I'm a web developer who has been using Photoshop since version 3.0, so I'm not exactly a new user/hobbyist. It's interface may suck less than some of its former competitors but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
Personally, i think it would be nice if they would take some ideas from the GIMP. (Not that i think the GIMP's interface is necessarily better- a lot of its tools behave in very confusing ways, and a lot of menu options are not well named, but the feel of the interface overall is much less frustrating.) At the very least they need to get rid of their awful MDI. I'm not really against MDI in principle, but I am opposed to ones that are poorly implemented.
it's not me personally- i'm only a developer, i just heard the description from one of our operations guys.
we have multiple data centers around the state and we host dozens of sites for multiple clients. we keep up-to-date copies of each site in each data center, but we only serve each site from one data center at a time. having 5 minute TTLs in our DNS records allows us to shift which data center we are hosting a given site out of with little or no notice in case of problems or maintenance needs.
there are of course very expensive ways that we could achieve the same results without mucking with DNS, but from what i understand, the DNS system that they put in place back when they didn't have the money for more expensive failover systems has worked well enough that they never really saw the need to spend more money on a 'better' solution.
And it remains one of the most elegant pieces of software ever assembled.
hmmm... you must have access to some strange version of photoshop i''ve never heard of. the feature set may be well thought out, but the user interface is one of the greatest abominations in the software world today, right behind, well, just about anything else made by adobe.
personally, i think adobe bought macromedia because they were worried that flash integration into the web was becoming too seamless. i hear they're going to turn over future maintenance of the flash plugin to the acrobat guys, who will quadruple the loading time, and add beautifully animated splash screens that will bring your entire browsing session to a halt for a few seconds just to make sure you know you are dealing with flash rather than html. i believe their goal is to make average web surfers who accidentally surf to a flash page to wince and curse the same way they do now when they accidentally click on a pdf link.
Download setup.exe, install, run. No dependencies (except a few possible dll's, which can be included with the application), no compiling, no need for 50 libs on your system to match a certain version number. It just works. More often than not anyways.
you realize that it works the same way on linux, right? for anything that isn't included in your base distribution anyway. try installing acrobat, realplayer, firefox, mozilla... i belive it goes something like this. 1) download installation executable alt 1a) download setup tarball alt 1b) unzip 2) install 3) run
looks pretty much the same as your steps for windows/mac. of course this is for applications that are not included with your OS installation. for those it's even easier... the nice thing here is that probably 85% of typical users would never need any program that doesn't come preinstalled with the OS, so they'd never even have to worry about how to install an application. and then the distro will keep everything up to date for them automatically as well. how many desktop applications come preinstalled on windows? a web browser and a media player. (although windows does have one edge- media players in linux pretty much suck across the board it seems.)
assuming this is even served off the same servers that host their ads, i worked for one of doubleclick's competitors 5 years ago, before doubleclick bought them. we were serving 6 billion ads a month in 2000, and we might have been one of the top five online advertisers. considering doubleclick probably had double our traffic before they bought us, and considering how many other companies they've swallowed up over the years....
if you think even the combined bandwidth of every slashdotter has a chance of even perceptibly slowing down doubleclick, you are deluding yourself.
No, i was thinking of rotaries. If I was talking about radials I wouldn't have cited their streamlined shape as a benefit, and I don't think that radials have that much better of a power to weight ratio than an ordinary engine either (slightly lower weight due to simpler cooling system, but mechanically it's still a conventional piston engine with a different cylinder layout).
I wasn't trying to say that rotaries are particularly common in aircraft, only that there is (or at least was) more interest in researching rotary engines in the aircraft community than in the auto community because the advantages of a rotary engine over a piston engine lend themselves particularly well to use in aircraft. I have no idea how common they actually are these days in the aircraft world, but in the automotve world, they pretty much only exist in one barely mass-market sports car and a few niche European vehicles so it's not exactly a large market there either.
