> But does a solution involving SVG allow for synchronized audio? For instance, if I > wanted to use SVG instead of SWF to make an animated series such as Homestar Runner > or Weebl and Bob, would that work?
Not in pure SVG, but with CSS it ought to be possible.
Bear in mind, though, a lot of people don't have our web browsers set up to play sound, because that got old about three days after Netscape released a version that supported sound (2.0, wasn't it? Or was it 3.0?), when we heard for the eightieth time one of those same three annoying.midi files that every webmaster on the planet copied from some other site and included on every stinking page, played through the monophonic PC Speaker sound driver that came with Windows 3.1.
> The resultant file decompresses into what appears to be a standard JPEG icon in > Mac OS X but was actually a compiled Unix executable in disguise.
Sounds like a Trojan to me. Does it attach itself to other executables? How would it do that on OS X, without admin privs? Trojans for Unix are of course possible and have been around since, to a first approximation, the beginning of time (i.e., 1970). What makes this news? Is this one spreading quite a bit, or something?
> And, as per usual, any discussion about Flash tends to stereotype Linux users as > stubborn, backwards types that hate everything that regular people like about computers. > Great image to project about yourselves, guys.
Regular people don't like Flash, on the whole. They like a *handful* of the things Flash is used for (mainly cheesy games, and to a lesser extent, inane animated "greeting cards"), but they sure don't like it on *most* of the pages it appears on. Click-to-play for plugins is a feature virtually no user dislikes, and one that is destined to become standard.
Who likes Flash? I'll tell you who likes Flash: young fresh-out-of-school IT guys who fancy themselves senior webmasters, although if you asked them the difference between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1, all they'd be able to come up with is that 1.1 is newer.
> If the user doesn't have javascript turned on, then they can't see our ads. If they > can't see our ads, then... we really don't care if the site doesn't work for them.
Here's the thing: neither do they.
If your site is broken, hey, there are tens of billions of other sites out there, tens of dozens of which can supply them with essentially the same thing your site provides, and like as not a dozen of them come up higher in their search results than your javascript adfarm, because, you know, they provide _useful content_ that other people _want_ to link to, and because their standard HTML is easily parsed by the search engines so that their relevance to the user's search criteria is evident.
> For all of you who've got adblockers on and javascript and flash turned off, welcome to > the beginning of the end. I hope you enjoy cruising the crusty bowels of the Internet
The irony here is simply stunning. I was pretty sure sites that say, "If your browser doesn't support Feature X, then our site is too good for you" *were* the crusty bowels of the internet, the state of the art of 1996. Welcome to the past.
> Point quick browser to a directory containing links to your favourite > applications, or images etc.
This has been suggested to me before, but I am highly skeptical about whether it will do what I want. Among other things...
Panel drawers, when they pop out, contain launchers that are just like the ones on the panel itself, i.e., their size is configurable, and so forth. In particular, they are pretty close to square, *not* vertically shrunken and horizontally wide like the items on a menu. This is good, because it makes them very easy to hit quickly.
Panel drawers may also contain panel applets, e.g., if I for space reasons don't want to keep the volume control applet on my main panel, but I do want it around for occasional use, I can toss it in a drawer. This is not a deal-breaker, but it sure is nice.
When my panel fills up with launchers and I need to make some space, it's easy to just grab one of the least-used items on the panel and drag it into a drawer. Along the same lines, creating a new launcher in the drawer is the same as creating one on the panel.
Basically, panel drawers are a designed-in feature of the interface. What you seem to be suggesting as a substitute is that I try to make do with a completely dissimilar feature that's inherently not designed to do what I want. It's not that the feature you're talking about is *bad*, but I think it's fundamentally not the same feature I was talking about.
Indeed. If I could make Gnome 1.4 my desktop but still have the Gnome2 libraries installed for apps that require them, and expect everything to _work_ with that setup, that is what I would be using. Since 1.4, every successive version of Gnome is objectively worse than the one before, in terms of features. As for "usability", that's much more subjective, and as a high-end power user I find that my needs are *very* different from those of the kind of low-end end-user that current Gnome versions seem to be targetting.
For all that, I still use Gnome, because it still (for now, anyway) has the one killer feature it has always had that led me to prefer Gnome over KDE in the first place (back when both of them used Netscape 4 as their default browser): panel drawers. I consider this to be an essential feature, because on the one hand there's not room on one panel for all the launchers that I want, but on the other hand it's *not* acceptable to have to dig through 3-5 levels of menus for things that I use on anything resembling a regular basis, and it's *certainly* not acceptable to have to minimize all my windows and use desktop icons as launchers. As far as I'm concerned, panel drawers are the greatest thing since tab completion, and any system that doesn't have them is just not an option.
I *would* switch to KDE if it got panel drawers, because in every other respect I *hate* the direction Gnome has been going since 2.0.
