I don't think that's such a sad thing. It'll be actively marketed in one way or another as long as someone sees a way to make money from it. IBM has found such a way (or believes that it has), but even if it stops then linux and open source will still be there for me to use --- complete with all of the enhancements that IBM provided.
I realise that it's not exactly what you're referring to, but in the past week or so I've been hearing Microsoft commercials on the morning radio, definitely peak time on high rating stations, that directly target open source software.
I don't recall the exact wording but the commercials definitely say something along the lines of "you may think there are free software alternatives, but there are really hidden costs." This is where I am locally (New Zealand), but I understand that Microsoft has been taking similar approaches in other places.
From the tone of the commercials, I honestly can't see how Microsoft could be doing anything but shooting itself in the foot with this type of campaign. One of the main barriers to open source is that people haven't heard of it, and another is that people don't see it as something that's worth seriously trying to use. It's a credit for open source whenever anyone hears that Microsoft is afraid of it, because that implies that lots of other people actually are using it and successfully.
How any person can get to university without realising that plaigarism is wrong is beyond me.
I don't wish to defend this guy at all, but in my experience it is possible to not get that message, especially if you're coming from a different culture.
I do a lot of computer science tutoring in an english speaking university (not in the US) where we get a lot of international students from mostly asian countries for whom English is a second language. Often they've only had a few months to learn it after flying over before starting academic courses here.
What sometimes seems to happen is that people who aren't natural English speakers have trouble reading or understanding the assignments that we give them. The normal procedure is for them to get together in groups of their own and translate the assignment, work on it and then translate the answer back into English as a group. (I don't know for certain but I'm reasonably sure that this is what happens from observations and a reasonable amount of marking.) It's not so much copying someone else's work as all handing in the same work.
They may know that it's wrong, but combine it with:
their situation of being far from home -- often with very high expectations of excellence from parents who are paying a lot of money for them to be here.
being in a place where they often feel outcast from the majority, at least in part due to language barriers and cultural differences.
having trouble not just with understanding the assignments, but sometimes also the course material such as what the lecturer is actually saying.
The result is that we sometimes get groups of assignments handed in that have very similar answers, often in nearly identical broken English with occasional variations here and there. It's also obvious when they've switched to copying something from another source because the writing style very suddenly changes to much more fluent language. It's not just because they don't understand that it's wrong -- often they do. But there are a lot of other factors also causing it.
I don't mean to imply that this is okay, either. We stress to students over and over again that plaguarism isn't acceptable. When we spot it happening, it's dealt with. At the very least, the students will usually be spoken to and where appropriate, marks will be docked. Kicking them from a course isn't something that will normally happen, though, unless they're excessively bad offenders. More often than not people tend to drop the programme before they get that far -- they're too stressed out.
What I think will be interesting to watch is how software also starts evolving from apps with a narrow focus (think along the lines of early 90's WordPerfect) to apps which try to do pretty much everything - perhaps a bad example, but MS Word already allows table and cell editing similar to Excel, graphics manipulation, and desktop publishing.
That's true. I've been suspicious for a while that apps in the way we think of them will eventually disappear along with the generic desktop/laptop/notebook/PDA computer. Word processing and spreadsheets, for instance, are quite different tasks... yet we essentially operate these tasks through the same interface. (Keyboard, mouse, monitor.)
This is mostly due to the superior economics of cramming lots of digital tasks into the one box. Word processing used to be done on typewriters, then electronic typewriters, but before the typewriter could develop much further with the computer technology, word processors became good enough and took over.
Using the same physical tool for several things is cheaper and it takes less space. What you lose, though, are the advantages of having specialist features on the hardware. It creates confusion, because it's often unclear to a user which parts of what they're doing will work the same, and which parts will work differently. (The keyboard and mouse are normally modal -- they do different things depending on the internal state of the system.)
I think the real challenge of successfully implementing ubiquity is figuring out how to effectively combine the necessary functionality for people's tasks with specialised interfaces that are easy to understand. I'm personally skeptical that this will involve leaving these tasks inside a generic box in which people "run" an application that they want to use.
I like to hope that computers will eventually merge into the background so we won't need to think of them or necessarily decide what application is necessary for the task-at-hand. This will probably involve a revolution of sorts in what hardware is, and a big merging of what software is and how it interacts with other software... if different software can even be distinguished.
I don't think it's too unlikely that computer hardware will end up as a public good (in the same way as roads and street lighting), much more merged all around society than the discrete computers we buy and sell today, with task agents (of sorts) following people around as they interact and do things.
On the surface it's an HCI issue, but realistically every segment of computer science is involved.
Now I don't know anyone at all that uses Netscape and whenever I'm asked to recommend a decent browser I suggest Firefox. AOL would do better to give up on Netscape and throw their support behind Mozilla instead.
I have trouble understanding why anyone who's in the know still would use Netscape. It's now essentially the same browser as Mozilla having been forked from identical code.
The only thing that it seems to add is a combination of the brand name, more product placement and advertising in the download, and the popup-blocking option disabled from the front end. (I haven't checked that last one lately.)
Both of my parents have used Netscape since NS4 -- it came on their ISP's CD many years ago, and neither has ever been familiar with MSIE at all. Clicking the icon in Win95/98 usually resulted in complicated dialogs and wizards popping up asking about setting up an Internet connection, and there was never a need to follow all of that through. They've also always used Netscape for email because they have from the start, and I don't think have ever considered anything else.
Netscape dwindled for years, but they finally upgraded to NS6 after it was released, converting hundreds of megabytes of email and other profile bits and pieces. It was quite a transition and very buggy even compared with NS4, and it took quite a bit for them to get used to it.
A few months ago my dad bought a new PC, and he wanted me to help him move everything over to it. I took the opportunity to suggest that he switch to Mozilla for his mail and browsing, which by then was flying in it's stability and performance compared with a few years ago. The conversion was relatively easy because it's such a similar browser. As far as I can tell he's now having a much better experience with anything that would be Netscape-branded.
Well I agree with you. I do think it more likely that Microsoft would at the very least turn off the graphical part of Windows, remove it completely, or possibly re-write it from scratch.
