I am reading Slashdot on Windoze (I have to be able to deal with MS Office and IE programming for my job at least until some *ux gets 10% of the desktop market). There is no anti-aliasing anywhere on my screen and I don't see any in StarCalc or StarWriter at any font size either.
I use smallish fonts and run an LCD screen at about 95 dpi. I have seen anti-aliased fonts like the ones in the display and they are terrible for my eyes. I understand that some people have different vision-brain physiology and love AA -- I don't like it a bit on fonts but appreciate it with graphics.
I do most of my work in Putty (thanks!) and the Windows terminal, TNR, and even courier fonts are a delight. I think that's a result of proper True Type rendering of hints and good quality bimap fonts at proper resolution.
I have run some Linux desktops and I find that the font choices available are much lower quality than the Windows fonts. They are not clear at reasonably small sizes and they include excessive space around each characer and the ascenders and descenders are allocated far too much space so that fewer lines of text can appear.
And aside from the work issue (which will be fixed as soon as I can eliminate Access from our project if Wine runs IE okay) this is the biggest thing that prevents me fron going all Linux. Next is that X is sllooooowwww compared to Win32, but hardware has done a lot to help with that in the past few years.
Sure OpenSSH will protect you when you log into your *nix box. But what happens when you go to get your POP mail from your ISP? You send out your password in plaintext and then your mail is completely vulnerable. Does anyone make a mail
server that encrypts with common clients?
-Brian
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
Have you seen the Macintosh installation
documentation? There are no words on it. It's so simple that my 50-something computer illiterate friends can be on the internet based on a color coded diagram on one glossy poster without reading a word of English.
Gosh, I love that. Sixty year old folks from small towns in the mountains send me email based on listserv posts I've made and meet me to camp in the desert. And you should see graphics designers take to Macs!
They say Windows works one day and not the next and nobody knows why; I don't see iMac users doing regular reinstalls, but I hear a lot from PC users about it. And I'm tired of it.
-Brian
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
I bought a PC Laptop with USB, 56k, 10/100,
400MHz K6-2, 14.1" 1024/768, 6GB Disk, CDROM,
128MB RAM, Li battery, 7lbs, 1.8in thick
for US$2000 in August, 1999.
And I've never had any hardware trouble or driver incompaitiblity.
Now I could get twice as much for the same price.
So it remains the same: Macintosh hardware costs US$1000 more for the same machine if you need a developer quality system. US$200 to US$500 more if you just need to do email, word processing, and surf.
But I'll still consider a Titanium because it would be great to run OSX, it's very nice hardware, Apple quality may be worth US$1000 more,
and it's real UNIX, not just Cygwin and PuTTY (both of which I love -- thanks a billion guys!).
I think that installing PCs in an office might be a mistake considering TCO nowadays. I'd switch to iMacs and Cubes now that I've spent some time doing system administrationa and maintenance for a startup. It's easy for me to manage my machine beacuse I'm a techie, but my life would be much asier if everyone else's machine just hummed, too.
Does anyone know what compatibility issues I'd face switching an office over to iMacs and PCs all on the same network (just a DHCP firewall and a big hub)? Would SMB work? Will everything configure itself automatically the same as now?
The whole HAL scheme with the intelligent computer going bad and then
terrorizing the humans is nothing but a high gloss ripoff of Colossus: The Forbin Project.
Many of the best individual scenes, like the
scheming to disconnect HAL are taken directly
from Colossus.
If you liked the monkees and the excavation of
monoliths and space station stuff, that's one thing. But the
focus on HAL in reminiscenes of 2001
is silly since it was done better both before
and after.
Tomcat is a reference implementation that is
moving toward being a viable product for small
self maintained sites. I use it for testing
because I find that its instability and open
development strategy are plusses.
There are real commercial Servlet Containers
that are much faster and more stable. Resin is blazing
fast, includes lost of fun gadgets (but start with
plain servlets, please) and is OPEN SOURCE. It's
free for small installations, but costs US$500
for commercial licenses. I use it.
What I really like about Resin is that it is
rock solid. And nicely supported.
Servlets are at their best with complicated, large, or frequently updated sites. Consider a
framework like Turbine or a
templating engine like WebMacro or both to build
a good quality maintainable site.
JSP is designed to emulate ASP. It's a great transition path. Now some taglibs exist to make
it a viable platform for development, too. But a real framework is better, so consider one.
Since 95% of browsers come with Flash, that
was really not fair to your wannabe.
