are the worst designed user interfaces I have ever used. Cram an 800 character include path into a small 40 character NON-RESIZEABLE text box and try to find a typo in it sometime! Hey Microsoft - ever hear about RESIZEABLE dialog boxes? God - Motif, Qt, GTK all have them. Setting TCP settings on all the different flavours of Windows is another nightmare. To my delight yesterday after 3 hours of trying I learned on Windows 98 there were TCP properties on the dialup dialog as well as more properties on the dialup dialog icon (but not if it is a shortcut placed on your desktop). If you specify the DNS settings on the system TCP stack - they are completely ignored by the dialup icon which has its own TCP settings. This user interface of Windows should win awards for being cryptic. Man - screw all these dialogs and put it all in XML flat files so they don't change from one Windows version to the next!
You can always edit the project file. It's text, you know.
First, its really not a problem. Business desktops usually use Office very extensively, and something that makes it start faster isn't bad, its good. Also, I never keep stuff in my startup dir, and Office starts almost instantly on my system (about as fast as Konq on KDE 2.2.1).
Yeah, but the fact that it's there at all is still lame. The app should be able to load within 5 seconds or *less* without having to have something running in the background. All the apps I work on do. And I've worked on some pretty big ones.
Well, I don't use Windows, but I'm (99.4 +/- 1.2)% sure that there's an Office Start-up icon (application) in the system tray that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to load Office. Also, IE loads because of the reason I mentioned in my post above.
Actually, having just double-checked, yep, it's there in the Startup folder.
Unfortunately (actually, it's a good thing), no single company controls the Linux desktop/operating system, so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office)
What the hell are you talking about?
The only thing that Office has ever done on boot-up (and only the first time you run it) is to run BIND and WALIGN on all of its files -- which takes all of the DLL's entry points and binds them to the other DLLs they use with a timestamp, so if anything changes it can use the older mechanism.
This kind of thing has been available to all Windows developers for years. I use it myself; it makes your apps load pretty much instantaneously instead of taking forever.
Of course, this annoys my bosses when they want to insert splash screens... which annoys me when they tell me "put it up for 5 seconds regardless".
Uh the reason so many people will pick apart studies claiming Windows superiority is because heistory has shown us that they are usually untrue. I know Linux is technically superior to Windows I know Linux is more powerful than Windows, I don't need a study to prove it.
I guess you also know that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Is it dark where you are? I mean, surely there's not much illumination when your head is stuck up your ass.
Oh, and by the way, Windows doesn't constantly crash, unless a Linux user is running it.
Well, of course I always would like to see Linux come out ahead, but the real question is -- Does it really matter? While pipes are an important part of Unix programming, are they useful in Windows? I mean I have used up to 10 - 15 little utilites piped together to get a desired output on Linux. I am not sure there is a parallel under Windows. Not being a programmer under Windows I don't know what kind of IPC they prefer to use...
Generally, not that kind. If you want to do that kind of piping, then you're using stdin/stdout/stderr from the command line in Windows. Pipes are something that - typically - most programmers never use on Windows; there just doesn't really seem to be any point, and the mechanism appears to only be there for compatibility with the NT Posix layer. COM is another solution; or mutexes with memory mapped files for interprocess communication. Or heck, even 'mailslots'.
Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants - please tell me a reason to allow a system of numbers where we can set 1=3 ?? In this sense our general understanding of number thoery and the basis there in of the universe would runravel...
You use it all the time. It's called binary (except when you add numbers, you don't carry the 1). Modulo 2 arithmetic.
XOR is based on this. CRC checksums are based on this. Most crypto appears to be based on this. It's not exactly 'useless'.
That Nomad Jukebox almost certainly has hardware codecs for mp3 and wma decoding. It probably has an 8-bit microcontroller for handling the display and reading the HD. Comparing it to a PC is apples and oranges
No. I can guarantee you that it is software decoding for both; especially as it didn't originally ship with WMA support - that was a firmware add on about 6 months ago.
