Drop-down menus have been around so long because they work!
So should the "insert row" function be in the "insert" menu or the "table" menu?
Menus, in my opinion, never worked because inevitably the interface will be changed and a new function will be added. When the new function is added, a choice must be made on which menu it should appear and if a new menu is necessary. Eventually you end up with too many functions that were tacked on and a huge tree of functions burried in menus. That's what happened to office and now I can hardly find anything because the menus contain too many items are are unorganized.
I mean, even take practical restaurant menus: you sit at a table, the waiter hands you a menu and now you sit there staring at the thing for 5 to 10 minutes. Who in their right minds thought that this menu would ever be efficient unless the user studied and memorized the stupid thing. It's like reading a book except in the restuarant, at least you have the flavors and crapiness/goodness of the food to help remind you of what was good and what wasn't. In working with software there's no such experience. Click the button, it didn't do what I want, ctrl+z and the option never even had a shot at my long term memory unless it did something that undo wouldn't fix.
Now I haven't use the ribbon myself, but as I understand, Microsoft hired some big time usability experts and spent an awful lot of time trying to make the new Office 2007 interface usable. Note that usability encompasses many attributes of an interface, and learning curve and consistency (the topics that agrivate people the most) are just a few of the many things that need to be accounted for. The problem Microsoft has, and almost any software, hardware, gadget thingy today has is improving the interface without sacrificing consistency. The issue is, some time in the past, someone made a mistake in designing the interface, but because it was there in the previous version, if you take it away or change it in the next version, people immediately complain even though it is obviously a bad way to do it. Is the user correct? Absolutely, they learned how to do something and now that knowledge is lost and they have to relearn it. Is the vendor or designer correct? Absolutely, the method of doing that operation was stupid and required too much training or effort by the user to perform. But give it up, it was wrong to start, and it's going to take some pain to fix.
Now you say "give me my old interface." But I say to you, "tough luck, learn it over again." Chances are, at least with this version, Microsoft put a whole lot of effort into fixing it and getting it right. Had they left in the old interface, that would accomplish nothing. People would laugh at the ribbon and continue using the "old way" for the sake of avoiding learning something new when they could take the time to learn the new way, find out it is actually much more efficient than the old way, and embrace the change because it is actually helping them.
Why do I say this without even having tried the interface? I'm no MS shill, but I admit that their Office suite is unfortunately the standard among office suites because there is no competitor with a good enough feature set. I've tried open office, but often I run into some feature that was available in microsoft (even an older version) but still isn't in open office. Additionally, I've looked at this screenshot tour of Office 2007's keyboard shortcuts. The basic idea is now every function in Office 2007 can be accessed via keyboard. Furthermore, the interface even labels each function with a key or combination of keys to press in order to execute that function without the mouse. I would think Slashdot of all places would actually love this change; it's like the power of VI (in the sense that
Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.
and
Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.
So they're also 7.992 million neurons and an additional 1700 synapses per a neuron short and that's only to get to half of the whole thing.
Regardless that's a huge neural network they got going. I remember putting together a simple neural network for a handwritten digit recognizer. The thing worked...eventually, but occasionally got things wrong (confused 4s and 7s) and needed some additional processing prior to feeding it the actual data. Keep in mind, this was just to recognize digits and this was after various training on the network (anywhere from a thousand samples to ten-thousand samples). I didn't conduct any reasonable experiments on the network but I did notice that I hit a wall in terms of accuracy no matter how much I trained the network. I guess I could've tried setting up the network differently or adding additional nodes to account for things like centering the image, resizing the image so it's roughly the same size, etc but either way I was hand-crafting the network and doing this by trial and error. If those guys can get any insight on how to better construct these things that'd provide some big advancements to understanding how brains work and are constructed to do useful processing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm trying to put Ubuntu on a USB key and get it fully functioning in the event the OS becomes unusable. Setting that aside however...
No, we aren't at the promised land. We are many steps closer but still many critical steps away. Can Joe-user go to the local electronics store and purchase a piece of hardware he knows will work with linux without any geek knowledge? No. Can Joe-user go to walmart and purchase a computer with linux installed instead of Windows or OSX, probably not. Can Joe-user go to the store and buy software that is linux compatible? Not really.
My point is, linux needs commercial support from major software and hardware vendors including *gasp* Microsoft. Why MS? Just for their wonderful office suite which is pretty much the standard. Open office is certainly a great free alternative, however, it is many steps behind. Linux also needs a big leap in support from printer manufacturers and other consumer items like digital cameras, web cams, etc. Linux communities are doing a great job trying to get more support for hardware and software (wine), but people don't like waiting or being told that they can't use something because there's no vendor support for their platform. The products, especially newly released products, need to work out-of-the-box for linux.
When I can comfortably go to any best buy, circuit city, or whatever big electronics store normal people go to for their computer needs and finally see a good amount of products labeled "linux supported" then, and only then, will I think linux has made it to the desktop.
For most employees, businesses don't need high end machines. They need low to mid-range machines that are reliable and easy to repair quickly. That usually means the lowest common denominator on most hardware except maybe the cpu and ram. The GP's point is that Apple doesn't cater to this market and their closest product that would fit the purpose costs too much.
You forgot 98se, ME, and Win2k. The correct order should be:
3.1, 95, 98, 98se, ME, Win2k, WinXP, and now Vista.
There's also the previous NT line (Win NT 4.0) mixed somewhere in there. In all cases except 3.1 to 95, there was little reason to upgrade. The only reason people were so infatuated with it was because people (then) liked shiny (if it was newer it was obviously better even though win98 ran slower than win95 in some tasks on the same machine). Now people are more practical and realize that shiny often means pain. I remember loading up win98 on the same computer with win95 and my immediate reaction was: it looks better but my start menu takes a lot longer to open.
