> I think this is the wrong kind of solution to the problem. A standard would be easier.
Clearly you are not familiar with the tabs-vs-spaces argument.
Advocates of tabs say that having everything indended by multiples of some standard amount is a good thing. This is, of course, wrong for source code in many computer languages, because it prevents things from being indented to the correct position relative to the line above, as in the following example (in the Inform language)...
Object matchbox kitchen_cupboard class cardboard, with short_name "matchbox", description "A standard cardboard matchbox. It says ~Strike on Box~ on the side.", name 'matchbox' 'box', has openable container;
I suppose it doesn't matter for write-once applications, but if you're trying to write _maintainable_ code, it's essential to have things line up properly, and that means they often need to line up under specific characters on the line above. That's possible with tabs if the character they need to line up under is preceded by whitespace (as it generally is with e.g. SQL), but if that's not so, tabs are useless. I don't see how these new "expanding" tabs change that.
Inform is the *best* example I know of a language that *cannot* be properly indented with only tabs, i.e., spaces are *needed*. There are other languages with which this is somewhat true, e.g. Lisp (wherein you often want to line up under a specific open-parenthesis which may not be preceded by whitespace) and Perl (although most Perl code is not indented as well as it could be, partly because tools such as cperl-mode do not support it).
If you agree on a fixed width for tabs (e.g., 8 characters), you could use a mixture of tabs and spaces, but that won't make tab-indentation advocates happy, because they want to get *rid* of leading spaces and use tabs only, usually because they want to use proportional fonts. If you're going to use spaces for indentation, you might as well use all spaces and no tabs.
> Check your inflation rates. You were making a good $4-5k more than me.
I have. I wasn't, at least not in terms of the inflation of goods I spend money on. (Some things have gone up at rather higher rates, but they are not things I have in my budget. Real estate, for instance (at least around here) is up quite a bit, but I haven't bought any, so that's irrelevant.)
> Meanwhile, I do have savings,
So when you spoke of trying not to starve, you were just being dramatic?
> The point is that God does not need your money. He's God.
This, while true as far as it goes, is quite beside the point.
> The church does not need your money; the church does not need to exist.
This is your real objection. You do not wish to be part of a church, because you do not view it as worthwhile. You should have said so in the first place, rather than appealing to the "poor and starving" argument.
I did say earlier that not wanting the government to decide your religion for you was a valid reason to withdraw from a state church. Not wanting to be a part of any church at all wasn't what I really had in mind, but if that's your position, then that's the reason you should give for withdrawing.
> Lastly, the church absolutely does not have the right to levy a tax on its members
I do prefer voluntary giving. Which is what we have here, incidentally.
> > As a result of customer feedback... > Whenever I see that in a statement from Microsoft, it is always code for > "We have totally ignored the wishes of our customers and instead focused > on lock-in, the breaking of standards, and the complete bollixing of normal > user interface conventions."
You have to understand which customers Microsoft collects feedback from. They don't collect feedback from computer geeks like us, nor from our grandmothers. They're interested primarily in feedback from the technology-related executives of Fortune 100 corporations and large federal government departments -- people whose immediate underlings supervise people who supervise people who supervise the people who do actual IT work.
This, when you think about it, explains a great deal. For one thing, Fortune 100 execs are *busy*, so they don't really have time for Microsoft's silly feedback surveys, and they're not going to put a lot of deep thought into the answers. They probably delegate the surveys to their secretaries half the time.
And of course there are several levels of detachment between these people and the people who actually have to work directly with the software and its consequences.
ActiveX is a perfect example of a Microsoft technology born out of this kind of feedback. Sure, it's a security nightmare for normal people who just want to use the web, but hey, if it makes it easier to build the company's ticket system for assigning teams to projects (or whatever)... and web browsing all goes through transparent a corporate filtering proxy at the network boundary anyhow...
> So Firefox only scored a 1500 on its SAT. IE is still wearing a helmet > and drooling on itself as it takes the short bus back to Redmond.
You exagerate. Yes, Firefox handles CSS (especially CSS2) rather a lot better than IE, but the browser drooling on itself on the short bus with regard to CSS is Netscape 4 (remember that frustration?), and the one scoring 1500, when it emerges, will handle a lot more CSS3 than any browser I've yet seen can manage so far.
Perhaps a better analogy would involve grade levels: IE7 is still a couple of grade levels behind Firefox, but in time it can potentially get to where Firefox is today. Sure, it needs to study CSS2, but that's coming up on its academic schedule, I imagine.
> IE is the biggest frustration on the planet right now to anyone who actually > works in this industry.
Okay, that much is true. (Well, it's true if you define "this industry" as web development specifically, rather than lumping all computer stuff together as is often done.)
You have to give them a little time. Remember that Netscape was behind on CSS support for several years during the 4.x era. Microsoft can catch up.
And they are making visible progress. After all, the IE7 beta does fully support PNG, including the alpha channel, which is a major boon for web developers. Mozilla didn't support that until at least 1998, IIRC, so while IE might be a little bit behind, if you cut them some slack, they'll catch up on the relevant standards eventually.
And yeah, I'm posting this using the IE7 Beta 3 preview. Since part of my job involves web development, I have to test out new browsers, especially ones that are likely to become popular, whether they're my personal preference or not.
> 1.3%. At my paltry salary, that's $246/year I could be spending on not starving.
Not so very long ago (late nineties), I made less than you make and managed to put about 10% of it into savings (in addition to whatever undisclosed amount I may have given to a church, something I'm not comfortable putting numbers to on an open forum like slashdot -- but here's a small hint: I would not have considered $246/year to be so very much), meanwhile paying off $10 thousand in student loans over the course of four years. Somehow I escaped starvation. Indeed, I seem to have escaped it by a wider margin than would be ideal, i.e., gained more weight than I wanted.
