They didn't subcontract it -- they bought it (it was made when they bought it).
And they licensed it to IBM something like 12 hours before they actually bought it...:-)
MS actually does a surprisingly small amount of development. You see their names associated with a lot of software products, but frequently they're just the publisher, they purchased the product, or they subcontracted out. Take MS's excellent fonts (ah, Verdana, thou art equalled only by Espy Sans upon my screen). Subcontracted. Their wonderful Close Combat war sim series (those games are *great*...if WINE ever supports them fully, I'm going to go nuts) are only published by MS. Bungie made Halo...but they were a company that did incredible stuff and had tons of work on Halo done when Microsoft purchased them. Hotmail was purchased.
Office and Windows, the two core MS products, were both done in-house, however.
And both are among the flakiest products in their lineup.
Also, in response to the people talking about DOS, DOS is still and has been used for some time for a real-time OS. Linux isn't really that great for doing a real-time stuff (well, vanilla Linux isn't great for real-time period) when you have very tight resources available.
It's also still the only way most people let you flash your BIOS...someone needs to make a mini-OS just for that.
Not putting out a finished, runs-on-end-user-systems product like a word processor or a web browser.
And before someone invokes Sketch, you will notice that the performance-critical portions of the thing had to be written in C. (It also isn't as fast as the excellent sodipodi, though that is neither here nor there. BTW, if you haven't looked at sodipodi recently, it's up to the point where it can be used for (light) production work. I remember when the GIMP got to this point and development exploded. Mmm...Linux has vector graphics now.:-)
It's possible that the JVM bytecode engine can contain bit-level ops and is big-endian. I really don't know if it is, but it's possible. Other than that, I dunno what he's talking about.
You could always use a compiler that compiles Java to native code instead of a JVM...
The big Java nasties are bounds checking and runtime type checking combined with casts being required when working with generic container objects (the container objects gripe comes directly from a lecture by Harper, one of the ML language designers, who knows what he's talking about).
Oh, and heap-allocating local variables sucks down cycles as well. That gets awfully expensive if you're calling functions over and over...
I'm not sure I agree that Java is "great stuff". Java has a few awfully nice features. *Good* networking support. It's crossplatform. It prints out stack traces if it dies, and really good threading support.
However, Java is annoyingly slow.
The problem is that the primary alternative is, well, Microsoft.
I'd kill for a good third alternative.
Eiffel isn't that popular. Same for Objective C (though I expect OS X has helped that a bit). Ada and Pascal are rarely used any more, and C/C++ are both too low-level. ML is functional.Lisp and Scheme are both functional and lack static typing. Most of the other "alternatives" are even lower performance (Ruby, perl...) and not really designed for large-scale application development.
The main improvements I'd like to see are:
* Speed. No-compromises speed. If you have to do runtime overhead at all, you had better have a damn good reason to do it. C and C++ do this right. SML is safe *and* manages to do this. I suppose I can live with bounds checking, a la eiffel and Java. But no more (maybe pay-as-you-go RTTI like C++). The language should be designed around maximizing speed -- it's terribly hard for a compiler to do much with C or C++ because they don't know what a pointer might be pointing to, and cross-function optimization is almost impossible. * Threading support standard. One of the best points in Java.
they will have to withdraw from the certification standard
Why? As long as they support the language (and presumably a certain set of library code, haven't looked at the exact requirements), they should be gold.
serious disadvantage in the war against java which is what this shit is about
Not really. Has gcc fallen beside the wayside to Sun's or IBM's cc because it supports extensions that go above and beyond ANSI (well, now ISO) C? No. People frequently use gcc or gmake because code uses GNU-only extensions that are useful. I use the --verbose flag of GNU rm in a particular script, for another instance of being willing to require extensions.
alternative implementations
This is completely and utterly not an issue for MS. They ship.NET on all their machines. Anyone using extensions is going to have things work just fine on a Windows box. Furthermore, I seem to recall MS going up against Borland, Watcom, and a couple others and squashing them in the past while *using* a language that's quite standardized (C), yet VS code not infrequently uses extensions to C and C++. Matter of fact, the reason the cygwin/mingw/gcc guys don't do MFC is because it utilizes some VS extensions. What makes you think that this would be any different?