Where are you getting $1200 from? Dell will happily sell you computers with Windows Vista Business (that's the version without the games or media center installed) for under $500.
Also I've given Openoffice a chance, I really have. But there are some compatibility issues when saving a document as a.doc (they don't appear as they should in MS Word) and there are an awful lot of lacking features. It's the same reason why I'm forced to use Photoshop instead of GIMP because Photoshop is always many steps ahead of GIMP. The same goes for office.
When I was in high school a counselor asked me what I was thinking about doing after high school. I replied and said "I would like to go to a University of California school." For those of you without the background, UC schools are the highest available public education schools in the state of California, are rated above public California state schools, some UCs are rated at or above highly recognized private schools. He looked at my GPA and told me that he didn't think I would get accepted to ANY UC and that I would be best to apply for state schools. That pissed me off quite a bit because I knew that while my GPA wasn't glamorous that I had purposely taken advanced classes along with all of the top students in my high school and had proven to at least my teachers that I was capable of being there and continuing with higher education. Unlike other students in the school who just routinely take the normal classes in favor of a higher GPA at less workload, I forced myself to be challenged.
I applied to the UCs anyway. The UC application (at the time) required all of your high school course work, any notable extra activities (sports, music, awards/achievements, etc), GPA, SAT, SAT2 test scores, and finally a personal statement. Everything but the personal statement (which is basically an essay with a limit to how many words on why they should accept you) was straight forward. I knew that in my case, this essay was the "make or break" portion of my application. Fortunately for me, because I had challenged myself all throughout high school, I had something meaningful to say. Other students were frustrated with it and didn't know what to write, what they should talk about. But I knew that they were better at writing than I (or at least I assumed that) and that whatever they wrote was probably better structured and better grammatically than anything I could put out. So as a precaution, I took my essay to be proof read by two different English teachers, one of which was an advanced English teacher and the teacher in charge of the Speech and Debate team.
Based on my past history with essays, I thought that my essay would come back with something incredibly wrong with it--that I would have to really revamp it completely and get it proof read a second time before I would have any confidence in submitting it. But when I returned a few days later for my proof read essay, one of the speech and debate students said to me that my essay was the best essay our teacher read out of all of the personal statements she reviewed. I was confused because I didn't know if she (the student) somehow had gotten my essay and actually read it or if she just overheard our teacher talking about it. I muttered along anyway and confronted my teacher and sure enough, she confirmed that my essay was probably the best it could be and better than any others she read. She even went on to say that she did nothing to the content except correct some grammar mistakes and make the language tighter (which was a relief for me because I was having trouble trimming it down). It was a surreal experience for me because previously every essay I ever submitted had something wrong and needed significant corrections, yet here is the same teacher saying that I had exceeded everyone's expectations.
So I went on to submit my application to 6 different UC schools, hoping that by increasing the number of schools I applied to I might increase my chances of getting accepted to at least one of them. After all, the same application was used for all UC schools so applying to more than one just increased your application fees. But based on what the counselor had said, I was doubtful. I felt that he, having more experience, probably already knew the outcome, and I was just throwing away money. But I had to try.
At the end of the day, four out of six UCs accepted my application as well as two of three state schools (screw cal poly). I received two rejection letters from the top two UCs (obviously), but I never expected to be sitting down and choosing between 6
But I do understand your point. Almost all machines being sold today fit most people's needs (email, web browsing, word processing, file management) and every time I get asked the question "what do I need to look for in a new computer" I almost always say almost any machine available now is capable of doing everything they need.
However, that view is a short-sighted; while in the past people were writing up documents without graphical interfaces, people also were not able to use their computers for any other tasks. Today, some sort of multimedia capability is expected and standard; if the picture doesn't load instantly and in full 24bit color I'm pissed. Same for sounds and videos and presentations.
Now we've hit a point where we're not sure what we're going to do with all this extra processing speed other than a few niche areas like games, video processing, and number crunching and I think the industry is reacting and trying to find alternatives or other design constraints that better meet the consumers needs. Take for example batteries and efficiency: many companies in the computer industry have made it a new priority to maximize battery life instead of performance. Also look at the progress of laptops and how much closer they are getting to desktops in terms of cost and performance.
So to answer your question, while I don't think there is an immediate need for faster computers for everyone, I do believe there are other ways to apply our technology advances to meet other requirements other than performance (think convenience).
Do yourself a favor and first learn how operating systems (in general) work. The problem with linux is many people will start off just by saying "run this command that then do this and it will work" but when that's all done you fixed the problem but have no clue on why it worked or what the commands were doing to make it work.
As an unexperienced undergrad CS student, I tried running redhat, mandriva, and even a really simple Freesco floppy distro (router distro), but at the end of the day I was still having a lot of trouble when something went wrong. It wasn't until I took my CS OS course that things really started to make sense.
For example, let's look at the file system works. The file system will typically divide the disk into blocks of equal sizes of say 4096 bytes per a block (in most file systems you can choose a different block size and the default size is different). Obviously there's a problem with this: files typically aren't 4096 bytes in size so if the file is smaller, we wasted space (you can only have one file per a block), or if the file is larger we need some kind of method of allocating and keeping track of which blocks make up a file. All of these details are up to the file system and there are different methods and approaches to accomplishing this (hence why we have different file systems). This also explains why on some file systems, if you create a file that has a really tiny amount of data, it still consumes 4kb of disk space because the file system reserved an entire block to store that data. It also explains why when you go out and buy a hard disk, divide by 1024 to get the actual number of bytes, plug it in and format it, but when you look at the available disk space, it's still lower compared to your original calculation. That's because the file system used up blocks to index your files and when it was done calculating the necessary space it needed, it subtracted those blocks from the disk to show you the actual usable disk space. Some of these parameters and pieces of information vary depending on the file system and OS.