> As for things like "focus follows mouse" and the like
Focus follows mouse is terribly inconvenient for those of us who are heavy keyboard users. Frequently we just want the mouse pointer _out of the way_ for extended periods of time. I personally tend to park it in one corner of the screen and just leave it there for a while. I couldn't do that if I had "focus follows mouse" turned on.
However, it doesn't bother me that "focus follows mouse" is an option. Frankly, it wouldn't bother me even if it were the default. (Defaults are for end-users. Power users go systematically through the options when we set the system up, then we promptly forget what the defaults even were in the first place, because we know how *we* want the system to behave.) With that said, I don't think traditional "focus follows mouse" would be a very good default, because it would likely confuse the everliving bejeebers out of new users. *If* you could get keyboard focus to follow the mouse not just from window to window but to each widget, *then* it might make a sensible setting for some end users. Maybe. I wouldn't roll it out to a wide group without first watching half a dozen normal end users trying to use it, though.
> I think nautilus is pretty good
Yeah, I think the complexspiral demo is cool, too.
Oh, you meant the file manager? I haven't used a graphical file manager on anything resembling a regular basis since I discovered tab completion. I have no opinion on Nautilus versus Konqueror, because I view them both as strictly end-user stuff. I personally have Nautilus exorcised from my Gnome session, because not having it in memory saves RAM. This means my wallpaper doesn't get set, but that's not important to me. (As noted above, I use panel drawers, so I don't need to keep icons on my desktop, so I don't need to compulsively minimize everything all the time; consequently, I haven't *seen* my background in weeks. Usually when I do see more than a small section of it, it's because I'm closing everything in preparation for logging out, e.g. because I've upgraded some ports and want to move to the new versions.)
> Also, I find that you complaint about the configuration menus and whatnot valid. KDE takes > a bit of customization, but I usually just sit down with a new install and go through the > control panel until I'm satisfied. Most users shouldn't have to do this.
Right, this is the difference between defaults versus options. Defaults are for end users, and most users, be
> And, before last year, calling something 'a tsunami' outside of oceanographic > circles probably would get you a lot of strange looks
All educated persons in the English-speaking world know what a tsunami is. This has not changed since the events last year. Granted, a lot of vocabulary-impoverished people have _also_ picked up the word now, but that's a temporary effect. The phonemics of the word are sufficiently foreign to the English-speaking ear that in a couple of years many people will go back to calling it a "tidal wave". This is neither here nor there. This is slashdot, so we assume you know how to use the internet: if somebody uses a word you don't know, you can head over to dictionary.com or Wikipedia or someplace and look it up.
> A tsunami is a giant wave, you're talking about drowning in a sea of tokens.
A sea is stationary. He appears to be implying that he's been suddenly deluged with tokens, overcome by a plethora, inundated under a veritable torrent, buried under an avalanche of tokens. Sure, there's a bit of hyperbole going on, but we understood what he was saying. Well, some of us did.
> It could easily be rolled in to the setup fee on your checking account, for example.
Umm, that would only work if your bank charges exhorbitant setup fees for starting a checking account. My bank (First Federal Bank of Ohio) charges only the cost of having checks printed. You can, of course, order the checks from another supplier if you find a better price on them, so that makes the checking account itself entirely free. Of course, they don't pay you interest on any balance you maintain in your checking account, so they essentially have the (temporary) use of your money in exchange for whatever costs they incur handling your transactions.
Incidentally, I'm not advocating this bank. (In fact, I'm thinking of switching, for reasons having to do with hours of operation.) All I'm saying is, rolling extra stuff into the cost of setting up a checking account may not be universally acceptable. It is my understanding that free checking accounts like this are a relatively _common_ practice, which banks use to get customers.
Two-factor authentication? In small towns and rural areas, people don't even like having their ID checked. "Come on, Bob, you know it's me, and I have to be at work in ten minutes!"
Standardizing on a single language is, in theory, possible. In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Yes, with any Turing-complete language you *theoretically* can do anything you need to do, you will in practice discover that this is not the case, that there are things for which you just plain have to have a different language.
What those things are depend on what language you standardize on, of course. At work all reports are created for Microsoft Reporting Services, so that means TSQL. A few weeks ago, I ran into a solid brick wall: TSQL does not have regular expression matching. At all. I needed, for a particular report, two or three dozen regular expression matches. Implementing any given one of them in some other fashion (e.g., with a trainload of LIKE operators glued together with OR) was going to turn a hundred-line report into tens of thousands of lines, to get everything right. Initially I settled for kludging together LIKE matches for just the most common subsets, but ultimately we had to install a third-party regular expression library, which is (guess what?) not implemented in T-SQL. If we'd been locked into only solutions implemented in a certain language, I'd have been stuck.
It doesn't matter what language you standardize on: you will find it utterly inappropriate for some tasks. Even a language like Perl, which is expressly designed to make "the hard things possible", has some things it's just *not* well-suited for doing (in Perl's case, GUI stuff).
