OpenOffice can tell Windows it's capable of reading CSV files, but not install itself as the default for opening CSV files. Then when you double-clicked it, you'd get a nice little dialog that reads something like, "there is no default program for this file format, would you like to use the following program? * OpenOffice". I believe that's what Excel does.
Seriously. You could learn and master the Office 2007 interface in less time than it takes to find, download, and install OpenOffice. That's the lamest excuse ever.
I'd have gone for "I didn't want to pay for an upgrade." That I can get behind. But, "I'm too much of a wuss to learn a slightly different, and vastly superior, UI?" No.
That summary was the most biased, paranoid rambling that I've ever seen. You might as well followed it up with a paragraph about how Microsoft uses those little plastic strips in $20 bills to track you when you go through airport scanners, so they know whether to equip your plane with chemtrail equipment before redirecting it to land in the secret tunnel between Washington D.C. and Area 51.
The best bet would be moving the whole world to a situation like we have with USB, where the majority of devices are covered by the generic drivers. I mean, once you have one USB Mass Storage driver, you can plug everything from a hard drive to a memory key to a camcorder into your computer and it all works seamlessly. Ditto with the generic USB sound driver, etc.
Unless a device is really, really odd, it shouldn't need its own driver. Unfortunately, this plan also requires multiple companies with margins $0.01 per unit to agree on something, so it'll probably never happen. USB was a fluke.
Well, it's been awhile, but last time I used it: 1) It wasn't able to import an outline from a document and automatically convert it into slides 2) It totally didn't have the concept of "master slides", where you can change the appearance/behavior of a slide, then apply that new appearance to all the other slides automatically 3) Related to that, if you changed a slide's template, it lost the content of the slide. (Actually, IIRC, it kept the title but deleted everything else.) 4) The fonts and drawing tools weren't anti-aliased, so they looked like shit
I mean, I'm not saying Powerpoint is good, either... Microsoft has clearly been neglecting Powerpoint for years. But compared to Impress, it's a gem. Probably the best presentation software out there right now is Apple's Keynote... but nothing will read the file format, so.
Yeah, and what's hilarious is that those peasants lived to the ripe old age of 30, if they were lucky. They were all eligable to be conscripted into whatever retarded war their lord involved his kingdom in, and these wars were non-stop. Hell, he could be stabbed in the stomach for no reason other than his lord wanted to test his new sword-- their lives had literally no value at all.
I wish we have a time machine we could use to send people like you back in time to the era you love so much. Then you could happy die alone and afraid face-down in a pool of mud and your own blood.
It'll probably be optional for existing installs of Word. So you could just not install it. It might be a good idea if you have to interoperate with a lot of other people who may or may not have it, at least you know you won't be sending them incompatible files.
For new installs, though, it'll have to be burnt on the DVD, so you're out of luck.
I used columnar data as a mere example of an operation an advanced text editor is capable of doing at an advanced users behest without any built-in special-purpose/knowledge of the specific task at hand.
Yes, but you're still missing my point.
A text editor should be really really fucking good at editing text. If you're writing a computer program (and don't delude yourself, writing a RegEx as complex as that one is writing a computer program), then you should be using another tool.
I don't want my text editor to be able to do crazy insane things that have absolutely nothing to do with editing text. I just want it to be really really fucking good at editing text.
Those advanced features in Photoshop are all there to make it really really fucking good at manipulating bitmap images. That's what Photoshop does, so there's no issue with those features being there.
It's not a hard point to understand, is it? Cripes.
In my example, I accomplish my task in under 15 seconds on a remote system somewhere. If I had to download the data, import it into a spreadsheet app (btw, having to describe to the spreadsheet how the data is delimited), manipulate it, save it (btw, it is nearly guaranteed to screw up the delimiting on writeback), and write it back, that would make me tons less productive.
Not if you're any good at using a spreadsheet program. Also, what decade are you from where you can't run a spreadsheet app remotely?
The entire problem with a lot of the 'shitty' Sun, Oracle, IBM software is they subscribe to the concept of special-purpose formats that are awkward to generically manipulate in the name of putting them into the 'right' application.
Then demand better. You're paying for the software, demand great software. Don't just roll over and put up with their bullshit because you happen to have spent years learning RegEx... demand fucking better.
Look, you're using a 1975 tool on a 1975 problem in the year 2010. You're preventing software from evolving, from getting better, because you have this hammer you learned back in the 80s, and you're buying software made by people just like you who are using tools just as bad and you're using it to fucking hammer in screws and you're never stopping to ask yourself, "wait a second, why the fuck isn't there a better tool for putting screws in wood?" It pisses me off.