It's really a lot of knowledge and then some if you want to learn something about networking (I had to take another class for that). But once I really understood how computers and OSes worked (not just linux itself), I really felt like I understood what I was doing and I could actually interpret what the commands where telling me. For example, the next time you issue the 'df' command to see how much disk space is free, the default option typically shows the number of free blocks not the amount of free space. Now you know why (and hopefully why the number of free blocks is actually important).
If you don't want to take a class, you could probably also get by by buying the same books required by the class and just reading the book, but my TA was actually a BSD guy so he gave us some other insight that you probably wouldn't find in the books. But the main idea is to first understand how the computer and OS work in general, then start reading about the specific commands and details specific to a particular OS.
This is a real complaint and is often a key element to good usability: the correct use of whitespace and grouping. One of my complaints when slashdot was trying to pick a new theme for the website was that the current theme doesn't use whitespace effectively and relies too much on unnecessary lines and gradients.
Looking at the comment form there's already an issue. The current comment form looks something like:
Name
tknd
Subject
Mod parent up
Of course the bolding helps but the whitespace use is incorrect. A better layout would be:
Name:
tknd
Subject:
Mod parent up
Another big beef I have with the comment layout is when you're reading comments there is no consideration outside of the styling for whitespace. So if you just glance at the page, your eye gets confused because things aren't grouped well or separated by whitespace. You have to train yourself that the green bar denotes the top and the gray bar denotes the bottom and the stuff in between is the comment. This could easily be fixed if there was whitespace.
For example, the current comments look like this:
- - - - - - - - A Comment Title
- - - - - - - -
Some other comment meta information
- - - - - - - - Finally the comment text. Which hopefully is more than one line. So you can actually identify it quickly. - - - - - - - - Reply _ _ _ _ _ _ - - - - - - - - Another Comment Title
- - - - - - - -
Some other comment meta information
- - - - - - - -
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line. So you can actually identify it quickly.
- - - - - - - -
Reply
_ _ _ _ _ _
(Unfortunately the lines don't show up well because slashdot complains when I use too many of those characters) But why so much need for the styling? It looks cluttered in my opinion. You can easily get by with whitespace and grouping instead of adding more styling. I don't want to see your lines and gradients. I want to read the comment. Something much easier to read would be like the following:
A Comment Title [small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly. Reply
A Comment Title [small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly. Reply
Obviously I have limited tools available with the allowed html but I would put a little more spacing above and below the comment body to allow the body to be more defined. But I'd certainly get rid of all of the backgrounds except maybe the title bars like how the old slashdot had it. In the current layout I even get confused trying to understand which comment is a parent/child when there are many responses. There's simply too many lines and backgrounds, it's annoying.
The main reason why it is much harder to produce a good looking font on a screen is due to the low dpi factor of screens. In print, you can get a much higher dpi and as such some fonts like Times look great. But on the screen they look like crap because the screen only has so much resolution. You can play a few tricks with current lcd technology and anti-aliasing but compare it to anything in print and there's no comparison.
I certainly wouldn't mind higher resolution displays to display crisper fonts. And no, I'm not talking about running Windows at 3200x2400 so I can fit 4 1600x1200 browser windows on the screen, but rather so that my 10pt font looks much sharper. Then, maybe then I wouldn't have to read a blurry pdf on the screen or be forced to zoom in so the fonts render clearer.
I didn't get into this level of detail in the article because I already had to trim it so much (yes, what you're looking at is the *trimmed* version:) ).
(Offtopic but:) if you can express what you mean in fewer words you will find that your writing will be much clearer and people will actually read what you wrote. Allow me to help you with a portion:
Original:Actually, I like honesty, and Judge Nault is like the hot chick who just tells you that she doesn't like your looks instead of making up some crap about your personality. But after getting similar (but usually more subtle) messages from so many different judges, I thought it was worthwhile to test whether the motions I was filing were being read at all...(italics mine).
Reworded: I like honesty, but after receiving similar message from many judges, I decided to test whether the motions I was filing were being read.
All I have done is removed unnecessary phrases that add little or no meaning. For example, the entire phrase about the "hot chick" didn't help. You don't need a simile or metaphor if the concept you're describing is obvious. The entire meaning is encapsulated in the word "honesty" so why say more if the topic isn't a "hot chick?" In writing this is sometimes referred to as removing clutter. I think you need to practice some of it yourself, and it will probably help you be more successful.
-When you pick it up off the shelf 5 subscription cards fall out of it -The covers are covered with fancy bolded text for each headline hoping that one of the articles will attract you -When you open the cover the first page is a full page ad -The next page is an ad -And the next -Until 10 pages later you find the table of contents... which is conveniently broken into a page and a half with a half page ad between -Then the article you want to read is listed, but of course the smallest text is the page number -As you flip through finding the page, the page number text is in a small font and sometimes misplaced or in a different color because of full page ads -When you find the article there are full page ads, half page ads, quarter page ads, and column ads between the start and end of the article -Finally they want you to pay for your subscription so they can feed you 4 pages of useful content and 100 pages of ads -And the back of the magazine is typically... you guessed it, an ad. So when the mail man or someone misplaces and drops a magazine, it's not the magazine you see but a STUPID AD!
There are a few good magazines out there but most are a joke.
