Hmmm... I definately wouldn't sacrifice whitespace to make a function fit on one page. But I am a fan of making object's methods fit on a screen or 2 (well, at high res at least) and never having an if's else more than a screen away if at all possible.
""" Stephenson's sub-rant on the use of "document" and "save" in GUIs to mean the opposite of everyday meanings is not unusual in the least. A word is often used to mean opposite things. """
The problem I see here is that we are not just using "document" and "save" as words, but as parts of a metaphor. As such, the use of the words to being the opposite breaks the metaphor that the Desktop is supposed to be presenting.
See _About Face_ by Alan Cooper for a good deconstuction of the 'File' menu.
>>1. Require Microsoft to publish complete documentation of all interfaces between software components, all communications protocols, and all file formats.
If Microsoft, why not Apple or Be? Because they don't currently have a monopoly? Will there be some level of marketshare at which we will require a company to start publishing all of their interfaces?
I guess the big question is "what is enough information to extracg?"
If you just want to be able to get at the raw text of the document (which is usually all I want) then the Office 2000 XML formats provide a way, if a somewhat bulky and gross way, to get at it.
If you want to get at the style information, or complicated stuff associated with a spreadsheet, you're reduced to trying to parse all the gunk out. XML may package it pretty, but the contents are still pretty bad.
I find the comments somewhat weird, since 'simple' apps like desktop productivity software is exactly the place where Linux is a bit lacking these days. Also consider that most of your customers are using MS format documents, which require pretty much require MS Office to open correctly.
Thing is, Navigator was a commercial product until IE was given away for free. Hard to comepte with free (hmm... Linux is free!). Granted, most eveyone just downloaded Netscape and never bought a license anyways.
I would argue that people searching for overly simple, generic terms like 'dogs', 'sex', or 'canada' are using search engines incorrectly.
Back in grade school it seems like the library staff never tired of teaching us how to use the card catalog. There are Subject, Author, and Title cards, and they look like this, and this is where information is, and here is the call number, etc.
I picked it up pretty quickly (being a naiscent computer geek back then even). But now I can reflect back on it and see that searching information is a skill that must be learned. Technology can help or hinder this (as countless proprietary one-cheecked computerized library card catalogs can attest to), but it still must be learned.
In a post above, a reader hypothesizes about doing a search for 'football' and wanting to get various results. I'd say that the correct way to go about finding things (helmets for sale, player stats) is not to do a generic search on 'football'. If you want to buy helmets then you want to look for sporting goods stores. If you want player stats, you want some sports site.
Granted, most users don't want to learn each engine's specific grammar for complex boolean searches. Most don't want to see something full of (),*?+. But people who really want to find information will be willing to learn ways to improve their search results.
For people who just look for 'cats', and ad to a site will probably bring up things that are just as relavent as all the porn-site hits that will come up.
All this said, I think that schools should be teaching information searching skills. The Web (or whatever eventually replaces it at some level) will only get more and more prevelant, and those who know how to look for things will have a big advantage.
So finally, about the ads, sneaking ads into search results really does bug me on a philosophical level. Doing it for broad terms alreay has its problems (ie, buy the Linux term and use it to sell whatever). Once it becomes accepted practice, ads will get worked into more and more complex searches just as an established practice.
On the bright side, as sites like Google show, there is still room for new players to attract users. We can always just jump ship to better sites and proxy out the ad banners.
I have no idea how my car works, yet I drive it every day.
Why should people have to know how their computers work just to write email, browse the web, etc?
The big benefit of a real Consumer Linux is that its probably way more stable than doing the same level of tasks on a Windows box, and its much easier for your techie friend to quickly fix something (or even remotely!) than wading through a bunch of dialog boxes under windows.
Perhaps a consumer Linux should work kind of like the way Kai's Power Tools does? Exposes more functionality to users that explore all the tools available?
Reward the curious users, and give the others the benefit of a crash-free desktop experience.
Turning the task of learning Linux into a kind of discovery process seems a lot better than just dumping a CLI on someone and saying, "Here you go! Feel the power yet?".
Assuming that we are dealing with fixed-width characters (which is probably a bad assumption these days), finding the length of a string is O(n), and doing a string compare of 2 strings is O(min(n,m)).
