Let's be honest, there are always a million posts and bug reports floating around saying things along the lines of "I'm a regular user who tried to use X feature/menu. It didn't work well because it is missing A,B and C options, and D, E and F are in the wrong menu". If the linux/free software community had any track record of responding to those with 'well, I guess that needs to be fixed' instead of 'read the documentation/use commend line workaround with -r hfg blarg whatamidoing +7' linux would be a better experience than OS X by now.
Let's be honest, if those one million posts and bug reports had been implemented, there would be a million options in all menus and the programmers would be busy moving around options between menus.
The people who suggest to add A, B and C to X menu are not always right. That's why a project needs someone ultimately responsible for usability, who can grasp the bigger picture and judge which suggestions should go in, which should be changed/merged, and which should be ignored.
Actually, I'm in Sweden, and yeah they have about a gazillion models running at least two different operating systems. I'm about as annoyed as you are about the multitude of models, I was just pointing out that Nokia unquestionably already has something good going on.
Also, considering that a developer today would probably target Symbian OS (or a variation of it), their application would run on over half of the world's smartphones. Even if said developer would only target Nokia's N95, it would run on over 7 million phones.
Looking at numbers, Nokia had a net income of $11 billion last year, compared to Apple's $3.5 billion, of $80 billion vs $24 billion in revenues.
They are also the world's leading supplier of digital cameras and digital audio players.
If they stop spamming out a billion different mobile models a year and focus on getting some nice, neat hardware backed by some good open source, get enough developer support, and they could have something going on.
Nokia could have something good going on? Apart from owning 40% (and climbing) of the global mobile telephone market and having revenue higher than the state budget of Finland? Yeah, I'm sure they need your help in deciding which kinds of models to build.
First off, I think you should start with a language such as Python or Ruby. I started with BASIC which was easy to grasp, and more modern languages are easy yet more powerful.
Second, when I started programming I was first looking at my brother, writing really simple BASIC programs on the C64. Later, I was interested in fractals and wrote algorithms for drawing fractals. I had a book with code examples for different fractals, but in some other language (I don't remember which). The process of interpreting the algorithm in the first language and translating it to BASIC was very good for learning. Tweaking and extending the algorithms and seeing the changes visually was very encouraging.
Today, if I were to teach a kid programming, I think I would look into Lego Mindstorms. It helps if the kid is into Lego or robotics, of course. That's a contained environment with a powerful and easy language, which is also part of something else, with immediate feedback on the changes. You can program it in either the Lego-supplied RCX Code (BASIC-like) or ROBOLAB (LabView-based), or any of a number of languages supplied by the community (C, C++, C#, Java, Lua etc).
You wouldn't pay $50 for Elton John, if you were a fan of him? I pay that (yeah, the dollar is low now but I think your taxes are low enough to even that out) to see a rapper with a DJ. Are concerts really that much cheaper in the US?
Anyway, I guess giving away concert tickets with records would be great marketing, it's just that it's an entirely different economy, with other companies and other interests involved. Yes, a show is great promotion for an artist, record sales wise, but that show has to be pretty cheap, if the record company is going to afford to buy tickets for each record sold, not to mention the fact that the number of expected sales (for an artist as Elton John, at least) has got to be a lot larger than the number of available seats at a show in a given area.
For record companies trying to use the higher quality of the CD as an edge would be a doomed path. The market for music will be entirely digital (as in, no physical medium) in a few years, except for a smaller market of hardcore enthusiasts who will buy vinyl or higher quality digital discs. No, the future for the record companies, which still is an option surprisingly enough, is for them to sell music digitally, with a higher quality product than which is available on the "pirate market" and to a low enough price. With that, they will sell more music than ever. They WILL compete on equal grounds with smaller labels, but their huge back-catalogs will still be a money making machine.
Trackers such as Oink (which is an amazing thing, no doubt) will still exist, but if the sales are high enough they will be considered collateral damage. If it's easy enough, cheap enough and high enough quality (and I'm not only talking about bit-rate, but correctly, "richly" tagged files, with cover art, liner notes, credits, maybe lyrics, and bonus material) the vast majority of people will not bother with the hassle of underground pirate trackers or p2p.
