They probably did standard installs for both Windows and Linux.
But the Linux distribution standard install includes OpenOffice, while Windows XP doesn't have any Office suite at all. The Linux distribution also contains about a million applications and other things that the Windows one doesn't.
In this case, you can get the misleading results you want without actually lying.
I think the severe problem here was that regardless of the content-type header, Internet Explorer would still recognize the signature at the beginning of the file as WMF and therefore display it as WMF.
Is there any canned code to verify that an image is in WMF format? It seems to me that there's no reason not to ban WMF uploads since I can't think of the last time I heard of someone actually wanting to use that file format for its charactertistics.
Asking someone to die because he likes Steve Jobs seems a little extreme, no?
Wozniak has come and gone, primarily because he made enough at Apple to live for the rest of his life in comfort. That was his motivation, and so he did it and now he's a schoolteacher. I can sympathise. Making high-tech products is a tough job. A lot of people who make their pile get sick of their tough jobs with little social interaction and go on to someone else. I'd consider JWZ to be another excellent example. He made his pile at Netscape, and he created the DNA Lounge, which I'm sure gives him as much of a social life as anyone would want.
Steve is a different type of guy. His single goal is to make Great Products. I don't think he's personally even that interested in selling them at a profit. The profit is means to an end, so he can make still more Great Products.
I'm typing this on a 17" PowerBook running MacOS X right now, and I can tell you, it is a Great Product. That's why I'm an Apple customer. Steve Jobs guides the technical people and makes sure they aspire to greatness instead of mediocrity.
I know in my own mind, as a technical person, how easy it is to say "Hey, this is good enough, let's go on to the next thing" instead of "Hold it, it's not great yet, let's do this and make it best in the world." I try to be my own goad, to make sure my product is the best. But it's hard and that's because Steve's role is hard, and necessary, in any company that wants to truly aspire to greatness, instead of creating stuff that's "just OK".
So few people make great products, because most people are willing to settle for lousy ones, like Windows or cheap PCs. But for those who love great products, and can afford them, it's Steve we have to thank, because he had the strength to demand only the best from technical people, including Wozniak.
I believe Amazon tried this a while back. They increased their prices for customers they realized were price-insensitive and so you would receive different prices for the same book depending on where you were.
If my memory serves, there was an enormous outcry, Amazon's reputation was seriously damaged, and they had to rescind the policy.
Wrong. DEP only works with specific AMD hardware. Apparently Windows' software DEP doesn't work in this instance.
I think I could trust a patch to fix a problem this horrible that has a pretty well-defined goal. It doesn't seem like a fix likely to have heavy reprecussions, and the possible consequences of not having a fix are too horrible to contemplate. Someone who doesn't fix this is literally one myspace profile away from disaster.
Fortunately I'm a Mac user so I don't have to worry about this one.
Certainly Gnome and KDE look a great deal better than they did when I first switched to Apple products. But now I'm pretty much entrenched and happy in the Apple environment, and a lot of bad things would have to happen for me to want to change. One thing that really helped me was the use of Emacs-style control characters in text windows. I'm in Safari as I type this and I use Control-N to go to the next line, Control-P for the previous, and so on, without even thinking, and they work. Not so on FireFox.
As the Apple Turns is a satirical site. I think they were pulling your leg. If you look at the screen shot presented, it seems pretty clear that it's a quick, crude knockoff, probably (as the last paragraph of the Appleturns story suggests) created off copies of Apple's pre-release images.
I'm too lazy (and busy) to look it up right now, but I seem to remember Konfabulator was a riff on desk accessories, and now Apple has an improved version. It's the normal give and take of commerce, and it helps keep everyone on their toes.
This is a fair question, and I'll try and give you a fair answer.
The problem with Windows is that it took over the business world and forced a lot of us to work with it. We quickly found out that its quality was dreadful, and yet we could not make money with Unix because everyone was running pell-mell towards Windows. Thus, a HUGE amount of resentment towards Windows, because it was lousy, and because people were forcing us to use it.
