...you can now sit in your underwear in Omaha and learn French from a tutor in Paris.
and
...RosettaStudio, a place where a user can talk to a native speaker via video chat.
Poor foreigners with languages that people want to learn. They hope to teach people the delights of their own language rather than being forced to speak American (or even real English - that's what we speak in England;) ) and end up having a webcam foreign languages session with some guy in his briefs!
Besides, why would the companies want to give you a Fair Use right? Half of the point (if not the whole point) of DRM is to ensure that they get as much money as possible from those willing to pay. If that involves making laws that prohibit breaking DRM for personal use then so be it. If that also involves people having to buy in multiple formats for multiple players then not only "so be it", but you can bet they're rubbing their hands in glee in a method not suitable for children to see.
All sensible law should allow you to buy and own a copy that you can do what you want with, but companies push for law with more power than people and so the law isn't sensible.
It depends on your local law as to how enforceable the EULA is. I bought a game, I didn't pay for a license (at least not as far as it was presented to me). If nothing else, physical copies of the game will still work even if you do violate some obscure license clause ("you can't play this game while wearing red socks"), where as Steam and similar DRMed games are dead in the water as soon as your "license" to play is pulled.
As for your old games, just because you've lost or scratched them doesn't mean that everyone else has. Not working in current OSes is normally easily resolved with DOS Box/ScummVM or some other emulator.
You have read about the DMCA laws, haven't you? It doesn't matter what your intent is, if you're bypassing copy protection and other physical measures then you're automatically in league with the devil/paedophiles/terrorists. And that's just the start of the law - the big name companies seem to want to push it even further!
And....and what? I MUST KNOW! Although, if one of them is GfWL then maybe the other one was censored for our sanity and it is best kept secret!
I agree, though. Why put so much junk on games? The only way not to be treated like a criminal these days is to be a criminal and pirate the game! There's something seriously wrong when it gets to that. They need to focus on the important stuff (producing good stuff) rather than on the pointless arms race that is "defeating the pirates". If you make stuff good enough then people will pay for it, and if they're not going to pay for it then they're not part of your target audience, so stop wasting money on them.
Perhaps because 1) that can involve breaking the law (hacking machines) where as blocking people and making them tidy up doesn't, 2) the CnC nodes are getting more and more distributed, 3) that still leaves the bots on the machines, whether they're controlled or not and 4) chances are the CnC node is outside the ISPs control, where as the 100,000 bots are in their control and affecting resources they care about (like bandwidth and blacklisting of their IP addresses).
I can't avoid putting spaces in documents, but I put them in where they help clarity (e.g. between the variable, the equals and the value) and generally let the IDE's auto-format sort out the tabs (unless I'm working in a text editor like gEdit or Geany, at which point it is tabs at the start then spaces in the middle).
Naturally enough, it depends on your development environment.
True, which is why I find it kind of funny that some people get so irate over using tabs. Spaces are usable if you must, but I find tabs more flexible and easier to work with, especially in an IDE but also in a text editor and the console. Half of the space-users seem to go ballistic at the idea of tabs!
(Did you mean that Eclipse would replace spaces with tabs? Isn't that what you wanted?)
Yeah, Eclipse can auto-format to replace spaces at the start of a line with correct tab-based indentation (and probably the other way around if you set it, but I've not looked). It is what I wanted, and it solves the "what if you end up with a mix" problem. I just wish that more IDEs (like the two main.Net ones) supported it.
And you missed the point as well, so your solution is utterly broken;)
What if I downloaded code that used 8 spaces instead of tabs? Then I have no control over the indent depth whatsoever and so I have no choice but to keep scrolling horizontally. IMO that completely undermines the idea that using spaces is preferable, since different monitors resolutions and font sizes can make readable code unreadable.
Seriously, you people who argue for this one must all use IDEs and never let the code out of the IDE.
Nope, wrong:) I do PHP, Java and C# coding, plus some tinkering in other stuff.
copy&pasted into mail, Usenet, README files, various document formats
Mail is rare. Usenet never (not needed to). Readme files and Wikis get code dumps. I've put it in Word documents as well (and tabs are definitely better there).
run through less(1), grep(1) etc and viewed on a Unix terminal
Yep, done that with my code. Don't see what difference tabs versus spaces make - you're either seeing X character widths of tab or X spaces. Any tweaks on my server are done with Vi.
diffed and merged in various tools
Occasionally - mainly the IDE's built in one (Eclipse and MonoDevelop), plus diff and some GUI tool or other on Linux. Currently Diffuse, but I've used others (most of which were quite similar to diff)
printed on paper (rarely)
Again, rarely, but I have done it on occasion. As with the pasting to Word documents, tabs seemed like an advantage there.
