Hmm...I have a Lacie DVD burner that is USB2/Firewire, and it's nice and all, but the annoying thing is that it won't activate for firewire usage unless it detects power on the firewire connector.
This is very annoying if you have a PC laptop, as they tend to have the small 4-pin firewire connectors with no plugs.
The damn thing has its own PSU, but it won't work when plugged into a device with an unpowered firewire port:(
Speaking personally, I used to use ICQ, but the interface sucked. Sometimes it seemed like there were no two buttons in the entire interface that were the same height. It looked like a crappy shareware app that had been thrown together.
MSN IM came along with a clean and standard UI, provided a convenient context history for conversations, conversations with multiple participants, and centralised the contact list storage on Microsoft's servers. With ICQ you had to find all your contacts again whenever you reinstalled/used a different machine.
The ICQ interface was just crap crap crap. I'm glad I don't have to use it anymore.
The MSN IM interface is not perfect, but it's way less annoying than ICQ ever was. I found the MSN IM interface cleaner and easier to use than the ICQ one. The day I installed ICQ on a new PC and found that when I typed messages to people each keypress made a noise like a goddamn 1920s typewriter was when I knew it was time to give up on ICQ. Although to be fair, the period when it would silently install a web server on your PC wasn't great either.
I hate Boyle's Law, what bullshit it is. Some guy looked at the pressure and volume of gas at different temperatures (probably using a pen and paper or something), and now it's used to design submarines.
Let's all forget Boyle's Law. Let's call it my law, gas is all schloopy and stuff.
WinAmp has always had a non-standard small, confusing and cluttered interface
Are you trying to say the iTunes interface is in any way standard..? Give me a break.
Plus, Winamp isn't dog slow.
iTunes is great for ripping, but for actually finding and playing music, life's too short to use iTunes (on Windows, at least - but it's not exactly nippy on my Mac either, to be honest).
Plus just having iTunes running takes up >40Mb of RAM on Windows. 40Mb! To play mp3s! Winamp 5, which has largely similar search facilities takes less than 8Mb for me. Plus when I click on stuff, it happens on a non-geological timescale. That's always a bonus.
I'm confused. You've been criticising the 'poor' writing (although as far as I can tell, you've not read the book), and bemoaning the author's failure to study the liberal arts, yet you don't seem to be able to cope with a story that leaves questions unanswered, or maybe requires the reader to think when they close the book after finishing it.
You're a bit like the people I meet now and then who are unable to dissociate the views of the characters from the views of the writers, be it in films, books, or whatever. I've had someone tell me they don't see why anyone would make a film like Se7en - John Doe was so awful, how could anyone think like that? They must be sick. etc.
Here's an example of a lesson I and others learned early on in life, but it seems others never did.
When I was a teenager, there was a TV mini-series on UK TV called "A Very British Coup". It was an excellent series, and used the premise of a committed Labour (socialist) political party and leader being elected. The leader proceeded to implement radical policies like disarming all the UK's nuclear arsenal, sending US forces back home from US bases on UK soil, diverting money to hospitals/schools, etc.
Needless to say there was a backlash - but being in Britain, the reaction was muted, and behind closed doors. Various people in positions of power (e.g. unelected government officials, intelligence services, media chiefs) and so on began to hatch schemes. They spied on him, tried to synthesise suspicious financial transactions in the prime minister's accounts, and even assassinated one of his chief advisors. Eventually they settled on a scandal - they concocted rumours of an affair between the prime minister and a married woman years beforehand, to show the prime minister was not trustworthy. The rumours were printed/reported on in the media. There was absolutely nothing in the rumours; they were just friends. But the damage was done.
The prime minister suspected who was behind all this (but had no hard proof), and went on TV to call a general election, and to explain what had happened, and thus why he was calling a general election.
The final scene was of him getting up on the morning of the general election. He washed, shaved, ate his breakfast, and walked off down the road to the local polling station to vote.
The series ended at that moment.
I complained to my mother about the crap ending - did he get re-elected or not? What happened?!
My mother said something to me that I've never forgotten: "It doesn't matter whether or not he wins - it matters that he was honest, and let the people decide the truth for themselves."
