Reminds me of a UserFriendly.org comic from a few years ago...went something like this:
"Someone is force-feeding you 5 bricks while kneeing you in the crotch. Suddenly, they decide to feed you only FOUR bricks. Do you THANK them?!?"
The thing that continues to infuriate me about tabs, is that we're expecting applications to provide them. This is a waste of time for application developers! The lack of tab support is a deficiency in the majority of window managers, that should be addressed (only) at the window manager level.
The proof is in how poorly tabs continue to integrate with OSes. Suddenly you need 5 or 6 commands to deal specifically with tabs, e.g. it seems there has to be a "Close Tab", "Open in New Tab", etc. in addition to "Close Window", all because there is no easy way for the application to distinguish one from the other. Minimization doesn't seem to do exactly what you want. And sheets on Mac OS X, originally awesome for their ability to not block access to more than one window, now end up blocking 20 tabs at once.
But even if this wasn't the case, who is to say that all my tabs should be web browsers? It is completely reasonable to want one of those tabs to be my mail client, a couple to be terminals, etc. with web browsers mixed in. The only sane way to achieve that is with window manager support.
Yes, some window managers have this, but only obscure ones. Until you have Windows and Mac doing this, Firefox won't stop doing it.
Why yes, because when I think of what it would take to quickly open and view PDFs, I immediately conclude that the only solution is a program big enough and complex enough to require a sandbox, to make sure that it can't be exploited.
For years, Adobe has been creating extremely bloated software. And it has been years, not coincidentally, since I've wanted to install any of their stuff.
Why did PDF have to have all this crap added to it? The answer is, it didn't; Adobe just wanted to keep extending their reach, for as long as they could convince people to keep installing "free" readers that just happen to contain your kitchen sink. Enough.
Recommending that people "new to computers" use Windows is the worst advice imaginable. We've given Microsoft over 20 horrible years, and they have managed to make computing almost boring in that time. It is well past time to hand the torch somewhere else...ANYWHERE else. The last thing we need is another generation who thinks Windows is what it means to "use a computer".
Even in 1990, the power and potential of machines was staggering. And I'm sorry, but Microsoft has done NOTHING with that potential. Software is still overly-expensive, locked-in, ugly, and crashing, and impressively it seems that basic tasks are even slower today than on machines of the 80s. It really wouldn't have taken much effort to bring the world way forward, to make PCs absolutely marvelous devices. Instead of realizing the potential, these incredibly sophisticated machines still have pretty basic uses, and I find that sad.
We need another generation, the people "new to computers", to use something new. Let them tinker without the chains of some stupid monopoly, and build a better machine.
Job listings don't mean very much.
Employees that are very happy with a language, and productive in it, might keep their jobs for years; you may never even know that their companies were using that language. One productive employee might do the job of 10 people in some other language, and maybe that's why they aren't hiring.
Some job postings only made me cringe when I saw them, and many make me think to myself: "all-Microsoft shop, never heard of what X, Y or Z can do". Just because there's a job available, doesn't mean the language is popular; it might even mean the opposite, i.e. all the sane people jumped ship months ago, instead of trying to maintain a steaming pile of code, that a company is now desperately trying to hire people to support.
Don't ever learn one of the stupid programming languages just to get a job. Do something you enjoy...make money without programming if you have to, for awhile, until you find a job that requires languages and platforms that you actually like and can be productive in. Nothing else is worthwhile.
I believe that people need to see the effects of accidents in order for it to truly register. (Heck, do this for other serious stuff, too, like the casualties of wars.) Making it cost "more money" to drive dangerously is basically sugar-coating, hiding the very real risks.
There should be ads in prime time that show accident victims whose lives have been turned upside down. Show people who can no longer walk, or who lost limbs, or who lost family members. Make it clear that it was drunk driving, or cell phones, or whatever, that led to their demise.
