not only has to be better than IE, it has to be so much better that its worth the effort of switching and learning the new interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking, maybe. Rick-rolling, absolutely.
If anyone is using youtube to get medical information, I say that the best (and laziest) solution would be to just let natural selection run its course.
Of course - here I was reading this article and the comments thinking that maybe they had valid points. Lack of tactile feedback, overzealous spell-correcter (apparently not just a checker), no support for International English even when the phone is used internationally...
Isn't apple pushing this as a highly refined phone with an interface that a 2 year old could use? Not their exact words, I'm sure, but that's their standard refrain for all their products.
Therefore, it can't be apple's fault. Lets blame the users - it's really their fault.
Just how old do you think linux is, anyways?
Is it? I look at it, and I see that it uses the GTK - but the G in GTK stands for Gimp, so thats hardly surprising. I look at the GNOME human interface guidelines, and I see whole bunches of ways the Gimp doesn't conform.
For example, the toolbox windows should have no title, should not appear in the system window list, and should always stay on top of the primary window. The fact that the Gimp's main window essentially IS a toolbox (in function if not in window type) seems to violate the HIG. "Toolboxes and other utility windows may be shared between multiple SDI documents, but closing them should have no effect on the document windows." definately doesn't apply to the gimp, as closing the toolbox ends the programme.
GNOME HIG also state that tool windows should not have menus, and that ideally, only primary windows should have menus. Gimp has two menus - one in the tool window, and one in each document/image.
If I recall correctly, Gimp also does not use any of the GNOME libraries, only Gtk ones, and other non-GNOME libraries.
I don't really see how this is a good area where linux can grow. People who *need* that kind of power and can't get it elsewhere usually already use linux (or some other unix based OS).
Maybe linux should be thought of as a way to turn your Ford Pinto into a Toyota for free?
I don't know about you, but I still wind up with a good sized price difference. This is in Canada, so YMMV, but a Vostro 200 with the hardware set to match the bottom-end iMac is $840, while the iMac itself is $1299. Actually, the dell was slightly better. The RAM was in 2x512MiB sticks instead of 1x1GiB stick, and it came with Works '08 on it. I've periodically spec'd out others, comparing them to dell and what I could build myself, and the canadian apple store has never even gotten close to the competition. I can understand buying it as a luxury item, but don't try and say (in canada) that it doesn't cost any more.
Hungry Hippo
I'm partial to the Geany code editor. It has all of the features I need, seems to support just about every language you'd like (both in terms of highlighting and running), and still seems very light-weight.
For designing graphical interfaces, it doesn't get any easier than GLADE. No auto-generated code, just an XML file that can be loaded by any language that has a port of libglade, and like that, you have a GUI for your programme.
Both can be found in the package manager, but here are their websites if you're interested.
Geany: http://uanews.org/node/16426
Glade: http://glade.gnome.org/
No, that's not it - at least, not for me anyways.
Even when looking at screenshots, there's just something...jarring, i suppose, about the widgets
I think that it has something to do with their use of gradients, although I can't put my finger on it either. The edges of widgets also seem to grate with me a little bit.
I've tried to introduce myself to KDE several times over the past year (it seems nice, really). I want to like it, I want to be able to use it (or atleast Qt based apps alongsize GNOME), but every time I try, no matter what theme engine/colour scheme I try, I find myself constantly cringing at the appearance of the widgets. The closest I ever got to getting rid of that feeling was with the 'Domino' engine, but even that was just somehow...jarring.
Interersting. I had assumed that this bucket analogy was referring to the number of instructions per clock that the CPU was able to do, which has traditionally been the counterpoint to the "OMG FAST CLOCK SPEEDZ!!!" argument that companies like intel made for a long time.
I suppose dual cores are sort of a crude way to try and double the IPC count for a chip, but with the added need for ambidextrous programmes.
Computer hardware manufacturers shouldn't be providing support for software products running on their hardware. Hardware manufacturers should support the hardware, and any issues it has, like bad HDD sectors, or faulty memory, etc... If you buy an OS from a third party and install it on the OS-less computer, don't you think that its the third party vendors responsibility to provide support for that product? Not to pick on MS in particular here, but say MS makes an OS with a crummy installer, shouldn't they be the ones who have to support it? Maybe then they'll learn to do better next time.
But that underscores the problem with the PC + OS forced combination.
Why does HP provide technical support for windows? It's microsoft's product. I know that HP is a reseller, but come on.
When I have a hardware problem and call up for support, I always get the same line: "We can't support you unless you're running windows." Even when its clearly a hardware issue, because they always want to rule out software issues.
They sold me a computer that was perfectly capable of running linux - its not like i hacked the bios or added a mod chip. Its a perfectly valid configuration of the comptuer. Why can I not get support?
