Oh, man, why did I ever bring this up. This is worst than a coding standards meeting:)
[OFFTOPIC] If you're so picky with words, then you should realize also that Canadians are "Americans" just like Mexicans, Peruvians and Panamenians. [/OFFTOPIC]
I see a lot of people confused about the use of "pound" for #.
I don't know about you, but most people I've talked to (proffesionally , at school , conferences, etc) read the C statement
#define
as "pound define".
I'm not saying that's the only way to pronounce it, I'm not saying everybody should, I'm just saying that for the target audience of this language C/C++/maybe Java programmers, many if not most are used to pronnounce it that way in a programming context not the musical one.
You're right. This discussion is starting to look like the silly Star Wars discussions about how the Force can't exists, can you build a planet destroying weapon, sounds in space, lightsabers and their scientific explinations.
Geez !!!
Some people just can't have any fun.
Re:Spoilers. Of course, Bluth did that already.
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 1
The Drej supposedly destroyed the Earth because the Humans built the Titan... a ship capable of creating a new planet for the Human species since their old one was destroyed by the Drej. Cause and effect, anyone?
They didn't say that the humans constructed the Titan as a result of a possible Drej attack, just that they constructed it. Maybe this was for a colony, to solve over population , who know ! The point was that humans had a technology that was opposite to one of the Drej's most potent weapons. Drej=planet busting canon, Humans=planet building ship.
Cale's dad, apparently an otherwise smart guy, made the activation of the Titan contingent upon Cale surviving the escape from Earth, being found by one of his buddies, not losing the ring (would YOU give a small, easily-losable device that was humanity's last, best hope to a 4-year-old?) and then finding the Titan.
This is as believable as the future of a galaxy dependent on the disfuntional relationship between a farm boy , his half cyborg dad and their lightsaber battles !!!!(specially in a world with weapons that can destroy planets!)
[formatted wrong on previous, sorry:) ] > Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. And Titan is supposed to be serious ??? What are you trying to say ?
> Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. And Titan is supposed to be serious ??? What are you trying to say ?
Most of these "IT" curriculums are a "learn the latest language" crap that can be outdated in a couple of years. You end up with zombies that don't understand the fundamentals, and just know how to script/code certain things.
Good computer science curriculums focus on theory, and theory is something that last a lot longer than learning language X. I can't stand the amount of people coming out of school, claiming to compete in this field and they barely know what an algorithm is , not to even tell how to analyse it. (O complexity, what ???)
To think of it, we had so much theory we didn't even get formally introduced to programming in C. It was just expected of you to pick it up. Same with Ada and other languages.
... was that Apple knew that research found that a 2 (or more) button mice was better and easier to use, but Marketing decided to settle on one button so they could do their "use the computer with one button" campaing for the Mac.
My UI professor told me this, I don't know if it's true. Anybody heard about this ???
At some point you do, otherwise all the bitching is pointless.
Yes, when it's just whining for the sake of whining , it is pointless. We agree there.
I agree that there doesn't seem to be much innovation on the UI end of things, but who says there needs to be?
If you have a chance, I recommend you take a grad level course in User Interface design. I just did last semester, and we looked at the current state of interfaces and there where a lot of areas that we could all agree that need improvement. But even better, what I got from the course was to not take for granted just how difficult it is for a "normal" user to use a computer and that things are not as intuitive for others, keeping in mind I've been using these things since I was 12 !!! This leads me to believe either we currently use the best UI model available, or we lack the intelligence as a species to come up with a better one.
Just because the current model seems good enough or even the "best" we can come up with, we shouldn't ever think that there can't be any more innovations or improvemnts to be made ! I mean, if that was the case, then why do people still write papers and do research in the User Interface field ? There will always be research, specially with things like Speech recognition, Vision, 3-D interfaces, etc.
I just don't think we can have this "this is the best it gets" attitude. Maybe I read your post incorrectly.
I also think, we should respect people who have problems with thinks like a "start" bar and don't know of a good solution or alternative. It's up to the "experts" to come up with such solutions, not the users.
Hum, I didn't try to insult you (like you did with your ignorant argument) I just said some of us prefer to do it a different way from you.
