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According to http://www.ionet.net/~luttrell/history.html, the first parking meters were installed in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935. They were intended to solve the problem of people who worked downtown taking too many parking spots all day.

Actually, KDE's icons are great in the sense of an icon designer. The key term is usability, not looks. GNOME2 appears to go the same route, and it is looking pretty similiar to KDE2's icons. Compare these two screenshots:

icons of gnome2:
here

icons of kde2:
here

Notice gnome2's new toolbar icons. I think this is a great step in terms of usability. GNOME 1.x's toolbar icons were photorealistic and therefore, quite horrible from an icon designer's perspective.

You wanna see great code in as many languages as youve ever seen assembled? Sing and follow me! "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles..."

http://www.ionet.net/~timtroyr/funhouse/beer.html

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"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"

Your favourite song retold in a total of 227 different languages:

99 Bottles of Beer

Maybe you have noticed in the 3rd screenshot that in the background there is Windows C code (at least, as I recall, GetDlgItemText and a variable called hDlg look suspicious)... looks like they've screwed it up... which means, whoever did it can't be a true geek :)

This picture makes it look like Scott McNealy of Sun makes a cameo as well.

Speaking as someone who "would rather write programs that write programs than write programs", I have to take a stand in the "form as function is EVIL!" camp. If I'm emitting code from my program to the compiler, noone's ever going to see it, so why the hell should I care how it looks?

Disclaimer: I have used TUTOR (where not only do you have to indent, but each indentation level is denoted as [PERIOD][TAB]), so that probably explains my reaction.

For some reason it reminds me of the 99 bottle of beer website. That's not funny, but it uses "print/display the entire lyrics to the 99 bottles of beer song" instead of "Hello World" in languages ranging from COBOL to Befunge to YACC. It's an interesting read, at least.

The same applies to programming languages. For many programming tasks, the imperative model will serve you well, but there are times -- especially when repetitive, recursive or just plain mathematically complex tasks are involved -- that a good functional language is exactly what you need.

P.S. While probably not the best way to compare languages, you might want to check out this web page that compares how you'd get verious programming languages to output the complete lyrics to the "99 bottles of beer" song. (At last, an almost on-topic posting about beer!)

Remember this page?
It has implementations for "99 bottles of beer" in over 200 languages, including some really obscure ones. (trumpet winsock, turing machine, pov-ray just to mention a few).
Have a look and laugh.

Some screenshots of Nautilus, part of Eazel's attempt to bring us a next-generation file navigation system.

One of the things I find interesting about Nautilus is its idea of 'zooming in' on the standard icon/list views we're used to reveal more information about the various file system objects represented there. While the example screenshots don't reveal much useful information (oh, WOW, an item count!), it at least suggests a drill-down method for further investigating a subset of documents. Combining this sort of technique with a data-soup method would let a user go straight to the file/folder they're looking for if they recognize it in the "big picture" view, or drill-down if they still aren't sure which item they're looking for.

In addition, Tog's latest column discusses some UI niceties he considers long over-due. Part of the column covers what he calls "screen objects." He brings up the concepts of piles, notebooks, and scrapbooks, but perhaps one of the most innovate ideas is how to convey time to the user through icons. He suggests having cobwebs or dust pile up on folders and files that haven't been touched in years, among other things.

Link summary:

• Nautilus
• Related Wired Article
• Ask Tog OSX/UI Design Article

Some screenshots of Nautilus, part of Eazel's attempt to bring us a next-generation file navigation system.

One of the things I find interesting about Nautilus is its idea of 'zooming in' on the standard icon/list views we're used to reveal more information about the various file system objects represented there. While the example screenshots don't reveal much useful information (oh, WOW, an item count!), it at least suggests a drill-down method for further investigating a subset of documents. Combining this sort of technique with a data-soup method would let a user go straight to the file/folder they're looking for if they recognize it in the "big picture" view, or drill-down if they still aren't sure which item they're looking for.

In addition, Tog's latest column discusses some UI niceties he considers long over-due. Part of the column covers what he calls "screen objects." He brings up the concepts of piles, notebooks, and scrapbooks, but perhaps one of the most innovate ideas is how to convey time to the user through icons. He suggests having cobwebs or dust pile up on folders and files that haven't been touched in years, among other things.

Link summary:

• Nautilus
• Related Wired Article
• Ask Tog OSX/UI Design Article

(quick summary: this site is basically a collection of programs in EVERY programming language on earth, practically, that print out the song "99 bottles of beer on the wall", in a loop, all the way down to 0 bottles on the wall.)

Check out sendmail's entry.