There has actually been a lot of research into how to make progress bars "feel" right -- it turns out that certain psychological tricks can help with that, too. Roughly speaking, it tends to be better to be conservative at the start (i.e. give a worst case estimate) and then improve it over time, than the other way around. Hence a simple trick to improve the user experience is to take whatever you think will be an accurate value for the progress, but then apply a scale to it to make it appear slower at the beginning, and faster at the end. This is studied and discussed in depth in the paper "Rethinking the Progress Bar": http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHarrison.pdf
For example, if x is the progress ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, then instead of using x directly, use f(x) = (x+(1-x)/2)^8 to calculate the progress estimate you are going to display to the user.
The key observation here is that if I am told something will be finished in 1 minute, but then it turns out to take 2 minutes, I am upset; if instead I am told it will take 2 minutes, but then it finishes already after 1 minute, I'll be happy. Of course this has limits, and one needs to strike a delicate balance: if the original estimate is too far off and bad, the negative reaction to the initial bad estimate and how far it is away from reality will create a strong negative reaction on its own (what would you think if you were regularly told "performing this operation will take ~2 days" when it ends up needing only 1 minute each time...)
what a stupid question. it's a wide open internet, not one company server
look:
do you understand why the music industry is dying because of the internet?
Last I looked, they actually weren't doing that badly, after learning some hard lessons... but that's besides the point.
now apply that understanding to your proposal, because you are asking for the same damn unenforceable impossible thing
This akin to arguing that theft should not be illegal; after all, a law cannot stop somebody from stealing, and clearly thefts still happens every day, too, so what is the point in forbidding it in the first place?
Yet it seems a majority of people think that outlawing theft is a good idea anyway, and that social contracts (which laws are, in the end) in general have a reason to exist.
I also dislike the fact that they but a huge video on there. Instead of putting up bigger links to e.g. their guided tour https://www.dropbox.com/tour (which also contains a video, but one doesn't have to view it to follow the tour). Or the features page -- both links are the bottom.
So, while I agree that they should be a lot bigger and more prominent, I'd like to point out that these are not *that* hard to find;)
Or, you could just take the guided tour https://www.dropbox.com/tour the DropBox site offers (which also contains a video, but one doesn't have to view it to follow the tour).
Deleted all cookies, it still crashes. Best way to trigger it is to go to that site, and then follow internal links, and scroll a lot, while they are loading. I.e. click on a link and start wildly to scroll up and down (works nicely using my MacBook Pro's touchpad).
Last crash involved WebCore::BitmapImage::draw.
No extensions installed at all!
Yes, I do have some math fonts (used by jsMath) installed. However, no such problems occur with Firefox and Chrome. So while I of course can't exclude the possibility that a font is corrupt, it seems strange that Chrome (which also uses Webkit) is not affected...
Also weird is that I get quite some different stack traces. But several of them seem to be related to cookie storage (stack trace contains among other things MemoryCookies::~MemoryCookies and DiskCookieStorage::syncStorageLocked).
I'll try deleting all cookies. Weird.
I was quite excited when I saw this and went to get it. Now I have it for half an hour and already regret it -- it already crashes over a dozen times on me -- albeit always on the same page, just at different points (and with different crash stack backtraces, too). Specifically, http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ is where I see those. Anybody else having similar problems?
What about the rights of the children? I don't think that parents "own" their children, and should be allowed to do with them in whatever way they want. Sure, parents should take care of their kids until they are old enough to really make well-informed own decisions.
The idea behind enforcing that all children are sent to a school (which by the way, includes many alternate school forms, not just the regular state schools, as many people here claim incorrectly) is that this way, all kids are ensured a chance to get suitable education. And moreover, to have a chance to learn how to socialize with other people, too. To learn to live with people who have different believes and opinions side by side, and respect them. In my class, there were christians, atheists, muslims. I grew up knowing that there are many different kinds of people out there, and that yet they are (mostly;) normal people you can have great fun with and like. Not enemies, as many religions paint any non-believers, sadly.
