Things like removing drive lettering, would be quite helpful. But would break everything ever written for Windows. It wouldn't have to. There are a couple ways that things could be done. First, the / directory could be treated as C:. If a program asked to open C:\blah, it could just translate that to/blah. The problem with this is other drives; the CD drive would have to be translated to/media/cdrom for instance. I'm not sure what the list of such translations would be, and I could see this as being very ad-hoc.
The second option would be to implicitly prepend a / before open requests starting with a drive letter; e.g. C: would become/C:, and D: would become/D:. Set up links at/C: and/D: that point to probably / and/media/cdrom, respectively.
(Actually this second option is really just like the first, just at a different layer; in the first, the translation would be done by "fopen" or whatever, in the latter by the file system.)
Things like completely redoing the start bar from scratch to make it actually useful would break every program installer that wants to create a shortcut.
Installers for Windows 3.1 are still able to create Program Groups even though Program Manager no longer exists.
Or making Internet Explorer swappable for another browser, as in, being able to completely remove it. There goes everything hard coded to use IE and expects it to be there, such a Steam.
This is actually at least close to being possible, at least in the most direct sense, in Vista. The (Windows) Explorer/IE integration I think has basically been completely severed. However, the MSHTML component, which is what actually provides the HTML rendering, is still pretty tightly coupled into Windows, and there's not really any way to remove that (unless they were to make it a pluggable API so you could replace MSHTML with something else). You remove that component, you break Windows Help and who knows what else.
Actually the fact that if you uninstalled IE it would break stuff like Steam isn't a big deal I think, because you could just not uninstall IE in that situation.
Backwards compatibility is an interesting animal for MS. I would say that MS's commitment to breaking almost nothing (you can still run many MS-DOS programs from two and a half decades ago on 32-bit Vista for instance) may be the biggest single reason why Windows is in the position it is today. If it isn't, it's at least up there. Way too many companies have old DOS programs, or Excel macros written for Excel 6, etc. that are business critical to easily change platforms. About the best they can do is stay with what they have, but they'll cease to get security updates in that case. So MS is understandably and reasonably very uncomfortable with the idea of breaking compatibility.
But at the same time, it has brought them heaps of trouble. A lot of the security vulnerabilities are due in part to it, a lot of the complexity is borne out of it (though MS has gotten very good at isolating this sort of thing).
I think the answer is to do something where for the base system they revamp and break compatibility, but they also maintain a backwards-compatible layer, probably using the technology they have in VirtualPC and in the Server 2008 hypervisor. Do basically what Apple did with OS X. I wouldn't be surprised if you see this in the next couple release cycles. (Though I may break from/. wisdom and say that I think they should base the ground kernel off of NT, not off of a Unix like Apple did. I have various reasons for thinking this which I'm too lazy to write now.)
(The article: "'Tin Whiskers' were a problem with early electronic solders which were coincidentally lead-free, and lead was initially added in part to eliminate them. These problems are negligible in modern alloys,[citation needed] however, except in hi-rel military, aerospace-satellite and life-critical medical applications." So where are these links to original sources?)
Or just follow the links to the original sources that the Wikipedia article cites.
I don't see anything about tin whiskers [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed]here[/url].
(The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder]article[/url]: "'Tin Whiskers' were a problem with early electronic solders which were coincidentally lead-free, and lead was initially added in part to eliminate them. These problems are negligible in modern alloys,[citation needed] however, except in hi-rel military, aerospace-satellite and life-critical medical applications." So where are these links to original sources?)
He's not talking about replacing stuff like Mutt because it's antequated, he's talking about replacing things like old versions of Outlook/Outlook Express, or even old versions of Thunderbird.
I think you would find that a 2 year agreement is pretty much the standard these days.There are a few phones that only require 1 year but the norm is 2 year.
Pretty much all the carriers also offer prepaid plans, and depending on use those can be very cheap. I've paid $20/mth for a phone for the last year and a half, so if my understanding is correct and you have to get the $60 plan, that would instantly triple my costs. If I could just pay $200 for the phone and use it with my prepaid account, I would do it an in instant.