Because using only spaces never causes confusion. Using only TABs can cause confusion in many cases, even if one never uses spaces for indenting.
I'd disagree there, but to each his own.
For example, you comment one line temporarily for a test. What happens to the tab that's now following a start comment character(s)?
Erm, it is still there, just as if it were a space? And some IDEs may even still keep your code lined up and not indent it further than its neighbours, or else it'll behave the same as spaces.
You merge two lines into one, what happens to the tab characters that are now inserted in the middle of a line?
What happens to the spaces in that situation? Same thing.
You break one line into two, will you need to convert the spaces into tabs?
Which spaces? Editors will have one of two behaviours: 1) be "intelligent" and keep the indenting at the same level (so it'll tab it the same depth) or 2) be "dumb" and drop it to the start of the line, at which point I tab it back to place with a couple of key strokes.
You cut and paste text from somewhere else, how will you make sure that the indentation contains only tabs?
How do you know that the indentation contains only spaces?;)
Have you ever copied text from a web page? From a PDF file? From a scanned+OCR'd paper?
Yes, yes, no. In the first two cases it works sometimes and not others, depending on whether it was done with tabs or spaces. The advantage if it was done with tabs is that it'll work no matter my tab width, where as spaces are going to be wrong for someone who uses 8 where people use 4 or whatever.
We have one character that means 'blank', having another one just for the sake of the few people who want a specially personalized indentation is a complication we can live without
No, we have one character that means "insert a single character space, such as might be found between two words" and one character that means "move the text to a fixed position according to the tab stop/width". Why overload one character when you can differentiate with two?;)
How can you ever be sure that in those and many other situations that all your lines contain the exact number of tabs?
How can you be sure that they contain the right number of spaces? Every time I've worked with space indenting then I've ended up realising that one method block was indented by 5 spaces instead of 4 only at the point where I paste some code that is indented 4 spaces. Tabs, on the other hand, are generally quite obviously wrong because they're a full layer of indenting out of step.
How can you be sure that your OCR, your document editor, and your PDF reader are configured to the same tab width as your code editor?
By configuring them? PDF shouldn't make a difference, since PDFs are about identical presentation. OCR and document editors are customisable, but even if they aren't then half of the point of tabs is that they can fit whatever width.
If your OCR reads 2x8char tabs instead of 4x4char then you've got half the indentation when you read it and it needs fixing, but it is just as likely to read 10/11/13 instead of 12 or whatever when using spaces. That's just called sanitising your inputs. Besides, how frequently do most people OCR their source code?
If people really want to use spaces then that's fine, I just find it interesting that so many of the reasons for spaces being better can apply equally well to tabs being better!
Why enforce never using tabs? Why not enforce never using spaces? Tabs are more flexible than spaces (developers can do their own width if they want) and as long as you're using *only* tabs then you're fine, just the same as if you're using *only* spaces then you're fine. "Only use spaces because tabs mess it up" is specious reasoning, because the inverse argument of "only use tabs because spaces mess it up" applies equally well.
As for the mess of code in OSS projects: 1) I'm sure it happens in commercial software as well, 2) that is what conventions are for - just convert the patch before you apply it and 3) decent IDEs (like Eclipse) will let you auto-format code, including swapping spaces to tabs for indentation, which ensures everyone uses the same and that copy&paste from other sources doesn't mess things up.
Just like how everything is nice and neat with spaces until someone puts spaces in (and you're not using as wide a width for your tabs as they used for spaces);)
That's the somewhat circular argument that works either way around - mandate one convention then have someone different use the other and your convention is broken and things don't look right. The difference is that "use tabs as the convention" lets you be flexible with indent width between developers but "use spaces as the convention" means everyone has to a) use the same width, even if they don't like it or b) screw up the VCS history with indentation fights as everyone keeps re-indenting to what they prefer.
Know thy test editor sir! Use the Ctrl key with cursor keys. We're not in the 70s anymore.....