All new browsers that common folk use (IE and NN) come with Flash. And the people using older
stuff are not likely to be the disposable cash
demographic that WebRetail caters to.
I don't like flash myself, but people judge your image on pretty pictures. They will trust
your site more when it comes with Flashy nonsense.
-Brian
If Joe Q. Example decides to live out in the middle of the Nevada desert where there are no utilities, how, exactly, does society
benefit by paying to give him a phone hookup? Does someone antisocial enough to want to live far, far away from society in
general really benefit that society by having a phone connection to it?
Now that's a remarkably farsighted view for the techno futurists at/dot.
Now imagine this:
What if Joe Q. Example wants to live in a rural
agricultural community far out in the Nebraska plains and doesn't want to go Amish or to live in tech central, but to be a part of a mainstream free society that is free from the 'convenience'
of global integration and techno modernism? In a
capitalist society, few rural communities would
have more than a handfull of phone lines or internet connections, and those would probably be
in a central location like the county seat library.
I know of a remote rural community in AZ near the
Sonora border where Maryjane is cheap from 'international entrepreneurs', organic vegetables
are a viable industry, open space and mountain
views are easy to come by, and land is cheap. It's just about 40 miles from this close knit community to a major city, too. But nobody moves there, because there is no easy access to subsidized phone lines or publicly subsidized
water works. Furthermore, the highway is long and
roundabout and takes hours to travel because it's
not as heavily subsidized as an interstate.
It's a wonderful place and it would die promptly
along with its close knit, open, unique, and
worldly culture if 'universal service' and the
other destructive forces of socialist globalism
made their grubby way in there.
Land would soon be too expensive for homesteading
immigrants and native children would be forced to
move to the city to earn a living. Rich yuppie
second homes would start crowding the landscape
and the colonial town center would be redone. The
two famous writers who live in the area would
escape from scrutiny by living alone or finding
another community where they could live as
a part of a community and not a celebrity.
But that would have to be outside the USA, as
the socialist menace of 'universal service' and
various other leveling schemes carry us down into
fascism.
In fact, we know that we percieve colors the same way because we have matching colors, fashion, graphic design, pretty flowers, and other color preferences and combinational preferences.
The fact the people (women, anyway) can agree on what is beautiful and visually pleasing without a previously agreed standard proves that humans percieve colors in some similar way.
-Brian
In the USA, a 75K nominal salary (the emplyer will
pay about 5k more in employer taxes) will be taxed like this in California, assuming a married couple with no kids and one income:
Federal Income Tax: US$13500
Federal Employment Tax: US$5500
State Income Tax: US$3000
Other Miscellaneous Income Taxes: US$1000
That adds up to US$24 000.
The state sales tax is 8%. There is no federal sales tax, GST, or VAT.
In other states, the state income tax may be as low as 0% (Texas, Florda, Washington, Nevada, New
Hampshire, South Dakota) or the state sales tax
may be lower.
So that seems like much less than your Canadian total. Consdier that US$75 000 US is very unlikely to buy what CAN$100 000 buys in the most desirable parts of the USA. Health care is usually taken care of for free by your employer, unless you are a contractor and the USA has by far the best health care in the world.
San Francisco is my favotrite place in the world. But I'm not the world's most attractive person and that made it really hard to find a girlfriend. So I left after three years of culture, freedom, good transit, political involvement, and total frustration. More about leaving later.
It was far worse when I worked in Silicon Valley.
Now here's the story about SV life. These are single M to F ratios, adjusted for average age at first marriage and targeted at 28 year old males. They are the best guide to your chances of meeting and marrying a good partner. More about homosexuality later. Here goes (derived from much analysis of raw data at www.census.gov, 1999 figures all +/- 5%):
San Francisco 125%
Alameda (East Bay) 115%
Santa Clara (SV proper) 160%
Now that's depressing. Consider, though, that SF's gay population (about 5% to 12%, depending ou your definitions and estimates, and about 3 to 1 male) makes your odds almost as good as in Alameda.
The US avarage is about 100%, so anywhere in the SF Bay area is going to be far worse than your alternatives. For females and gay males, SV is great; no place else has the culture, the weather, the opportunities. But for a single het male, earn your money and leave.
I knew women who kept two and three boyfriends for fun. There were women I worked with who had a waiting list of men who wanted to marry them if their current husbands didn't work out. The men tend to be rich and desperate; if I were a girl, I'd never consider anywhere else.
I checked to see if I were bi, but that didn't work out, so now I live here.
