First, Hyatt is not a UI programmer [...] but he doesn't know shit about user interfaces
What, exactly, does the fact, that he is not a professional UI programmer, have to do with the comment he wrote? I find that comment perfectly reasonable and it's indeed (almost) exactly how I feel using Mozilla's tabbed browsing vs. Opera's MDI windowing. The key difference between Mozilla's tabs and MDI is that there's no window management in Mozilla's tabs. MDI app has always, more or less, it's own window manager.
If you want to see a really, really bad example of MDI, just view the Metalworks demo in Java 1.4.1_01. Just try to open some windows, minimize some of them and resize the main window after that. Looks pretty stupid, eh? Compare this to Mozilla's tabs where a tab is always the same size with all the other tabs inside the same main window and the resizing is done by resizing the main window. Seems like a pretty intuitive way to work for me. Another important usability feature is that you can have multiple main windows open in paraller. Most apps have either all windows detached from each other (e.g. Gimp) or all windows inside the main window (e.g. older versions of Opera).
Excluding [XML test] Safari was the only browser that was perfect on all tests.
I don't have a Mac to test on but at least my old Nightly Build of Mozilla 1.3b (ID:2003021806) does render also the DHTML test perfectly[1]. You're right that the XML test is broken (the server is misconfigured).
[1] Or... it does display and remove the scrollbar as expected when the div goes over (under?) the right edge of viewport. However, it doesn't display the scrollbar when the div goes over the left border of the viewport, which I consider as a bug also. It's the bug ID:6976 in case you want to vote it. Don't post extra comments to that bug unless you have a fix.
it was my mis understanding that if you had a file 000, and you wanted to delete it, you would need to chmod it to a deleteable state. [...]kinda makes sense in the long run since the permissions aren't written to the file.
File metadata being written to "file" or to "directory" really doesn't matter. File permissions don't apply to root. You can make directories with 000 and still normally cd to those and use ls to list the contents. Similarly mkdir and rmdir still work fine. One thing to not is that bash doesn't want to execute files without eXecute bit even when root (I guess it's a security feature) so some bits still matter. Doing something like "cd/; chmod -R 000 *" wouldn't be wise.
edit was acting strangely as packaged in Mandrake 9.0
I've read that the problem is that Mandrake uses lesstif and anything above version 0.93.18 doesn't really work with nedit. Haven't tested if this is true. You could also download statically linked version from nedit.org.
One of the few important ones [that only work with MSIE], at least for Windows users, is the windowsupdate site.
I really don't care if that would be the only site. In fact, I think windowsupdate should drop the support for MSIE too and use native update application instead. A web browser shouldn't be used for something like updating the system. Notice that MS already does provide such an app but AFAIK it can be used to fetch security patches only. You get no feature updates without going to windowsupdate.com with the browser.
Doesnt Flash memory have a really low number of rewrites, like 10,000 after which the chip goes bad?
Actually, they say that typical endurance is 27 years for a drive that gets written 100GB a day and 28000 years if the drive gets written only 100MB a day. And those are just for 1GB model. 4.6GB model can take 100GB a day and still survice 123 years. I'd call that damn reliable. No details how they do that but I guess there's some hardware layer that remaps new data to least used areas.
The only thing I don't like is the read and write speeds. And the price, probably.
I think we should already forget the chess and move along. It's only matter of time until somebody (or should I say, something?) comes up with a perfect play of chess. My guess is that it'll be a move sequence that quarantees a draw for the white. After that, once you get black, you have no change to win.
The only question is how long such game would be in turns. That's imporant because if that's "long" then finding even one will take quite some time. IIRC there's a joke in Futurama where robots are playing chess. There's a chess board with all the pieces in the starting positions. The winner only says "Mate in 143 moves" and the loser says "Oh man, you win again". I'm afraid that joke is closer to reality than many of us would want to believe.
I'm pretty sure there's perfect play of Go, too. Finding that will take so much time that I don't need to worry about that. I'm not that sure about chess.
There is no standard DVD caption text.. every player does it differently.
AFAIK every DVD disk has different font, not the player. The subtitles are in fact 3 bit (color1, color2 and transparent) images. That's why tools that rip DVD subtitles are in fact scanning the text from the images. I think this kind of method was selected so that every browser wouldn't need full unicode fonts to be able to display subtitles for e.g. latin and japanese content.
The only thing the DVD player can do is to add some kind of filtering to that text -- as it isn't antialised and can be blocky looking on high-res displays.
In addition to the official subtitling on the DVD some player software is able to use external subtitles from a text file. In that case, those players can display the font in any size, color and font-face available for the software.
