"Bloat" is one of those catchy ideas that seems to explain things but is IMO mistaken. Modern software isn't actually that bloated - it's much more featureful, and it handles much larger and more complex datasets in much more straightforward ways. Also, it's often cross-platform, or designed for forward portability and rapid maintenance in ways that old software was not. None of these things are "bloat" - you'd miss them if there were absent.
For any real programming task, the question has to be: why do you care baout that? Is it, specifically, a bottleneck in your code as detected with profiling tools?
If it isn't, then don't wank around optimizing for single cycles on a machine that probably bleeds off a million cycles every time you raise a window.
What you just witnessed was stage 1 of the formation of a guild. The government has decided to grant "journalists" special privileges. As a necessary part of this, it's also taken on itself the role of defining "journalist". From now on, a journalist is what the government says is one.
Stage two is industry insider capture of the definition process, and its formal transfer to the journalists themselves. At which point, the guild is fully formed, and they start pressing for action against "unlicensed" non-members, cf: doctors.
It is not possible to be perfectly binary format compatible.
First, even Office itself isn't.
Second, if you succeed, M$ will move the goalposts. You can't lead and you can't catch up. It's as pointless as a dog chasing its tail.
OpenDocument offers the only sane path out. "I know this game, it's called cat and mouse" "how do you win?" "don't be the mouse". Time to make M$ chase after our document formats.
OpenDocument is now before the ISO (International Standards Organization) board for ratification. From there, there is no doubt in my mind that OpenDocument is heading to the W3C for ratification as the successor to HTML and XHTML.
Seriously, WTF?
OpenDocument isn't a web markup. It's an office document format.
You're thinking like a programmer, or maybe like a graphics geek.
It's in the layer menu because it only affects the current layer. Otherwise it would be in the image menu.
Now see, it's stuff like that that causes GIMP's UI to suck. Understand: layers are not what the program is there for. Layers are a means, not an end. Unless forced by necessity, UI controls should serve ends, not be subordinate to means.
I'll give an example to explain. Here's another way the brightness/contrast UI control could have been done. First: in regard of layers, what's the normal thing a user wants to do? A novice user won't be using layers. A pro will, and normally wants to affect the current layer. So, default everything to affecting the current layer. Straight off the bat that saves a lot of UI duplication! Make the common case simple, the rare case possible. So, allow edits to all layers at once if a toggle is set (I'd put it prominently on the layers dialog). Meanwhile, the "colors" and "transforms" menus go at the top level, because they're the sort of thing every Joe Digtal-camera wants to use. So from being buried two levels deep in a place that relates to an incidental technicality, brightness/contrast is instead up in front where the user can "grab it and go".
Coincidentally, this approach I outlined above would add new features in a simple way. Autocrop the layer, autocrop the image, depending on the "affect one/all" toggle. (Joe Digtal-camera isn't using layers, so the toggle behaves as if set to "affect all", and does what he expects.)
BTW path and stroke, you must be a graphical geek if you think it's tolerable. It's a pitiful hack! "Stroking" a vector (render to editable pixels) is a rare case. Normal case should be as with other combi vector/pixel editors, vectors remain vectors and are "stroked" when you export to JPG. Yes it might be nice to have a menu option to stroke a vector, for the cases when you need it. It shouldn't be the normal way to operate! (I understand GIMP's attitude is "I edit pixels, vectors had better start acting like pixels if they want to be edited". Thinking like a programmer again!)
Faced with a choice of GIMP or Xara, I think I know what Joe Six-pack would choose, and it wouldn't be GIMP. It's easier to ignore unnecessary features than to twist your mind around a terrible UI. I mean for frick's sake, brightness/contrast is in the layer menu?
GIMP gets used on Linux because it's the only tool, not because it's a nice tool.
BTW, mixed vector and pixel editing is one of those things you can't see the use for, until you need it. Very typical use: marking up and labelling an image. That's a pain to do in gimp (path and stroke? sounds like teenage courtship). Not much alleviated by exporting to a vector tool that doesn't have the first clue what to do with pixels.
It would be nice, but I worry the EM spectrum's too limited. It would surely be taken over by the government on the pretext of fair allocation, cartelized with a system of licenses, captured by music industry placemen, and forced to play lowest-common-denominator trash. Despite the technology now becoming possible, I don't believe we can look to wireless broadcast audio for any sort of information revolution.
People talk about download time, irritating animation and flash ads, etc. For me that's secondary. I simply dislike to have my web experience interrupted with distractions. A web page with ads is like having your interesting and involved conversation constantly broken into by a pushy host who keeps shoving food at you. Even if you're hungry, it gets to be annoying.
