in my 12th grade C++ class (late 90s), I had points deducted from a test for using "\n" instead of 'endl' when using 'cout'. I also had points deducted for using/* */ style comments rather than the teacher's preferred// one-line comments.
A friend of mine who was in some community college had points deducted when naming his functions and variables "just_like_this" rather than "justLikeThis" in Java.
This is a great idea for a new CSS feature, but it doesn't require a new language. I'm pretty sure there's already a proposal for something like this anyway. What you probably want is the ability to do something like this: Back when CSS2 first came out, I read a proposal that someone had regarding something similar to this. The issue was that CSS was designed to be as simple as possible. I agree it should be part of the CSS spec... although, I think the guys behind CSS want to keep as much logic out of it as possible; that's the only reason I'd suggest that it be separate.
Your example is exactly what I'm talking about, though. Although I'd even love something more than just blocks... where you can define a value... be it "50%" or "500px" or "#666" or "1px solid white" and use it anywhere that that value is allowed.
WML has had this for years, and it wouldn't be a problem to add it to HTML. Something which I've found highly effective here is to define an attribute in the html such as this: , and then use a javascript library to examine the various fields and automatically do the form validation. For this, what you recommend is a great workaround for today, but if you were to separate the validation logic out into a separate file (via a link tag) or separate section of the document (which brings me to another thing which I'll get to in a second), you could make it easy to include the validation code on the server side without any effort. No need to go through and parse the document with server-side-JS and you could keep the validation coders out of your document structure.
So, with that, you could have great separation between design (CSS), coding (the JS, and any server-side languages, and validation), document structure (XML/XHTML/HTML).
Getting back to my earlier mention of the information stored in the header, I really wish the style tag wasn't its own tag. Same with script. I almost feel that it would be best to have a separate tag; let's call it "module" that you can use for these non-document sections; and it is only allowed to go in the header.
so you could have something like... and even have the option to do something like and in the same way, you could also supply the validation code, style information (using CSS or whatever), or any other extra information you'd want to include.
"module" is a terrible name for it, but you get the idea.
I agree with you about some things you're saying...
You need to realize that the markup language shouldn't be used for layout. Your comment about "making UIs as easy as drag and drop" can be done with a website development environment like Dreamweaver. You need a base language for that.
Personally, I think that XHTML/CSS is going the right way. It can be extended easily, it's simple enough that that basic sites can be created by new users relatively quickly, however complex layouts still require some experience (yeah, it's got a learning curve, but that's what Dreamweaver is for).
The whole point of XHTML/CSS is that it's not designed to be implemented the same way in all browsers. It's designed so that you can take the same "content" and render it for different devices/media (ie: home PC, cellphone, paper, ebook) simply by either supporting a different subset of the styling or different stylesheets altogether.
Have you ever tried to look at a table-based layout on a mobile device? have you ever tried to look at a table-based layout on a laptop with a tiny screen or a tiny window (think one monitor, webbrowser, terminal, and code editor on the same 15" laptop screen)? table-based layouts are hell in those scenarios. Properly coded XHTML/CSS pages are a godsend, especially when you can disable styles and still get a general feel for what the content on the page is.
I'm not sure if I 100% agree with this XHTMLv2 thing, but I think XHTMLv1 is doing great. I just really wish someone would make something that was pretty much exactly what CSS is, but make it a little more robust. Not with more types of styles, but with ways of positioning or sizing an element based on its parent element, better support for multiple classes, variables (for globally changing colors), and ways of adjusting colors relative to other colors. I'd love to be able to say "on hover, make the background 20% darker or 20% more red". I'd love to be able to change my color in one place instead of having to change the link color, the background color of my header and the underline of my h elements each time I want to tweak a color.
I'd also love if you could separate form validation from the page. doing validation with JS works, but it's not optimal. Having a validation language would be pretty awesome. Especially if you could implement it server-side. If the client could grab the validation code and validate the form before sending and handle errors (by displaying errors and highlighting fields) and then the server could also run that same code and handle errors (security... it would be easy to modify or disable anything on the clientside...) that would be great. All you'd really need is just a handful of cookiecutter directives (validate the length, format/regex, and also have some built-in types like phonenumbers and emails), that would be great, too.
I also think that it's about time for JS to get an upgrade. Merge Prototype.js into javascript. Add better support for AJAX and make it easier to create rich, interactive sites.
If we're not careful, Flash is going to become more and more prominent in casual websites. The only advantage the the current standards have is that they're free and don't require a commercial solution to produce.
XSS is a sideeffect of trusting the client too much and a side-effect that won't be solved by anything you've suggested.
