An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening.
And from the first paragraph of the article:
An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening.
Therefore, irikar must be Guy Dixon, the author of the article, right?
Slashdot, you were doing so well recently, and then you just had to fall back into the old pattern of directly lifting paragraphs from the article for use as a summary. For shame!
from the over-and-over-again dept.
How appropriate, since Slashdot keeps plagiarizing articles over and over again.
As for the remainder, yes - the defect tracking system is absolutely the correct place to keep discussions about the defect. IRC? Who logs that, and what if I'm hit by a bus and someone wants to finish what I'd stared? Nope, that's the entire point of bugzilla and similar systems - to keep information most local to where it's needed. A fine programming principle...
As I read the comments in the bug, you were looking for technical information (ie, "do I have to create a stream, or is it provided to me by the dialog?" (not a direct quote)), not design. The design should be kept close to the problem, and definitely in the bug. The technical implementation details, and especially minor questions about how you do this or that, don't need to be logged in the bug. Again, as I read it, what you really needed was a comprehensive architecture document of Thunderbird, or failing that at least someone familiar with similar code that could point you in the right direction. That's a task for IRC channels (because the discussion is ephemeral, and doesn't need to be logged for anything but your development purposes) or mailing lists.
Well, I wasn't about to buy it an engagement ring that's for sure. How 'genuine' would be enough for you? A tattoo on my forearm? A declaration of undying commitment before a gathering of my peers? A nice romantic dinner, just me and the bug?
Consider it from the approver's point of view. You offered to help, ran into a technical snag, asked a question in an inappropriate forum, and disappeared for 7 months. I get that it's open source, and work is done by individuals in their spare time, but that doesn't sound to me like you were really committed to fixing the bug. If you were, you would've tracked down the information you needed (it wasn't a design question requiring a committee vote), and continued with the work. That's how I define "genuine".
Enjoy the remainder of your aggression. Remember the point of this Slashdot thread? About how Mozilla was failing to build a community...?
That wasn't aggression, and I'm not affiliated with Firefox in any way (in fact, aside from having it installed but never using it, I have no association with the project at all). To turn it around on you, perhaps Mozilla is failing to build a community because people don't follow through on commitments? Of course, it's more likely that they're failing to build a community because they've failed to build a community. (no, really -- the fact that your technical question went unanswered can be seen as a sign of a lack of community, and short of some group of people stepping up and actively trying to build that community, the community will continue to not grow...)
Duplication. Check the bug report I mentioned - it seems to me as if vCard handling is actually pretty much there in Thunderbird but simply has no UI, so I wanted to re-use the existing code rather than create my own vCard library which would be out of sync with the rest of the code and probably would be rejected as duplicated work anyway.
Yeah, and? The point of the question was, "Why didn't you go ahead and do what you wanted to do, rather than file a bug and wait for permission?" In cases like this (and in many things in life), it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. If you are willing to write the code it takes to do what you want, there's a much higher chance of your bug getting noticed if it's accompanied by a patch. The patch doesn't have to be perfect code. It could be as simple as a proof of concept (though if you're going to do it, you may as well do it right). But a bug saying, "Hey, Project X needs feature Y. I'm willing to write the code. What say you?" is easily ignorable, while a bug saying, "Hey, Project X needs feature Y. Here's a patch with an implementation. Please give me feedback, and if you feel the feature is appropriate for Project X, check it into the tree," is hard to ignore. You've suggested a feature and provided an implementation all at once. The implementation may need tweaking, but the work is pretty much done, making it an easy feature request to approve.
From the bug, it seems that you got stuck on a few points and need some clarification. That's fine, but I wonder if asking that type of question within a bug is the right place to do it? Doesn't Mozilla have an IRC channel for development questions, or mailing lists for the various components? In short, that you didn't try to find the information you need elsewhere (assuming you didn't, from your posts here and in the bug) makes one question whether your commmitment to code the feature was genuine.
If you look at very successful FOSS projects, you'll see a comitted 3-5 member team which does pretty much everything for that project (projects like KDE or gnome don't classify as projects, they are meta-projects).
No need to single out KDE and GNOME, as they're exactly the same as Mozilla -- a meta-project consisting of many smaller projects (in this case, Firefox), which are run by a small, committed group of people.
I doubt much of anyone is using a 600x800 resolution. Tablet PCs tend to be higher resolution and I doubt you could even get a driver for the ISA VGA card that ran the old 15" radius pivot monitors.
I dunno, my nVidia card can rotate the screen, and my LCD monitor can rotate (meant for access to inputs on the back of monitor). I don't think I'd actually use my monitor that way, but I could if I wanted to.
Holy crap! That has to be the worst browser interface I've ever seen. Awful color scheme, buttons everywhere, three different input bars (one for searching, one for addresses, and one for "shopping"?; worse, the most important bar, the address bar, is too small to show even the domain portion of a normal URL, and is not in a properly prominent position), funky menu positioning (by putting the menu in the title bar, I suppose you can no longer grab that part of the bar to drag the window), etc. Netscape really needs to invest in some competent UI designers ASAP.
You are able to record two HD streams and watch another at the same time!
