Whatever happened to the BK that was supposedly going in to downtown Hartford, CT that was going to do this ('net time with a combo meal or some such)? I live in the area and haven't seen/heard a thing of it since the slashdot article from a few years ago.
About that time frame, my then-local BK (North Florida area) did this. Still had the "plastic crap" and all that, but they brought the food to your table when it was done. Interesting experiment, but it didn't catch on. They went back to being a normal BK after maybe a couple months. People who blinked during that time frame missed out (aside from the TV commercials that were touting the new service while it was in effect).
That's why games don't come with those ridiculous code wheels and text-lookups-in-the-instruction-manual protection schemes any more.
The brings back some fairly interesting memories of hand-copying and hand-creating a fairly elaborate code-wheel to play a copy of a friend's game. Took me all d*mn day, but being ~15 or so at the time with no cash, it did let me play it without dropping $50 or so. (Think it was 'starflight' or some such.) Ironically, if they priced it lower than it was (say, $30), I would've bought a legit copy and not needed to go through that. Then the company'd have gotten a total of $60 as opposed to a total of $50 between my friend and I.
Heck, the science-type community (in my immediate experience, engineers) has not fully adapted to "modular" programming, let alone, OO. The couple of us where I work were thoroughly horrified and amused to see the following take place: (1) internal company code 'X' is F77 based, and purely procedural (and that even with a frightening number of GOTO's), (2) company gets new F90 compiler, (3) code 'X' is modified *just enough* to pass the compiler with no errors (warnings, on the other hand...), (4) voila! code 'X' is now "modular", since we all know F90 is modular (the complete lack of "MODULE" statements notwithstanding). Granted, these guys are practicalists and aren't comp-sci grads, but the degree of cleanup that could be achieved ('X' is nearly untraceable, given the level of spaghetti) is staggering.
As to the parent poster: aside from/.'ing too much for a workday already, I'd love to see what your new approaches are w.r.t. a new OS UI. Here at work, I made a GUI for a completely cumbersome system process where no UI of any kind (even really CLI) existed, and I did it at everyone else's request. When it was all said and done (about 30,000 lines, accounting for comments and junk), all I had was, as you mentioned, a roomful of people too stubborn (as engineers, mind you, not as computer technophiles!) to see past the working proof-of-concept UI to understand that, if used, it would save untold hours in upfront work, downstream re-work, and general PITA-ness. So they lost interest, I got put on a new task, and -- what might've been the best work improvement that group has ever seen -- never got polished, or used. Case in point of stubborn refusal to change methodologies to get demonstrably greater productivity. (And an interesting lesson for yours truly.)
and that with [a lot] of open/free source apps the core team can move at such a pace the poor ui designers have no choice but to botch things
I agree that can be a contributor. It is perhaps a function of the development model's potential attraction of a mix-n-match design team that code is written before a good overall design is worked out on paper. (This isn't to say I haven't changed my mind and direction a few dozen times on some pet projects of my own, of course.) As for the hue and cry of "cloning" the current beta(s) for next years projects, I think it probably serves our development communities more good than ill. On a personal note, I'm attempting to write a clone of a fairly useful and popular MS application. (Mainly for personal use, but, hey, if anyone else finds it useful, good for all of us; not enough done to make anything available yet or mention just what it is.) Given I want it to work similarly to the MS version, given I find that their interface actually works and is logical for this application, and given they've more than likely invested some resources into usability studies, it behooves me to mimic the overall layout/appearance.
... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
I can't debate how accurate that point is, but I have noticed, having recently read through the gnome interface guidelines, that most of the "not like this" examples are the myriads of various gnome apps. It'd probably go a long way if the developers that *do* write UI code (regardless of how "good" they are at "designing" said UI) actually follow UI guidelines.
Also, I wonder how well respected someone who mainly does "UI" design/layout things would be respected by the core development team of some project that actually has to code up the critical working guts.
In practice, a phase locked loop creates a frequency comparable with the broadcast carrier frequency, and this frequency is "mixed" with the incoming signal (using a non-linear circuit, which is often a diode or simple transistor circuit). The resulting signal has 4 components, spectrally, at the two original frequencies, their sum and their difference. The difference one is kept (because it effectively eliminates the original high frequency carrier) and the other three are elminited with a simple low-pass filter. The PLL accurately creates exactly the right frequency (well, as accurate as the quartz crystal it has), and the "groping though" the spectrum is an extreemly simple circuit and a low pass filter. There is also the small matter of automatic gain control, but it's also an easy circuit.
