The CEO admits that her company has never launched a satellite before, but somehow she feels qualified to say that her company's "product" could meet all of the needs of NWS and all of the defense agencies for $70 million per year. How does she even know the requirements of NWS and all defense agencies, let alone know how much it would cost to support them?
Ignoring that, do we really think it's a good idea to replace public property with private property? If this company ever goes under, our government would immediately lose weather forecasts and defense satellite feeds. And do we even want sensitive defense information in the hands of a private company?
No, this certainly isn't tolerable for me. I'm fine with the government contracting competent companies to build, launch, and maintain these satellites, but if they're going to use our tax dollars, then the satellites themselves had better remain government property!
I downloaded and listened to some files that had 16/44 and 24/96 versions. I have a very good system and decent ears, but I was surprised that there was absolutely no discernable difference between the two. I expected to hear some kind of a difference, even if it was only a placebo effect, but that didn't happen. This bothered me, so I thought about it some more and realized that as good as my speakers are, they can not reproduce frequencies above 44 KHz. After thinking about it, there probably aren't many speakers in the world that go up to 96 KHz, so it's no wonder that few, if any, people have ever been able to tell the difference in frequency. I cannot speak for the bitrate, so I will leave that discussion for others, but the point is that at this moment the difference may be negligible. That doesn't mean that there won't be a time in the future where we can produce speakers that would allow us to hear the difference.
The presence of Twitter would not have made a difference for at least two major reasons:
1. People were too afraid to vehemently question the administration's decision. Sure some people took to the streets, but anyone with enough power to expose the fraudulence of the war were too afraid to do so. And who could blame them? Who would dare challenge an administration that claimed that anyone who is not with them is against them? And especially after they had been given unprecedented powers to spy on their own citizens, put them into prison without a trial, and use torture against them. After that chain of events, it was the first time I had ever experienced a genuine fear of my own government and the need to keep a low profile. Any comments I made against the war were posted anonymously and were worded to be sure that they couldn't possibly be construed as a threat. And even the most liberal news media outlets didn't dare expose the extent that the "evidence" of WMDs was a complete farce. So the presence of Twitter would not have had any real affect if they people were too afraid to call out the administration for their exaggeration of the situation.
2. The administration had already decided that they were going to Iraq. The President gave speeches very frequently and it was clear that he was not going to give up. We were going and it was just a matter of convincing enough of the undecided people and wearing down the resolve of the dissenters. This was done by speeches that promised new information, but contained no actual details. Instead, they were filled with rhetoric and the strategic and repeated use of the words "Bin Laden", "al Queda", "Saddam", and "terrorism" in close proximity of each other in an attempt to get people to link Saddam with 9/11. And it worked too: surveys showed that over time more people began to believe that Saddam had some responsibility for 9/11 despite the fact that evidence of such a link never existed.
Going to Iraq was inevitable given the cast of characters and their motivations. Bush wanted to finish what his father started. In addition to that, he and Cheney wanted to secure oil for all of their buddies in the oil business. There were a number of security companies with close ties to Rice and Cheney that would be able to get lucrative contracts for private security. Rumsfeld was a notorious war hawk who was a member of an organization called Project for a New American Century that had been pushing to go back to Iraq since Clinton was in office. Many other members of Bush's administration were also a part of that organization which advocated using our military to "promote American global leadership" in an atmosphere akin to a modern global Manifest Destiny. And we haven't even begun to talk about how Saddam had converted all oil transactions from U.S. dollars to Euros, thus weakening the dollar. The list goes on and on, but the point is that we were going to Iraq as soon as that administration took office and the presence of all of the social media web sites in the world would not have stopped them.
For years, Adobe has been a black hole of technological innovation. I think the bigger question is why anyone at Apple would even consider hiring anyone from Adobe to be their CTO? What's next? Hiring leadership from within RIM to be the president of Apple's mobile division?
That part of my statement is admittedly an emotionally-charged and exaggerated response to this heinous crime. I do not really believe that this guy should be subjected to broadcasted rape. I just think it's sad that if he is convicted for any of these crimes, he will probably serve more time for the DDOS attack than he would for defrauding the government to deploy a tactical team to threaten the life of his victim. When a person shows a blatant disregard for another person's life and goes out of their way to endanger that person's life, then I relinquish just about any empathy I had for that person as a fellow human being. I won't go out of my way to do them harm, but I also won't go out of my way to draw support for any reduced sentence - this guy deserves whatever he gets.
