Rather than looking to TV for an example, look to "normal" (ie: non-web) computer programs. Most have a splash screen of some sort, consisting mostly of the program name, a copyright notice, and some fancy graphic.
Most people don't complain about these. Moreover, they actually have a purpose. They are there to "hide" the program start-up. Most programs take a second or 2 (or in the case of MS' programs, a minute or 2 (sorry, couldn't resist)) to load up, into memory. Rather than sit there, loading, and doing nothing visibly, leaving the user to wonder, "did I actually click the icon? does the program actually work?", the splash screen provides some sort of feedback to inform the user that something is, indeed happening.
And this is a Good Thing (TM). One of my biggest pet peeves about XEmacs (an otherwise nice program (no flamewars, please!)) is that it doesn't do that. It just sits there and loads in the background, and I never know whether it's loading or not, for the first several minutes.
So the natural impulse to most web designers, when creating a web site, is to treat it as a standalone program. For the most part, I think this actually works. Except for a few things, like the splash screen.
Since the splash screen takes just as long to load as the normal starting page would, it becomes useless. Moreover, you can tell when the main screen loads. Even if, for whatever reason, the main page takes a while to load, you can still tell when the process has started. You can still tell when the site exists. So the splash screen becomes pointless. Redundant.
In fact, if -- as is apparently the case here (I haven't actually checked the site out myself) -- the splash screen takes a long time to load, it is counterproductive. It re-introduces the very problem it was designed to solve.
But most web designers, for whatever reason, don't realize this intuitively. The splash screen seems just as valid (especially when they are designing it on a local system) as it would have been on a standalone program.
So it becomes up to us ("us" being the web-browsing public) to inform them that their lovely splash screen is, in fact, detrimental to fluid browsing.
Just a few thoughts of mine... don't kill me over them:-) -- - Sean
> And if I had been hassled by a security guard for that I'd have seriously thought about telling him to fuck himself....
... in which case I fervently hope we're never in the same airport, or on the same plane together.
Because that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. There have been innumerable cases of someone abandoning their bag, for just a few minutes, even, and a terrorist taking the opportunity to slip drugs, explosives, who knows what else into the bag, then disappear back into the crowd. The owner of the bag never knows a thing, but the whole world knows about it when the plane blows up in mid-air.
Don't brush it off -- it's happened. More than twice.
And it is for exactly that sort of reason that we have security guards, and whatnot, around. 1. To catch the criminals. 2. To catch the criminally stupid.
If your first response would have been to tell him to "fuck himself...." then I suggest you start using your brain, not your mouth. -- - Sean
Dude, there's a HUGE differerence between being forthright about what you are, and spamming every single discussion board in existence. I don't mind your statuphilia or whatever you call it. I don't mind you being open about it, and proud of the fact. I'm happy for you and the fact you've found something you enjoy.
But I absolutely hate the way you go around spamming every single slashdot board in existence, pushing it in people's faces where it's not wanted, and most especially, not on topic. I'm sorry... can't you read anything from the fact that your posts are constantly marked off-topic? I'm sorry for being harsh, but... what the hell's wrong with you???
Be happy about your statue fetish. Be proud of yourself for who you are. If you find a discussion on sexuality, or repression of sexuality, or sex with statues, or sex with people, or whatever... post there.
But don't come into a fucking technology forum discussing news and tech, and fucking well SPAM us with that stuff! It's not wanted. It's OFF TOPIC!!!!!!!!!
You don't see anyone else spamming every single thread with posts on what they do to their girlfriend, or boyfriend, or whatever. And there's a damn good reason for it. It's SPAM. It's NOT WANTED. It's OFF TOPIC. Get it????
If you want to advocate, fine! Do so! BUT NOT HERE!!!!!
The only thing you're doing is making people hostile. Hostile to you, and your ideas and your beliefs. You're being counter-productive, dude. You're turning people OFF, not ON. -- - Sean
Oh, I'm well aware of it. But that wasn't the point. The original post was talking about "persecution" and "harrassment" (I use the terms lightly) faced by Christians in the United States of America Today.
