Of course this is all ridiculous, and the correct answer is of course "Oh, Joe is using ms office, so he can't read OpenDoc - just send him a copy in word format"
Did you read the rest of my post?
"Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
I've spent the last ten years working heavily with Macs and PCs--starting with Mac OS 7.5.5 and Win95. (My computer experience goes back to ATs, XTs, and Apple ][s, but I didn't start spending every day, all day with them until 1995.)
At first, I liked Windows a lot better. It was faster. You could turn off animations and sounds, and things like resizing or minimizing windows happened in the blink of an eye. Not to recycle the old troll but if you were copying a file it didn't matter if it was a foreground app or not--it didn't slow down like Mac OS did, which gave a high priority to the foreground process and cut everything else by about 75%. Alt-tab to switch apps. (Thanks for joining us, badly, OS 8!) Right-clicking in Photoshop 3 and Netscape 3 (and everywhere else) rocked. Keyboard shortcuts for managing windows--Mac OS always had copy, paste, print, etc., but Windows let you do things like alt-space+R/N/X to restore/minimize/maximize windows. Not to mention Windows-M (and later Windows-D) to hide everything and see the desktop. (Thanks for joining us seven years later, Exposé! And option-clicking on the Desktop or Finder doesn't count, because Finder windows stay open.) I liked being able to resize a window from any side. And a million other things.
OS X showed promise. I had been using Linux some and wanted TAR, SCP, CRON, and lots of other command-line goodies, which, while available for Windows, were never native. But 10.0 sucked rocks and had no apps. (But I put it to use as an Intranet server right away running a Perl-based calendar app, among other things.) 10.1 was better (at least, not slow as shit) but still didn't have many apps I needed. (Photoshop, Quark, and others.) 10.2 was the first real usable OS X and by then there were tons of good commercial, shareware, and free apps out. However, I was very comfortable in W2K (super-stable, and the software for my ATI capture card finally worked) so it was a draw.
But 10.3 is very nice. And XP sucks. ("Your wireless network is here! Want to join it? Oops, it's gone! Now it's back! Want to join it? Oh, and your LAN cable is unplugged." --No shit, dumbass, I'm using WIRELESS!!!!! Or trying to, at least.) So I've turned completely around. In the last 3 years OS X has gotten great and Windows has gotten horrible. Plus Mac hardware is much, much more affordable than it used to be, and better designed than ever before, and has lots of great little features--they don't need crossover cables, they have target disk mode, etc etc etc.
So: four years ago I would have said "I like Windows a lot because it's fast and tight" but now my answer is "I like OS X 'cause it has lots of cool stuff and XP is like an albatross around my neck." And yes, I really did *like* Windows--back when it didn't get in your way and treat you like a first-grader.
An excerpt from my journal that I wrote in January, because I was tired of re-creating that post every time this came up...
Remeber in the old days the saying was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Now it's the same with MS. We all know business reality is ugly and non-idea but the sooner you accept that business reality is reality, as far as businesses are concerned, the better off you'll be. Imagine these two conversations:
Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because he has a different version of Word than you have."
Boss: "Oh. Stupid Microsoft. Can you fix it?"
or
Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as.DOC or.RTF or export to.PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.
Yes, Mac OS X can make PDFs from any application that can print. Yes, you can make PDFs for free in Windows with a Samba server and ps2pdf. Yes, OOo has built-in one-click PDF support. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that all OOo docs are just gzipped XML and your data can never, ever be lost or unreadable. Doesn't matter that IBM likes it. Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world. Office won't be unseated anytime soon.
And I know we're talking about SO here today and not OOo, but the argument still stands. SO has even less of a chance to kill MSO than OOo does--at least OOo is free. SO still exists because Sun is driven by an irrational hatred of MS. Want to kill MS, Sun? Make the Sun Ray really, really, really compelling. Start by using Crossover or something to get MS Office running great on it. Get a theme that looks like XP and make sure Solitaire and Minesweeper run. Make the server as cheap as you can stand to. (At first, heh.) Then push, push, push this product to IT and management. Put together a package of a server and 5 or 10 clients and loan them to anyone who asks for 60 days. The centralized management and smart-card based identity are really cool features. Make it good, market it like mad.
