It's not necessarily a boring job. I just think that, for the typical kind of person who writes OSS, it is difficult to take a step back from the algorithm to look at how to represent the system to the user. I think 80% of the usability problem could be sovled by the developer taking an extra couple of minutes each time to think about how to add each feature to the UI. It's not some magic that only closed source software has, 80% of it is common sense (and reading Donald Norman).
What? In what kind of fucked-up world should the user have to disable previewing a plain-text message? Displaying a bunch of ASCII should not be something the user has to think about the security implications of.
Blocking all adverts isn't really the answer. The problem is the positive feedback effect - more adverts -> people take less notice -> more adverts to get same effect. Personally, I think things like Google's adsense are a reasonable alternative - targeted, simple, bandwidth friendly. Of course, I use them on my site so I might be biased.
The company behind the trials said that people found the commercials much less irritating than other ads on the web.
So it's less annoying than DHTML animated adverts that move around getting in the way of what you're trying to read or those red/yellow flashing "You've won" banners in the middle of an article. What an achievement.
You have to wonder at the mind set of advertising executives. "People aren't taking notice of our adverts. What can we do?" "I know, lets make them even bigger,more intrusive and waste megabytes of our potential customers bandwidth as well". A serious case of needing to stop bailing and plug the leak.
I've never played and MMORPG, but have always had a n interest in them. When the article talks about "grinding through" professions like tailor or whatever, what does it actually entail? Is it literally just:
1) select "make trousers" 2) click on raw material slot in inventory 3) wait 4) goto 1
until you get enough XP? Or is there more to it than that. It doesn't seem much fun paying $15 to be a keyboard macro.
I doubt CS would help much. The recoil effect modelling is pretty bad, there is no gravitational or bullet flight-time effect - the guns are more like lasers than anything else. Day of Defeat is a bit better in the recoil effect, BF1942 has decent bullet flight time modelling.
Personally, I spent a lot of time playing FPSs, and I also got the highest score for marksmanship (Cadet GP) in my cadet days, but I think that's more to do with a childhood shooting air rifles and BBs than Doom.
Re:Linux Has Travelled Far... In The Wrong Directi
on
Linus on Linux in 1994
·
· Score: 1
I find people's lack of desire for change with the current MS dominance disturbing. Gates, after all, is a convicted monopolist, gave extremely evasive evidence that made him appear an untrustworthy liar and faces massive fines in the EU.
Whenever I mention to people I work in a computing-related area, I get a stream of questions and complaints about lost work, crashes and system corruption caused by MS software. Yet everybody just carries on using MS.
"I nearly choked on my Zelda disk - Nintendo knew those things are dangerously small" "My son was so excited at completing Super Mario Sunshine he had a heart attack. Nintendo should put "calm down" messages on the sceen"
This is like 0.00001% (6/50+ million?) of users and there have been clear warnings since forever.
This is the UK we're talking about. Home of the toilet paper degree and housing obsession. So you have lots of people with no skills but a 2:1 in Media studies from Birmingham Poly^H^H^H^HUniversity, and lots of people trying to do their houses up to make money. High demand, low supply, prices go up.
"The basis for SCO's belief is the precision and efficiency with which the migration to Linux occurred, which suggests the use of shared libraries to run legacy applications on Linux."
So their only evidence for suing is that Autozone managed the transition well. Sounds like a fishing expedition to me. Aren't they illegal?
Why the hell does every single KDE or GNOME thread have to devolve into name calling between the two camps or attacks on the free Desktops? To save late comers time, most of the comments below are: -Gnome sucks, I used 1.4 or 2.0 for five minutes and KDE 3.2 is much better -KDE sucks, it's slow and non-free. Oh yeah, I only used it for five minutes. version 3.0_beta1 on a p-166. -Windows/OSX is better because they fix bugs. OSS is always buggy.
Desktop environment isn't a religion. This is a story about KDE trying to make its development team more inclusive and improve its quality.
Doesn't this seem exactly like the classic snake-oil sales technique - having a friend in the audience who you pretend never to have seen before enthusiastically buy ten bottles to make the product seem more attractive?
So even a change to a non-public part of a class could kick of a wave of (unnecessary) recompiles.
That's why you use interface classes and derive implementation classes from them. Change the implementation class and nothing that calls it needs to be recompiled - all they see is the interface class. For most things apart from really tight loops, which will probably be hidden inside the rendering classes anyway, virtual function calls aren't too much overhead.
