I'd agree abiout emacs, and indeed tried to
convince ESR that emacs goes against the Unix
philosophy for his TAOUP book,
although he wasn't having any of it.
However, I disagree about
sendmail. Sendmail isn't huge, and it only
does one thing (email routing), and it does
it very well. I'm not going to argue about
its ease of configuration, or its historical
security problems. But in terms of doing
what it's designed for, you can't fault it.
In general, though, I agree with your sentiments.
One only has to look at GNOME and KDE to see how
much the Unix landscape has been infiltrated by
people that just don't get it.
And dna profiling continues to be court admissable evidence.
IIRC (from speaking to my mcirobiologist ex),
DNA profiling can only guarantee negatives,
never positives, and thus in the UK cannot be
used to convict someone, only to acquit them.
I wonder how true the claim is that introversion is truly hard-wired.
You do? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind.
It's hard wired.
I didn't choose to be an introvert. Why would I deliberately
set out to be socially inept, dismissed by others,
generally lacking social skills, and looked down
upon my the majority of the population?
As it happens, I think I'm better off being who I
am, than being one of them. They think they're
superior. I know it's the other way round. But I
have no desire to correct their
misunderstanding:-) The fact is, I can't imagine
what it would be like to be extroverted, and I
don't particularly care. Unlike some (many?)
introverts, I'm happy being who I
am.
Your insurance company doesn't put a value on your life, you choose the number when you buy the policy.
Hmmm... that's not how it's commonly done in the UK.
The policy has an amount and you either buy it or
not. Since most life insurance is done through company schemes or mortgage lenders
anyway, you don't get any say in
the matter anyway.
Depends who you ask. Your life insurance company
certainly has a figure in mind. You may or may not
agree with it, but they've put a value on your life.
Well yes, but it is far from "nice research".
In fact, it's incredibly poorly researched and
written.
It's inaccurate, misleading and very biased.
Sadly, this just serves to undermine the
credibility of the valid points in the text.
konqueror and safari are the new browser kings on *nix.
Ha ha ha ha. If KHTML could render half of the
sites I view properly, then maybe I'd agree with
you. As it is, they've made a good start and have
a solid foundation on which to build a decent
browser. But there are a lot of bugs to fix, and
a long way to go before they're usable for
everyday browsing...
You are free to set an LCD to run at 640x480, 800x600, or whatever you like.
Sure, you're free to run it at whatever resolution
you like. Of course, unlike a CRT, it'll look like
shit most of the time, but hey, flat panels are
sexy, right, so who cares? To be fair, if your
full reolution is an integer multiple of your
scaled resultion, then it'll be a bit blocky,
but otherwise OK.
Personally, I'll be
sticking with my CRT for some time yet.
For cfish,
my advice is relax. Yes, in time, CRTs will be
phased out of the mass market. But they'll still
be around for the forseeable future, they'll just
be a niche device, so you won't be able to get
them from high street shops. Even then, that's
still a fair way off...
I can't agree with this enough. I got mine because
it was the cheapest PostScript laser I could find,
and it was money well spent. I'd recommend them to
anyone.
Doesn't seem to work for me. It's different to most
Flash sites, I'll admit, but it's not going back
to the previous page when I request it.
So: the implementation and format make all these things possible, and doesn't even steer developers in one particular direction, it just lets them make a choice. So again, don't blame the format, blame the designers.
Perhaps. Perhaps I'd be more agreeable if the
common tools for creating SWF came with a sane
set of defaults that gave the behaviour you've
described.
If you can't promise them that a technology will give the intended result most of the time (and remember, IE accounts for 95% of all web users), to them it isn't "reliable".
I agree. Completely. And I stick by what I said.
If you stick to the same PNG features that GIF
provides, PNG is just as reliable as GIF, plus
giving you additional benefits. If you want to
take advantage of PNG's full alpha channel, then
at the moment you have to accept a fair bit of
"unreliability". Which is why I'm not advocating
it. PNGs without full alpha support work reliably
in every version of IE from 4 up. To me, that
counts as giving pretty good coverage.