Or, forget killing MS and just concentrate on server stuff.
"Did you know there was AJAX word processor, AJAX spreadsheet, AJAX calendar, AJAX presentation-building software, AJAX e-mail client, AJAX note-taking software and some other interesting applications, which, deployed on your local server, do not need installation and "just work" in a browser window?"
Let's see: word processor--didn't feel like signing up for an account. Spreadsheet--works in Firefox 1.0/Mac, but not Safari 1.3. Overall, has a long way to go--can't use arrow keys to move the active box in the grid, for example. And I doubt it's possible to recreate a zillion other useful features from a binary spreadsheet app, like dragging a cell's corner to fill lower rows. Calendar--wouldn't load at all in FF or Safari. Presentation--it's not AJAX. Email client--ha! instead of linking to Gmail, one of two programs that POPULARIZED AJAX (the other being google maps), the link leads to a nonexistant product from Yahoo. The note thing works but is pretty simple--feels like a bright student's DHTML project.
Fucking-A right. Here's a conversation I had just last week
Me: My #1 gripe about gmail: I can't click the top of a column and sort by date, size, sender, etc. Saving conversations in clumps and everything else it does is worthless to me without basic functionality like that. Do I need to RTFM, or is this feature really missing?
AC reply: The main idea behind gmail is the ability to sort the mail using what google is built for.. by searching.
Fuck that! Fuck all this "search everything!" business. For the web, which is organized like SHIT, yes, search is great. For things you haven't seen in so long you forget where it is, search is great. But for email, where certain metadata--date, sender--is hardcoded in, let me just use the existing data! If I know my mom sent me something between christmas and new year's, don't make me do a big `select * from mail where sender='mom' and date>20041225 and date<20041231`--let me just sort by date and look for 'mom', OR sort by sender and look at dates. Names, dates--these things come naturally to civilized humans. It's not like memorizing IP addresses or anything. Fuck!
Has anyone here given up on arranging their files into folders and just thrown everything into ~/ and just using Spotlight all the time? NO! Why? Because SEARCH ISN'T THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING!!!!!111one
Surprised no one else caught your factual error. In Safari: Edit -> Spelling -> Check Spelling as You Type. I've been using this for ages. And yes, using a systemwide dictionary rocks.
...is technology the only field where, when something has been growing in popularity for thirty years and then is almost an essential part of most people's daily lives, people start coming out of the woodwork proclaiming "the end is nigh!!!"? I've got an idea: show me five straight years of PCs declining in sales, use, and popularity before telling me it's soon to be a relic.
My #1 gripe about gmail: I can't click the top of a column and sort by date, size, sender, etc. Saving conversations in clumps and everything else it does is worthless to me without basic functionality like that. Do I need to RTFM, or is this feature really missing?
Plenty of other things I don't like as well, but let's start with the basics.
Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. They are your property to use as you wish. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack.
I've read about that for years (googling, I see a reference to it for the public beta) but never gotten it to work. you just set your mac up so you type username/password instead of showing a list of users, then to log in you enter '>console' for the user with no password and click 'log in'?
But don't visit that page in Safari. (Safari 1.3/OS X 10.3, at least.) Safari tries to render it as HTML, so two things happen: 1) you lose all the (plain-text) formatting 2) you lose content between tag samples, and the page stops at "the contents of " because of the starting 'script' tag.
Google's #1 use is still search. You can hear people on prime-time TV shows talking about "googling" things but I haven't heard a reference to google maps, gmail, or anything else yet. Google search kicks ass because a) it works and b) it isn't annoying. Until someone comes up with search results that are better and/or a better interface, google has no chance of being killed. And not just 10% better results--we know from experience that a slightly better product isn't enough to get people to change en masse. It needs to be orders of magnitude better.
