I'm all for technological nostalgia, and let's do something new with old technology just because we can, but this is a bridge too far. Morse code was outdated even 100 years ago!
And before you say "never give out your e-mail" there are Sales and Support people that really don't have a choice.
Not to mention those public e-mail addresses on websites... "support@mycompany.com" that are just absolutely drowned with spam.
Don't forget that, thanks to email worms, there's really no such thing as a "private" email address anymore. If you forwarded an email to a friend, who forwarded to a friend, ad nauseum any one of those people in the trail not only has the address, but might also unwillingly pass it on to others if infected with an email worm.
The problem here is that an email address is basically like giving out a master key to your house, just so someone can drop off a note. There's no authentication inherent in the specifications.
This is why I think that all sub-standard open source mail servers should be outlawed in favor of Exchange 2000, which in coordination with Active Directory is the only messaging solution which supports a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) whereby sources of email can be authenticated by the sender's trusted certificate, and if necessary blocked.
That's really just because Apple's control of the hardware and the OS has allowed them dictatorial control w/r/t APIs. I can't say I have first hand knowledge of OSX development, I would imagine it's hard to get text rendered in the screen buffer without using a certain Apple API which ensures that everything scales right with resolution, as well as complying with all the Aqua goodies (transparency, slurping windows, etc.). So it's a tradeoff of the developer's control of things vs. standardization.
I can put an entry in a CSS style sheet which says that all checkboxes on my web page should be rendered as 8 pixels high. Of course, this is going to kill people who are running at 1600x1200. Does this mean that this ability shouldn't be allowed in the CSS spec? No, it has its uses, but I'm a bad developer for using it in the wrong place. Also, if I do use it for a reason, I don't expect a browser to override it and change my page's display.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm running at 1600x1200 right now. I know it has it's shortcomings in some places (Microsoft Money especially), but 90% of the UI is scaled the way I want it.
Yes, dialog boxes are definitely a bitch. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 and although I have my general UI stuff tweaked to satisfaction, all those control panels and IE dialog boxes are still tiny. My take on it is that I don't spend all day screwing around with dialog boxes, so as long as 90% of my UI experience is covered, I'll live.
XP is probably the first windows that takes some of what the original poster was bitching about. It lets you scale most things. However I would be willing to bet most third party windows do not take these sorts of things into account.
Nope, it's been there since Win95. Also, the vast majority of professional apps developed in say the past 8 years, base measurements on the System Properties. You usually see problems with some app developed as "my first VB project" by some guy in Bum-Fucked Eastern Siberia or something.
In Windows, the OS is precisely compliant to what the application developer wanted the program to do. For instance, if I write a web page with an "img src" tag with the height and width set in pixels, then the image will be that size, regardless of the resolution of the monitor. If I set the height and width in a proportional unit like points, or to be a percentage of the window size, then it will scale along with everything else. Programming using Windows Forms works the same way, although I know some of the old widgets refused scaling (I seem to recall some difference in the Picture vs Bitmap control in VB 5 or 6).
In other words, it's up to the app developer to base their UI on the dynamic System Properties rather than on fixed values. If, for instance, Windows YP was developed to "override" fixed pixel sizes and try to make them proportional, it would probably screw up more than it would fix.
It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts. You should just be able to tell it the size of your monitor and have fonts displayed at the *correct* size, dammit.
Umm, that's exactly what it does. If you have a.inf file for your specific monitor, Windows is aware of the physical size and calculates the DPI accordingly. If you don't have a specific INF or you feel its calculation is wrong, You can go into Display Properties>Settings>Advanced and set the DPI settings to Custom, at which point a ruler is displayed onscreen which you can compare to a physical ruler, and adjust until they're equal. At this point, a 10 pt font is the exact same size on any properly calibrated monitor. The Small Large or Extra Large settings are just shortcuts that bump up the size of all UI widgets to a certain setpoint; you can just as easily get into the advanced Appearance settings and set your Icon Captions to be 72 points, if that's what floats your boat.
The trouble is there are still a lot of apps that specify things in pixel sizes rather than in real units (centimetres) or some other scalable unit (fraction of the total display size).
