The common user wants one easy means of installing software and a common GUI. Now, please, tell me I'm wrong.
Then let THEM write it. My software works, installs fine on literally hundreds of thousands of Linux, Unix, and POSIX-compatible machines that it is available on, and is in every single Linux distribution, and the BSD ports tree. I have yet to hear one complaint that it didn't install like they expected it to.
If someone wants to make it install LIKE WINDOWS, then they'll have to write it and contribute it back to the project.
If the user wants one common GUI, let them choose one at install time. Forcing all Linux distributions to use that single GUI or recommend it standard (GNOME, KDE, blecch) is death to Linux. We are not trying to mimic or emulate Microsoft, so stop it!
The users have to educate themselves, mature their behavior, and learn a little bit. This is not Windows, so stop trying to make it like Windows.
Not to be a naysayer, but in 12 years Linux has managed to gain only a few percentage points worth of the desktop market. Users really don't care, don't know, and have no reason to be aware of the development model used to create their software.
Whew, that's a relief, because you know what... Linux wasn't created to replace Windows!.
Let the users complain all they want, Linux doesn't exist to compete with Windows, nor is the goal of Linux to supplant Windows on the desktop.It may be the goal of some Linux companies to engineer a Linux version to compete with Windows, but this is not the goal of Linux.
As a Linux developer (and not a Linux Distribution employee), I really don't care what the Windows users whine about. If they don't like it, they can go back to Windows. Linux wasn't created by whiners, and I don't work for them.
If the users can't use it, or it's not too easy for them, there are plenty of other operating systems they can play with that might be easier. I'm sick of hearing this topic come up over and over and over. "But for Linux to be successful, it has to make it to the desktop...". Linux is already successful, even if I am the only person in the world using it.
It's MY job to make the software, and make it work.
It's someone ELSE's job to make it work like Windows.
Welcome to capitalism, and (for good or ill) one of the roles of OSS. How many times have you heard "RedHat is cheaper than Windows, so businesses should use it!!!", or worse, said that yourself? Don't like it when the other edge of the OSS sword swings around and hits you, eh?
I think you, like the rest of the media and masses who don't know enough about this environment, clearly missed the point..
The point is NOT that it's free (as well as Free), or that they save money by using it... Go ahead, use it, save billions, that's the reason it exists, to improve the technology.
The real point here is that they violate the SPIRIT of the license and community by NOT GIVING BACK to the community that helped them.
Where are the fixes to the code they use?
Where are the bug reports?
What about patches?
New features?
Where's the "Thanks for saving us millions!" letters?
Nothing. That's the point. We save thousands of companies billions of dollars a year, and we see less than 1/10th of a percent of fixes/bugs/patches back, and maybe one in 5,000 people actually care to say "Thanks". Now go back and re-read this book from the beginning, and stop skipping to the last page, you've clearly missed a lot.
Doesn't support Maildir in the main code, only thru third-party patches, and pine guys rejects to add Maildir support to the code.
Have you ever noticed that the development of Pine is completely architected and funded by students and faculty of wash.edu? They don't run Maildir on their servers, so why should they even invest time and money in developing support for something they can't test, use, or deploy internally? Pine is used on their internal mail system, and it uses mbox.
If you want Maildir, don't use Pine. If you want the less-capable mail reader, use mutt. Just because mutt supports Maildir does not make it better.
2. Is not GPL
Pine is free. You can make as many patches and additions as you want to it, you just can't redistribute it as "Pine". If you want a GPL clone of Pine (and one that looks and acts IDENTICAL to Pine), you should be using Mana with Nano the editor, both are GPL'd and if you want, encourage their development to suit your needs. If not, you have absolutely no reason to be complaining.
Anything else? I didn't think so.