The practice of SWATting needs to stop immediately. SWAT raids are very tense for all parties involved and they can go wrong in a hurry. One of these days an innocent person is going to end up dead because of this practice. The prosecutors need to go after this guy, get him the maximum sentence for all of his many crimes, and broadcast his prison rapes so that no one ever thinks of doing something like this again.
Thank you for the informative reply and for not taking offense to my gripes of your current OS of choice. Your display of maturity is a rarity these days!
How long has it been since you used OS X? I don't remember when it happened exactly but most apps let you resize from all edges and corners now. I can't remember when this wasn't the case with OS X, actually.
I stopped upgrading after 10.5.8 and as of that version you still need to resize windows in the bottom-right corner. Maybe they added resize from all edges in Snow Leopard.
App switching in OS X works like this: Cmd+Tab switches between applications, and Cmd+` (backtick, it's under the tilde and right above the Tab key) cycles between individual windows within an application
I just tried this and I think I learned it before and forgot it for two reasons: First, you have to switch to the app with Cmd+Tab, release Cmd, then Cmd+` to start switching windows. Add in the fact that at least one of the windows is usually minimized, and it's just easier to switch windows via the Dock.
There is a SIMBL plugin called SizeWell
I may have to try that sometime. I'm usually hesitant about plugins since they are usually half-baked and the integration is rarely up to par with native tools, but from your description this plugin sounds like an exception.
clicking a single radio button control in the Keyboard preferences enables full keyboard support for tabbing through buttons in dialogs and clicking buttons with the spacebar and so forth
Thanks for the tip! The setting was under the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab which I normally associate strictly with global OS keyboard shortcuts and not navigation via keyboard, but sure enough the option is available.
A few minutes of googling should have revealed that there is also a keyboard shortcut for accessing the menu bar, if you really can't remember the keyboard shortcuts for what you want to do in your app. Once you move focus to the menu bar you can move around with the arrow keys just fine
I found this under Keyboard Shortcuts - it's Ctrl+F2 (or Ctrl+Fn+F2 on my laptop). It works great for using the arrow keys, but the behavior is not predictable when pressing the first letter of the menu option since there can be more than one option with the same name.
These tips will definitely improve my user experience in OS X, but I'm still much more productive under Linux. But to each their own - I've grown past the point of looking down on people who prefer a different OS (or any product for that matter) and I'm glad to see that among the hoards of fanboys for different OS'es, there are people such as yourself that are capable of doing the same. Your useful information and lack of condescension goes a lot further than any name calling and snide corrections you could have made. If I was able to mod you up, I certainly would.
Are you honestly suggesting that you believe that we would not be subject to the same scrutiny if we moved all of our private sector transactions over to BitCoin or some other non-government currency?
I hate to reply to myself, but I just thought of a few more biggies:
- Window Management: This wasn't as big of an issue until I discovered that Alt + Left Mouse Button allowed me to drag windows from anywhere inside of the window under Linux. After I learned that I could resize windows in Linux using Alt + Mouse Button 2 or 3 (button depends on your Window Manager), using OS X felt much more tedious. Even Microsoft Windows lets you resize a window by dragging any edge, but with OS X, you have to use the little corner in the bottom-right section of the window. In addition to this, switching apps on OS X with the keyboard shortcut doesn't restore iconified windows which means you still have to go down to the doc to get it. Better yet, you can not switch to one specific window of an app using the keyboard shortcut - instead, they all come to the front and then you have to find the window you want.
- Window Maximization: Some apps require a lot of real-estate and there is no way to maximize a window with a single button click in OS X. Intuitively you would press the green "+" button on the window, but that simply switches the window "between its standard state and its user state" and that behavior is always unpredictable. You can manually "maximize" the window by moving the mouse to the titlebar and dragging the window to the upper left portion of the screen and then moving the mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen to resize the window. I guess Apple figures if you have to do more work for something, you'll appreciate it more.
- Horrible Keyboard Support: Have both hands on the keyboard and a dialog pops up? In most sane environments, you could use the arrow keys or the Tab key to toggle among the available buttons of the dialog box. Failing that, you could hold the Alt key and press the key of the underlined letter of each dialog button. In OS X, neither of those are an option. If you want to choose a different option, you'd better use your mouse! The same goes for menu options. In Windows and Linux, you can hold down the Alt key and the focus shifts to the app's menu. You can use the arrow keys to navigate the menu as well as press the key of the underlined letter in each menu item. In addition to that, there is usually a global keyboard shortcut listed in the menu that allows you to use that feature without ever accessing the menu. In OS X, there are usually only a few global keyboard shortcuts and I am not aware of any way to switch focus to the app's menu from the keyboard.