At the place where I work, we use 5 minute TTLs. It used to be lower, but after experimenting for a while the admins discovered that 5 minutes is the smallest amount most ISP's whill honor before just defaulting to 24 hours. I would imagine most ISP's honor the 5 minute TTL, if only because we deal with enough traffic, and we use DNS to direct traffic among multiple datacenters, that I think I would have heard if we had problems with lage numbers of users getting stale DNS information.
I think in this case, the more likely answer is (as someone else suggested) that this guy had been running his DNS with TTL set at 2 weeks, and then one day decided to change it to 1 day, and wondered why everything was still cached for 2 weeks. I think the default in pretty much every sane DNS server is to respect the TTL, and I can't imagine there are that many admins that would go out of their way to break it for a very small savings.
actually, if i remember correctly, rotary engines are far more popular in aviation than they are in automobiles. their streamlined shape and high power to weight ratio are even more of a benefit in the air than they are on the ground.
and unlike many car owners, pilots and flight mechanics tend to be a lot more likely to follow proper maintenance procedures.
Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
then why has every office release since office '97 gotten progressively harder to use productively?
outlook seems to me to be the only part of office that gets noticeably better with each release. everything else seems to get incrementally worse...
Now imagine if the 100,000+/. readers all donated $5 - $10 a year.
somehow i don't think even making $500K - $1 million a year the slashdot editors still woudn't care enough about their jobs to avoid posting dupes or do anything meaningful to improve the site....
having trouble configuring cvs to use ssh or understanding unix permissions may make you an unsuitable systems administrator, and maybe even a poor choice for a kernel developer, but i fail to see how it would make you a poor software developer, even for unix applications. i suppose it never occured to you that people might want to use cvs/svn for other kinds of projects?
as JWZ said it: "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
isn't that kind of like asking how there can be such a thing as 'postmodern' art/architecture? it was just a name. at the time the name was coined, it was accurate.
anyway, eventually enough people noticed the irony of the situation, and started calling it "modern rock" instead...
just like red hat, suse, mandrake, et al crahed and burned "shamelessly trying to make a buck by coercing people to pay for something they can currently get for free"?
now if they were just trying to sell the free version of firefox for money, then they are idiots, and they will get what's coming to them, however, numerous companies have shown that it can be profitable to sell value added versions of otherwise free products.
Slashdot, since you're completely in cohoots, will speakeasy be signing this agreement?
Probably not, since i think all of the ETLA's mentioned in the article were European organizations. Doesn't mean that their American counterparts won't look to do something similar if it works over there, of course, but for the moment at least this dscussion seems to behappenning on the other side of the pond.
Either way, I know corporate cultures can change over time, (or in response to large sums of money), but from my experience with Speakeasy some years ago, they wouldn't make an agreement like this unless there was a law passed requireing them to.
The few line example I presented in the other comment really is ALL you need to get started and working and the commands in there are really all you will ever need in the first few months or even years of usage. If you use tortoisesvn you get all that even nicly integrated into the Windows explorer.
assuming everyone who is using svn/cvs has shell access to the computer you are working on and that you have permissions set up correctly. i've never really used subversion, but i remember getting cvs/ssh network access set up properly being a headach the last time i tried, and UNIX permissions (in general, not just regarding cvs) have been known to trip up people who have been working with them for years if you need to accomplish anything remotely out of the ordinary with them.
They cry and whinge about how inherently evil OSS is,
No, Microsoft likes (or at least doesn't particularly dislike) open source. Several of the command line tools in windows are or were at one time based on bsd code, and they even have a couple of projects hosted on SourceForge.
