well, it's a word, yes, but not a very proper or one. first, it's redundant. "irr" and "less" are both negative, which is just silly.
secondly, it's hardly ever used correctly. as in the original post, it's often used in place of "regardless", but "irregardless" should have the opposite meaning, since it's "regardless" with an "irr-" prefix.
those links you provided contain their own mini-diatribes against this retarded word.
It's really the mouse gestures in Opera that make it the winner for me. They seriously make browsing much faster. Since I'm authoring and reading web pages all day, I really notice the small difference adding up. Especially when I have to go back to IE or something.:)
For the uninitiated, mouse gestures in Opera are Palm Graffitti like mouse motions that take the place of button-clicking for some operations. For example, right mouse button+moving the mouse left is like pressing the Back button. Similarly-simple commands exist for maximizing/closing/minimizing windows, etc.
Does Mozilla have similar gesture support? I thought I remember reading about that a while ago, but I haven't been able to find it.
Opera's also very fast. It eats up a lot of RAM by default, but you can edit the RAM cache size in Preferences, which actually makes it run pretty lean (or as lean as you want it to).
The built-in mail reader is quite nice. Fast and simple. The contact list management is nice. It's got instant messaging built-in, but I haven't tried that yet.
Opera does tend to crash at times, but it loads quickly, and when you load it back up it gives you the option of reloading all the URLs it was surfing when the crash occurred. After a crash, I'm up again so quickly that I hardly mind, although it is a bit annoying. Hopefully, this 6.02 release is even more stable.
Well, that's just my two cents about the Win32 version, anyway.
...that they're selling the movie theater experience as much as the actual movie? Like Taco said, even if somebody plunked a DIVX copy of AOTC in my hands right now, there's no way I'm gonna watch some shitty DIVX when I can pay 8 dollars for to watch it on a screen that's bigger than my apartment, in a comfy chair, with booming digital sound.
In any business, you think about what you're offering that's UNIQUE, whether it be price, quality, features, or convenience. What do theaters have that's unique? Certainly not the movies, since they're freely available via the Internet, or cheaply available via rental several months later. It's the theaters themselves (and the associated trip-to-the-movies-with-friends experience) that are unique. Now, this experience SUCKS in some ways (lines, rude employees, partially-chewed Goobers under your feet in the theater) but that's all the more reason to improve it.
Theaters ARE starting to catch on, with features like comfy stadium seating. I'd like to see them take it a little further. A lot of art-house movie theaters have nice interiors and lounges, with food that's nicer than the usual horrid crap at large theaters, and it often costs less. It would be nice to see slightly more upscale mainstream theaters. Also, they should sell beer.:) I'd pay a few extra dollars for a ticket to a more upscale theater.
Sure, lots of people are gonna download this flick off the net, but I really don't think many of those people were gonna PAY to see the movie in the first place.
When you have mirrored drives, you're running two (or more) drives with the same data on them. Performance is the same (well, slightly decreased, actually) but reliabilty is greatly increased because if one drive goes down, you're still okay.
If they give the film too light of a rating, the crucial older crowd won't want to see it. And with a slightly older rating, that practically guarantees all the younger kids will want to see it. It's win/win for the studios.
I remember hearing Spielberg say they put certain things into E.T. for just this reason, to avoid the dreaded "G" rating. Of course, that may have just been his excuse for taking them out of th newly-released version.:)
You're totally right. I didn't mention striping specifically in my post since the original poster was talking about "doubling his speed" with two drives, so I assumed it went without saying that we were talking about striping. For maximum clarity i should have mentioned that you could run a mirrored setup with two drives for greater reliability if you don't mind forgoing the throughput boost that striping gives you.
Then again, if all you have is two IBM Deskstar drives, might as well runn 'em striped anyway-- they'll both fail in what, a week?:)
Well, the reliability of each drive is the same. However, the chance that your data will disappear to a drive crash on any given day is doubled since only one of the two drives needs to fail.
And as another poster pointed out, yes, I was talking about RAID striping two drives here, not a two-drive mirror configuration.
