And what's with the "blue screen" comments? Like most Slashdotters, I don't like Microsoft - but to suggest that Windows has problems with "blue screens" is, like, so 1999.
I dunno, I still get them from time to time. Got one an hour ago on my W2K laptop, in fact. System must have been protesting that I was reading this article.
Microsoft knows about DLL hell. They admit the problem. And, as of Windows 2000, it's largely fixed. Stupid installers cannot overwrite system DLLs (well, they can, but they would have to first delete the cached version in \system32\dllcache).
First of all, I am not convinced that is true. The fact that the system restores particular.dlls may alleviate problems with system stability, but then what happens with the apps that are coded such that they expect a different version of a dll than what's installed. At best they work around it, at worst they crash. I know coders are supposed to deal with this, but it is still a potential point of failure in the system.
Secondly, what about the registry? This still remains in WinXP. What happens when numerous registry entries point to an app at a particular place, then you move the application? The fact that these registry entries exist and refer to paths rather than inodes provide a barrier to moving things around. Due to the registry's large size and ubiquitous use, it also constitutes one very large potential source for failure that can affect many aspects of the system. There is some feeback further up where someone tried moving the MS Office folder and got all sorts of prompts by the app to re-install. I think this is evidence of how the registry restricts movement of applications. The Mac has no registry, just a few small databases that perform small, specific tasks. Move an application, nothing needs to be updated. Double click on a file, its helper app launches. Close the helper app, move it somewhere else, then double click on the file again, the helper app still opens. No alerts, no attempted re-installs, no user maintenance.
As for my choice, I develop on W2K and XP at work, and use Mac OS 10.2.4 at home. There is no question in my mind that Mac OS X is the most reliable and easiest to maintain of the two.
The patent office is allowing a "black box" style patent--without even proof of a working system
You don't need to have something that works to file a patent, just a disclosure on how it _would_ work. A notable exception is a perpetual motion machine. People have tried, and for some strange no one can get their prototype to work! Can't understand why.
"In this house we *obey* the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer
Try registering for a domain name. You have to use a legitimate email address for that, and they are on public record. I got one or two a day until I registered for a domain. Now I get around 30 a day. Could be worse but still annoying.
I find that the spam filtering on Mac OS X's mail program is great, though. I believe that it uses Bayesian filtering as well, and now I only get the occasional email that slips through.
and that, yes, a bug they just fixed did prevent it from running the CSS1 test suite at w3c.org.
Cool! I submitted that bug last night, as I am sure others did as well. It would be nice to believe that Apple responded that quickly to the bug reports, although it may have already been on their bug list.
Now to see if they act on the "bug" reports on the lack of tabs!
Seems a strange way of loading what is essentially a floating frame. If you manually change the address of the current page to the page shown in the data attribute "http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/tes t11.htm", it renders fine.
I disagree here. It is their choice whether or not they charge for support, and I agree that they need to make money somehow. That said, to prevent the information on how to fix the issue from being further disseminated is against the open source spirit, and will just lead to increased user frustration and will reduce the number of people who will use the product as they give up in frustration.
"Apple increased its distribution and promotion of Internet Explorer not because of a conviction that the quality of Microsoft's product was superior to Navigator's, or that consumer demand for it was greater, but rather because of the in terrorem effect of the prospect of the loss of Mac Office. To be blunt, Microsoft threatened to refuse to sell a profitable product to Apple, a product in whose development Microsoft had invested substantial resources, and which was virtually ready for shipment. Not only would this ploy have wasted sunk costs and sacrificed substantial profit, it also would have damaged Microsoft's goodwill among Apple's customers, whom Microsoft had led to expect a new version of Mac Office. The predominant reason Microsoft was prepared to make this sacrifice, and the sole reason that it required Apple to make Internet Explorer its default browser and restricted Apple's freedom to feature and promote non-Microsoft browsing software, was to protect the applications barrier to entry. More specifically, the requirements and restrictions relating to browsing software were intended to raise Internet Explorer's usage share, to lower Navigator's share, and more broadly to demonstrate to important observers (including consumer, developers, industry participants, and investors) that Navigator's success had crested. Had Microsoft's only interest in developing the Mac OS version of Internet Explorer been to enable organizational customers using multiple PC operating-system products to standardize on one user interface for Web browsing, Microsoft would not have extracted from Apple the commitment to make Internet Explorer the default browser or imposed restrictions on its use and promotion of Navigator."