And that will be tough. Going from 75% useful (yahoo! and altavista search results) to 99% useful (google) was big enough to get people to change. But what--are you going to change to a search engine that gives 99.5% useful results? 99.9%? Could you even *notice* that small a change? And the UI--google has been designed with this quote in mind: You know you've achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery. quoted in James Gosling, Henry McGilton. "The Java Language Environment"
Overally, they''ll be tough to top.
Oh yeah, so anyway, my point: can we quit with the lame-ass "OMG teh google killer?!??!11" scary headlines? And maybe the iPod-killer ones as well?
Directnic is awesome. I get messages at (I think) 60, 30, 15, 7 days and probably more when an expiration is coming up. (I've never let it get further.) From their FAQ:
Q: When I buy a domain, who owns it?
A: If you purchase a domain in your own directNIC account, you are the owner (registrant) of the domain during the registration. directNIC is your registrar. You have the total control of your domain name and you can make modifications, transfers, or sell the domain name at any time during your registration. The Organization contact you choose for the domain will be displayed in WHOIS as the registrant of the domain.
Please be aware that the administrative contact of the domain has the administrative control of the domain. In addition, the owner of the account where the domain is located also has power to manage the domain. This happens when you ask someone else to register the domain for you. You are listed as the owner of the domain but the reseller places the domain in his/her account instead of your own account.
After the domain expires, you will be given 40 days grace period to renew the domain. If you do not renew the domain within the 40 days, you will lose the ownership of the domain.
When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the 'uncontrollable' outburst accordingly.
So, they're saying that the madder we are, the more we swear, possibly taking consequences (getting fired, a good ass-kicking) into account, rather than just letting fly with a random string of curses of indeterminate length? wow. once again I am blown away by professional researchers.
coming up next week: which work better, springy clothespins or the other kind?
I know you're joking, but as it happens, you're actually wrong.
2/2/2004: KB832894: Security Update for IE6/Windows XP: "This affects all computers with Internet Explorer installed (even if you don't run Internet Explorer as your Web browser)."
...another stupid program that thinks "command-minus" is OK as-is but insists you need to press "shift" for "command-plus" to work. (since "plus" is actually "shift + equals") Of course, "command shift minus" works the same as "command minus" and "command equals" does nothing. I can see I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this app.
And why does "zoom +100%" = double but "zoom -100%" = about one-fifth? Either zoom to zero (since that's what "minus 100%" really means") or zoom to 50% which is what any rational person would expect.
And I swear I'm gonna kill the next browser developer who thinks "don't show the status bar" (you know, the handy little thing that shows you WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE ABOUT TO CLICK ON) is an OK default setting. (Safari makes the same mistake.) HOW THE HELL are we ever going to teach users "be careful what you click on!" if we don't give them a way (ON BY DEFAULT, natch!) to see WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE CLICKING ON?!?!? (Yes, I'm yelling.)
Speaking of which, why is the status bar under "view -> toolbars"? It has no tools on it!
And why do I need to see the effing ENCODING, and MIME type, when I mouseover a tab? And no "home" button, unless the location bar is active? Oh yeah, that's good--if I'm on a page, it takes two clicks to go home, instead of just one. Good move--I'm really short on space here on my 1280x1024 display. That 16x16-pixel icon would've crowded out EVERYTHING. Looks like it's time for a nice ranty blog entry. So far, this browser sucks balls.
When I was 12, I was about as good of a programmer as I was a piano player or a painter. But since I spent a lot of time coding, guess what, I'm a pretty damn good coder and a shitty piano player. That doesn't mean I couldn't have been a good piano player, just that it takes years to get good.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is such thing as talent and natural ability. I took piano lessons for years but never "got it" and could never do more than memorize sequences of notes. I have friends who never took a lesson in their life but they "get" how music works and can hear a new song, walk over to a piano (or any other instrument), and play the song they just heard note-perfect.