Apple, on the other hand, gave us a deal. "Hey guys," Steve said, "What if you could use a platform that has designer beauty, that will run all those cool commercial applications like Photoshop, but that is Unix underneath so you could run all your great free software?"
Well, at the time he made this offer, computers running Linux either used window managers that took a week to set up, or had fonts that were so ugly they rivaled kindergarden scrawls in legibiilty. And to make matters worse, the developers of KDE and Gnome decided that Windows was the be all and end-all of user interface design and implemented the whole shooting match, from the Start button to the taskbar.
So we started playing with the MacOS and we realized that this wasn't half bad. In fact, it's pretty darn cool. It's beautfully designed, well-engineered, and we can still play with our favorite command line toys. And hey, we're starting to make a few bucks, we don't need to put together a computer out of random dumpster parts for $2.98 anymore. We can afford a little luxury, and Apple's PowerBooks and PowerMacs are the most luxurious personal computers made, from the quality of their keyboards, to their screens, to their elegant metal finishes.
Is it really that bad to run software controlled by a company? The reality is that it depends on the company. True, Apple equipment's expensive, and operating system and bundled software updates cost money. But Apple has never failed us. Each release brings us wonderful surprises and new fun stuff. The basic OS is solid as a rock, as long as you don't cheap out on your memory.
To jog your memory, there are a lot of people who used Windows 2000 who loathed XP because of how oddly they switched things around. Apple has never done that. When they make improvements, they make sure they really are improvements. In short, although Apple is not a perfect company, they have shown themselves on the main to be a good, trustworthy partner, making computers that are genuinely beloved by the people who use them.
In short, the problem of being controlled by a company depends on the company. And so far, Steve Jobs and his team have never failed us in creating cool, fun to use products. I don't think the Linux guys can say the same thing, since what they've done most of the time is to rip off old Windows and X11 interface ideas. Steve's willing to do things that are original, and beautiful, and some of us like both of those things, very much.
It it nice to be able to play around and tinker with the OS? Only if you have time to burn. Many of us don't anymore, and would rather create something cool ourselves rather than messing around with someone people have already done. And I haven't noticed anything about the MacOS that seems like human waste products. it looks like a beautiful, slick, well-designed system that I genuinely enjoy using.
In the end, for me, that's what matters, not whether I can fool around with the scheduler to my heart's content.
I don't know what Dada's computing platform is, but if he uses a Mac, you can just hook up the FireWire cable to your old Mac and suck out the configuration.
It worked great for me - it took about two hours to suck up the data and applications, but I was productive on it immediately after that.
Of course with his consulting practice, he probably needs to use Windows. I wonder if there's something similar there?
This seems like a great point, until you note that all this service appears to do is match players together. If you have a Quake server (and Quake is the game you want to play), you don't need them.
I don't have any examples available because I'm not actually a gamer (it's the social interaction aspects of this story that interest me), but aren't there a lot of free web sites that promise to bring gamers together? Why pay $50 a year for this?
I don't think many of the people writing in this thread understand what Dada's doing.
He's underpaying workers until the project ends. Then he gives them a bonus based on profitability. This enables him to bid fixed-price contracts because buyers love them.
I'm going to throw out some numbers. I hope he's listening because he can confirm or deny that his pay scale works as I say.
He has a project which he bills out at $145 an hour. He pays his people $6 an hour. However, he doesn't really charge $145 an hour. Instead, he says the project is 100 hours @ $145 an hour, or $14,500. Let's say 20 of those hours are his supervision and he has one person working 80 hours. He pockets the $145 an hour x 20 and gives the worker $6 an hour x 80, or $480. This is a total of $3,380. He has a gross profit of $11,120 remaining. Then he gives the worker a bonus, splitting the remaining revenue 50/50, meaning he gets $2900 + $5560 and the worker gets $480 + $5560.
In the end, this means the worker got paid approximately $75 an hour. This is substantially more than he would normally get paid in a more typical work environment, maybe more like $60 an hour. So the worker loves this system.
But it gets better - if the project can be done in 80% of the time, the worker still makes $5560 but divided by fewer hours. In fact, he would make about $86 an hour.