Ignoring the minor fact that the video output from a GF2 (and, frankly, all nVidia cards) sucks, the poster was pretty obviously wanting to put a high-end game-capable video card in his HTPC
If you've HTPC you should also have display with VGA (RGB+Hsync+Vsync) or DVI input. Unless you have such a display, you really should be using consumer hardware that has stuff like component output or RGB (RGB+sync). In no situation should you use HTPC to output anything to normal TV if you want any quality. (I do have Radeon and even its s-video output still sucks big time. All nvidia based products I've seen contain much worse outputs.)
I'm still hoping I've a new DLP projector by the time Doom 3 comes out. All I have is a lousy CRT cannon.
From the [H]ard|OCP review:
"Using a decibel meter we tested the sound level of the GFFX at three feet away, directly in front of the exhaust vent. In 2D mode, the reading was 56dB."
I don't know about you, but I find 56 dB to be very noisy.
Me too. Every day the noise is becoming a bigger problem. For example, I tested Epson 811 model earlier this week and found that even though the specs say 38dB it's way too noisy for my taste. (In case you're interested, I didn't like the image quality of it either.) My clone PC box with silent power supply and low rpm CPU fan is much quieter. Of course, I'm not running 1.5+GHz CPU.
So even if they knew the price wan't going under $8, then would still never buy one. Its kinda like me and a cray super computer. I think they're neat, i want one, but i would never spend more than $3000 dollars on a computer, and since cray's will never cost $3000 or less, i'll just never buy one.
But you do know that gray computers are way more expensive than $3000. If gray announced that they will sell some higher end model for $4000 for a limited time I guess you would get one even though you now think spending that much on any computer is waste. I wouldn't say I'll never pay $20000 for a car. It could be that somebody agrees to sell me a new ferrari or lamborghini for $25000. I think I would buy that one even though I'd probably sell that soon.
[Talking about compressing XML:] Not bad for taking non repeditive text, with random xml schemas and getting 86.4%. Now imagine a larger one with a consistent schema. Compression goes even higher. Granted, it will be slightly larger than a binary. But even a 100meg file can be moved across a 100megabit network in 5 minutes time. And THAT is a lot of data.
100MB file over 100Mbps network takes 5 minutes? What kind of "100Mbps" network is that exactly? I can easily transfer 100MB of data over 10Mbps line in 5 minutes. With 100Mbps line it should take more like 10-15 seconds. Did you mean that 100MB XML file would compress to something like 20MB file and it would take maximum of 5 seconds to transfer that over 100Mbps line?
In addition, (compressed) XML file can be sometimes smaller than the same thing expressed in proprietary binary file. This is because XML version probably does have better structure than the binary file. Example: try to save a MS Word document in its default format and its "HTML" format. Notice how that "bloated text based HTML version" is smaller than binary one. YMMV, of course.
I can see that it makes a certain amount of logical sense to convert images to objects, etc.... but getting rid of H* tags and, as Mark mentioned, CITE? There isn't really anything to replace that kind of semantic markup, which is unfortunate.
If you had ever read HTML 4.01 spec fully you would have noted how it suggested that object element should be used for all embedded objects. To quote w3c:
For example, to include a PNG image in a document, authors may write:
<BODY>
<P>Here's a closeup of the Grand Canyon:
<OBJECT data="canyon.png" type="image/png">
This is a <EM>closeup</EM> of the Grand Canyon.
</OBJECT>
</BODY>
Previous versions of HTML allowed authors to include images (via IMG) and
applets (via APPLET). These elements have several limitations:
They fail to solve the more general problem of how to include new and
future media types.
The APPLET element only works with Java-based applets. This element is
deprecated in favor of
OBJECT.
They pose accessibility problems.
And now they have removed IMG and APPLET. Are you surprised?
About what comes to CITE, as many already noted that was simply an authoring mistake while making the draft and it has already announced on the mailing list that it'll be back in the next draft.
I think that anybody that says h1-h6 should be kept instead of SECTION and H elements doesn't simply know what she is talking about. The problem with Hx is that one can skip levels. If the headers were numbered by default it would be highly visible. I know many slashdotters do start their web page with H3 simply because "it looks better than that god-awful-huge h1". If the first header said "1.1.1. I'm the first header" even an idiot author would think something smells fishy. In addition, there's no way to tell where one section of document ends. They new way is to enclose sections inside SECTION elements. Those sections can be nested and section can contain header enclosed in a H element. Browser then uses the nesting depth of SECTIONs what enclose a single H element to decide the size the header should be rendered at.
Note that "baz" belongs to logical section named "header1". You cannot represent a structure like this with H1-H6.