A two-drive array will nearly double your throughput, and with quality controllers, it's fairly linear up through three to five drives - again, depending on the quality of the controller
A two-drive array can double your throughput, but halve your reliability since if one of the drives fails, you lose all your data;-)
that sort of RAID is neat but it's just inviting disaster. you need to move to the higher levels of RAID which involve more drives and offer parity as well as striping!
I was flipping through Phantom Menace the other day, and I'd have to agree with you. It wasn't as bad as I remembered it being after seeing it in the theater.
It still didn't seem that great, but it was watchable, at least. I think you're right- peoples' huge expectations definitely hurt their enjoyment of Phantom Menace.
Most of the posts so far have focused on creature comforts. The NUMBER ONE THING that gets me out of the zone, though, isn't a creature comfort or lack thereof. It's FUCKING SPEC CHANGES (or a lack of specs). Holy crap, nothing else even comes close.
I'm most in the zone when a lot of time is spent defining a good spec up front, and having good management that doesn't allow the client to break it with constant changes after coding has already begun. Then I can just bear down and WORK and turn out a clean, easily-maintainable piece of software, as well. Otherwise, it's spaghetti crap code that is hell to write, maintain, and debug.
On the creature comfort side of things, a nicely-equipped computer is nice. It doesn't have to be a dual-SCSI, dual-CPU monster, but a 512MB of RAM and a nice monitor go a long way. With cheap RAM and monitors these days, this shouldn't be a problem... only another $200 or so over a barebones setup. Also, make sure the vid card and the monitor can both work together at high resolutions and refresh rates, please! Some offices "splurge" and buy cheap 19" monitors, but workers are still stuck at 1024x768 at 60hz or some shit.;-)
Being able to wear headphones to block out office noise is a must, too. That sounds like a silly demand, but I once worked at a place where headphones were verboten!
I'd put $1,000 down right now - there are more people writing code for a living than writing novels. Which one is easier?
Whether you're right or wrong, your analogy isn't the least bit apt. Most programmers work on software that's customized for a particular client, or a small number of clients in a specific field. Do any novel-writers write customized novels for 3 or 4 clients? The surgeon analogy doesn't even begin to make sense. Unlike surgery, do people really need life-and-death software support? 99.9% of the time, no. In the fields where software IS a life-and-death matter (air traffic control, nuclear power plants) you can bet the software companies have engineers on call at all times much like doctors.
Also, it's not a matter of programmers "just doing it". The question is not, "should my programmers have to work if they don't feel like it?" The question is: "how can I place my programmers in an environment where they'll be the most productive?"
If you even think about the question asked in the story, you'll realize it's about squeezing more productivity out of programmers by creating a favorable environment for them.
Your response is pretty sick. I'm sensing some built-up hostility there. It's true, there's a lot of whiny, overpaid, pampered programmers in the world, but that's not what this person is seeking to create.
I believe it's possible to create a comfortable work environment for programmers and still demand maximum productivity and deadline adherence...
I love Shakespeare and I loved this movie, too. don't forget the Shakespeare was popular entertainment back in its day, too- it was entertainment for the masses.
Shakespearian plays were full of sleeping around, romantic mixups, stabbing, and comic mischief. As wonderfully-crafted as most of his tales were, as as witty as the dialogue was they're not exactly the most sophisticated/complex things things in the world.
So, the gap between Shakespeare and enjoyable trash like this movie isn't as far as you might thing. Personally, having seen many of Shakespeare's plays, I think most people think they're "sophisticated" just because they're in old English.
Need evidence? Look at any Shakespearian translation set in modern times, performed in modern English....
Durons run a little cooler than Athlons. Suppose you're building a box where even an 800mhz Duron has more performance than you need... such as a word processing box, web-surfing box for Mom, mp3 server for the living room, whatever.
For boxes like that, the extra horsepower of the Athlon is overkill, so it can be nice to pick a Duron because and run a quieter fan since they produce less heat. Most of the time though, yeah... i'd say spend the extra 20 bucks and get the performance of an Athlon!
From everything I've read, including posts from the Ogg guys, the Ogg decoding algorithm requires floating-point math, something small embedded processors typically don't have. This isn't the case with mp3's.
