I use largish fonts on a nice, big display so that I can sit comfortably far away from the screen and still read everything easily (yes, my eyes are fine - I just like it better this way). Both designs use fixed spacing, for which they should automatically be disqualified with prejudice, but the winner survives the scaling up much better than the runner up.
Having said that, I hate three column designs. You heard me: they suck. Particularly when the main column is much longer than the sidebars, resulting in a narrow column of text bordered by wide, empty white expanses. Well, I suppose it's too late to get that changed now.
Find out why huge disks are the bane of DBAs everywhere.
I read your manifesto, but still don't understand your premise. You don't adequately explain why larger sizes are inherently bad, save for the seek time issue. Given two drives with identical performance but a 2x difference in size, why is the larger worse if it's holding the exact same data?
A single mayor toolkit would help prevent that. Programming styles and editors don't make that issue better or worse, they are irrelevant.
You have no idea what you're talking about. First, there is already such a major toolkit, but how many new Xaw apps have you seen lately?
Second, programming styles are relevant, perhaps moreso than anything else. Some programmers grok procedural code - they can write it well, they can understand what others have written, and it matches well with their conceptual understanding of the machine. Others are OOP advocates for exactly the same reasons.
Herein is the problem, though: it's basically impossible to write a single toolkit that fundamentally supports both paradigms. I know there are C++ bindings for GTK and C bindings for QT, but those are leaky abstractions that are orthogonal to how either toolkit is designed.
So, you're never going to get a single unified toolkit until you decide which basic plan you're going to follow, and then implement an abstraction layer that's featureful enough to allow the half of the coding population who hates your plan to use it efficiently anyway. These aren't minor inconveniences that a bit of handwaving can erase, but irreconcilable differences that you'll have to work around. Until that happens, we'll keep using and bitching about multiple toolkits.
I think we need one major development kit, instead of GTK vs QT.
Excellent idea! Now all we have to do is get everyone to decide whether procedural, OOP, or maybe even functional programming is The One True Best Way.
While we're at it, let's go ahead and settle on Emacs or vi or ed. On FreeBSD, of course.
Our public school system has a Montessori program, and we were lucky enough to get our kids enrolled their. Halfway through kindergarten, my daughter was adding 6 digit numbers (with carry) and learning her multiplication tables through ten. She's reading 60-page chapter books (without pictures). When she's done reading them, she writes reports about them.
A couple of months ago, when I was picking her up after school, she told me they were learning about different kinds of animals. I asked her what kinds, and she replied with "vertebrates and invertebrates". I asked her for an example of vertebrates, and she told me about mammals which "have hard bones, give live birth, and breathe air through their lungs".
Kindergarten.
There are some very, very bright points in our future - even within the public school system.
It's from an episode of "Malcolm In The Middle". Dewey has an old lady's amputated leg, and the dog Hal brought home as a consolation surprise to Dewey had dragged the leg under the garage. Dewey asked whether they should give up and call the police for help, at which point Hal uttered my sig.
The infatuation that some people have for ASCII seems quite bizarre to me.
Likewise me with binary formats. While they have their place (I notice that TCP/IP headers aren't compressed XML), neither do they make a lot of sense in many of the places people want to use them. Using them as a wrapper around human-generated text seems to be one of those places.
We have no problem requiring users to use new tools such as browsers to achieve some goal
A visual {HT,X}ML interpreter wasn't the best counterexample you could have picked.
Any program that that understands a particular format (ASCII or otherwise) will still be able to understand it 100 years from now (assuming the media is still readable). If the binary spec for ASCII were lost, you'd be just as SOL as you would be with any other spec.
But encodings are far more universal than formats. Any basic frequency analysis would immediately reveal that an ASCII document was 1) composed of 8-bit bytes, and 2) "A"=65, "B"=66, etc. That's many orders of magnitude easier than, say, reverse engineering DOC without access to a program that generates files in that format.
Depends what you mean by overhead. It's less overhead for the programmer, but more for the program.