Not on any site I've seen, and not with any version
of the Flash plugin I've used (I'm using 6.0 r79,
which is the latest released version, according to
Macromedia). Care to provide a URL where I can
see this is action?
resizing text works
Nope. Zooming is not the same as resizing. It is
also waaaay to clumsy to be useful on a regular
basis. It's far easier to just give up on the
site and go somewhere else.
cutting and pasting text works
Again, not in any version of Flash I've used.
Care to provide some examples? I've just tried
going to http://www.macromedia.com,
to see if I could do it, but no joy. Can you
explain what I'd need to do to cut and paste some
of the text from the flash presentation on the
front page?
But until PNG images can be displayed reliably, it makes no sense to insist that everybody should migrate away from GIFs.
Yes, it does, because PNGs *can* be displayed
reliably today. PNGs give techinical advantages
over GIF, regardless of the LZW patent. Even IE
can display them without problems, providing that
alpha is either fully on or fully off. That
immediately gives the same amount of functionality
as GIF87, with some added benefits as well
(smaller file sizes, non-paletted images,
progressive rendering, etc.). I wasn't
recommending that people start using
PNGs with a varied alpha channel yet,
precisely because IE is so braindead.
What I don't understand is why so many/.-ers hate it so much
There are
numerous problems with Flash, and SVG has the
potential to solve all of them. Many people hate
Flash so much because of the countless sites that
have been rendered unreadable and unusable
by gratuitous use of Flash.
(No, I didn't forget PNG. It has some technical and ideological advantages, but browser support is still, well, incomplete.
Browser support is complete enough that there's no
reason to use GIFs on the web today for anything
other than animated images. All static images
that were previously GIF can be switched to PNG
today and still have effectively full browser
support, and in the vast majority of cases,
gain some advantages in terms of size. Browser
support is lacking in terms of taking advantage
of PNG's alpha channel, but GIF didn't
have that anyway, so you wouldn't lose anything
by switching to PNG.
Is there something new you're offering (other than a different set of lawyers) that we should be noticing?
Let me see:
The ability to navigate using the traditional
back/forward buttons (although I believe the lastest
versions of Flash support this to some extent).
The ability to resize text so it's halfway
readable.
The ability to cut and paste text.
The ability to use my standard ctrl-pageup/pagedown keys to switch between tabs
in Mozilla (as well as other browser keyboard
accelerators) without them getting intercepted
by the Flash plugin.
The ability for search engines to index the
content I'm presenting.
There are many reasons why Flash is fundamentally
flawed, and SVG is a much better solution in the
long run. Only time will tell if the market is
able to see that.
PDF is handled by a plugin. SVG is handled by a plugin. They plugins come from the same company. So why is native browser support a necessary condition for SVG's success?
Because PDF tends to be used for standalone
documents, where SVG tends to be embedded within
a web page. This means that PDF is usable even
without a plugin (by using an external application
-- in this case, Acrobat Reader). Indeed, I use it
like that, finding it more convenient than using
the plugin. SVG, on the other hand, can't work
like that sensibly. You could call an
external SVG viewer, but you'd lose the context
of the surrounding document.
...now all we need are some browsers with native
SVG support. With the Mozilla SVG project still seemingly no closer to
delivering a shippable release, and no hope
whatsoever of MS
releasing an SVG enabled IE, looks like we're stuck
with the Adobe plugin for now. Until we get past
that, I doubt SVG will enter the mainstream (more's
the pity).
There are plenty of albums I can put on as background music, but few that I'd actually want to listen to.
Then I can only say that your listening habits are
significantly different to mine and most of the
people I associate with. It's rare for me to buy an
album with more than a couple of poor tracks. The
artists I like fairly consistently produce a solid
collection of tracks with very little filler. There
are a few exceptions, the odd one hit wonder that
really doesn't have the songwriting ability to
make a full album of music. But that's the
exception, not the rule. Perhaps that's a
consequence of listening to a genre of music
(heavy metal) that's so under represented in the
mainstream media that the concept of a single is
almost unheard of. Most of my favourite
bands only make albums -- there's no
point in making a single, because it's never
going to get played anywhere anyway. Or perhaps
it's some other reason entirely...
P.S. Today's music recomendation: Masterplan's
eponymous debut album. Feel the soulburn...
Agreed. Ideally, I'd like (soon to be Ogg) FLAC
and Ogg Vorbis as options, rather than, or perhaps
as well as, MP3. I generally prefer to encode my
own Oggs, so FLAC would be the ideal starting point.
