If your website is large, have a fucking search box. There's nothing more frustrating than having to navigate through a huge hierarchy just to find something when you already know exactly what it is that you're looking for.
Most shopping sites have this but a lot of content sites do not. It's most irritating when you want to find a page that you've already been to or are looking for something on a University's site.
I'm having the same problem. My athlon fan is constantly changing its volume and it's driving me nuts, especially during those all nighter Comp Sci assignments.
I was about to buy some fans from www.quietpc.com when this thread came up.
Has anyone had any experience with the products on this site? Their prices seem to be much better than thinkgeek's.
I just bought an older Mini-ITX barebones system at the end of the summer for US$240, it's the Shuttle SK41G. It fits conveniently underneath the desk drawers in my small dorm room.
I've added an NVidia GeForce4 Ti4200, an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, a TV-input card and it uses a VIA KM266 chipset with integrated everything else. Most of the newer mini-ITX systems use NVidia chipsets but I was too cheap. :/
Anyways, the article says that Mini-ITX are less powerful and that VIA chipsets (some of the fastest for Athlons) don't support anything but the Cyrix stuff. These are lies. They're less expandable maybe, but more than adequate in terms of power.
You need apt-get for rpm. We implemented this at work when we were upgrading to Redhat 9. It allows us to automatically apply updates without subscribing to RHN.
But our major goal with apt-get is to be able to automatically upgrade the entire distribution overnight when the next version of RedHat comes out. It will be less disruptive and generally neat if we can keep our systems at the latest version without having to stand around kickstarting every machine (There are about 50 of them).
We also looked into RHEL, but as far as the desktop goes, it doesn't seem like the best solution. The 18 month release cycle means that a lot of the fancy GUI stuff will go stale.
For example, RHEL 2.1 still uses GNOME 1.4. IMO, this makes the user experience more painful than it should be when versions of RedHat exist running the much more aesthetic GNOME 2.2. The same sort of thing will likely happen with RHEL 3.0's desktop in a year or so. One of the best and worst things about linux is its rapid pace of development.
I remember in high school, some kid was talking about how his friend's credit card information was magically stolen by a website, he didn't even have to enter it anywhere on the internet. It was because of those damn cookies! Don't use cookies! The RCMP says they let people steal your credit card information!!!
Then I told him that it was more likely that his friend did something stupid and was too embarrassed to admit it. There was a pause and then "Nuh uh, it was the cookies!"
I found from various lecture classes that the hexegonal shape of these pens causes me to lose feeling in the tip of my thumb for 2 days or so. Maybe I should relax my death grip.
Anyways, for arts classes I use these cheap padded round Papermate pens (the Comfort Mate, sounds like a vibrator or something) and for math I use Bic mechanical pencils. The bic pencils are the best because you just carry 2 with you and throw one out when it runs out.
I used to live on the Canadian side of the US/Canada border and it was hard work ordering American things. A lot of places wouldn't accept a Canadian billing address so you had to call your credit card company and register your shipping desitination (in our case, a warehouse in Michigan) as a billing address. It didn't make much sense but whatever, it worked for a lot of places.
The worst though was Dell, they have those refurbished laptops on their US site that are actually a really good deal but in Canada the best refurbished notebook is from 2 years ago. They also didn't carry as many product lines for new stuff as the dell.com site.
Why even bother having a Canadian division if they're going to be so inferior? Wouldn't it be better and cheaper just to have a small pack of logistics people and lawyers working in the US to ship stuff to Canada?
I would have been perfectly happy to have given Dell a large sum of money for one of their products but ended up going somewhere else. Dell.ca sucks!
Incidentally, if you work sales support at one of these USian companies, don't suggest to me that I have an American friend order it for me. I don't care to know anyone in northern Michigan and even if I did, I doubt they would be willing to let me put several thousand dollars on their credit card.
What are you talking about? Those X terminals in the math building suck, a lot. I just stay home and use my linux box rather than dealing with the twm, Netscape 4.7, xterm nightmare they have going on down there. Just because it's unix doesn't mean it has to have an insanely annoying interface.
I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and figure out how to get WindowMaker to run on those things one day.
xhosting isn't that great either compared to VNC. Those machines run about as smooth as oatmeal.
