Here in the UK, DAB is no longer a long way off. The BBC have been heavily promoting it, and it does seem to have finally left the ground.
I recently bought a DAB radio alarm, and I find the quality is pretty good. Admittedly, I can't tell if it is better or worse than FM through the speaker on the radio itself (although that rather reinforces what others have said on this story - that FM quality is not the limiting factor in most listening environments). Sometime, I mean to plug it into my HiFi and see if I can hear any difference.
You don't have to wait for 3.2 to get service menus. They have been available for a while, though perhaps not very well advertised.
e.g. save this as ~/.kde3/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/rotatejp g.desktop for a right-click menu to losslessly rotate jpegs from your digital camera:
[Desktop Entry] ServiceTypes=image/jpeg Actions=rotateLef t
The space in "rotateLef t" is a slashcodism - it shouldn't be there. (Or put it in/usr/kde/3/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus to make it available to all users.)
Real-time OSs are a different world though. It's horses for courses. If you want a desktop machine, you don't need real-time but you probably do want lots services that a bare-bones RT-OS wouldn't supply.
Fast context switches in Linux would be nice, but without knowing much about it (and that's never stopped anyone here), I'd be surprised if there was no trade-off required to get that kind of speed.
SCO will just cease to be, and all the honest investors will get screwed.
Honest investors? It may be an old-fashioned view, but doesn't investing in a company by buying shares imply that you agree with the company's aims and ethos and wish to support its business?
Good idea. It would as you say be instructive to design a style sheet even if I don't submit it (and the page does clearly say graphic designers only).
On the font sizes - I don't think most of the designs are fixable. The problem is that all of the designs are very reliant on bitmaps, and bitmaps don't scale with font size changes. You'd also have to change the box dimensions to use ems rather than pixels (or else column widths become out of proportion to the size of the text in them), which would further compound the problem.
Talking of maximised browser windows, I'd love to see a technique that makes creative use of all that screen width, without requiring that the user has their browser window that wide, or worse still, horizontal scrolling. Everything I've seen so far either has a fixed width (evil!) and leaves blank space if the window is wider than this, or suffers from the over-long line length problem in wide windows.
This is my best attempt at a site with liquid layout, allows font-size changes, and doesn't suffer from line-length problems. But I think it should be possible to do a lot better. There's a lot of blank screen if you make the window really wide and use a small font, and as you'll agree, there isn't a lot of real design to this site.
I'm not a graphic designer. I have very little sense of colour. I couldn't possibly improve on the examples at the CSS Zen Garden. From a design point of view, they look absolutely fabulous.
But it's not the place to look for answers to the questions I posed in my original post.
What I would dearly love to see is a beautiful design submitted to the Zen Garden by a talented graphic designer, that uses no bit maps, that adjusts itself to the browser window width, and that survives any font size change the user throws at it.
Now I can do those technical things, but my designs are far from beautiful. That's why I want to see what someone with more design sense than me can come up with under those constraints.
My first view of this site was like yours. But then I began to think - all these designs are basically similar. A lot of bitmaps, and clever positioning CSS.
What is more interesting is what is missing: 1. No liquid layouts. 2. Few designs that are fully robust against changes in font size. 3. Almost all designs rely 100% on bitmaps for their graphic design. Has anyone tried a pure CSS no bitmap design using borders, styled text, etc? That's much more of a challenge.
Or it could be that most people don't really understand the need for encryption, are hopelessly confused by key management, and won't use it until it is bundled with their computer and employed by default in their email program.
While I agree with your insightful comment, I think if encryption was bundled with my email system and enabled by default, I'd just turn it off unless it was completely invisible to me and to everyone with whom I corresponded.
I understand that anyone can read my emails in transit, and I really don't care. What I do care about is a) the person I'm sending an email to can read it, b) I can read any email I receive, and c) I don't get hassled with warnings about unverified keys etc.