I bet the hardware manufacturers would love to implement Ogg- I doubt they like paying licensing fees to Microsoft and Franhofer (sp?) for WMA and MP3 licenses.
I believe the Ogg guy(s) are working on a decoding algorithm that doesn't require floating-point math. I'm out of touch with Ogg land though... check their site.
Re:Flash is Style over Substance, Usability Nightm
on
Flash and Open Source
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· Score: 2
Cripes do you demand information from art galleries?
That's an interesting point. I think it's a matter of taking advantage of the strengths of a particular medium. If you want pretty, why web pages? It's probably one of the least well-suited mediums for whatever aesthetic goal you're trying to achieve.
Now, having said that, playing around with constraints is fun too. I'm a big fan of the music and sound on old(er) video games as well as a lot of minimalist art in general. I dunno, I like that FM synthesis music and those 16-color sprites. So, I guess it's a matter of personal taste.
Re:Flash is Style over Substance -- no, it's not
on
Flash and Open Source
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· Score: 2
For every bad example of Flash usablility, I can show you 1,000 or more HTML usablility nightmares. So is HTML bad? No. Bad designers are bad.
Whatever your opinion of HTML (and there are PLENTY of things with which to find fault, usability-wise) Flash inherits all of them, and adds a few more such as the breaking of the browser's back/forward buttons and URL field.
Even a well-designed Flash site has these problems, because they break standard browser navigation UI conventions. While you could of course create an HTML site which is less usable than many Flash sites, HTML is, on the whole, inherently more usable and consistant than Flash for the reasons I outlined above.
Pointing out any number of badly-designed HTML sites does not address the issue of Flash being better or worse than HTML. That's like saying, "for every drug overdose fatality, I can show you 1,000 or more fatalities that did not involve drug overdoses." True, perhaps, but you're not addressing the issue! If you want to argue in favor of Flash, by all means do so but please address the issue.
Re:Flash is Style over Substance, Usability Nightm
on
Flash and Open Source
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· Score: 2
I just wanted to add one thing...
Think about why people will be using this web site. Do they want pretty? Or do they want information? If they wanted pretty, they'd watch a movie or take acid and stare at some vintage 70's wallpaper.:)
You should try to make the site attractive, of course- but don't forget your #1 priority which is (or should be) usability and information. Any compromise to make the site flashy is a detriment to what your site set out to accomplish.
Flash is Style over Substance, Usability Nightmare
on
Flash and Open Source
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Flash is hell from a usability standpoint. It does away with many of the notions that the web was founded out - consistant interfaces, as well as the page-based metaphor. Flash essentially "breaks" the browser controls people have finally learned to use (the back button, URL bar, etc etc).
I'm sure Flash could be useful in cases where animation is actually necessary - animated diagrams and the such. But the cases where such a thing is actually CALLED FOR are extremely rare.
All in all, Flash epitomizes style over substance. Just don't do it. There's really no good reason to.
I mean just think of the win95->98->2000->XP product line. What really improved with each of those versions?
If you don't think anything improved from 98->2000, you're not really qualified to talk about it. 2000 brought a completely different kernel and 2000 is stable as a rock compared to 98. If you think Win2K sucked, that's fine and I'd even agree with you to some extent, but to say 98->2000 was a minor or nonexistant upgrade/change is just idiotic and not true. FUD isn't cool when either side does it!
Some reckon this is what killed Sega, their latest console was just too difficult to program relative to the others.
You've got the facts wrong. Sega, after learning their lesson the hard way with the difficult-to-program-for Saturn, made the Dreamcast one of the easiest-to-program systems of all time, by every account I've ever read. For evidence, look at the Dreamcast launch titles compared to the last titles released for the system this year - developers were maxxing the thing out right off the bat, with games like Soul Calibur.