Salt Lake City 90%
It's like transmogrifying into Mel Gibson. And my girlfriend and her friends think polygyny might be a viable option. Never thought anybody would take me seriously on that count!
Too bad I can't handle the snow and the culture is a wasteland. I've been here three years, but I won't last forever in these winters.
Next stop, Mexico City. Culture, great city, real community, good transit, SF Bay style weather, cheap housing (but more expensive than SLC, believe it or not), and a young growing geek industry. The air pollution is now comparable to LA and getting better quickly. Heaven.
Slashdot Mirror
I am reading Slashdot on Windoze (I have to be able to deal with MS Office and IE programming for my job at least until some *ux gets 10% of the desktop market). There is no anti-aliasing anywhere on my screen and I don't see any in StarCalc or StarWriter at any font size either.
I use smallish fonts and run an LCD screen at about 95 dpi. I have seen anti-aliased fonts like the ones in the display and they are terrible for my eyes. I understand that some people have different vision-brain physiology and love AA -- I don't like it a bit on fonts but appreciate it with graphics.
I do most of my work in Putty (thanks!) and the Windows terminal, TNR, and even courier fonts are a delight. I think that's a result of proper True Type rendering of hints and good quality bimap fonts at proper resolution.
I have run some Linux desktops and I find that the font choices available are much lower quality than the Windows fonts. They are not clear at reasonably small sizes and they include excessive space around each characer and the ascenders and descenders are allocated far too much space so that fewer lines of text can appear.
And aside from the work issue (which will be fixed as soon as I can eliminate Access from our project if Wine runs IE okay) this is the biggest thing that prevents me fron going all Linux. Next is that X is sllooooowwww compared to Win32, but hardware has done a lot to help with that in the past few years.
-Brian
-Brian
Have you seen the Macintosh installation documentation? There are no words on it. It's so simple that my 50-something computer illiterate friends can be on the internet based on a color coded diagram on one glossy poster without reading a word of English.
Gosh, I love that. Sixty year old folks from small towns in the mountains send me email based on listserv posts I've made and meet me to camp in the desert. And you should see graphics designers take to Macs!
They say Windows works one day and not the next and nobody knows why; I don't see iMac users doing regular reinstalls, but I hear a lot from PC users about it. And I'm tired of it.
-Brian
I bought a PC Laptop with USB, 56k, 10/100, 400MHz K6-2, 14.1" 1024/768, 6GB Disk, CDROM, 128MB RAM, Li battery, 7lbs, 1.8in thick for US$2000 in August, 1999. And I've never had any hardware trouble or driver incompaitiblity.
Now I could get twice as much for the same price.
So it remains the same: Macintosh hardware costs US$1000 more for the same machine if you need a developer quality system. US$200 to US$500 more if you just need to do email, word processing, and surf.
But I'll still consider a Titanium because it would be great to run OSX, it's very nice hardware, Apple quality may be worth US$1000 more, and it's real UNIX, not just Cygwin and PuTTY (both of which I love -- thanks a billion guys!).
I think that installing PCs in an office might be a mistake considering TCO nowadays. I'd switch to iMacs and Cubes now that I've spent some time doing system administrationa and maintenance for a startup. It's easy for me to manage my machine beacuse I'm a techie, but my life would be much asier if everyone else's machine just hummed, too.
Does anyone know what compatibility issues I'd face switching an office over to iMacs and PCs all on the same network (just a DHCP firewall and a big hub)? Would SMB work? Will everything configure itself automatically the same as now?
-Brian
The whole HAL scheme with the intelligent computer going bad and then terrorizing the humans is nothing but a high gloss ripoff of Colossus: The Forbin Project.
Many of the best individual scenes, like the scheming to disconnect HAL are taken directly from Colossus.
If you liked the monkees and the excavation of monoliths and space station stuff, that's one thing. But the focus on HAL in reminiscenes of 2001 is silly since it was done better both before and after.
Tomcat is a reference implementation that is moving toward being a viable product for small self maintained sites. I use it for testing because I find that its instability and open development strategy are plusses.
There are real commercial Servlet Containers that are much faster and more stable. Resin is blazing fast, includes lost of fun gadgets (but start with plain servlets, please) and is OPEN SOURCE. It's free for small installations, but costs US$500 for commercial licenses. I use it.
What I really like about Resin is that it is rock solid. And nicely supported.
Servlets are at their best with complicated, large, or frequently updated sites. Consider a framework like Turbine or a templating engine like WebMacro or both to build a good quality maintainable site.