What I really don't understand is why it would be necessary or smart to brand such a product as Windows at all. Windows means graphical user interface, and the way it's presented ties quite closely to desktop use. It definitely doesn't mean the remote administration that's likely to be required for an HPC, and trying to remotely administer a Windows box is usually quite clumsy compared with a unix box unless you drop a lot of the traditional Windows UI stuff that's often so tied into its operation.
When I think of Windows, and I don't think I'm alone, one of the first impressions that comes to mind is a relatively klunky monolithic GUI-dependant operating system that spends a lot of time drawing pretty front-end pictures. This almost certainly isn't an accurate picture of what's actually happening all the time and it's not to say that Windows couldn't be adjusted to work in other ways. But it's a first impression.
You can at least argue that the graphical side of things is good for usability on the desktop (even though usability realistically takes a lot more than pretty pictures), but why on earth would Microsoft want to continue that image into an HPC market? Surely they have completely different customers in that market with different goals that likely don't include chewing processor time on pretty pictures for the UI.
To me at least, it'd make much more sense for Microsoft to simply create a new operating system here from scratch (or buy a company or whatever they do), and call it something that's not Windows. It could be Microsoft HPC Server, for instance, and be completely independent from Windows. Microsoft can then claim that their new OS specialises in HPC tasks, and it'll also give them an independent OS product to push in the future if either it or MS Windows collapses.
What I meant was font size, bold, and italic (such as for emphasis or to make titles stand out). I don't want to debate the merits of including the font information, but if the original author included such formatting in the paper original, even just to add emphasis to dialogue he/she had written, I think it's accurate to say that "information" is lost in the plain ASCII version.
I'm not sure what the official PG archive line says, but the stated Primary Rule in the Distributed Proofreaders Proofreading Guidelines states that "the final electronic book seen by a reader, possibly many years in the future, should accurately convey the intent of the author".
It's true that some information may be lost, but I read this to mean that at the very least, some intelligence will be applied when deciding what information to keep and what to throw away. It's fortunate that most authoring is more about writing words than formatting them, and the majority of the works currently being preserved by PG would have originally been typed on a either typewriter or something with less accuracy.
The proofing guidelines also instruct on how to mark up bold and italics, and the proofing interface makes it relatively easy to enter non-ASCII characters, such as accented letters, which come up in books from time to time. Even if it's not official, there appears to be an attempt to save a lot of the important information so that at the very least it can be translated later.
It's still kept quite simple though, and I guess that's because for every extra complication, the participation would go down.
But all of that said, I don't think the main goal of Project Gutenberg is to provide output that will easily parse in people's perl scripts. The primary goal is to save as many out-of-copyright books as possible before they completely disappear, and make them reasonably accessible... which plain text files do remarkably well. If added complication causes things to go noticibly more slowly then it conflicts with that goal.
Perhaps instead, a separate project is needed with different goals, that would take works outputted from PG and standardise them to a format that's more accessible to technology. If it works out and they liaise well enough, they might end up merging in the end anyway. I think a good proof of concept would be needed first, though.
Ever heard of a man named Andrew Gilligan? The Hutton Report? The whole thing was a cut-and-dried case of the BBC asserting its right to distort stories and transmit outright lies.
I'm not exactly qualified to comment on the journalistic integrity of news outlets with any authority, but I don't think it's fair to mention that without at least acknowledging that heads rolled at BBC once it was revealed what happened. There was a lot of embarassment for several people in high-up positions, who'd knowingly failed their obligations to provide an accurate reporting service.
I don't personally see the BBC as quite the same as a network like Fox, where it at least seems to be trendy to bend the truth as part of the process. Or at the very least, lots of people joke about how Fox does so frequently, and lots of other people (apparently) still treat it as a serious and accurate source of information.
I'm surprised that nobody (at least who's been modded up enough) seems to have said anything about two particular projects that attempt to deal with a couple of the main problems that developers tend to have with MSIE.
"IE7" is an Internet Explorer hack that parses standards-based CSS that you provide in a page, and mangles it so that earlier versions of IE display it how it's supposed to be displayed.
"PNG in Windows IE" is a hack that tells IE to use a separate ActiveX control to load any PNG's in the page, instead of the internal image display code. This causes it to get alpha blending right. (I think there are a few variations of this hack around the web besides the one I've linked to.)
Both are javascript hacks that you can include at the top of a page and add the appropriate construct around them so that only IE will see them. Clearly they're not perfect, and I'd be edgey about using them in important websites without a lot more testing.
But has anyone actually used them effectively? How useful are they?
I've managed to get the PNG hack working, but I still haven't been able to get IE7 going. (Possibly something to do with the server sending the wrong MIME type.)
One thing that confuses me a little is why TLD's need to be restricted in the first place. If anyone was (easily and accessibly) able to create their own TLD and sell (or give away) names underneath them on their own terms, it would reduce the motivation for businesses to go and snap up every single variation of their name under every TLD.
Presumably the people or businesses who snap up the better TLD's and run them more reliably will simply get more people wanting to use them to index their servers on the net. Meanwhile everyone else would still be able to run their thousands of other TLD's under their own terms.
There are already alternative domain registries that do things this way (eg. OpenDNS), but they're immediately disadvantaged because nobody who matters uses their name servers.
I'm not an expert on DNS. Is there some overriding technical reason these days why TLD's need to be restricted to a small and controlled minority? Or is it something else?
I for one do not have much faith in our legal system. forget OJ, look at Microsoft. half a decade in the courts has not forced a change in Microsoft's business practices.
I'm not sure if I agree entirely. I have a friend working at Microsoft, on the Windows team, who I had the opportunity to meet again recently.
She gave us an informal seminar about working in Microsoft, where she pointed out that any meetings that they have with any clients, including the MS Office team, have to be planned very carefully in advance. One of the rules that they're required to be very careful about is that they don't give any internal information to anyone that doesn't go to everyone.
On the higher corporate level, Microsoft hasn't really changed a lot. It manipulates the law and competitors, abuses its position, and I fully agree that that's a bad thing and the legal enforcement hasn't had the effect that it should. But it's not entirely correct to say that the lawsuits haven't had at least some effect on many of the procedures followed within Microsoft. Teams that might often have intermingled frequently are no longer allowed to talk with each other in detail about what they're doing.