They still got threading wrong..
on
PINE Releases 4.50
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The stock threading in Pine 4.50 is STILL wrong, but the patch I've been running here for over a year works perfectly (in fact, my name is actually in the patch itself for a similar bug). Let me explain:
When you want to sort your mail, so the newest messages arrive at the top (normal for anyone who reads a LOT of mail), you set Pine to sort by "Reverse Arrival". Using the patch, I hit 'k', and now I expose threads, but ONLY the first message of the thread is sorted in reverse-arrival mode (as it should be). All replies to that thread are shown consecutively underneath it in normal arrival mode (replace dots for spaces, Slashdot strips them):
Nov 22...Message 1
Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 15...Message 4
With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:
Nov 22...Message 1
Nov 22...Message 2
Nov 22...........+---Re: Message 3 (repl 3)
Nov 20.......+---Re: Message 3 (repl 2)
Nov 19...+---Re: Message 3 (repl 1)
Nov 18...Message 3
Nov 15...Message 4
And there's no way to stop it. Sorting by Reverse-Arrival hides threads.
Sorting by Threads sorts upside-down (as above).
Sorting by Reverse-Threads puts new messages at the bottom.
I've been a happy user of Pine for 10 years (or however long it has been out), but I can't upgrade to this when such a core function is non-working like this (incidentally, don't tell me to try mutt, I've tried mutt, and it can't even come remotely close in features to what last-year's pine can do, not to mention the exploitable holes with mutt's file browser).
I guess I'll report this again, and hope that Eduardo can come up with a quick patch to fix it.
Then buy music from unsigned musicians and street artists!! There's a lot of good original stuff out there that you can find if you look for it. Any more most bands have a web page where you can sample their music, buy a cd, and find out about a show.
You miss the larger point.. you download music from unsigned artists, you learn to like it, and you want to burn it to CDR so you can listen to it in your player or in your car. You buy some blank CDR media to record it, and BAM! you just paid the RIAA a royalty, for their "starving artists", which will NEVER go to that indy band you just burned to CDR media.
They get money on every single side, whether or not the end-result is recording an indy band's music, with the band's FULL PERMISSION.
I'd love to hear their explanation of how they "meter" how many blank CDRs are actually used to record non-RIAA music, and where the actual facility is that sends THAT bit of their royalty to THOSE bands.
The RIAA assumes everyone is guilty, whether they buy CDR (to back up a mail spool, record a (non-RIAA-signed) indy band, etc.), purchase a player for their car, home, or a CDR drive to do backups of their computer. "Everyone is guilty, now pay up!"
It's sickening. I've been saying this for 3-4 years now, that the RIAA missed the boat on the Internet as a music distribution medium (search slashdot archives for my posts over the years). Think about it.. we have faster computers, bigger bandwidth, a good percentage of us have CDR drives and high-quality printers. Just pay the RIAA online for your favorite music, download it, download the album art, burn it to CDR, print the album art, and away you go.. all for MUCH less per CD than going to the store and paying 10 middlemen (retail outlets, drivers, distribution services, printers, etc. etc.). They lost, and I feel no sorrow for them.
I was using AvantGo with my Linux box ages ago, with a utility called malsync. I suspect that it would work just fine on any Unix, including OSX, so AvantGo works on the same number of platforms as Plucker.
Actually, I'm being quite fair, malsync is not an AvantGo product, nor is it supported by AvantGo in any way (and in fact, I host the mainline malsync sourcecode in my cvs). malsync is a reverse-engineered tool that provides functionally-similar capabilities to what AvantGo's Windows conduit provides, but it most-certainly is not supported or written by current AvantGo personnel (unless that changed very recently).
I didn't include third-party tools or patches in my assesment above, for both products, for exactly this reason. Otherwise, I would have included the fact that Plucker _does_ support forms and tables, through third-party patches and code.
I'm actually working on a better breakdown of pros and cons between both applications, which was spawned by my original post here. Hit me in private email for the link to it. I'd love to get your input on the featuresets.
And please don't use my real name here in an open forum. I didn't use it, so I trust that you'll respect that and do the same.
File systems that support multiple streams (like NTFS) could save undo information in a separate stream. "Not everyone has such a file system," you might say. I say, whatever -- if we're talking about moving forward here, we'll have to go past FAT and other beginner's file systems.
VMS has done this for a decade or more. Every time you edit a file, you get 'file.txt;1', 'file.txt;2' and so on, which you can pick up at any point and continue editing. It's semantically similar to cvsfs, where every file saved revisions itself. Implementing cvsfs globally could be "A Good Thing[tm]" overall.