Maybe other manufacturers and consumers will realize that linux is superior to windows in just about every way possible. It's taken long enough anyways, the average linux Desktop not only looks, performs and is more intuitive than windows' explorer.exe, but also has way more applications available from the start.
The keyboard I have now is the best feeling one I have owned, it replaced the Honeywell BS keyboard I was using from 1992. I bought it for $3 on the internet while getting some other stuff.
Here it is, the Solidtek 270A. It's a membrane board but the membranes are really resistent at first and then give in completely. You don't have that uncertainty after you hit a key of whether or not it registered. It even has 3 extra buttons, Sleep, Wake Up, and Power, but I can't get them to work in linux. :/
Also, I remember grade 9 typing class. 35 Model Ms all going at once, it was extremely noisy. And I'm sure the engineers at IBM would move the keycaps around to write swears and question eachother's sexuality too while they were designing it. Good times.
It's true that the web doesn't fit into a 1"x1" screen but what about a 4"x1" screen? I've always wondered why the displays don't flip up along the length of the phone. With a thumb controlled scroll wheel and maybe some backlighting, this could be quite comfortable, say with a 800x150 or 640x140 resolution.
You could even fit a blackberry style keyboard in there too and have the ultimate device, just stick the number pad on the external side of the flip up display and you have an extremely versatile design.
It's a shame I'm not the guy they ask to design phones.
I question the validity of blindly praising microkernels.
A lot of the decision depends on the architecture involved. I hope someone more knowledgable than myself will comment on this, but as far as I know, the reason BeOS started to implement networking into the main kernel instead of making it a microkernel "server" was because the x86 architecture is much slower in switching between sub-functions than the PowerPC was (I've read 10 times slower but can't remember the source).
The two monolithic operating systems you criticize are both i386-centric, so a true microkernel probably wouldn't be such a hot idea.
QNX's design is great for certain applications but not all. I looked into it for an intel based SMP homebrewed but critical (as in the systems behind it cost over $1 million) firewall and decided a more traditional i386 operating system would be better.
I know you're not a culprit here, but being a fanboy for one design approach or another is just bad engineering sense. It's something I see all the time and I'd wish they'd teach a lot more critical thinking skills at the high school level because of it.
I know what you mean, I'm a Computer Science undergrad and I've had this experience in group projects. I always try to make the program as scalable as possible with lots of places for hooks and modular components. Most of the partners I've had (well, the ones who are competent in programming at least) write brutal code that uses a lot of clever one-line tricks and is impossible to read or modify by anyone else.
But at least it's done fast. That is, until there's a bug in that line that does everything and is either obscure or 200 characters long.
It seems like there's a kind of mental masturbation involved to write the most concise and elaborate piece of code possible when people should be striving to write the most scalable code possible.
The curriculum is ok, they do focus on heavy use of objects from the beginning but they never really say why or demonstrate why not.
The onion follows the following format for their articles: 1) Think of something funny. 2) Write a five paragraph article ramming that funny idea into the ground at breakneck speeds.
Most sites that imitate the onion seem to have trouble with step 1 but really nail step 2.
I've been tweaking my redhat 8.0 install to boot in something like 15 seconds. kudzu, dhcp and gnome were the biggest offenders here and I haven't even compiled a new kernel yet. I was surprised at how fast X can go with WindowMaker instead of the 'Desktop Environment's.
Is there a distribution that's meant to be fast instead of bloated? Just because something's user friendly doesn't mean it can't also be minimilast, BeOS was good for that. With a few config utils and only the best apps (OOo, konquerer/pheonix, ximian) there could be a really cool dist the size and speed of a fresh win98 install without the part about it sucking.
I'm not saying you're doing this but I don't understand why people criticize MS over Word's feature set.
It's not like we don't have the processing power or ram to handle these things anymore and your not going to be running UT with a word processor in the background anyways.
And why is it that people always think that because there are 90+ features that they have no use for, that everyone else thinks the same. It may be certain that people only use some features but everyone probably doesn't use the exact same set of features.
Bleh, I'm not a fan of microsoft but I think sometimes people criticize them just because they're microsoft instead of pointing out real anti-competitive behaviour. No one on slashdot would know anything about that though.