When it is declassified, they just delete the text needed to lower the classification, or maybe replace the text with a few '#' to show were text was missing (but never a one-for-one character replacement).
...and as long as they use Microsoft Word to save their new revisions, it's fine with me.:)
One of the more contriversial aspects of the US space shuttle is if there's really a proper justification for the manned spaceflight that it provides. (Very expensive, arguably most of what it does could be done without people, etc.)
I guess one of the differences is that NASA already has a lot of sunk costs in it's space shuttle programme. Whether it makes economic sense or not, part of the reason that NASA maintains it's manned space programme is probably because it already has one and doesn't want to lose it.
The ESA doesn't have one at the moment, which (to me) makes it very interesting that they're trying to start one. Is there a big economic justification that the ESA has for putting people in space?
Or alternatively, is it for the same contriversial and possibly political reasons that the US keeps people there? I'm not trying to imply that it's good or bad to have people in space, but I'm curious if it for some reason makes a lot of economic sense for the ESA to have a manned space programme moreso than NASA.
To think that these voice actors would consider destroying a brilliant show which they had benefited so much from because they couldn't live on 125 K a week just makes me sick.
I'm sorry, but I just disagree with the tone of what you've posted.
Most if not all of these people have been working in this job for sixteen years! That's sixteen years of their life that they've been required to set aside their time to go and do voice acting for the same show with the same characters over and over again. I don't think it's at all fair to blame them if they'd rather be elsewhere doing other things. If Fox told them to get bent and fired them, it'd free up their time! Chances are they'd be more than happy to do other work and be paid much less. It'd certainly be more interesting for them.
But Fox doesn't want them to go and do other things. Fox would much rather they kept their jobs doing voice acting for a show that rakes in lots and lots of money for Fox. The voice actors are not like animators, who Fox can easily replace if they leave.
The contract negotiations are simply part of the process. The actors are simply setting a price. If they receive it they'll feel compensated in the face of what they'd much rather be doing. If Fox won't meet that then the voice actors leave and get to spend their time on other things that are more interesting.
But if you have a problem with this, then don't place the burden on the actors for "blackmailing" poor, defenceless Fox and the viewing public. They've been sticking with the show for long enough already, and they don't have any obligation to anyone to keep going if they're sick of it.
If you have to place a blame on anyone, then it should be on Fox for agreeing to pay so much for them. But even then, you can bet that Fox has budgeted it out and decided that the expected return from the high salaries is worth it. This whole thing is just part of the process. The alternative is to kick the show, and the voice actors will quite possibly be just as happy, if not much happier.
Thanks for posting this -- I was about to try, but was having problems pinpointing everything I wanted to say. You seem to have nailed it almost exactly.
I was looking forward to seeing Gimp 2.0, which so many people were boasting about how the user interface had had a complete overhaul and now looked much better. When I finally saw it though, I hardly noticed anything. It was just the widgets that had changed, making things look a little shinier but with the exact same menu hierarchies and the exact same difficulties in finding the right ways to do what you actually wanted to do. The UI "overhaul" was a completely developer centric overhaul, changing the code and the surface look, but not changing the usability structure at all.
I don't do any serious photo editing, though I use Gimp mostly because it's the only serious option in open source that's free. It's nice to have something that's free, but one of the things that really irks me is that the interface is so feature-based rather than task based.
If you don't want to do anything too tricky, Gimp will probably let you do it. The problem is that it's so difficult to figure out how to do it, because all of it's features seem to've been just thrown into a relatively uncategorised pile that you have to dig through every time you want to do anything.
When there is categorisation, it's often related to the way that a feature has been coded rather zthan what it does. Otherwise, why on earth does the menu strcuture distinguish between the filters, script-fu and python-fu??? Personally I rarely even touch script-fu and python-fu because my first impression some time ago resulted in Gimp locking up.
I can't ask anything more from the existing developers because they're already doing what they want to do at no charge, and for that I appreciate. But it certainly wouldn't hurt Gimp if some UI-proficient people were called in to seriously look at the interface from a task-based perspective. It still won't compete with Photoshop, but it might actually be usable. Gimp needs it.
Uh, no. They thought, if there are 5 stores in a mall and they are one of them, passerbys, who were in the mall for one of the other stores, many of htem would still visit Lycos, right? Or at least look in. Makes a lot of sense.
I find this analogy quite interesting. It's similar in a way to one of the interesting things that General Motors apparently does, which I hadn't realised until someone pointed it out to me. Presumably it works for General Motors, though.
The theory is that if there are five brands of car on the market, then people who are shopping for a new car will pick one of those five, based on which one they prefer out of the available choices. If there are fifteen brands of car on the market, people will do the same. They have more choice, of course.
On the other hand, if ten of those brands happen to be owned by General Motors, then the chances are much higher that someone will choose a General Motors brand. It might not be completely even -- they might only get half of the custom instead of two thirds of it -- but the illusion of extra choice will prevent people from realising that a lot of those options are actually very similar to each other.
It's not entirely comparable, but the strategy seems to imply that sometimes just being there may be enough to get a significant amount of attention. As long as you're good enough to be considered. (That said, I agree that it clearly didn't work for Lycos.)
All tools can be used stupidly, and oddly enough the results really can be the fault of the operator. It is also possible for fault to lie in more than one area.
I disagree with your post in many ways. This is the same logic that causes so many work-place accidents to be blamed on "human error" when they're really in combination with bad design that fails to take into account the practical limitations of human abilities. It's also the same logic that HCI advocates have been arguing against for some time now. Certainly the user does have to be responsible, but the design of a tool and how it's expected to be used should be taken just as seriously.
For instance, if you design an aircraft that requires the pilot to reach over her left shoulder to adjust a control that will cause the plane to pitch to the right, it shouldn't be any great surprise that sooner or later someone's simply going to make an error. You can train pilots about how to fly the plane for as long as you like, but sooner or later someone's going to make a mistake, perhaps with drastic consequences. That's a fact, based on human limitations. It's also a fact that it wouldn't happen as often with interfaces that are designed more intuitively with the pilot in mind.
