...GoDaddy's revenues fell markedly as people found they could easily break in and setup their own sites at the parked domains without having to pay for them.
Regular as clockwork, every couple of years, it seems someone has to wail "this can't keep going on!", as far back as the 80's when it was "USENET's saturating my modem link!" Then they'd double or quadruple the speed of the modems.
Humans adapt. That's why we're here. However they don't like to throw things out and start from scratch. Email's evolved considerably since the first messages were typed over arpanet, and it will keep evolving. That's the way things work.
(strongly resisting the urge to insert a creationism comment. Sit on your hands... Sit on your hands...)
I went and fetched the latest gimp, and it looks like it actually supports both X's now, that's an improvement, and there are things I like about it, like the markers on the edges showing where your pointer is.
The main thing I've always disliked about GIMP is that it's too busy and stuff is scattered all over. It's a bit overwhelming for someone starting with it, a bunch of icons that really don't mean much unless you already know what they mean or spend a lot of time mousing over. Since I've used lite versions of photoshop for a decade now, it wasn't worth the effort of jumping the hurdle.
On the other hand, it's really not much different than the little side menus photoshop puts up (which is another change I'm not sure I like in Elements, building them all into a frame around a hole where your image goes), so I'm not sure why they're more daunting.
Maybe it's just inertia... Now that I just spent the bucks on Elements a week or so ago, I guess I'll try using Gimp again;-)
Well for starters, on Mac, it's picky about which X server it uses. It seems there are two, and they're incompatible (the nice thing about standards is that everyone can have one?). So I have one app I use frequently that requires on, and gimp requires the other. So it's been a while, but my recollection is that the photoshop version didn't work very well, and the regular interface was pretty weird (as it often seems Xt apps are). I'll try to fire it up and give some specific comments though later...
The reason it is so difficult to change the size of a file in Photoshop
I don't remember it being that way before, but maybe I'd already found the resample button and somewhere a way to tell it to do that always.
Yes, there are a bazillion odd cases that Photoshop has to deal with, and yes, for some given person, any one of those cases may be the "norm". Nevertheless, it would be very intuitive to *not* grey out the pixel fields, but have an Options button there that lets you select which of those weird cases you want, and have a checkbox for "Make this the default". The manual and Help buttons should then explain why and when you would want to select each of the options and why and when you would want to avoid selecting each of the options (if there are some gotchas that could trip people up). And in really complex areas, perhaps even link to or recommend reference sites and/or material.
My point is, this is an expert level application with a TON of functionality
Photoshop Elements, as I understand it, is the stripped down version for the masses, which would imply to me two modes: screen and basic PC printing. It also doesn't help that the "experts" redefine common terms: it is not at all intuitive that "resizing the image" means "change the way it prints without affecting the image at all" in a tool that is an image editor (i.e. it's whole purpose is to change the image). It would make more sense to make that redefinition in Illustrator, though that sort of thing still ought to be in a "print setup" menu, not a "resize" menu.
How do you intuitively ask the user if they want to scale their styles
If you don't *have* any styles (or other complex modifiers)... But even if you did, I would expect such things to be in a Styles menu, i.e. "Style/Resize" just like this one is "Image/Resize". This brings up another case that adds complexity that is often frustrating: greyed out items. If you wanted to scale a style, you would need to have a scale selected (if you had more than one; one frustrating (for a lot more than this minor reason) tool I've used requires selecting an object to edit even when there's only one). I've run into several cases where I didn't understand *why* an item was greyed out, so I would like to see greyed out menu items, either when clicked, moused over, right clicked, whatever, to bring up something that says 1. why it's greyed out ("You don't have a scale selected, so I don't know what you want me to work on") and 2. what you need to do to activate it ("You can select a Scale in the Tools/Misc/Buried/and/Hidden/Scale Select menu").
It is is a little work, but not really that hard to do an intuitive interface if you ask the question, "what is the user trying to do?" rather than the more commonly asked question "what do I have here that I need the user to get to".
So it is, thanks! When you click on "resample" (at the very bottom of the dialog, then the pixel values become editable. The workaround I had found had been to scale it in "Save for web"...
I consider it partially my responsibility to climb that learning curve to do real work in digital graphics.
For the stuff that is technically advanced, I agree, though it should still be intuitive for someone who is technically advanced in the field.
