My bet is that this "Hare" program just turns off a bunch of unneeded services and wasteful windows drawing options that come installed as defaults on all Windows systems.
Sure elegant code is better than messy code. But rewriting software that has performed reliably for years needs a bigger justification than truisims about elegant code.
followed by.
A programmer's job is to create and maintain reliable software that meets the needs of its users.
If the code's a pain to read, and hard to understand, making it look good might very well be the first step towards making sure it is maintainable in a far more efficent fashion.
A sense of software esthetic is justifiable as a means to that ends -- not an end in itself.
"Open source will handle this challenge quite fine. It's not a unified effort, but all the pieces are falling into place:
1) OpenGL 2.0 should easily be a match for whatever the successor to Direct 3D is. A lot stuff mentioned in the article is also in OpenGL 2.0.
2) The freedesktop.org folks are working on building an X server that sits on top of OpenGL.
3) Some DRI folks are working on an OpenGL implementation that can operate without the X server, to support using the X server on top of it."
The OSS community has already been working on it. Now find some new FUD.
Tell ya what to do, convince some companies to donate large funds to Enlightenment and call back in a few years, cuz those are the only dudes who can code NEARLY well enough to get done what needs to get done.
Hell, MS is going to make their next desktop a behemoth, it needed to be a slim and trim version of what shipped with 2000/2003, with just a BIT of XP thrown in there (namely the fast user switching!).
OSS has yet to provide a decent performance fully featured integrated desktop, though from what I hear, newer releases of Gnome aren't QUITE so painfully slow, maybe I'll try it... again...
My point is that we need a return to the good old days of the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum & Amiga when it was possible for "bedroom programmers" to create good quality games.
It's not gonna happen. (Not that you seem to believe it yourself)
The first movies were made by the Lumiere brothers, who invented the projector.
The first photograph was unincidentally taken by Niepce who unsurprizingly was the inventor of the first camera.
It follows naturally that the first computer games were written by computer hobbyists and programmers.
I believe however, that the day of programmers as the major creative force in computer games is over. Like the cinematograph and the camera, the computer has been accepted as an artists' tool and computer games as a medium. It's part of the entertainment industry now. And with that comes the high-budget, polished productions that cost money and bars the entry of amateurs.
Sure, now and then a small independent film made on grainy 16mm film unexpectedly breaks through and receives a cult following, and I expect something similar for amateur computer games in the future.
But the days when a guy sitting in his basement could produce a major computer game hit is simply over.
Serious Sam. Ok not exactly a small venture, but not Multimillion dollar Hollywood financed either.
Hell, you checked out shockwave.com lately? Lots of games from small time developers, actually selling! (same games are on games.yahoo.com and every other site).
Actually, I can't think of a single game genre that DOES demand a huge well funded team. A team sure, but five or six people really is sufficent, given that those five or six people are all very talented. This is no different from days of old, when it just took one or two talented programers to make a game, just scaled up a bit, (more than 4 or 16 colors on the screen at a time.:) )
The Poor Underpaid Intern Who Fixes All The System Administrator's Mistakes Appreciation Day
Re:I got bored just after Kazaa came out.
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P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 1
You may laugh, but my brother checked out the contents of an old hard disk that he had gotten at a salvage yard. It had a resume on it complete with e-mail, and he gave in to temptation and sent a very formal and friendly and polite and (for the poor woman in question) very creepy e-mail to her. He then found a marriage vow, written out in Word. He never got a response. I can only assume the poor woman was so creeped out she deleted it immediately.
Oh that isn't so bad, for a period of a few years, when anybody e-mailed me I would contact them back and ask them how the weather in their home town was.
Information is so fluid, up until I turned 18 nothing about me existed on the net, now I am all over the place (my real name is plastered to the end of all e-mails I send, and so forth. While I was a minor, my information was closely enough guarded that only ONE site had my real name posted on a publically viewable page, and it was not connected to my e-mail address!)
Re:I got bored just after Kazaa came out.
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P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I prefer looking up people's resume and sending them a message,
Flash: Widely supported, good tool set, easy to use, looks good, performance varies but is generally acceptable if the artist didn't go massivly nuts.
