How many websites have you seen that say "here's a PDF of a document - you'll need to download Adobe Reader [insert link] if you want to view it" and how many say "here's a PDF of a document - you'll need to download a PDF reader such as Adobe Reader [insert link], Foxit [insert link],... if you want to view it"? Most commercial sites that distribute PDFs recommend Adobe, and if you're not a techy then you'll assume that Adobe is all you can use. Why do you think so many people used IE6 when Firefox and Opera were available?
Complaining that initial download contains 9.1 vs 9.1.2 is just splitting hairs.
That depends on the difference between 9.1 and 9.1.2. If the difference is a week or two (i.e. the bug fixes haven't been out long) then it's not unreasonable to have a delay updating the download (although it would obviously be better to update it as well rather than distribute known vulnerabilities). If the difference between them is several months or more then it's less excusable and they've had plenty of time to update it.
Encrypting just/home is a bit of a half-arsed attempt. What about any files that get copied to/tmp? Better is to use Fedora and create a fully encrypted machine (except a tiny/boot partition, which it won't let you encrypt and which needs root permissions to write to anyway).
Re:Why are people still on FTP - Firewalls, perhap
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R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
Not when it is a corporate network, they have their own certificate installed in your browser as "auto-approved", and all communication is re-encrypted using that certificate (and so looks like HTTPS) by the proxy server. Yes, it is a MITM attack, but if your certificate is installed and says it is valid for all domains then no browser will complain.
And then you just leave yourself with outdated and potentially bug-riddled software still installed on your machine. The better option would be to remove IE completely if you don't use it, but that's obviously not possible;)
I never liked any of the Radio 1 DJs or the seeming dance focus to the music, the Radio 2 DJs seemed to waffle on too much (especially Jonathan Ross), and the rest was all too old. In general the BBC is probably as good in radio as it is on TV (I'm a lot happier now that the F1 is back on the Beeb and most stuff I watch is either BBC or US imports on Sky 1) but the radio stations never seemed to have enough rock on them. I think I used to ignore adverts because half of them were musical and blended in to some degree anyway (although some are quite jarring).
Re:Why are people still on FTP - Firewalls, perhap
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R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
Unless the bit where they seem to do some kind of protocol sniffing and make sure that HTTP traffic is HTTP traffic gets in the way (so we can't check out SVN over HTTP because it rejects some commands it needs for not being POST or GET). The main corporate network also intercepts HTTPS and accesses the site for you, returning content using its own certificate (if the site is approved), although it doesn't seem to do that on our developer network.
It's still a valid PNG, so it shouldn't crash IE when you open it. Based on the examples then it looks ugly as hell (it's more "render the file as-is but interpret as RGBA colours in a PNG" than "discretely hide the important data in some way" ala Spore's creature photos), but it is still an image.
That said, I wouldn't trust some versions of IE not to choke on standard 32-bit PNGs anyway:D
At least GTK does things properly and doesn't leave you accidentally opening something when you meant to select it or accidentally selecting something by hovering over it;)
rental services have died a horrible death because DVD/CD media has become affordable enough not to pirate them
I think that depends on the rental service. I've got an account with LoveFilm and can rent as many DVDs as I want each month for ~£15. Even when DVDs are cheap there's no way I'm getting the number of films I can watch for that kind of money!
As for the tie-in, maybe the DRM is where it lies - the service will be free as long as you're using a Windows Vista/7 PC or a Zune!
Then it's just 50% annoying chat instead of adverts;) It's the one thing I don't like about radio - there's too much inane chatter from the DJs. Much better to listen to some of the "music only" stations on Sky (and probably on DAB as well - at least for some of them).
Except the problem that slows most of our desktop machines down at work is the huge number of background processes chewing processor time rather than memory limits. Also, I think a lot of corporate environments have special suppliers for things like computer hardware and so while 4GB of DDR2 memory off the shelf is cheap a) that's not the price they see it at (add on a premium plus install cost) and b) it's still a cost they've got to justify, no matter how small it is.
Why are people still on FTP - Firewalls, perhaps?
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R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
Maybe people still use FTP rather than SFTP because of firewalls. At work we've got a firewall that blocks all unexpected ports and even does a degree of protocol checking on the expected ports. We're allowed to use the Net for personal use at lunch etc, and we have a proxy for FTP that lets use get at FTP servers, but anything encrypted like SSH/SFTP is right out.
It's probably not just the old legacy apps that don't support the protocols (which people will keep on using once they've bought them if they're expensive for the new ones and it isn't a commercial site) and a lack of knowledge, but sometimes it'll be technical limitations as well. FTP is a nice common denominator that people can rely on more than encrypted stuff.
