One major thing that brings me back to slashdot, is how easy it is on the eyes. You aren't assaulted with multiple columns of content or gaudy, interleaved ads. It's right to the point, top to bottom. [...] Slashdot also isn't like other tech news sites where you have 20% story, %80 related links or other fluff. [...] anything other than a chronological top down design would ruin what slashdot is.
I agree completely. If you want to see an example of bad site design, of what Slashdot should avoid looking like at all costs, just look at publish.com, the site on which the article was posted. Click on the link to TFA, and see what a bad web site looks like:
The content is strung down a narrow column in the middle, with ugly gray gutters taking up nearly half of the screen real estate on either side.
Nearly half of the remaining space is occupied by content that has nothing to do with the article, and half of it is ads, formatted in such narrow columns that only one or two words per line can fit in the space available.
The article takes up only about half of the vertical space, with the rest populated by approximately 30-40 billion totally unrelated and totally uninteresting links.
The story is interrupted periodically by links to other pages. (This is not the same thing as links to other pages appearing within the article text, which is perfectly acceptable.)
Most of the pictures appearing on the page are for ads for other content having nothing to do with the article. There are actually no pictures on the page at all that have anything to do with the article itself.
Contrast this with Slashdot's current layout:
There is a narrow bar at the top with links to other sites. IIRC, you can turn this bar off in your user preferences.
There is a narrow column down the left side with a bunch of links to other areas of the site.
There are a few (very few!) graphics near the top that link to related topics or sections, and the graphics are halfway decent looking and are actually somewhat indicative of the corresponding link (as opposed to the links on publish.com, many of which are photos of people that I don't know, and in whom I am not the least bit interested).
There are several links to external pages, and some of them are to commercial sites, but they are all at least somewhat related to the main article.
There is at most one, only mildy obtrusive, ad between the article and the comments.
The comments section, which is the main section, takes up over 90% of the horizontal space, and is uniterrupted by ads, extraneous links, and other distracting garbage.
There is no doubt which site is better.
I highly recommend that C.T. not listen to the "pros" and "experts", who seem to be responsible for a large portion of the crap commercial web pages infesting the World Wide Web.
A few other recommendations, not covered in the above:
Please let your users pick the color schemes, or at least give them a choice of schemes, so that they can avoid the games.* and it.* color schemes and the like.
Please avoid using any Flash or ECMAScript/JavaScript/AnyScript, or at least provide a non-script fallback for those of us who have all of that crap disabled.
Allow us to use more character entity references (such as °, ½, etc.) in comments.
Don't count markup in sig lines as contributing to the 120-character limit. Also, increase the limit to 160 or higher, but don't allow any more than two or three newlines in a sig.
There are probably some other things, but I can't think of them right now.
Well, ":imap ^Q^M \n" works in vim to insert (the two-character sequence) "\n" when <return> is hit, but I can't figure out how to detect when the cursor is within a string. It would be nice if autocommand had a mode that would fire when entering or leaving a syntactic region, so that I could map and unmap the key that way. Oh, well; I will play with it some more when I have time. If I can figure it out, I will also set it up so that "^I" (tab) inserts "\t", etc.
So are you seriously asserting that \Unicode 2424 should be used in place of \n? Sure, it's pretty and all, but A) it takes a hell of a lot longer to type/specify using a keyboard, and B) common functions should be mapped to common characters. Newline is EXCEEDINGLY common, so it should be very, very fast to specify, not mapped to some obscure graphic buried somewhere in Unicode. (at least 2424 would be pretty easy to remember.)
No, I'm speculating that, visibly, it may be more indicative of an actual newline than \n. Also, I'm not suggesting that someone should have to type backslash alt u 2 4 2 4 or something similar to get a newline. Here are two ways to do it:
Type \ <alt>+<return> (three keystrokes), and the keyboard handler sends \ U+2424 (two characters) to the editor, which places them in the text, or, even better,
just type <return> (one keystroke), and the context-sensitive editor, seeing that the cursor is inside of a string, inserts \ U+2424 (two characters).
Note that many editors these days, such as vim, can know whether or not the cursor is inside of a string, and so it should be possible to have different keyboard mappings for the return key, depending on where the cursor is. That way, when you type <return>, the editor can insert \ U+2424 if the cursor is inside of a string, or <newline> if it is outside of a string. Even better, the editor can insert \ n into the string so that it's valid ANSI C/C++, but display it as U+2424 in a different color to make it stand out as a newline character. That way you get the best of both worlds.