Two possible ways around this are to:
Design with the user in mind, so as to minimise mistakes.
Design to allow for mistakes, so that when a mistake is made then there's enough slack for the user to recover.
I'm not familiar with power tool accidents, but there are certainly a variety of situations where the tools can easily be considered at fault for their badly designed interfaces that consistently place unrealistic expectations on a user, yet the people are blamed for failing to operate the tools correctly.
It's in the documentation for the psql command line utility, which is here, which is listed in the reference section of the manual under "PostgreSQL Client Applications". This appears to be from the same source as the psql man page.
I think the postgres attitude to this is that their command line client utility for accessing databases is a discrete entity from the database product itself. I agree that it could perhaps be clearer in the main part of the documentation. psql is referenced in the tutorial, but there isn't much indication of where to find out more about it.
Arguably there are different choices for different needs in web development (PostgreSQL, PHP, Java, etc.), but there is no argument that if you are planning on putting together a website, using MySQL and Perl that MySQL & Perl for the Web will aid immensely in that development.
Maybe so, but I still have trouble figuring out why MySQL is given so much credibility in the first place.
In the previous story about MySQL, I posted a comment asking what it actually did that other databases (including the also-free PostgreSQL) didn't do at least as well, or better. The main responses seemed to include:
MySQL being the only DB supported for an application that someone wanted.
People already being very familiar with MySQL's strange ways of doing things that are inconsistent with every other respected database, not to mention SQL standards.
No other free databases having reliable Windows builds. (A Windows build of Postgres is on the way, but not yet fully complete.)
ISP's only providing a MySQL server.
Simply not knowing anything else due to past experience.
The Windows build issue seems quite reasonable, but the other reasons imply that the main reason MySQL is so popular is simply due to lock-in. People use it because they have to, or because they're not familiar with the alternatives --- not necessarily because it's actually better for the task-at-hand.
Perhaps MySQL is such a common name that people haven't heard of better alternatives out there. Presumably the book that this story reviews, which gives it even more publicity, is yet another reason that someone might consider MySQL without even thinking about alternatives.
Can anyone tell me if I've missed anything, though? Besides the typical lock-in reasons for using MySQL, does it actually do anything better than other databases as any sort of killer feature?
If not, and if you're looking to start learning about a database and actually have a choice, it seems that you're much better off looking at an alternative database.... whether it be a free one such as Postgres, or one of the big ones such as Oracle or SQL Server. At the very least, you'd get a more reliable database than MySQL, a more portable database than MySQL, and even postgres (just as free) offers a wealth of additional -- often useful and important -- features such as stored procedures and more complete data integrity. You'll probably also become much more familiar with correct SQL syntax... for what it's worth.
The horrors of the Nikon Coolpix UI
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Coincidentally I recently saw a Coolpix 4300 that one of my friends owns, which is essentially the modernised form of the same camera that I have.
I wasn't very impressed that 36 months later, the interface is almost exactly the same. Four main buttons with some arrows to move up and down, and a hierarchy of about a million menu options to change anything that matters.
I can understand if they need this for the new types of functions that digital cameras offer which don't have established standard interfaces, such as viewing photos. On the other hand, there shouldn't be any reason for them to be required to carry out the standard camera functions that have been standardised in camera interfaces for decades.
To be fair I've found that my Coolpix can give really nice photos with it's auto and scene modes. It seems to have nice optics, and for that I really like it. But there doesn't seem to be much point in having the extra manual functionality there when it's so inaccessible.
Re:As an ex-commercial photographer
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I almost agree, except I don't see any harm in leaving a few extra functions there to avoid having to do too much doctoring in a PC. Not everyone wants to spend ages adjusting their photos in photoshop before they look okay, and personally I'd prefer to have more control in the camera. What irritates me most, however, is the way that so many digital cameras have ignored the very well developed and efficient interfaces which regular cameras have had for ages.
36 months ago I purchased a Nikon Coolpix 885, which I still have and use. It was my first digital camera, and one of the main reasons I chose it was due to the ability to make manual adjustments instead of relying on the camera's automatic settings.
After a few days of playing with it, though, I was quite disappointed at the whole user interface. Although it was capable of customising nearly everything, actually doing so required navigating through a storm of hierarchies in menus on the digital display on the back, using a few small buttons. Want to change the settings without the LCD switched on? Forget it.
Why oh why couldn't they just keep to traditional camera interface? It's developed over the space of a hundred years into a very intuitive and accessible interface, and the digital manufacturers simply ignored it. (Unless you were willing to pay a lot of money, of course.) Unfortunately the designers seemed to think that just because they've digitised the cameras, it must be a good idea to encapsulate all of the useful parts of the interface behind non-standard buttons and digital control panels.
I do still use my Coolpix 885, but manual adjustments are such a pain and take so long that I normally fall back to using the auto-adjust settings for everything. It's a shame because I would have liked to tinker more with the manual settings. I've since decided that I won't bother buying another digital camera until I'm satisfied that the manual settings are much more accessible.
Well 5-20 is on the average to higher side as far as showers tend to go, but it's also important to point out that the meteor shower numbers are frequently misleading if you're not familiar with how they're calculated.
Normally that number refers to what you'd be expected to see if you're in a completely dark sky, able to see in all directions at once, and with the radiant directly overhead. Realistically this isn't normally what happens.
Most people live near a populated area, so they only see the brighter meteors. It's also unusual to be directly underneath the radiant, so some of the meteors (up to half) may be below the local horizon. Also, you can't look in all directions. People who observe meteor showers properly often work in groups, with each person assigned a particular area of the sky to keep watch on.
There are often exceptions and perhaps you'll get lucky, but don't be too surprised or disappointed if you only see one meteor every 10 or 20 minutes, or maybe less than that. Although the article states about 5-20, Gary Kronk's meteor page comments that there can be occasional bursts of up to 100. Don't get your hopes up too much though, or you'll end up disappointed.
I think Access is great, for what it's intended for. It's perfect for small databases where someone would otherwise use flat files.
