What about setup screens? Menus? Searching dialogs? File browsers? Surely there are going to be a fair number of such UI things going on besides straight viewing of book pages. And when you're looking at an e-book are you going to be tempted to flip back and forth between pages more or less often? (What was the name of that character that was just introduced? What, 2 pages back? maybe it was last chapter? Whoops! I just burned through 50/7500's of my page flips!)
The question is valid. How long is a 7500 page battery going to turn out to be in practice?
Re:What about the chimes in the commercials?
on
'Intel Inside' No More
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· Score: 3, Funny
Oh, come on. It's a million less times annoying than any jingle with lyrics. I mean you may get annoyed by it when you hear it, but at least you don't find yourself humming it all day long like... oh I don't know like an annoying commercial jingle. The worst one over here in Japan is something for a fiber optic internet service. "Hikaru umi, hikaru sora, hi-ka-ru ma-n-shon". Gah! Drives me nuts. Just hearing one verse will get it stuck in my head all day. Damn, now wish I hadn't thought of that example.
... hikaru umi, hikaru sora... da da dah dah da da da da.. Nooooooooo!
I looked at the one about "making a presentation fast". First he was setting up the slide transitions in the wizard, and he says we're going to choose "fast" for the slide transitions. But the preview doesn't seem to change it's speed at all, so he adds "which is actually not that fast". Then later it was amusing to see the guy clicking on different slide templates to try to change the layout of the title slide. Nothing was happening. Then apparently he realized you have to select the slide in the pane on the left for anything to happen. Then it worked -- a big box appeared on top of the existing title slide text saying "click here to add text", so he clicks it, but nothing happens. Huh? So he just deletes the box and goes on without saying what all that was about.
I think you're right. It will be quite a surprise if these actually prove to provide much comfort or guidance to newbies. Plus the video quality is really bad, so anyone looking at these videos as a way to preview OOo is likely to think "what a slow, crapy-looking piece of junk!", when it's really just the lossy compression and bad frame rate.
Still, my reaction was pretty much... "looks like I'm sticking with PowerPoint for another year." If Impress has some killer features, this vid sure didn't show 'em.
I liked the original poster's metaphor. It conjures up a very visceral image. Your suggested replacement, "shot itself in the foot," is too much of a cliche to have much expressive impact.
Lua is quite big among game developers, and I suspect that's why it's on Brian Hook's radar screen, Brian having spent a good amount of time in the game dev arena. Why is it popular with game developers? For one, because when they look for portability, they really need portability. Often all the way from dual proc Wintel boxes right down to GBA. This is possible in part because Lua is apparently quite light weight in terms of memory requirements unlike most other scripting languages.
Hey, that's not bad. Thanks. That's almost what I was asking for. Always resizeable is definitely good. Always with a menubar, though, is not exactly what I wanted.
Really what I'd like to do is be able to turn menubars and things on and off on the fly, like via a context menu. It seems like with the above about:config options you can make them always come on, but you can't decide to add them to a window that popped up without them. About half the time I'd say I agree with the web site developer that the popup window in question doesn't need need a menubar etc. And in those cases it's nice not to have the clutter. But sometimes the designer screwed up and the contents don't actually fit, or they forgot that the contents contain a link out to some other pages of more general web content
Eh, but the above settings give me 90% of what I was after. Thanks again, vagabond_gr.
The reminds me of the Philip K. Dick novel in which the main character thinks he lives an ordinary life, and who solves the daily puzzle in the newspaper every day for cheap entertainment. In reality, though, the whole town he lives in is a front, and the fun puzzles he's solving in the newspaper are actually cleverly disguised military strategy problems of some sort.
Quick -- someone patent that storyline and sue Amazon for infringement!
I'd like to see a plugin that lets me override annoying javascript that prevents resizing windows. It's my window damnit, I should be able to resize it if I want to. Or a plugin which lets me add the standard menu bar to a window that doesn't have it if I want the window to have a freaking menu bar.
Ok, probably not bedazzling enough to win the competition, but it would still be a great plugin to have.
For typing math in PowerPoint, TeXPoint is the biz. I was lured away from PowerPoint a few times in the past by the OOo equation editor, but after trying TeXPoint, now editing equations in PowerPoint is so easy I'd rather do it there than with OOo's editor. OOo's syntax is kind of TeX-like, but TeXPoint is the full deal.
That said, you better like editing equations in TeX, because that's the only way to make an equation with TeXPoint. None of this fancy WYSIWYG editing crap.