One possible rendering could be: header1
foo
| header2
| bar
baz
But the truth is, this all really doesn't matter. People will continue to author HTML3.2, stick XHTML2 DOCTYPE identifier and serve the documents as text/plain, regardless of what the possible final spec will say. And they will complain if their cool frameset doesn't work. Those few of us who care to follow the recommendation can easily do it. Simply change those few remaining IMG elements to objects and upgrade your document structure to SECTION and H and you're pretty much done. If you feel adventureous you could start authoring XHTML2 pages immediatly and simply write the missing rendering instructions in the user stylesheet. Yeah, it might work in Mozilla only, but that can be used for testing and as a real world prototype.
If you want to bitch about something it should be that XForms are too complex, but anything is better than current HTML forms.
this game has been in final regression testing since before December 4th, 2002.
I think they're just trying not to repeat history. MOO1 and MOO2 were created by Simtex (bought by Microprose (bought by Hasbro)) and AFAIK none of the Simtex games worked correctly without a patch... After saying that, I'm afraid MOO3 isn't the game I'm expecting it to be simply because pretty much nobody from the previous versions is in the development group.
Only in unpatched MOO2 IIRC. About the best weapons: use plasma cannons (it takes a lot of research!) after they are miniaturised, join with achilles targetting unit, structural analyzer, subspace teleporter and time warp facilitors. The idea is to hit with every beam (maximum damage every time) directly into the structure. You can easily destroy 20+ doomstar class starships in one turn with one doomstar size ship. That is, if you're to start first. Stellar converter can do only 400 hit points of damage and IIRC my ships could do total damage of something like 10000 hit points in one turn--bybassing shield and armor!
...99% of their audience... Uses some form of IE...don't care. So, it's web design for the Lowest Common Denominator.
W3C specs are about accessibility, not looks. If IE has bugs that cause some text to be rendered too large to its users then you should tell those users about that. Ff they mind about the issue, they should try some other browser. Or at least fix their user style sheet. For example we have Opera and Phoenix for Windows, Galeon, Mozilla, Phoenix and Konqueror fox unixes and Mozilla, Chimera, MSIE/mac and Safari for MacOS. All of those can properly display text unlike MSIE/win32.
If you adjust your website text size to look good (in your opinion, some people in fact think bigger text looks better) in MSIE/win32, then less people are going to change to standards compliant browser and we're going to suffer with MSIE/win32 forever. Do you think there would be many users with NN4.x with Javascript and CSS on if authors simply decided to follow the spec only (and causing the NN4.x to crash when float and clear properties were used)? Why do you think we still have that many users using that bad browser?
It's not like you're going to lose customers if your font size is the default 12px instead of 8px (that you think looks good) but the other way around may be true (the text is so small that
visitor cannot read it for a reason or another).
In addition, you list one reason as "they don't care" which I consider as a reason not to change the font size from default, not a reason to change it. If they really wanted the text size look smaller they would do something for it, don't you think?
Note that I'm not saying that you should support Mozilla/Opera/Konqueror/Safari and try to make the life of those who use MSIE harder. Instead I suggest that everybody should simply make pages strictly according to the recommendation. If many enough did this, MS didn't had choise but to fix the problems in their browser or lose the market position.
Microsoft decided to not provide an UI to define default font size in the Internet Explorer. Consider this being equivalent to a TV set without an option to adjust volume.
Some web "designers" feel that they have to compensate the fact that the MS engineer decided to specify "too large" default font size.
I'm so SICK of hearing people bitch about this. Maybe you morons should use a different browser if your current shitty one doesn't support such rudimentary features.
Uh? Perhaps you should reread my post? The word "some" doesn't include me. You might be speaking about yourself in 3rd person but I don't do that. I was bitching about the fact that because MSIE is buggy and it has many users some web "designers" feel that they must break some rules to make a web page to compensate some of those bugs. Nevermind the fact that those "fixes" break any standards-compiliant browser. I don't use MSIE, I don't support it and I always try to code according to the recommended spec--but there're many others doing something else.
Using font-size: small should not post a significant problem with any browser if implimented properly.
Yes, it's fine as long as it isn't used for normal text. Sure, it's still readable, but far from optimal. If you make a page and don't specify font size at all, the font size will be optimal (because I've set up my browser preferences correctly). Why to make things complicated and decrease readability by changing the font size from default? Notice that I'm not saying that one shouldn't use font sizes smaller than default for something like navigation or text based advertisement.
I repeat my point: it's a mistake to compensate for MSIE's default settings even if you feel that that default is "too large". Some people may feel that its default is optimal (there must be some reason for the decided default size) and changing the font size from it makes the text look too small [or large]. In addition to those MSIE users, anybody with correctly configured browser also sees text too small.