Same with artists. I took some drawing classes in college and developed a small talent into a slightly-less-small talent. Then I went to work at a publisher and a designer friend showed me illustrations he did when he was 12 that was better than what I could do at 22. There are countless other examples.
OTOH, this same guy never "got" how to copy files from one floppy to another--the idea of "insert one floppy, copy its files to the desktop, insert the other floppy, copy the files from desktop to floppy, delete the temp files" never stuck.
OK, so maybe it's not which half of the brain you use, but there definitely is such thing as natural ability. The only problem here is that people think coding != creativity. Coding (or, more properly, programming) == problem solving, which takes a huge amount of creativity. Just because what programmers produce isn't aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean there's no creativity involved.
At the same time, all creativity is not equal. I'd be willing to bet that you could spend 5 years taking piano lessons or painting lessons and still be a pretty shitty player or painter. (no offense.) And that's the point the parent is making. Just because you're good at one thing does not make you good at another. You mentioned hackaday.com? Check out http://thedailywtf.com/.
Lots of people can have skills in more than one area. I like to think I'm a pretty decent coder and designer (though I accept I'm not as good as a specialist at either) and the best DBA I ever knew was also a great sax player. And don't come around with the tired argument that music == math, because it doesn't. Just because an octave higher = a string of half-length doesn't mean that music is inherently easy to understand for those who are good at math. I'm pretty good at math and pretty sucky at music, as were most of the other guys in my degree program.
From C:\Windows\System32\eula.txt on my Windows XP box: "Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Product and support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, either express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose, of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness of responses..."
IANAL, this might not stand up in court, might be different in other countries, etc etc etc. All I was saying was that this type of thing is not unique to Apache products. (Though others are saying it *is* unique to this particular Windows port of Apache. Anyone know if that's the case with 1.3.x, 2.x, or both?)
Since all the posts were focusing on the "windows and unix hardware" bit I figured I'd RTFA (yeah, I'm new here, why do you ask?) and get the whole story. seems to be a lot of stupidity all around. A few bits:
"In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.'..."
And the DC admins installed it anyway because...?
"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."
I think you'll find similar words from Microsoft regarding all of their products, and most software from most vendors in general. There are no guarantees in life, period. Software companies just spell it out. This is as amazing a revelation as the "Caution: risk of electric shock, injury, and death" label on my toaster.
"We've been down for three days," said one secondary school principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concern that his comments could get him into trouble. "I've sent my attendance counselor down to the central office to see if she could input today's attendance. She said they couldn't do anything."... "D.C. STARS is not a broken system," Brady said...
Typical political bullshit. Refreshing to see it alive and well in yet another school district.
...Still, he added, "We're going to come up with a game plan to improve the system for school administrators in D.C."
Reminds me of "My client did not kill his wife, but if he did, he had a very good reason." Uh-huh. "It's not broken. On a related note, by sheer coincidence, we're going to improve it. But not because it's broken. No-sir-ee."
"Instead of the technology helping, it could be a hindrance," Roy said.
If you've got shitty admins (or, benefit of the doubt since it's school/gov't work, admins who are being asked to do way too much with way too little) then yeah, that's how it goes. A car can be helpful or kill you. Depends on how much you know.
Are you really saying a laptop is not a small, expensive, likely-to-break thing that might get carried around?
Or are you from the UK, where a fry is a chip, a chip is a crisp, a cookie is a biscuit, and, apparently, a laptop is a desktop?:-)
I look at fragility and percent of price, and then factor in depreciation. Laptops and LCD screens are fragile, so they get warranties. For other things, it's like gambling: say a $100 item has an optional $50 3-year warrant. You're basically saying "There's a 50-50 chance this will break within 3 years." True or false? Your answer to that question determines your purchase.