Handling your money well is not about how much you make. It's about whether you have learned to control your expenses and live within your means.
> I would like to start taking 1.3% of your income. Not wanting to give it to me is a > "terrible" reason to withdraw from this offer. How would you like to set this up?
I'm decidedly not a fan of state churches, but saving less than 2% on your taxes is a *terrible* reason to withdraw. I mean, come on, 1.3%? Buncha misers. How can a church even survive on that in the first place? If we only gave that percentage of our income around here, our churches wouldn't be able to cover the utility bills and such, much less pay the pastor any kind of salary.
If you object to having the state decide your religion for you, then withdraw for that reason. That's a good reason. Don't withdraw just because you're too stingy to cough up the measley 1.3% tithe. Sheesh.
> My 98 used to go from power button to booted in 38 seconds. > That beats my current average of 52 for Ubuntu.
Are you kidding? My Pentium II/233 used to boot PC-DOS 3.3 in nothing flat. If you blinked at the end of the POST banner the next thing you saw was the prompt.
Boot and shutdown speeds of Windows 95/98/Me varies wildly, and the theoretical speed of the hardware doesn't seem to have much to do with it. Hardware can make a big difference, but I think it has more to do with driver idiosyncracies than actual the number of MHz. Adding hardware (whether an expansion card or a peripheral) often significantly changes the system start time with Windows 98. Even something as simple as a bog-standard ATAPI CD-ROM drive can make a user-noticeable difference.
Another major contributing factor is network structure. Yes, really: adding another Windows system on the same LAN segment will often change the boot and/or shutdown speed of an existing system. I don't know why this happens but I am not making it up. Actually using the network, e.g. for file or print sharing, can have even more impact.
And, of course, what software you have installed is always a major issue. Installing MS Works will add a few seconds to your boot time, for instance. OpenOffice (version 1.x at least; not sure about 2.x) is an example of an application that adds a few seconds to your shutdown time, although it has no noticeable impact on startup time (unless you turn on its preload feature, of course, and even then it only adds about the same amount of time the app normally takes to load). And so on -- various applications contribute varying amounts of time.
> You were hoping to discern my location, political orientation and whatnot based on my date > format? Do you really think I would let on that I'm an alien in such an obvious way?
It's not so much a question of _where_ you are as it is _who_ you are. Things like your physical location, phenotype, voting history, and so forth, those are things we already know, but they are merely incidental details. It's the contents of your mind we're really interested in, and little things like how you respond to a question about date formats are more revealing than you think...
> When you see a flying saucer in front of your house, that's when you'll know we've come for you...
Very interesting. Subject responds with threats when minor information about his identity is disclosed...
> Once you learn your first 10 or so languages, additional languages tend to be very easy to pick up
Yes, yes, but we're talking here about writing the program that makes the company go, not just crufting together some quick hack to automate some minor chore.
Sure, if you've previously programmed in a dozen or so languages (as I had before I learned Perl) you can pick up the language in a week or so and write code that basically works (as I did). That's fine, for some purposes. But the code you write under those conditions is *not* good quality maintainable code, and you don't want to hang the company's bread and butter on it. You end up with Perl that looks like it was written by a C programmer (ugh), VB that looks like it was written by a Java guy, or cetera -- in short, you end up with a mess.
Yeah, sure. Get an IBM Model M keyboard. They sell on ebay all the time for the kinds of prices that make the cost of shipping a major component of your total expenditure. And they *are* a good-quality keyboard.
If what you want is The Perfect Keyboard for Computer Geeks, then you'll want an Avant Stellar. It costs more, but it's fully remappable, supports macros, comes with a tool for changing the keytops, and all that sort of thing, plus it has the function keys in _both_ places (left side, like on an XT keyboard and top edge, like on the newer 101-key layout), so whichever place They Were Meant To Be in your opinion, there they are, and then you can use the others for extras or macro keys.
> Sadly, I was never able to find a combination that was truly worthy
That's partly because you didn't actually *know* much chemistry. (Which is normal. You wouldn't be expected to. You were a just a kid.)
The chemistry sets they sell for children don't usually include the sorts of chemicals that will readily and vigorously react with practically anything you pour them together with, so if you want to do any really interesting chemistry you're going to need two things: some knowledge of what you're doing, and access to a grocery or hardware store, so you can pick up things like soda, vinegar, lye, bleach, ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and so forth.
Dangerous is not much more difficult to achieve than interesting, however, so I do *not* recommend just randomly pouring those sorts of chemicals together at random to see what happens. There are at least three ways to kill yourself just using the specific chemicals I listed. Yeah, I know, when I was ten years old I wanted to be a chemist too, and I thought that meant I'd get to pour random vials together and watch them fizzle, smoke, explode, et cetera. Then I had a chemistry class and found out this isn't actually how chemists work.
This doesn't mean you can't play around with chemicals a bit, but you should stop first and think about what's going to happen, based on what you're combining and what its properties are. For instance, combining lye and hydrochloric acid is interesting but more or less safe (as long as your container is large enough and won't react with either component individually), and you end up with saltwater (plus of course the left-over of either the acid or the lye (whichever you had more of by mol)), but combining bleach and ammonia is not such a great idea, and the result can poison you, burn down your house, or both. (If you *have* to try it, do it outdoors wearing a gas mask, and be careful of your eyes. Have a running garden hose close at hand in case you need to flush your eyes. Don't try it in a basement or garage unless you have a proper ventilation hood like the ones in serious chem labs.)