You should clarify this. Like DirecTV DVRs, the Comcast box is dual-tuner, which means you can record one HD or SD channel while watching another HD or SD channel. If you want to record two HD or SD channels at the same time, you can watch a pre-recorded HD or SD stream as well, but you can't watch another HD or SD channel (that would require a third tuner).
I really like the new box, but the disk space is a little low (one hour-long HD recording and one hour-long SD recording currently takes 7% of the space on my box), and there's no option to change the recording quality level to fit reduce the space used. The search is a little weak, and the series scheduler isn't smart enough to know that it already recorded an episode (I have to go through and remove the encore presentations of shows like Carnivale, since the DVR records it on Sunday night, and then wants to record the same episode again on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday). I still love my Tivo, but the ability to record HDTV streams forgives all of the other issues I have with the Comcast box. Now if only it had a 30 second skip/8 second reverse skip like Tivo...
And all the actors are late-30's portraying 16-18 year-olds... I just find that a little weird.
Not that I'm a fan or anything, but would it hurt to do a little bit of research first? The oldest "kid" on the show is played by an actor in his late 20s (1978). the youngest is actually the correct age (1986). None of the "kids" are late-30s. Late-20s, maybe, and I agree that's a little weird having an actor play 10+ years younger than he/she is, but late-20s is a lot closer to teens than late-30s.
Re:being a geek is not just about not fitting in
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Ask mc chris
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There are all sorts of people who don't fit in, yet would not qualify as geeks; goths, crazy cult members, people with social anxiety disorder, or many dug addicts for example. There's a relatively well-defined set of things that qualifies one as a geek, like a preoccupation with video games, Dungeons & Dragons, sci-fi, and other things. It's true that not fitting in well is a classic geek characteristic, but it's hardly the sole criteria for differentiating a geek from a non-geek.
And here I thought being a geek meant biting the heads off of live chickens. Shows what I know.
Re:Dear Lord make the madness stop!
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Effective XML
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If you're going to be passing around DOM trees in your script, then fair enough, but if you are simply outputting data, it's quicker and easier to simply write it out
Except that now you introduce the potential to have bugs that you wouldn't get from a DOM tree. For example, building a document through a DOM tree makes it impossible to forget a / on a close tag, or to open a tag as "<foo>" but close it as "</Foo>". Sure, it's quicker, and in trivial examples you're not likely to have a problem. Real-world problems are not always as simple as examples, and you're trading the memory used by building a DOM for the accuracy of building your tree within the DOM rather than ad-hoc by hand.
"Bookmarks" is the original, traditional terminology, used in all the earliest browsers (Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape). "Favorites" is the dumbed-down Microsoftism imposed by people who insist on changing terminology for no good reason. I'd be peeved if Mozilla ever caved into this nonsense.
Re-read my comment, and realize that I don't care one way or the other what name is used. "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" doesn't matter to me, it's the accelerator key to access it that does. "Favorites" starts with an 'f', but uses the 'a' as the accelerator (because "File" also starts with 'f'). "Bookmark" starts with 'b', but it has an 'a' in the name, and could easily use the 'a' for the accelerator key rather than the 'b'. As I said before, alt-a is a much easier chord to hit than alt-b, so it's a practical problem. (depending on the keyboard layout, alt-a is easily hit with the left thumb and left pinky; alt-b is a comination that either requires you to convolute your hand around so you can hit the alt key with your left thumb and 'b' with your left pointer finger, forget about chording and hit alt and then 'b' with your left thumb, or use two hands to hit the opposite side alt)
You could call the damned things "Slashdots" if you want, so long as an 'a' still exists in the name and is used as the accelerator key to access the menu.
I've tried Firefox many times, and I have it installed right now, but I keep going back to IE. Why? Because Firefox just doesn't "feel" right.
Minor things bug me, like "Bookmarks" in Firefox versus "Favorites" in IE. I don't really care what you call them, but I've trained my muscle memory to hit "alt-a" to open the "Favorites" menu. In Firefox, I have to consciously think about hitting "alt-b" (which is a more cumbersome chord than "alt-a", as well, given the placement of 'a' vs. 'b' on a qwerty keyboard). I could live with that, retrain my muscle memory, but there's a bigger problem once the menu is open. In IE, I can step through the entries by typing the first character. If I have three favorites starting with 'm', I can hit 'm' three times to get the third one. This works in Firefox, except when a bookmark starts with the same character as one of the accelerator keys ('b' to bookmark the page, 'm' to manage bookmarks, 'o' on a submenu to open all bookmarks in tabs (which seems like a stupid feature to me anyway, and why isn't it on the main menu page as well as submenus?)). If I have the same three bookmarks in Firefox starting with 'm' as I have favorites in IE, I can't quickly access them by typing 'm'. As soon as I do that, I'm taken to the window to manage my bookmarks. That sucks.
Another issue I have with Firefox is the installation of themes and extensions. Why must I restart the entire browser just to change a theme? I can understand having to do that with the installation of an extension (the same thing is necessary in IE), but for switching my theme? That's just silly. Still, that's a minor issue that's made worse by the fact that Firefox's default theme is pretty poor (the button icons are pretty amateur, and just don't look "right" to me). So, I go to find a better theme, and many of the listed themes don't have any preview image (side note: If you have a website dedicated to something visual like a browser theme, you had better have previews for every item -- I'm not clicking through and installing every theme that has no preview just to see if I like it or not). Once I find a theme I like (or not, as the case may be), and am able to install it (after a new release, good luck getting old themes to work), I still have to stop and restart the browser just to see what it looks like. Lame.