What is intuitive to us is what is standard -- adding new buttons with new pictures, new dials, and other things in a single instance interface only confuses everyone. Even if some of the properties are inefficient, regular GUI standards are the way to go.
Answer me this... why do icons in Windows have titles underneath them? Why do ANY icons have titles underneath them? Do you even care what the picture is? No, you read the titles. Why? Because Microsoft failed to standardize on them and make them as commonly known as a picture of a "Stop" sign, or a "green light" as we see while driving every day.
What is intuitive is what works or what is used, not what is standard, because there are no standards in this space. Making "pretty pictures" under the buttons makes them understandable, in the absence of other descriptive features (such as a title).
If I see something with colorful, bubbly bitmaps on the gui, I probably won't use it.
Aren't you glad Open Source exists then? Now you can look at the source, and CHANGE IT to suit your individual behavior. Try that with Microsoft Media Player 7.0...
It's all about choice. Open Source gives you choice, while proprietary software continues to take it away.
I don't wan't to name the document until I decide to save it. Does anyone else here want this feature? I create many documents every day, to re-format, print, view differently cut / paste from web for printing, for email, etc... I don't want my hard drive cluttered with this crap. That's why I don't save it. Yet, this Matthew Thomas guy thinks this would be good. I think his first example of "cruft" is a bad one.
Wow, you completely missed the ball on this one. If you MANUALLY save the document, and it's your first save, the name that was automatically given by the autosave function could just rename it from $autosave_version to $your_version, and you'd never see a difference. The difference would appear if you crashed your document editor, and launched it again, your data would be intact, and ready to continue editing. Yes, the ideal goal is to stop it from crashing, but this is a brilliant way to get around that.
Oh, and if you decide NOT to save the document, and close your editor before MANUALLY saving the document at all, the $autosave_version could just be deleted as you closed the editor.
Simple, elegant, brilliant.
Now why couldn't Microsoft think of this? Because Microsoft believes their APPLICATION is the most important, not the DATA that their application creates. Pompous on their part, and it will be a major contributor to their demise.
I've been using and working with Plucker since 1998, and I think I can lend some credence to our particular alternative here. Here's a brief rundown of our project against AvantGo's offering:
Plucker has three forms of compression (Zlib, DOC, and none), AvantGo does not
Plucker supports 14 languages, AvantGo does not
Plucker supports local files (file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet (including https://) content, AvantGo does not
Plucker supports runtime image scaling via the parser ([alt]maxwidth, [alt]maxheight), AvantGo does not
Plucker is an 100k footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is 399k, without content
Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration options, AvantGo does not
Plucker is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License, AvantGo is not
Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, AvantGo does not
Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh)
Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own content or slap them with fines for misusing it, AvantGo does
Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not
You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot
Plucker offers 5 font choices, 7 on Sony devices and 9 on Handera devices, AvantGo offers 2 fonts, with one being built-into the PalmOS itself
Plucker has full support for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OSX operating systems, AvantGo supports.. well, one.
Plucker includes full tools in Python, Java, Perl, C, C++, GUI desktop options, commandline options, and parsers, including viewers for Linux-based PDA devices. AvantGo has none of these
Plucker supports an email-only interface, AvantGo does not
Plucker supports Bookmarks, AvantGo does not
Plucker does not force advertisements on you, AvantGo does
Plucker does not use an insecure proxy server to "broker" requests from the client, AvantGo does
Plucker does not support "hiding" of PDA-sized content urls, AvantGo does, and restricts by license, what content providers can and can't do with their own content
..and many other features I didn't mention
Have a look at our project at www.plkr.org and try it out for yourself. If you want to help us out, please do. We believe we have the superior product, for dozens of reasons. We're smaller, faster, more feature-rich, secure, and we put the user and content provider back in control of their own content.
The Plucker Desktop application can be found at desktop.plkr.org. It is written in wxWindows, and works on Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
The High-resolution viewer application for Sony and Handera high-resolution devices can be found at hires.plkr.org.