Exactly, so why use spaces?;)
On a more serious note, that doesn't resolve issues with dropping a level of indent and moving up or down there. Ctrl+arrow would drop you to the start or end of the indent, not move you one level. Moving one level with spaces needs you to count (and to hope that "consistent use of spaces" is consistent).
1. With each commit you're making a tonne of SVN noise making it impossible to figure out if you accidentally checked in something you shouldn't have. You'd have a *lot* of explaining to do if I was your lead....
And the difference between that change (which is then flexible for anyone who wants any indent) and the people who have advocated spaces and said "well I just replace all of the spaces to meet my standard" is...? Whatever reason you're changing white-space for, you're making VCS noise.
2. How is 'well indented code using tabs' more maintainable than 'well indented code using spaces'? Attempting to argue that point will just make you look silly.
Tabs may be more maintainable between developers because of personal preferences, but beyond that I agree - indent method and maintainability aren't that closely linked.
3. I think you're confusing 'poorly formatted code' and 'code formatted with spaces'. I indent all of my code with 2 spaces. I can guarantee you that it does not need reformatting.
What if 2 spaces isn't a sufficient indent and I want 4? It needs reformatting. What if you're a space-indenter who also tries to align things (e.g. multi-line in-line array declarations) with their spaces rather than just indenting an extra layer and the length of a variable changes? It needs reformatting.
The first of those isn't a problem with tabs, and the second is a problem with using spaces and wasting time getting character column perfect alignment.
The solution there would be to either a) change your tab indent to something less than 5 or b) do something about your horrendous code to reduce all of the nesting (since it is only nesting, not code length that has changed).
Don't blame the rendering for issues in your code complexity;)
That'd be the first point then - code cleanup in Eclipse replaces tabs with spaces as "correct indentation". VS.Net may still be behind in that area (I know MonoDevelop is), but mixing is an unavoidable possibility whether you prefer tabs or spaces unless you have IDE tools to automatically resolve it.
Create file in VS.Net and put in tabs rendered at 8 spaces. Save. Copy to Linux. Edit with MonoDevelop, Eclipse, GEdit, Geany, etc with tabs rendered at 4 spaces. Make changes, with extra indent done at an extra tab deep (not spaces). Save. Copy back to Windows. Watch VS.Net render the code the same, except with the indents being wider. Line endings are about the only potential problem, but most IDEs handle that anyway and has nothing to do with tabs.
Never had a problem with tabs until spaces get in the mix, and then different conventions completely screw up your code. Different conventions with tabs (2, 4, 8 or other depths) are all fine, don't require changes to source code for each developer who has a different preference, and doesn't mess up your version control history with superfluous changes.
That is unless your developers are doing pointless and wasteful things like trying to align elements in in-line array initialisations (just indent them one level rather than getting perfect alignment, which will be messed up as soon as your variable name or type changes length) or trying to align multiple lines of method arguments (at which point you probably need to refactor to something more sensible anyway).
Eclipse has "code cleanup profiles" to handle that. Not sure about VS.Net - the last I used was 2005 and it was somewhat lacking in that area.
Or you just tell your developers "use tabs because tabs let everyone get what they want" and slap the ones who insist on using spaces until they do it right;)
OS X hits the sweet spot by not being too really or flashy? Seriously? The one thing I hate about OS X icons (and KDE) is that they're attempting to be almost photo-realistic and putting too much gloss on there for no real benefit other than looking hideous. I'd much rather have a more subdued, abstract and well structured set like Tango.
As for insights, I was hoping for insights in to how to use icons, what icons to use in specific situations (e.g. pointers on "how to get the right icon for an abstract concept with no physical counter-part), and what aspects of an icon make it good. Instead it went for bland hand-waving of "look, remove all of the identifiable detail and you can't tell what it is, but make it too specific and it is too specific for people to easily recognise as a general concept".
It was like trying to explain how to ask about someone's blog and saying "don't call it 'your written stuff' because that's too vague to apply to the one thing, and don't call it 'your innermost diatribe on the wide and various ponderances of the social and psychological experiences of the human condition within the immediate vicinity identified as your local environment that you store in a complex form of binary digits within an automated system purposefully designed for the storage and retrieval of data that is interfaced by a custom creation of scripting language statements to extract said data and present it to the multitudinous visitors to the virtual location that is its presentation to the outside world...' because that's too specific and confusing and doesn't define a generic concept". Just seemed like a bit of a "well, duh" moment, and I'm a techy rather than artistic person.