On the other hand, "standardizing" on a particular language in the sense of requiring all of your programmers to know that language and work with it on a regular basis is probably a good thing. Just make sure it's understood that there will occasionally have to be things implemented elsewise.
> I think MySQL has a long ways to go before it will really be a contender
Contender for what? MySQL isn't aiming for Oracle's market space.
> but before version 5 it really didn't have many of the standard features the bigger > players had such as stored procedure support or even sub queries
Stored procedures are overrated. SQL is fundamentally the wrong choice of language for doing anything that complicated, which is why you have database bindings in whatever high-level programming language the application is written in. Business logic should be coded in that language (yes, modularly, in separate procedures, in separately-compiled libraries even, but in that language), not embedded in the database. Stored procedures are a maintenance programmer's nightmare.
> It's basically a four foot chicken with a bad temper and a crazy look in its eye who > can use its razor-sharp talons to disembowel a man where he stands.
> argument of pragmatism is exactly what keeps millions and millions using Internet Exploder.
If we were arguing about which model of car is better, and I said, "I guess I'll just keep the one I've got", would you say, "That's exactly the same argument that keeps so many people riding tricycles"?
What it does is, when you visit a page that includes Flash content, instead of executing the Flash content, it displays a gaudy "blocked" logo. The Flash doesn't get executed unless you inadvertently click the logo. This is in every way inferior to just not installing Flash in the first place, unless you for some bizarre reason actually *want* to execute the Flash content in some instances. I personally can't imagine ever wanting to do that, but apparently some people occasionally do, so they prefer FlashBlock over not having Flash installed.
> For the most part if your code is up to standards it looks fine in opera. > 90% of the time it renders like Mozilla.
A lot of things are similar, yeah, but Opera and Gecko apparently do support slightly different subsets of CSS, and I've run into some of the differences.
Granted, it's nothing like trying to make a page work in IE. Gah.
> Researchers believe they have found a new compound that > could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus,
We've known of compounds that will kill HIV for a long time, that's nothing new. HIV is actually rather fragile; *lots* of things kill it. Phenol, betadine, chlorine bleach,...
> Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
You're kidding, right?
Opera traditionally charged consumers money for their product, when Netscape was free for non-commercial use. Later, IE and Netscape were free to use for commercial *or* non-commercial use, and Opera still charged. Still later, the open-source Mozilla came around, and Opera went to an ad-supported model, where you had to have extra superfluous banner advertisments taking up large portions of the toolbar -- unless you paid. In other words, it became nagware.
The move to make Opera totally free (to use) didn't happen until *very* recently, after Firefox 1.0 was released.
One thing you have to give Opera credit for: they have remained as one of the semi-major browsers -- never in the top two, but never far from the top three -- for more than a decade now. Netscape (as a company, and as a brand) is washed up, and Mosaic is a distant memory indeed, but Opera is still around.
> Vista, well, it's been delayed a couple of years so I guess it qualifies, even if it's > one of those things that's guranteed to come out, in a way like nothing else on that > list, even if does take another three years.
I'd count Longhorn/Vista as vaporware. It was going to come out in 2003 (or was it 2002?). The original projected release date for *Blackcomb* (the release that was going to be after Longhorn) passed in late 2004. It's now early 2006. However, it's not the total quantity of delay time that really makes Longhorn vapor; it's the continual repeated pushing-back in small increments: Every spring, it's coming out later this year. Every summer, it's coming out in time for Christmas. Every Christmas, it's coming out next year. Mmm Hmm. Sure it is. Now they're saying 2006 Q3. Since they've now shown an actual factual beta to a significant number of people outside the company, I project it will now only get pushed back 1-2 more times, and release in 2007.
> even if it's one of those things that's guranteed to come out, in a way like nothing > else on that list even if does take another three years.
That's another vapor-ish thing about Longhorn/Vista: the ever-changing feature list. *Something* is guaranteed to eventually come out, and Microsoft will *call* it Vista, but if you look at what Longhorn was going to be, in terms of promised features... well, that's another thing. Some of that stuff may *never* come out.
For instance, they've changed the whole *concept* of WinFS, at least twice. Originally it was going to be a filesystem built on top of a database (kinda like BeFS, only on steroids), that would eliminate the whole concept of hierarchical file storage in favor of a database/metadata paradigm for organizing data. Fortunately, they thought better of that, so then they said well, it's going to be an extra symantic _layer_, on top of a more traditional filesystem, so that while the traditional hierarchical storage will be there under the hood, the user won't ever see that, and you'll have the database and the metadata paradigm on the surface instead. That too has now not been heard in the last year or so. At this point I think what's left of WinFS is little more than a specialized indexer.
> They only ones worse are Girl Scouts at cookie time and Jehova's Witnesses. > Those I've had to learn to live with.