Perhaps I'm just too set in my ways to switch away from IE, but that's fine by me. I use SP2's popup blocker alongside my own custom-built blocker. I set the security permissions properly so I can block Flash crap. I have full control over cookies. I haven't had a spyware infestation in quite some time, and the last virus I got was back in 1994. In short, IE works for me, and I've long since gotten used to its minor problems. The utility I'd gain by switching to Firefox is not enough to outweigh the need to learn and get used to a whole new set of minor annoyances.
I didn't say you should write all your code without comments. I said that it is better to write your code clearly, so it doesn't require them. If you have a hairball of crap, you obviously need comments. You should put them in when you regurgitate it. At the same time put in a reminder to yourself to fix it, like a doxygen \todo comment. Then, when the crunch period is over, you go through the code and turn it back into a clean elegant form. At that point it should once again require no comments due to painful obviousness. Finally, you should make an appointment with your supervisor to discuss crunch time policy, illustrated with graphic before-and-after printouts and estimates on just how much time you lost due to hairballs of crap in them.
That's all well and good in theory, but you're making invalid assumptions.
You assume that you get to own your code in perpetuity, and only you get to work with code you wrote. That's rarely ever the case. You're maintaining someone else's cruft, and someone else is screwing up your nice, elegant code (because you left the company, changed jobs within the company, switched projects, whatever -- the point is, after you write the code, and perhaps after a few versions of being on the same project if you're lucky, typically you're no longer owning the code because you're off to bigger and better things).
"Monster hairballs of crap" don't spring up from one crunch period. They don't even spring up from a couple. They spring up from a couple years of maintenance on a code base, hacking on features (either by you because you've been given a ridiculous timeframe, or by someone else because you've moved on and they obviously don't have the proper reverance for your code), fixing bugs, adjusting to changing business rules, and so on.
You assume your supervisor will care when you give your little presentation about how you should never have to work anything more than 8 hour days, and preferably 6 hour days:). Chances are your supervisor is in the same boat as you, being forced from on high to agree to ridiculously short schedules while trying to shoehorn as much into each release as possible. That's not to say you shouldn't bring up your concerns, or that your supervisor can't do anything about it, just that usually your supervisor is in an even worse position than you are, and unless your supervisor is a real ass he or she already knows what you're dealing with.
I wish I could live in a world where the only code I have to ever deal with is the code I write, and nobody ever has to modify my code. In the real world (software industry vs. academia/FOSS), that rarely happens and you have to learn how to deal with it.
Can you give me some pointer to where to start learning by myself? Also I found a couple algorithm dictionaries but they're not very useful to me since I'm not that familiar with the terms.
You only need one book: Introduction to Algorithms, also referred to simply as CLR (for the authors, Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest, though they've added Stein for the 2nd Edition and it should probably be called CLRS). That's all you really need to get started. You're not going to go through it in an evening, or even a month, so it's money well-spent. I still pull out my 1st edition copy from time to time in my job.
Eventually you'll want to move on to other books as well, such as Design Patterns by the Gang of Four. CLR will keep you busy for a long time, though.
And it's true too. Although comments are indeed a good thing, writing code that does not require them is a much better one. If your code needs comments, it's probably too complex for continued maintenance.
But after years and years of continued maintenance with no comments, your clean, elegant code has turned into a monster hairball of crap.
Of course, the knife cuts both ways. If you comment everything and then the logic changes during maintenance without a corresponding change to the comments, they becomse worse than convoluted code (at least convoluted code can run through a debugger to give you an idea of what's happening).
Get dial up then have a dedicated 2nd phone line just for it, and leave it connected 24/7. I did this in college and never had a problem. There are lots of free programs out there to do stuff like keep your connection alive, redail on dissconnect, etc.
Unfortunately, most "unlimited" dial-up plans are actually hour-limited. If you read the TOU carefully, they'll tell you what "unlimited" means, but it's typically a high (but not impossible) number of hours per month. If you pass that limit, you'll either get blocked for the rest of the month, or charged a very large amount, depending on the ISP. Not every ISP will catch you, and those that do won't catch you every time, but if you keep a dial-up connection up 24/7 for months on end, any ISP you use will notice sooner or later and take some action.
The best thing to do is ask when you sign up for the ISP. They may have a more expensive dial-up plan that allows you to stay up 24/7/365. It might cost you $30/mo rather than $10/mo, but that's still cheaper than $50/mo broadband.
Google hiring ex-Microsoft employees would make it... a faceless bureaucratic corporation just like all the others.
Google is snapping up Microsoft employees (current and ex) left and right. While there's nothing wrong with that, in this case it is a problem for the part that you failed to quote:
Jeff Reynar - was the lead SmartTag Program Manager while at MS and is reportedly now a Google Product Manager
who's being credited as AutoLink's creator.