I have a somewhat old computer (Pentium, 233MHz) running with 256 MB of RAM. WMA lags, skips and generally does not sound good.
MP3, on the other hand, plays back clearly.
I have a Nomad Jukebox (which doesn't have a fast enough CPU to update its LCD display in anything like real-time when playing back MP3s or WMAs), and both play back absolutely fine.
Certainly, the CPU requirements for both seem about equal. Probably the biggest CPU hog you've got is all of the flashy visuals from Windows Media Player being transferred across your bus - which WILL cause problems with your sound card.
The whole thing with the DNA-encoded secret information. 1) It's unlikely that the Klingons would have such a technology. (In TNG, they hadn't the technical sophistication to fix Worf's broken spine, since they often favored euthanasia to advancing medical science.) 2) I won an award from HP and the ACM for a science fiction story I wrote in which the underground of a plutechnocratic Silicon Valley used the same biological transfer methods as their "underground newspaper." I'm pissed.
Why are you pissed? Unless you wrote that idea back in the 70s, it wasn't even a novel one; it has been used - for example - in Blood Music.
1. It's the year 2001 now. UIs have moved on. The mouse should as well.
2. That's not the case in pretty much every app I've every used.
3. You don't have to do that. You just right click anywhere on the document window. ANYWHERE. That's not a tiny X by Y window; that's HUGE.
4. You obviously have never used a Windows system. Shortcut keys work the same way as the command key shortcuts. Mnemonics are mainly for ACCESSIBILITY/power user usage - they make the system easier to use by people with disabilities (eg. those who have difficulty using a mouse), and people who remember the keystroke combos. Usually a sequence will include both a mnemonic AND a control-key sequence. So there's actually more flexibility here than Apple provides.
Not only that, but your "Alt / Ctrl take up too much space on the menu" comment is insane. There's NO real-estate to take up - the menu is a separate window on both the Mac and Windows, and expands to fits its contents... ON BOTH SYSTEMS!
And no, most users remember the keyboard shortcuts and NOT the mnemonics. The mnemonics don't 'jam peoples minds' at all. Where have you been reading this claptrap?
As for your point 5:
5. [mac users are] against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.
Well, that's the pot calling the kettle black, because that's what you just did throughout your entire post, but against Windows.
I can't think of anything so egregious in Windows, except having to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to change your password (which might have been fixed).
... which is actually for security reasons, because it's a hardware interrupt which means that keyloggers etc. can't get between you and the password dialog box and sniff the password.
Re:You have a very American point of view
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 2
(Interestingly enough, in the US the only persons that do get big severance payments seem to be incompetent CEOs and the likes - the ones that put big companies close to bankrupcy usually get the biggest severance payments)
Actually, it's funny you should mention that. The reason behind this is actually because once a CEO screws up, they will usually never be able to get a job again. Or at least, not in that field (ie. running companies).
Thus the large severance. Seems somewhat unfair to me - if I screwed up huge, I might never be able to get a job again either, but I don't get paid any kind of golden handshake. But that, alas, is how it works. They look out for their own.;-)
The language has changed to fit the times. Sorry, but hacker doesn't mean 'cool computer guru' any more - it means someone who breaks into systems for malicious purposes.
Get with the times. Sure, hacker is a nice term. But the language has changed.
You don't expect a computer to be someone who sits and runs calculations through a mechanical calculator any more, do you? Just checking.
I'm going home from work now. I'm going to get into my horseless carriage, and drive down the turnpike until I get home.
I worked on a system that had a "hibernate" feature back in 1990. Every minute it would save the current state of the computer to disk to the "hibernate" file so that it could return to it's current state after a reboot. The code that ran on it was attrociously horrible. So it would get into a state that would cause a crash and reboot back to the last state it was in, ~30 seconds back on average. What happened next, well it rebooted again and again and again and again and again and again, add in-finitum. They would have to reinstall the software to get it to stop.
My first task at getting my hands on it was deleting all "hiberation" features and then rewriting the main system using a methodology. Worked much better, there were no reboots except during lightning strikes. And "hiberation" was completely unnecessary in a properly designed system. Turned out the "hiberation" feature was added because there were too many reboots and loss of computations.