- Samba Issues: Sometimes file shares fail to mount with an error message that is simply a negative number. Once this happens, you will not be able to mount that file share again, even if you restart the samba processes on the file server. At that point, your only recourse is to reboot OS X!
Again, none of these annoyances are critical, but they come together to provide an annoying experience if you're coming from a Linux, or even Windows, background.
After the story about Miguel de Icaza switching to Mac OS X, it got me thinking about my own history of operating systems. While I had happily used OS X for six and a half years, over that period of time I have drifted back in favor of Linux. This had less to do with new features being offered in Linux as it did with growing tired of foibles in OS X. Here are a list of some of the bigger issues:
- Beach Ball of Death (BBOD): While this didn't occur frequently, when it did it was more frustrating than a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). At least you knew you were fucked when you saw the BSOD. With the BBOD, sometimes you would recover from it and other times you could wait for up to ten minutes before realizing that you're never coming back. During that period, you are completely unable to access the System menu or start another app to find the proc that is chewing resources so that it can be killed. In 2013, this is completely unacceptable from an OS.
- Mouse Acceleration: There is no way to modify the acceleration curve in OS X, let alone disable acceleration. This is not a problem when you are using a trackpad since the acceleration curve is one of the best out of all OS'es for that, but it is incredibly frustrating when using a mouse. I have gone through many forums and found many other users complaining about this issue, but no one has come up with a decent solution for disabling mouse acceleration. For situations in which I am better off with a mouse, I always hopped over to a non-OS X machine.
- Poor Multi-Monitor Support: Since the menu for each application is in a detached panel that is only displayed on one monitor, this means you will be racking up a lot of mileage on your pointing device to hop between apps on the secondary monitor and their menu on the primary monitor.
- Updating Settings Behind Your Back: For me, this shit started with Microsoft and was one of the big reasons I left their OS. After an update, some of your settings would be changed to whatever they felt you should be using. Apple has since taken up this behavior, doing things like resetting all of your file associations to iTunes after one of their many updates. This didn't happen with my latest update, so maybe they stopped, or at least took a break from this behavior, but it has still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
- Frequent Update Cycles: This would not be too bad of a thing if they didn't regularly remove features they didn't like (but you may have loved) as well as make changes that disrupt your workflow. At this point, I am an old curmudgeon who has everything exactly as he likes it. I don't want to upgrade and run the risk of having the upgrade go south. Such an issue would cause me to have to reinstall all of my apps from scratch and attempt to reconfigure tons of settings to get it to work like it did before the upgrade. And with the update frequent cycles, it won't be long before your current OS version is not supported. Once that happens, Chrome and Firefox support go out the window as well. And don't even get me started on how Apple stops supporting perfectly fine hardware when they come out with new versions of OS X. Apple: you control the hardware in your machines yet you can't be bothered to continue supporting it six years after it is released while Microsoft supported XP on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations for eight years and Linux even longer!
There are many, many more reasons, but these are the biggest gripes. None of them on their own were dealbreakers, but over time they wore on me to the point of driving me back to Linux. While I still use my Mac for some commercial software that isn't available on Linux, it's Linux for everything else.
I am so sick of hearing how evil Google was for recording information that other people forcefully put out into public airwaves. I know there are going to be plenty of bad analogies, so let me attempt to preempt them with a good analogy. If you go through the effort of acquiring a bullhorn to communicate with other members in your household and then proceed to pollute public airwaves with your personal information using this bullhorn, you have absolutely zero expectations of privacy. It really is as simple as that. If you don't like this, then you have many options: takes 30 seconds to set up a damn password, use https connections when possible, or use a wired connection! Once you put something out there, you can't take it back, so exercise some damn personal responsibility if you hold any expectations of privacy.
Yes, by all means spam me now with all the arguments that claim that X11 is terrible because it's imperfect. I'm well aware it's imperfect.
Easy to say when you're not one of the people whose job it is to implement modern features on an aging display architecture.
But the fact is it's not imperfect enough to warrant throwing it out and replacing it with something that lacks the more awesome things X11 does
Network transparency is one of X11's "more awesome things"? Then why is X11 network performance trounced by RDP for many modern applications? Yes, RDP may require rendering a full desktop rather than a single app, but at this point that is a small tradeoff for the performance benefits.