Pardon me, your exhalted highness, Lord Ender. I too have seen dozens of rants about whitespace, and I agree with you that mostly they are pointless. I find most of the complaints I read about the whitespace in Python to be pretty silly, the answer generally being "well duh, get a better editor". But I've not seen anyone mention the issue I raised above, which isn't solved so easily just by getting a better editor. Basically in a nutshell you could just phrase it as auto-indent not working so well.
vadim_t pretty much described the type of situation I'm talking about. Another example is when you've got an existing block of code and you paste in a big chunk from somewhere else that was at a different indentation level, it's a bit annoying to get it lined up. In a curly-brace language I just sloppily select the whole area plus a little bit extra perhaps on either end, and hit "reindent". But in Python I find I have to be very careful to select just the right lines, and then indent the block to the right level using block indent commands like "indent-region", rather than the catch-all "reindent-region". So it just means that with Python I have to stay on my toes and know what the right indent level is. That's all.
And it wasn't intended to be a troll. If there's some way make it work nicely in emacs that would be great to know. But I'm afraid indent and unindent block commands that make me pay attention to the indent level aren't as easy as an oblivious "reindent-region".
I'm not saying that it's a showstopper. Far from it. I still continue happily to use Python. Python is great. I just think that that's one genuine annoyance that you can't get around when using whitespace to indicate structure.
Oh, bother. Why do I even try. And I was doing so well for a while there just ignoring Slashdot. My apologies for posting an off-topic comment. But redundant and troll, I think not.
I was willing to believe that Python's whitespace indentation was a good thing. I wanted to believe. But unfortunately I just find it to be a pain. I like Python, but the using whitespace to indicate block structure is annoying. Why? Because auto-indenters don't work. When I'm writing the code the first time that doesn't really cause problems, but when I go start messing with existing code and rearranging things, refactoring loops and such, then I just want to hit my magic Ctrl-Alt-\ key sequence and have the editor reformat things for me. But if whitespace is the only indicator of block structure then it doesn't work properly.
Maybe it's just a problem with Emacs' python mode, but I don't really see a good way for it to automatically know what indentation level this chunk of code I just dropped in is supposed to go.
I was thinking more in terms of big corporate deals for custom software. Contract work. If you have a contract and they don't deliver the software promised in the contract, then the courts can help. Or more likely an arbiter because the contract probably stipulates that you agree to binding arbitration, but whichever. You still have some recourse if they don't come through with the software.
But now that I think about it more, that's got nothing to do with open or closed source. You can hire out contract work under either licensing model.
I don't know about you, but I eat stuff all the time that doesn't have ingredients listed. And odd thing is, the more I pay, usually the less they're willing to tell me about the recipe.
Medicine is a good analogy. But then again most software isn't life and death. So there isn't as compelling a reason why the "ingredients" should be listed on software.
Then there's the old car analogy which is becoming less and less apt by the year. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" Even if you don't know how to fix it, don't you like knowing that you can take it to whoever you want to get it fixed? Sure, but these days, more and more functionality is sealed inside the car's embedded computer running its closed source code, and even your mechanic just has to shrug and send it to the dealer for fixing. So, sadly, it matters less and less that we can get under the hood of our cars.
Proprietary: someone will catch you if you offer to pay enough money.
Open Source: someone will catch you as long as they aren't too busy doing other things at their real jobs, and they find it personally interesting that you're falling.
I love open source, don't get me wrong, but I certainly wouldn't characterize it as something you can count on in a pinch. You can't really count on propietary software either, but at least if they let you fall then you've got a chance at getting some damages back in the courts.
I have obsolutely no abjections to thier decision to obstain from this practice. Hopefully this serves as an abject lesson for them. Though I wish the fine had been higher. It should be abvious to everyone that given how abstinate they are, they're just going to do this again. The only way to stop them would be force them into object poverty.
Agreed. Back in the day (1990's) there was a company called Visix that made a toolkit called Galaxy, not unlike Qt. (Though Qt's overall design is better in my opinion). Anyway single-developer single platform licenses for Galaxy 3.0 went for about $20,000. The argument was that it saves you from having to hire an entire programmer just to do the mac port.
But the point is that it sold pretty well even at $20K a pop, precisely because companies felt they could reduce staff and reduce development time by having such a product.
I think there were pretty few shrink-wrap app customers. Mostly internal development.
There also used to be some bizarre language in the license FAQ stating that you were not allowed to use the GPL Qt to develop a commercial app, and then buy commercial licenses once you were ready to distribute commercially. Basically, in their eyes, any code developed with GPL Qt is forever tainted and can't be used any way besides GPL. Here's the link that says basically that.