In other words, he's breaking his NDA and knowingly violating a pending patent by carrying over the same ideas he had at Microsoft to Google. It sounds silly, but when he filed for a patent while a Microsoft employee, he gave those thoughts to Microsoft. To use them now at Google would require a licensing agreement with Microsoft.
This is the kind of problem I'm surprised we haven't seen more of in the software industry. Developers are highly mobile, often changing jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily), and part of the reason to hire you over someone else is your skills and ideas. If the main idea you're bringing to the plate for my company is the same idea you patented at your last job, I don't want you. You'll only get me in legal trouble (and get yourself in legal trouble, violating your previous NDA).
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, whether Microsoft goes after the person as well as the company. (The majority of Microsoft's legal history involves them as the defendent. They haven't often initiated lawsuits of their own.)
SmartLink was intended to replace existing tags with links to places MS wanted you to go, and to add links that would only work if you happened to be running Windows.
This was modded informative? Man, I want some of that moderator crack. First off, I assume you're referring to Microsft's Smart Tags (no idea what "SmartLink" is). Second, it wasn't at all intended to replace existing links. It was in addition to any links on the pages (think similar to VibrantMedia's intellitext crap, but way less intrusive, and still under your control). Third, of course it would only work if you happen to be running Windows. The Google thing only works if you happen to be running Windows, IE, and the Google toolbar. So what? Fourth, Smart Tags were and are configurable. You could remove tags you didn't want, and install new ones you did. Perhaps there would've been security issues with the tags installing by themselves, but I never saw that (I used the IE 6 beta back in the day), and now it would only be speculation. You could write your own smart tags and distribute them completely independent of Microsoft, and most of the smart tags I've seen were useful, not advertisements (ie, a name gets tagged so you can look it up in your Outlook contact list, an address gets tagged so you can look it up on mappoint, etc).
People reacted poorly to Microsoft's Smart Tags because they were from Microsoft, not because they were inherently evil. That's also why people are not up in arms about Google doing it (they "Do no Evil," right?). At least in Microsoft's case the API to build your own smart tags was available (I don't know about Google's, since I don't run the Google toolbar and I've not looked into this deeper).
In Halo 2 on Xbox Live, I can give feedback about cheaters and other jerks. I think it's actually a feature of Live, but Bungie actually uses the data to kick people off Halo 2 for being jerky.
That is a feature of Live!. The feedback is not public, and nobody really knows how much feedback it takes to get someone booted (off of Live!, not a particular game). However, you can also leave good feedback, which may cancel out negative feedback.
In recent weeks I've noticed some improvement in the kind of opponents I face. It's nice.
More likely you've just worked your way up the ranks to a pocket of "nice" players. The lamers are above you (for the kids with nothing else to do but play H2 all day) or below you (because ruining your day often has a negative effect on rank, like team-killing).
Yes, because there's nothing quite like using an alpha-level project that hasn't had a nightly snapshot update in a year (last snapshot is from February 8, 2004). Certainly instills confidence in the project, if you ask me!
WRT visual cues....do I *really* need stuff in a menu to change because I am pointing at it? I can already see where my mouse is pointing. That 'cue' is very annoying, whether it is in web pages (in web pages, it's not quite as bad if done properly, since a web page has no standard layout), or application menus (highlighting here is just dumb and gives me a headache more than it helps me in any way...whoever started this trend should be shot).
When your mouse pointer is between two menu items, which one is activated when you click? Maybe you're using a huge display at a low resolution, but for the rest of us on our lowly 21" monitors at 1600x1200 aren't easily able to determine if the pointer is one pixel up from the boundary between two items, or one pixel down. By highlighting the menu item, you can see exactly what you're going to get, without any guess work. Of course, if the items in the menu move around depending on where your mouse is at (*cough*OS X dock*cough*), that's bad. But highlighting? How can you not like highlighting? I assume then that you never use a keyboard to navigate menu items?
Speaking of menu items and visual cues, one I really like is the fading menu selection in Windows 2000 and newer. When you select an item from a menu, the menu fades out with that item still highlighted. If gives you a nice visual confirmation that you did indeed select the correct option, without the annoying double- or triple-flash that macs used to use (no idea if they still do that in OS X; and not saying that the flash is bad, since it serves the same purpose, just that I find it more annoying than a nice, smooth fade out).
Is this the same crappy PS2 controller that contains *all* spring-free analog buttons (including the D-pad), and analog sticks that are in the position your thumb occupies at rest rather than up out of the way?
That cuts both ways. The spring-free "analog" buttons (in quotes, because "off", "half-on", and "on" don't qualify as analog in my book) make the PS2 crap for racing games. Sure, a spring-loaded trigger may be more prone to wear, but I'm fine with that. I've gone through only two XBox controllers since launch day due to bad springs, and I'd happily buy another controller if my current one dies. The ability to actually modulate throttle and braking in XBox racing games is awesome, compared to the craptastic gameplay you get in Gran Turismo 3 with the standard dual-shock controller. (Don't even say I can use the right thumbstick as analog throttle and brakes -- for one my brain just doesn't work that way, and for another you need to be able to apply brakes and throttle at the same time, which you can't do on a joystick.)
