Eh, you have to expect that. I find it hilarious that the Internet eco-set doesn't seem to know where the technology they use comes from or why it's cheap enough for them to afford.
I compile QT for windows, and it typically takes a few hours. Slightly annoying, but QT is well worth it.
However, most of that time is spent compiling examples, demos, internationalization tools, qt-specific build tools, etc. If you disable the compilation of the examples and demos it takes significantly less time to compile.
QT has it all over GTK+ in nearly everything except programming language portability and the license.
It's far easier to program with and distribute on multiple platforms than GTK or wxWidgets, also.
wxWidget's API is reminiscent of the horrible old Windows API's -- it's just ugly and makes for hideous code, imho. QT is clean and elegant, and the signals/slots mechanism makes thread-safe gui code dead simple.
I found the same thing when I used Blender a few years ago. The lack of documentation prior to that kept me away, but ever since the program opened up and many free tutorials were published, a few hours time spent learning the U/I reaps great rewards.
It's very fast once you learn. It's kind of like the vi of graphics programs.
Out of all of the ways to fit many windows onto one screen in a usable manner, properly done virtual desktops are the least bad.
Personally I think "windows" are a horrible idea, but if you're going to have them, having a bunch of nested sub-windows inside a larger window is just awful.
What I'd really like to see is the Gimp copy some of the old Amiga paint programs like Digi-Paint 3 or Deluxe Paint, which kicked so much ass it wasn't even funny.
I'm sure that the global warming hysteria will try to make this look like a bad thing, but it's a real boon to nautical industries like shipping and such. There just aren't that many ways around continents. Having an extra option is great.
This whole social networking (and cell phone proliferation) started as I went through college.
My senior year of high school, cell phones were divided into two classes - "Mobile Phones" which were a brick with a handset attached that you kept in your car, and "Cellular Phones" which looked much like the phones you buy today but four times the size. Nobody who didn't have a full time job as a salesman had one.
Four years later, the mobile brick phones were gone, cell phones were cheap enough that almost everyone I knew had one, and Instant Messaging had become mainstream.
I noticed in that time that when they were constantly available, people became extremely loathe to make any concrete plans at all. Whereas four years before, I could say, "Hey, tonight lets meet at 7 at the club" and expect a yes or no response, after everyone had a cell phone the response was, "Well, uhh, just call me on my cell." Getting a group of people together was no longer a matter of setting a date time, and being able to reasonably expect them to show up, it now required 15,000 phone calls.
I don't know how it happened, but cell phones and IM turned everyone into 14-year-old girls.
Now if I'm expected to check your web site every day to see if you're having a party instead of the courtesy of a phone call or email, thanks, but no thanks.
As such, I don't blame your friend in the least for not wanting to participate in the drama of keeping in touch with people like that.
Like it or not, Microsoft enabled a lot of people who couldn't care less about computers to feel comfortable enough to invest in a computer and use it.
The "monopoly" part is nearly inevitable -- people want a standard. Just like hardly anybody cares about the HD-DVD/Bluray format war except that there will be a winner so that they can go buy the right device to play new movies, most people didn't own computers in the early 80's because there was such a wide choice and your entire investment was truly obsolete in a few years. Own a Commodore 64? Too bad, Commodore's new and better computer, the Amiga, doesn't run the software, or even have a compatible disk drive. Same with Apple, TI, Atari, etc.
So yeah, Microsoft made it possible for Google to make a ton of money advertising to all of the people who would not otherwise own computers. But I wouldn't brag about it -- they were in the right place at the right time. Their success is due more to luck than any other factor.
"Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcasts 100's of miles away."
That's interesting.
Let's say a bunch of us decide to chip in some money and buy a piece of land in Kansas somewhere, and set up an antenna farm there. The antennas demodulate TV signals, and immediately send the data to each of us via the Internet using a bittorrent-like protocol.
Our computers can record the incoming data just as a Tivo would.
So we get all this set up, and offer "shares" of the antenna farm for $5, which buys you lifetime access to the data. Millions of people sign up.
This would provide essentially the same service, but I see no legal problem. The only difference between this system and an antenna on top of your house is how many people own it and the length of the wire connecting it to your TV.
You're very close. I have no idea what the grandparent was talking about.
Nyquist's theorem says that if you sample data (with infinite precision) at a rate greater than twice the bandwidth of the original signal, you can reproduce that signal exactly from the sampled data.
The infinite precision part means that the samples are mathematical samples, that is, not quantized samples like on a CD.
I'm sure the laws against rebroadcast and retransmission would make the distribution of any digital copy illegal, however.