And for non-visual characters like 'newline'.... what other idea, exactly, did you have?
How about U+2424? Actually, that's the symbol for a graphic representing a newline (a slightly raised N next to a slightly lowered L, shrunk and crammed together into an area approximately a single em-space wide), so maybe that's not such a good idea (as how would you represent the graphic itself in a string?). OTOH, a \ followed by U+2424 could better represent a newline graphically in a string.
The reason that \n seems "pretty straightforward" is that most of us are used to it. The concept of backslash followed by a letter representing a control character started in C in the 1960s (or possibly even in earlier languages), and has been copied into dozens of other languages, along with other things like using % in printf strings to format variables (although some languages, like Ruby, are starting to offer alternative representations to %). Note that, in Common LISP, a newline is represented by ~% and ~& in formatting strings, and #\Newline (spelled just that way) represents a newline character outside of formatting strings. In Object Pascal/Delphi, a newline is represented by its decimal or hexadecimal equivalent, #10 or #$0A. Some languages, like Python and sh/ksh/bash/etc., allow an actual newline in a string itself, so no representation is necessary (although Python allows \n as well, in its non-raw strings). Other representations that I have seen in the past include ^J and ^M^J (for line feed and carriage return/line feed as control characters) and $ (for end-of-line in regular expressions (although the $ doesn't (usually) match the actual newline itself)) and in "list" mode in vi.
[U.S.-centric ignorance]30 degree heat? Wouldn't those poor people be hypothermic and not hot?[/U.S.-centric ignorance]
You have to remember that the British measure their temperatures in centipedes, not fairyheights like sensible people. So you have to convert from centipedes to fairyheights. Let's see, 30 centipedes, multiply by 666, dance naked around the altar, carry the one, sacrifice the virgin, run the units program, type "30C<CR>F<CR>", and you get, uh, "conformability error", which is pretty damn hot I guess.
Then you might want to look at vim 7, which is where all the features are going. Spell checking, intelligent autocompletion, a hell of a lot of new tweaks that make vim even nicer to work with.
Ack. One thing that I like about vim is its small size. It's a shame that it is getting more and more bloated. It seems that no software is immune to this.
it put a bright yellow highlight on whatever word the cursor was over, which persists even after I exit vi and start it again, until I manually edit the config file to delete the highlight keyword.
The bright yellow highlight is highlighting text that matches the current search expression. It's where you'll go if you type "n" or "N" in command mode. If you want to get rid of the highlighting, you don't have to edit the config file. Instead, just search for the end of line, which isn't (normally) printed. Here is the command: "/$", followed by the <RETURN> key.
Re:Not only is it a fantastic editor...
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
VIM does not load entire file into memory.
It still scans through the entire file, copying the whole thing to a temp file, before it displays anything. More/less doesn't. Use the right tool for the right job. For example, tail -1000 filename | more to scan through the last 1000 lines of a huge file is much more efficient than using vi to do it. OTOH, vi is better if you are going to be going back and forth in the file, searching for text in context, etc. Use the right tool for the right job.
Re: Vi Modes Considered Harmful
on
Vim 6.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No one says vim is user friendly. It's not supposed to be.
Actually, when vi was first released, it was very user-friendly, at least compared to the default editor ed, which is a line editor, and which was generally the only other text editor available on most UNIX systems. (If you want to compare the two, type "ed <some file>" at the command prompt on most *IX systems (including cygwin under MS-Windows), and try to edit the file. Vi(m) is so much better.) Even when editing on a DECWriter (a hard-copy terminal popular back in ancient times), I preferred using ex, the one-dimensional version of vi, to using ed.
Vi has held up surprisingly well over the last couple of decades, and (g)vim's added capabilities have made it even better. (I really like the '*' and '#' commands, and being able to use the mouse and arrow keys in insert mode. Oh, split-screen mode. Etc., etc.) Vi has done a decent job making the transition from TTY to GUI.
The one thing that annoys me sometimes is when I accidentally try to use vi commands in a non-vi setting. For example, more than once I have accidentally dismissed a dialog box after filling in a text box because I hit the escape key to terminate insert mode.
They always think the end is near. The end has never been near.
On the contrary, the end will always be near. Just like commercially viable fusion will always be available within five years. Or Duke Nukem Forever will always be out next year.
The transition from one step to the next, viewed independently of any other step, is considered valid algebra.
That's not true, either. Going from x+y=y to 2y=y depends on x=y. If you are going to use x=y in that step, then you also have to use it in the step where you divide by x-y.
