The saddest part of this whole story to me is the screenshot itself. I'm looking at it on a 10-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42, and there's considerable blank space in my browser window both above and below that screen image, plus my browser's title bar, menu, location bar, bookmark bar, my gadgets at the top of the screen, and my bar thingy at the bottom of my screen... The ancient screen is 1050 pixels high; the screenshot is768 pixels. Modern laptop displays are missing a quarter of their vertical pixels! Why did people ever stoop to buying this crap? Nobody sells any laptop with anything close to the 10 year old standard in vertical pixels in any reasonable price range these days.
I guess it matters more now than ever how good a UI is, because it has to work in such tight vertical spaces -- rather like a coal miner. With so many other aspects (pun intended) of computers improving year after year, this one thing -- vertical pixels -- seems to have taken a turn for the utterly stupid. It makes me sad.
Word has an understandable formatting model. That is, all the formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark. You can select a paragraph mark, copy it, paste it somewhere else in the document, and you have a paragraph formatted identically to the original. In OO, your text may take on different formatting depending on whether you backspace away a paragraph mark vs deleting it. No kidding. Also, there's no way to reliably copy a paragraph from one place in a document to another and retain the formatting without adding sacrificial paragraphs before and sometimes after the text you are trying to copy. Seriously. OO's formatting model is just broken.
Until this basic problem is addressed, people will -- rightly -- prefer using word. I've been fighting oo's formatting for years, and frankly, I'm sick of it.
Unity follows the Emacs philosophy into the graphical desktop - the fewer times I need to reach for that damned mouse, the better.
Exactly the point. You don't need a graphical interface. You already know the names of all the apps you want to run. But my mother and father do need a graphical interface, and they don't know the names of all the apps -- however few they are. They can't touch type and look at the screen at the same time. They need to nudge the computer with the mouse toward useful operations. They could do that before, and they can't with Unity, or with the GNOME Shell.
So, no you aren't a lone voice, but you are in the extreme minority. If I want to run my computer from the keyboard, I'll open a terminal. I like the terminal. And I like a real GUI. I don't much care for screens that are too short and too wide playing animations in response to undiscoverable key strokes, which as far as I can tell is the point of both Unity and the GNOME Shell. (I know you were just talking about Unity, but personally I'd toss them both in the same bin.)
No, the trick is to find the 1% of the 1% who will influence the other 99% of the greater 1% who will then get everybody else on board and get them on board.
I repeat (though why I have to wonder): It's not a flood zone. It's the ocean. We aren't talking about flood insurance. Floods are when the water comes then the water goes. When the water comes and stays, that's... the ocean.
I'm just having fun in the surf and sand here. Please don't take me seriously. I certainly don't take you seriously.
Who said anything about flood insurance? Sea level rising is not a flood. You won't be able to get _any_ insurance. (Although, I guess fire insurance is a pretty safe bet for the insurance companies on property that's under water -- in the literal sense.)
That's public sector planners. Insurance companies will use whatever sources they think are reasonable, so some of this to-be-planned development may be hard to insure.
If by "the government" you mean "we the people", that's exactly where it should be. If you're proposing that we should bust it up and distribute it amongst private entities for profit while removing accountability to the public, I'm not so much ready to support that.
For the record, I've very happy with what our public schools have done for my kids. I realize not everybody is so lucky, and others may have quite different opinions for good reasons.
Some parts of society are ill, public financing has issues, expectations are sometimes out of whack, but those are different issues. Many schools and their students are doing just fine.
When I'm king, I'm going to solve this problem. No more short term capitol gains taxes, because there'll be no more short term capitol gains. How? I'll impose this one rule: Any stock, bond, security, whatever, has to be held for at least one year before it can be sold. There's no end of problems this one rule will fix. When I'm king. Oh well.
Back in the day I wrote a TSR for DOS called "cAPSlOCK". If you hit a shifted letter key, you got a capitol letter and the CapsLock key -- if it was on -- would be turned off. No more aCCIDENTAL sWITCHED cAPITOLIZATION. At least, until Windows came along. I can count on one hand's fingers how many times I've intentionally gotten a lower-case letter by using shift with the CapsLock on. Dinosaurs like me who learned to type on mechanical devices learned to use Shift to unlock CapsLock, so this behavior seems natural to me. Fortunately, we'll die off soon enough.