So, pretty please, knock it off with the Wayland/Mir shit, at least until you achieve feature parity.
Distros are going to continue supporting running X apps until there is feature parity and I'm sure you'll find distros that snub Wayland to support users such as yourself. Besides, Wayland could always tack on network transparency later. Yes, I do realize how bad that sounds, but it appears to have turned out alright for GDI/RDP.
So a cable company is upset because the only way they can get certain channels is to buy them in a bundle with other channels that they don't want. Congratulations, Cablevision! Now you know how your customers feel.
Do you really believe in your first point? I can think of a LOT of people who are not careful on how much money they spend on themselves. Given that a large segment of the U.S. population is living in debt, I think that speaks for itself. If not, check out the assets of almost any performers or pro athletes that haven't had any gigs in the past decade and see if they still have their fortunes.
I've been saying this for a while. The last space race we had allowed 440,000 engineers to make advances in almost every sector of industry. From materials that could withstand the cold of space and the heat of re-entry to the computer and hardware that controlled the spacecraft, that decade was one of the most productive periods of technical advancement in human history. And we don't stand a chance of doing it again, not because there's a shortage of big technological problems, but because of the fact that there is a large segment of the population that believes that the government should not be involved in such technological advancements - the private sector should do it alone. And here we stand, at the sunset of the American empire, and many Americans are too ideological to see the value in having the government work in cooperation with the private sector to make another technological push that will propel us further out into the lead. We've already reduced government's role in technology quite a bit and yet we seem to be losing ground to the Chinese who are using a combination of the public and private sector to push forward. I know many people are rightly concerned about our national debt, but you have to spend money to make money. We just have to be a LOT better at taking the money we make and actually paying off our debt for once.
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
Yes and it was very informative. No one could have possibly known what you would have to do if a car ran out of fuel before Top Gear showed it happening to an electric car.
Until their next update resets that option, forcing you to stumble through the dashboard du jour to figure out where to set the option to load the game upon disc insertion.
I still don't understand why I see so much hatred towards the exciting advancements of electric cars on a technology web forum. Everyone is quick to point out that it can't make long distance trips, but the average person rarely does that. Hell, I own a car with an ICE and I still rent a car when going on long trips because I don't want the extra mileage put onto my car and I can rent a car with nearly double the fuel economy of my own car, so it practically pays for itself. Instead of looking at the limitations of electric cars, let's look at the advantages:
- Charging the car can be three times cheaper than refueling a car that runs on decaying fossils
- You don't need to go out of your way every few days to find a gas station and refuel (especially nice if you live in an area that has cold weather)
- In the near future, you will be able to get a wireless charger that precludes you from having to plug in anything
- The electric car is likely quieter inside and outside of the cabin
- Your car isn't constantly spitting out pollutants and ruining our air
Not to mention that many American families have two cars. Make your next car an electric car and keep the gas guzzler for those long trips you claim to be constantly taking.
Loser Pays. In Europe, when a patentee files an infringement lawsuit and loses, they are liable for the defendant's court costs and attorney's fees. In the US, unless the suit was frivolous (and this is a high bar to meet), each party pays its own costs.
So when an independent inventor sues a megacorp for copying his invention and he ends up getting out-lawyered by the megacorp's rockstar lawyers, he can be responsible for paying millions of dollars for the megacorp's lawyers. It would be safer to just let them copy your idea than to potentially be responsible for paying their lawyers' astronomical salaries.
Like many people on this site, I feel that patents are granted far too easily for "inventions" that are hardly original or novel, but I feel that getting rid of the system entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. However, if we are ever going to fix the patent system, we need to explore all extremes. Right now, we are living under a system of extremely heavy patent protection. This system has been so indoctrinated into most of the population that the suggestion to reduce patent protection usually gets reactions of horror as if you are perpetrating a plot to bring down the entire economy. Therefore, articles like this lend credence to the idea that our economy would be fine without patents and then we can attempt to find a balanced solution.
I'll admit that I have thought about the implications of removing the patent system completely and I believe it would certainly change the economy, but it wouldn't completely upend it. If patents didn't exist, people would rampantly copy each other's ideas. With so much copying going on, they would eventually be forced to differentiate their products from other copies. Therefore, they would create many small innovations to distinguish themselves from the other clones and innovation on the smaller scale would increase. Conversely, since inventions could be freely copied, there would be less incentive for people to put research into costly large-scale research projects. The goal to maximize incentive is to continue protecting the large-scale projects while providing minimal, if any, protection to minor inventions. I think we can all agree that the current system has reached the point of absurdity where even the most trivial concepts are protected and we need to start scaling back to find that sweet spot in the middle.
