I agree with most of what you wrote, nevertheless, it is true that CFLs can take a long time to warm up.
It is a particular problem for the physically smaller CFLs. Manufacturers are doing all they can to get the size down so that they fit in the same space as an incandescent bulb, but as they reduce the size so the startup time seems to increase.
These small bulbs are the ones that are particularly difficult to replace with CFLs. Mind you, if I had my tinfoil hat handly I would probably claim that GE and the like are deliberately obstructing the adoption of CFLs by making conventional bulbs smaller and encouraging light fitting manufacturers to make their fittings smaller to suit.
The other problem I have is that the centre of the region from which the light is emitted is always further from the base of the light fitting than with an incandescent bulb. Even the most compact CFLs have this problem. It isn't the size of the tube that is at fault. It is the size of the bulbous plastic bit just behind (which I believe contains the ballast).
The effect is that when you put a CFL in a conventional light fitting, the light emerges at the wrong angle. It is particularly noticable with uplighters.
Having said that, I'm replacing all of the incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs.
Anybody who tried to turn the key off would have found themselves moving at highway speeds with dramatically decreased steering.
Have you ever tried it? In any sane car (and I except 2 tonne SUV monstrosities) you don't need power steering to steer effectively except at very low speed.
Brakes might be more of an issue, but even after turning off the engine, there is usually enough stored potential energy in the servo reservoir for a minute or two of braking.
So what would you suggest for say quality settings for an image format.
Numbers are a bit of an artificial construct when what you are really interested in is quality. This is a perfect example of the point I was trying to make. Since quality is an analogue scale, something like a slider might be appropriate. No numbers required.
Or what about when someone enters the order number from a package that has just arrived in goods inwards to receipt it and the order in question does not exist?
I'd question why an order has to be represented by a number, rather than the order itself. After all, it is not the number we are interested in. That's a bit irrelevant here though, because the error you asked about isn't the user's fault. The very different kind of issue I was trying to highlight is when the software allows users to try to do things that make no sense because the design of the software isn't right.
Or what about when your customer gives you thier customer number to order and the database says they are blocked and not allowed to order anything because they haven't been paying thier invoices?
Again, this isn't the kind of error I was talking about.
Or what about when something beyond your programs control (out of disk space, out of memory, network down etc) makes what should be a reasonable operation impossible?
As I said, 'where possible...'
For better or worse errors will happen and need to be reported.
Agreed. But where possible, the user interface should avoid giving the user a chance to do something that makes no sense.
That was the sound of my point completely passing you by.
In the first place I said "as far as possible". Everyone can come up with an example where nobody seems to be able to come up with an alternative paradigm and therefore checking the input after it has been provided and interrupting the user's flow with an error notification is still needed. (Of course it may still be that we haven't thought hard enough...)
But most of the time, with most of the error dialogs I see, if the interface had been designed from a usability point of view rather than a programmer's point of view, the error dialog could have been avoided by making the error unthinkable - that is to say, the application shouldn't give the user the opportunity even to express the kind of wrong thinking that would lead to the error dialog.
I had a support call once where the customer was 'interpreting' the error message I needed to know about. It wasn't exactly a long message - just one short line, but I didn't recognise the message from what he was telling me. Even when I asked him to read it to me verbatim, he still insisted on 'interpreting' it. Eventually I was reduced to asking him to spell it out to me. He clearly thought I was an imbercile, but I finally found out what was on the screen in front of him. It was nothing even remotely related to what he had been telling me; suddenly everything made sense and I immediately had all of the information I needed to provide a fix.
There should be no errors. Period. Your program should not allow errors.
I agree: errors should not be allowed. That's why, when the user does something dumb, instead of allowing an error to occur, you should display a message on the screen alerting the user to the problem and informing them of how to fix it, so that an error doesn't occur.
Come on, seriously?
Yes, seriously. At least as far as possible anyway.
It is all about the design. Your problem is making a user interface that allows users to do really dumb things. You want a number from 1 to 10?
1. Level one is a free text entry field with no checking. The user types in -15 and **boom** - the program bails out.
2. Level two is a free text entry field with input validation. The user types in XYZZY and **boom** - up comes an error dialog. Almost as annoying as 1.
3. Level three is a text entry field that allows only digits 1 to 10, and a maximum of two characters. The user types 99 and **boom** - up comes an error dialog. Still quite annoying.
4. Level four is a spin box. The user can't enter a number directly but presses buttons to ratchet up and down between 1 and 10. It is now quite impossible to enter an illegal value. But pressing a button ten times is a real drag. And you still get an error dialog if you select one of the values that has already been taken.
5. Level five realises that asking for a number between 1 and 10 was a really bad user interface design in the first place and goes back to ask the user what he really wanted to get done.
