Why would we want to have another monopoly? (granted, an open, standards-compliant one would be a nice change...)
Better to allow all software to read all formats, as well as is possible. Especially since everyone and their dog already uses Word - easier to get them to install a tiny plugin than the massive bulk of openoffice.
Yeah, filenames are a pain. Except when you know where the file is, and can open it up right away. I'd rather do that than "search on the indexed executive summary".
I disagree with other stuff too - I think we need to focus more on DATA oriented computing. So that we have some data, and we can then edit/view it in anything that supported that sort of data. Get rid of proprietary data formats, and we can then edit data as we see fit (ideally, anyway).
The problem with "task oriented computing" as I see it is that you often end up with "now start the text editor" meaning the single program on the system that can be used for editing text (the way MS is going with Word, it seems). However, I regularly use 4-5 different text editors/word processors on my machines. Sometimes because one is lacking a feature that I need, but sometimes one is just more suited for a given task.
OpenOffice is great for large, freeform documents, for example, lyx is better for more structured writing, vim is my choice for coding, etc etc...
And how do you define all the things you use a "text editor" for as tasks? There's no limit! (e-mail, letters, scholarly writing, technical writing, coding, invoices, etc)
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the term "task-oriented", but it seems like a rather limited way to function to me.
Seems almost every province has a London. PEI was very unimaginative when naming its towns (not many native settlements maybe?), so they all seem to be reused names.
Especially odd, since most of these "towns" consist of 10 houses at the most.:)
That stuff isn't. But close to a decade of personal mail, writings for school, recordings I've made, the hours I've put into configuring everything, etc... would be damn nice to have around. Especially the e-mail - mine doesn't actually go back more than about 5 years, because I stupidly erased it all without a backup, and then reinstalled windows over it. *sigh*
Since then I've amassed a large quantity of mail, a lot of which would be a serious disappointment to lose.
Grocery stores are already full of ads and stuff, and you can see very clearly what's on sale and what isn't. Having to haul the ads around with me while shopping does not appeal in the slightest.
The whole concept of allowing some web designer to run arbitrary code (though it is *supposed* to be very limited...) on your computer when you visit his web page is rather odd to me.
Whether it's secure or not doesn't take away from the fact that he can use your computer for what he wants to do, rather than what you want to do. Any code can be malicious - no matter what resources on the computer it's allowed to access, it still can use the CPU and memory. An endless loop can still screw things up, and all of it is completely out of your control once you turn on client-side scripting.
(anyone made up a hack so that visitors to a busy web page calculate seti@home units or something like that?)
I don't want a web designer to control how I use my computer. This includes obvious things, like bugs allowing the computer to be crashed/wiped/etc.. But also more subtle things - doing random calculations to suck up CPU, stealing the focus from where *I* want it, opening windows I don't want, messing with the UI that I specifically chose and arranged.
Web designers shouldn't have that much control over us! I leave javascript turned off completely, except in the rare cases where a page requires it, and is worth the annoyance. In general, it only improves my experience, and keeps things safer in general.
I guess I'm lucky to be living somewhere where you don't need much money, but I could *easily* live off of a full-time minimum wage job.
As it stands, I'm working several very part-time jobs, and covering living expenses pretty easily - had to take out a loan for tuition, but that's different.
I'm currently working about 10 hours a week at the help desk for my school's computer centre, getting paid to sing in a church choir, tuning a harpsichord for another university, and taking various freelance performing gigs where I can.
Of course, living where I am, I don't need (or want) a car, my living expenses total about $500 Canadian) and I'm generally pretty low-maintenance.
I have several friends with rather severe money problems - huge debts, damaged credit, etc... - most of whom make about 10 times what I do in a year. There's a point where you just have to look at how little you can live off of - do you really *need* that Xbox? Can you put off upgrading for another year? etc...
I pity those people forced to live in more expensive places. Almost any city in the States - and even more places like London - just paying rent on a small apartment can easily cost several times my total living expenses... Makes you wonder if it's really worth the trouble of living there.
Dan's Data recently had a review of a speaker kit. He was very pleased with the results.
Of course, that company is based in Australia, so if you're not there, you'll probably want to find something closer. Anyone know of any similar companies in North America? (Especially in Canada, for my sake!)