SVG: Slow as hell no matter how fast your machine is, poor support, I/GUESS/ there is a tool set out there, but who in their right mind would want to use it?
Honestly, I think the SVG toolset is larger than the Flash toolset, but Flash, umm, well, works.
And there is the difference folks. Flash and Shockwave are easy to install, frequently updated (albiet with slower and slower versions each time, heh, but Flash HAS gotten much more powerful over the years), and it actually shows moving image thingies at a speed faster than a crawl.
And no, don't link to Adobe's laughable SVG plugin.
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
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Game with God
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
I bought B/W the day it came out.
High hopes, buggy execution. The game needed some serious work and it never got it, not to mention the developer community did not spring up around it fast enough, the SDK really needed to be released at the same time as the game was.
Also, the gesture system sucked, badly. The hotkeys were faster, more reliable, and overall much easier to use.
The alignment system was quirky, the moster AI was dopey, all in all, I think I got maybe a month or so of play time out of it, mostly trying to get it working. . . .
Those exist, yes, (mentioned on/. when the technology was first developed!) but the site also says the price of the device will drop down to around $100 once it is mass produced.
Even mass produced, just the SPEAKER and high resolution screen would cost over $100.
I bought a used Sonly Clie S360 on Ebay for $37. It has a low res B/W greyscale screen, 120x120 IIRC, and sure I would like a higher one, much more useful for taking notes. Heck one of the software silkscreens would be a SERIOUS boost, I have used them before and my accuracy goes up tremendously.
But you know what? Until they are under $50, no way. College student == no $$$.
Also, my GF has a Palm m505, she gets about 3 days battery life out of it. It also resets itself randomly every few months and deletes everything, joy. Color isn't worth all the hassle. ^_^ I have about three to four weeks battery life, no issues, and I found a good 4MB sony digital memory stick card to shove my backup data on. Unfortuntly Sony is a prick when it comes to software support and refuses to release the special version of Palm Desktop that is needed to synch, but the only reason I use sync is for data backup anyways.
I do not use Outlook, and until Thunderbird gets decent contact management and what not, (a working calander plugin would help to!) I will not be too worried about hotsynching.
I will upgrade when prices drop below $50 and battery life matches what I currently have.
now, realize that while you can critisize what you don't understand, you come off looking about 14.
there are reasons for/usr/local and/usr,/bin and/sbin - try to understand what they are, and if you do any admin work above your desktop machine, you might agree they make good sense.
Holy shit, NOW I know why MS has the Windows Registry.
To keep users away from all that crap. . ..
/usr/share/dict
Yah, umm, okay, how about instead the local of such and such list is stored in an agreed upon registry entry and the user never has to see a bleeming/dict directory?
Oh, and writting a game installer looks like it is SO much fun:
/usr/share/games
/var/games
/usr/games
/usr/lib/games
Wow, how simple!...
I Don't Give A Shit Where My Games Store Their Data!
No, they are under C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\Lokale Einstellungen\Temp.
And I couldn't even type out in what directory they would be at the local asian restaurant. Horribly annoying i would say.
Bleck, there is some system variable that gets to it, but I was too lazy to bother looking it up.
Properly coded programs on Windows are forwards compatible and easily multilingual. Of course poorly made programs tends to be the opposite, they break as soon as the next service pack comes out, and require massive rewrites for simple translations. ^_^
%programfiles% is -not- a simple lay out. Not only do you have every application in its own folder (that's not in your path), sometimes the application directories are hung off an intermediate directory for the vendor (such as %programfiles$\Adobe). This is assuming we're talking about a well-behaved program.
Yes, but at least it is all contained within one directory, ignoring whatever shared DLLs have been placed in system32\
If I need to find all executables relating to a program, I can in general (95%+ of the time), go to a SINGLE directory and do "dir *.exe/s" and know that the results will be everything I am looking for.
In contrast, trying to find all binaries relating to X.... Ick!