A question, then: which takes more CPU overhead - running "grep < inputfile | sed > foo.xml; zip curdir" or opening a heavyweight client such as OOo or MS Office and scripting it to perform the same edits?
If I have to create 10,000 documents per hour, I know which approach I'd prefer (hint: it's the one with less programmer and CPU expense).
That would work for locally mounted filesystems, but not so well for CIFS or Samba shares and other similar paths. I tried making a symlink to "smb://myserver/pictures" in hopes that digiKam would attempt to resolve the link itself (and use the appropriate KIOslave to open it), but that didn't seem to work.
but for editing/working on larger documents/spreadsheets you may find yourself using MSOffice document formats
TeX consists of long streams of ASCII bytes and offer no random-access abilities whatsoever except those implemented by a text editor and the underlying filesystem. And yet, LyX, which can easily handle thousand-page documents, loads and saves nearly instantaneously.
Your complaint is really over the relative brokenness of two major office suites, not the inherent advantages of their document formats.
It would be better that Microsoft offers an open binary format, but truly open, patent free. XML is really heavy compared to efficient binary formats.
...and it can also be written with any program that can read and write text. Right now, today, I can generate valid OpenDocument files with standard Unix command line tools and simple "print" commands in common scripting languages. While that isn't valuable to the average user, it's extremely handy for those of us who want to generate documents dynamically with as little overhead as possible (example: sending quotes based on form input on a website).
Beyond that, XML is human readable (even if not terribly convenient). I can read well-designed XML documents with any text editor. 100 years from now, I'll still be able to glean the content of OpenDocument files with any program that understands by-then legacy encodings like ASCII. If a binary spec is lost, though, so are the documents written with it.
just point it at the root of your pictures directory hierarchy when you first run it
But I don't have just one directory hierarchy. For historical and organizational purposes, there's stuff in my home directory, stuff in my wife's iPhoto folder, a lot of scanned photos on a network share, etc. I could move everything into one neat giant directory, but realistically speaking that probably won't happen.
Let me give an example closer to Slashdotter's heart: I'm at work and don't want to upload the contents ~/porn to smb:/imageserver/projects. Doing so would make sense in an abstract, theoretical sort of way. It'd also get me fired. Same scenario for s/work/home/, s/projects/recreation/, and s/fired/divorced/.
In either case, it'd be really nice to be able to configure a list of root directories (and possibly a default directory that new images get saved to). Does any photo app currently support this?
I've installed and tinkered with digiKam and KimDaba. To my undiscerning eye, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the two. Assuming I don't care about camera support, is there a reason I'd want one over the other? Something one of them does really, really well that isn't obvious to the casual experimenter?
I know that the real answer is to try both and decide which I like best. Given that I don't want to organize my entire image collection twice, though, just to see how easily I can, I could stand to be pointed in the right direction.
Also, has anyone figured out how to get either app to leave pictures in their source directory? I really don't want to copy 10GB off the network shares into ~/Pictures for the sake of a single application, regardless of how good it might be.
Clearly this school is just preparing its students for the America of tomorrow.
Then maybe it's time for the students to bring the school into the America of today: petition the ACLU to sue the living crap out of the district and school board for illegal restriction of free speech. Get a few hundred students to file suit simultaneously, call the local media, CNN and Fox to explain why the district just exposed itself to several tens of millions of dollars of legal liability. Send a letter to every parent directing them to home and private schooling resources.
I would never, ever contradict a teacher who appropriately punished my child for legitimate misbehavior. Actually, I have a great relationship with my kids' teachers because I support their decisions and reinforce them at home. However, if they attempted to destroy my kid's educational career for something not directly related to their performance or behavior at school, the claws would come out quickly and sharp.
IMHO was not using a game storage format you can easily copy with common PC hardware.
For a counter-anecdote, I've never known a console pirate over the age of 21. When you hang out with the crowd that does that stuff, it looks like everyone in the entire world must be doing the same thing. Once you move past it, though, you'll see that sales figures don't tend to support that conclusion.