Why do people like you look at the bullshit that Sun and Oracle and IBM are feeding them and say "yes sir, may I have another?" The tools suck ass, the files (as you imply) are convoluted and the tools for editing the files are even worse. But you're totally ignoring the problem because you found a workaround! It's possible to build good software, but why should they? People like you *buy the shitty software already*.
And what happens when a company decides to attempt to join the 21st century? Microsoft comes along and says "hey Bash sucks we can do better", and come up with something like PowerShell, and how do you react? Derision, insults, and for fuck's sake of course you never bothered to TRY to use it.
It makes my head hurt.
My point is that ultimate capability comes at a price of requiring learning to occur, and I am happy to see projects come along that aren't afraid of features simply because they would require a learning curve to be effective.
That's fine, but if it's a app to edit text, the feature needs to be relevant to the task of editing text. Not editing some other completely different type of file that just happens to look like text if you kind of squint. That's a waste of the developers' time and a waste of your time, because you're using the fucking hammer to put in the goddamned screws.
Sorry for the rant. I just feel like the industry is at a complete standstill because the old guard isn't bothering to tell the young guys, "hey, our tools suck shit... make something better."
Finder as browser more closely matches how I think about interacting with a computer now.
And more power to you. Although I do wonder if your preference changed as a result of Microsoft's preference changing-- for example, when OS 9 and Windows 2000 were king, did you prefer Windows 2000's browser-based Explorer?
What irritates me more is that they *removed* my preferred way of interacting with files and folders. It's gone, and no longer exists in any form. This is the only time I've ever seen a version of a product with significantly *fewer* features than the previous version... OS X Finder had only a fraction of the features of OS 9 Finder. Ridiculous.
Anyway, there's nothing stopping Apple from making both me and you happy-- there's no reason spatial and browser modes can't co-exist. In fact, Apple seemed to even kind of attempt a half-assed co-existence in 10.1 and 10.2. But they completely botched the spatial view anyway, so it doesn't really matter if it's ditched now.
Like I said, if I have to use a mediocre UI, I might as well use the mediocre UI with better backwards compatibility and more games.
If in a holistically-usable environment there is no cause to manipulate text at all,
I didn't say that.
If you're going to criticize my comments, please take the time to read and comprehend them first. I didn't say that text files wouldn't exist, that's retarded. I said that non-text (specifically, columnar) data wouldn't exist in a text file and thus text editors wouldn't need to include features for handling them.
If a user complains that they have this text data they want to manipulate (not because their app demanded it, but because a friend sent it or who knows what else), the correct response is that capable text editing doesn't belong in a 'usable' environment and therefore applications offering advanced capability have no place in the world?
Ok, two points here:
1) What does "having columnar data in a text file" have anything to do with "offering advanced capability?" You seem to have conflated these two concepts, and I have no idea why or what you're driving at.
2) I understand that in the real world, computers have to interface with shitty software-- hell, any software from Sun, Oracle or IBM is bound to be shitty and that's a lot of software. But even then, if you have a text file full of columnar data, you should import it into an editor that's designed to support columnar data (i.e. a database, or spreadsheet) and not twiddle with columns in a text editor.
In short, and using popular programs as examples, whether or not Word can perform that operation is beside the point since Excel is *designed* to perform that operation.
The only company I've worked for that made use of the H1B program was Microsoft, and they definitely do not abuse the program or the employees using it.
I'd need to see some evidence to come around to your opinion, it's not by any long shot "common knowledge."
They could be very heavy computer users, like a CAD company. Or have very high turnaround, and so require more manpower to image computer and do training.
Or, hell, in this economy you're critical at a company hiring *too many* employees? Man, let just get a paycheck and feel good about it.
And BTW this is an advantage of Free software as you are automatically entitled to redistributing the library yourself.
An advantage of Free software is that it lets you, using an arcane and complex process, fix the problem caused by using Free software in the first place?
And you prefer the way Microsoft does it because you.... like.... applications installed and running without your knowing? Or you are employed by an antivirus provider or something?
Did you miss the part where he had UAC turned-on in Windows?
He's complaining that at least UAC is a simple "yes/no" permission grant, where Apple's mechanism requires you type your password. (At least that's how I read it.)
UAC is not Unix-like.
Yeah; for one thing it can automatically determine when a app needs elevation instead of Unix-like method of the app shitting all over itself, then you know to re-run it with elevation only after it fails. From my perspective, UAC is better than Unix-like implementations.
