No, it adds spaces so the page remains readable on lower resolutions; go check the imdb forums and see how gracefully that handles long strings. People will accept that a page doesn't fit entirely on screen, and requires them to scroll down to read the rest. However, horizontal scrolling is just plain ugly and confusing; reach the end of the line, scroll back to the left, and umm... What line was I reading again???
Ira Steven Behr may not have planned everything out the way J. Michael Straczynski did, and B5 certainly influenced DS9, but to say that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 is a bit disingenuous.
JMS came to Paramount with the script for B5 and they rejected. Little while later they came out with a Trek series set on (coincidence, coincidence) a space station! Yeah, I can see how saying DS9 was a ripoff from B5 was a bit disingenuous...
I'm not saying it's completely impossible that both creators couldn't have independently thought up the concept of "let's do a SF series on a space station with lots of politics and stuff". This could be the reason paramount rejected JMS's series; too similar to a project we're already working on... But it's still a little suspect, if you ask me.
Anyway, I never really liked DS9; it introduced too much myth into the Trek universe, overall the episodes were boring (personal opinion), the characters were too unidimensional (something that can also be said of certain B5 characters), the alien races were again the same old rehash of one single facet of human nature, crystalised into the sole purpose of an entire species' existance (something most so called sci-fi suffers from). But, it seemed to pick up near the end though; the giant clash with the Dominion, the betrayal of the Cardassians... Now THAT was something I enjoyed.
Can't they get the terms right. It should be Battle Stations or Red Alert--not Action Alert.
Actually, that's one of the things that's irking me about that show. I don't know if the Colonials originaly came from Earth, left ages ago, or if Earth is just the result of some colony ship drifting way off course, but no way in hell has modern Earth culture influenced the culture of the Colonials, since there hasn't been any contact with this mythical 13th colony since they settled... Ages ago...
Unless the new series is gonna change the plot and make all this stuff happen in the far future, instead of in this time and age like the original BSG did. Then they could compensate for this by having the colonials leave Earth somewhere in the far future, on a mission to spread the seeds of mankind throughout the universe.
So really, there is no reason at all to use any of our terran jargon and military ranks.
Wasn't it the other way around? JMS was asked to do season 4 of Enterprise, but rejected, AFAIK...
Makes sense; after making stuff like B5 and Jeremiah, who wants to take the risk of working with a crew that's used to making series that have no overall story arc, but instead are focused on weekly viewer ratings?
It's kinda like asking Picasso to fix your 3 year old's child drawings. Yes, he could do it. And yes, it's an insult.
I live in Europe where we have 220V@50Hz... Never knew about the fluorescent lighting's interaction with LCDs though... You learn something new every day, I guess.;)
Doesn't matter; you're confusing two different things here. The 60 Hz you speak of is the number of screen updates per second, the "FPS" of the LCD screen. The refresh time is the time it takes a pixel to switch from lit to dark and dark to lit. Well, since the switch is not linear, it's not from completely lit to completely dark, but I can't remember the percentages off the top of my head. What this means is that although an LCD updates its screen 60 times per second, if the switch time for the individual pixels is too big, you'll see ghost images on your screen. This would also happen if the LCD would refresh only 10 times per second, btw. Smaller switch times for the pixels improve this, even though the screen "only" updates 60 times per second. Since an LCD doesn't need to refresh to retain its image, it doesn't really matter how many times per second it updates and 60 FPS is good enough for anything ranging from static content (documents, web pages) to games and movies. A CRT is different in this regard that one screen sweep lights the phosphor at the inside of the glass, but the phosphor doesn't retain its state but instead loses its excited state pretty fast, so it needs to be "pumped up" on a regular basis to retain the image. The faster these updates occur, the less the brightness of the phosphor will have decreased, resulting in a more stable image.
Or in short: the "refresh rate" of 60 Hz means your screen redraws 60 times per second, the switch time of the individual pixels determines how quickly the new state (the new image) is achieved at each refresh cycle. Hope this helps; can't explain it any clearer than that at the moment.