This issue is often compared to a Joe Sixpack calling local TV station and asking them to turn the volume down because it's too loud. Do you think the local TV station would do that, or do you think they would tell the user to turn down the volume level in his own TV set? You can be pretty sure that the former would happen in reality. But why are web "designers" thinking they should turn the volume own instead?
I typically use "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" or "Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica"
I hope you don't touch the font-size. Or at least specify it as "100%" or "1em". This is important because otherwise correctly configured browsers display the characters too small.
Way too many websites use styles like p {font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;}. This rule is saying that the author of the page thinks that the page looks best when viewed with font face called "verdana" with a font size of 85% of the size the user has selected she is comfortable with. I'm ok with suggesting a font face but no way normal text should be made smaller than I've set in the preferences. This situation is caused by two reasons:
Microsoft decided to not provide an UI to define default font size in the Internet Explorer. Consider this being equivalent to a TV set without an option to adjust volume. Some web "designers" feel that they have to compensate the fact that the MS engineer decided to specify "too large" default font size. (MSIE does have view-text size menu but it has only 5 choices and in addition the feature has many bugs.)
Verdana looks better with small font sizes. The problem is, verdana looks bigger than most other fonts so the font-size "has to" be modified to be much smaller for verdana to look good. This results to really small fonts if user's system cannot provide font face called "verdana" or it's different from the one distributed by Microsoft
The above issues, joined with the fact that MSIE is the most common browser and verdana is distributed alongside MSIE practically guarantee that change to the better isn't going to happen unless majority of web "designers" get a clue. I've already lost faith that majority of the users would have some clue (MSIE with all the latest patches applied: still 11 security holes with publicly available exploits. Scary, eh?).
Fortunately, Mozilla does have minimum font-size setting. Unfortunately, some web sites define such a small font sizes that my minimum of 9px is hit with H1 level headers--so all headers look the same and paragraph text is the same size as all the headers.
Last time I checked, this VGA connection to my monitor wasn't digital either.
Yes, and that's is why we're trying to move to DVI connectors. The difference between [analog] VGA signal and NTSC/PAL/SECAM signals are that one is supposed to be able to access single pixel with VGA signal but not so with television signals. VGA is superior to the signaling used in nowadays TV sets but it wasn't available during the time the still used television standards were made.
I have an HD-ready 50" RP Toshiba [...] I'm pretty sure my resolution is equivalent to 1920x1080. [...] I play Playstation 2 on it regularly and it's out of this world.
Sure, PS2 looks good on a display such as that but surely not out of this world. If you're happy with the PS2 image you aren't normally looking at 1920x1080 for sure. I do have a non-HDTV CRT projector (which are always somewhat blurry compared to DLP or LCD projectors) and PS2 still looks much blurrier than a regular DVD player (both connected via s-video cables). If PS2 cannot even display true interlaced broadcast quality signal, how on earth one could be happy with its image on a HDTV setup? Note that I'm using PAL setup which already has higher resolution than NTSC systems.
For a (reletively) mere $2,000, you can get a good, bright projector capable HDTV-like quality at 1280x1024 That gives you a good 3'-25' screen for what, 1/10 the price of that plasma monster?
...and later in the same thread you gave us a link to that "HDTV" projector. The specs say 1024x768 (usually called XGA), 1500 ansi lumens and contrast ratio of 400:1. That's pretty good, but nowhere near to the image quality of the reviewed plasma display. Well, it has higher resolution, but worse contrast ratio and probably dimmer white point--depending how small image you're going to project.
In addition, that display is an LCD so you can forget ever seeing black again--especially in this case due to high brightness. In addition to greyish "black" you can be pretty sure to be able to see pixel structure due to LCD technology. True, you cannot get true black from plasma display either. For maximum image quality I'd use UXGA (or better) DLP projector in a black painted room. That should provide you with true black and truely sharp image.
Remember that most projectors have bulb life of 2000 hours or less. And watch out those bulb expences--some do cost well over $500 a piece.
If a room with walls and the ceiling painted black sounds exaggerating, just think for a second what we're trying to do here: we're trying to make white panel (silver screen or something similar) to look truly black. If any part of the image has any light, the light will be reflected back from any non-black surface in the viewing room, namely walls, which makes the full screen to wash out. Trust me, I do own a CRT projector in a small room that has white walls and I'm not allowed to paint those darker. Black curtains help a little, though.
They're tightening restrictions, not banning binary-only modules.
This sure is not the way to ensure broad hardware support and acceptance. Believe it or not, hardware companies do not feel the same need to support linux as they do windows, and making the platform hostle isn't going to win anyone over. (emphasis mine)
IMO, the value on the stuff they sell should be on hardware. A good example for this is so called "winmodems" which, in worst case, contain only minimum hardware required to connect phone cord to the PC and all the logic is done in the drivers. In this case selling the stuff as "hardware" is misleading and I understand fully if the manufacturer doesn't want to release full source code. Stuff like this should be sold as software and I think kernel should include API to allow running this kind of software if commercial software is allowed to be run in user mode. However, this kind of software doesn't need to mess with syscall table and stuff so I think current restrictions given to binary drivers should be kept in the future too.