If that were true, radio signals wouldn't work. Different carrier frequencies are trivially filtered from each other. You only see problems like you describe in the digital domain when the sampling rate isn't high enough to disambiguate one frequency from another that's a multiple of it.
And you're not considering the bandwidth of the signal, which is important. AM signals have two sidebands based on the percent modulation of the carrier. There will be no interference after that.
FM signals have a theoretical infinite number of sidebands, but practically speaking the power degrades so sharply as you get further from the carrier that only the first few are powerful enough to produce any interference worth worrying about, while the rest are lost in the noise.
There's a simple fix, then. Change the payment model to a newspaper/magazine one.
Publishing a web site is extremely cheap compared to physical distribution. If your web site is so popular that you can't support it because people are blocking ads, then go to the advertisers and ask for flat rate. When they tell you to pound sand, then start charging for use of the site/membership benefits, etc.
Nobody owes anyone a right to a living. If what you offer is valuable enough, people will pay for it. If you think what you offer is more valuable than what people are currently paying, then start charging them.
There is nothing more self-centered than a young child. Part of growing up and maturing is realizing your actions have consequences beyond the end of your nose.
I don't think anyone ever becomes "more selfish" as they get older, it's just that their immaturity is much more apparent because it's so far from the norm.
I was thinking about the non-parameterized database queries that were ripe for SQL injection attacks that persisted up until recent versions. Just that the developers would let something so huge like that slide for so long made me extremely wary of using PHP, because that's an indication to me that they didn't know what they were doing, or just didn't care.
I'm sure it's better now, but the bad first impression I got has persisted, and PHP isn't so great that I'm willing to take the risk with it.
It's slow as hell, doesn't do anything my local desktop doesn't do already, and the interface is horrible. Other than that it's fine.
The problem with web desktops is that these guys aren't asking the question, "What problem do people have that we can solve using Javascript?" They're asking, "How cool would it be if we could make a desktop on the web?!" It's a solution looking for a problem.
This sort of thing could be REALLY useful, but not by emulating desktops. I'm never in the position where I say, "Hey, I wish I could click on desktop icons remotely." Emulating vi or emacs in Javascript, however, kicks ass, because I *always* want vi keybindings in browser text areas, and making quick changes to web sites with a decent editor in Javascript would mean I could skip the "upload the changes via ftp" step that cheap web hosts make you go through.
I also don't know why the people who write these things can't implement a "window" with a border properly so that the border doesn't lag horribly behind the window content when you drag it. Use a div, and make it draggable. Put the content inside. Then make your empty window div a Javascript prototype so that Javascript applications can subclass it. Don't worry about shiny gradients until I can drag a window without it falling apart.
"but in reality, how often over the lifetime of your website will you migrate to a different database?"
If you told me I could pick either the database to use or the scripting language to code in, I'd pick Postgresql and let you pick the language. Most of the things people try to do in scripting languages can be handled in the database much more elegantly and scalably. Of course, most people don't realize this because they've only used MySQL and don't realize how much it's missing.
If you told me I could pick both, I'd go with Perl, unless I were doing something very simple that's been done a thousand times before.
PHP is decent enough for what it is. Historically there have been security problems with it, and the design is crappy. But it's quick and easy.
I've never used Rails, but it sounds like it does a lot for you. In my experience, that can be a blessing if you're doing something textbook. If not, have fun fighting with the assumptions other people made.
I'll second that. I don't know where people find the time to organize everything. I just want an interface that lets me drag a whole bunch of stuff from one place to another, organized or not.
I have four laptops, each with multiple OS's, and I don't want to screw around with one program that tries to organize everything on "My Computer". "My Computer" doesn't exist as a single entity.
I don't want playlists, I don't want fifteen different "My Music" libraries on my computer that each store music files their own way.
I like ripping CD's with Windows Media Player which you can configure to rip each album to its own folder. That's easy, simple, and the whole catalog can be moved quickly.
How can I create my own flash content and distribute it without paying a large sum of money?
I believe the express version of Visual Studio is free. If there were something like Flash that were just as widespread and free to develop for, I'd definitely use it instead of Flash.
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Eh, you have to expect that. I find it hilarious that the Internet eco-set doesn't seem to know where the technology they use comes from or why it's cheap enough for them to afford.
I compile QT for windows, and it typically takes a few hours. Slightly annoying, but QT is well worth it.
However, most of that time is spent compiling examples, demos, internationalization tools, qt-specific build tools, etc. If you disable the compilation of the examples and demos it takes significantly less time to compile.