What you should have stated was that each step seems valid.
As stated, the problem is unsolvable because there is no restriction on where the parallelogram may be on the page.
That's not a problem.
The only generalized solution is to find the center of the paper and the center of the parallelogram and make the fold through there. However, this is not generalized for any parallelogram and must be calculated each time a new parallelogram is drawn.
Nothing has to be calculated. Finding the center of any quadrilateral using simple folding is relatively straightforward:
Given quadrilateral ABCD. Fold paper so point A is touching B. Where the fold crosses line AB is the midpoint of line segment AB. Call this point Q. Do similar folds to get midpoints of BC, CD, and DA, called R, S, and T. Fold along DQ (that is, through points D and Q) and along BT. Where these two folds cross is the center of triangle ABD. Call this crossing point A'. Similarly fold along AR and along CQ to get point B', along BS and along DR to get point C', and along CT and along AS to get point D'. Fold along A'C' and along B'D'. Where these two folds cross is the center of the quadrilateral.
Finding the center of a rectangular piece of paper is easier: Fold top-to-bottom and side-to-side. Where the folds cross is the center of the page. Fold through the center of the page and the center of the qudrilateral, and you're done.
But I still can't figure out what the name of the game has to do with it.
The name of the game is "Petals Around the Rose", not "Petals of the Rose". The name of the game is significant.
To figure out what the name of the game has to do with it, you have to look at the dice. Don't play with the numbers. Look at the dice. And, remember, the name of the game is "Petals Around the Rose".
It took me about 10-15 minutes to figure out, and I figured it out graphically, not mathematically.
etc. Note that none of the digits will ever exceed 3. I have a truly marvelous proof for this, which, unfortunately, this post is too small to contain.
if an alien civilization manages to stumble across it and reverse-engineer the storage medium, it'll be the first inter-galactic goatse.
Why do you assume that the aliens will be extra-galactic? Don't you think that there are aliens in our own galaxy who are just as capable at reverse-engineering human storage media? Assuming that our aliens are less capable than, uh, alien aliens is just being galaxist.
Everyone should be on Zulu time (which is basically just GMT expressed in 24-hour format). [...] From that point, it's a hop-skip-jump to making everyone have the same date
Everyone should be using UTC, which automatically puts everyone at the same date in the first place, thus eliminating the necessity of your various ambulatory mechanations.
all those road signs that almost always are written in english with no picture in the US. Most of the time they are OK, but sometimes it's just what the heck do they mean...
Maybe using pictures on the warning signs is too simple?
Maybe some of the pictures are difficult to decipher, or are ambiguous, and plain English words aren't (or are less so)? For example, from the page to pointed to, what does this sign mean? Or this one? Or this one? And I assume that these two signs have something to do with simple street crossings, but if they are, why are they so elaborate, and multi-colored? The simple "+" indicator found on signs in the U.S. is far easier to comprehend.
Graphic (picture) signs are fine when they're simple and unambiguous (such as the many of the various diamond road signs in the U.S.). However, frequently, words are necessary.
So how do you know that it's not the other way around? I have a theory that Global Warming is causing people to use more fossil fuels, rather than the other way around. Perhaps I can get a grant from the Bush administration to study this, by going to warmer climes (e.g., Maui, Fiji, Ft. Lauderdale, etc.) and seeing how much people there use fossil fuels.
Seriously, why would you spend all that time and money building a machine to sort 18,000 larvae per hour instead of just building an equally impressive FLY KILLING MACHINE.
Moquitoes aren't flies, so a fly-killing machine would be ineffective against them.
If you went in a straight line, you'd end up in outer space.
Yeah, but first you would plunge into the ocean, then plow through the Earth's crust and upper mantle. This might cause some damage to the plane, and the view for the passengers, especially during the subterranean part of the trip, would be less than spectacular, and possibly somewhat alarming, what with the total darkness, super-high pressures, searing heat from magma, and the like.
I experienced many of them when I was a child, back before they were banned. I don't know about large airliners, but relatively small SS fighter jets at high altitude (but low enough to leave contrails) produced a sound that is quieter than an average thundeclap. It didn't rattle pictures, or even windows. An electrical tranformer exploding a half-mile away makes more noise. If they could keep the number of booms down (maybe once or twice per day), keep them on-schedule (same time each day), make sure that they occur only during normal waking hours, and make them quieter by using modern technology (and by flying above the speed of sound only at high altitude), then I don't see that there should be any problem with them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to see an example of bad site design, of what Slashdot should avoid looking like at all costs, just look at publish.com, the site on which the article was posted.