I think the problem with ads is that they are adversarial. You want one thing, the advertiser wants another, and they try to divert you from your goal. They can try, but with "adblock" I can stop them, so I do.
I suppose that this could be seen - from the perspective of the vendor - as a targeting issue. Advertising directed at people who don't want to buy is wasted. Is there some way to screen out all the non-buyers? This got me thinking: maybe the whole idea of advertising is ass-backward for the 21st century? Rather than struggling to sift out customers from looky-loos, perhaps you can just make it easy for them to find you? Advertising is a phenomenon of information scarcity. If you know who the vendors are - or can find out by searching froogle - then it becomes unnecessary. Could high-quality search make it obsolete?
EFF and whoever, this is your cue to hit the piggy-bank with the hammer, and call in all your favours! There will never be a better moment to move the mainstream and throw patents out of software for good.
Computer software has been mostly unregulated. This has allowed us to watch the "invisible hand" of the market in its purest form. Commodity programs have disclaimers, buy bespoke and you get guarantees, pay yet more and you get formally certified code. The cost of risk and the cost of the program are in effect two seperate purchases - product and insurance.
If you force programmers to carry the risk cost, you don't magically get bugfree code. You just delete the no-guarantees market. In effect you're forcing programmers to bundle insurance with every installation. "Free" disappears. "Libre" might survive in an attenuated form - edit "open source" and you become the liability carrier. You might do it in house, but few could afford to publish.
The guy points out that other industry sectors have this sort of law. Yup, they do, and I contend we're all worse off as a result. Amateurs are frozen out, because they can't afford to jump insurance hoops. Innovations are stifled. Saleable skills are wasted. Personal self-expression is denied. Even though all parties are willing, the law stands in between saying "no". This is nothing to emulate!
Nanny liberals would contend they are protecting buyers from risk. As an adult you have to accept that the universe has dangers. You can't wish it safe, and the utopia of your childhood was an illusion. Who then is best placed to decide when you should gamble and when hedge? Philosophically, no action can be said to be "better" or "worse" without a reference to a person whose goals it serves or thwarts. No person can know another's mind. Therefore, you alone are properly placed to weigh the options and decide on your own behalf. At best a law commands you to take your best choice. At worst, bans it. Neutral or harmful, and (given diversity) certain to be harmful to some. This is why regulation is never better than a free market, even in risk.
In the real 21st century, the robot reads your intentions out of the Slashdot archive, cross references your name to your email with google, uses your email to retrieve your credit record and postal address, enters your zipcode into google maps, spots your fortified compound in a satellite photo, and turns up at the door disguised as a travelling salesman for exactly the brand of Russian marital aids for which your purchase histoy shows such fondness.
Re:Some folks have a weird (spelled right) idea of
on
Python vs. Alligator
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· Score: 1
I've noticed that the more nutty and passionate ideologies usually contain people railing against their own opposite belief. So socialism contains patrician elitists, and ecology contains people who refuse to consider human action as natural.
"As the top species on the planet, it is OUR job to steward all our fellows" - said the Victorian zookeper! Your human-chauvinism amuses me. Other species are their own selves. They aren't anthropomorphisms with "rights", anymore than they grant each other rights, and they aren't wards of humanity. We use them, they use us, everybody uses what or whomever is convenient and goes about their own business. Evolution eventually fits these uses together into an ecosystem of mutual utility. This is the natural way of interactions between species!
If Microsoft does give this away, then the other anti-virus companies will go out of business.
Nonsense. No more than eg: Avast's free (and good!) virus checker is going to impoverish Symantec or McAfee.
Virus checkers are an example of a product where there is zero (or even negative) network effect. Unlike most other markets where M$ has basically taken over by giving freebies, there is no disadvantage to running a different brand of checker if it actually does a better job. The job itself is important, and "better features and quality" are not just checklist candy, but often the difference between a working PC or not. That's why some folks are prepared to pay big bucks despite there being freebies available.
The only way M$ will lock out the paid virus checker market, is by fixing their OS's default-allow security model.
The obvious counter game is: buy more than one, until you verify you have a hi-spec, then rebox the lo-spec mechines and resell them as "brand new unwanted" on ebay. You'll probably lose a small amount on the others, but it's offset against the cheap hi-spec machine, raising its effective cost only slightly.
I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely. The
idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community without a
functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole worlds have
become single biological communities without an interrelated social structure
and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically instructive under
overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding
create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these
forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt are worth study.
Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any
social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity.
Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the
need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds
and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by
confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.
... is a replacement for DNS that distributes the root in a peer-to-peer way. Then the countries can all bugger off, and the internet will contain whatever sites people feel inclined to add.
...then I will just point my resolv.conf at some public nameservers in USA.
I do not trust UN or EU to run the DNS properly. They are both corrupt root and branch, and the UN is deliberately built to treat dictators and free countries as equals.
Why would they want control of the internet? When right now, the only thing that's being done with that control is "laissez faire"?
Obvious answer: they want to stop the laissez faire. Consider a UN internet, where China would demand the de-listing of Tibetan independence and Falun Gong sites, Germany would demand takedown of neonazi sites, The arab nations would demand takedown of Israeli sites... you get the picture.
These people want to wreck the freedom of the internet. For all this is couched in the langauge of "balance", it's a direct attempt to stuff the information genie back in its bottle.
If you care for your freedom, don't let them get away with it.
Some folks have a wierd "static" idea of nature
on
Python vs. Alligator
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's as if there weren't such thing as invasive species before humans came along to transplant them.
Seriously, what you have there is an example of evolution in action. The snakey equivalent of a Darwin award. At some point over the next half-milennium, a new ecological balance will stabilize between indigenous gators and feral snakes. Either one will be the top predator, or they'll stay mutual predators, but with a better appreciation of "don't bite off more than you can chew". Meanwhile all the other beasties will match their habits to the new predator's methods - or die out, as it always has been and always shall.
What's so special about eg: "endangered woodstorks" that makes their species worthy to get a free pass on evolution?
What is the reason for these licenses? Surely the market would reward companies willing to assert their stuff is unbreakable, and take the legal liability to prove it? Well, in some cases it does - in "vertical" markets, and at a greatly increased price. This reflects the reality of software engineering at the present moment: there is simply no way to make zero-defect software at retail prices, or as a hobby. The most that's realistic is for tried-and-tested software to have been cured of the more obvious problems.
This is the reason for those licenses. Responsibility must match control! It would be stupid to accept liability for something you can't prevent. It would be irrational, nothing short of bloody-minded spite, to enforce that liability.
...wasn't that about the amount of money that Louisiana was just recently asking, to fix the damage from one hurricane? What, they want their own space station, now?
Slashdot Mirror
"Bloat" is one of those catchy ideas that seems to explain things but is IMO mistaken. Modern software isn't actually that bloated - it's much more featureful, and it handles much larger and more complex datasets in much more straightforward ways. Also, it's often cross-platform, or designed for forward portability and rapid maintenance in ways that old software was not. None of these things are "bloat" - you'd miss them if there were absent.
For any real programming task, the question has to be: why do you care baout that? Is it, specifically, a bottleneck in your code as detected with profiling tools?
If it isn't, then don't wank around optimizing for single cycles on a machine that probably bleeds off a million cycles every time you raise a window.
What you just witnessed was stage 1 of the formation of a guild. The government has decided to grant "journalists" special privileges. As a necessary part of this, it's also taken on itself the role of defining "journalist". From now on, a journalist is what the government says is one.
Stage two is industry insider capture of the definition process, and its formal transfer to the journalists themselves. At which point, the guild is fully formed, and they start pressing for action against "unlicensed" non-members, cf: doctors.
It is not possible to be perfectly binary format compatible.
First, even Office itself isn't.
Second, if you succeed, M$ will move the goalposts. You can't lead and you can't catch up. It's as pointless as a dog chasing its tail.
OpenDocument offers the only sane path out. "I know this game, it's called cat and mouse" "how do you win?" "don't be the mouse". Time to make M$ chase after our document formats.
Seriously, WTF?
OpenDocument isn't a web markup. It's an office document format.
Now see, it's stuff like that that causes GIMP's UI to suck. Understand: layers are not what the program is there for. Layers are a means, not an end. Unless forced by necessity, UI controls should serve ends, not be subordinate to means.
I'll give an example to explain. Here's another way the brightness/contrast UI control could have been done. First: in regard of layers, what's the normal thing a user wants to do? A novice user won't be using layers. A pro will, and normally wants to affect the current layer. So, default everything to affecting the current layer. Straight off the bat that saves a lot of UI duplication! Make the common case simple, the rare case possible. So, allow edits to all layers at once if a toggle is set (I'd put it prominently on the layers dialog). Meanwhile, the "colors" and "transforms" menus go at the top level, because they're the sort of thing every Joe Digtal-camera wants to use. So from being buried two levels deep in a place that relates to an incidental technicality, brightness/contrast is instead up in front where the user can "grab it and go".