I mean, unlimited distribution opportunities directly into peoples homes has to be the greatest thing ever for media companies! They will lose some sales to illegitimate copying, but they will gain a lot more with sheer volume.
Of course, banks should require more than that to allow a withdrawal. Its a lot easier to put money into an account than to take it out.
Keyword here is should. Of course, this is Britain we're talking about, so that's not exactly the case - according to my friends living in England, many banks have "security" measures along these lines:
Customer: "Hello, my name is such-and-such. Would you please empty this account for me: xxx-xxxx-xxx-xx" Bank clerk: "Right. I'll just need to ask you a couple of security questions. What's your mother's maiden name? Where were you born?" Customer: "Her name is so-and-so, and I was born here-and-there." Bank clerk: "All right, I'm sending the cheque!"
See, they don't trust new-fangled technology that provides real security.
Have you ever known anybody to say: "There are just too many girls to choose from, I guess I'll go hide in the basement."? Or: "There are ten thousand restaurants in this city. I just can't cope. I'm going to stop eating."?
A better label for the whole subject would be: " How a small minority of people fail to learn tree-pruning techniques, and dissolve in panic." Then we all could say: "Yep, sounds like my ex-girlfriend. Been there, done that. Next?"
Girls to choose from?! Ex-girlfriend?!?!! Last night just called, it wants your dream back!
When browsers added password management features 5 (?) years ago, there weren't a lot of sites that required passwords, included user-generated content, and allowed that user-generated content to include password fields. But there were (and still are) many sites where loading just about any URL on the site could give you a "you need to log in" page.
Horse shit. I would even say it was more common 6-7+ years ago, a lot of discussion forums allowed HTML in the posts back then. Of course, more people are using it now since the web is more widespread, but this feature is not a feature, it's a bug, and I've always thought it was strange that the browser would fill out any form with my credentials.
If you use LAME, set your Q to 9. A 320kbps MP3 with Q=1 and 320kbps mp3 with Q=9 are WILDLY different, while both the same bitrate and same size. Whatever garbage MP3 files you have, re-encoding them as 320kbps/Q9 files isn't going to make them sound any worse to 99.9% of humans. Of course it takes more time to encode them this way.
I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong, but according to the documentation for my lame (version 3.96.1):
-q qual
0 <= qual <= 9
-q 0:
use slowest & best possible version of all algorithms. -q 0 and
-q 1 are slow and may not produce significantly higher quality.
-q 2:
recommended. Same as -h.
-q 5:
default value. Good speed, reasonable quality.
-q 7:
same as -f. Very fast, ok quality. Psycho acoustics are used
for pre-echo & M/S, but no noise shaping is done.
-q 9:
disables almost all algorithms including psy-model. Poor qual‐
ity.
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold?
on
Acme for Windows
·
· Score: 1
Eclipse does it, as does IntelliJ Idea. I'd say most modern IDEs do it.
Perhaps you'll get more out of this instead: The Win32 Subsystem (what makes it Windows) is clearly running in user mode.
Um... No? They were clearly running in user mode in NT 3.51. Under that is the specification of how they changed that in NT 4.0, and then a pretty straight-forward explanation of what they did: Move (most of) the Win32 Subsystem into kernel space.
How about actually reading what you're referring to?
I just checked notepad, MSWord and Firefox on windows 2000. They all present dialogs with 'save' and 'cancel' when asked to save something. Windows has its usability problems, but it isn't as bad as you want it to be.
I just checked Notepad and MS Word. If you try to close a document with unsaved changes, you get a dialog along the lines of "Do you want to save the changes? Yes No Cancel" in both apps.
This is in Windows XP. This is exactly as bad as GP made it out to be - I can't say I read it as GP wanted it to be bad, though?!
Because it doesn't hurt mysql, it hasn't hurt mysql, and it won't hurt mysql because mysql also has maxdb AND it can continue to use the innodb and berkley engines because they are open source.
It won't hurt MySQL the database (at least not that much). However, it could hurt MySQL AB, the company, a lot. They sell pretty expensive licenses to companies that wish to link against MySQL the database while not releasing their own code under the GPL. You know, the whole dual-licensing thing?
IF Oracle decides not to provide BDB/InnoDB under a commercial license, but only as GPL, MySQL cannot sell licenses anymore. They will have to live off support only (or alms).