Sadly, there are no third-party PS2 controllers with spring-loaded triggers, and I've not yet found a way to connect an XBox controller to my PS2 (there are plenty of adapters to connect a PS2 controller to an XBox, which seems like a huge waste of time and effort). If anybody knows where I can find a PS2 controller with proper triggers, or an adapter to use an XBox controller on PS2, please let me know.
Since you can't use the "Well, Direct3D is better than OpenGL" argument, they've started using the "Oh, well Direct3D is more high-level than OpenGL."
It's not a matter of OpenGL vs. Direct3D. Both are very good in their own way. Direct3D has come a long way, and is a hugely different animal than what it was in versions 1 through 3 (btw, Direct3D as a name is dead, and it's just referred to now as DirectX). The more important part is everything else. DirectX is a framework that provides 3D, 2D (though DirectDraw is dead, and only available for backwards compatibility), audio, input management, networking, and a whole lot more. OpenGL is a 3D (and 2D, if you like) framework and nothing more. That's why Loki developed SDL way back when. As good as SDL is now, it still has a long way to go to be on par with DirectX. Even id uses DirectX for input and sound (though they use other libraries for sound management as well).
I agree that 3rd party libraries aren't sufficient for success they are necessary and we're one of a few that are puting that belief into practice.
Is that qualified as, "We're one of a few in the open source community that are putting that belief into practice"? I ask because in the commercial software industry, very few people roll their own. They license rendering engines like id's Quake 3 and now Doom 3 engine, the Unreal engine, Renderware, or one of a number of others. They use sound engines like Miles. The Havok physic engine is widely used by a number of games as well. The point here is that there are a few companies that build infrastructure pieces, and most game developers license that technology so they can focus on content and gameplay. They make some modifications to the licensed bits here and there (Ubisoft's dynamic lighting they added to the Unreal engine for Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, and Rainbow Six 3), but they can do that because they didn't have to spend the time building the engine up from nothing.
For example, people complain that id's "games" aren't very great, that they're little more than technical demos for their latest technology. That's absolutely true. The amount of money id will make from licensing the Doom 3 engine to other developers will hugely overshadow the amount they make from selling the Doom 3 game itself (and when the cash cow runs out, id is good about GPLing their old tech -- the Q3 engine should be available shortly). This is the way of the future, and you're absolutely correct that using third-party software to develop a game is crucial to allow a developer to focus on what's important. Maybe the open source community hasn't quite caught on yet, but they will. Kudos to you for seeing the trend and getting in early.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Slashdot summary:
And from the first paragraph of the article: Therefore, irikar must be Guy Dixon, the author of the article, right?Slashdot, you were doing so well recently, and then you just had to fall back into the old pattern of directly lifting paragraphs from the article for use as a summary. For shame!
How appropriate, since Slashdot keeps plagiarizing articles over and over again.
As I read the comments in the bug, you were looking for technical information (ie, "do I have to create a stream, or is it provided to me by the dialog?" (not a direct quote)), not design. The design should be kept close to the problem, and definitely in the bug. The technical implementation details, and especially minor questions about how you do this or that, don't need to be logged in the bug. Again, as I read it, what you really needed was a comprehensive architecture document of Thunderbird, or failing that at least someone familiar with similar code that could point you in the right direction. That's a task for IRC channels (because the discussion is ephemeral, and doesn't need to be logged for anything but your development purposes) or mailing lists.
Consider it from the approver's point of view. You offered to help, ran into a technical snag, asked a question in an inappropriate forum, and disappeared for 7 months. I get that it's open source, and work is done by individuals in their spare time, but that doesn't sound to me like you were really committed to fixing the bug. If you were, you would've tracked down the information you needed (it wasn't a design question requiring a committee vote), and continued with the work. That's how I define "genuine".
That wasn't aggression, and I'm not affiliated with Firefox in any way (in fact, aside from having it installed but never using it, I have no association with the project at all). To turn it around on you, perhaps Mozilla is failing to build a community because people don't follow through on commitments? Of course, it's more likely that they're failing to build a community because they've failed to build a community. (no, really -- the fact that your technical question went unanswered can be seen as a sign of a lack of community, and short of some group of people stepping up and actively trying to build that community, the community will continue to not grow ...)
Yeah, and? The point of the question was, "Why didn't you go ahead and do what you wanted to do, rather than file a bug and wait for permission?" In cases like this (and in many things in life), it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. If you are willing to write the code it takes to do what you want, there's a much higher chance of your bug getting noticed if it's accompanied by a patch. The patch doesn't have to be perfect code. It could be as simple as a proof of concept (though if you're going to do it, you may as well do it right). But a bug saying, "Hey, Project X needs feature Y. I'm willing to write the code. What say you?" is easily ignorable, while a bug saying, "Hey, Project X needs feature Y. Here's a patch with an implementation. Please give me feedback, and if you feel the feature is appropriate for Project X, check it into the tree," is hard to ignore. You've suggested a feature and provided an implementation all at once. The implementation may need tweaking, but the work is pretty much done, making it an easy feature request to approve.
From the bug, it seems that you got stuck on a few points and need some clarification. That's fine, but I wonder if asking that type of question within a bug is the right place to do it? Doesn't Mozilla have an IRC channel for development questions, or mailing lists for the various components? In short, that you didn't try to find the information you need elsewhere (assuming you didn't, from your posts here and in the bug) makes one question whether your commmitment to code the feature was genuine.