Let me get this straight. The whole net neutrality thing is a fine idea to impose on the big boys, but when _you_ play the ISP role, then traffic shaping and priority for your preferred content is all perfectly fine, and btw here are two dozen ways to do it. Am I missing something?
Right, well, heat is energy, which as Einstein showed, is mass. So, figure out the net "heat emitted" vector and you've got your opposite reaction thingy right there.
I think he's talking about a different problem altogether.
We have about 40,000 people, any one of which may want a web site. They've all got storage in our campus storage. Provisioning our web servers for all those people is just a matter of <Directory "/home/*/public_html">
AllowOverride [some options]
Options [some other options].... </Directory>
All they have to do is put some html pages in place.
Now, if some subset of those users wants to put a MySQL backed blog or some other low traffic app in their html space, they've got to stand up their own MySQL, or talk to a dba and do a lot of hand holding. This doesn't scale horizontally -- lots of users doing basically the same thing. You can't say
<Directory "/home/*/public_dbspace">
[appropriate database defaults]
AllowOverride [some other defaults]... </Directory>
and if the users put the right stuff in their ~/public_dbspace, they get data base service. We're not talking about high performance or large data. We're talking about large number of mostly very small users being provisioned with very little intervention on our part.
If you think about it, web servers and data bases _in_this_application_ do the same thing: they provide highly specialized interfaces to data in specifically provided files. There's no inherent reason providing the M to a LAMP stack should be any harder than the A, but configuration for the masses is clearly easier for the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
The saddest part of this whole story to me is the screenshot itself. I'm looking at it on a 10-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42, and there's considerable blank space in my browser window both above and below that screen image, plus my browser's title bar, menu, location bar, bookmark bar, my gadgets at the top of the screen, and my bar thingy at the bottom of my screen... The ancient screen is 1050 pixels high; the screenshot is768 pixels. Modern laptop displays are missing a quarter of their vertical pixels! Why did people ever stoop to buying this crap? Nobody sells any laptop with anything close to the 10 year old standard in vertical pixels in any reasonable price range these days.
I guess it matters more now than ever how good a UI is, because it has to work in such tight vertical spaces -- rather like a coal miner. With so many other aspects (pun intended) of computers improving year after year, this one thing -- vertical pixels -- seems to have taken a turn for the utterly stupid. It makes me sad.
Or do they mean Excel as in "Kleenex"?
I think the mean Excel as in "Charmin".
Word has an understandable formatting model. That is, all the formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark. You can select a paragraph mark, copy it, paste it somewhere else in the document, and you have a paragraph formatted identically to the original. In OO, your text may take on different formatting depending on whether you backspace away a paragraph mark vs deleting it. No kidding. Also, there's no way to reliably copy a paragraph from one place in a document to another and retain the formatting without adding sacrificial paragraphs before and sometimes after the text you are trying to copy. Seriously. OO's formatting model is just broken.
Until this basic problem is addressed, people will -- rightly -- prefer using word. I've been fighting oo's formatting for years, and frankly, I'm sick of it.
There is no other kind of successful Emacs user.
Exactly the point. You don't need a graphical interface. You already know the names of all the apps you want to run. But my mother and father do need a graphical interface, and they don't know the names of all the apps -- however few they are. They can't touch type and look at the screen at the same time. They need to nudge the computer with the mouse toward useful operations. They could do that before, and they can't with Unity, or with the GNOME Shell.
So, no you aren't a lone voice, but you are in the extreme minority. If I want to run my computer from the keyboard, I'll open a terminal. I like the terminal. And I like a real GUI. I don't much care for screens that are too short and too wide playing animations in response to undiscoverable key strokes, which as far as I can tell is the point of both Unity and the GNOME Shell. (I know you were just talking about Unity, but personally I'd toss them both in the same bin.)
Because what the world needs now is a better E. coli.
Science: Is there nothing it can't do?
No, the trick is to find the 1% of the 1% who will influence the other 99% of the greater 1% who will then get everybody else on board and get them on board.
You were doing good right up to your last sentence. (I'm joking, but not really.)