If you want to see something that _appears_ dangerous but is actually controlled and not going to seriously injure anyone, get yourself some pure sodium and play around with tossing fingernail-sized pieces of it into buckets of water. This is reasonably safe provided you start with very small pieces and work your way *gradually* up the size scale. You may want earplugs if you're going to use pieces much larger than what I said, and know in advance that significant amounts of the water may splash everything nearby, but this is otherwise not a very dangerous experiment.
Actually, you can just search the web for interesting chemical experiments; there are plenty of mostly-harmless but reasonably interesting things you can do with household stuff.
He hired you to rewrite this thing in VB, even though you aren't familiar enough with VB to effectively argue (one way or the other) its merits? So he's smart enough to have written the software that got the company started, but he's not smart enough to realize he should hire somebody who *knows* the language he wants them to work in? Does he seriously think it's a good idea to have somebody who's new to the language writing production code in that language?
I don't.
If you're going to be working on rewriting it, it needs to be rewritten in a language you have significant experience writing in. Period. For instance, if *I* were going to be rewriting it, the logical languages to choose would be Perl or maybe lisp, because those are the languages I know well enough to write good code. If he wanted it rewritten in VB, he needed to hire someone with VB experience.
VB *is* reasonably good for certain things (mostly, pure GUI work, e.g., an application that facilitates data entry), but only if the programmer doing the work is familiar with VB. I've seen applications written in VB by someone who didn't know the language well, and they were universally terrible in every respect (_including_ the UI). This is true in any language. When somebody is just learning the language, they aren't going to be comfortable with the language's features or conventions, and so they're going to write execrable code for several months until they learn those things. During that time, you don't want them writing something mission-critical in that language. It's bad juju.
> You're missing the other common use, portable online publishing.
PDF is a lousy choice if the user needs to be able to view it onscreen.
> What format would you recommend I e-mail to a client?
Ordinarily? Plain text.
Yes, there are situations where people need to see things like "this is how your brochure will look on paper", and for that PDF is suitable (although just sending them a paper proof might also be an option). I suppose if you work in prepress or something like that PDF would be your bread and butter.
Which is, approximately, what I said in the first place.
Preferably, cross-platform, but perhaps that is too much to ask.
> What applications have you tried?
Acrobat Reader itself, of course, GSView, xpdf, gpdf,... pretty much anything that claims to display PDFs on screen. I don't remember the names of all of them.
> From your list, I think Preview on OS X might fit the bill. It handles the > colors for usability
Umm, OS X is unusable for me, precisely because it does not have a centralized mechanism for user-specified colors. In particular, every application and its brother feels free to just go ahead and use Evil Blinding White Backgrounds, and there's nothing you can do about it. Some individual apps (including, I'm told, Finder, although the UI for it is pretty well hidden) allow you to specify user colors, but there's no centralized way to specify them for all apps.
I have to have low-contrast with a dark background and lighter foreground. Otherwise I get bad headaches after a few minutes.
> BTW, any takers on the ammount of time till patch. Clock starts now.
I'll take the 30th of May (yes, 2006) if that's available. Sooner is possible, but... well, I'll say the 30th. Bear in mind, the operative word here is "patch". A workaround, such as "shut off such-and-such an option until the real fix comes out" doesn't count as a patch, IMO.
> Actually that is old news to the Tolkien folk. If you search around you will find > that His works have always been well recieved by the greater christian community,
Well-received, sure. They're perfectly good books, no mistake about that. Christian allegory, however, they are not (at least, not in anything like the same sense that Lewis' books are, for instance).
> [Tolkein's] triolgy has been given many meanings through the years - the Ring as > Nuclear power, as Race relations, as a simple life vs the worldly one.
The ring is none of these things, although you do find some things about race relations in Tolkein's books. There is also a certain amount of anti-industrial sentiment evident in the books, which I imagine probably reflects to a significant extent the author's views. And, of course, there are deliberate geographical parallels between various places in Middle Earth and in our world, and Tolkein's mythology does borrow bits and pieces from various sources -- Norse mythology and Christianity among them. Fundamentally, though, it was not written as allegory, and although it may contain a bit of allegory here or there, that is secondary and is certainly not the main thrust of the work.
> For me, they are the best stories ever told.
Certainly, I would call them some of the best fiction ever written. The amount of work put into them is a large part of the reason. Tolkein poured most of his life into revising and re-revising his stories, continuously working on editing and improving them. LOTR is excellent. As for the Silmarillion... it would doubtless have been rather better if he'd had more time to keep working on it, but even in the form we have it it's quite a *lot* better than the form it started in (see Book of Lost Tales for insight into this).
If you want allegory, go read C.S. Lewis. His books are not of the same level of literary quality as Tolkein's (although some of them are not bad either), but they are unquestionalby intended allegorically (well, his _fiction_ books are intended allegorically; he also wrote various non-fiction books).
> doesn't even support PNG properly yet (even ie7 I believe)
As near as I can tell (from what testing I have done), the PNG support in IE7 is excellent. There are still some issues with CSS2, but PNG support seems to be good to go.
As near as I can determine, there isn't one. I've tried all the usual suspects, and I can't stand any of them. Among other things:
* No PDF viewer that I've ever tried properly supports system colours.
This is an accessibility requirement for me and a major big deal.
* The search feature seldom works properly.
* Most of the time even standard text selection doesn't work right.
* Keyboard support is usually beyond terrible. Even such basic things as
the standard cursor movement keys don't work.
I consider PDF to be a good format for sending to an external printing shop when you want to get something run off in bulk on a press. It can also be used in those weird cases when for one reason or another (e.g., network structure) you need to print a document on a printer that you can't print to from the computer where you created the document. Basically, it's an intermediate step on the way to paper.