And when it comes to MaxDB: Stop pretending like it won't be a problem for MySQL's many paying, commercial customers to switch to an entirely different DB. And while they're at it, why would they choose Max instead of any of the other alternatives you have listed in this thread? Again, it hurts MySQL AB.
Where do you get the idea that mysql will not be able to use those engines?
Again, MySQL can use them, but MySQL AB, potentially, can't get a license.
I would really, really love to see the two books "Rymdväktaren" and "Nyaga" by Swedish writer Peter Nilson. I'm pretty sure that won't happen, because there isn't even an English translation AFAIK, but they are a masterpiece. I can't figure out why they haven't been translated.
Another favorite would be "Aniara" by Harry Martinson, an epic about a giant space ship that gets out of course and continues into outer space. Aniara has also been adapted to an opera.
What would killing mysql accomplish when ther are a plethora of great open source databases that are fully transactional, full featured and proven in some of the largest companies in the world?
You keep saying that, and I agree with you. However, now that Oracle actually has bought Sleepycat and Innobase, why do you think they've done that, if not to hurt MySQL? I can't see any other plausible reason. This is Larry Ellison we're talking about, he's not famous for giving stuff away.
Using the In-Reply-To: header flag, perhaps? It uses the unique Message-Id. That's how threading works (in good MUAs - Thunderbird has it's own very very strange message threading). Save the message-id for outgoing e-mails, for each user. When a message is received, match the In-Reply-To header against the list of Message-Ids. If it's there, whitelist.
Not sure where he gets megapixels from... Each one is 432x432 which is only 186,000 pixels... Any cheap digital camera can do at least 640x480.
It's cute seeing a Slashdotter (with a lowish userid, too!) who won't even consider the possibility of the posted images being scaled down for the web - even when the size (in MB) of each image is in the caption.
My scenario using 'less' was just a simple example. I'm right there with you. No more File, Edit, View menus, no more application menus.
Well, I think I would like to keep the File, Edit, View menus, but good riddance to the Toolbar (which already is removable in most apps, at least in Gnome).
I like the idea of Biff and IM on the keyboard (although I personally hate IM), this could extend to CRM and ERP systems as well. Workflow that appears on your keyboard. "Ms. Gradenko, why haven't you processed those forms...the 'workflow' button on your keyboard is flashing yellow!"
Now we're talking! I really like that idea. I wrote a campaign planner with workflow capabilities as a contractor a couple years back - if I could have done this back then they would have given me a longer contract.;)
When it comes to flashing buttons, another poster expressed concern over this and likened it to blinking gifs. I'm thinking a nice pulsating, more along the lines of the pulsating windows in the Gnome panel window list, or the bouncing icons in OS X' icon bar. It should be configurable, of course. I wouldn't want my keyboard to start blinking on every IM either...
Slashdot Mirror
Let's be honest, there are always a million posts and bug reports floating around saying things along the lines of "I'm a regular user who tried to use X feature/menu. It didn't work well because it is missing A,B and C options, and D, E and F are in the wrong menu". If the linux/free software community had any track record of responding to those with 'well, I guess that needs to be fixed' instead of 'read the documentation/use commend line workaround with -r hfg blarg whatamidoing +7' linux would be a better experience than OS X by now.
Let's be honest, if those one million posts and bug reports had been implemented, there would be a million options in all menus and the programmers would be busy moving around options between menus.
The people who suggest to add A, B and C to X menu are not always right. That's why a project needs someone ultimately responsible for usability, who can grasp the bigger picture and judge which suggestions should go in, which should be changed/merged, and which should be ignored.
I can believe time travel before I believe faster than light travel.
Faster than light travel is time travel.
I am intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Actually, I'm in Sweden, and yeah they have about a gazillion models running at least two different operating systems. I'm about as annoyed as you are about the multitude of models, I was just pointing out that Nokia unquestionably already has something good going on.
Also, considering that a developer today would probably target Symbian OS (or a variation of it), their application would run on over half of the world's smartphones. Even if said developer would only target Nokia's N95, it would run on over 7 million phones.
Looking at numbers, Nokia had a net income of $11 billion last year, compared to Apple's $3.5 billion, of $80 billion vs $24 billion in revenues.
They are also the world's leading supplier of digital cameras and digital audio players.