We also have an irc channel, so feel free to join and talk to other Plucker users and developers. Point your irc client to irc.plkr.org and join #plucker to chat with us.
If you wish to help out with PDA-sized websites, take a look at OpenURLS and help us out maintaining the list. I've done all of the work so far to fetch these urls (600+), but we need some help sorting them and categorizing them.
We have a lot of other things going on, and we are quite active. Jump aboard and help us out!
"If they have a role that they are in contact with customers (even a remote chance of it), it makes a lot of sense that they follow some standards."
The article was talking about IT "dot-com" types, not managers or salespeople. That being said, I agree that anyone coming in contact with customers should cleanly represent the company, IF that is their focus (i.e. a cable installer on a telephone pole can wear jeans, as long as he has the company shirt logo on.. (and in fact, jeans are safer on the pole than slacks)).
However, MOST of the IT "dot-com" technologists are developers, coders, hackers, and people who you want 25 hours a day, focusing on CODE, the core thing that makes your business or product successful. Sticking them in front of customers is not only going to probably confuse and anger your customers, but will slash productivity by half, since the coder is no longer CODING.
The point is moot, as a developer, we'll just take our skills elsewhere, or we'll just start our own business with our own products, and compete with yours.
"..instead of that grumpy guy sitting over in the corner who won't talk to anyone."
..that grumpy guy who is writing all the code that makes your business successful, and which generates money so YOU can get paid, and have a wonderful house and a wife and a dog.
Get over it. If you want people to be productive, give them a productive environment. Asking them to wear clothes which don't express their creativity or allow them to feel comfort in the workplace (within certain legal boundaries of course, i.e. nudity or obscenity), then you should expect to get cramped, "head-nodding" engineers who can't write their way out of a paper sack.
Once the PHB-types realize it is about COMFORT that drives productivity, and not LOOKS, that drive success, maybe they'll slacken up a bit and watch their profits rise. Also, when job applicants realize that the workplace is a comfortable, easy-going-but-fast-paced place to work, the line will be out the door, without ever advertising for employees.
If you tell everyone that they have to adhere to a strict dress code ("can't leave your cube without a suitcoat on"), you'll be putting ads in the paper to find applicants.
Besides, for most people, they would gladly accept dressing in business-casual over "Funeral" any day, just ask.
Anyone notice that the failed credit card deduction is almost the same as the stolen amount(x2)? Maybe the thief wanted to get 2 of these camera/PDA devices, and couldn't get them both when the credit card was denied, so he just took the max from the cash value purchase price of one of them, $581.00.
This truly sucks. As a maintainer of a few open source packages myself, who currently is using PayPal to keep the project websites, cvs, et al. bandwidth paid for, I'm at a loss to find any alternatives. Anyone else?
You want absolutely raw speed in a graphical browser? One word... Dillo. Without a doubt, the smallest, fastest browser I've ever used. It loads in about 0.03 seconds here, and renders all of Slashdot's main page in about 0.8 seconds.
Would you even know the project existed, without an announcement?
Would it get as many users testing it, finding bugs and helping out, if it weren't for the stories on it in the early stages?
Don't shun the "Release Early, Release Often" mantra just because it disagrees with your own moral semantics of development. This is the way things improve early on.
Would you rather have it developed when nobody was testing it, and nobody knew about it, and then Phoenix 1.0 is released, full of bugs buried in the code that'll take weeks to rewrite and debug, when the code is 200,000 lines? Or now, when it's early, at 10,000 lines?
How could you possibly be using it right now, when it doesn't even support the login cookies and password management required to actually log into slashdot? It's reproducable on every single site that requires a login: slashdot, advogato, freshmeat, newsforge, banks, etc. You put in your username and password, click Login, boom... browser crashes.
We should be supporting other vendors that sell these titles, not just the most-expensive ones. I personally recommend using isbn.nu for my book purchases. It allows you to locate a book by title, author, isbn, etc. and compares the price on the top 10 or so listings, including Amazon, Barnes, etc.
I'm all for making this "required reading" for those self-proclaimed "webmasters" and "web developers", who use tables for layout, specify font sizes, override user defaults, remove titlebars, try to disable right-click, and a whole host of other things that define the ineptitude of these individuals, and their lack of skill in proper design.
