My position actually seems pretty similar to your own.
I have not made any claims about the quality of the aforementioned programs as programs; I have criticised them for a lack of innovation and design savvy.
I think innovation and design savvy are things that come naturally with market, and not technical pressures. Technical pressures make the guts of something good; market pressures make it pretty and well designed, from a user (not a technical) perspective.
What this means in my view is that there's room for both types of software; they each do different things in different ways.
Think about Darwin and MacOS X as an excellent example; Darwin ensures MacOS X's core is free, and Steve et al make sure it's pretty. Thus, the ideal synthesis of commercial and non-commercial elements.
But what that also means is that few open source applications are likely to catch on when compared to something like Final Cut Pro, which has been honed endlessly and brilliantly by its developers.
For some reason, open source developers seem to like the technical challenges of replicating what already exists in closed form (Linux, OpenOffice, etc) instead of blazing new paths.
You can get them to want to create an attractive interface, but they don't have the deep design skills fostered by the commercial groups.
Because of this, it would be very difficult to get something as good and complicated as Final Cut Pro in an open source project.
I would personally recommend a balanced approach.
Buy the best PowerMac G5 you can afford.
Get and use Final Cut Pro
Install X-Windows and you can use whatever open source products appear
Then you have the best of the open and proprietary worlds, and you can decide on a case by case basis which one you prefer. And your basic platform is about 50/50 open source.
I think it's an unbeatable compromise, and it's what I run personally.
Even CmdrTaco has a PowerBook. What more can I say?
The holidays are coming! Worst timing in the world considering all the PayPal scammers.
Their sites may look professional at times, but their use of bad spelling and grammar gives them away. People, watch for poor language in these emails; it looks like most of them perpetrators are either from outside the US or are victims of our appalling schools.
I'll read the scam emails so I can laugh at their ineptitutde and delete them, but obviously this is a real problem for the less-educated.
I think I was the first user of the JenniCam. I knew her from her original Tour of Her Body web site, and had a mad crush on her for some time.
Anyway, she told me she got a cam, and primitive software that loaded a new picture every minute, and she was showing it to me hosted off her dorm room Mac.
The images were black and white, and at that time Jenni was a really hot-looking girl. (I haven't looked lately, so I won't comment on her current status). It began as something private, a special moment or two shared between her and her friends.
For a while I even hosted her site, but eventually had to move due to the huge bandwidth use once she took it public.
For her, it was never about the money, it was about showing her life, as it was. I admired her for that and still do.
But she did wind up changing. For a long time, I had an archive featuring her most charming pictures, and if you were persistent enough, you could see her naughtiest. But she made me take it down, with a remarkably cold note threatening legal action. I thought that was contrary to the original spirit of it, but since I didn't want to hurt her, I respected her wishes.
So yes, today I shed a tear for her innovation, her charm and her creation. What a long strange trip it's been.
I wonder what she will do next...
D
How can IBM provide what SCO is requesting?
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When I write software, I certainly don't save every version of every program I've ever written. And I delete old backups on a continuous basis to save disk space.
So there's no way in the world I could even comply with such a request, since the information just isn't there.
IBM might well save every daily backup tape because they're so huge they can afford to without breaking a sweat. Maybe they should just dump every single tape for every single version of every operating system they have, and let SCI sort it out.
But I'm curious about the interim versions, since I would think that it would not be a copyright violation unless the code was in the distributed version... would it?
Depends. They also listen to their computer guy, and if s/he tells them to use Google, they'll bookmark it and use it no matter what Microsoft has.
I think Google will do fine as long as people continue to have positive feelings about it. That will make them deliberately select it, and all the marketing in the world won't change that.
I think the idea is so the bank can use off the shelf software to serve advertising on their ATMs. Not that it would be that difficult to do this with OS/2, mind.
I wrote the following email to Bank of America's support staff after reading this article:
--
What is your reaction to this story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34175.ht ml
Why on earth would someone buy ATMs based on Windows?
I'd call that criminal stupidity if I were you.
I like the online banking service a lot, and it works pretty well, but the use of Windows ATMs really unsettles me. I'd rather see you return to OS/2 than feel that one day I won't have access to my money because of this kind of messup.
OS/2 has worked just fine, and quite honestly being bombarded with advertisements whenever I use an ATM is not what I would call a significant improvement in service.
Your reactions, please.
Many thanks.
Best D
--
I haven't heard from them yet, but they promise a response between "3 to 6 business days", so it's not like they're tardy just yet.
I'm going to be in the market for the big Cinema Display pretty soon, and the one thing I would love to see in the next model is an iMac style arm so it's easy to position anywhere I want it.