As for your other questions, no clue. I don't follow the LCD market that close. I might upgrade my CRT to LCD some day, but I'll probably keep my 19" CRT hooked up for watching movies with friends since it offers a better viewing angle. We sometimes have movie nights at a friend's place who owns a 19" LCD, and I'm not overly impressed with the image quality we get from different positions in the room; usualy the image has too little contrast and the blacks are grey because I'm not sitting at the optimal angle for decent brightness/contrast ratios. The horizontal viewing angle is pretty OK, but the vertical angle is still too narrow, and when you sit too low or too high the image just plain sucks... Just experiment with your girlfriends LCD and you'll see what I mean.
Lucky for me, my blog is not nearly as popular as your forum; it's just a work in progress blog of some project I'm working on, hardly anybody reads it, so all I get is automated spam. I guess for my intents and purposes my methods are good enough. A forum needs good mods though, especialy if it starts becoming popular. And I don't mean the kind that is under the delusion they have to nuke X amount of posts/threads a day to show they're actualy doing something useful with their mod powers.;)
True, it's a long term solution which is not gonna do any good in the short run. The short term solution is to make it impossible for the spammers to attack your blog in the first place. Change the names of the files that handle comment posting etc... (and of course change the code that points to such pages) and most automated spam bots are lost. If you really want to be secure, implement an intermediate page where it asks explicit permission before posting (tick a checkbox and click "yes, submit") and you can be pretty sure you're safe from comment spam.
Right now I'm testing with the first and easier of the two solutions: just change the names of the scripts around and change the code pointing to them. So far no spam, but then again, this test has only been running for a week or so.
Cisco is just working on solutions against DDOS attacks; it's not Cisco's responsibility if that technology is used to protect the Pentagon or some online gambling site. Following your logic, Cisco is already in trouble because those online gambling companies already use Cisco hardware in their setup... And so is Dell, 'coz they made the PCs used by the casino staff, and so is the company who made the bricks for the building their HQ is located in etc...
See how ridiculous it gets if you stop to think about it?;)
Yah, and I'd feel sorry for them if they'd play nice and stop writing worms to crawl blogs and paste poker spam in the comments. You wouldn't believe the amount of spam I had to clear from my blog comment area already. Imagine my surprise when I saw the same poker spam in the comments of every single post in my blog on some computer graphics project I'm working on... Feel sorry for them? Not really.
Yup, actually had the Richfiles bookmarked like 7 or 8 years ago(I think it was hosted on geocities back then), and the overclock page was already on there. The SPInterface looked rather cool too and I had plans to build one, but then I switched from engeneering tot informatics and the TI-85 I owned became kind of obsolete...
It's cool, I'll give you that, but not exactly news.
Oh, come on... Not Jacob Nielsen. That guy is an idiot.
Besides, what's wrong with config options? Sometimes you can't work around them. Example: Sloppy focus vs click-to-focus... Do you really want to force the user to choose his focus behaviour every time he starts his window manager? I'm perfectly happy with setting some config option once and be done with it for the rest of the installation's lifetime.
I think the poster is crapping out of his neck. From the description given in the article it is reasonable to assume that Thomas Sowell, the article author, does not use free software... In that he's probably correct... However, that still doesn't mean he uses Windows; he doesn't specify what OS and what software he uses. But yes, it's even reasonable to assume he uses MS Windows, given the description of the applications he tried to install on it. But... Does he complain about the OS? Hell no! He complains about third party software, presumably written by the $10-15 a program companies that flood the low budget end of the market. So, how exactly does this reflect bad on Microsoft?