No need to single out KDE and GNOME, as they're exactly the same as Mozilla -- a meta-project consisting of many smaller projects (in this case, Firefox), which are run by a small, committed group of people.
I dunno, my nVidia card can rotate the screen, and my LCD monitor can rotate (meant for access to inputs on the back of monitor). I don't think I'd actually use my monitor that way, but I could if I wanted to.
Holy crap! That has to be the worst browser interface I've ever seen. Awful color scheme, buttons everywhere, three different input bars (one for searching, one for addresses, and one for "shopping"?; worse, the most important bar, the address bar, is too small to show even the domain portion of a normal URL, and is not in a properly prominent position), funky menu positioning (by putting the menu in the title bar, I suppose you can no longer grab that part of the bar to drag the window), etc. Netscape really needs to invest in some competent UI designers ASAP.
You should clarify this. Like DirecTV DVRs, the Comcast box is dual-tuner, which means you can record one HD or SD channel while watching another HD or SD channel. If you want to record two HD or SD channels at the same time, you can watch a pre-recorded HD or SD stream as well, but you can't watch another HD or SD channel (that would require a third tuner).
I really like the new box, but the disk space is a little low (one hour-long HD recording and one hour-long SD recording currently takes 7% of the space on my box), and there's no option to change the recording quality level to fit reduce the space used. The search is a little weak, and the series scheduler isn't smart enough to know that it already recorded an episode (I have to go through and remove the encore presentations of shows like Carnivale, since the DVR records it on Sunday night, and then wants to record the same episode again on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday). I still love my Tivo, but the ability to record HDTV streams forgives all of the other issues I have with the Comcast box. Now if only it had a 30 second skip/8 second reverse skip like Tivo ...
Not that I'm a fan or anything, but would it hurt to do a little bit of research first? The oldest "kid" on the show is played by an actor in his late 20s (1978). the youngest is actually the correct age (1986). None of the "kids" are late-30s. Late-20s, maybe, and I agree that's a little weird having an actor play 10+ years younger than he/she is, but late-20s is a lot closer to teens than late-30s.
And here I thought being a geek meant biting the heads off of live chickens. Shows what I know.
Except that now you introduce the potential to have bugs that you wouldn't get from a DOM tree. For example, building a document through a DOM tree makes it impossible to forget a / on a close tag, or to open a tag as "<foo>" but close it as "</Foo>". Sure, it's quicker, and in trivial examples you're not likely to have a problem. Real-world problems are not always as simple as examples, and you're trading the memory used by building a DOM for the accuracy of building your tree within the DOM rather than ad-hoc by hand.
Re-read my comment, and realize that I don't care one way or the other what name is used. "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" doesn't matter to me, it's the accelerator key to access it that does. "Favorites" starts with an 'f', but uses the 'a' as the accelerator (because "File" also starts with 'f'). "Bookmark" starts with 'b', but it has an 'a' in the name, and could easily use the 'a' for the accelerator key rather than the 'b'. As I said before, alt-a is a much easier chord to hit than alt-b, so it's a practical problem. (depending on the keyboard layout, alt-a is easily hit with the left thumb and left pinky; alt-b is a comination that either requires you to convolute your hand around so you can hit the alt key with your left thumb and 'b' with your left pointer finger, forget about chording and hit alt and then 'b' with your left thumb, or use two hands to hit the opposite side alt)
You could call the damned things "Slashdots" if you want, so long as an 'a' still exists in the name and is used as the accelerator key to access the menu.
I've tried Firefox many times, and I have it installed right now, but I keep going back to IE. Why? Because Firefox just doesn't "feel" right.
Minor things bug me, like "Bookmarks" in Firefox versus "Favorites" in IE. I don't really care what you call them, but I've trained my muscle memory to hit "alt-a" to open the "Favorites" menu. In Firefox, I have to consciously think about hitting "alt-b" (which is a more cumbersome chord than "alt-a", as well, given the placement of 'a' vs. 'b' on a qwerty keyboard). I could live with that, retrain my muscle memory, but there's a bigger problem once the menu is open. In IE, I can step through the entries by typing the first character. If I have three favorites starting with 'm', I can hit 'm' three times to get the third one. This works in Firefox, except when a bookmark starts with the same character as one of the accelerator keys ('b' to bookmark the page, 'm' to manage bookmarks, 'o' on a submenu to open all bookmarks in tabs (which seems like a stupid feature to me anyway, and why isn't it on the main menu page as well as submenus?)). If I have the same three bookmarks in Firefox starting with 'm' as I have favorites in IE, I can't quickly access them by typing 'm'. As soon as I do that, I'm taken to the window to manage my bookmarks. That sucks.
Another issue I have with Firefox is the installation of themes and extensions. Why must I restart the entire browser just to change a theme? I can understand having to do that with the installation of an extension (the same thing is necessary in IE), but for switching my theme? That's just silly. Still, that's a minor issue that's made worse by the fact that Firefox's default theme is pretty poor (the button icons are pretty amateur, and just don't look "right" to me). So, I go to find a better theme, and many of the listed themes don't have any preview image (side note: If you have a website dedicated to something visual like a browser theme, you had better have previews for every item -- I'm not clicking through and installing every theme that has no preview just to see if I like it or not). Once I find a theme I like (or not, as the case may be), and am able to install it (after a new release, good luck getting old themes to work), I still have to stop and restart the browser just to see what it looks like. Lame.