(even more amusing, a fair number of years ago I had a fresh install of some version of Mandrake, and after running the included auto-updater, the system rebooted and I was dumped to the console with no way to get back to X! Nice changing the defaults and removing the graphical login screen. . . . yah that really helps a first time user who just paid $30 for your product. . ..)
It's much more difficult to make a typo in/etc than/System/Config. That's one of the godsends of the POSIX structure over that of Windows -/lib is easier to remember/type than C:\Windows\System32. And there are none of those annoying spaces in/usr/bin that exist in C:\Program Files.
Tab auto complete....
annnyways, that aside;
One thing that has always irritated me about the *nixs in general is the tendency to have everything spread across the entire hard drive. Binaries for X alone can reside in any of a number of directories, properly configured path statements have to be half a mile long, and good luck remembering where any one specific file is at!
I used to think that willy-nilly file structures were OK, after all, just use an OS's built in Search or Find feature right? This was until I actually organized my HD and got things working right, hey, look, files are were they SHOULD be!
TLA(brev)sare a pain in the butt from multiple perspectives. You end up with directories like/etc (oh yah, THAT is thinking ahead. . . . ) or crud like/usr/sbin, which I assume is either Special Binaries or System Binaries, but what the hell, people bitched about 8.3 file names, just call the directory System Programs and get over it.
Oh and I just love how there is usr/local/sbin, OR usr/sbin, and WHY usr? If 'local' can have 5 letters, would it be so deadly to spell out 'user'?
Oddly enough, with the modern incarnations (Windows 2000+), Windows is laid out in a rather straightforward matter, with the exception of the Windows directory itself, which has (finally!) been abstracted far enough away from the users that only the 'system32' directory (which is in the path by default) is actually ever accessed.
Local settings and non-local (roaming, or whatever MS is calling them these days) settings are handled by the OS, so most users need not care about anything outside of the MyDocuments and Desktop folder in their profile directory, (albeit local settings is fun to play around with).
To the end user, you have a nice SIMPLE directory structure:
%systemroot%\System32\ {--- System tools and what not
%programfiles% {---- programs!
%userprofile%\desktop\ {---- desktop
%userprofile%\My Documents\ {---- documents!
now isn't that nice and simple? Want to run something, you have ONE place to look around in, %programfiles%, not 4 different \bin\ directories. Some programs need to be run by some users but not by others? Not a program, there are a fair number of ways to accomplish this, NONE of which involve creating (to the end user!) a multitude of extra directory structures.
The programmer has it even better. They can either shove all their DLL files in %systemroot%\system32\ and be done with it (not too polite), store a copy in their own program folder (not done much anymore *sigh*), or use %commonprogramfiles%
For locally maintained settings only (very cool, Nvidia takes advantage of this in their Nview system application, so my monitor settings, including color correction, are maintained on each terminal separately!), %userprofile%\local settings\application data should be used.
This is the equivalent of *nix's usr/local/whateverRandomThreeLetterAbbreviationGoe sHere, with one exception;
it is blatantly self obvious what the directory is there for, and the existence of other directories removes the programmer's urge to shove binaries in weird places!
Actually, the entire local/remote binary thing is left more towards the administrators, they can choose to either have programs be run remotely (which granted not all programs support, but if they are written correctly and do not feel the need to shove random files all over the client machine's hard drive. . .
Hell I can't get into the damned department at my local U (University of Washington), a 3.6 GPA minimum is required, some students don't get in with a 3.8 or even a 4.0! It is crazy, CS is one of the hardest fields to get into around here.
Look at how good OpenOffice is and yet it still cannot knock Microsoft Office out of the number one spot and it matches almost every feature of Microsoft Office and has excellent compatibility with the Microsoft file formats.
Funny story, awhile back I tried to make a complete change over to Open Office. I had refused to install any MS Office related app on my (Windows) PC for some time, but finally found myself needing to do some equation editing as well as some Excel compatible work, so I figured Open Office would be the way to go.
Long story short, loved the equation editor, and only one issue popped up.
On three seperate computers running three different versions of Windows (ME, 2K, XP), Open Office was unable to correctly print out mathematical equations from any of them.
