It all looks pretty reasonable, sexy OLED display *on* the actual device, and then you get to this part:
While it connects via USB, the player appears to have a non-standard connector, so it won't connect directly to a PC's USB port, just the bundled cable.
(From The Register)
Just like the iPod photo, which needed a special cable to connect to TVs to show photos, it will fail (iPod photo is Apple's slowest seller) - nobody wants to carry around a cable for basic functionality.
Imagine the scenario, you're at a client site, or at a friend's house, and need to move a file from one computer to another - and because the network is down, you have to use your USB stick. But no, you forgot to bring the cable. Brilliant.
in the Control Center, under KDE Components, there's a "Component Chooser" panel that's been there since 3.3 that allows you to set your default browser, email, text editor, IM client and terminal app.
Ah, that explains it - I was looking for the Komponent Khooser. Thanks!
How did parent get modded "Insightful"?
on
Two Books On Plone
·
· Score: 1
This is a troll if I ever saw one. I usually don't respond to trolls, but when they get modded "+4 Insightful", I have to.
Zope is a nice application server, but not exactly fast. It has nice abstractions like acquisition to do very complex web applications with only a few lines of code.
Zope is among the fastest application servers out there, and certainly scales better than any Java-based app server I've seen due to its native support for ZEO (server clustering). Boston.com runs a huge Zope cluster on the back-end, and CBS New York does the same. This is pure FUD.
Plone adds more layers of abstraction and makes the whole even slower. It is almost as if the plone designers read a book about advanced OO concepts and wanted to implement every single concept they just learned about in a single application.
Oh, come on. We haven't added any unnecessary abstractions - we have mostly added glue code to tie together other pieces of Zope and CMF code in a better way, and put a standards-compliant, user-friendly UI on it.
Abstractions are your friend. If you want to know everything about how things work, the Python code is available for you to read. Trust me, you don't want to have to think about every single detail about what's going on underneath the hood at all times.
The goal of Plone is to make things Just Work, and from the feedback we get from our users, we have succeeded in this.
The only way to get decent performance out of a plone/zope setup is to put a squid proxy in front of it, but that causes a lot of problems with dynamic content.
The only way to get decent performance on *any* web-based application server system is to put a cache in front. Apache and Squid work well, and we have giant Plone sites out there with Squid in front and dynamic cache invalidation. And what are the "problems with dynamic content" you are referring to? Both Apache and Squid handle expiry dates for web pages and cache invalidation just fine.
Plone is distributed for development, not deployment. It's common knowledge among all developers that you have to spend some time doing proper caching setups for bigger and more complex sites - but that's the case for every system out there.
The documentation is also horrible. If you are lucky it is just incomplete and out of date, but in most cases there is none at all.
There are three books on it out now, and the best one so far wasn't reviewed here. Andy McKay's book shows you most of what you want to know, is available for free (under a Creative Commons license) online. How is that "horrible"?
If you want to do a small application with less than one hit per second, go ahead. But for a big site: forget it.
It's actually the other way around. If you want to do a small site, Plone's workflow support, schema-based content type definitions, metadata engine, reference support, superior multilingual support and server scalability makes it a tad too complex for small projects, and we usually recommend other systems for people who just want a blog or a forum system.
Plone has had excellent support for blind people for quite a while, and passes both the US Section 508 accessibility guidelines and the much stricter WAI-AA accessibility requirements.
I've seen several blind people use the CMS without problems, and it's quite a satisfying feeling to see that people can make use of your application even when they can't see it.
We regularly get thank-you e-mails from blind people that are extremely grateful for giving them a way to do online publishing and intranets. Web standards really matter more than you think - especially to these groups of people.
What we have seen with our own project, the Plone Content Management System is that people very often use Windows as their evaluation platform. Since it is so simple for them to download, double-click the installer and have a Plone site up and running in a few minutes, they actually find that Plone is a good alternative to whatever proprietary solution they are using or considering. They get hands-on experience without the hassle of setting up a separate server to test it.
The most common scenario we see is organizations that are evaluating or currently using MS Sharepoint, and they find Plone as a much more compelling and useful system for them, regardless of cost.
When they can then get rid of the Windows box they purchased to run the other system, and install Linux on it, and not have to reboot the server every night just to keep it stable - they couldn't be happier.
Bruce Tognazzini (of Macintosh and Nielsen Norman Group fame) has an excellent article where he contrasts *actual* security with perceived security here. Well worth a read, and one the pages I most frequently refer to.
It's missing instant full-text indexing like the Opera M2 mailer has. The power you have with 4 years worth of mail instantly searchable/accessible in under a second is life-changing.