That seems like such an obvious idea I'm surprised Apple hasn't done it.
From the original example, it seemed to me that the guy mentioned was keeping himself awake with illegal drugs so he could spin. You do that long enough and you're not going to be fit to work anywhere.
I think it's reasonable to anticipate what you believe might happen and make your decisions accordingly. On the whole, I would probably prefer someone who had a less disruptive schedule for working on his dreams. I'm not against dreams, but if you do it until 5am and you have to work at 8, work's not going to, well, work out.
Concerning Bechtel and water, I happen to know that Bechtel has one of the best reputations on the planet for creating difficult projects rapidly and of high quality. Consider this indictment against them:
http://www.actagainstwar.org/article.php?id=208
That attack has virtually no facts. It doesn't tell us why Bechtel was in Bolivia in the first place, and it doesn't tell us what they did there. It just sneeringly implies that they were bad because they are a big corporation.
Well, they are a big, wealthy corporation. No question. But that doesn't mean they're bad people, or that they do a bad job. Check out their response to the Bolivian allegations:
I see more facts and considerably more detail than the allegations against Bechtel listed. Perhaps best of all, I see no sneering, contempt or name-calling tactics.
Anti-Bechtel literature implies that just because Rumsfield likes Bechtel, Bechtel is bad. Well, this is not true. If Rumsfield has tofu for breakfast, does that mean you shouldn't? If I were to make similar arguments, you wouuld quite rightly laugh me out of the room.
Anti-Bechtel literature implies that Bechtel is doing a poor job, primarily with sneering and insinuations, not facts. I think that if Bechtel was genuinely doing a lousy job, you could come up with more than the weak gruel I've been reading.
And, of course, at no time was Bechtel the Bolivian government. The government sanctioned the rate increases, and the government quelled the revolt. If you want to condemn someone, condemn the government for managing things poorly.
I'm not saying Bechtel consists of saints. Of course they want to make money! So would you, if you were investing the kinds of sums they are. But I am saying that you are listening to only one side of the story. Check out both sides and make up your mind. Give Bechtel a fair hearing and the truth might surprise you.
Finally (I really don't have time to address all the issues in your article), I checked out Michael Albert and Paraecon some time ago. If my memory serves, it says that skilled people who have in-demand abilities such as medicine or computers should, as part of the system, empty garbage cans and clean toilets as well.
I'm sorry, guy. On those terms, I much prefer the world as it is.
Well, I was really curious about what would be so superior to Apple's stuff, so I wandered around his various web sites and found that the "revolutionary" task-based user interface is simply making everything you can do with your computer require a wizard dressed up with HTML.
Wizards have been around since Windows 95. Making a wizard with a colourful background and a few more options instead of Windows Depresso Gray is hardly a revolution. After all, we have a few of those in Windows XP right now, and I don't see people begging for more. I'm certainly not, and I administrate a mixed network consisting of many Windows systems of various flavours. What's in XP isn't making my job any easier. In fact, I'd say it's a little harder than before.
But at least they dropped Windows Depresso Gray in XP, so I no longer feel like I'm attending someone's funeral when I check out the interface. (Instead, I feel like I'm attending some kind of obnoxious kids' party, which is an improvement, I guess).
If the new Longhorn UI is what passes for innovation in Microsoft land, I think Apple will stay on top for a while.
I have done a lot of research on this question, but have no practical experience.
That being said, there are two points nobody's brought up yet.
First, if you want to live in a beautiful place, with design you'll enjoy living with, a stick-built house may be the only way to do it. A good architect will design a house for you that's designed to fit you, your needs and the site like hand in glove. That kind of expertise costs money, and blows up costs everywhere, but if you want something great, that will bring you joy over a lifetime, it's worth considering. The works of Christopher Alexander (The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, etc) express the appeal of this much better than I can. They are worth checking out (yes, even at their rather hideous prices) before you make a final decision.
The basic difference is that a pre-fab house is built out of resuable components. If those components don't fit the site, if there is a specific angle that needs to be used to make the best view, you're never going to see it. Alexander argues most persuasively that there is a moral and ethical failing about allowing houses to be built in such a cold, sterile way.
That being said, I'll bet you can figure out pretty easily what he thinks of tract housing. There would appear to be little advantage of a stick-built tract house over a pre-fab, since they are both following the same rules, and are not custom in any meaningful way.
If you are building on a hillside, and the View is an important aspect of what you want with your house, I would almost certainly say you want a stick-built house. If you're not a view buyer, I would say a pre-fab or tract style house might fit your needs.
