"As for "hotdog users", well, I think that you're referring to savvy users--those who take the time to learn about their tools and prefer craftsmanship to heavyhandedness. I've used keyboard commands in WordPerfect for years not because I feel cool doing it, but because I leave my hands on one input device rather than two."
I was a WordPerfect user and I, too, used to know the keys by heart. (I still remember F11 - View codes!). I'm not sure what you mean by "hotdog users" though.
I believe 'command | tail -1' will do it. Or something very like that. Read the manual page."
I tried tail (and awk, and cat, and cut, and tr). AFAIK there is no way to tell tail to give me the "last" line. This is the same as awk and all the others. You have to specify the line # or range of numbers. Seems like -1 would mean lines 1 to 1.
"Of course, if Microsoft was smart like the KDE 2.0 team, for example they would have made the menu sliding feature optional, and completely disablable if you hate it, using 0 system resources"
You can "disable" menu "animation" under Display Properties I think. The functionality is still there, though, requiring a run-time check (heck, perhaps even every click given the evidence of Microsoft coding stupidity in a previous post), and a another library to do the stupid animation (which will probably be permanently resident in memory, if not embedded into the damn "kernel"). Better yet, get 98Lite and trash the new web-explorer monstrosity.
If these are the people making the TOOLS, imagine what stupid DEVELOPERS are capable of. No wonder everything is bloated in Windows! The best programmer in the world is only as good as the tools/code he/she has to use. To give them credit, it would appear that *most* Windows developers are much more intelligent than the bozos who made Regclean. Heck, I'm not even familiar with VC++ or MFC, and I bet *I* could make a less bloated version. What type of monkeys do they hire at MS?
"Re:My humble responses (Score:1) by nil on Wednesday July 07, @12:58PM EDT (#101) (User Info)" [snip] "Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid."
Netscape is monolithic, archaic, years-old code. It is in the state it is in, in part, because of Microsoft's mad race to push out its own bigger, bloatier browser. Correspondingly, Netscape was forced to add on the same bells and whistles to keep step, instead of having time to improve its design.
There's a coding triangle. One point is Size, another is Performance, the other is "Lack of time/effort". Efficiency is optimal along the line connecting Size and Performance (it's just a trade-off). If something needs to get out the door fast (which has to be done), then your point will wander towards "Lack of time/effort" and you will incurr bloat and inefficiency to incorporate the same feature set. I guess with this diagram "bloat" can be considered both size-wise and performance-wise.
"BeOS, Linux, and every other system has to play catch-up on the stupid features, now, if they want the Windows marketshare."
Stupid features for stupid people I guess. If all those Windows groupies want these useless things, fine. I just don't like being forced to use the products, which I have to if I'm to do anything with them (they sure as heck won't change *their *software).
On the other hand...I just spent several hours this morning fighting with 'sed' to print the last line of some input...
Like for instance, the fact that the Office97 buttons are Win98ish regardless of whether it is actually running on Win98. Know why? Because they embedded the darn controls in the program! They don't use the system's ComCtrl.dll (or whatever that stupid thing is), they have their own right in there!. Same for the Mac office suite. Shouldn't these programmers be coordinating with each other??
I don't buy that bloat is caused solely (or even *predominantly*) by user-requested (user-wanted as per market study) features.
For instance, who the heck asked for that damn paper clip and his moronic friends!!?? Who thought to themselves: "Damn it! I can't do a thing with this Office97...hey! I know! A dancing paper clip would really help me a lot!"
Also...Users don't buy upgrades JUST for new features. In fact, I'd argue users buy upgrades JUST so that they can stay current enough to work with everyone (and everything) else. Maybe if Microsoft didn't break its old file formats and introduce new ones every rev then people wouldn't upgrade as much. I got Word 6.1 for free with a new computer and have to date not installed a new one. I can't use documents from work though (and NO, it was not my choice to use MS Office...).
