Ever heard of bookmarks ?
Of course one problem with them is that they can disappear or change between the moment you save them and the moment you use them. The obvious answer is to save a local copy (with wget, or whatever..) which will be easier to search than a paper... And you can still print it if you need.
Then you can easily search though all the pages you downloaded for the one which holds the information you need, which probably takes you a long time with paper...
Of course all those things are bloody obvious and i don't understand how they can make a ask slashdot headline. Or maybe I didn't understand something in your problem ?
The taskbar preview is a perfect example. I move my mouse down to the taskbar to click on a folder, and a little thumbnail appears. A *useless* thumbnail. It doesn't do anything
I disagree, did you see that it's not just a thumbnail but the actual live window ? (try it with a video...)
It can be usefull for those tasks you want to keep an eye on. For example say you're burning a cd and copying some files. With the preview you just need to hover your mouse on the taskbar icon to see how the progress is going, instead of maximizing the window, checking, and reminimize... A little detail yes but vista is full of those little neat things. But i agree about flip3d, they could have make something really more useful if they took the time to.
Sounds like marketing, but like someone mentioned, it's very possible that the invites were used as a sort of social network mapping tool. in that case it make sense to give lots of invites. Whatever google does, their final purpose always seems to be to get more data from you.
Nero, at the very least, works perfectly well under vista. Didn't try others, but Nero 7.5 (i think, the latest) works perfectly well, and the latest 6.x is also reported to work (even if vista warns you about possible incompatibilities).
Usually that means giving the user an HTTP 500 error
Which, in webapp speak, is a crash... Yes it won't kill the server since the exception has been handled before that but if your index page dies with an HTTP 500 error it's exactly the same thing for the user : "Website doesn't work".
I'm a big Kubrick fan, and read most Stephen king books.
The book and the movie are both really good, for totally different reasons. A *lot* of background stuff are missing in the movie, but the atmosphere, filming and actors are so top noch that it simply stands on its own.
IIRC (been a while...) the particular scene you speak about is a "straight port" from the book though. The whole scene is described in exactly the same way, in fact it feels like King is filming the scene and you only get to see what goes through the lens. No Nicholson, but believe me the emotional pressure that adds up as you turn the pages without understanding why exactly the pressure is building up is a good change.
Wha ? Your linux machine has a way faster hard drive maybe ??
Because on my machine, KDE alone needs more time to boot than Xp.
On this machine, Ubuntu needs 3-4 times the same time as xp to load, maybe even more.
And it's not a particular daemon which blocks the process either, it just takes forever to load everything. And yes, dma is enabled on the hdd.
My Xp install is 2 years old, while the Ubuntu install was mostly a vanilla install.
When Xp went gold, there was some talk in various distros communauties about parallelizing the initial daemons loading process (like xp) instead of launching them one after the other (when possible). What happened to that ? Surely it seems feasible ?
Sounds like pure hype. Basically they're saying they have a 2 years technical advantage because they've been working on better multithreading schemes and avoiding deadlocks to put the multi cores at better use. How groundbreaking... Never mind that most game companies obviously have been working on that too but simply don't talk about it. They also make it sound like they invented distcc... which reinforce the impression that they're just trying to impress people and show how high tech they are (not). Almost sounds like a stock increase scheme or something on those lines if you ask me.
True but the difference is that eyetoy is a standalone product.
If the second screen, the stylus, wifi and the mic on the DS were standalone products, it would just be one more handled, because you'd have two games using them since developpers would know that players most probably don't have them. Likewise if the eyetoy was included from the start with every ps2, you could bet half of the game would have found innovative uses for it that would really make a difference in gameplay/immersion. So the eye-toy might be an innovative product, but including it with the ps2 would have made a much more innovative console, with much more innovative games. A world of difference...
In fact the experiment was already tried on one french and while he believed the escargots were really tasty we can't handle more than one of this type of mutations. He can't even fly and some glowing camembert is continously pouring from his armpits. On the other hand we believe the brits couldn't tell the difference between their christmas cake and some radioactive snails chips with vinegar mixed with grey goo, so we plan on testing it on them soon just to see if the resulting brit is more tony blair like, or monthy python like. They're both entertaining though so i don't care personally:P
And you're too stupid to understand what justice is about.