Perhaps I'm just too set in my ways to switch away from IE, but that's fine by me. I use SP2's popup blocker alongside my own custom-built blocker. I set the security permissions properly so I can block Flash crap. I have full control over cookies. I haven't had a spyware infestation in quite some time, and the last virus I got was back in 1994. In short, IE works for me, and I've long since gotten used to its minor problems. The utility I'd gain by switching to Firefox is not enough to outweigh the need to learn and get used to a whole new set of minor annoyances.
That's all well and good in theory, but you're making invalid assumptions.
- You assume that you get to own your code in perpetuity, and only you get to work with code you wrote. That's rarely ever the case. You're maintaining someone else's cruft, and someone else is screwing up your nice, elegant code (because you left the company, changed jobs within the company, switched projects, whatever -- the point is, after you write the code, and perhaps after a few versions of being on the same project if you're lucky, typically you're no longer owning the code because you're off to bigger and better things).
- "Monster hairballs of crap" don't spring up from one crunch period. They don't even spring up from a couple. They spring up from a couple years of maintenance on a code base, hacking on features (either by you because you've been given a ridiculous timeframe, or by someone else because you've moved on and they obviously don't have the proper reverance for your code), fixing bugs, adjusting to changing business rules, and so on.
- You assume your supervisor will care when you give your little presentation about how you should never have to work anything more than 8 hour days, and preferably 6 hour days
:). Chances are your supervisor is in the same boat as you, being forced from on high to agree to ridiculously short schedules while trying to shoehorn as much into each release as possible. That's not to say you shouldn't bring up your concerns, or that your supervisor can't do anything about it, just that usually your supervisor is in an even worse position than you are, and unless your supervisor is a real ass he or she already knows what you're dealing with.
I wish I could live in a world where the only code I have to ever deal with is the code I write, and nobody ever has to modify my code. In the real world (software industry vs. academia/FOSS), that rarely happens and you have to learn how to deal with it.You only need one book: Introduction to Algorithms, also referred to simply as CLR (for the authors, Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest, though they've added Stein for the 2nd Edition and it should probably be called CLRS). That's all you really need to get started. You're not going to go through it in an evening, or even a month, so it's money well-spent. I still pull out my 1st edition copy from time to time in my job.
Eventually you'll want to move on to other books as well, such as Design Patterns by the Gang of Four. CLR will keep you busy for a long time, though.
But after years and years of continued maintenance with no comments, your clean, elegant code has turned into a monster hairball of crap.
Of course, the knife cuts both ways. If you comment everything and then the logic changes during maintenance without a corresponding change to the comments, they becomse worse than convoluted code (at least convoluted code can run through a debugger to give you an idea of what's happening).
The Jagged Alliance 2 owned by the X-Com owned by the Civilizations? What? Were you trying for pluralization?
Unfortunately, most "unlimited" dial-up plans are actually hour-limited. If you read the TOU carefully, they'll tell you what "unlimited" means, but it's typically a high (but not impossible) number of hours per month. If you pass that limit, you'll either get blocked for the rest of the month, or charged a very large amount, depending on the ISP. Not every ISP will catch you, and those that do won't catch you every time, but if you keep a dial-up connection up 24/7 for months on end, any ISP you use will notice sooner or later and take some action.
The best thing to do is ask when you sign up for the ISP. They may have a more expensive dial-up plan that allows you to stay up 24/7/365. It might cost you $30/mo rather than $10/mo, but that's still cheaper than $50/mo broadband.
Google is snapping up Microsoft employees (current and ex) left and right. While there's nothing wrong with that, in this case it is a problem for the part that you failed to quote:
In other words, he's breaking his NDA and knowingly violating a pending patent by carrying over the same ideas he had at Microsoft to Google. It sounds silly, but when he filed for a patent while a Microsoft employee, he gave those thoughts to Microsoft. To use them now at Google would require a licensing agreement with Microsoft.This is the kind of problem I'm surprised we haven't seen more of in the software industry. Developers are highly mobile, often changing jobs (voluntarily or involuntarily), and part of the reason to hire you over someone else is your skills and ideas. If the main idea you're bringing to the plate for my company is the same idea you patented at your last job, I don't want you. You'll only get me in legal trouble (and get yourself in legal trouble, violating your previous NDA).
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, whether Microsoft goes after the person as well as the company. (The majority of Microsoft's legal history involves them as the defendent. They haven't often initiated lawsuits of their own.)
This was modded informative? Man, I want some of that moderator crack. First off, I assume you're referring to Microsft's Smart Tags (no idea what "SmartLink" is). Second, it wasn't at all intended to replace existing links. It was in addition to any links on the pages (think similar to VibrantMedia's intellitext crap, but way less intrusive, and still under your control). Third, of course it would only work if you happen to be running Windows. The Google thing only works if you happen to be running Windows, IE, and the Google toolbar. So what? Fourth, Smart Tags were and are configurable. You could remove tags you didn't want, and install new ones you did. Perhaps there would've been security issues with the tags installing by themselves, but I never saw that (I used the IE 6 beta back in the day), and now it would only be speculation. You could write your own smart tags and distribute them completely independent of Microsoft, and most of the smart tags I've seen were useful, not advertisements (ie, a name gets tagged so you can look it up in your Outlook contact list, an address gets tagged so you can look it up on mappoint, etc).