If you're eyeing a lot in Malibu or Topanga Canyon in LA, be aware that you have to go through the same amazing two year planning and approval process including delightful Coastal Commission hearings and other fun stuff before you can put anything on a lot.
So if you're considering this to avoid those tiresome regulations, they apparently run right after you anyway:-(.
I know because I asked.
You may not be around Malibu or Topanga, but you should still find out what the rules are and make sure you follow them, or that you can get away without following them. (Topanga probably has more building code violations per acre than anywhere else in the world).
I don't know about correct, but it's worked for the decade or so I've been coding web pages.
For some reason I've been under the impression that not all browsers supported single quotes, but that probably shows my age more than anything else.
The rules as I knew them were that you don't have to quote anything unless it contains characters that appear to be spaces. That's not something specific to a list of HTML tags, it's a general rule that always works. So you would need to quote "The Great Foo" in this example:
<img src = foo.gif alt = "The Great Foo">
but not the name foo.gif itself, no matter what tag was involved.
If you take this literally - and the standards check things are as literal as things come - you have:
<input name = "variable_name" type = "text" size = "30">
As someone not used to quoting variable names, this is pretty jarring. I have always said
<input name = variable_name type = text size = 30>
without a problem.
I think what annoys me is the Rule Nazis basically say THEIR WAY is the One True HTML, and anyone who wants to code some other way is MORALLY WRONG. The older style is a lot easier on the eyes, at least for me, and I don't see why I have to be branded as an incompetent through their validation tools just because I'd rather write HTML the way I have for a decade. (amazing.com: Since 1994, and my web roots go even deeper).
I'm not a total reactionary - Cascading Style Sheets have value, because they let me simplify a page, create much better looking pages, and be more creative than I have been in the past. This is great, even if the syntax is convoluted and commands are sufficiently changed as to require a huge body of additional memorization. I'll conform like that when I see real and substantial benefits.
But I don't see how putting quotes where I used to omit them benefits anybody. I don't understand the moralistic attitude, which sneeringly implies that I'm killing kittens or poisoning the web by simply writing HTML which works in every browser that I've ever used.
Let me give you another example.
According to various references, the <center> tag is immoral. Instead, they want you to say <div align = "center">. They tell us that, in some abstract universe, this is easier to understand.
Certainly nobody outside the W3C can say that <div align = "center"> is easier for human beings to read or understand than <center>.
I code in a way that makes it easiest for me (and hopefully other humans) to read. So I still use <center>. If you talk to HTML purists about this tag, they would stare at you as though you're killing babies in the cradle.
Why? What's wrong with keeping HTML a language that's easy for humans to read, maintain and understand?
I think the main reason for avoiding CSS is that it is not easy to figure out, mainly due to the lack of error messages and feedback from browsers. It took me a long time to embrace CSS for that reason, although I have finally converted the front page of my personal site to it. Unfortunately, I have thousands of pages in the old style, developed over ten years of having a web site, and I have to say the task of even thinking of how to reorganize them is just overwhelming.
In order to convert my pages, I would have to say:
I find that if I'm creating HTML through programs, the latter produces much more readable programs than the former, since I don't need to escape any quotes.
What earthly purpose does quoting numbers serve? There is no programming language that I know of that requires, or even allows, quoted numbers as numeric values.
Now, I know in certain cases, omiting quotes doesn't work, but for properly encoded URLs it's completely safe as far as I can tell, since spaces are not allowed.
So why quote URLs when it makes programming harder? What higher purpose is served by that?
I find the religious attitude of strict HTML purists a little silly. If it's no harder to code a browser so omitting quotes works, why force them on people, when in many ways the old style was far more readable?
I think the guy's comments were spot on, actually.
If you use mind-altering substances to stay up all night, then the next morning you'll be tired half to death and won't be able to do good work. So unfortunately, that IS the business of an employer to know.
If he gets buzzed on Friday or Saturday night and spins his tunes, great!
But if he does it on Sunday-Thursday, he's probably going to be borderline at work all week.
If you are anti-capitalist, and hate the company you're working for, you're bound to do Bad Things to that company, or at least not support it loyally. I've known a few people like that, and I've experienced the situation when they've tried to be subversive and destroy the "awful" people they work for while happily cashing the paychecks. The employer's point of view is just as valid as yours.
If you don't want to work under "the man", start your own company. Figure out something the world wants, and then you can BE "the man". That's the flexibility of capitalism in action, and it's unbeatable.
But what really puzzles me is that you're against corporate control, but don't recognize that government control is far worse.