I repeat (though why I have to wonder): It's not a flood zone. It's the ocean. We aren't talking about flood insurance. Floods are when the water comes then the water goes. When the water comes and stays, that's... the ocean.
I'm just having fun in the surf and sand here. Please don't take me seriously. I certainly don't take you seriously.
Who said anything about flood insurance? Sea level rising is not a flood. You won't be able to get _any_ insurance. (Although, I guess fire insurance is a pretty safe bet for the insurance companies on property that's under water -- in the literal sense.)
That's public sector planners. Insurance companies will use whatever sources they think are reasonable, so some of this to-be-planned development may be hard to insure.
If by "the government" you mean "we the people", that's exactly where it should be. If you're proposing that we should bust it up and distribute it amongst private entities for profit while removing accountability to the public, I'm not so much ready to support that.
For the record, I've very happy with what our public schools have done for my kids. I realize not everybody is so lucky, and others may have quite different opinions for good reasons.
Education isn't broken.
Some parts of society are ill, public financing has issues, expectations are sometimes out of whack, but those are different issues. Many schools and their students are doing just fine.
I was a big fan of the text editor "DME" that he wrote and maintained in those days. Good to know he's still kickin' bits.
Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out.
Don't be ridiculous. The exhaust would kill us all!
When I'm king, I'm going to solve this problem. No more short term capitol gains taxes, because there'll be no more short term capitol gains. How? I'll impose this one rule: Any stock, bond, security, whatever, has to be held for at least one year before it can be sold. There's no end of problems this one rule will fix. When I'm king. Oh well.
"about physical objects such as a carrot, a horse or a house."
What about a battery or staple, correct?
Back in the day I wrote a TSR for DOS called "cAPSlOCK". If you hit a shifted letter key, you got a capitol letter and the CapsLock key -- if it was on -- would be turned off. No more aCCIDENTAL sWITCHED cAPITOLIZATION. At least, until Windows came along. I can count on one hand's fingers how many times I've intentionally gotten a lower-case letter by using shift with the CapsLock on. Dinosaurs like me who learned to type on mechanical devices learned to use Shift to unlock CapsLock, so this behavior seems natural to me. Fortunately, we'll die off soon enough.
Let's quit calling them "widescreen displays" and start calling them what they are: shortscreen displays.
But English is a living language and it evolves over time. Get over it.
But English iz a living language and it evolvez over time. Get over it.
Let me get this straight. The whole net neutrality thing is a fine idea to impose on the big boys, but when _you_ play the ISP role, then traffic shaping and priority for your preferred content is all perfectly fine, and btw here are two dozen ways to do it. Am I missing something?
Hypocrites!
Yeah, but fewer than 5 should be left-aligned.
Right, well, heat is energy, which as Einstein showed, is mass. So, figure out the net "heat emitted" vector and you've got your opposite reaction thingy right there.
WHAT? Are you practising network engineering, in public, on a network, without a license?
You fell for the bait, citizen. Against the wall, you.
/Live near Raleigh, getting a kick, etc.
Don't open that locket. It's probably a horcrux. Volde--DON'T SAY THE NAME-mort.. [Oops]
I think he's talking about a different problem altogether.
We have about 40,000 people, any one of which may want a web site. They've all got storage in our campus storage. Provisioning our web servers for all those people is just a matter of ....
<Directory "/home/*/public_html">
AllowOverride [some options]
Options [some other options]
</Directory>
All they have to do is put some html pages in place.
Now, if some subset of those users wants to put a MySQL backed blog or some other low traffic app in their html space, they've got to stand up their own MySQL, or talk to a dba and do a lot of hand holding. This doesn't scale horizontally -- lots of users doing basically the same thing. You can't say
<Directory "/home/*/public_dbspace"> ...
[appropriate database defaults]
AllowOverride [some other defaults]
</Directory>
and if the users put the right stuff in their ~/public_dbspace, they get data base service. We're not talking about high performance or large data. We're talking about large number of mostly very small users being provisioned with very little intervention on our part.
If you think about it, web servers and data bases _in_this_application_ do the same thing: they provide highly specialized interfaces to data in specifically provided files. There's no inherent reason providing the M to a LAMP stack should be any harder than the A, but configuration for the masses is clearly easier for the latter.