I agree that Christians elsewhere in the world do face such things. To a certain extent, that's even what I was referring to when I was talking about real forms of harrassment. But they sure as hell don't exist in the US. Not today. -- - Sean
Man, I'd hate to see what you'd call it when faced with some real harrassment, like family members jailed for no reason, like house arrest, like your business closed down (again for no reason), like your credit cards being canceled, like any one of the myriad other things that go on in many places around the world...
I don't think you know how easy you got it! -- - Sean
Well, then, I guess it depends on the person using the product, and on their personal preferences.
Why? Because if I pull up my copy of Word, and count, I get...
*pulls up Word and counts*
...38 toolbar buttons that I use regularly (once every couple of days or more often). I have my toolbar customized so that only the buttons I find useful (ie: I use them on a regular basis; see above) are there. And there are 38 of them.
Now, granted, it's not as bad as the screenshots they showed, but still, it's more than "one or two," and I, for one, don't find them stupid. I happen to quite like toolbar buttons! -- - Sean
"Barely" notice your own phone? I got a pair of those suckers, and I regularly look up from my screen to see the little light on the phone flashing, telling me there's a message there (and I'd been sitting right in front of it the whole time). Missed the fire alarm once. My coworker had to pull the headphones off my head and tell me that there was a fire drill. Oops! Those things are sweet! -- - Sean
Yes! Finally! Someone else who really likes Ummagumma! I was despairing of ever finding anyone.
Not sure which disc I like better, though, the live or the studio.
They're both really good, but I think I like the live disc better -- the version of Careful With that Axe, Eugene is just unparallelled. The Come in #51, Your Time is Up rendidion off the Zabriskie Point soundtrack is also good, but the live one on Ummagumma just kicks total ass! -- - Sean
That left-right oscillation "shit" on Interstellar Overdrive wasn't their doing. The original was mono, not stereo (that's why I have the rereleased "mono" version of Piper!). It was the record company (can't remember which one, sorry; I could look it up but I'm lazy) that introduced those effects when they put out the "improved" (heh) stereo version.
The band fought it and tried to prevernt it from getting released, but lost the argument.
But right now, I have The Proclaimers' Sunshine on Leith on, and I was singing along to it at the top of my voice, when I came across your comment... thought it kinda funny. -- - Sean
> If it's a linux RPM system (like redhat), you can un-apply a patch just by installing the old rpm.
Heh... unless you try installing the latest glibc rpm's without first making sure that they'll be compatible with any other libs on yer system... if you do that, then you're hosed! You won't be able to run anything at all without encountering a segfault (well... nothing that's written in C, anyway... and that inludes RPM).
I learned this one the hard way... ended up having to cross my fingers and hit the power button (you think 'shutdown -h now' worked??), mount the HD in another machine, manually copy over any *libc*.* files I could find, update the config file by hand (can't remember the name... the one that ldconfig works with), cross my fingers again, stick the drive back in the old machine and reboot.
So how can I run multiple programs at once with this scheme? Maybe I'm missing something, but...
As an example (I'm at work right now, so running NT, but the principle still applies), I am currently running:
- Outlook 98 - Word 97 - Excel 97 - PowerPoint 97 - Access 97 - Opera 3.6 - WordPad (5 copies) - MSIE 5.0 (3 copies) - Notepad (about 10 copies) - VB 6.0 (2 copies) - VC++ 5.0 - MS Peer Web Services - CD Player - Calculator - Various explorer windows - ICQ - QuickADS (a program I'm developing) - VShield - Various other crap.
So, how do you propose I do that off of bootable CD's? PC's aren't consoles, and they don't work like consoles. My PC sure as hell isn't just a game-playing machine (although I do run games on occasion, yes). It has very different needs. Unless you can figure something out, then thanks but no thanks.
And I have zero intention of waiting while each one of these loads itself off a CD into memory. That just ain't happening. Bzzzt! Thanks for playing...
Ok, granted, the particular implementation may be crap, but the design philosophy behind the interface is what he's getting at... and that seems to be fairly solid.