I completely agree. Access isn't a great database, but it makes up for that by the front end features that it provides for building small data-centric applications quickly and conveniently, with all of the forms and reports that you might want. Most other databases are essentially servers, and at best provide a command line access utility and an API so you can write programs to connect and get at the data.
I used Access for several years to store a relatively small membership database for an organisation I was helping out. (On the order of a few hundred members.) By it's nature the data integrity wasn't absolutely critical, but the relationships were complex enough that I really didn't want to munge it into a flat file. On the other hand it wasn't worth going to the effort of having a complete relational database server back-end and writing entire separate applications to access and format the data.
Access offers a nice miniature encapsulated package that lets you do things like this. You can store several tables and join them via SQL queries to get at your data. As importantly, you can also design the data entry forms and reports, package it all up inside a single database file and give it to someone else who can open and edit it directly as if it's any other document.
Since I've switched completely to Linux I've been looking for something that offers a similar accessible front end, but I haven't really found one. From what I understand StarOffice has something very similar to Access, but I haven't meen motivated enough to check that yet.
The only open source project I can find that does anything similar seems to be PgAccess, which is a Tcl/Tk front end for a postgres database. It's interesting, but still nowhere near as complete from a quick-and-dirty data-centric application interface perspective as MS Access.
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I don't think that's such a sad thing. It'll be actively marketed in one way or another as long as someone sees a way to make money from it. IBM has found such a way (or believes that it has), but even if it stops then linux and open source will still be there for me to use --- complete with all of the enhancements that IBM provided.
I realise that it's not exactly what you're referring to, but in the past week or so I've been hearing Microsoft commercials on the morning radio, definitely peak time on high rating stations, that directly target open source software.
I don't recall the exact wording but the commercials definitely say something along the lines of "you may think there are free software alternatives, but there are really hidden costs." This is where I am locally (New Zealand), but I understand that Microsoft has been taking similar approaches in other places.
From the tone of the commercials, I honestly can't see how Microsoft could be doing anything but shooting itself in the foot with this type of campaign. One of the main barriers to open source is that people haven't heard of it, and another is that people don't see it as something that's worth seriously trying to use. It's a credit for open source whenever anyone hears that Microsoft is afraid of it, because that implies that lots of other people actually are using it and successfully.
I don't wish to defend this guy at all, but in my experience it is possible to not get that message, especially if you're coming from a different culture.
I do a lot of computer science tutoring in an english speaking university (not in the US) where we get a lot of international students from mostly asian countries for whom English is a second language. Often they've only had a few months to learn it after flying over before starting academic courses here.
What sometimes seems to happen is that people who aren't natural English speakers have trouble reading or understanding the assignments that we give them. The normal procedure is for them to get together in groups of their own and translate the assignment, work on it and then translate the answer back into English as a group. (I don't know for certain but I'm reasonably sure that this is what happens from observations and a reasonable amount of marking.) It's not so much copying someone else's work as all handing in the same work.
They may know that it's wrong, but combine it with:
The result is that we sometimes get groups of assignments handed in that have very similar answers, often in nearly identical broken English with occasional variations here and there. It's also obvious when they've switched to copying something from another source because the writing style very suddenly changes to much more fluent language. It's not just because they don't understand that it's wrong -- often they do. But there are a lot of other factors also causing it.
I don't mean to imply that this is okay, either. We stress to students over and over again that plaguarism isn't acceptable. When we spot it happening, it's dealt with. At the very least, the students will usually be spoken to and where appropriate, marks will be docked. Kicking them from a course isn't something that will normally happen, though, unless they're excessively bad offenders. More often than not people tend to drop the programme before they get that far -- they're too stressed out.
That's true. I've been suspicious for a while that apps in the way we think of them will eventually disappear along with the generic desktop/laptop/notebook/PDA computer. Word processing and spreadsheets, for instance, are quite different tasks... yet we essentially operate these tasks through the same interface. (Keyboard, mouse, monitor.)
This is mostly due to the superior economics of cramming lots of digital tasks into the one box. Word processing used to be done on typewriters, then electronic typewriters, but before the typewriter could develop much further with the computer technology, word processors became good enough and took over.
Using the same physical tool for several things is cheaper and it takes less space. What you lose, though, are the advantages of having specialist features on the hardware. It creates confusion, because it's often unclear to a user which parts of what they're doing will work the same, and which parts will work differently. (The keyboard and mouse are normally modal -- they do different things depending on the internal state of the system.)
I think the real challenge of successfully implementing ubiquity is figuring out how to effectively combine the necessary functionality for people's tasks with specialised interfaces that are easy to understand. I'm personally skeptical that this will involve leaving these tasks inside a generic box in which people "run" an application that they want to use.
I like to hope that computers will eventually merge into the background so we won't need to think of them or necessarily decide what application is necessary for the task-at-hand. This will probably involve a revolution of sorts in what hardware is, and a big merging of what software is and how it interacts with other software... if different software can even be distinguished.
I don't think it's too unlikely that computer hardware will end up as a public good (in the same way as roads and street lighting), much more merged all around society than the discrete computers we buy and sell today, with task agents (of sorts) following people around as they interact and do things.
On the surface it's an HCI issue, but realistically every segment of computer science is involved.
I have trouble understanding why anyone who's in the know still would use Netscape. It's now essentially the same browser as Mozilla having been forked from identical code.
The only thing that it seems to add is a combination of the brand name, more product placement and advertising in the download, and the popup-blocking option disabled from the front end. (I haven't checked that last one lately.)
Both of my parents have used Netscape since NS4 -- it came on their ISP's CD many years ago, and neither has ever been familiar with MSIE at all. Clicking the icon in Win95/98 usually resulted in complicated dialogs and wizards popping up asking about setting up an Internet connection, and there was never a need to follow all of that through. They've also always used Netscape for email because they have from the start, and I don't think have ever considered anything else.
Netscape dwindled for years, but they finally upgraded to NS6 after it was released, converting hundreds of megabytes of email and other profile bits and pieces. It was quite a transition and very buggy even compared with NS4, and it took quite a bit for them to get used to it.