Microsoft threatened to hold back development of software for the Mac platform. Apple wasn't in a position to refuse the money.
There is a list of contact info at http://developer.apple.com/contact/ although they didn't seem to include a feedback address. When OS X first came out, there was a web page expressly for this, but I can't find it anymore. I did find some discussion forums at http://discussions.info.apple.com/ which would probably be your best bet for submitting ideas.
My thinking on this is that you can throw as many technical questions at a person that you want, but what you might find is someone who may be a good programmer, but not a good employee. I would qualify a good employee as someone who has a good aptitude to learn, communicates well with others, and is going to add personality to the work environment.
Being on both sides of the interview process, what I find works best is to have a conversation, not an interview. Ask questions about their non-computer related interests, get a conversation going from that, and once your into a conversation, continue to have a conversation about the more technical and business aspects of their experience. What you do is make the person more comfortable and gets them out of their pre-rehearsed "interview" shell. If you can't find experiences in common to talk about, or they have no interests aside from computers, that probably was not a good candidate to work in your team. You still will want to get a sense of their technical acuity by asking them technical questions, but not until you have had a chance to assess their personality.
Incidentally, in one interview I was asked "Do you consider yourself a programmer?". My response was that I consider programming to be one of numerous tools that I use, but I had no interest in doing nothing but programming. The interviewer's reply was "Good, we don't hire those people." I got the job, and am still working at it three years later.
I think that the use of CG here is a double edged sword. I personally laughed histerically when I saw the Yoda fight scene, so I would say that computer graphics are good for something. On the other hand, how does an actor interact with an animated character they can't see in an environment they are not actually in? Yes, actors are supposed to be able to perform in ficticious surroundings, but by giving the actors a real person to interact with and real surroundings to perform in, their performances are also going to be that much more real. I personally think that this is a big factor in some of the wooden performances I saw in both Episode 1 and Episode 2.
And what about fastforwarding through the previews and commercials on videos and DVDs? Are they going to try and put anti-fast-forwarding technology in them?
Actually, yes. The DVD format supports the blocking of certain actions during certain segments of playback. I have seen examples of this in action with commercials on some rental DVDs, and it pisses me off. Sure as hell doesn't motivate me to buy the DVD later!
Where I live on the west coast, the ferries use the symbol of a hand inside a red octagon to indicate areas off limits to passengers. One dissertation on symbol design I read described how passengers would enter these areas because they thought the signs meant "push here".
We have a hard enough time designing symbols _now_ that everyone can understand. Take away the cultural knowledge that current symbol designers rely on and it becomes pretty much impossible to design a symbol that has even a reasonable chance of being interpreted in the way it was intended.
Imagine the horror if thousands of years from now that were the surviving culture, and they stumbled upon this: "OOH look! a celebration of the dead! let's go see!"
Actually, that possibility is probably not that far off. One of the points that was apparently raised in deliberations of this project was to avoid giving the impression that the site was a tomb. I suspect that the skull and crossbones could easily be interpreted that way by someone unfamiliar with the symbol's history.
Besides, the last thing you would want is for that to be the filming location for "The Mummy Returns MXVI".
No, for commands to become habitual you need to practice them. People have a difficult time learning the intricacies of vi because they don't use it for 100% of their text editing....*snip*... True, some are easier, but those that are the most powerful are usually those that require the most effort to learn.
Um, I'm sorry but if you have to practice commands in order for them to become habitual, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of intuitiveness that is sorely lacking, and strikes me as forcing the user to conform to the system, rather than the other way around. Vi is an extremely powerful application, but because so much of its functionality is hidden and requires the user to actively seek out how to do many actions, I think the term that best describes it is 'expert friendly'.
Furthermore, a powerful application does not and should not have to be complex, while at the same time there are plenty of examples of applications with few features that are still a pain to learn.
I know this all sounds obvious, but it can be amazing how many of these obvious things get missed.
Envisional Ltd., which sells software and services for monitoring intellectual-property rights violations online, discovered the potential infringement while doing an MP3-related research project for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
I think someone got confused over the spelling. Its the only explanation that makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
And what's with the "blue screen" comments? Like most Slashdotters, I don't like Microsoft - but to suggest that Windows has problems with "blue screens" is, like, so 1999.