On the other hand, if the manufacturer is selling real hardware then writing the driver is only pain in the ass and I cannot imagine any reason not to open spec to the hardware interface. After that, many manufacturers doing cool stuff could get drivers for their products for practically free by giving out a piece of hardware to some known open source developer. If that piece of hardware is worth the money, one could be pretty sure that GPLed version of the driver ends up to the kernel distribution and manufacturer doesn't have to pay anybody to be able to support linux.
That being said, I must add that even though I think that nVidia does some pretty awesome hardware they also do some hairy tricks to speed up the driver and other display adapter manufactures would love to use those tricks too. When the driver must do stuff like full OpenGL support I'd allow doing that in proprietary format. Though, nVidia should probably do proprietary stuff in the user mode and keep kernel mode driver part open, though.
If you really wanted your HTML to be hard to read you could always give the ascii number (or unicode for fun) of every character on the page
I wouldn't rate such hack as a good contestant simply because the method is way too simple. But if you prefer to do such a thing, just use this perl script.
Note that HTML tidy can easily clean up such simple hacks. Truly unreadable source cannot be fixed with something as simple as HTML tidy. You can try the above perl script on some HTML file and then inputting that file to HTML Tidy Online.
The source must validate. This rule applies to both (X)HTML and CSS
Allowed doctypes are HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1. For styling, anything up to CSS2 is allowed. Conditional comments are disallowed because they would make the contest too easy.
Page must be readable with Mozilla 1.2 and Opera 7.0 (beta)
The winner the one with the most artistic rendering in MSIE6/win32, combined with unreadable source.
Extra points, if page is still readable in the Netscape Navigator 4.x.
No scripting is allowed.
I think you could get pretty interesting results by layering elements one over another and creating resulting images with interfere patterns caused by letters laid over other letters. Use CSS features that MSIE doesn't implement, or has bugs in, to correct the positioning in correctly behaving browsers and @import trick for keeping NN4.x in the game.
Creating page that works only in one nonstandard browser is too easy. Creating standards compliant page that works in every browser but one buggy one should be hard enough.
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What, exactly, does the fact, that he is not a professional UI programmer, have to do with the comment he wrote? I find that comment perfectly reasonable and it's indeed (almost) exactly how I feel using Mozilla's tabbed browsing vs. Opera's MDI windowing. The key difference between Mozilla's tabs and MDI is that there's no window management in Mozilla's tabs. MDI app has always, more or less, it's own window manager.
If you want to see a really, really bad example of MDI, just view the Metalworks demo in Java 1.4.1_01. Just try to open some windows, minimize some of them and resize the main window after that. Looks pretty stupid, eh? Compare this to Mozilla's tabs where a tab is always the same size with all the other tabs inside the same main window and the resizing is done by resizing the main window. Seems like a pretty intuitive way to work for me. Another important usability feature is that you can have multiple main windows open in paraller. Most apps have either all windows detached from each other (e.g. Gimp) or all windows inside the main window (e.g. older versions of Opera).
I don't have a Mac to test on but at least my old Nightly Build of Mozilla 1.3b (ID:2003021806) does render also the DHTML test perfectly[1]. You're right that the XML test is broken (the server is misconfigured).
[1] Or... it does display and remove the scrollbar as expected when the div goes over (under?) the right edge of viewport. However, it doesn't display the scrollbar when the div goes over the left border of the viewport, which I consider as a bug also. It's the bug ID:6976 in case you want to vote it. Don't post extra comments to that bug unless you have a fix.
File metadata being written to "file" or to "directory" really doesn't matter. File permissions don't apply to root. You can make directories with 000 and still normally cd to those and use ls to list the contents. Similarly mkdir and rmdir still work fine. One thing to not is that bash doesn't want to execute files without eXecute bit even when root (I guess it's a security feature) so some bits still matter. Doing something like "cd /; chmod -R 000 *" wouldn't be wise.
I've read that the problem is that Mandrake uses lesstif and anything above version 0.93.18 doesn't really work with nedit. Haven't tested if this is true. You could also download statically linked version from nedit.org.
I really don't care if that would be the only site. In fact, I think windowsupdate should drop the support for MSIE too and use native update application instead. A web browser shouldn't be used for something like updating the system. Notice that MS already does provide such an app but AFAIK it can be used to fetch security patches only. You get no feature updates without going to windowsupdate.com with the browser.