So what you are saying is that what's important is to judge the crime based not on what happened, but on what the victim, or victim's entourage feels about it ?
So if I'm a bad father and hate my son, and don't care he's raped and killed, surely the murderer should be let free, or at least have less jail time that if I loved him ?
If I have extraordinary love for my son then surely the murderer should endure a jail time way longer than if he killed my neighbour's son ?
And if the murderer happens to have his whole familly slaughtered at the age of 6, then was raped by his uncle every days until he was 18 which left him in a psychosic state surely if he commits a rape or murder he should have the exact same jail time as someone who is perfectly sane and murdered his wife because he could make money out of it ? After all, the concequences are the same right ?
What if you see a child on the other side of the road who is about to be crushed by a car, run to save him but inadvertently hit someone else on the road, whom is crushed by a truck because of you ? Highly improbable yes, but surely you should be killed after all the person you pushed had a wife, whose life has been devastated, don't you think ?
Finally decided to switch to opera today, and i'm quite happy with it so far.
The auto satisfaction of the firefox team, marketing gimmicks and now version number pushing finally got me. Well no, in fact those three are the last straw, the real reason is the total crap that ff has become. I've been moaning about the memory leaks for more than 3 years (no, i'm not talking about the slow as hell cache "feature"), pages take forever to parse and display (it seems like 10x faster in opera, really...), and basically switching to opera gave a new life to my venerable Athlon 1.2 / 500M. On this kind of machine, you can really see the difference... Feels like switching from an interpreted BASIC app to C++ one. In fact when you think about with all the XUL code that sits on top of gecko, it's probably the case...
The only thing I could miss are the developper extensions (which, combined with the inspector are really good), but I'm not into web programming any more for now (happy me !)
Dude having a green, luminescent, and 1 meter long penis is enough to play into porn movies until you die ! Yes, even with your flickering face. If it doesn't work out you should consider the tentacle pron industry.
I've also got a serious collection of 2-6GB harddrives kicking around, now, so I've been using them for swap. It's really pointless to have a 4GB partition for data, so I just use the entire 6GB drive for swap on some machines.
But those disks must be way slower than your main, newer disks. And since swap is often used by the vm in other cases that just running out of ram, it probably slows your system down because of very slow I/O.
Free, like in freebox, is a company name. Internet access is not regulated by the french government. We certainly pay huge taxes (world's biggest tax rates more exactly...) but internet access has nothing to do with it.
It has been regulated for a long time because france telecom was owned by the government, but it was privatized something like 5 years ago. Which gave birth to a myriad of internet providers and wanabe telcos.
So it's more an exemple of free market than anything else... And it's certainly nice to see the speeds go up and the price go down, but it's also a terrible mess for consumers. You'd better make a good choice if you don't want to be tied for 1 year to a company which lacks the necessary infrastructures to handle its growns. My brother signed with "Free" 3 years ago and couldn't log more than 5 minuts per day for 3 months for example... But hopefully things seems to be settling down lately.
Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig?
Of course i can !
For example do you think buying an AMD X2 just before Jully 24th of this year was a good idea ??
Their price was announced to be cut by half at this date so clearly buying one the jully 23th, or even one or two months before
would have been a very bad move, don't you think ? We're talking about a $200 price cut for a X2 3800+ (very approx converted from euros).
Also that's the day the Core duo 2^Twins or whatever they are calling it went gold, and even with the AMD price drop they're a real bargain compared to X2s. So yeah, NOW isn't always the best time, you ought to do your research a little if you don't want to lose $200 or $300 just because you didn't wait one more day...
In the same self-exemplifying lines, a fantastic piece of work is scott mcloud's understanding comics (the invisible art).
He explains why and how comics can be used to convey very rich messages, while using comics as his medium. The book itself proves his point magistrally. There are quite complicated and often abstract and philosophical issues in there, yet he manages to explain them in four frames, with a few words and very insightful yet simple drawings. They both melt into a message that would take a full page to explain if he used a regular book. It's totally amazing, and could be used in lots of places.