I haven't run across one of these in quite a while; I know that about 8 years ago I saw some apps which were coded in old versions of VB or ported from Win 3.11 which would have problems when run in a high resolution in Win95, but I haven't seen many recently released major apps (in the Win98/2k/XP era) with these problems. I don't think vector icons are that important, as long as icons and bitmaps are used for the right things, and text is always rendered as a scalable font. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor right now, and the "News for Nerds" in the Slashdot logo looks like it's a 10 pt font. If it were rendered as HTML text, it would scale up along with the rest of the stuff based on the browser font size.
Make your fonts bigger, you dipstick. In Windows XP, right-click on the desktop, click Properties, click Appearance, and under Font Size pick Large or Extra Large. Oooooooooh difficult. Is your brain as impaired as your vision?
He's not suing the people who bought him an Ipod, he's suing the people who held him up for global ridicule and ruined his life. If I beat the shit out of you, and someone else comes along and gives you a teddy bear to comfort you, does that mean you shouldn't take action against me?
Yes, these are good arguments for XML vs. INI files, writing your own parser, etc. I think calling XSLT a nice scripting language provokes my gag reflex a little bit. My point was that Flash does mostly the same things (graphical interfaces), and currently these two are on par in deployment methods (SVG requires a plugin, Flash requires a plugin), whereas Flash already has a robust graphical "IDE" which is understood by many thousands of web developers. Like most languages, there's a hell of a difference between reading and writing the various X* languages, and actually programming in them.
But thanks for your useless. You have reinforced my impression of those who fear the right to keep and bear arms as irrational, unthinking people.
You are welcome for my useless. Thank you for participating in the latest bi-weekly Slashdot Second Amendment flamewar on Slashdot. I noticed that this week nobody brought up the "Hitler wanted gun control/Yeah but Hitler was a vegetarian too/Yeah and Hitler was an atheist too/No he wasn't" thread. Your little PS brings up the good ol' "You are a fascist" ad-hominem slippery slope, so we're really just one step away from the "YOU ARE A NAZI!" whistle which signals the end of the flamewar.
Thanks again for sharing becase "sharing is caring".
Along with ceacing bullet production, I suggest a NRA maintained list of owners cross-referenced with the guns they own. If a firearm is recovered from the scene of a crime, then the original owner should be charged with accessory to that crime. This would make people less likely to leave the crate of Glocks on their back porch to be "stolen".
And if you ever sold a gun, you'd be damn sure to see that the license was transfered.
God forbid, the Right Wing Maniacs say. That would be infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. But you can't even get a valid license plate without showing a title to a car (and showing transfer of that title from person to person).
Take Switzerland, for example (I think it's Switzerland), where all men are required to serve in the military.
Take Israel, where everyone's required to. Nobody dying of gunshot wounds there. Whoops, bad example.
Actually I think Switzerland's a bad example, given that collectively as a nation and a culture they haven't done anything aggressive since the time of Julius Caesar. I think they've had their balls off ever since Caesar decimated their population.
People do illegal things. Therefore, laws are ineffective. Therefore, we should get rid of all the laws (except the 2nd Amendment) and just carry a DEagle 5-0. Anyone who thinks differently is a whack-job.
Right, I can dig it. So why doesn't everybody load up on guns to protect themselves, we'll assign a gun to each kid on the first day of class, have handy ammo dispensing machines in the cafeteria, and the first time some goth calls some football player a "mean jock" and reaches for their piece they'll be pulverized into a thin red paste in a hail of 1000 bullets.
Thank you for officially beginning the obligatory Second Amendment flame-war. I will counter by making the obligatory mention of Columbine. "Columbine". Your turn.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for technological nostalgia, and let's do something new with old technology just because we can, but this is a bridge too far. Morse code was outdated even 100 years ago!
And before you say "never give out your e-mail" there are Sales and Support people that really don't have a choice.
Not to mention those public e-mail addresses on websites... "support@mycompany.com" that are just absolutely drowned with spam.
