I would share music because it was much easier to grab a dozen mp3's from AudioGalaxy whenever I heard of an artist which might have been my flavour -- giving them a listen, and if it was any good, buying the album.
So I care a great deal about copyright, but was still trading lots of tunes with good conscience.
Call me a hypocrite, but I bought much more music when I had access to AudioGalaxy then today, where I do not trade music, and cannot find any inspiration in the stuff the record labels try to make available through public channels.
AudioGalaxy didn't have a moderation system, but for each artist there was an easy to use message board, so just go to your favourite artist and see what other people recommend (and read why, if you don't care why, there was of course also the correlation system also found at Amazon).
I never bought as much music as in the days of AudioGalaxy, even though I had to "import" it from various different countries, since much of it was not available in the mainstream music stores.
Absolutely #3 is the way to go. "metadata" should always be figured out from the contents of the file [...]
So you think that *every* file format should re-invent the wheel and define a tagging scheme? So an mp3-player will need to read and parse ID3 v1, v2.2, v2.3 and v2.4 (yes, all these tagging schemes are incompatible) and when Ogg Vorbis support becomes an issue, create a new parser for their meta data format...
Also, some files are not really in a format, so you can't embed meta data within these, e.g. text/plain (used for scripts, sources and similar).
My question was actually sincere, I do realise that a lot of people praise BBEdit as "the king of editors", but I really fail to see the attraction -- I have tried to use it on several occasions, but I lack tons of features, it has a horrible user interface, is slow to start up (the app bundle is ~17 MB) and the features it has are sort of in the way...
I have started to write my own editor, borrowing inspiration from close to every other editor I have ever seen, but seeing how BBEdit is mentioned on the mac, take this interview as an example, which amongst other refer to it as: "one of the best examples of how modular software should work. It's small, fast, slick [...]", then I have started to seriously doubt on my success on providing a small (below 512 KB) feature rich editor to OS X...
What is it that I am missing with BBEdit?
And no, I am no fan of vim nor emacs, although at least with these editors, I know exactly why one would favour it over a "graphical" editor which is well integrated into the operating system...
[...] it is much better as a general developer's text editor [...]
Seriously, did you try a decent editor? BBEdit has no easy to use scratch macros (if macros at all?), its column selection is a joke (doesn't extend past the text, can't paste as columns), the syntax highlight isn't user configurable, it hasn't got overwrite mode, freehanded (non-restrained) cursor movement, auto-completion (or just completion), doesn't use the user configurable OS X key bindings (and the default values doesn't conform to the rest of the OS), it can't fold text, auto-underline misspelled words, hasn't got a useable (unlimited) clipboard history and I could go on for hours...
All in all, I'll take the free editor that comes with Cocoa (and is used in Project Builder) over BBEdit any day (with the TextExtras plug-in of course:-) )... at least this one doesn't get on my nerves by ridicules names for the options, ugly often border less windows, non-consistent (and non style guide compliant) GUI, and a whole lot of question for each simple little operation...
ohh... and it takes forever to start, it's big and bloated -- the slogan: "Software that doesn't suck" really seems to be self irony IMHO!
I think it is even worse for a norwegian to understand danish
I wouldn't doubt that for a second (being from Denmark) -- we mumble and make many contractions where we simply skip entire words and/or parts thereof. For example when saying "Det er godt" we say "De' got" and "Hvordan går det?" becomes "Hvo'n går de?".
I wasn't the AC posting the previous, but AFAIK Apple don't want to present their users with two buttons, because that introduce an element of ambiguity -- it's also written in their style guide that all functionality of an application should be reachable with one button.
This is the sadest I have ever read.
I have NONE of such certifications you require.
And I have a strong disbelieve in specialization, especialy in computer science.
6-7 years ago I also frowned at the established world for their need to neglect all my (self taught) skills -- today I have 6 years of computer science behind me and do realize how naive I were back then.
First of all, you can't really say something is bad without having tried it
Secondly, I have seen much code produced by self taught geniuses -- the problem is that it scales really bad, is a mess to maintain etc. etc. Rarely have self taught people any knowledge about time complexity, proper OOD/MVC and they never use the existing literature to find solutions to their problems, thinking instead that their solution is probably just as good as what an entire field of research have produced over several years.