JWs are easy to get rid of. Just start quoting passages that deal with the deity of Christ (John 1 is good, or Hebrews 3-4) in the original Greek, and translating on the fly, explaining the nuances of the translation process as you go. ("You see, a word-for-word translation would read 'God was the Word' (or 'God was the Message'), but we know that logos is the subject because it is flagged with the article. Theos is placed foremost in the clause for emphasis, but it cannot have the article because it is the nominative, not the subject, and the absense of the article is necessary to place it in the predicate, since the same case is used for both in Greek, as in English. The equivalent in modern English would be to say 'The Word was GOD', with the Word first and 'God' emphasized somehow, perhaps with tone of voice or in boldface type, depending on the medium. We still wouldn't use the article on God, but for a different reason: in English we consider it to be a proper noun, like someone's name, and we don't use an article in that instance. Now, when we come to verse fourteen...") They go away, and they don't come back.
Of course, this assumes your goal is to get rid of them. If they are standing at my door in we're-here-to-convert-you mode, that generally _is_ my goal.
Somehow I have escaped ever having to deal with Girl Scouts, but in any case we bake our own cookies in my family.
> For goodness sakes! we can't do without Pluto! The kids would just lose interest!
Taking away Pluto's status as a major planet is possible, although a lot of people do have an emotional attachment to it. What would be undesirable (for the reasons I already discussed) would be adding Quoar and Sedna and UB313 et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam ad bedlam.
PCI was designed to use a bridge architecture so that PCI and ISA or EISA slots could appear on the same motherboard. In fact, just about *every* motherboard with PCI slots also had ISA or EISA slots for the first several years. Early models would have three or four legacy slots and one or two PCI; later models increased the number of PCI slots, added an AGP slot, and reduced the number of legacy slots until a typical board only had one of them, and eventually brave manufacturers started leaving them off altogether and going with all PCI (and AGP and maybe one AMR slot; AMR fortunately seems not to have lasted).
Remember: if your new tech is a major improvment, you can break compatibility with some things (e.g., your new kind of slot doesn't have to support the old kind of card in it) if you keep compatibility in other areas (in the case of PCI, BUS-level compatibility with having the other kind of slots on the board). It's breaking compatibility with everything at once that's fatal.
Of course, if your new tech is only a minor improvement, then the backward-compatibility requirements are more demanding.
Oh, we use those as craft supplies. You let the kids glue them shiny-side-out to things. It doesn't much matter what things you let kids glue them to; kids just like to glue stuff, and CDs are shiny, so as long as you don't do it too often (more than, say, once a year with any given group of kids), they have a blast gluing AOL CDs to practically anything. For instance, if you have accumulated only enough AOL CDs for two per kid, you let them glue the CDs back-to-back and run a ribbon through the hole, and it's a Christmas tree ornament. (Yes, this is incredibly lame, but a typical six-year-old thinks it's the best fun he's ever had.)
> [MCA] was REALLY good. It only had one single flaw:
No, you weren't paying attention. MCA had The Absolutely Fatal Flaw That Consistently Dooms All New Technology To Which It Applies: it made absolutely no pretense of being backward-compatible with anything whatsoever. Any *other* flaw (or quality, for that matter) that it might have had was 100% irrelevant.
Breaking backward-compatibility with *some* things can be okay, if you do it right, e.g., DDR broke compatibility with traditional SDRAM and did fine in the market. However, if you break compatibility with everything all at once, like MCA or Itanium, you've got yourself a one-way ticket to historical footnote status.
> > The problem here is that the number of known small iceballs out there past > > Neptune is growing fairly rapidly
> No, not really.
Yes, really.
> That assumed figure
I said "known", not "guessed".
> for individual members of the Ort Cloud
We don't actually know whether the Oord Cloud exists in the proposed form, because it's too far out to observe with current equipment, and we haven't sent anything out far enough to look. (We do know that comets come from somewhere, obviously... but that doesn't imply the details of the Oort Cloud as usually stated are correct.)
Furthermore, by "small iceballs" I meant the things the other poster was proposing to classify as major planets, mainly KBOs. In the last year alone we've seen half a dozen new ones just in postings on slashdot, and several of them have been proposed to be called the "tenth planet".
> > we'll no longer be able to teach elementary school children the list of planets. > Why, ummmmmmmm, on Earth, do you feel this is an important issue?
The IAU has this on their mind, because if they don't keep up a decent rapport with school teachers, the university departments responsible for much of their funding will end up closing down in a few years for lack of students. Learning the list of the major planets in the solar system is one of two major astronomy-related items in the curriculum of most school systems. (The other is a field trip to a planetarium.) If you take that away, kids will grow up with no interest in astronomy. It's bad enough that with the cold war over the boys don't all want to be astronauts anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
> But does a solution involving SVG allow for synchronized audio? For instance, if I
.midi files that every webmaster on the planet copied from some other site and included on every stinking page, played through the monophonic PC Speaker sound driver that came with Windows 3.1.