Getting rid of folders sounds scary in the beginning, but you have stopped categorizing links after Google arrived too, haven't you?;)
Opera even had this feature long before GMail, but GMail got all the buzz.
Have a look at the Opera M2 Tutorial if you want to know why this is one of the few non-free products I use.
Native system theme integration will be available for Gnome (version 2.4 or higher), Microsoft Windows (including XP and future versions), and KDE (version 3.2 and higher) desktop environments. On Windows XP the "Windows XP Style" must be chosen under Settings->Control Panel->Display->Appearance to achieve the correct look.
No mention of Mac OS X, so I guess that's a no.
Theme integration will be the default for desktop environments that support it (listed above). Systems that do not support it (e.g., Windows 98/ME/2000, CDE) will see no visual change in OpenOffice.org. On supported systems OpenOffice.org will always adopt the theme of the system and cannot choose not to do so.
They seem to ignore OS X as a platform altogether in the feature overview, not a good sign.
Oh, so you are that random guy that keeps calling me just because my Skype account name begins with an A and is at the top of the list.
But seriously, my major problem with Skype is an inability to only receive calls from people that are on your list (why that list isn't centrally stored is another mystery).
Yes, they can be blocked, but normally it's not repeated callers, it's different people every time. I want people to be on the blacklist until I've added them, much like IM works.
Well, having unbiased and good reporting and development of open source software (the upcoming Dirac codec, other media containment formats) come out of the BBC is worth something too.
Personally, I think the BBC is about the best news source out there, and have been so for as long as I can remember.
Fox News anyone?
As further advice - I just bought a Powerbook 12", got it stolen a few weeks later, and bought a 15" instead.
I originally thought the 12" would be fine, but the Window Management of OS X leaves a lot to be desired, and it's almost *designed* for wide screen.
So while I thought the lower weight of the 12" would be better for me (I do a lot of travelling all around the world), it's actually not a subnotebook - so the additional weight of the 15" is very much worth it for the screen and resolution alone.
1024x768 resolution on an operating system that doesn't have anything like a "show one application at a time" functionality really sucks.
(As a curious footnote, that feature was in the pre-release betas of Mac OS X, but they removed it before they released it. Wish they would put it back.)
They went to court to get google.no back, but were thrown out of court a while ago.
This is actually one of the cases where I think Google should have won, though.
The whois record for the domain states:
Domain Name................: google.no
Additional information: Created: 2001-02-26
...well after Google had started being the dominant search engine. The site in question sells cheap sunglasses for a ludicrous markup, and prints the word "Google" on them to make them a collector's item.
Using the Wayback Machine, you can see that they had a placeholder there for half a year before they put up anything - which is a pretty common tactic if you just hope to be bought by the company in question.
Skinning has done more to ruin usability of applications than anything else the last 10 years. Skinning has absolutely nothing to do with usability, it's purely visual customization.
Throwing out the menu/window paradigm is a very bad idea, as you get rid of the only thing the user will be able to re-use from other applications in yours.
I haven't read the article yet (on my way there now), but the parent poster has no idea what constitutes good UI, and shouldn't be modded up. I assume the article has more sane advice.
There's one very important need, at least for people doing web applications - and that is to be able to test how things look in Internet Explorer.
The only thing tying me to Windows at the moment is the fact that all our clients use it, and I need to make sure that everything is flawless in that browser too.
I'm going to try this out when I get the time to set up a proper Linux setup, and if it works - you have a switcher.;)
This is exactly what you need to communicate, that it's easier than you think to influence people in the right position to do something about this mess.
There's also a big point in making things visible and digestible by the general populace. Most people don't know patent law, but use the analogy about patenting the recipe for bread, and they get it pretty quickly.
The FFII people have done an excellent job, but with a clearer message and more planning for the demo etc, they would have had far more impact.
So now's the time to make sure the European Parliament doesn't approve this. Get up, contact the media - radio stations, TV, newspapers - and let your voice be heard.
I'm personally going to do this even if I live in Norway (which is outside of the EU), because the important people here have close ties to people on the inside of the EU parliament.
We have nothing to lose, everything to win. Get up, get out, and spread the message. This cannot continue.
I know PDAs are not selling as much as cellphones. But they ARE selling better than smartphones at the moment I think.
Actually, they don't. The year the Nokia 7650 was released (arguably the first usable smart phone, still bulky, and didn't sell that well), it outsold the Palm line by 7:1 or something that year. I'm to lazy to find the link right now, so my numbers might be a bit off, but smartphones already outsell PDAs by a large margin.