Or rather, it seems to be something that most people are relatively comfortable with... moreso than the howlings would indicate that they are with the way linux currently does things.
Don't get me wrong... I install everything via "tar -zxvf && less README &&./configure && make && make install;"
But for a newbie, a standard GUI interface that hides the background mechanism, installs into a location the user can supply interactively, and provides a consistent user-friendly uninstaller would be a Good Thing (TM).
Hell... who knows... if it ever matured at all, I might be convinced to use it myself. -- - Sean
Ummm... he didn't say that he couldn't run it under Win2k, he said he couldn't run it under Win2k using the directx drivers!
He went on to say that the OpenGL drivers (presumably still under Win2k) work fine.
Then again, of course, as with anything, YMMV. -- - Sean
Re:We need to help these poor guys...
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 1
The only problem is that you would start to run into people who don't want their sites mirrored, for whatever reason (advertising comes to mind). I'm under the impression that CmdrTaco, et al. have already given this sort of scheme a quick once-over, but then rejected it for this very idea. At any rate, it's definitely been discussed.
The end result has been that there's enough resistance to it on the part of the webmasters that it's generally considered to be not worth the trouble. -- - Sean
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than looking to TV for an example, look to "normal" (ie: non-web) computer programs. Most have a splash screen of some sort, consisting mostly of the program name, a copyright notice, and some fancy graphic.
:-)
Most people don't complain about these. Moreover, they actually have a purpose. They are there to "hide" the program start-up. Most programs take a second or 2 (or in the case of MS' programs, a minute or 2 (sorry, couldn't resist)) to load up, into memory. Rather than sit there, loading, and doing nothing visibly, leaving the user to wonder, "did I actually click the icon? does the program actually work?", the splash screen provides some sort of feedback to inform the user that something is, indeed happening.
And this is a Good Thing (TM). One of my biggest pet peeves about XEmacs (an otherwise nice program (no flamewars, please!)) is that it doesn't do that. It just sits there and loads in the background, and I never know whether it's loading or not, for the first several minutes.
So the natural impulse to most web designers, when creating a web site, is to treat it as a standalone program. For the most part, I think this actually works. Except for a few things, like the splash screen.
Since the splash screen takes just as long to load as the normal starting page would, it becomes useless. Moreover, you can tell when the main screen loads. Even if, for whatever reason, the main page takes a while to load, you can still tell when the process has started. You can still tell when the site exists. So the splash screen becomes pointless. Redundant.
In fact, if -- as is apparently the case here (I haven't actually checked the site out myself) -- the splash screen takes a long time to load, it is counterproductive. It re-introduces the very problem it was designed to solve.
But most web designers, for whatever reason, don't realize this intuitively. The splash screen seems just as valid (especially when they are designing it on a local system) as it would have been on a standalone program.
So it becomes up to us ("us" being the web-browsing public) to inform them that their lovely splash screen is, in fact, detrimental to fluid browsing.
Just a few thoughts of mine... don't kill me over them
--
- Sean
> And if I had been hassled by a security guard for that I'd have seriously thought about telling him to fuck himself....
... in which case I fervently hope we're never in the same airport, or on the same plane together.
Because that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. There have been innumerable cases of someone abandoning their bag, for just a few minutes, even, and a terrorist taking the opportunity to slip drugs, explosives, who knows what else into the bag, then disappear back into the crowd. The owner of the bag never knows a thing, but the whole world knows about it when the plane blows up in mid-air.
Don't brush it off -- it's happened. More than twice.
And it is for exactly that sort of reason that we have security guards, and whatnot, around. 1. To catch the criminals. 2. To catch the criminally stupid.
If your first response would have been to tell him to "fuck himself...." then I suggest you start using your brain, not your mouth.
--
- Sean
Dude, there's a HUGE differerence between being forthright about what you are, and spamming every single discussion board in existence. I don't mind your statuphilia or whatever you call it. I don't mind you being open about it, and proud of the fact. I'm happy for you and the fact you've found something you enjoy.