Come join some of us on #html on Efnet and you'll see the defining class of pedants like myself, and the others who insist that they aren't breaking usability by full-screening a browser window, removing all of the titlebars and then disabling right-click, and setting it to onBlur() by default.
RIAA does not, it owns every record. So it can crack down on piracy without benefiting competitor.
Unfortunately, no. RIAA is one company, that holds a controlling share in many record companies, but certainly not ALL record companies. There are hundreds of others, but for bands who see the "sparkle", they go for the one with the biggest bucks, and chances are those labels are controlled by the RIAA.
Did you even see the show? The "door" is in an 8"x8" square shaft that entends up at about a 45 degree angle. I think the shaft was 200 ft long.
Did you even look at the video footage? The 8x8 shaft had a "plug" in the end of it, which was 3" thick. They drilled through that plug, inserted an endoscope with a light, and found a _room_ with a door at the end of it, much larger than the 8x8 hole which led up to it. The room appeared to be blank, with only the door at the other end. It was most-certainly not an 8x8 "door" that they found. The hole they drilled is equivalent to drilling a hole in a shoebox from the outside, and looking inside it from that hole.
The Mozilla client would be very well integrated into the server, able to access web pages, email, and newsgroups, as well as LDAP contacts, scheduling, and other groupware features.
Isn't this how we got into this mess in the first place? The OS needs, IE, which you can't remove, and Outlook requires IE, and everything is integrated into these two applications and their support subsystem. Look at the trouble it's given the Windows users.
Let's not go there, unless of course, you can de-couple EVERY piece of fucntionality, and use say, pine for mail, gnomecal for calendaring, and so on. If it's all integrated into Mozilla, it's pretty much useless for a large majority of actual power-users.
Remember, just because a screwdriver CAN work as a chisel, doesn't mean it's the best chisel for the job.
I've put up a huge archive of images that I've collected the first month of the tragedy, starting on the morning of the event. I stopped collecting these when I reached about 13,500 images, I'll keep adding them to Gallery as I get time.
There are hundreds of images in there that have never made it to the media, images that were passed to me on irc the day it happened, from people in NY with cameras, out of their apartments, from their dorms, everywhere. There's a few gruesome pictures of human parts falling from the buildings, as well as images of "jumpers".
To those we have lost, we mourn you, and to those who remain, we feel your pain.
Slashdot Mirror
Then let THEM write it. My software works, installs fine on literally hundreds of thousands of Linux, Unix, and POSIX-compatible machines that it is available on, and is in every single Linux distribution, and the BSD ports tree. I have yet to hear one complaint that it didn't install like they expected it to.
If someone wants to make it install LIKE WINDOWS, then they'll have to write it and contribute it back to the project.
If the user wants one common GUI, let them choose one at install time. Forcing all Linux distributions to use that single GUI or recommend it standard (GNOME, KDE, blecch) is death to Linux. We are not trying to mimic or emulate Microsoft, so stop it!
The users have to educate themselves, mature their behavior, and learn a little bit. This is not Windows, so stop trying to make it like Windows.
Whew, that's a relief, because you know what... Linux wasn't created to replace Windows! .
Let the users complain all they want, Linux doesn't exist to compete with Windows, nor is the goal of Linux to supplant Windows on the desktop.It may be the goal of some Linux companies to engineer a Linux version to compete with Windows, but this is not the goal of Linux.
As a Linux developer (and not a Linux Distribution employee), I really don't care what the Windows users whine about. If they don't like it, they can go back to Windows. Linux wasn't created by whiners, and I don't work for them.
If the users can't use it, or it's not too easy for them, there are plenty of other operating systems they can play with that might be easier. I'm sick of hearing this topic come up over and over and over. "But for Linux to be successful, it has to make it to the desktop...". Linux is already successful, even if I am the only person in the world using it.
It's MY job to make the software, and make it work.
It's someone ELSE's job to make it work like Windows.
I think you, like the rest of the media and masses who don't know enough about this environment, clearly missed the point..