The catch is that there are probably very, very few people who can use the medium in the same way he does. It's an art in itself, and i'm pretty sure if other people tried to use his formula it would lead to stupid books where the message ends up being very weak.
based on my experience, i'd say skip the Toshiba...
First their support/service is nearly inexistant. I had a remote controler shipped with mine which drivers stopped working after a (pre SP1) xp patch. I'm still waiting for them to update the driver.
Then during the two year i owned my €2700 laptop, i had:
the hard drive
the dvd writer
the battery
die on me.
Then two days after the end of warranty the motherboard stopped working... I suspected it was dc jack so i decided to have a look a it.
I spent 1.5 days trying to unassemble the thing, before giving up in anger. One month later armed with patience I finally was able to get to
the jack in about 4 or 5 hours. I've never seen a so contrived piece of hardware in my life, there are layers and layers of shit all linked together like very bad spaghetti code. Basically everything is mounted bottom-up and meant to never be disassembled. I'm now waiting for a new dc Jack from ebay, and hoping i'll be able to reassemble the thing, if the jack solves the problem...
I don't even want to know the price of their motherboards since their price for replacement parts seems like 5x their normal price at least. For example when they replaced the dvd writer they sent a sort of invoice (which i hopefully didn't have to pay since it was under warranty) wich quoted the price of the drive at €650... one could buy a decent computer for that money, or about 20 regular dvd writers...
Gold plated USB connector for maximum conductivity
I love this one, I've seen music stores sell golden usb adapters so you can plug your soundcard in it (lots of home studio soundcards are external usb racks) to have a better sound. Of course they were sold for something like $35.
To buy this shit you have to not only not understand a damn thing about what a digital signal is (which the target market should at least have a clue about), but also not understand that it's an *adapter*, so even if golden connectors made a better signal, you'd still be plugged into those with regular connectors.
Maybe it's just a sucker detector for the salesman, if someone come and buy this they know they can probably sell them all the other useless crap they have in store:)
--
I like the new design, but <p> should not have the same behaviour as <br/>, damnit !
Ok, I read too fast;)
I was about to answer a long rant about how i thought the w3c should propose reference implementations of their standards, but finally decided it had little to do with your post so i answered the main post (here)
I don't understand why they don't procure reference implementations of their standards to go with them, like tomcat is for servlet containers. Oh I understand why they didn't chose to do that at the beginning, because the internet has been built on specifications like that. But it's not like implementing an FTP or SMTP server, it's way more complicated and it seems it's very hard to get right, and nearly impossible to get right for every browsers at a given time. History has proven that, so maybe it's time to try another method ?
I think it would make things so much simpler for everybody, especially if they used firefox or another free (freedom) browser as a base. Maybe it would force others to fill the gaps. In fact in my perfect world they'd just code a friggin good xhtml/css engine, make binding for x languages, and provide it for free to every browser maker or whatever... Seriously, I know it won't happen, but it would be such a step forward for the web in general. Choice is good, competition is good, but not in this particular area. You'd still be able to chose between a lot a browser, but their rendering would be consistent.
I think people see absolute positioning as the evil, when it's really not.
It's mainly evil if you use it to place the main layout blocks, but once you enter into those blocks it's often very useful to place sub elements by using absolute inside the parent element positionning (i mean by using #layoutblock { position: relative } #layoutblock #logo {position: absolute; top: 0.5em (or maybe even px); left: 0} )
What i mean is that maybe it should not only be seen as the last resort, but also as something which can help your designs to scale the right way. Sometimes you can do without, and it scales, but it would scale more nicely if absolute positioning was used in some key parts of the design. Some designers refuse to see that, because they burned themselves with absolute positioning at first when learning CSS, and kinda fear it because of the consequences it can have when used at the page layout level.
Column splitting is present in CSS 3... possibly others, I just skimmed through a few pages of the proposal and decided to stop there because i'd feel spoiled for the next 5 years. Yeah i know, it's not very helpful to do real work but still.
And of course you realize that XSLT is not in any way a replacement to CSS... When using XSLT to do web stuff you generate HTML with xslt, and style it with CSS.