Maybe the current way of forcing all kids in Germany to visit some kind of school is not the best. But then I also don't believe that allowing parents to isolate their children and to indoctrinate them is a good idea, either -- no matter whether it is orthodox Christianity, radical Islam, zealous Science-believe, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The foundation of a democracy is mutual understanding and a willingness to cooperate with each other, and I feel that's more important than granting a universal home schooling right, with all its pros and cons.
Wait, we are talking about somebody who has "disappeared" a year ago; only he hasn't really disappeared, he occasionally showed up for meetings, making promises, then vanished again (and didn't keep the promises).
How would this be explained or justified by a hypothetical medical situation? Even if there was one, then shouldn't he have said months ago "Hey folks, I am in some sort of bad situation, somebody needs to take over my responsibilities while I try to resolve things." ?
Nope, I think what they did was very reasonable; although maybe they should have done it a couple months earlier.
Sorry, but your spreading incorrect information here:
First of, it *is* possible to cancel projects. In the admin section, there is a whole section dedicated specifically to "Project Removal". In addition, you can takeover existing orphaned projects, there is a support document explaining how.
Secondly: If you lost your password or do not have access to your old email address anymore: They have a whole support document dealing just with that topic, too: .
Finally, projects which never made any code releases and have no other "real" data etc. are automtaically purged after some time. In addition they even undertook a big effort 1-2 years ago to mark and "delete" empty projects (with lots of fail safes, asking all project members whether the project is really dead etc. etc.) -- it still produced a cry of outrage over here on slashdot... The usual double standards seem to apply here:-/
Oh the red X is quite noticable. But so are the highlighted (blue) navigation arrows, which happen to reside in a *different* window. but which one would expect to reside in the *active* window... Frankly, my first reaction was to say "the window with the red X", too, but now I am confused, and having never used a Vista beta so far, I wouldn't risk betting money on either of the two candidates for "active window":-).
On OS X (and probably other systems, like older Windows versions, though I am not too familiar with those), many more visual clues are used to indicate which window is active: Scroll bars are drawn differently (un-colored) in the background, window titles get grayed out, buttons change visually, etc. . Well, I am sure Microsoft will eventually do that, too (the approach to color the close widget red on the active windows exists on OS X, too, BTW).
Sorry to say but you are talking complete nonsense.
First off, this was about the C++ ABI used by GCC, which indeed changed (again!) between GCC 3.1 and 3.3, meaning that C++ code is incompatbile between those versions.
Next, Mach-O and CFM are binary executable formats, which is a whole other story. Besides, you make it sound as if they were the same, when in fact they are not. They are two very different formats. CFM is the one used traditonally, the only one supported by classic MacOS. Max OS X also supports it, and in fact if you want your Carbon programs to run both on OS 9 and OS X, you have to supply them in CFM. However, GCC is *not* able of outputting CFM. The only C/C++ compiler running on OS X which support this is (AFAIK) MetroWerks CodeWarrior.
Mach-O is the binary format of choice for anything else which only runs on OS X, and it's the only format GCC and the IBM XL compiler support (on OS X, that is).
First off: we agree, even if SCO wins the law suite against IBM, it means little, since it is about SCOs claim that IBM broke a contract with them, not about copyright for code in the kernel. The only 'bad' scenario would be if SCO could prove that the Linux kernel contains code violating their rights
You are of course right that the person buying the stolen wheels from IBM can't be punished for the wrong they did (I am not saying IBM did anything wrong, I am just following your example:-).
However, once you learn that the goods you acquired were stolen, you still have to return them to the rightful owner. You can try to get reimbursement from the guy who sold you the stolen goods, but the original owner doesn't owe you anything, even if you are already using the wheels on your car, and removing them means for you that you can't use your car anymore.
Translated this means that from a legal point of view, you would have to stop using any kernel using code which violates SCOs rights, even if it's not your fault that the code is in there. If you want to keep using the code anyway, then you have to settle it with SCO, which could mean paying for license, if they request it (as they did).
His analogy is way off base. He compares knowingly comitting theft, to unknowingly using code that was distributed in breach of contract.