JSP is designed to emulate ASP. It's a great transition path. Now some taglibs exist to make it a viable platform for development, too. But a real framework is better, so consider one.
-B. Earl
Since 95% of browsers come with Flash, that was really not fair to your wannabe.
All new browsers that common folk use (IE and NN) come with Flash. And the people using older stuff are not likely to be the disposable cash demographic that WebRetail caters to.
I don't like flash myself, but people judge your image on pretty pictures. They will trust your site more when it comes with Flashy nonsense. -Brian
Now that's a remarkably farsighted view for the techno futurists at /dot.
Now imagine this:
What if Joe Q. Example wants to live in a rural agricultural community far out in the Nebraska plains and doesn't want to go Amish or to live in tech central, but to be a part of a mainstream free society that is free from the 'convenience' of global integration and techno modernism? In a capitalist society, few rural communities would have more than a handfull of phone lines or internet connections, and those would probably be in a central location like the county seat library.
I know of a remote rural community in AZ near the Sonora border where Maryjane is cheap from 'international entrepreneurs', organic vegetables are a viable industry, open space and mountain views are easy to come by, and land is cheap. It's just about 40 miles from this close knit community to a major city, too. But nobody moves there, because there is no easy access to subsidized phone lines or publicly subsidized water works. Furthermore, the highway is long and roundabout and takes hours to travel because it's not as heavily subsidized as an interstate.
It's a wonderful place and it would die promptly along with its close knit, open, unique, and worldly culture if 'universal service' and the other destructive forces of socialist globalism made their grubby way in there.
Land would soon be too expensive for homesteading immigrants and native children would be forced to move to the city to earn a living. Rich yuppie second homes would start crowding the landscape and the colonial town center would be redone. The two famous writers who live in the area would escape from scrutiny by living alone or finding another community where they could live as a part of a community and not a celebrity.
But that would have to be outside the USA, as the socialist menace of 'universal service' and various other leveling schemes carry us down into fascism.
In fact, we know that we percieve colors the same way because we have matching colors, fashion, graphic design, pretty flowers, and other color preferences and combinational preferences.
The fact the people (women, anyway) can agree on what is beautiful and visually pleasing without a previously agreed standard proves that humans percieve colors in some similar way. -Brian
In the USA, a 75K nominal salary (the emplyer will pay about 5k more in employer taxes) will be taxed like this in California, assuming a married couple with no kids and one income:
That adds up to US$24 000.
The state sales tax is 8%. There is no federal sales tax, GST, or VAT.
In other states, the state income tax may be as low as 0% (Texas, Florda, Washington, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota) or the state sales tax may be lower.
So that seems like much less than your Canadian total. Consdier that US$75 000 US is very unlikely to buy what CAN$100 000 buys in the most desirable parts of the USA. Health care is usually taken care of for free by your employer, unless you are a contractor and the USA has by far the best health care in the world.
B. Earl Watkins
It was far worse when I worked in Silicon Valley.
Now here's the story about SV life. These are single M to F ratios, adjusted for average age at first marriage and targeted at 28 year old males. They are the best guide to your chances of meeting and marrying a good partner. More about homosexuality later. Here goes (derived from much analysis of raw data at www.census.gov, 1999 figures all +/- 5%):
Now that's depressing. Consider, though, that SF's gay population (about 5% to 12%, depending ou your definitions and estimates, and about 3 to 1 male) makes your odds almost as good as in Alameda.
The US avarage is about 100%, so anywhere in the SF Bay area is going to be far worse than your alternatives. For females and gay males, SV is great; no place else has the culture, the weather, the opportunities. But for a single het male, earn your money and leave.
I knew women who kept two and three boyfriends for fun. There were women I worked with who had a waiting list of men who wanted to marry them if their current husbands didn't work out. The men tend to be rich and desperate; if I were a girl, I'd never consider anywhere else.
I checked to see if I were bi, but that didn't work out, so now I live here.
It's like transmogrifying into Mel Gibson. And my girlfriend and her friends think polygyny might be a viable option. Never thought anybody would take me seriously on that count!
Too bad I can't handle the snow and the culture is a wasteland. I've been here three years, but I won't last forever in these winters.
Next stop, Mexico City. Culture, great city, real community, good transit, SF Bay style weather, cheap housing (but more expensive than SLC, believe it or not), and a young growing geek industry. The air pollution is now comparable to LA and getting better quickly. Heaven.
Oh, yeah: