Maybe he can actually create an interface so amazing, so perfect, so right that no one would ever be able to improve upon it. I won't hold my breath, though.
I don't think what he said about creating a UI that "doesn't need preferences" doesn't mean the UI is fixed in stone. What about a UI that learns from the user and configures itself?
For example, the plain desktop could slowly cycle through the colors of the rainbow while a user is using the system, taking some kind of "productivity" measure as the user is using it. If it's determined that the user works better when the background is blue, the cycling could be weighted towards showing blue more often. The same could be done with dialog positioning, button positioning, window sizes, etc. I'd be willing to help figure out how that could be done.
I would agree that the type of data entry you suggest goes very well on a command line. But I don't think there's anything that can't be improved. What about a desktop of command line applications? That would allow users to deal with only one command prompt at a time if that's how they work best, or they'd be able to stack multiple windows to do things in phases if they liked that method better. That is going to improve usabliliy for *someone*, while not degrading it for the rest.
For me, I would prefer to stretch my "subconscious" processing of alternative, skinned UIs so that I can respond to a greater number of computing/information presentation. I may not be able to autonomically process a given interface as quickly as somebody who is familiar with the standardized UI, but I will be able to adapt to other UIs.
I would say that's a resonable opinion for someone who wants to get a diverse computer use experience, but then again most computer users (of which slashdoters are a small small minority) just want to get in, get things done, and get out.
Have you ever used the trial version of WinZip? The trial dialog that pops up before you can use the product swaps the OK and Cancel buttons intentionally every time it starts up. Even if you use WinZip 10 times a day every day your concious mind comes into play every time you use this application. What's the task at hand? Accepting a dialog. Why should you have to think about this?
The same mental lag happens for novice users working between UIs (or skins)... bringing the concious mind into the picture is not helpful to people who need/want thier entire concious mind available for the task at hand, not accepting a dialog.:)
Microsoft did NOT pioneer this. This is how nearly all Mac software has always been installed. For the most part, Mac software doesn't have chains of dependancies and special settings to be made as part of an install... and if it does, those are drag-and-drop files as well. Let's just put it this way... you don't have to fiddle with keys in a registry.:)
One of SOAP's primary transports is HTTP, and that's not Microsoft specific.
And I still don't see the problem with the long connections.
If you make a SOAP call with HTTP has your primary transport, and the call takes 5 hours to process on the server, how's the server going to get back to you with the data? That's the problem with HTTP... MS is basically wanting another protocol that can be used for SOAP that punches through firewalls as easily as HTTP does, but doesn't have timeout problems.
Because Microsoft has never shown any level of success with security.
And they've never really shown any incentive to improve security until this past bug fix month. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem. MS is doing that, and they get reamed for it. Some Slashdot readers need to admit that they have a problem with double standards.
One of the most common security problems is buffer overflows; the way I worked around this was to write a special string library where the strings had meta data; including the maxiumum length a given string could have.
OK, great. But how can we be assured that your string library doesn't have security problems? Somewhere, someplace, memory is getting allocated and bytes are getting written, string copies are being performed, and buffers await overrunning. Auditing code so it is perfect and without bugs does work for security, it just has to take place in the libraries rather than the applications.
I heard there was this thing called VHF that also lets you receive some television stations for free. It's pretty amazing what they come up with these days.
Re:Tip for better NFS performance in FreeBSD
on
Understanding NFS
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· Score: 2
That was pointed out in the article... interestingly, using 99% of the same words and sentance structures your post uses.
So, this conveyor belt carpet device, it was covered with machine-generated snow, was it? Oh, wait - it would all fall off the bottom of the belt.
No... there is no snow involved. Alot of people have already mentioned this and have called it "carpet" for lack of a better term, but this isn't your average gray indoor-outdoor... it's really more like a foamy shag. It's enough to allow you to cut directly on the surface. I think it actually solves alot of problems that snow on any kind of conveyor or turntable would cause, but I wouldn't go on it, for the sake of my edges.:)
Yes, I did read the article. I just don't think any amount of refreshing (on a surface moving at up to 30kph no less) can refresh the surface damage I was explaining, so it's really not worth mentioning. The only thing the article points out is that the snow refreshing allows this to be used in warmer climates so that the snow doesn't melt away. It didn't say anything about the generation of fresh snow "fixing" the problems incurred by the use of the slope.
That was already pointed out in the article. Have you ever seen a ski hill groomed and flocked at 30kph? I didn't think so. It also doesn't change the fact that a normal volume of skiers are non-stop tracking the same 300m surface, which does not happen on any ski hill in existance... wear is spread out over longer hills.
"[Bass' flight] is just an advertising stunt, I can promise you," Spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said. "This is better advertising than he could ever pay for."
Where did that quote come from? I didn't see that anywhere in the Yahoo news article. And according to the article I read about this the other day, nothing was ever said about it begin a done deal.
If you're ever privaledged enough to be able to even SAY you want to TRY go to space on a partcular space flight, why should any of us put you down for it? It's only a step forward towards average Joe being able to take space flights, not a step backward.
Doesn't the snow get worn out?
on
Perpetual Skislope
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The problem I'm seeing here is pretty major. If you take a 3000m ski run and compress it into a 300m run, there's still going to be 3000m worth of "snow damage" per skier/run, but it will be compressed into 300m of distance. So the snow is going to be 10 times as chopped up in any one place. And real ski resorts have multiple runs that reduces the traffic on any one run... to even begin to pay for this thing it's going to have to be packed.
A number of written that the sky is fallen because Microsft is allowing smart tags. Of course, if you read the article smart tags are only implemented in the latest version of thier browser - where new features that some people like and others don't have always been.
Exactly how many lines of source code is Windows? *If* IE *is* tightly integrated into the Windows interface then they are going to need to put in alot of skilled man hours to get it out. Imagine if they couldn't extract it... that would pretty much entirely blow the case for the state. They're going to have to throw a lot of resources at it or risk failing.
He didn't say what Microsoft was doing wasn't immoral.. he said it wasn't illegal. And it's not. Your arugement is perfectly valid as to the morality of the situation, but not to the legality.
How long have you been reading Slashdot? No doubt people are going to tear this apart and start complaining about the lack of separation between the bits and the plastic, information has no owner, and so on and so forth. But if you believe you only bought the plastic, that's a personal choice. Personal choice about the value of the idea and creations of others is the American way too. Welcome to the vacuum that is the rest of it.:)
It's important to note that VB.NET does not support pointers and the "unsafe" modes of operation that were discussed in the Slashdot article yesterday. The model that protects business programmers from themselves and ensures the security of *that particular aspect* of the seciruty model is not in the framework itself but this so-called "skinning." The icing on the cake is that the framework itself (which has nothing to do with that aspect of security, but rather code-locale and permission-based security) allows these things for more advanced languages than VB (like C#.)
The second paragraph from the article you posted states that "mainstream CPUs are equally fitted to very different languages as they only do the most fundamental, low-level operations, so they cannot be biased towards particular languages." If you agree with that statement, and think it's a crux in the arguement, I'm not sure how you can say you don't agree with the inclusion of "unsafe" modes in the.NET framework. They're part of what makes the framework flexible enough to even come close to supporting "non skinned" languages, and in a speedy method at that.
I disagree with the quote as well, but for a different reason. A whole generation of programmers are already educated in address/pointer compatible languages. Complaining about a particular platform or model stifling innovation seems like a post-mortem to me... it's been stifled since the modern processor was introduced.
All languages are totally inappropriate for many projects. Your point should not be that C# is an inappropriate language of choice, but that any language is. A broad view would teach many languages, and since business applications ARE what most developers end up doing, there is no reason that C# shouldn't be one (if not the) language to be taught as that part of the broad view.
This bit still scares me. Does this mean that the C# compiler marks the IL as unsafe, and that the CLR trusts this marking?
No. The runtime itself will not support the interop functionality and will instead throw exceptions when a block of code with a network origin point tries to run. It has zero to do with the compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he can actually create an interface so amazing, so perfect, so right that no one would ever be able to improve upon it. I won't hold my breath, though.