In the same vein, I think embedding HTML functionality into everything is stupid. I hate getting those bloat laden HTML messages from people in Pine, which I have to decipher for myself. Sometimes these messages include two attachments: one HTML attachment for bloated email readers, and one plain text attachment for normal ISO8859_1 readers. Over double the bandwandth of the simple plain text message. Most people don't even know this feature is on when they sprinkle bold, italic, and font tags all through there 1 line message and 6 line sig.
Bloat is also caused by laziness. I guess nobody at Microsoft ever thought "Hey, if we actually took the 3 extra months to get this really tight we might have a product consumers would buy and not feel like it was being stuffed down their throat." The lazy approach to complexity is to just scale up the same techniques and practices you were doing before. It's easy to copy your O(2^n) parser from Bloatv1.0 to Bloatv2.0 to use with files 10 times bigger. It's harder to redesign the whole architecture.
In any case, it seems to me the bloat coming out of MS is more due to two things: 1) Introducing useless technologies and additions to 2) Position themselves strategically for even more dominance, than attempting to add things users *want*. Heck, I've *wanted* a smaller, tighter office suite for years...they haven't added *that* feature.
"By the 1930 elections, the Nazi party took 18% of the popular vote. Hitler ran for president of Germany in 1932 and won 30% of the vote. In 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by president Hindenburg."
Yes, Hitler ran in 1930, and his party won %37 of the vote, but he did not *win* the election. Hindenburg did. The Nazi party had 37% of Reichstag seats, and violence on the streets by @400,000 SA "brownshirts" was already prevalent (Bloody Sunday). Yes he got the majority vote, but it was because if you didn't vote for him your's and your family's welfare would be in extreme danger. That's not what I call popular, or a democracy. In effect, Hitler's appointment was due much more to deciept and treachery on his behalf, and the egos of several other people vying for chancellorship. It was not a military putsch in actuality, but the threat of a military putsch that got Hitler appointed.
"To say that having a democratic system implies a greater degree of human rights and freedoms is a logical fallacy."
A democratic system does not, by necessity, imply greater human rights and freedoms, but it *is* the one under which such things *can* be *ensured*. Meaning that these things *can* exist and *continue* to exist with assurance. As previously stated, sure, all of the above *can* exist in a dictatorship, but who's to say they will exist after a new dictator takes power?? A democracy allows the opportunity for such things. Do not use the U.S. as an example...it is a broken and diseased democracy (although a democracy to a great extent nonetheless). The simple fact is that there is no *correct* political system. Some political systems exist simply because others do not *scale* well (hence a Republic over a Democracy).
* Who the hell is Darth Maul? His on-screen life span is about 30 seconds!!! This very intriguing character is not explained at all, and then killed.
* What the hell is that two-headed sports announcer??? When I saw that I thought "Is this a joke? Does Lucas want to destroy all my credibility of his universe?"
* Within 1 day on Tatooine: Jedis meet Anakin. Anakin wins race. Jedis take Anakin away from mother forever. Ummm...what?? Anakin's mother is just willing to have strangers come and take her child away in the span of 1 day?? Um, sure she's a slave virgin and all, but she didn't even want a few days to say goodbye? Whatever...
* Evil is SO STUPID. Remember when Anakin lands on that droid ship? He shoots at 1 piece of machinery (1 piece! looks like a column) and the WHOLE damn ship blows up! The Sith must have the stupidest engineers in the universe! And they don't even REMEMBER this fact when time and time again in all the other movies, inevitably some gung-ho jedi shoots at one object and the whole ship/doom star/whatever blows up. Dumb Sith.
* Those little things that live in Jedis and give them powers. Oh give me a break. What type of bull is this? This is such a totally weak explanation. Oh, the Force is not a big uncomprehensible cosmic thing, it's just due to little organisms in your cells...sheesh...through this whole movie I feel like Lucas is talking to me like he thinks I'm a moron...
* Super backflips. Ok, what the heck was that thing that Obi did at the end to kill Darth?? He flipped up backwards magically?? What kind of bull is that? Is that some Jedi power? If so, why the heck couldn't Qui-gonn pull some of that out of his butt and whoop Maul?? Given that he is older and more experienced than Obi.