It is clear by your embarrassing display of ignorance that you have never created a screen with so much as ten components using a GridBag so that resizing works correctly.
Well, I've been doing UIs since (started w Motif) I was in the University and 4 years professionally, and I haven't had a problem with my technique yet. The current product I'm working on is on its third version and customers have been happy with the UI so far.
What fun that would be to correctly make constraints by hand for each component.
I don't use GridBag most of the time. I nest components by logical grouping and most of the times, I abstract layouts with objects for forms and the like. For example a have a form object that let's you code forms very easily without worrying about the UI.
We also have a lot of dynamic screens, that have different data that can be configured and it's not known at compile time. So we need lots of generic components and UI decisions made at runtime. These tasks are not doable with a screen builder. (neither is the vector graphic engine which where most of the code for our product in the UI)
Like I said, I tried JBuilder, and other IDEs, but I didn't like them. And at the end of the day, for the type of interfaces I get paid for, I can do a better job by hand. And that's not counting how unstable things like JBuilder, the times the thing crashed, I lost code , locked up , rebooted. Blah Blah Blah.
Hey, speak for yourself. Some of us do know how to program complex layouts by hand. I actually used JBuilder for a while and got tired of it's generated code.
Nothing like vi for good UI programming:-) (actually I just "discovered" gvim which is better)
> but for any real use X server must be fast and be capable of using graphics card's acceleration for everything that card allows to accelerate. This X server can take advantage of "card" acceleration if it uses the Java2D API.
Will it be as fast as a native C (or assembly) app ? Probably not, but your "acceleration" statement shows you don't know what you're talking about. Look up Java2D and Java3D and then come back with an opinion.
BTW, it's usable on my machine, but the transperency stuff does make it too slugish. That's the prize you pay for fanciness.:)
Because Microsoft came up with a menu button and taskbar (blatently false, but lets pretend) it must be a bad idea.
I don't think he said that. His point seems to be that Gnome does not seem to innovate at all, since it's merely copying the Windows functionality. I didn't see any "MS idea = bad idea".
> Do you have a better idea? Everyone complaines about the way GUIs work, but I have yet to hear any suggestions except "try something new"
I didn't know you had to come up with a "better idea" in order to critique current ideas !!!??? Certainly there is much that can be improved / changed from the current Windows Taskbar. Like in Win2000 (-not sure if that's much better, but they've tried-) with the "frequently used" options showing up first, etc.
I agree with the original poster, it doesn't seem that Gnome/KDE are innovating much as far as UI design goes. Maybe they're just catching up at this stage ?
You dislike Java a lot, but for OO, it's way better to tech it instead of C++, which is a hybrid, and adds complication with pointers. Not to mention that C++ is a couple of magnitudes more complicated than Java because of the pointers, memory management, multiple inheritance, blah blah blah.
I started with BASIC, and I'm glad I didn't touch C until later. I liked C when I learnt it, but I'm not sure I would have liked learing to program by doing pointer / memory management when I was 10.
The CANF is a very powerful organization connected to leaders in both main US parties, who contribute and flex their political muscle all the time to keep and expand the Helms Burton Act.
It's an exile organization, that has decided that the best way to help their people is to augment their poverty even more.
They have also convinced clueless politicians, that the only way to win Florida is to support their efforts:(
Slashdot Mirror
Oh boy, I'm not trying to speak for everyone, don't be so literal !
:)
This explains better what I'm saying.
Oh, man, why did I ever bring this up. This is worst than a coding standards meeting
[OFFTOPIC]
If you're so picky with words, then you should realize also that Canadians are "Americans" just like Mexicans, Peruvians and Panamenians.
[/OFFTOPIC]
I do listen to music while I code. Maybe that's as far as I should combine the two.
INTERCAL ???
It's true, there are too many languages !!!
That's exactly my point !!! It seems there are a lot less C coders on slashdot than I tought.
I see a lot of people confused about the use of "pound" for #.
:)
I don't know about you, but most people I've talked to (proffesionally , at school , conferences, etc) read the C statement
#define
as "pound define" .