At least a cool thing about CSS is that it can remove a lot of complexity in XSLT sheets since most of the time you can just spit your data into divs with XSLT, and do all the layout with CSS.
Complex layout with pure XSLT can get really nasty, way too often you end up doing procedural programming with an XSLT engine which is... a little crazy in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever tried Google Reader ?
Ever heard of bookmarks ?
Of course one problem with them is that they can disappear or change between the moment you save them and the moment you use them. The obvious answer is to save a local copy (with wget, or whatever..) which will be easier to search than a paper... And you can still print it if you need.
Then you can easily search though all the pages you downloaded for the one which holds the information you need, which probably takes you a long time with paper...
Of course all those things are bloody obvious and i don't understand how they can make a ask slashdot headline. Or maybe I didn't understand something in your problem ?
I disagree, did you see that it's not just a thumbnail but the actual live window ? (try it with a video...) It can be usefull for those tasks you want to keep an eye on. For example say you're burning a cd and copying some files. With the preview you just need to hover your mouse on the taskbar icon to see how the progress is going, instead of maximizing the window, checking, and reminimize... A little detail yes but vista is full of those little neat things. But i agree about flip3d, they could have make something really more useful if they took the time to.
Sounds like marketing, but like someone mentioned, it's very possible that the invites were used as a sort of social network mapping tool.
in that case it make sense to give lots of invites.
Whatever google does, their final purpose always seems to be to get more data from you.
Yep, however vista does have a window manager, called DWM.
What are you talking about ?
Nero, at the very least, works perfectly well under vista. Didn't try others, but Nero 7.5 (i think, the latest) works perfectly well, and the latest 6.x is also reported to work (even if vista warns you about possible incompatibilities).
Usually that means giving the user an HTTP 500 error
Which, in webapp speak, is a crash... Yes it won't kill the server since the exception has been handled before that but if your index page dies with an HTTP 500 error it's exactly the same thing for the user : "Website doesn't work".
I'm a big Kubrick fan, and read most Stephen king books.
The book and the movie are both really good, for totally different reasons. A *lot* of background stuff are missing in the movie, but the atmosphere, filming and actors are so top noch that it simply stands on its own.
IIRC (been a while...) the particular scene you speak about is a "straight port" from the book though. The whole scene is described in exactly the same way, in fact it feels like King is filming the scene and you only get to see what goes through the lens. No Nicholson, but believe me the emotional pressure that adds up as you turn the pages without understanding why exactly the pressure is building up is a good change.
Wha ? Your linux machine has a way faster hard drive maybe ??
Because on my machine, KDE alone needs more time to boot than Xp.
On this machine, Ubuntu needs 3-4 times the same time as xp to load, maybe even more. And it's not a particular daemon which blocks the process either, it just takes forever to load everything. And yes, dma is enabled on the hdd.
My Xp install is 2 years old, while the Ubuntu install was mostly a vanilla install.
When Xp went gold, there was some talk in various distros communauties about parallelizing the initial daemons loading process (like xp) instead of launching them one after the other (when possible). What happened to that ? Surely it seems feasible ?
Sounds like pure hype. Basically they're saying they have a 2 years technical advantage because they've been working on better multithreading schemes and avoiding deadlocks to put the multi cores at better use. How groundbreaking... Never mind that most game companies obviously have been working on that too but simply don't talk about it. They also make it sound like they invented distcc... which reinforce the impression that they're just trying to impress people and show how high tech they are (not). Almost sounds like a stock increase scheme or something on those lines if you ask me.
True but the difference is that eyetoy is a standalone product. /immersion. So the eye-toy might be an innovative product, but including it with the ps2 would have made a much more innovative console, with much more innovative games. A world of difference...
If the second screen, the stylus, wifi and the mic on the DS were standalone products, it would just be one more handled, because you'd have two games using them since developpers would know that players most probably don't have them.