> wanted to use SVG instead of SWF to make an animated series such as Homestar Runner
> or Weebl and Bob, would that work?
Not in pure SVG, but with CSS it ought to be possible.
Bear in mind, though, a lot of people don't have our web browsers set up to play sound, because that got old about three days after Netscape released a version that supported sound (2.0, wasn't it? Or was it 3.0?), when we heard for the eightieth time one of those same three annoying
> The resultant file decompresses into what appears to be a standard JPEG icon in
> Mac OS X but was actually a compiled Unix executable in disguise.
Sounds like a Trojan to me. Does it attach itself to other executables? How would it do that on OS X, without admin privs? Trojans for Unix are of course possible and have been around since, to a first approximation, the beginning of time (i.e., 1970). What makes this news? Is this one spreading quite a bit, or something?
> And, as per usual, any discussion about Flash tends to stereotype Linux users as
> stubborn, backwards types that hate everything that regular people like about computers.
> Great image to project about yourselves, guys.
Regular people don't like Flash, on the whole. They like a *handful* of the things Flash is used for (mainly cheesy games, and to a lesser extent, inane animated "greeting cards"), but they sure don't like it on *most* of the pages it appears on. Click-to-play for plugins is a feature virtually no user dislikes, and one that is destined to become standard.
Who likes Flash? I'll tell you who likes Flash: young fresh-out-of-school IT guys who fancy themselves senior webmasters, although if you asked them the difference between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1, all they'd be able to come up with is that 1.1 is newer.
> If the user doesn't have javascript turned on, then they can't see our ads. If they ... we really don't care if the site doesn't work for them.
> can't see our ads, then
Here's the thing: neither do they.
If your site is broken, hey, there are tens of billions of other sites out there, tens of dozens of which can supply them with essentially the same thing your site provides, and like as not a dozen of them come up higher in their search results than your javascript adfarm, because, you know, they provide _useful content_ that other people _want_ to link to, and because their standard HTML is easily parsed by the search engines so that their relevance to the user's search criteria is evident.
> For all of you who've got adblockers on and javascript and flash turned off, welcome to
> the beginning of the end. I hope you enjoy cruising the crusty bowels of the Internet
The irony here is simply stunning. I was pretty sure sites that say, "If your browser doesn't support Feature X, then our site is too good for you" *were* the crusty bowels of the internet, the state of the art of 1996. Welcome to the past.
> Point quick browser to a directory containing links to your favourite
> applications, or images etc.
This has been suggested to me before, but I am highly skeptical about whether it will do what I want. Among other things...
Panel drawers, when they pop out, contain launchers that are just like the ones on the panel itself, i.e., their size is configurable, and so forth. In particular, they are pretty close to square, *not* vertically shrunken and horizontally wide like the items on a menu. This is good, because it makes them very easy to hit quickly.
Panel drawers may also contain panel applets, e.g., if I for space reasons don't want to keep the volume control applet on my main panel, but I do want it around for occasional use, I can toss it in a drawer. This is not a deal-breaker, but it sure is nice.
When my panel fills up with launchers and I need to make some space, it's easy to just grab one of the least-used items on the panel and drag it into a drawer. Along the same lines, creating a new launcher in the drawer is the same as creating one on the panel.
Basically, panel drawers are a designed-in feature of the interface. What you seem to be suggesting as a substitute is that I try to make do with a completely dissimilar feature that's inherently not designed to do what I want. It's not that the feature you're talking about is *bad*, but I think it's fundamentally not the same feature I was talking about.
Yes, I'm picky.
> I just pine away for the old GNOME
Indeed. If I could make Gnome 1.4 my desktop but still have the Gnome2 libraries installed for apps that require them, and expect everything to _work_ with that setup, that is what I would be using. Since 1.4, every successive version of Gnome is objectively worse than the one before, in terms of features. As for "usability", that's much more subjective, and as a high-end power user I find that my needs are *very* different from those of the kind of low-end end-user that current Gnome versions seem to be targetting.
For all that, I still use Gnome, because it still (for now, anyway) has the one killer feature it has always had that led me to prefer Gnome over KDE in the first place (back when both of them used Netscape 4 as their default browser): panel drawers. I consider this to be an essential feature, because on the one hand there's not room on one panel for all the launchers that I want, but on the other hand it's *not* acceptable to have to dig through 3-5 levels of menus for things that I use on anything resembling a regular basis, and it's *certainly* not acceptable to have to minimize all my windows and use desktop icons as launchers. As far as I'm concerned, panel drawers are the greatest thing since tab completion, and any system that doesn't have them is just not an option.
I *would* switch to KDE if it got panel drawers, because in every other respect I *hate* the direction Gnome has been going since 2.0.
> As for things like "focus follows mouse" and the like
Focus follows mouse is terribly inconvenient for those of us who are heavy keyboard users. Frequently we just want the mouse pointer _out of the way_ for extended periods of time. I personally tend to park it in one corner of the screen and just leave it there for a while. I couldn't do that if I had "focus follows mouse" turned on.