The downside of this is that if the project is estimated poorly, the worker will get paid less. Let's say the project goves over by 50%. The worker's paid a bit more than $5560 because his minimum wage pay goes up. But his bonus goes down. I'm too lazy to do a detailed calculation, but he's down to about $46 an hour.
What this system does is align the incentives of the owner and worker. If the worker can get the work done more rapidly, his bonus is enormous and he's motivated to do even better. If he does dismally (say he takes four weeks to do this two week job), his pay is down enormously and he might even want to leave the company.
If you compare this with a typical contractor who might pay $60 an hour and bill at $175 an hour, you can see how the bonus formula I've described above is actually a better arrangement as long as you work diligently and at about the proper estimated time.
Personally, I would have loved to have worked as a contractor under that system. It's fair and transparent.
Oh, don't be so scroogy. It's still a pretty neat idea, although admittedly it should have been started a long time ago to get a good bunch of pictures by now.
Actually, I had my most expensive monitors years ago. For example, years ago, I bought a NEC Multisync XP21 for $2,500-odd. That's the price of a 30" Cinema Display today. And I have used $5,000 SGI monitors, although at heart they were just Sonys marked up outrageously by SGI.
So it really looks like high-priced monitors have been surprisingly stable in price if you leave out the SGI monitor and its markup. They have just become enormously more capable.
The wide sceens, at least as I use them, are most useful for having multiple windows displayed at the same time, such as the web browser and the text editor to write code, or about a million browser windows. You will very rarely see anyone use a full screen browser window on a 1920x1200 screen. Right now, I'm using about a 1000x900 browser window. Anything bigger than that and pretty much any web site is going to look very strange.
If you want to see this in action, drop by your local Apple retail store. Even in the humblest locations, they have at least one PowerMac G5 connected to a 30" Cinema HD Display (US$2,499) that you can play with.
So I would not worry too much about the 1920 wide case. If you design the site so it looks decent with 800x600-1024x768, you're probably serving those of us who browse at 1920x1200 pretty well.
I wouldn't be too worried about 640x480. From what I understand, it's almost dead and 800x600 is heading that way fast. In actual use, when I have a 1024x768 or smaller screen, I tend to maximize the browser window, so it's really not much differnet from my experience on the huge monitor. Really, a deficiency in height is far more of a problem than width.
When I had a CRT, the highest it would go was 1280x1024.
Then I got my SGI 1600SW flat panel, which was 1600x1000.
Right now, I have a Cinema HD Display, which is 1920x1200.
So you can see that my screen resolution has increased enormously with the advent of the LCD. I really want to get a 30" Apple Cinema Display, but I'm expecting to do a lot of travel and so my resolution may actually shrink to the 17" PowerBook's 1680x1050. However, note that this is still a bit higher than my highest CRT resolution was.
Even in the mainstream, I think most people came from 1024x768 17" monitors, to 1280x1024 17" LCDs.
Back in the CRT days, most people had their systems set up for low resolution. It's only rabid geeks like me that ran their CRTs at high resolution.
Like the others here, I don't recommend that you design for a specific resolution. However, in my experience it's best to make the left and right sidebars fixed and assign the middle space to whatever resolution remains (usually the bulk of it). It gets pretty ugly if you assign left side 20, middle 60 and right 20 percent of the screen, since the left and right get huge, to no gain.
Insofar as I can tell, Znet wants some kind of participatory democracy where everyone votes on what people can have. So instead of buying what you want, you put in requests to the central system, everyone votes on it, and you receive what they want to give you.
Basically, it means that every year you have to beg for your allowance.
I really, really don't think Richard Stallman would do well in that kind of world.
I'd be happy to hear that I'm wrong, but as I understand it, it sounds like a horrible system. It's especially hard on individualists and eccentrics, and I think that describes both RMS and myself.
I don't think zmag would like his positions on certain issues. Beneath the veneer of talking about the tyrant Bush, he supports free enterprise and freedom of exchange. You can even see that in his interview: Instead of asking for a government program to develop software, he went and did it himself. You can see that he appreciates the freedom he had to do this, even at great personal cost. I do not think he would be happy under a Communist tyranny.