Because there is something that makes.NET always faster than java if implemented properly on intel architecture.
True. Java is, and will always be hobbled by performance. I think that sacrificing performance was a fucking stupid idea on the part of Sun, but that doesn't imply anything about whether MS will extend.NET or not.
I hate java so any means of killing it should be cherished and supported.
Ah, well. Someone has to break Goodwin's Law. There were Germans that said the same thing about communists right before Hitler's rise to power...
we will be back to square one where we began.
You mean MS will be in control of the primary popular application development language?
To perl and python as the only "portable" languages.
Um...no. You just quoted performance as being the crucial issue, right? Perl and python are both quite slow languages when compared to real programming languages -- I'm not sure whether perl or python really fall into the "scripting" or the "programming" language set.
Perl is completely and utterly useless for developing a full-scale application. It's a slick language for hacks -- nothing, nothing can compare with the power of ten lines of perl code. But somewhere above a couple hundred lines of perl, I've found that programs generally devolve into unreadability and the lack of types becomes an issue.
I don't know about python -- I don't use it. I suspect that again performance would be enough of an issue to kill it in any fight against.NET. That's not really what python is intended to be used for -- general application development. It's nice for rapid development and scripting. Prototyping. Not putting out a finished, runs-on-end-user-systems product like a word processor or a web browser.
I *would* agree, but the problem is that people have frequently taken option A in the past (esp. if a powerhouse like MS is backing it, and MS has made quite a show of backing.NET to the hilt).
ASP. IE/Navigator web extensions. Visual Basic. FrontPage extensions. Javascript that works on only IE. All these were things that (at least at one point) relied on a single company, yet many people chose to go with them.
Fair enough -- I'm sorry that I criticized your work. (I'm one of the people that's a little uncomfortable with.NET, and would hardly work on it, and have stuck with other open-source projects like rxvt, snes9x, dillo, gtk-gnutella...).
My irritation stemmed from the amount of hippocracy on Slashdot -- calls to action, claims that people are going to do political activism...but then no one does anything, including the people trying to convince people to do something. You're the genuine article, and I was out of line.:-)
The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.
Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.
They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.
Same thing. Looks fine here.
The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.
I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?
They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.
Uh..yeah? So?
From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.
I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...
They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.
The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.
They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.
This is true.
It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.
True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.
I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.
There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.
Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):
ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.
HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).
Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).
BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.
Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.
So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.
There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.
Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top.:-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.
It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.
Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.
You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.
You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.
You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.
I doubt that will happen. They'll add something and make the open-source engine work mostly, but as a less-reliable system with fewer features.
And they aren't going to get MS sorts using it (even ignoring the pre-installed issue that beat even Netscape's best efforts), because MS put lots of money, time, and talent into their own VM, and the GNU one just ain't gonna be significantly better any time soon.
Given that your resolutions are listed backwards from what one would normally want (in yours, + decreases the resolution, - increases the resolution), and you have to hand-edit the XF86Config file to fix this, whereas most people (even admins) never see their monitor identifier...
Did you editors not read the comment in the last story? They're running on an emergency setup, and *specifically* requested that their new network *not* be linked to by slashdot.
So they donate resources to Debian, their NOC burns down, they set up an emergency system *and* go to the trouble of politely requesting Slashdot *not* to link to it and the first thing you do is do exactly that, making the network unusable for the students that are already having to deal with the burning down of part of the university.
Mutt will tell you what keys are available at any point if you hit "?", and you can hit "c" to change mailboxes.
Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton..
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Electronic Life
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· Score: 2
I never understood the draw of Gibson. Yes, he contributed a great deal to later authors, and his books are at least enjoyable, but IIRC from reading an Hypercard version of some of his earlier books, they tended to be confusing...