Want to know frustration? How about the *alternate* Sun keyboard layout. You know... CTRL and Caps Lock are reversed (in lower left corner), ESC is where the ` (backtick) key is, the ` key is between = and a one-key-wide backspace, and one or two other completely UNIX-hostile layout changes. Our workplace (all Sun systems for real work) seems to have these alternate layouts sporadically deployed at about 20%, so you're at someone else's desk helping them out or whatever, 1 in 5 chance that you can't do anything beyond straight alpha-typing. Need emacs? God help you figure out why your case keeps changing, but none of the bound functions are working.;-)
I don't want to be too much of a nay-sayer here; I just have one personal experience to speak from, and it may well be the exception to the rule. However, a few years ago, I gave a copy of a commercial tax program a try. (I don't remember which one, but it was one of the leading versions in any software store, or I (rather my mom) wouldn't have bothered.) Anyway, as opposed to doing it by hand, the computer version would have actually cost me about $200.00. I went through it a couple times to make sure I didn't miss a key question in some wizard, but never really figured it out. I filed the paper-and-pencil version that year, and every year since. (Granted, it isn't like my returns are *that hard* yet, so I'm willing to change as does my filing situation.) At any rate, don't just blindly trust the programs. Once you get it's best scenario, it may be worthwhile to pencil-and-paper the thing out with the instructions and worksheets just to double-check things yourself.
At a personal frustration level, I'd love to see kde and gnome merge into one super-desktop. I'd also love to see one package manager reign supreme (ostensibly the "linux standard base" has put forth that this should be 'rpm', sorry to tell you) just to set a standard that'd reasonably assure me that some application/utility/whatever, being general available, would install in my system with little or no fuss.
OTOH, the fact that there is "choice" available precludes this from happening. Developer group 'A' decides that developer group 'B' isn't doing the job right, or fast enough, or isn't taking certain requirements into account. So you get two similar-but-different apps. (I'm about to possibly do this to a well-known gnome app, given they aren't scratching my itch.) Then, given they are both [freely?] available, you'll naturally get fans of one or the other (assuming they are both equally "good", as IMO gnome and kde are) who will fight tooth and nail to support their pet application (and to some extent, not need to go through re-learning of minutiae).
So what then? I think the distro concept is a good jumping-off point for the generic geek (that likes to poke, prod, break, and recompile everything) or admin (who wants to standardize on a fixed set of things). The problem then is the newbie hobbyist geek gets into trouble when they go "off-distribution"... just because they can (and, given that, because they want to learn). What may make more sense (for your problem, though not everyone's) is for a distro-like organization to make hard decisions about using app. A vs. app B. and provide only that. (But then this flies against the face of 'choice' that everyone likes to see, so I'd be doubtful to truly see this fly.)
Wording in the second paragraph on the second page (i.e., defining "Departing Load" that they're wanting to tax) makes me wonder if there's an [exceedingly] minor hole: the definition says you either stay at the same location or move to somewhere supplied by the utility. (singular sense). Not being a resident, is it possible to move inside CA where you would have to change utilities to one of the other two (of three listed) utility providers? Then, could you use self-generation without impact?
Relatedly, what if I was to (shudder!) move to CA? I've never been served by the utility(s) before, so there's no "departing load". ?
Funny thing about starcraft. For me, it ran about the same speed either way, but on Windows, the screen size resolution (whatever) was goofed on it (with updated video/monitor drivers), so I couldn't see the whole screen (notably the action button pallette), so I couldn't play it. Via wine (which, though granted it took a smidge of extra time, hardly took 8 hours) I could actually play the darned thing. Score one for the penguin.
I've watched my mother work with programs and helped her solve problems several times. I've come to the conclusion that... She doesn't want to learn how things work. She just wants to get things done.
Would that I had mod points! This doesn't describe just my mom, but over twenty people in my and my wife's extended families that have computers. I even a couple years ago e-mailed everyone that, if they ever had questions about how/why things worked, I'd do what I could to answer them. Number of questions received to date? ZERO They don't care either. The PC is a stupid tool foisted upon them by society to get something done, and, even though they bang their heads against all manner of problems, they could[n't] really care less just how the thing (hardware or software) works.