Any use of PDF that does not involve paper is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad idea. Notably, PDF is an horrific choice for anything that needs to be viewed on screen.
> If we'd all said that GIF was good enough, PNG wouldn't have happened.
Moving from GIF to PNG, there are some *very solid* answers to the "why" question. Among other things, PNG supports much nicer colour depth and an alpha channel. The former means you can have photo-quality images. The latter means that you can have images that look good against different background colors. These are useful things.
> If we'd all said that ZIP was good enough, RAR and 7z wouldn't have happened.
I don't consider RAR or 7z to be enough of an improvement over ZIP to warrant switching, when ZIP is so widely supported. Nonetheless, the answer to the "why" question would still be pretty obvious: better compression. I just don't think it's *enough* better to be worth the hassle of dealing with poorly supported not-widely-deployed formats.
> If we'd all said that WAV was good enough, MP3 wouldn't have happened. > If we'd all said that MP3 was good enough, AAC wouldn't have happened.
Now you're just babblying. WAV is more than just "good enough": it's better -- MUCH better. WAV sounds so much better than MP3 that there is no comparison. I can barely *make* myself listen to MP3, just to get a vague idea what a song sounds like, approximately. OTOH, I quite enjoy listening to a properly ripped WAV; it sounds just as good as (I would say the same as) listening to the CD. The only *conceivable* reason to use MP3 is for internet distribution, if the bandwidth requirements of WAV are absolutely prohibitive, e.g., if you need to be able to distribute to dialup users. For personal use (e.g., if you own the CD and rip it for more convenient listening), choosing WAV over MP3 is a no-brainer. Frankly, even for internet distribution, a broadband user might well choose WAV over MP3. Yeah, it uses more bandwidth, but it's *worth* it, because you can actually hear the music the way it was intended to sound.
AAC I don't know much about, so I won't comment on that, except to say that if I was going to replace MP3 with something it would probably be WAV, or _maybe_ FLAC.
All of this is neither here nor there. You claim that this new format is "better" than existing image formats, but you don't explain why. The question "why" is a very valid one. The GIF format is worth keeping because it works well for images with a very small number of colors (mainly logos and pictographs), and the filesize is quite small. For a general-purpose image format, I don't know of anything better than PNG, and that's what I'd say this new format needs to be "better than" in order to be worth implementing. Saying a new image format is better than JPEG is a bit like saying a new car is better than an old Ford Pinto. JPEG ompression is lossy and the result looks terrible, so whenever I'm forced to use JPEG for any reason I invariably end up setting the compression to 0%, resulting in *much* larger filesizes than the equivalent PNG. "Better than JPEG" is *not* a selling point, as far as I'm concerned. I want to know how this new format is better than PNG, or else I'm not interested.
I'm with the other poster: I want to know why this is worth my time. Feel free to enlighten me on exactly why this new format is better than PNG, and *enough* better to warrant implementing, when PNG is already so widely supported and deployed. I don't know of any reasons why that would be the case.
Dobson was a child psychologist (and, as near as I can determine, a pretty good one), but the popularity of his books (some of which *are* quite good) apparently went to his head, and he started to see himself as a religious leader (which was dangerous, because he doesn't have the proper training for that; his training is in psychology). Then in order to maintain his popularity and keep selling books and magazines and things, he at some point along the line abandoned all pretenses of discernment and started using his name to publish, basically, whatever sensational thing will get people excited enough to buy subscriptions. His magazines will print virtually anything that purports to be conservative, family-oriented, and Christian, even if it's baldly incoherent nonsense. For instance, around the time LOTR:FOTR came out his magazine ran an article that attempted to claim that LOTR was Christian allegory. Even worse was the malarke they ran about Y2K. I was unaware of the particular stance you mention, but it fits the pattern.
I assume Dobson himself doesn't bother to proofread these articles before they get approved. Not that that excuses him from all responsibility. It doesn't, and he should be ashamed of what he has allowed his name to be used for. I guess what I'm saying is that his organizations do indeed seem to have become entities unto themselves at this point. I don't think everything they do is initiated by one man any more.
First: games. If it's a computer you plan to play a lot of games on, you're pretty much screwed, because many of them won't work, and they won't give you a decent error message as to exactly what permission they're missing. Quasi-educational games for children are the worst offenders, but games intended for adults will give you trouble too. My recommendation is to have a separate computer for nothing _but_ games, don't do anything important with it, don't store any important data on it, run as admin, and when (not if) it's compromised, just fdisk and reinstall.
Another problem area is automatic updates -- not Windows Update, those work fine, but automatic updates for other applications, such as antivirus software, web browsers, extensions, plugins, and the like, will often not happen until somebody logs in as admin. For this reason, somebody needs to log in as admin on a regular basis, preferably daily. Most home users will not appreciate the ritual of having to log in as admin but then log out and log back in under another account to do stuff, so unless you've got a geek around that can take care of that sort of thing there could be significant... issues, in terms of getting that to happen.
Finally, the problem that bothers more savvy users who try to do this is that, as near as I can determine, there's effectively no reasonable, convenient equivalent for su or sudo. If someone can tell me an easy way to log into XP as a limited user and open a cmd prompt with admin privs on my otherwise-limited-privs desktop, without logging out or using the Switch User feature, I'll be more grateful than you can know. Surely I must be missing something, but for the life of me I cannot locate this feature.
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> I think this is the wrong kind of solution to the problem. A standard would be easier.
Clearly you are not familiar with the tabs-vs-spaces argument.
