Menus are an important special case as they are typically the only user interface elements not managed by the window manager.
I've wondered about this since I first started working with X11 back in 1993.
Menus should be managed by the window manager, just like the title bars. This wouldn't be hard to do, either.
An application would define a property, WM_MENU, on any window that needs a menu. The property would be a list of menu items, each similar to the structs used in just about every windowing system, and allowing recursive definitions of other menus by pointing to other window properties. Applications wouldn't have to respond to the menu events, only to the final selection. The advantages would be many.
Applications could be smaller, since they won't have to manage the menus.
Applications, especially those running remotely from the display server, would seem more responsive to the user because the menu would be handled locally.
Best of all, window managers could offer more choice in menu bars.
Right now, every X11-based system has to use Microsoft's look-and-feel for application menus. If the WM handled menus, the WM could offer choices, such as putting the menu bar along the top of the display. Or by changing one preference, you could implement pie-menus in all of your applications.
Or someone could come up with something even better!
There are many bird-watchers who are blind. How do they do it? They listen to the birds, identifying them by their songs. If you are a small publisher, then the laws will exempt you, but all it takes is one dissatisfied customer to poison your good-will.
Many books and magazines are available on tape. I know, my wife is a reader for college textbooks. I also recall several years ago, someone sued to get Playboy on tape. He was blind and really did "just read it for the articles".
I can't speak for every state (or country!), but in Missouri, the DMV handles not just licenses, but also ID cards for people who don't want or can't get a license. So, if you're blind, over 21, and want to buy a beer, you need to deal with the DMV.
As for learning to fly, partial deafness is a disability that's covered by the ADA. If a learning-to-fly website had a lot of sound effects, it could make the site unusable to potential pilots.
Cost is an important consideration, in that every penny spent should be justifiable. So, for example, no fancy 3-D hardware unless it's already on the mobo of the cheapest system. I've already got a DSL connection for which my employer reimburses me, but I was thinking about using dynamic DNS instaed of static: myfamilyname.dyndns.com isn't any harder to bookmark than myfamilyname.org. And yes, I realize that there may be issues with my provider's Terms of Service, but I'm hoping that the traffic will be low enough that they won't mind.
I am quite interested in creating a useful LAMP-based server that other families could use as well. For example, my oldest son spent the summer hiking in Greece, and in recent years I've hiked the Appalacian and Ozark Trails. Both of us would like to stop off an an internet cafe, upload pix, and have an automagically generated item on a front page with a link to the photos and a spot for others to comment. And maybe I'm being an uber-geek here, but I'm also like to easily generate CD-ROMs containing the past year's contents as an Xmas "letter" or something.
Yeah, you're probably right about ADVENT using Fortran-10. I remembered that it used extensions to F66, and assumed that it was F77. After I had posted, I wished that I had mentioned DEC along with IBM as contributing ideas to F77. I compiled ADVENT on an IBM mainframe using F77, and it required minimal hacking to get it to run.
ADVENT was pretty portable, though, in spite of the string handling. For player commands, ADVENT used it's own, non-ASCII, character encoding that fit six characters into a pair of 16-bit values. This meant that even with the source code, you couldn't make heads or tails of the table containing all the verbs, so you didn't know what actions were available to you.
Beside serving as a virtual corkboard for messages, I want to share photos without worrying about the online album provider going under. Adn I have a lot of photos!
Oh, I understand the difference between fault-tolerance and a back-up. At work, I burn a CD-R quarterly as a personal backup, because once upon a time a previous employer suddenly and unextectedly laid off several people, including myself. I wound up losing a lot of stuff (primarily emails) that I wish I still had. As for my home server, I'll probably back it up regularly to my work latptop. OTOH, my ex-wife lost a hard drive immediately after uploading and deleting several dozen pictures from her camera. That's what the RAID is for.
