It's like designing web pages from a command line.
I design web pages from a command line, you insensitive clod!
In fact, I'm working on a web page for my robotics team (that's not the new site yet; you can see that here if my computer is on--take a look!), and I use vim to write it. A Perl script plugs the content into Template Toolkit, and it's formatted with CSS.
Designing pages with a GUI is horrible; designing them by hand with an editor that simply provides extra efficiency typing tags and inserting common sets of tags and attributes is good.
Seen it. Not impressed. Many vertical strokes were anti-aliased to be two pixels wide when they should render one wide. It makes the text look blurry.
I totally agree. Mac OS X does have a "smooth" feel to it, but when you get down to actually looking at it, the fonts are blurry. They're smooth, but blurry. On the other hand, Gnome renders crisp fonts on my laptop with subpixel rendering, and smooths only in a positive way. Part of the problem, I think, is that X had font smoothing tacked on and thus the fonts had a good definition of where the lines were (sort of like hinting backwards--if you turn a bitmap font into a smoothed vector/TrueType/whatever font, the lines are still nice and crisp) while OS X doesn't really care. I guess OS X doesn't do hinting...
I suspect the problem with the screenshots is that they use the default fonts (the free Bitstream ones I think).
What's wrong with them? Beyond a couple of awkward letters (the "w" is one of them, and sometimes the zero looks oddly pointy on the top and bottom), they're quite nice, and scale down well. (I like using small fonts to make my 1024x768 screen feel more like 1600x1200;-)
Frankly, having the database server run on two processors probably isn't as great as it sounds. Having all kernel stuff (file and network access, mostly) and other services run on the first processor and giving the database server free run of the second should keep the system happy, I think.
True, it's good to discourage paranoid lunatics. They've probably killed more interesting internet technologies (or made them more useless by anonymizing) than they've helped fix. (The HTTP User: header could have been useful sometimes, but for privacy reasons it's gone... and so on...)
I can't stand it when crappy reporters collapse computer code and 500 other things that are either binary or not understandable to them into the word "code", or worse "codes".
What's even more annoying are "standards" like a lot of ANSI and ISO ones, that the entire computer world runs on, but that you have to pay a large sum of money to read. It really can't cost that much money to develop them, and even less to send someone a PDF copy... it's shameful that these things became standards when they're not open enough for anyone to implement.
Perhaps someone should just design a really great instruction set and then patent it and GPL (or similar license) it, so anyone can use it but nobody can patent it. (Perhaps the LGPL is better, since companies won't want to share all their designs.)
Certain Linux distrobutions got their act together organizational wise, and that's why they're doing so much better now as well.
Just to put in a plug, Gentoo (my new favorite distro;-) has quite a strong organizational structure. Beyond the normal distro-specific stuff like package manager (Portage), they're adding some quite neat stuff. They're even adding Trusted Computing support--completely controllable by the user, of course. (It's a kernel module, you can rmmod it...) They really seem to have their act together organizationally. (Of course, I came from Slackware, which is Pat churning out updates as fast as he can when he's alive, so something with such an administration running it seems far more organized...)
Because cookies aren't accepted by all browsers, and are blocked by every paranoid lunatic on the internet. It's fine not to let them sign in to something without cookies, but keeping them from viewing images is bad. Besides, most people hate cookies sent to them randomly, when they didn't log in or provide any information to be saved.
Um, you totally missed my point. I would use a CGI script to control access to the images, not another CGI script. Instead of/images/image001.jpg, you would do/cgi-bin/image.cgi?id=001 and it would check the referer and/or and provide the image if correct, otherwise provide 1. nothing, 2. an "Image Hosted by OtherSite", or 3. something nasty (perhaps selected by amount of hits per "stealing" domain).