By contrast, the PS2 is an absolute bitch to code for from what I've heard. The graphics chip is so powerful that you're essentially programming a dual-CPU system. I haven't programmed either system myself, but I've read dozens and dozens of articles, all of which have said the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
well, it's a word, yes, but not a very proper or one. first, it's redundant. "irr" and "less" are both negative, which is just silly.
secondly, it's hardly ever used correctly. as in the original post, it's often used in place of "regardless", but "irregardless" should have the opposite meaning, since it's "regardless" with an "irr-" prefix.
those links you provided contain their own mini-diatribes against this retarded word.
is "irregardless" a word there, too? :)
How long until this guy gets offed by the feds? :-)
It's really the mouse gestures in Opera that make it the winner for me. They seriously make browsing much faster. Since I'm authoring and reading web pages all day, I really notice the small difference adding up. Especially when I have to go back to IE or something. :)
For the uninitiated, mouse gestures in Opera are Palm Graffitti like mouse motions that take the place of button-clicking for some operations. For example, right mouse button+moving the mouse left is like pressing the Back button. Similarly-simple commands exist for maximizing/closing/minimizing windows, etc.
Does Mozilla have similar gesture support? I thought I remember reading about that a while ago, but I haven't been able to find it.
Opera's also very fast. It eats up a lot of RAM by default, but you can edit the RAM cache size in Preferences, which actually makes it run pretty lean (or as lean as you want it to).
The built-in mail reader is quite nice. Fast and simple. The contact list management is nice. It's got instant messaging built-in, but I haven't tried that yet.
Opera does tend to crash at times, but it loads quickly, and when you load it back up it gives you the option of reloading all the URLs it was surfing when the crash occurred. After a crash, I'm up again so quickly that I hardly mind, although it is a bit annoying. Hopefully, this 6.02 release is even more stable.
Well, that's just my two cents about the Win32 version, anyway.
...that they're selling the movie theater experience as much as the actual movie? Like Taco said, even if somebody plunked a DIVX copy of AOTC in my hands right now, there's no way I'm gonna watch some shitty DIVX when I can pay 8 dollars for to watch it on a screen that's bigger than my apartment, in a comfy chair, with booming digital sound.
:) I'd pay a few extra dollars for a ticket to a more upscale theater.
In any business, you think about what you're offering that's UNIQUE, whether it be price, quality, features, or convenience. What do theaters have that's unique? Certainly not the movies, since they're freely available via the Internet, or cheaply available via rental several months later. It's the theaters themselves (and the associated trip-to-the-movies-with-friends experience) that are unique. Now, this experience SUCKS in some ways (lines, rude employees, partially-chewed Goobers under your feet in the theater) but that's all the more reason to improve it.
Theaters ARE starting to catch on, with features like comfy stadium seating. I'd like to see them take it a little further. A lot of art-house movie theaters have nice interiors and lounges, with food that's nicer than the usual horrid crap at large theaters, and it often costs less. It would be nice to see slightly more upscale mainstream theaters. Also, they should sell beer.
Sure, lots of people are gonna download this flick off the net, but I really don't think many of those people were gonna PAY to see the movie in the first place.
When you have mirrored drives, you're running two (or more) drives with the same data on them. Performance is the same (well, slightly decreased, actually) but reliabilty is greatly increased because if one drive goes down, you're still okay.
If they give the film too light of a rating, the crucial older crowd won't want to see it. And with a slightly older rating, that practically guarantees all the younger kids will want to see it. It's win/win for the studios.
:)
I remember hearing Spielberg say they put certain things into E.T. for just this reason, to avoid the dreaded "G" rating. Of course, that may have just been his excuse for taking them out of th newly-released version.
You're totally right. I didn't mention striping specifically in my post since the original poster was talking about "doubling his speed" with two drives, so I assumed it went without saying that we were talking about striping. For maximum clarity i should have mentioned that you could run a mirrored setup with two drives for greater reliability if you don't mind forgoing the throughput boost that striping gives you.
:)
Then again, if all you have is two IBM Deskstar drives, might as well runn 'em striped anyway-- they'll both fail in what, a week?
Well, the reliability of each drive is the same. However, the chance that your data will disappear to a drive crash on any given day is doubled since only one of the two drives needs to fail.
And as another poster pointed out, yes, I was talking about RAID striping two drives here, not a two-drive mirror configuration.