And why does something need to be "compiled" to be faster? What needs to be faster? Rendering? Javascript? Or are you talking about server-side? Why don't we start writing all our websites in C? Let's just regress back to treating our desktop machines as thinclients. We'll access websites like applications over X11. It'll be great.;)
I don't know why this is, I think its just human nature.
one reason for this is that when you pick up someone elses project, you're picking it up from point X where that person coded it from the beginning. Where at their starting point, the goal may have been one thing and was shifted several times over the development timeline and the programmer learned new tricks to keep up with the changing demands and also evolved. This, in addition to different people having different thought processes when coding can lead to challenges when picking up other people's code.
For me, I have the same issue when I look at my code from today versus 6 months ago versus 6 years ago. When I look at my own code from just a couple years ago, I say "this is impossible... I need to rewrite this." It's the same way when I look at code that I did when I was sick or when I wasn't in the zone. Because of this, I've found that putting comments in my code is important. rather than commenting "Recursively loop over directory and process", to actually putting in a paragraph explaining what's happening and why. My code now is probably about half comments for larger projects. Projects that are under 200 lines typically only have a few dozen comments. It's also interesting when you look at your code and you see it's 3500 lines, but you run it through sloccount and realize it's only 1800 lines or less when comments and whitespace are stripped.
Programming is an evolution. It's constantly changing. Your best bet is to familiarize yourself with the code and break it down into a use-case. Program around the way you want the code to be used in the end and it becomes easier to maintain and follow because you've got levels of abstraction and it becomes easier for someone else to pick up later.
COD4... my roommate got it somehow... not sure where it came from. I thought he signed up online. And I'm pretty sure his account isn't gold. They should have a Game Prereleases section or something in addition to the demos.
and I never saw any additional free stuff that was gold-only. I've gotten free shit that's come with games (skins/avatars).
Game videos are not a perk, unless they're Xboxlive exclusive.
I'd hate to see where this is going; perceived value is a crock.
$5 a month to play online, sure, ok, I buy that. They want control over the whole online multiplayer environment, but to take away permissions that previously existed (I was about to use the word 'features,' but then I realized that seeing content when it's released isn't really a feature) and allowing paying accounts to access the demos before the non-paying ones just stinks.
If they wanted to add more perceived value, they could offer pre-release demos (betas) or additional content or even a teeshirt or something.
I am a gold member, but this still really annoys me.
When they released Myth2, the windows uninstaller had a bug where if you installed the game anywhere other than the default, uninstalling it would basically erase your harddrive.
I remember picking it up the day it came out, about 20 minutes before it got recalled, and was unable to play any of my friends since they weren't able to get their own copies. Since Bungie released Mac/Windows hybrid disks, this had the unfortunate effect of the game being widely unavailable for a week or two, even to mac users.
My music selection was considerably larger than the 2GB Nano that I had bought so iTunes decided to randomly choose music from my collection to fill the device.
this is the main shortcoming of iTunes... that it wants to do this by default. Everyone I know who gets an iPod who can't figure out that they should disable this usually regrets getting their iPod when they encounter this issue.
A problem is that iTunes is NOT just a media player... it kinda takes some control away from you and when you finally realize that it does and just let it, it really makes managing your music require a lot less work... but it's not for everyone, as most people on here are aware of, I'm sure.
...Microsoft's online music store isn't as comprehensive as iTunes.
Not only that, but putting the music on the zune isn't as easy a task as setting up iTunes. I have a first-gen zune (brown, no less) and it took me over an hour to get the software installed and get ready to use the zune. Also, I got the zune second-hand and once I set up my software, I wasn't able to play any of the music that was left on it. It kept saying that I didn't have permission. When I asked the guy who I got it from about that, he said that they were mp3'd using the zune's software, so he didn't know why that was the case... they shouldn't have been DRM'd.
I don't know if the new zunes fixed that or if the new zunes have a better interface on the device itself (I do know they haven't really gotten the desktop application any simpler. it's still a pain to use). The old zune is a pain in the arse to navigate and the only thing I really feel it has going for it is the larger screen, although I haven't put any video on it, yet.
so, has anyone used one of the new zunes, yet? has MS improved the interface? The physical box definitely is much nicer looking than the original model and, from a purely superficial standpoint looks like it can compete with the ipods... at least with the general consumer population.
I.e., by "window styling" are you referring to the title bar and window border, or everything in the window?
I was referring primarily to the titlebar and border in my original post.
My complaint is more that X11 does not seem to have moved forward with the rest of the system and has remained in the same state as it was in Tiger rather than adopting the new colorscheme of Leopard. X11 windows are darker when they're in the background than Leopard windows (making them seem to be active).
I rarely use the fn key (mostly for adjusting the volume since the stupid keyboard backlight controls are on the same keys I use for expose and I'd rather just hit F9 than fn+F9 every time I want to use that feature), so I don't think that's it.