If MS wants to put all that stuff in their program, I have no problem with it, it's not like I'll suddenly have to learn something completely different with every version. Even then, Word is still a lot faster than OOo, somebody at OOo should do something about that. Of course, office still costs an assload regardless.
I hate buying electronics because they never have some feature I want while having a bunch that I don't. If manufacturers would release stuff that's programmable, this wouldn't be a problem.
For example, my watch is a plain Timex thing with a timer and chronometer I never use but 3 alarms that can't ring depending on the date. If I could buy a good watch that let me fiddle with it and fix the things I don't like, I would pay extra. Timex does have watches that can download from your computer but they seem pretty closed.
Manufacturers should open source their firmware (or at least let it run user made binaries) so user communities can make the hardware not suck. My RCA Lyra could run executables but only supported the proprietary formats that RCA wanted. That sucked. Now I have a CD MP3 player that only plays non-variable bitrate mp3's, it sucks too. If I could just put a dir on the CD called bin or something with all the decoders, display controls and hacks I wanted, I'd easily pay a premium for the privilege.
I have an old OkiData 400e laser printer from my 486 that sort of works fine (it started printing pages completely smeared with black for a while and then fixed itself somehow) but I barely use it. The problem is that it went obsolete. I haven't tried it in linux but it's been compatible with everything I've tried it with so far. It has hp compatibility mode for DOS programs so that probably means something.
The printer's page buffer is too small to do a lot of stuff. If all you're printing out is text then it works fine but if you try printing out a full page image at 300 dpi (the max setting) it doesn't work. It doesn't even print out some graphics heavy pages done in word. I would upgrade but instead I just don't use a printer.
The printer is a solid piece of work though, really heavy and well built with an lcd display that actually gives useful information, although it jams more than it used to. If you want a printer that lasts, buy a laser, they seem to be built better because of their price and the life span of the toner. Get one you can barely lift and doesn't creek when you twist it and you'll be good until your requirements deem otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another one:
If your website is large, have a fucking search box. There's nothing more frustrating than having to navigate through a huge hierarchy just to find something when you already know exactly what it is that you're looking for.
Most shopping sites have this but a lot of content sites do not. It's most irritating when you want to find a page that you've already been to or are looking for something on a University's site.
=> Americas Army
I'm having the same problem. My athlon fan is constantly changing its volume and it's driving me nuts, especially during those all nighter Comp Sci assignments.
I was about to buy some fans from www.quietpc.com when this thread came up.
Has anyone had any experience with the products on this site? Their prices seem to be much better than thinkgeek's.
I just bought an older Mini-ITX barebones system at the end of the summer for US$240, it's the Shuttle SK41G. It fits conveniently underneath the desk drawers in my small dorm room.
/
I've added an NVidia GeForce4 Ti4200, an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, a TV-input card and it uses a VIA KM266 chipset with integrated everything else. Most of the newer mini-ITX systems use NVidia chipsets but I was too cheap. :
Anyways, the article says that Mini-ITX are less powerful and that VIA chipsets (some of the fastest for Athlons) don't support anything but the Cyrix stuff. These are lies. They're less expandable maybe, but more than adequate in terms of power.
You need apt-get for rpm. We implemented this at work when we were upgrading to Redhat 9. It allows us to automatically apply updates without subscribing to RHN.
But our major goal with apt-get is to be able to automatically upgrade the entire distribution overnight when the next version of RedHat comes out. It will be less disruptive and generally neat if we can keep our systems at the latest version without having to stand around kickstarting every machine (There are about 50 of them).
We also looked into RHEL, but as far as the desktop goes, it doesn't seem like the best solution. The 18 month release cycle means that a lot of the fancy GUI stuff will go stale.
For example, RHEL 2.1 still uses GNOME 1.4. IMO, this makes the user experience more painful than it should be when versions of RedHat exist running the much more aesthetic GNOME 2.2. The same sort of thing will likely happen with RHEL 3.0's desktop in a year or so. One of the best and worst things about linux is its rapid pace of development.
I believe that my hat is older than that.
- The Pope
I remember in high school, some kid was talking about how his friend's credit card information was magically stolen by a website, he didn't even have to enter it anywhere on the internet. It was because of those damn cookies! Don't use cookies! The RCMP says they let people steal your credit card information!!!