Microsoft likes to demonize the GPL, becase commercial companies can't use it without giving back anything they change (which, of course, is the entire point).
while i'm no expert in the audio field by any means, if these batteries are (as other posters suggest) delivering a higher voltage than typical batteries, it seems quite possible that they will make your audio player sound slightly different. at the very least, it could be delivering a different amount of power to the headphones, and while it's obviously not affecting the decoding algorithms of the player, it seems possible that it might have a minor affect in the D/A conversion process.
of course, whether something sounds 'better' in a case like this is extremely hard for most people to define. but if they can hear a subtle difference between the two batteries, they'll probably tell you that the more expensive one sounds better.
at any rate, the claims, while most likely meaningless, are not necessarily outright false.
in this case, the 'certain employee' who claimed (publicly, not just to his boss) to have written cherryOS in four months, by himself, is one of the founders of the company. this is not a large company we're talking about, here, this is a small shop with at most a couple of developers.
So, we have a company that was founded by a guy who is known to have blatantly disregarded the GPL in the past, that from all apearances has no employees except the two founders, whose two main commercial products show substantial evidence of consisting mainly of code taken from open source projects.
you may wish to give 'the company' the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions in this mess, but if you do, just remember, they are not the victim of some 'fly by night' contractor, but of one of their own founders.
while theoretically possible, it doesn't make the company any more respectable in my eyes, as they swore up and down that the entire project was written in four months by their lead developer, who has shown a blatent disregard for the GPL several times on the past.
I'm not totally sure about this, but i suspect it has at least as much to do with the number of takeoffs and landings the plan has gone done than the total flight hours, as that would be when the most stress is put on the airframe. of course, for engines and related systems, it's total time running, but most failures tend to be the result of metal fatigue or similar breakdowns, and the stresses that cause metal fatigues are strongest in takeoff and landing (especially if you are flying something like a B-52, where the wings 'take off' quite a while before the plane leaves the ground.
then again, there are a wide variety of problems that can occur in an aircraft and they all have different causes. iirc, the challenger explosion was the reult of a cracked o-ring - a failure like that is usually the result of pure age (and poor maintenance procedures) and has little to do with flight hours logged.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a web developer who has been using Photoshop since version 3.0, so I'm not exactly a new user/hobbyist. It's interface may suck less than some of its former competitors but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
Personally, i think it would be nice if they would take some ideas from the GIMP. (Not that i think the GIMP's interface is necessarily better- a lot of its tools behave in very confusing ways, and a lot of menu options are not well named, but the feel of the interface overall is much less frustrating.) At the very least they need to get rid of their awful MDI. I'm not really against MDI in principle, but I am opposed to ones that are poorly implemented.
we don't dislike french people. on the contrary, if there were no french people, who would we make fun of?
it's not me personally- i'm only a developer, i just heard the description from one of our operations guys.
we have multiple data centers around the state and we host dozens of sites for multiple clients. we keep up-to-date copies of each site in each data center, but we only serve each site from one data center at a time. having 5 minute TTLs in our DNS records allows us to shift which data center we are hosting a given site out of with little or no notice in case of problems or maintenance needs.
there are of course very expensive ways that we could achieve the same results without mucking with DNS, but from what i understand, the DNS system that they put in place back when they didn't have the money for more expensive failover systems has worked well enough that they never really saw the need to spend more money on a 'better' solution.
And it remains one of the most elegant pieces of software ever assembled.
hmmm... you must have access to some strange version of photoshop i''ve never heard of. the feature set may be well thought out, but the user interface is one of the greatest abominations in the software world today, right behind, well, just about anything else made by adobe.
personally, i think adobe bought macromedia because they were worried that flash integration into the web was becoming too seamless. i hear they're going to turn over future maintenance of the flash plugin to the acrobat guys, who will quadruple the loading time, and add beautifully animated splash screens that will bring your entire browsing session to a halt for a few seconds just to make sure you know you are dealing with flash rather than html. i believe their goal is to make average web surfers who accidentally surf to a flash page to wince and curse the same way they do now when they accidentally click on a pdf link.
Download setup.exe, install, run.
No dependencies (except a few possible dll's, which can be included with the application), no compiling, no need for 50 libs on your system to match a certain version number. It just works. More often than not anyways.
you realize that it works the same way on linux, right? for anything that isn't included in your base distribution anyway. try installing acrobat, realplayer, firefox, mozilla... i belive it goes something like this.