Self taught people are mostly hackers -- they hack a solution
However, many people with certificates and even formal education are also incompetent, and have a tendency to give the entire system a bad name among the self taught.
In general, when you hear something like this, if nobody specifically mentions what the problem might be [...]
Then let me explain:
Mac OS X has a serious problem with text layout (the NSLayoutManager class and friends).
I myself is currently writing a browser, and I have a 740 KB test page. If I use NSLayoutManager to obtain the text dimensions then it takes 20 seconds to layout this page (on my 733 MHz G4) -- if I instead use some cached glyphs (which is needed if I want to bypass NSLayoutManager) and NSFont's positionOfGlyph:precededBy: then I can cut down the time to around a seconds.
Unfortunately caching glyphs is not really a good solution because I'll then miss ligatures and other features of Mac OS X (not to mention that there is not really any well documented way to obtain the glyphs in the first place -- ATS is completely undocumented).
However, I believe that Opera use Carbon, which would not be using NSLayoutManager (but maybe it use ATSUI, which again rely on ATS, which should be the system NSLayoutManager use) -- and Opera spend 50 seconds on the page in question (OmniWeb takes almost 2 minutes, IE & MZ both take 12 seconds).
The sad thing is, my 40 MHz Amiga can parse, layout and render the same page in 8 seconds.
I deserve to be spammed?
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 1
Don't use mailto tags in your HTML. Use form submission instead. If you use mailto: tags you DESERVE to be spammed.
So trying to provide the audience of my web-pages with some comfort (a single click and a decent (configurable) mail editor appears, which allows for the address to be bookmarked, the letter to be saved as a draft for later completion, sending a carbon copy to a friend etc.) should be re-payed with punishment like being spammed?
Are you one of those persons who also claim that if you leave your stuff unprotected then you deserve to have it stolen? what a sad society we live in...
Why is it that even though I'm reading slashdot with only high scoring comments displayed, then I always have to read about popup-blocking in Mozilla?
I mean, this feature were to be found in other browsers before Mozilla, and I'm sure those reading slashdot & using Mozilla have already found out how to disable the popup adds!
These high-rated comments are starting to get more annoying than the popup adds themselves...:-)
I did the opposite (was: Re:Question)
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 1
Funny, last week when the headline was something about some old sketches found from Python, I figured it was the author of the [Monthy] Python language who had some hand-written sketches of the initial design/grammar or similar...
Come on... this just looks like a stupid competition of who have read the most books -- I doubt people have even read through many of the books they suggest, or have considered why that book should be a must read.
It's similar to me listing all my CD's and labeling them Music you must have.
I consider myself rather skilled when it comes to computers/programming -- but even though I've read many of the books mentioned, I certainly wouldn't say they are must read -- Knuths The Art of Computer Programming seems to come up rather often, so does Design Patterns (during the recent years), but exactly what is it in these books that make them a must read? Is it simply so that you can discuss the content with your fellow programmer friends (or should I say brag about having skimmed the table of contents?).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against books -- I have 6 years of formal education behind me, but seeing people list the same hyped books just make me think that those people haven't really read anything else, and also have missed out on a lot of real computer science information left out of those popular books... not to mention the parent list, which list 10 books that in their title reveal that they are tied to C/C++ -- C/C++ is a practical language, but academically inferior, and only reading about that language certainly will limit your perspective -- besides, how much can these books teach you apart from the actual language? You should just get the language definition and then read books about all sorts of other topics, to get more general design and algorithm knowledge, not to mention getting your hands dirty by getting some experience!
The difficulty was getting Windows to be able to read the HFS+ filesystem
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't this be completely handled by the iPod itself? I mean, it has to be able to read the file system when it isn't connected to a Mac...
I generally agree with you, but had to comment on this one:
Professional typesetters use serif fonts for body text because it aids reading speed and decreases eye fatigue, yet many "web designers" prefer sans-serif fonts for body text
Professional typesetters do use sans serif fonts on-screen, because here the resolution is not good enough for the serifs, and so they act as noise rather than reading cues.
Unfortunately I cannot find the article ATM, but somewhere on the web is an interview with the person who designed the free Microsoft fonts (who is a professional type-face designer), and he explains what he did to ensure optimal readability on-screen -- an interesting read...