So in the case where the lengths are equal we have O(n) + O(n) + O(n), which is just O(n). Granted, this is 3 times less efficient, but its probably not horrendously bad.
At least, my algortihms teacher probably wouldn't think so. My boss, however, would.
As an aside, there is a tire store around here called Big-O Tires. I wonder if geeks buy tires there?
Please explain why the length comparision is needed here. Are you saying that strcmp compares on a character-class-by-character-class basis, instead of a character-by-character basis?
The clerks at my grocery store (OK, Safeway) always say "thank you mr/ms last-name-from-your-check-or-CC-or-debit-card". I suppose I can always pay in cash if this starts bugging me too much.
As far as Godiva goes, they purposefully have self-help boxes and people at the counter waiting to help you, because they know that some people prefer not to be hassled, while those that need help will either (1) ask for it or (2) be fairly obvious in a store the size of a Godiva.
I can see where you are coming from here. Its the difference between walking to a local rental place (with good 'bulk' prices) in the U District (of Seattle), versus driving to a Blockbuster in Bellevue.
I guess its that old "guy who runs the small shop" versus "MegaCorp (TM) (R) (C)" all over again.
From a WSJ article found in my inbox today: """ Mr. Iams said Linux excels in four areas: Internet providers, entry-level computer networks, specialized computing devices such as network routers, and scientifically oriented computer "clusters" that link scores of PCs to make a single supercomputer.
But he said Linux currently lacks some of the features demanded by corporations that intend to run their entire business on computers. Among them are the ability to run simultaneously on many processors in a single computer and to keep a log of what the computer has done. """
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... I definately wouldn't sacrifice whitespace to make a function fit on one page. But I am a fan of making object's methods fit on a screen or 2 (well, at high res at least) and never having an if's else more than a screen away if at all possible.
The 6x6x6 cube is progratically easy to "nearest-neighbor" colors to, since you just drop the lower bits.
Unfortunately, the eye has different levels of sensitivity to R, G & B, thus all the "wasted" colors in the cube.
"""
Stephenson's sub-rant on the use of "document" and "save" in GUIs to mean the opposite of everyday meanings is not unusual in the least. A word is often used to mean opposite things.
"""
The problem I see here is that we are not just using "document" and "save" as words, but as parts of a metaphor. As such, the use of the words to being the opposite breaks the metaphor that the Desktop is supposed to be presenting.
See _About Face_ by Alan Cooper for a good deconstuction of the 'File' menu.
>>1. Require Microsoft to publish complete documentation of all interfaces between software components, all communications protocols, and all file formats.
If Microsoft, why not Apple or Be? Because they don't currently have a monopoly? Will there be some level of marketshare at which we will require a company to start publishing all of their interfaces?
I guess the big question is "what is enough information to extracg?"
If you just want to be able to get at the raw text of the document (which is usually all I want) then the Office 2000 XML formats provide a way, if a somewhat bulky and gross way, to get at it.
If you want to get at the style information, or complicated stuff associated with a spreadsheet, you're reduced to trying to parse all the gunk out. XML may package it pretty, but the contents are still pretty bad.
I find the comments somewhat weird, since 'simple' apps like desktop productivity software is exactly the place where Linux is a bit lacking these days. Also consider that most of your customers are using MS format documents, which require pretty much require MS Office to open correctly.
Well, there are people who buy Opera...
Thing is, Navigator was a commercial product until IE was given away for free. Hard to comepte with free (hmm... Linux is free!). Granted, most eveyone just downloaded Netscape and never bought a license anyways.
I would argue that people searching for overly simple, generic terms like 'dogs', 'sex', or 'canada' are using search engines incorrectly.
Back in grade school it seems like the library staff never tired of teaching us how to use the card catalog. There are Subject, Author, and Title cards, and they look like this, and this is where information is, and here is the call number, etc.
I picked it up pretty quickly (being a naiscent computer geek back then even). But now I can reflect back on it and see that searching information is a skill that must be learned. Technology can help or hinder this (as countless proprietary one-cheecked computerized library card catalogs can attest to), but it still must be learned.