The phone market is orders of magnitude larger than the PDA market, so even a smart phone that doesn't sell that well will outsell PDAs. I don't think you realize just how big a company Nokia is.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It all looks pretty reasonable, sexy OLED display *on* the actual device, and then you get to this part:
While it connects via USB, the player appears to have a non-standard connector, so it won't connect directly to a PC's USB port, just the bundled cable. (From The Register)
Just like the iPod photo, which needed a special cable to connect to TVs to show photos, it will fail (iPod photo is Apple's slowest seller) - nobody wants to carry around a cable for basic functionality.
Imagine the scenario, you're at a client site, or at a friend's house, and need to move a file from one computer to another - and because the network is down, you have to use your USB stick. But no, you forgot to bring the cable. Brilliant.
Ah, that explains it - I was looking for the Komponent Khooser. Thanks!
Missed the link to Oxfam America - sorry. :)
This is a troll if I ever saw one. I usually don't respond to trolls, but when they get modded "+4 Insightful", I have to.
Zope is a nice application server, but not exactly fast. It has nice abstractions like acquisition to do very complex web applications with only a few lines of code.
Zope is among the fastest application servers out there, and certainly scales better than any Java-based app server I've seen due to its native support for ZEO (server clustering). Boston.com runs a huge Zope cluster on the back-end, and CBS New York does the same. This is pure FUD.
Plone adds more layers of abstraction and makes the whole even slower. It is almost as if the plone designers read a book about advanced OO concepts and wanted to implement every single concept they just learned about in a single application.
Oh, come on. We haven't added any unnecessary abstractions - we have mostly added glue code to tie together other pieces of Zope and CMF code in a better way, and put a standards-compliant, user-friendly UI on it.
Abstractions are your friend. If you want to know everything about how things work, the Python code is available for you to read. Trust me, you don't want to have to think about every single detail about what's going on underneath the hood at all times.
The goal of Plone is to make things Just Work, and from the feedback we get from our users, we have succeeded in this.
The only way to get decent performance out of a plone/zope setup is to put a squid proxy in front of it, but that causes a lot of problems with dynamic content.
The only way to get decent performance on *any* web-based application server system is to put a cache in front. Apache and Squid work well, and we have giant Plone sites out there with Squid in front and dynamic cache invalidation. And what are the "problems with dynamic content" you are referring to? Both Apache and Squid handle expiry dates for web pages and cache invalidation just fine.
Plone is distributed for development, not deployment. It's common knowledge among all developers that you have to spend some time doing proper caching setups for bigger and more complex sites - but that's the case for every system out there.
The documentation is also horrible. If you are lucky it is just incomplete and out of date, but in most cases there is none at all.
There are three books on it out now, and the best one so far wasn't reviewed here. Andy McKay's book shows you most of what you want to know, is available for free (under a Creative Commons license) online. How is that "horrible"?
If you want to do a small application with less than one hit per second, go ahead. But for a big site: forget it.
It's actually the other way around. If you want to do a small site, Plone's workflow support, schema-based content type definitions, metadata engine, reference support, superior multilingual support and server scalability makes it a tad too complex for small projects, and we usually recommend other systems for people who just want a blog or a forum system.
For bigger organizations like Oxfam America, Credit Muncipal de Paris, Rice University's Connextion project, Clear Channel's racing sites and the USDA Forest Service - you *need* a proper tool to keep the content up-to-date.
Plone is that tool. Take your trolling elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I'm one of Plone's founders, so I'm biased. The claims put forth by the parent poster have nothing to do with reality, though.
Tooting my own horn here for a bit, but:
Plone has had excellent support for blind people for quite a while, and passes both the US Section 508 accessibility guidelines and the much stricter WAI-AA accessibility requirements.
I've seen several blind people use the CMS without problems, and it's quite a satisfying feeling to see that people can make use of your application even when they can't see it.
We regularly get thank-you e-mails from blind people that are extremely grateful for giving them a way to do online publishing and intranets. Web standards really matter more than you think - especially to these groups of people.
What we have seen with our own project, the Plone Content Management System is that people very often use Windows as their evaluation platform. Since it is so simple for them to download, double-click the installer and have a Plone site up and running in a few minutes, they actually find that Plone is a good alternative to whatever proprietary solution they are using or considering. They get hands-on experience without the hassle of setting up a separate server to test it.
The most common scenario we see is organizations that are evaluating or currently using MS Sharepoint, and they find Plone as a much more compelling and useful system for them, regardless of cost.
When they can then get rid of the Windows box they purchased to run the other system, and install Linux on it, and not have to reboot the server every night just to keep it stable - they couldn't be happier.