BTW, if this article is representative of the kind of stuff Thomas Sowell usualy writes, I wonder why the hell the poster even bothered to post this tripe on slashdot. It's just one big uninformed piece of rant with the vaguest of problem descriptions, filled with bad analogies, and not even a hint as to how the problem might be remedied. The same type of senseless and meritless rant I have to endure every weekend when I go visit the old folks, when my old man goes on and on about how all politicians are greedy bastards who only want to fill their own pockets. I'd like to see him give running the country a go, behold how Belgium will go bankrupt in less than a month!;)
Bottom line: if you percieve a problem, try to be part of the solution. If you can't be bothered to acquire the insight and knowledge to be part of the solution, then shut the fuck up and let more knowledgeable people deal with the problem. And perhaps this might come as a shocker to all those usability whiners, but did it ever occur to them to actually put some research into the products they buy? If you don't want a chess program with tons of bells and whistles, why the hell don't you check the back of the box to see what you're actually buying before carelessly dropping the damn thing into your shopping cart?
Then again, how serious are we to take someone who admits needing a computer guru to do a simple basic installation of a chess game, and who's so tech-savvy that he would refrain from playing a game of scrabble on his laptop in the middle of the night, lest he wake up the neighbours? If you can't even grasp a concept as simple as a volume button, you have no right to own an electronic apparatus of any design, let alone a laptop! And this guy is supposedly a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.???
Presumably you believe it's crippled because you have to pay for it, which I have to say I find a poor argument.
Since you obviously can't be bothered to read the article, I went ahead and did it for you. The "free" version of MT3D offers full functionality, but only for one author and a maximum of 3 blogs.
Very interresting, my cute little fluffy friend, but the clueless one is you: we're not discussing the spreading of virii here, but the remote upgrade of a piece of software.
There's a difference between scanning a couple of thousands of random IPs to find some hosts to infect, and scanning the whole fucking Internet to find each and every install of your client software to upgrade it. Wouldn't work either; firewalls, NAT etc... can make it impossible for the central server to reach all of its clients. Ergo, remote upgrading is always instantiated at the client side, unless perhaps in a development environment where you want to be able to "push" updates when debugging your app.
And comparing me, of all people, with those lusers spreading virii and not giving a rat's ass... Shows not only your ignorance, but also your limitless arrogance. Plus it has nothing to do with the current discussion. But in case you do want to come off as the "big man", calling other people names, try do a little background check before you decide which insult in that little notebook of yours you're gonna use for the occasion. Reading peoples' sigs might be a good start.
Oh, come on, read the rest of his replies and be realistic about it. Besides, do you really consider the scenario where a server contacts each and every client separately and issues delete and upgrade packets realistic in any way?
And to answer your question: no, I don't read every line of code of the software I run either, but at least I don't diss other peoples' efforts in an halfass attempt at being clever/funny or whatever it was you were attempting back there.
I just hate it when people just criticize stuff while they got no clue what the heck they're talking about. There's a saying in my language; don't know if it exists in English as well, but it goes like this: "The best sailors stand ashore"... I think this saying certainly applies to your post.
This is more than deleting files - this is having an open socket listening for requests from anyone to delete files. If your updater does that please tell me the name of the software so I can be sure to avoid it!
So you insinuate being a security-aware person, but would still install anything on your box and need the author of the insecure application to actualy tell you his application is insecure in order to be able to avoid it?
Yes yes, The GIMP is being used in some places, but so is Maya, guess which one has a larger professional user base?
FYI, Maya is also available for Linux. Not trying to disprove your point though; lots of software companies use is available for Windows only, and that's what keeps lots of computers running it still.
In fact, pal, I sure hope Linux won't ever become so popular that it pushes MacOS, or any OS for that matter, out of the market.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a linux guy myself, but I love diversity. Linux is cool, mac is cool, so many other OSses are cool, so why can't we just coexist? I'm a bit tired of this whole "will Linux ever push <insert OS> out of the market" talk. It's not constructive.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it adds spaces so the page remains readable on lower resolutions; go check the imdb forums and see how gracefully that handles long strings. People will accept that a page doesn't fit entirely on screen, and requires them to scroll down to read the rest. However, horizontal scrolling is just plain ugly and confusing; reach the end of the line, scroll back to the left, and umm... What line was I reading again???