What happens is I will have safari windows open on 3 workspaces, for instance... I'll create a new window or minimize something in space 2 and spaces will fly to space 1, then fly back to my space 2. Or, I'll be in space 4, quit an app, and suddenly fly from space 2 to 1 to 3.
I haven't been able to reproduce it on queue, but the bug also frequently happens when I wake the machine from sleep.
no, X11 apps are "aqua" they're just Tiger's Aqua and not leopards. They're not quite the same colors as the rest of the OS. In Tiger, they matched perfectly and you'd only know that they weren't native OSX apps by the fact that toolkits like GTK don't properly reproduce the same kind of spacing you see in aqua apps.
have you used X11 in OSX? Apple has their own windowmanager that's installed by default called "aquawm" that not only gives the apps the aqua look and feel but also allows you to minimize them to the dock and whatnot.
3rd party X11 (e.g. installed through fink) get the standard twm styling unless you install your own wm like blackbox, or kde.
I haven't had any crashes in Leopard... I've been running it on my Macbook Pro since the day it came out.
I too have compared OSX to Vista on several occasions. For the first time that I've noticed, Apple has added visual effects without regard to usability and with the latest release of their OS, it feels like they just added visual effects for the sake of adding visual effects. It seems almost like apple is trying to wow people visually and although they did improve a lot of things beyond animations, reflections and tabs, the bugginess of the new OS overshadows the whole thing and even their marketing concentrates on the new effects more than anything else.
I've compared Leopard to Vista several times since I've installed it and apple has detracted from usability with many features. Also, they seem to have screwed the more advanced users in several areas. Following are some of my main gripes that I can think of immediately:
They left out the split-window feature in Terminal.app; a feature that although I rarely use, I miss terribly.
X11 performance feels much slower...
X11 window styling does not match the rest of the OS
Spaces feels half-implemented and is very buggy.
Frequently my workspace switches for no reason, sometimes several times in a row
creating new windows in a workspace that is not the native workspace for that app causes it to create the window in that workspace instead of the current one
I have Terminal.app set to be on a specific workspace, but if I have a terminal window in another one and I drag out a tab from that window, the space switches back to the original
the softer shadows are harder on the eyes
the transparent menubar sometimes makes things hard to see
mousepointer performance is flakey; sometimes my arrow gets jerkey and freezes for no reason
the new dock is horrifically hard on the eyes... from the reflections to the little blue dots for running apps
There's more that I've been complaining about, but I'm drawing a blank right now. When I first installed it, I was having issues with Mail.app when I would delete IMAP messages and my Aventail VPN client didn't work, but I've since fixed both of those.
I just ordered a new MacPro for my desktop and I'm a little upset that it's going to come with the new OS. I'd rather hold off on having that machine be so up to date, but what can I do? I guess I'll just have to wait until 10.5.2 or higher. blah.
Encryption technologies that provide plausible deniability are possible, but I doubt they will enter widespread use
One really interesting project that I've been keeping my eye on and trying to come up with an excuse to use is Phonebook; a FUSE-based deniable encryption application. If I had the skill to implement such a plugin based on his sourcecode, I would make something like OTR... hell, even extend OTR so that every IM is of a specific size and contains the message inside it. It actually shouldn't be that difficult to implement. Such an implementation would add a large amount of deniability to your IMs and also have the ability to store several payloads per message.
Speaking of OTR... it's a great little plugin, but it's poorly executed, imho. Fingerprints are transported between the parties too easily. They should have a paranoid setting where it requires that you manually add a fingerprint file for that user and a way of saving out your own fingerprint so you can email/IM/SFTP the file to the person on the other end for manual entry. I realize that it's got a menu where you can see your current privacy status, but I don't know how comfortable I am that everything negotiated properly all the time; especially during the initial transaction.
Also, the OTR plugin is a little fragile. At my job, we have some kind of IM security system that not only logs all conversations, but also looks for spim (IM spam for the uninformed) and viruses, and if it thinks it finds something like that, it will send a challenge question across the line. When that happens during a private conversation, it totally whacks out OTR and requires me to restart the IM app (be it adium or Pidgin... pidgin flakes out more often) since simply refreshing OTR doesn't fix it. OTR needs better facilities for detecting that.
Although what you describe sounds pretty nice and is great since it would have zero learning curve, the best part of your standard source versioning system (svn/cvs) is that you take notes when you commit your changes and your revision #s contain groups of changes.
Your system would make it difficult to figure out what changes were made at what points in time and what changes should be grouped together.
It would be nice to be able to roll back to any state of any file in conjunction with svn, though.
The problem with software patents is that the vast majority of them get in the way of future and present products and many, many may not be so "obvious" but are not really worthy of patenting.