As for depreciation: I bought one of the first DVD players that was $300 and paid, I think, ~$100 for a warranty. I figured it was still a new-ish technology, it was a newly released model, so I said yeah, what the hell. 3 years later DVD players were below $100 every day of the week and a year later they're $35-40 at Target. If you're buying something where technology will drive the prices down that fast (not really "depreciation" but I can't think of a better word right now), take that into consideration: does the warranty cost more than the replacement will in the same timespan?
... about a windowing system that you need 256MB+ to experience it? My prediction: absofuckinglutely nothing. OS X does some nifty stuff with Quartz Extreme (16MB and the right chipset required) but you know what? I could happily live without every bit of it.* And knowing Microsoft like I do, I would bet my next check that they aren't going to do anything interesting, even with 16x more VRAM. Whatever they do, I'll bet the first thing I do when I boot up a new system is the same thing I've done since Win98--turn all the crap off.
Then again, maybe MS has some inside info on 300dpi flat panels--it's not much of stretch to say they'll be commonplace when Vista ships.:-)
* To be honest, I'd be happier without it all--that is, without the effects that require QE in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this is all ridiculous, and the correct answer is of course "Oh, Joe is using ms office, so he can't read OpenDoc - just send him a copy in word format"
Did you read the rest of my post?
"Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default , it has no chance to take over the world.
I've spent the last ten years working heavily with Macs and PCs--starting with Mac OS 7.5.5 and Win95. (My computer experience goes back to ATs, XTs, and Apple ][s, but I didn't start spending every day, all day with them until 1995.)
At first, I liked Windows a lot better. It was faster. You could turn off animations and sounds, and things like resizing or minimizing windows happened in the blink of an eye. Not to recycle the old troll but if you were copying a file it didn't matter if it was a foreground app or not--it didn't slow down like Mac OS did, which gave a high priority to the foreground process and cut everything else by about 75%. Alt-tab to switch apps. (Thanks for joining us, badly, OS 8!) Right-clicking in Photoshop 3 and Netscape 3 (and everywhere else) rocked. Keyboard shortcuts for managing windows--Mac OS always had copy, paste, print, etc., but Windows let you do things like alt-space+R/N/X to restore/minimize/maximize windows. Not to mention Windows-M (and later Windows-D) to hide everything and see the desktop. (Thanks for joining us seven years later, Exposé! And option-clicking on the Desktop or Finder doesn't count, because Finder windows stay open.) I liked being able to resize a window from any side. And a million other things.
OS X showed promise. I had been using Linux some and wanted TAR, SCP, CRON, and lots of other command-line goodies, which, while available for Windows, were never native. But 10.0 sucked rocks and had no apps. (But I put it to use as an Intranet server right away running a Perl-based calendar app, among other things.) 10.1 was better (at least, not slow as shit) but still didn't have many apps I needed. (Photoshop, Quark, and others.) 10.2 was the first real usable OS X and by then there were tons of good commercial, shareware, and free apps out. However, I was very comfortable in W2K (super-stable, and the software for my ATI capture card finally worked) so it was a draw.
But 10.3 is very nice. And XP sucks. ("Your wireless network is here! Want to join it? Oops, it's gone! Now it's back! Want to join it? Oh, and your LAN cable is unplugged." --No shit, dumbass, I'm using WIRELESS!!!!! Or trying to, at least.) So I've turned completely around. In the last 3 years OS X has gotten great and Windows has gotten horrible. Plus Mac hardware is much, much more affordable than it used to be, and better designed than ever before, and has lots of great little features--they don't need crossover cables, they have target disk mode, etc etc etc.
So: four years ago I would have said "I like Windows a lot because it's fast and tight" but now my answer is "I like OS X 'cause it has lots of cool stuff and XP is like an albatross around my neck." And yes, I really did *like* Windows--back when it didn't get in your way and treat you like a first-grader.
