Nothing was uglier than your average X Windows app when Windows was at version 2.
Too true. MS did a good thing when they got some people with artistic sense to help with Windows 3. The problem is that the industry's given more and more influence to artists of less and less talent, sense and taste for the last 10 years and now so many Windows apps' UI looks like angry fruit salad.
I think high-color graphics cards, Photoshop and the Web did more damage than Bryce or Kai could ever dream of. I find it ironic that with all the "skinning" available that apps look crappier than ever (this is on the Windows platform), and standards have been all but abandoned, even by MS, who should know better.
UI design has been in free-fall since about the late 90's... because of this I think the various Linux desktops became better looking and more "beautiful" by doing nothing while Microsoft thinks UI "innovation" is letting you make WMP look like eyeballs.
There isn't a single member of Congress that anyone form the most gun-happy, Bible-thumping conservative to the most amoral, tree-hugging liberal couldn't find a legitimate reason to vote out. If we all voted against people who did the kinds of things we object to, who could we vote _for_?
Given that Congress' approval rating is usually around of even below 20% these days, I'd have to ask back to you, why haven't we thrown the bums out? Unfortunately, we don't have much to choose from, and while there are some members of Congress who seem to be honest and earnest in their support of certain policies (e.g., Tancredo on immigation reform and Boucher on computer-related issues), the fact is that you gotta pick somebody and it's guaranteed that that candidate will have something you don't like. This is exacerbated by the fact that 99% of the candidates belong to The One Big Party(TM) or The Other Big Party (U.S. Pat. Pending, All Rights Reserved).
The DCMA probably doesn't get a lot of brain cycles outside of nerdatoria like/. or the fever swamps of Hollywood big business, but even if it did, there are other issues which almost everyone considers more important. Given issues like war, national security, crime, taxes and medical care, you are probably not going to put as much emphasis on the craziness surrounding IP law no matter how bad it gets... no one can really be a one-issue voter... you get everything the candidate (and usually his whole party) stands for. Against capital punishment? Fine, but you gotta vote for abortion. For greater school choice? Well, then you gotta take the pro-gun stance. You get everything from column A or everything from column B, even if that means the stringy mushrooms or the mushy lo-mein.
Of course, in the case of caving to the media companies, it seems you lose almost regardless of your choice. Congress doesn't have much interest in Fair Use or Consumer Rights when there's, gasp, Piracy going on (Bom! Bom! BWOOOOMMMMM!). "Steamboat Willie" is going into public domain? That's OK, Disney will buy an extension to the Copyright Law. Digital Recorders? That's OK, there'll be a broadcast flag. And so on...
You can show me a bum to throw out and a better guy to vote in for each topic I'm interested in. The problem is they won't all be the same guy or the same party. SO in the grand scheme of Life, the Universe and Everything, this issue won't be in the front row, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
p.s. And I never said the cabal was secret... they are operating right there in the sublight.
Maybe performance isn't the problem. Maybe the problem is that most Java programs look like Java programs, i.e., crappy. Java's strength seems to be on the back-end, not for UI work. My sole experience with Java UI programming was nightmarish, but that was 5 years ago. I found myself digging into library source just to try to do something that took a few minutes to set up with MFC.
Constitutional? What does that have to do with anything? Apparently you haven't heard of the Benjamin Franklin Amendment: The one with the Benjamins gets to make the amendments.
This legislation was bought and paid for, period. Under the guise of legitimately protecting businesses from theft by piracy, etc, they have essentially given the businesses lock and key over what you purchase and thrown Fair Use out the window.
This country was founded upon the ideas of competition and free trade, but now there is a whole industry based on outmoded means of distribution (i.e., media companies who want to shackle us the _19th_ century modes of content distribution, or at least the functional equivalent). Sure I understand people are just illegally trading this stuff, but since almost every "innovation" in the industry is geared towards decreasing value and increasing hassle, they are making their own problems worse. iTunes, etc, is a start... not a great one, but a good step in the right direction. I know in my case, it's not that I want it free... I'm more than happy to pay for it, I just want it the way I want it with no restrictions on use. I want to be able to make a copy for my car, or a backup copy, or to be able to play it on my computer or PocketPC. At least we still have RedBook CD's, but I can forsee a day when it becomes illegal to sell them, in favor of some DRM'ed media (that has 0-day hacks for every upgrade...).