A prime example is Microsoft's patent on start bar button grouping-- When the start bar is running out of room and a single application has several buttons on it, they can consolidate to a single button menu. This is first seen in XP, iirc and the patent is broad enough that no one can really create an application with a similar feature.
Another good example is Amazon's One-Click Check-Out patent.
The issue with software patents is that rather than patenting a way of implementing a specific feature, they patent the feature itself, and due to the wording, it applies to such a broad set of functions that it can be impossible to implement something similar to an unrelated product.
And that patent on putting the search query at the end of a URL without a query string? How the hell can you patent that?
So, you should patent the way of implementing multi-touch on a touchscreen, not the ability to actually utilize multi-touch. You should patent a specific way of detecting duplicate information on a filesystem and a method of storing the de-dupe information rather than patenting de-duping altogether.
The reason that patents actually stifle innovation is because you have these companies that own patents on things and they either don't implement them or they implement them in one product and then sit on it for years. Many companies do this while competitors have new ways of using that idea in their own products or even in unrelated products and that causes stagnation.
How can you do something new when an overly broad or overly simplistic patent gets in your way?
That said, I don't mind the option (rather like it actually) but it should be turned off by default.
It should either be off by default, or be more than one option. In fact, it would be nice if they had an advanced pane for that that let you configure the filetypes that you could have it auto-open. I wouldn't mind it having auto-open for things like graphics files, torrents and sourcecode, although I'd really prefer fine-grained control over things like that.
For me personally, I'd rather not have it auto unzip (or unstuff) or auto-mount a disk image, though. Or, if it does that, it should at least present a dialog box with a warning and information about where the file came from and stuff like that.
The security method for the auto-open is wayyy too simple for what could potentially be done.
I'd bet that if you created a site that would detect the OS of the user and present them with a file for that system claiming "This website uses new features of Web 2.0. Please run the attached update to get the full experience," that you would get a pretty decent number of people running that application.
Especially if you tailored the message for them a la "Firefox 2.0.8 running in Windows Vista does not support..."
never underestimate the security people feel when their browser automatically does things as opposed to them actually having to manually run things.
I feel that a non-technical user would be less inclined to actually go through such a process if it required actually mounting the DMG and doubleclicking.
If the installer window simply pops up after they click the link, it may appear that it's coming more from the browser and less from the actual computer's system.
In my experience with non-technical users, there's no difference between the computer and the operating system and the GUI... However, the webbrowser is "the internet" and what happens in a browser isn't part of their computer.
and I agree with you about this "safe" web file thing. When I first saw that, I bitched about it and I really didn't imagine it surviving this long... what, has it been like 3 major revisions to the OS since it first reared its ugly head? I think it's been around since the original betas of Safari. sheesh.
I've seen this story on several Apple/Mac related news sites yet, and the majority of the comments consisted of Apple apologists telling each other "nothing to worry about, because you still have to enter your admin password".
The type of people who will be infected by this will be similar to the types that get caught up in the 419 scam.
The only real reason this is news is because it's the first occurrence of an OSX trojan in the wild. Much like Crispus Attucks, it's only getting exposure because it's the first.
This really isn't any different than someone creating an applescript called FreePr0n.app that erases a user's harddrive, and as other commentors have pointed out, it requires a bit of user interaction to actually get itself installed. Although I'm sure people who jumped ship to OSX thinking that the mac is virusproof are going to run anything and everything they come across on the internet thinking their safe.
Good thing Leopard adds an extra layer of protection.
and why does safari have the Open "safe" files on by default, again? I don't get that.
With Ruby on Rails, it uses a similar technique for discovering actions. It even has facilities for creating custom URL maps so what would normally come across as ?search=blah would get converted into/search/blah...
For my internal invoicing system that I wrote in PHP (but never finished), you could search for invoices by going to/invoice/# or invoice/customer/[name or number] or search for customers using similar techniques.
The trick involves a.htaccess file that does a rewrite to a single catch-all if the requested URL does not exist. The app can then parse the request and infer what the user really wants, whether it's an action of a controller, a query or similar.
Although I've never seen this specifically applied to search (a la google), it's been used for filtering with tags (like del.icio.us).
Don't all Windows and Linux distros by default allow offsite users remote access to a computer (with some sort of authentication needed of course) in order to help with tech support questions?
AFAIK, with windows, the user has to specifically request a help session. If you want to be able to connect remotely to a windows box without the request, you've got to check the box enabling RDP (the Remote Desktop Protocol).
The mac has all remote services turned off by default except for Bonjour (automatic service discovery and name protocol) which doesn't have an obvious way of disabling. You can enable ssh (root login is disabled by default) or Apple Remote Desktop/VNC in the System Prefs.