But I think that what we disagree on is that there's some sort of crisis that would cause us to have to give up intelectual property rights for the time being until we can fix the patent system. No doubt there are problems, but at this time, the good outweighs the bad.
Well, I believe very strongly that we are in a crisis. It seems like every day I ready about a new abusive patent that makes my job as a programmer more dangerous and expensive. If the system can be fixed, then by all means let's do so. However, based on my opinion that no one seems interested in actually fixing the system, and that society has received very little benefit (the occasional PageRank aside), I think it's time to consider more drastic options.
Again, I'm not against the theory of software patents per se. The problem as I see it is that what we have now is worse on balance than having nothing at all. At this point, I don't care which path is chosen - improving it or scrapping it - as long as something is changed and soon.
For what it's worth, I'm a staunch conservative and the last person you'd hear arguing against property rights. It's clear to me that opposition to the current implementation of software patents is gaining support across all political groups.
People shouldn't have the right to own an idea because it's better if everyone can use the ideas that people come up with. Come to think of it, why allow people to own anything? Who needs property rights?
The problem is that I haven't seen any algorithm worthy of a patent in a long time. Canonical example: Amazon's stupid "single click" patent. Can you look me in the eyes and truthfully say you think that was legitimate?
Furthermore, the lifetime on software patents is ridiculously long. The vast majority of "new" algorithms that seem perfectly reasonable today are stale five years from now, and hopelessly obsolete a decade later. For every Knuth, there are a million boneheads reinventing CSS (the "encryption" (hah!) system).
Finally, patents were explicitly created to benefit society. What benefit did society get from the obvious and illegitimate "xor mouse cursor" patent?
I could actually see the benefit of software patents if they weren't so widely abused, far too long-lasting, and detrimental to the public they were intended to serve. Fix those problems and I'd be happy to reconsider my stance.
They want to keep him tied up in legal proceedings until the Apple case has been resolved, and they're using a number of dirty tricks to do so.
I don't know. Seems like he'd make an ideal witness for Apple. He's provably not biased toward them (the whole episode started because he had a problem with their products), yet clearly doesn't want this to procede.
To be honest, I think Apple should make peace with him by introducing him to the happy side of their legal department. Shysters against little guy? No problem. Shysters against Apple's legal unit? Not so easy. It'd be relatively cheap for Apple and great PR.
After work my wife and I headed to the store and picked up a DS, New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart DS, and Nintendogs (for her).
Do yourself a favor: buy another DS and Animal Crossing (for her). I picked it up for my wife two months ago and she's played it every single day without exception, and hasn't played any other games. Do it. She'll love you for it.
As long as they're up front about the fact it's not a sale, I don't see where this is legally questionable.
Nothing prevents Sony from making you sign a contract before leaving the store with their product. However, anything short of that is a sale. Put another way, I don't care if I pick up a widget from the "Widget Rental" bin sitting under the "Rent Your Widgets Here!" sign at the "Rent-A-Widget Center". If I hand you cash and you hand me a receipt and a smile without me signing something, I just made a purchase.
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Having said that, I hate three column designs. You heard me: they suck. Particularly when the main column is much longer than the sidebars, resulting in a narrow column of text bordered by wide, empty white expanses. Well, I suppose it's too late to get that changed now.
I read your manifesto, but still don't understand your premise. You don't adequately explain why larger sizes are inherently bad, save for the seek time issue. Given two drives with identical performance but a 2x difference in size, why is the larger worse if it's holding the exact same data?
You have no idea what you're talking about. First, there is already such a major toolkit, but how many new Xaw apps have you seen lately?
Second, programming styles are relevant, perhaps moreso than anything else. Some programmers grok procedural code - they can write it well, they can understand what others have written, and it matches well with their conceptual understanding of the machine. Others are OOP advocates for exactly the same reasons.
Herein is the problem, though: it's basically impossible to write a single toolkit that fundamentally supports both paradigms. I know there are C++ bindings for GTK and C bindings for QT, but those are leaky abstractions that are orthogonal to how either toolkit is designed.