I dunno, I still get them from time to time. Got one an hour ago on my W2K laptop, in fact. System must have been protesting that I was reading this article.
Microsoft knows about DLL hell. They admit the problem. And, as of Windows 2000, it's largely fixed. Stupid installers cannot overwrite system DLLs (well, they can, but they would have to first delete the cached version in \system32\dllcache).
.dlls may alleviate problems with system stability, but then what happens with the apps that are coded such that they expect a different version of a dll than what's installed. At best they work around it, at worst they crash. I know coders are supposed to deal with this, but it is still a potential point of failure in the system.
First of all, I am not convinced that is true. The fact that the system restores particular
Secondly, what about the registry? This still remains in WinXP. What happens when numerous registry entries point to an app at a particular place, then you move the application? The fact that these registry entries exist and refer to paths rather than inodes provide a barrier to moving things around. Due to the registry's large size and ubiquitous use, it also constitutes one very large potential source for failure that can affect many aspects of the system. There is some feeback further up where someone tried moving the MS Office folder and got all sorts of prompts by the app to re-install. I think this is evidence of how the registry restricts movement of applications. The Mac has no registry, just a few small databases that perform small, specific tasks. Move an application, nothing needs to be updated. Double click on a file, its helper app launches. Close the helper app, move it somewhere else, then double click on the file again, the helper app still opens. No alerts, no attempted re-installs, no user maintenance.
As for my choice, I develop on W2K and XP at work, and use Mac OS 10.2.4 at home. There is no question in my mind that Mac OS X is the most reliable and easiest to maintain of the two.
The patent office is allowing a "black box" style patent--without even proof of a working system
You don't need to have something that works to file a patent, just a disclosure on how it _would_ work. A notable exception is a perpetual motion machine. People have tried, and for some strange no one can get their prototype to work! Can't understand why.
"In this house we *obey* the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer
Try registering for a domain name. You have to use a legitimate email address for that, and they are on public record. I got one or two a day until I registered for a domain. Now I get around 30 a day. Could be worse but still annoying.
I find that the spam filtering on Mac OS X's mail program is great, though. I believe that it uses Bayesian filtering as well, and now I only get the occasional email that slips through.
and that, yes, a bug they just fixed did prevent it from running the CSS1 test suite at w3c.org.
Cool! I submitted that bug last night, as I am sure others did as well. It would be nice to believe that Apple responded that quickly to the bug reports, although it may have already been on their bug list.
Now to see if they act on the "bug" reports on the lack of tabs!
I took a look at the source to that test page. Its not the CSS that is messing it up, its the tag that they are using to load the test html.
s t11.htm", it renders fine.
<OBJECT height="100%" width="100%" border="0" type="text/html" data="test11.htm">...</object>
Seems a strange way of loading what is essentially a floating frame. If you manually change the address of the current page to the page shown in the data attribute "http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/te
I disagree here. It is their choice whether or not they charge for support, and I agree that they need to make money somehow. That said, to prevent the information on how to fix the issue from being further disseminated is against the open source spirit, and will just lead to increased user frustration and will reduce the number of people who will use the product as they give up in frustration.
Taken from the DOJ 's conclusions of law of the Microsoft anti-trust case:
"Apple increased its distribution and promotion of Internet Explorer not because of a conviction that the quality of Microsoft's product was superior to Navigator's, or that consumer demand for it was greater, but rather because of the in terrorem effect of the prospect of the loss of Mac Office. To be blunt, Microsoft threatened to refuse to sell a profitable product to Apple, a product in whose development Microsoft had invested substantial resources, and which was virtually ready for shipment. Not only would this ploy have wasted sunk costs and sacrificed substantial profit, it also would have damaged Microsoft's goodwill among Apple's customers, whom Microsoft had led to expect a new version of Mac Office. The predominant reason Microsoft was prepared to make this sacrifice, and the sole reason that it required Apple to make Internet Explorer its default browser and restricted Apple's freedom to feature and promote non-Microsoft browsing software, was to protect the applications barrier to entry. More specifically, the requirements and restrictions relating to browsing software were intended to raise Internet Explorer's usage share, to lower Navigator's share, and more broadly to demonstrate to important observers (including consumer, developers, industry participants, and investors) that Navigator's success had crested. Had Microsoft's only interest in developing the Mac OS version of Internet Explorer been to enable organizational customers using multiple PC operating-system products to standardize on one user interface for Web browsing, Microsoft would not have extracted from Apple the commitment to make Internet Explorer the default browser or imposed restrictions on its use and promotion of Navigator."
