I see your point, I should have said "the whole width of the window". And I actually did what you suggest. What I mean is that a web page author should create elastic pages, trying to fit about twelve words per line, so as the reader doesn't have to resize windows.
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense?
Most of the stuff is indeed common sense. A few things are just plain wrong, like saying you shouldn't mess with link colours. I almost always use red links (purple visited ones) because I think links should stand out.
I didn't read the book, but "stuff that Neilson says" can be found in his site, which is really bad. Would anyone dare say that spreading text across the whole width of the screen is good user interface? What about those horizontal rulers?
Agreed. I always remove the case from a hard-cover book. It looks so much better! What pisses me off is when you buy an expensive hard-cover book that comes with no slipcase. Makes them look so cheap.
While I'm talking about it, I'd say that I found it good as a design book, for it brings many examples from areas other than web sites (TV ads, packaging, magazines). Something I didn't like is the usage of MSIE-only techniques, as well as NN-only ones that are presented. I never use those.
The last Web Design book I read had its cover in the same very uncomfortable colour scheme. I don't have it right here, but I think it's called "HTML Artistry - More Than Code" Is this a conspiracy or what?
This seems to me to be an excellent use of computer technology, more specifically of AI. If you can read Portuguese you may take a look at the State Court's web site where they comment about this "Justice on Wheels" inniciative. There is some sort of a pun in this name, I think, for the service is specifically intended to solve disputes involving damages from car crashes. It was a local population claim that these disputes be solved in less time. Each team is formed by a judge, forensic experts and an administrative person. The page does not mention the existence of such software, from what I can infer that this is completely instrumental, not the emphasis. And that's is why I say it is an excellent usage of AI: helping an expert (the judge) to solve problems in a narrow domain (car accident damages) in a situation where he/she may be constrained as to what material can be referred to. One more thing, these civil disputes are not ruled by jurys in Brazil.
I work as a tax auditor for another state government, and I've been dreaming on building my own AI system to help me and my colleagues. Sometimes it's really easy, due to stress and workload, to overlook important aspects of some case, and software is still dumb enough not to get pissed off or distracted, looking at every possible ramification of thought.
Sure, I would write it in C++.;)
Re:Another one jumps on the free software wave.
on
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From QNX page:
The popular command-line GNU development tools are included with the platform, as are graphical debuggers and third-party development tools
Perl has a very handy construct that can render almost all code highly maintainable:
# # it looks like this #
I think the problem is that we should try as much as practical to say things clearly in code rather than in comments. From the little Perl code I have seen so far (I don't do Perl) it is not easy to infer what the code does. The comment you answered to seems to address this problem and the fact that some enhancement in the language has rendered it even more cryptic, at least potentially.
This may not be an issue for those fluent in the language, but this cryptic character certainly demotivates those who consider learning it.
Before some oyster-minded zealot flames me, I want to point out that this comment comes from someone who is trying to get rid of a nasty habit, namely using one single tool to do just about anything. That happens to be C++ in my case (besides HTML obviously). The wide acceptance of Perl was an indicator that it could be an excelent complementary tool to C++, but this syntax issue is really an obstacle.
By the way, I guess the answer to the subject question must be something like:
# This outputs "Hello world!" to the console &^%$[]"Hello world!"\\!@ #:)
Achei que você fosse alemão porque outro dia você defendeu os alemães, não sei bem qual era o assunto. Mas entendo que sua convivência com eles explica uma certa afinidade, ninguém pode gostar do que não conhece. Moro em Jaraguá do Sul, SC (mas sou paulista) e nessa região é comum ouvir as pessoas falando alemão na fila do supermercado. Assim, conheço bem as figuras! Quanto ao resident era mais ou menos o que eu havia entendido.
Um cluster de Beowulfs transmitindo mensagens em português, a respeito da Natalie Portman soltando troços quentes calças abaixo, com análise de JonKatz.
Estranho, sempre achei que você fosse alemão, não só pelo nome, mas por uns pontos de vista, em uma outra discussão.
Não acho muito respeitoso escrever em outro idioma que não o inglês aqui, mas como foram eles próprios que começaram esta baderna, vamos aderir, só por hoje.
A propósito, o que você quer dizer com resident no contexto acima?
The fact that some stories don't make it to the "big ones" or to the American press in general has other effects other than just not keeping people informed. It may put in check the credibility of the news outlet which publishes these stories.
