When I say screwed up, I mean it uses the order of icons in the dock, not the Z-order of windows.
This might seem geeky, but it allows you to flip back and forth between 2 or 3 applications really easily with Alt-Tab under windows.
And the truth is, no-one except geeks or uber power users even know about Alt-Tab anyway, so imho, keep it geeky:) (The most common reaction when I use Alt-Tab from most people is "What was that? What did you do?")
Anyway, I like the fact that Alt-Tab is context sensitive under Windows (i.e. the most recently used apps are first in the list). It means I don't have to think when I'm using it. Whereas the OS X feature always makes me think, "Er...". It's probably because I've been using Alt-Tab for 10+ years, and half the time I don't even bother looking at the list of icons because I know how many times to press Tab without looking. I may not be representative, of course.
it's clear your supposed to 'stick to the rails' - like so many games thinking outside the box is not encoraged
It is actually reasonably hard to cope with infinite input possibilities and do something sensible with all of them without imposing a few rules or shortcuts. Valve could always have done better but if you remember millions of frustrated fanboys were screaming and bitching that they ship the damn game (along with infantile talk of betrayal, etc).
Sure I think the artwork in HL2 was okay
Okay? Okay?!
This sort of comment makes me feel that some people's expectations are way too high.
(The best facial animation ever seen in a video game is 'okay'?)
You seem to be forgetting that I was replying to the original poster's point:
allow democratic secession of any region that does not want to be part of your country
The Republic of Ireland is not part of the region in question, not are Scotland, England or Wales. So following the OP's plan, none of these regions/countries should have a say in the secession. It is up to the region itself, according to the 'plan'.
And as I pointed out with my keyhole wikipedia article, it's not entirely clear that the region wants to break away from the UK. Indeed, it has been my understanding what makes the issue so tricky is that there are sizeable parts of the population who want to leave the UK, and sizeable parts who want to stay, and both groups hold their views with no little vehemence or conviction.
I was pointing out that instances such as this make the foolproof anti-terrorist plan somewhat hard to follow.
A slight majority of the present-day population are unionist and wish to remain part of the United Kingdom, but a significant minority, known as nationalists, want to see a united Ireland. These two views are linked to deeper cultural divisions. Unionists are predominantly Protestant and often descendants of Scottish and English (mainly Scottish) settlement in previous centuries, while nationalists are predominantly Catholic and usually descend from the population predating such settlement.
Sure, Apple have invented things (e.g. Firewire, as you say), but you proved my point. Different companies and organisations are held to different standards when it comes to innovation. Let's take a look at some of these Apple innovations:
First to bundle optical mouse with computers
So the innovation was to sell a 2 year old peripheral with their systems. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. If that's innovative, then Clippy sure as hell is.
First to use USB
No. I had USB on my PC before you could buy Macs with USB. (Here come the "Ah, but...well..." and "Apple made it popular" blah blah excuses)
First to incorperate built-in ethernet ports
Same as wifi. Doesn't seem that innovative. Integration of existing peripherals is not that amazing. It's nice, but is it innovative? We're back to my point. Who's yardstick will you use?
First to have trackpads on their laptops
That is innovation. Assuming it's true; I've no idea myself - at the time it happened I still viewed laptops as huge time sinks.
First 17" laptop
Gosh, integration of existing peripherals again. That does seem to be the cornerstone of innovation, doesn't it? If Dell then happened to be first with 18" screens, would that make Dell innovative?
First to embrace Wifi with its Airport products
'Embrace' - we're getting even more nebulous now:)
First to have DVD burners
Er, weren't the first DVD burners external SCSI devices? So not specific to Macs. When they announced the first combo burners (Superdrive), I also checked that at the time. There was another combo drive around that you could buy (Panasonic, maybe?) that had been out for 3-6 months.
iPod. 'nuff said. (Don't argue, remember what I said about the wheel)
No argument from me on iPods. I own one. They're great. Even so, a friend of mine described the iPod about 4 years before it existed, and kept saying he wanted to make one - and I doubt he was the only person.
Regardless, the iPod is a good example - a new product, while built on what many geeks would have thought of/considered to be a good idea anyway, but well made, well designed (both from UI and industrial design point of view). I've still found nothing better (battery problems notwithstanding).