Re:My generation was so lucky...
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Electronic Life
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· Score: 2
4. Period of time when you could still get at the guts of the software. Apple IIs had a nice built in debugger, a programming environment, and you could see the source for a tremendous amount of programs. Same for similar computers of the time...
Now, there's so many layers that it's kind of intimidating to a new developer...
Re:Congo was one of his best???
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Electronic Life
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· Score: 2
Congo was pretty bad compared to Andromeda Strain or Jurassic Park, IMHO.
What would the point be of putting a GUI on it? It's well evolved to the text-based paradigm. I can't see much advantage added by moving to a GUI. I can resize my window and have the thing auto-resize already. If you really want to, you can enable mouse support. What would the point of going GUI be?
As far as I'm concerned, if you can't use vi, you're not qualified to work on UNIX boxes
Yeah? As far as I'm concerned, if you can't use FORTRAN-77, you're not qualified to work on UNIX boxes. Oh, and Ada. And screen. You *do* know how to use screen, right? And sendmail. God forbid that anyone be allowed to use a UNIX box without the ability to hand-code up a sendmail.cf file without any reference material.
That's about how silly the "vi" requirement comes off to me. Short of troubleshooting a system with a dead emacs (not exactly something that happens often), there's little reason to require someone to know vi. And for really nasty troubleshooting, I suspect most x86 people are more likely to use e3 than vi to avoid the libc requirement (/me remembers a dark day with a broken ld.so).
That being said, pico is a pretty frusterating editor to try using very seriously, or for anything other than mail.
I've never seen an elm vs pine flame war. Most of us that have been using elm, look at all pine users as newbies and just ignore them.
You may not have seen such, but boy, are you ever trying hard to start one.
Nothing like demonstrating one's l33tness by showing that you can figure out how to use Foo email client instead of Baz email client. Yessiree, that sure is badass.
Actually, the 21.2 is technically supposed to be "0.21.2", but they finally gave up on the 0 since it wasn't ever going to get up to version 1...
Re:Fix it yourself (was Re:Does it..)
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PINE Releases 4.50
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· Score: 2
Um...he didn't blame it on you. He said that the bug was in termcap (more UNIXish than pine, which at least also exists on Windows). He's also correct -- the termcap was incorrect. And while I suppose the topic was somewhat incindiary, he just gave you some free tech support. Chill out.
You run
ssty erase ^H
and you'll fix it.
The reason that only pine demonstrates the problem is that a lot of pieces of software simply take ^H and ^? and treat them both as backspace (bash, for instance, does this). If you want another piece of software that will demonstrate this problem, try running less on a file, typing slash to search, and then entering a search string. Any backspaces you hit while typing your query will spew "^H"s.
Pine: * Heavily menu-based, easier to learn * Better colorization when reading letters (colorizes each level of replied-to text a different color) * Most keys easier to remember * Has a monthly sent-mail folder. You can do this in mutt, but it takes a bit of work and editing your config file.
Mutt: * More consistent keystrokes...Pine has something like three keystrokes that mean "back out of this screen" -- Q, E, and less-than. Mutt inexplicably still uses both "q" and "i", but it's somewhat better. * Unlike pine, you don't have to turn on something like 50 options to get reasonable functionality out of the program -- pine defaults to an extremely simple set of options, mutt to a much more powerful set. * really, really good PGP support * more and nicer colorization of the UI aside from the recieved mail text.
Both are fairly configurable, mutt more so. Mutt takes much more poking around and time spent to get working the way you want.
I *strongly* suggest using whichever you choose in conjunction with procmail to process your incoming mail. I sort mailing list stuff into mailing list inboxes, filter out viruses, and eat spam with procmail. A little more work to use than the more simplistic filters in a GUI email program, but very powerful, and quite a useful tool to have under the belt.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't subcontract it -- they bought it (it was made when they bought it).