I sure wish I could buy laws, but you know the saying: one millionaire, one vote.
but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here
I would imagine if there are places where people are paying $1 or $2 for movies or games, they are bootleg in the first place. I agree that region encoding was always about screwing the consumer, but I don't think your logic is correct. I'm sure there will be something to offset the benefits of no region codes. I'm betting Hollywood will buy some ill-conceived, indefensible, and unenforceable legislation to prevent foreign movies from coming into the U.S.
When Hollywood says "Jump!", Congress asks "How high?"
I'm sure the movie industry will lobby for (i.e., buy) legislation to prohibit this. Then we will have yet another situation of thousands or millions of people doing something and a tiny minority getting selected at random to be made examples of. Orrin Hatch, call your office.
Let's face it, the U.S. Congress is Hollywood's bitch, and if Hollywood don't like it, I'm sure we will see some legislative action.
No she has to obey the Constitution. The problem right now is that there are about 4 or 5 Justices who like to obey their consciences regardless of what the Constitution says.
Yeah, they so totally ripped off The Comedian, oh, wait.
I think you're going a little overboard here. Yeah, the powers coincided with the FF for 3 out of 4 of the family, but the story only bore a similarity to one small aspect of The Watchmen, which would be a good movie but never will be. Yeah, they pulled it off with Spiderman, but I can't help but think they would butcher The Watchmen.
Anyhow, it was a good old-fashioned advnture story that had a good story, incredible sense of style (very retro, and yet not retro), great characters, great acting (although Brad Bird does _not_ sound like a woman, period) and excellent visuals.
The real question though is what they mean by native PDF support
Based on history, it probably means that you can output a Word document to something called MS-PDF which will lose several important types of formatting, and will crash Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader one time out of three. Word will only open PDF's created by Word, and it will lose even more formatting when pulling it in. Oh, and if you install Acroread 7 after Word, Word will start crashing when trying to export to "PDF".
Well, first off I use 4NT which is a superscript of the CMD shell with far more capabilities (i.e., it's a real shell), and secondly I have cygwin in the path. I think I'm pretty well covered in that respect.
Nice. There's a lot of great stuff you can do with Windows if you look past the GUI. The hardest part is finding out about it. I'd never heard of robocopy until I worked with an ex-Microsoftie.
I hope this discussion wasn't limited to Unix or anything.
It shouldn't be. Another source of good command line tools is sysinternals.com.
The pstools let you do all kinds of nifty things that are sometimes covered by RK utils, but the sysinternals stuff is usually way better......with one exception that drives me crazy. pslist is their version of ps, which I just alias using 4NT, however they don't echo the banner to stderr like most utils, so if you sort the list looking to see if you need to kill and errant process of Firefox 1.5 beta 1, you get the banner sorted with the list of processes.
Other than that, they are great tools.
You can easily control services on other machines ("net" might let you do this but I don't know how), you can even defrag with "contig". Heck there's even a blue screen screen saver. At one place, years ago I used to run this to encourage people not to mess with my machine.
Of course no Windows command line would be complete without cygwin in the path.
how many of them are in jail? How many honest citizens have been screwed over?
Those are good questions. You seem to imply that the answer to the first is small and the answer to the second is large. If that's true then you have a point, but I don't take that as given.
Now I'm not arguing for the increased powers or against our liberties, but you seem to take it as given that it's failing. But do you know of any proof? I don't know about you, but there haven't been too many terrorist attacks lately. That doesn't mean there won't be one tomorrow, but how do you know they haven't caught a lot of terrorist operatives in the U.S. Do you think they are going to advertise that?
How many honest citizens have been screwed over? Well, there were a couple people detained in Guantanamo who were apparently citizens, although they were captured overseas. Have there been more people "screwed over"? I haven't heard about them? Have you? If so, then please enlighten me.
Of course you need to ask, "How many honest citizens could be screwed over?" I think that's an important question too. But I think the previous one deserves a definitive answer.
In other words, you can't blame them for screwing up if they haven't screwed up, just because they might. I'm as concerned about the Patriot Act I, II, 3-D, and Son of as much as the rest of the crowd around here. But it's been around for years. Where are the horror stories?
Like I said, just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean it's the end of the world. Has it really been the bad idea we (me too!) have made it out to be? Or are there enough checks and balances in the system to protect the innocent?
MSVC6 will claim that i is declared twice. That's what we are talking about. There doesn't seem to be a good way to handle this for code that is compiled under the old bad way and the newer good way of interpreting scope for the for loop variables.