Click on the link to TFA, and see what a bad web site looks like:
formatted
in such
narrow
columns
that only
one or
two words
per line
can fit
in the
space
available.
(This is not the same thing as links to other pages appearing within the article text, which is perfectly acceptable.)
There are actually no pictures on the page at all that have anything to do with the article itself.
Contrast this with Slashdot's current layout:
- There is a narrow bar at the top with links to other sites.
- There is a narrow column down the left side with a bunch of links to other areas of the site.
- There are a few (very few!) graphics near the top that link to related topics or sections, and the graphics are halfway decent looking and are actually somewhat indicative of the corresponding link (as opposed to the links on publish.com, many of which are photos of people that I don't know, and in whom I am not the least bit interested).
- There are several links to external pages, and some of them are to commercial sites, but they are all at least somewhat related to the main article.
- There is at most one, only mildy obtrusive, ad between the article and the comments.
- The comments section, which is the main section, takes up over 90% of the horizontal space, and is uniterrupted by ads, extraneous links, and other distracting garbage.
There is no doubt which site is better.IIRC, you can turn this bar off in your user preferences.
I highly recommend that C.T. not listen to the "pros" and "experts", who seem to be responsible for a large portion of the crap commercial web pages infesting the World Wide Web.
A few other recommendations, not covered in the above:
- Please let your users pick the color schemes, or at least give them a choice of schemes, so that they can avoid the games.* and it.* color schemes and the like.
- Please avoid using any Flash or ECMAScript/JavaScript/AnyScript, or at least provide a non-script fallback for those of us who have all of that crap disabled.
- Allow us to use more character entity references (such as °, ½, etc.) in comments.
- Don't count markup in sig lines as contributing to the 120-character limit.
There are probably some other things, but I can't think of them right now.Also, increase the limit to 160 or higher, but don't allow any more than two or three newlines in a sig.
Well, ":imap ^Q^M \n" works in vim to insert (the two-character sequence) "\n" when <return> is hit, but I can't figure out how to detect when the cursor is within a string.
It would be nice if autocommand had a mode that would fire when entering or leaving a syntactic region, so that I could map and unmap the key that way.
Oh, well; I will play with it some more when I have time.
If I can figure it out, I will also set it up so that "^I" (tab) inserts "\t", etc.
And now that DEC is part of HP, they can return 016 as well. /8s.
HP doesn't need two
Also, I'm not suggesting that someone should have to type backslash alt u 2 4 2 4 or something similar to get a newline.
Here are two ways to do it:
- Type \ <alt>+<return> (three keystrokes), and the keyboard handler sends \ U+2424 (two characters) to the editor, which places them in the text, or, even better,
- just type <return> (one keystroke), and the context-sensitive editor, seeing that the cursor is inside of a string, inserts \ U+2424 (two characters).
Note that many editors these days, such as vim, can know whether or not the cursor is inside of a string, and so it should be possible to have different keyboard mappings for the return key, depending on where the cursor is.That way, when you type <return>, the editor can insert \ U+2424 if the cursor is inside of a string, or <newline> if it is outside of a string.
Even better, the editor can insert \ n into the string so that it's valid ANSI C/C++, but display it as U+2424 in a different color to make it stand out as a newline character.
That way you get the best of both worlds.
Actually, that's the symbol for a graphic representing a newline (a slightly raised N next to a slightly lowered L, shrunk and crammed together into an area approximately a single em-space wide), so maybe that's not such a good idea (as how would you represent the graphic itself in a string?).
OTOH, a \ followed by U+2424 could better represent a newline graphically in a string.
The reason that \n seems "pretty straightforward" is that most of us are used to it.
The concept of backslash followed by a letter representing a control character started in C in the 1960s (or possibly even in earlier languages), and has been copied into dozens of other languages, along with other things like using % in printf strings to format variables (although some languages, like Ruby, are starting to offer alternative representations to %).
Note that, in Common LISP, a newline is represented by ~% and ~& in formatting strings, and #\Newline (spelled just that way) represents a newline character outside of formatting strings.
In Object Pascal/Delphi, a newline is represented by its decimal or hexadecimal equivalent, #10 or #$0A.
Some languages, like Python and sh/ksh/bash/etc., allow an actual newline in a string itself, so no representation is necessary (although Python allows \n as well, in its non-raw strings).