The point is NOT that it's free (as well as Free), or that they save money by using it... Go ahead, use it, save billions, that's the reason it exists, to improve the technology.
The real point here is that they violate the SPIRIT of the license and community by NOT GIVING BACK to the community that helped them.
Where are the fixes to the code they use?
Where are the bug reports?
What about patches?
New features?
Where's the "Thanks for saving us millions!" letters?
Nothing. That's the point. We save thousands of companies billions of dollars a year, and we see less than 1/10th of a percent of fixes/bugs/patches back, and maybe one in 5,000 people actually care to say "Thanks". Now go back and re-read this book from the beginning, and stop skipping to the last page, you've clearly missed a lot.
Have you ever noticed that the development of Pine is completely architected and funded by students and faculty of wash.edu? They don't run Maildir on their servers, so why should they even invest time and money in developing support for something they can't test, use, or deploy internally? Pine is used on their internal mail system, and it uses mbox.
If you want Maildir, don't use Pine. If you want the less-capable mail reader, use mutt. Just because mutt supports Maildir does not make it better.
Pine is free. You can make as many patches and additions as you want to it, you just can't redistribute it as "Pine". If you want a GPL clone of Pine (and one that looks and acts IDENTICAL to Pine), you should be using Mana with Nano the editor, both are GPL'd and if you want, encourage their development to suit your needs. If not, you have absolutely no reason to be complaining.
Anything else? I didn't think so.
When you want to sort your mail, so the newest messages arrive at the top (normal for anyone who reads a LOT of mail), you set Pine to sort by "Reverse Arrival". Using the patch, I hit 'k', and now I expose threads, but ONLY the first message of the thread is sorted in reverse-arrival mode (as it should be). All replies to that thread are shown consecutively underneath it in normal arrival mode (replace dots for spaces, Slashdot strips them):
With the threading in the new Pine 4.5, without using the threading patch (which was written by wash.edu, btw), you get:
And there's no way to stop it. Sorting by Reverse-Arrival hides threads.
Sorting by Threads sorts upside-down (as above).
Sorting by Reverse-Threads puts new messages at the bottom.
I've been a happy user of Pine for 10 years (or however long it has been out), but I can't upgrade to this when such a core function is non-working like this (incidentally, don't tell me to try mutt, I've tried mutt, and it can't even come remotely close in features to what last-year's pine can do, not to mention the exploitable holes with mutt's file browser).
I guess I'll report this again, and hope that Eduardo can come up with a quick patch to fix it.
You miss the larger point.. you download music from unsigned artists, you learn to like it, and you want to burn it to CDR so you can listen to it in your player or in your car. You buy some blank CDR media to record it, and BAM! you just paid the RIAA a royalty, for their "starving artists", which will NEVER go to that indy band you just burned to CDR media.
They get money on every single side, whether or not the end-result is recording an indy band's music, with the band's FULL PERMISSION.
I'd love to hear their explanation of how they "meter" how many blank CDRs are actually used to record non-RIAA music, and where the actual facility is that sends THAT bit of their royalty to THOSE bands.
The RIAA assumes everyone is guilty, whether they buy CDR (to back up a mail spool, record a (non-RIAA-signed) indy band, etc.), purchase a player for their car, home, or a CDR drive to do backups of their computer. "Everyone is guilty, now pay up!"
It's sickening. I've been saying this for 3-4 years now, that the RIAA missed the boat on the Internet as a music distribution medium (search slashdot archives for my posts over the years). Think about it.. we have faster computers, bigger bandwidth, a good percentage of us have CDR drives and high-quality printers. Just pay the RIAA online for your favorite music, download it, download the album art, burn it to CDR, print the album art, and away you go.. all for MUCH less per CD than going to the store and paying 10 middlemen (retail outlets, drivers, distribution services, printers, etc. etc.). They lost, and I feel no sorrow for them.
Actually, I'm being quite fair, malsync is not an AvantGo product, nor is it supported by AvantGo in any way (and in fact, I host the mainline malsync sourcecode in my cvs). malsync is a reverse-engineered tool that provides functionally-similar capabilities to what AvantGo's Windows conduit provides, but it most-certainly is not supported or written by current AvantGo personnel (unless that changed very recently).