So now Windoze has adopted this wonderful brain fart of logic. Screw your system and make it permanenent. You gotta love it, Bill told you so.
Do yourself a favor. Look up what "Hibernate" means on Windows - because you're talking through your arse if you think that what it means on Windows is what you're describing above.
Now all the Microdroids will scream "HA! See?! Linux users can get worms too!"
You're obviously highly misinformed. At least three Linux worms have been out in the past year, and none of them require Wine to run - just uninformed lusers like yourself leaving boxes unpatched.
I am sad to admit that every day I write code in C++, using MFC. My conclusion is that development is more difficult on Windows in C++ than on any other platform/language I have used. M$ has an idea of how an application should be laid out that very rarely fits my idea of how an application should be laid out.
Then use ATL's windowing support instead. It's exceedlingly lightweight, and doesn't bind you into any kind of framework (caveat: yes, you have to create your Window objects deriving from certain classes, and you have to create a message map, but other than that, it leaves you the hell alone). Much nicer than MFC, and much more powerful.
We've got three infected workstations out of six here at work now. We were already planning on putting in six Linux workstations, but now we're going to have to go to all Linux (and Mac for the artists). This is ridiculous.
Maybe if you were doing your job properly, they would have been patched and thus invulnerable to this attack by now?
Or are you going to bitch and moan when your Linux boxen are rooted too?
And so is the browser, the vendor tells us. So is it really wise to base the defense of a multimiliion dollar ship on an OS which can be brought down by the web surfing of a bored sailor?
Operating system != kernel. It's a superset. The kernel is a subset.
I have good hardware. Has no trouble running anything. Unless it's Counter-Strike, and then on a real simple alt-tab (or god help me if I leave the machine and the screen saver kicks in).
Poof.
Some kind of memory error that I don't really feel like figuring out.
Nice. I'm sure that people are all playing Counter Strike on servers across the country.
Actually, it would be nearly useless in this case. GPS signals are very, very weak and can blocked by as little as a sheet of aluminum foil or a few millimeters of water. A GPS receiver under all those tons of concrete and steel would never be able to aquire and track.
No problem; just cache the result if you lose the GPS signal. In cases such as this, your location wouldn't change too much, and people could use the last-known location information as a starting point for exhaustive searches.
The conviction in 1990 wasn't for creating a virus. I know, because I was network manager at one of the sites involved and was responsible for logging network activity which formed part of the evidence.
Uh, actually, no, it was for creating a virus, and had nothing to do with mainframes as you suggest.
I had corresponded with the author (he was part of the SAM Coupé programming community). I know who he is. I have tons of his source code. And he was convicted for (on the surface of it) creating the first assembly-language polymorphic virus, and putting it into a virus kit.
Hmmm.. on an average day, Slashdot dishes out 20 pages per second.
MSNBC, on an average day, dishes out > 200 pages per second - and possibly higher.
Slashdot's traffic doubled. Well, whoopdidoo. It was still less than 1/5th that of MSNBC on a normal day. Congratulations to Slashdot for handling more load than they normally do. But is it really surprising when they don't even have to handle 1/5th the traffic?
Simon
Re:There will never again be a good day....
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
Has anyone seen any major wreckage from the 4th plane, such as the tail? If you look at other crash photos, this almost always survives. Unless of course, the plane was hit from the back by a missile which could disintegrate the back of the plane. Would Bush really shoot down a passenger jet and then try to cover it up? did Bill Clinton F*ck and lie? you bet'cha ass.
Oh don't be such a conspiracy nut. The plane was FULL of jet fuel. The tail of the plane was VAPORIZED.