Microsoft threatened to hold back development of software for the Mac platform. Apple wasn't in a position to refuse the money.
There is a list of contact info at http://developer.apple.com/contact/ although they didn't seem to include a feedback address. When OS X first came out, there was a web page expressly for this, but I can't find it anymore. I did find some discussion forums at http://discussions.info.apple.com/ which would probably be your best bet for submitting ideas.
My thinking on this is that you can throw as many technical questions at a person that you want, but what you might find is someone who may be a good programmer, but not a good employee. I would qualify a good employee as someone who has a good aptitude to learn, communicates well with others, and is going to add personality to the work environment.
Being on both sides of the interview process, what I find works best is to have a conversation, not an interview. Ask questions about their non-computer related interests, get a conversation going from that, and once your into a conversation, continue to have a conversation about the more technical and business aspects of their experience. What you do is make the person more comfortable and gets them out of their pre-rehearsed "interview" shell. If you can't find experiences in common to talk about, or they have no interests aside from computers, that probably was not a good candidate to work in your team. You still will want to get a sense of their technical acuity by asking them technical questions, but not until you have had a chance to assess their personality.
Incidentally, in one interview I was asked "Do you consider yourself a programmer?". My response was that I consider programming to be one of numerous tools that I use, but I had no interest in doing nothing but programming. The interviewer's reply was "Good, we don't hire those people." I got the job, and am still working at it three years later.
I think that the use of CG here is a double edged sword. I personally laughed histerically when I saw the Yoda fight scene, so I would say that computer graphics are good for something. On the other hand, how does an actor interact with an animated character they can't see in an environment they are not actually in? Yes, actors are supposed to be able to perform in ficticious surroundings, but by giving the actors a real person to interact with and real surroundings to perform in, their performances are also going to be that much more real. I personally think that this is a big factor in some of the wooden performances I saw in both Episode 1 and Episode 2.
And what about fastforwarding through the previews and commercials on videos and DVDs? Are they going to try and put anti-fast-forwarding technology in them?
Actually, yes. The DVD format supports the blocking of certain actions during certain segments of playback. I have seen examples of this in action with commercials on some rental DVDs, and it pisses me off. Sure as hell doesn't motivate me to buy the DVD later!
Where I live on the west coast, the ferries use the symbol of a hand inside a red octagon to indicate areas off limits to passengers. One dissertation on symbol design I read described how passengers would enter these areas because they thought the signs meant "push here".
We have a hard enough time designing symbols _now_ that everyone can understand. Take away the cultural knowledge that current symbol designers rely on and it becomes pretty much impossible to design a symbol that has even a reasonable chance of being interpreted in the way it was intended.
Imagine the horror if thousands of years from now that were the surviving culture, and they stumbled upon this: "OOH look! a celebration of the dead! let's go see!"
Actually, that possibility is probably not that far off. One of the points that was apparently raised in deliberations of this project was to avoid giving the impression that the site was a tomb. I suspect that the skull and crossbones could easily be interpreted that way by someone unfamiliar with the symbol's history.
Besides, the last thing you would want is for that to be the filming location for "The Mummy Returns MXVI".
No, for commands to become habitual you need to practice them. People have a difficult time learning the intricacies of vi because they don't use it for 100% of their text editing. ...*snip*... True, some are easier, but those that are the most powerful are usually those that require the most effort to learn.
Um, I'm sorry but if you have to practice commands in order for them to become habitual, it seems to me that there is a certain amount of intuitiveness that is sorely lacking, and strikes me as forcing the user to conform to the system, rather than the other way around. Vi is an extremely powerful application, but because so much of its functionality is hidden and requires the user to actively seek out how to do many actions, I think the term that best describes it is 'expert friendly'.
Furthermore, a powerful application does not and should not have to be complex, while at the same time there are plenty of examples of applications with few features that are still a pain to learn.
I know this all sounds obvious, but it can be amazing how many of these obvious things get missed.
Envisional Ltd., which sells software and services for monitoring intellectual-property rights violations online, discovered the potential infringement while doing an MP3-related research project for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
I think someone got confused over the spelling. Its the only explanation that makes sense.
-- Sig? What sig?