I don't live in the U.S., so I receive a bunch of information that Americans in general don't. Not that they can't reach it if they so want, I'm talking about the kind of news that reaches you, the kind of news that you see browsing the front page of a newspaper or watching the evening news on TV (which I don't).
My prime source of general international news is cnn.com, I find it up to the minute and well organized. Moreover, it's quite hard to change one's news-gattering habits. On more than one ocasion, though, I came across international news from other sources and took a look at cnn.com just to see what they had to say about it, from a U.S. perspective (which, of course, they are not the sole owners) and I was intrigued by the fact that the story wans't even mentioned. That, in the begining, led me to believe that maybe the other source had gone a bit overboard, or that things hadn't been confirmed, whatever. It took some time for it to strike me that it was the kind of news that wouldn't satisfy some interests, or even wouldn't be what readers were willing to read, for the material was negative to the U.S., or the American self image.
The airborne amphibian reportedly "looked comfortable" while under the influence of the magnetic field, and seems to have emerged from the experiment fully intact. "It went back to its fellow frogs looking perfectly happy,"
I would really like to express my opinion on this, but I'm not sure what I think is correct for I can't read the story. Would someone please point a http mirror for those of us who don't have access to a Usenet server?
It's really sad to see the Internet becoming so much influenced by big corporations. I'm not talking about e-commerce, I'm pointing to the user experience. It seems that the wish of many is to spread the idea that the Internet should be "surfed" through portals with their own content and links to corporate websites. Someone referred to this change, IIRC, as the Internet becoming a shopping mall where we would be forced to live in the back load delivery areas. Corporations don't own the net, but they would love to.
I don't see such a clear cause-effect relationship in owning a trademark and thus being entitled to own the domain name. Courts, OTOH, are easily fooleed into thinking so.
Now, if this guy had set up his site he would have much more reason to complain. He should also put a clear link saying something like "if you want to go to the "Coca-Cola Company website...". Things would be much easier. Many companies don't rely in the country letters, they have pages like "www.acme.com/france", which I think is the best way to go.
Coca-Cola has a history of strongly defending the trademark (their main asset). If you paint their logo in your business and the tone of red is not precisely the same, or if the tail of the third "C" in Coca-Cola does not pass through the "l" loop exactly as in their model, they force you to repaint it. That capitalization issue someone mentioned is another good example. This guy is having a though fight ahead.
Modems are going to be going away pretty fast over the next few years, and I would think that perhaps 3Com pretty much milked USR for everything they could.
Someone has already pointed out that there are areas in the U.S. where there's nothing to choose but modem connection. But if you broaden your scope you will notice that many countries in the world still buy U.S.-made hardware. The internet is growing fast, and faster outside highly developed areas, where modems will be the only access route for many years to come.
This is already happening (I mean the repressed demand). When I run my BBS in '94, when I wanted to add a line I had a dozen places I could go to and buy a USR Sportster 14.400. Installing them was a breeze. Today I cannot find a Sportster to replace the crappy WinModem that came with what is now my Linux box (I live in a small town without ISDN, in Brazil). I had to "steal" the USR 28.8k card from the box my children use. And many others don't "turn" to Linux because of this.
It's a graphic utility specialized in a specif image tratment. I'm writing it for Windows and I shall start porting for Linux this week.
My initial question was motivated by the fact that I really feel the project is interesting and would benefit enourmously from the colaboration of other brains and hands.
Another implication of not coding with open source in mind is that I have to create my own classes for image file types, color space conversions, resampling and so on. If I felt confident that the program would be open source I could re-use some code from another program (e.g. GIMP) which is known to work right and fast. This may not be a problem now, as long as I am prototyping, but the production code will need a lot of tuning.
I'm working on a project that I would really like to be open source, but the perspective of licensing it and making some money has been a strong deterrant. Would anyone educate me and probably others (maybe suggest a link) on how to make money writing OSS, other than support? IPO's like this really makes believe it's just like doing business any other way, but I just haven't seen how yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, I should have said "the whole width of the window". And I actually did what you suggest. What I mean is that a web page author should create elastic pages, trying to fit about twelve words per line, so as the reader doesn't have to resize windows.
Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense?
Most of the stuff is indeed common sense. A few things are just plain wrong, like saying you shouldn't mess with link colours. I almost always use red links (purple visited ones) because I think links should stand out.