At that moment, I began to appreciate dramatic writing on a whole new level, and realised that the writer wouldn't always tie everything up for me, or tell me what to think, or make it all better for the ending. Sometimes (often?) the writer is just trying to make you think and feel about a subject. What would you do? What would your friends do? What would other people do? What would happen?
This does not imply bad writing.
If you're still having trouble with this concept, trying reading/watching the play "An Inspector Calls" by JB Priestley. The ending of that one will probably have you in fits.
Which is in itself a self-inflicted problem - why would you need broadband access to download a driver for your sound card? Because Creative forced you to download 80Mb of crap for SBLive. All I wanted was the freaking sound driver, not all the other Creative bullshit applications that they use to 'differentiate' their product from the others.
A sound driver should be a 5Mb download max. And even that's pretty big (bear in mind it's compressed). It's their own dumb fault if they force everyone to install a load of crap and then complain it takes ages for their customers to download the drivers.
For most hardware I buy, if I can ever get away with it, I use the supplied MS drivers for XP. Putting in the CD I get with a piece of hardware is the last resort, believe me. I've had so much hassle from manufacturer's CDs/drivers that I avoid them like the plague. If the standard Windows driver works, then woohoo!
No problem. It's the sort of thing I've nearly done a couple of times when I skim a post about something I'm interested in/feel strongly about, and have been just about to hit submit on my devastating argument, only to notice my point was addressed and comprehensively dismissed in the first paragraph of the parent.:)
Hmmm...care to give me an example of DirectSound, DirectInput or networking stuff that is provided by "...a card with Direct X 9.0 capability that installs into an AGP slot" ?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm...I have a Lacie DVD burner that is USB2/Firewire, and it's nice and all, but the annoying thing is that it won't activate for firewire usage unless it detects power on the firewire connector.
:(
This is very annoying if you have a PC laptop, as they tend to have the small 4-pin firewire connectors with no plugs.
The damn thing has its own PSU, but it won't work when plugged into a device with an unpowered firewire port
Speaking personally, I used to use ICQ, but the interface sucked. Sometimes it seemed like there were no two buttons in the entire interface that were the same height. It looked like a crappy shareware app that had been thrown together.
MSN IM came along with a clean and standard UI, provided a convenient context history for conversations, conversations with multiple participants, and centralised the contact list storage on Microsoft's servers. With ICQ you had to find all your contacts again whenever you reinstalled/used a different machine.
The ICQ interface was just crap crap crap. I'm glad I don't have to use it anymore.
The MSN IM interface is not perfect, but it's way less annoying than ICQ ever was. I found the MSN IM interface cleaner and easier to use than the ICQ one. The day I installed ICQ on a new PC and found that when I typed messages to people each keypress made a noise like a goddamn 1920s typewriter was when I knew it was time to give up on ICQ. Although to be fair, the period when it would silently install a web server on your PC wasn't great either.
That's my theory, anyway.
That'll teach you to post to slashdot from your Palm ;-)
"Newton's Observation of Gravity"
It has a nice ring to it.
I hate Boyle's Law, what bullshit it is. Some guy looked at the pressure and volume of gas at different temperatures (probably using a pen and paper or something), and now it's used to design submarines.
Let's all forget Boyle's Law. Let's call it my law, gas is all schloopy and stuff.
Well, you know, it gives you something to do while saving up for the annual OS X upgrade tax... :-)
"Woah! That guy's all kinds of stupid!"
Wait a minute...hold the phone! You're saying that a book publisher didn't really understand anything about the internet?!
Say it aint so! :-)
I feel your pain, my son :-)
I think your keyboard is causing your addiction - it must take you ages to type the 'www' part whenever you want to visit a website :-)
Are you trying to say the iTunes interface is in any way standard..? Give me a break.
Plus, Winamp isn't dog slow.
iTunes is great for ripping, but for actually finding and playing music, life's too short to use iTunes (on Windows, at least - but it's not exactly nippy on my Mac either, to be honest).
Plus just having iTunes running takes up >40Mb of RAM on Windows. 40Mb! To play mp3s! Winamp 5, which has largely similar search facilities takes less than 8Mb for me. Plus when I click on stuff, it happens on a non-geological timescale. That's always a bonus.
