It is indeed a feature of Vista - when an app makes a noise, it gets added to the audio mixer (I believe that's how it works). One nice feature is that the noise the app made is remembered, so when you adjust the volume, it is replayed so you can judge the volume properly. The example I saw in the C9 video was (I think) Outlook's mail notification beep. As they dragged the Outlook volume slider, the mail notification beep was replayed.
It was neat. I've been waiting since BeOS^Wforever for this feature though.
Reminds me of the story of the fly-by-wire jet fighter that had a slight bug. It all worked fine in the tests, until one day the jet happened to fly south of the equator, whereupon it started flying upside down.
It sounds apocryphal, but I really want it to be true.:-)
All this axing of shows, and then they come back with DVD sales, and then the people that axed them want to make them again. It keeps happening. It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a race-car.
I would throttle them, but that would make _me_ the bad guy.
Ha. That made this pop into my head:
"Ironic, isn't it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election. And yet, if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you."
Specifically, read some of the things Tog has written on the Dock and Fitt's Law.
Wasn't Tog's complaint about the dock and Fitt's Law that the icons scale, and hence move about?
Hiding the dock doesn't preclude the dock from exploiting Fitt's Law (at least to reveal it), because the dock still occupies the 'infinite' bottom edge of the screen, so you can throw the mouse down the bottom to reveal it without requiring any accuracy at all. (Similar arguments could be made for the OP's request to be able to hide the menu-bar. Especially as they were - as I understand it - asking for it in a media center sort of environment, where you're quite happy to put up with the issues of hiding the menu-bar if it means it's not permanently on display on your TV.)
Obviously, hiding the dock (or Windows taskbar) still leaves you with issues, because you don't know where the UI elements will be until the dock is revealed, but that's not so much to do with Fitt's Law, really. Is it?
I suppose you could argue that when the dock is hidden, that the sizes of the targets are infinitely small, which plugs into Fitt's Law, but I can't help feeling that's sort of cheating.
making another gui component autohide isn't a brand new feature requiring development of new technology or ripping off ideas.
Yet even in the depths of my retardedness, I know that Windows 95 supported auto-hiding of the taskbar when it was launched, which predates the OS X dock by a few years.
So, thus armed with my retardedity, I made a satirical comment reflecting on the fact that whenever MS implements a feature after Apple, they are accused of photocopying, whereas whenever Apple implements a feature after MS, then they did it properly or better or some other rationalisation that lets the fanboys feel better about MS getting there first.
you aren't a patent lawyer are you?
No, I'm retarded. I think we've established that. But even with my pervasive retardosity, I still possess basic reading and comprehension skills, and a rudimentary knowledge of the history of GUI development in mainstream OSs.
What if I were a lawyer? Were you going to do a lawyer joke?
I've looked this up a couple of times in the past, and many people seem to believe it was water-cooled. However, when I checked before my last posting above, I did see a mention that only some DCs had water-cooling, not all of them.
But there's plenty of mentions of it to be found via Google - for instance.
Interestingly there is some confusion on whether the early models were water-cooled and Sega switched to air-cooling later, or the other way around.
(Btw, I admit the evidence above is hardly empirical)
Interestingly (well, I think so), I once worked with a guy who told me how he had decided to document most of the important decisions he made in his life, whether it be personal life, or at work, etc. He tried to write down as objectively as possible what he thought at the time, the pros and cons of each solution, etc. Not in huge detail, just enough for him to go back and look at it dispassionately a few years later. He also wrote down how he felt about the decision. He did this for a few years, so when he went back to the information he would be quite distant from the situation and his decisions, and so hopefully more objective when assessing whether he had made the right decision or not.
And after analysing the information, his conclusion? Very simple. Go with your gut feeling. That seemed to be the most reliable indicator of the correct decision to take.
Consumer protection laws are pretty standard affairs. You buy something, and if it doesn't work, then you take it back and either get a replacement or a refund (depending on those local laws).
Anyone who's ever bought more than 3 things in their life probably knows this. You make it sound like you're stuck with some broken piece of equipment that you have to throw away the day after you bought it. Generally, this is not the case.
You might be willing to pay the premium for products that are absolutely 100% guaranteed to work when you get them home (let me know if you find one of those, btw), but most people aren't. The rest of us will take our chances and go back to the shop on the rare occasions when a product is non-functional/damaged. If we notice a particular brand tends to be broken/poorly designed, then we tend to avoid that brand in the future - assuming there are alternatives, of course. Which there almost always are. (Compensating someone if they have to return a $20 item like a memory stick comes under the heading of a price premium, btw.)
Otherwise you're doing something rather similar to complaining about the fact that you have to put your Ikea furniture together yourself.
So in other words, they can detect biological material?