I'm not sure what the advantage is with open-source though.
ehm... modularity is always good -- basically a micro kernel tries to put everything in user mode, this will make it easier to upgrade only parts of the system (do you really like to recompile your kernel to try a new file system?), it will add more features for the non-root user, because he can run his own services without security concerns (AFAIK a user can't mount a file system (which would actually be handy, e.g. to mount ftp as a file system on my unix account)), it will improve the uptime, because only the parts in the micro kernel really needs to be 100% stable, as anything besides this can just be killed (and re-started).
The only real argument I have heard against the monolithic approach is speed, but a) this is not a proved fact, for example Jochen Liedtke's L4 micro kernel (for x86) is an efficient implementation that beats the monolithic approachs, and b) memory protection, page swapping, using XML for data and many other things we do today are also more expansive than the more raw approach -- but do we really want to go back to this?
I wish that all of these dying companies would open-source their code.
Tell you what, you provide the servers and I'll write the software, and even make it better than AudioGalaxy!
IOW: I don't really think that it's their closed source attitude that hinders alternative services...
Read the article (was: Re:Yahoo's problems...)
on
Hacking Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Informative
if Yahoo has such easily exploitable end-user software, I'm very worried about the quality of their security as a whole.
The article is not about (security related to) instant messaging, but e.g. bots signing up for a dozen Yahoo E-mail accounts, which use them for spam, people grabbing their stock quotes every fifth minute and re-publish them on their own site, people who do password attacks on auction accounts to trigger a lock-out, so that the bidder can't place any new bids during the last hour of the action etc.
These are all stories covered here or at the Reg. Even for MS, which has reliably averaged one PR disaster per week for the last year at least,
I'm afraid that I don't share your optimism. During the last year I recall Microsoft getting mention in the national news (on or publicly (non-commercially) funded TV-station) on 3 different occasions.
The launch of the Xbox (yes, that made it to the public news, even though PS2, N64 or similar never did) --- the launch of previous versions of Windows also amounted to news coverage.
when Bill testified, though only reporting that he said that if Windows were to be split up then it would take the development 10 years back, and he could not guarantee the stability --- this was in no way questioned by the media (even though they normally love to bring in experts to comment on stuff).
Microsoft bought a Danish software company (NaVision) for 10 billion KR (~= $1.2 billions) --- this was reported as a success story (everybody wants to be bought by Microsoft).
So I'm afraid that all this bad PR never reach the mainstream.
Some of my (technical) friends and fellow students (of computer science) are even pro Microsoft, and probably find me rather fanatic.
Oh, one last little test... open up a loooong site in each (nice fat thread on Slashdot at Score:0 will do it), then press and hold the down arrow key and see how long it takes to scroll to the bottom. Opera is about twice as fast as Mozilla, and about half again as fast as IE.
The time it takes to scroll to the bottom is proportional with font size (the accumulated height of the page) and line increment assigned to arrow down.
So that test doesn't really show anything besides perhaps a little bit of ignorance on your part;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I would share music because it was much easier to grab a dozen mp3's from AudioGalaxy whenever I heard of an artist which might have been my flavour -- giving them a listen, and if it was any good, buying the album.
So I care a great deal about copyright, but was still trading lots of tunes with good conscience.
Call me a hypocrite, but I bought much more music when I had access to AudioGalaxy then today, where I do not trade music, and cannot find any inspiration in the stuff the record labels try to make available through public channels.
He has later retracted his statement, but it is not positive.
And this post sums up what Ruby thinks of Bruce :-)
Each window is drawn entirely with the cpu in main memory and uploaded as a texture -- then OpenGL is used to blend these textures.
AudioGalaxy didn't have a moderation system, but for each artist there was an easy to use message board, so just go to your favourite artist and see what other people recommend (and read why, if you don't care why, there was of course also the correlation system also found at Amazon).
I never bought as much music as in the days of AudioGalaxy, even though I had to "import" it from various different countries, since much of it was not available in the mainstream music stores.
So you think that *every* file format should re-invent the wheel and define a tagging scheme? So an mp3-player will need to read and parse ID3 v1, v2.2, v2.3 and v2.4 (yes, all these tagging schemes are incompatible) and when Ogg Vorbis support becomes an issue, create a new parser for their meta data format...
Also, some files are not really in a format, so you can't embed meta data within these, e.g. text/plain (used for scripts, sources and similar).
ehh... I list the reasons I dislike BBEdit, you then say "don't be an ass", and now you accuse me of being disrespectful...