With linux, it depends on the distribution. I'm not aware of any that installs with VNC enabled by default, but depending on the distro, SSH may or may not be on. Many distros have root login disabled by default. Most desktop linux distros have ssh disabled by default.
All of the above services are useless if the machine is behind a properly configured firewall. The firewall could block outgoing requests for remote help on windows and block incomming ssh/rdp/vnc connections. Hell, a properly configured firewall/content filter would prevent the majority of P2P apps as well.
I'm surprised that no content filter vendors that I'm aware of offer P2P content filtering (ie: block any files that aren't.mp3 or.mpg for example).
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That example isn't so silly.
/* */ style comments rather than the teacher's preferred // one-line comments.
in my 12th grade C++ class (late 90s), I had points deducted from a test for using "\n" instead of 'endl' when using 'cout'. I also had points deducted for using
A friend of mine who was in some community college had points deducted when naming his functions and variables "just_like_this" rather than "justLikeThis" in Java.
Your example is exactly what I'm talking about, though. Although I'd even love something more than just blocks... where you can define a value... be it "50%" or "500px" or "#666" or "1px solid white" and use it anywhere that that value is allowed. WML has had this for years, and it wouldn't be a problem to add it to HTML. Something which I've found highly effective here is to define an attribute in the html such as this: , and then use a javascript library to examine the various fields and automatically do the form validation. For this, what you recommend is a great workaround for today, but if you were to separate the validation logic out into a separate file (via a link tag) or separate section of the document (which brings me to another thing which I'll get to in a second), you could make it easy to include the validation code on the server side without any effort. No need to go through and parse the document with server-side-JS and you could keep the validation coders out of your document structure.
So, with that, you could have great separation between design (CSS), coding (the JS, and any server-side languages, and validation), document structure (XML/XHTML/HTML).
Getting back to my earlier mention of the information stored in the header, I really wish the style tag wasn't its own tag. Same with script. I almost feel that it would be best to have a separate tag; let's call it "module" that you can use for these non-document sections; and it is only allowed to go in the header.
so you could have something like
"module" is a terrible name for it, but you get the idea.
I agree with you about some things you're saying...
;)
You need to realize that the markup language shouldn't be used for layout. Your comment about "making UIs as easy as drag and drop" can be done with a website development environment like Dreamweaver. You need a base language for that.
Personally, I think that XHTML/CSS is going the right way. It can be extended easily, it's simple enough that that basic sites can be created by new users relatively quickly, however complex layouts still require some experience (yeah, it's got a learning curve, but that's what Dreamweaver is for).
The whole point of XHTML/CSS is that it's not designed to be implemented the same way in all browsers. It's designed so that you can take the same "content" and render it for different devices/media (ie: home PC, cellphone, paper, ebook) simply by either supporting a different subset of the styling or different stylesheets altogether.
Have you ever tried to look at a table-based layout on a mobile device? have you ever tried to look at a table-based layout on a laptop with a tiny screen or a tiny window (think one monitor, webbrowser, terminal, and code editor on the same 15" laptop screen)? table-based layouts are hell in those scenarios. Properly coded XHTML/CSS pages are a godsend, especially when you can disable styles and still get a general feel for what the content on the page is.
I'm not sure if I 100% agree with this XHTMLv2 thing, but I think XHTMLv1 is doing great. I just really wish someone would make something that was pretty much exactly what CSS is, but make it a little more robust. Not with more types of styles, but with ways of positioning or sizing an element based on its parent element, better support for multiple classes, variables (for globally changing colors), and ways of adjusting colors relative to other colors. I'd love to be able to say "on hover, make the background 20% darker or 20% more red". I'd love to be able to change my color in one place instead of having to change the link color, the background color of my header and the underline of my h elements each time I want to tweak a color.
I'd also love if you could separate form validation from the page. doing validation with JS works, but it's not optimal. Having a validation language would be pretty awesome. Especially if you could implement it server-side. If the client could grab the validation code and validate the form before sending and handle errors (by displaying errors and highlighting fields) and then the server could also run that same code and handle errors (security... it would be easy to modify or disable anything on the clientside...) that would be great. All you'd really need is just a handful of cookiecutter directives (validate the length, format/regex, and also have some built-in types like phonenumbers and emails), that would be great, too.
I also think that it's about time for JS to get an upgrade. Merge Prototype.js into javascript. Add better support for AJAX and make it easier to create rich, interactive sites.
If we're not careful, Flash is going to become more and more prominent in casual websites. The only advantage the the current standards have is that they're free and don't require a commercial solution to produce.
XSS is a sideeffect of trusting the client too much and a side-effect that won't be solved by anything you've suggested.
And why does something need to be "compiled" to be faster? What needs to be faster? Rendering? Javascript? Or are you talking about server-side? Why don't we start writing all our websites in C? Let's just regress back to treating our desktop machines as thinclients. We'll access websites like applications over X11. It'll be great.