Photoshop and Illustrator are classic examples of what I consider bad user interfaces, because things that should be simple and obvious, aren't. For example, cropping a picture (Elements actually fixed this one): you drag the border as you'd expect, then you want to fine tune it. Bzzzt. You had to use some combination of shift-alt-click-something to adjust it, or do the add/subtract from selection thing.
On the other hand, Elements has broken something simple and basic: resizing images. Something even earlier versions of Photoshop did well. No more: "resize/image size" just changes some parameter it saves that says how big to print it, and the only options you get are printer units. OK, fine, leave "resizing" to the printer people, there's a canvas size option, but no, that is effectively a crop if you shrink it and adds blank space if you expand it. How about the scale menu item, that should work. Nope: "transformations should be applied to layers. do you want to make the background a layer?" Despite the word "should", your only options are to cancel the entire operation or to let it make a layer out of it. And I don't want to resize one layer, I want to resize the entire thing!
Sorry, but crappy non-intuitive user interfaces are a hot button, and I just recently tripped over this one. In my mind, the entire point of a GUI is that you shouldn't have to RTFM to do the basic functions of the application.
Just because a tool is powerful doesn't mean it has to be non-intuitive...
I'm actually not arguing different either: I meant literally what I said: they need to have a section that specifically discusses the security ramifications of various aspects of the environment, proxying being an obvious point to address. Rather like the IETF requiring Security Considerations in RFCs for quite some time now...
Security restrictions prevent the Flash player from fetching XML from hosts other than the one it do
wnloaded the SWF file from. It requires a crossdomain.xml permission file to exist on other servers
from which Flash downloads content or calls web services.
The solution is for the OpenLaszlo Server or PHP to act as a proxy for other servers.
Isn't there a reason for that? I would like to see something that specifically addresses the security issues here...
American Idol was a DDOS attack on the phone system in the early days. It's not limited to the Internet, it's just easier to implement attacks there. Even so, it's conceivable that someone could create a virus that would cause pc's to dial phone numbers somewhere to disrupt the phone system, and could have even been done back in the haydays of bbses. In fact in a minor local incident, I once had the sheriff show up at my door once many years ago when I misconfigured a uucp connection to dial a lawyer's home phone before the other end was ready for testing (thus masking the fact of the wrong phone number). I corrected it while he watched and that was the last I heard of it fortunately;-)
You can buy a 300G Seagate drive for $100 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8 2E16822148131&ATT=22-148-131&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r) ; it doesn't require any more case, power supply, i/o channel or floor space than the tape drive you put the 3592 cartridge in, the hotswap case it goes in is a lot cheaper than the drive, it's got faster throughput, faster random access to the data and it's about the same size. It may be a little more fragile, and a little heavier.
The thing about this is that it looks like they're just gathering background data for pattern analysis. If they'd *asked*, I probably would have allowed my calls to be logged to collect information on normal call patterns, as long as that's all they were doing.
What I don't understand is why this administration seems to be so bent on doing things furtively. They've got the FISA court that's likely to give them whatever they want already, and they *still* prefer to do it the underhanded way. It's like he's going out of his way to destroy what little credibility he has.
on the mac 1.5.0.3 it's even worse: the left side is there, with nothing to the right, then down below that are tabs, with all the right side content on the left and some odd box outlines, then finally down below that are the articles, also left aligned. Jason's site seems to be slashdotted; the only one that works, and actually does look nice is Peter's...
I just got the HD Tivo for DirecTV, but it looks like I'm in a bad location where I can't see any of the terrestrial HD transmitters. Apparently DirecTV's HD DVR can pull in local HD channels, but they're highly compressed, which seems to me like it defeats the purpose of going HD in the first place. And it sounds like it's user interface sucks too.
So, IF:
1. I could get full quality HD channels 2. I could expand the disk capacity
or
1. It was setup to allow me to archive shows (fat chance)
So let me understand this: people compare two os's side by side on the same hardware. When they find that the one they're not familiar with is much better than the one they're used to, and they switch, they're lemmings? I always thought a lemming would be doing what everyone else does just because everyone else does it, which sounds a lot more like your typical Windoze user to me...