I have an HP* LaserJet 1320 myself, and it works quite nicely. The print is extremely crisp, and the duplexing works great. Grayscale graphics are a little "splotchy" (very slight variations in tone), but that's not what you get a laser printer for. The feed from the paper tray works fine--it's only jammed one page, and that was because I accidentally grabbed it after it came out halfway for duplexing and it went back in crooked. I have tried the manual feed (which is what I hear is screwed up on it) and it does have a little trouble with whole sheets*, but it works well with envelopes. The Mac OS X driver works identically with Linux, since they both run CUPS or you can use hpijs. All in all, I'd say it's a great printer, unless you do a lot of full-page manual feed stuff (like transparencies, but I doubt Slashdot users still use overhead projectors).
I am quite frustrated, as are other owners, that in a $400 printer, they include neither a USB nor a serial cable, and give you only a regular-size toner cartridge--I really can't see how it saves them that much money. But this isn't unique to HP; all printer makers have been skimping on stuff for a while. At least they didn't skimp on the actual printer itself.
* HP: I wonder if Carly made HP lowercase because they aren't her initials.
* Manual feed: I jammed the front-door-closed limit switch with a pen cap and figured out what the problem is. It's three things:
The little guides on the side slant inward in the middle, making it harder to keep paper straight.
The paper-detect switch is about 1 cm earlier in the paper path than the rollers it triggers.
The rollers do not run continuously but just jerk forward about 60 degrees (maybe 0.5cm) when the paper is first detected. This means two things: First, since the paper-detect switch is 1cm away, you have to move the paper forward that 1cm in the fraction of a second before it tries to feed the paper, otherwise it misses it. Second, this means it doesn't always grab the paper firmly enough to hold it.
If you shove the paper in straight and quickly, it will work fine. If you dawdle and put it in slowly (perhaps trying to align it) the printer will not grip it.
What most websites do is use a CGI script that blocks by Referer and/or IP Address (so like allow any request with your site as a referer, or any IP that has requested another page within the past ~5 minutes, in case people hide referers with crappy paranoid firewalls). You could make it generate a list of pages for you to easily review and allow or block.
Most Gentoo users don't patch every day. You can easily patch once a month--just read the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter to check for serious vulnerabilities, and ignore other patches until you have time. The difference is M$ keeps the patches after the public knows (all the articles are "M$ found a vuln today and will release a patch later") but Gentoo releases a patch and informs people at the same time. You can update whenever you want.
I'd say the best solution is to make all Unicode letters blue, or some other non-offensive color. Is this sorta like the opposite of hiding affiliate links with % escapes?--instead of using an escaping method to make a normal URL look like it goes somewhere weird, it uses an escaping method to make a weird URL look like it goes somewhere normal. Perhaps the IDN standard needs to refuse domains that replicate ASCII characters with escapes, on the premise that those could be written as ASCII?
Gentoo has given advance notice that 5 packages have problems and will be updated. Happily within the week they will explain them in the next Gentoo Weekly Newsletter. Gentoo users, don't forget to run 'emerge sync' in 15 minutes when your local Portage mirror is updated.
Um, as you can see the same thing happens to any OS. The difference is that Gentoo does this: 1. write a patch to fix current version so users are safe, then 2. put fixed version in Portage when available, then 3. notify users with a Gentoo Linux Security Advisory. Microsoft does this: 1. let news about vuln spread, 2. wait for someone important to notice, 3. announce vuln, 4. wait a week to a month, 5. release patch, 6. give sheepish excuse.
OMFG!!!! The FBI can't tell the difference between the web www.fbi.gov and e-mail user@fbi.gov! Not only that, but they use their e-mail system to "view internet sites"???!!! WTF!!!? That's like a friend of mine asking me about a web address that looks like: http://user@fbi.gov!
There was a gospel concert at my school once, and they gave out programs with something that vaguely looked like either a web or email address:
www.BrotherDennis@aol.com
Some people are too stupid to have a computer. That includes most AOL users, and any and all people who refuse to absorb simple knowledge such as the difference between an email and a web address. Once, my mom tried to convince me that the (WWW) address of her school's webmail was webmail@city.k12.state.us...
I once gave out maps of our library with computer names labelled, and instructions for net send, and the worst that happened was another student who was harrassing someone got in trouble as they should have.
What have you seen that's worse? (I like administration vs. hacker [i.e. stupid vs. smart most of the time] stories;-)
What about promoting rape and cop killing in a rap song? Is that a large enough scale?
Personally, I think so, but that's just because I personally think it's stupid to sing (or grunt) about killing people. There's a fine line that we have to draw between creating a fantasy world where crimes are committed and encouraging people to commit crimes in the real world. Like if someone plays a game where they kill people and then goes nuts, it's partially their problem for not being able to separate reality and fantasy. If an "artist" sings a song about killing people, the difference is whether they are creating a fantasy world where they kill people or whether they encourage their listeners to kill people. Given the intelligibility of most rap music, it's a difference that's hard to define.
Okay, this is reaching the edge of where I can reason. I used to play Quake, and had no urges to kill people from it, so I think I should be allowed to play it. If someone else plays Quake and kills people, I think I should still be allowed to play it. On the other hand, I think that if someone creates a song that encourages people to kill each other, it should be banned, or restricted to people with the mental stability to figure out what's a song and what's reality. The theoretical part of my mind says that Quake and murder-themed rap songs are both inappropriate for kids, but the practical side says I like Quake but not rap so ban rap, not Quake... I can't think anymore.
You know, my first reflex when reading this story was the Slashdot mob mentality: "He was only linking!"
But after reading the replies to this post, I had a change of heart. To steal one of the badly-construdted, not-really-applicable real-life analogies from this story, let's say I was pointing people to a computer store selling illegal MP3's. Telling one person isn't illegal, but realistically neither is giving a friend a link to an MP3 file. Putting up a billboard, or a large website with a search engine, however, is reaching the point of illegality. IANAL, but doing this on a large scale is like being an accomplice.
An equal analogy for why search engines aren't exempt is that if I advertise such a store in the back of a computer magazine, and the magazine doesn't know, it's a problem. Basically, as I see it, if you set up a "trading ground" for P2P and knowingly allow it to distribute copyrighted content without trying to stop it, you're doing something wrong. A simple message like "iTunes is for legal and rightholder-authorized sharing only. Don't steal music." is enough, I think--there's not much more you can do than ask users.
Random idea: if two people separately post two files that, when XOR'ed together, produce copyrighted music, can either be sued?
At my elementary school we used to have an IBM network system (token ring--those were the days!) with a menu system in it. It was unfortunate, since a friend of mine and I liked to program in QBASIC, and all the menu allowed was Logo and Microsoft Works. However, Microsoft Works had a convenient "Launch Program" option on the File menu, whose first choice was a command prompt. That led to tons of fun in QBASIC. Fortunately my teachers weren't idiots, and didn't really care.
I just remembered, they had a really creative approach to "logging" superuser logins--the computer just made a loud siren noise when you logged on as SYSOP, making it impossible to do within earshot of a teacher.
I really can't stand the anti-geek (mostly anti-smarter-than-the-administration) sentiment in today's schools... people are idiots.
From my reading on Broadband Reports, I thought that 128k up couldn't support 3M down, and Verizon offers 768k up with its 3M down package. Isn't 400k really cutting it to support 8M down?
"Internet" access, by its very name, is access to the Internet. You get an IP address (however fleetingly) and can send and receive IP packets to other computers. Email, Usenet, free hosting, and so on are just extra perks. Offering a dedicated Usenet host is not a core part of Internet access.
Why, oh why does Intel insist on giving everything some crappy marketing name and confusing customers?
I don't think it confuses a very large portion of their consumers. There are basically three segments: those who don't understand what's in their computers and don't care--they will just buy it as a package, as it was intended; those who understand what's in their computers--they will buy it if it's what they want, or get a Pentium-M with another wireless chipset to save money; and those who don't understand what's in their computers but want to--these people will be confused, since they don't usually know how to find out except by asking companies or checking their web sites, and the computer manufacturers are really the ones who make it unclear.
So many computer manufacturers throw around "Mobile", "Centrino", and "Pentium M" randomly, which is really what causes confusion. It would be fine if everyone just described laptops like this:
Foobar 5000 notebook, powered by Intel Centrino Mobile Technology, with a Pentium-M 735 processor (1.7 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache) and Intel 802.11g wireless
Get this: they have their brand name, they drop the "Centrino" name since it is a Centrino laptop, they name the processor correctly, both with Intel's numbering and the real specs, and they note the wireless card. It's not that hard, especially in bullet format. Centrino is just another "feature" of a laptop, albeit one completely derived from a combination of other features. But describing it that way makes sure customers understand what's actually inside it without diminishing the Centrino brand name.
It's really not that hard, it's a brand name. Complaining about this is like complaining that Dell calls one of their laptops the Inspiron 600m and doesn't list out all the parts instead. It's a brand name, simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
I design web pages from a command line, you insensitive clod!
In fact, I'm working on a web page for my robotics team (that's not the new site yet; you can see that here if my computer is on--take a look!), and I use vim to write it. A Perl script plugs the content into Template Toolkit, and it's formatted with CSS.
Designing pages with a GUI is horrible; designing them by hand with an editor that simply provides extra efficiency typing tags and inserting common sets of tags and attributes is good.
I totally agree. Mac OS X does have a "smooth" feel to it, but when you get down to actually looking at it, the fonts are blurry. They're smooth, but blurry. On the other hand, Gnome renders crisp fonts on my laptop with subpixel rendering, and smooths only in a positive way. Part of the problem, I think, is that X had font smoothing tacked on and thus the fonts had a good definition of where the lines were (sort of like hinting backwards--if you turn a bitmap font into a smoothed vector/TrueType/whatever font, the lines are still nice and crisp) while OS X doesn't really care. I guess OS X doesn't do hinting...
What's wrong with them? Beyond a couple of awkward letters (the "w" is one of them, and sometimes the zero looks oddly pointy on the top and bottom), they're quite nice, and scale down well. (I like using small fonts to make my 1024x768 screen feel more like 1600x1200 ;-)
Frankly, having the database server run on two processors probably isn't as great as it sounds. Having all kernel stuff (file and network access, mostly) and other services run on the first processor and giving the database server free run of the second should keep the system happy, I think.
But IANADBA.
True, it's good to discourage paranoid lunatics. They've probably killed more interesting internet technologies (or made them more useless by anonymizing) than they've helped fix. (The HTTP User: header could have been useful sometimes, but for privacy reasons it's gone... and so on...)
Ugh...
I can't stand it when crappy reporters collapse computer code and 500 other things that are either binary or not understandable to them into the word "code", or worse "codes".
Ugh. I know what you mean.
What's even more annoying are "standards" like a lot of ANSI and ISO ones, that the entire computer world runs on, but that you have to pay a large sum of money to read. It really can't cost that much money to develop them, and even less to send someone a PDF copy... it's shameful that these things became standards when they're not open enough for anyone to implement.
Perhaps someone should just design a really great instruction set and then patent it and GPL (or similar license) it, so anyone can use it but nobody can patent it. (Perhaps the LGPL is better, since companies won't want to share all their designs.)
Just to put in a plug, Gentoo (my new favorite distro ;-) has quite a strong organizational structure. Beyond the normal distro-specific stuff like package manager (Portage), they're adding some quite neat stuff. They're even adding Trusted Computing support--completely controllable by the user, of course. (It's a kernel module, you can rmmod it...) They really seem to have their act together organizationally. (Of course, I came from Slackware, which is Pat churning out updates as fast as he can when he's alive, so something with such an administration running it seems far more organized...)
Yeah, it's called "Lad Vampire", it's also at Artists Against 419, and you can find it here.
Because cookies aren't accepted by all browsers, and are blocked by every paranoid lunatic on the internet. It's fine not to let them sign in to something without cookies, but keeping them from viewing images is bad. Besides, most people hate cookies sent to them randomly, when they didn't log in or provide any information to be saved.
Um, you totally missed my point. I would use a CGI script to control access to the images, not another CGI script. Instead of /images/image001.jpg, you would do /cgi-bin/image.cgi?id=001 and it would check the referer and/or and provide the image if correct, otherwise provide 1. nothing, 2. an "Image Hosted by OtherSite", or 3. something nasty (perhaps selected by amount of hits per "stealing" domain).