You seem to mean by 'freedom of speech' something more like 'a right to be heard' or 'a right to an audience'. And probably 'a right to a platform' from which to expound your controversial views.
I profoundly disagree that these rights exist. The reason is simple. If you have a right to be heard, then someone else has the responsibility to do the hearing. If you have the right to a platform, the someone else has the responsibility to provide the platform. What makes you so privileged that someone else must provide these for you?
Do you stop every time you pass a street preacher and listen carefully until he has finished? After all, it is your responsibility to do so if you believe that you also have a right to be heard.
I think you mean simple, or perhaps very simple. Simplistic means too simple or over-simplified. If your unit tests are simplistic then thay are not adequate for the job.
you also have to click in each window first to activate it, then you can select your tool...
You need to activate click-through in the X11 server. It is a pain that this isn't the default, but now that you know, you'll find GIMP so much nicer on OS X.
There's one small operation we can now perform to make it easier to use (note that this is not necessary). Doing this will save you many unnecessary double-clicks during editing by not requiring you to activate GIMP windows before you can click on them. While Gimp and X11 are closed, open/Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and paste the following command in it and press enter: # If you installed the XQuartz packages :
If I can fool you into giving me your 3DS password somehow, I can shop online as you with great false trust, and the merchants don't care because they're protected.
You don't even need my password. The password restrictions are such that when I first was forced to start using "Verified by Visa" I could not remember my password. I pressed the 'forgot password' button and in order to reset my password and continue with the transaction I was asked to enter, guess what:
# my VISA card number and # my date of birth
(This is with a UK bank.) That's all. Assuming that the person trying to make a fraudulent purchase with my card number knows my card number (a safe assumption?) the only other bit of information they need is my date of birth. That really would not be very difficult to find out.
I forgot and reset my password about the first dozen times I used the system. I started putting in random passwords with no attempt to memorise them.
I thought this might flag up suspicious activity and my card be blocked, but... nothing.
"All are forgiven"... a group of us we were discussing this very same point earlier this week.
I think the point is, all are offered forgiveness. Those who accept that forgiveness are the ones who end up actually having that forgiveness. And almost by definition, you cannot accept forgiveness without acknowledging and turning away from the thing you did wrong.
So it goes like this:
1. Is offered forgiveness 2. Accepts that forgiveness 3. Is forgiven
Wireless power transmission is essentially a transformer with the two coils a long way apart and air instead of a ferromagnetic core.
Even more information: A BBC News article about wireless power transmission. Note that to achieve sufficient coupling between the transmitter and the receiver, very low frequency waves have to be used. The "tails" of energy mentioned in the article are the evanescent waves.
The article explains this. Apparently their research shows that the 40 mile all-electric range hits the sweet-spot for most American commuters.
Make the batteries bigger and you still have to have the gas engine for when you visit your cousin 300 miles away. Make the batteries smaller and you need to run the gas engine even for your daily commute.
I don't understand why people always try to "get around" these restrictions. If there is a legitimate business need, then get it approved.
I suppose it depends on the size of the business. Where I work, it is usually impossible even to find out who is responsible for a particular policy. As for actually getting a policy changed, you'd be better off pissing into the wind.
Whenever I need information from a blocked site (I'm talking about work-related information here), I just keep trying Google results until I find one that isn't blocked. Sometimes it can take fifteen or twenty minutes, when I know that the top result would have answered my question immediately. On occasions I send myself an email at home so that I can look it up after work, but why should I have to do this?
Good point, but I think more important is to ask not what is my goal but "what is the audience's goal?"
You can give a first class presentation with a very clearly defined goal, but if that goal is not the one the audience came along with then you are wasting your time.
Most of the crappy presentations I have to attend are crappy mainly because they are telling me a load of stuff I have absolutely no interest in, and they don't answer the issues I really want to know about.
Operators have a hard limit on the amount of service they can actually provision. Allowing any and all devices to run willy nilly on the network would be certain death, even for the best-laid network.
Or alternatively, why not use an appropriate charging structure, so that it becomes prohibitively expensive for the end user to consume excessive resources? And use the extra revenue earned from those users who are willing to pay for large consumption to increase the capacity.
Just in case anyone else didn't get it, permuting the text or combining characters into single glyphs would completely break the page for any browser not supporting @font-face. It would be like replacing text with bitmaps and not supplying alt text.
Omitting all glyphs not actually used on the page would be fine. Except it would become a maintenance nightmare when the text of the page is changed...
To me, it sounds a bit like Chrome OS is an operating system where the browser is the OS. It's not yet clear whether Google expect all applications running on Chrome OS to be web applications. Let's suppose the answer is 'yes'...