However, it doesn't bother me that "focus follows mouse" is an option. Frankly, it wouldn't bother me even if it were the default. (Defaults are for end-users. Power users go systematically through the options when we set the system up, then we promptly forget what the defaults even were in the first place, because we know how *we* want the system to behave.) With that said, I don't think traditional "focus follows mouse" would be a very good default, because it would likely confuse the everliving bejeebers out of new users. *If* you could get keyboard focus to follow the mouse not just from window to window but to each widget, *then* it might make a sensible setting for some end users. Maybe. I wouldn't roll it out to a wide group without first watching half a dozen normal end users trying to use it, though.
> I think nautilus is pretty good
Yeah, I think the complexspiral demo is cool, too.
Oh, you meant the file manager? I haven't used a graphical file manager on anything resembling a regular basis since I discovered tab completion. I have no opinion on Nautilus versus Konqueror, because I view them both as strictly end-user stuff. I personally have Nautilus exorcised from my Gnome session, because not having it in memory saves RAM. This means my wallpaper doesn't get set, but that's not important to me. (As noted above, I use panel drawers, so I don't need to keep icons on my desktop, so I don't need to compulsively minimize everything all the time; consequently, I haven't *seen* my background in weeks. Usually when I do see more than a small section of it, it's because I'm closing everything in preparation for logging out, e.g. because I've upgraded some ports and want to move to the new versions.)
> Also, I find that you complaint about the configuration menus and whatnot valid. KDE takes
> a bit of customization, but I usually just sit down with a new install and go through the
> control panel until I'm satisfied. Most users shouldn't have to do this.
Right, this is the difference between defaults versus options. Defaults are for end users, and most users, be
> And, before last year, calling something 'a tsunami' outside of oceanographic
> circles probably would get you a lot of strange looks
All educated persons in the English-speaking world know what a tsunami is. This has not changed since the events last year. Granted, a lot of vocabulary-impoverished people have _also_ picked up the word now, but that's a temporary effect. The phonemics of the word are sufficiently foreign to the English-speaking ear that in a couple of years many people will go back to calling it a "tidal wave". This is neither here nor there. This is slashdot, so we assume you know how to use the internet: if somebody uses a word you don't know, you can head over to dictionary.com or Wikipedia or someplace and look it up.
> A tsunami is a giant wave, you're talking about drowning in a sea of tokens.
A sea is stationary. He appears to be implying that he's been suddenly deluged with tokens, overcome by a plethora, inundated under a veritable torrent, buried under an avalanche of tokens. Sure, there's a bit of hyperbole going on, but we understood what he was saying. Well, some of us did.
> It could easily be rolled in to the setup fee on your checking account, for example.
Umm, that would only work if your bank charges exhorbitant setup fees for starting a checking account. My bank (First Federal Bank of Ohio) charges only the cost of having checks printed. You can, of course, order the checks from another supplier if you find a better price on them, so that makes the checking account itself entirely free. Of course, they don't pay you interest on any balance you maintain in your checking account, so they essentially have the (temporary) use of your money in exchange for whatever costs they incur handling your transactions.
Incidentally, I'm not advocating this bank. (In fact, I'm thinking of switching, for reasons having to do with hours of operation.) All I'm saying is, rolling extra stuff into the cost of setting up a checking account may not be universally acceptable. It is my understanding that free checking accounts like this are a relatively _common_ practice, which banks use to get customers.
Two-factor authentication? In small towns and rural areas, people don't even like having their ID checked. "Come on, Bob, you know it's me, and I have to be at work in ten minutes!"
Standardizing on a single language is, in theory, possible. In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Yes, with any Turing-complete language you *theoretically* can do anything you need to do, you will in practice discover that this is not the case, that there are things for which you just plain have to have a different language.
What those things are depend on what language you standardize on, of course. At work all reports are created for Microsoft Reporting Services, so that means TSQL. A few weeks ago, I ran into a solid brick wall: TSQL does not have regular expression matching. At all. I needed, for a particular report, two or three dozen regular expression matches. Implementing any given one of them in some other fashion (e.g., with a trainload of LIKE operators glued together with OR) was going to turn a hundred-line report into tens of thousands of lines, to get everything right. Initially I settled for kludging together LIKE matches for just the most common subsets, but ultimately we had to install a third-party regular expression library, which is (guess what?) not implemented in T-SQL. If we'd been locked into only solutions implemented in a certain language, I'd have been stuck.
It doesn't matter what language you standardize on: you will find it utterly inappropriate for some tasks. Even a language like Perl, which is expressly designed to make "the hard things possible", has some things it's just *not* well-suited for doing (in Perl's case, GUI stuff).
On the other hand, "standardizing" on a particular language in the sense of requiring all of your programmers to know that language and work with it on a regular basis is probably a good thing. Just make sure it's understood that there will occasionally have to be things implemented elsewise.