If your only choice is to work for the State, and the State doesn't like you, then you'll wind up in the gulag.
In the corporate world, you have a chance to work for a small company that tolerates your eccentricities, just as I do.
Ironically enough, you can only start your leftist website under capitalism, which provides all the gadgets you need - the servers, the bandwidth, and so on. Then it makes them available free or at a cost you can afford.
In Cuba, nobody's allowed to have a web site, and people are arrested and thrown in jail for 20+ years for having a lending library in their homes. Look it up if you don't believe me.
I've always been curious about what kind of world anti-capitalist types really want. Sure, it would be nice if the world didn't revolve around money, and you could have a nice house in Topanga Canyon for the price of hacking down a few trees, instead of half a mil for a tiny shack.
But in the end, we need stuff, whether it be food or Apple Cinema Displays, and we need people to work in an organized way to make stuff. Seems to me capitalism is the best way to accomplish this, with about as much fairness as can exist in a highly imperfect world.
This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.
Of course I went through the whole rest of the article to see what OS they did use, and no dice. Maybe they're using Windows but don't want to be flamed by Slashdotters.
Seems to me RAID 5 would have given them better protection for just $250 more especially considering that the total cost of their system wound up over $3,000.
Their main argument against RAID 5 seems to be that if they don't use it, they can break out the drives and use them individually without reformatting; the information will simply be on the drives. But that means you couldn't stripe the drives at all, so you would have 5-250mb drives and not 1-1tb effective drive, which I thought was what they wanted.
Their final objection is that you couldn't expand to 2tb later since they only got an 8-drive case. I suppose this is because IDE cards can serve four drives each, so they would simply buy another IDE card. But they already need to, since they have a 110gb system drive. So they could hook up the fifth drive to that, and hook up the second array's fifth drive to it too.
So I think I'd seriously lean towards a 10-drive case and RAID 5. But that's just me, and it may expose my ignorance regarding hardware design. If you feel in the mood, feel free to tell me what I've left out.
I believe the article's links are to CNET's price comparison engine. If you buy something off the price comparison engine, the stores rebate a percentage of the price to CNET.
So yes, CNET hopes to gain revenue from the article.
I don't think that's bad - the writer deserves to be paid - but it should be considered when evaluting his statements.
This is the best response I've gotten, and I'd mod it up if I wasn't already a participant in the discussion. (Of course this is why I have plenty of points and almost never use them!)
But there are sites, such as Wired or the Washington Post, that have people creating content for money. To research investigative articles take the bucks to send them out in the field to find stuff, and pay them when they get back with usable information.
Slashdot survies as a parasite of sorts, since without news articles to comment on - virtually all of which are written by people who are paid for their words - the site wouldn't work.
And even Slashdot has a paid staff. Last time I looked, it was a pretty well paid staff too, and deservedly so. Those people need to eat so they can keep on thinking up cool stuff. And therefore, we have to figure out a decent way to pay them.
I, too, remember the Internet as it was. It wasn't nearly as comprehensive a resource as it is now, and people could not reasonably use it as their sole daily news source, as they can today.
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort. Banner ads are not perfect, but so far nobody has found anythiing better to balance the needs of users with those of advertisers.
Once the Internet becomes more than a purely amateur medium, it requires the elements of professional publication, and one of them is ads. It's either that or pay, and I think those who complain most vociferously about banner ads are the least likely to fork out real bucks for content.
They switched to Windows with gigantic fanfare about a year or so ago. I was shocked and incomprehending, since it just didn't make any sense to do that given their Unix heritage.
I guess they're now back to Solaris, which is just where they were before.
I don't think anyone can accuse Simonyi of being dumb, but even smart guys have poor ideas.
I don't like Hungarian notation just because it makes my code look ugly. I spend a lot of time making things look clean and simple, and Hungarian notation... well, let's just say it doesn't exactly advance that goal.
Slashdot Mirror
My position actually seems pretty similar to your own.
I have not made any claims about the quality of the aforementioned programs as programs; I have criticised them for a lack of innovation and design savvy.
I think innovation and design savvy are things that come naturally with market, and not technical pressures. Technical pressures make the guts of something good; market pressures make it pretty and well designed, from a user (not a technical) perspective.
What this means in my view is that there's room for both types of software; they each do different things in different ways.
Think about Darwin and MacOS X as an excellent example; Darwin ensures MacOS X's core is free, and Steve et al make sure it's pretty. Thus, the ideal synthesis of commercial and non-commercial elements.
