Pans have been there for centuries, and there is nothing preventing me from throwing stuff in the wrong place, nor undo the eggs in the stew. It's so intolerable, and I feel so ashamed and guilty on behalf of all the pan makers.

Not. We are in a field where we can prevent a lot more stuff to happen than in the real world (and the real world is soooo broken...). We should try our best to make the state of usability and fool-proofness advance as much as we can, and surely there must already be something that would help your wife's case. But we should also be more realistic when voicing expectations.

But all these require preparation, settings and some care. It could get better, even 'magical', but it would be an achievement that should not be taken for granted.

Btw we could make a pan for stew that checks if you are adding eggs to it, but no one would want the tradeoffs IMO.

Something I find hard to belive from a woman whose husband is reading hacker news.

'thesis' and 'not backed up' are forbidden to appear in the same sentense by "the Universe(tm)". This law is enforced by _always_ deleting the contents of 'thesis'.

From that sentence, I interpreted it as the latest version of the thesis was not backed up, and that she may have lost several days' work.

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/undo.html#undo-persist...

...I'm sure Word will catch up eventually.

I couldn't live without some kind of clipboard manager. It was Ditto on Windows and klipper now on Linux. Dunno about Mac OS, but I bet there is something with similar functionality. It adds another layer of protection to Ctrl-Z everywhere and undo-tree-mode in Emacs. As a programmer I deal with text all the time and I need to be able to recover as much as possible if I make a mistake and this (clipboard manager + undo-tree + version control + normal undo) is the most robust system I could find.

I've used ClipMenu [1] for years after using Jumpcut [2] as far back as 2003.

[1: http://www.clipmenu.com ] [2: http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net ]

This has saved my butt a number of times.

Hopefully I never have to use it, but pretty cool none the less.

One of humanity's biggest enemies to progress are "Not invented here" and the cult of youth. It's often better to start with a blank slate ("being ignorant") because amongst other things like simply having a different perspective (worth 100 IQ points ~Alan Key) it helps with actually starting to build something. Eventually though we should still be aware of what we as a collective have learned already.

To be fair I think Github folks should know their history so this project might be one of the exceptions - looking forward to it! <3

Side note: Neither of the two issues you mentioned are "one of humanity's biggest enemies to progress."

"Ignorance is Strength" (1984)

Your comments makes me think that neither you nor your wife knew about tracking changes in office documents: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-wh...

But then considering that the unfortunate loss of data happened after an already lengthy sequence of manual actions, I wouldn't be surprised if the "o crap" would come after a longer sequence that involves disabling whatever should have been prevented the unpleasant events. I'm sorry for the loss, but I don't find my profession responsible more than I would find a car designer/engineer responsible for a car accident caused by driver's deficient attention.

Except, per my other comment, Microsoft doesn't bother writing Mac software that works like Mac software. It's kind of like running Java desktop software (actually worse)... neither native feel nor integrated with the OS like other Mac apps.

Inexpensive and truly unlimited storage. Windows, OSX, and Linux too!

http://shiftleft.com/mirrors/www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alistai...

Why even give users control of the data? No, that should rest squarely with the file system and ait should never delete things unless it is running out of space.

File > Revert To > Browse all versions

I love how OS X stays out of your way, but most regular users never get to take advantage of greater complexity. You have to be in the mindset of one of 'us' (reading every update to Apple's PR) to get a handle on everything OS X can do.

Maybe you find it one day trolling through the menubar. Maybe you don't.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/track-changes-wh...

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14378

Careful, that is quite a slippery slope...

⌘-Z should have been adequate.

I hope you don't work in usability.

I've made exactly the mistake described, several times. When making small changes to a bunch of files, it's common to go through the whole open-edit-save-close sequence in a few seconds, and if you've got a few things open and someone's talking to you, it's easy to fuck up.

I get it, but the convenience of things like ZFS and Time Machine have a cost. It takes time to implement such things and they take resources. And even then a failure is possible.

E.g. you decide to do some kind of Garbage Collect on a HD, because you lack disk space and you don't want to buy a disk, but you forgot to backup a file you deleted a month ago.

Then there's software that's designed to allow lay-people to get stuff done with the promise that it will hide the nasty things of the world from them.

Microsoft Word really is the perfect example of this. The main use-case it's built around is being a lovely place for a new user to write and print a small document. It captures users from this simple use-case, and then tries to upsell them to large document and multi-user scenarios with madness like mail-merge wizards and sharepoint.

The promise of Microsoft Word is to bring functionality to users while shielding them from the nasty realities of the world. It's reasonable to be vicious about it when it fails to protect the user from themselves.

> I get it, but the convenience of things like ZFS and Time Machine have a cost. It takes time to implement such things and they take resources. And even then a failure is possible.

You need to weigh the development cost of a feature against the cost to the user of not having it times the number of users. It is usually cheaper to make the software do the tricky stuff than to make your users do it.

One should also consider a logarithmic decrease in backups: while I'm writing, a backup of the state a few seconds ago is useful, but I don't need every second from weeks ago. Say the system keeps a backup of every few seconds for the last few minutes, every few minutes for the last few hours, every few hours for the last few days, every few days for the last few weeks, every few weeks for the last few months, every few months for the last few years--the odds are then pretty good that I'd be able to revert to a version I find useful, but not requiring an awful lot of versions.

Back of the envelope: 5 versions/minute for 5 minutes = 25 versions; 4 versions/hour for 8 hours = 24 versions; 3 versions/day for seven days = 21 versions; 4 versions/week for four weeks = 16 versions; 1 version/month for 4 years = 48 versions, so a grand total of 134 previous versions of a document, which really isn't that much space, particularly assuming efficient differencing algorithms.

No offense, to you or your wife, but this statement is hilarious for several reasons!