Then I told him that it was more likely that his friend did something stupid and was too embarrassed to admit it. There was a pause and then "Nuh uh, it was the cookies!"
I found from various lecture classes that the hexegonal shape of these pens causes me to lose feeling in the tip of my thumb for 2 days or so. Maybe I should relax my death grip.
Anyways, for arts classes I use these cheap padded round Papermate pens (the Comfort Mate, sounds like a vibrator or something) and for math I use Bic mechanical pencils. The bic pencils are the best because you just carry 2 with you and throw one out when it runs out.
I found this in the linux kernel:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
I used to live on the Canadian side of the US/Canada border and it was hard work ordering American things. A lot of places wouldn't accept a Canadian billing address so you had to call your credit card company and register your shipping desitination (in our case, a warehouse in Michigan) as a billing address. It didn't make much sense but whatever, it worked for a lot of places.
The worst though was Dell, they have those refurbished laptops on their US site that are actually a really good deal but in Canada the best refurbished notebook is from 2 years ago. They also didn't carry as many product lines for new stuff as the dell.com site.
Why even bother having a Canadian division if they're going to be so inferior? Wouldn't it be better and cheaper just to have a small pack of logistics people and lawyers working in the US to ship stuff to Canada?
I would have been perfectly happy to have given Dell a large sum of money for one of their products but ended up going somewhere else. Dell.ca sucks!
Incidentally, if you work sales support at one of these USian companies, don't suggest to me that I have an American friend order it for me. I don't care to know anyone in northern Michigan and even if I did, I doubt they would be willing to let me put several thousand dollars on their credit card.
What are you talking about? Those X terminals in the math building suck, a lot. I just stay home and use my linux box rather than dealing with the twm, Netscape 4.7, xterm nightmare they have going on down there. Just because it's unix doesn't mean it has to have an insanely annoying interface.
I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and figure out how to get WindowMaker to run on those things one day.
xhosting isn't that great either compared to VNC. Those machines run about as smooth as oatmeal.
Maybe other manufacturers and consumers will realize that linux is superior to windows in just about every way possible. It's taken long enough anyways, the average linux Desktop not only looks, performs and is more intuitive than windows' explorer.exe, but also has way more applications available from the start.
The keyboard I have now is the best feeling one I have owned, it replaced the Honeywell BS keyboard I was using from 1992. I bought it for $3 on the internet while getting some other stuff.
/
Here it is, the Solidtek 270A. It's a membrane board but the membranes are really resistent at first and then give in completely. You don't have that uncertainty after you hit a key of whether or not it registered. It even has 3 extra buttons, Sleep, Wake Up, and Power, but I can't get them to work in linux. :
Also, I remember grade 9 typing class. 35 Model Ms all going at once, it was extremely noisy. And I'm sure the engineers at IBM would move the keycaps around to write swears and question eachother's sexuality too while they were designing it. Good times.
A custom redhat install + apt-get = linux perfection
It's true that the web doesn't fit into a 1"x1" screen but what about a 4"x1" screen? I've always wondered why the displays don't flip up along the length of the phone. With a thumb controlled scroll wheel and maybe some backlighting, this could be quite comfortable, say with a 800x150 or 640x140 resolution.
You could even fit a blackberry style keyboard in there too and have the ultimate device, just stick the number pad on the external side of the flip up display and you have an extremely versatile design.
It's a shame I'm not the guy they ask to design phones.
I question the validity of blindly praising microkernels.
A lot of the decision depends on the architecture involved. I hope someone more knowledgable than myself will comment on this, but as far as I know, the reason BeOS started to implement networking into the main kernel instead of making it a microkernel "server" was because the x86 architecture is much slower in switching between sub-functions than the PowerPC was (I've read 10 times slower but can't remember the source).
The two monolithic operating systems you criticize are both i386-centric, so a true microkernel probably wouldn't be such a hot idea.
QNX's design is great for certain applications but not all. I looked into it for an intel based SMP homebrewed but critical (as in the systems behind it cost over $1 million) firewall and decided a more traditional i386 operating system would be better.
I know you're not a culprit here, but being a fanboy for one design approach or another is just bad engineering sense. It's something I see all the time and I'd wish they'd teach a lot more critical thinking skills at the high school level because of it.