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone's going to buy a relatively expensive mac just so they can try osx on a machine that will still run windoze. Boot Camp's primary utility is saving mac users from having to buy a pc to run applications that they need to run, but which only work in windoze. If/when a native mode virtual pc comes out, boot camp will be even less relevant. To that end, I can agree that boot camp is nothing to get excited about, but that doesn't mean it's without merit.
That's exactly what I did, even though I'm unlikely to switch in the next couple of years. I've gotten screwed by such things at least as much as I've benefited, and I'm fed up with the crap.
You either have to store passwords on the system in a way that programs can get to them, which no matter what you do, is insecure, or you have to have someone there whenever the system reboots. And if you've got a vhost server with hundreds or thousands of domains hosted...
There are two solutions I can think of off hand:
1. If the application allows, make the database or other sensitive resources append-only by the basic app. Further access requires the user to login with higher level credentials.
2. Have some sort of media with "read-once" properties; when the system is rebooted (which typically triggers a reset of some sort), the read-once is reset. The necessary connection parameters can be stored here then.
First we hear the science supporting global warming is being suppressed, now we hear that science opposing global warming is being suppressed. The only clear conclusion is to get politics out of science, but I don't think anyone's ever succeeded at that in its entire history.
It may be a (small) step forward in thinking, but why on earth would I put up with lame-brain commercials when I already have it on tivo? Getting it early is not much help either, as I usually run several days behind anyhow just finding time to watch all the good shows. Even before tivo, I muted commercials and ignored them as much as I could. I'd rather pay money to subscribe to shows and do without the commercials entirely.
One thing they *could* do however is this:
1. Make the commercials interesting to watch instead of being as stupid as most are 2. Give you show credits towards your subscribed shows for watching them as a separate batch.
That way they don't interrupt the program flow and there's incentive to watch them. And even if people just turn them on and leave, that's not really any different that existing commercials. If they're interesting, people will actually watch them though.
I'll have to wait until I get home to check the serial number, but I held out for the 2.16ghz model, and the only issue I have with it is the heat problem --- you definitely can't set it on bare or thinly covered skin if you've been using it for any length of time... Otherwise, I'm quite happy with it...
Slashdot Mirror
...GoDaddy's revenues fell markedly as people found they could easily break in and setup their own sites at the parked domains without having to pay for them.
Regular as clockwork, every couple of years, it seems someone has to wail "this can't keep going on!", as far back as the 80's when it was "USENET's saturating my modem link!" Then they'd double or quadruple the speed of the modems.
Humans adapt. That's why we're here. However they don't like to throw things out and start from scratch. Email's evolved considerably since the first messages were typed over arpanet, and it will keep evolving. That's the way things work.
(strongly resisting the urge to insert a creationism comment. Sit on your hands... Sit on your hands...)
I went and fetched the latest gimp, and it looks like it actually supports both X's now, that's an improvement, and there are things I like about it, like the markers on the edges showing where your pointer is.
;-)
The main thing I've always disliked about GIMP is that it's too busy and stuff is scattered all over. It's a bit overwhelming for someone starting with it, a bunch of icons that really don't mean much unless you already know what they mean or spend a lot of time mousing over. Since I've used lite versions of photoshop for a decade now, it wasn't worth the effort of jumping the hurdle.
On the other hand, it's really not much different than the little side menus photoshop puts up (which is another change I'm not sure I like in Elements, building them all into a frame around a hole where your image goes), so I'm not sure why they're more daunting.
Maybe it's just inertia... Now that I just spent the bucks on Elements a week or so ago, I guess I'll try using Gimp again
Well for starters, on Mac, it's picky about which X server it uses. It seems there are two, and they're incompatible (the nice thing about standards is that everyone can have one?). So I have one app I use frequently that requires on, and gimp requires the other. So it's been a while, but my recollection is that the photoshop version didn't work very well, and the regular interface was pretty weird (as it often seems Xt apps are). I'll try to fire it up and give some specific comments though later...
The reason it is so difficult to change the size of a file in Photoshop
;-)
I don't remember it being that way before, but maybe I'd already found the resample button and somewhere a way to tell it to do that always.
Yes, there are a bazillion odd cases that Photoshop has to deal with, and yes, for some given person, any one of those cases may be the "norm". Nevertheless, it would be very intuitive to *not* grey out the pixel fields, but have an Options button there that lets you select which of those weird cases you want, and have a checkbox for "Make this the default". The manual and Help buttons should then explain why and when you would want to select each of the options and why and when you would want to avoid selecting each of the options (if there are some gotchas that could trip people up). And in really complex areas, perhaps even link to or recommend reference sites and/or material.