Or, forget killing MS and just concentrate on server stuff.
"Did you know there was AJAX word processor, AJAX spreadsheet, AJAX calendar, AJAX presentation-building software, AJAX e-mail client, AJAX note-taking software and some other interesting applications, which, deployed on your local server, do not need installation and "just work" in a browser window?"
Let's see: word processor--didn't feel like signing up for an account. Spreadsheet--works in Firefox 1.0/Mac, but not Safari 1.3. Overall, has a long way to go--can't use arrow keys to move the active box in the grid, for example. And I doubt it's possible to recreate a zillion other useful features from a binary spreadsheet app, like dragging a cell's corner to fill lower rows. Calendar--wouldn't load at all in FF or Safari. Presentation--it's not AJAX. Email client--ha! instead of linking to Gmail, one of two programs that POPULARIZED AJAX (the other being google maps), the link leads to a nonexistant product from Yahoo. The note thing works but is pretty simple--feels like a bright student's DHTML project.
Fuck that! Fuck all this "search everything!" business. For the web, which is organized like SHIT, yes, search is great. For things you haven't seen in so long you forget where it is, search is great. But for email, where certain metadata--date, sender--is hardcoded in, let me just use the existing data! If I know my mom sent me something between christmas and new year's, don't make me do a big `select * from mail where sender='mom' and date>20041225 and date<20041231`--let me just sort by date and look for 'mom', OR sort by sender and look at dates. Names, dates--these things come naturally to civilized humans. It's not like memorizing IP addresses or anything. Fuck!
Has anyone here given up on arranging their files into folders and just thrown everything into ~/ and just using Spotlight all the time? NO! Why? Because SEARCH ISN'T THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING!!!!!111one
Surprised no one else caught your factual error. In Safari: Edit -> Spelling -> Check Spelling as You Type. I've been using this for ages. And yes, using a systemwide dictionary rocks.
See this screenshot: http://apple.newbox.org/pics/spelling.png
...is technology the only field where, when something has been growing in popularity for thirty years and then is almost an essential part of most people's daily lives, people start coming out of the woodwork proclaiming "the end is nigh!!!"? I've got an idea: show me five straight years of PCs declining in sales, use, and popularity before telling me it's soon to be a relic.
My #1 gripe about gmail: I can't click the top of a column and sort by date, size, sender, etc. Saving conversations in clumps and everything else it does is worthless to me without basic functionality like that. Do I need to RTFM, or is this feature really missing?
Plenty of other things I don't like as well, but let's start with the basics.
Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. They are your property to use as you wish. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack.
:-)
Link please.
I've read about that for years (googling, I see a reference to it for the public beta) but never gotten it to work. you just set your mac up so you type username/password instead of showing a list of users, then to log in you enter '>console' for the user with no password and click 'log in'?
...he can top "Perl6 will give you the big knob," I see no reason to tune in. :-)
Link?
But don't visit that page in Safari. (Safari 1.3/OS X 10.3, at least.) Safari tries to render it as HTML, so two things happen:
1) you lose all the (plain-text) formatting
2) you lose content between tag samples, and the page stops at "the contents of " because of the starting 'script' tag.
Google's #1 use is still search. You can hear people on prime-time TV shows talking about "googling" things but I haven't heard a reference to google maps, gmail, or anything else yet. Google search kicks ass because a) it works and b) it isn't annoying. Until someone comes up with search results that are better and/or a better interface, google has no chance of being killed. And not just 10% better results--we know from experience that a slightly better product isn't enough to get people to change en masse. It needs to be orders of magnitude better.
And that will be tough. Going from 75% useful (yahoo! and altavista search results) to 99% useful (google) was big enough to get people to change. But what--are you going to change to a search engine that gives 99.5% useful results? 99.9%? Could you even *notice* that small a change? And the UI--google has been designed with this quote in mind:
You know you've achieved perfection in design,
Not when you have nothing more to add,
But when you have nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery. quoted in James Gosling, Henry McGilton. "The Java Language Environment"
Overally, they''ll be tough to top.