After two days of trouble shooting I was forced to ditch OO and go with Word.
I have found Win2K3 to be an amazing performer in comparison to even Win2K. Ok ok the memory footprint is a bit higher (140MB compared to ~70MB for Win2K) but the performance is amazing.
Then again, don't listen to me, I am one of those weirdos using it as a desktop OS, increased reliability and hardware support, not to mention performance, in comparison with Windows 2000 makes it a good choice IMHO.
And since you appear to consider yourself an expert in these matters, I would point out that the 6.0 release was a complete rewrite of the Netscape codebase, and is related to the 4.x series in name only.
Microsoft was sued for practices that ensued during the so called "browser wars", which involved the 4.x generation of web browsers.
The Netscape 6.x codebase is based upon Mozilla. Netscape 6.x and the various other Mozilla derived versions are all now serious condeners in the market place, but 4.x never had a chance.
You conveniently forget to mention, IE had one additional advantage: It came pre-installed on every single computer!
And Netscape came with darn nearly every ISP startup kit that existed at the time. Hell I downloaded 4.x but never used it! The thing just sucked.
None of the things you mentioned are relevant to the antitrust lawsuit; even if IE might have deserved to win solely on merit (it's not nearly as open-and-shut as you imply), it was this abuse of their monopoly position that turned the browser wars into a bloodbath.
This is what makes the anti-MS rherotic so tiring. MS has done many things that are immoral and illegal, but damnit, even my tech illiterate friends know how much Netscape 4.x sucked! As soon as I mention IE vs Netscape, one of them will pop up with "Yah but IE is better!".
Hardly anybody mentions the entire DR-DOS fiasco, or the MS licencing contracts involving Word/Works/etc, or how they managed to get anybody to use Windows in the first place! (earth to zealots, earth to zealots, Windows 1.0-9x all sucked horribly, do some research on how MS kept managing to sell them!)
Now that Microsoft has an actual DECENT set of operating systems for sale, it is going to get harder and harder to discredit Microsoft. Especially in many user's eyes, as we can no longer go "Hey, Windows sucks, it crashes all the time, and the only reason you have to use it is because MS financially forced companies into signing contract agreements stating they would install this crappy OS on to every computer they sell!"
Seriously, what is the anti-MS rhetoric going to be now? "come on over to Linux, if your lucky you can get sound working"?
Well IE vs. Netscape isn't from a TV show, it's reality. Perhaps you weren't paying attention when it all happenned, or weren't on the net then,
Well I was on the net then. Netscape 4.x sucked, most ISPs gave out Netscape 3.x and even in the begining 4.x to all their users, but as time went on:
Netscape kept changing how plugins where handled. Their "centralized" page for downloading plugins was horribly unorganized and always being altered to some other unorganized scheme
Crashed. Continiously. Horribly.
Used an outdated rendering engine that required the complete page be downloaded before it could be rendered. Ick.
Generally sucked, was slow, unstable, and ate up RAM. This was on any platform!
Internet Explorer in comparison:
Had a smaller memory footprint (more or less ^_^ )
Had a slimmer UI
Had a single unified way of installing plugins (even if in retrospect it also, years later, allowed for the proliferation of spyware and adware, oops! At least it worked at the time!)
Was quick to boot (yah yah so it was integrated with the OS, nobody was stopping Netscape from loading up a minimalistic framework at boot time to allow for reduced delay upon starting the program!)
Had a modern rendering engine
It took the Mozilla project years to remove all the cruft that existed in Netscape 4.x (maybe it would have been better if they had started from the 3.x code instead. . ..), and just recently (within the last year and a half or so) has FireFox (and FireBird before that) been able to compete with IE for sheer speed and memory usage.
FireFox is actually a superior browser to IE in many respect, I still use IE because I am so acustom to hitting WindowKey-E to open an explorer window which I then hit F4 to go to the URL line and enter a site address. Browser/OS integration rocks, like it or not, it IS what the users want!