The Tango project tried to stay multi-lingual and meaningful to as many people as possible by representing the action rather than playing word games. They did still have huge problems with ideas for some icons, though, as the concepts were just too vague. I tend to find the Tango icons quite sensible for meanings, but someone must have done some image processing and interpretation research on them.
I don't suppose you'll ever get perfect recognition, since most of the actions on a computer can be quite abstract anyway and so don't always have perfect mappings, but sometimes the image must be more understandable (especially in the space available) than what could be a few words or more.
You say that, but I've been using a "remote generation of gaming images" system for years and there is basically no lag. Okay, the catalogue of games is a little limited, but the control and response is amazing. Distance? I'd say about three or four feet from the input and output devices to the box that generates my images. Definitely remote from the devices and definitely working over wires without latency issues.
So, it is already working, and I can't see why I'd want to change to this new one.
And the problem with consoles is that they're not as good as PCs. I've checked comparative screenshots and the PS3 can come close, but the XBox360 tends to look shoddy. PCs these days can pump out way more frames at higher resolutions than consoles (actually, I think they've always done that, but consoles are at least up at decent resolutions now), so I'd still rather have my PC.
Depends how they do it. Sky let you rent or 'buy' episodes of House at £1.50 and £2 per pop respectively. That doesn't sound bad, and given that pretty much the only things me and the wife watch on Sky that we can't get on Freesat (free to air satellite) are House and Bones then it might work out cheaper than our Sky bill, even if we buy them.
The down side is that "buy" doesn't seem to be buy. It seems to be a still DRMed perpetual rental, so I'm getting the worst of buying (higher price and not replaced if I lose/delete/damage it) with the worst of renting (I could at any point get screwed over by the DRM crapping out or Sky's service disappearing, and I can't use it as I want).
Oh, and it seems to run on Silverlight as well and require Media Player 10, or something.
Or any law on the Internet, for that matter. I'm in the UK but the servers I rent are in the US, so I'm aware that the American government may have no qualms at all about implementing their (stupid or otherwise) legislation on my site and it is reasonable enough, since that is where the server sits.
The problem comes if I had a server in the UK and they try the same thing - they'll sure as hell feel that they have a right to enforce their laws (because it is relevant to an American citizen, damnit) but if my nation doesn't have a DMCA law, I'm not in their nation and the server isn't in their nation then there is no way that any sensible implementation of cross-border justice should apply. Of course, "sensible" is the key stumbling block there.
I guess the 4th Amendment would still apply to info about US citizens on foreign servers being accessed by US authority (since the subject and the authority are American and not doing that would create one hell of a wonderful loophole for nations to target their own people by going outside their borders) but if it is a foreign server with foreign access then you're playing by foreign rules.
Slashdot Mirror
and
Poor foreigners with languages that people want to learn. They hope to teach people the delights of their own language rather than being forced to speak American (or even real English - that's what we speak in England ;) ) and end up having a webcam foreign languages session with some guy in his briefs!
Besides, why would the companies want to give you a Fair Use right? Half of the point (if not the whole point) of DRM is to ensure that they get as much money as possible from those willing to pay. If that involves making laws that prohibit breaking DRM for personal use then so be it. If that also involves people having to buy in multiple formats for multiple players then not only "so be it", but you can bet they're rubbing their hands in glee in a method not suitable for children to see.
All sensible law should allow you to buy and own a copy that you can do what you want with, but companies push for law with more power than people and so the law isn't sensible.
It depends on your local law as to how enforceable the EULA is. I bought a game, I didn't pay for a license (at least not as far as it was presented to me). If nothing else, physical copies of the game will still work even if you do violate some obscure license clause ("you can't play this game while wearing red socks"), where as Steam and similar DRMed games are dead in the water as soon as your "license" to play is pulled.
As for your old games, just because you've lost or scratched them doesn't mean that everyone else has. Not working in current OSes is normally easily resolved with DOS Box/ScummVM or some other emulator.
You have read about the DMCA laws, haven't you? It doesn't matter what your intent is, if you're bypassing copy protection and other physical measures then you're automatically in league with the devil/paedophiles/terrorists. And that's just the start of the law - the big name companies seem to want to push it even further!