I didn't read the book, but "stuff that Neilson says" can be found in his site, which is really bad. Would anyone dare say that spreading text across the whole width of the screen is good user interface? What about those horizontal rulers?
BTW, thanks for that Apple link!
Agreed. I always remove the case from a hard-cover book. It looks so much better! What pisses me off is when you buy an expensive hard-cover book that comes with no slipcase. Makes them look so cheap.
OK, let me do my homework... here is it.
While I'm talking about it, I'd say that I found it good as a design book, for it brings many examples from areas other than web sites (TV ads, packaging, magazines). Something I didn't like is the usage of MSIE-only techniques, as well as NN-only ones that are presented. I never use those.
The last Web Design book I read had its cover in the same very uncomfortable colour scheme. I don't have it right here, but I think it's called "HTML Artistry - More Than Code"
Is this a conspiracy or what?
This seems to me to be an excellent use of computer technology, more specifically of AI. If you can read Portuguese you may take a look at the State Court's web site where they comment about this "Justice on Wheels" inniciative. There is some sort of a pun in this name, I think, for the service is specifically intended to solve disputes involving damages from car crashes. It was a local population claim that these disputes be solved in less time. Each team is formed by a judge, forensic experts and an administrative person. The page does not mention the existence of such software, from what I can infer that this is completely instrumental, not the emphasis. And that's is why I say it is an excellent usage of AI: helping an expert (the judge) to solve problems in a narrow domain (car accident damages) in a situation where he/she may be constrained as to what material can be referred to. One more thing, these civil disputes are not ruled by jurys in Brazil.
I work as a tax auditor for another state government, and I've been dreaming on building my own AI system to help me and my colleagues. Sometimes it's really easy, due to stress and workload, to overlook important aspects of some case, and software is still dumb enough not to get pissed off or distracted, looking at every possible ramification of thought.
Sure, I would write it in C++. ;)
From QNX page:
The popular command-line GNU development tools are included with the platform, as are graphical debuggers and third-party development tools
So, you can count on having at least GNU gcc.
Perl has a very handy construct that can render almost all code highly maintainable:
#
# it looks like this
#
I think the problem is that we should try as much as practical to say things clearly in code rather than in comments. From the little Perl code I have seen so far (I don't do Perl) it is not easy to infer what the code does. The comment you answered to seems to address this problem and the fact that some enhancement in the language has rendered it even more cryptic, at least potentially.
This may not be an issue for those fluent in the language, but this cryptic character certainly demotivates those who consider learning it.
Before some oyster-minded zealot flames me, I want to point out that this comment comes from someone who is trying to get rid of a nasty habit, namely using one single tool to do just about anything. That happens to be C++ in my case (besides HTML obviously). The wide acceptance of Perl was an indicator that it could be an excelent complementary tool to C++, but this syntax issue is really an obstacle.
By the way, I guess the answer to the subject question must be something like:
# This outputs "Hello world!" to the console :)
&^%$[]"Hello world!"\\!@
#
Achei que você fosse alemão porque outro dia você defendeu os alemães, não sei bem qual era o assunto. Mas entendo que sua convivência com eles explica uma certa afinidade, ninguém pode gostar do que não conhece. Moro em Jaraguá do Sul, SC (mas sou paulista) e nessa região é comum ouvir as pessoas falando alemão na fila do supermercado. Assim, conheço bem as figuras! Quanto ao resident era mais ou menos o que eu havia entendido.
Um cluster de Beowulfs transmitindo mensagens em português, a respeito da Natalie Portman soltando troços quentes calças abaixo, com análise de JonKatz.
Esqueci alguma coisa?
Being one of the resident Portuguese speakers
Estranho, sempre achei que você fosse alemão, não só pelo nome, mas por uns pontos de vista, em uma outra discussão.
Não acho muito respeitoso escrever em outro idioma que não o inglês aqui, mas como foram eles próprios que começaram esta baderna, vamos aderir, só por hoje.
A propósito, o que você quer dizer com resident no contexto acima?
This crap is *not* Portuguese! This is the output from some translation engine, and it makes almost no sense.
The fact that some stories don't make it to the "big ones" or to the American press in general has other effects other than just not keeping people informed. It may put in check the credibility of the news outlet which publishes these stories.
I don't live in the U.S., so I receive a bunch of information that Americans in general don't. Not that they can't reach it if they so want, I'm talking about the kind of news that reaches you, the kind of news that you see browsing the front page of a newspaper or watching the evening news on TV (which I don't).