The last completely new PC I bought was more than 2 years ago at the end of 2004. It was a dell laptop that I still use today. My current desktop machine has had a few upgrades in the last 3 to 4 years but no complete hardware changes. I'd say I've probably spent a good $300 to $400 in upgrades over those years which is nothing compared to Apple machine prices. My parents have been using the same AMD Athlon XP computer for 4 to 5 years with no hardware changes. My aunt still uses a slower Athlon XP computer that has DDR 2100 RAM and onboard video. My uncle uses a Athlon Thunderbird 1ghz chip running Ubuntu.
I have purposely decided to hold off for as long as possible with my current machine even though there is an issue with the motherboard chipset since the fan broke. I fixed that with a spare fan and get by on the other hardware that still works so it's no problem anymore.
The only consumer that needs constant upgrades to a PC is a gamer that is always playing the latest and greatest. Other than that, everyone else can get by on hardware that's 2 or more generations old. The only problems are the default windows partition is one huge partition so the drive gets fragmented easily due to the swap file being on the same partition as their temp files and everything else. No consumer needs to upgrade the OS for home purposes as long as they have adequate protection (behind a NAT device at least, preferably a router with a firewall) and aren't stupid enough to download and install any random program.
The only reason I feel compelled to upgrade from time to time is because I see some review of new hardware on the net and the geek inside of me gets all excited like it's a new great toy to play with. But if you sit yourself back down and think logically, "do I really new hardware" the more often than not the answer is no. As such, I've been able to hold off on PC upgrades, but I'm still having difficulty stopping myself from buying random smaller gadgets especially those coming from a company called Nintendo:(
I also often get asked about what people should look for when the buy a new computer. I often tell them that almost anything offered right now is more than enough for what they need to do (email, web browsing, write a few documents, copy a few cds). The only thing they need to be mindful of is the amount of RAM the machine comes with and if it is upgradeable. The CPUs are plenty fast. The hard disks are typically large enough for most people (unless they know a thing or two about bittorrent). 3D isn't a necessity for most and if they're a gamer they've got totally different requirements. But these days are nothing like the windows 9x days and days before that when loading programs and multitasking could potentially be painful. I remember back then when you'd load a program and sit around while it showed it's fancy little splash screen. These days I get pissed off if a program has a splash screen, delete the splash screen and just show me the App.
I live in California and while I do agree that for much of the U.S. rail doesn't make sense, I still think there are a few cases were it does, particularly for the coastal regions like the California coast and the east coast.
California is a prime target because most Californians are settled either near the San Francisco area or the Los Angeles area. Furthermore, California is very long rather than square or circular so a single train line is all that's necessary to link most of California together.
Now if only people would get the hint and understand that freeway is by no means cheap (millions of dollars per a mile of freeway) or efficient (people change lanes, people typically drive alone) and that sitting in front of a wheel for hours with your eyes glued to the road is actually a pretty piss poor way of getting from point A to point B. Maybe once people get that we can stop building these ridiculously large freeways (up to 8 lanes in one direction) and start building an efficient train system.
I once successfully interfaced with a girl device but then the girl device sent an interrupt. I didn't understand it and was too busy to service it anyway so I dropped it off from the queue. The next thing I know the girl device disappeared from the bus.
Release date: November 19, 2006. Today: March 27, 2007.
Days between the two dates: 129 days (including today)
Wii's produced till today: 6,000,000+
6,000,000 Wiis / 129 days = 46,511.628 Wiis / day.
Each Wii sold includes 1 remote, 1 nun-chuck, 1 sensor bar, 1 a/v cable, and 1 power brick. In addition to this, Nintendo must also produce additional remotes, nun-chucks, and classic controllers at roughly the same rate.
I don't know about you, but you find me a manufacturer that can produce electronic hardware at a rate of 46.5k units a day without running out of any supplied part in the process. Even if you give them an additional 30 days to buffer the launch dates with units to sell you'd still get roughly 37.7k Wiis per a day. In order to pull this off Nintendo has to have good engineering (low defect rate), good manufacturing process (low manufacturing defects, fast/efficient production lines), and good supply chain management (can be compensated by better engineering to accept multiple part alternatives in the event a supplier cannot keep up with demand--I've seen this with their battery manufacturer changes that ship with the remotes). That doesn't even begin to include what you're going to do when people send back defective units during the warranty period.
For a global/multilingual launch and a company that only deals with gaming hardware/software, I'd say they're doing a damn good job.
I don't think anyone expected this kind of demand; it's not everyday that your mom, aunt, and grandma (literally) say "I want a Nintendo (Wii)." If there was a new product that was the next big thing compared to sliced bread, this is pretty close.
I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times).
I don't use the mouse much either when I am editing on windows in notepad, ultraedit, and e-texteditor. I often find with these text-editors, the limit is no longer how fast I can type or use the editor, but how fast I can think of the code. Even then, that isn't much of the time taken anyway, most of the time is lost testing what I've made and documenting it correctly.
Now I still use vi occasionally when I'm working directly with the server but I haven't mastered it. My coworker on the other hand only uses vi and I find I can still write code just as fast as he can (using my text editors listed above). The trick is most shortcuts for moving around in even notepad already exist, they're just not defined anywhere and you have to come across the by accident. For example to jump between 'words' you can use ctrl + right-arrow or ctrl + left-arrow. Not only does this work in notepad, but it also works in most windows 'text' fields. If you also hold down 'shift' along with the ctrl key, it will begin selecting text word by word.
Now I still wouldn't use notepad to edit documents simply because it's missing some basic features like unlimited undo, but the keyboard still has plenty of built-in functions to make editing text fast and mouseless as long as you know the tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
So should the "insert row" function be in the "insert" menu or the "table" menu?