Let's not account for the fact that "online" means lower overhead than having an equivalent extra physical presence (building cost, lease, local warehousing, supply delivery, staff, utilities) to provide the equivalent amount of goods, shall we? It bugs the h*ll out of me that "online" stuff costs me a convenience fee when I *know* that it is making life easier on the other person and cutting out middle-men that are potential error producers. (Online banking : fee... file taxes online (depending): fee... state/local government stuff (DMV, etc) done online : fee.) So why should I be paying more this way, again?
If forced, this is an argument I would probably try myself. Fortunately, I think the wording of my ISP's TOS words it using "one computer connected to service". Now, if the wording for someone else's TOS is along the lines of "one computer *using the connection* to the ISP at a time", then this argument would work less well. Going a bit more extreme, my router box only has one processor, so, though it might be time-slicing like a mad hornet, it is technically only processing for one thing at a time.;-) (OTOH, if faced with account termination from a jerk-off ISP, this is all probably moot, at which point I'd probably "fess up" and "promise it wouldn't happen again" since "that other box is being sold at the end of the week anyway". *shrug*)
I know what would be handy for me w.r.t. gnucash is a "MS Money User's Transition Guide" or some such. I've tried 1.4, 1.6, and the beta for 1.8, but I just cannot make a dent in doing much with gnucash. I invariably get frustrated and delete the whole thing. (Maybe I'm spoiled somewhat; I popped in MS Money on the windows box and was running multiple accounts, multiple banks, loans, credit cards -- the whole shebang -- in half an hour.) Can someone post anything notable that'd help user's of other finance programs to switch over?
Then why just stop at drive letters? Rather than some "A:" which is assumed to be mapped to the floppy disk, why don't all the references in the slick GUI just say "Floppy Disk", "Documents", "Public Network Storage" (or some such)... after all, if you're worried about people being afraid of "/mnt/floppy" references, then these people likely won't be anywhere near a command line for "A:" to matter either. Let the GUI developers (e.g., desktop environment / app writers) deal with this, but in a consistent way. (It is this last part that is the trick: everyone actually adhering to an interface guideline set.)
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to the BK that was supposedly going in to downtown Hartford, CT that was going to do this ('net time with a combo meal or some such)? I live in the area and haven't seen/heard a thing of it since the slashdot article from a few years ago.
About that time frame, my then-local BK (North Florida area) did this. Still had the "plastic crap" and all that, but they brought the food to your table when it was done. Interesting experiment, but it didn't catch on. They went back to being a normal BK after maybe a couple months. People who blinked during that time frame missed out (aside from the TV commercials that were touting the new service while it was in effect).
Maybe *they* are the freeloader?
The brings back some fairly interesting memories of hand-copying and hand-creating a fairly elaborate code-wheel to play a copy of a friend's game. Took me all d*mn day, but being ~15 or so at the time with no cash, it did let me play it without dropping $50 or so. (Think it was 'starflight' or some such.) Ironically, if they priced it lower than it was (say, $30), I would've bought a legit copy and not needed to go through that. Then the company'd have gotten a total of $60 as opposed to a total of $50 between my friend and I.
INFINITY !!
Heck, the science-type community (in my immediate experience, engineers) has not fully adapted to "modular" programming, let alone, OO. The couple of us where I work were thoroughly horrified and amused to see the following take place: (1) internal company code 'X' is F77 based, and purely procedural (and that even with a frightening number of GOTO's), (2) company gets new F90 compiler, (3) code 'X' is modified *just enough* to pass the compiler with no errors (warnings, on the other hand...), (4) voila! code 'X' is now "modular", since we all know F90 is modular (the complete lack of "MODULE" statements notwithstanding). Granted, these guys are practicalists and aren't comp-sci grads, but the degree of cleanup that could be achieved ('X' is nearly untraceable, given the level of spaghetti) is staggering.
We could take a page from the Lik Sang story:
"OpenOffice.org : So close to MS Office, neither you, nor the BSA, can tell the difference!"
Moderators please mod parent up!
/.'ing too much for a workday already, I'd love to see what your new approaches are w.r.t. a new OS UI. Here at work, I made a GUI for a completely cumbersome system process where no UI of any kind (even really CLI) existed, and I did it at everyone else's request. When it was all said and done (about 30,000 lines, accounting for comments and junk), all I had was, as you mentioned, a roomful of people too stubborn (as engineers, mind you, not as computer technophiles!) to see past the working proof-of-concept UI to understand that, if used, it would save untold hours in upfront work, downstream re-work, and general PITA-ness. So they lost interest, I got put on a new task, and -- what might've been the best work improvement that group has ever seen -- never got polished, or used. Case in point of stubborn refusal to change methodologies to get demonstrably greater productivity. (And an interesting lesson for yours truly.)