Too many ignorant people seem to think that the world is a heck of a lot nicer than it really is. That ignorance continues when they get behind the wheel.
You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up.
Few users seem to realize that the Help menu (as of Leopard at least) has full search of all menu items. You can literally type command-? to open the text field, and start typing to have it find matching items. It is actually incredibly easy to "explore" menus on the Mac now.
On windows, you do alt, F, S and get to the save menu item in the file menu. On OS X you do contol-F2, F, S, and get to the save menu.
Well actually, on the Mac it's control-F2, F, down-arrow, S, then return. As much as I hate Windows, the Mac's method is more awkward. (Save is a bad example because it has a direct short-cut, but imagine accessing any item in a similar way.)
Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?
As expected, spammers keep becoming smarter.
The way to stop spam is to eliminate its value, not its source. Spammers send this crap to make money. So who pays them?
If it's a business, then that business is doing a pretty poor job of analyzing its marketing success rates. Just because you can "reach" the whole world, doesn't mean it's worth the money: everyone will delete your "flyer" and make a mental note to hate your brand for eternity (and tell their friends). So, one step is to convince businesses that spam not only won't win any customers, but it will most definitely lose some.
The other likely payer is the receiver, when receiving scam spam. Scammers aren't paying anyone to send spam, they're expecting a payoff when some idiot gives them what they "legitimately" asked for. Again, the solution is education, but a different kind: people need to be informed about how to recognize E-mail scams (apparently some people really can't). Even if one guy in a million sends his life savings, it justifies the effort of spammers.
Maybe novice computer users need a license to drive their mail client, as if it were a car, and I'm only half kidding. They can harm at least themselves if they don't know what they're doing. This education would solve other problems as well.
For more on this story, please watch the following interview video...oh crap.
I've seen this kind of attitude more and more: organizations terrified to change anything, where even the tiniest tweak starts to require a bureaucracy of change control. Years can go by without significant improvement, until eventually a change seems unavoidable and turns into a complicated, expensive and near-catastrophic upgrade. Ridiculously, in these same organizations, "improvements" as silly as discovering some feature in Outlook are heralded as being amazing productivity boosts.
As time goes by, the I.T. people necessary to successfully pull off transitions from A to B grow frustrated and leave, which only makes organizations less likely to ever successfully make that jump.
Is this fear of change because managers are coming from industries that have moved more slowly than technology? I'm not sure.
But this is one of the reasons I hate Microsoft...their software has set the entire industry -- and maybe several industries -- back by at least a decade. Microsoft delivers junk, and in turn Windows software companies seem to just copy Microsoft's bad examples. Entire groups are essentially now trained to believe that computers must be ugly, awkward, and unstable pieces of junk that require entire legions of I.T. people to keep running properly. They see no problem going for coffee while their machine churns away doing what should be trivial tasks. They are trained to believe that software must be really expensive, and that if it isn't hundreds of dollars and supported by an army, it is somehow a "risk" to use and isn't as "good" as what they've been using. It is truly sad that so many groups around the world will probably be completely screwed into using older versions of Windows for years.
This problem occurred only for people who updated their system's Perl distro via CPAN.
A vendor is free to do what it wants in the part of the system it supports. This isn't new, it's been done for decades on Unix with the distinction between the
People need to know that it's better to install customizations in
I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.
On Linux, I now use
On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.
Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.
In quotes from interviews in the article, and comments here on Slashdot, there seems to be this misguided assumption that "taxpayer" equals "American". That is wrong!!!
Immigrants who work here, even on a visa, pay taxes on their income. They shop at the same stores, forking over sales tax. Many foreign workers own property that is taxed, they buy stocks that are taxed, etc. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any difference between an immigrant and a U.S. citizen from a "paying taxes" point of view, over the same period of residency.
So, stop acting as if foreign workers contribute no money to the government, as if somehow every use of tax dollars will only impact U.S. citizens.
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time. -- George Carlin