To be fair, the Office 2007 UI is actually one of the more impressive things MS has done recently. They put a lot of effort, thought, and UI research (user studies) into that design, and while the outcome is a bit polarizing, the feedback I've heard has been largely very positive, even from within Slashdot.
I can't speak to it personally though, as I don't have a copy. I'd like to though.
The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.
At the same time, how many FOSS programs do ANY formal usability studies, let alone put a few million dollars into them?
I'd love modified SLR firmware for Canon to add features they've left off, presumably to sell high priced external add ons. I want an intervalometer! (simple program to do time lapse shots in camera - Nikon's have it built in...)
I've thought about making an external programmable shutter release for this. If I ever actually sit down and learn more electronics and such that's on my list of things to do. (Also: much longer exposures.)
Anyway, I still occasionally use a couple SLRs my parents have from the late 70s. They still operate. Granted, they aren't used much, but they haven't worn out.
And for a feature which can be accurately deduced through the meter. OMG YAY!
What meter? Do you mean viewfinder?
The viewfinder doesn't show you if you are overexposing part of your image, and there are a number of times when there are shots that are very hard or impossible to take while looking through the viewfinder.
If I'm holding the camera at arms length over my head, it would be nice to see what I'm aiming at. Or be able to set it on the floor and not have to figure out some configuration where I can put my head in where I can see into the viewfinder. Or put it on the ground facing up. Or if I had more money, underwater photography. Or...
Anyway, I think I would still use the viewfinder for most shots. But there are enough reasons that would be helpful that if, when I was in the market for a DSLR, there was one that had live preview and one that didn't, that would have been a strong argument for the one with it.
Although, for RAW images, cheap point and shoot cameras don't have physical build, and lack everything that makes RAW images special. Taking RAW images with my camera was akin to storing 1 MB JPEG image into 3 MB RAW format.
RAW images should give you the ability to white-balance them after the shot. (You at least can with the RAW images from my DSLR.)
That alone is worth the price of admission (i.e. a larger memory card) IMHO.
If you would have read the article, you would have noticed that the firmware hacks do let you use higher/lower shutter speeds then the stock firmware. Sure they might not be reliable because they aren't tested by Canon, but they are there.
The cameras in the current story aren't SLRs; they don't have physical shutters. To hack in faster shutter speeds to a DSLR would "require" actually moving the shutter faster; there are physical limits here.
(I suppose you could probably keep the shutter open longer than necessary then expose electronically like point-and-shoot cameras, but I'm not positive this would work.)
Um, changing the firmware isn't going to put a LCD screen on the mirror. Apparently you haven't grasped how a SLR works.
Or maybe you don't have enough imagination. Why not lock the mirror up with the shutter open (thus exposing the CCD), then when the button is pressed, close the shutter, start exposing, open the shutter, expose, close the shutter, stop exposure, then open the shutter again.
It would slightly increase button-press-to-photograph time, but not by much.
This has already been suggested a number of times...
Anyway, it's rather harder than you think. (Read my third and fourth reasons from that post, and the fifth from my followup. Three reasons why a naively simple script like this doesn't work very well.)
There are three problems with such a simple solution; I talk about them above. (Ignore the first two; they don't apply. The third/fifth is in a reply to that post.)
This fixes the first two problems I give here, but the third and fourth remain.
You have to do rather more bookkeeping. I do plan on writing a program that will make this all work "correctly", but I'd like to make sure that I'm not duplicating work.
First, it's just obnoxious to add the ~/.Trash/ at the end.
Second, it would be really easy to forget ~/.Trash/. If the final thing you are "deleting" is a directory, this would mean that it would move everything into that directory.
Third, it doesn't record the restore location. It looks like the Gnome trash doesn't either; this is very surprising to me, and I consider it broken. Even Windows 95 recorded the location it came from, so you could right click and choose restore and it would go back where it was. Mac OS also behaves this way.