But what that also means is that few open source applications are likely to catch on when compared to something like Final Cut Pro, which has been honed endlessly and brilliantly by its developers.
D
People writing for sites like eBay and PayPal have a reasonable command of English.
Nobody's going to write a phishing tool for Slashdot accounts, at least not unless someone reads this and decides it's too much of a dare to pass up.
D
You can get them to want to create an attractive interface, but they don't have the deep design skills fostered by the commercial groups.
Because of this, it would be very difficult to get something as good and complicated as Final Cut Pro in an open source project.
I would personally recommend a balanced approach.
- Buy the best PowerMac G5 you can afford.
- Get and use Final Cut Pro
- Install X-Windows and you can use whatever open source products appear
Then you have the best of the open and proprietary worlds, and you can decide on a case by case basis which one you prefer. And your basic platform is about 50/50 open source.I think it's an unbeatable compromise, and it's what I run personally.
Even CmdrTaco has a PowerBook. What more can I say?
Hope that helps.
D
The holidays are coming! Worst timing in the world considering all the PayPal scammers.
Their sites may look professional at times, but their use of bad spelling and grammar gives them away. People, watch for poor language in these emails; it looks like most of them perpetrators are either from outside the US or are victims of our appalling schools.
I'll read the scam emails so I can laugh at their ineptitutde and delete them, but obviously this is a real problem for the less-educated.
Interesting.
D
That's probably why he mentions on the first page of his site that it was started in 1999.
D
I think I was the first user of the JenniCam. I knew her from her original Tour of Her Body web site, and had a mad crush on her for some time.
...
Anyway, she told me she got a cam, and primitive software that loaded a new picture every minute, and she was showing it to me hosted off her dorm room Mac.
The images were black and white, and at that time Jenni was a really hot-looking girl. (I haven't looked lately, so I won't comment on her current status). It began as something private, a special moment or two shared between her and her friends.
For a while I even hosted her site, but eventually had to move due to the huge bandwidth use once she took it public.
For her, it was never about the money, it was about showing her life, as it was. I admired her for that and still do.
But she did wind up changing. For a long time, I had an archive featuring her most charming pictures, and if you were persistent enough, you could see her naughtiest. But she made me take it down, with a remarkably cold note threatening legal action. I thought that was contrary to the original spirit of it, but since I didn't want to hurt her, I respected her wishes.
So yes, today I shed a tear for her innovation, her charm and her creation. What a long strange trip it's been.
I wonder what she will do next
D
When I write software, I certainly don't save every version of every program I've ever written. And I delete old backups on a continuous basis to save disk space.
... would it?
So there's no way in the world I could even comply with such a request, since the information just isn't there.
IBM might well save every daily backup tape because they're so huge they can afford to without breaking a sweat. Maybe they should just dump every single tape for every single version of every operating system they have, and let SCI sort it out.
But I'm curious about the interim versions, since I would think that it would not be a copyright violation unless the code was in the distributed version
D
Depends. They also listen to their computer guy, and if s/he tells them to use Google, they'll bookmark it and use it no matter what Microsoft has.
I think Google will do fine as long as people continue to have positive feelings about it. That will make them deliberately select it, and all the marketing in the world won't change that.
D
The army's been starting to switch some things to Linux, so it's not that much of a surprise for me.
:-(.
It's too early in the morning for me to find the relevent articles, though
D
Not much of a point getting your balance there with free online banking, which I have to admit works pretty darn good.
I started actually liking BofA when they started the free online banking and bill pay.
D
I think the idea is so the bank can use off the shelf software to serve advertising on their ATMs. Not that it would be that difficult to do this with OS/2, mind.
t ml
I wrote the following email to Bank of America's support staff after reading this article:
--
What is your reaction to this story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34175.h
Why on earth would someone buy ATMs based on Windows?
I'd call that criminal stupidity if I were you.
I like the online banking service a lot, and it works pretty well, but the use of Windows ATMs really unsettles me. I'd rather see you return to OS/2 than feel that one day I won't have access to my money because of this kind of messup.
OS/2 has worked just fine, and quite honestly being bombarded with advertisements whenever I use an ATM is not what I would call a significant improvement in service.
Your reactions, please.
Many thanks.
Best
D
--
I haven't heard from them yet, but they promise a response between "3 to 6 business days", so it's not like they're tardy just yet.
D
I'm going to be in the market for the big Cinema Display pretty soon, and the one thing I would love to see in the next model is an iMac style arm so it's easy to position anywhere I want it.
That seems like such an obvious idea I'm surprised Apple hasn't done it.
Anyone know why not?