QT has it all over GTK+ in nearly everything except programming language portability and the license.
It's far easier to program with and distribute on multiple platforms than GTK or wxWidgets, also.
wxWidget's API is reminiscent of the horrible old Windows API's -- it's just ugly and makes for hideous code, imho. QT is clean and elegant, and the signals/slots mechanism makes thread-safe gui code dead simple.
I found the same thing when I used Blender a few years ago. The lack of documentation prior to that kept me away, but ever since the program opened up and many free tutorials were published, a few hours time spent learning the U/I reaps great rewards.
It's very fast once you learn. It's kind of like the vi of graphics programs.
Gotta agree with the grandparent on this one.
Out of all of the ways to fit many windows onto one screen in a usable manner, properly done virtual desktops are the least bad.
Personally I think "windows" are a horrible idea, but if you're going to have them, having a bunch of nested sub-windows inside a larger window is just awful.
What I'd really like to see is the Gimp copy some of the old Amiga paint programs like Digi-Paint 3 or Deluxe Paint, which kicked so much ass it wasn't even funny.
I'm gonna go suggest that.
I'm sure that the global warming hysteria will try to make this look like a bad thing, but it's a real boon to nautical industries like shipping and such. There just aren't that many ways around continents. Having an extra option is great.
This whole social networking (and cell phone proliferation) started as I went through college.
My senior year of high school, cell phones were divided into two classes - "Mobile Phones" which were a brick with a handset attached that you kept in your car, and "Cellular Phones" which looked much like the phones you buy today but four times the size. Nobody who didn't have a full time job as a salesman had one.
Four years later, the mobile brick phones were gone, cell phones were cheap enough that almost everyone I knew had one, and Instant Messaging had become mainstream.
I noticed in that time that when they were constantly available, people became extremely loathe to make any concrete plans at all. Whereas four years before, I could say, "Hey, tonight lets meet at 7 at the club" and expect a yes or no response, after everyone had a cell phone the response was, "Well, uhh, just call me on my cell." Getting a group of people together was no longer a matter of setting a date time, and being able to reasonably expect them to show up, it now required 15,000 phone calls.
I don't know how it happened, but cell phones and IM turned everyone into 14-year-old girls.
Now if I'm expected to check your web site every day to see if you're having a party instead of the courtesy of a phone call or email, thanks, but no thanks.
As such, I don't blame your friend in the least for not wanting to participate in the drama of keeping in touch with people like that.
Like it or not, Microsoft enabled a lot of people who couldn't care less about computers to feel comfortable enough to invest in a computer and use it.
The "monopoly" part is nearly inevitable -- people want a standard. Just like hardly anybody cares about the HD-DVD/Bluray format war except that there will be a winner so that they can go buy the right device to play new movies, most people didn't own computers in the early 80's because there was such a wide choice and your entire investment was truly obsolete in a few years. Own a Commodore 64? Too bad, Commodore's new and better computer, the Amiga, doesn't run the software, or even have a compatible disk drive. Same with Apple, TI, Atari, etc.
So yeah, Microsoft made it possible for Google to make a ton of money advertising to all of the people who would not otherwise own computers. But I wouldn't brag about it -- they were in the right place at the right time. Their success is due more to luck than any other factor.
"Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcasts 100's of miles away."
That's interesting.
Let's say a bunch of us decide to chip in some money and buy a piece of land in Kansas somewhere, and set up an antenna farm there. The antennas demodulate TV signals, and immediately send the data to each of us via the Internet using a bittorrent-like protocol.
Our computers can record the incoming data just as a Tivo would.
So we get all this set up, and offer "shares" of the antenna farm for $5, which buys you lifetime access to the data. Millions of people sign up.
This would provide essentially the same service, but I see no legal problem. The only difference between this system and an antenna on top of your house is how many people own it and the length of the wire connecting it to your TV.
You're very close. I have no idea what the grandparent was talking about.
Nyquist's theorem says that if you sample data (with infinite precision) at a rate greater than twice the bandwidth of the original signal, you can reproduce that signal exactly from the sampled data.
The infinite precision part means that the samples are mathematical samples, that is, not quantized samples like on a CD.
I'm sure the laws against rebroadcast and retransmission would make the distribution of any digital copy illegal, however.
>Now and then I tune in the networks on my set (Arial only, no cable...
Huh. I tend to watch network TV in Comic Sans.
If you think the network is the bottleneck, try "ssh -XC" to compress the data over that link. It might speed things up for you.