I have a huge library of code that I use with MSVC++6. Some day I imagine a client will actually want to use VC2003 or newer (hasn't happened yet). I'd rather use the new style as it is (and always has been) the correct implementation for C++, but if I need to go back to VC6, then the code won't compile.
You could turn off the newer, correct interpretation in VC2000+, but that's just as bad since you are deliberately breaking the language and perpetuating a mistake that was made a decade or more ago. I remember reading Stroustrop's comment that it was wrong, but most compilers at the time implemented scope the way VC6 does. After some consideration I realized his way was best, but there wasn't anything I could do, at the time.
It's really a bit of an ugly situation for those of us who always declared loop variables in the loop, and want to continue to support a development environment that is still used by about half the Windows programmers. Face it, MS mostly got it right with VC6, and just like with OS's and Office, for most people they ran out of reasons to make them upgrade.
I was referring to the GP post. Someone plugged a game. Now it could be just an honest plug from a satisfied customer. I do that all the time. But it also could be the "stealth marketing" you were talking about, and that's what I was trying to imply. Believe me, I have worked with someone in the game industry and have often resisted the urge to do the same thing for his product. I don't want to call the motives of the GPP into question, but the text did seem a little "marketingy" to me.
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Nothing was uglier than your average X Windows app when Windows was at version 2.
Too true. MS did a good thing when they got some people with artistic sense to help with Windows 3. The problem is that the industry's given more and more influence to artists of less and less talent, sense and taste for the last 10 years and now so many Windows apps' UI looks like angry fruit salad.
I think high-color graphics cards, Photoshop and the Web did more damage than Bryce or Kai could ever dream of. I find it ironic that with all the "skinning" available that apps look crappier than ever (this is on the Windows platform), and standards have been all but abandoned, even by MS, who should know better.
UI design has been in free-fall since about the late 90's... because of this I think the various Linux desktops became better looking and more "beautiful" by doing nothing while Microsoft thinks UI "innovation" is letting you make WMP look like eyeballs.
p.s. I mean the _use_ of Photoshop, not its UI.
Unlimited spending by the two bug parties acts as an effective barrier to entry to third parties.
I'm sick of bug parties, I think we need scientists to create sterile male politicians with glow-in-the-dark gonads to try to wipe them out.
We need some new parties... ones that represent someone other than money and status quo (i.e., the big two) or crackpots (i.e., most of the rest).
Almost certainly, the recent evolution can be mapped and I would bet that it will be in areas of high mosquito concentrations.
[dull monotone]
Yes, there are far more species in the Amazon than in Antarctica.
[/dull monotone]
Seriously though, it's a really intriguing concept... evolution caused by viruses. Hey, it could happen.
The truth, should we ever find it, will probably be something equally bizarre.
I really think that there are more direct methods of addressing the issue
Yeah, it's called DDT.
No, it was that way before you left.
not assistance in turning Linux into Windows 2.
;-)
Really. We don't want Linux to become Windows 2. It was limited to 16 colors and was even uglier than your average X Windows app.
Well, we are saying the same thing. By being a monopoly, they were forcing you to let them screw you. :-P
However, like some other posters said, it seems appropriate to pay them with Monopoly money.
Who's oversimplifying?
/. or the fever swamps of Hollywood big business, but even if it did, there are other issues which almost everyone considers more important. Given issues like war, national security, crime, taxes and medical care, you are probably not going to put as much emphasis on the craziness surrounding IP law no matter how bad it gets... no one can really be a one-issue voter... you get everything the candidate (and usually his whole party) stands for. Against capital punishment? Fine, but you gotta vote for abortion. For greater school choice? Well, then you gotta take the pro-gun stance. You get everything from column A or everything from column B, even if that means the stringy mushrooms or the mushy lo-mein.
There isn't a single member of Congress that anyone form the most gun-happy, Bible-thumping conservative to the most amoral, tree-hugging liberal couldn't find a legitimate reason to vote out. If we all voted against people who did the kinds of things we object to, who could we vote _for_?
Given that Congress' approval rating is usually around of even below 20% these days, I'd have to ask back to you, why haven't we thrown the bums out? Unfortunately, we don't have much to choose from, and while there are some members of Congress who seem to be honest and earnest in their support of certain policies (e.g., Tancredo on immigation reform and Boucher on computer-related issues), the fact is that you gotta pick somebody and it's guaranteed that that candidate will have something you don't like. This is exacerbated by the fact that 99% of the candidates belong to The One Big Party(TM) or The Other Big Party (U.S. Pat. Pending, All Rights Reserved).
