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Richard MacCutchan wrote: Q: "Which star sometimes referred to as Alpha Canis Majoris, is the brightest in the night sky?"
Technically, a perfectly correct answer would be "Alpha Canis Majoris", but I doubt they'd accept it! 
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One of the things he is remembered for is using the phrase "Standing on the shoulders of giants". Newton said this in a letter to Robert Hooke about his advances in optics, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” and it is supposedly meant to imply that he built on the work of others, but it's also widely held to be a slight at Hooke, who was of small stature, and hence not a giant. Newton famously disliked Hooke, and reputedly had his portraits removed from the premises of the Royal Society (and many, if not all, destroyed); they were great rivals, and after Hooke's death Newton went to great lengths to diminish Hooke's legacy, almost writing him out of history.
Aside: many of the churches in London referred to as Christopher Wren designs are thought to actually be designs by Hooke.
modified 10-Apr-24 6:27am.
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My mom, a 92 year old grandmother, dreads every ios update pushed to her phone. Why do the Apple UI/UX people have to move EVERYTHING every time? Seems to me Apple has WAAAAAY to many UI/UX folks that need to justify their existence?
Now, grandma is no slouch. We're talking about an early adopter here. She always gets the latest iPhone and loves it. Uses her iPad constantly. But the updates are keeling her.
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Bless her heart.
Definition of a burocrate; Delegate, Take Credit, shift blame.
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.3.1 JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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Because the alternatives are even worse.
I hate to put it that way, but...that's reality.
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I have a cheapo galaxy A25 or something. I love it. Then again, I don't do much with phones, but it's unobtrusive and fast.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Maybe Apple sucks harder than any but is really good with makeup.
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Whether it's a sign of too many UI/UX folks, it's a sign very poor planning in that area. The changes could be reduced if capabilities planned in future releases were taken into account instead of churning the UI every release.
I worked on a product that decided to change its UI. The difference, compared to the Apple, was that it had a much smaller customer base consisting of large companies. The people in those companies who used the product pushed back on the UI changes because they already knew how to use the product and didn't want to learn how all over again. This killed the UI "improvement" initiative. Apple, on the other hand, faces no significant, if any, pushback.
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and Microsoft, let's not forget about that clown show....
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Err... usually Apple gets grief because the iOS UI didn't change enough (compared to Android).
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The Android UI changes?! 
I've installed Microsoft Launcher as one of the first apps on the last 4 Android phones I've had so, as far as I can tell, the UI has stayed pretty much the same for about 8 years.
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I feel ya as a long time iphone user. But I gotta say that Microsoft started that trend, afaik. Microsoft has been rearranging the furniture for 3 or 4 decades now.
I think that's their attempt to make you feel like it was money well spent. 
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.
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...because (some) people collect paycheck without
being productive.
Yes, it depends how you define "being productive"...
(some) answers can be found in "Inmates are running the asylum".
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I'm a firm believer Apple's decline started when Jobs passed. They're just so big it's gonna be a looooooong decline. Or maybe they're too big now to fail... even if they're dumber. But, you start to see it in some questionable choices, like Apple TV forcing more clicks to get to paid movies, etc.
I don't use Android, but if I had to guess they change crap up too. The real issue is, Apple used to make elegant changes. Now, it's just changes that are in lower quality than what we've become accustomed too.
So for now, IMO, it's still better than the alternative, but since the real mind behind Apple is gone, they're gonna level themselves out in terms of elegance. Welcome to change.
Jeremy Falcon
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I don't use Android, but if I had to guess they change crap up too...
I'm not so sure. I've never used Apple, but an Apple coworker who wanted to play Men At Work's 'Down Under' song for her husband asked me for help (they aren't very technically literate). I figured it couldn't be too hard - just pull up YouTube, search the song, pause it, and play when she sees her husband. Opened up Safari and was gobsmacked to find that it didn't give me access to the address bar! Pulled down, pulled up, ... the only option I could find was to type 'youtube.com' into the google search bar on the Safari screen. My Android browser has ALWAYS given me access to the address bar (Samsung), even if I have to pull down on the screen to make it appear. I am missing something - tell me I am missing something! It can't be that restrictive!
Even worse, tested it by pausing the video then hitting the home button. Going back to Safari, the video wasn't up! It went to default, or something. I've never had that happen with my phone browser.
Every time I've played with Apple stuff I end up shaking my head in wonderment of their non-intuitiveness - like the time I played on a Mac and didn't know the trick to two-finger scrolling. Couldn't use the mouse to grab the scrollbar, so couldn't even scroll a web page intuitively. 
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David O'Neil wrote: I am missing something - tell me I am missing something! It can't be that restrictive!
Mobile Safari does this thing where scrolling down will hide the address bar and bottom toolbar to make the website feel more like an application. Which seems like a great idea, and stuff should reappear when you scroll up. Buuttt, I have seen it get stuck on occasion. Not sure what triggers that.
To me though, that's just a bug (dear God I hope so) and not intentionally designed to be stuck. My point was more about Apple losing its elegance on the things it intended to do. Assuming that getting stuck wasn't a design feature.  But yeah, it's whack to have that happen.
David O'Neil wrote: Even worse, tested it by pausing the video then hitting the home button. Going back to Safari, the video wasn't up! It went to default, or something. I've never had that happen with my phone browser.
Yeah when it gets stuck, you either gotta scroll like a wild man and pray or just close Safari out. The Home button won't do it, that's akin to minimizing the app while its still running.