Advocates of tabs say that having everything indended by multiples of some standard
amount is a good thing. This is, of course, wrong for source code in many computer
languages, because it prevents things from being indented to the correct position
relative to the line above, as in the following example (in the Inform language)...
Object matchbox kitchen_cupboard
class cardboard,
with short_name "matchbox",
description "A standard cardboard matchbox.
It says ~Strike on Box~ on the side.",
name 'matchbox' 'box',
has openable container;
I suppose it doesn't matter for write-once applications, but if you're trying
to write _maintainable_ code, it's essential to have things line up properly,
and that means they often need to line up under specific characters on the line
above. That's possible with tabs if the character they need to line up under is
preceded by whitespace (as it generally is with e.g. SQL), but if that's not so,
tabs are useless. I don't see how these new "expanding" tabs change that.
Inform is the *best* example I know of a language that *cannot* be properly
indented with only tabs, i.e., spaces are *needed*. There are other languages
with which this is somewhat true, e.g. Lisp (wherein you often want to line up
under a specific open-parenthesis which may not be preceded by whitespace)
and Perl (although most Perl code is not indented as well as it could be,
partly because tools such as cperl-mode do not support it).
If you agree on a fixed width for tabs (e.g., 8 characters), you could use a
mixture of tabs and spaces, but that won't make tab-indentation advocates happy,
because they want to get *rid* of leading spaces and use tabs only, usually
because they want to use proportional fonts. If you're going to use spaces
for indentation, you might as well use all spaces and no tabs.
> Check your inflation rates. You were making a good $4-5k more than me.
I have. I wasn't, at least not in terms of the inflation of goods I spend money on. (Some things have gone up at rather higher rates, but they are not things I have in my budget. Real estate, for instance (at least around here) is up quite a bit, but I haven't bought any, so that's irrelevant.)
> Meanwhile, I do have savings,
So when you spoke of trying not to starve, you were just being dramatic?
> The point is that God does not need your money. He's God.
This, while true as far as it goes, is quite beside the point.
> The church does not need your money; the church does not need to exist.
This is your real objection. You do not wish to be part of a church, because you do not view it as worthwhile. You should have said so in the first place, rather than appealing to the "poor and starving" argument.
I did say earlier that not wanting the government to decide your religion for you was a valid reason to withdraw from a state church. Not wanting to be a part of any church at all wasn't what I really had in mind, but if that's your position, then that's the reason you should give for withdrawing.
> Lastly, the church absolutely does not have the right to levy a tax on its members
I do prefer voluntary giving. Which is what we have here, incidentally.
> > As a result of customer feedback...
> Whenever I see that in a statement from Microsoft, it is always code for
> "We have totally ignored the wishes of our customers and instead focused
> on lock-in, the breaking of standards, and the complete bollixing of normal
> user interface conventions."
You have to understand which customers Microsoft collects feedback from. They don't collect feedback from computer geeks like us, nor from our grandmothers. They're interested primarily in feedback from the technology-related executives of Fortune 100 corporations and large federal government departments -- people whose immediate underlings supervise people who supervise people who supervise the people who do actual IT work.
This, when you think about it, explains a great deal. For one thing, Fortune 100 execs are *busy*, so they don't really have time for Microsoft's silly feedback surveys, and they're not going to put a lot of deep thought into the answers. They probably delegate the surveys to their secretaries half the time.
And of course there are several levels of detachment between these people and the people who actually have to work directly with the software and its consequences.
ActiveX is a perfect example of a Microsoft technology born out of this kind of feedback. Sure, it's a security nightmare for normal people who just want to use the web, but hey, if it makes it easier to build the company's ticket system for assigning teams to projects (or whatever)... and web browsing all goes through transparent a corporate filtering proxy at the network boundary anyhow...
> So Firefox only scored a 1500 on its SAT. IE is still wearing a helmet
> and drooling on itself as it takes the short bus back to Redmond.
You exagerate. Yes, Firefox handles CSS (especially CSS2) rather a lot better than IE, but the browser drooling on itself on the short bus with regard to CSS is Netscape 4 (remember that frustration?), and the one scoring 1500, when it emerges, will handle a lot more CSS3 than any browser I've yet seen can manage so far.
Perhaps a better analogy would involve grade levels: IE7 is still a couple of grade levels behind Firefox, but in time it can potentially get to where Firefox is today. Sure, it needs to study CSS2, but that's coming up on its academic schedule, I imagine.
> IE is the biggest frustration on the planet right now to anyone who actually
> works in this industry.
Okay, that much is true. (Well, it's true if you define "this industry" as web development specifically, rather than lumping all computer stuff together as is often done.)
You have to give them a little time. Remember that Netscape was behind on CSS support for several years during the 4.x era. Microsoft can catch up.
And they are making visible progress. After all, the IE7 beta does fully support PNG, including the alpha channel, which is a major boon for web developers. Mozilla didn't support that until at least 1998, IIRC, so while IE might be a little bit behind, if you cut them some slack, they'll catch up on the relevant standards eventually.
And yeah, I'm posting this using the IE7 Beta 3 preview. Since part of my job involves web development, I have to test out new browsers, especially ones that are likely to become popular, whether they're my personal preference or not.
> 1.3%. At my paltry salary, that's $246/year I could be spending on not starving.
Not so very long ago (late nineties), I made less than you make and managed to put
about 10% of it into savings (in addition to whatever undisclosed amount I may have
given to a church, something I'm not comfortable putting numbers to on an open forum
like slashdot -- but here's a small hint: I would not have considered $246/year to
be so very much), meanwhile paying off $10 thousand in student loans over the course
of four years. Somehow I escaped starvation. Indeed, I seem to have escaped it by
a wider margin than would be ideal, i.e., gained more weight than I wanted.
Handling your money well is not about how much you make. It's about whether you
have learned to control your expenses and live within your means.
> I would like to start taking 1.3% of your income. Not wanting to give it to me is a
> "terrible" reason to withdraw from this offer. How would you like to set this up?
You are not my church.
I'm decidedly not a fan of state churches, but saving less than 2% on your taxes is a *terrible* reason to withdraw. I mean, come on, 1.3%? Buncha misers. How can a church even survive on that in the first place? If we only gave that percentage of our income around here, our churches wouldn't be able to cover the utility bills and such, much less pay the pastor any kind of salary.
If you object to having the state decide your religion for you, then withdraw for that reason. That's a good reason. Don't withdraw just because you're too stingy to cough up the measley 1.3% tithe. Sheesh.
> My 98 used to go from power button to booted in 38 seconds.
> That beats my current average of 52 for Ubuntu.
Are you kidding? My Pentium II/233 used to boot PC-DOS 3.3 in nothing flat. If you blinked at the end of the POST banner the next thing you saw was the prompt.
Boot and shutdown speeds of Windows 95/98/Me varies wildly, and the theoretical speed of the hardware doesn't seem to have much to do with it. Hardware can make a big difference, but I think it has more to do with driver idiosyncracies than actual the number of MHz. Adding hardware (whether an expansion card or a peripheral) often significantly changes the system start time with Windows 98. Even something as simple as a bog-standard ATAPI CD-ROM drive can make a user-noticeable difference.
Another major contributing factor is network structure. Yes, really: adding another Windows system on the same LAN segment will often change the boot and/or shutdown speed of an existing system. I don't know why this happens but I am not making it up. Actually using the network, e.g. for file or print sharing, can have even more impact.
And, of course, what software you have installed is always a major issue. Installing MS Works will add a few seconds to your boot time, for instance. OpenOffice (version 1.x at least; not sure about 2.x) is an example of an application that adds a few seconds to your shutdown time, although it has no noticeable impact on startup time (unless you turn on its preload feature, of course, and even then it only adds about the same amount of time the app normally takes to load). And so on -- various applications contribute varying amounts of time.
This is good news. It means both Windows Vista *and* Perl6 have a chance to beat DNF out the door.
> You were hoping to discern my location, political orientation and whatnot based on my date
> format? Do you really think I would let on that I'm an alien in such an obvious way?
It's not so much a question of _where_ you are as it is _who_ you are. Things like your physical location, phenotype, voting history, and so forth, those are things we already know, but they are merely incidental details. It's the contents of your mind we're really interested in, and little things like how you respond to a question about date formats are more revealing than you think...
> When you see a flying saucer in front of your house, that's when you'll know we've come for you...
Very interesting. Subject responds with threats when minor information about his identity is disclosed...
> Once you learn your first 10 or so languages, additional languages tend to be very easy to pick up
Yes, yes, but we're talking here about writing the program that makes the company go, not just crufting together some quick hack to automate some minor chore.
Sure, if you've previously programmed in a dozen or so languages (as I had before I learned Perl) you can pick up the language in a week or so and write code that basically works (as I did). That's fine, for some purposes. But the code you write under those conditions is *not* good quality maintainable code, and you don't want to hang the company's bread and butter on it. You end up with Perl that looks like it was written by a C programmer (ugh), VB that looks like it was written by a Java guy, or cetera -- in short, you end up with a mess.
Yeah, sure. Get an IBM Model M keyboard. They sell on ebay all the time for the kinds of prices that make the cost of shipping a major component of your total expenditure. And they *are* a good-quality keyboard.
If what you want is The Perfect Keyboard for Computer Geeks, then you'll want an Avant Stellar. It costs more, but it's fully remappable, supports macros, comes with a tool for changing the keytops, and all that sort of thing, plus it has the function keys in _both_ places (left side, like on an XT keyboard and top edge, like on the newer 101-key layout), so whichever place They Were Meant To Be in your opinion, there they are, and then you can use the others for extras or macro keys.
It's not black, though.
> Sadly, I was never able to find a combination that was truly worthy
That's partly because you didn't actually *know* much chemistry. (Which is normal. You wouldn't be expected to. You were a just a kid.)
The chemistry sets they sell for children don't usually include the sorts of chemicals that will readily and vigorously react with practically anything you pour them together with, so if you want to do any really interesting chemistry you're going to need two things: some knowledge of what you're doing, and access to a grocery or hardware store, so you can pick up things like soda, vinegar, lye, bleach, ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and so forth.
Dangerous is not much more difficult to achieve than interesting, however, so I do *not* recommend just randomly pouring those sorts of chemicals together at random to see what happens. There are at least three ways to kill yourself just using the specific chemicals I listed. Yeah, I know, when I was ten years old I wanted to be a chemist too, and I thought that meant I'd get to pour random vials together and watch them fizzle, smoke, explode, et cetera. Then I had a chemistry class and found out this isn't actually how chemists work.
This doesn't mean you can't play around with chemicals a bit, but you should stop first and think about what's going to happen, based on what you're combining and what its properties are. For instance, combining lye and hydrochloric acid is interesting but more or less safe (as long as your container is large enough and won't react with either component individually), and you end up with saltwater (plus of course the left-over of either the acid or the lye (whichever you had more of by mol)), but combining bleach and ammonia is not such a great idea, and the result can poison you, burn down your house, or both. (If you *have* to try it, do it outdoors wearing a gas mask, and be careful of your eyes. Have a running garden hose close at hand in case you need to flush your eyes. Don't try it in a basement or garage unless you have a proper ventilation hood like the ones in serious chem labs.)