Likewise if the eyetoy was included from the start with every ps2, you could bet half of the game would have found innovative uses for it that would really make a difference in gameplay
In fact the experiment was already tried on one french and while he believed the escargots were really tasty we can't handle more than one of this type of mutations. He can't even fly and some glowing camembert is continously pouring from his armpits. :P
On the other hand we believe the brits couldn't tell the difference between their christmas cake and some radioactive snails chips with vinegar mixed with grey goo, so we plan on testing it on them soon just to see if the resulting brit is more tony blair like, or monthy python like. They're both entertaining though so i don't care personally
And you're too stupid to understand what justice is about.
So what you are saying is that what's important is to judge the crime based not on what happened, but on what the victim, or victim's entourage feels about it ?
So if I'm a bad father and hate my son, and don't care he's raped and killed, surely the murderer should be let free, or at least have less jail time that if I loved him ?
If I have extraordinary love for my son then surely the murderer should endure a jail time way longer than if he killed my neighbour's son ?
And if the murderer happens to have his whole familly slaughtered at the age of 6, then was raped by his uncle every days until he was 18 which left him in a psychosic state surely if he commits a rape or murder he should have the exact same jail time as someone who is perfectly sane and murdered his wife because he could make money out of it ? After all, the concequences are the same right ?
What if you see a child on the other side of the road who is about to be crushed by a car, run to save him but inadvertently hit someone else on the road, whom is crushed by a truck because of you ? Highly improbable yes, but surely you should be killed after all the person you pushed had a wife, whose life has been devastated, don't you think ?
Finally decided to switch to opera today, and i'm quite happy with it so far.
The auto satisfaction of the firefox team, marketing gimmicks and now version number pushing finally got me. Well no, in fact those three are the last straw, the real reason is the total crap that ff has become. I've been moaning about the memory leaks for more than 3 years (no, i'm not talking about the slow as hell cache "feature"), pages take forever to parse and display (it seems like 10x faster in opera, really...), and basically switching to opera gave a new life to my venerable Athlon 1.2 / 500M. On this kind of machine, you can really see the difference... Feels like switching from an interpreted BASIC app to C++ one. In fact when you think about with all the XUL code that sits on top of gecko, it's probably the case...
The only thing I could miss are the developper extensions (which, combined with the inspector are really good), but I'm not into web programming any more for now (happy me !)
Dude having a green, luminescent, and 1 meter long penis is enough to play into porn movies until you die ! Yes, even with your flickering face.
If it doesn't work out you should consider the tentacle pron industry.
I've also got a serious collection of 2-6GB harddrives kicking around, now, so I've been using them for swap. It's really pointless to have a 4GB partition for data, so I just use the entire 6GB drive for swap on some machines.
But those disks must be way slower than your main, newer disks. And since swap is often used by the vm in other cases that just running out of ram, it probably slows your system down because of very slow I/O.
Free, like in freebox, is a company name. Internet access is not regulated by the french government. We certainly pay huge taxes (world's biggest tax rates more exactly...) but internet access has nothing to do with it.
It has been regulated for a long time because france telecom was owned by the government, but it was privatized something like 5 years ago. Which gave birth to a myriad of internet providers and wanabe telcos.
So it's more an exemple of free market than anything else... And it's certainly nice to see the speeds go up and the price go down, but it's also a terrible mess for consumers. You'd better make a good choice if you don't want to be tied for 1 year to a company which lacks the necessary infrastructures to handle its growns. My brother signed with "Free" 3 years ago and couldn't log more than 5 minuts per day for 3 months for example... But hopefully things seems to be settling down lately.
Can you point to a time in recent computer history where "NOW" wasn't the best time to purchase a new rig?
Of course i can !
For example do you think buying an AMD X2 just before Jully 24th of this year was a good idea ??
Their price was announced to be cut by half at this date so clearly buying one the jully 23th, or even one or two months before would have been a very bad move, don't you think ? We're talking about a $200 price cut for a X2 3800+ (very approx converted from euros).
Also that's the day the Core duo 2^Twins or whatever they are calling it went gold, and even with the AMD price drop they're a real bargain compared to X2s.
So yeah, NOW isn't always the best time, you ought to do your research a little if you don't want to lose $200 or $300 just because you didn't wait one more day...
In the same self-exemplifying lines, a fantastic piece of work is scott mcloud's understanding comics (the invisible art).