But in terms of his idealism, I'm afraid you're right. And that's why I mentioned in my original message that his idealism was a little scary. It seemed to defy condiions on the ground. I can respect his idealism while still saying that alas, it's not workable for most people.
I stand by my statement that it's really crummy this is the case. They were building a little utopia up there at the AI lab, where users from outside could get in via the ArpaNet and play around with the same computers the big guys did. It worked amazingly well while it lasted, but subsequent events make it all too clear it was not scalable past a community where everyone knew each other:-(.
It didn't hurt that ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System, which was used at the AI Lab at the time) was very hard to learn. People keen to learn it tended to be relatively benign, which is why they were able to maintain open public access for a time. As an example, you would log in by using u - dhdu would log me in, and you could log out with u. Control-O deleted files, Control-R printed them, and so on.
If you knew the secret, you could type lock and at the _ prompt, 5down to take the whole system down in five minutes. No way that could survive in the modern era.
I know that when I hung out at MIT, he was staff, not a professor, so I'd be very surprised to say the least if he taught any classes as another reply to your message says. From my acquiantance with him, there's no question that he was a man of principle, which is in both an admirable and a terrifying thing. I definitely would not accuse him of ever being less than genuine or willing to betray his principles.
At the time I knew him, he was rebelling against the institution of passwords that had just been introduced at MIT. He made it very well known that his password was blank, and later when they forbade blank passwords, he made sure the whole world knew what it was. In those ArpaNet days, most of the people who discovered the ArpaNet and used MIT's systems were pretty benign, but today, sadly, his stand wouldn't last 24 hours before his data was ruined by vandals. It is truly a sad world we live in.
During his formative years he was paid by MIT as a staffer. I think he was fired, or he quit over an issue of principle (probably revolving around his free software principles, but I don't know the details). However, he was allowed to continue using MIT's facilities, and I seem to remember hearing that at least for a while, he lived in the building.
At this point, I don't recognize GNU's address as being the MIT building he was long associated with. His building [warning: link in PDF] looks pretty nice, so I assume he and his organization are not doing badly financially. In fact, the 5th floor is the top of the building, which traditionally commands high rents.
I strongly suspect what's going on is that the FSF - which I believe is effectively him - gets contributions, and they pay for the office space and whatever salary he takes out of it. When he was starting out with emacs, he would charge a substantial sum (I think a few hundred dollars) for tapes. And of course the emacs manual and official documentation are still being sold.
I think he would have been more of a business success with a less rigid attitude, but he seems to be making enough money for him, and personally, even if I were a donor, I wouldn't care if he was taking a $100k+ salary from the FSF. Indeed, I hope he is and is living well, because he deserves it as an incredibly hard-working and principled individual.
I remember that when ISPs first started, they were all flaky, but we loved what we could do on the net. We tolerated outages because we knew that all ISPs had roughly the same failure rate and so switching wouldn't improve much.
The current situation with blogs looks about the same.
Blog services are sticky when they form a community of sorts. If you like the people you know through those services, you stick around. And if your web address is based on their site (i.e. xxx.blogspot.com), well, moving will cause you to lose all your readers, too.
So I would say the answer is yes, that people will stick to the services they enjoy, because they know that if they move, they'll get about the same level of service.
Good observation, but the article's pretty vague about it. It could be something as simple as AOL soaking up unused ad inventory. For example, i notice that if I search for the lamest keyword in the world, I get "Buy your xxx at eBay!" Maybe we'll get "Discuss xx at AOL!".
Slashdot Mirror
They probably did standard installs for both Windows and Linux.
But the Linux distribution standard install includes OpenOffice, while Windows XP doesn't have any Office suite at all. The Linux distribution also contains about a million applications and other things that the Windows one doesn't.
In this case, you can get the misleading results you want without actually lying.
D
I think the severe problem here was that regardless of the content-type header, Internet Explorer would still recognize the signature at the beginning of the file as WMF and therefore display it as WMF.
