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Pentadactyl/Vimperator do absolutely have that (set showtabline=never).

I use Pentadactyl, and a Shift-B (show buffers) followed by a <tab_number>gt will get me to wherever I need to go.

This is, of course, not discoverable, and therefore not really suitable for the demographic whose problems this article is hoping to solve, but for someone who's willing to put some time into learning a program (or who already uses vim), it's pretty spot-on. I, for one, love it.

I should add that the problems this article is trying to solve really ought to be solved through a thorough integration of the browser tab-system with the window manager. That, of course, necessitates a thorough rethinking of the window manager, also. But that was the problem tabs alleviated in the first place, right?

The WIMP model really is the walking dead.


Pressing b also opens show buffer window and you can select tab by pressing tab. You can also filter by title which is not possible in shift+b way.


While I appreciate the effort to bring attention to the serious differences between the simply well-off and the astonishingly-rich-and-powerful, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around some of this:

"While income and lifestyle are all relative, an after-tax income between $6.6k and $8.3k per month today will hardly buy the fantasy lifestyles that Americans see on TV and would consider 'rich.' In many areas in California or the East Coast, this positions one squarely in the hard working upper-middle class, and strict budgeting will be essential. An income of $190k post tax or $15.8k per month will certainly buy a nice lifestyle but is far from rich."

What in the hell?

Where I come from, six figures is rich, period. I grew up in a household whose yearly income was a bit over $100,000 (pre-tax), and had no delusions about my place in the economy. Sure, weren't "free from financial worry," but we nonetheless could afford the occasional vacation and a new or semi-new car when we needed it.

My significant other comes from a place where $50,000 each year (pre-tax) is considered rich (and this in the apparently-mythical California, no less). She grew up with a pre-tax annual income of less than $10,000.

While it's inaccurate an potentially damaging to misrepresent the degree to which it truly is the super-rich that benefit most dramatically from our economy, it also seems just as potentially damaging to write as though we really are all in the middle-class. This article seems to utterly silence the existence of poverty and the working class in order to make its point.

Maybe I just come from one of those strange parts of the country where we still have backwards things like "industry" and a "proletariat." I suspect, however, there's a lot more folks from places like where I'm from than places like the strange utopia this guy lives in.

Uh, </end_rant>?


This is undoubtedly true (with the flagrant exception of iCal and Address Book), but some of us old-timey Mac users remember a glorious past full of matte gray and a spatial Finder…


Possibly the UI of iCal and Address Book might have the inconsistant UI, but they still have the exact same UX as every other OS X app, thanks to all (with the exception of iTunes?) being built in Cocoa so they all use the same text controls and menu items etc.

You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.

The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)


That's true about iCal and Address Book. I don't use either of those, so I'd forgotten what they'd done to them.

I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?


I am in fact. If I remember correctly (I may very well not!) Mac OS 8 or so (maybe 8.5) was the height of the let's-never-ever-deviate-from-the-HIG days.

This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.

Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.

I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.


You remember correctly; in the 8/8.5 days, Apple's HIG was considered a must-read for any application programmer, and deviating from it was guaranteed to get you lots of criticism. IIRC, about the only 'non-standard' common widget in applications was the floating windoid, which started out as a hackish WDEF.

As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.


iCal and Address Book are perfectly consistent. They use standard control which are clearly identifiable as such.

I think they are ugly but they are certainly not inconsistent.


It's pretty deeply preferable to "co-operating," if you ask me.


They'll tend to see them as protecting the interests of business, which has, for whatever reason, become part and parcel of supporting the "free market" in contemporary American political culture.


and that's the biggest hypocrisy... what they are really supporting are the interests of existing businesses.


To clarify, as one who has now and again been involved in "IRL" activism: blocking a road to hold a protest is a crime, legally-speaking.*

In fact, police SOP for a protest that's beginning to get a bit rowdy is to cite them for just such a crime. "Disperse from the road, or be incarcerated," as it were. Some protests will take this as a sign to move back into sanctioned areas (if it seems strategically appropriate to keep the action going); others will choose to stay and go to prison for the night.

In some sense, it doesn't qualify as "civil disobedience," in the Dr. King sense, unless the latter happens:

"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." — Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," 1963[1]

[1]: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

*Edit: At least in the U.S.


A Debian Developer has a good set of articles[1] on this vulnerability. It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Time to whip out the epoxy, I reckon.

[1]: http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-f...


> It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Not really. Note that LightPeak/Thunderbolt has the exact same issue. I believe it can be mitigated by the right IOMMU implementation (if the OS takes advantage of the feature).


I think this is a much better article to read, because it covers a variety of platforms, instead of grabbing headlines by talking about Lion, and it contains links to a variety of preexisting papers and tools, instead of regurgitating the contents of a press release


Likewise, as much as the last name "Winklevoss" makes me want them to be the stuck-up rich assholes to Zuckerberg's self-made work ethic, Zuckerberg did go to Harvard from Phillips-Exeter Academy.

Financial Aid can do wonders, but that kind of track record spits money.


I don't know how many other folks feel this way, but I would kill for a GUI-less version of your client. I'd love to configure XML files, or some (any!) analog.

I've been looking for an off-site backup solution for a (nerdy and technically competent) home user for years, and yours is the only one that I could afford (poor recent BA here).

Please?! I would pay $10 a month (probably more, really) for that. Even if you don't want to support it, could you do it just for me? It'll be our little secret!


It sounds like those XML files are already there when you install the windows or mac version. Why don't you just open them up and edit them by hand?


Honestly, the XML files are pretty simple. The one main one the GUI writes out is called bzinfo.xml and is found on any Mac system at /Library/Backblaze/bzdata/bzinfo.xml and on any Windows Vista or later system at C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata\bzinfo.xml

Backblaze is designed to be used with absolutely no configuration (for many users they have no idea where their Outlook.pst file is and we don't think they should have to know), and the only way we could figure out how to make this work was to backup EVERYTHING on your system unless you explicitly exclude it. So bzinfo.xml is basically a flat list of excluded folders you do not want backed up. There is also a throttle in there if you don't want Backblaze to utterly destroy your network uplink, and a few other small settings. It's pretty straightforward.

With that said, we really pride ourselves on easy to use software, so it goes against everything in our DNA to release software with NO GUI at all, but maybe we'll give that a serious thought. If you are using Linux, you probably aren't the average Mom & Pop user. :-)


To a linux user, editing an xml file is easy to use. And since it's a pretty reasonable default to backup /home, you're likely to be pretty safe with defaults anyway.

Call it alpha, see how much demand there is, and the extra money you bring in might be the motivation to finish up the pretty. :)


we really pride ourselves on easy to use software, so it goes against everything in our DNA to release software with NO GUI at all, but maybe we'll give that a serious thought. If you are using Linux, you probably aren't the average Mom & Pop user. :-)

I just want to join others asking here for a Linux version. Please do release whatever you have. And actually I would prefer a command line tool, so I can use it in my cron.


Hell is other people!


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