:-)
And they licensed it to IBM something like 12 hours before they actually bought it...
MS actually does a surprisingly small amount of development. You see their names associated with a lot of software products, but frequently they're just the publisher, they purchased the product, or they subcontracted out. Take MS's excellent fonts (ah, Verdana, thou art equalled only by Espy Sans upon my screen). Subcontracted. Their wonderful Close Combat war sim series (those games are *great*...if WINE ever supports them fully, I'm going to go nuts) are only published by MS. Bungie made Halo...but they were a company that did incredible stuff and had tons of work on Halo done when Microsoft purchased them. Hotmail was purchased.
Office and Windows, the two core MS products, were both done in-house, however.
And both are among the flakiest products in their lineup.
Also, in response to the people talking about DOS, DOS is still and has been used for some time for a real-time OS. Linux isn't really that great for doing a real-time stuff (well, vanilla Linux isn't great for real-time period) when you have very tight resources available.
It's also still the only way most people let you flash your BIOS...someone needs to make a mini-OS just for that.
Not putting out a finished, runs-on-end-user-systems product like a word processor or a web browser.
:-)
And before someone invokes Sketch, you will notice that the performance-critical portions of the thing had to be written in C. (It also isn't as fast as the excellent sodipodi, though that is neither here nor there. BTW, if you haven't looked at sodipodi recently, it's up to the point where it can be used for (light) production work. I remember when the GIMP got to this point and development exploded. Mmm...Linux has vector graphics now.
It's possible that the JVM bytecode engine can contain bit-level ops and is big-endian. I really don't know if it is, but it's possible. Other than that, I dunno what he's talking about.
You could always use a compiler that compiles Java to native code instead of a JVM...
True.
The big Java nasties are bounds checking and runtime type checking combined with casts being required when working with generic container objects (the container objects gripe comes directly from a lecture by Harper, one of the ML language designers, who knows what he's talking about).
Oh, and heap-allocating local variables sucks down cycles as well. That gets awfully expensive if you're calling functions over and over...
I'm not sure I agree that Java is "great stuff". Java has a few awfully nice features. *Good* networking support. It's crossplatform. It prints out stack traces if it dies, and really good threading support.
However, Java is annoyingly slow.
The problem is that the primary alternative is, well, Microsoft.
I'd kill for a good third alternative.
Eiffel isn't that popular. Same for Objective C (though I expect OS X has helped that a bit). Ada and Pascal are rarely used any more, and C/C++ are both too low-level. ML is functional.Lisp and Scheme are both functional and lack static typing. Most of the other "alternatives" are even lower performance (Ruby, perl...) and not really designed for large-scale application development.
The main improvements I'd like to see are:
* Speed. No-compromises speed. If you have to do runtime overhead at all, you had better have a damn good reason to do it. C and C++ do this right. SML is safe *and* manages to do this. I suppose I can live with bounds checking, a la eiffel and Java. But no more (maybe pay-as-you-go RTTI like C++). The language should be designed around maximizing speed -- it's terribly hard for a compiler to do much with C or C++ because they don't know what a pointer might be pointing to, and cross-function optimization is almost impossible.
* Threading support standard. One of the best points in Java.
they will have to withdraw from the certification standard
.NET on all their machines. Anyone using extensions is going to have things work just fine on a Windows box. Furthermore, I seem to recall MS going up against Borland, Watcom, and a couple others and squashing them in the past while *using* a language that's quite standardized (C), yet VS code not infrequently uses extensions to C and C++. Matter of fact, the reason the cygwin/mingw/gcc guys don't do MFC is because it utilizes some VS extensions. What makes you think that this would be any different?
.NET always faster than java if implemented properly on intel architecture.
.NET or not.
.NET. That's not really what python is intended to be used for -- general application development. It's nice for rapid development and scripting. Prototyping. Not putting out a finished, runs-on-end-user-systems product like a word processor or a web browser.