Menus, in my opinion, never worked because inevitably the interface will be changed and a new function will be added. When the new function is added, a choice must be made on which menu it should appear and if a new menu is necessary. Eventually you end up with too many functions that were tacked on and a huge tree of functions burried in menus. That's what happened to office and now I can hardly find anything because the menus contain too many items are are unorganized.
I mean, even take practical restaurant menus: you sit at a table, the waiter hands you a menu and now you sit there staring at the thing for 5 to 10 minutes. Who in their right minds thought that this menu would ever be efficient unless the user studied and memorized the stupid thing. It's like reading a book except in the restuarant, at least you have the flavors and crapiness/goodness of the food to help remind you of what was good and what wasn't. In working with software there's no such experience. Click the button, it didn't do what I want, ctrl+z and the option never even had a shot at my long term memory unless it did something that undo wouldn't fix.
Now I haven't use the ribbon myself, but as I understand, Microsoft hired some big time usability experts and spent an awful lot of time trying to make the new Office 2007 interface usable. Note that usability encompasses many attributes of an interface, and learning curve and consistency (the topics that agrivate people the most) are just a few of the many things that need to be accounted for. The problem Microsoft has, and almost any software, hardware, gadget thingy today has is improving the interface without sacrificing consistency. The issue is, some time in the past, someone made a mistake in designing the interface, but because it was there in the previous version, if you take it away or change it in the next version, people immediately complain even though it is obviously a bad way to do it. Is the user correct? Absolutely, they learned how to do something and now that knowledge is lost and they have to relearn it. Is the vendor or designer correct? Absolutely, the method of doing that operation was stupid and required too much training or effort by the user to perform. But give it up, it was wrong to start, and it's going to take some pain to fix.
Now you say "give me my old interface." But I say to you, "tough luck, learn it over again." Chances are, at least with this version, Microsoft put a whole lot of effort into fixing it and getting it right. Had they left in the old interface, that would accomplish nothing. People would laugh at the ribbon and continue using the "old way" for the sake of avoiding learning something new when they could take the time to learn the new way, find out it is actually much more efficient than the old way, and embrace the change because it is actually helping them.
Why do I say this without even having tried the interface? I'm no MS shill, but I admit that their Office suite is unfortunately the standard among office suites because there is no competitor with a good enough feature set. I've tried open office, but often I run into some feature that was available in microsoft (even an older version) but still isn't in open office. Additionally, I've looked at this screenshot tour of Office 2007's keyboard shortcuts. The basic idea is now every function in Office 2007 can be accessed via keyboard. Furthermore, the interface even labels each function with a key or combination of keys to press in order to execute that function without the mouse. I would think Slashdot of all places would actually love this change; it's like the power of VI (in the sense that
FTA:
and
So they're also 7.992 million neurons and an additional 1700 synapses per a neuron short and that's only to get to half of the whole thing.
Regardless that's a huge neural network they got going. I remember putting together a simple neural network for a handwritten digit recognizer. The thing worked...eventually, but occasionally got things wrong (confused 4s and 7s) and needed some additional processing prior to feeding it the actual data. Keep in mind, this was just to recognize digits and this was after various training on the network (anywhere from a thousand samples to ten-thousand samples). I didn't conduct any reasonable experiments on the network but I did notice that I hit a wall in terms of accuracy no matter how much I trained the network. I guess I could've tried setting up the network differently or adding additional nodes to account for things like centering the image, resizing the image so it's roughly the same size, etc but either way I was hand-crafting the network and doing this by trial and error. If those guys can get any insight on how to better construct these things that'd provide some big advancements to understanding how brains work and are constructed to do useful processing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm trying to put Ubuntu on a USB key and get it fully functioning in the event the OS becomes unusable. Setting that aside however...
No, we aren't at the promised land. We are many steps closer but still many critical steps away. Can Joe-user go to the local electronics store and purchase a piece of hardware he knows will work with linux without any geek knowledge? No. Can Joe-user go to walmart and purchase a computer with linux installed instead of Windows or OSX, probably not. Can Joe-user go to the store and buy software that is linux compatible? Not really.
My point is, linux needs commercial support from major software and hardware vendors including *gasp* Microsoft. Why MS? Just for their wonderful office suite which is pretty much the standard. Open office is certainly a great free alternative, however, it is many steps behind. Linux also needs a big leap in support from printer manufacturers and other consumer items like digital cameras, web cams, etc. Linux communities are doing a great job trying to get more support for hardware and software (wine), but people don't like waiting or being told that they can't use something because there's no vendor support for their platform. The products, especially newly released products, need to work out-of-the-box for linux.
When I can comfortably go to any best buy, circuit city, or whatever big electronics store normal people go to for their computer needs and finally see a good amount of products labeled "linux supported" then, and only then, will I think linux has made it to the desktop.
For most employees, businesses don't need high end machines. They need low to mid-range machines that are reliable and easy to repair quickly. That usually means the lowest common denominator on most hardware except maybe the cpu and ram. The GP's point is that Apple doesn't cater to this market and their closest product that would fit the purpose costs too much.
You forgot 98se, ME, and Win2k. The correct order should be:
3.1, 95, 98, 98se, ME, Win2k, WinXP, and now Vista.
There's also the previous NT line (Win NT 4.0) mixed somewhere in there. In all cases except 3.1 to 95, there was little reason to upgrade. The only reason people were so infatuated with it was because people (then) liked shiny (if it was newer it was obviously better even though win98 ran slower than win95 in some tasks on the same machine). Now people are more practical and realize that shiny often means pain. I remember loading up win98 on the same computer with win95 and my immediate reaction was: it looks better but my start menu takes a lot longer to open.