This doesn't add up...
My question was actually sincere, I do realise that a lot of people praise BBEdit as "the king of editors", but I really fail to see the attraction -- I have tried to use it on several occasions, but I lack tons of features, it has a horrible user interface, is slow to start up (the app bundle is ~17 MB) and the features it has are sort of in the way...
I have started to write my own editor, borrowing inspiration from close to every other editor I have ever seen, but seeing how BBEdit is mentioned on the mac, take this interview as an example, which amongst other refer to it as: "one of the best examples of how modular software should work. It's small, fast, slick [...]", then I have started to seriously doubt on my success on providing a small (below 512 KB) feature rich editor to OS X...
What is it that I am missing with BBEdit?
And no, I am no fan of vim nor emacs, although at least with these editors, I know exactly why one would favour it over a "graphical" editor which is well integrated into the operating system...
Seriously, did you try a decent editor? BBEdit has no easy to use scratch macros (if macros at all?), its column selection is a joke (doesn't extend past the text, can't paste as columns), the syntax highlight isn't user configurable, it hasn't got overwrite mode, freehanded (non-restrained) cursor movement, auto-completion (or just completion), doesn't use the user configurable OS X key bindings (and the default values doesn't conform to the rest of the OS), it can't fold text, auto-underline misspelled words, hasn't got a useable (unlimited) clipboard history and I could go on for hours...
All in all, I'll take the free editor that comes with Cocoa (and is used in Project Builder) over BBEdit any day (with the TextExtras plug-in of course :-) )... at least this one doesn't get on my nerves by ridicules names for the options, ugly often border less windows, non-consistent (and non style guide compliant) GUI, and a whole lot of question for each simple little operation...
ohh... and it takes forever to start, it's big and bloated -- the slogan: "Software that doesn't suck" really seems to be self irony IMHO!
On the contrary, I have promoted my hobby to be my job and made room for another hobby.
I wouldn't doubt that for a second (being from Denmark) -- we mumble and make many contractions where we simply skip entire words and/or parts thereof. For example when saying "Det er godt" we say "De' got" and "Hvordan går det?" becomes "Hvo'n går de?".
I wasn't the AC posting the previous, but AFAIK Apple don't want to present their users with two buttons, because that introduce an element of ambiguity -- it's also written in their style guide that all functionality of an application should be reachable with one button.
6-7 years ago I also frowned at the established world for their need to neglect all my (self taught) skills -- today I have 6 years of computer science behind me and do realize how naive I were back then.
First of all, you can't really say something is bad without having tried it
Secondly, I have seen much code produced by self taught geniuses -- the problem is that it scales really bad, is a mess to maintain etc. etc. Rarely have self taught people any knowledge about time complexity, proper OOD/MVC and they never use the existing literature to find solutions to their problems, thinking instead that their solution is probably just as good as what an entire field of research have produced over several years.
Self taught people are mostly hackers -- they hack a solution
However, many people with certificates and even formal education are also incompetent, and have a tendency to give the entire system a bad name among the self taught.
Then let me explain:
Mac OS X has a serious problem with text layout (the NSLayoutManager class and friends).
I myself is currently writing a browser, and I have a 740 KB test page. If I use NSLayoutManager to obtain the text dimensions then it takes 20 seconds to layout this page (on my 733 MHz G4) -- if I instead use some cached glyphs (which is needed if I want to bypass NSLayoutManager) and NSFont's positionOfGlyph:precededBy: then I can cut down the time to around a seconds.
Unfortunately caching glyphs is not really a good solution because I'll then miss ligatures and other features of Mac OS X (not to mention that there is not really any well documented way to obtain the glyphs in the first place -- ATS is completely undocumented).
However, I believe that Opera use Carbon, which would not be using NSLayoutManager (but maybe it use ATSUI, which again rely on ATS, which should be the system NSLayoutManager use) -- and Opera spend 50 seconds on the page in question (OmniWeb takes almost 2 minutes, IE & MZ both take 12 seconds).
The sad thing is, my 40 MHz Amiga can parse, layout and render the same page in 8 seconds.
So trying to provide the audience of my web-pages with some comfort (a single click and a decent (configurable) mail editor appears, which allows for the address to be bookmarked, the letter to be saved as a draft for later completion, sending a carbon copy to a friend etc.) should be re-payed with punishment like being spammed?