And....and what? I MUST KNOW! Although, if one of them is GfWL then maybe the other one was censored for our sanity and it is best kept secret!
I agree, though. Why put so much junk on games? The only way not to be treated like a criminal these days is to be a criminal and pirate the game! There's something seriously wrong when it gets to that. They need to focus on the important stuff (producing good stuff) rather than on the pointless arms race that is "defeating the pirates". If you make stuff good enough then people will pay for it, and if they're not going to pay for it then they're not part of your target audience, so stop wasting money on them.
Perhaps because 1) that can involve breaking the law (hacking machines) where as blocking people and making them tidy up doesn't, 2) the CnC nodes are getting more and more distributed, 3) that still leaves the bots on the machines, whether they're controlled or not and 4) chances are the CnC node is outside the ISPs control, where as the 100,000 bots are in their control and affecting resources they care about (like bandwidth and blacklisting of their IP addresses).
I can't avoid putting spaces in documents, but I put them in where they help clarity (e.g. between the variable, the equals and the value) and generally let the IDE's auto-format sort out the tabs (unless I'm working in a text editor like gEdit or Geany, at which point it is tabs at the start then spaces in the middle).
True, which is why I find it kind of funny that some people get so irate over using tabs. Spaces are usable if you must, but I find tabs more flexible and easier to work with, especially in an IDE but also in a text editor and the console. Half of the space-users seem to go ballistic at the idea of tabs!
Yeah, Eclipse can auto-format to replace spaces at the start of a line with correct tab-based indentation (and probably the other way around if you set it, but I've not looked). It is what I wanted, and it solves the "what if you end up with a mix" problem. I just wish that more IDEs (like the two main .Net ones) supported it.
And you missed the point as well, so your solution is utterly broken ;)
What if I downloaded code that used 8 spaces instead of tabs? Then I have no control over the indent depth whatsoever and so I have no choice but to keep scrolling horizontally. IMO that completely undermines the idea that using spaces is preferable, since different monitors resolutions and font sizes can make readable code unreadable.
Nope, wrong :) I do PHP, Java and C# coding, plus some tinkering in other stuff.
Mail is rare. Usenet never (not needed to). Readme files and Wikis get code dumps. I've put it in Word documents as well (and tabs are definitely better there).
Yep, done that with my code. Don't see what difference tabs versus spaces make - you're either seeing X character widths of tab or X spaces. Any tweaks on my server are done with Vi.
Occasionally - mainly the IDE's built in one (Eclipse and MonoDevelop), plus diff and some GUI tool or other on Linux. Currently Diffuse, but I've used others (most of which were quite similar to diff)
Again, rarely, but I have done it on occasion. As with the pasting to Word documents, tabs seemed like an advantage there.
I'd disagree there, but to each his own.
Erm, it is still there, just as if it were a space? And some IDEs may even still keep your code lined up and not indent it further than its neighbours, or else it'll behave the same as spaces.
What happens to the spaces in that situation? Same thing.
Which spaces? Editors will have one of two behaviours: 1) be "intelligent" and keep the indenting at the same level (so it'll tab it the same depth) or 2) be "dumb" and drop it to the start of the line, at which point I tab it back to place with a couple of key strokes.
How do you know that the indentation contains only spaces? ;)
Yes, yes, no. In the first two cases it works sometimes and not others, depending on whether it was done with tabs or spaces. The advantage if it was done with tabs is that it'll work no matter my tab width, where as spaces are going to be wrong for someone who uses 8 where people use 4 or whatever.
No, we have one character that means "insert a single character space, such as might be found between two words" and one character that means "move the text to a fixed position according to the tab stop/width". Why overload one character when you can differentiate with two? ;)
How can you be sure that they contain the right number of spaces? Every time I've worked with space indenting then I've ended up realising that one method block was indented by 5 spaces instead of 4 only at the point where I paste some code that is indented 4 spaces. Tabs, on the other hand, are generally quite obviously wrong because they're a full layer of indenting out of step.
By configuring them? PDF shouldn't make a difference, since PDFs are about identical presentation. OCR and document editors are customisable, but even if they aren't then half of the point of tabs is that they can fit whatever width.