I have an HP* LaserJet 1320 myself, and it works quite nicely. The print is extremely crisp, and the duplexing works great. Grayscale graphics are a little "splotchy" (very slight variations in tone), but that's not what you get a laser printer for. The feed from the paper tray works fine--it's only jammed one page, and that was because I accidentally grabbed it after it came out halfway for duplexing and it went back in crooked. I have tried the manual feed (which is what I hear is screwed up on it) and it does have a little trouble with whole sheets*, but it works well with envelopes. The Mac OS X driver works identically with Linux, since they both run CUPS or you can use hpijs. All in all, I'd say it's a great printer, unless you do a lot of full-page manual feed stuff (like transparencies, but I doubt Slashdot users still use overhead projectors).
I am quite frustrated, as are other owners, that in a $400 printer, they include neither a USB nor a serial cable, and give you only a regular-size toner cartridge--I really can't see how it saves them that much money. But this isn't unique to HP; all printer makers have been skimping on stuff for a while. At least they didn't skimp on the actual printer itself.
* HP: I wonder if Carly made HP lowercase because they aren't her initials.
* Manual feed: I jammed the front-door-closed limit switch with a pen cap and figured out what the problem is. It's three things:
If you shove the paper in straight and quickly, it will work fine. If you dawdle and put it in slowly (perhaps trying to align it) the printer will not grip it.
What most websites do is use a CGI script that blocks by Referer and/or IP Address (so like allow any request with your site as a referer, or any IP that has requested another page within the past ~5 minutes, in case people hide referers with crappy paranoid firewalls). You could make it generate a list of pages for you to easily review and allow or block.
Most Gentoo users don't patch every day. You can easily patch once a month--just read the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter to check for serious vulnerabilities, and ignore other patches until you have time. The difference is M$ keeps the patches after the public knows (all the articles are "M$ found a vuln today and will release a patch later") but Gentoo releases a patch and informs people at the same time. You can update whenever you want.
I'd say the best solution is to make all Unicode letters blue, or some other non-offensive color. Is this sorta like the opposite of hiding affiliate links with % escapes?--instead of using an escaping method to make a normal URL look like it goes somewhere weird, it uses an escaping method to make a weird URL look like it goes somewhere normal. Perhaps the IDN standard needs to refuse domains that replicate ASCII characters with escapes, on the premise that those could be written as ASCII?
Tomorrow's Slashdot headline:
Um, as you can see the same thing happens to any OS. The difference is that Gentoo does this: 1. write a patch to fix current version so users are safe, then 2. put fixed version in Portage when available, then 3. notify users with a Gentoo Linux Security Advisory. Microsoft does this: 1. let news about vuln spread, 2. wait for someone important to notice, 3. announce vuln, 4. wait a week to a month, 5. release patch, 6. give sheepish excuse.
There was a gospel concert at my school once, and they gave out programs with something that vaguely looked like either a web or email address:
Some people are too stupid to have a computer. That includes most AOL users, and any and all people who refuse to absorb simple knowledge such as the difference between an email and a web address. Once, my mom tried to convince me that the (WWW) address of her school's webmail was webmail@city.k12.state.us...
What happened?
I once gave out maps of our library with computer names labelled, and instructions for net send, and the worst that happened was another student who was harrassing someone got in trouble as they should have.
What have you seen that's worse? (I like administration vs. hacker [i.e. stupid vs. smart most of the time] stories ;-)
This already exists. It's Lindows, and you can buy it at Wal-Mart.
Seriously, they have done exactly what you said, so they can make ever-cheaper computers.
Personally, I think so, but that's just because I personally think it's stupid to sing (or grunt) about killing people. There's a fine line that we have to draw between creating a fantasy world where crimes are committed and encouraging people to commit crimes in the real world. Like if someone plays a game where they kill people and then goes nuts, it's partially their problem for not being able to separate reality and fantasy. If an "artist" sings a song about killing people, the difference is whether they are creating a fantasy world where they kill people or whether they encourage their listeners to kill people. Given the intelligibility of most rap music, it's a difference that's hard to define.
Okay, this is reaching the edge of where I can reason. I used to play Quake, and had no urges to kill people from it, so I think I should be allowed to play it. If someone else plays Quake and kills people, I think I should still be allowed to play it. On the other hand, I think that if someone creates a song that encourages people to kill each other, it should be banned, or restricted to people with the mental stability to figure out what's a song and what's reality. The theoretical part of my mind says that Quake and murder-themed rap songs are both inappropriate for kids, but the practical side says I like Quake but not rap so ban rap, not Quake... I can't think anymore.
You know, my first reflex when reading this story was the Slashdot mob mentality: "He was only linking!"
But after reading the replies to this post, I had a change of heart. To steal one of the badly-construdted, not-really-applicable real-life analogies from this story, let's say I was pointing people to a computer store selling illegal MP3's. Telling one person isn't illegal, but realistically neither is giving a friend a link to an MP3 file. Putting up a billboard, or a large website with a search engine, however, is reaching the point of illegality. IANAL, but doing this on a large scale is like being an accomplice.
An equal analogy for why search engines aren't exempt is that if I advertise such a store in the back of a computer magazine, and the magazine doesn't know, it's a problem. Basically, as I see it, if you set up a "trading ground" for P2P and knowingly allow it to distribute copyrighted content without trying to stop it, you're doing something wrong. A simple message like "iTunes is for legal and rightholder-authorized sharing only. Don't steal music." is enough, I think--there's not much more you can do than ask users.
Random idea: if two people separately post two files that, when XOR'ed together, produce copyrighted music, can either be sued?
Please yell at the school!
At my elementary school we used to have an IBM network system (token ring--those were the days!) with a menu system in it. It was unfortunate, since a friend of mine and I liked to program in QBASIC, and all the menu allowed was Logo and Microsoft Works. However, Microsoft Works had a convenient "Launch Program" option on the File menu, whose first choice was a command prompt. That led to tons of fun in QBASIC. Fortunately my teachers weren't idiots, and didn't really care.
I just remembered, they had a really creative approach to "logging" superuser logins--the computer just made a loud siren noise when you logged on as SYSOP, making it impossible to do within earshot of a teacher.
I really can't stand the anti-geek (mostly anti-smarter-than-the-administration) sentiment in today's schools... people are idiots.
From my reading on Broadband Reports, I thought that 128k up couldn't support 3M down, and Verizon offers 768k up with its 3M down package. Isn't 400k really cutting it to support 8M down?
"Internet" access, by its very name, is access to the Internet. You get an IP address (however fleetingly) and can send and receive IP packets to other computers. Email, Usenet, free hosting, and so on are just extra perks. Offering a dedicated Usenet host is not a core part of Internet access.
The mere idea of a PHB implies that they are your boss, and so you can't fire them.
I don't think it confuses a very large portion of their consumers. There are basically three segments: those who don't understand what's in their computers and don't care--they will just buy it as a package, as it was intended; those who understand what's in their computers--they will buy it if it's what they want, or get a Pentium-M with another wireless chipset to save money; and those who don't understand what's in their computers but want to--these people will be confused, since they don't usually know how to find out except by asking companies or checking their web sites, and the computer manufacturers are really the ones who make it unclear.
So many computer manufacturers throw around "Mobile", "Centrino", and "Pentium M" randomly, which is really what causes confusion. It would be fine if everyone just described laptops like this:
Foobar 5000 notebook, powered by Intel Centrino Mobile Technology, with a Pentium-M 735 processor (1.7 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache) and Intel 802.11g wireless
Get this: they have their brand name, they drop the "Centrino" name since it is a Centrino laptop, they name the processor correctly, both with Intel's numbering and the real specs, and they note the wireless card. It's not that hard, especially in bullet format. Centrino is just another "feature" of a laptop, albeit one completely derived from a combination of other features. But describing it that way makes sure customers understand what's actually inside it without diminishing the Centrino brand name.
It's really not that hard, it's a brand name. Complaining about this is like complaining that Dell calls one of their laptops the Inspiron 600m and doesn't list out all the parts instead. It's a brand name, simple as that.