If they stop spamming out a billion different mobile models a year and focus on getting some nice, neat hardware backed by some good open source, get enough developer support, and they could have something going on.
Nokia could have something good going on? Apart from owning 40% (and climbing) of the global mobile telephone market and having revenue higher than the state budget of Finland? Yeah, I'm sure they need your help in deciding which kinds of models to build.
First off, I think you should start with a language such as Python or Ruby. I started with BASIC which was easy to grasp, and more modern languages are easy yet more powerful.
Second, when I started programming I was first looking at my brother, writing really simple BASIC programs on the C64. Later, I was interested in fractals and wrote algorithms for drawing fractals. I had a book with code examples for different fractals, but in some other language (I don't remember which). The process of interpreting the algorithm in the first language and translating it to BASIC was very good for learning. Tweaking and extending the algorithms and seeing the changes visually was very encouraging.
Today, if I were to teach a kid programming, I think I would look into Lego Mindstorms. It helps if the kid is into Lego or robotics, of course. That's a contained environment with a powerful and easy language, which is also part of something else, with immediate feedback on the changes. You can program it in either the Lego-supplied RCX Code (BASIC-like) or ROBOLAB (LabView-based), or any of a number of languages supplied by the community (C, C++, C#, Java, Lua etc).
The Phantom is the greatest comic evarrr! Disregard the horrible movie with Billy Zane, here's the comic: http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/phantom/about.htm
A company would keep this information for their own data mining, which is pretty much all that Google is interested in. User data, trends, interests.
Saving that data, as much as possible, is what they do!
You wouldn't pay $50 for Elton John, if you were a fan of him? I pay that (yeah, the dollar is low now but I think your taxes are low enough to even that out) to see a rapper with a DJ. Are concerts really that much cheaper in the US?
Anyway, I guess giving away concert tickets with records would be great marketing, it's just that it's an entirely different economy, with other companies and other interests involved. Yes, a show is great promotion for an artist, record sales wise, but that show has to be pretty cheap, if the record company is going to afford to buy tickets for each record sold, not to mention the fact that the number of expected sales (for an artist as Elton John, at least) has got to be a lot larger than the number of available seats at a show in a given area.
For record companies trying to use the higher quality of the CD as an edge would be a doomed path. The market for music will be entirely digital (as in, no physical medium) in a few years, except for a smaller market of hardcore enthusiasts who will buy vinyl or higher quality digital discs. No, the future for the record companies, which still is an option surprisingly enough, is for them to sell music digitally, with a higher quality product than which is available on the "pirate market" and to a low enough price. With that, they will sell more music than ever. They WILL compete on equal grounds with smaller labels, but their huge back-catalogs will still be a money making machine.
Trackers such as Oink (which is an amazing thing, no doubt) will still exist, but if the sales are high enough they will be considered collateral damage. If it's easy enough, cheap enough and high enough quality (and I'm not only talking about bit-rate, but correctly, "richly" tagged files, with cover art, liner notes, credits, maybe lyrics, and bonus material) the vast majority of people will not bother with the hassle of underground pirate trackers or p2p.
I mean, unlimited distribution opportunities directly into peoples homes has to be the greatest thing ever for media companies! They will lose some sales to illegitimate copying, but they will gain a lot more with sheer volume.
Keyword here is should. Of course, this is Britain we're talking about, so that's not exactly the case - according to my friends living in England, many banks have "security" measures along these lines:
See, they don't trust new-fangled technology that provides real security.
They're external drives. They almost always come preformatted (FAT32), usually with some (autorun) software installed.
Girls to choose from?! Ex-girlfriend?!?!! Last night just called, it wants your dream back!
So, how about this Google search query?
e t+mp3
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Azshare.n
Google provides easy access to a lot of copyrighted material...
When browsers added password management features 5 (?) years ago, there weren't a lot of sites that required passwords, included user-generated content, and allowed that user-generated content to include password fields. But there were (and still are) many sites where loading just about any URL on the site could give you a "you need to log in" page.
Horse shit. I would even say it was more common 6-7+ years ago, a lot of discussion forums allowed HTML in the posts back then. Of course, more people are using it now since the web is more widespread, but this feature is not a feature, it's a bug, and I've always thought it was strange that the browser would fill out any form with my credentials.