I don't think what he said about creating a UI that "doesn't need preferences" doesn't mean the UI is fixed in stone. What about a UI that learns from the user and configures itself?
For example, the plain desktop could slowly cycle through the colors of the rainbow while a user is using the system, taking some kind of "productivity" measure as the user is using it. If it's determined that the user works better when the background is blue, the cycling could be weighted towards showing blue more often. The same could be done with dialog positioning, button positioning, window sizes, etc. I'd be willing to help figure out how that could be done.
I would agree that the type of data entry you suggest goes very well on a command line. But I don't think there's anything that can't be improved. What about a desktop of command line applications? That would allow users to deal with only one command prompt at a time if that's how they work best, or they'd be able to stack multiple windows to do things in phases if they liked that method better. That is going to improve usabliliy for *someone*, while not degrading it for the rest.
For me, I would prefer to stretch my "subconscious" processing of alternative, skinned UIs so that I can respond to a greater number of computing/information presentation. I may not be able to autonomically process a given interface as quickly as somebody who is familiar with the standardized UI, but I will be able to adapt to other UIs.
:)
I would say that's a resonable opinion for someone who wants to get a diverse computer use experience, but then again most computer users (of which slashdoters are a small small minority) just want to get in, get things done, and get out.
Have you ever used the trial version of WinZip? The trial dialog that pops up before you can use the product swaps the OK and Cancel buttons intentionally every time it starts up. Even if you use WinZip 10 times a day every day your concious mind comes into play every time you use this application. What's the task at hand? Accepting a dialog. Why should you have to think about this?
The same mental lag happens for novice users working between UIs (or skins)... bringing the concious mind into the picture is not helpful to people who need/want thier entire concious mind available for the task at hand, not accepting a dialog.
Microsoft did NOT pioneer this. This is how nearly all Mac software has always been installed. For the most part, Mac software doesn't have chains of dependancies and special settings to be made as part of an install... and if it does, those are drag-and-drop files as well. Let's just put it this way... you don't have to fiddle with keys in a registry. :)
First these long transaction are not that common and second they work fine.
Ever heard of the Slashdot effect? It doesn't seem to work fine to me.
Is anybode except MS using it for RPC?
One of SOAP's primary transports is HTTP, and that's not Microsoft specific.
And I still don't see the problem with the long connections.
If you make a SOAP call with HTTP has your primary transport, and the call takes 5 hours to process on the server, how's the server going to get back to you with the data? That's the problem with HTTP... MS is basically wanting another protocol that can be used for SOAP that punches through firewalls as easily as HTTP does, but doesn't have timeout problems.
Because Microsoft has never shown any level of success with security.
And they've never really shown any incentive to improve security until this past bug fix month. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem. MS is doing that, and they get reamed for it. Some Slashdot readers need to admit that they have a problem with double standards.
One of the most common security problems is buffer overflows; the way I worked around this was to write a special string library where the strings had meta data; including the maxiumum length a given string could have.
OK, great. But how can we be assured that your string library doesn't have security problems? Somewhere, someplace, memory is getting allocated and bytes are getting written, string copies are being performed, and buffers await overrunning. Auditing code so it is perfect and without bugs does work for security, it just has to take place in the libraries rather than the applications.
I heard there was this thing called VHF that also lets you receive some television stations for free. It's pretty amazing what they come up with these days.
That was pointed out in the article... interestingly, using 99% of the same words and sentance structures your post uses.
:)
Coincidence? I think not.
So, this conveyor belt carpet device, it was covered with machine-generated snow, was it? Oh, wait - it would all fall off the bottom of the belt.
:)
No... there is no snow involved. Alot of people have already mentioned this and have called it "carpet" for lack of a better term, but this isn't your average gray indoor-outdoor... it's really more like a foamy shag. It's enough to allow you to cut directly on the surface. I think it actually solves alot of problems that snow on any kind of conveyor or turntable would cause, but I wouldn't go on it, for the sake of my edges.