From your own link:
While the colors used to signify "inorganic" and "metal" may vary between manufacturers, all X-ray systems use shades of orange to represent "organic." This is because most explosives are organic.
The caption on the picture of the bag also says:
Notice that all organic items are a shade of orange.
Slashdot Mirror
It was neat. I've been waiting since BeOS^Wforever for this feature though.
It sounds apocryphal, but I really want it to be true. :-)
Windows Calculator, for example.
And thus began the slide of Vegas casinos into insolvency.
"It looks like you are trying to tell a 5-year old joke..."
Is any of this getting through to you?
"Nurse! He's escaped again! Get me the restraints."
You forgot Sony's fantabulous UMD format. So they will have 4 formats of everything.
Ideal, really. Can't see stores getting annoyed by that.
(Then again, I fully expect UMD to go the way of pre-recorded Minidisc - let's hope so, anyway.)
Ha. That made this pop into my head:
Mr Burns, of course :-)
As I quoted above, from the article:
(Emphasis added by me because you seemed to miss it the first time.)
I said that the scanners can detect biological material, not that they can detect explosive material.
Wasn't Tog's complaint about the dock and Fitt's Law that the icons scale, and hence move about?
Hiding the dock doesn't preclude the dock from exploiting Fitt's Law (at least to reveal it), because the dock still occupies the 'infinite' bottom edge of the screen, so you can throw the mouse down the bottom to reveal it without requiring any accuracy at all. (Similar arguments could be made for the OP's request to be able to hide the menu-bar. Especially as they were - as I understand it - asking for it in a media center sort of environment, where you're quite happy to put up with the issues of hiding the menu-bar if it means it's not permanently on display on your TV.)
Obviously, hiding the dock (or Windows taskbar) still leaves you with issues, because you don't know where the UI elements will be until the dock is revealed, but that's not so much to do with Fitt's Law, really. Is it?
I suppose you could argue that when the dock is hidden, that the sizes of the targets are infinitely small, which plugs into Fitt's Law, but I can't help feeling that's sort of cheating.
Yes, I am retarded.
As the original poster pointed out.
Yet even in the depths of my retardedness, I know that Windows 95 supported auto-hiding of the taskbar when it was launched, which predates the OS X dock by a few years.
So, thus armed with my retardedity, I made a satirical comment reflecting on the fact that whenever MS implements a feature after Apple, they are accused of photocopying, whereas whenever Apple implements a feature after MS, then they did it properly or better or some other rationalisation that lets the fanboys feel better about MS getting there first.
No, I'm retarded. I think we've established that. But even with my pervasive retardosity, I still possess basic reading and comprehension skills, and a rudimentary knowledge of the history of GUI development in mainstream OSs.
What if I were a lawyer? Were you going to do a lawyer joke?
I can pretend to be a lawyer if it will help.
...as good as Halo then?
Dude, where were you 5-8 years ago? That type of game has been and gone.
But there's plenty of mentions of it to be found via Google - for instance.
Interestingly there is some confusion on whether the early models were water-cooled and Sega switched to air-cooling later, or the other way around.
(Btw, I admit the evidence above is hardly empirical)
But that would be copying a feature from MS Windows. What would the Fanboy Police say?
Except try to claim that the way Apple hide the menu is inherently better (just because! ok?) than the way the Windows task bar is hidden.
Which makes the hiring of Vaio engineers (if true, of course) all the more amusing.
They were easy to do, but they were really small. Happy times :)
And after analysing the information, his conclusion? Very simple. Go with your gut feeling. That seemed to be the most reliable indicator of the correct decision to take.
It's made me wonder ever since :-)
As I understand it, the SH4 CPU in the Dreamcast console was water-cooled.
Gah! Too late! You've been hit by the WMF image virus already!
Anyone who's ever bought more than 3 things in their life probably knows this. You make it sound like you're stuck with some broken piece of equipment that you have to throw away the day after you bought it. Generally, this is not the case.
You might be willing to pay the premium for products that are absolutely 100% guaranteed to work when you get them home (let me know if you find one of those, btw), but most people aren't. The rest of us will take our chances and go back to the shop on the rare occasions when a product is non-functional/damaged. If we notice a particular brand tends to be broken/poorly designed, then we tend to avoid that brand in the future - assuming there are alternatives, of course. Which there almost always are. (Compensating someone if they have to return a $20 item like a memory stick comes under the heading of a price premium, btw.)
Otherwise you're doing something rather similar to complaining about the fact that you have to put your Ikea furniture together yourself.
You mean some people have bought accessories for a large scale global consumer product, and some of them are faulty?
Say it aint so! This is brand new information!
From your own link:
The caption on the picture of the bag also says:
But can we really trust it?