New Headline: Male Scientists More Prone To Be Reported Of Misconduct
Males are less likely to report misconduct of women either because we want to have sex with them or we don't want to appear weak and petty to our male co-workers and/or managers by resorting to snitching. That's not to say that we don't commit more misconduct, it just makes it harder to measure.
Slashdot Mirror
The CEO admits that her company has never launched a satellite before, but somehow she feels qualified to say that her company's "product" could meet all of the needs of NWS and all of the defense agencies for $70 million per year. How does she even know the requirements of NWS and all defense agencies, let alone know how much it would cost to support them?
Ignoring that, do we really think it's a good idea to replace public property with private property? If this company ever goes under, our government would immediately lose weather forecasts and defense satellite feeds. And do we even want sensitive defense information in the hands of a private company?
No, this certainly isn't tolerable for me. I'm fine with the government contracting competent companies to build, launch, and maintain these satellites, but if they're going to use our tax dollars, then the satellites themselves had better remain government property!
I downloaded and listened to some files that had 16/44 and 24/96 versions. I have a very good system and decent ears, but I was surprised that there was absolutely no discernable difference between the two. I expected to hear some kind of a difference, even if it was only a placebo effect, but that didn't happen. This bothered me, so I thought about it some more and realized that as good as my speakers are, they can not reproduce frequencies above 44 KHz. After thinking about it, there probably aren't many speakers in the world that go up to 96 KHz, so it's no wonder that few, if any, people have ever been able to tell the difference in frequency. I cannot speak for the bitrate, so I will leave that discussion for others, but the point is that at this moment the difference may be negligible. That doesn't mean that there won't be a time in the future where we can produce speakers that would allow us to hear the difference.
The presence of Twitter would not have made a difference for at least two major reasons:
1. People were too afraid to vehemently question the administration's decision. Sure some people took to the streets, but anyone with enough power to expose the fraudulence of the war were too afraid to do so. And who could blame them? Who would dare challenge an administration that claimed that anyone who is not with them is against them? And especially after they had been given unprecedented powers to spy on their own citizens, put them into prison without a trial, and use torture against them. After that chain of events, it was the first time I had ever experienced a genuine fear of my own government and the need to keep a low profile. Any comments I made against the war were posted anonymously and were worded to be sure that they couldn't possibly be construed as a threat. And even the most liberal news media outlets didn't dare expose the extent that the "evidence" of WMDs was a complete farce. So the presence of Twitter would not have had any real affect if they people were too afraid to call out the administration for their exaggeration of the situation.
2. The administration had already decided that they were going to Iraq. The President gave speeches very frequently and it was clear that he was not going to give up. We were going and it was just a matter of convincing enough of the undecided people and wearing down the resolve of the dissenters. This was done by speeches that promised new information, but contained no actual details. Instead, they were filled with rhetoric and the strategic and repeated use of the words "Bin Laden", "al Queda", "Saddam", and "terrorism" in close proximity of each other in an attempt to get people to link Saddam with 9/11. And it worked too: surveys showed that over time more people began to believe that Saddam had some responsibility for 9/11 despite the fact that evidence of such a link never existed.
Going to Iraq was inevitable given the cast of characters and their motivations. Bush wanted to finish what his father started. In addition to that, he and Cheney wanted to secure oil for all of their buddies in the oil business. There were a number of security companies with close ties to Rice and Cheney that would be able to get lucrative contracts for private security. Rumsfeld was a notorious war hawk who was a member of an organization called Project for a New American Century that had been pushing to go back to Iraq since Clinton was in office. Many other members of Bush's administration were also a part of that organization which advocated using our military to "promote American global leadership" in an atmosphere akin to a modern global Manifest Destiny. And we haven't even begun to talk about how Saddam had converted all oil transactions from U.S. dollars to Euros, thus weakening the dollar. The list goes on and on, but the point is that we were going to Iraq as soon as that administration took office and the presence of all of the social media web sites in the world would not have stopped them.
For years, Adobe has been a black hole of technological innovation. I think the bigger question is why anyone at Apple would even consider hiring anyone from Adobe to be their CTO? What's next? Hiring leadership from within RIM to be the president of Apple's mobile division?