I'm not saying that's the only way to pronounce it, I'm not saying everybody should, I'm just saying that for the target audience of this language C/C++/maybe Java programmers, many if not most are used to pronnounce it that way in a programming context not the musical one.
Please, don't take it so seriously !! Geez !!!
It comes from pronouncing #define as "pound define".
> # is pronounced "sharp" on sheet music.
;)
I'm not thinking about sheet music when I'm programming. Maybe I should ?
Maybe. But not that much better ...
Cool seemed to be targeted at teenage programmers, with C "sharp" I think they're going after the programmer musicians.
The honestly expect programmers to pronounce this C sharp , when we all say pound for "#".
Yet another lame MS "techonology" marketing name. LOL !!!
You're right. This discussion is starting to look like the silly Star Wars discussions about how the Force can't exists, can you build a planet destroying weapon, sounds in space, lightsabers and their scientific explinations.
Geez !!!
Some people just can't have any fun.
The Drej supposedly destroyed the Earth because the Humans built the Titan... a ship capable of creating a new planet for the Human species since their old one was destroyed by the Drej. Cause and effect, anyone?
They didn't say that the humans constructed the Titan as a result of a possible Drej attack, just that they constructed it. Maybe this was for a colony, to solve over population , who know ! The point was that humans had a technology that was opposite to one of the Drej's most potent weapons. Drej=planet busting canon, Humans=planet building ship.
Cale's dad, apparently an otherwise smart guy, made the activation of the Titan contingent upon Cale surviving the escape from Earth, being found by one of his buddies, not losing the ring (would YOU give a small, easily-losable device that was humanity's last, best hope to a 4-year-old?) and then finding the Titan.
This is as believable as the future of a galaxy dependent on the disfuntional relationship between a farm boy , his half cyborg dad and their lightsaber battles !!!!(specially in a world with weapons that can destroy planets!)
[formatted wrong on previous, sorry :) ] > Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. And Titan is supposed to be serious ??? What are you trying to say ?
> Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. And Titan is supposed to be serious ??? What are you trying to say ?
What Java demo ? It's not an applet but an Active X control ! Didn't you get the "do you trust this content" crap dialog ?
...
...
It doesn't work on Netscape (of course) but on IE, the link is this
http://www.avatarme.com/download/example1.htm
The speed is probably slow because of downloading all that data, or they might have a crappy viewer with software only rendering
I can't believe Epic MegaGames is still selling that pinball game. It's super old !!! Can't they just give it away ? C'mon guys !!! Get real !
Most of these "IT" curriculums are a "learn the latest language" crap that can be outdated in a couple of years. You end up with zombies that don't understand the fundamentals, and just know how to script/code certain things.
Good computer science curriculums focus on theory, and theory is something that last a lot longer than learning language X. I can't stand the amount of people coming out of school, claiming to compete in this field and they barely know what an algorithm is , not to even tell how to analyse it. (O complexity, what ???)
To think of it, we had so much theory we didn't even get formally introduced to programming in C. It was just expected of you to pick it up. Same with Ada and other languages.
Are we now copyrighting our own posts, what's going on ? Are people cutting and pasting slashdot comments on other sites ???
Just curious. I've only seen this done by another guy in the CORBA newsgroups.
... was that Apple knew that research found that a 2 (or more) button mice was better and easier to use, but Marketing decided to settle on one button so they could do their "use the computer with one button" campaing for the Mac.
My UI professor told me this, I don't know if it's true. Anybody heard about this ???
At some point you do, otherwise all the bitching is pointless.
Yes, when it's just whining for the sake of whining , it is pointless. We agree there.
I agree that there doesn't seem to be much innovation on the UI end of things, but who says there needs to be?
If you have a chance, I recommend you take a grad level course in User Interface design. I just did last semester, and we looked at the current state of interfaces and there where a lot of areas that we could all agree that need improvement. But even better, what I got from the course was to not take for granted just how difficult it is for a "normal" user to use a computer and that things are not as intuitive for others, keeping in mind I've been using these things since I was 12 !!! This leads me to believe either we currently use the best UI model available, or we lack the intelligence as a species to come up with a better one.