If you want to see something that _appears_ dangerous but is actually controlled and not going to seriously injure anyone, get yourself some pure sodium and play around with tossing fingernail-sized pieces of it into buckets of water. This is reasonably safe provided you start with very small pieces and work your way *gradually* up the size scale. You may want earplugs if you're going to use pieces much larger than what I said, and know in advance that significant amounts of the water may splash everything nearby, but this is otherwise not a very dangerous experiment.
Actually, you can just search the web for interesting chemical experiments; there are plenty of mostly-harmless but reasonably interesting things you can do with household stuff.
He hired you to rewrite this thing in VB, even though you aren't familiar enough with VB to effectively argue (one way or the other) its merits? So he's smart enough to have written the software that got the company started, but he's not smart enough to realize he should hire somebody who *knows* the language he wants them to work in? Does he seriously think it's a good idea to have somebody who's new to the language writing production code in that language?
I don't.
If you're going to be working on rewriting it, it needs to be rewritten in a language you have significant experience writing in. Period. For instance, if *I* were going to be rewriting it, the logical languages to choose would be Perl or maybe lisp, because those are the languages I know well enough to write good code. If he wanted it rewritten in VB, he needed to hire someone with VB experience.
VB *is* reasonably good for certain things (mostly, pure GUI work, e.g., an application that facilitates data entry), but only if the programmer doing the work is familiar with VB. I've seen applications written in VB by someone who didn't know the language well, and they were universally terrible in every respect (_including_ the UI). This is true in any language. When somebody is just learning the language, they aren't going to be comfortable with the language's features or conventions, and so they're going to write execrable code for several months until they learn those things. During that time, you don't want them writing something mission-critical in that language. It's bad juju.
> You're missing the other common use, portable online publishing.
PDF is a lousy choice if the user needs to be able to view it onscreen.
> What format would you recommend I e-mail to a client?
Ordinarily? Plain text.
Yes, there are situations where people need to see things like "this is how your brochure will look on paper", and for that PDF is suitable (although just sending them a paper proof might also be an option). I suppose if you work in prepress or something like that PDF would be your bread and butter.
Which is, approximately, what I said in the first place.
> What platform are you looking for?
... pretty much anything that claims to display PDFs on screen. I don't remember the names of all of them.
Preferably, cross-platform, but perhaps that is too much to ask.
> What applications have you tried?
Acrobat Reader itself, of course, GSView, xpdf, gpdf,
> From your list, I think Preview on OS X might fit the bill. It handles the
> colors for usability
Umm, OS X is unusable for me, precisely because it does not have a centralized mechanism for user-specified colors. In particular, every application and its brother feels free to just go ahead and use Evil Blinding White Backgrounds, and there's nothing you can do about it. Some individual apps (including, I'm told, Finder, although the UI for it is pretty well hidden) allow you to specify user colors, but there's no centralized way to specify them for all apps.
I have to have low-contrast with a dark background and lighter foreground. Otherwise I get bad headaches after a few minutes.
> BTW, any takers on the ammount of time till patch. Clock starts now.
I'll take the 30th of May (yes, 2006) if that's available. Sooner is possible, but... well, I'll say the 30th. Bear in mind, the operative word here is "patch". A workaround, such as "shut off such-and-such an option until the real fix comes out" doesn't count as a patch, IMO.
> Actually that is old news to the Tolkien folk. If you search around you will find
> that His works have always been well recieved by the greater christian community,
Well-received, sure. They're perfectly good books, no mistake about that. Christian allegory, however, they are not (at least, not in anything like the same sense that Lewis' books are, for instance).
> [Tolkein's] triolgy has been given many meanings through the years - the Ring as
> Nuclear power, as Race relations, as a simple life vs the worldly one.
The ring is none of these things, although you do find some things about race relations in Tolkein's books. There is also a certain amount of anti-industrial sentiment evident in the books, which I imagine probably reflects to a significant extent the author's views. And, of course, there are deliberate geographical parallels between various places in Middle Earth and in our world, and Tolkein's mythology does borrow bits and pieces from various sources -- Norse mythology and Christianity among them. Fundamentally, though, it was not written as allegory, and although it may contain a bit of allegory here or there, that is secondary and is certainly not the main thrust of the work.
> For me, they are the best stories ever told.
Certainly, I would call them some of the best fiction ever written. The amount of work put into them is a large part of the reason. Tolkein poured most of his life into revising and re-revising his stories, continuously working on editing and improving them. LOTR is excellent. As for the Silmarillion... it would doubtless have been rather better if he'd had more time to keep working on it, but even in the form we have it it's quite a *lot* better than the form it started in (see Book of Lost Tales for insight into this).
If you want allegory, go read C.S. Lewis. His books are not of the same level of literary quality as Tolkein's (although some of them are not bad either), but they are unquestionalby intended allegorically (well, his _fiction_ books are intended allegorically; he also wrote various non-fiction books).
I guess I've drifted pretty far off topic.
> doesn't even support PNG properly yet (even ie7 I believe)
As near as I can tell (from what testing I have done), the PNG support in IE7 is excellent. There are still some issues with CSS2, but PNG support seems to be good to go.
> Download a decent PDF reader already.
As near as I can determine, there isn't one. I've tried all the usual suspects, and I can't stand any of them. Among other things:
* No PDF viewer that I've ever tried properly supports system colours.
This is an accessibility requirement for me and a major big deal.
* The search feature seldom works properly.
* Most of the time even standard text selection doesn't work right.
* Keyboard support is usually beyond terrible. Even such basic things as
the standard cursor movement keys don't work.