Red Queen race
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
causing Java to become stagnant
Why would we not want a language to be stagnant? I wonder how much time is wasted just trying to keep up with changes to languages and development environments?
The point CBackSlash was making is that the software you want to use could be made to refuse to install/run unless it detects a DRM-enabled BIOS. So you can't use it unless the BIOS confirms that it is not a pirated copy. 'Guilty until proven innocent'.
Any form of certificate based authentication is a serious problem for freedom of speech and reliability. Anytime you can use a certificate to turn off a spammer, you can use it to turn off anyone's ability to speak/communicate.
Not this old one again. Freedom of speech is not the same as a right to be heard. You can say what you want. And I can choose not to listen. You still have your freedom of speech.
Reliability also becomes critically impaired because there is now an additional requirement for every single piece of mail transfer to check the validity of its certificate with a given certificate authority.
You can validate certificates without needing to contact the CA by (in effect) just verifying the checksum.
In fact, disable the audio driver. There are two advantages: 1) Nothing gets forgotten 2) The OS actually knows that you didn't hear the sound it just tried to play, and intelligent applications will then try another method to get your attention.
Problem with a PhD I would see is that it narrows your field. Unless you are damn sure your PhD topic is what you want to work on its probably not worth it.
Not my experience. My PhD is in Physics (experimental surface science), but I am now working in a totally unrelated area as a programmer in the electrical power industry. I applied along with the regular graduate intake. The company was enlightened (?) enough to offer me a slightly higher salary than the non-PhD graduates, but that was a bonus as far as I was concerned.
And yes, doing a PhD was worth it for me, because I got a huge amount of satisfaction out of doing it. No other reason.
The only valid reason for chosing to do a PhD is that you really want to. Forget career - that should have nothing to do with your decision. Doing a PhD is hard work, and you will almost certainly go through times when you wish you'd never started and wonder if you should just cut your losses. On the other hand, it can be immensely rewarding, and will teach you a whole new way of thinking.
As for jobs afterwards, outside academia at least, it's a lottery. Some companies value them, others don't. So that shouldn't really affect your decision.
Well, in the example I gave above (a simple slide-show applet), when I wrote it I had Blackdown Java installed (Gentoo Linux, I don't remember which version of the VM/SDK) the captions at the bottom of the picture seemed to display as non-antialiased text. I didn't bother too much about it, but sometime later I removed Blackdown Java and installed the Sun version, and immediately noticed that the fonts were now antialiased.
You can grab the source off the same website if you really want to. I don't have any explanation for the difference, and I'm not planning on investigating it any further.
On linux the best looking fonts are anti-aliased TrueType, which Swing doesn't support.
I think that must depend on whose VM you are using. I found that to be true of the Blackdown, but Sun's VM does antialias truetype fonts with no trouble at all. This isn't a great example, but look at the captions of this.
After all, you wouldn't want someone arbitrarily umounting/home while 30 users are logged onto a system, or/var while an email server is receiving 100 emails per second...It is a logical thing, but you're absolutely right that ejecting a CD SHOULD just happen.... So what is the solution? I don't know myself.
I think the solution is to do what a human would do. That is - it all depends. As programmers, we try to make everything as general as possible with no special cases, but humans have special cases for just about everything. In this case, ejecting a CDROM while a program has an open handle to a file on it should just eject the CDROM. The program ought to handle it gracefully, but if it crashes, well, too bad. At least you weren't writing anything. On the other hand, trying to unmount/home should bring up an error, unless of course you are the only user with open handles, in which case it should tell you which files are open and from which application, and if the applications are such that it might make sense to shut them down automatically, to offer to do this for you...
You get the general idea. Intelligent software that thinks like humans. Is this practical? Probably not, but every little helps.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe flamebait and inciteful?
..."raise all tool palletes on document focus"...
That is what Macintosh applications have always done, and yes, it is a perfect solution. I'd love to see this in the GIMP.
Here in the UK, DAB is no longer a long way off. The BBC have been heavily promoting it, and it does seem to have finally left the ground.
