begin quote On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 22:08:40 -0500 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote: > On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 19:09 +0100, Keith Sharp wrote: <snippage> > But we just totally made up the definition of stop. There does > not exist a hardware player where stop means "reset to the beginning > of track." With tapes, play resumed where you left off. And with > CDs, play resumed at the beginning of the disc, not the track. > > The metaphor is completely bogus. > > > > Stop is worse than legacy cruft. At least legacy things had some > purpose when first we did them. > ony my physical state cd/mp3 player I have the following functions. Previous. Next. : they do the obvious, jump one track back or forwards. Previous double-functions, hit it once and it resets the current track, hit it again and it jumps back once. (causing a "hiss" and a move of the head) Then there is the Play/pause button : ||> (ascii art! ;) Which simply halts playback or starts it. (Hitting next causes a start after a few seconds, but its a fairly long wait as it tries to forsee if you will press the button a few more times or not.) and the "stop" button, which will in fact stop the disk, restore the head, and completly reset both the programming and the state of the disk. This means that it actually -shuts down- when you hit "stop", forgetting the album you were playing, as well as forgetting the tracklist you spent several minutes to program. All this, because once you hit <stop> the lid will unlock and you can once more open the drive. Now, in this sense, the stop button makes sense, even for an mp3 player. However, it doesn't bear any resemblance at all to anything I'd want in a mp3 player on my computer. Its a legacy function. Stop would simply be "stop playing, reset all statistics, focus the marker on All albums, All artists, reset the current playlist" now, in this sense, perhaps a stop button would work. However, I think "reset" is a better label for such a thing. And really, who would want to do this on their computer, when we can actually have state saved in an easy to access manner? Stop is legacy. On my crufty hardware player without battery-powered RAM its sort of necessary, but even then. Nah. I can do without it. //Spider -- begin .signature Tortured users / Laughing in pain See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end
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