I consider PDF to be a good format for sending to an external printing shop when you want to get something run off in bulk on a press. It can also be used in those weird cases when for one reason or another (e.g., network structure) you need to print a document on a printer that you can't print to from the computer where you created the document. Basically, it's an intermediate step on the way to paper.
Any use of PDF that does not involve paper is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad idea. Notably, PDF is an horrific choice for anything that needs to be viewed on screen.
> If we'd all said that GIF was good enough, PNG wouldn't have happened.
Moving from GIF to PNG, there are some *very solid* answers to the "why" question. Among other things, PNG supports much nicer colour depth and an alpha channel. The former means you can have photo-quality images. The latter means that you can have images that look good against different background colors. These are useful things.
> If we'd all said that ZIP was good enough, RAR and 7z wouldn't have happened.
I don't consider RAR or 7z to be enough of an improvement over ZIP to warrant switching, when ZIP is so widely supported. Nonetheless, the answer to the "why" question would still be pretty obvious: better compression. I just don't think it's *enough* better to be worth the hassle of dealing with poorly supported not-widely-deployed formats.
> If we'd all said that WAV was good enough, MP3 wouldn't have happened.
> If we'd all said that MP3 was good enough, AAC wouldn't have happened.
Now you're just babblying. WAV is more than just "good enough": it's better -- MUCH better. WAV sounds so much better than MP3 that there is no comparison. I can barely *make* myself listen to MP3, just to get a vague idea what a song sounds like, approximately. OTOH, I quite enjoy listening to a properly ripped WAV; it sounds just as good as (I would say the same as) listening to the CD. The only *conceivable* reason to use MP3 is for internet distribution, if the bandwidth requirements of WAV are absolutely prohibitive, e.g., if you need to be able to distribute to dialup users. For personal use (e.g., if you own the CD and rip it for more convenient listening), choosing WAV over MP3 is a no-brainer. Frankly, even for internet distribution, a broadband user might well choose WAV over MP3. Yeah, it uses more bandwidth, but it's *worth* it, because you can actually hear the music the way it was intended to sound.
AAC I don't know much about, so I won't comment on that, except to say that if I was going to replace MP3 with something it would probably be WAV, or _maybe_ FLAC.
All of this is neither here nor there. You claim that this new format is "better" than existing image formats, but you don't explain why. The question "why" is a very valid one. The GIF format is worth keeping because it works well for images with a very small number of colors (mainly logos and pictographs), and the filesize is quite small. For a general-purpose image format, I don't know of anything better than PNG, and that's what I'd say this new format needs to be "better than" in order to be worth implementing. Saying a new image format is better than JPEG is a bit like saying a new car is better than an old Ford Pinto. JPEG ompression is lossy and the result looks terrible, so whenever I'm forced to use JPEG for any reason I invariably end up setting the compression to 0%, resulting in *much* larger filesizes than the equivalent PNG. "Better than JPEG" is *not* a selling point, as far as I'm concerned. I want to know how this new format is better than PNG, or else I'm not interested.
I'm with the other poster: I want to know why this is worth my time. Feel free to enlighten me on exactly why this new format is better than PNG, and *enough* better to warrant implementing, when PNG is already so widely supported and deployed. I don't know of any reasons why that would be the case.
Dobson was a child psychologist (and, as near as I can determine, a pretty good one), but the popularity of his books (some of which *are* quite good) apparently went to his head, and he started to see himself as a religious leader (which was dangerous, because he doesn't have the proper training for that; his training is in psychology). Then in order to maintain his popularity and keep selling books and magazines and things, he at some point along the line abandoned all pretenses of discernment and started using his name to publish, basically, whatever sensational thing will get people excited enough to buy subscriptions. His magazines will print virtually anything that purports to be conservative, family-oriented, and Christian, even if it's baldly incoherent nonsense. For instance, around the time LOTR:FOTR came out his magazine ran an article that attempted to claim that LOTR was Christian allegory. Even worse was the malarke they ran about Y2K. I was unaware of the particular stance you mention, but it fits the pattern.
I assume Dobson himself doesn't bother to proofread these articles before they get approved. Not that that excuses him from all responsibility. It doesn't, and he should be ashamed of what he has allowed his name to be used for. I guess what I'm saying is that his organizations do indeed seem to have become entities unto themselves at this point. I don't think everything they do is initiated by one man any more.
First: games. If it's a computer you plan to play a lot of games on, you're pretty much screwed, because many of them won't work, and they won't give you a decent error message as to exactly what permission they're missing. Quasi-educational games for children are the worst offenders, but games intended for adults will give you trouble too. My recommendation is to have a separate computer for nothing _but_ games, don't do anything important with it, don't store any important data on it, run as admin, and when (not if) it's compromised, just fdisk and reinstall.
Another problem area is automatic updates -- not Windows Update, those work fine, but automatic updates for other applications, such as antivirus software, web browsers, extensions, plugins, and the like, will often not happen until somebody logs in as admin. For this reason, somebody needs to log in as admin on a regular basis, preferably daily. Most home users will not appreciate the ritual of having to log in as admin but then log out and log back in under another account to do stuff, so unless you've got a geek around that can take care of that sort of thing there could be significant... issues, in terms of getting that to happen.
Finally, the problem that bothers more savvy users who try to do this is that, as near as I can determine, there's effectively no reasonable, convenient equivalent for su or sudo. If someone can tell me an easy way to log into XP as a limited user and open a cmd prompt with admin privs on my otherwise-limited-privs desktop, without logging out or using the Switch User feature, I'll be more grateful than you can know. Surely I must be missing something, but for the life of me I cannot locate this feature.