Slashdot Mirror
are the worst designed user interfaces I have ever used. Cram an 800 character include path into a small 40 character NON-RESIZEABLE text box and try to find a typo in it sometime! Hey Microsoft - ever hear about RESIZEABLE dialog boxes? God - Motif, Qt, GTK all have them. Setting TCP settings on all the different flavours of Windows is another nightmare. To my delight yesterday after 3 hours of trying I learned on Windows 98 there were TCP properties on the dialup dialog as well as more properties on the dialup dialog icon (but not if it is a shortcut placed on your desktop). If you specify the DNS settings on the system TCP stack - they are completely ignored by the dialup icon which has its own TCP settings. This user interface of Windows should win awards for being cryptic. Man - screw all these dialogs and put it all in XML flat files so they don't change from one Windows version to the next!
You can always edit the project file. It's text, you know.
Simon
First, its really not a problem. Business desktops usually use Office very extensively, and something that makes it start faster isn't bad, its good. Also, I never keep stuff in my startup dir, and Office starts almost instantly on my system (about as fast as Konq on KDE 2.2.1).
Yeah, but the fact that it's there at all is still lame. The app should be able to load within 5 seconds or *less* without having to have something running in the background. All the apps I work on do. And I've worked on some pretty big ones.
Simon
Well, I don't use Windows, but I'm (99.4 +/- 1.2)% sure that there's an Office Start-up icon (application) in the system tray that greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to load Office. Also, IE loads because of the reason I mentioned in my post above.
f t+ office+startup%22
Actually, having just double-checked, yep, it's there in the Startup folder.
Apparently, it does this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22microso
Damn, that's lame.
Unfortunately (actually, it's a good thing), no single company controls the Linux desktop/operating system, so we therefore can't make some `Start-up Wizard' that loads when the OS boots-up and makes start time 4 times faster (think M$FT Windows/Office)
What the hell are you talking about?
The only thing that Office has ever done on boot-up (and only the first time you run it) is to run BIND and WALIGN on all of its files -- which takes all of the DLL's entry points and binds them to the other DLLs they use with a timestamp, so if anything changes it can use the older mechanism.
This kind of thing has been available to all Windows developers for years. I use it myself; it makes your apps load pretty much instantaneously instead of taking forever.
Of course, this annoys my bosses when they want to insert splash screens... which annoys me when they tell me "put it up for 5 seconds regardless".
Simon
Uh the reason so many people will pick apart studies claiming Windows superiority is because heistory has shown us that they are usually untrue. I know Linux is technically superior to Windows I know Linux is more powerful than Windows, I don't need a study to prove it.
I guess you also know that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Is it dark where you are? I mean, surely there's not much illumination when your head is stuck up your ass.
Oh, and by the way, Windows doesn't constantly crash, unless a Linux user is running it.
Well, of course I always would like to see Linux come out ahead, but the real question is -- Does it really matter? While pipes are an important part of Unix programming, are they useful in Windows? I mean I have used up to 10 - 15 little utilites piped together to get a desired output on Linux. I am not sure there is a parallel under Windows. Not being a programmer under Windows I don't know what kind of IPC they prefer to use...
Generally, not that kind. If you want to do that kind of piping, then you're using stdin/stdout/stderr from the command line in Windows. Pipes are something that - typically - most programmers never use on Windows; there just doesn't really seem to be any point, and the mechanism appears to only be there for compatibility with the NT Posix layer. COM is another solution; or mutexes with memory mapped files for interprocess communication. Or heck, even 'mailslots'.
Simon
Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants - please tell me a reason to allow a system of numbers where we can set 1=3 ?? In this sense our general understanding of number thoery and the basis there in of the universe would runravel...
You use it all the time. It's called binary (except when you add numbers, you don't carry the 1). Modulo 2 arithmetic.
XOR is based on this. CRC checksums are based on this. Most crypto appears to be based on this. It's not exactly 'useless'.
Simon
That Nomad Jukebox almost certainly has hardware codecs for mp3 and wma decoding. It probably has an 8-bit microcontroller for handling the display and reading the HD. Comparing it to a PC is apples and oranges
No. I can guarantee you that it is software decoding for both; especially as it didn't originally ship with WMA support - that was a firmware add on about 6 months ago.