I recently bought a DAB radio alarm, and I find the quality is pretty good. Admittedly, I can't tell if it is better or worse than FM through the speaker on the radio itself (although that rather reinforces what others have said on this story - that FM quality is not the limiting factor in most listening environments). Sometime, I mean to plug it into my HiFi and see if I can hear any difference.
e.g. save this as ~/.kde3/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/rotatej
(Or put it in
Real-time OSs are a different world though. It's horses for courses. If you want a desktop machine, you don't need real-time but you probably do want lots services that a bare-bones RT-OS wouldn't supply.
Fast context switches in Linux would be nice, but without knowing much about it (and that's never stopped anyone here), I'd be surprised if there was no trade-off required to get that kind of speed.
Completely free ports of the GNU UNIX-like versions of most of these utilities and may others are available from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/.
SCO will just cease to be, and all the honest investors will get screwed.
Honest investors? It may be an old-fashioned view, but doesn't investing in a company by buying shares imply that you agree with the company's aims and ethos and wish to support its business?
Good idea. It would as you say be instructive to design a style sheet even if I don't submit it (and the page does clearly say graphic designers only).
On the font sizes - I don't think most of the designs are fixable. The problem is that all of the designs are very reliant on bitmaps, and bitmaps don't scale with font size changes. You'd also have to change the box dimensions to use ems rather than pixels (or else column widths become out of proportion to the size of the text in them), which would further compound the problem.
Talking of maximised browser windows, I'd love to see a technique that makes creative use of all that screen width, without requiring that the user has their browser window that wide, or worse still, horizontal scrolling. Everything I've seen so far either has a fixed width (evil!) and leaves blank space if the window is wider than this, or suffers from the over-long line length problem in wide windows.
This is my best attempt at a site with liquid layout, allows font-size changes, and doesn't suffer from line-length problems. But I think it should be possible to do a lot better. There's a lot of blank screen if you make the window really wide and use a small font, and as you'll agree, there isn't a lot of real design to this site.
I'm not a graphic designer. I have very little sense of colour. I couldn't possibly improve on the examples at the CSS Zen Garden. From a design point of view, they look absolutely fabulous.
But it's not the place to look for answers to the questions I posed in my original post.
What I would dearly love to see is a beautiful design submitted to the Zen Garden by a talented graphic designer, that uses no bit maps, that adjusts itself to the browser window width, and that survives any font size change the user throws at it.
Now I can do those technical things, but my designs are far from beautiful. That's why I want to see what someone with more design sense than me can come up with under those constraints.
Don't be silly. This is a book review. It's not a statement of Slashdot policy.
My first view of this site was like yours. But then I began to think - all these designs are basically similar. A lot of bitmaps, and clever positioning CSS.
What is more interesting is what is missing:
1. No liquid layouts.
2. Few designs that are fully robust against changes in font size.
3. Almost all designs rely 100% on bitmaps for their graphic design. Has anyone tried a pure CSS no bitmap design using borders, styled text, etc? That's much more of a challenge.
Or it could be that most people don't really understand the need for encryption, are hopelessly confused by key management, and won't use it until it is bundled with their computer and employed by default in their email program.
While I agree with your insightful comment, I think if encryption was bundled with my email system and enabled by default, I'd just turn it off unless it was completely invisible to me and to everyone with whom I corresponded.
I understand that anyone can read my emails in transit, and I really don't care. What I do care about is a) the person I'm sending an email to can read it, b) I can read any email I receive, and c) I don't get hassled with warnings about unverified keys etc.
causing Java to become stagnant
Why would we not want a language to be stagnant? I wonder how much time is wasted just trying to keep up with changes to languages and development environments?
The point CBackSlash was making is that the software you want to use could be made to refuse to install/run unless it detects a DRM-enabled BIOS. So you can't use it unless the BIOS confirms that it is not a pirated copy. 'Guilty until proven innocent'.