Actually, they say that typical endurance is 27 years for a drive that gets written 100GB a day and 28000 years if the drive gets written only 100MB a day. And those are just for 1GB model. 4.6GB model can take 100GB a day and still survice 123 years. I'd call that damn reliable. No details how they do that but I guess there's some hardware layer that remaps new data to least used areas.
The only thing I don't like is the read and write speeds. And the price, probably.
The only question is how long such game would be in turns. That's imporant because if that's "long" then finding even one will take quite some time. IIRC there's a joke in Futurama where robots are playing chess. There's a chess board with all the pieces in the starting positions. The winner only says "Mate in 143 moves" and the loser says "Oh man, you win again". I'm afraid that joke is closer to reality than many of us would want to believe.
I'm pretty sure there's perfect play of Go, too. Finding that will take so much time that I don't need to worry about that. I'm not that sure about chess.
AFAIK every DVD disk has different font, not the player. The subtitles are in fact 3 bit (color1, color2 and transparent) images. That's why tools that rip DVD subtitles are in fact scanning the text from the images. I think this kind of method was selected so that every browser wouldn't need full unicode fonts to be able to display subtitles for e.g. latin and japanese content.
The only thing the DVD player can do is to add some kind of filtering to that text -- as it isn't antialised and can be blocky looking on high-res displays.
In addition to the official subtitling on the DVD some player software is able to use external subtitles from a text file. In that case, those players can display the font in any size, color and font-face available for the software.
If you've HTPC you should also have display with VGA (RGB+Hsync+Vsync) or DVI input. Unless you have such a display, you really should be using consumer hardware that has stuff like component output or RGB (RGB+sync). In no situation should you use HTPC to output anything to normal TV if you want any quality. (I do have Radeon and even its s-video output still sucks big time. All nvidia based products I've seen contain much worse outputs.)
I'm still hoping I've a new DLP projector by the time Doom 3 comes out. All I have is a lousy CRT cannon.
I don't know about you, but I find 56 dB to be very noisy.
Me too. Every day the noise is becoming a bigger problem. For example, I tested Epson 811 model earlier this week and found that even though the specs say 38dB it's way too noisy for my taste. (In case you're interested, I didn't like the image quality of it either.) My clone PC box with silent power supply and low rpm CPU fan is much quieter. Of course, I'm not running 1.5+GHz CPU.
But you do know that gray computers are way more expensive than $3000. If gray announced that they will sell some higher end model for $4000 for a limited time I guess you would get one even though you now think spending that much on any computer is waste. I wouldn't say I'll never pay $20000 for a car. It could be that somebody agrees to sell me a new ferrari or lamborghini for $25000. I think I would buy that one even though I'd probably sell that soon.
100MB file over 100Mbps network takes 5 minutes? What kind of "100Mbps" network is that exactly? I can easily transfer 100MB of data over 10Mbps line in 5 minutes. With 100Mbps line it should take more like 10-15 seconds. Did you mean that 100MB XML file would compress to something like 20MB file and it would take maximum of 5 seconds to transfer that over 100Mbps line?
In addition, (compressed) XML file can be sometimes smaller than the same thing expressed in proprietary binary file. This is because XML version probably does have better structure than the binary file. Example: try to save a MS Word document in its default format and its "HTML" format. Notice how that "bloated text based HTML version" is smaller than binary one. YMMV, of course.
If you had ever read HTML 4.01 spec fully you would have noted how it suggested that object element should be used for all embedded objects. To quote w3c:
And now they have removed IMG and APPLET. Are you surprised?
About what comes to CITE, as many already noted that was simply an authoring mistake while making the draft and it has already announced on the mailing list that it'll be back in the next draft.
I think that anybody that says h1-h6 should be kept instead of SECTION and H elements doesn't simply know what she is talking about. The problem with Hx is that one can skip levels. If the headers were numbered by default it would be highly visible. I know many slashdotters do start their web page with H3 simply because "it looks better than that god-awful-huge h1". If the first header said "1.1.1. I'm the first header" even an idiot author would think something smells fishy. In addition, there's no way to tell where one section of document ends. They new way is to enclose sections inside SECTION elements. Those sections can be nested and section can contain header enclosed in a H element. Browser then uses the nesting depth of SECTIONs what enclose a single H element to decide the size the header should be rendered at.
Example:
<section><h>header1</h>foo
<section><h>header2</h>bar</section>
baz</section>
Note that "baz" belongs to logical section named "header1". You cannot represent a structure like this with H1-H6.