If your OCR reads 2x8char tabs instead of 4x4char then you've got half the indentation when you read it and it needs fixing, but it is just as likely to read 10/11/13 instead of 12 or whatever when using spaces. That's just called sanitising your inputs. Besides, how frequently do most people OCR their source code?
If people really want to use spaces then that's fine, I just find it interesting that so many of the reasons for spaces being better can apply equally well to tabs being better!
Why enforce never using tabs? Why not enforce never using spaces? Tabs are more flexible than spaces (developers can do their own width if they want) and as long as you're using *only* tabs then you're fine, just the same as if you're using *only* spaces then you're fine. "Only use spaces because tabs mess it up" is specious reasoning, because the inverse argument of "only use tabs because spaces mess it up" applies equally well.
As for the mess of code in OSS projects: 1) I'm sure it happens in commercial software as well, 2) that is what conventions are for - just convert the patch before you apply it and 3) decent IDEs (like Eclipse) will let you auto-format code, including swapping spaces to tabs for indentation, which ensures everyone uses the same and that copy&paste from other sources doesn't mess things up.
Just like how everything is nice and neat with spaces until someone puts spaces in (and you're not using as wide a width for your tabs as they used for spaces) ;)
That's the somewhat circular argument that works either way around - mandate one convention then have someone different use the other and your convention is broken and things don't look right. The difference is that "use tabs as the convention" lets you be flexible with indent width between developers but "use spaces as the convention" means everyone has to a) use the same width, even if they don't like it or b) screw up the VCS history with indentation fights as everyone keeps re-indenting to what they prefer.
Exactly, so why use spaces? ;)
On a more serious note, that doesn't resolve issues with dropping a level of indent and moving up or down there. Ctrl+arrow would drop you to the start or end of the indent, not move you one level. Moving one level with spaces needs you to count (and to hope that "consistent use of spaces" is consistent).
And the difference between that change (which is then flexible for anyone who wants any indent) and the people who have advocated spaces and said "well I just replace all of the spaces to meet my standard" is...? Whatever reason you're changing white-space for, you're making VCS noise.
Tabs may be more maintainable between developers because of personal preferences, but beyond that I agree - indent method and maintainability aren't that closely linked.
What if 2 spaces isn't a sufficient indent and I want 4? It needs reformatting. What if you're a space-indenter who also tries to align things (e.g. multi-line in-line array declarations) with their spaces rather than just indenting an extra layer and the length of a variable changes? It needs reformatting.
The first of those isn't a problem with tabs, and the second is a problem with using spaces and wasting time getting character column perfect alignment.
The solution there would be to either a) change your tab indent to something less than 5 or b) do something about your horrendous code to reduce all of the nesting (since it is only nesting, not code length that has changed).
Don't blame the rendering for issues in your code complexity ;)
That'd be the first point then - code cleanup in Eclipse replaces tabs with spaces as "correct indentation". VS.Net may still be behind in that area (I know MonoDevelop is), but mixing is an unavoidable possibility whether you prefer tabs or spaces unless you have IDE tools to automatically resolve it.
What weird-arse editors are you using?
Create file in VS.Net and put in tabs rendered at 8 spaces. Save. Copy to Linux. Edit with MonoDevelop, Eclipse, GEdit, Geany, etc with tabs rendered at 4 spaces. Make changes, with extra indent done at an extra tab deep (not spaces). Save. Copy back to Windows. Watch VS.Net render the code the same, except with the indents being wider. Line endings are about the only potential problem, but most IDEs handle that anyway and has nothing to do with tabs.
Never had a problem with tabs until spaces get in the mix, and then different conventions completely screw up your code. Different conventions with tabs (2, 4, 8 or other depths) are all fine, don't require changes to source code for each developer who has a different preference, and doesn't mess up your version control history with superfluous changes.
That is unless your developers are doing pointless and wasteful things like trying to align elements in in-line array initialisations (just indent them one level rather than getting perfect alignment, which will be messed up as soon as your variable name or type changes length) or trying to align multiple lines of method arguments (at which point you probably need to refactor to something more sensible anyway).
Eclipse has "code cleanup profiles" to handle that. Not sure about VS.Net - the last I used was 2005 and it was somewhat lacking in that area.