As to the parent poster: aside from
That's a cheap price to sell your soul!
Nonsense! They're merely selling their sense of ethics. A soul, on the other hand, currently goes for $299.00.
[*rimshot*]
and that with [a lot] of open/free source apps the core team can move at such a pace the poor ui designers have no choice but to botch things
I agree that can be a contributor. It is perhaps a function of the development model's potential attraction of a mix-n-match design team that code is written before a good overall design is worked out on paper. (This isn't to say I haven't changed my mind and direction a few dozen times on some pet projects of my own, of course.)
As for the hue and cry of "cloning" the current beta(s) for next years projects, I think it probably serves our development communities more good than ill. On a personal note, I'm attempting to write a clone of a fairly useful and popular MS application. (Mainly for personal use, but, hey, if anyone else finds it useful, good for all of us; not enough done to make anything available yet or mention just what it is.) Given I want it to work similarly to the MS version, given I find that their interface actually works and is logical for this application, and given they've more than likely invested some resources into usability studies, it behooves me to mimic the overall layout/appearance.
... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
I can't debate how accurate that point is, but I have noticed, having recently read through the gnome interface guidelines, that most of the "not like this" examples are the myriads of various gnome apps. It'd probably go a long way if the developers that *do* write UI code (regardless of how "good" they are at "designing" said UI) actually follow UI guidelines.
Also, I wonder how well respected someone who mainly does "UI" design/layout things would be respected by the core development team of some project that actually has to code up the critical working guts.
Sorry... can't resist:
;-)
In practice, a phase locked loop creates a frequency comparable with the broadcast carrier frequency, and this frequency is "mixed" with the incoming signal (using a non-linear circuit, which is often a diode or simple transistor circuit). The resulting signal has 4 components, spectrally, at the two original frequencies, their sum and their difference. The difference one is kept (because it effectively eliminates the original high frequency carrier) and the other three are elminited with a simple low-pass filter. The PLL accurately creates exactly the right frequency (well, as accurate as the quartz crystal it has), and the "groping though" the spectrum is an extreemly simple circuit and a low pass filter. There is also the small matter of automatic gain control, but it's also an easy circuit.
*woop, woop, woop* Nerd alert! Nert alert! *woop, woop, woop*
(Yeah, I know, I am too.
Want to know frustration? How about the *alternate* Sun keyboard layout. You know... CTRL and Caps Lock are reversed (in lower left corner), ESC is where the ` (backtick) key is, the ` key is between = and a one-key-wide backspace, and one or two other completely UNIX-hostile layout changes. Our workplace (all Sun systems for real work) seems to have these alternate layouts sporadically deployed at about 20%, so you're at someone else's desk helping them out or whatever, 1 in 5 chance that you can't do anything beyond straight alpha-typing. Need emacs? God help you figure out why your case keeps changing, but none of the bound functions are working. ;-)
I don't want to be too much of a nay-sayer here; I just have one personal experience to speak from, and it may well be the exception to the rule. However, a few years ago, I gave a copy of a commercial tax program a try. (I don't remember which one, but it was one of the leading versions in any software store, or I (rather my mom) wouldn't have bothered.) Anyway, as opposed to doing it by hand, the computer version would have actually cost me about $200.00. I went through it a couple times to make sure I didn't miss a key question in some wizard, but never really figured it out. I filed the paper-and-pencil version that year, and every year since. (Granted, it isn't like my returns are *that hard* yet, so I'm willing to change as does my filing situation.) At any rate, don't just blindly trust the programs. Once you get it's best scenario, it may be worthwhile to pencil-and-paper the thing out with the instructions and worksheets just to double-check things yourself.
At a personal frustration level, I'd love to see kde and gnome merge into one super-desktop. I'd also love to see one package manager reign supreme (ostensibly the "linux standard base" has put forth that this should be 'rpm', sorry to tell you) just to set a standard that'd reasonably assure me that some application/utility/whatever, being general available, would install in my system with little or no fuss.
... just because they can (and, given that, because they want to learn). What may make more sense (for your problem, though not everyone's) is for a distro-like organization to make hard decisions about using app. A vs. app B. and provide only that. (But then this flies against the face of 'choice' that everyone likes to see, so I'd be doubtful to truly see this fly.)