That part of my statement is admittedly an emotionally-charged and exaggerated response to this heinous crime. I do not really believe that this guy should be subjected to broadcasted rape. I just think it's sad that if he is convicted for any of these crimes, he will probably serve more time for the DDOS attack than he would for defrauding the government to deploy a tactical team to threaten the life of his victim. When a person shows a blatant disregard for another person's life and goes out of their way to endanger that person's life, then I relinquish just about any empathy I had for that person as a fellow human being. I won't go out of my way to do them harm, but I also won't go out of my way to draw support for any reduced sentence - this guy deserves whatever he gets.
It might also be one of the only decisions it has gotten right in years.
The practice of SWATting needs to stop immediately. SWAT raids are very tense for all parties involved and they can go wrong in a hurry. One of these days an innocent person is going to end up dead because of this practice. The prosecutors need to go after this guy, get him the maximum sentence for all of his many crimes, and broadcast his prison rapes so that no one ever thinks of doing something like this again.
And your decision to play it straight has obviously paid off since it has taken you all the way to knighthood! :)
I stopped upgrading after 10.5.8 and as of that version you still need to resize windows in the bottom-right corner. Maybe they added resize from all edges in Snow Leopard.
I just tried this and I think I learned it before and forgot it for two reasons: First, you have to switch to the app with Cmd+Tab, release Cmd, then Cmd+` to start switching windows. Add in the fact that at least one of the windows is usually minimized, and it's just easier to switch windows via the Dock.
I may have to try that sometime. I'm usually hesitant about plugins since they are usually half-baked and the integration is rarely up to par with native tools, but from your description this plugin sounds like an exception.
Thanks for the tip! The setting was under the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab which I normally associate strictly with global OS keyboard shortcuts and not navigation via keyboard, but sure enough the option is available.
I found this under Keyboard Shortcuts - it's Ctrl+F2 (or Ctrl+Fn+F2 on my laptop). It works great for using the arrow keys, but the behavior is not predictable when pressing the first letter of the menu option since there can be more than one option with the same name.
These tips will definitely improve my user experience in OS X, but I'm still much more productive under Linux. But to each their own - I've grown past the point of looking down on people who prefer a different OS (or any product for that matter) and I'm glad to see that among the hoards of fanboys for different OS'es, there are people such as yourself that are capable of doing the same. Your useful information and lack of condescension goes a lot further than any name calling and snide corrections you could have made. If I was able to mod you up, I certainly would.
Are you honestly suggesting that you believe that we would not be subject to the same scrutiny if we moved all of our private sector transactions over to BitCoin or some other non-government currency?
I hate to reply to myself, but I just thought of a few more biggies:
- Window Management: This wasn't as big of an issue until I discovered that Alt + Left Mouse Button allowed me to drag windows from anywhere inside of the window under Linux. After I learned that I could resize windows in Linux using Alt + Mouse Button 2 or 3 (button depends on your Window Manager), using OS X felt much more tedious. Even Microsoft Windows lets you resize a window by dragging any edge, but with OS X, you have to use the little corner in the bottom-right section of the window. In addition to this, switching apps on OS X with the keyboard shortcut doesn't restore iconified windows which means you still have to go down to the doc to get it. Better yet, you can not switch to one specific window of an app using the keyboard shortcut - instead, they all come to the front and then you have to find the window you want.
- Window Maximization: Some apps require a lot of real-estate and there is no way to maximize a window with a single button click in OS X. Intuitively you would press the green "+" button on the window, but that simply switches the window "between its standard state and its user state" and that behavior is always unpredictable. You can manually "maximize" the window by moving the mouse to the titlebar and dragging the window to the upper left portion of the screen and then moving the mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen to resize the window. I guess Apple figures if you have to do more work for something, you'll appreciate it more.
- Horrible Keyboard Support: Have both hands on the keyboard and a dialog pops up? In most sane environments, you could use the arrow keys or the Tab key to toggle among the available buttons of the dialog box. Failing that, you could hold the Alt key and press the key of the underlined letter of each dialog button. In OS X, neither of those are an option. If you want to choose a different option, you'd better use your mouse! The same goes for menu options. In Windows and Linux, you can hold down the Alt key and the focus shifts to the app's menu. You can use the arrow keys to navigate the menu as well as press the key of the underlined letter in each menu item. In addition to that, there is usually a global keyboard shortcut listed in the menu that allows you to use that feature without ever accessing the menu. In OS X, there are usually only a few global keyboard shortcuts and I am not aware of any way to switch focus to the app's menu from the keyboard.