I didn't include third-party tools or patches in my assesment above, for both products, for exactly this reason. Otherwise, I would have included the fact that Plucker _does_ support forms and tables, through third-party patches and code.
I'm actually working on a better breakdown of pros and cons between both applications, which was spawned by my original post here. Hit me in private email for the link to it. I'd love to get your input on the featuresets.
And please don't use my real name here in an open forum. I didn't use it, so I trust that you'll respect that and do the same.
VMS has done this for a decade or more. Every time you edit a file, you get 'file.txt;1', 'file.txt;2' and so on, which you can pick up at any point and continue editing. It's semantically similar to cvsfs, where every file saved revisions itself. Implementing cvsfs globally could be "A Good Thing[tm]" overall.
Answer me this... why do icons in Windows have titles underneath them? Why do ANY icons have titles underneath them? Do you even care what the picture is? No, you read the titles. Why? Because Microsoft failed to standardize on them and make them as commonly known as a picture of a "Stop" sign, or a "green light" as we see while driving every day.
What is intuitive is what works or what is used, not what is standard, because there are no standards in this space. Making "pretty pictures" under the buttons makes them understandable, in the absence of other descriptive features (such as a title).
Aren't you glad Open Source exists then? Now you can look at the source, and CHANGE IT to suit your individual behavior. Try that with Microsoft Media Player 7.0...
It's all about choice. Open Source gives you choice, while proprietary software continues to take it away.
Wow, you completely missed the ball on this one. If you MANUALLY save the document, and it's your first save, the name that was automatically given by the autosave function could just rename it from $autosave_version to $your_version, and you'd never see a difference. The difference would appear if you crashed your document editor, and launched it again, your data would be intact, and ready to continue editing. Yes, the ideal goal is to stop it from crashing, but this is a brilliant way to get around that.
Oh, and if you decide NOT to save the document, and close your editor before MANUALLY saving the document at all, the $autosave_version could just be deleted as you closed the editor.
Simple, elegant, brilliant.
Now why couldn't Microsoft think of this? Because Microsoft believes their APPLICATION is the most important, not the DATA that their application creates. Pompous on their part, and it will be a major contributor to their demise.
If not, can your PocketPC run the GTK+ viewer? If so, then yes.
If not, then someone will have to port it to PocketPC, i.e. not us.
Have a look at our project at www.plkr.org and try it out for yourself. If you want to help us out, please do. We believe we have the superior product, for dozens of reasons. We're smaller, faster, more feature-rich, secure, and we put the user and content provider back in control of their own content.
The Plucker Desktop application can be found at desktop.plkr.org. It is written in wxWindows, and works on Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
The High-resolution viewer application for Sony and Handera high-resolution devices can be found at hires.plkr.org.
We also have an irc channel, so feel free to join and talk to other Plucker users and developers. Point your irc client to irc.plkr.org and join #plucker to chat with us.
If you wish to help out with PDA-sized websites, take a look at OpenURLS and help us out maintaining the list. I've done all of the work so far to fetch these urls (600+), but we need some help sorting them and categorizing them.
We have a lot of other things going on, and we are quite active. Jump aboard and help us out!
The article was talking about IT "dot-com" types, not managers or salespeople. That being said, I agree that anyone coming in contact with customers should cleanly represent the company, IF that is their focus (i.e. a cable installer on a telephone pole can wear jeans, as long as he has the company shirt logo on.. (and in fact, jeans are safer on the pole than slacks)).
However, MOST of the IT "dot-com" technologists are developers, coders, hackers, and people who you want 25 hours a day, focusing on CODE, the core thing that makes your business or product successful. Sticking them in front of customers is not only going to probably confuse and anger your customers, but will slash productivity by half, since the coder is no longer CODING.
The point is moot, as a developer, we'll just take our skills elsewhere, or we'll just start our own business with our own products, and compete with yours.
..that grumpy guy who is writing all the code that makes your business successful, and which generates money so YOU can get paid, and have a wonderful house and a wife and a dog.