1) download installation executable
alt 1a) download setup tarball
alt 1b) unzip
2) install
3) run
looks pretty much the same as your steps for windows/mac. of course this is for applications that are not included with your OS installation. for those it's even easier... the nice thing here is that probably 85% of typical users would never need any program that doesn't come preinstalled with the OS, so they'd never even have to worry about how to install an application. and then the distro will keep everything up to date for them automatically as well. how many desktop applications come preinstalled on windows? a web browser and a media player. (although windows does have one edge- media players in linux pretty much suck across the board it seems.)
assuming this is even served off the same servers that host their ads, i worked for one of doubleclick's competitors 5 years ago, before doubleclick bought them. we were serving 6 billion ads a month in 2000, and we might have been one of the top five online advertisers. considering doubleclick probably had double our traffic before they bought us, and considering how many other companies they've swallowed up over the years....
if you think even the combined bandwidth of every slashdotter has a chance of even perceptibly slowing down doubleclick, you are deluding yourself.
i also would be very surprised if this file was even served off the same pool of servers as their ads.
No, i was thinking of rotaries. If I was talking about radials I wouldn't have cited their streamlined shape as a benefit, and I don't think that radials have that much better of a power to weight ratio than an ordinary engine either (slightly lower weight due to simpler cooling system, but mechanically it's still a conventional piston engine with a different cylinder layout).
I wasn't trying to say that rotaries are particularly common in aircraft, only that there is (or at least was) more interest in researching rotary engines in the aircraft community than in the auto community because the advantages of a rotary engine over a piston engine lend themselves particularly well to use in aircraft. I have no idea how common they actually are these days in the aircraft world, but in the automotve world, they pretty much only exist in one barely mass-market sports car and a few niche European vehicles so it's not exactly a large market there either.
At the place where I work, we use 5 minute TTLs. It used to be lower, but after experimenting for a while the admins discovered that 5 minutes is the smallest amount most ISP's whill honor before just defaulting to 24 hours. I would imagine most ISP's honor the 5 minute TTL, if only because we deal with enough traffic, and we use DNS to direct traffic among multiple datacenters, that I think I would have heard if we had problems with lage numbers of users getting stale DNS information.
I think in this case, the more likely answer is (as someone else suggested) that this guy had been running his DNS with TTL set at 2 weeks, and then one day decided to change it to 1 day, and wondered why everything was still cached for 2 weeks. I think the default in pretty much every sane DNS server is to respect the TTL, and I can't imagine there are that many admins that would go out of their way to break it for a very small savings.
actually, if i remember correctly, rotary engines are far more popular in aviation than they are in automobiles. their streamlined shape and high power to weight ratio are even more of a benefit in the air than they are on the ground.
and unlike many car owners, pilots and flight mechanics tend to be a lot more likely to follow proper maintenance procedures.
Keeping a plane in the sky is impossible to do with 100% certainty, no matter how skilled you are.
well, obviously you have to land sooner or later...
Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
then why has every office release since office '97 gotten progressively harder to use productively?
outlook seems to me to be the only part of office that gets noticeably better with each release. everything else seems to get incrementally worse...
Now imagine if the 100,000+ /. readers all donated $5 - $10 a year.
somehow i don't think even making $500K - $1 million a year the slashdot editors still woudn't care enough about their jobs to avoid posting dupes or do anything meaningful to improve the site....
having trouble configuring cvs to use ssh or understanding unix permissions may make you an unsuitable systems administrator, and maybe even a poor choice for a kernel developer, but i fail to see how it would make you a poor software developer, even for unix applications. i suppose it never occured to you that people might want to use cvs/svn for other kinds of projects?
as JWZ said it:
"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
and that everyone interesting has already moved on...
i realise this is just MHO, but was there ever anyone interesting there to start out with?
isn't that kind of like asking how there can be such a thing as 'postmodern' art/architecture? it was just a name. at the time the name was coined, it was accurate.
anyway, eventually enough people noticed the irony of the situation, and started calling it "modern rock" instead...
just like red hat, suse, mandrake, et al crahed and burned "shamelessly trying to make a buck by coercing people to pay for something they can currently get for free"?
now if they were just trying to sell the free version of firefox for money, then they are idiots, and they will get what's coming to them, however, numerous companies have shown that it can be profitable to sell value added versions of otherwise free products.