And MS has never "locked" anybody out from replacing Explorer entirely, it is quite easy to change Windows shells, in fact a number of companies specialize in doing exactly that! Nobody has created a new integrated file manager / web browser yet (or if they have, it has yet to become main stream) but MS is not keeping anybody from doing so. For all the Win9x OSs, it was a simple one line alteration to change interfaces (and in fact for awhile I had command.com as my interface instead of Explorer), and with the NT line it is just a simple registery alteration.
Netscape started crashing MORE after MS decided they wanted the browser market.
Netscape 4.x sucked. Period. 4.7 sucked even more. 3.x never had problems, before or after MS entered the market. 4.x was bloatware, and even some ex-Netscape employees have said such, it just sucked.
There's also the current issue with Windows Media Player. Tried to find anything else out there to compete with it? Quicktime and Real both don't work quite right with formats outside their native ones. I spent a week hunting for an alternative media player with AVI and Mpeg files that I could do playlists with at one point.
You've got to be an idiot then, either that or the WORST google user ever.
Most sane Media players on Windows use DirectShow and VFW, meaning ALL media players can play ALL formats of video, except for those formats that refuse to write a DirectShow or VFW decoder. (such as Real and Sorenson (the codec most often used for quicktime).
Winamp also works, but I would really like a way to dock just the video window on the screen and have the rest of the interface dissapear (I think there is an option for that somewhere but. . ..)
As it is I use Windows Media Player 6.2 (start-->Run, type in m
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it doesn't even do that.
followed by.
If the code's a pain to read, and hard to understand, making it look good might very well be the first step towards making sure it is maintainable in a far more efficent fashion.
A sense of software esthetic is justifiable as a means to that ends -- not an end in itself.
Treat it as more of a waypoint on a journey.
"Open source will handle this challenge quite fine. It's not a unified effort, but all the pieces are falling into place:
1) OpenGL 2.0 should easily be a match for whatever the successor to Direct 3D is. A lot stuff mentioned in the article is also in OpenGL 2.0.
2) The freedesktop.org folks are working on building an X server that sits on top of OpenGL.
3) Some DRI folks are working on an OpenGL implementation that can operate without the X server, to support using the X server on top of it."
The OSS community has already been working on it. Now find some new FUD.
Tell ya what to do, convince some companies to donate large funds to Enlightenment and call back in a few years, cuz those are the only dudes who can code NEARLY well enough to get done what needs to get done.
Hell, MS is going to make their next desktop a behemoth, it needed to be a slim and trim version of what shipped with 2000/2003, with just a BIT of XP thrown in there (namely the fast user switching!).
OSS has yet to provide a decent performance fully featured integrated desktop, though from what I hear, newer releases of Gnome aren't QUITE so painfully slow, maybe I'll try it... again...
Well SOMEBODY must be fixing the mistakes, and it sure isn't the sysadmin, he hasn't come outa his office in weeks.
It's not gonna happen. (Not that you seem to believe it yourself)
The first movies were made by the Lumiere brothers, who invented the projector.
The first photograph was unincidentally taken by Niepce who unsurprizingly was the inventor of the first camera.
It follows naturally that the first computer games were written by computer hobbyists and programmers.
I believe however, that the day of programmers as the major creative force in computer games is over. Like the cinematograph and the camera, the computer has been accepted as an artists' tool and computer games as a medium. It's part of the entertainment industry now. And with that comes the high-budget, polished productions that cost money and bars the entry of amateurs.
Sure, now and then a small independent film made on grainy 16mm film unexpectedly breaks through and receives a cult following, and I expect something similar for amateur computer games in the future.
But the days when a guy sitting in his basement could produce a major computer game hit is simply over.
Serious Sam. Ok not exactly a small venture, but not Multimillion dollar Hollywood financed either.
Hell, you checked out shockwave.com lately? Lots of games from small time developers, actually selling! (same games are on games.yahoo.com and every other site).
Actually, I can't think of a single game genre that DOES demand a huge well funded team. A team sure, but five or six people really is sufficent, given that those five or six people are all very talented. This is no different from days of old, when it just took one or two talented programers to make a game, just scaled up a bit, (more than 4 or 16 colors on the screen at a time.