If there was a console version of lyx, I'd be very happy. As it is, the X requirement makes it frequently unusable, though it is my WP of choice, and what I usually end up using.
A more pressing question might be, "why should anything be *preserved* at all?"
Why not let culture change and grow so that it can be understood and appreciated by a the new society that's really its audience?
It's not a simple questions, though the overwhelmingly popular answer these days is that everything cultural, from languages, to buildings, to superheroes needs to be preserved for all infinity. This certainly wasn't always the case! I think the very copyright laws that we love to hate here on Slashdot have done a lot to foster this notion (though it's a bit of a chicken & egg situation - the laws might just be in reaction to the attitudes already present).
In any case, I think more people should really consider what's more important: preserving history, or actually building new culture, and letting the past influence the present (and thus the future) on its own terms, without being stuck on a pedestal of historicity.
This might sound like hypocrisy, coming from a harpsichord player like myself, but it's an issue that I wrestle with every day, and have yet to come to a real conclusion.
Of course, not relying on javascript can make things much easier, not only to test, but to use.
Javascript can make things a lot easier for the developer, it seems, but my experience has been that it causes far more harm than good. I leave it off in my browsers with very few exceptions, and any web designer that requires it usually gets a harshly-worded e-mail from me.
There's usually a better way that doesn't use javascript and ends up being more portable and easier to use all around. People are used to using their browsers the way they already work - javascript changes this normal behaviour.
Really, this machine's more powerful than you need for word processing. My advice would be to track down wordperfect 5.1 and freedos, and install them.
It's not wysiwyg, but that's not really much of a problem for most people.
It's actually much EASIER in my experience for most people to use this sort of system. For the simple things most people do in word processors, you need to learn and memorize (or just write down) about 10 commands that are easily entered, you don't have to worry about stability, or the periodic reinstalls that windows seems to necessitate, and you don't end up trying to set up linux or something similar in a truly idiot-proof way.
And hell, if you go that route, you could sell that overpowered machine and get an XT or something.:)
I know next to nothing on the subject, but when I was tinkering about back in the good ole' DOS days, I came across this list of interrupts: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/
I expect most people have seen it. It lists the following fod 0d:
0D INT 0D C - IRQ5 - FIXED DISK (PC,XT), LPT2 (AT), reserved (PS/2) 0D INT 0D C - IRQ5 - Tandy 1000 60 Hz RAM REFRESH 0D INT 0D - HP 95LX - INFRARED INTERRUPT 0D INT 0D C - CPU-generated (80286+) - GENERAL PROTECTION VIOLATION
At McGill University most people use Corporate Time, by Steltor (recently bought by Oracle). It's not open-source or free, but it seems to work quite well. Most people in my department seem to like it, though I don't have any need for it, really - a notebook with a date written on each page is all the calendaring I need.
At the very least, it's an alternative... and it can sync to Outlook, and to Palmpilots.
Also, it's got clients for many operating systems, including linux (I haven't tried it) and a half-decent web interface.
I, for one, don't want you customizing web pages for me. If anyone does customizing like that, I want it to be ME.
If you just use basic standards-compliant code, then browsers can show it how they want, and users and configure the browser to show it how they want. What's to say your fonts look good on my system? You're not here...
FOr that matter, the classical music written between 1550 and 1650. Or 1750 and 1800. Or 1850 and 1900. Hell.. ALL of it.
If your classical music sounds much like electronica, you're not playing it very well. Just because, on paper, it can be described in terms of precise rhythms and exact tempos and so on, it doesn't mean that it should be performed that way. Any pre-20th century music is very flexible in almost every way. It's just the advent of modernism and mechanization that brought on much strict adherence to the printed page, metronomes, and other gizmos.
There wasn't much of an industry based on recording and copying, maybe. The industry focused much more on live performance. I wish today's did as well.
I think it's kind of sad, not surprising, but disappointing, that we feel we need an "entertainment industry" to keep us occupied.
Back in the Good Ole' Days(tm) they didn't have recordings of the superstars. If you wanted music, you played it, or hired someone who could do it for you, for those higher in finance than in talent. And if you were lucky/dedicated/rich&famous you could hear the superstars.