I have to disagree with your reasoning here. In Germany we have a proverb: "Unwissenheit schuetzt vor Strafe nicht", roughly translated "Not knowing doesn't protect you from punishment". This is actually a rule of most modern law system, including that of the US. The fact that you didn't know you were involved in a crime doesn't protect you from the consequences.
That said, don't get me wrong, I am no SCO friend, and I don't believe they have any realistic chance to effectively sue anybody for anything. And as other here have stated, they can not sue customers for (hypothetical) license infringments of some vendor(s). But that doesn't make your reasoning any better:-)
There is a port to Symbian 7.0, for the Sony Ericsson P800: http://dreo.org/p800/. And it will soon be integrated into CVS, too.
Sorry, you'll have to try again 8-)
Thanks for your wisdom which enlightens us. I knew this ScummVM stuff must be a sham. Oh, BTW, can you please point me again at those instructions to get WINE running on PalmOS, MorphOS, DreamCast, WinCE or Mac OS X? I just can't seem to find them right now.
Hmmm, and how again do I activate the aspect ratio correction and Scale2x for Maniac Mansion?
Oh and while you are at it, please tell me which program I need to use my Amiga version of Mi2 with Wine?
I am looking forward to your helpful answers, oh grand master and bringer of light:-)
No, you missed that page was only added after Christoph complained. And even now, it is not as if you were ever to see it, unless you specifically look for it.
I don't think one should put down Apex generally, and I don't suspect real bad will behind his actions. But I also think it was pretty lame by him to pretend he did port all the software, when in fact a large subset of his packages were straight "ports" (or should I say: rip-offs?) of Fink packages. That in turn wouldn't be too bad, if he just gave credit where credit was due.
I think SDL is a great piece of code, I like it alot. But for mostly 3D apps, I think it might be worth to consider CrystalSpace, a powerful LGPL 3d engine. It works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, BeOS, and more. A PS2 port is in the work, too.
I must admit that I have so far not used it; but I heard so many good things about it, i believe it is wort checking it out, if you intend to write a 3D applcation for many platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
There has actually been a lot of research into how to make progress bars "feel" right -- it turns out that certain psychological tricks can help with that, too. Roughly speaking, it tends to be better to be conservative at the start (i.e. give a worst case estimate) and then improve it over time, than the other way around. Hence a simple trick to improve the user experience is to take whatever you think will be an accurate value for the progress, but then apply a scale to it to make it appear slower at the beginning, and faster at the end. This is studied and discussed in depth in the paper "Rethinking the Progress Bar": http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHarrison.pdf
For example, if x is the progress ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, then instead of using x directly, use f(x) = (x+(1-x)/2)^8 to calculate the progress estimate you are going to display to the user.
The key observation here is that if I am told something will be finished in 1 minute, but then it turns out to take 2 minutes, I am upset; if instead I am told it will take 2 minutes, but then it finishes already after 1 minute, I'll be happy. Of course this has limits, and one needs to strike a delicate balance: if the original estimate is too far off and bad, the negative reaction to the initial bad estimate and how far it is away from reality will create a strong negative reaction on its own (what would you think if you were regularly told "performing this operation will take ~2 days" when it ends up needing only 1 minute each time...)
There are other tricks to make the UI feel "faster" when it comes to progress bars, see e.g. http://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-to-make-progress-bars-feel-faster-to-users/
what a stupid question. it's a wide open internet, not one company server
look:
do you understand why the music industry is dying because of the internet?
Last I looked, they actually weren't doing that badly, after learning some hard lessons... but that's besides the point.
now apply that understanding to your proposal, because you are asking for the same damn unenforceable impossible thing
This akin to arguing that theft should not be illegal; after all, a law cannot stop somebody from stealing, and clearly thefts still happens every day, too, so what is the point in forbidding it in the first place?
Yet it seems a majority of people think that outlawing theft is a good idea anyway, and that social contracts (which laws are, in the end) in general have a reason to exist.
Go figure...
I also dislike the fact that they but a huge video on there. Instead of putting up bigger links to e.g. their guided tour https://www.dropbox.com/tour (which also contains a video, but one doesn't have to view it to follow the tour). Or the features page -- both links are the bottom.
