Well, to be fair to the guy, maybe his bad day is... ever day?

Java is used in a lot of respectable universities in introduction (and/or higher level) courses, yet we all know it's shit and should not be used. I don't see how MIT is relevant here.

The Buick Regal, which is basically the same thing as the Insignia is around 26 grand in the US, so you might need to recalculate that.

>If you took the bus instead of driving, would you have more chance to use a smartphone?

No, then he would be able to just use a laptop :D

This is actually how we know that he's an Internet expert (well, besides being the Dear Leader) -- he's been providing on-the-spot guidance to the internet noobs for a while now:
http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/post/14177194906/looking-at-a-computer-room
http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/post/9001585800/looking-at-a-computer-monitor
http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/post/3906687832/looking-at-a-computer-mouse

Also, the Boston Globe have a few more unrelated to internet photos of him looking at things, in higher resolution:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/03/on_the_spot_with_kim_jong-il.html

How does it feel to be so wrong about everything?

Speak for yourself. UI is the most important factor for me in any piece of software.

Windows 7 Start Menu, the problems:
- The quick icons... it's a great idea to have, unfortunately just because I access a program frequently doesn't mean I want it in the start menu. It also seems to arbitrarily exempt certain programs from being in there - like Notepad.

If you don't want an application on the start menu, you can remove it from the list with two clicks.
Notepad does show up on the list, however this depends on whether you launch it a way a normal user would, through the start menu, task bar, explorer, etc. It can't just stick every executable that is ran as it would end up with a bunch of crap that gets loaded by other programs, for instance.

- Windows Explorer - I've never used the default libraries, I'm not interested in it. I don't store information in that manner and it's great that a lot of people do, however, I used to be able to do it my way not the popular way. It refuses to default to anything but 'Libraries' and if I manually adjust it it resets frequently.

You don't have to use libraries if you don't want to. Explorer's starting location can be changed via the shortcut properties, it never changed itself for me, plus it seems to default to "My computer" when launched with Win+E anyway.

- Right click doesn't always right click. Granted this one may be a bug, but I'll often find that desktop icons can't be right clicked until they're given focus. Mouseover is supposed to give them focus but in some cases it doesn't.

Yeah that's a bug or some application causing this.

- Mouse position actions are SOOO annoying. Examples - the most common resting position for the mouse is off tot he bottom or right of the screen. This is because there's no gutter on the left for the mouse to disappear into, nor top. This means that the most common resting position for the mouse is also where they decided to put a mouse over desktop preview. Try bottom left? The open items on your start menu, as I type this message the mouse moves due to my thumbs touching the mousepad (granted this is bad design by Samsung but it's a common that the mousepad is directly under the space between the H and J on laptops with a full keyboard). Because the mouse movies it pops up the program preview over what I'm typing. Try top right? Oh, the close menu is there and accidentally closes your programs with an accidental mouse tap when you hit space. Middle right? Same deal as top right except it hits the scrollbar and moves you to a random spot in your document.

I dunno, the most common resting place for the cursor is near wherever it was used the last time, but fine, if you want to rest it in the bottom-right corner, go ahead - you can disable the desktop peek feature of that region. Also, Windows doesn't give focus on mouse-over, so can just keep typing as you move the mouse all over the screen anyway.

- Control over context menus is entirely with individual developers. Control is great, but part of what makes an operating system an operating system is a common set of controls you can use for all programs. When I right click->close, it should close the program not minimize it.

Fair enough, developers should be more consistent with the UI guidelines. However, where does this happen? Right-clicking on the taskbar application icons, as well as on the preview thumbnails gives you more or less the standard set of commands including Closing the window.

Office Ribbons the problems
- Clutter. Plain and simple. There are so many different colours, shapes, sizes, and wrapping text that it's a jumbled mess. They also assume which buttons you use commonly. Most common functions I use, I use key commands for because I use them commonly and that means I want them as fast as possible. Buttons I use for less frequent items, that I would have trouble remembering which menu they fell under, those I want as buttons.

I disagree about the clutter, despite combining many different elements I think the ribbon manages to keep everything look nice and consistent. Or have you forgotten the mess of toolbars that came before it?

I guess it's good that you can make your own ribbon tabs with whatever buttons you want now...

- The whole point of a button is to provide a small icon representing the function you want to use to make a convenient shortcut to it. Reduces memory work required to operate a program. I don't need to see the text below it, otherwise what's the point of the icon itself? You might as well make it a grouping of text.

Really, you have a problem with buttons having descriptive text labels? Do buttons outside of the ribbon never have them?

- Overall desktop real estate. Ribbons are massive compared to other menu styles. They also don't take advantage of the fact that most screens are widescreen now and the UI would be much better along the sides of a document (CS5 style).

Of course the ribbon uses more space than a menu, because it isn't replacing just the menu, but also the toolbars. You can google yourself for comparisons, but the ribbon typically takes up about as much space as a default set of toolbars, and much less than the 10-rows of toolbars horrors that you often see in the wild. The ribbon takes advantage of wide-screen monitors by creating a flexible layout that takes advantage of the winder windows by scaling its content. A bit more flexibility of being able ot put it on the side of the screen would be nice, admittedly.

PS: Menu hiding is bad.

Ok.

When was the last the it wasn't completely obvious from the context which of the PIN/pin/pen it's supposed to be? Like "please type in your PIN", would you try to type in your pin or ball-point pen into the ATM machine? How would that even work?

Or a Perl one liner!

Of course, ideally that would be true. But when it turned out not to be the case, damage control mode kicked in and they now try to claim that at least it sucks efficiently.

Or maybe 2B is what Bulldozer actually has, but their new PR team came up with the idea: claim it only has 1.2B transistors, so even though it still sucks, at least it doesn't need 2 billion transistors to do it.

Shouldn't an introduction that is supposed to excite people into learning be, you know, not boring?

Physics aren't particularly exciting either, but a while ago I watched videos of Walter Lewin's physics lectures at MIT, and they were fantastic, to the point of making me want to learn physics even though I have at most a high-school level of physics and it's completely unrelated to what I am currently doing and what I'm planning to do in the future.

Oh hi Larry, how do you like it here?

>Do you think that Photoshop is the only application people will ever use?

Well, maybe he's just an Mac user.

You're missing the point. There don't have to be laws that explicitly discriminate against black people by literally saying something like "niggers are not to be allowed into the good schools".

Instead, the thinking when coming up with the education funding system might have been "So how do we fuck black people over? They seem to live in poor areas, so let's tie school funding to local property taxes, this way they'll never be able to afford schools good enough to get good jobs or into colleges".

Or maybe not, I don't know how it actually went, but neither do you, I suspect. The point is, without knowing this, we can still observe that the system has an institutional bias based on the outcomes, and that's what this whole thread is about.

There may be no laws in place, but the system is set up in a way (possibly, but not necessarily unintentionally) that is biased. Poor people are disproportionally black, and tend to live with areas with shitty schools and no jobs. Bam! They aren't getting out of it!

We have the same shit with the Romas here, and nobody likes to talk about it. They're often sent to substandard schools or schools for "special" children, and then everyone is surprised that they generally don't perform well and some turn out to be fuckups.