But I absolutely hate the way you go around spamming every single slashdot board in existence, pushing it in people's faces where it's not wanted, and most especially, not on topic. I'm sorry... can't you read anything from the fact that your posts are constantly marked off-topic? I'm sorry for being harsh, but... what the hell's wrong with you???
Be happy about your statue fetish. Be proud of yourself for who you are. If you find a discussion on sexuality, or repression of sexuality, or sex with statues, or sex with people, or whatever... post there.
But don't come into a fucking technology forum discussing news and tech, and fucking well SPAM us with that stuff! It's not wanted. It's OFF TOPIC!!!!!!!!!
You don't see anyone else spamming every single thread with posts on what they do to their girlfriend, or boyfriend, or whatever. And there's a damn good reason for it. It's SPAM. It's NOT WANTED. It's OFF TOPIC. Get it????
If you want to advocate, fine! Do so! BUT NOT HERE!!!!!
The only thing you're doing is making people hostile. Hostile to you, and your ideas and your beliefs. You're being counter-productive, dude. You're turning people OFF, not ON.
--
- Sean
Oh, I'm well aware of it. But that wasn't the point. The original post was talking about "persecution" and "harrassment" (I use the terms lightly) faced by Christians in the United States of America Today.
I agree that Christians elsewhere in the world do face such things. To a certain extent, that's even what I was referring to when I was talking about real forms of harrassment. But they sure as hell don't exist in the US. Not today.
--
- Sean
What???
You call that harrassment!!!?!?!??
Man, I'd hate to see what you'd call it when faced with some real harrassment, like family members jailed for no reason, like house arrest, like your business closed down (again for no reason), like your credit cards being canceled, like any one of the myriad other things that go on in many places around the world...
I don't think you know how easy you got it!
--
- Sean
Moderators! Bump the parent post up! Really good discussion on Hidden API's!!
--
- Sean
Ummm... dude? Did you actually look at the screenshots in the article?
--
- Sean
Hmmm... wouldn't surprise me if they were the ones that came up with the brilliant innovation that is the Annoying Talking Paperclip (TM).
--
- Sean
Well, then, I guess it depends on the person using the product, and on their personal preferences.
...38 toolbar buttons that I use regularly (once every couple of days or more often). I have my toolbar customized so that only the buttons I find useful (ie: I use them on a regular basis; see above) are there. And there are 38 of them.
Why? Because if I pull up my copy of Word, and count, I get...
*pulls up Word and counts*
Now, granted, it's not as bad as the screenshots they showed, but still, it's more than "one or two," and I, for one, don't find them stupid. I happen to quite like toolbar buttons!
--
- Sean
Erm, minor point, but...
What the hell does how long it's been since the last code change have to do with anything?
--
- Sean
"Barely" notice your own phone? I got a pair of those suckers, and I regularly look up from my screen to see the little light on the phone flashing, telling me there's a message there (and I'd been sitting right in front of it the whole time). Missed the fire alarm once. My coworker had to pull the headphones off my head and tell me that there was a fire drill. Oops! Those things are sweet!
--
- Sean
Yes! Finally! Someone else who really likes Ummagumma! I was despairing of ever finding anyone.
Not sure which disc I like better, though, the live or the studio.
They're both really good, but I think I like the live disc better -- the version of Careful With that Axe, Eugene is just unparallelled. The Come in #51, Your Time is Up rendidion off the Zabriskie Point soundtrack is also good, but the live one on Ummagumma just kicks total ass!
--
- Sean
That left-right oscillation "shit" on Interstellar Overdrive wasn't their doing. The original was mono, not stereo (that's why I have the rereleased "mono" version of Piper!). It was the record company (can't remember which one, sorry; I could look it up but I'm lazy) that introduced those effects when they put out the "improved" (heh) stereo version.
The band fought it and tried to prevernt it from getting released, but lost the argument.
And you're right. It is shit.
--
- Sean
> And by the way, which one's Pink?
:-)
Anderson. But he ain't around no mo'.
--
- Sean
> It doesnt last very long tho'
:-)
Hmmm... my first thought would be that it should be fairly easy to work a 'tail' into there somewhere and solve that problem...
--
- Sean
No, you're not! At least, not unless I am, too...