The Poor Underpaid Intern Who Fixes All The System Administrator's Mistakes Appreciation Day
Oh that isn't so bad, for a period of a few years, when anybody e-mailed me I would contact them back and ask them how the weather in their home town was.
Information is so fluid, up until I turned 18 nothing about me existed on the net, now I am all over the place (my real name is plastered to the end of all e-mails I send, and so forth. While I was a minor, my information was closely enough guarded that only ONE site had my real name posted on a publically viewable page, and it was not connected to my e-mail address!)
I prefer looking up people's resume and sending them a message,
"So, how's the weather in [insert locale here] "
Holy shit, I want one of those.
Crap, hard to find just 640x480 here in the states. *sigh*
Well, then again, I wouldn't buy one unless it was under $80, so I guess there is a reason they aren't marketing them here.
Hmm, let me see:
/GUESS/ there is a tool set out there, but who in their right mind would want to use it?
Flash: Widely supported, good tool set, easy to use, looks good, performance varies but is generally acceptable if the artist didn't go massivly nuts.
SVG: Slow as hell no matter how fast your machine is, poor support, I
Honestly, I think the SVG toolset is larger than the Flash toolset, but Flash, umm, well, works.
And there is the difference folks. Flash and Shockwave are easy to install, frequently updated (albiet with slower and slower versions each time, heh, but Flash HAS gotten much more powerful over the years), and it actually shows moving image thingies at a speed faster than a crawl.
And no, don't link to Adobe's laughable SVG plugin.
I bought B/W the day it came out.
High hopes, buggy execution. The game needed some serious work and it never got it, not to mention the developer community did not spring up around it fast enough, the SDK really needed to be released at the same time as the game was.
Also, the gesture system sucked, badly. The hotkeys were faster, more reliable, and overall much easier to use.
The alignment system was quirky, the moster AI was dopey, all in all, I think I got maybe a month or so of play time out of it, mostly trying to get it working. . . .
The site says the screen is also a speaker. . . .
/. when the technology was first developed!) but the site also says the price of the device will drop down to around $100 once it is mass produced.
Those exist, yes, (mentioned on
Even mass produced, just the SPEAKER and high resolution screen would cost over $100.
Hey, hairy and proud of it!
American's view European woman as being masculine, the men as staying at home and cooking.
Not that there is anything wrong with a man staying at home and cooking.
It is just the frilly pink dress that throws most Americans off.
I thought up of this a looong time ago. . . .
:(
Patent too expensive to afford. *sigh*
The issue is price.
I bought a used Sonly Clie S360 on Ebay for $37. It has a low res B/W greyscale screen, 120x120 IIRC, and sure I would like a higher one, much more useful for taking notes. Heck one of the software silkscreens would be a SERIOUS boost, I have used them before and my accuracy goes up tremendously.
But you know what? Until they are under $50, no way. College student == no $$$.
Also, my GF has a Palm m505, she gets about 3 days battery life out of it. It also resets itself randomly every few months and deletes everything, joy. Color isn't worth all the hassle. ^_^ I have about three to four weeks battery life, no issues, and I found a good 4MB sony digital memory stick card to shove my backup data on. Unfortuntly Sony is a prick when it comes to software support and refuses to release the special version of Palm Desktop that is needed to synch, but the only reason I use sync is for data backup anyways.
I do not use Outlook, and until Thunderbird gets decent contact management and what not, (a working calander plugin would help to!) I will not be too worried about hotsynching.
I will upgrade when prices drop below $50 and battery life matches what I currently have.
read the FHS, then come back.
now, realize that while you can critisize what you don't understand, you come off looking about 14.
there are reasons for
Holy shit, NOW I know why MS has the Windows Registry.
To keep users away from all that crap. . .
Yah, umm, okay, how about instead the local of such and such list is stored in an agreed upon registry entry and the user never has to see a bleeming
Oh, and writting a game installer looks like it is SO much fun:
Wow, how simple!
I Don't Give A Shit Where My Games Store Their Data!
And I couldn't even type out in what directory they would be at the local asian restaurant. Horribly annoying i would say.