If that were true, radio signals wouldn't work. Different carrier frequencies are trivially filtered from each other. You only see problems like you describe in the digital domain when the sampling rate isn't high enough to disambiguate one frequency from another that's a multiple of it.
And you're not considering the bandwidth of the signal, which is important. AM signals have two sidebands based on the percent modulation of the carrier. There will be no interference after that.
FM signals have a theoretical infinite number of sidebands, but practically speaking the power degrades so sharply as you get further from the carrier that only the first few are powerful enough to produce any interference worth worrying about, while the rest are lost in the noise.
There's a simple fix, then. Change the payment model to a newspaper/magazine one.
Publishing a web site is extremely cheap compared to physical distribution. If your web site is so popular that you can't support it because people are blocking ads, then go to the advertisers and ask for flat rate. When they tell you to pound sand, then start charging for use of the site/membership benefits, etc.
Nobody owes anyone a right to a living. If what you offer is valuable enough, people will pay for it. If you think what you offer is more valuable than what people are currently paying, then start charging them.
There is nothing more self-centered than a young child. Part of growing up and maturing is realizing your actions have consequences beyond the end of your nose.
I don't think anyone ever becomes "more selfish" as they get older, it's just that their immaturity is much more apparent because it's so far from the norm.
I was thinking about the non-parameterized database queries that were ripe for SQL injection attacks that persisted up until recent versions. Just that the developers would let something so huge like that slide for so long made me extremely wary of using PHP, because that's an indication to me that they didn't know what they were doing, or just didn't care.
I'm sure it's better now, but the bad first impression I got has persisted, and PHP isn't so great that I'm willing to take the risk with it.
It's slow as hell, doesn't do anything my local desktop doesn't do already, and the interface is horrible. Other than that it's fine.
The problem with web desktops is that these guys aren't asking the question, "What problem do people have that we can solve using Javascript?" They're asking, "How cool would it be if we could make a desktop on the web?!" It's a solution looking for a problem.
This sort of thing could be REALLY useful, but not by emulating desktops. I'm never in the position where I say, "Hey, I wish I could click on desktop icons remotely." Emulating vi or emacs in Javascript, however, kicks ass, because I *always* want vi keybindings in browser text areas, and making quick changes to web sites with a decent editor in Javascript would mean I could skip the "upload the changes via ftp" step that cheap web hosts make you go through.
I also don't know why the people who write these things can't implement a "window" with a border properly so that the border doesn't lag horribly behind the window content when you drag it. Use a div, and make it draggable. Put the content inside. Then make your empty window div a Javascript prototype so that Javascript applications can subclass it. Don't worry about shiny gradients until I can drag a window without it falling apart.
"but in reality, how often over the lifetime of your website will you migrate to a different database?"
If you told me I could pick either the database to use or the scripting language to code in, I'd pick Postgresql and let you pick the language. Most of the things people try to do in scripting languages can be handled in the database much more elegantly and scalably. Of course, most people don't realize this because they've only used MySQL and don't realize how much it's missing.
If you told me I could pick both, I'd go with Perl, unless I were doing something very simple that's been done a thousand times before.
PHP is decent enough for what it is. Historically there have been security problems with it, and the design is crappy. But it's quick and easy.
I've never used Rails, but it sounds like it does a lot for you. In my experience, that can be a blessing if you're doing something textbook. If not, have fun fighting with the assumptions other people made.
As someone who drive through San Jose once in a while, the yellow is horrible, because you can't tell the street lights apart from the traffic lights.
No joke. You should hear about my wedding in Kazakhstan. Near total disaster.
Yikes. Not every relationship has to be sexual. People don't give up all their friends once they're married.
I don't totally disagree with your assessment, but it seems a bit harsh.
I'll second that. I don't know where people find the time to organize everything. I just want an interface that lets me drag a whole bunch of stuff from one place to another, organized or not.
I have four laptops, each with multiple OS's, and I don't want to screw around with one program that tries to organize everything on "My Computer". "My Computer" doesn't exist as a single entity.
I don't want playlists, I don't want fifteen different "My Music" libraries on my computer that each store music files their own way.
I like ripping CD's with Windows Media Player which you can configure to rip each album to its own folder. That's easy, simple, and the whole catalog can be moved quickly.
That made my day. Can you please put a fancy logo on there?
All applications expand their feature set until they are capable of reading email.
I guess Eudora, now based on Thunderbird, finally can make that claim.
How can I create my own flash content and distribute it without paying a large sum of money?
I believe the express version of Visual Studio is free. If there were something like Flash that were just as widespread and free to develop for, I'd definitely use it instead of Flash.