A two-drive array will nearly double your throughput, and with quality controllers, it's fairly linear up through three to five drives - again, depending on the quality of the controller
;-)
A two-drive array can double your throughput, but halve your reliability since if one of the drives fails, you lose all your data
that sort of RAID is neat but it's just inviting disaster. you need to move to the higher levels of RAID which involve more drives and offer parity as well as striping!
I was flipping through Phantom Menace the other day, and I'd have to agree with you. It wasn't as bad as I remembered it being after seeing it in the theater.
It still didn't seem that great, but it was watchable, at least. I think you're right- peoples' huge expectations definitely hurt their enjoyment of Phantom Menace.
Most of the posts so far have focused on creature comforts. The NUMBER ONE THING that gets me out of the zone, though, isn't a creature comfort or lack thereof. It's FUCKING SPEC CHANGES (or a lack of specs). Holy crap, nothing else even comes close.
;-)
I'm most in the zone when a lot of time is spent defining a good spec up front, and having good management that doesn't allow the client to break it with constant changes after coding has already begun. Then I can just bear down and WORK and turn out a clean, easily-maintainable piece of software, as well. Otherwise, it's spaghetti crap code that is hell to write, maintain, and debug.
On the creature comfort side of things, a nicely-equipped computer is nice. It doesn't have to be a dual-SCSI, dual-CPU monster, but a 512MB of RAM and a nice monitor go a long way. With cheap RAM and monitors these days, this shouldn't be a problem... only another $200 or so over a barebones setup. Also, make sure the vid card and the monitor can both work together at high resolutions and refresh rates, please! Some offices "splurge" and buy cheap 19" monitors, but workers are still stuck at 1024x768 at 60hz or some shit.
Being able to wear headphones to block out office noise is a must, too. That sounds like a silly demand, but I once worked at a place where headphones were verboten!
I'd put $1,000 down right now - there are more people writing code for a living than writing novels. Which one is easier?
Whether you're right or wrong, your analogy isn't the least bit apt. Most programmers work on software that's customized for a particular client, or a small number of clients in a specific field. Do any novel-writers write customized novels for 3 or 4 clients? The surgeon analogy doesn't even begin to make sense. Unlike surgery, do people really need life-and-death software support? 99.9% of the time, no. In the fields where software IS a life-and-death matter (air traffic control, nuclear power plants) you can bet the software companies have engineers on call at all times much like doctors.
Also, it's not a matter of programmers "just doing it". The question is not, "should my programmers have to work if they don't feel like it?" The question is: "how can I place my programmers in an environment where they'll be the most productive?"
If you even think about the question asked in the story, you'll realize it's about squeezing more productivity out of programmers by creating a favorable environment for them.
Your response is pretty sick. I'm sensing some built-up hostility there. It's true, there's a lot of whiny, overpaid, pampered programmers in the world, but that's not what this person is seeking to create.
I believe it's possible to create a comfortable work environment for programmers and still demand maximum productivity and deadline adherence...
I love Shakespeare and I loved this movie, too. don't forget the Shakespeare was popular entertainment back in its day, too- it was entertainment for the masses.
Shakespearian plays were full of sleeping around, romantic mixups, stabbing, and comic mischief. As wonderfully-crafted as most of his tales were, as as witty as the dialogue was they're not exactly the most sophisticated/complex things things in the world.
So, the gap between Shakespeare and enjoyable trash like this movie isn't as far as you might thing. Personally, having seen many of Shakespeare's plays, I think most people think they're "sophisticated" just because they're in old English.
Need evidence? Look at any Shakespearian translation set in modern times, performed in modern English....
Durons run a little cooler than Athlons. Suppose you're building a box where even an 800mhz Duron has more performance than you need... such as a word processing box, web-surfing box for Mom, mp3 server for the living room, whatever.
For boxes like that, the extra horsepower of the Athlon is overkill, so it can be nice to pick a Duron because and run a quieter fan since they produce less heat. Most of the time though, yeah... i'd say spend the extra 20 bucks and get the performance of an Athlon!