Bleck, there is some system variable that gets to it, but I was too lazy to bother looking it up.
Properly coded programs on Windows are forwards compatible and easily multilingual. Of course poorly made programs tends to be the opposite, they break as soon as the next service pack comes out, and require massive rewrites for simple translations. ^_^
Yes, but at least it is all contained within one directory, ignoring whatever shared DLLs have been placed in system32\
If I need to find all executables relating to a program, I can in general (95%+ of the time), go to a SINGLE directory and do "dir *.exe
In contrast, trying to find all binaries relating to X.... Ick!
(even more amusing, a fair number of years ago I had a fresh install of some version of Mandrake, and after running the included auto-updater, the system rebooted and I was dumped to the console with no way to get back to X! Nice changing the defaults and removing the graphical login screen. . . . yah that really helps a first time user who just paid $30 for your product. . .
Tab auto complete....
/etc (oh yah, THAT is thinking ahead. . . . ) or crud like /usr/sbin, which I assume is either Special Binaries or System Binaries, but what the hell, people bitched about 8.3 file names, just call the directory System Programs and get over it.
annnyways, that aside;
One thing that has always irritated me about the *nixs in general is the tendency to have everything spread across the entire hard drive. Binaries for X alone can reside in any of a number of directories, properly configured path statements have to be half a mile long, and good luck remembering where any one specific file is at!
I used to think that willy-nilly file structures were OK, after all, just use an OS's built in Search or Find feature right? This was until I actually organized my HD and got things working right, hey, look, files are were they SHOULD be!
TLA(brev)sare a pain in the butt from multiple perspectives. You end up with directories like
Oh and I just love how there is usr/local/sbin, OR usr/sbin, and WHY usr? If 'local' can have 5 letters, would it be so deadly to spell out 'user'?
Oddly enough, with the modern incarnations (Windows 2000+), Windows is laid out in a rather straightforward matter, with the exception of the Windows directory itself, which has (finally!) been abstracted far enough away from the users that only the 'system32' directory (which is in the path by default) is actually ever accessed.
Local settings and non-local (roaming, or whatever MS is calling them these days) settings are handled by the OS, so most users need not care about anything outside of the MyDocuments and Desktop folder in their profile directory, (albeit local settings is fun to play around with).
To the end user, you have a nice SIMPLE directory structure:
%systemroot%\System32\ {--- System tools and what not
%programfiles% {---- programs!
%userprofile%\desktop\ {---- desktop
%userprofile%\My Documents\ {---- documents!
now isn't that nice and simple? Want to run something, you have ONE place to look around in,
%programfiles%, not 4 different \bin\ directories. Some programs need to be run by some users but not by others? Not a program, there are a fair number of ways to accomplish this, NONE of which involve creating (to the end user!) a multitude of extra directory structures.
The programmer has it even better. They can either shove all their DLL files in %systemroot%\system32\ and be done with it (not too polite), store a copy in their own program folder (not done much anymore *sigh*), or use %commonprogramfiles%
For locally maintained settings only (very cool, Nvidia takes advantage of this in their Nview system application, so my monitor settings, including color correction, are maintained on each terminal separately!), %userprofile%\local settings\application data should be used.
This is the equivalent of *nix's usr/local/whateverRandomThreeLetterAbbreviationGoe sHere, with one exception;
it is blatantly self obvious what the directory is there for, and the existence of other directories removes the programmer's urge to shove binaries in weird places!
Actually, the entire local/remote binary thing is left more towards the administrators, they can choose to either have programs be run remotely (which granted not all programs support, but if they are written correctly and do not feel the need to shove random files all over the client machine's hard drive. . .
w00t, we're on the map! Goooo Seatttllleee!
Hell I can't get into the damned department at my local U (University of Washington), a 3.6 GPA minimum is required, some students don't get in with a 3.8 or even a 4.0! It is crazy, CS is one of the hardest fields to get into around here.
.
:)
Wait. . .
*looks at where he is at in the country*
Doh.