Yes, I did read the article. I just don't think any amount of refreshing (on a surface moving at up to 30kph no less) can refresh the surface damage I was explaining, so it's really not worth mentioning. The only thing the article points out is that the snow refreshing allows this to be used in warmer climates so that the snow doesn't melt away. It didn't say anything about the generation of fresh snow "fixing" the problems incurred by the use of the slope.
That was already pointed out in the article. Have you ever seen a ski hill groomed and flocked at 30kph? I didn't think so. It also doesn't change the fact that a normal volume of skiers are non-stop tracking the same 300m surface, which does not happen on any ski hill in existance... wear is spread out over longer hills.
"[Bass' flight] is just an advertising stunt, I can promise you," Spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said. "This is better advertising than he could ever pay for."
Where did that quote come from? I didn't see that anywhere in the Yahoo news article. And according to the article I read about this the other day, nothing was ever said about it begin a done deal.
If you're ever privaledged enough to be able to even SAY you want to TRY go to space on a partcular space flight, why should any of us put you down for it? It's only a step forward towards average Joe being able to take space flights, not a step backward.
The problem I'm seeing here is pretty major. If you take a 3000m ski run and compress it into a 300m run, there's still going to be 3000m worth of "snow damage" per skier/run, but it will be compressed into 300m of distance. So the snow is going to be 10 times as chopped up in any one place. And real ski resorts have multiple runs that reduces the traffic on any one run... to even begin to pay for this thing it's going to have to be packed.
A number of written that the sky is fallen because Microsft is allowing smart tags. Of course, if you read the article smart tags are only implemented in the latest version of thier browser - where new features that some people like and others don't have always been.
Quick, post something nice about AOL now!
Exactly how many lines of source code is Windows? *If* IE *is* tightly integrated into the Windows interface then they are going to need to put in alot of skilled man hours to get it out. Imagine if they couldn't extract it... that would pretty much entirely blow the case for the state. They're going to have to throw a lot of resources at it or risk failing.
Oh, you mean that squad of 20 elite programmers that the states just keep on hand in case they ever have to modify an OS?
He didn't say what Microsoft was doing wasn't immoral.. he said it wasn't illegal. And it's not. Your arugement is perfectly valid as to the morality of the situation, but not to the legality.
How long have you been reading Slashdot? No doubt people are going to tear this apart and start complaining about the lack of separation between the bits and the plastic, information has no owner, and so on and so forth. But if you believe you only bought the plastic, that's a personal choice. Personal choice about the value of the idea and creations of others is the American way too. Welcome to the vacuum that is the rest of it. :)
It's important to note that VB.NET does not support pointers and the "unsafe" modes of operation that were discussed in the Slashdot article yesterday. The model that protects business programmers from themselves and ensures the security of *that particular aspect* of the seciruty model is not in the framework itself but this so-called "skinning." The icing on the cake is that the framework itself (which has nothing to do with that aspect of security, but rather code-locale and permission-based security) allows these things for more advanced languages than VB (like C#.)
The second paragraph from the article you posted states that "mainstream CPUs are equally fitted to very different languages as they only do the most fundamental, low-level operations, so they cannot be biased towards particular languages." If you agree with that statement, and think it's a crux in the arguement, I'm not sure how you can say you don't agree with the inclusion of "unsafe" modes in the .NET framework. They're part of what makes the framework flexible enough to even come close to supporting "non skinned" languages, and in a speedy method at that.
I disagree with the quote as well, but for a different reason. A whole generation of programmers are already educated in address/pointer compatible languages. Complaining about a particular platform or model stifling innovation seems like a post-mortem to me... it's been stifled since the modern processor was introduced.
A broad view is very important.
All languages are totally inappropriate for many projects. Your point should not be that C# is an inappropriate language of choice, but that any language is. A broad view would teach many languages, and since business applications ARE what most developers end up doing, there is no reason that C# shouldn't be one (if not the) language to be taught as that part of the broad view.
This bit still scares me. Does this mean that the C# compiler marks the IL as unsafe, and that the CLR trusts this marking?
No. The runtime itself will not support the interop functionality and will instead throw exceptions when a block of code with a network origin point tries to run. It has zero to do with the compiler.