UAC is a wrapper around the same horrible implementation of Microsoft's security scheme.
How is it horrible? You can assign much finer-grained security permissions to many more objects than in Unix-like OSes. So, again, from my perspective, Microsoft's security scheme is significantly better than Unix-like implementations.
So, there is still silent escalation among other things not yet understood.
If you don't understand it, maybe you should figure it out instead of just implying that *everybody* is as ignorant as you.
There is no silent escalation-- you have to prove claims like that, you can't just write your train-of-thought directly to the screen.
So, yes, there is protection. Just like a condom. You have to type in your password to take the condom off.
If you like typing a password, you can easily set UAC to require one also. In which case, there's absolutely *no* difference whatsoever between Apple and Microsoft's implementation-- oh, except to raving fanboys like you, the Apple one is "good" and the Microsoft one is "bad".
I switched off Macs because their UI quality has gone to shit compared to the Classic days. I could cope with the constant upgrade treadmill, as Apple constantly broke my not-very-old software due to OS/CPU changes. But fucking up Finder's spatial mode and that abomination of a search interface? Fuck that.
If I have to use a shitty UI, I'll use it on Windows where my old apps work and there are more games. Since the move I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of Windows, which is still increasing and not decreasing like OS X is.
The problem for me (and a lot of the old guard) is that most OS X users are coming from Windows or Linux, so they simply have no clue how much better Apple *used* to be. Apple let the NeXT guys take over their OS, and the quality went down the shitter. (Given: Apple's always been terrible at backwards-compatibility.)
It's like saying that my Honda is a piece of crap-- I didn't change the oil in 12000 miles and now it won't run! You're blaming the OS for something that isn't it's fault. If your post were honest, you'd talk only about the flakey driver without mentioning the OS. (especially since, in your case, the OS has bogong to do with it.
I'm actually seriously curious about the term though. When something is "worth a horselaugh" what does that mean, exactly? Is that a common slang term I just haven't happened to come across before?
A new user is NOT, I repeat NOT, gonna be comfortable with CLI, and frankly if you have a decent OS there shouldn't be ANY reason why they should have to be. Apple OSX? Frankly most of the guys I've talked to running OSX doesn't even know it HAS a CLI.
Mac Classic actually literally had no CLI whatsoever. First and last OS to ever do that, I believe.
I have never seen a "one way GUI" such as you describe.
Handbrake on Windows (and presumably Linux and OS X) have one. It's a complete pain in the ass, especially compared to the older Handbrake version which had great usability.
Now you configure your video ripping, and a fucking CMD box pops up to do the actual work!
"Oh I want to play a video game, let me pause transcoding"... can't do it, you can't interactively communicate with a CLI process! Sucks to be you! Either you cancel it (only possible by closing the CMD box and *killing* the process), or you suck it up and let it finish.
Ugh. I miss the old Handbrake, before it was taken over by people with no clue how to make a decent UI. It's rare to see a product actually go *backwards* that much.
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100,
In the world of good UIs, that text file doesn't exist and should never exist for any reason. The only reason you'd ever have to do an operation like that is if you're interfacing to an device with an absolutely shitty UI.
In a holistically-usable environment, there's no way the example you cite would ever come up. You're demonstrating a point, but I don't think it's the one you intended.
They are a victim of the marketing department at Microsoft, which (look back for the article last week)has admitted to paying "independent" shills and stacking discussion panels to endorse their inferior product.
I think it's cute that the NY Times forgets Amazon is online, they don't rely on local people, and could just as easily move overseas as it could to another state to save that billion dollars in taxes. I'm sure there's plenty of states that would welcome Amazon and the 15,000+ jobs it brings with tax-exempt status.
Please California, chase away all of your big businesses! Midwestern states would welcome the jobs.
Amazon's in Washington.
Not all of the west coast is California, you know. In fact, the best parts of it aren't. And don't encourage California to kill off their business, or they'll all move up here and ruin our State too.
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OpenOffice can tell Windows it's capable of reading CSV files, but not install itself as the default for opening CSV files. Then when you double-clicked it, you'd get a nice little dialog that reads something like, "there is no default program for this file format, would you like to use the following program? * OpenOffice". I believe that's what Excel does.
And that plug-in would have been shipped as a feature, except for Adobe's teeth gnashing and threatening of lawsuits.
Here's a pro-tip: PDF is only an open format if you're too small a company to effectively compete with Adobe.