From everything I've read, including posts from the Ogg guys, the Ogg decoding algorithm requires floating-point math, something small embedded processors typically don't have. This isn't the case with mp3's.
I bet the hardware manufacturers would love to implement Ogg- I doubt they like paying licensing fees to Microsoft and Franhofer (sp?) for WMA and MP3 licenses.
I believe the Ogg guy(s) are working on a decoding algorithm that doesn't require floating-point math. I'm out of touch with Ogg land though... check their site.
Cripes do you demand information from art galleries?
That's an interesting point. I think it's a matter of taking advantage of the strengths of a particular medium. If you want pretty, why web pages? It's probably one of the least well-suited mediums for whatever aesthetic goal you're trying to achieve.
Now, having said that, playing around with constraints is fun too. I'm a big fan of the music and sound on old(er) video games as well as a lot of minimalist art in general. I dunno, I like that FM synthesis music and those 16-color sprites. So, I guess it's a matter of personal taste.
For every bad example of Flash usablility, I can show you 1,000 or more HTML usablility nightmares. So is HTML bad? No. Bad designers are bad.
Whatever your opinion of HTML (and there are PLENTY of things with which to find fault, usability-wise) Flash inherits all of them, and adds a few more such as the breaking of the browser's back/forward buttons and URL field.
Even a well-designed Flash site has these problems, because they break standard browser navigation UI conventions. While you could of course create an HTML site which is less usable than many Flash sites, HTML is, on the whole, inherently more usable and consistant than Flash for the reasons I outlined above.
Pointing out any number of badly-designed HTML sites does not address the issue of Flash being better or worse than HTML. That's like saying, "for every drug overdose fatality, I can show you 1,000 or more fatalities that did not involve drug overdoses." True, perhaps, but you're not addressing the issue! If you want to argue in favor of Flash, by all means do so but please address the issue.
I just wanted to add one thing...
:)
Think about why people will be using this web site. Do they want pretty? Or do they want information? If they wanted pretty, they'd watch a movie or take acid and stare at some vintage 70's wallpaper.
You should try to make the site attractive, of course- but don't forget your #1 priority which is (or should be) usability and information. Any compromise to make the site flashy is a detriment to what your site set out to accomplish.
Flash is hell from a usability standpoint. It does away with many of the notions that the web was founded out - consistant interfaces, as well as the page-based metaphor. Flash essentially "breaks" the browser controls people have finally learned to use (the back button, URL bar, etc etc).
I'm sure Flash could be useful in cases where animation is actually necessary - animated diagrams and the such. But the cases where such a thing is actually CALLED FOR are extremely rare.
All in all, Flash epitomizes style over substance. Just don't do it. There's really no good reason to.
I mean just think of the win95->98->2000->XP product line. What really improved with each of those versions?
If you don't think anything improved from 98->2000, you're not really qualified to talk about it. 2000 brought a completely different kernel and 2000 is stable as a rock compared to 98. If you think Win2K sucked, that's fine and I'd even agree with you to some extent, but to say 98->2000 was a minor or nonexistant upgrade/change is just idiotic and not true. FUD isn't cool when either side does it!
Some reckon this is what killed Sega, their latest console was just too difficult to program relative to the others.
You've got the facts wrong. Sega, after learning their lesson the hard way with the difficult-to-program-for Saturn, made the Dreamcast one of the easiest-to-program systems of all time, by every account I've ever read. For evidence, look at the Dreamcast launch titles compared to the last titles released for the system this year - developers were maxxing the thing out right off the bat, with games like Soul Calibur.
By contrast, the PS2 is an absolute bitch to code for from what I've heard. The graphics chip is so powerful that you're essentially programming a dual-CPU system. I haven't programmed either system myself, but I've read dozens and dozens of articles, all of which have said the same thing.
Talk about having one hell of a vision and forsight in the mid-1980's!
:)
It's also quite possible the marketing department wrote a little revisionary history to make them look really good.
Dude... I have mod points. I almost modded you down just for using the phrase "paradigm shift". :)
I agree with you though, btw.
What would be more practical for the referenced site is a webserver than handle more than 5 hits per hour. maybe he's using that other guy's Game Boy!