So, you're never going to get a single unified toolkit until you decide which basic plan you're going to follow, and then implement an abstraction layer that's featureful enough to allow the half of the coding population who hates your plan to use it efficiently anyway. These aren't minor inconveniences that a bit of handwaving can erase, but irreconcilable differences that you'll have to work around. Until that happens, we'll keep using and bitching about multiple toolkits.
Excellent idea! Now all we have to do is get everyone to decide whether procedural, OOP, or maybe even functional programming is The One True Best Way.
While we're at it, let's go ahead and settle on Emacs or vi or ed. On FreeBSD, of course.
A couple of months ago, when I was picking her up after school, she told me they were learning about different kinds of animals. I asked her what kinds, and she replied with "vertebrates and invertebrates". I asked her for an example of vertebrates, and she told me about mammals which "have hard bones, give live birth, and breathe air through their lungs".
Kindergarten.
There are some very, very bright points in our future - even within the public school system.
I laughed myself to tears and beyond.
Likewise me with binary formats. While they have their place (I notice that TCP/IP headers aren't compressed XML), neither do they make a lot of sense in many of the places people want to use them. Using them as a wrapper around human-generated text seems to be one of those places.
We have no problem requiring users to use new tools such as browsers to achieve some goal
A visual {HT,X}ML interpreter wasn't the best counterexample you could have picked.
Any program that that understands a particular format (ASCII or otherwise) will still be able to understand it 100 years from now (assuming the media is still readable). If the binary spec for ASCII were lost, you'd be just as SOL as you would be with any other spec.
But encodings are far more universal than formats. Any basic frequency analysis would immediately reveal that an ASCII document was 1) composed of 8-bit bytes, and 2) "A"=65, "B"=66, etc. That's many orders of magnitude easier than, say, reverse engineering DOC without access to a program that generates files in that format.
Thanks. I realize that not everyone has reason to do things like that, but I'm glad you recognize that many of us actually do.
ISO compliance and support for applications other than word processing. RTF isn't so great for generating spreadsheets.
How's that for going off of a tangent?
A question, then: which takes more CPU overhead - running "grep < inputfile | sed > foo.xml; zip curdir" or opening a heavyweight client such as OOo or MS Office and scripting it to perform the same edits?
If I have to create 10,000 documents per hour, I know which approach I'd prefer (hint: it's the one with less programmer and CPU expense).
That would work for locally mounted filesystems, but not so well for CIFS or Samba shares and other similar paths. I tried making a symlink to "smb://myserver/pictures" in hopes that digiKam would attempt to resolve the link itself (and use the appropriate KIOslave to open it), but that didn't seem to work.
TeX consists of long streams of ASCII bytes and offer no random-access abilities whatsoever except those implemented by a text editor and the underlying filesystem. And yet, LyX, which can easily handle thousand-page documents, loads and saves nearly instantaneously.
Your complaint is really over the relative brokenness of two major office suites, not the inherent advantages of their document formats.
...and it can also be written with any program that can read and write text. Right now, today, I can generate valid OpenDocument files with standard Unix command line tools and simple "print" commands in common scripting languages. While that isn't valuable to the average user, it's extremely handy for those of us who want to generate documents dynamically with as little overhead as possible (example: sending quotes based on form input on a website).
Beyond that, XML is human readable (even if not terribly convenient). I can read well-designed XML documents with any text editor. 100 years from now, I'll still be able to glean the content of OpenDocument files with any program that understands by-then legacy encodings like ASCII. If a binary spec is lost, though, so are the documents written with it.
But I don't have just one directory hierarchy. For historical and organizational purposes, there's stuff in my home directory, stuff in my wife's iPhoto folder, a lot of scanned photos on a network share, etc. I could move everything into one neat giant directory, but realistically speaking that probably won't happen.
Let me give an example closer to Slashdotter's heart: I'm at work and don't want to upload the contents ~/porn to smb:/imageserver/projects. Doing so would make sense in an abstract, theoretical sort of way. It'd also get me fired. Same scenario for s/work/home/, s/projects/recreation/, and s/fired/divorced/.