Fourth, it isn't sensitive to file systems. So for instance, deleting a file on a file system other than the one ~/.Trash/ is mounted on will result in a long copy over to that file system, which may also cause problems with available space.
Personally, I find it annoying and do all my deleting from the command line.
To each his own I guess. I do a lot of work from the command line, and I find it annoying that I *don't* have a good way to handle this.
So if you want some sort of soft delete, don't use rm or del. Use a tool that 'soft deletes' a file by moving it into a trash bin, which you can 'hard delete' when you need more space. This is how Windows and KDE both work. Know of a command line tool that fits this description that comes with most *nix distributions?
I agree with you to an extent; putting in additional options does have a very real usability cost. That said, I think the Gnome people have taken it a bit far.
However the cleanup really did improve Gnome in the long run. Since instead of a bazillion option you now have a desktop that behaves correct by default.
Just by point of contrast, I disagree. Given a choice I would take KDE in a second. To make Gnome remotely usable for me it is at least necessary to go into gconf and turn off spatial navigation. I still get aggravated that the full file system is two extra clicks away in a open or save dialog.
In my experience this is extremely location-centric (which is unsurprising); the places I've been has had an extreme prevalence of AIM, with almost no one on MSN. I haven't signed onto MSN for years. But the places I've been in Europe has been essentially the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
Things like removing drive lettering, would be quite helpful. But would break everything ever written for Windows. /blah. The problem with this is other drives; the CD drive would have to be translated to /media/cdrom for instance. I'm not sure what the list of such translations would be, and I could see this as being very ad-hoc.
It wouldn't have to. There are a couple ways that things could be done. First, the / directory could be treated as C:. If a program asked to open C:\blah, it could just translate that to
The second option would be to implicitly prepend a / before open requests starting with a drive letter; e.g. C: would become /C:, and D: would become /D:. Set up links at /C: and /D: that point to probably / and /media/cdrom, respectively.
(Actually this second option is really just like the first, just at a different layer; in the first, the translation would be done by "fopen" or whatever, in the latter by the file system.)
Things like completely redoing the start bar from scratch to make it actually useful would break every program installer that wants to create a shortcut.
Installers for Windows 3.1 are still able to create Program Groups even though Program Manager no longer exists.
Or making Internet Explorer swappable for another browser, as in, being able to completely remove it. There goes everything hard coded to use IE and expects it to be there, such a Steam.
This is actually at least close to being possible, at least in the most direct sense, in Vista. The (Windows) Explorer/IE integration I think has basically been completely severed. However, the MSHTML component, which is what actually provides the HTML rendering, is still pretty tightly coupled into Windows, and there's not really any way to remove that (unless they were to make it a pluggable API so you could replace MSHTML with something else). You remove that component, you break Windows Help and who knows what else.
Actually the fact that if you uninstalled IE it would break stuff like Steam isn't a big deal I think, because you could just not uninstall IE in that situation.
Backwards compatibility is an interesting animal for MS. I would say that MS's commitment to breaking almost nothing (you can still run many MS-DOS programs from two and a half decades ago on 32-bit Vista for instance) may be the biggest single reason why Windows is in the position it is today. If it isn't, it's at least up there. Way too many companies have old DOS programs, or Excel macros written for Excel 6, etc. that are business critical to easily change platforms. About the best they can do is stay with what they have, but they'll cease to get security updates in that case. So MS is understandably and reasonably very uncomfortable with the idea of breaking compatibility.
But at the same time, it has brought them heaps of trouble. A lot of the security vulnerabilities are due in part to it, a lot of the complexity is borne out of it (though MS has gotten very good at isolating this sort of thing).
I think the answer is to do something where for the base system they revamp and break compatibility, but they also maintain a backwards-compatible layer, probably using the technology they have in VirtualPC and in the Server 2008 hypervisor. Do basically what Apple did with OS X. I wouldn't be surprised if you see this in the next couple release cycles. (Though I may break from /. wisdom and say that I think they should base the ground kernel off of NT, not off of a Unix like Apple did. I have various reasons for thinking this which I'm too lazy to write now.)
