mcswell

62 ms·

931.
by mcswell 7y ago
I'm confused. You wound up better for discovering they existed and not buying them, or for discovering they existed and buying them?
932.
by mcswell 7y ago
Reminds me of using a slide rule. You normally push the inner part (the C scale) to the right, line up the 1 on the C scale with the first number you're multiplying on the D scale, then look on the C scale for the second number you&#x
933.
by mcswell 7y ago
There's a solution for that, you know: go to a church where they serve coffee after the service!
934.
by mcswell 7y ago
My sister and brother-in-law used to live in Bellingham, and they would get black black beans that positively oozed oil. And the taste... (Although this suggests I'm wrong: https://www.sagebrushcoffee.com/blogs/e
935.
by mcswell 7y ago
I came here to post about that, and you beat me to it. I was provoked by the article's title, "coffee...a modern necessity." Unless of course you consider Bach modern!
936.
by mcswell 7y ago
Can you explain what you mean by "struggle"? If you click on the page, it brings up what amounts to several character maps; there's a 'g' in the upper right-hand quad. Then you can move the cursor around as before
937.
by mcswell 7y ago
This doesn't speak to the question, but as for language learning displacing more important activities: young children learn new languages pretty much effortlessly, and no one has found anything to indicate that second language learning
938.
by mcswell 7y ago
Agreed.
939.
by mcswell 7y ago
The Athabaskan languages (Slave, Gwich'in, Navajo = Dene, Apache, Chilcotin, and a host of others) have been shown by linguists to be probably related to the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia. If this is true, it does not howev
940.
by mcswell 7y ago
"I'm also getting old" It could be worse; you could stop getting old. (I turn 70 in a couple months.)
941.
by mcswell 7y ago
I'm sure people would be happy to provide more bad examples--indeed, they have done just that (and I contributed my own gripes about Adobe Acrobat). I can think of bad UI choices in nearly every application I use. I think one over-arc
942.
by mcswell 7y ago
"UIs today are much more beautiful than in 1995." Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just looked at some Win95 screen shots, and apart from the large pixels (making the icons back then rather grainy), and the fact that disp
943.
by mcswell 7y ago
You mean like Windows 2?
944.
by mcswell 7y ago
Yeap. Look at the users' reaction to changes to Google News (must be ten years ago now), or to Google Maps. The GooN fiasco resulted in tens of thousands of complaints on their feedback page, and only one single "that was a good
945.
by mcswell 7y ago
Linguist here. I think you over-estimate the linguistic change in the last century. Sure, there's new vocabulary for new things: spacecraft, hybrid (car), email, covid-19. But syntax and morphology have hardly changed at all, and yo
946.
by mcswell 7y ago
I'm not disagreeing, but I have noticed that in the current version of Outlook, when I tell it I want to attach a file, it suggests the last few files I've edited in some program (I'm guessing it has to be an Office program),
947.
by mcswell 7y ago
"Most programmers are not good designers." Unfortunately, most designers are not good designers, at least these days. I say that because from what I've heard, the UI abominations that are being rightly bemoaned on this thre
948.
by mcswell 7y ago
Thunderbird (an email desktop client) has a similar issue: some keystroke (I don't know what, but I've accidentally hit it a few times) collapses the folder view on the left. The only way I've found to restore it, is to mous
949.
by mcswell 7y ago
I haven't used Gimp in perhaps a decade, but I can't imagine a worse UI than Adobe. At home, I have a free PDF reader, but at work (...when I was going to work...), I had to use Adobe's PDF editor. (Not that I edit the
950.
by mcswell 7y ago
Agreed, 1000%. I have the traditional Firebox menu bar turned on, but I can't get rid of the lousy hamburger menu. Plus I have ten icons up there, most of which I don't have any idea what they do. I should probably get rid of t
951.
by mcswell 7y ago
Anecdote: a little while after the start of this covid thing, I broke the band on my wristwatch. My first impulse was to run to the store, or order a new one from Amazon. Then I realized: I'm working from home, there are clocks all a
952.
by mcswell 7y ago
Some of you may be familiar with the original version: http://homepageradio.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html
953.
by mcswell 7y ago
"langauge". And I'm a linguist, so I type this word a lot...
954.
by mcswell 7y ago
I'd rather imagine getting 100 years' interest on my savings account. Especially considering what's happening today to my 401(k)...
955.
by mcswell 7y ago
Did you go talk to Mary and Joseph and tell them what was going to happen?
956.
by mcswell 7y ago
I have a vivid recollection of reading a Scientific American article in late '98 or early '99 that claimed that no matter how much time and $ was put into fixing Y2K before 1 Jan 2000, there was going to be a disaster; it was just
957.
by mcswell 7y ago
CDC...if it was like the CDC system I worked on back in the early 80s, the 6-bit chars (64 distinct chars, including control chars) did not include lower case Latin. Our system was munged so that lower case alphabetic chars could be repres
958.
by mcswell 7y ago
Nonsense. It's trivial to program a bot to post something, it's creating the natural language content to post that's more difficult. But from what I've seen, typical bot-posts are hardly what you'd call natural la
959.
by mcswell 7y ago
Up until a decade or two ago, tritium--which emits alpha radiation--was commonly on wristwatch dials, precisely because they were not dangerous. Alpha radiation is easily stopped; it's only dangerous if you breathe it (or drink it, if
960.
by mcswell 7y ago
"Every part of the ribbon can be customised" Afaik, that is not true. I tried to do that just today with Outlook; I cannot remove the ribbons (ribbon groups??) that I don't ever use, Send/Receive for example. (When yo

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