I like the idea of jewel case inlays. Ideally these
would be in a neutral vector format like SVG rather
than a bitmap, but
even just PostScript or PDF would be fine. Oh, and
obviously, I'd like my kind of music to be
available. The problem with pretty much all online
music stores is that they don't cater to my
nichetastes (mostly Euro power metal, Norwegian black
metal, and a bit of goth and glam metal thrown in
for good measure).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree abiout emacs, and indeed tried to convince ESR that emacs goes against the Unix philosophy for his TAOUP book, although he wasn't having any of it. However, I disagree about sendmail. Sendmail isn't huge, and it only does one thing (email routing), and it does it very well. I'm not going to argue about its ease of configuration, or its historical security problems. But in terms of doing what it's designed for, you can't fault it.
In general, though, I agree with your sentiments. One only has to look at GNOME and KDE to see how much the Unix landscape has been infiltrated by people that just don't get it.
IIRC (from speaking to my mcirobiologist ex), DNA profiling can only guarantee negatives, never positives, and thus in the UK cannot be used to convict someone, only to acquit them.
You do? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind. It's hard wired. I didn't choose to be an introvert. Why would I deliberately set out to be socially inept, dismissed by others, generally lacking social skills, and looked down upon my the majority of the population?
As it happens, I think I'm better off being who I am, than being one of them. They think they're superior. I know it's the other way round. But I have no desire to correct their misunderstanding :-) The fact is, I can't imagine
what it would be like to be extroverted, and I
don't particularly care. Unlike some (many?)
introverts, I'm happy being who I
am.
<sarcasm>
Becasue obviously they've been really successful at doing that...
</sarcasm>
Hmmm... that's not how it's commonly done in the UK. The policy has an amount and you either buy it or not. Since most life insurance is done through company schemes or mortgage lenders anyway, you don't get any say in the matter anyway.
Depends who you ask. Your life insurance company certainly has a figure in mind. You may or may not agree with it, but they've put a value on your life.
Oh how I wish I had some mod points for this...
Well yes, but it is far from "nice research". In fact, it's incredibly poorly researched and written. It's inaccurate, misleading and very biased. Sadly, this just serves to undermine the credibility of the valid points in the text.
Ha ha ha ha. If KHTML could render half of the sites I view properly, then maybe I'd agree with you. As it is, they've made a good start and have a solid foundation on which to build a decent browser. But there are a lot of bugs to fix, and a long way to go before they're usable for everyday browsing...
And still more than 60% cheaper than an equivalently sized (and lower spec) LCD.
Sure, you're free to run it at whatever resolution you like. Of course, unlike a CRT, it'll look like shit most of the time, but hey, flat panels are sexy, right, so who cares? To be fair, if your full reolution is an integer multiple of your scaled resultion, then it'll be a bit blocky, but otherwise OK. Personally, I'll be sticking with my CRT for some time yet.
For cfish, my advice is relax. Yes, in time, CRTs will be phased out of the mass market. But they'll still be around for the forseeable future, they'll just be a niche device, so you won't be able to get them from high street shops. Even then, that's still a fair way off...
I can't agree with this enough. I got mine because it was the cheapest PostScript laser I could find, and it was money well spent. I'd recommend them to anyone.
Smaller file size alone is enough. But in addition, there's far superior interlacing, and the ability to have non paletted images.
Doesn't seem to work for me. It's different to most Flash sites, I'll admit, but it's not going back to the previous page when I request it.
So: the implementation and format make all these things possible, and doesn't even steer developers in one particular direction, it just lets them make a choice. So again, don't blame the format, blame the designers.
Perhaps. Perhaps I'd be more agreeable if the common tools for creating SWF came with a sane set of defaults that gave the behaviour you've described.
I agree. Completely. And I stick by what I said. If you stick to the same PNG features that GIF provides, PNG is just as reliable as GIF, plus giving you additional benefits. If you want to take advantage of PNG's full alpha channel, then at the moment you have to accept a fair bit of "unreliability". Which is why I'm not advocating it. PNGs without full alpha support work reliably in every version of IE from 4 up. To me, that counts as giving pretty good coverage.