Many games take half an hour or longer to compile when starting from scratch, or when a major C++ header file is changed.
Come on, Design Patterns is only $50. Surely they can afford a copy or two? Shouldn't the public interfaces to external classes for a module be fixed pretty early on, if not at design time?
Wow - he managed to write 600 words without really explaining what he wants to do. Is he just saying that distributions should go for niche markets by allowing greater customisation? So instead of installing everything of the 3 CDs you only install what you want? Kind of like every other distro? Or is it more than that? Some kind of pluggable component system akin to Debian's virtual package "provides" system? So you can have different packages that provide standard services (mail, desktop, web-serving etc.) through common interfaces to the other components.
Maybe OSS needs a central repository of OSS development "best practice".
A collection of technical howtos (subversion/cvs, patches etc), articles on UI design, documentation writing, managing distributed volunteer teams, handling users. Things like "Dos and Donts", articles from experienced OSS developers and users - maybe a little less inflammatory than ESR's, though. A Wiki maybe? All this information must be out there, distributed in mailing lists, forums and developers' memories. Surely it would improve OSS quality if new developers sent a few hours reading through that sort of material before starting to contribute.
OK, I'll give you that one. Of course, it's not on any more, hasn't been replaced, and Ricky Gervais is now helping on the US version. The Fast Show quality dropped and is gone, the last few Alan Partridge series were awful. Only Fools and Horses died a horrible, unfunny death. The last series of Red Dwarf had about three laughs in the entire series. The talent seems to be leaching out of the BBC. Even the Simpsons episodes they show are old ones that have been on a million times.
Both Dead Ringers and Little Britain started out on Radio 4, not TV. The main problem with the Dead Ringers transition was that the impressionists look absolutely nothing like the actual people - after all, it doesn't matter on radio. Radio 4 seems to be a last bastion of quality on the BBC.
Slashdot Mirror
+2 True geek humour,
+5 if you didn't need to use an ASCII chart
People take computer advice from someone who:
a) uses Frontpage
b) doesn't change the title of the pages from "New Page 1"
Worrying.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele ases/0.8/FirefoxSetup-0.8.exe
What do you mean "What's a command line"?
I meant the arch linux forums, not the gentoo ones. I should have been clearer.
I predict a wave of Arch linux zealots any day now. There seem to be a lot of disaffected Gentoo users on their forums.
It's not necessarily a boring job. I just think that, for the typical kind of person who writes OSS, it is difficult to take a step back from the algorithm to look at how to represent the system to the user.
I think 80% of the usability problem could be sovled by the developer taking an extra couple of minutes each time to think about how to add each feature to the UI. It's not some magic that only closed source software has, 80% of it is common sense (and reading Donald Norman).
What? In what kind of fucked-up world should the user have to disable previewing a plain-text message? Displaying a bunch of ASCII should not be something the user has to think about the security implications of.
Erm, did you read the article? The user doesn't need to open the attachment due to MS's handy auto-infect feature.
Yes, a patch exists. But why the hell should Outlook take any action when a file is deleted? It shows a basic lack of secure thinking at MS.
Blocking all adverts isn't really the answer. The problem is the positive feedback effect - more adverts -> people take less notice -> more adverts to get same effect. Personally, I think things like Google's adsense are a reasonable alternative - targeted, simple, bandwidth friendly. Of course, I use them on my site so I might be biased.
The company behind the trials said that people found the commercials much less irritating than other ads on the web.
So it's less annoying than DHTML animated adverts that move around getting in the way of what you're trying to read or those red/yellow flashing "You've won" banners in the middle of an article. What an achievement.
You have to wonder at the mind set of advertising executives. "People aren't taking notice of our adverts. What can we do?" "I know, lets make them even bigger,more intrusive and waste megabytes of our potential customers bandwidth as well". A serious case of needing to stop bailing and plug the leak.
I've never played and MMORPG, but have always had a n interest in them.
When the article talks about "grinding through" professions like tailor or whatever, what does it actually entail? Is it literally just:
1) select "make trousers"
2) click on raw material slot in inventory
3) wait
4) goto 1
until you get enough XP? Or is there more to it than that. It doesn't seem much fun paying $15 to be a keyboard macro.
I doubt CS would help much. The recoil effect modelling is pretty bad, there is no gravitational or bullet flight-time effect - the guns are more like lasers than anything else. Day of Defeat is a bit better in the recoil effect, BF1942 has decent bullet flight time modelling.