Re:Seriously people use anything but ssh/scp/sftp?
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R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
Stealing a key-pair is *so* much easier than stealing 47 different passwords I'm amazed people use anything else.
There, fixed that for you;)
(Yes, you can put a pass-phrase on your key-pair, but then you're still either at the point of having one password for everything or having 47 key-pairs and 47 passwords;) )
I'd expect behaviour when using to be the same, but behaviour on first opening is down to the application. If the app sets the properties wrong then the wrong folder may be selected (e.g. the parent folder thing).
As for the KDE file picker, the only times I've ever used it then it's been adequate but nothing amazing - much like Windows, which does just barely enough and nothing more.
When I just click the OK button to use the current directory, it uses the current directory.
When I use the crumbtrail to navigate to a parent directory then yes the old directory is still selected, but it saves it in that parent directory (so bad feedback, but the behaviour is as expected).
When I open the file picker later it always seems to open the same directory, not its parent. Some of the Qt apps I use always default back to ~/. My guess is that's apps as much as the UI, as I've done similar work in WinForms UIs and know exactly how you could trigger it.
I think you're using a slightly broken version of the file picker;)
Is that not a Qt4 thing, the same as them looking completely native with other widgets? I've got some Qt4 apps, but others are still Qt3 and aren't likely to update soon. And that's all in openSuse rather than any version of Ubuntu;)
Very good article, and I definitely agree with most of it. Things like the search in the Firefox "Fantasmical bar" are all well and good, but I don't always want to search and sometimes searching is less efficient. Unfortunately, my experience with the Firefox bar is similar to the comments in the article - someone comes up with what they think is a great new UI and because they know how it works then they assume it'll work for everyone in every situation and don't want to give it up or accept criticism of it.
Seems like it's a big divide. Personally I much prefer the Gnome file picker over any other, but it has been ages (seems like years) since I last had to use "browse for other folders". No, that's not because I only ever dump stuff in a single folder, that's just because it's always expanded on my machines. I've got a couple of QT apps installed on my home machine and the file picker in their feels like a big step backwards to the old Windows days. The "places" and the cookie crumb for location can be very useful.
what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) should do their work for them and magically organise everything behind the scenes.
And then there's the bit that always gets me (and which annoys me with some of the Firefox 3 results and can be a touch annoying with too many Gnome Do extensions): They also want to to magically understand what they meant when they try to find files from the magical file system.
People have these fantastic ideas about "intelligent applications" that guess what you want, but there are just too many times when they can't/don't get it right because I know what I want and could do it quickly with a "dumb" system, but it is ambiguous to a "smart" system and so it returns excess cruft that I need to filter out.
And before anyone mentions "learning" with smart systems, that's all well and good until I want to do a different but similar behaviour, at which point it is more buried than it should be because it has "learned" that I only ever do the normal thing;)
Pay for a copy for my personal use and I'll compare the professional version;)
I've used the full version of 2003 because we got it free through University for non-commercial use and it was terrible. 2005 Express is a definite improvement, but I'd still rather have the power of something equivalent to Eclipse, if only it wasn't written in Java for doing C# work.
Strangely, I do Java work as my day job in Eclipse and C# in my spare time using Visual Studio (2005 Express) and MonoDevelop. While I prefer C# as a language overall, I'd much rather have something like Eclipse for C#! There's so much more power to it in terms of refactoring and other features that it puts the minimal functionality that Visual Studio always had to shame.
C is a stupid strawman here. Nobody is porting anything to C.
So you're knocking down the strawman of C but not putting up any arguments on the "porting to C++" front?
I find it funny how kids these days think C# brings something new to table.
It doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table since Java had generics and GC first, and other languages probably do the delegates. What it does do, though, is wrap some of the Java-like functionality up in a nicer package for some people that integrates better with many desktops.
Working with objects in an OO environment where you talk about objects and properties? Well now you actually get a distinction in your code between functions/methods and properties. Want to subscribe one method to be called on three different events? You don't need to implement interfaces, add yourself and implement three different methods that do the same thing. Want to subscribe three different methods of one object to the same event? You can actually do it with delegates.
They don't have what it takes to do it in C++, but require the safety wheels of static typing in order to keep their spaghetti manageable.
Personally, I'd just rather not write the spaghetti in the first place as it's a much more productive and enjoyable use of my time.
Writing without static typing can be done without too much effort on your own (it's effectively what you had to do in Java/C# before generics when you used collections - treat everything as a known type and assume that's all that's in there), but making sure that extensions and customisations don't break your code becomes debugging from stack traces and crashes once your app is running rather than finding that your app isn't doing what it should at the compile stage.