I think we'd all be a lot better off in this sort of thing if we didn't think of "entertainment" as "recorded performances by strangers". Instead, try to think of it as "participation in the act of creation".
My network is named after molluscs starting with the letter S. Good thing I'm a poor destitute musician who can't afford more than 5 computers, because I think that's all there are! Squid (main box), slug (slow firewall box), snail, scallop, and scapholopod. I haven't been able to come up with any more than that...
As if javascript, java and flash invading everything else wasn't already bad enough...
This is a TERRIBLE idea. One of the great things about html (even more so when done right, with CSS) is that it's a very flexible format - you can take the same html file, display it a million different ways by modifying the css file; extract the text easily; convert it to a million other formats; edit with any text editor; etc... Not to mention the fact that it's usable on any computer - lynx running in dos on a 286 can display a properly done html page. But for most flash, you need something pretty speedy. A lot of flash is slow even on my 850 MHz machine!
Added to this is the proprietary closed-sourcedness of it all...
Count me out.
That said, I LOVE flash - I think it's a wonderful format for vector movies, and all sorts of presentations (www.brokensaints.com is a fine example) but it's not a good replacement for HTML.
Why would you use big fat fonts? If it's someone who's visually impaired reading the site, wouldn't they just increase the font size on their browser? That's why it's there! Specify the normal font size, and let the reader specify what they want their normal font to be in their browser.
However, the majority of web sites need to work on for a large variety of people, with different needs - some people might fall into the group that would love flash and all that, but what if they can't see?
The fact is, you can design for who you WANT to be visiting your site, but you have no idea who will actually be seeing it.
I know my site is seen by browsers from lynx, many versions of IE, and netscape, along with things built from mozilla. This would be true if it was a bunch of music stuff (as it mostly is) or if it was all about programming in linux (which it isn't). I've read both of those sorts of sites on IE and on galeon, and lynx, and all sorts of other browsers, on different platforms. Many of the pages were horrifically annoying on many/most of them, because they abused standards, and used completely unnecessary things.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we want to have another monopoly? (granted, an open, standards-compliant one would be a nice change...)
Better to allow all software to read all formats, as well as is possible. Especially since everyone and their dog already uses Word - easier to get them to install a tiny plugin than the massive bulk of openoffice.
Yeah, filenames are a pain. Except when you know where the file is, and can open it up right away. I'd rather do that than "search on the indexed executive summary".
I disagree with other stuff too - I think we need to focus more on DATA oriented computing. So that we have some data, and we can then edit/view it in anything that supported that sort of data. Get rid of proprietary data formats, and we can then edit data as we see fit (ideally, anyway).
The problem with "task oriented computing" as I see it is that you often end up with "now start the text editor" meaning the single program on the system that can be used for editing text (the way MS is going with Word, it seems). However, I regularly use 4-5 different text editors/word processors on my machines. Sometimes because one is lacking a feature that I need, but sometimes one is just more suited for a given task.
OpenOffice is great for large, freeform documents, for example, lyx is better for more structured writing, vim is my choice for coding, etc etc...
And how do you define all the things you use a "text editor" for as tasks? There's no limit! (e-mail, letters, scholarly writing, technical writing, coding, invoices, etc)
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the term "task-oriented", but it seems like a rather limited way to function to me.
Seems almost every province has a London. PEI was very unimaginative when naming its towns (not many native settlements maybe?), so they all seem to be reused names.
:)
Especially odd, since most of these "towns" consist of 10 houses at the most.
That stuff isn't. But close to a decade of personal mail, writings for school, recordings I've made, the hours I've put into configuring everything, etc... would be damn nice to have around. Especially the e-mail - mine doesn't actually go back more than about 5 years, because I stupidly erased it all without a backup, and then reinstalled windows over it. *sigh*
Since then I've amassed a large quantity of mail, a lot of which would be a serious disappointment to lose.
what a pointless and stupid idea.
Grocery stores are already full of ads and stuff, and you can see very clearly what's on sale and what isn't. Having to haul the ads around with me while shopping does not appeal in the slightest.
Please do.
The whole concept of allowing some web designer to run arbitrary code (though it is *supposed* to be very limited...) on your computer when you visit his web page is rather odd to me.