D
From the original example, it seemed to me that the guy mentioned was keeping himself awake with illegal drugs so he could spin. You do that long enough and you're not going to be fit to work anywhere.
e .h tm
I think it's reasonable to anticipate what you believe might happen and make your decisions accordingly. On the whole, I would probably prefer someone who had a less disruptive schedule for working on his dreams. I'm not against dreams, but if you do it until 5am and you have to work at 8, work's not going to, well, work out.
Concerning Bechtel and water, I happen to know that Bechtel has one of the best reputations on the planet for creating difficult projects rapidly and of high quality. Consider this indictment against them:
http://www.actagainstwar.org/article.php?id=208
That attack has virtually no facts. It doesn't tell us why Bechtel was in Bolivia in the first place, and it doesn't tell us what they did there. It just sneeringly implies that they were bad because they are a big corporation.
Well, they are a big, wealthy corporation. No question. But that doesn't mean they're bad people, or that they do a bad job. Check out their response to the Bolivian allegations:
http://www.bechtel.com/iraqdemonstrationrespons
I see more facts and considerably more detail than the allegations against Bechtel listed. Perhaps best of all, I see no sneering, contempt or name-calling tactics.
Anti-Bechtel literature implies that just because Rumsfield likes Bechtel, Bechtel is bad. Well, this is not true. If Rumsfield has tofu for breakfast, does that mean you shouldn't? If I were to make similar arguments, you wouuld quite rightly laugh me out of the room.
Anti-Bechtel literature implies that Bechtel is doing a poor job, primarily with sneering and insinuations, not facts. I think that if Bechtel was genuinely doing a lousy job, you could come up with more than the weak gruel I've been reading.
And, of course, at no time was Bechtel the Bolivian government. The government sanctioned the rate increases, and the government quelled the revolt. If you want to condemn someone, condemn the government for managing things poorly.
I'm not saying Bechtel consists of saints. Of course they want to make money! So would you, if you were investing the kinds of sums they are. But I am saying that you are listening to only one side of the story. Check out both sides and make up your mind. Give Bechtel a fair hearing and the truth might surprise you.
Finally (I really don't have time to address all the issues in your article), I checked out Michael Albert and Paraecon some time ago. If my memory serves, it says that skilled people who have in-demand abilities such as medicine or computers should, as part of the system, empty garbage cans and clean toilets as well.
I'm sorry, guy. On those terms, I much prefer the world as it is.
D
Well, I was really curious about what would be so superior to Apple's stuff, so I wandered around his various web sites and found that the "revolutionary" task-based user interface is simply making everything you can do with your computer require a wizard dressed up with HTML.
Wizards have been around since Windows 95. Making a wizard with a colourful background and a few more options instead of Windows Depresso Gray is hardly a revolution. After all, we have a few of those in Windows XP right now, and I don't see people begging for more. I'm certainly not, and I administrate a mixed network consisting of many Windows systems of various flavours. What's in XP isn't making my job any easier. In fact, I'd say it's a little harder than before.
But at least they dropped Windows Depresso Gray in XP, so I no longer feel like I'm attending someone's funeral when I check out the interface. (Instead, I feel like I'm attending some kind of obnoxious kids' party, which is an improvement, I guess).
If the new Longhorn UI is what passes for innovation in Microsoft land, I think Apple will stay on top for a while.
D
I have done a lot of research on this question, but have no practical experience.
:-(.
That being said, there are two points nobody's brought up yet.
First, if you want to live in a beautiful place, with design you'll enjoy living with, a stick-built house may be the only way to do it. A good architect will design a house for you that's designed to fit you, your needs and the site like hand in glove. That kind of expertise costs money, and blows up costs everywhere, but if you want something great, that will bring you joy over a lifetime, it's worth considering. The works of Christopher Alexander (The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, etc) express the appeal of this much better than I can. They are worth checking out (yes, even at their rather hideous prices) before you make a final decision.
The basic difference is that a pre-fab house is built out of resuable components. If those components don't fit the site, if there is a specific angle that needs to be used to make the best view, you're never going to see it. Alexander argues most persuasively that there is a moral and ethical failing about allowing houses to be built in such a cold, sterile way.
That being said, I'll bet you can figure out pretty easily what he thinks of tract housing. There would appear to be little advantage of a stick-built tract house over a pre-fab, since they are both following the same rules, and are not custom in any meaningful way.
If you are building on a hillside, and the View is an important aspect of what you want with your house, I would almost certainly say you want a stick-built house. If you're not a view buyer, I would say a pre-fab or tract style house might fit your needs.