The DCMA probably doesn't get a lot of brain cycles outside of nerdatoria like
Of course, in the case of caving to the media companies, it seems you lose almost regardless of your choice. Congress doesn't have much interest in Fair Use or Consumer Rights when there's, gasp, Piracy going on (Bom! Bom! BWOOOOMMMMM!). "Steamboat Willie" is going into public domain? That's OK, Disney will buy an extension to the Copyright Law. Digital Recorders? That's OK, there'll be a broadcast flag. And so on...
You can show me a bum to throw out and a better guy to vote in for each topic I'm interested in. The problem is they won't all be the same guy or the same party. SO in the grand scheme of Life, the Universe and Everything, this issue won't be in the front row, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
p.s. And I never said the cabal was secret... they are operating right there in the sublight.
But should they be allowed to screw you? No.
Bzzt. Yes, they should be allowed to screw you. But you can't be forced to let them.
Maybe performance isn't the problem. Maybe the problem is that most Java programs look like Java programs, i.e., crappy. Java's strength seems to be on the back-end, not for UI work. My sole experience with Java UI programming was nightmarish, but that was 5 years ago. I found myself digging into library source just to try to do something that took a few minutes to set up with MFC.
If you go out to start your car, and there's a weird vertical hole drilled straight through it, do not get it repaired!
Unless you're in L.A. on the morning of January 1st, then everyone on your block will have them.
How is the DMCA even constitutional?
Constitutional? What does that have to do with anything? Apparently you haven't heard of the Benjamin Franklin Amendment: The one with the Benjamins gets to make the amendments.
This legislation was bought and paid for, period. Under the guise of legitimately protecting businesses from theft by piracy, etc, they have essentially given the businesses lock and key over what you purchase and thrown Fair Use out the window.
This country was founded upon the ideas of competition and free trade, but now there is a whole industry based on outmoded means of distribution (i.e., media companies who want to shackle us the _19th_ century modes of content distribution, or at least the functional equivalent). Sure I understand people are just illegally trading this stuff, but since almost every "innovation" in the industry is geared towards decreasing value and increasing hassle, they are making their own problems worse. iTunes, etc, is a start... not a great one, but a good step in the right direction. I know in my case, it's not that I want it free... I'm more than happy to pay for it, I just want it the way I want it with no restrictions on use. I want to be able to make a copy for my car, or a backup copy, or to be able to play it on my computer or PocketPC. At least we still have RedBook CD's, but I can forsee a day when it becomes illegal to sell them, in favor of some DRM'ed media (that has 0-day hacks for every upgrade...).
I sure wish I could buy laws, but you know the saying: one millionaire, one vote.
I can't figure out who this serves. Oh, well, we keep electing these people, and they keep using the system against us.
I'm sure there will be some alternative that makes up for the lack of region code here in the U.S. too.
but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here
I would imagine if there are places where people are paying $1 or $2 for movies or games, they are bootleg in the first place. I agree that region encoding was always about screwing the consumer, but I don't think your logic is correct. I'm sure there will be something to offset the benefits of no region codes. I'm betting Hollywood will buy some ill-conceived, indefensible, and unenforceable legislation to prevent foreign movies from coming into the U.S.
When Hollywood says "Jump!", Congress asks "How high?"
I'm sure the movie industry will lobby for (i.e., buy) legislation to prohibit this. Then we will have yet another situation of thousands or millions of people doing something and a tiny minority getting selected at random to be made examples of. Orrin Hatch, call your office.
Let's face it, the U.S. Congress is Hollywood's bitch, and if Hollywood don't like it, I'm sure we will see some legislative action.
She has to obey her conscience, not some client.
No she has to obey the Constitution. The problem right now is that there are about 4 or 5 Justices who like to obey their consciences regardless of what the Constitution says.
Yeah, they so totally ripped off The Comedian, oh, wait.
I think you're going a little overboard here. Yeah, the powers coincided with the FF for 3 out of 4 of the family, but the story only bore a similarity to one small aspect of The Watchmen, which would be a good movie but never will be. Yeah, they pulled it off with Spiderman, but I can't help but think they would butcher The Watchmen.
Anyhow, it was a good old-fashioned advnture story that had a good story, incredible sense of style (very retro, and yet not retro), great characters, great acting (although Brad Bird does _not_ sound like a woman, period) and excellent visuals.