> I think MySQL has a long ways to go before it will really be a contender
Contender for what? MySQL isn't aiming for Oracle's market space.
> but before version 5 it really didn't have many of the standard features the bigger
> players had such as stored procedure support or even sub queries
Stored procedures are overrated. SQL is fundamentally the wrong choice of language for doing anything that complicated, which is why you have database bindings in whatever high-level programming language the application is written in. Business logic should be coded in that language (yes, modularly, in separate procedures, in separately-compiled libraries even, but in that language), not embedded in the database. Stored procedures are a maintenance programmer's nightmare.
Subqueries I won't argue about. Those are useful.
> It's basically a four foot chicken with a bad temper and a crazy look in its eye who
> can use its razor-sharp talons to disembowel a man where he stands.
Yeah, but does it pack heat?
No? Too bad. I bet it tastes like chicken.
> argument of pragmatism is exactly what keeps millions and millions using Internet Exploder.
If we were arguing about which model of car is better, and I said, "I guess I'll just keep the one I've got", would you say, "That's exactly the same argument that keeps so many people riding tricycles"?
> I'm not familiar with the Flashblock extension
What it does is, when you visit a page that includes Flash content, instead of executing the Flash content, it displays a gaudy "blocked" logo. The Flash doesn't get executed unless you inadvertently click the logo. This is in every way inferior to just not installing Flash in the first place, unless you for some bizarre reason actually *want* to execute the Flash content in some instances. I personally can't imagine ever wanting to do that, but apparently some people occasionally do, so they prefer FlashBlock over not having Flash installed.
> For the most part if your code is up to standards it looks fine in opera.
> 90% of the time it renders like Mozilla.
A lot of things are similar, yeah, but Opera and Gecko apparently do support slightly different subsets of CSS, and I've run into some of the differences.
Granted, it's nothing like trying to make a page work in IE. Gah.
> Researchers believe they have found a new compound that
...
> could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus,
We've known of compounds that will kill HIV for a long time, that's nothing new. HIV is actually rather fragile; *lots* of things kill it. Phenol, betadine, chlorine bleach,
> Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
You're kidding, right?
Opera traditionally charged consumers money for their product, when Netscape was free for non-commercial use. Later, IE and Netscape were free to use for commercial *or* non-commercial use, and Opera still charged. Still later, the open-source Mozilla came around, and Opera went to an ad-supported model, where you had to have extra superfluous banner advertisments taking up large portions of the toolbar -- unless you paid. In other words, it became nagware.
The move to make Opera totally free (to use) didn't happen until *very* recently, after Firefox 1.0 was released.
One thing you have to give Opera credit for: they have remained as one of the semi-major browsers -- never in the top two, but never far from the top three -- for more than a decade now. Netscape (as a company, and as a brand) is washed up, and Mosaic is a distant memory indeed, but Opera is still around.
> Vista, well, it's been delayed a couple of years so I guess it qualifies, even if it's
> one of those things that's guranteed to come out, in a way like nothing else on that
> list, even if does take another three years.
I'd count Longhorn/Vista as vaporware. It was going to come out in 2003 (or was it 2002?). The original projected release date for *Blackcomb* (the release that was going to be after Longhorn) passed in late 2004. It's now early 2006. However, it's not the total quantity of delay time that really makes Longhorn vapor; it's the continual repeated pushing-back in small increments: Every spring, it's coming out later this year. Every summer, it's coming out in time for Christmas. Every Christmas, it's coming out next year. Mmm Hmm. Sure it is. Now they're saying 2006 Q3. Since they've now shown an actual factual beta to a significant number of people outside the company, I project it will now only get pushed back 1-2 more times, and release in 2007.
> even if it's one of those things that's guranteed to come out, in a way like nothing
> else on that list even if does take another three years.
That's another vapor-ish thing about Longhorn/Vista: the ever-changing feature list. *Something* is guaranteed to eventually come out, and Microsoft will *call* it Vista, but if you look at what Longhorn was going to be, in terms of promised features... well, that's another thing. Some of that stuff may *never* come out.
For instance, they've changed the whole *concept* of WinFS, at least twice. Originally it was going to be a filesystem built on top of a database (kinda like BeFS, only on steroids), that would eliminate the whole concept of hierarchical file storage in favor of a database/metadata paradigm for organizing data. Fortunately, they thought better of that, so then they said well, it's going to be an extra symantic _layer_, on top of a more traditional filesystem, so that while the traditional hierarchical storage will be there under the hood, the user won't ever see that, and you'll have the database and the metadata paradigm on the surface instead. That too has now not been heard in the last year or so. At this point I think what's left of WinFS is little more than a specialized indexer.
> They only ones worse are Girl Scouts at cookie time and Jehova's Witnesses.
> Those I've had to learn to live with.