Are you one of those persons who also claim that if you leave your stuff unprotected then you deserve to have it stolen? what a sad society we live in...
Why is it that even though I'm reading slashdot with only high scoring comments displayed, then I always have to read about popup-blocking in Mozilla?
I mean, this feature were to be found in other browsers before Mozilla, and I'm sure those reading slashdot & using Mozilla have already found out how to disable the popup adds!
These high-rated comments are starting to get more annoying than the popup adds themselves... :-)
I don't know which is worse...
Come on... this just looks like a stupid competition of who have read the most books -- I doubt people have even read through many of the books they suggest, or have considered why that book should be a must read.
It's similar to me listing all my CD's and labeling them Music you must have.
I consider myself rather skilled when it comes to computers/programming -- but even though I've read many of the books mentioned, I certainly wouldn't say they are must read -- Knuths The Art of Computer Programming seems to come up rather often, so does Design Patterns (during the recent years), but exactly what is it in these books that make them a must read? Is it simply so that you can discuss the content with your fellow programmer friends (or should I say brag about having skimmed the table of contents?).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against books -- I have 6 years of formal education behind me, but seeing people list the same hyped books just make me think that those people haven't really read anything else, and also have missed out on a lot of real computer science information left out of those popular books... not to mention the parent list, which list 10 books that in their title reveal that they are tied to C/C++ -- C/C++ is a practical language, but academically inferior, and only reading about that language certainly will limit your perspective -- besides, how much can these books teach you apart from the actual language? You should just get the language definition and then read books about all sorts of other topics, to get more general design and algorithm knowledge, not to mention getting your hands dirty by getting some experience!
Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't this be completely handled by the iPod itself? I mean, it has to be able to read the file system when it isn't connected to a Mac...
Professional typesetters do use sans serif fonts on-screen, because here the resolution is not good enough for the serifs, and so they act as noise rather than reading cues.
Unfortunately I cannot find the article ATM, but somewhere on the web is an interview with the person who designed the free Microsoft fonts (who is a professional type-face designer), and he explains what he did to ensure optimal readability on-screen -- an interesting read...
ehm... modularity is always good -- basically a micro kernel tries to put everything in user mode, this will make it easier to upgrade only parts of the system (do you really like to recompile your kernel to try a new file system?), it will add more features for the non-root user, because he can run his own services without security concerns (AFAIK a user can't mount a file system (which would actually be handy, e.g. to mount ftp as a file system on my unix account)), it will improve the uptime, because only the parts in the micro kernel really needs to be 100% stable, as anything besides this can just be killed (and re-started).
The only real argument I have heard against the monolithic approach is speed, but a) this is not a proved fact, for example Jochen Liedtke's L4 micro kernel (for x86) is an efficient implementation that beats the monolithic approachs, and b) memory protection, page swapping, using XML for data and many other things we do today are also more expansive than the more raw approach -- but do we really want to go back to this?
Tell you what, you provide the servers and I'll write the software, and even make it better than AudioGalaxy!
IOW: I don't really think that it's their closed source attitude that hinders alternative services...
The article is not about (security related to) instant messaging, but e.g. bots signing up for a dozen Yahoo E-mail accounts, which use them for spam, people grabbing their stock quotes every fifth minute and re-publish them on their own site, people who do password attacks on auction accounts to trigger a lock-out, so that the bidder can't place any new bids during the last hour of the action etc.
But read a story about any technical device and you'll find that readers are posting their review, because they bought it months ago...
Besides, when they post a story about the job marked, wouldn't it seem rather pompous if people start to write about their huge salaries?
With 200.000+ readers I'd tend to think so, as you don't see posts from 200.000 different individuals on each story...
I'm afraid that I don't share your optimism. During the last year I recall Microsoft getting mention in the national news (on or publicly (non-commercially) funded TV-station) on 3 different occasions.
So I'm afraid that all this bad PR never reach the mainstream.
Some of my (technical) friends and fellow students (of computer science) are even pro Microsoft, and probably find me rather fanatic.
The time it takes to scroll to the bottom is proportional with font size (the accumulated height of the page) and line increment assigned to arrow down.
So that test doesn't really show anything besides perhaps a little bit of ignorance on your part ;-)