One possible rendering could be:
header1
foo
| header2
| bar
baz
But the truth is, this all really doesn't matter. People will continue to author HTML3.2, stick XHTML2 DOCTYPE identifier and serve the documents as text/plain, regardless of what the possible final spec will say. And they will complain if their cool frameset doesn't work. Those few of us who care to follow the recommendation can easily do it. Simply change those few remaining IMG elements to objects and upgrade your document structure to SECTION and H and you're pretty much done. If you feel adventureous you could start authoring XHTML2 pages immediatly and simply write the missing rendering instructions in the user stylesheet. Yeah, it might work in Mozilla only, but that can be used for testing and as a real world prototype.
If you want to bitch about something it should be that XForms are too complex, but anything is better than current HTML forms.
I think they're just trying not to repeat history. MOO1 and MOO2 were created by Simtex (bought by Microprose (bought by Hasbro)) and AFAIK none of the Simtex games worked correctly without a patch... After saying that, I'm afraid MOO3 isn't the game I'm expecting it to be simply because pretty much nobody from the previous versions is in the development group.
Only in unpatched MOO2 IIRC. About the best weapons: use plasma cannons (it takes a lot of research!) after they are miniaturised, join with achilles targetting unit, structural analyzer, subspace teleporter and time warp facilitors. The idea is to hit with every beam (maximum damage every time) directly into the structure. You can easily destroy 20+ doomstar class starships in one turn with one doomstar size ship. That is, if you're to start first. Stellar converter can do only 400 hit points of damage and IIRC my ships could do total damage of something like 10000 hit points in one turn--bybassing shield and armor!
W3C specs are about accessibility, not looks. If IE has bugs that cause some text to be rendered too large to its users then you should tell those users about that. Ff they mind about the issue, they should try some other browser. Or at least fix their user style sheet. For example we have Opera and Phoenix for Windows, Galeon, Mozilla, Phoenix and Konqueror fox unixes and Mozilla, Chimera, MSIE/mac and Safari for MacOS. All of those can properly display text unlike MSIE/win32.
If you adjust your website text size to look good (in your opinion, some people in fact think bigger text looks better) in MSIE/win32, then less people are going to change to standards compliant browser and we're going to suffer with MSIE/win32 forever. Do you think there would be many users with NN4.x with Javascript and CSS on if authors simply decided to follow the spec only (and causing the NN4.x to crash when float and clear properties were used)? Why do you think we still have that many users using that bad browser?
It's not like you're going to lose customers if your font size is the default 12px instead of 8px (that you think looks good) but the other way around may be true (the text is so small that visitor cannot read it for a reason or another).
In addition, you list one reason as "they don't care" which I consider as a reason not to change the font size from default, not a reason to change it. If they really wanted the text size look smaller they would do something for it, don't you think?
Note that I'm not saying that you should support Mozilla/Opera/Konqueror/Safari and try to make the life of those who use MSIE harder. Instead I suggest that everybody should simply make pages strictly according to the recommendation. If many enough did this, MS didn't had choise but to fix the problems in their browser or lose the market position.
I'm so SICK of hearing people bitch about this. Maybe you morons should use a different browser if your current shitty one doesn't support such rudimentary features.
Uh? Perhaps you should reread my post? The word "some" doesn't include me. You might be speaking about yourself in 3rd person but I don't do that. I was bitching about the fact that because MSIE is buggy and it has many users some web "designers" feel that they must break some rules to make a web page to compensate some of those bugs. Nevermind the fact that those "fixes" break any standards-compiliant browser. I don't use MSIE, I don't support it and I always try to code according to the recommended spec--but there're many others doing something else.
Yes, it's fine as long as it isn't used for normal text. Sure, it's still readable, but far from optimal. If you make a page and don't specify font size at all, the font size will be optimal (because I've set up my browser preferences correctly). Why to make things complicated and decrease readability by changing the font size from default? Notice that I'm not saying that one shouldn't use font sizes smaller than default for something like navigation or text based advertisement.
I repeat my point: it's a mistake to compensate for MSIE's default settings even if you feel that that default is "too large". Some people may feel that its default is optimal (there must be some reason for the decided default size) and changing the font size from it makes the text look too small [or large]. In addition to those MSIE users, anybody with correctly configured browser also sees text too small.
This issue is often compared to a Joe Sixpack calling local TV station and asking them to turn the volume down because it's too loud. Do you think the local TV station would do that, or do you think they would tell the user to turn down the volume level in his own TV set? You can be pretty sure that the former would happen in reality. But why are web "designers" thinking they should turn the volume own instead?
I hope you don't touch the font-size. Or at least specify it as "100%" or "1em". This is important because otherwise correctly configured browsers display the characters too small.