* Engineer stupidity again. Make a humongous droid army. Make droids totally innocuous unless controlled remotely. Make one master control center. Let a 10-year old kid destroy it. How stupid. I wish I lived in a universe like that, in which all bad people were stupid as rocks.
* Balance of the Force. Um, wasn't Anakin the one to bring "balance to the Force"?? Supposedly things are really unbalanced because there are not enough bad guys right? So why try to kill them??? Duh. If you want balance let there be just as many on the Dark side as on the Light side. Lucas tries to meld some sort of Zen into this, but it really doesn't work.
* Um, what the heck was Samuel Jackson doing in this movie?? Lucas gives this intriguing character like 30 seconds of screen-time also, without any explanation?? Really, a Jedi knight is not the role for Jackson. I expected him at any moment to stand up, pull out a 9mm and say: "Let's get medieval on these Sith mofos!!"
* Racial stereotypes...was I the only one to pick this up:
Jar-Jar: Can we say sambo? Trade Federation: Why do all these guys have oriental (ok, to be p.c., far eastern) accents?? Anakin's mother: What, just because she lives in something that looks like a pueblo hut, she has to have a Spanish accent?? Jedis: Well, of course they have to be British.
Along with Independence Day, and Armageddon, yet another movie with dazzling effects, and a *very* promising plot that was done stupidly and horribly wrong.
"Let me tell you something you might have forgotten. The Nazi government was elected, through due democratic process. The public loved them. For the average German in the 30s, a government that promised freedom from the economic hell imposed by the winners of WWI and getting rid of the Jewish commercial elite that they believed was the source of all their problems (there, another elite creeps into place). HITLER AND THE NAZI PARTY HAD A DIRECT MANDATE FROM THE GERMAN PEOPLE, AND YET THEY ARE STILL THE CAUSE FOR SOME OF THE WORST ATROCITIES EVER COMMITTED."
ERRRRRRRRRR...the Nazi government was NOT elected. The Weimar Republic was set up after WWI. Hitler dissolved the Weimar Republic in a military putsch.
Try Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer
If you want to point to evidence showing how democratic governments can do Bad Things, try the U.S. government's genocide of another democracy, the Iroquios (a 5 nation confederacy, the largest in North America).
The reason downloads for some operating systems are not available despite the fact that it is written in Java, as I mentioned in another post, is at least partly due to the fact that JDK 1.2 is not fully supported on all platforms. Each platform probably also has a custom installer.
My suggestion is, if you really want to see this (it's not that great), download one for an OS closest to yours (Windows for OS/2, Solaris for *nix), then unpack (unzip, untar, whatever), and try to run it with latest version of the JDK and Swing classes you have.
Re:anyone have a cool website I could ripoff?
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
·
· Score: 1
Did that come out of an Apple marketing brochure?
What about mirroring Slashdot the halve the load...
Re:so I can make a Mercury Cougar clone....
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
·
· Score: 1
> The iMac clone is very easy to confuse with that > brand.
Well if Apple's target audience for the iMac is so stupid it can't tell the two apart when they're next to each other or do even the most minimal homework before their major purchase I'd say they're getting what they asked for. If you target dummies you'll get dummies.
yup...been there I read his Pirates comments... he also has a really cool sub-pixel rendering app which demonstrates the technology Microsoft is apparently claiming as their own (ClearType??)
I'd like to know if these claims are true or false. It seems if they are actually true that they may in fact be illegal in and of themselves, regardless of AO's and Harvard's feelings.
Well if the web spider found a page that linked to the otherwise-inaccessible page, it could very possibly be found by a search engine. I have heard, though, that the site was set up with "robot rules" which kept (well-behaved) spiders from even indexing the accessible pages.
Slashdot Mirror
"As for "hotdog users", well, I think that you're referring to savvy users--those who take the time to learn about their tools and prefer craftsmanship to heavyhandedness. I've used keyboard commands in WordPerfect for years not because I feel cool doing it, but because I leave my hands on one input device rather than two."
I was a WordPerfect user and I, too, used to know the keys by heart. (I still remember F11 - View codes!). I'm not sure what you mean by "hotdog users" though.