Wait, the Iraq war is still about terrorism? I thought we all agreed that it was really about oil.
I don't know why this is, I think its just human nature.
one reason for this is that when you pick up someone elses project, you're picking it up from point X where that person coded it from the beginning. Where at their starting point, the goal may have been one thing and was shifted several times over the development timeline and the programmer learned new tricks to keep up with the changing demands and also evolved. This, in addition to different people having different thought processes when coding can lead to challenges when picking up other people's code.
For me, I have the same issue when I look at my code from today versus 6 months ago versus 6 years ago. When I look at my own code from just a couple years ago, I say "this is impossible... I need to rewrite this." It's the same way when I look at code that I did when I was sick or when I wasn't in the zone. Because of this, I've found that putting comments in my code is important. rather than commenting "Recursively loop over directory and process", to actually putting in a paragraph explaining what's happening and why. My code now is probably about half comments for larger projects. Projects that are under 200 lines typically only have a few dozen comments. It's also interesting when you look at your code and you see it's 3500 lines, but you run it through sloccount and realize it's only 1800 lines or less when comments and whitespace are stripped.
Programming is an evolution. It's constantly changing. Your best bet is to familiarize yourself with the code and break it down into a use-case. Program around the way you want the code to be used in the end and it becomes easier to maintain and follow because you've got levels of abstraction and it becomes easier for someone else to pick up later.
but it was a goof!
Halo3 beta access came with crackdown.
COD4... my roommate got it somehow... not sure where it came from. I thought he signed up online. And I'm pretty sure his account isn't gold. They should have a Game Prereleases section or something in addition to the demos.
and I never saw any additional free stuff that was gold-only. I've gotten free shit that's come with games (skins/avatars).
Game videos are not a perk, unless they're Xboxlive exclusive.
I'd hate to see where this is going; perceived value is a crock.
$5 a month to play online, sure, ok, I buy that. They want control over the whole online multiplayer environment, but to take away permissions that previously existed (I was about to use the word 'features,' but then I realized that seeing content when it's released isn't really a feature) and allowing paying accounts to access the demos before the non-paying ones just stinks.
If they wanted to add more perceived value, they could offer pre-release demos (betas) or additional content or even a teeshirt or something.
I am a gold member, but this still really annoys me.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Bungie did this, too.
When they released Myth2, the windows uninstaller had a bug where if you installed the game anywhere other than the default, uninstalling it would basically erase your harddrive.
I remember picking it up the day it came out, about 20 minutes before it got recalled, and was unable to play any of my friends since they weren't able to get their own copies. Since Bungie released Mac/Windows hybrid disks, this had the unfortunate effect of the game being widely unavailable for a week or two, even to mac users.
My music selection was considerably larger than the 2GB Nano that I had bought so iTunes decided to randomly choose music from my collection to fill the device.
this is the main shortcoming of iTunes... that it wants to do this by default. Everyone I know who gets an iPod who can't figure out that they should disable this usually regrets getting their iPod when they encounter this issue.
A problem is that iTunes is NOT just a media player... it kinda takes some control away from you and when you finally realize that it does and just let it, it really makes managing your music require a lot less work... but it's not for everyone, as most people on here are aware of, I'm sure.
...Microsoft's online music store isn't as comprehensive as iTunes.
Not only that, but putting the music on the zune isn't as easy a task as setting up iTunes. I have a first-gen zune (brown, no less) and it took me over an hour to get the software installed and get ready to use the zune. Also, I got the zune second-hand and once I set up my software, I wasn't able to play any of the music that was left on it. It kept saying that I didn't have permission. When I asked the guy who I got it from about that, he said that they were mp3'd using the zune's software, so he didn't know why that was the case... they shouldn't have been DRM'd.
I don't know if the new zunes fixed that or if the new zunes have a better interface on the device itself (I do know they haven't really gotten the desktop application any simpler. it's still a pain to use). The old zune is a pain in the arse to navigate and the only thing I really feel it has going for it is the larger screen, although I haven't put any video on it, yet.
so, has anyone used one of the new zunes, yet? has MS improved the interface? The physical box definitely is much nicer looking than the original model and, from a purely superficial standpoint looks like it can compete with the ipods... at least with the general consumer population.
I.e., by "window styling" are you referring to the title bar and window border, or everything in the window?
I was referring primarily to the titlebar and border in my original post.
My complaint is more that X11 does not seem to have moved forward with the rest of the system and has remained in the same state as it was in Tiger rather than adopting the new colorscheme of Leopard. X11 windows are darker when they're in the background than Leopard windows (making them seem to be active).