Seriously. You could learn and master the Office 2007 interface in less time than it takes to find, download, and install OpenOffice. That's the lamest excuse ever.
I'd have gone for "I didn't want to pay for an upgrade." That I can get behind. But, "I'm too much of a wuss to learn a slightly different, and vastly superior, UI?" No.
That summary was the most biased, paranoid rambling that I've ever seen. You might as well followed it up with a paragraph about how Microsoft uses those little plastic strips in $20 bills to track you when you go through airport scanners, so they know whether to equip your plane with chemtrail equipment before redirecting it to land in the secret tunnel between Washington D.C. and Area 51.
The best bet would be moving the whole world to a situation like we have with USB, where the majority of devices are covered by the generic drivers. I mean, once you have one USB Mass Storage driver, you can plug everything from a hard drive to a memory key to a camcorder into your computer and it all works seamlessly. Ditto with the generic USB sound driver, etc.
Unless a device is really, really odd, it shouldn't need its own driver. Unfortunately, this plan also requires multiple companies with margins $0.01 per unit to agree on something, so it'll probably never happen. USB was a fluke.
Well, it's been awhile, but last time I used it:
1) It wasn't able to import an outline from a document and automatically convert it into slides
2) It totally didn't have the concept of "master slides", where you can change the appearance/behavior of a slide, then apply that new appearance to all the other slides automatically
3) Related to that, if you changed a slide's template, it lost the content of the slide. (Actually, IIRC, it kept the title but deleted everything else.)
4) The fonts and drawing tools weren't anti-aliased, so they looked like shit
I mean, I'm not saying Powerpoint is good, either... Microsoft has clearly been neglecting Powerpoint for years. But compared to Impress, it's a gem. Probably the best presentation software out there right now is Apple's Keynote... but nothing will read the file format, so.
Yeah, and what's hilarious is that those peasants lived to the ripe old age of 30, if they were lucky. They were all eligable to be conscripted into whatever retarded war their lord involved his kingdom in, and these wars were non-stop. Hell, he could be stabbed in the stomach for no reason other than his lord wanted to test his new sword-- their lives had literally no value at all.
I wish we have a time machine we could use to send people like you back in time to the era you love so much. Then you could happy die alone and afraid face-down in a pool of mud and your own blood.
I'd just like to point out that there's no guarantee, or reason to believe, that open source office software is any better in this regard.
And, hell, OpenOffice's presentation software is so weak, even a completely corrupted Office 2007 file probably looked better.
It'll probably be optional for existing installs of Word. So you could just not install it. It might be a good idea if you have to interoperate with a lot of other people who may or may not have it, at least you know you won't be sending them incompatible files.
For new installs, though, it'll have to be burnt on the DVD, so you're out of luck.
I used columnar data as a mere example of an operation an advanced text editor is capable of doing at an advanced users behest without any built-in special-purpose/knowledge of the specific task at hand.
Yes, but you're still missing my point.
A text editor should be really really fucking good at editing text. If you're writing a computer program (and don't delude yourself, writing a RegEx as complex as that one is writing a computer program), then you should be using another tool.
I don't want my text editor to be able to do crazy insane things that have absolutely nothing to do with editing text. I just want it to be really really fucking good at editing text.
Those advanced features in Photoshop are all there to make it really really fucking good at manipulating bitmap images. That's what Photoshop does, so there's no issue with those features being there.
It's not a hard point to understand, is it? Cripes.
In my example, I accomplish my task in under 15 seconds on a remote system somewhere. If I had to download the data, import it into a spreadsheet app (btw, having to describe to the spreadsheet how the data is delimited), manipulate it, save it (btw, it is nearly guaranteed to screw up the delimiting on writeback), and write it back, that would make me tons less productive.
Not if you're any good at using a spreadsheet program. Also, what decade are you from where you can't run a spreadsheet app remotely?
The entire problem with a lot of the 'shitty' Sun, Oracle, IBM software is they subscribe to the concept of special-purpose formats that are awkward to generically manipulate in the name of putting them into the 'right' application.
Then demand better. You're paying for the software, demand great software. Don't just roll over and put up with their bullshit because you happen to have spent years learning RegEx... demand fucking better.
Look, you're using a 1975 tool on a 1975 problem in the year 2010. You're preventing software from evolving, from getting better, because you have this hammer you learned back in the 80s, and you're buying software made by people just like you who are using tools just as bad and you're using it to fucking hammer in screws and you're never stopping to ask yourself, "wait a second, why the fuck isn't there a better tool for putting screws in wood?" It pisses me off.