Why? As long as they support the language (and presumably a certain set of library code, haven't looked at the exact requirements), they should be gold.
serious disadvantage in the war against java which is what this shit is about
Not really. Has gcc fallen beside the wayside to Sun's or IBM's cc because it supports extensions that go above and beyond ANSI (well, now ISO) C? No. People frequently use gcc or gmake because code uses GNU-only extensions that are useful. I use the --verbose flag of GNU rm in a particular script, for another instance of being willing to require extensions.
alternative implementations
This is completely and utterly not an issue for MS. They ship
Because there is something that makes
True. Java is, and will always be hobbled by performance. I think that sacrificing performance was a fucking stupid idea on the part of Sun, but that doesn't imply anything about whether MS will extend
I hate java so any means of killing it should be cherished and supported.
Ah, well. Someone has to break Goodwin's Law. There were Germans that said the same thing about communists right before Hitler's rise to power...
we will be back to square one where we began.
You mean MS will be in control of the primary popular application development language?
To perl and python as the only "portable" languages.
Um...no. You just quoted performance as being the crucial issue, right? Perl and python are both quite slow languages when compared to real programming languages -- I'm not sure whether perl or python really fall into the "scripting" or the "programming" language set.
Perl is completely and utterly useless for developing a full-scale application. It's a slick language for hacks -- nothing, nothing can compare with the power of ten lines of perl code. But somewhere above a couple hundred lines of perl, I've found that programs generally devolve into unreadability and the lack of types becomes an issue.
I don't know about python -- I don't use it. I suspect that again performance would be enough of an issue to kill it in any fight against
I *would* agree, but the problem is that people have frequently taken option A in the past (esp. if a powerhouse like MS is backing it, and MS has made quite a show of backing .NET to the hilt).
ASP. IE/Navigator web extensions. Visual Basic. FrontPage extensions. Javascript that works on only IE. All these were things that (at least at one point) relied on a single company, yet many people chose to go with them.
It's worth considering.
Fair enough -- I'm sorry that I criticized your work. (I'm one of the people that's a little uncomfortable with .NET, and would hardly work on it, and have stuck with other open-source projects like rxvt, snes9x, dillo, gtk-gnutella...).
:-)
My irritation stemmed from the amount of hippocracy on Slashdot -- calls to action, claims that people are going to do political activism...but then no one does anything, including the people trying to convince people to do something. You're the genuine article, and I was out of line.
The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.
:-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.
:-)
Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.
They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.
Same thing. Looks fine here.
The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.
I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?
They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.
Uh..yeah? So?
From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.
I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...
They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.
The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.
They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.
This is true.
It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.
True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.
I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.
There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.
Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):
ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.
HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).
Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.
RCA. Rollover menus from hell.
Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).
BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.
Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.
So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.
There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.
Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top.
It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.
Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.
You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.
You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.
You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.
You use Javascript for normal links
Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.
On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.
Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs.
And have *you* contributed anything whatsoever to dotGNU?
I doubt that will happen. They'll add something and make the open-source engine work mostly, but as a less-reliable system with fewer features.
.NET move was a pretty good move for MS.
And they aren't going to get MS sorts using it (even ignoring the pre-installed issue that beat even Netscape's best efforts), because MS put lots of money, time, and talent into their own VM, and the GNU one just ain't gonna be significantly better any time soon.
The
It would be a bad idea from a financial standpoint -- people are willing to pay current prices.
Given that your resolutions are listed backwards from what one would normally want (in yours, + decreases the resolution, - increases the resolution), and you have to hand-edit the XF86Config file to fix this, whereas most people (even admins) never see their monitor identifier...
/me hopes that you're not wanting them to turn into the bitmapped "Flash-enabled" monstrosities that litter the Internet now.
is getting slashdotted
Yes. This is downright reprehensible.
Did you editors not read the comment in the last story? They're running on an emergency setup, and *specifically* requested that their new network *not* be linked to by slashdot.
See this comment on your own story.