Just because the current model seems good enough or even the "best" we can come up with, we shouldn't ever think that there can't be any more innovations or improvemnts to be made ! I mean, if that was the case, then why do people still write papers and do research in the User Interface field ? There will always be research, specially with things like Speech recognition, Vision, 3-D interfaces, etc.
I just don't think we can have this "this is the best it gets" attitude. Maybe I read your post incorrectly.
I also think, we should respect people who have problems with thinks like a "start" bar and don't know of a good solution or alternative. It's up to the "experts" to come up with such solutions, not the users.
Hum, I didn't try to insult you (like you did with your ignorant argument) I just said some of us prefer to do it a different way from you.
It is clear by your embarrassing display of ignorance that you have never created a screen with so much as ten components using a GridBag so that resizing works correctly.
Well, I've been doing UIs since (started w Motif) I was in the University and 4 years professionally, and I haven't had a problem with my technique yet. The current product I'm working on is on its third version and customers have been happy with the UI so far.
What fun that would be to correctly make constraints by hand for each component.
I don't use GridBag most of the time. I nest components by logical grouping and most of the times, I abstract layouts with objects for forms and the like. For example a have a form object that let's you code forms very easily without worrying about the UI.
We also have a lot of dynamic screens, that have different data that can be configured and it's not known at compile time. So we need lots of generic components and UI decisions made at runtime. These tasks are not doable with a screen builder. (neither is the vector graphic engine which where most of the code for our product in the UI)
Like I said, I tried JBuilder, and other IDEs, but I didn't like them. And at the end of the day, for the type of interfaces I get paid for, I can do a better job by hand. And that's not counting how unstable things like JBuilder, the times the thing crashed, I lost code , locked up , rebooted. Blah Blah Blah.
You need to cool off a bit and back off.
Hey, speak for yourself. Some of us do know how to program complex layouts by hand. I actually used JBuilder for a while and got tired of it's generated code.
:-) (actually I just "discovered" gvim which is better)
Nothing like vi for good UI programming
> but for any real use X server must be fast and be capable of using graphics card's acceleration for everything that card allows to accelerate.
:)
This X server can take advantage of "card" acceleration if it uses the Java2D API.
Will it be as fast as a native C (or assembly) app ? Probably not, but your "acceleration" statement shows you don't know what you're talking about. Look up Java2D and Java3D and then come back with an opinion.
BTW, it's usable on my machine, but the transperency stuff does make it too slugish. That's the prize you pay for fanciness.
Because Microsoft came up with a menu button and taskbar (blatently false, but lets pretend) it must be a bad idea.
I don't think he said that. His point seems to be that Gnome does not seem to innovate at all, since it's merely copying the Windows functionality. I didn't see any "MS idea = bad idea".
> Do you have a better idea?
Everyone complaines about the way GUIs work, but I have yet to hear any suggestions except "try something new"
I didn't know you had to come up with a "better idea" in order to critique current ideas !!!???
Certainly there is much that can be improved / changed from the current Windows Taskbar. Like in Win2000 (-not sure if that's much better, but they've tried-) with the "frequently used" options showing up first, etc.
I agree with the original poster, it doesn't seem that Gnome/KDE are innovating much as far as UI design goes. Maybe they're just catching up at this stage ?
You dislike Java a lot, but for OO, it's way better to tech it instead of C++, which is a hybrid, and adds complication with pointers. Not to mention that C++ is a couple of magnitudes more complicated than Java because of the pointers, memory management, multiple inheritance, blah blah blah.
I started with BASIC, and I'm glad I didn't touch C until later. I liked C when I learnt it, but I'm not sure I would have liked learing to program by doing pointer / memory management when I was 10.
More specifically, the CANF (Cuban American National Foundation).
:(
The CANF is a very powerful organization connected to leaders in both main US parties, who contribute and flex their political muscle all the time to keep and expand the Helms Burton Act.
It's an exile organization, that has decided that the best way to help their people is to augment their poverty even more.
They have also convinced clueless politicians, that the only way to win Florida is to support their efforts