The RAID is for redundacy, not capacity. My idea was to add a second 10 Gig harddrive to the one that comes with the Walmart box. If something breaks when I'm on a week-long business trip, the system should stay up until I can get home to fix it.
I can rule out the corkboard solution easily: One of my kids is an exchange student in Hungary, the others are spread over two households, and I travel a lot. So, I need a virtual cordboard.
I do have an idea of how much horsepower I need, and it isn't much. Besides the Walmart box, I've been looking at DIY mini-ITX systems (the 533 MHz Eden, not the 800 MHz C3) and recycling a 1995-vintage CTX laptop. That's three ways to go, and I though that instead of rolling a die, I'd ask/.
And I do listen to the aswers. I'd been leaning toward the macho-ness of rolling my own mini-ITX, but as I think about the time investment, the laptop is looking better and better.
I went to college in the mid 70's. We learned (essentially) Fortran 77, although it wasn't called that then. F77 didn't have a very formal standardization process, it was just the collecting of extensions that several vendors (mostly IBM) had made to F66.
F77 was a cool language. IIRC, the original version of Adventure Cave used an interpreter that was written in F77. It is also one of the few languages that have native support for imaginary numbers (some versions of APL did as well).
Looking at the summary of changes, I suspect that they've finally messed up the things that made FORTRAN (or at least F77) great. The addition of pointers stands an excellent chance of rendering code un-optimizable, and I fear that adding OO features is an even bigger mistake. I would have liked to have seen Unicode support and exception handling, and that's about it.
I've already seem dozens of posts from people who apparently completely misunderstood the proposal. This is not yet another place where your personal info will be stored, this is a directory to keep track of where your personal info is stored. It isn't doring data, but pointers to data.
For instance, lets say that I want your medical records. I would go to the central registry and make a request. The central registry would reply that the information is stored at, say, the Mayo Clinic. I would still have to go there and jump through whatever hoops they present to actually get the data.
The definite good thing about this is that if you decide that you don't want to use the Mayo Clinic for some reason (poor security policies, impersonal staff, whatever), then you can designate John Hopkins, and future requests will be transparently routed there instead.
The potentially good thing is that the central redirector could implement its own security policies. For example, medical info requests should only be forwarded if they come from someone with a certificate signed by an appropriate authority (i.e. ama-assn.org and/or amerchiro.org).
The process would work a lot like DNS. In fact, I don't see any reason why the central server couldn't be distributed in a manner similar to DNS servers.
There's already a hue and cry over the words, "we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public". Note that he doesn't say how the ports are scanned. BayTSP could easily be using a windoze macro-bot to run, say WinMX, looking for all files containing the letter "a", then capturing the results. Repeat for other letters and digits. Then repeat for IRC clients, etc.
Or, you can do what I did, which was scrap Charter, buy DishNetwork, and sign up for the superstation package, which consists of the UPN stations in NY and Boston and the WB stations in NY, Denver and LA. This provides two benefits: (1) I get to watch Enterprise and Buffy with the rest of the country, and (2) I never have to worry about KPLR preempting Angel and Smallville for Blues hockey. The only drawback is having two stations that advertise themselves as "WB 11".
IIRC, Sagan said that he believed that the Voyager records were more likely to be retrieved by humans than aliens. I don't recall any elaboration, but I got the idea that he expected them to be found by, say, a robotic Oort cloud explorer in AD 2929.
If so, I would hope that the spacecraft would be analyzed in situ and allowed to continue rather than being returned to Earth and stuck in a museum.
Your guess is exactly correct. Sagan published a coffe-table book (Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record)
about the gold record, containing all the images encoded on the disk and text explainations. As I recall, he noted the use of S rather than C to avoid confusion.
I used to own the hardcover, but it disappeared one day, along with my copy of A House in Space, the story of the first space station, Skylab.
Looks like securecomputing.com is getting./ed, since response times are deteriorating even as I type.
Anyway, I checked it out and you're right.