In a post above, a reader hypothesizes about doing a search for 'football' and wanting to get various results. I'd say that the correct way to go about finding things (helmets for sale, player stats) is not to do a generic search on 'football'. If you want to buy helmets then you want to look for sporting goods stores. If you want player stats, you want some sports site.
Granted, most users don't want to learn each engine's specific grammar for complex boolean searches. Most don't want to see something full of (),*?+. But people who really want to find information will be willing to learn ways to improve their search results.
For people who just look for 'cats', and ad to a site will probably bring up things that are just as relavent as all the porn-site hits that will come up.
All this said, I think that schools should be teaching information searching skills. The Web (or whatever eventually replaces it at some level) will only get more and more prevelant, and those who know how to look for things will have a big advantage.
So finally, about the ads, sneaking ads into search results really does bug me on a philosophical level. Doing it for broad terms alreay has its problems (ie, buy the Linux term and use it to sell whatever). Once it becomes accepted practice, ads will get worked into more and more complex searches just as an established practice.
On the bright side, as sites like Google show, there is still room for new players to attract users. We can always just jump ship to better sites and proxy out the ad banners.
Thanks for listening.
A key point here is that cars and computers are both consumer products, whereas I know many fewer people who own planes.
I'd like to think of a box running a consumer linux as a sort of transformer: There's more than meets the eye! (TM)
I have no idea how my car works, yet I drive it every day.
Why should people have to know how their computers work just to write email, browse the web, etc?
The big benefit of a real Consumer Linux is that its probably way more stable than doing the same level of tasks on a Windows box, and its much easier for your techie friend to quickly fix something (or even remotely!) than wading through a bunch of dialog boxes under windows.
Perhaps a consumer Linux should work kind of like the way Kai's Power Tools does? Exposes more functionality to users that explore all the tools available?
Reward the curious users, and give the others the benefit of a crash-free desktop experience.
Turning the task of learning Linux into a kind of discovery process seems a lot better than just dumping a CLI on someone and saying, "Here you go! Feel the power yet?".
One thing that is all too common are people complaining that they don't learn any current, useful stuff in college classes.
This isn't the point! The point is how to learn how to learn, and how to learn how to communicate.
If you're lucky, you'll be able to do projects for classes that allow you to investigate current technology.
Its horrible that so many smart computer types see communcation as a secondary or tertiary skill.
When I ask intern candidates to implement a strcmp function, I'm suprised how many of them feel that doing a strlen first is required!
Assuming that we are dealing with fixed-width characters (which is probably a bad assumption these days), finding the length of a string is O(n), and doing a string compare of 2 strings is O(min(n,m)).
So in the case where the lengths are equal we have
O(n) + O(n) + O(n), which is just O(n).
Granted, this is 3 times less efficient, but its probably not horrendously bad.
At least, my algortihms teacher probably wouldn't think so. My boss, however, would.
As an aside, there is a tire store around here called Big-O Tires. I wonder if geeks buy tires there?
Please explain why the length comparision is needed here. Are you saying that strcmp compares on a character-class-by-character-class basis, instead of a character-by-character basis?
The clerks at my grocery store (OK, Safeway) always say "thank you mr/ms last-name-from-your-check-or-CC-or-debit-card". I suppose I can always pay in cash if this starts bugging me too much.
As far as Godiva goes, they purposefully have self-help boxes and people at the counter waiting to help you, because they know that some people prefer not to be hassled, while those that need help will either (1) ask for it or (2) be fairly obvious in a store the size of a Godiva.
I can see where you are coming from here.
Its the difference between walking to a local rental place (with good 'bulk' prices) in the U District (of Seattle), versus driving to a Blockbuster in Bellevue.
I guess its that old "guy who runs the small shop" versus "MegaCorp (TM) (R) (C)" all over again.
From a WSJ article found in my inbox today:
"""
Mr. Iams said Linux excels in four areas: Internet providers, entry-level computer networks, specialized computing devices such as network routers, and scientifically oriented computer "clusters" that link scores of PCs to make a single supercomputer.
But he said Linux currently lacks some of the features demanded by corporations that intend to run their entire business on computers. Among them are the ability to run simultaneously on many processors in a single computer and to keep a log of what the computer has done.
"""
*cough*
Microsoft is based in REDMOND not SEATTLE.