Any form of certificate based authentication is a serious problem for freedom of speech and reliability. Anytime you can use a certificate to turn off a spammer, you can use it to turn off anyone's ability to speak/communicate.
Not this old one again. Freedom of speech is not the same as a right to be heard. You can say what you want. And I can choose not to listen. You still have your freedom of speech.
Reliability also becomes critically impaired because there is now an additional requirement for every single piece of mail transfer to check the validity of its certificate with a given certificate authority.
You can validate certificates without needing to contact the CA by (in effect) just verifying the checksum.
So providing a link to Google, but not actually including any promising search keywords in the link is now informative?
In fact, disable the audio driver. There are two advantages:
1) Nothing gets forgotten
2) The OS actually knows that you didn't hear the sound it just tried to play, and intelligent applications will then try another method to get your attention.
Problem with a PhD I would see is that it narrows your field. Unless you are damn sure your PhD topic is what you want to work on its probably not worth it.
Not my experience. My PhD is in Physics (experimental surface science), but I am now working in a totally unrelated area as a programmer in the electrical power industry. I applied along with the regular graduate intake. The company was enlightened (?) enough to offer me a slightly higher salary than the non-PhD graduates, but that was a bonus as far as I was concerned.
And yes, doing a PhD was worth it for me, because I got a huge amount of satisfaction out of doing it. No other reason.
I strongly agree with the parent.
The only valid reason for chosing to do a PhD is that you really want to. Forget career - that should have nothing to do with your decision. Doing a PhD is hard work, and you will almost certainly go through times when you wish you'd never started and wonder if you should just cut your losses. On the other hand, it can be immensely rewarding, and will teach you a whole new way of thinking.
As for jobs afterwards, outside academia at least, it's a lottery. Some companies value them, others don't. So that shouldn't really affect your decision.
Then, the only stupid people will be the ones still using MS Office.
So we replace one monopoly with another?
Surely the right thing to do is to agree on an open standard for the exchange of information, and then use any software that supports this standard?
No current Linux JVM currently does antialiasing by default, you have to enable it explicitly.
I did enable it - that's why I was expecting it to be rendered antialiased. Anyway, it was probably an old version of the Blackdown VM then.
Well, in the example I gave above (a simple slide-show applet), when I wrote it I had Blackdown Java installed (Gentoo Linux, I don't remember which version of the VM/SDK) the captions at the bottom of the picture seemed to display as non-antialiased text. I didn't bother too much about it, but sometime later I removed Blackdown Java and installed the Sun version, and immediately noticed that the fonts were now antialiased.
You can grab the source off the same website if you really want to. I don't have any explanation for the difference, and I'm not planning on investigating it any further.
On linux the best looking fonts are anti-aliased TrueType, which Swing doesn't support.
I think that must depend on whose VM you are using. I found that to be true of the Blackdown, but Sun's VM does antialias truetype fonts with no trouble at all. This isn't a great example, but look at the captions of this.
After all, you wouldn't want someone arbitrarily umounting /home while 30 users are logged onto a system, or /var while an email server is receiving 100 emails per second...It is a logical thing, but you're absolutely right that ejecting a CD SHOULD just happen. ... So what is the solution? I don't know myself.
/home should bring up an error, unless of course you are the only user with open handles, in which case it should tell you which files are open and from which application, and if the applications are such that it might make sense to shut them down automatically, to offer to do this for you...
I think the solution is to do what a human would do. That is - it all depends. As programmers, we try to make everything as general as possible with no special cases, but humans have special cases for just about everything. In this case, ejecting a CDROM while a program has an open handle to a file on it should just eject the CDROM. The program ought to handle it gracefully, but if it crashes, well, too bad. At least you weren't writing anything. On the other hand, trying to unmount
You get the general idea. Intelligent software that thinks like humans. Is this practical? Probably not, but every little helps.
(Excellent comment reposting at +2 as I don't have mod points. Sorry. Don't mod up this comment!)