Their motivation is pretty obvious: most startups fail, so they want to get cash from any company using Qt right away before they go belly-up. But that's more restrictive and viral than even the GPL, isn't it? With the regular GPL, nothing is stopping me from developing my prototype using GPL code, and then replacing the GPL bits with something non-GPL at the last minute before distribution.
I guess the difference is that they're the ones selling you the commercial license in the end, so they can make the terms of the commercial license whatever they want. I.e. they can say that you're in viloation of that license if you initially developed your code under GPL Qt.
Yeh, I know I don't have to do it that way, but I believe most of the examples do. I was just a little surprised to see them actually pushing this as the "right" way to code wx apps. After reading all the intro material about how great a cross-platform toolkit wx is etc ect, then to see the first 1/3 of the demo code is full of this platform specific junk just strikes me as wrong somehow. But I grew up on the principal that platform specific #ifdefs in actual main application code should be an absolute last resort. Call me old fashioned.
// For compilers that support precompilation, includes "wx/wx.h". #include "wx/wxprec.h"
#ifdef __BORLANDC__ #pragma hdrstop #endif
#ifndef WX_PRECOMP #include "wx/wx.h" #endif
in every single one of my dang.cpp files.
After working with Qt for a while I was totally dumbstruck with the sheer amount of such garbage required to program according to official wx guidelines.
But the wxPython version doesn't require that kind of cruft. What's your beef with wxPython?
Relax. If you RTFS you will see this is for "NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program", not the engineering department. So the guy is probably a tech-savvy artist rather than an art-savvy techie. And if you download the thesis you'll see that it is in fact "A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES in INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University"
So don't worry. You can still be proud of your engineering PhD when you get it.
Still, you have to admit that even though the underlying tech is nothing new, he does present some fairly novel usage cases for it. Of course most of them are fairly pointless like "let's collaborate together by looking at completely different things on the same screen". But the idea does seem to make sense for something like the split screen mode in 2-player video-games. If you can only have 512x768 pixels out an XGA display for your view, wouldn't you rather have those spread over the whole screen than squished onto one half of it, like they typically do? And if the other guy can't see what you're doing, all the better.
Anyway the point is these lenticular screen 3D monitors that various companies are starting to make may have a variety of interesting uses beyond just displaying 3D imagery. Exploring those ideas is probably worth a master's degree in "professional studies," whatever that is.
Slashdot Mirror
What about setup screens? Menus? Searching dialogs? File browsers? Surely there are going to be a fair number of such UI things going on besides straight viewing of book pages. And when you're looking at an e-book are you going to be tempted to flip back and forth between pages more or less often? (What was the name of that character that was just introduced? What, 2 pages back? maybe it was last chapter? Whoops! I just burned through 50/7500's of my page flips!)
The question is valid. How long is a 7500 page battery going to turn out to be in practice?
Sounds like this is a popularized writeup about the work that was just published at SIGGRAPH in July. So it's more recent than 1996.
I looked at the one about "making a presentation fast". First he was setting up the slide transitions in the wizard, and he says we're going to choose "fast" for the slide transitions. But the preview doesn't seem to change it's speed at all, so he adds "which is actually not that fast". Then later it was amusing to see the guy clicking on different slide templates to try to change the layout of the title slide. Nothing was happening. Then apparently he realized you have to select the slide in the pane on the left for anything to happen. Then it worked -- a big box appeared on top of the existing title slide text saying "click here to add text", so he clicks it, but nothing happens. Huh? So he just deletes the box and goes on without saying what all that was about.
I think you're right. It will be quite a surprise if these actually prove to provide much comfort or guidance to newbies. Plus the video quality is really bad, so anyone looking at these videos as a way to preview OOo is likely to think "what a slow, crapy-looking piece of junk!", when it's really just the lossy compression and bad frame rate.
Still, my reaction was pretty much... "looks like I'm sticking with PowerPoint for another year." If Impress has some killer features, this vid sure didn't show 'em.
I liked the original poster's metaphor. It conjures up a very visceral image. Your suggested replacement, "shot itself in the foot," is too much of a cliche to have much expressive impact.
Lua is quite big among game developers, and I suspect that's why it's on Brian Hook's radar screen, Brian having spent a good amount of time in the game dev arena. Why is it popular with game developers? For one, because when they look for portability, they really need portability. Often all the way from dual proc Wintel boxes right down to GBA. This is possible in part because Lua is apparently quite light weight in terms of memory requirements unlike most other scripting languages.