Buy my stickers, put one on your forehead
What, you mean one of these?
well there is no word for that kind of evil, that i know of.
Yes there is... Badong...
Ira Steven Behr may not have planned everything out the way J. Michael Straczynski did, and B5 certainly influenced DS9, but to say that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 is a bit disingenuous.
JMS came to Paramount with the script for B5 and they rejected. Little while later they came out with a Trek series set on (coincidence, coincidence) a space station! Yeah, I can see how saying DS9 was a ripoff from B5 was a bit disingenuous...
I'm not saying it's completely impossible that both creators couldn't have independently thought up the concept of "let's do a SF series on a space station with lots of politics and stuff". This could be the reason paramount rejected JMS's series; too similar to a project we're already working on... But it's still a little suspect, if you ask me.
Anyway, I never really liked DS9; it introduced too much myth into the Trek universe, overall the episodes were boring (personal opinion), the characters were too unidimensional (something that can also be said of certain B5 characters), the alien races were again the same old rehash of one single facet of human nature, crystalised into the sole purpose of an entire species' existance (something most so called sci-fi suffers from). But, it seemed to pick up near the end though; the giant clash with the Dominion, the betrayal of the Cardassians... Now THAT was something I enjoyed.
Can't they get the terms right. It should be Battle Stations or Red Alert--not Action Alert.
Actually, that's one of the things that's irking me about that show. I don't know if the Colonials originaly came from Earth, left ages ago, or if Earth is just the result of some colony ship drifting way off course, but no way in hell has modern Earth culture influenced the culture of the Colonials, since there hasn't been any contact with this mythical 13th colony since they settled... Ages ago...
Unless the new series is gonna change the plot and make all this stuff happen in the far future, instead of in this time and age like the original BSG did. Then they could compensate for this by having the colonials leave Earth somewhere in the far future, on a mission to spread the seeds of mankind throughout the universe.
So really, there is no reason at all to use any of our terran jargon and military ranks.
Wasn't it the other way around? JMS was asked to do season 4 of Enterprise, but rejected, AFAIK...
Makes sense; after making stuff like B5 and Jeremiah, who wants to take the risk of working with a crew that's used to making series that have no overall story arc, but instead are focused on weekly viewer ratings?
It's kinda like asking Picasso to fix your 3 year old's child drawings. Yes, he could do it. And yes, it's an insult.
I live in Europe where we have 220V@50Hz... Never knew about the fluorescent lighting's interaction with LCDs though... You learn something new every day, I guess. ;)
Doesn't matter; you're confusing two different things here. The 60 Hz you speak of is the number of screen updates per second, the "FPS" of the LCD screen. The refresh time is the time it takes a pixel to switch from lit to dark and dark to lit. Well, since the switch is not linear, it's not from completely lit to completely dark, but I can't remember the percentages off the top of my head. What this means is that although an LCD updates its screen 60 times per second, if the switch time for the individual pixels is too big, you'll see ghost images on your screen. This would also happen if the LCD would refresh only 10 times per second, btw. Smaller switch times for the pixels improve this, even though the screen "only" updates 60 times per second. Since an LCD doesn't need to refresh to retain its image, it doesn't really matter how many times per second it updates and 60 FPS is good enough for anything ranging from static content (documents, web pages) to games and movies. A CRT is different in this regard that one screen sweep lights the phosphor at the inside of the glass, but the phosphor doesn't retain its state but instead loses its excited state pretty fast, so it needs to be "pumped up" on a regular basis to retain the image. The faster these updates occur, the less the brightness of the phosphor will have decreased, resulting in a more stable image.