JWs are easy to get rid of. Just start quoting passages that deal with the deity of Christ (John 1 is good, or Hebrews 3-4) in the original Greek, and translating on the fly, explaining the nuances of the translation process as you go. ("You see, a word-for-word translation would read 'God was the Word' (or 'God was the Message'), but we know that logos is the subject because it is flagged with the article. Theos is placed foremost in the clause for emphasis, but it cannot have the article because it is the nominative, not the subject, and the absense of the article is necessary to place it in the predicate, since the same case is used for both in Greek, as in English. The equivalent in modern English would be to say 'The Word was GOD', with the Word first and 'God' emphasized somehow, perhaps with tone of voice or in boldface type, depending on the medium. We still wouldn't use the article on God, but for a different reason: in English we consider it to be a proper noun, like someone's name, and we don't use an article in that instance. Now, when we come to verse fourteen...") They go away, and they don't come back.
Of course, this assumes your goal is to get rid of them. If they are standing at my door in we're-here-to-convert-you mode, that generally _is_ my goal.
Somehow I have escaped ever having to deal with Girl Scouts, but in any case we bake our own cookies in my family.
> For goodness sakes! we can't do without Pluto! The kids would just lose interest!
Taking away Pluto's status as a major planet is possible, although a lot of people do have an emotional attachment to it. What would be undesirable (for the reasons I already discussed) would be adding Quoar and Sedna and UB313 et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam ad bedlam.
PCI was designed to use a bridge architecture so that PCI and ISA or EISA slots could appear on the same motherboard. In fact, just about *every* motherboard with PCI slots also had ISA or EISA slots for the first several years. Early models would have three or four legacy slots and one or two PCI; later models increased the number of PCI slots, added an AGP slot, and reduced the number of legacy slots until a typical board only had one of them, and eventually brave manufacturers started leaving them off altogether and going with all PCI (and AGP and maybe one AMR slot; AMR fortunately seems not to have lasted).
Remember: if your new tech is a major improvment, you can break compatibility with some things (e.g., your new kind of slot doesn't have to support the old kind of card in it) if you keep compatibility in other areas (in the case of PCI, BUS-level compatibility with having the other kind of slots on the board). It's breaking compatibility with everything at once that's fatal.
Of course, if your new tech is only a minor improvement, then the backward-compatibility requirements are more demanding.
> I now incinerate any aol trial cds I get.
Oh, we use those as craft supplies. You let the kids glue them shiny-side-out to things. It doesn't much matter what things you let kids glue them to; kids just like to glue stuff, and CDs are shiny, so as long as you don't do it too often (more than, say, once a year with any given group of kids), they have a blast gluing AOL CDs to practically anything. For instance, if you have accumulated only enough AOL CDs for two per kid, you let them glue the CDs back-to-back and run a ribbon through the hole, and it's a Christmas tree ornament. (Yes, this is incredibly lame, but a typical six-year-old thinks it's the best fun he's ever had.)
> Why does anyone use AOL anymore?
Have you ever tried to cancel an AOL account?
> [MCA] was REALLY good. It only had one single flaw:
No, you weren't paying attention. MCA had The Absolutely Fatal Flaw That Consistently Dooms All New Technology To Which It Applies: it made absolutely no pretense of being backward-compatible with anything whatsoever. Any *other* flaw (or quality, for that matter) that it might have had was 100% irrelevant.
Breaking backward-compatibility with *some* things can be okay, if you do it right, e.g., DDR broke compatibility with traditional SDRAM and did fine in the market. However, if you break compatibility with everything all at once, like MCA or Itanium, you've got yourself a one-way ticket to historical footnote status.
> > The problem here is that the number of known small iceballs out there past
> > Neptune is growing fairly rapidly
> No, not really.
Yes, really.
> That assumed figure
I said "known", not "guessed".
> for individual members of the Ort Cloud
We don't actually know whether the Oord Cloud exists in the proposed form, because
it's too far out to observe with current equipment, and we haven't sent anything
out far enough to look. (We do know that comets come from somewhere, obviously...
but that doesn't imply the details of the Oort Cloud as usually stated are correct.)
Furthermore, by "small iceballs" I meant the things the other poster was proposing
to classify as major planets, mainly KBOs. In the last year alone we've seen half
a dozen new ones just in postings on slashdot, and several of them have been proposed
to be called the "tenth planet".
> > we'll no longer be able to teach elementary school children the list of planets.
> Why, ummmmmmmm, on Earth, do you feel this is an important issue?
The IAU has this on their mind, because if they don't keep up a decent rapport with
school teachers, the university departments responsible for much of their funding will
end up closing down in a few years for lack of students. Learning the list of the
major planets in the solar system is one of two major astronomy-related items in the
curriculum of most school systems. (The other is a field trip to a planetarium.) If
you take that away, kids will grow up with no interest in astronomy. It's bad enough
that with the cold war over the boys don't all want to be astronauts anymore.
I'm more concerned about whether it comes out before Perl6.