I rarely use the fn key (mostly for adjusting the volume since the stupid keyboard backlight controls are on the same keys I use for expose and I'd rather just hit F9 than fn+F9 every time I want to use that feature), so I don't think that's it.
What happens is I will have safari windows open on 3 workspaces, for instance... I'll create a new window or minimize something in space 2 and spaces will fly to space 1, then fly back to my space 2. Or, I'll be in space 4, quit an app, and suddenly fly from space 2 to 1 to 3.
I haven't been able to reproduce it on queue, but the bug also frequently happens when I wake the machine from sleep.
no, X11 apps are "aqua" they're just Tiger's Aqua and not leopards. They're not quite the same colors as the rest of the OS. In Tiger, they matched perfectly and you'd only know that they weren't native OSX apps by the fact that toolkits like GTK don't properly reproduce the same kind of spacing you see in aqua apps.
have you used X11 in OSX? Apple has their own windowmanager that's installed by default called "aquawm" that not only gives the apps the aqua look and feel but also allows you to minimize them to the dock and whatnot.
3rd party X11 (e.g. installed through fink) get the standard twm styling unless you install your own wm like blackbox, or kde.
I too have compared OSX to Vista on several occasions. For the first time that I've noticed, Apple has added visual effects without regard to usability and with the latest release of their OS, it feels like they just added visual effects for the sake of adding visual effects. It seems almost like apple is trying to wow people visually and although they did improve a lot of things beyond animations, reflections and tabs, the bugginess of the new OS overshadows the whole thing and even their marketing concentrates on the new effects more than anything else.
I've compared Leopard to Vista several times since I've installed it and apple has detracted from usability with many features. Also, they seem to have screwed the more advanced users in several areas. Following are some of my main gripes that I can think of immediately:
There's more that I've been complaining about, but I'm drawing a blank right now. When I first installed it, I was having issues with Mail.app when I would delete IMAP messages and my Aventail VPN client didn't work, but I've since fixed both of those.
I just ordered a new MacPro for my desktop and I'm a little upset that it's going to come with the new OS. I'd rather hold off on having that machine be so up to date, but what can I do? I guess I'll just have to wait until 10.5.2 or higher. blah.
Encryption technologies that provide plausible deniability are possible, but I doubt they will enter widespread use
One really interesting project that I've been keeping my eye on and trying to come up with an excuse to use is Phonebook; a FUSE-based deniable encryption application. If I had the skill to implement such a plugin based on his sourcecode, I would make something like OTR... hell, even extend OTR so that every IM is of a specific size and contains the message inside it. It actually shouldn't be that difficult to implement. Such an implementation would add a large amount of deniability to your IMs and also have the ability to store several payloads per message.
Speaking of OTR... it's a great little plugin, but it's poorly executed, imho. Fingerprints are transported between the parties too easily. They should have a paranoid setting where it requires that you manually add a fingerprint file for that user and a way of saving out your own fingerprint so you can email/IM/SFTP the file to the person on the other end for manual entry. I realize that it's got a menu where you can see your current privacy status, but I don't know how comfortable I am that everything negotiated properly all the time; especially during the initial transaction.
Also, the OTR plugin is a little fragile. At my job, we have some kind of IM security system that not only logs all conversations, but also looks for spim (IM spam for the uninformed) and viruses, and if it thinks it finds something like that, it will send a challenge question across the line. When that happens during a private conversation, it totally whacks out OTR and requires me to restart the IM app (be it adium or Pidgin... pidgin flakes out more often) since simply refreshing OTR doesn't fix it. OTR needs better facilities for detecting that.
Although what you describe sounds pretty nice and is great since it would have zero learning curve, the best part of your standard source versioning system (svn/cvs) is that you take notes when you commit your changes and your revision #s contain groups of changes.
Your system would make it difficult to figure out what changes were made at what points in time and what changes should be grouped together.
It would be nice to be able to roll back to any state of any file in conjunction with svn, though.
The problem with software patents is that the vast majority of them get in the way of future and present products and many, many may not be so "obvious" but are not really worthy of patenting.
A prime example is Microsoft's patent on start bar button grouping-- When the start bar is running out of room and a single application has several buttons on it, they can consolidate to a single button menu. This is first seen in XP, iirc and the patent is broad enough that no one can really create an application with a similar feature.
Another good example is Amazon's One-Click Check-Out patent.
The issue with software patents is that rather than patenting a way of implementing a specific feature, they patent the feature itself, and due to the wording, it applies to such a broad set of functions that it can be impossible to implement something similar to an unrelated product.
And that patent on putting the search query at the end of a URL without a query string? How the hell can you patent that?
So, you should patent the way of implementing multi-touch on a touchscreen, not the ability to actually utilize multi-touch. You should patent a specific way of detecting duplicate information on a filesystem and a method of storing the de-dupe information rather than patenting de-duping altogether.