Way too many websites use styles like p {font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;}. This rule is saying that the author of the page thinks that the page looks best when viewed with font face called "verdana" with a font size of 85% of the size the user has selected she is comfortable with. I'm ok with suggesting a font face but no way normal text should be made smaller than I've set in the preferences. This situation is caused by two reasons:
The above issues, joined with the fact that MSIE is the most common browser and verdana is distributed alongside MSIE practically guarantee that change to the better isn't going to happen unless majority of web "designers" get a clue. I've already lost faith that majority of the users would have some clue (MSIE with all the latest patches applied: still 11 security holes with publicly available exploits. Scary, eh?).
Fortunately, Mozilla does have minimum font-size setting. Unfortunately, some web sites define such a small font sizes that my minimum of 9px is hit with H1 level headers--so all headers look the same and paragraph text is the same size as all the headers.
Yes, and that's is why we're trying to move to DVI connectors. The difference between [analog] VGA signal and NTSC/PAL/SECAM signals are that one is supposed to be able to access single pixel with VGA signal but not so with television signals. VGA is superior to the signaling used in nowadays TV sets but it wasn't available during the time the still used television standards were made.
Sure, PS2 looks good on a display such as that but surely not out of this world. If you're happy with the PS2 image you aren't normally looking at 1920x1080 for sure. I do have a non-HDTV CRT projector (which are always somewhat blurry compared to DLP or LCD projectors) and PS2 still looks much blurrier than a regular DVD player (both connected via s-video cables). If PS2 cannot even display true interlaced broadcast quality signal, how on earth one could be happy with its image on a HDTV setup? Note that I'm using PAL setup which already has higher resolution than NTSC systems.
In addition, that display is an LCD so you can forget ever seeing black again--especially in this case due to high brightness. In addition to greyish "black" you can be pretty sure to be able to see pixel structure due to LCD technology. True, you cannot get true black from plasma display either. For maximum image quality I'd use UXGA (or better) DLP projector in a black painted room. That should provide you with true black and truely sharp image.
Remember that most projectors have bulb life of 2000 hours or less. And watch out those bulb expences--some do cost well over $500 a piece.
If a room with walls and the ceiling painted black sounds exaggerating, just think for a second what we're trying to do here: we're trying to make white panel (silver screen or something similar) to look truly black. If any part of the image has any light, the light will be reflected back from any non-black surface in the viewing room, namely walls, which makes the full screen to wash out. Trust me, I do own a CRT projector in a small room that has white walls and I'm not allowed to paint those darker. Black curtains help a little, though.
This sure is not the way to ensure broad hardware support and acceptance. Believe it or not, hardware companies do not feel the same need to support linux as they do windows, and making the platform hostle isn't going to win anyone over. (emphasis mine)
IMO, the value on the stuff they sell should be on hardware. A good example for this is so called "winmodems" which, in worst case, contain only minimum hardware required to connect phone cord to the PC and all the logic is done in the drivers. In this case selling the stuff as "hardware" is misleading and I understand fully if the manufacturer doesn't want to release full source code. Stuff like this should be sold as software and I think kernel should include API to allow running this kind of software if commercial software is allowed to be run in user mode. However, this kind of software doesn't need to mess with syscall table and stuff so I think current restrictions given to binary drivers should be kept in the future too.
On the other hand, if the manufacturer is selling real hardware then writing the driver is only pain in the ass and I cannot imagine any reason not to open spec to the hardware interface. After that, many manufacturers doing cool stuff could get drivers for their products for practically free by giving out a piece of hardware to some known open source developer. If that piece of hardware is worth the money, one could be pretty sure that GPLed version of the driver ends up to the kernel distribution and manufacturer doesn't have to pay anybody to be able to support linux.
That being said, I must add that even though I think that nVidia does some pretty awesome hardware they also do some hairy tricks to speed up the driver and other display adapter manufactures would love to use those tricks too. When the driver must do stuff like full OpenGL support I'd allow doing that in proprietary format. Though, nVidia should probably do proprietary stuff in the user mode and keep kernel mode driver part open, though.
I wouldn't rate such hack as a good contestant simply because the method is way too simple. But if you prefer to do such a thing, just use this perl script.
Note that HTML tidy can easily clean up such simple hacks. Truly unreadable source cannot be fixed with something as simple as HTML tidy. You can try the above perl script on some HTML file and then inputting that file to HTML Tidy Online.
And just for the record, numeric character entities always refer to unicode character code positions. For example, — (0x97) is undefined (reserved), even though many people try to use that in HTML source to represent emdash.
I think you could get pretty interesting results by layering elements one over another and creating resulting images with interfere patterns caused by letters laid over other letters. Use CSS features that MSIE doesn't implement, or has bugs in, to correct the positioning in correctly behaving browsers and @import trick for keeping NN4.x in the game.
Creating page that works only in one nonstandard browser is too easy. Creating standards compliant page that works in every browser but one buggy one should be hard enough.