Or in short: the "refresh rate" of 60 Hz means your screen redraws 60 times per second, the switch time of the individual pixels determines how quickly the new state (the new image) is achieved at each refresh cycle. Hope this helps; can't explain it any clearer than that at the moment.
As for your other questions, no clue. I don't follow the LCD market that close. I might upgrade my CRT to LCD some day, but I'll probably keep my 19" CRT hooked up for watching movies with friends since it offers a better viewing angle. We sometimes have movie nights at a friend's place who owns a 19" LCD, and I'm not overly impressed with the image quality we get from different positions in the room; usualy the image has too little contrast and the blacks are grey because I'm not sitting at the optimal angle for decent brightness/contrast ratios. The horizontal viewing angle is pretty OK, but the vertical angle is still too narrow, and when you sit too low or too high the image just plain sucks... Just experiment with your girlfriends LCD and you'll see what I mean.
Lucky for me, my blog is not nearly as popular as your forum; it's just a work in progress blog of some project I'm working on, hardly anybody reads it, so all I get is automated spam. I guess for my intents and purposes my methods are good enough. A forum needs good mods though, especialy if it starts becoming popular. And I don't mean the kind that is under the delusion they have to nuke X amount of posts/threads a day to show they're actualy doing something useful with their mod powers. ;)
Lol, yeah, it's ancient by now, but amen to that. ;)
True, it's a long term solution which is not gonna do any good in the short run. The short term solution is to make it impossible for the spammers to attack your blog in the first place. Change the names of the files that handle comment posting etc... (and of course change the code that points to such pages) and most automated spam bots are lost. If you really want to be secure, implement an intermediate page where it asks explicit permission before posting (tick a checkbox and click "yes, submit") and you can be pretty sure you're safe from comment spam.
Right now I'm testing with the first and easier of the two solutions: just change the names of the scripts around and change the code pointing to them. So far no spam, but then again, this test has only been running for a week or so.
Cisco is just working on solutions against DDOS attacks; it's not Cisco's responsibility if that technology is used to protect the Pentagon or some online gambling site. Following your logic, Cisco is already in trouble because those online gambling companies already use Cisco hardware in their setup... And so is Dell, 'coz they made the PCs used by the casino staff, and so is the company who made the bricks for the building their HQ is located in etc...
See how ridiculous it gets if you stop to think about it? ;)
Yah, and I'd feel sorry for them if they'd play nice and stop writing worms to crawl blogs and paste poker spam in the comments. You wouldn't believe the amount of spam I had to clear from my blog comment area already. Imagine my surprise when I saw the same poker spam in the comments of every single post in my blog on some computer graphics project I'm working on... Feel sorry for them? Not really.
Yup, actually had the Richfiles bookmarked like 7 or 8 years ago(I think it was hosted on geocities back then), and the overclock page was already on there. The SPInterface looked rather cool too and I had plans to build one, but then I switched from engeneering tot informatics and the TI-85 I owned became kind of obsolete...
It's cool, I'll give you that, but not exactly news.
Funny:
And then you say:
So, to reiterate... Why does everything have to be about profit?
Oh, come on... Not Jacob Nielsen. That guy is an idiot.
Besides, what's wrong with config options? Sometimes you can't work around them. Example: Sloppy focus vs click-to-focus... Do you really want to force the user to choose his focus behaviour every time he starts his window manager? I'm perfectly happy with setting some config option once and be done with it for the rest of the installation's lifetime.
I think the poster is crapping out of his neck. From the description given in the article it is reasonable to assume that Thomas Sowell, the article author, does not use free software... In that he's probably correct... However, that still doesn't mean he uses Windows; he doesn't specify what OS and what software he uses. But yes, it's even reasonable to assume he uses MS Windows, given the description of the applications he tried to install on it. But... Does he complain about the OS? Hell no! He complains about third party software, presumably written by the $10-15 a program companies that flood the low budget end of the market. So, how exactly does this reflect bad on Microsoft?