They have miscategorized Brewnix as an MP3 site. I've submitted a request that it be reclassified as a Drug site, along with Budweiser, Miller, and Samuel Adams.
Re:1976 Cobol programmer's bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
I'm fairly certain that it was one of the keypunchers. They made zero/oh mistakes all the time, but you'd normally get an error message about an undeclared variable. For instance, you'd be using "TOTAL" and they'd enter "T0TAL". This could sometimes lead to interesting problems because they'd do the initial punching of the program, while the programmers would punch changes. Thus, it wouldn't be until you made a correction to some logic error that you would get the error message. By the time you figured it out, you'd find it easier to use the keypuncher's spelling instead of your own!
1976 Cobol programmer's bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I once had to debug someone else's code that looked vaguely like this:
READ A,E,I,O,U [...] X=A+E+I+0+U
See the problem? Note that in 1976, programmers would write their code on a form that was given to keypunch operators, who "typed" it onto 80-column punch cards that were then fed into the computer. When the author got back from vacation, I refrained from punching him in the face, and just yelled at him instead.
"I have seen pirate copies of my album sold in the street and it hurts to see the fruits of your hard work stolen on every corner. Since Ukrainian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive."
Ukrainian artist Katya Cilly at the International IP Conference, Kiev, February 2002
This is an interesting quote. I've thought for some time that the decline in the cost of replicating data has been driving artists back to "the old ways". Consider that up until about 100 years ago, the only way to survive as a artist was "to give endless concerts". Not only musicians, but poets and artists made a living by public performances of one sort or another.
I suspect that the 20th century will be viewed as an aberation as we move to a "Star Trek" economy of art, where no one watches TV anymore (or listens to the radio, etc). Instead, people will prefer to attend live performances, usually by firends or family, occasionally by a recognized star. Like the Grateful Dead always did, recordings will be used primarily to introduce someone to a performer; the "true experience" will be the live concert.
Actually, I've mostly good things to say about Centropy's releases (aside from file size, and that's now been explained). The picture quality is excellent. The files that I noted in my original post, however, were very quiet. To listen to the movie, I had to really crank up the volume on my PC. Then when it was done, I started my MP3 player and was nearly blown out of the room!
I've started suspecting that someone at the one or more of the studios deliberately floods the P2P "market" with crappy versions of the latest movies. For instance, there's the hand-held camera, with MST3K effects. After watching for a few minutes, you start thinking about deleting the file and going to see the "real thing". When there's a good image, the sound is frequently bad.
And then there's the matter of file sizes. Look at this:
03/02/2002 07:35a 746,689,484 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 1of3.mpg
03/07/2002 04:36a 721,932,332 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 2of3.mpg
03/02/2002 11:58a 425,062,892 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 3of3.mpg
3 File(s) 1,893,684,708 bytes
You can fit roughly 650 MB on a 74 minute CD-R, or 700 MB on an 80 minute. There's no way that the first two parts of this movie will fit without violating the spec! And there's no reason for it, because the total, divided by 3, will easily fit on either size CD-R: 631,228,236!
Obviously, the only reason for doing this is to keep people from burning the movie onto CD-R's, which prevents archival storage and means that you have to decide to either keep it on your hard drive, or eventually delete it and hope that you won't want to watch it again.
No fax machine! Snail mail or phone, no fax machine!
I presume that you mean that members of Congress typically ignore faxes, as well as email. I haven't seen mention of this before, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's true. Faxes are almost as cheap as email, so they are pretty easy to spam.
OK, everyone, no faxes, just snail-mail. Three stamps only cost about $1.00. If you're having trouble justifying the cost, ask youself if this is as important as a candy bar and a can of soda.
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An application would define a property, WM_MENU, on any window that needs a menu. The property would be a list of menu items, each similar to the structs used in just about every windowing system, and allowing recursive definitions of other menus by pointing to other window properties. Applications wouldn't have to respond to the menu events, only to the final selection. The advantages would be many.
- Applications could be smaller, since they won't have to manage the menus.
- Applications, especially those running remotely from the display server, would seem more responsive to the user because the menu would be handled locally.
- Best of all, window managers could offer more choice in menu bars.
Right now, every X11-based system has to use Microsoft's look-and-feel for application menus. If the WM handled menus, the WM could offer choices, such as putting the menu bar along the top of the display. Or by changing one preference, you could implement pie-menus in all of your applications. Or someone could come up with something even better!Many books and magazines are available on tape. I know, my wife is a reader for college textbooks. I also recall several years ago, someone sued to get Playboy on tape. He was blind and really did "just read it for the articles".
As for learning to fly, partial deafness is a disability that's covered by the ADA. If a learning-to-fly website had a lot of sound effects, it could make the site unusable to potential pilots.
OTOH, my son bought a laptop that didn't include a battery.
I am quite interested in creating a useful LAMP-based server that other families could use as well. For example, my oldest son spent the summer hiking in Greece, and in recent years I've hiked the Appalacian and Ozark Trails. Both of us would like to stop off an an internet cafe, upload pix, and have an automagically generated item on a front page with a link to the photos and a spot for others to comment. And maybe I'm being an uber-geek here, but I'm also like to easily generate CD-ROMs containing the past year's contents as an Xmas "letter" or something.
ADVENT was pretty portable, though, in spite of the string handling. For player commands, ADVENT used it's own, non-ASCII, character encoding that fit six characters into a pair of 16-bit values. This meant that even with the source code, you couldn't make heads or tails of the table containing all the verbs, so you didn't know what actions were available to you.
Beside serving as a virtual corkboard for messages, I want to share photos without worrying about the online album provider going under. Adn I have a lot of photos!
Oh, I understand the difference between fault-tolerance and a back-up. At work, I burn a CD-R quarterly as a personal backup, because once upon a time a previous employer suddenly and unextectedly laid off several people, including myself. I wound up losing a lot of stuff (primarily emails) that I wish I still had. As for my home server, I'll probably back it up regularly to my work latptop. OTOH, my ex-wife lost a hard drive immediately after uploading and deleting several dozen pictures from her camera. That's what the RAID is for.
The RAID is for redundacy, not capacity. My idea was to add a second 10 Gig harddrive to the one that comes with the Walmart box. If something breaks when I'm on a week-long business trip, the system should stay up until I can get home to fix it.
I do have an idea of how much horsepower I need, and it isn't much. Besides the Walmart box, I've been looking at DIY mini-ITX systems (the 533 MHz Eden, not the 800 MHz C3) and recycling a 1995-vintage CTX laptop. That's three ways to go, and I though that instead of rolling a die, I'd ask /.
And I do listen to the aswers. I'd been leaning toward the macho-ness of rolling my own mini-ITX, but as I think about the time investment, the laptop is looking better and better.
F77 was a cool language. IIRC, the original version of Adventure Cave used an interpreter that was written in F77. It is also one of the few languages that have native support for imaginary numbers (some versions of APL did as well).
Looking at the summary of changes, I suspect that they've finally messed up the things that made FORTRAN (or at least F77) great. The addition of pointers stands an excellent chance of rendering code un-optimizable, and I fear that adding OO features is an even bigger mistake. I would have liked to have seen Unicode support and exception handling, and that's about it.
Here's my ideal IDE: while [[ $quit != y ]] do vi mypgm.c make mypgm && ./mypgm
echo -n 'Quit? '
read quit
done
For instance, lets say that I want your medical records. I would go to the central registry and make a request. The central registry would reply that the information is stored at, say, the Mayo Clinic. I would still have to go there and jump through whatever hoops they present to actually get the data.
The definite good thing about this is that if you decide that you don't want to use the Mayo Clinic for some reason (poor security policies, impersonal staff, whatever), then you can designate John Hopkins, and future requests will be transparently routed there instead.
The potentially good thing is that the central redirector could implement its own security policies. For example, medical info requests should only be forwarded if they come from someone with a certificate signed by an appropriate authority (i.e. ama-assn.org and/or amerchiro.org).
The process would work a lot like DNS. In fact, I don't see any reason why the central server couldn't be distributed in a manner similar to DNS servers.
There's already a hue and cry over the words, "we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public". Note that he doesn't say how the ports are scanned. BayTSP could easily be using a windoze macro-bot to run, say WinMX, looking for all files containing the letter "a", then capturing the results. Repeat for other letters and digits. Then repeat for IRC clients, etc.
Or, you can do what I did, which was scrap Charter, buy DishNetwork, and sign up for the superstation package, which consists of the UPN stations in NY and Boston and the WB stations in NY, Denver and LA. This provides two benefits: (1) I get to watch Enterprise and Buffy with the rest of the country, and (2) I never have to worry about KPLR preempting Angel and Smallville for Blues hockey. The only drawback is having two stations that advertise themselves as "WB 11".
If so, I would hope that the spacecraft would be analyzed in situ and allowed to continue rather than being returned to Earth and stuck in a museum.
I used to own the hardcover, but it disappeared one day, along with my copy of A House in Space , the story of the first space station, Skylab.
Anyway, I checked it out and you're right. They have miscategorized Brewnix as an MP3 site. I've submitted a request that it be reclassified as a Drug site, along with Budweiser, Miller, and Samuel Adams.
I'm fairly certain that it was one of the keypunchers. They made zero/oh mistakes all the time, but you'd normally get an error message about an undeclared variable. For instance, you'd be using "TOTAL" and they'd enter "T0TAL". This could sometimes lead to interesting problems because they'd do the initial punching of the program, while the programmers would punch changes. Thus, it wouldn't be until you made a correction to some logic error that you would get the error message. By the time you figured it out, you'd find it easier to use the keypuncher's spelling instead of your own!
I once had to debug someone else's code that looked vaguely like this:
READ A,E,I,O,U
[...]
X=A+E+I+0+U
See the problem? Note that in 1976, programmers would write their code on a form that was given to keypunch operators, who "typed" it onto 80-column punch cards that were then fed into the computer. When the author got back from vacation, I refrained from punching him in the face, and just yelled at him instead.
I suspect that the 20th century will be viewed as an aberation as we move to a "Star Trek" economy of art, where no one watches TV anymore (or listens to the radio, etc). Instead, people will prefer to attend live performances, usually by firends or family, occasionally by a recognized star. Like the Grateful Dead always did, recordings will be used primarily to introduce someone to a performer; the "true experience" will be the live concert.
Actually, I've mostly good things to say about Centropy's releases (aside from file size, and that's now been explained). The picture quality is excellent. The files that I noted in my original post, however, were very quiet. To listen to the movie, I had to really crank up the volume on my PC. Then when it was done, I started my MP3 player and was nearly blown out of the room!
And then there's the matter of file sizes. Look at this:
03/02/2002 07:35a 746,689,484 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 1of3.mpg
03/07/2002 04:36a 721,932,332 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 2of3.mpg
03/02/2002 11:58a 425,062,892 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 3of3.mpg
3 File(s) 1,893,684,708 bytes
You can fit roughly 650 MB on a 74 minute CD-R, or 700 MB on an 80 minute. There's no way that the first two parts of this movie will fit without violating the spec! And there's no reason for it, because the total, divided by 3, will easily fit on either size CD-R: 631,228,236!
Obviously, the only reason for doing this is to keep people from burning the movie onto CD-R's, which prevents archival storage and means that you have to decide to either keep it on your hard drive, or eventually delete it and hope that you won't want to watch it again.
See this article from April 9th.
OK, everyone, no faxes, just snail-mail. Three stamps only cost about $1.00. If you're having trouble justifying the cost, ask youself if this is as important as a candy bar and a can of soda.