This sort of thing, and stuff like the airport express are what make you turn to the rest of the class and say "There, why can't you all do your homework as well as Apple?". As friends have become bored of me saying, the design of the iPod power supply shows more thought and care and attention to detail than most products have in total. And just looking at a picture of the Airport Express almost invokes pure joy that someone would 'get it' so well.
So my point is, I guess, where do you draw the line? Apple have certainly been innovative, but they (and others) seem to get more leeway in what is described as innovative. I've seen huge lists of Apple 'innovations' on websites, of which 80% is fluff. If Apple weren't the first, it's "they made it popular". For instance, anti-aliased fonts - I'd been using those on Acorn machines for years, but when I challenged an Apple fan who claimed Apple had innovated with them, they said that Apple had made them mainstream. Whatever.
The thing that made me post originally is that saying Microsoft is not innovative is just plain fucking stupid when they have the most successful desktop OS on the planet. By many of these definitions of innovation that come up, that would seem to qualify.
BTW, if this seems like a personal attack, it's not:)
I'd have to disagree, given the precondition that I find 'innovation' to be a pretty nebulous concept, and very much in the eye of the beholder.
For instance, Apple are often described as innovative for producing things like the iMac, integrated wifi, bringing high quality industrial design to their products, etc. (Even not putting a floppy drive in the iMac was seen as innovation. Still trying to work that one out.)
Yet these things are not new. Apple didn't invent wifi, nor the idea of integration (ask Adam Osborne), and designing things well is not new either. But they did them anyway, and they're all good things to have that weren't being done in a widespread way before. This seems to be the only definition of innovation that I can come up with that matches most people's ideas of innovation (when they rant about it on slashdot).
So, taking one of my main areas of interest, where I use Microsoft software, which is development, Microsoft had the following innovations:
Incremental compilation
Incremental linking
Pre-compiled headers
A very strong visual debugger, with useful features like DataTips.
Integrated source browser
Integrated class browser
Remote debugging over tcp/ip
SQL debugger
Intellisense (auto-completion)
That's without considering VS.net, either. It's amusing to note that when Apple released the version of Xcode with incremental compilation/linking, some slashbots ranted about how innovative this was, and when will Microsoft catch up and copy this?!!!!111 I believe at that point, MSVC had had this feature for 5+ years. Nuff said.
People will no doubt argue that these things were all done in some obscure package before Visual C++ had them, but as I say, if integrating wifi hardware into a laptop is innovation, then the things in the above list certainly count.
I saw a robot like this on TV years ago - except it could fret any string anywhere on the fretboard (not fretless), because it had a 'fingertip' for every possible position.
I think it was made by one of the Japanese tech companies. It could play some pretty complex music, including stuff humans can't play, due to it not being limited by finger length - so it could play a bass line and melody simultaneously on the same guitar (or multiple bass lines, etc).
This was like 5+ years ago. A quick google yields nothing, but I remember it well.
We had a C/C++ quiz that we would give people to get a feel for how much they actually knew about the language.
You got points for various questions - think the total was about 35. Anyway, the first page, to make it easy, I made them a gift - fill in the truth tables for OR, AND and XOR. 1 point each. So you get 3 points just for showing up.
You probably wouldn't believe how many people got some of those truth tables wrong. Well, I was shocked, because I was expecting nobody to get any of them wrong. They did.
Another question was a simple example of the swap with no temporary value operation:
int a = 4;
int b = 7;
a = a ^ b
b = b ^ a
a = a ^ b
The question just asked what was happening. Some people were there trying to work out 4 to the power of 7 to the power of 7 to the power of...
Neither, I would guess. The media companies love new formats, because they get to resell all their content again on the new format (cf what happened when CDs were launched). They just like having new formats so they can sell the same stuff again. (Except when the new format can be transferred over a computer network, of course.)
There may have been other considerations, but that was probably the main reason for doing it.
Fine him up the ass, make him do community service for a decade, but there's no reason why we should throw essentially a social criminal who harmed no one but business into prison.
I was saying goodnight to a friend/colleague who is a medical doctor the other night, and he was meeting a consultant after work. The consultant mentioned that the <insert name of large London hospital> was suffering a virus attack, and most of the computer systems were screwed.