Bruce Tognazzini (of Macintosh and Nielsen Norman Group fame) has an excellent article where he contrasts *actual* security with perceived security here. Well worth a read, and one the pages I most frequently refer to.
It's missing instant full-text indexing like the Opera M2 mailer has. The power you have with 4 years worth of mail instantly searchable/accessible in under a second is life-changing.
Getting rid of folders sounds scary in the beginning, but you have stopped categorizing links after Google arrived too, haven't you? ;)
Opera even had this feature long before GMail, but GMail got all the buzz.
Have a look at the Opera M2 Tutorial if you want to know why this is one of the few non-free products I use.
But seriously, my major problem with Skype is an inability to only receive calls from people that are on your list (why that list isn't centrally stored is another mystery).
Yes, they can be blocked, but normally it's not repeated callers, it's different people every time. I want people to be on the blacklist until I've added them, much like IM works.
Try Ubuntu - not a live CD, but excellent Mac support, both for iBooks and PowerBooks.
...and another one.
Well, having unbiased and good reporting and development of open source software (the upcoming Dirac codec, other media containment formats) come out of the BBC is worth something too. Personally, I think the BBC is about the best news source out there, and have been so for as long as I can remember. Fox News anyone?
...has had this for a while already.
As further advice - I just bought a Powerbook 12", got it stolen a few weeks later, and bought a 15" instead.
I originally thought the 12" would be fine, but the Window Management of OS X leaves a lot to be desired, and it's almost *designed* for wide screen.
So while I thought the lower weight of the 12" would be better for me (I do a lot of travelling all around the world), it's actually not a subnotebook - so the additional weight of the 15" is very much worth it for the screen and resolution alone.
1024x768 resolution on an operating system that doesn't have anything like a "show one application at a time" functionality really sucks.
(As a curious footnote, that feature was in the pre-release betas of Mac OS X, but they removed it before they released it. Wish they would put it back.)
Ubuntu has their own channel, #ubuntu on Freenode. I believe the IRC client defaults to that.
If you look at the URL...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/plan ning/redir-binarydelta.asp
It only runs in 800x600. No other resolutions. Brilliant for those LCD monitors which has a native resolution higher than that.
I believe you're looking for this.
They went to court to get google.no back, but were thrown out of court a while ago.
This is actually one of the cases where I think Google should have won, though.
The whois record for the domain states:
...well after Google had started being the dominant search engine. The site in question sells cheap sunglasses for a ludicrous markup, and prints the word "Google" on them to make them a collector's item.
Using the Wayback Machine, you can see that they had a placeholder there for half a year before they put up anything - which is a pretty common tactic if you just hope to be bought by the company in question.
...and, of course - Plone. XHTML, WAI-AA and Section 508 compliant.
Bollocks.
Skinning has done more to ruin usability of applications than anything else the last 10 years. Skinning has absolutely nothing to do with usability, it's purely visual customization.
Throwing out the menu/window paradigm is a very bad idea, as you get rid of the only thing the user will be able to re-use from other applications in yours.
I haven't read the article yet (on my way there now), but the parent poster has no idea what constitutes good UI, and shouldn't be modded up. I assume the article has more sane advice.
And yes, IAAID (I am an interaction designer).
The only thing tying me to Windows at the moment is the fact that all our clients use it, and I need to make sure that everything is flawless in that browser too.
I'm going to try this out when I get the time to set up a proper Linux setup, and if it works - you have a switcher. ;)
This is exactly what you need to communicate, that it's easier than you think to influence people in the right position to do something about this mess.
There's also a big point in making things visible and digestible by the general populace. Most people don't know patent law, but use the analogy about patenting the recipe for bread, and they get it pretty quickly.
The FFII people have done an excellent job, but with a clearer message and more planning for the demo etc, they would have had far more impact.
So now's the time to make sure the European Parliament doesn't approve this. Get up, contact the media - radio stations, TV, newspapers - and let your voice be heard.
I'm personally going to do this even if I live in Norway (which is outside of the EU), because the important people here have close ties to people on the inside of the EU parliament.
We have nothing to lose, everything to win. Get up, get out, and spread the message. This cannot continue.
Actually, they don't. The year the Nokia 7650 was released (arguably the first usable smart phone, still bulky, and didn't sell that well), it outsold the Palm line by 7:1 or something that year. I'm to lazy to find the link right now, so my numbers might be a bit off, but smartphones already outsell PDAs by a large margin.
The phone market is orders of magnitude larger than the PDA market, so even a smart phone that doesn't sell that well will outsell PDAs. I don't think you realize just how big a company Nokia is. :)