If you're eyeing a lot in Malibu or Topanga Canyon in LA, be aware that you have to go through the same amazing two year planning and approval process including delightful Coastal Commission hearings and other fun stuff before you can put anything on a lot.
So if you're considering this to avoid those tiresome regulations, they apparently run right after you anyway
I know because I asked.
You may not be around Malibu or Topanga, but you should still find out what the rules are and make sure you follow them, or that you can get away without following them. (Topanga probably has more building code violations per acre than anywhere else in the world).
Hope that helps.
D
I don't know about correct, but it's worked for the decade or so I've been coding web pages.
For some reason I've been under the impression that not all browsers supported single quotes, but that probably shows my age more than anything else.
The rules as I knew them were that you don't have to quote anything unless it contains characters that appear to be spaces. That's not something specific to a list of HTML tags, it's a general rule that always works. So you would need to quote "The Great Foo" in this example:
<img src = foo.gif alt = "The Great Foo">
but not the name foo.gif itself, no matter what tag was involved.
If you take this literally - and the standards check things are as literal as things come - you have:
<input name = "variable_name" type = "text" size = "30">
As someone not used to quoting variable names, this is pretty jarring. I have always said
<input name = variable_name type = text size = 30>
without a problem.
I think what annoys me is the Rule Nazis basically say THEIR WAY is the One True HTML, and anyone who wants to code some other way is MORALLY WRONG. The older style is a lot easier on the eyes, at least for me, and I don't see why I have to be branded as an incompetent through their validation tools just because I'd rather write HTML the way I have for a decade. (amazing.com: Since 1994, and my web roots go even deeper).
I'm not a total reactionary - Cascading Style Sheets have value, because they let me simplify a page, create much better looking pages, and be more creative than I have been in the past. This is great, even if the syntax is convoluted and commands are sufficiently changed as to require a huge body of additional memorization. I'll conform like that when I see real and substantial benefits.
But I don't see how putting quotes where I used to omit them benefits anybody. I don't understand the moralistic attitude, which sneeringly implies that I'm killing kittens or poisoning the web by simply writing HTML which works in every browser that I've ever used.
Let me give you another example.
According to various references, the <center> tag is immoral. Instead, they want you to say <div align = "center">. They tell us that, in some abstract universe, this is easier to understand.
Certainly nobody outside the W3C can say that <div align = "center"> is easier for human beings to read or understand than <center>.
I code in a way that makes it easiest for me (and hopefully other humans) to read. So I still use <center>. If you talk to HTML purists about this tag, they would stare at you as though you're killing babies in the cradle.
Why? What's wrong with keeping HTML a language that's easy for humans to read, maintain and understand?
D
I think the main reason for avoiding CSS is that it is not easy to figure out, mainly due to the lack of error messages and feedback from browsers. It took me a long time to embrace CSS for that reason, although I have finally converted the front page of my personal site to it. Unfortunately, I have thousands of pages in the old style, developed over ten years of having a web site, and I have to say the task of even thinking of how to reorganize them is just overwhelming.
In order to convert my pages, I would have to say:
<a href = "http://www.amazing.com/">amazing.com<a>
instead of
<a href = http://www.amazing.com/>amazing.com<a>
I find that if I'm creating HTML through programs, the latter produces much more readable programs than the former, since I don't need to escape any quotes.
Especially with something like this:
<img src = "foo.gif" height = "100" width = "50">
Why should I have to say someting like:
print("<img src = \"foo.gif\" height = \"100\" width = \"50\">\n");
instead of
print("<img src = foo.gif height = 100 width = 50>");
What earthly purpose does quoting numbers serve? There is no programming language that I know of that requires, or even allows, quoted numbers as numeric values.
Now, I know in certain cases, omiting quotes doesn't work, but for properly encoded URLs it's completely safe as far as I can tell, since spaces are not allowed.
So why quote URLs when it makes programming harder? What higher purpose is served by that?
I find the religious attitude of strict HTML purists a little silly. If it's no harder to code a browser so omitting quotes works, why force them on people, when in many ways the old style was far more readable?
D
I think the guy's comments were spot on, actually.
If you use mind-altering substances to stay up all night, then the next morning you'll be tired half to death and won't be able to do good work. So unfortunately, that IS the business of an employer to know.
If he gets buzzed on Friday or Saturday night and spins his tunes, great!
But if he does it on Sunday-Thursday, he's probably going to be borderline at work all week.
If you are anti-capitalist, and hate the company you're working for, you're bound to do Bad Things to that company, or at least not support it loyally. I've known a few people like that, and I've experienced the situation when they've tried to be subversive and destroy the "awful" people they work for while happily cashing the paychecks. The employer's point of view is just as valid as yours.