Now, moan all you like about choice of OS in a hospital, but it seems to me that it's not just 'business' that gets harmed. There's no magic wand that means that non-profit organisations, charities or hospitals don't get pwn3d by viruses.
Slashdot Mirror
Not by Jobs, maybe, but some Mac fans hailed it as the second coming :-)
When I say screwed up, I mean it uses the order of icons in the dock, not the Z-order of windows.
This might seem geeky, but it allows you to flip back and forth between 2 or 3 applications really easily with Alt-Tab under windows.
And the truth is, no-one except geeks or uber power users even know about Alt-Tab anyway, so imho, keep it geeky :) (The most common reaction when I use Alt-Tab from most people is "What was that? What did you do?")
Anyway, I like the fact that Alt-Tab is context sensitive under Windows (i.e. the most recently used apps are first in the list). It means I don't have to think when I'm using it. Whereas the OS X feature always makes me think, "Er...". It's probably because I've been using Alt-Tab for 10+ years, and half the time I don't even bother looking at the list of icons because I know how many times to press Tab without looking. I may not be representative, of course.
Yes, but in a stroke of genius they screwed up that feature when they copied it (unless it's been fixed in later versions of OS X).
Also, didn't they copy user-switching? But it's alright because they gave it a 3D animation, so it was innovative ;-)
And you usually won't need to turn it on - it's on by default I believe. Well, I've certainly never turned it on, and my PCs do it anyway.
I resemble that remark.
It is actually reasonably hard to cope with infinite input possibilities and do something sensible with all of them without imposing a few rules or shortcuts. Valve could always have done better but if you remember millions of frustrated fanboys were screaming and bitching that they ship the damn game (along with infantile talk of betrayal, etc).
Okay? Okay?!
This sort of comment makes me feel that some people's expectations are way too high.
(The best facial animation ever seen in a video game is 'okay'?)
The Republic of Ireland is not part of the region in question, not are Scotland, England or Wales. So following the OP's plan, none of these regions/countries should have a say in the secession. It is up to the region itself, according to the 'plan'.
And as I pointed out with my keyhole wikipedia article, it's not entirely clear that the region wants to break away from the UK. Indeed, it has been my understanding what makes the issue so tricky is that there are sizeable parts of the population who want to leave the UK, and sizeable parts who want to stay, and both groups hold their views with no little vehemence or conviction.
I was pointing out that instances such as this make the foolproof anti-terrorist plan somewhat hard to follow.
So all we need to do to get rid of terrorism is to undo the past 1000 or so years of history.
Sounds do-able!
I've seen this a couple of times on /. in the past week, and it seems the best way of replying:
* <------------ parent's comment
* <------------ your head
Subjective or inflammatory much?
From wikipedia's article on Northern Ireland:
So...er...you were saying?
Ha...stating that MS are innovative if we all play by the same rules, and I get moderated Informative, Overrated, and Troll.
Figures.
And the strength of my feeling on this matter is amply demonstrated by my failure to spell 'whose' correctly.
So the innovation was to sell a 2 year old peripheral with their systems. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. If that's innovative, then Clippy sure as hell is.
No. I had USB on my PC before you could buy Macs with USB. (Here come the "Ah, but...well..." and "Apple made it popular" blah blah excuses)Same as wifi. Doesn't seem that innovative. Integration of existing peripherals is not that amazing. It's nice, but is it innovative? We're back to my point. Who's yardstick will you use?
That is innovation. Assuming it's true; I've no idea myself - at the time it happened I still viewed laptops as huge time sinks.
Gosh, integration of existing peripherals again. That does seem to be the cornerstone of innovation, doesn't it? If Dell then happened to be first with 18" screens, would that make Dell innovative?
'Embrace' - we're getting even more nebulous now :)
Er, weren't the first DVD burners external SCSI devices? So not specific to Macs. When they announced the first combo burners (Superdrive), I also checked that at the time. There was another combo drive around that you could buy (Panasonic, maybe?) that had been out for 3-6 months.
No argument from me on iPods. I own one. They're great. Even so, a friend of mine described the iPod about 4 years before it existed, and kept saying he wanted to make one - and I doubt he was the only person.
Regardless, the iPod is a good example - a new product, while built on what many geeks would have thought of/considered to be a good idea anyway, but well made, well designed (both from UI and industrial design point of view). I've still found nothing better (battery problems notwithstanding).