BTW, if this article is representative of the kind of stuff Thomas Sowell usualy writes, I wonder why the hell the poster even bothered to post this tripe on slashdot. It's just one big uninformed piece of rant with the vaguest of problem descriptions, filled with bad analogies, and not even a hint as to how the problem might be remedied. The same type of senseless and meritless rant I have to endure every weekend when I go visit the old folks, when my old man goes on and on about how all politicians are greedy bastards who only want to fill their own pockets. I'd like to see him give running the country a go, behold how Belgium will go bankrupt in less than a month! ;)
Bottom line: if you percieve a problem, try to be part of the solution. If you can't be bothered to acquire the insight and knowledge to be part of the solution, then shut the fuck up and let more knowledgeable people deal with the problem. And perhaps this might come as a shocker to all those usability whiners, but did it ever occur to them to actually put some research into the products they buy? If you don't want a chess program with tons of bells and whistles, why the hell don't you check the back of the box to see what you're actually buying before carelessly dropping the damn thing into your shopping cart?
Then again, how serious are we to take someone who admits needing a computer guru to do a simple basic installation of a chess game, and who's so tech-savvy that he would refrain from playing a game of scrabble on his laptop in the middle of the night, lest he wake up the neighbours? If you can't even grasp a concept as simple as a volume button, you have no right to own an electronic apparatus of any design, let alone a laptop! And this guy is supposedly a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.???
Presumably you believe it's crippled because you have to pay for it, which I have to say I find a poor argument.
Since you obviously can't be bothered to read the article, I went ahead and did it for you. The "free" version of MT3D offers full functionality, but only for one author and a maximum of 3 blogs.
Yes, grandparent poster was right: crippled.
Try reading at a lower treshold and all will make sense. ;)
Very interresting, my cute little fluffy friend, but the clueless one is you: we're not discussing the spreading of virii here, but the remote upgrade of a piece of software.
There's a difference between scanning a couple of thousands of random IPs to find some hosts to infect, and scanning the whole fucking Internet to find each and every install of your client software to upgrade it. Wouldn't work either; firewalls, NAT etc... can make it impossible for the central server to reach all of its clients. Ergo, remote upgrading is always instantiated at the client side, unless perhaps in a development environment where you want to be able to "push" updates when debugging your app.
And comparing me, of all people, with those lusers spreading virii and not giving a rat's ass... Shows not only your ignorance, but also your limitless arrogance. Plus it has nothing to do with the current discussion. But in case you do want to come off as the "big man", calling other people names, try do a little background check before you decide which insult in that little notebook of yours you're gonna use for the occasion. Reading peoples' sigs might be a good start.
Oh, come on, read the rest of his replies and be realistic about it. Besides, do you really consider the scenario where a server contacts each and every client separately and issues delete and upgrade packets realistic in any way?
And to answer your question: no, I don't read every line of code of the software I run either, but at least I don't diss other peoples' efforts in an halfass attempt at being clever/funny or whatever it was you were attempting back there.
I just hate it when people just criticize stuff while they got no clue what the heck they're talking about. There's a saying in my language; don't know if it exists in English as well, but it goes like this: "The best sailors stand ashore"... I think this saying certainly applies to your post .
So you insinuate being a security-aware person, but would still install anything on your box and need the author of the insecure application to actualy tell you his application is insecure in order to be able to avoid it?
Funny...
Did anyone say pie?
Oh, btw, it's ludicrous...
FYI, Maya is also available for Linux. Not trying to disprove your point though; lots of software companies use is available for Windows only, and that's what keeps lots of computers running it still.
But Maya was just a bad example. ;)
In fact, pal, I sure hope Linux won't ever become so popular that it pushes MacOS, or any OS for that matter, out of the market.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a linux guy myself, but I love diversity. Linux is cool, mac is cool, so many other OSses are cool, so why can't we just coexist? I'm a bit tired of this whole "will Linux ever push <insert OS> out of the market" talk. It's not constructive.