A few months ago my dad bought a new PC, and he wanted me to help him move everything over to it. I took the opportunity to suggest that he switch to Mozilla for his mail and browsing, which by then was flying in it's stability and performance compared with a few years ago. The conversion was relatively easy because it's such a similar browser. As far as I can tell he's now having a much better experience with anything that would be Netscape-branded.
Well I agree with you. I do think it more likely that Microsoft would at the very least turn off the graphical part of Windows, remove it completely, or possibly re-write it from scratch.
What I really don't understand is why it would be necessary or smart to brand such a product as Windows at all. Windows means graphical user interface, and the way it's presented ties quite closely to desktop use. It definitely doesn't mean the remote administration that's likely to be required for an HPC, and trying to remotely administer a Windows box is usually quite clumsy compared with a unix box unless you drop a lot of the traditional Windows UI stuff that's often so tied into its operation.
When I think of Windows, and I don't think I'm alone, one of the first impressions that comes to mind is a relatively klunky monolithic GUI-dependant operating system that spends a lot of time drawing pretty front-end pictures. This almost certainly isn't an accurate picture of what's actually happening all the time and it's not to say that Windows couldn't be adjusted to work in other ways. But it's a first impression.
You can at least argue that the graphical side of things is good for usability on the desktop (even though usability realistically takes a lot more than pretty pictures), but why on earth would Microsoft want to continue that image into an HPC market? Surely they have completely different customers in that market with different goals that likely don't include chewing processor time on pretty pictures for the UI.
To me at least, it'd make much more sense for Microsoft to simply create a new operating system here from scratch (or buy a company or whatever they do), and call it something that's not Windows. It could be Microsoft HPC Server, for instance, and be completely independent from Windows. Microsoft can then claim that their new OS specialises in HPC tasks, and it'll also give them an independent OS product to push in the future if either it or MS Windows collapses.
I'm not sure what the official PG archive line says, but the stated Primary Rule in the Distributed Proofreaders Proofreading Guidelines states that "the final electronic book seen by a reader, possibly many years in the future, should accurately convey the intent of the author".
It's true that some information may be lost, but I read this to mean that at the very least, some intelligence will be applied when deciding what information to keep and what to throw away. It's fortunate that most authoring is more about writing words than formatting them, and the majority of the works currently being preserved by PG would have originally been typed on a either typewriter or something with less accuracy.
The proofing guidelines also instruct on how to mark up bold and italics, and the proofing interface makes it relatively easy to enter non-ASCII characters, such as accented letters, which come up in books from time to time. Even if it's not official, there appears to be an attempt to save a lot of the important information so that at the very least it can be translated later.
It's still kept quite simple though, and I guess that's because for every extra complication, the participation would go down.
But all of that said, I don't think the main goal of Project Gutenberg is to provide output that will easily parse in people's perl scripts. The primary goal is to save as many out-of-copyright books as possible before they completely disappear, and make them reasonably accessible... which plain text files do remarkably well. If added complication causes things to go noticibly more slowly then it conflicts with that goal.
Perhaps instead, a separate project is needed with different goals, that would take works outputted from PG and standardise them to a format that's more accessible to technology. If it works out and they liaise well enough, they might end up merging in the end anyway. I think a good proof of concept would be needed first, though.
I'm not exactly qualified to comment on the journalistic integrity of news outlets with any authority, but I don't think it's fair to mention that without at least acknowledging that heads rolled at BBC once it was revealed what happened. There was a lot of embarassment for several people in high-up positions, who'd knowingly failed their obligations to provide an accurate reporting service.
I don't personally see the BBC as quite the same as a network like Fox, where it at least seems to be trendy to bend the truth as part of the process. Or at the very least, lots of people joke about how Fox does so frequently, and lots of other people (apparently) still treat it as a serious and accurate source of information.
I'm surprised that nobody (at least who's been modded up enough) seems to have said anything about two particular projects that attempt to deal with a couple of the main problems that developers tend to have with MSIE.
"IE7" is an Internet Explorer hack that parses standards-based CSS that you provide in a page, and mangles it so that earlier versions of IE display it how it's supposed to be displayed.
"PNG in Windows IE" is a hack that tells IE to use a separate ActiveX control to load any PNG's in the page, instead of the internal image display code. This causes it to get alpha blending right. (I think there are a few variations of this hack around the web besides the one I've linked to.)
Both are javascript hacks that you can include at the top of a page and add the appropriate construct around them so that only IE will see them. Clearly they're not perfect, and I'd be edgey about using them in important websites without a lot more testing.
But has anyone actually used them effectively? How useful are they?
I've managed to get the PNG hack working, but I still haven't been able to get IE7 going. (Possibly something to do with the server sending the wrong MIME type.)
One thing that confuses me a little is why TLD's need to be restricted in the first place. If anyone was (easily and accessibly) able to create their own TLD and sell (or give away) names underneath them on their own terms, it would reduce the motivation for businesses to go and snap up every single variation of their name under every TLD.
Presumably the people or businesses who snap up the better TLD's and run them more reliably will simply get more people wanting to use them to index their servers on the net. Meanwhile everyone else would still be able to run their thousands of other TLD's under their own terms.
There are already alternative domain registries that do things this way (eg. OpenDNS), but they're immediately disadvantaged because nobody who matters uses their name servers.
I'm not an expert on DNS. Is there some overriding technical reason these days why TLD's need to be restricted to a small and controlled minority? Or is it something else?
I'm not sure if I agree entirely. I have a friend working at Microsoft, on the Windows team, who I had the opportunity to meet again recently.
She gave us an informal seminar about working in Microsoft, where she pointed out that any meetings that they have with any clients, including the MS Office team, have to be planned very carefully in advance. One of the rules that they're required to be very careful about is that they don't give any internal information to anyone that doesn't go to everyone.
On the higher corporate level, Microsoft hasn't really changed a lot. It manipulates the law and competitors, abuses its position, and I fully agree that that's a bad thing and the legal enforcement hasn't had the effect that it should. But it's not entirely correct to say that the lawsuits haven't had at least some effect on many of the procedures followed within Microsoft. Teams that might often have intermingled frequently are no longer allowed to talk with each other in detail about what they're doing.