Whether it's secure or not doesn't take away from the fact that he can use your computer for what he wants to do, rather than what you want to do. Any code can be malicious - no matter what resources on the computer it's allowed to access, it still can use the CPU and memory. An endless loop can still screw things up, and all of it is completely out of your control once you turn on client-side scripting.
(anyone made up a hack so that visitors to a busy web page calculate seti@home units or something like that?)
I don't want a web designer to control how I use my computer. This includes obvious things, like bugs allowing the computer to be crashed/wiped/etc.. But also more subtle things - doing random calculations to suck up CPU, stealing the focus from where *I* want it, opening windows I don't want, messing with the UI that I specifically chose and arranged.
Web designers shouldn't have that much control over us! I leave javascript turned off completely, except in the rare cases where a page requires it, and is worth the annoyance. In general, it only improves my experience, and keeps things safer in general.
I guess I'm lucky to be living somewhere where you don't need much money, but I could *easily* live off of a full-time minimum wage job.
As it stands, I'm working several very part-time jobs, and covering living expenses pretty easily - had to take out a loan for tuition, but that's different.
I'm currently working about 10 hours a week at the help desk for my school's computer centre, getting paid to sing in a church choir, tuning a harpsichord for another university, and taking various freelance performing gigs where I can.
Of course, living where I am, I don't need (or want) a car, my living expenses total about $500 Canadian) and I'm generally pretty low-maintenance.
I have several friends with rather severe money problems - huge debts, damaged credit, etc... - most of whom make about 10 times what I do in a year. There's a point where you just have to look at how little you can live off of - do you really *need* that Xbox? Can you put off upgrading for another year? etc...
I pity those people forced to live in more expensive places. Almost any city in the States - and even more places like London - just paying rent on a small apartment can easily cost several times my total living expenses... Makes you wonder if it's really worth the trouble of living there.
Dan's Data recently had a review of a speaker kit. He was very pleased with the results.
Of course, that company is based in Australia, so if you're not there, you'll probably want to find something closer. Anyone know of any similar companies in North America? (Especially in Canada, for my sake!)
If there was a console version of lyx, I'd be very happy. As it is, the X requirement makes it frequently unusable, though it is my WP of choice, and what I usually end up using.
But of course, you're likely to need more and more bandwith.....
A more pressing question might be, "why should anything be *preserved* at all?"
Why not let culture change and grow so that it can be understood and appreciated by a the new society that's really its audience?
It's not a simple questions, though the overwhelmingly popular answer these days is that everything cultural, from languages, to buildings, to superheroes needs to be preserved for all infinity. This certainly wasn't always the case! I think the very copyright laws that we love to hate here on Slashdot have done a lot to foster this notion (though it's a bit of a chicken & egg situation - the laws might just be in reaction to the attitudes already present).
In any case, I think more people should really consider what's more important: preserving history, or actually building new culture, and letting the past influence the present (and thus the future) on its own terms, without being stuck on a pedestal of historicity.
This might sound like hypocrisy, coming from a harpsichord player like myself, but it's an issue that I wrestle with every day, and have yet to come to a real conclusion.
Of course, not relying on javascript can make things much easier, not only to test, but to use.
Javascript can make things a lot easier for the developer, it seems, but my experience has been that it causes far more harm than good. I leave it off in my browsers with very few exceptions, and any web designer that requires it usually gets a harshly-worded e-mail from me.
There's usually a better way that doesn't use javascript and ends up being more portable and easier to use all around. People are used to using their browsers the way they already work - javascript changes this normal behaviour.
Really, this machine's more powerful than you need for word processing. My advice would be to track down wordperfect 5.1 and freedos, and install them.
:)
It's not wysiwyg, but that's not really much of a problem for most people.
It's actually much EASIER in my experience for most people to use this sort of system. For the simple things most people do in word processors, you need to learn and memorize (or just write down) about 10 commands that are easily entered, you don't have to worry about stability, or the periodic reinstalls that windows seems to necessitate, and you don't end up trying to set up linux or something similar in a truly idiot-proof way.
And hell, if you go that route, you could sell that overpowered machine and get an XT or something.