Oh yeah, so anyway, my point: can we quit with the lame-ass "OMG teh google killer?!??!11" scary headlines? And maybe the iPod-killer ones as well?
Directnic is awesome. I get messages at (I think) 60, 30, 15, 7 days and probably more when an expiration is coming up. (I've never let it get further.) From their FAQ:
Q: When I buy a domain, who owns it?
A: If you purchase a domain in your own directNIC account, you are the owner (registrant) of the domain during the registration. directNIC is your registrar. You have the total control of your domain name and you can make modifications, transfers, or sell the domain name at any time during your registration. The Organization contact you choose for the domain will be displayed in WHOIS as the registrant of the domain.
Please be aware that the administrative contact of the domain has the administrative control of the domain. In addition, the owner of the account where the domain is located also has power to manage the domain. This happens when you ask someone else to register the domain for you. You are listed as the owner of the domain but the reseller places the domain in his/her account instead of your own account.
After the domain expires, you will be given 40 days grace period to renew the domain. If you do not renew the domain within the 40 days, you will lose the ownership of the domain.
When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the 'uncontrollable' outburst accordingly.
So, they're saying that the madder we are, the more we swear, possibly taking consequences (getting fired, a good ass-kicking) into account, rather than just letting fly with a random string of curses of indeterminate length? wow. once again I am blown away by professional researchers.
coming up next week: which work better, springy clothespins or the other kind?
IE is more secure... if you don't use it.
I know you're joking, but as it happens, you're actually wrong.
2/2/2004: KB832894: Security Update for IE6/Windows XP: "This affects all computers with Internet Explorer installed (even if you don't run Internet Explorer as your Web browser)."
Yes, IE is that fucking bad.
...another stupid program that thinks "command-minus" is OK as-is but insists you need to press "shift" for "command-plus" to work. (since "plus" is actually "shift + equals") Of course, "command shift minus" works the same as "command minus" and "command equals" does nothing. I can see I'm gonna have a lot of fun with this app.
And why does "zoom +100%" = double but "zoom -100%" = about one-fifth? Either zoom to zero (since that's what "minus 100%" really means") or zoom to 50% which is what any rational person would expect.
And I swear I'm gonna kill the next browser developer who thinks "don't show the status bar" (you know, the handy little thing that shows you WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE ABOUT TO CLICK ON) is an OK default setting. (Safari makes the same mistake.) HOW THE HELL are we ever going to teach users "be careful what you click on!" if we don't give them a way (ON BY DEFAULT, natch!) to see WHAT THE FUCK THEY'RE CLICKING ON?!?!? (Yes, I'm yelling.)
Speaking of which, why is the status bar under "view -> toolbars"? It has no tools on it!
And why do I need to see the effing ENCODING, and MIME type, when I mouseover a tab? And no "home" button, unless the location bar is active? Oh yeah, that's good--if I'm on a page, it takes two clicks to go home, instead of just one. Good move--I'm really short on space here on my 1280x1024 display. That 16x16-pixel icon would've crowded out EVERYTHING. Looks like it's time for a nice ranty blog entry. So far, this browser sucks balls.
When I was 12, I was about as good of a programmer as I was a piano player or a painter. But since I spent a lot of time coding, guess what, I'm a pretty damn good coder and a shitty piano player. That doesn't mean I couldn't have been a good piano player, just that it takes years to get good.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is such thing as talent and natural ability. I took piano lessons for years but never "got it" and could never do more than memorize sequences of notes. I have friends who never took a lesson in their life but they "get" how music works and can hear a new song, walk over to a piano (or any other instrument), and play the song they just heard note-perfect.