In that case, perhaps they don't really need a windowing system at all. What if the graphical interface of Chrome OS is to be a web browser that displays itself as a single window in a simple frame buffer?
Slashdot Mirror
Does it really have to be spelled out to you?
On 17 August 1896, 44-year-old Bridget Driscoll became the first person to be killed by a motor car.
the first person world-wide who died as a result of being hit by a car (not in a car crash) was Mrs Bridget Driscoll
The quote relates to the first person to be killed after being hit by a car. You may note the profound irony in the coroner's statement.
I agree with most of what you wrote, nevertheless, it is true that CFLs can take a long time to warm up.
It is a particular problem for the physically smaller CFLs. Manufacturers are doing all they can to get the size down so that they fit in the same space as an incandescent bulb, but as they reduce the size so the startup time seems to increase.
These small bulbs are the ones that are particularly difficult to replace with CFLs. Mind you, if I had my tinfoil hat handly I would probably claim that GE and the like are deliberately obstructing the adoption of CFLs by making conventional bulbs smaller and encouraging light fitting manufacturers to make their fittings smaller to suit.
The other problem I have is that the centre of the region from which the light is emitted is always further from the base of the light fitting than with an incandescent bulb. Even the most compact CFLs have this problem. It isn't the size of the tube that is at fault. It is the size of the bulbous plastic bit just behind (which I believe contains the ballast).
The effect is that when you put a CFL in a conventional light fitting, the light emerges at the wrong angle. It is particularly noticable with uplighters.
Having said that, I'm replacing all of the incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs.
Have you ever tried it? In any sane car (and I except 2 tonne SUV monstrosities) you don't need power steering to steer effectively except at very low speed.
Brakes might be more of an issue, but even after turning off the engine, there is usually enough stored potential energy in the servo reservoir for a minute or two of braking.
Numbers are a bit of an artificial construct when what you are really interested in is quality. This is a perfect example of the point I was trying to make. Since quality is an analogue scale, something like a slider might be appropriate. No numbers required.
I'd question why an order has to be represented by a number, rather than the order itself. After all, it is not the number we are interested in. That's a bit irrelevant here though, because the error you asked about isn't the user's fault. The very different kind of issue I was trying to highlight is when the software allows users to try to do things that make no sense because the design of the software isn't right.
Again, this isn't the kind of error I was talking about.
As I said, 'where possible...'
Agreed. But where possible, the user interface should avoid giving the user a chance to do something that makes no sense.
Woosh.
That was the sound of my point completely passing you by.
In the first place I said "as far as possible". Everyone can come up with an example where nobody seems to be able to come up with an alternative paradigm and therefore checking the input after it has been provided and interrupting the user's flow with an error notification is still needed. (Of course it may still be that we haven't thought hard enough...)
But most of the time, with most of the error dialogs I see, if the interface had been designed from a usability point of view rather than a programmer's point of view, the error dialog could have been avoided by making the error unthinkable - that is to say, the application shouldn't give the user the opportunity even to express the kind of wrong thinking that would lead to the error dialog.
I had a support call once where the customer was 'interpreting' the error message I needed to know about. It wasn't exactly a long message - just one short line, but I didn't recognise the message from what he was telling me. Even when I asked him to read it to me verbatim, he still insisted on 'interpreting' it. Eventually I was reduced to asking him to spell it out to me. He clearly thought I was an imbercile, but I finally found out what was on the screen in front of him. It was nothing even remotely related to what he had been telling me; suddenly everything made sense and I immediately had all of the information I needed to provide a fix.
Yes, seriously. At least as far as possible anyway.
It is all about the design. Your problem is making a user interface that allows users to do really dumb things. You want a number from 1 to 10?
1. Level one is a free text entry field with no checking. The user types in -15 and **boom** - the program bails out.
2. Level two is a free text entry field with input validation. The user types in XYZZY and **boom** - up comes an error dialog. Almost as annoying as 1.
3. Level three is a text entry field that allows only digits 1 to 10, and a maximum of two characters. The user types 99 and **boom** - up comes an error dialog. Still quite annoying.
4. Level four is a spin box. The user can't enter a number directly but presses buttons to ratchet up and down between 1 and 10. It is now quite impossible to enter an illegal value. But pressing a button ten times is a real drag. And you still get an error dialog if you select one of the values that has already been taken.
5. Level five realises that asking for a number between 1 and 10 was a really bad user interface design in the first place and goes back to ask the user what he really wanted to get done.
You seem to mean by 'freedom of speech' something more like 'a right to be heard' or 'a right to an audience'. And probably 'a right to a platform' from which to expound your controversial views.