Coincidentally, this approach I outlined above would add new features in a simple way. Autocrop the layer, autocrop the image, depending on the "affect one/all" toggle. (Joe Digtal-camera isn't using layers, so the toggle behaves as if set to "affect all", and does what he expects.)
BTW path and stroke, you must be a graphical geek if you think it's tolerable. It's a pitiful hack! "Stroking" a vector (render to editable pixels) is a rare case. Normal case should be as with other combi vector/pixel editors, vectors remain vectors and are "stroked" when you export to JPG. Yes it might be nice to have a menu option to stroke a vector, for the cases when you need it. It shouldn't be the normal way to operate! (I understand GIMP's attitude is "I edit pixels, vectors had better start acting like pixels if they want to be edited". Thinking like a programmer again!)
...don't put it on. Seriously. Bad things would happen.
Faced with a choice of GIMP or Xara, I think I know what Joe Six-pack would choose, and it wouldn't be GIMP. It's easier to ignore unnecessary features than to twist your mind around a terrible UI. I mean for frick's sake, brightness/contrast is in the layer menu?
GIMP gets used on Linux because it's the only tool, not because it's a nice tool.
BTW, mixed vector and pixel editing is one of those things you can't see the use for, until you need it. Very typical use: marking up and labelling an image. That's a pain to do in gimp (path and stroke? sounds like teenage courtship). Not much alleviated by exporting to a vector tool that doesn't have the first clue what to do with pixels.
It would be nice, but I worry the EM spectrum's too limited. It would surely be taken over by the government on the pretext of fair allocation, cartelized with a system of licenses, captured by music industry placemen, and forced to play lowest-common-denominator trash. Despite the technology now becoming possible, I don't believe we can look to wireless broadcast audio for any sort of information revolution.
People talk about download time, irritating animation and flash ads, etc. For me that's secondary. I simply dislike to have my web experience interrupted with distractions. A web page with ads is like having your interesting and involved conversation constantly broken into by a pushy host who keeps shoving food at you. Even if you're hungry, it gets to be annoying.
I think the problem with ads is that they are adversarial. You want one thing, the advertiser wants another, and they try to divert you from your goal. They can try, but with "adblock" I can stop them, so I do.
I suppose that this could be seen - from the perspective of the vendor - as a targeting issue. Advertising directed at people who don't want to buy is wasted. Is there some way to screen out all the non-buyers? This got me thinking: maybe the whole idea of advertising is ass-backward for the 21st century? Rather than struggling to sift out customers from looky-loos, perhaps you can just make it easy for them to find you? Advertising is a phenomenon of information scarcity. If you know who the vendors are - or can find out by searching froogle - then it becomes unnecessary. Could high-quality search make it obsolete?
EFF and whoever, this is your cue to hit the piggy-bank with the hammer, and call in all your favours! There will never be a better moment to move the mainstream and throw patents out of software for good.
Computer software has been mostly unregulated. This has allowed us to watch the "invisible hand" of the market in its purest form. Commodity programs have disclaimers, buy bespoke and you get guarantees, pay yet more and you get formally certified code. The cost of risk and the cost of the program are in effect two seperate purchases - product and insurance.
If you force programmers to carry the risk cost, you don't magically get bugfree code. You just delete the no-guarantees market. In effect you're forcing programmers to bundle insurance with every installation. "Free" disappears. "Libre" might survive in an attenuated form - edit "open source" and you become the liability carrier. You might do it in house, but few could afford to publish.
The guy points out that other industry sectors have this sort of law. Yup, they do, and I contend we're all worse off as a result. Amateurs are frozen out, because they can't afford to jump insurance hoops. Innovations are stifled. Saleable skills are wasted. Personal self-expression is denied. Even though all parties are willing, the law stands in between saying "no". This is nothing to emulate!
Nanny liberals would contend they are protecting buyers from risk. As an adult you have to accept that the universe has dangers. You can't wish it safe, and the utopia of your childhood was an illusion. Who then is best placed to decide when you should gamble and when hedge? Philosophically, no action can be said to be "better" or "worse" without a reference to a person whose goals it serves or thwarts. No person can know another's mind. Therefore, you alone are properly placed to weigh the options and decide on your own behalf. At best a law commands you to take your best choice. At worst, bans it. Neutral or harmful, and (given diversity) certain to be harmful to some. This is why regulation is never better than a free market, even in risk.