Slashdot, since you're completely in cohoots, will speakeasy be signing this agreement?
Probably not, since i think all of the ETLA's mentioned in the article were European organizations. Doesn't mean that their American counterparts won't look to do something similar if it works over there, of course, but for the moment at least this dscussion seems to behappenning on the other side of the pond.
Either way, I know corporate cultures can change over time, (or in response to large sums of money), but from my experience with Speakeasy some years ago, they wouldn't make an agreement like this unless there was a law passed requireing them to.
The few line example I presented in the other comment really is ALL you need to get started and working and the commands in there are really all you will ever need in the first few months or even years of usage. If you use tortoisesvn you get all that even nicly integrated into the Windows explorer.
/ssh network access set up properly being a headach the last time i tried, and UNIX permissions (in general, not just regarding cvs) have been known to trip up people who have been working with them for years if you need to accomplish anything remotely out of the ordinary with them.
assuming everyone who is using svn/cvs has shell access to the computer you are working on and that you have permissions set up correctly. i've never really used subversion, but i remember getting cvs
They cry and whinge about how inherently evil OSS is,
No, Microsoft likes (or at least doesn't particularly dislike) open source. Several of the command line tools in windows are or were at one time based on bsd code, and they even have a couple of projects hosted on SourceForge.
Microsoft likes to demonize the GPL, becase commercial companies can't use it without giving back anything they change (which, of course, is the entire point).
while i'm no expert in the audio field by any means, if these batteries are (as other posters suggest) delivering a higher voltage than typical batteries, it seems quite possible that they will make your audio player sound slightly different. at the very least, it could be delivering a different amount of power to the headphones, and while it's obviously not affecting the decoding algorithms of the player, it seems possible that it might have a minor affect in the D/A conversion process.
of course, whether something sounds 'better' in a case like this is extremely hard for most people to define. but if they can hear a subtle difference between the two batteries, they'll probably tell you that the more expensive one sounds better.
at any rate, the claims, while most likely meaningless, are not necessarily outright false.
in this case, the 'certain employee' who claimed (publicly, not just to his boss) to have written cherryOS in four months, by himself, is one of the founders of the company. this is not a large company we're talking about, here, this is a small shop with at most a couple of developers.
So, we have a company that was founded by a guy who is known to have blatantly disregarded the GPL in the past, that from all apearances has no employees except the two founders, whose two main commercial products show substantial evidence of consisting mainly of code taken from open source projects.
you may wish to give 'the company' the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions in this mess, but if you do, just remember, they are not the victim of some 'fly by night' contractor, but of one of their own founders.
while theoretically possible, it doesn't make the company any more respectable in my eyes, as they swore up and down that the entire project was written in four months by their lead developer, who has shown a blatent disregard for the GPL several times on the past.
I'm not totally sure about this, but i suspect it has at least as much to do with the number of takeoffs and landings the plan has gone done than the total flight hours, as that would be when the most stress is put on the airframe. of course, for engines and related systems, it's total time running, but most failures tend to be the result of metal fatigue or similar breakdowns, and the stresses that cause metal fatigues are strongest in takeoff and landing (especially if you are flying something like a B-52, where the wings 'take off' quite a while before the plane leaves the ground.
then again, there are a wide variety of problems that can occur in an aircraft and they all have different causes. iirc, the challenger explosion was the reult of a cracked o-ring - a failure like that is usually the result of pure age (and poor maintenance procedures) and has little to do with flight hours logged.