Why do people like you look at the bullshit that Sun and Oracle and IBM are feeding them and say "yes sir, may I have another?" The tools suck ass, the files (as you imply) are convoluted and the tools for editing the files are even worse. But you're totally ignoring the problem because you found a workaround! It's possible to build good software, but why should they? People like you *buy the shitty software already*.
And what happens when a company decides to attempt to join the 21st century? Microsoft comes along and says "hey Bash sucks we can do better", and come up with something like PowerShell, and how do you react? Derision, insults, and for fuck's sake of course you never bothered to TRY to use it.
It makes my head hurt.
My point is that ultimate capability comes at a price of requiring learning to occur, and I am happy to see projects come along that aren't afraid of features simply because they would require a learning curve to be effective.
That's fine, but if it's a app to edit text, the feature needs to be relevant to the task of editing text. Not editing some other completely different type of file that just happens to look like text if you kind of squint. That's a waste of the developers' time and a waste of your time, because you're using the fucking hammer to put in the goddamned screws.
Sorry for the rant. I just feel like the industry is at a complete standstill because the old guard isn't bothering to tell the young guys, "hey, our tools suck shit... make something better."
Finder as browser more closely matches how I think about interacting with a computer now.
And more power to you. Although I do wonder if your preference changed as a result of Microsoft's preference changing-- for example, when OS 9 and Windows 2000 were king, did you prefer Windows 2000's browser-based Explorer?
What irritates me more is that they *removed* my preferred way of interacting with files and folders. It's gone, and no longer exists in any form. This is the only time I've ever seen a version of a product with significantly *fewer* features than the previous version... OS X Finder had only a fraction of the features of OS 9 Finder. Ridiculous.
Anyway, there's nothing stopping Apple from making both me and you happy-- there's no reason spatial and browser modes can't co-exist. In fact, Apple seemed to even kind of attempt a half-assed co-existence in 10.1 and 10.2. But they completely botched the spatial view anyway, so it doesn't really matter if it's ditched now.
Like I said, if I have to use a mediocre UI, I might as well use the mediocre UI with better backwards compatibility and more games.
If in a holistically-usable environment there is no cause to manipulate text at all,
I didn't say that.
If you're going to criticize my comments, please take the time to read and comprehend them first. I didn't say that text files wouldn't exist, that's retarded. I said that non-text (specifically, columnar) data wouldn't exist in a text file and thus text editors wouldn't need to include features for handling them.
If a user complains that they have this text data they want to manipulate (not because their app demanded it, but because a friend sent it or who knows what else), the correct response is that capable text editing doesn't belong in a 'usable' environment and therefore applications offering advanced capability have no place in the world?
Ok, two points here:
1) What does "having columnar data in a text file" have anything to do with "offering advanced capability?" You seem to have conflated these two concepts, and I have no idea why or what you're driving at.
2) I understand that in the real world, computers have to interface with shitty software-- hell, any software from Sun, Oracle or IBM is bound to be shitty and that's a lot of software. But even then, if you have a text file full of columnar data, you should import it into an editor that's designed to support columnar data (i.e. a database, or spreadsheet) and not twiddle with columns in a text editor.
In short, and using popular programs as examples, whether or not Word can perform that operation is beside the point since Excel is *designed* to perform that operation.
The only company I've worked for that made use of the H1B program was Microsoft, and they definitely do not abuse the program or the employees using it.
I'd need to see some evidence to come around to your opinion, it's not by any long shot "common knowledge."
They could be very heavy computer users, like a CAD company. Or have very high turnaround, and so require more manpower to image computer and do training.
Or, hell, in this economy you're critical at a company hiring *too many* employees? Man, let just get a paycheck and feel good about it.
And BTW this is an advantage of Free software as you are automatically entitled to redistributing the library yourself.
An advantage of Free software is that it lets you, using an arcane and complex process, fix the problem caused by using Free software in the first place?
Wow.
And you prefer the way Microsoft does it because you.... like.... applications installed and running without your knowing? Or you are employed by an antivirus provider or something?
Did you miss the part where he had UAC turned-on in Windows?
He's complaining that at least UAC is a simple "yes/no" permission grant, where Apple's mechanism requires you type your password. (At least that's how I read it.)
UAC is not Unix-like.
Yeah; for one thing it can automatically determine when a app needs elevation instead of Unix-like method of the app shitting all over itself, then you know to re-run it with elevation only after it fails. From my perspective, UAC is better than Unix-like implementations.
UAC is a wrapper around the same horrible implementation of Microsoft's security scheme.