- Samba Issues: Sometimes file shares fail to mount with an error message that is simply a negative number. Once this happens, you will not be able to mount that file share again, even if you restart the samba processes on the file server. At that point, your only recourse is to reboot OS X!
Again, none of these annoyances are critical, but they come together to provide an annoying experience if you're coming from a Linux, or even Windows, background.
After the story about Miguel de Icaza switching to Mac OS X, it got me thinking about my own history of operating systems. While I had happily used OS X for six and a half years, over that period of time I have drifted back in favor of Linux. This had less to do with new features being offered in Linux as it did with growing tired of foibles in OS X. Here are a list of some of the bigger issues:
- Beach Ball of Death (BBOD): While this didn't occur frequently, when it did it was more frustrating than a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). At least you knew you were fucked when you saw the BSOD. With the BBOD, sometimes you would recover from it and other times you could wait for up to ten minutes before realizing that you're never coming back. During that period, you are completely unable to access the System menu or start another app to find the proc that is chewing resources so that it can be killed. In 2013, this is completely unacceptable from an OS.
- Mouse Acceleration: There is no way to modify the acceleration curve in OS X, let alone disable acceleration. This is not a problem when you are using a trackpad since the acceleration curve is one of the best out of all OS'es for that, but it is incredibly frustrating when using a mouse. I have gone through many forums and found many other users complaining about this issue, but no one has come up with a decent solution for disabling mouse acceleration. For situations in which I am better off with a mouse, I always hopped over to a non-OS X machine.
- Poor Multi-Monitor Support: Since the menu for each application is in a detached panel that is only displayed on one monitor, this means you will be racking up a lot of mileage on your pointing device to hop between apps on the secondary monitor and their menu on the primary monitor.
- Updating Settings Behind Your Back: For me, this shit started with Microsoft and was one of the big reasons I left their OS. After an update, some of your settings would be changed to whatever they felt you should be using. Apple has since taken up this behavior, doing things like resetting all of your file associations to iTunes after one of their many updates. This didn't happen with my latest update, so maybe they stopped, or at least took a break from this behavior, but it has still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
- Frequent Update Cycles: This would not be too bad of a thing if they didn't regularly remove features they didn't like (but you may have loved) as well as make changes that disrupt your workflow. At this point, I am an old curmudgeon who has everything exactly as he likes it. I don't want to upgrade and run the risk of having the upgrade go south. Such an issue would cause me to have to reinstall all of my apps from scratch and attempt to reconfigure tons of settings to get it to work like it did before the upgrade. And with the update frequent cycles, it won't be long before your current OS version is not supported. Once that happens, Chrome and Firefox support go out the window as well. And don't even get me started on how Apple stops supporting perfectly fine hardware when they come out with new versions of OS X. Apple: you control the hardware in your machines yet you can't be bothered to continue supporting it six years after it is released while Microsoft supported XP on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations for eight years and Linux even longer!
There are many, many more reasons, but these are the biggest gripes. None of them on their own were dealbreakers, but over time they wore on me to the point of driving me back to Linux. While I still use my Mac for some commercial software that isn't available on Linux, it's Linux for everything else.
I am so sick of hearing how evil Google was for recording information that other people forcefully put out into public airwaves. I know there are going to be plenty of bad analogies, so let me attempt to preempt them with a good analogy. If you go through the effort of acquiring a bullhorn to communicate with other members in your household and then proceed to pollute public airwaves with your personal information using this bullhorn, you have absolutely zero expectations of privacy. It really is as simple as that. If you don't like this, then you have many options: takes 30 seconds to set up a damn password, use https connections when possible, or use a wired connection! Once you put something out there, you can't take it back, so exercise some damn personal responsibility if you hold any expectations of privacy.
Easy to say when you're not one of the people whose job it is to implement modern features on an aging display architecture.
Network transparency is one of X11's "more awesome things"? Then why is X11 network performance trounced by RDP for many modern applications? Yes, RDP may require rendering a full desktop rather than a single app, but at this point that is a small tradeoff for the performance benefits.
Distros are going to continue supporting running X apps until there is feature parity and I'm sure you'll find distros that snub Wayland to support users such as yourself. Besides, Wayland could always tack on network transparency later. Yes, I do realize how bad that sounds, but it appears to have turned out alright for GDI/RDP.