Funny story, awhile back I tried to make a complete change over to Open Office. I had refused to install any MS Office related app on my (Windows) PC for some time, but finally found myself needing to do some equation editing as well as some Excel compatible work, so I figured Open Office would be the way to go.
Long story short, loved the equation editor, and only one issue popped up.
On three seperate computers running three different versions of Windows (ME, 2K, XP), Open Office was unable to correctly print out mathematical equations from any of them.
After two days of trouble shooting I was forced to ditch OO and go with Word.
I have found Win2K3 to be an amazing performer in comparison to even Win2K. Ok ok the memory footprint is a bit higher (140MB compared to ~70MB for Win2K) but the performance is amazing.
Then again, don't listen to me, I am one of those weirdos using it as a desktop OS, increased reliability and hardware support, not to mention performance, in comparison with Windows 2000 makes it a good choice IMHO.
Microsoft was sued for practices that ensued during the so called "browser wars", which involved the 4.x generation of web browsers.
The Netscape 6.x codebase is based upon Mozilla. Netscape 6.x and the various other Mozilla derived versions are all now serious condeners in the market place, but 4.x never had a chance.
And Netscape came with darn nearly every ISP startup kit that existed at the time. Hell I downloaded 4.x but never used it! The thing just sucked.
This is what makes the anti-MS rherotic so tiring. MS has done many things that are immoral and illegal, but damnit, even my tech illiterate friends know how much Netscape 4.x sucked! As soon as I mention IE vs Netscape, one of them will pop up with "Yah but IE is better!".
Hardly anybody mentions the entire DR-DOS fiasco, or the MS licencing contracts involving Word/Works/etc, or how they managed to get anybody to use Windows in the first place! (earth to zealots, earth to zealots, Windows 1.0-9x all sucked horribly, do some research on how MS kept managing to sell them!)
Now that Microsoft has an actual DECENT set of operating systems for sale, it is going to get harder and harder to discredit Microsoft. Especially in many user's eyes, as we can no longer go "Hey, Windows sucks, it crashes all the time, and the only reason you have to use it is because MS financially forced companies into signing contract agreements stating they would install this crappy OS on to every computer they sell!"
Seriously, what is the anti-MS rhetoric going to be now? "come on over to Linux, if your lucky you can get sound working"?
Well I was on the net then. Netscape 4.x sucked, most ISPs gave out Netscape 3.x and even in the begining 4.x to all their users, but as time went on:
Internet Explorer in comparison:
It took the Mozilla project years to remove all the cruft that existed in Netscape 4.x (maybe it would have been better if they had started from the 3.x code instead. . . .), and just recently (within the last year and a half or so) has FireFox (and FireBird before that) been able to compete with IE for sheer speed and memory usage.
FireFox is actually a superior browser to IE in many respect, I still use IE because I am so acustom to hitting WindowKey-E to open an explorer window which I then hit F4 to go to the URL line and enter a site address. Browser/OS integration rocks, like it or not, it IS what the users want!
And MS has never "locked" anybody out from replacing Explorer entirely, it is quite easy to change Windows shells, in fact a number of companies specialize in doing exactly that! Nobody has created a new integrated file manager / web browser yet (or if they have, it has yet to become main stream) but MS is not keeping anybody from doing so. For all the Win9x OSs, it was a simple one line alteration to change interfaces (and in fact for awhile I had command.com as my interface instead of Explorer), and with the NT line it is just a simple registery alteration.
Netscape 4.x sucked. Period. 4.7 sucked even more. 3.x never had problems, before or after MS entered the market. 4.x was bloatware, and even some ex-Netscape employees have said such, it just sucked.
You've got to be an idiot then, either that or the WORST google user ever.
.)
BSPlayer solves all your problems.
Most sane Media players on Windows use DirectShow and VFW, meaning ALL media players can play ALL formats of video, except for those formats that refuse to write a DirectShow or VFW decoder. (such as Real and Sorenson (the codec most often used for quicktime).
Winamp also works, but I would really like a way to dock just the video window on the screen and have the rest of the interface dissapear (I think there is an option for that somewhere but. . .
As it is I use Windows Media Player 6.2 (start-->Run, type in m