Simon
I have a somewhat old computer (Pentium, 233MHz) running with 256 MB of RAM. WMA lags, skips and generally does not sound good.
MP3, on the other hand, plays back clearly.
I have a Nomad Jukebox (which doesn't have a fast enough CPU to update its LCD display in anything like real-time when playing back MP3s or WMAs), and both play back absolutely fine.
Certainly, the CPU requirements for both seem about equal. Probably the biggest CPU hog you've got is all of the flashy visuals from Windows Media Player being transferred across your bus - which WILL cause problems with your sound card.
Simon
The whole thing with the DNA-encoded secret information. 1) It's unlikely that the Klingons would have such a technology. (In TNG, they hadn't the technical sophistication to fix Worf's broken spine, since they often favored euthanasia to advancing medical science.) 2) I won an award from HP and the ACM for a science fiction story I wrote in which the underground of a plutechnocratic Silicon Valley used the same biological transfer methods as their "underground newspaper." I'm pissed.
Why are you pissed? Unless you wrote that idea back in the 70s, it wasn't even a novel one; it has been used - for example - in Blood Music.
Simon
1. It's the year 2001 now. UIs have moved on. The mouse should as well.
2. That's not the case in pretty much every app I've every used.
3. You don't have to do that. You just right click anywhere on the document window. ANYWHERE. That's not a tiny X by Y window; that's HUGE.
4. You obviously have never used a Windows system. Shortcut keys work the same way as the command key shortcuts. Mnemonics are mainly for ACCESSIBILITY/power user usage - they make the system easier to use by people with disabilities (eg. those who have difficulty using a mouse), and people who remember the keystroke combos. Usually a sequence will include both a mnemonic AND a control-key sequence. So there's actually more flexibility here than Apple provides.
Not only that, but your "Alt / Ctrl take up too much space on the menu" comment is insane. There's NO real-estate to take up - the menu is a separate window on both the Mac and Windows, and expands to fits its contents... ON BOTH SYSTEMS!
And no, most users remember the keyboard shortcuts and NOT the mnemonics. The mnemonics don't 'jam peoples minds' at all. Where have you been reading this claptrap?
As for your point 5:
5. [mac users are] against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.
Well, that's the pot calling the kettle black, because that's what you just did throughout your entire post, but against Windows.
Get a fricking clue.
I can't think of anything so egregious in Windows, except having to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to change your password (which might have been fixed).
... which is actually for security reasons, because it's a hardware interrupt which means that keyloggers etc. can't get between you and the password dialog box and sniff the password.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Simon
Put up or shut up -- what's the hack?
(Interestingly enough, in the US the only persons that do get big severance payments seem to be incompetent CEOs and the likes - the ones that put big companies close to bankrupcy usually get the biggest severance payments)
;-)
Actually, it's funny you should mention that. The reason behind this is actually because once a CEO screws up, they will usually never be able to get a job again. Or at least, not in that field (ie. running companies).
Thus the large severance. Seems somewhat unfair to me - if I screwed up huge, I might never be able to get a job again either, but I don't get paid any kind of golden handshake. But that, alas, is how it works. They look out for their own.
Simon
The language has changed to fit the times. Sorry, but hacker doesn't mean 'cool computer guru' any more - it means someone who breaks into systems for malicious purposes.
Get with the times. Sure, hacker is a nice term. But the language has changed.
You don't expect a computer to be someone who sits and runs calculations through a mechanical calculator any more, do you? Just checking.
I'm going home from work now. I'm going to get into my horseless carriage, and drive down the turnpike until I get home.
I worked on a system that had a "hibernate" feature back in 1990. Every minute it would save the current state of the computer to disk to the "hibernate" file so that it could return to it's current state after a reboot. The code that ran on it was attrociously horrible. So it would get into a state that would cause a crash and reboot back to the last state it was in, ~30 seconds back on average. What happened next, well it rebooted again and again and again and again and again and again, add in-finitum. They would have to reinstall the software to get it to stop.