Another fairly common operation under Windows is using both the command line SVN client and Tortoise.
Crap, have been spending too much time on the XKCD forums, and didn't preview. I'll just copy what I said before and adjust the links:
Or just follow the links to the original sources that the Wikipedia article cites.
I don't see anything about tin whiskers here.
(The article: "'Tin Whiskers' were a problem with early electronic solders which were coincidentally lead-free, and lead was initially added in part to eliminate them. These problems are negligible in modern alloys,[citation needed] however, except in hi-rel military, aerospace-satellite and life-critical medical applications." So where are these links to original sources?)
Or just follow the links to the original sources that the Wikipedia article cites.
I don't see anything about tin whiskers [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed]here[/url].
(The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder]article[/url]: "'Tin Whiskers' were a problem with early electronic solders which were coincidentally lead-free, and lead was initially added in part to eliminate them. These problems are negligible in modern alloys,[citation needed] however, except in hi-rel military, aerospace-satellite and life-critical medical applications." So where are these links to original sources?)
He's not talking about replacing stuff like Mutt because it's antequated, he's talking about replacing things like old versions of Outlook/Outlook Express, or even old versions of Thunderbird.
Or maybe it's someone who is trying to write a regular expression that matches a literal period. ;-)
HL2 Episode 2 only required a DX7 video card, and recommended a DX9 one. I wouldn't exactly call that game lacking shiny and high res textures.
I think you would find that a 2 year agreement is pretty much the standard these days.There are a few phones that only require 1 year but the norm is 2 year.
Pretty much all the carriers also offer prepaid plans, and depending on use those can be very cheap. I've paid $20/mth for a phone for the last year and a half, so if my understanding is correct and you have to get the $60 plan, that would instantly triple my costs. If I could just pay $200 for the phone and use it with my prepaid account, I would do it an in instant.
To be fair, the Office 2007 UI is actually one of the more impressive things MS has done recently. They put a lot of effort, thought, and UI research (user studies) into that design, and while the outcome is a bit polarizing, the feedback I've heard has been largely very positive, even from within Slashdot.
I can't speak to it personally though, as I don't have a copy. I'd like to though.
You have to know the rules to be able to break them.
The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.
At the same time, how many FOSS programs do ANY formal usability studies, let alone put a few million dollars into them?
It's pretty much a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 (which is 9 years old).
Not even that. Word 2000 had outline mode, normal mode, and (IIRC) non-sucky change tracking, all of which I use, and none of which OO has.
I'd love modified SLR firmware for Canon to add features they've left off, presumably to sell high priced external add ons. I want an intervalometer! (simple program to do time lapse shots in camera - Nikon's have it built in...)
I've thought about making an external programmable shutter release for this. If I ever actually sit down and learn more electronics and such that's on my list of things to do. (Also: much longer exposures.)
And wear your mirror action up twice as fast, too
...
The mirror doesn't need to go, only the shutter.
Anyway, I still occasionally use a couple SLRs my parents have from the late 70s. They still operate. Granted, they aren't used much, but they haven't worn out.
And for a feature which can be accurately deduced through the meter. OMG YAY!
What meter? Do you mean viewfinder?
The viewfinder doesn't show you if you are overexposing part of your image, and there are a number of times when there are shots that are very hard or impossible to take while looking through the viewfinder.
If I'm holding the camera at arms length over my head, it would be nice to see what I'm aiming at. Or be able to set it on the floor and not have to figure out some configuration where I can put my head in where I can see into the viewfinder. Or put it on the ground facing up. Or if I had more money, underwater photography. Or
Anyway, I think I would still use the viewfinder for most shots. But there are enough reasons that would be helpful that if, when I was in the market for a DSLR, there was one that had live preview and one that didn't, that would have been a strong argument for the one with it.