OTOH, the fact that there is "choice" available precludes this from happening. Developer group 'A' decides that developer group 'B' isn't doing the job right, or fast enough, or isn't taking certain requirements into account. So you get two similar-but-different apps. (I'm about to possibly do this to a well-known gnome app, given they aren't scratching my itch.) Then, given they are both [freely?] available, you'll naturally get fans of one or the other (assuming they are both equally "good", as IMO gnome and kde are) who will fight tooth and nail to support their pet application (and to some extent, not need to go through re-learning of minutiae).
So what then? I think the distro concept is a good jumping-off point for the generic geek (that likes to poke, prod, break, and recompile everything) or admin (who wants to standardize on a fixed set of things). The problem then is the newbie hobbyist geek gets into trouble when they go "off-distribution"
Wording in the second paragraph on the second page (i.e., defining "Departing Load" that they're wanting to tax) makes me wonder if there's an [exceedingly] minor hole: the definition says you either stay at the same location or move to somewhere supplied by the utility. (singular sense). Not being a resident, is it possible to move inside CA where you would have to change utilities to one of the other two (of three listed) utility providers? Then, could you use self-generation without impact?
Relatedly, what if I was to (shudder!) move to CA? I've never been served by the utility(s) before, so there's no "departing load". ?
Funny thing about starcraft. For me, it ran about the same speed either way, but on Windows, the screen size resolution (whatever) was goofed on it (with updated video/monitor drivers), so I couldn't see the whole screen (notably the action button pallette), so I couldn't play it. Via wine (which, though granted it took a smidge of extra time, hardly took 8 hours) I could actually play the darned thing. Score one for the penguin.
I've watched my mother work with programs and helped her solve problems several times. I've come to the conclusion that ... She doesn't want to learn how things work. She just wants to get things done.
Would that I had mod points! This doesn't describe just my mom, but over twenty people in my and my wife's extended families that have computers. I even a couple years ago e-mailed everyone that, if they ever had questions about how/why things worked, I'd do what I could to answer them. Number of questions received to date? ZERO They don't care either. The PC is a stupid tool foisted upon them by society to get something done, and, even though they bang their heads against all manner of problems, they could[n't] really care less just how the thing (hardware or software) works.
love to enter and konquer...
;-)
When KDE users mispell...
(yeah, its completely OT
Let's not account for the fact that "online" means lower overhead than having an equivalent extra physical presence (building cost, lease, local warehousing, supply delivery, staff, utilities) to provide the equivalent amount of goods, shall we? It bugs the h*ll out of me that "online" stuff costs me a convenience fee when I *know* that it is making life easier on the other person and cutting out middle-men that are potential error producers. (Online banking : fee ... file taxes online (depending): fee ... state/local government stuff (DMV, etc) done online : fee.) So why should I be paying more this way, again?
If forced, this is an argument I would probably try myself. Fortunately, I think the wording of my ISP's TOS words it using "one computer connected to service". Now, if the wording for someone else's TOS is along the lines of "one computer *using the connection* to the ISP at a time", then this argument would work less well. Going a bit more extreme, my router box only has one processor, so, though it might be time-slicing like a mad hornet, it is technically only processing for one thing at a time. ;-) (OTOH, if faced with account termination from a jerk-off ISP, this is all probably moot, at which point I'd probably "fess up" and "promise it wouldn't happen again" since "that other box is being sold at the end of the week anyway". *shrug*)
I know what would be handy for me w.r.t. gnucash is a "MS Money User's Transition Guide" or some such. I've tried 1.4, 1.6, and the beta for 1.8, but I just cannot make a dent in doing much with gnucash. I invariably get frustrated and delete the whole thing. (Maybe I'm spoiled somewhat; I popped in MS Money on the windows box and was running multiple accounts, multiple banks, loans, credit cards -- the whole shebang -- in half an hour.) Can someone post anything notable that'd help user's of other finance programs to switch over?
<matrix insight>Maybe *we* are the sim of the sim to see if, err...</matrix insight>
My head hurts. Thanks a lot!
Then why just stop at drive letters? Rather than some "A:" which is assumed to be mapped to the floppy disk, why don't all the references in the slick GUI just say "Floppy Disk", "Documents", "Public Network Storage" (or some such)... after all, if you're worried about people being afraid of "/mnt/floppy" references, then these people likely won't be anywhere near a command line for "A:" to matter either. Let the GUI developers (e.g., desktop environment / app writers) deal with this, but in a consistent way. (It is this last part that is the trick: everyone actually adhering to an interface guideline set.)