So they donate resources to Debian, their NOC burns down, they set up an emergency system *and* go to the trouble of politely requesting Slashdot *not* to link to it and the first thing you do is do exactly that, making the network unusable for the students that are already having to deal with the burning down of part of the university.
Assholes.
Mutt will tell you what keys are available at any point if you hit "?", and you can hit "c" to change mailboxes.
I never understood the draw of Gibson. Yes, he contributed a great deal to later authors, and his books are at least enjoyable, but IIRC from reading an Hypercard version of some of his earlier books, they tended to be confusing...
4. Period of time when you could still get at the guts of the software. Apple IIs had a nice built in debugger, a programming environment, and you could see the source for a tremendous amount of programs. Same for similar computers of the time...
Now, there's so many layers that it's kind of intimidating to a new developer...
Congo was pretty bad compared to Andromeda Strain or Jurassic Park, IMHO.
found out about Emacs VM and never used pine again
I like emacs for most things, but vm is slooooooooooowwwww.
What would the point be of putting a GUI on it? It's well evolved to the text-based paradigm. I can't see much advantage added by moving to a GUI. I can resize my window and have the thing auto-resize already. If you really want to, you can enable mouse support. What would the point of going GUI be?
As far as I'm concerned, if you can't use vi, you're not qualified to work on UNIX boxes
Yeah? As far as I'm concerned, if you can't use FORTRAN-77, you're not qualified to work on UNIX boxes. Oh, and Ada. And screen. You *do* know how to use screen, right? And sendmail. God forbid that anyone be allowed to use a UNIX box without the ability to hand-code up a sendmail.cf file without any reference material.
That's about how silly the "vi" requirement comes off to me. Short of troubleshooting a system with a dead emacs (not exactly something that happens often), there's little reason to require someone to know vi. And for really nasty troubleshooting, I suspect most x86 people are more likely to use e3 than vi to avoid the libc requirement (/me remembers a dark day with a broken ld.so).
That being said, pico is a pretty frusterating editor to try using very seriously, or for anything other than mail.
I've never seen an elm vs pine flame war. Most of us that have been using elm, look at all pine users as newbies and just ignore them.
You may not have seen such, but boy, are you ever trying hard to start one.
Nothing like demonstrating one's l33tness by showing that you can figure out how to use Foo email client instead of Baz email client. Yessiree, that sure is badass.
Actually, the 21.2 is technically supposed to be "0.21.2", but they finally gave up on the 0 since it wasn't ever going to get up to version 1...
You run and you'll fix it.
The reason that only pine demonstrates the problem is that a lot of pieces of software simply take ^H and ^? and treat them both as backspace (bash, for instance, does this). If you want another piece of software that will demonstrate this problem, try running less on a file, typing slash to search, and then entering a search string. Any backspaces you hit while typing your query will spew "^H"s.
Well, let's see.
Pine:
* Heavily menu-based, easier to learn
* Better colorization when reading letters (colorizes each level of replied-to text a different color)
* Most keys easier to remember
* Has a monthly sent-mail folder. You can do this in mutt, but it takes a bit of work and editing your config file.
Mutt:
* More consistent keystrokes...Pine has something like three keystrokes that mean "back out of this screen" -- Q, E, and less-than. Mutt inexplicably still uses both "q" and "i", but it's somewhat better.
* Unlike pine, you don't have to turn on something like 50 options to get reasonable functionality out of the program -- pine defaults to an extremely simple set of options, mutt to a much more powerful set.
* really, really good PGP support
* more and nicer colorization of the UI aside from the recieved mail text.
Both are fairly configurable, mutt more so. Mutt takes much more poking around and time spent to get working the way you want.
I *strongly* suggest using whichever you choose in conjunction with procmail to process your incoming mail. I sort mailing list stuff into mailing list inboxes, filter out viruses, and eat spam with procmail. A little more work to use than the more simplistic filters in a GUI email program, but very powerful, and quite a useful tool to have under the belt.