Where are you getting $1200 from? Dell will happily sell you computers with Windows Vista Business (that's the version without the games or media center installed) for under $500.
Also I've given Openoffice a chance, I really have. But there are some compatibility issues when saving a document as a .doc (they don't appear as they should in MS Word) and there are an awful lot of lacking features. It's the same reason why I'm forced to use Photoshop instead of GIMP because Photoshop is always many steps ahead of GIMP. The same goes for office.
When I was in high school a counselor asked me what I was thinking about doing after high school. I replied and said "I would like to go to a University of California school." For those of you without the background, UC schools are the highest available public education schools in the state of California, are rated above public California state schools, some UCs are rated at or above highly recognized private schools. He looked at my GPA and told me that he didn't think I would get accepted to ANY UC and that I would be best to apply for state schools. That pissed me off quite a bit because I knew that while my GPA wasn't glamorous that I had purposely taken advanced classes along with all of the top students in my high school and had proven to at least my teachers that I was capable of being there and continuing with higher education. Unlike other students in the school who just routinely take the normal classes in favor of a higher GPA at less workload, I forced myself to be challenged.
I applied to the UCs anyway. The UC application (at the time) required all of your high school course work, any notable extra activities (sports, music, awards/achievements, etc), GPA, SAT, SAT2 test scores, and finally a personal statement. Everything but the personal statement (which is basically an essay with a limit to how many words on why they should accept you) was straight forward. I knew that in my case, this essay was the "make or break" portion of my application. Fortunately for me, because I had challenged myself all throughout high school, I had something meaningful to say. Other students were frustrated with it and didn't know what to write, what they should talk about. But I knew that they were better at writing than I (or at least I assumed that) and that whatever they wrote was probably better structured and better grammatically than anything I could put out. So as a precaution, I took my essay to be proof read by two different English teachers, one of which was an advanced English teacher and the teacher in charge of the Speech and Debate team.
Based on my past history with essays, I thought that my essay would come back with something incredibly wrong with it--that I would have to really revamp it completely and get it proof read a second time before I would have any confidence in submitting it. But when I returned a few days later for my proof read essay, one of the speech and debate students said to me that my essay was the best essay our teacher read out of all of the personal statements she reviewed. I was confused because I didn't know if she (the student) somehow had gotten my essay and actually read it or if she just overheard our teacher talking about it. I muttered along anyway and confronted my teacher and sure enough, she confirmed that my essay was probably the best it could be and better than any others she read. She even went on to say that she did nothing to the content except correct some grammar mistakes and make the language tighter (which was a relief for me because I was having trouble trimming it down). It was a surreal experience for me because previously every essay I ever submitted had something wrong and needed significant corrections, yet here is the same teacher saying that I had exceeded everyone's expectations.
So I went on to submit my application to 6 different UC schools, hoping that by increasing the number of schools I applied to I might increase my chances of getting accepted to at least one of them. After all, the same application was used for all UC schools so applying to more than one just increased your application fees. But based on what the counselor had said, I was doubtful. I felt that he, having more experience, probably already knew the outcome, and I was just throwing away money. But I had to try.
At the end of the day, four out of six UCs accepted my application as well as two of three state schools (screw cal poly). I received two rejection letters from the top two UCs (obviously), but I never expected to be sitting down and choosing between 6
And "640K ought to be enough for anybody"!
But I do understand your point. Almost all machines being sold today fit most people's needs (email, web browsing, word processing, file management) and every time I get asked the question "what do I need to look for in a new computer" I almost always say almost any machine available now is capable of doing everything they need.
However, that view is a short-sighted; while in the past people were writing up documents without graphical interfaces, people also were not able to use their computers for any other tasks. Today, some sort of multimedia capability is expected and standard; if the picture doesn't load instantly and in full 24bit color I'm pissed. Same for sounds and videos and presentations.
Now we've hit a point where we're not sure what we're going to do with all this extra processing speed other than a few niche areas like games, video processing, and number crunching and I think the industry is reacting and trying to find alternatives or other design constraints that better meet the consumers needs. Take for example batteries and efficiency: many companies in the computer industry have made it a new priority to maximize battery life instead of performance. Also look at the progress of laptops and how much closer they are getting to desktops in terms of cost and performance.
So to answer your question, while I don't think there is an immediate need for faster computers for everyone, I do believe there are other ways to apply our technology advances to meet other requirements other than performance (think convenience).
A violent person when exposed to violent media will tend to act...wait for it...more violently!
And I run around with a knife because it makes me run faster.
Do yourself a favor and first learn how operating systems (in general) work. The problem with linux is many people will start off just by saying "run this command that then do this and it will work" but when that's all done you fixed the problem but have no clue on why it worked or what the commands were doing to make it work.
As an unexperienced undergrad CS student, I tried running redhat, mandriva, and even a really simple Freesco floppy distro (router distro), but at the end of the day I was still having a lot of trouble when something went wrong. It wasn't until I took my CS OS course that things really started to make sense.
For example, let's look at the file system works. The file system will typically divide the disk into blocks of equal sizes of say 4096 bytes per a block (in most file systems you can choose a different block size and the default size is different). Obviously there's a problem with this: files typically aren't 4096 bytes in size so if the file is smaller, we wasted space (you can only have one file per a block), or if the file is larger we need some kind of method of allocating and keeping track of which blocks make up a file. All of these details are up to the file system and there are different methods and approaches to accomplishing this (hence why we have different file systems). This also explains why on some file systems, if you create a file that has a really tiny amount of data, it still consumes 4kb of disk space because the file system reserved an entire block to store that data. It also explains why when you go out and buy a hard disk, divide by 1024 to get the actual number of bytes, plug it in and format it, but when you look at the available disk space, it's still lower compared to your original calculation. That's because the file system used up blocks to index your files and when it was done calculating the necessary space it needed, it subtracted those blocks from the disk to show you the actual usable disk space. Some of these parameters and pieces of information vary depending on the file system and OS.