Of course, driving/flying everywhere at 524 km/h (please excuse my metric) isn't necessarily a good idea. Especially if everyone has them.
One of the more contriversial aspects of the US space shuttle is if there's really a proper justification for the manned spaceflight that it provides. (Very expensive, arguably most of what it does could be done without people, etc.)
I guess one of the differences is that NASA already has a lot of sunk costs in it's space shuttle programme. Whether it makes economic sense or not, part of the reason that NASA maintains it's manned space programme is probably because it already has one and doesn't want to lose it.
The ESA doesn't have one at the moment, which (to me) makes it very interesting that they're trying to start one. Is there a big economic justification that the ESA has for putting people in space?
Or alternatively, is it for the same contriversial and possibly political reasons that the US keeps people there? I'm not trying to imply that it's good or bad to have people in space, but I'm curious if it for some reason makes a lot of economic sense for the ESA to have a manned space programme moreso than NASA.
Can anyone comment?
You realised that neither of the actors who you mentioned as hopeless are exactly novices in getting work. (Yeardley Smith, Julie Kavner).
Certainly it's been a bit thin lately, but then they've been working on The Simpsons episodes for all of that time.
I'm sorry, but I just disagree with the tone of what you've posted.
Most if not all of these people have been working in this job for sixteen years! That's sixteen years of their life that they've been required to set aside their time to go and do voice acting for the same show with the same characters over and over again. I don't think it's at all fair to blame them if they'd rather be elsewhere doing other things. If Fox told them to get bent and fired them, it'd free up their time! Chances are they'd be more than happy to do other work and be paid much less. It'd certainly be more interesting for them.
But Fox doesn't want them to go and do other things. Fox would much rather they kept their jobs doing voice acting for a show that rakes in lots and lots of money for Fox. The voice actors are not like animators, who Fox can easily replace if they leave.
The contract negotiations are simply part of the process. The actors are simply setting a price. If they receive it they'll feel compensated in the face of what they'd much rather be doing. If Fox won't meet that then the voice actors leave and get to spend their time on other things that are more interesting.
But if you have a problem with this, then don't place the burden on the actors for "blackmailing" poor, defenceless Fox and the viewing public. They've been sticking with the show for long enough already, and they don't have any obligation to anyone to keep going if they're sick of it.
If you have to place a blame on anyone, then it should be on Fox for agreeing to pay so much for them. But even then, you can bet that Fox has budgeted it out and decided that the expected return from the high salaries is worth it. This whole thing is just part of the process. The alternative is to kick the show, and the voice actors will quite possibly be just as happy, if not much happier.
Thanks for posting this -- I was about to try, but was having problems pinpointing everything I wanted to say. You seem to have nailed it almost exactly.
I was looking forward to seeing Gimp 2.0, which so many people were boasting about how the user interface had had a complete overhaul and now looked much better. When I finally saw it though, I hardly noticed anything. It was just the widgets that had changed, making things look a little shinier but with the exact same menu hierarchies and the exact same difficulties in finding the right ways to do what you actually wanted to do. The UI "overhaul" was a completely developer centric overhaul, changing the code and the surface look, but not changing the usability structure at all.
I don't do any serious photo editing, though I use Gimp mostly because it's the only serious option in open source that's free. It's nice to have something that's free, but one of the things that really irks me is that the interface is so feature-based rather than task based.
If you don't want to do anything too tricky, Gimp will probably let you do it. The problem is that it's so difficult to figure out how to do it, because all of it's features seem to've been just thrown into a relatively uncategorised pile that you have to dig through every time you want to do anything.
When there is categorisation, it's often related to the way that a feature has been coded rather zthan what it does. Otherwise, why on earth does the menu strcuture distinguish between the filters, script-fu and python-fu??? Personally I rarely even touch script-fu and python-fu because my first impression some time ago resulted in Gimp locking up.
I can't ask anything more from the existing developers because they're already doing what they want to do at no charge, and for that I appreciate. But it certainly wouldn't hurt Gimp if some UI-proficient people were called in to seriously look at the interface from a task-based perspective. It still won't compete with Photoshop, but it might actually be usable. Gimp needs it.
I find this analogy quite interesting. It's similar in a way to one of the interesting things that General Motors apparently does, which I hadn't realised until someone pointed it out to me. Presumably it works for General Motors, though.
The theory is that if there are five brands of car on the market, then people who are shopping for a new car will pick one of those five, based on which one they prefer out of the available choices. If there are fifteen brands of car on the market, people will do the same. They have more choice, of course.
On the other hand, if ten of those brands happen to be owned by General Motors, then the chances are much higher that someone will choose a General Motors brand. It might not be completely even -- they might only get half of the custom instead of two thirds of it -- but the illusion of extra choice will prevent people from realising that a lot of those options are actually very similar to each other.
It's not entirely comparable, but the strategy seems to imply that sometimes just being there may be enough to get a significant amount of attention. As long as you're good enough to be considered. (That said, I agree that it clearly didn't work for Lycos.)
I disagree with your post in many ways. This is the same logic that causes so many work-place accidents to be blamed on "human error" when they're really in combination with bad design that fails to take into account the practical limitations of human abilities. It's also the same logic that HCI advocates have been arguing against for some time now. Certainly the user does have to be responsible, but the design of a tool and how it's expected to be used should be taken just as seriously.
For instance, if you design an aircraft that requires the pilot to reach over her left shoulder to adjust a control that will cause the plane to pitch to the right, it shouldn't be any great surprise that sooner or later someone's simply going to make an error. You can train pilots about how to fly the plane for as long as you like, but sooner or later someone's going to make a mistake, perhaps with drastic consequences. That's a fact, based on human limitations. It's also a fact that it wouldn't happen as often with interfaces that are designed more intuitively with the pilot in mind.
Two possible ways around this are to:
I'm not familiar with power tool accidents, but there are certainly a variety of situations where the tools can easily be considered at fault for their badly designed interfaces that consistently place unrealistic expectations on a user, yet the people are blamed for failing to operate the tools correctly.