It will.
I've heard they're moving to XML.
(A bell should have gone off, warning you that Microsoft is intent on making yet another proprietary perversion of a standard.)
Doh! *bonk*
You are right.
tail -1 it is...
"Why use sed when there's tail?
I believe 'command | tail -1' will do it. Or something very like that. Read the manual page."
I tried tail (and awk, and cat, and cut, and tr). AFAIK there is no way to tell tail to give me the "last" line. This is the same as awk and all the others. You have to specify the line # or range of numbers. Seems like -1 would mean lines 1 to 1.
I ended up using command | sed -n "$"p
"Of course, if Microsoft was smart like the KDE 2.0 team, for example they would have made the menu sliding feature optional, and completely disablable if you hate it, using 0 system resources"
You can "disable" menu "animation" under Display Properties I think. The functionality is still there, though, requiring a run-time check (heck, perhaps even every click given the evidence of Microsoft coding stupidity in a previous post), and a another library to do the stupid animation (which will probably be permanently resident in memory, if not embedded into the damn "kernel"). Better yet, get 98Lite and trash the new web-explorer monstrosity.
Oh. My. God.
If these are the people making the TOOLS, imagine what stupid DEVELOPERS are capable of. No wonder everything is bloated in Windows! The best programmer in the world is only as good as the tools/code he/she has to use. To give them credit, it would appear that *most* Windows developers are much more intelligent than the bozos who made Regclean. Heck, I'm not even familiar with VC++ or MFC, and I bet *I* could make a less bloated version. What type of monkeys do they hire at MS?
"Re:My humble responses (Score:1)
by nil on Wednesday July 07, @12:58PM EDT (#101)
(User Info)"
[snip]
"Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid."
BE convinced. VERY convinced.
Netscape is monolithic, archaic, years-old code. It is in the state it is in, in part, because of Microsoft's mad race to push out its own bigger, bloatier browser. Correspondingly, Netscape was forced to add on the same bells and whistles to keep step, instead of having time to improve its design.
"So how do you send mail? :)"
I use Pine. Pine, by default, uses Pico internally as its editor (Pico is also standalone). I believe Pine uses Mail or Sendmail to send mail.
Give me Pico any day (I can't stand those obscure vi commands).
I'm wary of the Emacs monster (there is probably a dish-washing and hot-dog-preparing plugin).
There's a coding triangle. One point is Size, another is Performance, the other is "Lack of time/effort". Efficiency is optimal along the line connecting Size and Performance (it's just a trade-off). If something needs to get out the door fast (which has to be done), then your point will wander towards "Lack of time/effort" and you will incurr bloat and inefficiency to incorporate the same feature set. I guess with this diagram "bloat" can be considered both size-wise and performance-wise.
"BeOS, Linux, and every other system has to play catch-up on the stupid features, now, if they want the Windows marketshare."
Stupid features for stupid people I guess. If all those Windows groupies want these useless things, fine. I just don't like being forced to use the products, which I have to if I'm to do anything with them (they sure as heck won't change *their *software).
On the other hand...I just spent several hours this morning fighting with 'sed' to print the last line of some input...
Oops...I was the one who requested the doom-VR and pinball game...doh!
Like for instance, the fact that the Office97 buttons are Win98ish regardless of whether it is actually running on Win98. Know why? Because they embedded the darn controls in the program! They don't use the system's ComCtrl.dll (or whatever that stupid thing is), they have their own right in there!. Same for the Mac office suite. Shouldn't these programmers be coordinating with each other??
I don't buy that bloat is caused solely (or even *predominantly*) by user-requested (user-wanted as per market study) features.
For instance, who the heck asked for that damn paper clip and his moronic friends!!?? Who thought to themselves: "Damn it! I can't do a thing with this Office97...hey! I know! A dancing paper clip would really help me a lot!"
Also...Users don't buy upgrades JUST for new features. In fact, I'd argue users buy upgrades JUST so that they can stay current enough to work with everyone (and everything) else. Maybe if Microsoft didn't break its old file formats and introduce new ones every rev then people wouldn't upgrade as much. I got Word 6.1 for free with a new computer and have to date not installed a new one. I can't use documents from work though (and NO, it was not my choice to use MS Office...).