I know next to nothing on the subject, but when I was tinkering about back in the good ole' DOS days, I came across this list of interrupts: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/
I expect most people have seen it. It lists the following fod 0d:
0D INT 0D C - IRQ5 - FIXED DISK (PC,XT), LPT2 (AT), reserved (PS/2)
0D INT 0D C - IRQ5 - Tandy 1000 60 Hz RAM REFRESH
0D INT 0D - HP 95LX - INFRARED INTERRUPT
0D INT 0D C - CPU-generated (80286+) - GENERAL PROTECTION VIOLATION
At McGill University most people use Corporate Time, by Steltor (recently bought by Oracle). It's not open-source or free, but it seems to work quite well. Most people in my department seem to like it, though I don't have any need for it, really - a notebook with a date written on each page is all the calendaring I need.
At the very least, it's an alternative... and it can sync to Outlook, and to Palmpilots.
Also, it's got clients for many operating systems, including linux (I haven't tried it) and a half-decent web interface.
I, for one, don't want you customizing web pages for me. If anyone does customizing like that, I want it to be ME.
If you just use basic standards-compliant code, then browsers can show it how they want, and users and configure the browser to show it how they want. What's to say your fonts look good on my system? You're not here...
FOr that matter, the classical music written between 1550 and 1650. Or 1750 and 1800. Or 1850 and 1900. Hell.. ALL of it.
If your classical music sounds much like electronica, you're not playing it very well. Just because, on paper, it can be described in terms of precise rhythms and exact tempos and so on, it doesn't mean that it should be performed that way. Any pre-20th century music is very flexible in almost every way. It's just the advent of modernism and mechanization that brought on much strict adherence to the printed page, metronomes, and other gizmos.
There wasn't much of an industry based on recording and copying, maybe. The industry focused much more on live performance. I wish today's did as well.
I think it's kind of sad, not surprising, but disappointing, that we feel we need an "entertainment industry" to keep us occupied.
Back in the Good Ole' Days(tm) they didn't have recordings of the superstars. If you wanted music, you played it, or hired someone who could do it for you, for those higher in finance than in talent. And if you were lucky/dedicated/rich&famous you could hear the superstars.
I think we'd all be a lot better off in this sort of thing if we didn't think of "entertainment" as "recorded performances by strangers". Instead, try to think of it as "participation in the act of creation".
My network is named after molluscs starting with the letter S. Good thing I'm a poor destitute musician who can't afford more than 5 computers, because I think that's all there are! Squid (main box), slug (slow firewall box), snail, scallop, and scapholopod. I haven't been able to come up with any more than that...
Not to mention that burning mp3's is not necessarily illegal either. Distributing them would be.
As if javascript, java and flash invading everything else wasn't already bad enough...
This is a TERRIBLE idea. One of the great things about html (even more so when done right, with CSS) is that it's a very flexible format - you can take the same html file, display it a million different ways by modifying the css file; extract the text easily; convert it to a million other formats; edit with any text editor; etc... Not to mention the fact that it's usable on any computer - lynx running in dos on a 286 can display a properly done html page. But for most flash, you need something pretty speedy. A lot of flash is slow even on my 850 MHz machine!
Added to this is the proprietary closed-sourcedness of it all...
Count me out.
That said, I LOVE flash - I think it's a wonderful format for vector movies, and all sorts of presentations (www.brokensaints.com is a fine example) but it's not a good replacement for HTML.
Why would you use big fat fonts? If it's someone who's visually impaired reading the site, wouldn't they just increase the font size on their browser? That's why it's there! Specify the normal font size, and let the reader specify what they want their normal font to be in their browser.
However, the majority of web sites need to work on for a large variety of people, with different needs - some people might fall into the group that would love flash and all that, but what if they can't see?
The fact is, you can design for who you WANT to be visiting your site, but you have no idea who will actually be seeing it.
I know my site is seen by browsers from lynx, many versions of IE, and netscape, along with things built from mozilla. This would be true if it was a bunch of music stuff (as it mostly is) or if it was all about programming in linux (which it isn't). I've read both of those sorts of sites on IE and on galeon, and lynx, and all sorts of other browsers, on different platforms. Many of the pages were horrifically annoying on many/most of them, because they abused standards, and used completely unnecessary things.