Not on any site I've seen, and not with any version of the Flash plugin I've used (I'm using 6.0 r79, which is the latest released version, according to Macromedia). Care to provide a URL where I can see this is action?
resizing text works
Nope. Zooming is not the same as resizing. It is also waaaay to clumsy to be useful on a regular basis. It's far easier to just give up on the site and go somewhere else.
cutting and pasting text works
Again, not in any version of Flash I've used. Care to provide some examples? I've just tried going to http://www.macromedia.com, to see if I could do it, but no joy. Can you explain what I'd need to do to cut and paste some of the text from the flash presentation on the front page?
Yes, it does, because PNGs *can* be displayed reliably today. PNGs give techinical advantages over GIF, regardless of the LZW patent. Even IE can display them without problems, providing that alpha is either fully on or fully off. That immediately gives the same amount of functionality as GIF87, with some added benefits as well (smaller file sizes, non-paletted images, progressive rendering, etc.). I wasn't recommending that people start using PNGs with a varied alpha channel yet, precisely because IE is so braindead.
Oh, agreed. But at least with SVG, we'll be able to resize text, middle click links and navigate properly, for example.
There are numerous problems with Flash, and SVG has the potential to solve all of them. Many people hate Flash so much because of the countless sites that have been rendered unreadable and unusable by gratuitous use of Flash.
Browser support is complete enough that there's no reason to use GIFs on the web today for anything other than animated images. All static images that were previously GIF can be switched to PNG today and still have effectively full browser support, and in the vast majority of cases, gain some advantages in terms of size. Browser support is lacking in terms of taking advantage of PNG's alpha channel, but GIF didn't have that anyway, so you wouldn't lose anything by switching to PNG.
Let me see:
- The ability to navigate using the traditional
back/forward buttons (although I believe the lastest
versions of Flash support this to some extent).
- The ability to resize text so it's halfway
readable.
- The ability to cut and paste text.
- The ability to use my standard ctrl-pageup/pagedown keys to switch between tabs
in Mozilla (as well as other browser keyboard
accelerators) without them getting intercepted
by the Flash plugin.
- The ability for search engines to index the
content I'm presenting.
There are many reasons why Flash is fundamentally flawed, and SVG is a much better solution in the long run. Only time will tell if the market is able to see that.Because PDF tends to be used for standalone documents, where SVG tends to be embedded within a web page. This means that PDF is usable even without a plugin (by using an external application -- in this case, Acrobat Reader). Indeed, I use it like that, finding it more convenient than using the plugin. SVG, on the other hand, can't work like that sensibly. You could call an external SVG viewer, but you'd lose the context of the surrounding document.
...now all we need are some browsers with native SVG support. With the Mozilla SVG project still seemingly no closer to delivering a shippable release, and no hope whatsoever of MS releasing an SVG enabled IE, looks like we're stuck with the Adobe plugin for now. Until we get past that, I doubt SVG will enter the mainstream (more's the pity).
Then I can only say that your listening habits are significantly different to mine and most of the people I associate with. It's rare for me to buy an album with more than a couple of poor tracks. The artists I like fairly consistently produce a solid collection of tracks with very little filler. There are a few exceptions, the odd one hit wonder that really doesn't have the songwriting ability to make a full album of music. But that's the exception, not the rule. Perhaps that's a consequence of listening to a genre of music (heavy metal) that's so under represented in the mainstream media that the concept of a single is almost unheard of. Most of my favourite bands only make albums -- there's no point in making a single, because it's never going to get played anywhere anyway. Or perhaps it's some other reason entirely...
P.S. Today's music recomendation: Masterplan's eponymous debut album. Feel the soulburn...
Agreed. Ideally, I'd like (soon to be Ogg) FLAC and Ogg Vorbis as options, rather than, or perhaps as well as, MP3. I generally prefer to encode my own Oggs, so FLAC would be the ideal starting point. I like the idea of jewel case inlays. Ideally these would be in a neutral vector format like SVG rather than a bitmap, but even just PostScript or PDF would be fine. Oh, and obviously, I'd like my kind of music to be available. The problem with pretty much all online music stores is that they don't cater to my niche tastes (mostly Euro power metal, Norwegian black metal, and a bit of goth and glam metal thrown in for good measure).