coding is better left to those who understand the difference between "to" and "too", or "can not" and "cannot".

Basic errors like that undermine the credibility of the "superannuated".

People who think the purpose of the left lane is to drive the exact same speed as the car to your right so other drivers are tempted to perform dangerous maneuvers just to get around your inconsiderate punk ass, rather than submit to your roadblock

Spoken like someone who thinks the purpose of the left lane is to allow someone to exceed the legal speed limit. The left lane is for passing traffic not traveling the legal speed limit.

Someone traveling the legal speed limit is not an obstacle, they are a responsible, law-abiding citizen. What lane they are in is irrelevant, since there is no legal justification for exceeding the legal speed limit to pass them.

The root cause of the problem you cite is poor impulse control. There is no compelling reason for society to tolerate an inability to exercise self restraint and drive the legal speed limit. It does not matter if you agree that this is true because it is true; it is self-evident from even the most casual appraisal of the facts.

"Nixon's had an asshole transplant... Apparently, the asshole's rejected him!"

I'm beating a horse that's been dead for almost ten years, and it's been called, rather amusingly, "Compatibility with the Monopoly". To quote an article written in 2000: "...95 percent of the world uses a two-button mouse."

Apple has had support for a two-button mouse for almost ten years. And that decision was made at the time to conform to the de facto standard. I'm not inventing any of this because I don't have to.

is a flaw. I want Apple HID guidelines to support a standard, and I want that standard to make sense and not restrict the way I use my computer because Jobs doesn't like buttons. I want my computer to be usable.

Apple occasionally makes poor decisions, then defends them with near-religious zeal, as do its legions of followers. I don't care about any of that. Apple's personality (?) as a company interferes with its ability to critically evaluate its own decisions. This has had a far greater impact on the company than the problems with the Apple III, Macintosh, or Lisa reported.

Anyway, the decision to put the minimize/zoom buttons in the upper, left-hand corner of the window is a decision that goes against my "technocratic" bias. I'd prefer to be able to decide where they appear, as I can in KDE. But I don't consider it a flaw, because it's not. It's a personal preference.

Like the "resize the window to fit the content" problem that Preview has.

Or the "one-button mouse" problem. I'm not willing to debate the meaning of the word "consistent" in this context, because I have a feeling it would be useless, but the company that doesn't conform to the de facto standard is the one which lacks consistency, and in this case it was Apple. Apple embraced the two-button mouse, so that problem has since been corrected, but that doesn't change the fact that many other idiosyncrasies of Apple computers deserve to meet the same fate, and the sooner the better.

is that Apple will follow their own HID guidelines. You are correct that "appropriate" behavior isn't mandated by Apple. That would be intolerable. But window behavior isn't standard even across Apple's own applications.

as I said, the one-button mouse is only really interesting because it's symptomatic of Apple's design philosophy. And that philosophy results in problems Apple won't correct, which is a much larger problem than any single "classic computer" ever had, including the Macintosh or Lisa, because it's one thing all Apple computers have shared.

The "classical age of computing" and X11 have nothing to do with that.

Personally, I think that level of customization is beyond what most users require, and I don't have a problem with application developers controlling what the context menu is used for in their applications.

I know that I find clicking and holding the mouse button (or trackpad button, or trackpad) to be mentally equivalent to a comma, in the middle of a sentence. It's an unnecessary pause.

Yes, that was intentional.

In general, I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards, but your objection is fair.

Simply put: I work in front of computers all day, and I want the text larger to reduce eyestrain.

I want the window to resize to fit the content. In your example, the content is a line of text. In my example, it is the page of a document (PDF). If the right text size for me results in content larger than the current window, and I click the zoom button, I want the window to resize to fit the content. If that would result in a window larger than the screen itself, I want the window to occupy the whole screen. This behavior is not standard in OSX. That's a problem for me.

if Apple's UI was consistent.

Of the three examples I gave:

• The first is a failure in Preview. Preview doesn't resize the window to fit the contents in accordance with Apple's HID standards, and Preview is copyright Apple Inc., not some third party.
• The second is a failure in ical. Clicking "one hour before event" should reset the reminder to one hour before the event, not one hour before the mouse click.
• The third was the result of a decision by Apple to "fix" OSX so that afp over ssh connections would not fail silently, because OSX clients don't support afp connections over ssh. Why doesn't the "fix" default to a secure connection OSX supports, and not afp, when the button is clicked?

Really. You can tell me an OS can't be all things to all people, and I completely agree, but these are problems that need to be corrected, not "features".

I've been at this a long time. And I had to explain how to set the clock on a VCR to my parents when I was a kid, and tune a UHF dial. But none of those things are important.

We're talking about Apple's failure to implement relatively simple UI features that its users want. And my point is that Apple's stubborn insistence that people use its computers the way Apple intended for them to be used affects their user acceptance.

I think your example supports my conclusion better than it supports yours. More people use a two-button mouse than use a one-button mouse, so I don't buy the "there's an intellectual barrier to entry" argument.

The maximize window button is just another feature people want that Apple won't implement. Some of us spend all day in front of our computers and we want to be able to read without eyestrain. The zoom button doesn't reliably size the window to fit the contents, even if the window will fit on the screen. That's a problem.

isn't the question. Apple's failure to include a relatively simple UI feature that many of its users want is the problem.

As I said, it's symptomatic of their approach to UI in general, which is: "we'll decide what you want to do", or "Do as I wilt".

That was one of the most serious design mistakes of the last thirty years, but it's only really interesting because it's symptomatic of Apple's design philosophy, which is: "Do as I wilt".

The one-button mouse spanned multiple generations of Apple computers and underscored Apple's stubborn unwillingness to produce computers that do what their users want, and not what Jobs or Apple's HID team think they should do.

Really. Apple refuses to correct the annoyances of the UI that should not exist. Why doesn't OSX have a maximize window button? Why does clicking on "one hour before event" for an ical event reset the clock to one hour before the time you click the button, and not one hour before the event? Why doesn't finder support afp connections over ssh?

None of those things seem to be complex, every one of them is a failure of the UI, and yet none of them have been corrected.

Yes, and the logical result of promising more than you can effectively deliver over the long term is that your experienced people depart for your competitors, taking their knowledge and experience with them.

Also, I've seen organizations enter negotiations with their customers because they were unable to manage this, and either demand a cost increase to offer "incentive pay" to their employees to induce them to stay, or a cost increase with impact to schedule to train the remaining employees to the knowledge and experience level of their departed employees.

In the end, it always comes down to the organization's ability to track where their dollars are being spent, and for what. If an organization is able to do that, they can determine if its improvement initiatives are really having the desired impact, or if they've cut too deep or too fast. When it's not able to do that all conclusions are based on projected cost savings, which are useless because they can be made to confirm or affirm any opinion management may have.

And if an organization is able to determine if its improvement initiatives are having the desired impact, offering bonuses for actual savings is an excellent incentive.