In either case, it'd be really nice to be able to configure a list of root directories (and possibly a default directory that new images get saved to). Does any photo app currently support this?
I know that the real answer is to try both and decide which I like best. Given that I don't want to organize my entire image collection twice, though, just to see how easily I can, I could stand to be pointed in the right direction.
Also, has anyone figured out how to get either app to leave pictures in their source directory? I really don't want to copy 10GB off the network shares into ~/Pictures for the sake of a single application, regardless of how good it might be.
Then maybe it's time for the students to bring the school into the America of today: petition the ACLU to sue the living crap out of the district and school board for illegal restriction of free speech. Get a few hundred students to file suit simultaneously, call the local media, CNN and Fox to explain why the district just exposed itself to several tens of millions of dollars of legal liability. Send a letter to every parent directing them to home and private schooling resources.
I would never, ever contradict a teacher who appropriately punished my child for legitimate misbehavior. Actually, I have a great relationship with my kids' teachers because I support their decisions and reinforce them at home. However, if they attempted to destroy my kid's educational career for something not directly related to their performance or behavior at school, the claws would come out quickly and sharp.
For a counter-anecdote, I've never known a console pirate over the age of 21. When you hang out with the crowd that does that stuff, it looks like everyone in the entire world must be doing the same thing. Once you move past it, though, you'll see that sales figures don't tend to support that conclusion.
just some guy
You rang?
Well, I believe very strongly that we are in a crisis. It seems like every day I ready about a new abusive patent that makes my job as a programmer more dangerous and expensive. If the system can be fixed, then by all means let's do so. However, based on my opinion that no one seems interested in actually fixing the system, and that society has received very little benefit (the occasional PageRank aside), I think it's time to consider more drastic options.
Again, I'm not against the theory of software patents per se. The problem as I see it is that what we have now is worse on balance than having nothing at all. At this point, I don't care which path is chosen - improving it or scrapping it - as long as something is changed and soon.
For what it's worth, I'm a staunch conservative and the last person you'd hear arguing against property rights. It's clear to me that opposition to the current implementation of software patents is gaining support across all political groups.
The problem is that I haven't seen any algorithm worthy of a patent in a long time. Canonical example: Amazon's stupid "single click" patent. Can you look me in the eyes and truthfully say you think that was legitimate?
Furthermore, the lifetime on software patents is ridiculously long. The vast majority of "new" algorithms that seem perfectly reasonable today are stale five years from now, and hopelessly obsolete a decade later. For every Knuth, there are a million boneheads reinventing CSS (the "encryption" (hah!) system).
Finally, patents were explicitly created to benefit society. What benefit did society get from the obvious and illegitimate "xor mouse cursor" patent?
I could actually see the benefit of software patents if they weren't so widely abused, far too long-lasting, and detrimental to the public they were intended to serve. Fix those problems and I'd be happy to reconsider my stance.
How's Wine doing on OS X PPC, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, or non-Intel Linux these days? QT is directly supported on all those latforms, but I doubt any other cross-platform toolkit handles all (if any) of them.
I don't know. Seems like he'd make an ideal witness for Apple. He's provably not biased toward them (the whole episode started because he had a problem with their products), yet clearly doesn't want this to procede.
To be honest, I think Apple should make peace with him by introducing him to the happy side of their legal department. Shysters against little guy? No problem. Shysters against Apple's legal unit? Not so easy. It'd be relatively cheap for Apple and great PR.
Do yourself a favor: buy another DS and Animal Crossing (for her). I picked it up for my wife two months ago and she's played it every single day without exception, and hasn't played any other games. Do it. She'll love you for it.
Nothing prevents Sony from making you sign a contract before leaving the store with their product. However, anything short of that is a sale. Put another way, I don't care if I pick up a widget from the "Widget Rental" bin sitting under the "Rent Your Widgets Here!" sign at the "Rent-A-Widget Center". If I hand you cash and you hand me a receipt and a smile without me signing something, I just made a purchase.