Is there any canned code to verify that an image is in WMF format? It seems to me that there's no reason not to ban WMF uploads since I can't think of the last time I heard of someone actually wanting to use that file format for its charactertistics.
D
Asking someone to die because he likes Steve Jobs seems a little extreme, no?
Wozniak has come and gone, primarily because he made enough at Apple to live for the rest of his life in comfort. That was his motivation, and so he did it and now he's a schoolteacher. I can sympathise. Making high-tech products is a tough job. A lot of people who make their pile get sick of their tough jobs with little social interaction and go on to someone else. I'd consider JWZ to be another excellent example. He made his pile at Netscape, and he created the DNA Lounge, which I'm sure gives him as much of a social life as anyone would want.
Steve is a different type of guy. His single goal is to make Great Products. I don't think he's personally even that interested in selling them at a profit. The profit is means to an end, so he can make still more Great Products.
I'm typing this on a 17" PowerBook running MacOS X right now, and I can tell you, it is a Great Product. That's why I'm an Apple customer. Steve Jobs guides the technical people and makes sure they aspire to greatness instead of mediocrity.
I know in my own mind, as a technical person, how easy it is to say "Hey, this is good enough, let's go on to the next thing" instead of "Hold it, it's not great yet, let's do this and make it best in the world." I try to be my own goad, to make sure my product is the best. But it's hard and that's because Steve's role is hard, and necessary, in any company that wants to truly aspire to greatness, instead of creating stuff that's "just OK".
So few people make great products, because most people are willing to settle for lousy ones, like Windows or cheap PCs. But for those who love great products, and can afford them, it's Steve we have to thank, because he had the strength to demand only the best from technical people, including Wozniak.
D
I believe Amazon tried this a while back. They increased their prices for customers they realized were price-insensitive and so you would receive different prices for the same book depending on where you were.
If my memory serves, there was an enormous outcry, Amazon's reputation was seriously damaged, and they had to rescind the policy.
D
Wrong. DEP only works with specific AMD hardware. Apparently Windows' software DEP doesn't work in this instance.
I think I could trust a patch to fix a problem this horrible that has a pretty well-defined goal. It doesn't seem like a fix likely to have heavy reprecussions, and the possible consequences of not having a fix are too horrible to contemplate. Someone who doesn't fix this is literally one myspace profile away from disaster.
Fortunately I'm a Mac user so I don't have to worry about this one.
D
Certainly Gnome and KDE look a great deal better than they did when I first switched to Apple products. But now I'm pretty much entrenched and happy in the Apple environment, and a lot of bad things would have to happen for me to want to change. One thing that really helped me was the use of Emacs-style control characters in text windows. I'm in Safari as I type this and I use Control-N to go to the next line, Control-P for the previous, and so on, without even thinking, and they work. Not so on FireFox.
As the Apple Turns is a satirical site. I think they were pulling your leg. If you look at the screen shot presented, it seems pretty clear that it's a quick, crude knockoff, probably (as the last paragraph of the Appleturns story suggests) created off copies of Apple's pre-release images.
I'm too lazy (and busy) to look it up right now, but I seem to remember Konfabulator was a riff on desk accessories, and now Apple has an improved version. It's the normal give and take of commerce, and it helps keep everyone on their toes.
D
This is a fair question, and I'll try and give you a fair answer.
The problem with Windows is that it took over the business world and forced a lot of us to work with it. We quickly found out that its quality was dreadful, and yet we could not make money with Unix because everyone was running pell-mell towards Windows. Thus, a HUGE amount of resentment towards Windows, because it was lousy, and because people were forcing us to use it.
Apple, on the other hand, gave us a deal. "Hey guys," Steve said, "What if you could use a platform that has designer beauty, that will run all those cool commercial applications like Photoshop, but that is Unix underneath so you could run all your great free software?"
Well, at the time he made this offer, computers running Linux either used window managers that took a week to set up, or had fonts that were so ugly they rivaled kindergarden scrawls in legibiilty. And to make matters worse, the developers of KDE and Gnome decided that Windows was the be all and end-all of user interface design and implemented the whole shooting match, from the Start button to the taskbar.