If you don't want to work under "the man", start your own company. Figure out something the world wants, and then you can BE "the man". That's the flexibility of capitalism in action, and it's unbeatable.
But what really puzzles me is that you're against corporate control, but don't recognize that government control is far worse.
If your only choice is to work for the State, and the State doesn't like you, then you'll wind up in the gulag.
In the corporate world, you have a chance to work for a small company that tolerates your eccentricities, just as I do.
Ironically enough, you can only start your leftist website under capitalism, which provides all the gadgets you need - the servers, the bandwidth, and so on. Then it makes them available free or at a cost you can afford.
In Cuba, nobody's allowed to have a web site, and people are arrested and thrown in jail for 20+ years for having a lending library in their homes. Look it up if you don't believe me.
I've always been curious about what kind of world anti-capitalist types really want. Sure, it would be nice if the world didn't revolve around money, and you could have a nice house in Topanga Canyon for the price of hacking down a few trees, instead of half a mil for a tiny shack.
But in the end, we need stuff, whether it be food or Apple Cinema Displays, and we need people to work in an organized way to make stuff. Seems to me capitalism is the best way to accomplish this, with about as much fairness as can exist in a highly imperfect world.
D
They didn't mention licensing, but they did put in a 510w power supply.
Maybe they're using FreeBSD?
D
You missed this:
This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.
Of course I went through the whole rest of the article to see what OS they did use, and no dice. Maybe they're using Windows but don't want to be flamed by Slashdotters.
Seems to me RAID 5 would have given them better protection for just $250 more especially considering that the total cost of their system wound up over $3,000.
Their main argument against RAID 5 seems to be that if they don't use it, they can break out the drives and use them individually without reformatting; the information will simply be on the drives. But that means you couldn't stripe the drives at all, so you would have 5-250mb drives and not 1-1tb effective drive, which I thought was what they wanted.
Their final objection is that you couldn't expand to 2tb later since they only got an 8-drive case. I suppose this is because IDE cards can serve four drives each, so they would simply buy another IDE card. But they already need to, since they have a 110gb system drive. So they could hook up the fifth drive to that, and hook up the second array's fifth drive to it too.
So I think I'd seriously lean towards a 10-drive case and RAID 5. But that's just me, and it may expose my ignorance regarding hardware design. If you feel in the mood, feel free to tell me what I've left out.
D
I believe the article's links are to CNET's price comparison engine. If you buy something off the price comparison engine, the stores rebate a percentage of the price to CNET.
So yes, CNET hopes to gain revenue from the article.
I don't think that's bad - the writer deserves to be paid - but it should be considered when evaluting his statements.
D
This is the best response I've gotten, and I'd mod it up if I wasn't already a participant in the discussion. (Of course this is why I have plenty of points and almost never use them!)
But there are sites, such as Wired or the Washington Post, that have people creating content for money. To research investigative articles take the bucks to send them out in the field to find stuff, and pay them when they get back with usable information.
Slashdot survies as a parasite of sorts, since without news articles to comment on - virtually all of which are written by people who are paid for their words - the site wouldn't work.
And even Slashdot has a paid staff. Last time I looked, it was a pretty well paid staff too, and deservedly so. Those people need to eat so they can keep on thinking up cool stuff. And therefore, we have to figure out a decent way to pay them.
Banner ads seem to be as good a source as any.
D
I, too, remember the Internet as it was. It wasn't nearly as comprehensive a resource as it is now, and people could not reasonably use it as their sole daily news source, as they can today.
The fundamental problem is that people who create things on the net as their full-time jobs need to somehow get paid for the effort. Banner ads are not perfect, but so far nobody has found anythiing better to balance the needs of users with those of advertisers.
Once the Internet becomes more than a purely amateur medium, it requires the elements of professional publication, and one of them is ads. It's either that or pay, and I think those who complain most vociferously about banner ads are the least likely to fork out real bucks for content.
D
They switched to Windows with gigantic fanfare about a year or so ago. I was shocked and incomprehending, since it just didn't make any sense to do that given their Unix heritage.
I guess they're now back to Solaris, which is just where they were before.
So much for Microsoft's marketing.
D
I don't think anyone can accuse Simonyi of being dumb, but even smart guys have poor ideas.
... well, let's just say it doesn't exactly advance that goal.
I don't like Hungarian notation just because it makes my code look ugly. I spend a lot of time making things look clean and simple, and Hungarian notation
D