O wait...
But right now, I have The Proclaimers' Sunshine on Leith on, and I was singing along to it at the top of my voice, when I came across your comment... thought it kinda funny.
--
- Sean
> If it's a linux RPM system (like redhat), you can un-apply a patch just by installing the old rpm.
Heh... unless you try installing the latest glibc rpm's without first making sure that they'll be compatible with any other libs on yer system... if you do that, then you're hosed! You won't be able to run anything at all without encountering a segfault (well... nothing that's written in C, anyway... and that inludes RPM).
I learned this one the hard way... ended up having to cross my fingers and hit the power button (you think 'shutdown -h now' worked??), mount the HD in another machine, manually copy over any *libc*.* files I could find, update the config file by hand (can't remember the name... the one that ldconfig works with), cross my fingers again, stick the drive back in the old machine and reboot.
Luckily, it worked.
*whew* !
--
- Sean
> s/just/jury/
Unterminated command string! hehe... just picking nits...
--
- Sean
>Microsoft's Motto: Hiding messes behind abstraction layers.
:-)
Heh... take it a step or 3 farther...
Microsoft:
1. Hiding messes behind abstraction layers.
2. Hiding undocumented API's behind messes.
3. Hiding broken standards behind undocumented API's.
--
- Sean
So how can I run multiple programs at once with this scheme? Maybe I'm missing something, but...
As an example (I'm at work right now, so running NT, but the principle still applies), I am currently running:
- Outlook 98
- Word 97
- Excel 97
- PowerPoint 97
- Access 97
- Opera 3.6
- WordPad (5 copies)
- MSIE 5.0 (3 copies)
- Notepad (about 10 copies)
- VB 6.0 (2 copies)
- VC++ 5.0
- MS Peer Web Services
- CD Player
- Calculator
- Various explorer windows
- ICQ
- QuickADS (a program I'm developing)
- VShield
- Various other crap.
So, how do you propose I do that off of bootable CD's? PC's aren't consoles, and they don't work like consoles. My PC sure as hell isn't just a game-playing machine (although I do run games on occasion, yes). It has very different needs. Unless you can figure something out, then thanks but no thanks.
And I have zero intention of waiting while each one of these loads itself off a CD into memory. That just ain't happening. Bzzzt! Thanks for playing...
Next!
--
- Sean
Eh? I know of an uninstall routine that works just great!
It goes... "rm -rf"
--
- Sean
Ok, granted, the particular implementation may be crap, but the design philosophy behind the interface is what he's getting at... and that seems to be fairly solid.
./configure && make && make install;"
Or rather, it seems to be something that most people are relatively comfortable with... moreso than the howlings would indicate that they are with the way linux currently does things.
Don't get me wrong... I install everything via "tar -zxvf && less README &&
But for a newbie, a standard GUI interface that hides the background mechanism, installs into a location the user can supply interactively, and provides a consistent user-friendly uninstaller would be a Good Thing (TM).
Hell... who knows... if it ever matured at all, I might be convinced to use it myself.
--
- Sean
Ummm... he didn't say that he couldn't run it under Win2k, he said he couldn't run it under Win2k using the directx drivers!
He went on to say that the OpenGL drivers (presumably still under Win2k) work fine.
Then again, of course, as with anything, YMMV.
--
- Sean
The only problem is that you would start to run into people who don't want their sites mirrored, for whatever reason (advertising comes to mind). I'm under the impression that CmdrTaco, et al. have already given this sort of scheme a quick once-over, but then rejected it for this very idea. At any rate, it's definitely been discussed.
The end result has been that there's enough resistance to it on the part of the webmasters that it's generally considered to be not worth the trouble.
--
- Sean
Erm... YAO (Yet Another Opinion), of course, but IMHO, when I think "big Linux distro," I tend to think (in this order):
- Red Hat
- Slackware
- Debian
- SuSE
- Caldera
- PPC Linux
- Mandrake
- Corel (soon to be)
Again, I dunno if I'm the "typical geek" (highly UNlikely), but that's how I think of them in terms of mindshare.
--
- Sean