Although, for RAW images, cheap point and shoot cameras don't have physical build, and lack everything that makes RAW images special. Taking RAW images with my camera was akin to storing 1 MB JPEG image into 3 MB RAW format.
RAW images should give you the ability to white-balance them after the shot. (You at least can with the RAW images from my DSLR.)
That alone is worth the price of admission (i.e. a larger memory card) IMHO.
If you would have read the article, you would have noticed that the firmware hacks do let you use higher/lower shutter speeds then the stock firmware. Sure they might not be reliable because they aren't tested by Canon, but they are there.
The cameras in the current story aren't SLRs; they don't have physical shutters. To hack in faster shutter speeds to a DSLR would "require" actually moving the shutter faster; there are physical limits here.
(I suppose you could probably keep the shutter open longer than necessary then expose electronically like point-and-shoot cameras, but I'm not positive this would work.)
Um, changing the firmware isn't going to put a LCD screen on the mirror. Apparently you haven't grasped how a SLR works.
Or maybe you don't have enough imagination. Why not lock the mirror up with the shutter open (thus exposing the CCD), then when the button is pressed, close the shutter, start exposing, open the shutter, expose, close the shutter, stop exposure, then open the shutter again.
It would slightly increase button-press-to-photograph time, but not by much.
*sigh*
This has already been suggested a number of times...
Anyway, it's rather harder than you think. (Read my third and fourth reasons from that post, and the fifth from my followup. Three reasons why a naively simple script like this doesn't work very well.)
There are three problems with such a simple solution; I talk about them above. (Ignore the first two; they don't apply. The third/fifth is in a reply to that post.)
This suggestion is broken for a few reasons. ...
.Trash directory at the same time.
Fifth, if you delete two files in different directories with the same name, both can't exist in the
alias rm='mv $1 /home/$USER/archives/$1'
This fixes the first two problems I give here, but the third and fourth remain.
You have to do rather more bookkeeping. I do plan on writing a program that will make this all work "correctly", but I'd like to make sure that I'm not duplicating work.
mv file.txt ~/.Trash/
This suggestion is broken for a few reasons.
First, it's just obnoxious to add the ~/.Trash/ at the end.
Second, it would be really easy to forget ~/.Trash/. If the final thing you are "deleting" is a directory, this would mean that it would move everything into that directory.
Third, it doesn't record the restore location. It looks like the Gnome trash doesn't either; this is very surprising to me, and I consider it broken. Even Windows 95 recorded the location it came from, so you could right click and choose restore and it would go back where it was. Mac OS also behaves this way.
Fourth, it isn't sensitive to file systems. So for instance, deleting a file on a file system other than the one ~/.Trash/ is mounted on will result in a long copy over to that file system, which may also cause problems with available space.
Personally, I find it annoying and do all my deleting from the command line.
To each his own I guess. I do a lot of work from the command line, and I find it annoying that I *don't* have a good way to handle this.
So if you want some sort of soft delete, don't use rm or del. Use a tool that 'soft deletes' a file by moving it into a trash bin, which you can 'hard delete' when you need more space. This is how Windows and KDE both work.
Know of a command line tool that fits this description that comes with most *nix distributions?
I agree with you to an extent; putting in additional options does have a very real usability cost. That said, I think the Gnome people have taken it a bit far.
However the cleanup really did improve Gnome in the long run. Since instead of a bazillion option you now have a desktop that behaves correct by default.
Just by point of contrast, I disagree. Given a choice I would take KDE in a second. To make Gnome remotely usable for me it is at least necessary to go into gconf and turn off spatial navigation. I still get aggravated that the full file system is two extra clicks away in a open or save dialog.
Most people I know who use Windows use MSN.
Just out of curiosity, where do you live?
In my experience this is extremely location-centric (which is unsurprising); the places I've been has had an extreme prevalence of AIM, with almost no one on MSN. I haven't signed onto MSN for years. But the places I've been in Europe has been essentially the opposite.