I know what you mean, I'm a Computer Science undergrad and I've had this experience in group projects. I always try to make the program as scalable as possible with lots of places for hooks and modular components. Most of the partners I've had (well, the ones who are competent in programming at least) write brutal code that uses a lot of clever one-line tricks and is impossible to read or modify by anyone else.
But at least it's done fast. That is, until there's a bug in that line that does everything and is either obscure or 200 characters long.
It seems like there's a kind of mental masturbation involved to write the most concise and elaborate piece of code possible when people should be striving to write the most scalable code possible.
The curriculum is ok, they do focus on heavy use of objects from the beginning but they never really say why or demonstrate why not.
The onion follows the following format for their articles:
1) Think of something funny.
2) Write a five paragraph article ramming that funny idea into the ground at breakneck speeds.
Most sites that imitate the onion seem to have trouble with step 1 but really nail step 2.
PS: Step 3) PROFIT is implied.
I seriously hope you don't run around in real life refering to yourself as Mr. Thundercleze.
I've been tweaking my redhat 8.0 install to boot in something like 15 seconds. kudzu, dhcp and gnome were the biggest offenders here and I haven't even compiled a new kernel yet. I was surprised at how fast X can go with WindowMaker instead of the 'Desktop Environment's.
Is there a distribution that's meant to be fast instead of bloated? Just because something's user friendly doesn't mean it can't also be minimilast, BeOS was good for that. With a few config utils and only the best apps (OOo, konquerer/pheonix, ximian) there could be a really cool dist the size and speed of a fresh win98 install without the part about it sucking.
A bunch of people with Down Syndrome when they were having a snack pack break. mmm pudding!
I'm not saying you're doing this but I don't understand why people criticize MS over Word's feature set.
It's not like we don't have the processing power or ram to handle these things anymore and your not going to be running UT with a word processor in the background anyways.
And why is it that people always think that because there are 90+ features that they have no use for, that everyone else thinks the same. It may be certain that people only use some features but everyone probably doesn't use the exact same set of features.
Bleh, I'm not a fan of microsoft but I think sometimes people criticize them just because they're microsoft instead of pointing out real anti-competitive behaviour. No one on slashdot would know anything about that though.
If MS wants to put all that stuff in their program, I have no problem with it, it's not like I'll suddenly have to learn something completely different with every version. Even then, Word is still a lot faster than OOo, somebody at OOo should do something about that. Of course, office still costs an assload regardless.
I hate buying electronics because they never have some feature I want while having a bunch that I don't. If manufacturers would release stuff that's programmable, this wouldn't be a problem.
For example, my watch is a plain Timex thing with a timer and chronometer I never use but 3 alarms that can't ring depending on the date. If I could buy a good watch that let me fiddle with it and fix the things I don't like, I would pay extra. Timex does have watches that can download from your computer but they seem pretty closed.
Manufacturers should open source their firmware (or at least let it run user made binaries) so user communities can make the hardware not suck. My RCA Lyra could run executables but only supported the proprietary formats that RCA wanted. That sucked. Now I have a CD MP3 player that only plays non-variable bitrate mp3's, it sucks too. If I could just put a dir on the CD called bin or something with all the decoders, display controls and hacks I wanted, I'd easily pay a premium for the privilege.
I have an old OkiData 400e laser printer from my 486 that sort of works fine (it started printing pages completely smeared with black for a while and then fixed itself somehow) but I barely use it. The problem is that it went obsolete. I haven't tried it in linux but it's been compatible with everything I've tried it with so far. It has hp compatibility mode for DOS programs so that probably means something.
The printer's page buffer is too small to do a lot of stuff. If all you're printing out is text then it works fine but if you try printing out a full page image at 300 dpi (the max setting) it doesn't work. It doesn't even print out some graphics heavy pages done in word. I would upgrade but instead I just don't use a printer.
The printer is a solid piece of work though, really heavy and well built with an lcd display that actually gives useful information, although it jams more than it used to. If you want a printer that lasts, buy a laser, they seem to be built better because of their price and the life span of the toner. Get one you can barely lift and doesn't creek when you twist it and you'll be good until your requirements deem otherwise.
Everyone should use the same random number.
I think 23 is a good one, nice an prime, and close to 21 too!