It's really a lot of knowledge and then some if you want to learn something about networking (I had to take another class for that). But once I really understood how computers and OSes worked (not just linux itself), I really felt like I understood what I was doing and I could actually interpret what the commands where telling me. For example, the next time you issue the 'df' command to see how much disk space is free, the default option typically shows the number of free blocks not the amount of free space. Now you know why (and hopefully why the number of free blocks is actually important). If you don't want to take a class, you could probably also get by by buying the same books required by the class and just reading the book, but my TA was actually a BSD guy so he gave us some other insight that you probably wouldn't find in the books. But the main idea is to first understand how the computer and OS work in general, then start reading about the specific commands and details specific to a particular OS.
part 0:
$ man man
This is a real complaint and is often a key element to good usability: the correct use of whitespace and grouping. One of my complaints when slashdot was trying to pick a new theme for the website was that the current theme doesn't use whitespace effectively and relies too much on unnecessary lines and gradients.
Looking at the comment form there's already an issue. The current comment form looks something like:
Of course the bolding helps but the whitespace use is incorrect. A better layout would be:
Another big beef I have with the comment layout is when you're reading comments there is no consideration outside of the styling for whitespace. So if you just glance at the page, your eye gets confused because things aren't grouped well or separated by whitespace. You have to train yourself that the green bar denotes the top and the gray bar denotes the bottom and the stuff in between is the comment. This could easily be fixed if there was whitespace.
For example, the current comments look like this:
(Unfortunately the lines don't show up well because slashdot complains when I use too many of those characters) But why so much need for the styling? It looks cluttered in my opinion. You can easily get by with whitespace and grouping instead of adding more styling. I don't want to see your lines and gradients. I want to read the comment. Something much easier to read would be like the following:
A Comment Title[small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly.
Reply
A Comment Title
[small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly.
Reply
Obviously I have limited tools available with the allowed html but I would put a little more spacing above and below the comment body to allow the body to be more defined. But I'd certainly get rid of all of the backgrounds except maybe the title bars like how the old slashdot had it. In the current layout I even get confused trying to understand which comment is a parent/child when there are many responses. There's simply too many lines and backgrounds, it's annoying.
The main reason why it is much harder to produce a good looking font on a screen is due to the low dpi factor of screens. In print, you can get a much higher dpi and as such some fonts like Times look great. But on the screen they look like crap because the screen only has so much resolution. You can play a few tricks with current lcd technology and anti-aliasing but compare it to anything in print and there's no comparison.
I certainly wouldn't mind higher resolution displays to display crisper fonts. And no, I'm not talking about running Windows at 3200x2400 so I can fit 4 1600x1200 browser windows on the screen, but rather so that my 10pt font looks much sharper. Then, maybe then I wouldn't have to read a blurry pdf on the screen or be forced to zoom in so the fonts render clearer.
I didn't get into this level of detail in the article because I already had to trim it so much (yes, what you're looking at is the *trimmed* version :) ).
(Offtopic but:) if you can express what you mean in fewer words you will find that your writing will be much clearer and people will actually read what you wrote. Allow me to help you with a portion:
Original: Actually, I like honesty, and Judge Nault is like the hot chick who just tells you that she doesn't like your looks instead of making up some crap about your personality. But after getting similar (but usually more subtle) messages from so many different judges, I thought it was worthwhile to test whether the motions I was filing were being read at all... (italics mine).
Reworded: I like honesty, but after receiving similar message from many judges, I decided to test whether the motions I was filing were being read.
All I have done is removed unnecessary phrases that add little or no meaning. For example, the entire phrase about the "hot chick" didn't help. You don't need a simile or metaphor if the concept you're describing is obvious. The entire meaning is encapsulated in the word "honesty" so why say more if the topic isn't a "hot chick?" In writing this is sometimes referred to as removing clutter. I think you need to practice some of it yourself, and it will probably help you be more successful.
Because if they didn't do it they wouldn't get on slashdot!
then what happens when I click on the NOT SPAM button... *snicker*
When the blue OLEDs stop working just tell your customers they've gone color blind. Problem solved!
I say someone has hijacked Slashdot.
In other news, read about 10 Firefox extensions you should avoid.
Magazines piss me off too:
-When you pick it up off the shelf 5 subscription cards fall out of it
-The covers are covered with fancy bolded text for each headline hoping that one of the articles will attract you
-When you open the cover the first page is a full page ad
-The next page is an ad
-And the next
-Until 10 pages later you find the table of contents... which is conveniently broken into a page and a half with a half page ad between
-Then the article you want to read is listed, but of course the smallest text is the page number
-As you flip through finding the page, the page number text is in a small font and sometimes misplaced or in a different color because of full page ads
-When you find the article there are full page ads, half page ads, quarter page ads, and column ads between the start and end of the article
-Finally they want you to pay for your subscription so they can feed you 4 pages of useful content and 100 pages of ads
-And the back of the magazine is typically... you guessed it, an ad. So when the mail man or someone misplaces and drops a magazine, it's not the magazine you see but a STUPID AD!
There are a few good magazines out there but most are a joke.