My point is, this is an expert level application with a TON of functionality
Photoshop Elements, as I understand it, is the stripped down version for the masses, which would imply to me two modes: screen and basic PC printing. It also doesn't help that the "experts" redefine common terms: it is not at all intuitive that "resizing the image" means "change the way it prints without affecting the image at all" in a tool that is an image editor (i.e. it's whole purpose is to change the image). It would make more sense to make that redefinition in Illustrator, though that sort of thing still ought to be in a "print setup" menu, not a "resize" menu.
How do you intuitively ask the user if they want to scale their styles
If you don't *have* any styles (or other complex modifiers)... But even if you did, I would expect such things to be in a Styles menu, i.e. "Style/Resize" just like this one is "Image/Resize". This brings up another case that adds complexity that is often frustrating: greyed out items. If you wanted to scale a style, you would need to have a scale selected (if you had more than one; one frustrating (for a lot more than this minor reason) tool I've used requires selecting an object to edit even when there's only one). I've run into several cases where I didn't understand *why* an item was greyed out, so I would like to see greyed out menu items, either when clicked, moused over, right clicked, whatever, to bring up something that says 1. why it's greyed out ("You don't have a scale selected, so I don't know what you want me to work on") and 2. what you need to do to activate it ("You can select a Scale in the Tools/Misc/Buried/and/Hidden/Scale Select menu").
It is is a little work, but not really that hard to do an intuitive interface if you ask the question, "what is the user trying to do?" rather than the more commonly asked question "what do I have here that I need the user to get to".
IMNSHO
So it is, thanks! When you click on "resample" (at the very bottom of the dialog, then the pixel values become editable. The workaround I had found had been to scale it in "Save for web"...
I consider it partially my responsibility to climb that learning curve to do real work in digital graphics.
For the stuff that is technically advanced, I agree, though it should still be intuitive for someone who is technically advanced in the field.
Photoshop and Illustrator are classic examples of what I consider bad user interfaces, because things that should be simple and obvious, aren't. For example, cropping a picture (Elements actually fixed this one): you drag the border as you'd expect, then you want to fine tune it. Bzzzt. You had to use some combination of shift-alt-click-something to adjust it, or do the add/subtract from selection thing.
On the other hand, Elements has broken something simple and basic: resizing images. Something even earlier versions of Photoshop did well. No more: "resize/image size" just changes some parameter it saves that says how big to print it, and the only options you get are printer units. OK, fine, leave "resizing" to the printer people, there's a canvas size option, but no, that is effectively a crop if you shrink it and adds blank space if you expand it. How about the scale menu item, that should work. Nope: "transformations should be applied to layers. do you want to make the background a layer?" Despite the word "should", your only options are to cancel the entire operation or to let it make a layer out of it. And I don't want to resize one layer, I want to resize the entire thing!
Sorry, but crappy non-intuitive user interfaces are a hot button, and I just recently tripped over this one. In my mind, the entire point of a GUI is that you shouldn't have to RTFM to do the basic functions of the application.
Just because a tool is powerful doesn't mean it has to be non-intuitive...
I'm actually not arguing different either: I meant literally what I said: they need to have a section that specifically discusses the security ramifications of various aspects of the environment, proxying being an obvious point to address. Rather like the IETF requiring Security Considerations in RFCs for quite some time now...
It would be pretty silly to do unless you controlled the content
Exactly. And how many people has that stopped?
The solution is for the OpenLaszlo Server or PHP to act as a proxy for other servers.
Isn't there a reason for that? I would like to see something that specifically addresses the security issues here...
American Idol was a DDOS attack on the phone system in the early days. It's not limited to the Internet, it's just easier to implement attacks there. Even so, it's conceivable that someone could create a virus that would cause pc's to dial phone numbers somewhere to disrupt the phone system, and could have even been done back in the haydays of bbses. In fact in a minor local incident, I once had the sheriff show up at my door once many years ago when I misconfigured a uucp connection to dial a lawyer's home phone before the other end was ready for testing (thus masking the fact of the wrong phone number). I corrected it while he watched and that was the last I heard of it fortunately ;-)
You can buy a 300G Seagate drive for $100 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8 2E16822148131&ATT=22-148-131&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r) ; it doesn't require any more case, power supply, i/o channel or floor space than the tape drive you put the 3592 cartridge in, the hotswap case it goes in is a lot cheaper than the drive, it's got faster throughput, faster random access to the data and it's about the same size. It may be a little more fragile, and a little heavier.