That doesn't explain how you can tax an open standard. As Mr2001 pointed out (and as I've seen mentioned by one of the Mono team) if Microsoft move a new iteration of C# in a direction that isn't compatible with open source (probably through patent issues) then all Mono does is continues to implement the previous standard and carries on with its own work in its own direction. It'll still be cross-platform, it'll still conform to C# standards, and it'll still be compatible with Microsoft's.Net framework, just not the very latest version.
Slashdot Mirror
How many websites have you seen that say "here's a PDF of a document - you'll need to download Adobe Reader [insert link] if you want to view it" and how many say "here's a PDF of a document - you'll need to download a PDF reader such as Adobe Reader [insert link], Foxit [insert link], ... if you want to view it"? Most commercial sites that distribute PDFs recommend Adobe, and if you're not a techy then you'll assume that Adobe is all you can use. Why do you think so many people used IE6 when Firefox and Opera were available?
That depends on the difference between 9.1 and 9.1.2. If the difference is a week or two (i.e. the bug fixes haven't been out long) then it's not unreasonable to have a delay updating the download (although it would obviously be better to update it as well rather than distribute known vulnerabilities). If the difference between them is several months or more then it's less excusable and they've had plenty of time to update it.
Encrypting just /home is a bit of a half-arsed attempt. What about any files that get copied to /tmp? Better is to use Fedora and create a fully encrypted machine (except a tiny /boot partition, which it won't let you encrypt and which needs root permissions to write to anyway).
Not when it is a corporate network, they have their own certificate installed in your browser as "auto-approved", and all communication is re-encrypted using that certificate (and so looks like HTTPS) by the proxy server. Yes, it is a MITM attack, but if your certificate is installed and says it is valid for all domains then no browser will complain.
And then you just leave yourself with outdated and potentially bug-riddled software still installed on your machine. The better option would be to remove IE completely if you don't use it, but that's obviously not possible ;)
I never liked any of the Radio 1 DJs or the seeming dance focus to the music, the Radio 2 DJs seemed to waffle on too much (especially Jonathan Ross), and the rest was all too old. In general the BBC is probably as good in radio as it is on TV (I'm a lot happier now that the F1 is back on the Beeb and most stuff I watch is either BBC or US imports on Sky 1) but the radio stations never seemed to have enough rock on them. I think I used to ignore adverts because half of them were musical and blended in to some degree anyway (although some are quite jarring).
Unless the bit where they seem to do some kind of protocol sniffing and make sure that HTTP traffic is HTTP traffic gets in the way (so we can't check out SVN over HTTP because it rejects some commands it needs for not being POST or GET). The main corporate network also intercepts HTTPS and accesses the site for you, returning content using its own certificate (if the site is approved), although it doesn't seem to do that on our developer network.
It's still a valid PNG, so it shouldn't crash IE when you open it. Based on the examples then it looks ugly as hell (it's more "render the file as-is but interpret as RGBA colours in a PNG" than "discretely hide the important data in some way" ala Spore's creature photos), but it is still an image.
That said, I wouldn't trust some versions of IE not to choke on standard 32-bit PNGs anyway :D
At least GTK does things properly and doesn't leave you accidentally opening something when you meant to select it or accidentally selecting something by hovering over it ;)
I think that depends on the rental service. I've got an account with LoveFilm and can rent as many DVDs as I want each month for ~£15. Even when DVDs are cheap there's no way I'm getting the number of films I can watch for that kind of money!
As for the tie-in, maybe the DRM is where it lies - the service will be free as long as you're using a Windows Vista/7 PC or a Zune!
Then it's just 50% annoying chat instead of adverts ;) It's the one thing I don't like about radio - there's too much inane chatter from the DJs. Much better to listen to some of the "music only" stations on Sky (and probably on DAB as well - at least for some of them).
Except the problem that slows most of our desktop machines down at work is the huge number of background processes chewing processor time rather than memory limits. Also, I think a lot of corporate environments have special suppliers for things like computer hardware and so while 4GB of DDR2 memory off the shelf is cheap a) that's not the price they see it at (add on a premium plus install cost) and b) it's still a cost they've got to justify, no matter how small it is.
Maybe people still use FTP rather than SFTP because of firewalls. At work we've got a firewall that blocks all unexpected ports and even does a degree of protocol checking on the expected ports. We're allowed to use the Net for personal use at lunch etc, and we have a proxy for FTP that lets use get at FTP servers, but anything encrypted like SSH/SFTP is right out.
It's probably not just the old legacy apps that don't support the protocols (which people will keep on using once they've bought them if they're expensive for the new ones and it isn't a commercial site) and a lack of knowledge, but sometimes it'll be technical limitations as well. FTP is a nice common denominator that people can rely on more than encrypted stuff.