Hey, that's not bad. Thanks. That's almost what I was asking for. Always resizeable is definitely good. Always with a menubar, though, is not exactly what I wanted.
Really what I'd like to do is be able to turn menubars and things on and off on the fly, like via a context menu. It seems like with the above about:config options you can make them always come on, but you can't decide to add them to a window that popped up without them. About half the time I'd say I agree with the web site developer that the popup window in question doesn't need need a menubar etc. And in those cases it's nice not to have the clutter. But sometimes the designer screwed up and the contents don't actually fit, or they forgot that the contents contain a link out to some other pages of more general web content
Eh, but the above settings give me 90% of what I was after. Thanks again, vagabond_gr.
The reminds me of the Philip K. Dick novel in which the main character thinks he lives an ordinary life, and who solves the daily puzzle in the newspaper every day for cheap entertainment. In reality, though, the whole town he lives in is a front, and the fun puzzles he's solving in the newspaper are actually cleverly disguised military strategy problems of some sort.
Quick -- someone patent that storyline and sue Amazon for infringement!
I'd like to see a plugin that lets me override annoying javascript that prevents resizing windows. It's my window damnit, I should be able to resize it if I want to. Or a plugin which lets me add the standard menu bar to a window that doesn't have it if I want the window to have a freaking menu bar.
Ok, probably not bedazzling enough to win the competition, but it would still be a great plugin to have.
For typing math in PowerPoint, TeXPoint is the biz.
I was lured away from PowerPoint a few times in the past by the OOo equation editor, but after trying TeXPoint, now editing equations in PowerPoint is so easy I'd rather do it there than with OOo's editor. OOo's syntax is kind of TeX-like, but TeXPoint is the full deal.
That said, you better like editing equations in TeX, because that's the only way to make an equation with TeXPoint. None of this fancy WYSIWYG editing crap.
Sigh.
Pardon me, your exhalted highness, Lord Ender. I too have seen dozens of rants about whitespace, and I agree with you that mostly they are pointless. I find most of the complaints I read about the whitespace in Python to be pretty silly, the answer generally being "well duh, get a better editor". But I've not seen anyone mention the issue I raised above, which isn't solved so easily just by getting a better editor. Basically in a nutshell you could just phrase it as auto-indent not working so well.
vadim_t pretty much described the type of situation I'm talking about. Another example is when you've got an existing block of code and you paste in a big chunk from somewhere else that was at a different indentation level, it's a bit annoying to get it lined up. In a curly-brace language I just sloppily select the whole area plus a little bit extra perhaps on either end, and hit "reindent". But in Python I find I have to be very careful to select just the right lines, and then indent the block to the right level using block indent commands like "indent-region", rather than the catch-all "reindent-region". So it just means that with Python I have to stay on my toes and know what the right indent level is. That's all.
And it wasn't intended to be a troll. If there's some way make it work nicely in emacs that would be great to know. But I'm afraid indent and unindent block commands that make me pay attention to the indent level aren't as easy as an oblivious "reindent-region".
I'm not saying that it's a showstopper. Far from it. I still continue happily to use Python. Python is great. I just think that that's one genuine annoyance that you can't get around when using whitespace to indicate structure.
Oh, bother. Why do I even try. And I was doing so well for a while there just ignoring Slashdot. My apologies for posting an off-topic comment. But redundant and troll, I think not.
I was willing to believe that Python's whitespace indentation was a good thing. I wanted to believe. But unfortunately I just find it to be a pain. I like Python, but the using whitespace to indicate block structure is annoying. Why? Because auto-indenters don't work. When I'm writing the code the first time that doesn't really cause problems, but when I go start messing with existing code and rearranging things, refactoring loops and such, then I just want to hit my magic Ctrl-Alt-\ key sequence and have the editor reformat things for me. But if whitespace is the only indicator of block structure then it doesn't work properly.
Maybe it's just a problem with Emacs' python mode, but I don't really see a good way for it to automatically know what indentation level this chunk of code I just dropped in is supposed to go.
I was thinking more in terms of big corporate deals for custom software. Contract work. If you have a contract and they don't deliver the software promised in the contract, then the courts can help. Or more likely an arbiter because the contract probably stipulates that you agree to binding arbitration, but whichever. You still have some recourse if they don't come through with the software.
But now that I think about it more, that's got nothing to do with open or closed source. You can hire out contract work under either licensing model.
I don't know about you, but I eat stuff all the time that doesn't have ingredients listed. And odd thing is, the more I pay, usually the less they're willing to tell me about the recipe.