The real question though is what they mean by native PDF support
Based on history, it probably means that you can output a Word document to something called MS-PDF which will lose several important types of formatting, and will crash Acrobat or the Acrobat Reader one time out of three. Word will only open PDF's created by Word, and it will lose even more formatting when pulling it in. Oh, and if you install Acroread 7 after Word, Word will start crashing when trying to export to "PDF".
Not that I'm being cynical or anything.
Well, first off I use 4NT which is a superscript of the CMD shell with far more capabilities (i.e., it's a real shell), and secondly I have cygwin in the path. I think I'm pretty well covered in that respect.
Nice. There's a lot of great stuff you can do with Windows if you look past the GUI. The hardest part is finding out about it. I'd never heard of robocopy until I worked with an ex-Microsoftie.
Now I use it all the time.
p.s. Did you spell "asinine" wrong on purpose?
I hope this discussion wasn't limited to Unix or anything.
...with one exception that drives me crazy. pslist is their version of ps, which I just alias using 4NT, however they don't echo the banner to stderr like most utils, so if you sort the list looking to see if you need to kill and errant process of Firefox 1.5 beta 1, you get the banner sorted with the list of processes.
It shouldn't be. Another source of good command line tools is sysinternals.com.
The pstools let you do all kinds of nifty things that are sometimes covered by RK utils, but the sysinternals stuff is usually way better...
Other than that, they are great tools.
You can easily control services on other machines ("net" might let you do this but I don't know how), you can even defrag with "contig". Heck there's even a blue screen screen saver. At one place, years ago I used to run this to encourage people not to mess with my machine.
Of course no Windows command line would be complete without cygwin in the path.
how many of them are in jail? How many honest citizens have been screwed over?
Those are good questions. You seem to imply that the answer to the first is small and the answer to the second is large. If that's true then you have a point, but I don't take that as given.
Now I'm not arguing for the increased powers or against our liberties, but you seem to take it as given that it's failing. But do you know of any proof? I don't know about you, but there haven't been too many terrorist attacks lately. That doesn't mean there won't be one tomorrow, but how do you know they haven't caught a lot of terrorist operatives in the U.S. Do you think they are going to advertise that?
How many honest citizens have been screwed over? Well, there were a couple people detained in Guantanamo who were apparently citizens, although they were captured overseas. Have there been more people "screwed over"? I haven't heard about them? Have you? If so, then please enlighten me.
Of course you need to ask, "How many honest citizens could be screwed over?" I think that's an important question too. But I think the previous one deserves a definitive answer.
In other words, you can't blame them for screwing up if they haven't screwed up, just because they might. I'm as concerned about the Patriot Act I, II, 3-D, and Son of as much as the rest of the crowd around here. But it's been around for years. Where are the horror stories?
Like I said, just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean it's the end of the world. Has it really been the bad idea we (me too!) have made it out to be? Or are there enough checks and balances in the system to protect the innocent?
What's the problem?
MSVC6 will claim that i is declared twice. That's what we are talking about. There doesn't seem to be a good way to handle this for code that is compiled under the old bad way and the newer good way of interpreting scope for the for loop variables.
I have a huge library of code that I use with MSVC++6. Some day I imagine a client will actually want to use VC2003 or newer (hasn't happened yet). I'd rather use the new style as it is (and always has been) the correct implementation for C++, but if I need to go back to VC6, then the code won't compile.
You could turn off the newer, correct interpretation in VC2000+, but that's just as bad since you are deliberately breaking the language and perpetuating a mistake that was made a decade or more ago. I remember reading Stroustrop's comment that it was wrong, but most compilers at the time implemented scope the way VC6 does. After some consideration I realized his way was best, but there wasn't anything I could do, at the time.
It's really a bit of an ugly situation for those of us who always declared loop variables in the loop, and want to continue to support a development environment that is still used by about half the Windows programmers. Face it, MS mostly got it right with VC6, and just like with OS's and Office, for most people they ran out of reasons to make them upgrade.
I was referring to the GP post. Someone plugged a game. Now it could be just an honest plug from a satisfied customer. I do that all the time. But it also could be the "stealth marketing" you were talking about, and that's what I was trying to imply. Believe me, I have worked with someone in the game industry and have often resisted the urge to do the same thing for his product. I don't want to call the motives of the GPP into question, but the text did seem a little "marketingy" to me.