1) Social media driven by algorithms, destroying the fabric of society.
2) Being the product, not the customer.
3) Endless, gratuitous, unstoppable changes to the tools we use.
4) The raging battle for our attention.
173 karma · joined October 6, 2014
So "vaccinating people who are the most likely to get sick" is the only option supported by the evidence. Or preferably vaccinate people most likely to become moderately to severey ill, or die.
At this time we should not be "vaccinating people who are the most likely to spread the virus". We don't know if approved vaccines will help with this.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210203-why-vaccinated-p...
Bing video search is by far better. Assuming you use DuckDuckGo type your search and follow it with !bv. The result is an excellent browsable display of videos that match your search well, that can be previewed by hovering over them, and the results aren't biased to just YouTube. You can also add emphasis to words in your search with the +/- operators and quotes.
Also the "up next" YouTube video is rarely as good as going back to the Bing search and choosing another video.
(1) https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1977-10/1977_10_BYT...
I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it.
If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?
https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/67169-can-i-make-op...
I know about Command-Click to open in a new tab (Mac) but I want thie to be the default. It's crazy that Edge does not support this because every other browser does. (If someone from Micthe Edge team happens to read this post, please fix it.)
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen.
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
The touchpad is pretty good but it's still not as precise as the Mac touchpad - there is a slight hysteresis that makes it imprecise for short movements. No amount of tweaking settings could overcome this. The only way to be accurate at short range is to slow the overall pointer speed so it takes more than one finger swipe to move across the screen. (If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - why don't you fix it? It can't be that hard.)
The other problem with the Surface Book is the Home and End keys are not accessible at the same time as the function keys - a show-stopper for smooth editing and debugging in an IDE.
Not only are Bing's results more on target, it also displays search results much more conveniently. Also Bing supports the "+" operator that Google does not. (Also the "-" operator.) These allow accurate targeting of what you are looking for.
I also usually redirect to Bing image search (!bi in DDG) because their support of the "+" operator allows more accurate search targeting.
PlatformIO https://platformio.org/ is the preferred Arduino IDE (a plugin for VS Code). It has support for hardware debugging, C++ code highlighting, code completion and Intellisense.
However I've been using since then with no need for servicing and the keys are at this moment perfect. Various keys have become intermittent since then but I found a trick that so far has fixed it every time.
The key mechanism seems to be VERY robust and can take a lot of pounding. Usually the particles jamming the mechanism (e.g. food crumbs) can be broken up by repeatedly banging hard on the offending key.
I've had keys that were intermittent or even not come all the way up and this has always fixed them to be literally as good as new. It seems that once the particles are broken small enough they either remain in place but are harmless or maybe they are small enough to fall out by themselves.
Based on this we decided to make the products more compatible in UI and able to work together better. It was a huge challenge because the products were designed by different teams that intensely belived in they way they had chosen to do things. It required Bill Gates to push it to make it happen and even then it was difficult.
Office 97 was the result and Office grew into a product that made billions for Microsoft. This came from our obsession with user experience...
Also, long before the Internet we asked users permission to send them a special version of Excel (called the Instrumented Version) that would intelligently log actions, but not data to a floppy disk. Users would send the disks back to us for analysis. We used the analysis to understand how users really did things vs what we thought the did. Sometimes we got some surprises. We used this to prioritize features where users were having difficulty that needed special attention. It also indicated frequenty performed actions that would benefit from, for example, being put on the toolbar.
I think our user focus was an important reason why Excel has been so enduring. (Although Office 2003 screwed it up to some extent - I was no longer there.)
Back then at Microsoft the applications group tended to take the lead in UI developement and many of the things we designed made their way into Windows. Some were even picked up by the Mac! Although Steve Jobs would never have admitted it.
It grieves me to see the shoddy state of software design these days. There is no craftsmanship. Visual design take precedence over real usability. Maybe this is because with fast developemnt cycles and the ability to instantly change a web based design, it's easer to throw crap at the wall and keep iterating until it sort of works.
These days user interaction designers have endless great user data on which to craft wonderful UI but it rarely happens. If they happen to hit on something good, usually another team takes over and changes it, often for the worse!
(End Rant)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-face...
"Likes" and reading narcissistic postings probably are not a good substitute for real human contact, and the more people become addicted to social media the less real human contact they are likely to seek. Of course companies like Facebook and Google (YouTube) purposely design their offerings to be addictive and as we know additions can be detrimental to one's mental and physical health.
It's great for spreadsheets. I even use the Macbook trackpad for 3D CAD. I used to use a spaceball and mouse, but the trackpad plus modifier keys is more convenient because it keeps the hands to the keyboard.
It will be available in the form of a hands-free music controller supported on what we call the "neck unit" or on a variety of hand-held units of different fingering styles that we call "finger units".
Also contributing to my decision is that the Touch Bar did not work for me at all. I have less than perfect eyesight. I need keys with tactile feedback and that don't move around to be sure I'm sure I'm accurately hitting the right key.
I do still have a non-touchbar 13 inch 2017 MacBook Pro that I use from time to time. I move around a lot and work in many locations. I've cursed Apple many times when suddenly needing to connect to an older USB or HDMI device but not having my dongle collection with me this time... The need to carry dongles seems like a kludge that detracts from the elegrant compactness the computer itself.