I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong, but according to the documentation for my lame (version 3.96.1):
Eclipse does it, as does IntelliJ Idea. I'd say most modern IDEs do it.
Um... No? They were clearly running in user mode in NT 3.51. Under that is the specification of how they changed that in NT 4.0, and then a pretty straight-forward explanation of what they did: Move (most of) the Win32 Subsystem into kernel space.
How about actually reading what you're referring to?
I just checked Notepad and MS Word. If you try to close a document with unsaved changes, you get a dialog along the lines of "Do you want to save the changes? Yes No Cancel" in both apps.
This is in Windows XP. This is exactly as bad as GP made it out to be - I can't say I read it as GP wanted it to be bad, though?!
Because it doesn't hurt mysql, it hasn't hurt mysql, and it won't hurt mysql because mysql also has maxdb AND it can continue to use the innodb and berkley engines because they are open source.
It won't hurt MySQL the database (at least not that much). However, it could hurt MySQL AB, the company, a lot. They sell pretty expensive licenses to companies that wish to link against MySQL the database while not releasing their own code under the GPL. You know, the whole dual-licensing thing?
IF Oracle decides not to provide BDB/InnoDB under a commercial license, but only as GPL, MySQL cannot sell licenses anymore. They will have to live off support only (or alms).
And when it comes to MaxDB: Stop pretending like it won't be a problem for MySQL's many paying, commercial customers to switch to an entirely different DB. And while they're at it, why would they choose Max instead of any of the other alternatives you have listed in this thread? Again, it hurts MySQL AB.
Where do you get the idea that mysql will not be able to use those engines?
Again, MySQL can use them, but MySQL AB, potentially, can't get a license.
I would really, really love to see the two books "Rymdväktaren" and "Nyaga" by Swedish writer Peter Nilson. I'm pretty sure that won't happen, because there isn't even an English translation AFAIK, but they are a masterpiece. I can't figure out why they haven't been translated.
Another favorite would be "Aniara" by Harry Martinson, an epic about a giant space ship that gets out of course and continues into outer space. Aniara has also been adapted to an opera.
What would killing mysql accomplish when ther are a plethora of great open source databases that are fully transactional, full featured and proven in some of the largest companies in the world?
You keep saying that, and I agree with you. However, now that Oracle actually has bought Sleepycat and Innobase, why do you think they've done that, if not to hurt MySQL? I can't see any other plausible reason. This is Larry Ellison we're talking about, he's not famous for giving stuff away.
How would you know that an email is a reply?
Using the In-Reply-To: header flag, perhaps? It uses the unique Message-Id. That's how threading works (in good MUAs - Thunderbird has it's own very very strange message threading). Save the message-id for outgoing e-mails, for each user. When a message is received, match the In-Reply-To header against the list of Message-Ids. If it's there, whitelist.
Easy.
Not sure where he gets megapixels from... Each one is 432x432 which is only 186,000 pixels... Any cheap digital camera can do at least 640x480.
It's cute seeing a Slashdotter (with a lowish userid, too!) who won't even consider the possibility of the posted images being scaled down for the web - even when the size (in MB) of each image is in the caption.
give me a 4gb flash drive and i'll be all over it!
Sure, here.
They list it as $599, but it's on sale for about $265, at least where I live (Sweden).
My scenario using 'less' was just a simple example. I'm right there with you. No more File, Edit, View menus, no more application menus.
;)
Well, I think I would like to keep the File, Edit, View menus, but good riddance to the Toolbar (which already is removable in most apps, at least in Gnome).
I like the idea of Biff and IM on the keyboard (although I personally hate IM), this could extend to CRM and ERP systems as well. Workflow that appears on your keyboard. "Ms. Gradenko, why haven't you processed those forms...the 'workflow' button on your keyboard is flashing yellow!"
Now we're talking! I really like that idea. I wrote a campaign planner with workflow capabilities as a contractor a couple years back - if I could have done this back then they would have given me a longer contract.
When it comes to flashing buttons, another poster expressed concern over this and likened it to blinking gifs. I'm thinking a nice pulsating, more along the lines of the pulsating windows in the Gnome panel window list, or the bouncing icons in OS X' icon bar. It should be configurable, of course. I wouldn't want my keyboard to start blinking on every IM either...