I know that they can't support all OSes ever made, but the least that they could do is try to do some obvious tests to try to rule out hardware issues, or better yet, ship the computer with a bootable "Hardware Diagnostic CD". Whenever you call HP for hardware support, they tell you to insert the CD and reboot. That way, they're dealing with a known environment that eliminates the possibility for software problems and lets them diagnose the hardware properly. It could even have a bunch of diagnostic tools loaded to get things going. It would probably even speed up a lot of the diagnostics exercises. Theres NO reason that PC HARDWARE support needs to be tied to the OS.
If you want to insist that formatting a PC's drive makes it not a PC anymore, then HP has a very clear alternative. Offer more than one choice of vendors for the OS. This would mean that the hardware (The Personal Computer) is not linked to a particular software package. To quote the last line of my post you were replying to...
Sure its a product. It's a physical product. The absurdity that the configuration of a few bits on the hard drive magically changes the thing from "not a product" to "product" boggles the mind. Its just not quite as out-of-the-boxish.
At the very least, they should give the user a choice, thereby no longer linking the hardware to that one specific piece of software. Consider one of those online confur-o-matic things. The base PC models should come with a cheaper/free OS like linux, and (as much as I hate and disagree with the phrasing) users could choose to "upgrade" to windows.
That is part of my point as well. I'm writing this in Gnome/Ubuntu. I have three window managers installed on this machine (KWin, Metacity, and Beryl), and all of them behave in the same way. I suspect that I could easily apt-get a few more that also behaved the same way. Windows also behaves the same way. Almost everything behaves in that same way. I realize that Apple likes to be different, but sometimes it would be nice if they at least included the option for the rest of us to do things the way that we're used to doing them. I know, I know, I have no right to demand anything from them. Thing is, Apple's big push now seems to be in winning converts from other operating systems. While I wouldn't hold some unusual default settings against them (I may very well like some of the different ways of doing things), I would very much like to have at least the option of changing things a bit.
One of the things thats always bothered me when I use OS X is the way that the maximize button behaves. I can see how its behaviour under OS X makes sense in a certain way (Only enlarging to be 'big enough'), but I maximize a window to hide the clutter behind it as well as to see some more content in the foreground window.
I've dug around in the system preferences a bit, and looked on google as well, and can't seem to find any way of changing this behaviour. Would an option to change behaviour be so hard? As silly as it may sound, its been one of the few annoying things thats really been keeping me from using OS X in any serious manner.
At this point, I don't even see how the icon could be mistaken for something relevant. kdawson calls the story inspirational - thats not the same thing as enlightening. IIRC, this isn't the first time he's done this, either. Now it seems like he's just using it to troll for comments like ours.
Hey, whatever gets people posting comments, I guess.
You're not the only one with this problem, I went through 4 (!) zen micros in 4 months. After a few weeks of simply walking with it in my pocket, the headphones would wiggle the socket loose.
I had the first one sent away to creative for repairs, and it came back 6 weeks later just as broken as it was when I sent it in.
I had a years warranty where I got it from, so the repairs/replacements didnt cost me, but it was quickly becoming absurd.
Finally i just traded up for an iPod mini 6 gig (traded up as in 1 gig more, and as in $30 more), and its lasted about 14 times as long as any one of those micros, and its still working properly.
I dont really miss the features that the creative had. The radio was weak as hell, and one local radio station could be picked up at 6 or 7 different points on the 'dial'. The removable battery was nice, and the first zen i got came with a second battery, but all the ones after that only had the one, so there was no real gain over the ipod there.
I may not be 'think[ing] different' with my ipod considering how popular it is, but i am 'listening better' with it than i was with the zen, and in the end, thats all that matters to me.
It'll be a long while before I trust creative with my money again.
Pfft...low tech n00bs, I usually take a roflcopter
Fine. You can explain to my grandparents why they shouldn't use IE anymore, if its so simple to get people to switch. They really truely did have trouble adjusting to Firefox from IE. You see, they didn't ever really learn how the thing worked, they just learned how to go through the motions of using it, and so even the change in the iconsets seemed to throw them for a bit.
"But usually it only takes a little push to send people over to the other side"
This would explain, then, why Apple has managed to capture most of the PC market with just the little push that their "Switch" ad campaign provided to people fed up with windows 98, and why the average home user is switching to Linux en masse thanks to a little prodding from a friend of a friend who uses it?
Theres the occasional person who defects from the standard set of applications, and the move to these alternatives is picking up steam, but I'd still say that Firefox is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to popularity. People will put up with a lot of inconveniences to avoid something new. The alternatives (If they're even aware that any exist) are unknown terrain, so bright and frightening, and it unnerves them. Will they break something, will they still know what they're doing?
Be better than the competition and make sure people learn that. Simple as that.
Ohh...so thats why microsoft is so popular.
Okay, maybe this is actually too simplistic a view. I don't think that its unfair to say that both sides will claim to be better than the other. Microsoft claims to be better all the time, and advertises heavily to that effect. How does the average consumer tell the difference?
More importantly, in this case, the playing field isn't exactly level. Microsoft is able to include IE with windows, so Firefox (or any other browser) not only has to be better than IE, it has to be so much better that its worth the effort of switching and learning the new interface.