Get over it. If you want people to be productive, give them a productive environment. Asking them to wear clothes which don't express their creativity or allow them to feel comfort in the workplace (within certain legal boundaries of course, i.e. nudity or obscenity), then you should expect to get cramped, "head-nodding" engineers who can't write their way out of a paper sack.
Once the PHB-types realize it is about COMFORT that drives productivity, and not LOOKS, that drive success, maybe they'll slacken up a bit and watch their profits rise. Also, when job applicants realize that the workplace is a comfortable, easy-going-but-fast-paced place to work, the line will be out the door, without ever advertising for employees.
If you tell everyone that they have to adhere to a strict dress code ("can't leave your cube without a suitcoat on"), you'll be putting ads in the paper to find applicants.
Besides, for most people, they would gladly accept dressing in business-casual over "Funeral" any day, just ask.
This truly sucks. As a maintainer of a few open source packages myself, who currently is using PayPal to keep the project websites, cvs, et al. bandwidth paid for, I'm at a loss to find any alternatives. Anyone else?
You want absolutely raw speed in a graphical browser? One word... Dillo. Without a doubt, the smallest, fastest browser I've ever used. It loads in about 0.03 seconds here, and renders all of Slashdot's main page in about 0.8 seconds.
Would it get as many users testing it, finding bugs and helping out, if it weren't for the stories on it in the early stages?
Don't shun the "Release Early, Release Often" mantra just because it disagrees with your own moral semantics of development. This is the way things improve early on.
Would you rather have it developed when nobody was testing it, and nobody knew about it, and then Phoenix 1.0 is released, full of bugs buried in the code that'll take weeks to rewrite and debug, when the code is 200,000 lines? Or now, when it's early, at 10,000 lines?
How could you possibly be using it right now, when it doesn't even support the login cookies and password management required to actually log into slashdot? It's reproducable on every single site that requires a login: slashdot, advogato, freshmeat, newsforge, banks, etc. You put in your username and password, click Login, boom... browser crashes.
This book can be found here on isbn.nu.
I'm all for making this "required reading" for those self-proclaimed "webmasters" and "web developers", who use tables for layout, specify font sizes, override user defaults, remove titlebars, try to disable right-click, and a whole host of other things that define the ineptitude of these individuals, and their lack of skill in proper design.
Come join some of us on #html on Efnet and you'll see the defining class of pedants like myself, and the others who insist that they aren't breaking usability by full-screening a browser window, removing all of the titlebars and then disabling right-click, and setting it to onBlur() by default.
I prefer to call them MCE's[tm] (my term). Magazine Certified Engineers.
Unfortunately, no. RIAA is one company, that holds a controlling share in many record companies, but certainly not ALL record companies. There are hundreds of others, but for bands who see the "sparkle", they go for the one with the biggest bucks, and chances are those labels are controlled by the RIAA.
Did you even look at the video footage? The 8x8 shaft had a "plug" in the end of it, which was 3" thick. They drilled through that plug, inserted an endoscope with a light, and found a _room_ with a door at the end of it, much larger than the 8x8 hole which led up to it. The room appeared to be blank, with only the door at the other end. It was most-certainly not an 8x8 "door" that they found. The hole they drilled is equivalent to drilling a hole in a shoebox from the outside, and looking inside it from that hole.
Isn't this how we got into this mess in the first place? The OS needs, IE, which you can't remove, and Outlook requires IE, and everything is integrated into these two applications and their support subsystem. Look at the trouble it's given the Windows users.
Let's not go there, unless of course, you can de-couple EVERY piece of fucntionality, and use say, pine for mail, gnomecal for calendaring, and so on. If it's all integrated into Mozilla, it's pretty much useless for a large majority of actual power-users.
Remember, just because a screwdriver CAN work as a chisel, doesn't mean it's the best chisel for the job.
There are hundreds of images in there that have never made it to the media, images that were passed to me on irc the day it happened, from people in NY with cameras, out of their apartments, from their dorms, everywhere. There's a few gruesome pictures of human parts falling from the buildings, as well as images of "jumpers".
To those we have lost, we mourn you, and to those who remain, we feel your pain.
We are wired, we are strong, and we are pissed!