I profoundly disagree that these rights exist. The reason is simple. If you have a right to be heard, then someone else has the responsibility to do the hearing. If you have the right to a platform, the someone else has the responsibility to provide the platform. What makes you so privileged that someone else must provide these for you?
Do you stop every time you pass a street preacher and listen carefully until he has finished? After all, it is your responsibility to do so if you believe that you also have a right to be heard.
I think you mean simple, or perhaps very simple. Simplistic means too simple or over-simplified. If your unit tests are simplistic then thay are not adequate for the job.
You need to activate click-through in the X11 server. It is a pain that this isn't the default, but now that you know, you'll find GIMP so much nicer on OS X.
From http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/guides/install_leopard/:
You don't even need my password. The password restrictions are such that when I first was forced to start using "Verified by Visa" I could not remember my password. I pressed the 'forgot password' button and in order to reset my password and continue with the transaction I was asked to enter, guess what:
# my VISA card number
and
# my date of birth
(This is with a UK bank.) That's all. Assuming that the person trying to make a fraudulent purchase with my card number knows my card number (a safe assumption?) the only other bit of information they need is my date of birth. That really would not be very difficult to find out.
I forgot and reset my password about the first dozen times I used the system. I started putting in random passwords with no attempt to memorise them.
I thought this might flag up suspicious activity and my card be blocked, but... nothing.
Depends on the culture where you live. In many countries a tip is for exceptional service. It isn't part of the wages.
"All are forgiven"... a group of us we were discussing this very same point earlier this week.
I think the point is, all are offered forgiveness. Those who accept that forgiveness are the ones who end up actually having that forgiveness. And almost by definition, you cannot accept forgiveness without acknowledging and turning away from the thing you did wrong.
So it goes like this:
1. Is offered forgiveness
2. Accepts that forgiveness
3. Is forgiven
You can't omit step 2.
Well, what a surprise. http://www.torfox.org/ is blocked; category "Proxy Avoidance".
DLP projectors also work by moving mirrors. There's no real reason why a scanning mirror need necessarily be unreliable.
No, it isn't. The decay is logarithmic because the wave is manifested as an evanescent wave.
See also Evanescent wave coupling, especially the second paragraph that mentions transformers.
Wireless power transmission is essentially a transformer with the two coils a long way apart and air instead of a ferromagnetic core.
Even more information: A BBC News article about wireless power transmission. Note that to achieve sufficient coupling between the transmitter and the receiver, very low frequency waves have to be used. The "tails" of energy mentioned in the article are the evanescent waves.
The article explains this. Apparently their research shows that the 40 mile all-electric range hits the sweet-spot for most American commuters.
Make the batteries bigger and you still have to have the gas engine for when you visit your cousin 300 miles away. Make the batteries smaller and you need to run the gas engine even for your daily commute.
Sounds like the perfect compromise to me.
That used to work, but Google cache results are now all blocked too - category 'Proxy Avoidance'.
At my place of work it takes at least a day. And it usually stays unblocked only for a few days, then it is blocked once more.
I suppose it depends on the size of the business. Where I work, it is usually impossible even to find out who is responsible for a particular policy. As for actually getting a policy changed, you'd be better off pissing into the wind.
Whenever I need information from a blocked site (I'm talking about work-related information here), I just keep trying Google results until I find one that isn't blocked. Sometimes it can take fifteen or twenty minutes, when I know that the top result would have answered my question immediately. On occasions I send myself an email at home so that I can look it up after work, but why should I have to do this?
Good point, but I think more important is to ask not what is my goal but "what is the audience's goal?"
You can give a first class presentation with a very clearly defined goal, but if that goal is not the one the audience came along with then you are wasting your time.
Most of the crappy presentations I have to attend are crappy mainly because they are telling me a load of stuff I have absolutely no interest in, and they don't answer the issues I really want to know about.
Try 'motivate'.
Or alternatively, why not use an appropriate charging structure, so that it becomes prohibitively expensive for the end user to consume excessive resources? And use the extra revenue earned from those users who are willing to pay for large consumption to increase the capacity.
I presume that was a joke.
Just in case anyone else didn't get it, permuting the text or combining characters into single glyphs would completely break the page for any browser not supporting @font-face. It would be like replacing text with bitmaps and not supplying alt text.
Omitting all glyphs not actually used on the page would be fine. Except it would become a maintenance nightmare when the text of the page is changed...
To me, it sounds a bit like Chrome OS is an operating system where the browser is the OS. It's not yet clear whether Google expect all applications running on Chrome OS to be web applications. Let's suppose the answer is 'yes'...
In that case, perhaps they don't really need a windowing system at all. What if the graphical interface of Chrome OS is to be a web browser that displays itself as a single window in a simple frame buffer?