Medicine is a good analogy. But then again most software isn't life and death. So there isn't as compelling a reason why the "ingredients" should be listed on software.
Then there's the old car analogy which is becoming less and less apt by the year. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" Even if you don't know how to fix it, don't you like knowing that you can take it to whoever you want to get it fixed? Sure, but these days, more and more functionality is sealed inside the car's embedded computer running its closed source code, and even your mechanic just has to shrug and send it to the dealer for fixing. So, sadly, it matters less and less that we can get under the hood of our cars.
Uh, wouldn't it be more like:
Proprietary: someone will catch you if you offer to pay enough money.
Open Source: someone will catch you as long as they aren't too busy doing other things at their real jobs, and they find it personally interesting that you're falling.
I love open source, don't get me wrong, but I certainly wouldn't characterize it as something you can count on in a pinch. You can't really count on propietary software either, but at least if they let you fall then you've got a chance at getting some damages back in the courts.
I have obsolutely no abjections to thier decision to obstain from this practice. Hopefully this serves as an abject lesson for them. Though I wish the fine had been higher. It should be abvious to everyone that given how abstinate they are, they're just going to do this again. The only way to stop them would be force them into object poverty.
Correction: I mean "Chu and Tai," of course.
And here are a few more urls where you can find videos and publications about that work:
here
here
here
and
here
[Disclosure -- I'm the author. That's my dissertation research].
The work Chu and Tan have done to put MoXi together looks very nice. I'll definitely be checking out their paper session at SIGGRAPH.
I think there are some not uncommon cases where double negatives make sense.
Agreed. Back in the day (1990's) there was a company called Visix that made a toolkit called Galaxy, not unlike Qt. (Though Qt's overall design is better in my opinion). Anyway single-developer single platform licenses for Galaxy 3.0 went for about $20,000. The argument was that it saves you from having to hire an entire programmer just to do the mac port.
But the point is that it sold pretty well even at $20K a pop, precisely because companies felt they could reduce staff and reduce development time by having such a product.
I think there were pretty few shrink-wrap app customers. Mostly internal development.
There also used to be some bizarre language in the license FAQ stating that you were not allowed to use the GPL Qt to develop a commercial app, and then buy commercial licenses once you were ready to distribute commercially. Basically, in their eyes, any code developed with GPL Qt is forever tainted and can't be used any way besides GPL.
Here's the link that says basically that.
Their motivation is pretty obvious: most startups fail, so they want to get cash from any company using Qt right away before they go belly-up. But that's more restrictive and viral than even the GPL, isn't it? With the regular GPL, nothing is stopping me from developing my prototype using GPL code, and then replacing the GPL bits with something non-GPL at the last minute before distribution.
I guess the difference is that they're the ones selling you the commercial license in the end, so they can make the terms of the commercial license whatever they want. I.e. they can say that you're in viloation of that license if you initially developed your code under GPL Qt.
Yeh, I know I don't have to do it that way, but I believe most of the examples do. I was just a little surprised to see them actually pushing this as the "right" way to code wx apps. After reading all the intro material about how great a cross-platform toolkit wx is etc ect, then to see the first 1/3 of the demo code is full of this platform specific junk just strikes me as wrong somehow. But I grew up on the principal that platform specific #ifdefs in actual main application code should be an absolute last resort. Call me old fashioned.
After working with Qt for a while I was totally dumbstruck with the sheer amount of such garbage required to program according to official wx guidelines.
But the wxPython version doesn't require that kind of cruft. What's your beef with wxPython?
Relax. If you RTFS you will see this is for "NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program", not the engineering department. So the guy is probably a tech-savvy artist rather than an art-savvy techie. And if you download the thesis you'll see that it is in fact "A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES in INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University"
So don't worry. You can still be proud of your engineering PhD when you get it.
Still, you have to admit that even though the underlying tech is nothing new, he does present some fairly novel usage cases for it. Of course most of them are fairly pointless like "let's collaborate together by looking at completely different things on the same screen". But the idea does seem to make sense for something like the split screen mode in 2-player video-games. If you can only have 512x768 pixels out an XGA display for your view, wouldn't you rather have those spread over the whole screen than squished onto one half of it, like they typically do? And if the other guy can't see what you're doing, all the better.
Anyway the point is these lenticular screen 3D monitors that various companies are starting to make may have a variety of interesting uses beyond just displaying 3D imagery. Exploring those ideas is probably worth a master's degree in "professional studies," whatever that is.
I'm guessing he uses C++ instead of assembly because he wants to actually get his programs written and debugged before he's 40.