So a cable company is upset because the only way they can get certain channels is to buy them in a bundle with other channels that they don't want. Congratulations, Cablevision! Now you know how your customers feel.
Do you really believe in your first point? I can think of a LOT of people who are not careful on how much money they spend on themselves. Given that a large segment of the U.S. population is living in debt, I think that speaks for itself. If not, check out the assets of almost any performers or pro athletes that haven't had any gigs in the past decade and see if they still have their fortunes.
I've been saying this for a while. The last space race we had allowed 440,000 engineers to make advances in almost every sector of industry. From materials that could withstand the cold of space and the heat of re-entry to the computer and hardware that controlled the spacecraft, that decade was one of the most productive periods of technical advancement in human history. And we don't stand a chance of doing it again, not because there's a shortage of big technological problems, but because of the fact that there is a large segment of the population that believes that the government should not be involved in such technological advancements - the private sector should do it alone. And here we stand, at the sunset of the American empire, and many Americans are too ideological to see the value in having the government work in cooperation with the private sector to make another technological push that will propel us further out into the lead. We've already reduced government's role in technology quite a bit and yet we seem to be losing ground to the Chinese who are using a combination of the public and private sector to push forward. I know many people are rightly concerned about our national debt, but you have to spend money to make money. We just have to be a LOT better at taking the money we make and actually paying off our debt for once.
Yes and it was very informative. No one could have possibly known what you would have to do if a car ran out of fuel before Top Gear showed it happening to an electric car.
Does Office 365 work on Feb 29 of leap years?
Until their next update resets that option, forcing you to stumble through the dashboard du jour to figure out where to set the option to load the game upon disc insertion.
I still don't understand why I see so much hatred towards the exciting advancements of electric cars on a technology web forum. Everyone is quick to point out that it can't make long distance trips, but the average person rarely does that. Hell, I own a car with an ICE and I still rent a car when going on long trips because I don't want the extra mileage put onto my car and I can rent a car with nearly double the fuel economy of my own car, so it practically pays for itself. Instead of looking at the limitations of electric cars, let's look at the advantages:
- Charging the car can be three times cheaper than refueling a car that runs on decaying fossils
- You don't need to go out of your way every few days to find a gas station and refuel (especially nice if you live in an area that has cold weather)
- In the near future, you will be able to get a wireless charger that precludes you from having to plug in anything
- The electric car is likely quieter inside and outside of the cabin
- Your car isn't constantly spitting out pollutants and ruining our air
Not to mention that many American families have two cars. Make your next car an electric car and keep the gas guzzler for those long trips you claim to be constantly taking.
So when an independent inventor sues a megacorp for copying his invention and he ends up getting out-lawyered by the megacorp's rockstar lawyers, he can be responsible for paying millions of dollars for the megacorp's lawyers. It would be safer to just let them copy your idea than to potentially be responsible for paying their lawyers' astronomical salaries.
Like many people on this site, I feel that patents are granted far too easily for "inventions" that are hardly original or novel, but I feel that getting rid of the system entirely would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. However, if we are ever going to fix the patent system, we need to explore all extremes. Right now, we are living under a system of extremely heavy patent protection. This system has been so indoctrinated into most of the population that the suggestion to reduce patent protection usually gets reactions of horror as if you are perpetrating a plot to bring down the entire economy. Therefore, articles like this lend credence to the idea that our economy would be fine without patents and then we can attempt to find a balanced solution.
I'll admit that I have thought about the implications of removing the patent system completely and I believe it would certainly change the economy, but it wouldn't completely upend it. If patents didn't exist, people would rampantly copy each other's ideas. With so much copying going on, they would eventually be forced to differentiate their products from other copies. Therefore, they would create many small innovations to distinguish themselves from the other clones and innovation on the smaller scale would increase. Conversely, since inventions could be freely copied, there would be less incentive for people to put research into costly large-scale research projects. The goal to maximize incentive is to continue protecting the large-scale projects while providing minimal, if any, protection to minor inventions. I think we can all agree that the current system has reached the point of absurdity where even the most trivial concepts are protected and we need to start scaling back to find that sweet spot in the middle.
From what I've heard about Fedora 18, you might be better off. :)
New Headline: Male Scientists More Prone To Be Reported Of Misconduct
Males are less likely to report misconduct of women either because we want to have sex with them or we don't want to appear weak and petty to our male co-workers and/or managers by resorting to snitching. That's not to say that we don't commit more misconduct, it just makes it harder to measure.