Same with artists. I took some drawing classes in college and developed a small talent into a slightly-less-small talent. Then I went to work at a publisher and a designer friend showed me illustrations he did when he was 12 that was better than what I could do at 22. There are countless other examples.
OTOH, this same guy never "got" how to copy files from one floppy to another--the idea of "insert one floppy, copy its files to the desktop, insert the other floppy, copy the files from desktop to floppy, delete the temp files" never stuck.
OK, so maybe it's not which half of the brain you use, but there definitely is such thing as natural ability. The only problem here is that people think coding != creativity. Coding (or, more properly, programming) == problem solving, which takes a huge amount of creativity. Just because what programmers produce isn't aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean there's no creativity involved.
At the same time, all creativity is not equal. I'd be willing to bet that you could spend 5 years taking piano lessons or painting lessons and still be a pretty shitty player or painter. (no offense.) And that's the point the parent is making. Just because you're good at one thing does not make you good at another. You mentioned hackaday.com? Check out http://thedailywtf.com/.
Lots of people can have skills in more than one area. I like to think I'm a pretty decent coder and designer (though I accept I'm not as good as a specialist at either) and the best DBA I ever knew was also a great sax player. And don't come around with the tired argument that music == math, because it doesn't. Just because an octave higher = a string of half-length doesn't mean that music is inherently easy to understand for those who are good at math. I'm pretty good at math and pretty sucky at music, as were most of the other guys in my degree program.
"Supposedly, Firefox/Mozilla will support it soon."
The future is now. The current beta of FF has SVG support. The official release of FF 1.5, with SVG support, should ship this month.
...Lockheed's getting $308M to keep a roomful of Pentium 200s running for eternity? :-)
From C:\Windows\System32\eula.txt on my Windows XP box:
"Microsoft and its suppliers provide the Product and
support services (if any) AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and
hereby disclaim all other warranties and conditions, either
express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited
to, any (if any) implied warranties, duties or conditions
of merchantability, of fitness for a particular purpose,
of reliability or availability, of accuracy or completeness
of responses..."
IANAL, this might not stand up in court, might be different in other countries, etc etc etc. All I was saying was that this type of thing is not unique to Apache products. (Though others are saying it *is* unique to this particular Windows port of Apache. Anyone know if that's the case with 1.3.x, 2.x, or both?)
Are you really saying a laptop is not a small, expensive, likely-to-break thing that might get carried around?
:-)
Or are you from the UK, where a fry is a chip, a chip is a crisp, a cookie is a biscuit, and, apparently, a laptop is a desktop?
I look at fragility and percent of price, and then factor in depreciation. Laptops and LCD screens are fragile, so they get warranties. For other things, it's like gambling: say a $100 item has an optional $50 3-year warrant. You're basically saying "There's a 50-50 chance this will break within 3 years." True or false? Your answer to that question determines your purchase.
As for depreciation: I bought one of the first DVD players that was $300 and paid, I think, ~$100 for a warranty. I figured it was still a new-ish technology, it was a newly released model, so I said yeah, what the hell. 3 years later DVD players were below $100 every day of the week and a year later they're $35-40 at Target. If you're buying something where technology will drive the prices down that fast (not really "depreciation" but I can't think of a better word right now), take that into consideration: does the warranty cost more than the replacement will in the same timespan?
... about a windowing system that you need 256MB+ to experience it? My prediction: absofuckinglutely nothing. OS X does some nifty stuff with Quartz Extreme (16MB and the right chipset required) but you know what? I could happily live without every bit of it.* And knowing Microsoft like I do, I would bet my next check that they aren't going to do anything interesting, even with 16x more VRAM. Whatever they do, I'll bet the first thing I do when I boot up a new system is the same thing I've done since Win98--turn all the crap off.
:-)
Then again, maybe MS has some inside info on 300dpi flat panels--it's not much of stretch to say they'll be commonplace when Vista ships.
* To be honest, I'd be happier without it all--that is, without the effects that require QE in the first place.