The reason that patents actually stifle innovation is because you have these companies that own patents on things and they either don't implement them or they implement them in one product and then sit on it for years. Many companies do this while competitors have new ways of using that idea in their own products or even in unrelated products and that causes stagnation.
How can you do something new when an overly broad or overly simplistic patent gets in your way?
That said, I don't mind the option (rather like it actually) but it should be turned off by default.
It should either be off by default, or be more than one option. In fact, it would be nice if they had an advanced pane for that that let you configure the filetypes that you could have it auto-open. I wouldn't mind it having auto-open for things like graphics files, torrents and sourcecode, although I'd really prefer fine-grained control over things like that.
For me personally, I'd rather not have it auto unzip (or unstuff) or auto-mount a disk image, though. Or, if it does that, it should at least present a dialog box with a warning and information about where the file came from and stuff like that.
The security method for the auto-open is wayyy too simple for what could potentially be done.
oh, and to add to that...
I'd bet that if you created a site that would detect the OS of the user and present them with a file for that system claiming "This website uses new features of Web 2.0. Please run the attached update to get the full experience," that you would get a pretty decent number of people running that application.
Especially if you tailored the message for them a la "Firefox 2.0.8 running in Windows Vista does not support..."
never underestimate the security people feel when their browser automatically does things as opposed to them actually having to manually run things.
well, it would be less automatic.
I feel that a non-technical user would be less inclined to actually go through such a process if it required actually mounting the DMG and doubleclicking.
If the installer window simply pops up after they click the link, it may appear that it's coming more from the browser and less from the actual computer's system.
In my experience with non-technical users, there's no difference between the computer and the operating system and the GUI... However, the webbrowser is "the internet" and what happens in a browser isn't part of their computer.
and I agree with you about this "safe" web file thing. When I first saw that, I bitched about it and I really didn't imagine it surviving this long... what, has it been like 3 major revisions to the OS since it first reared its ugly head? I think it's been around since the original betas of Safari. sheesh.
I've seen this story on several Apple/Mac related news sites yet, and the majority of the comments consisted of Apple apologists telling each other "nothing to worry about, because you still have to enter your admin password".
The type of people who will be infected by this will be similar to the types that get caught up in the 419 scam.
The only real reason this is news is because it's the first occurrence of an OSX trojan in the wild. Much like Crispus Attucks, it's only getting exposure because it's the first.
This really isn't any different than someone creating an applescript called FreePr0n.app that erases a user's harddrive, and as other commentors have pointed out, it requires a bit of user interaction to actually get itself installed. Although I'm sure people who jumped ship to OSX thinking that the mac is virusproof are going to run anything and everything they come across on the internet thinking their safe.
Good thing Leopard adds an extra layer of protection.
and why does safari have the Open "safe" files on by default, again? I don't get that.
Similar implementations have already been done.
/search/blah...
/invoice/# or invoice/customer/[name or number] or search for customers using similar techniques.
.htaccess file that does a rewrite to a single catch-all if the requested URL does not exist. The app can then parse the request and infer what the user really wants, whether it's an action of a controller, a query or similar.
With Ruby on Rails, it uses a similar technique for discovering actions. It even has facilities for creating custom URL maps so what would normally come across as ?search=blah would get converted into
del.icio.us uses that for tag search (ie: http://del.icio.us/username/blah).
For my internal invoicing system that I wrote in PHP (but never finished), you could search for invoices by going to
The trick involves a
Although I've never seen this specifically applied to search (a la google), it's been used for filtering with tags (like del.icio.us).
stupid software patents.
Don't all Windows and Linux distros by default allow offsite users remote access to a computer (with some sort of authentication needed of course) in order to help with tech support questions?
.mp3 or .mpg for example).
AFAIK, with windows, the user has to specifically request a help session. If you want to be able to connect remotely to a windows box without the request, you've got to check the box enabling RDP (the Remote Desktop Protocol).
The mac has all remote services turned off by default except for Bonjour (automatic service discovery and name protocol) which doesn't have an obvious way of disabling. You can enable ssh (root login is disabled by default) or Apple Remote Desktop/VNC in the System Prefs.
With linux, it depends on the distribution. I'm not aware of any that installs with VNC enabled by default, but depending on the distro, SSH may or may not be on. Many distros have root login disabled by default. Most desktop linux distros have ssh disabled by default.
All of the above services are useless if the machine is behind a properly configured firewall. The firewall could block outgoing requests for remote help on windows and block incomming ssh/rdp/vnc connections. Hell, a properly configured firewall/content filter would prevent the majority of P2P apps as well.
I'm surprised that no content filter vendors that I'm aware of offer P2P content filtering (ie: block any files that aren't