;)
So, while I agree that they should be a lot bigger and more prominent, I'd like to point out that these are not *that* hard to find
Or, you could just take the guided tour https://www.dropbox.com/tour the DropBox site offers (which also contains a video, but one doesn't have to view it to follow the tour).
Deleted all cookies, it still crashes. Best way to trigger it is to go to that site, and then follow internal links, and scroll a lot, while they are loading. I.e. click on a link and start wildly to scroll up and down (works nicely using my MacBook Pro's touchpad). Last crash involved WebCore::BitmapImage::draw.
Yes, scrolling seems to be involved for me, too. And I submitted a couple dozen crash reports already, hopefully they can figure it out :)
No extensions installed at all! Yes, I do have some math fonts (used by jsMath) installed. However, no such problems occur with Firefox and Chrome. So while I of course can't exclude the possibility that a font is corrupt, it seems strange that Chrome (which also uses Webkit) is not affected... Also weird is that I get quite some different stack traces. But several of them seem to be related to cookie storage (stack trace contains among other things MemoryCookies::~MemoryCookies and DiskCookieStorage::syncStorageLocked). I'll try deleting all cookies. Weird.
I was quite excited when I saw this and went to get it. Now I have it for half an hour and already regret it -- it already crashes over a dozen times on me -- albeit always on the same page, just at different points (and with different crash stack backtraces, too). Specifically, http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ is where I see those. Anybody else having similar problems?
What about the rights of the children? I don't think that parents "own" their children, and should be allowed to do with them in whatever way they want. Sure, parents should take care of their kids until they are old enough to really make well-informed own decisions.
The idea behind enforcing that all children are sent to a school (which by the way, includes many alternate school forms, not just the regular state schools, as many people here claim incorrectly) is that this way, all kids are ensured a chance to get suitable education. And moreover, to have a chance to learn how to socialize with other people, too. To learn to live with people who have different believes and opinions side by side, and respect them. In my class, there were christians, atheists, muslims. I grew up knowing that there are many different kinds of people out there, and that yet they are (mostly ;) normal people you can have great fun with and like. Not enemies, as many religions paint any non-believers, sadly.
Maybe the current way of forcing all kids in Germany to visit some kind of school is not the best. But then I also don't believe that allowing parents to isolate their children and to indoctrinate them is a good idea, either -- no matter whether it is orthodox Christianity, radical Islam, zealous Science-believe, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The foundation of a democracy is mutual understanding and a willingness to cooperate with each other, and I feel that's more important than granting a universal home schooling right, with all its pros and cons.
Wait, we are talking about somebody who has "disappeared" a year ago; only he hasn't really disappeared, he occasionally showed up for meetings, making promises, then vanished again (and didn't keep the promises). How would this be explained or justified by a hypothetical medical situation? Even if there was one, then shouldn't he have said months ago "Hey folks, I am in some sort of bad situation, somebody needs to take over my responsibilities while I try to resolve things." ? Nope, I think what they did was very reasonable; although maybe they should have done it a couple months earlier.
Sorry, but your spreading incorrect information here:
First of, it *is* possible to cancel projects. In the admin section, there is a whole section dedicated specifically to "Project Removal". In addition, you can takeover existing orphaned projects, there is a support document explaining how.
Secondly: If you lost your password or do not have access to your old email address anymore: They have a whole support document dealing just with that topic, too: .
Finally, projects which never made any code releases and have no other "real" data etc. are automtaically purged after some time. In addition they even undertook a big effort 1-2 years ago to mark and "delete" empty projects (with lots of fail safes, asking all project members whether the project is really dead etc. etc.) -- it still produced a cry of outrage over here on slashdot... The usual double standards seem to apply here :-/
Oh the red X is quite noticable. But so are the highlighted (blue) navigation arrows, which happen to reside in a *different* window. but which one would expect to reside in the *active* window... Frankly, my first reaction was to say "the window with the red X", too, but now I am confused, and having never used a Vista beta so far, I wouldn't risk betting money on either of the two candidates for "active window" :-).