Wireless audio.
No, wait, that's not new.
In the real 21st century, the robot reads your intentions out of the Slashdot archive, cross references your name to your email with google, uses your email to retrieve your credit record and postal address, enters your zipcode into google maps, spots your fortified compound in a satellite photo, and turns up at the door disguised as a travelling salesman for exactly the brand of Russian marital aids for which your purchase histoy shows such fondness.
I've noticed that the more nutty and passionate ideologies usually contain people railing against their own opposite belief. So socialism contains patrician elitists, and ecology contains people who refuse to consider human action as natural.
"As the top species on the planet, it is OUR job to steward all our fellows" - said the Victorian zookeper! Your human-chauvinism amuses me. Other species are their own selves. They aren't anthropomorphisms with "rights", anymore than they grant each other rights, and they aren't wards of humanity. We use them, they use us, everybody uses what or whomever is convenient and goes about their own business. Evolution eventually fits these uses together into an ecosystem of mutual utility. This is the natural way of interactions between species!
Virus checkers are an example of a product where there is zero (or even negative) network effect. Unlike most other markets where M$ has basically taken over by giving freebies, there is no disadvantage to running a different brand of checker if it actually does a better job. The job itself is important, and "better features and quality" are not just checklist candy, but often the difference between a working PC or not. That's why some folks are prepared to pay big bucks despite there being freebies available.
The only way M$ will lock out the paid virus checker market, is by fixing their OS's default-allow security model.
I disagree with this. What it is, is an informal attempt to hypothesize a natural law of information escapology.
Two things that immediately occur to mind:
The obvious counter game is: buy more than one, until you verify you have a hi-spec, then rebox the lo-spec mechines and resell them as "brand new unwanted" on ebay. You'll probably lose a small amount on the others, but it's offset against the cheap hi-spec machine, raising its effective cost only slightly.
* A Mad Tea Party
* Among the Chosen
* Boschen & Nesuko
* Bulletproof
* Crackling Silence
* Indavo
* Level
* Midnight Gurl
* Mondo Mecho
* Monica Furious * Reman Mythology
* Seraphic Blue
* Terinu
Padding text to allow this to post.
I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely. The idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community without a functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole worlds have become single biological communities without an interrelated social structure and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt are worth study. Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.
Leto Atreides, The Stolen Journals
Confucius say: man who accept JPEG as reciept, soon find all office computer have "gimp" installed.
... is a replacement for DNS that distributes the root in a peer-to-peer way. Then the countries can all bugger off, and the internet will contain whatever sites people feel inclined to add.
...then I will just point my resolv.conf at some public nameservers in USA.
I do not trust UN or EU to run the DNS properly. They are both corrupt root and branch, and the UN is deliberately built to treat dictators and free countries as equals.
Why would they want control of the internet? When right now, the only thing that's being done with that control is "laissez faire"?
Obvious answer: they want to stop the laissez faire. Consider a UN internet, where China would demand the de-listing of Tibetan independence and Falun Gong sites, Germany would demand takedown of neonazi sites, The arab nations would demand takedown of Israeli sites... you get the picture.
These people want to wreck the freedom of the internet. For all this is couched in the langauge of "balance", it's a direct attempt to stuff the information genie back in its bottle.
If you care for your freedom, don't let them get away with it.
It's as if there weren't such thing as invasive species before humans came along to transplant them.
Seriously, what you have there is an example of evolution in action. The snakey equivalent of a Darwin award. At some point over the next half-milennium, a new ecological balance will stabilize between indigenous gators and feral snakes. Either one will be the top predator, or they'll stay mutual predators, but with a better appreciation of "don't bite off more than you can chew". Meanwhile all the other beasties will match their habits to the new predator's methods - or die out, as it always has been and always shall.
What's so special about eg: "endangered woodstorks" that makes their species worthy to get a free pass on evolution?
What is the reason for these licenses? Surely the market would reward companies willing to assert their stuff is unbreakable, and take the legal liability to prove it? Well, in some cases it does - in "vertical" markets, and at a greatly increased price. This reflects the reality of software engineering at the present moment: there is simply no way to make zero-defect software at retail prices, or as a hobby. The most that's realistic is for tried-and-tested software to have been cured of the more obvious problems.
This is the reason for those licenses. Responsibility must match control! It would be stupid to accept liability for something you can't prevent. It would be irrational, nothing short of bloody-minded spite, to enforce that liability.
...wasn't that about the amount of money that Louisiana was just recently asking, to fix the damage from one hurricane? What, they want their own space station, now?