David O'Neil wrote: Every time I've played with Apple stuff I end up shaking my head in wonderment of their non-intuitiveness - like the time I played on a Mac and didn't know the trick to two-finger scrolling. Couldn't use the mouse to grab the scrollbar, so couldn't even scroll a web page intuitively.
As far as the two finger scrolling on a trackpad, that's an industry thing. It's the same exact way on a PC laptop. Not like Windows advertises that either. So let's at least play fair... you hate two finger scrolling.
About the mouse scrolling, the PC world never gets really creative, so my guess you're thinking like a PC user. A typical PC user acts like the world is about to end if Microsoft changes one icon. Apple is nothing of the sort. They will try new things and innovate. Microsoft does not innovate; they copy. And so they will eventually copy Apple once things become accepted or not after Apple gives it a go. It's always been that way (except for AR), and scrolling is no different. So, if you don't like change Macs aren't for you.
Anyway, about scrolling... Macs attempt to aim for elegance. Well, they used to. So you may wanna watch a tutorial on how to scroll. There are scrollbars, but they also hide if not needed (can be set to always show) and the mouse itself acts as a scroll wheel. Check the video out, man.
Edit: Keep in mind, I don't like having to use my thumb at all for shortcuts on a Mac. I'm a pinky dude through and through. So, Macs aren't perfect. Just want to make sure, we're playing fair here.
Jeremy Falcon
modified 9-Apr-24 22:08pm.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: So let's at least play fair... you hate two finger scrolling.
To be fair, it wasn't even about two-finger scrolling. I had only been exposed to it on crappy Windows laptop pads, and it never worked right. I didn't expect two-finger scrolling to be incorporated into the mouse itself, so wasn't expecting that to be THE ONLY WAY to scroll. What the real issue was is that I could not get Safari to scroll up and down even using the intuitive way: getting the scroll bar to appear, clicking on it with the mouse, and dragging, or clicking above/below the scrollbar. I believe I even tried page up/down, and didn't get that to work either, but I'm not sure about that - it was a while ago.
When I finally found out how two-finger scrolling works on Macs I kinda liked it. But figuring that out when I'd heard and seen that Apple only uses one-button mice? It just wasn't an intuitive jump. Everyone (said?) Apples are intuitive. I don't buy that any more. If you buy an Apple product without any background in the ecosystem you will probably need a friend to get you started, or videos, like you said.
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David O'Neil wrote: . I didn't expect two-finger scrolling to be incorporated into the mouse itself, so wasn't expecting that to be THE ONLY WAY to scroll.
It's one finger scrolling on a mouse and two finger on a trackpad. And just a heads up dude... don't shout. Like, you really that emotional right now? If that's trying to be funny it ain't.
You're forgetting something, Macs integrate software and hardware. You should know this. Also, you didn't watch the video link otherwise you'd see the error in your statement. Come on man, do better.
Jeremy Falcon
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Chill! Your skin is thin today! Have a better one! 
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I'm a firm believer their decline started with the corporate charter.
Growth is only good when it's not cancer.
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I was watching a commentary video (Scams In Software Engineering[^]) by Primeagen (funny youtuber who really understands dev and comments on development ideas).
While watching that video he mentions:
“The primary feature for easy maintenance is locality: Locality is that characteristic of source code that enables a programmer to understand that source by looking at only a small portion of it.”
The behaviour of a unit of code should be as obvious as possible by looking only at that unit of code
This is actually something I have been interested in for a long time and why I wrote a recent article here on CP: Is Dependency Injection the Missing Technique That's Holding Your Career Back? [^]
In that article I discuss how that DI causes a redirection of code (lack of Locality Of Behavior) so bad that DI can be quite terrible.
Two Issues
1) Seeing a call to a method DoThatThing(), only to discover that the implementation is in an injected class that is in another assembly and then you have to jump into that assembly to even see what it is doing, is a terrible part about DI.
2) Added on top of that, you have to know how all of the associated classes work to understand how the small piece of code works.
EDIT
Also, this idea of getting Locality of Behavior could be a naive one also. Meaning that only simple problems can have simple code and advanced coding for larger systems may require more obscurity in the code due to necessity of DI, patterns etc.
What do you think?
modified 9-Apr-24 10:17am.
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Larger systems won't demonstrate locality of behavior because of frameworks that use polymorphism and inheritance to invoke application classes. That's not much of a problem because people working on the system will be familiar with its frameworks, so all they'll usually need to look at are application classes. If the frameworks are well designed, all the code for an individual application will be colocated, making it possible to understand that application even though its implementation is scattered among various colocated classes.
When the DoThatThing in your DI example resolves to a specific target without the use of polymorphism or inheritance, I never got the point. It seems like artificial complexity and needless boilerplate.
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Greg Utas wrote: That's not much of a problem because people working on the system will be familiar with its frameworks
But this can be a "training issue" and even more so depending upon how many "company-specific" patterns are used.
This, in turn, means that you're always slower on maintenance and enhancements because "we always have to train new devs in our patterns so they can even fix one simple bug.
Greg Utas wrote: If the frameworks are well designed
Emphasis on if... 
(Yes, I'm being a bit facetious.)
You make good points but man code is just so often terribly obfuscated -- and especially so when DI is involved. That was my point of DoThatThing: no you can't just see the implementation here, you have to jump into another class then another one that is in another assembly and
You have to have the Gestalt of the entire system in your head before you can do one simple thing.
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The training issue can't be avoided with new devs. If you don't have frameworks, you'll have spaghetti, which will be even worse. Nested function traces are a great way to help new devs navigate the code.
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