There, fixed that for you ;)
(Yes, you can put a pass-phrase on your key-pair, but then you're still either at the point of having one password for everything or having 47 key-pairs and 47 passwords ;) )
I'd expect behaviour when using to be the same, but behaviour on first opening is down to the application. If the app sets the properties wrong then the wrong folder may be selected (e.g. the parent folder thing).
As for the KDE file picker, the only times I've ever used it then it's been adequate but nothing amazing - much like Windows, which does just barely enough and nothing more.
When I just click the OK button to use the current directory, it uses the current directory.
When I use the crumbtrail to navigate to a parent directory then yes the old directory is still selected, but it saves it in that parent directory (so bad feedback, but the behaviour is as expected).
When I open the file picker later it always seems to open the same directory, not its parent. Some of the Qt apps I use always default back to ~/. My guess is that's apps as much as the UI, as I've done similar work in WinForms UIs and know exactly how you could trigger it.
I think you're using a slightly broken version of the file picker ;)
Is that not a Qt4 thing, the same as them looking completely native with other widgets? I've got some Qt4 apps, but others are still Qt3 and aren't likely to update soon. And that's all in openSuse rather than any version of Ubuntu ;)
Very good article, and I definitely agree with most of it. Things like the search in the Firefox "Fantasmical bar" are all well and good, but I don't always want to search and sometimes searching is less efficient. Unfortunately, my experience with the Firefox bar is similar to the comments in the article - someone comes up with what they think is a great new UI and because they know how it works then they assume it'll work for everyone in every situation and don't want to give it up or accept criticism of it.
Seems like it's a big divide. Personally I much prefer the Gnome file picker over any other, but it has been ages (seems like years) since I last had to use "browse for other folders". No, that's not because I only ever dump stuff in a single folder, that's just because it's always expanded on my machines. I've got a couple of QT apps installed on my home machine and the file picker in their feels like a big step backwards to the old Windows days. The "places" and the cookie crumb for location can be very useful.
And then there's the bit that always gets me (and which annoys me with some of the Firefox 3 results and can be a touch annoying with too many Gnome Do extensions): They also want to to magically understand what they meant when they try to find files from the magical file system.
People have these fantastic ideas about "intelligent applications" that guess what you want, but there are just too many times when they can't/don't get it right because I know what I want and could do it quickly with a "dumb" system, but it is ambiguous to a "smart" system and so it returns excess cruft that I need to filter out.
And before anyone mentions "learning" with smart systems, that's all well and good until I want to do a different but similar behaviour, at which point it is more buried than it should be because it has "learned" that I only ever do the normal thing ;)
Pay for a copy for my personal use and I'll compare the professional version ;)
I've used the full version of 2003 because we got it free through University for non-commercial use and it was terrible. 2005 Express is a definite improvement, but I'd still rather have the power of something equivalent to Eclipse, if only it wasn't written in Java for doing C# work.
Really? Are you sure? The Wikipedia pages give a different impression.
Strangely, I do Java work as my day job in Eclipse and C# in my spare time using Visual Studio (2005 Express) and MonoDevelop. While I prefer C# as a language overall, I'd much rather have something like Eclipse for C#! There's so much more power to it in terms of refactoring and other features that it puts the minimal functionality that Visual Studio always had to shame.
So you're knocking down the strawman of C but not putting up any arguments on the "porting to C++" front?
It doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the table since Java had generics and GC first, and other languages probably do the delegates. What it does do, though, is wrap some of the Java-like functionality up in a nicer package for some people that integrates better with many desktops.
Working with objects in an OO environment where you talk about objects and properties? Well now you actually get a distinction in your code between functions/methods and properties. Want to subscribe one method to be called on three different events? You don't need to implement interfaces, add yourself and implement three different methods that do the same thing. Want to subscribe three different methods of one object to the same event? You can actually do it with delegates.
Personally, I'd just rather not write the spaghetti in the first place as it's a much more productive and enjoyable use of my time.
Writing without static typing can be done without too much effort on your own (it's effectively what you had to do in Java/C# before generics when you used collections - treat everything as a known type and assume that's all that's in there), but making sure that extensions and customisations don't break your code becomes debugging from stack traces and crashes once your app is running rather than finding that your app isn't doing what it should at the compile stage.
That doesn't explain how you can tax an open standard. As Mr2001 pointed out (and as I've seen mentioned by one of the Mono team) if Microsoft move a new iteration of C# in a direction that isn't compatible with open source (probably through patent issues) then all Mono does is continues to implement the previous standard and carries on with its own work in its own direction. It'll still be cross-platform, it'll still conform to C# standards, and it'll still be compatible with Microsoft's .Net framework, just not the very latest version.