So we started playing with the MacOS and we realized that this wasn't half bad. In fact, it's pretty darn cool. It's beautfully designed, well-engineered, and we can still play with our favorite command line toys. And hey, we're starting to make a few bucks, we don't need to put together a computer out of random dumpster parts for $2.98 anymore. We can afford a little luxury, and Apple's PowerBooks and PowerMacs are the most luxurious personal computers made, from the quality of their keyboards, to their screens, to their elegant metal finishes.
Is it really that bad to run software controlled by a company? The reality is that it depends on the company. True, Apple equipment's expensive, and operating system and bundled software updates cost money. But Apple has never failed us. Each release brings us wonderful surprises and new fun stuff. The basic OS is solid as a rock, as long as you don't cheap out on your memory.
To jog your memory, there are a lot of people who used Windows 2000 who loathed XP because of how oddly they switched things around. Apple has never done that. When they make improvements, they make sure they really are improvements. In short, although Apple is not a perfect company, they have shown themselves on the main to be a good, trustworthy partner, making computers that are genuinely beloved by the people who use them.
In short, the problem of being controlled by a company depends on the company. And so far, Steve Jobs and his team have never failed us in creating cool, fun to use products. I don't think the Linux guys can say the same thing, since what they've done most of the time is to rip off old Windows and X11 interface ideas. Steve's willing to do things that are original, and beautiful, and some of us like both of those things, very much.
It it nice to be able to play around and tinker with the OS? Only if you have time to burn. Many of us don't anymore, and would rather create something cool ourselves rather than messing around with someone people have already done. And I haven't noticed anything about the MacOS that seems like human waste products. it looks like a beautiful, slick, well-designed system that I genuinely enjoy using.
In the end, for me, that's what matters, not whether I can fool around with the scheduler to my heart's content.
Hope that helps.
D
I don't know what Dada's computing platform is, but if he uses a Mac, you can just hook up the FireWire cable to your old Mac and suck out the configuration.
It worked great for me - it took about two hours to suck up the data and applications, but I was productive on it immediately after that.
Of course with his consulting practice, he probably needs to use Windows. I wonder if there's something similar there?
D
This seems like a great point, until you note that all this service appears to do is match players together. If you have a Quake server (and Quake is the game you want to play), you don't need them.
I don't have any examples available because I'm not actually a gamer (it's the social interaction aspects of this story that interest me), but aren't there a lot of free web sites that promise to bring gamers together? Why pay $50 a year for this?
D
Could this exploit be hidden in a normal-looking image?
What if you uploaded this type of image to Flickr, and it was a nice image and people rated it well?
That could be a very successful attack and you wouldn't even have to get hosting for it.
D
I don't think many of the people writing in this thread understand what Dada's doing.
He's underpaying workers until the project ends. Then he gives them a bonus based on profitability. This enables him to bid fixed-price contracts because buyers love them.
I'm going to throw out some numbers. I hope he's listening because he can confirm or deny that his pay scale works as I say.
He has a project which he bills out at $145 an hour. He pays his people $6 an hour. However, he doesn't really charge $145 an hour. Instead, he says the project is 100 hours @ $145 an hour, or $14,500. Let's say 20 of those hours are his supervision and he has one person working 80 hours. He pockets the $145 an hour x 20 and gives the worker $6 an hour x 80, or $480. This is a total of $3,380. He has a gross profit of $11,120 remaining. Then he gives the worker a bonus, splitting the remaining revenue 50/50, meaning he gets $2900 + $5560 and the worker gets $480 + $5560.
In the end, this means the worker got paid approximately $75 an hour. This is substantially more than he would normally get paid in a more typical work environment, maybe more like $60 an hour. So the worker loves this system.
But it gets better - if the project can be done in 80% of the time, the worker still makes $5560 but divided by fewer hours. In fact, he would make about $86 an hour.
The downside of this is that if the project is estimated poorly, the worker will get paid less. Let's say the project goves over by 50%. The worker's paid a bit more than $5560 because his minimum wage pay goes up. But his bonus goes down. I'm too lazy to do a detailed calculation, but he's down to about $46 an hour.