In the same vein, I think embedding HTML functionality into everything is stupid. I hate getting those bloat laden HTML messages from people in Pine, which I have to decipher for myself. Sometimes these messages include two attachments: one HTML attachment for bloated email readers, and one plain text attachment for normal ISO8859_1 readers. Over double the bandwandth of the simple plain text message. Most people don't even know this feature is on when they sprinkle bold, italic, and font tags all through there 1 line message and 6 line sig.
Bloat is also caused by laziness. I guess nobody at Microsoft ever thought "Hey, if we actually took the 3 extra months to get this really tight we might have a product consumers would buy and not feel like it was being stuffed down their throat." The lazy approach to complexity is to just scale up the same techniques and practices you were doing before. It's easy to copy your O(2^n) parser from Bloatv1.0 to Bloatv2.0 to use with files 10 times bigger. It's harder to redesign the whole architecture.
In any case, it seems to me the bloat coming out of MS is more due to two things: 1) Introducing useless technologies and additions to 2) Position themselves strategically for even more dominance,
than attempting to add things users *want*. Heck, I've *wanted* a smaller, tighter office suite for years...they haven't added *that* feature.
Or:
Every program expands until it can render all content as HTML in an embedded widget.
"By the 1930 elections, the Nazi party took 18% of the popular vote. Hitler ran for president of Germany in 1932 and won 30% of the vote. In 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by president Hindenburg."
l er/collapse.htm
Yes, Hitler ran in 1930, and his party won %37 of the vote, but he did not *win* the election. Hindenburg did. The Nazi party had 37% of Reichstag seats, and violence on the streets by @400,000 SA "brownshirts" was already prevalent (Bloody Sunday). Yes he got the majority vote, but it was because if you didn't vote for him your's and your family's welfare would be in extreme danger. That's not what I call popular, or a democracy. In effect, Hitler's appointment was due much more to deciept and treachery on his behalf, and the egos of several other people vying for chancellorship. It was not a military putsch in actuality, but the threat of a military putsch that got Hitler appointed.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhit
"Geeks: we run the systems that run the world"
I like it.
"To say that having a democratic system implies a greater degree of human rights and freedoms is a logical fallacy."
A democratic system does not, by necessity, imply greater human rights and freedoms, but it *is* the one under which such things *can* be *ensured*. Meaning that these things *can* exist and *continue* to exist with assurance. As previously stated, sure, all of the above *can* exist in a dictatorship, but who's to say they will exist after a new dictator takes power?? A democracy allows the opportunity for such things. Do not use the U.S. as an example...it is a broken and diseased democracy (although a democracy to a great extent nonetheless). The simple fact is that there is no *correct* political system. Some political systems exist simply because others do not *scale* well (hence a Republic over a Democracy).
Besides all the illogical things Brin points out:
* Who the hell is Darth Maul? His on-screen life span is about 30 seconds!!! This very intriguing character is not explained at all, and then killed.
* What the hell is that two-headed sports announcer??? When I saw that I thought "Is this a joke? Does Lucas want to destroy all my credibility of his universe?"
* Within 1 day on Tatooine: Jedis meet Anakin. Anakin wins race. Jedis take Anakin away from mother forever. Ummm...what?? Anakin's mother is just willing to have strangers come and take her child away in the span of 1 day?? Um, sure she's a slave virgin and all, but she didn't even want a few days to say goodbye? Whatever...
* Evil is SO STUPID. Remember when Anakin lands on that droid ship? He shoots at 1 piece of machinery (1 piece! looks like a column) and the WHOLE damn ship blows up! The Sith must have the stupidest engineers in the universe! And they don't even REMEMBER this fact when time and time again in all the other movies, inevitably some gung-ho jedi shoots at one object and the whole ship/doom star/whatever blows up. Dumb Sith.