Or you just tell your developers "use tabs because tabs let everyone get what they want" and slap the ones who insist on using spaces until they do it right ;)
OS X hits the sweet spot by not being too really or flashy? Seriously? The one thing I hate about OS X icons (and KDE) is that they're attempting to be almost photo-realistic and putting too much gloss on there for no real benefit other than looking hideous. I'd much rather have a more subdued, abstract and well structured set like Tango.
As for insights, I was hoping for insights in to how to use icons, what icons to use in specific situations (e.g. pointers on "how to get the right icon for an abstract concept with no physical counter-part), and what aspects of an icon make it good. Instead it went for bland hand-waving of "look, remove all of the identifiable detail and you can't tell what it is, but make it too specific and it is too specific for people to easily recognise as a general concept".
It was like trying to explain how to ask about someone's blog and saying "don't call it 'your written stuff' because that's too vague to apply to the one thing, and don't call it 'your innermost diatribe on the wide and various ponderances of the social and psychological experiences of the human condition within the immediate vicinity identified as your local environment that you store in a complex form of binary digits within an automated system purposefully designed for the storage and retrieval of data that is interfaced by a custom creation of scripting language statements to extract said data and present it to the multitudinous visitors to the virtual location that is its presentation to the outside world...' because that's too specific and confusing and doesn't define a generic concept". Just seemed like a bit of a "well, duh" moment, and I'm a techy rather than artistic person.
You mean the vague, hand-waving and self-confessed unscientific graph that said "you need just enough abstraction but not too much"? ;)
The Tango project tried to stay multi-lingual and meaningful to as many people as possible by representing the action rather than playing word games. They did still have huge problems with ideas for some icons, though, as the concepts were just too vague. I tend to find the Tango icons quite sensible for meanings, but someone must have done some image processing and interpretation research on them.
I don't suppose you'll ever get perfect recognition, since most of the actions on a computer can be quite abstract anyway and so don't always have perfect mappings, but sometimes the image must be more understandable (especially in the space available) than what could be a few words or more.
And at the end of it I still don't know how abstract a picture should be - unless you count "just abstract enough" as an answer!
I was hoping for some insight and all I got was pretty pictures and hand-waving :(
You say that, but I've been using a "remote generation of gaming images" system for years and there is basically no lag. Okay, the catalogue of games is a little limited, but the control and response is amazing. Distance? I'd say about three or four feet from the input and output devices to the box that generates my images. Definitely remote from the devices and definitely working over wires without latency issues.
So, it is already working, and I can't see why I'd want to change to this new one.
And the problem with consoles is that they're not as good as PCs. I've checked comparative screenshots and the PS3 can come close, but the XBox360 tends to look shoddy. PCs these days can pump out way more frames at higher resolutions than consoles (actually, I think they've always done that, but consoles are at least up at decent resolutions now), so I'd still rather have my PC.
Depends how they do it. Sky let you rent or 'buy' episodes of House at £1.50 and £2 per pop respectively. That doesn't sound bad, and given that pretty much the only things me and the wife watch on Sky that we can't get on Freesat (free to air satellite) are House and Bones then it might work out cheaper than our Sky bill, even if we buy them.
The down side is that "buy" doesn't seem to be buy. It seems to be a still DRMed perpetual rental, so I'm getting the worst of buying (higher price and not replaced if I lose/delete/damage it) with the worst of renting (I could at any point get screwed over by the DRM crapping out or Sky's service disappearing, and I can't use it as I want).
Oh, and it seems to run on Silverlight as well and require Media Player 10, or something.
Or any law on the Internet, for that matter. I'm in the UK but the servers I rent are in the US, so I'm aware that the American government may have no qualms at all about implementing their (stupid or otherwise) legislation on my site and it is reasonable enough, since that is where the server sits.
The problem comes if I had a server in the UK and they try the same thing - they'll sure as hell feel that they have a right to enforce their laws (because it is relevant to an American citizen, damnit) but if my nation doesn't have a DMCA law, I'm not in their nation and the server isn't in their nation then there is no way that any sensible implementation of cross-border justice should apply. Of course, "sensible" is the key stumbling block there.
I guess the 4th Amendment would still apply to info about US citizens on foreign servers being accessed by US authority (since the subject and the authority are American and not doing that would create one hell of a wonderful loophole for nations to target their own people by going outside their borders) but if it is a foreign server with foreign access then you're playing by foreign rules.