How is it horrible? You can assign much finer-grained security permissions to many more objects than in Unix-like OSes. So, again, from my perspective, Microsoft's security scheme is significantly better than Unix-like implementations.
So, there is still silent escalation among other things not yet understood.
If you don't understand it, maybe you should figure it out instead of just implying that *everybody* is as ignorant as you.
There is no silent escalation-- you have to prove claims like that, you can't just write your train-of-thought directly to the screen.
So, yes, there is protection. Just like a condom. You have to type in your password to take the condom off.
If you like typing a password, you can easily set UAC to require one also. In which case, there's absolutely *no* difference whatsoever between Apple and Microsoft's implementation-- oh, except to raving fanboys like you, the Apple one is "good" and the Microsoft one is "bad".
I switched off Macs because their UI quality has gone to shit compared to the Classic days. I could cope with the constant upgrade treadmill, as Apple constantly broke my not-very-old software due to OS/CPU changes. But fucking up Finder's spatial mode and that abomination of a search interface? Fuck that.
If I have to use a shitty UI, I'll use it on Windows where my old apps work and there are more games. Since the move I've been pleasantly surprised at the quality of Windows, which is still increasing and not decreasing like OS X is.
The problem for me (and a lot of the old guard) is that most OS X users are coming from Windows or Linux, so they simply have no clue how much better Apple *used* to be. Apple let the NeXT guys take over their OS, and the quality went down the shitter. (Given: Apple's always been terrible at backwards-compatibility.)
That "vomit" ad was hilarious. I'd buy Microsoft products after watching that ad, and I'm annoyed that Microsoft was cowardly-enough to pull it.
It's like saying that my Honda is a piece of crap-- I didn't change the oil in 12000 miles and now it won't run! You're blaming the OS for something that isn't it's fault. If your post were honest, you'd talk only about the flakey driver without mentioning the OS. (especially since, in your case, the OS has bogong to do with it.
That's my beef.
Nice.
I'm actually seriously curious about the term though. When something is "worth a horselaugh" what does that mean, exactly? Is that a common slang term I just haven't happened to come across before?
A new user is NOT, I repeat NOT, gonna be comfortable with CLI, and frankly if you have a decent OS there shouldn't be ANY reason why they should have to be. Apple OSX? Frankly most of the guys I've talked to running OSX doesn't even know it HAS a CLI.
Mac Classic actually literally had no CLI whatsoever. First and last OS to ever do that, I believe.
I have never seen a "one way GUI" such as you describe.
Handbrake on Windows (and presumably Linux and OS X) have one. It's a complete pain in the ass, especially compared to the older Handbrake version which had great usability.
Now you configure your video ripping, and a fucking CMD box pops up to do the actual work!
"Oh I want to play a video game, let me pause transcoding"... can't do it, you can't interactively communicate with a CLI process! Sucks to be you! Either you cancel it (only possible by closing the CMD box and *killing* the process), or you suck it up and let it finish.
Ugh. I miss the old Handbrake, before it was taken over by people with no clue how to make a decent UI. It's rare to see a product actually go *backwards* that much.
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100,
In the world of good UIs, that text file doesn't exist and should never exist for any reason. The only reason you'd ever have to do an operation like that is if you're interfacing to an device with an absolutely shitty UI.
In a holistically-usable environment, there's no way the example you cite would ever come up. You're demonstrating a point, but I don't think it's the one you intended.
They are a victim of the marketing department at Microsoft, which (look back for the article last week)has admitted to paying "independent" shills and stacking discussion panels to endorse their inferior product.
I'm calling this bluff.
Link me.
I'm a sad pathetic loser who checks Slashdot virtually every day, and catches up on old stories on the next day if I miss them. There was no such Slashdot article last week. I just searched my Slashdot RSS feed, and the only even slightly relevant story is this one: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/26/2238218/Groklaw-Putting-Comes-v-Microsoft-Docs-Online?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)&utm_content=Google+Reader and there's nothing there to support your claim, as far as I can tell.
I think it's cute that the NY Times forgets Amazon is online, they don't rely on local people, and could just as easily move overseas as it could to another state to save that billion dollars in taxes. I'm sure there's plenty of states that would welcome Amazon and the 15,000+ jobs it brings with tax-exempt status.
Please California, chase away all of your big businesses! Midwestern states would welcome the jobs.
Amazon's in Washington.
Not all of the west coast is California, you know. In fact, the best parts of it aren't. And don't encourage California to kill off their business, or they'll all move up here and ruin our State too.