The last completely new PC I bought was more than 2 years ago at the end of 2004. It was a dell laptop that I still use today. My current desktop machine has had a few upgrades in the last 3 to 4 years but no complete hardware changes. I'd say I've probably spent a good $300 to $400 in upgrades over those years which is nothing compared to Apple machine prices. My parents have been using the same AMD Athlon XP computer for 4 to 5 years with no hardware changes. My aunt still uses a slower Athlon XP computer that has DDR 2100 RAM and onboard video. My uncle uses a Athlon Thunderbird 1ghz chip running Ubuntu.
I have purposely decided to hold off for as long as possible with my current machine even though there is an issue with the motherboard chipset since the fan broke. I fixed that with a spare fan and get by on the other hardware that still works so it's no problem anymore.
The only consumer that needs constant upgrades to a PC is a gamer that is always playing the latest and greatest. Other than that, everyone else can get by on hardware that's 2 or more generations old. The only problems are the default windows partition is one huge partition so the drive gets fragmented easily due to the swap file being on the same partition as their temp files and everything else. No consumer needs to upgrade the OS for home purposes as long as they have adequate protection (behind a NAT device at least, preferably a router with a firewall) and aren't stupid enough to download and install any random program.
The only reason I feel compelled to upgrade from time to time is because I see some review of new hardware on the net and the geek inside of me gets all excited like it's a new great toy to play with. But if you sit yourself back down and think logically, "do I really new hardware" the more often than not the answer is no. As such, I've been able to hold off on PC upgrades, but I'm still having difficulty stopping myself from buying random smaller gadgets especially those coming from a company called Nintendo :(
I also often get asked about what people should look for when the buy a new computer. I often tell them that almost anything offered right now is more than enough for what they need to do (email, web browsing, write a few documents, copy a few cds). The only thing they need to be mindful of is the amount of RAM the machine comes with and if it is upgradeable. The CPUs are plenty fast. The hard disks are typically large enough for most people (unless they know a thing or two about bittorrent). 3D isn't a necessity for most and if they're a gamer they've got totally different requirements. But these days are nothing like the windows 9x days and days before that when loading programs and multitasking could potentially be painful. I remember back then when you'd load a program and sit around while it showed it's fancy little splash screen. These days I get pissed off if a program has a splash screen, delete the splash screen and just show me the App.
I live in California and while I do agree that for much of the U.S. rail doesn't make sense, I still think there are a few cases were it does, particularly for the coastal regions like the California coast and the east coast.
California is a prime target because most Californians are settled either near the San Francisco area or the Los Angeles area. Furthermore, California is very long rather than square or circular so a single train line is all that's necessary to link most of California together.
Now if only people would get the hint and understand that freeway is by no means cheap (millions of dollars per a mile of freeway) or efficient (people change lanes, people typically drive alone) and that sitting in front of a wheel for hours with your eyes glued to the road is actually a pretty piss poor way of getting from point A to point B. Maybe once people get that we can stop building these ridiculously large freeways (up to 8 lanes in one direction) and start building an efficient train system.
I once successfully interfaced with a girl device but then the girl device sent an interrupt. I didn't understand it and was too busy to service it anyway so I dropped it off from the queue. The next thing I know the girl device disappeared from the bus.
Release date: November 19, 2006.
Today: March 27, 2007.
Days between the two dates: 129 days (including today)
Wii's produced till today: 6,000,000+
6,000,000 Wiis / 129 days = 46,511.628 Wiis / day.
Each Wii sold includes 1 remote, 1 nun-chuck, 1 sensor bar, 1 a/v cable, and 1 power brick. In addition to this, Nintendo must also produce additional remotes, nun-chucks, and classic controllers at roughly the same rate.
I don't know about you, but you find me a manufacturer that can produce electronic hardware at a rate of 46.5k units a day without running out of any supplied part in the process. Even if you give them an additional 30 days to buffer the launch dates with units to sell you'd still get roughly 37.7k Wiis per a day. In order to pull this off Nintendo has to have good engineering (low defect rate), good manufacturing process (low manufacturing defects, fast/efficient production lines), and good supply chain management (can be compensated by better engineering to accept multiple part alternatives in the event a supplier cannot keep up with demand--I've seen this with their battery manufacturer changes that ship with the remotes). That doesn't even begin to include what you're going to do when people send back defective units during the warranty period.
For a global/multilingual launch and a company that only deals with gaming hardware/software, I'd say they're doing a damn good job.
I don't think anyone expected this kind of demand; it's not everyday that your mom, aunt, and grandma (literally) say "I want a Nintendo (Wii)." If there was a new product that was the next big thing compared to sliced bread, this is pretty close.
I don't use the mouse much either when I am editing on windows in notepad, ultraedit, and e-texteditor. I often find with these text-editors, the limit is no longer how fast I can type or use the editor, but how fast I can think of the code. Even then, that isn't much of the time taken anyway, most of the time is lost testing what I've made and documenting it correctly.
Now I still use vi occasionally when I'm working directly with the server but I haven't mastered it. My coworker on the other hand only uses vi and I find I can still write code just as fast as he can (using my text editors listed above). The trick is most shortcuts for moving around in even notepad already exist, they're just not defined anywhere and you have to come across the by accident. For example to jump between 'words' you can use ctrl + right-arrow or ctrl + left-arrow. Not only does this work in notepad, but it also works in most windows 'text' fields. If you also hold down 'shift' along with the ctrl key, it will begin selecting text word by word.
Now I still wouldn't use notepad to edit documents simply because it's missing some basic features like unlimited undo, but the keyboard still has plenty of built-in functions to make editing text fast and mouseless as long as you know the tricks.