Have you priced tapes? Disk drives are cheaper by quite a bit these days...
I was wondering where they were finding tape drives that were "1/5th to 1/10th the cost of disk drives"...
The thing about this is that it looks like they're just gathering background data for pattern analysis. If they'd *asked*, I probably would have allowed my calls to be logged to collect information on normal call patterns, as long as that's all they were doing.
What I don't understand is why this administration seems to be so bent on doing things furtively. They've got the FISA court that's likely to give them whatever they want already, and they *still* prefer to do it the underhanded way. It's like he's going out of his way to destroy what little credibility he has.
on the mac 1.5.0.3 it's even worse: the left side is there, with nothing to the right, then down below that are tabs, with all the right side content on the left and some odd box outlines, then finally down below that are the articles, also left aligned. Jason's site seems to be slashdotted; the only one that works, and actually does look nice is Peter's...
I just got the HD Tivo for DirecTV, but it looks like I'm in a bad location where I can't see any of the terrestrial HD transmitters. Apparently DirecTV's HD DVR can pull in local HD channels, but they're highly compressed, which seems to me like it defeats the purpose of going HD in the first place. And it sounds like it's user interface sucks too.
So, IF:
1. I could get full quality HD channels
2. I could expand the disk capacity
or
1. It was setup to allow me to archive shows (fat chance)
Then I would switch...
So let me understand this: people compare two os's side by side on the same hardware. When they find that the one they're not familiar with is much better than the one they're used to, and they switch, they're lemmings? I always thought a lemming would be doing what everyone else does just because everyone else does it, which sounds a lot more like your typical Windoze user to me...
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone's going to buy a relatively expensive mac just so they can try osx on a machine that will still run windoze. Boot Camp's primary utility is saving mac users from having to buy a pc to run applications that they need to run, but which only work in windoze. If/when a native mode virtual pc comes out, boot camp will be even less relevant. To that end, I can agree that boot camp is nothing to get excited about, but that doesn't mean it's without merit.
spend the $200 extra for an unlocked phone
That's exactly what I did, even though I'm unlikely to switch in the next couple of years. I've gotten screwed by such things at least as much as I've benefited, and I'm fed up with the crap.
You either have to store passwords on the system in a way that programs can get to them, which no matter what you do, is insecure, or you have to have someone there whenever the system reboots. And if you've got a vhost server with hundreds or thousands of domains hosted...
There are two solutions I can think of off hand:
1. If the application allows, make the database or other sensitive resources append-only by the basic app. Further access requires the user to login with higher level credentials.
2. Have some sort of media with "read-once" properties; when the system is rebooted (which typically triggers a reset of some sort), the read-once is reset. The necessary connection parameters can be stored here then.
...otherwise people bellyache mightily. I put just the most critical announcements and a url to a more general info page.
First we hear the science supporting global warming is being suppressed, now we hear that science opposing global warming is being suppressed. The only clear conclusion is to get politics out of science, but I don't think anyone's ever succeeded at that in its entire history.
It may be a (small) step forward in thinking, but why on earth would I put up with lame-brain commercials when I already have it on tivo? Getting it early is not much help either, as I usually run several days behind anyhow just finding time to watch all the good shows. Even before tivo, I muted commercials and ignored them as much as I could. I'd rather pay money to subscribe to shows and do without the commercials entirely.
One thing they *could* do however is this:
1. Make the commercials interesting to watch instead of being as stupid as most are
2. Give you show credits towards your subscribed shows for watching them as a separate batch.
That way they don't interrupt the program flow and there's incentive to watch them. And even if people just turn them on and leave, that's not really any different that existing commercials. If they're interesting, people will actually watch them though.
W8609112VJ3
I'll have to wait until I get home to check the serial number, but I held out for the 2.16ghz model, and the only issue I have with it is the heat problem --- you definitely can't set it on bare or thinly covered skin if you've been using it for any length of time... Otherwise, I'm quite happy with it...