It's in the documentation for the psql command line utility, which is here, which is listed in the reference section of the manual under "PostgreSQL Client Applications". This appears to be from the same source as the psql man page.
I think the postgres attitude to this is that their command line client utility for accessing databases is a discrete entity from the database product itself. I agree that it could perhaps be clearer in the main part of the documentation. psql is referenced in the tutorial, but there isn't much indication of where to find out more about it.
Maybe so, but I still have trouble figuring out why MySQL is given so much credibility in the first place.
In the previous story about MySQL, I posted a comment asking what it actually did that other databases (including the also-free PostgreSQL) didn't do at least as well, or better. The main responses seemed to include:
The Windows build issue seems quite reasonable, but the other reasons imply that the main reason MySQL is so popular is simply due to lock-in. People use it because they have to, or because they're not familiar with the alternatives --- not necessarily because it's actually better for the task-at-hand.
Perhaps MySQL is such a common name that people haven't heard of better alternatives out there. Presumably the book that this story reviews, which gives it even more publicity, is yet another reason that someone might consider MySQL without even thinking about alternatives.
Can anyone tell me if I've missed anything, though? Besides the typical lock-in reasons for using MySQL, does it actually do anything better than other databases as any sort of killer feature?
If not, and if you're looking to start learning about a database and actually have a choice, it seems that you're much better off looking at an alternative database.... whether it be a free one such as Postgres, or one of the big ones such as Oracle or SQL Server. At the very least, you'd get a more reliable database than MySQL, a more portable database than MySQL, and even postgres (just as free) offers a wealth of additional -- often useful and important -- features such as stored procedures and more complete data integrity. You'll probably also become much more familiar with correct SQL syntax ... for what it's worth.
Coincidentally I recently saw a Coolpix 4300 that one of my friends owns, which is essentially the modernised form of the same camera that I have.
I wasn't very impressed that 36 months later, the interface is almost exactly the same. Four main buttons with some arrows to move up and down, and a hierarchy of about a million menu options to change anything that matters.
I can understand if they need this for the new types of functions that digital cameras offer which don't have established standard interfaces, such as viewing photos. On the other hand, there shouldn't be any reason for them to be required to carry out the standard camera functions that have been standardised in camera interfaces for decades.
To be fair I've found that my Coolpix can give really nice photos with it's auto and scene modes. It seems to have nice optics, and for that I really like it. But there doesn't seem to be much point in having the extra manual functionality there when it's so inaccessible.
I almost agree, except I don't see any harm in leaving a few extra functions there to avoid having to do too much doctoring in a PC. Not everyone wants to spend ages adjusting their photos in photoshop before they look okay, and personally I'd prefer to have more control in the camera. What irritates me most, however, is the way that so many digital cameras have ignored the very well developed and efficient interfaces which regular cameras have had for ages.
36 months ago I purchased a Nikon Coolpix 885, which I still have and use. It was my first digital camera, and one of the main reasons I chose it was due to the ability to make manual adjustments instead of relying on the camera's automatic settings.After a few days of playing with it, though, I was quite disappointed at the whole user interface. Although it was capable of customising nearly everything, actually doing so required navigating through a storm of hierarchies in menus on the digital display on the back, using a few small buttons. Want to change the settings without the LCD switched on? Forget it.
Why oh why couldn't they just keep to traditional camera interface? It's developed over the space of a hundred years into a very intuitive and accessible interface, and the digital manufacturers simply ignored it. (Unless you were willing to pay a lot of money, of course.) Unfortunately the designers seemed to think that just because they've digitised the cameras, it must be a good idea to encapsulate all of the useful parts of the interface behind non-standard buttons and digital control panels.
I do still use my Coolpix 885, but manual adjustments are such a pain and take so long that I normally fall back to using the auto-adjust settings for everything. It's a shame because I would have liked to tinker more with the manual settings. I've since decided that I won't bother buying another digital camera until I'm satisfied that the manual settings are much more accessible.
I guess you so often learn from the first time.
You're more than 122 years old?
Well 5-20 is on the average to higher side as far as showers tend to go, but it's also important to point out that the meteor shower numbers are frequently misleading if you're not familiar with how they're calculated.
Normally that number refers to what you'd be expected to see if you're in a completely dark sky, able to see in all directions at once, and with the radiant directly overhead. Realistically this isn't normally what happens.
Most people live near a populated area, so they only see the brighter meteors. It's also unusual to be directly underneath the radiant, so some of the meteors (up to half) may be below the local horizon. Also, you can't look in all directions. People who observe meteor showers properly often work in groups, with each person assigned a particular area of the sky to keep watch on.
There are often exceptions and perhaps you'll get lucky, but don't be too surprised or disappointed if you only see one meteor every 10 or 20 minutes, or maybe less than that. Although the article states about 5-20, Gary Kronk's meteor page comments that there can be occasional bursts of up to 100. Don't get your hopes up too much though, or you'll end up disappointed.
I completely agree. Access isn't a great database, but it makes up for that by the front end features that it provides for building small data-centric applications quickly and conveniently, with all of the forms and reports that you might want. Most other databases are essentially servers, and at best provide a command line access utility and an API so you can write programs to connect and get at the data.
I used Access for several years to store a relatively small membership database for an organisation I was helping out. (On the order of a few hundred members.) By it's nature the data integrity wasn't absolutely critical, but the relationships were complex enough that I really didn't want to munge it into a flat file. On the other hand it wasn't worth going to the effort of having a complete relational database server back-end and writing entire separate applications to access and format the data.
Access offers a nice miniature encapsulated package that lets you do things like this. You can store several tables and join them via SQL queries to get at your data. As importantly, you can also design the data entry forms and reports, package it all up inside a single database file and give it to someone else who can open and edit it directly as if it's any other document.
Since I've switched completely to Linux I've been looking for something that offers a similar accessible front end, but I haven't really found one. From what I understand StarOffice has something very similar to Access, but I haven't meen motivated enough to check that yet.
The only open source project I can find that does anything similar seems to be PgAccess, which is a Tcl/Tk front end for a postgres database. It's interesting, but still nowhere near as complete from a quick-and-dirty data-centric application interface perspective as MS Access.