I'm confused. You've been criticising the 'poor' writing (although as far as I can tell, you've not read the book), and bemoaning the author's failure to study the liberal arts, yet you don't seem to be able to cope with a story that leaves questions unanswered, or maybe requires the reader to think when they close the book after finishing it.
You're a bit like the people I meet now and then who are unable to dissociate the views of the characters from the views of the writers, be it in films, books, or whatever. I've had someone tell me they don't see why anyone would make a film like Se7en - John Doe was so awful, how could anyone think like that? They must be sick. etc.
Here's an example of a lesson I and others learned early on in life, but it seems others never did.
When I was a teenager, there was a TV mini-series on UK TV called "A Very British Coup". It was an excellent series, and used the premise of a committed Labour (socialist) political party and leader being elected. The leader proceeded to implement radical policies like disarming all the UK's nuclear arsenal, sending US forces back home from US bases on UK soil, diverting money to hospitals/schools, etc.
Needless to say there was a backlash - but being in Britain, the reaction was muted, and behind closed doors. Various people in positions of power (e.g. unelected government officials, intelligence services, media chiefs) and so on began to hatch schemes. They spied on him, tried to synthesise suspicious financial transactions in the prime minister's accounts, and even assassinated one of his chief advisors. Eventually they settled on a scandal - they concocted rumours of an affair between the prime minister and a married woman years beforehand, to show the prime minister was not trustworthy. The rumours were printed/reported on in the media. There was absolutely nothing in the rumours; they were just friends. But the damage was done.
The prime minister suspected who was behind all this (but had no hard proof), and went on TV to call a general election, and to explain what had happened, and thus why he was calling a general election.
The final scene was of him getting up on the morning of the general election. He washed, shaved, ate his breakfast, and walked off down the road to the local polling station to vote.
The series ended at that moment.
I complained to my mother about the crap ending - did he get re-elected or not? What happened?!
My mother said something to me that I've never forgotten: "It doesn't matter whether or not he wins - it matters that he was honest, and let the people decide the truth for themselves."
At that moment, I began to appreciate dramatic writing on a whole new level, and realised that the writer wouldn't always tie everything up for me, or tell me what to think, or make it all better for the ending. Sometimes (often?) the writer is just trying to make you think and feel about a subject. What would you do? What would your friends do? What would other people do? What would happen?
This does not imply bad writing.
If you're still having trouble with this concept, trying reading/watching the play "An Inspector Calls" by JB Priestley. The ending of that one will probably have you in fits.
Some people never started.
Which is in itself a self-inflicted problem - why would you need broadband access to download a driver for your sound card? Because Creative forced you to download 80Mb of crap for SBLive. All I wanted was the freaking sound driver, not all the other Creative bullshit applications that they use to 'differentiate' their product from the others.
A sound driver should be a 5Mb download max. And even that's pretty big (bear in mind it's compressed). It's their own dumb fault if they force everyone to install a load of crap and then complain it takes ages for their customers to download the drivers.
For most hardware I buy, if I can ever get away with it, I use the supplied MS drivers for XP. Putting in the CD I get with a piece of hardware is the last resort, believe me. I've had so much hassle from manufacturer's CDs/drivers that I avoid them like the plague. If the standard Windows driver works, then woohoo!
You could wire up the pin to a light in the shape of a question mark. The experienced programmer will usually know what's wrong... :-)
Or, as the old saying goes, make it possible to program computers in English, and you'll find that most programmers can't write English.
Are you sure you're using that word correctly? I don't think it means what you think it means.
Nice ploy! You don't fool me - I know you only posted all that stuff to smoke out all the annoying people who would point out that...
...you don't spell grammar like that.
No, you don't get me that easy!
No problem. It's the sort of thing I've nearly done a couple of times when I skim a post about something I'm interested in/feel strongly about, and have been just about to hit submit on my devastating argument, only to notice my point was addressed and comprehensively dismissed in the first paragraph of the parent. :)
Yes
How about reading the very first line of his post?
Just a thought :)
I did look it up. It was a joke.
Ah well. Not that much of a joke then.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to prepend them?
</pedantic>
Oh good. I thought it was just me. I couldn't figure out how to do anything useful at all in Blender.
:)
Plus, it seemed to love button-up drags. I thought anyone who knew anything about UI design knows that button-up drags are a no-no.
Oh wait, now I see...