Other representations that I have seen in the past include ^J and ^M^J (for line feed and carriage return/line feed as control characters) and $ (for end-of-line in regular expressions (although the $ doesn't (usually) match the actual newline itself)) and in "list" mode in vi.
So you have to convert from centipedes to fairyheights.
Let's see, 30 centipedes, multiply by 666, dance naked around the altar, carry the one, sacrifice the virgin, run the units program, type "30C<CR>F<CR>", and you get, uh, "conformability error", which is pretty damn hot I guess.
One thing that I like about vim is its small size.
It's a shame that it is getting more and more bloated.
It seems that no software is immune to this.
It's where you'll go if you type "n" or "N" in command mode.
If you want to get rid of the highlighting, you don't have to edit the config file.
Instead, just search for the end of line, which isn't (normally) printed.
Here is the command: "/$", followed by the <RETURN> key.
More/less doesn't.
Use the right tool for the right job.
For example, tail -1000 filename | more to scan through the last 1000 lines of a huge file is much more efficient than using vi to do it.
OTOH, vi is better if you are going to be going back and forth in the file, searching for text in context, etc.
Use the right tool for the right job.
(If you want to compare the two, type "ed <some file>" at the command prompt on most *IX systems (including cygwin under MS-Windows), and try to edit the file.
Vi(m) is so much better.)
Even when editing on a DECWriter (a hard-copy terminal popular back in ancient times), I preferred using ex, the one-dimensional version of vi, to using ed.
Vi has held up surprisingly well over the last couple of decades, and (g)vim's added capabilities have made it even better.
(I really like the '*' and '#' commands, and being able to use the mouse and arrow keys in insert mode.
Oh, split-screen mode.
Etc., etc.)
Vi has done a decent job making the transition from TTY to GUI.
The one thing that annoys me sometimes is when I accidentally try to use vi commands in a non-vi setting.
For example, more than once I have accidentally dismissed a dialog box after filling in a text box because I hit the escape key to terminate insert mode.
Just like commercially viable fusion will always be available within five years.
Or Duke Nukem Forever will always be out next year.
What you should have stated was that each step seems valid.
Finding the center of any quadrilateral using simple folding is relatively straightforward:Finding the center of a rectangular piece of paper is easier: Fold top-to-bottom and side-to-side.
Where the folds cross is the center of the page.
Fold through the center of the page and the center of the qudrilateral, and you're done.
The name of the game is significant.
To figure out what the name of the game has to do with it, you have to look at the dice.
Don't play with the numbers.
Look at the dice.
And, remember, the name of the game is "Petals Around the Rose".
It took me about 10-15 minutes to figure out, and I figured it out graphically, not mathematically.
It should go:etc.
Note that none of the digits will ever exceed 3.
I have a truly marvelous proof for this, which, unfortunately, this post is too small to contain.
Don't you think that there are aliens in our own galaxy who are just as capable at reverse-engineering human storage media?
Assuming that our aliens are less capable than, uh, alien aliens is just being galaxist.
For example, from the page to pointed to, what does this sign mean?
Or this one?
Or this one?
And I assume that these two signs have something to do with simple street crossings, but if they are, why are they so elaborate, and multi-colored?
The simple "+" indicator found on signs in the U.S. is far easier to comprehend.
Graphic (picture) signs are fine when they're simple and unambiguous (such as the many of the various diamond road signs in the U.S.).
However, frequently, words are necessary.
I have a theory that Global Warming is causing people to use more fossil fuels, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps I can get a grant from the Bush administration to study this, by going to warmer climes (e.g., Maui, Fiji, Ft. Lauderdale, etc.) and seeing how much people there use fossil fuels.
Make rocket go now!
Males don't bite, so if only males are released, then no "malaria-spreading bloodsuckers" will be released.
This might cause some damage to the plane, and the view for the passengers, especially during the subterranean part of the trip, would be less than spectacular, and possibly somewhat alarming, what with the total darkness, super-high pressures, searing heat from magma, and the like.
I don't know about large airliners, but relatively small SS fighter jets at high altitude (but low enough to leave contrails) produced a sound that is quieter than an average thundeclap.
It didn't rattle pictures, or even windows.
An electrical tranformer exploding a half-mile away makes more noise.
If they could keep the number of booms down (maybe once or twice per day), keep them on-schedule (same time each day), make sure that they occur only during normal waking hours, and make them quieter by using modern technology (and by flying above the speed of sound only at high altitude), then I don't see that there should be any problem with them.