My first task at getting my hands on it was deleting all "hiberation" features and then rewriting the main system using a methodology. Worked much better, there were no reboots except during lightning strikes. And "hiberation" was completely unnecessary in a properly designed system. Turned out the "hiberation" feature was added because there were too many reboots and loss of computations.
So now Windoze has adopted this wonderful brain fart of logic. Screw your system and make it permanenent. You gotta love it, Bill told you so.
Do yourself a favor. Look up what "Hibernate" means on Windows - because you're talking through your arse if you think that what it means on Windows is what you're describing above.
Now all the Microdroids will scream "HA! See?! Linux users can get worms too!"
You're obviously highly misinformed. At least three Linux worms have been out in the past year, and none of them require Wine to run - just uninformed lusers like yourself leaving boxes unpatched.
Simon
I am sad to admit that every day I write code in C++, using MFC. My conclusion is that development is more difficult on Windows in C++ than on any other platform/language I have used. M$ has an idea of how an application should be laid out that very rarely fits my idea of how an application should be laid out.
Then use ATL's windowing support instead. It's exceedlingly lightweight, and doesn't bind you into any kind of framework (caveat: yes, you have to create your Window objects deriving from certain classes, and you have to create a message map, but other than that, it leaves you the hell alone). Much nicer than MFC, and much more powerful.
Simon
We've got three infected workstations out of six here at work now. We were already planning on putting in six Linux workstations, but now we're going to have to go to all Linux (and Mac for the artists). This is ridiculous.
Maybe if you were doing your job properly, they would have been patched and thus invulnerable to this attack by now?
Or are you going to bitch and moan when your Linux boxen are rooted too?
And so is the browser, the vendor tells us. So is it really wise to base the defense of a multimiliion dollar ship on an OS which can be brought down by the web surfing of a bored sailor?
Operating system != kernel. It's a superset. The kernel is a subset.
Are you really this dense?
Simon
I'll give you one.
I have good hardware. Has no trouble running anything. Unless it's Counter-Strike, and then on a real simple alt-tab (or god help me if I leave the machine and the screen saver kicks in).
Poof.
Some kind of memory error that I don't really feel like figuring out.
Nice. I'm sure that people are all playing Counter Strike on servers across the country.
Try updating your video drivers.
Actually, it would be nearly useless in this case. GPS signals are very, very weak and can blocked by as little as a sheet of aluminum foil or a few millimeters of water. A GPS receiver under all those tons of concrete and steel would never be able to aquire and track.
No problem; just cache the result if you lose the GPS signal. In cases such as this, your location wouldn't change too much, and people could use the last-known location information as a starting point for exhaustive searches.
The conviction in 1990 wasn't for creating a virus. I know, because I was network manager at one of the sites involved and was responsible for logging network activity which formed part of the evidence.
Uh, actually, no, it was for creating a virus, and had nothing to do with mainframes as you suggest.
I had corresponded with the author (he was part of the SAM Coupé programming community). I know who he is. I have tons of his source code. And he was convicted for (on the surface of it) creating the first assembly-language polymorphic virus, and putting it into a virus kit.
The virus was called Smeg.
Here's a link that you might find informative:
News story
Simon
Hmmm.. on an average day, Slashdot dishes out 20 pages per second.
MSNBC, on an average day, dishes out > 200 pages per second - and possibly higher.
Slashdot's traffic doubled. Well, whoopdidoo. It was still less than 1/5th that of MSNBC on a normal day. Congratulations to Slashdot for handling more load than they normally do. But is it really surprising when they don't even have to handle 1/5th the traffic?
Simon
Has anyone seen any major wreckage from the 4th plane, such as the tail? If you look at other crash photos, this almost always survives. Unless of course, the plane was hit from the back by a missile which could disintegrate the back of the plane. Would Bush really shoot down a passenger jet and then try to cover it up? did Bill Clinton F*ck and lie? you bet'cha ass.
Oh don't be such a conspiracy nut. The plane was FULL of jet fuel. The tail of the plane was VAPORIZED.
Simon