I never have this problem on my mac, when I loose track of a dialog box I just hit the dedicated F key that shows me every window open in a giant grid. When I say Macs are better than windows, I am not talking about how fast a web page loads, I am talking about this kind of stuff. When a company cares enough to consider the user experience, people tend to complain less about the user experience. I swear I have tripled my personal productivity by switching over to mac, not for any one reason, but for thousands of reasons like the spacing of the keys on the keyboard and the use of (intuitive) gestures on the track pad. And the work flow features of the interface! Like being able to hit the space key and get an (literally) instant preview of whatever document you are browsing in the file manager. It really is absurd how much more thought-out my computer is than nearly any device I have ever owned. Built in print to pdf, in the box developers kit, backlit keys, lack of unnecessary third party software, no anti-virus ads popping up out of seemingly nowhere, no virus scares... do I need to go on?

A company called Axis made a 16-bit greyscale monitor like that for layout on Apples in the early 1990's, I use to have one, it was cool, but the extra mounting hardware it used for that feature had to be so heavy duty it made the thing very lumpy and big, and there really wasn't any good place to put it on a desk. My mother used it until it broke in the early 2000's for writing. I hated and loved that thing. The high quality of the image mixed with the lack of color gave it a very charming worthlessness. Like an IBM Selectric typewriter, in that, it is outdated and all of it's virtues are pointless next to modern technology and it has none of the romance of an Underwood or Brother manual, but it still has weird character that is hard to deny it.

I wish I still had that Axis monitor.

Thankyou! It sounds like your grandchildren have a Grandad/Grandma who definitely loves them, which all kids really need when you get down to it. I see some very tragic situations on a daily basis, and the one thing they have in common is not enough love, or love in the wrong form, it sounds like your babies* have everything they need.

*All the older ladies I work with call their students this, I have started using it the same way, hehe.

P.S. it was nice having such a civilized conversation on this website, it reminds me of the multi-week discussions that use to take place on BBS's back in the day, not to say there wasn't a fair amount of trolling back then as well.

I can relate to two of things you mentioned. I also worked in a (medium in my case) 'integrated' computer lab around the same era (early 2000's), and it was absurd how much people preferred them, even though half of the windows machines hardly worked because they were choked up with 100+(not exaggerating) copies of Bonzai Buddy installed. It was horrible to look at that troop of gorillas everyday. I tried to manage the spyware garbage as well as I could, but the university consistently ignored requests for administrative software that would allow me to keep that lab in better shape. Despite the decrepid nature of the windows machines, days would pass where not a single walk in would attempt to use a mac, despite the lines for everything else. The macs were not steller machines either, 1st gen imacs, but at least the screens did not contain dancing monkeys and machine-gun style pop-up advertising when nothing (seemed) to be running.

The second thing was that I had to do the exact same thing for my sister yesterday because she was having trouble with open office. I love Open Office for many reasons, I use it, but it needs to get out of Beta testing soon*, because it's astoundingly buggy.

* Yes, I know it's not actually in the beta stage.

P.S. I learned about the nightmare that is Vista in the process.

It is unfortunate that they are to some extent more expensive, but I think that it's a result of not cutting corners rather than any type of marketing inflation (the iPod is a very different story however). They just build computers the way I would build them. I work with children with Autism, and you would be amazed at what kind of havoc the sounds of computers wreak on the average sensory-oriented classroom (they are special-ed classrooms with certain sound and tactile features modified for Autism Spectrum Disorders). A low-quality computer fan can really be the difference between a good and bad day. I like my MB-Air because it never makes noise (unless you cover the vent holes and get it hot enough to kick the fan on).

Actually, I have a Macbook Air that I run OS X, XP (this is only for access to SPSS via an Active Directory system I need for work), and BackTrack 4. I use each one for various purposes.

I have heard this argument before, and I don't entirely agree with it. I think there would be plenty of security holes and viruses if another OS became as dominant as windows, but I think that the way Windows is set up at the deepest levels, it allows non-users far more access to the internal workings than any of it's competitors.

I don't think viruses or security problems would disappear if everyone switched to a Posix-style OS, but I certainly think a far smaller percentage (as in orders of magnitude) of computers in the world would be loaded down with viruses, worms, bots, etc.. And the biggest problem with windows is just how poorly legitimate software runs to begin with, and how easily and often it will install ancillary garbage you never asked it to install ("Bonzai Buddy" comes to mind).

It's easy to blame the user for these things, but why should the user have to think about security to begin with, the flexibility of computers and the process that produces their designs dictates that reasonable level of security can be made simple and easy for the user to keep up with without the addition of inadequate third-party solutions to the problem.

Microsoft is really bad about drowning the user with obtuse warning messages that cause them to generally ignore the important ones. From a behaviorism-oriented perspective on how they set everything up (I'm a behaviorists, so this is just how I look at things), it's a miracle that it works at all. And if the Windows boxes in my office are any indicator, most people just get by with partially functional computers for the most part.

This is just the tip of my very large rhetorical iceberg on this matter, but I appreciate the intelligent response to my less than intelligent comment, hehe.

Looking at the posts in this thread makes me very glad I don't have to do any of this to keep my computer functional. Windows is a complete joke, I don't think anyone has to put up with more bullshit in computing than the average Windows user, I do genuinely feel bad that these people waste so much time and money on such poorly built technology. It's really very tragic.

This is really a discussion of significant digits versus standard deviations. The measurable accuracy is far more precise than it's usefulness at that precision. First, most of the gaps in the performance numbers were orders of magnitude greater than their lowest decimal place, so using that level of accuracy really accomplishes nothing, it just looks really officially technical to people. The point of SI unit 'multipliers' is so you don't have to include a bunch of numbers that don't matter, making it easier to read.

For example

22.5 is easier to compare to 2.25 than .0000000225 to .00000000225

When you use bad numbering you can get a bad interpretation of results.

I believe you, I am just saying that the presence of a phone and SMS makes them more different then you are implying. Not to mention, price and contractual commitments are involved with phones. The iPod is still more of a 'smart' MP3 player than a 'dumbed-down' cellular phone.

Which is what makes it an iPhone as opposed to an iPod.

Here! Here! Seriously though, TEX is great, and most TEX suites output in PDFs anyway. I like PDFs, but I cannot stand the direction Adobe has gone in recent years.

I am with you on this, but the best part is that PDF is an ISO format, so we can keep using it, but without Adobe garbage.

This exploit is currently melting the email servers at a (very) major corporation which I will leave unnamed. According to someone currently dealing with that, the virus can send 250k messages an hour. It's basically the Ebola Zaire of viruses. It's funny in all the hoopla about Apple vs. Microsoft, people seem to not fathom that their is a real advantage in not having to worry about Microsoft security holes. I am not even vaguely worried about this, my computer doesn't have that problem, or any that I know of. Headache free operation is severely underrated.

It's interesting that my apple (running quick time) has none of these problems. I guess it's their shitty engineering that makes my computer so stable and operational. If you think Apples are less conducive to nerdery and functionality compared to most other options, you are amazingly unobservant. If you think Microsoft has any advantage to either of those two qualities, you are stupid and gullible. If you think 90% of the world's population has any chance of successfully installing, using, and maintaining any stable distro of Linux, you should try to help my grandmother find the word count on her computer sometimes, it will open your eyes to what level most of the worlds people compute on.