* Those little things that live in Jedis and give them powers. Oh give me a break. What type of bull is this? This is such a totally weak explanation. Oh, the Force is not a big uncomprehensible cosmic thing, it's just due to little organisms in your cells...sheesh...through this whole movie I feel like Lucas is talking to me like he thinks I'm a moron...
* Super backflips. Ok, what the heck was that thing that Obi did at the end to kill Darth?? He flipped up backwards magically?? What kind of bull is that? Is that some Jedi power? If so, why the heck couldn't Qui-gonn pull some of that out of his butt and whoop Maul?? Given that he is older and more experienced than Obi.
* Engineer stupidity again. Make a humongous droid army. Make droids totally innocuous unless controlled remotely. Make one master control center. Let a 10-year old kid destroy it. How stupid. I wish I lived in a universe like that, in which all bad people were stupid as rocks.
* Balance of the Force. Um, wasn't Anakin the one to bring "balance to the Force"?? Supposedly things are really unbalanced because there are not enough bad guys right? So why try to kill them??? Duh. If you want balance let there be just as many on the Dark side as on the Light side. Lucas tries to meld some sort of Zen into this, but it really doesn't work.
* Um, what the heck was Samuel Jackson doing in this movie?? Lucas gives this intriguing character like 30 seconds of screen-time also, without any explanation?? Really, a Jedi knight is not the role for Jackson. I expected him at any moment to stand up, pull out a 9mm and say: "Let's get medieval on these Sith mofos!!"
* Racial stereotypes...was I the only one to pick this up:
Jar-Jar: Can we say sambo?
Trade Federation: Why do all these guys have oriental (ok, to be p.c., far eastern) accents??
Anakin's mother: What, just because she lives in something that looks like a pueblo hut, she has to have a Spanish accent??
Jedis: Well, of course they have to be British.
Along with Independence Day, and Armageddon, yet another movie with dazzling effects, and a *very* promising plot that was done stupidly and horribly wrong.
"Let me tell you something you might have forgotten. The Nazi government was elected, through due democratic process. The public loved them. For the average German in the 30s, a government that promised freedom from the economic hell imposed by the winners of WWI and getting rid of the Jewish commercial elite that they believed was the source of all their problems (there, another elite creeps into place). HITLER AND THE NAZI PARTY HAD A DIRECT MANDATE FROM THE GERMAN PEOPLE, AND YET THEY ARE STILL THE CAUSE FOR SOME OF THE WORST ATROCITIES EVER COMMITTED."
ERRRRRRRRRR...the Nazi government was NOT elected. The Weimar Republic was set up after WWI. Hitler dissolved the Weimar Republic in a military putsch.
Try Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer
If you want to point to evidence showing how democratic governments can do Bad Things, try the U.S. government's genocide of another democracy, the Iroquios (a 5 nation confederacy, the largest in North America).
The reason downloads for some operating systems are not available despite the fact that it is written in Java, as I mentioned in another post, is at least partly due to the fact that JDK 1.2 is not fully supported on all platforms. Each platform probably also has a custom installer.
My suggestion is, if you really want to see this (it's not that great), download one for an OS closest to yours (Windows for OS/2, Solaris for *nix), then unpack (unzip, untar, whatever), and try to run it with latest version of the JDK and Swing classes you have.
Did that come out of an Apple marketing brochure?
What about mirroring Slashdot the halve the load...
> The iMac clone is very easy to confuse with that
> brand.
Well if Apple's target audience for the iMac is so stupid it can't tell the two apart when they're next to each other or do even the most minimal homework before their major purchase I'd say they're getting what they asked for. If you target dummies you'll get dummies.
yup...been there
I read his Pirates comments...
he also has a really cool sub-pixel rendering app which demonstrates the technology Microsoft is apparently claiming as their own (ClearType??)
I'd like to know if these claims are true or false. It seems if they are actually true that they may in fact be illegal in and of themselves, regardless of AO's and Harvard's feelings.
Well if the web spider found a page that linked to the otherwise-inaccessible page, it could very possibly be found by a search engine. I have heard, though, that the site was set up with "robot rules" which kept (well-behaved) spiders from even indexing the accessible pages.