Don't forget that, thanks to email worms, there's really no such thing as a "private" email address anymore. If you forwarded an email to a friend, who forwarded to a friend, ad nauseum any one of those people in the trail not only has the address, but might also unwillingly pass it on to others if infected with an email worm.
The problem here is that an email address is basically like giving out a master key to your house, just so someone can drop off a note. There's no authentication inherent in the specifications.
This is why I think that all sub-standard open source mail servers should be outlawed in favor of Exchange 2000, which in coordination with Active Directory is the only messaging solution which supports a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) whereby sources of email can be authenticated by the sender's trusted certificate, and if necessary blocked.
With OS X, that's how it works.
That's really just because Apple's control of the hardware and the OS has allowed them dictatorial control w/r/t APIs. I can't say I have first hand knowledge of OSX development, I would imagine it's hard to get text rendered in the screen buffer without using a certain Apple API which ensures that everything scales right with resolution, as well as complying with all the Aqua goodies (transparency, slurping windows, etc.). So it's a tradeoff of the developer's control of things vs. standardization.
I can put an entry in a CSS style sheet which says that all checkboxes on my web page should be rendered as 8 pixels high. Of course, this is going to kill people who are running at 1600x1200. Does this mean that this ability shouldn't be allowed in the CSS spec? No, it has its uses, but I'm a bad developer for using it in the wrong place. Also, if I do use it for a reason, I don't expect a browser to override it and change my page's display.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm running at 1600x1200 right now. I know it has it's shortcomings in some places (Microsoft Money especially), but 90% of the UI is scaled the way I want it.
Has anyone succeeded in getting Linux to run on one of these?
Yes, dialog boxes are definitely a bitch. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 and although I have my general UI stuff tweaked to satisfaction, all those control panels and IE dialog boxes are still tiny. My take on it is that I don't spend all day screwing around with dialog boxes, so as long as 90% of my UI experience is covered, I'll live.
XP is probably the first windows that takes some of what the original poster was bitching about. It lets you scale most things. However I would be willing to bet most third party windows do not take these sorts of things into account.
Nope, it's been there since Win95. Also, the vast majority of professional apps developed in say the past 8 years, base measurements on the System Properties. You usually see problems with some app developed as "my first VB project" by some guy in Bum-Fucked Eastern Siberia or something.
In Windows, the OS is precisely compliant to what the application developer wanted the program to do. For instance, if I write a web page with an "img src" tag with the height and width set in pixels, then the image will be that size, regardless of the resolution of the monitor. If I set the height and width in a proportional unit like points, or to be a percentage of the window size, then it will scale along with everything else. Programming using Windows Forms works the same way, although I know some of the old widgets refused scaling (I seem to recall some difference in the Picture vs Bitmap control in VB 5 or 6).
In other words, it's up to the app developer to base their UI on the dynamic System Properties rather than on fixed values. If, for instance, Windows YP was developed to "override" fixed pixel sizes and try to make them proportional, it would probably screw up more than it would fix.
It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts. You should just be able to tell it the size of your monitor and have fonts displayed at the *correct* size, dammit.
.inf file for your specific monitor, Windows is aware of the physical size and calculates the DPI accordingly. If you don't have a specific INF or you feel its calculation is wrong, You can go into Display Properties>Settings>Advanced and set the DPI settings to Custom, at which point a ruler is displayed onscreen which you can compare to a physical ruler, and adjust until they're equal. At this point, a 10 pt font is the exact same size on any properly calibrated monitor. The Small Large or Extra Large settings are just shortcuts that bump up the size of all UI widgets to a certain setpoint; you can just as easily get into the advanced Appearance settings and set your Icon Captions to be 72 points, if that's what floats your boat.
Umm, that's exactly what it does. If you have a
HTH
The trouble is there are still a lot of apps that specify things in pixel sizes rather than in real units (centimetres) or some other scalable unit (fraction of the total display size).