On OS X (and probably other systems, like older Windows versions, though I am not too familiar with those), many more visual clues are used to indicate which window is active: Scroll bars are drawn differently (un-colored) in the background, window titles get grayed out, buttons change visually, etc. . Well, I am sure Microsoft will eventually do that, too (the approach to color the close widget red on the active windows exists on OS X, too, BTW).
First off, this was about the C++ ABI used by GCC, which indeed changed (again!) between GCC 3.1 and 3.3, meaning that C++ code is incompatbile between those versions.
Next, Mach-O and CFM are binary executable formats, which is a whole other story. Besides, you make it sound as if they were the same, when in fact they are not. They are two very different formats. CFM is the one used traditonally, the only one supported by classic MacOS. Max OS X also supports it, and in fact if you want your Carbon programs to run both on OS 9 and OS X, you have to supply them in CFM. However, GCC is *not* able of outputting CFM. The only C/C++ compiler running on OS X which support this is (AFAIK) MetroWerks CodeWarrior.
Mach-O is the binary format of choice for anything else which only runs on OS X, and it's the only format GCC and the IBM XL compiler support (on OS X, that is).
First off: we agree, even if SCO wins the law suite against IBM, it means little, since it is about SCOs claim that IBM broke a contract with them, not about copyright for code in the kernel. The only 'bad' scenario would be if SCO could prove that the Linux kernel contains code violating their rights
You are of course right that the person buying the stolen wheels from IBM can't be punished for the wrong they did (I am not saying IBM did anything wrong, I am just following your example :-).
However, once you learn that the goods you acquired were stolen, you still have to return them to the rightful owner. You can try to get reimbursement from the guy who sold you the stolen goods, but the original owner doesn't owe you anything, even if you are already using the wheels on your car, and removing them means for you that you can't use your car anymore.
Translated this means that from a legal point of view, you would have to stop using any kernel using code which violates SCOs rights, even if it's not your fault that the code is in there. If you want to keep using the code anyway, then you have to settle it with SCO, which could mean paying for license, if they request it (as they did).
I have to disagree with your reasoning here. In Germany we have a proverb: "Unwissenheit schuetzt vor Strafe nicht", roughly translated "Not knowing doesn't protect you from punishment". This is actually a rule of most modern law system, including that of the US. The fact that you didn't know you were involved in a crime doesn't protect you from the consequences.
That said, don't get me wrong, I am no SCO friend, and I don't believe they have any realistic chance to effectively sue anybody for anything. And as other here have stated, they can not sue customers for (hypothetical) license infringments of some vendor(s). But that doesn't make your reasoning any better :-)
There is a port to Symbian 7.0, for the Sony Ericsson P800: http://dreo.org/p800/. And it will soon be integrated into CVS, too.
Sorry, you'll have to try again 8-)
Thanks for your wisdom which enlightens us. I knew this ScummVM stuff must be a sham. Oh, BTW, can you please point me again at those instructions to get WINE running on PalmOS, MorphOS, DreamCast, WinCE or Mac OS X? I just can't seem to find them right now.
Hmmm, and how again do I activate the aspect ratio correction and Scale2x for Maniac Mansion?
Oh and while you are at it, please tell me which program I need to use my Amiga version of Mi2 with Wine?
I am looking forward to your helpful answers, oh grand master and bringer of light :-)
No, you missed that page was only added after Christoph complained. And even now, it is not as if you were ever to see it, unless you specifically look for it.
I don't think one should put down Apex generally, and I don't suspect real bad will behind his actions. But I also think it was pretty lame by him to pretend he did port all the software, when in fact a large subset of his packages were straight "ports" (or should I say: rip-offs?) of Fink packages. That in turn wouldn't be too bad, if he just gave credit where credit was due.
I think SDL is a great piece of code, I like it alot. But for mostly 3D apps, I think it might be worth to consider CrystalSpace, a powerful LGPL 3d engine. It works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, BeOS, and more. A PS2 port is in the work, too. I must admit that I have so far not used it; but I heard so many good things about it, i believe it is wort checking it out, if you intend to write a 3D applcation for many platforms.