People reacted poorly to Microsoft's Smart Tags because they were from Microsoft, not because they were inherently evil. That's also why people are not up in arms about Google doing it (they "Do no Evil," right?). At least in Microsoft's case the API to build your own smart tags was available (I don't know about Google's, since I don't run the Google toolbar and I've not looked into this deeper).
That is a feature of Live!. The feedback is not public, and nobody really knows how much feedback it takes to get someone booted (off of Live!, not a particular game). However, you can also leave good feedback, which may cancel out negative feedback.
More likely you've just worked your way up the ranks to a pocket of "nice" players. The lamers are above you (for the kids with nothing else to do but play H2 all day) or below you (because ruining your day often has a negative effect on rank, like team-killing).
Yes, because there's nothing quite like using an alpha-level project that hasn't had a nightly snapshot update in a year (last snapshot is from February 8, 2004). Certainly instills confidence in the project, if you ask me!
When your mouse pointer is between two menu items, which one is activated when you click? Maybe you're using a huge display at a low resolution, but for the rest of us on our lowly 21" monitors at 1600x1200 aren't easily able to determine if the pointer is one pixel up from the boundary between two items, or one pixel down. By highlighting the menu item, you can see exactly what you're going to get, without any guess work. Of course, if the items in the menu move around depending on where your mouse is at (*cough*OS X dock*cough*), that's bad. But highlighting? How can you not like highlighting? I assume then that you never use a keyboard to navigate menu items?
Speaking of menu items and visual cues, one I really like is the fading menu selection in Windows 2000 and newer. When you select an item from a menu, the menu fades out with that item still highlighted. If gives you a nice visual confirmation that you did indeed select the correct option, without the annoying double- or triple-flash that macs used to use (no idea if they still do that in OS X; and not saying that the flash is bad, since it serves the same purpose, just that I find it more annoying than a nice, smooth fade out).
That cuts both ways. The spring-free "analog" buttons (in quotes, because "off", "half-on", and "on" don't qualify as analog in my book) make the PS2 crap for racing games. Sure, a spring-loaded trigger may be more prone to wear, but I'm fine with that. I've gone through only two XBox controllers since launch day due to bad springs, and I'd happily buy another controller if my current one dies. The ability to actually modulate throttle and braking in XBox racing games is awesome, compared to the craptastic gameplay you get in Gran Turismo 3 with the standard dual-shock controller. (Don't even say I can use the right thumbstick as analog throttle and brakes -- for one my brain just doesn't work that way, and for another you need to be able to apply brakes and throttle at the same time, which you can't do on a joystick.)
Sadly, there are no third-party PS2 controllers with spring-loaded triggers, and I've not yet found a way to connect an XBox controller to my PS2 (there are plenty of adapters to connect a PS2 controller to an XBox, which seems like a huge waste of time and effort). If anybody knows where I can find a PS2 controller with proper triggers, or an adapter to use an XBox controller on PS2, please let me know.
It's not a matter of OpenGL vs. Direct3D. Both are very good in their own way. Direct3D has come a long way, and is a hugely different animal than what it was in versions 1 through 3 (btw, Direct3D as a name is dead, and it's just referred to now as DirectX). The more important part is everything else. DirectX is a framework that provides 3D, 2D (though DirectDraw is dead, and only available for backwards compatibility), audio, input management, networking, and a whole lot more. OpenGL is a 3D (and 2D, if you like) framework and nothing more. That's why Loki developed SDL way back when. As good as SDL is now, it still has a long way to go to be on par with DirectX. Even id uses DirectX for input and sound (though they use other libraries for sound management as well).
Is that qualified as, "We're one of a few in the open source community that are putting that belief into practice"? I ask because in the commercial software industry, very few people roll their own. They license rendering engines like id's Quake 3 and now Doom 3 engine, the Unreal engine, Renderware, or one of a number of others. They use sound engines like Miles. The Havok physic engine is widely used by a number of games as well. The point here is that there are a few companies that build infrastructure pieces, and most game developers license that technology so they can focus on content and gameplay. They make some modifications to the licensed bits here and there (Ubisoft's dynamic lighting they added to the Unreal engine for Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, and Rainbow Six 3), but they can do that because they didn't have to spend the time building the engine up from nothing.
For example, people complain that id's "games" aren't very great, that they're little more than technical demos for their latest technology. That's absolutely true. The amount of money id will make from licensing the Doom 3 engine to other developers will hugely overshadow the amount they make from selling the Doom 3 game itself (and when the cash cow runs out, id is good about GPLing their old tech -- the Q3 engine should be available shortly). This is the way of the future, and you're absolutely correct that using third-party software to develop a game is crucial to allow a developer to focus on what's important. Maybe the open source community hasn't quite caught on yet, but they will. Kudos to you for seeing the trend and getting in early.