Personally, I spent a lot of time playing FPSs, and I also got the highest score for marksmanship (Cadet GP) in my cadet days, but I think that's more to do with a childhood shooting air rifles and BBs than Doom.
I find people's lack of desire for change with the current MS dominance disturbing. Gates, after all, is a convicted monopolist, gave extremely evasive evidence that made him appear an untrustworthy liar and faces massive fines in the EU.
Whenever I mention to people I work in a computing-related area, I get a stream of questions and complaints about lost work, crashes and system corruption caused by MS software. Yet everybody just carries on using MS.
Upcoming court cases against Nintendo:
"I nearly choked on my Zelda disk - Nintendo knew those things are dangerously small"
"My son was so excited at completing Super Mario Sunshine he had a heart attack. Nintendo should put "calm down" messages on the sceen"
This is like 0.00001% (6/50+ million?) of users and there have been clear warnings since forever.
This is the UK we're talking about. Home of the toilet paper degree and housing obsession. So you have lots of people with no skills but a 2:1 in Media studies from Birmingham Poly^H^H^H^HUniversity, and lots of people trying to do their houses up to make money. High demand, low supply, prices go up.
According to this, self-employed plumbers can make 50K GBP.
because their processor cores are running at almost 50 per cent faster
Because everyone knows more of them megahurtzy things is good,right?
From the SCO filing (thank you groklaw):
"The basis for SCO's belief is the precision and efficiency with which the migration to Linux occurred, which suggests the use of shared libraries to run legacy applications on Linux."
So their only evidence for suing is that Autozone managed the transition well. Sounds like a fishing expedition to me. Aren't they illegal?
Why the hell does every single KDE or GNOME thread have to devolve into name calling between the two camps or attacks on the free Desktops? To save late comers time, most of the comments below are:
-Gnome sucks, I used 1.4 or 2.0 for five minutes and KDE 3.2 is much better
-KDE sucks, it's slow and non-free. Oh yeah, I only used it for five minutes. version 3.0_beta1 on a p-166.
-Windows/OSX is better because they fix bugs. OSS is always buggy.
Desktop environment isn't a religion. This is a story about KDE trying to make its development team more inclusive and improve its quality.
Doesn't this seem exactly like the classic snake-oil sales technique - having a friend in the audience who you pretend never to have seen before enthusiastically buy ten bottles to make the product seem more attractive?
So even a change to a non-public part of a class could kick of a wave of (unnecessary) recompiles.
That's why you use interface classes and derive implementation classes from them. Change the implementation class and nothing that calls it needs to be recompiled - all they see is the interface class. For most things apart from really tight loops, which will probably be hidden inside the rendering classes anyway, virtual function calls aren't too much overhead.
Many games take half an hour or longer to compile when starting from scratch, or when a major C++ header file is changed.
Come on, Design Patterns is only $50. Surely they can afford a copy or two? Shouldn't the public interfaces to external classes for a module be fixed pretty early on, if not at design time?
Wow - he managed to write 600 words without really explaining what he wants to do.
Is he just saying that distributions should go for niche markets by allowing greater customisation? So instead of installing everything of the 3 CDs you only install what you want? Kind of like every other distro?
Or is it more than that? Some kind of pluggable component system akin to Debian's virtual package "provides" system? So you can have different packages that provide standard services (mail, desktop, web-serving etc.) through common interfaces to the other components.
Maybe OSS needs a central repository of OSS development "best practice".
A collection of technical howtos (subversion/cvs, patches etc), articles on UI design, documentation writing, managing distributed volunteer teams, handling users. Things like "Dos and Donts", articles from experienced OSS developers and users - maybe a little less inflammatory than ESR's, though. A Wiki maybe?
All this information must be out there, distributed in mailing lists, forums and developers' memories. Surely it would improve OSS quality if new developers sent a few hours reading through that sort of material before starting to contribute.
OK, I'll give you that one. Of course, it's not on any more, hasn't been replaced, and Ricky Gervais is now helping on the US version.
The Fast Show quality dropped and is gone, the last few Alan Partridge series were awful. Only Fools and Horses died a horrible, unfunny death. The last series of Red Dwarf had about three laughs in the entire series. The talent seems to be leaching out of the BBC. Even the Simpsons episodes they show are old ones that have been on a million times.
Both Dead Ringers and Little Britain started out on Radio 4, not TV. The main problem with the Dead Ringers transition was that the impressionists look absolutely nothing like the actual people - after all, it doesn't matter on radio.
Radio 4 seems to be a last bastion of quality on the BBC.