My prime source of general international news is cnn.com, I find it up to the minute and well organized. Moreover, it's quite hard to change one's news-gattering habits. On more than one ocasion, though, I came across international news from other sources and took a look at cnn.com just to see what they had to say about it, from a U.S. perspective (which, of course, they are not the sole owners) and I was intrigued by the fact that the story wans't even mentioned. That, in the begining, led me to believe that maybe the other source had gone a bit overboard, or that things hadn't been confirmed, whatever. It took some time for it to strike me that it was the kind of news that wouldn't satisfy some interests, or even wouldn't be what readers were willing to read, for the material was negative to the U.S., or the American self image.
Now, is this article "news for nerds"?
Any URLs?
Here you are.
One quote:
The airborne amphibian reportedly "looked comfortable" while under the influence of the magnetic field, and seems to have emerged from the experiment fully intact. "It went back to its fellow frogs looking perfectly happy,"
French scientists in Grenoble managed to get a mouse to levitate,
And how did they get the ball to roll then?I would really like to express my opinion on this, but I'm not sure what I think is correct for I can't read the story. Would someone please point a http mirror for those of us who don't have access to a Usenet server?
Just like breasts: intended for children, but grown-ups end up playing with them most of the time.
Federal researchers say they've created the most robust quantum computer ever...
And so the article goes. And so goes this discussion, focused primarily on how it works and what it could do.
Does anyone know of a quantum computer actually computing anything, be it problem-solving or adding two integers?
Now seriously: Does anybody know of virtual pets for Linux? It's for my kids...
You have to print gobs and gobs of stuff so you can keep your fish alive
You mean some sort of paper-eating fish, right?
It's really sad to see the Internet becoming so much influenced by big corporations. I'm not talking about e-commerce, I'm pointing to the user experience. It seems that the wish of many is to spread the idea that the Internet should be "surfed" through portals with their own content and links to corporate websites. Someone referred to this change, IIRC, as the Internet becoming a shopping mall where we would be forced to live in the back load delivery areas. Corporations don't own the net, but they would love to.
I don't see such a clear cause-effect relationship in owning a trademark and thus being entitled to own the domain name. Courts, OTOH, are easily fooleed into thinking so.
Now, if this guy had set up his site he would have much more reason to complain. He should also put a clear link saying something like "if you want to go to the "Coca-Cola Company website...". Things would be much easier. Many companies don't rely in the country letters, they have pages like "www.acme.com/france", which I think is the best way to go.
Coca-Cola has a history of strongly defending the trademark (their main asset). If you paint their logo in your business and the tone of red is not precisely the same, or if the tail of the third "C" in Coca-Cola does not pass through the "l" loop exactly as in their model, they force you to repaint it. That capitalization issue someone mentioned is another good example. This guy is having a though fight ahead.
Someone has already pointed out that there are areas in the U.S. where there's nothing to choose but modem connection. But if you broaden your scope you will notice that many countries in the world still buy U.S.-made hardware. The internet is growing fast, and faster outside highly developed areas, where modems will be the only access route for many years to come.
This is already happening (I mean the repressed demand). When I run my BBS in '94, when I wanted to add a line I had a dozen places I could go to and buy a USR Sportster 14.400. Installing them was a breeze. Today I cannot find a Sportster to replace the crappy WinModem that came with what is now my Linux box (I live in a small town without ISDN, in Brazil). I had to "steal" the USR 28.8k card from the box my children use. And many others don't "turn" to Linux because of this.
I think you've just killed your business in this discussion!
It's a graphic utility specialized in a specif image tratment. I'm writing it for Windows and I shall start porting for Linux this week.
My initial question was motivated by the fact that I really feel the project is interesting and would benefit enourmously from the colaboration of other brains and hands.
Another implication of not coding with open source in mind is that I have to create my own classes for image file types, color space conversions, resampling and so on. If I felt confident that the program would be open source I could re-use some code from another program (e.g. GIMP) which is known to work right and fast. This may not be a problem now, as long as I am prototyping, but the production code will need a lot of tuning.
I'm working on a project that I would really like to be open source, but the perspective of licensing it and making some money has been a strong deterrant. Would anyone educate me and probably others (maybe suggest a link) on how to make money writing OSS, other than support? IPO's like this really makes believe it's just like doing business any other way, but I just haven't seen how yet.