What this system does is align the incentives of the owner and worker. If the worker can get the work done more rapidly, his bonus is enormous and he's motivated to do even better. If he does dismally (say he takes four weeks to do this two week job), his pay is down enormously and he might even want to leave the company.
If you compare this with a typical contractor who might pay $60 an hour and bill at $175 an hour, you can see how the bonus formula I've described above is actually a better arrangement as long as you work diligently and at about the proper estimated time.
Personally, I would have loved to have worked as a contractor under that system. It's fair and transparent.
Hope that helps.
D
Actually, the analogy holds up. You can get a $300 PC, and it will sort of work, just as McDonald's is sort of food.
D
Oh, don't be so scroogy. It's still a pretty neat idea, although admittedly it should have been started a long time ago to get a good bunch of pictures by now.
D
Actually, I had my most expensive monitors years ago. For example, years ago, I bought a NEC Multisync XP21 for $2,500-odd. That's the price of a 30" Cinema Display today. And I have used $5,000 SGI monitors, although at heart they were just Sonys marked up outrageously by SGI.
So it really looks like high-priced monitors have been surprisingly stable in price if you leave out the SGI monitor and its markup. They have just become enormously more capable.
D
The wide sceens, at least as I use them, are most useful for having multiple windows displayed at the same time, such as the web browser and the text editor to write code, or about a million browser windows. You will very rarely see anyone use a full screen browser window on a 1920x1200 screen. Right now, I'm using about a 1000x900 browser window. Anything bigger than that and pretty much any web site is going to look very strange.
If you want to see this in action, drop by your local Apple retail store. Even in the humblest locations, they have at least one PowerMac G5 connected to a 30" Cinema HD Display (US$2,499) that you can play with.
So I would not worry too much about the 1920 wide case. If you design the site so it looks decent with 800x600-1024x768, you're probably serving those of us who browse at 1920x1200 pretty well.
I wouldn't be too worried about 640x480. From what I understand, it's almost dead and 800x600 is heading that way fast. In actual use, when I have a 1024x768 or smaller screen, I tend to maximize the browser window, so it's really not much differnet from my experience on the huge monitor. Really, a deficiency in height is far more of a problem than width.
Hope that helps.
D
When I had a CRT, the highest it would go was 1280x1024.
Then I got my SGI 1600SW flat panel, which was 1600x1000.
Right now, I have a Cinema HD Display, which is 1920x1200.
So you can see that my screen resolution has increased enormously with the advent of the LCD. I really want to get a 30" Apple Cinema Display, but I'm expecting to do a lot of travel and so my resolution may actually shrink to the 17" PowerBook's 1680x1050. However, note that this is still a bit higher than my highest CRT resolution was.
Even in the mainstream, I think most people came from 1024x768 17" monitors, to 1280x1024 17" LCDs.
Back in the CRT days, most people had their systems set up for low resolution. It's only rabid geeks like me that ran their CRTs at high resolution.
Like the others here, I don't recommend that you design for a specific resolution. However, in my experience it's best to make the left and right sidebars fixed and assign the middle space to whatever resolution remains (usually the bulk of it). It gets pretty ugly if you assign left side 20, middle 60 and right 20 percent of the screen, since the left and right get huge, to no gain.
D
Insofar as I can tell, Znet wants some kind of participatory democracy where everyone votes on what people can have. So instead of buying what you want, you put in requests to the central system, everyone votes on it, and you receive what they want to give you.
Basically, it means that every year you have to beg for your allowance.
I really, really don't think Richard Stallman would do well in that kind of world.
I'd be happy to hear that I'm wrong, but as I understand it, it sounds like a horrible system. It's especially hard on individualists and eccentrics, and I think that describes both RMS and myself.
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I don't think zmag would like his positions on certain issues. Beneath the veneer of talking about the tyrant Bush, he supports free enterprise and freedom of exchange. You can even see that in his interview: Instead of asking for a government program to develop software, he went and did it himself. You can see that he appreciates the freedom he had to do this, even at great personal cost. I do not think he would be happy under a Communist tyranny.