This sort of thing, and stuff like the airport express are what make you turn to the rest of the class and say "There, why can't you all do your homework as well as Apple?". As friends have become bored of me saying, the design of the iPod power supply shows more thought and care and attention to detail than most products have in total. And just looking at a picture of the Airport Express almost invokes pure joy that someone would 'get it' so well.
So my point is, I guess, where do you draw the line? Apple have certainly been innovative, but they (and others) seem to get more leeway in what is described as innovative. I've seen huge lists of Apple 'innovations' on websites, of which 80% is fluff. If Apple weren't the first, it's "they made it popular". For instance, anti-aliased fonts - I'd been using those on Acorn machines for years, but when I challenged an Apple fan who claimed Apple had innovated with them, they said that Apple had made them mainstream. Whatever.
The thing that made me post originally is that saying Microsoft is not innovative is just plain fucking stupid when they have the most successful desktop OS on the planet. By many of these definitions of innovation that come up, that would seem to qualify.
BTW, if this seems like a personal attack, it's not :)
You mean the iPod click wheel? :-)
I'd have to disagree, given the precondition that I find 'innovation' to be a pretty nebulous concept, and very much in the eye of the beholder.
For instance, Apple are often described as innovative for producing things like the iMac, integrated wifi, bringing high quality industrial design to their products, etc. (Even not putting a floppy drive in the iMac was seen as innovation. Still trying to work that one out.)
Yet these things are not new. Apple didn't invent wifi, nor the idea of integration (ask Adam Osborne), and designing things well is not new either. But they did them anyway, and they're all good things to have that weren't being done in a widespread way before. This seems to be the only definition of innovation that I can come up with that matches most people's ideas of innovation (when they rant about it on slashdot).
So, taking one of my main areas of interest, where I use Microsoft software, which is development, Microsoft had the following innovations:
That's without considering VS.net, either. It's amusing to note that when Apple released the version of Xcode with incremental compilation/linking, some slashbots ranted about how innovative this was, and when will Microsoft catch up and copy this?!!!!111 I believe at that point, MSVC had had this feature for 5+ years. Nuff said.
People will no doubt argue that these things were all done in some obscure package before Visual C++ had them, but as I say, if integrating wifi hardware into a laptop is innovation, then the things in the above list certainly count.
Yep, I know. I have one of his albums. But this guitar could still play things Jordan can't, due to virtual fingers :)
"Screw books" is insightful? Jesus.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
I saw a robot like this on TV years ago - except it could fret any string anywhere on the fretboard (not fretless), because it had a 'fingertip' for every possible position.
I think it was made by one of the Japanese tech companies. It could play some pretty complex music, including stuff humans can't play, due to it not being limited by finger length - so it could play a bass line and melody simultaneously on the same guitar (or multiple bass lines, etc).
This was like 5+ years ago. A quick google yields nothing, but I remember it well.
Maybe, but for the guys who couldn't fill in the truth table for OR, I don't think this problem will come up :-)
We had a C/C++ quiz that we would give people to get a feel for how much they actually knew about the language.
You got points for various questions - think the total was about 35. Anyway, the first page, to make it easy, I made them a gift - fill in the truth tables for OR, AND and XOR. 1 point each. So you get 3 points just for showing up.
You probably wouldn't believe how many people got some of those truth tables wrong. Well, I was shocked, because I was expecting nobody to get any of them wrong. They did.
Another question was a simple example of the swap with no temporary value operation:
The question just asked what was happening. Some people were there trying to work out 4 to the power of 7 to the power of 7 to the power of...
Sigh. Happy days.
There may have been other considerations, but that was probably the main reason for doing it.
It could be like 'jive' for Google Maps.
I was saying goodnight to a friend/colleague who is a medical doctor the other night, and he was meeting a consultant after work. The consultant mentioned that the <insert name of large London hospital> was suffering a virus attack, and most of the computer systems were screwed.
Now, moan all you like about choice of OS in a hospital, but it seems to me that it's not just 'business' that gets harmed. There's no magic wand that means that non-profit organisations, charities or hospitals don't get pwn3d by viruses.
She probably keeps telling him to look to the plank in his own eye.