I haven't run across one of these in quite a while; I know that about 8 years ago I saw some apps which were coded in old versions of VB or ported from Win 3.11 which would have problems when run in a high resolution in Win95, but I haven't seen many recently released major apps (in the Win98/2k/XP era) with these problems. I don't think vector icons are that important, as long as icons and bitmaps are used for the right things, and text is always rendered as a scalable font. For instance, I'm at 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor right now, and the "News for Nerds" in the Slashdot logo looks like it's a 10 pt font. If it were rendered as HTML text, it would scale up along with the rest of the stuff based on the browser font size.
Make your fonts bigger, you dipstick. In Windows XP, right-click on the desktop, click Properties, click Appearance, and under Font Size pick Large or Extra Large. Oooooooooh difficult. Is your brain as impaired as your vision?
Awesome dude.. the great David Wong replied to my troll. I hate your site, but I love you. Do you want to sue me for emotional distress now?
Kissy-kiss!
He's not suing the people who bought him an Ipod, he's suing the people who held him up for global ridicule and ruined his life. If I beat the shit out of you, and someone else comes along and gives you a teddy bear to comfort you, does that mean you shouldn't take action against me?
But what are they going to do about the fact that open source software SUCKS!!
Negative moderation incoming in 5...4...3...2...
Yes, these are good arguments for XML vs. INI files, writing your own parser, etc. I think calling XSLT a nice scripting language provokes my gag reflex a little bit. My point was that Flash does mostly the same things (graphical interfaces), and currently these two are on par in deployment methods (SVG requires a plugin, Flash requires a plugin), whereas Flash already has a robust graphical "IDE" which is understood by many thousands of web developers. Like most languages, there's a hell of a difference between reading and writing the various X* languages, and actually programming in them.
Is it just me, or is this just reinventing the wheel? It sounds like reinventing Flash only worse (because you have to "program" in XML).
But thanks for your useless. You have reinforced my impression of those who fear the right to keep and bear arms as irrational, unthinking people.
You are welcome for my useless. Thank you for participating in the latest bi-weekly Slashdot Second Amendment flamewar on Slashdot. I noticed that this week nobody brought up the "Hitler wanted gun control/Yeah but Hitler was a vegetarian too/Yeah and Hitler was an atheist too/No he wasn't" thread. Your little PS brings up the good ol' "You are a fascist" ad-hominem slippery slope, so we're really just one step away from the "YOU ARE A NAZI!" whistle which signals the end of the flamewar.
Thanks again for sharing becase "sharing is caring".
You almost forgot: "You'd all be speaking German or Japanese if it wasn't for us."
Which part don't you understand?
Along with ceacing bullet production, I suggest a NRA maintained list of owners cross-referenced with the guns they own. If a firearm is recovered from the scene of a crime, then the original owner should be charged with accessory to that crime. This would make people less likely to leave the crate of Glocks on their back porch to be "stolen".
And if you ever sold a gun, you'd be damn sure to see that the license was transfered.
God forbid, the Right Wing Maniacs say. That would be infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. But you can't even get a valid license plate without showing a title to a car (and showing transfer of that title from person to person).
Take Switzerland, for example (I think it's Switzerland), where all men are required to serve in the military.
Take Israel, where everyone's required to. Nobody dying of gunshot wounds there. Whoops, bad example.
Actually I think Switzerland's a bad example, given that collectively as a nation and a culture they haven't done anything aggressive since the time of Julius Caesar. I think they've had their balls off ever since Caesar decimated their population.
People do illegal things. Therefore, laws are ineffective. Therefore, we should get rid of all the laws (except the 2nd Amendment) and just carry a DEagle 5-0. Anyone who thinks differently is a whack-job.
Right, I can dig it. So why doesn't everybody load up on guns to protect themselves, we'll assign a gun to each kid on the first day of class, have handy ammo dispensing machines in the cafeteria, and the first time some goth calls some football player a "mean jock" and reaches for their piece they'll be pulverized into a thin red paste in a hail of 1000 bullets.
I mean, you can't stop it anyways, can you?
Thank you for officially beginning the obligatory Second Amendment flame-war. I will counter by making the obligatory mention of Columbine. "Columbine". Your turn.
Comic Book Guy? From the Simpsons? Is that you?
Don't try to fool me because I'm a seasoned expert at this. If you just use an AWP with an aimhack you can waste all of them before they turn around.