:-(.
But in terms of his idealism, I'm afraid you're right. And that's why I mentioned in my original message that his idealism was a little scary. It seemed to defy condiions on the ground. I can respect his idealism while still saying that alas, it's not workable for most people.
I stand by my statement that it's really crummy this is the case. They were building a little utopia up there at the AI lab, where users from outside could get in via the ArpaNet and play around with the same computers the big guys did. It worked amazingly well while it lasted, but subsequent events make it all too clear it was not scalable past a community where everyone knew each other
It didn't hurt that ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System, which was used at the AI Lab at the time) was very hard to learn. People keen to learn it tended to be relatively benign, which is why they were able to maintain open public access for a time. As an example, you would log in by using u - dhdu would log me in, and you could log out with u. Control-O deleted files, Control-R printed them, and so on.
If you knew the secret, you could type lock and at the _ prompt, 5down to take the whole system down in five minutes. No way that could survive in the modern era.
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So what's he doing after O'Reilly?
I figured he was there for life, especially now that the dotcom bust seems to be un-busting again.
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I know that when I hung out at MIT, he was staff, not a professor, so I'd be very surprised to say the least if he taught any classes as another reply to your message says. From my acquiantance with him, there's no question that he was a man of principle, which is in both an admirable and a terrifying thing. I definitely would not accuse him of ever being less than genuine or willing to betray his principles.
At the time I knew him, he was rebelling against the institution of passwords that had just been introduced at MIT. He made it very well known that his password was blank, and later when they forbade blank passwords, he made sure the whole world knew what it was. In those ArpaNet days, most of the people who discovered the ArpaNet and used MIT's systems were pretty benign, but today, sadly, his stand wouldn't last 24 hours before his data was ruined by vandals. It is truly a sad world we live in.
During his formative years he was paid by MIT as a staffer. I think he was fired, or he quit over an issue of principle (probably revolving around his free software principles, but I don't know the details). However, he was allowed to continue using MIT's facilities, and I seem to remember hearing that at least for a while, he lived in the building.
At this point, I don't recognize GNU's address as being the MIT building he was long associated with. His building [warning: link in PDF] looks pretty nice, so I assume he and his organization are not doing badly financially. In fact, the 5th floor is the top of the building, which traditionally commands high rents.
I strongly suspect what's going on is that the FSF - which I believe is effectively him - gets contributions, and they pay for the office space and whatever salary he takes out of it. When he was starting out with emacs, he would charge a substantial sum (I think a few hundred dollars) for tapes. And of course the emacs manual and official documentation are still being sold.
I think he would have been more of a business success with a less rigid attitude, but he seems to be making enough money for him, and personally, even if I were a donor, I wouldn't care if he was taking a $100k+ salary from the FSF. Indeed, I hope he is and is living well, because he deserves it as an incredibly hard-working and principled individual.
Hope that helps.
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If you click on the link, you'll find that it's this very funny guy who created the myspace worm.
He said that he joined Myspace to look at the pictures of cute girls, thus the link.
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Most people are on myspace because their friends are all on myspace, and they value that very time-consuming to set up network.
They also know that's where the hot girls and buff guys are.
So it remains popular even though its software engineering is truly abysmal.
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I remember that when ISPs first started, they were all flaky, but we loved what we could do on the net. We tolerated outages because we knew that all ISPs had roughly the same failure rate and so switching wouldn't improve much.
The current situation with blogs looks about the same.
Blog services are sticky when they form a community of sorts. If you like the people you know through those services, you stick around. And if your web address is based on their site (i.e. xxx.blogspot.com), well, moving will cause you to lose all your readers, too.
So I would say the answer is yes, that people will stick to the services they enjoy, because they know that if they move, they'll get about the same level of service.
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Good observation, but the article's pretty vague about it. It could be something as simple as AOL soaking up unused ad inventory. For example, i notice that if I search for the lamest keyword in the world, I get "Buy your xxx at eBay!" Maybe we'll get "Discuss xx at AOL!".
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They were competing directly with Microsoft. MS was in the same building during the tense negotiations.
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