He explains why and how comics can be used to convey very rich messages, while using comics as his medium. The book itself proves his point magistrally. There are quite complicated and often abstract and philosophical issues in there, yet he manages to explain them in four frames, with a few words and very insightful yet simple drawings. They both melt into a message that would take a full page to explain if he used a regular book. It's totally amazing, and could be used in lots of places.
The catch is that there are probably very, very few people who can use the medium in the same way he does. It's an art in itself, and i'm pretty sure if other people tried to use his formula it would lead to stupid books where the message ends up being very weak.
First their support/service is nearly inexistant. I had a remote controler shipped with mine which drivers stopped working after a (pre SP1) xp patch. I'm still waiting for them to update the driver.
Then during the two year i owned my €2700 laptop, i had:
- the battery
die on me. Then two days after the end of warranty the motherboard stopped working... I suspected it was dc jack so i decided to have a look a it.I spent 1.5 days trying to unassemble the thing, before giving up in anger. One month later armed with patience I finally was able to get to the jack in about 4 or 5 hours. I've never seen a so contrived piece of hardware in my life, there are layers and layers of shit all linked together like very bad spaghetti code. Basically everything is mounted bottom-up and meant to never be disassembled.
I'm now waiting for a new dc Jack from ebay, and hoping i'll be able to reassemble the thing, if the jack solves the problem...
I don't even want to know the price of their motherboards since their price for replacement parts seems like 5x their normal price at least. For example when they replaced the dvd writer they sent a sort of invoice (which i hopefully didn't have to pay since it was under warranty) wich quoted the price of the drive at €650... one could buy a decent computer for that money, or about 20 regular dvd writers
Gold plated USB connector for maximum conductivity
:)
I love this one, I've seen music stores sell golden usb adapters so you can plug your soundcard in it (lots of home studio soundcards are external usb racks) to have a better sound. Of course they were sold for something like $35.
To buy this shit you have to not only not understand a damn thing about what a digital signal is (which the target market should at least have a clue about), but also not understand that it's an *adapter*, so even if golden connectors made a better signal, you'd still be plugged into those with regular connectors.
Maybe it's just a sucker detector for the salesman, if someone come and buy this they know they can probably sell them all the other useless crap they have in store
--
I like the new design, but <p> should not have the same behaviour as <br/>, damnit !
Ok, I read too fast ;)
I was about to answer a long rant about how i thought the w3c should propose reference implementations of their standards, but finally decided it had little to do with your post so i answered the main post (here)
I think it would make things so much simpler for everybody, especially if they used firefox or another free (freedom) browser as a base. Maybe it would force others to fill the gaps.
In fact in my perfect world they'd just code a friggin good xhtml/css engine, make binding for x languages, and provide it for free to every browser maker or whatever... Seriously, I know it won't happen, but it would be such a step forward for the web in general.
Choice is good, competition is good, but not in this particular area. You'd still be able to chose between a lot a browser, but their rendering would be consistent.
I think people see absolute positioning as the evil, when it's really not.
It's mainly evil if you use it to place the main layout blocks, but once you enter into those blocks it's often very useful to place sub elements by using absolute inside the parent element positionning (i mean by using #layoutblock { position: relative } #layoutblock #logo {position: absolute; top: 0.5em (or maybe even px); left: 0} )
What i mean is that maybe it should not only be seen as the last resort, but also as something which can help your designs to scale the right way. Sometimes you can do without, and it scales, but it would scale more nicely if absolute positioning was used in some key parts of the design. Some designers refuse to see that, because they burned themselves with absolute positioning at first when learning CSS, and kinda fear it because of the consequences it can have when used at the page layout level.
And of course you realize that XSLT is not in any way a replacement to CSS... When using XSLT to do web stuff you generate HTML with xslt, and style it with CSS.
At least a cool thing about CSS is that it can remove a lot of complexity in XSLT sheets since most of the time you can just spit your data into divs with XSLT, and do all the layout with CSS.
Complex layout with pure XSLT can get really nasty, way too often you end up doing procedural programming with an XSLT engine which is... a little crazy in my opinion.