I can second that. We run a IT company with global customers from New Zealand and IM helps a lot to build customer relationships, solve tricky support issues more quickly, and makes up to some extent for being thousands of miles away.
That is for the customers who are comfortable with it; many are not.
I can also second the problem of people interrupting you however; just like the phone, it quickly becomes a downside if people aren't thoughtful about using it.
And it's my contention... that in most (read: almost all) circumstances copyright infringement IS wrong.
This is where you make a big assumption that many people no longer agree with. A lot of people now think that copyright, as it stands now, is not working right and therefore infringing it is not necessarily wrong.
This is not my opinion, but you seem to misunderstand the level the debate has moved to.
Superficially that seems nice, but there are some serious problems. 1. The back button doesn't go back anymore. This is really reason enough to dismiss it immediately, but we'll continue to some details...
2. Clicking on the left and right column to change page is totally unexpected. Did you know some people compulsively select areas of text? They will constantly be moved to the next page.
3. The previous and next links are very small text-embedded images in a faint colour, beloved of graphic designers but actually very annoying and difficult to read.
4. You can't select the whole article (e.g. to paste into an email)
When you want a real database but aren't using it heavily e.g. single or a few users, then Server Express is fine. We use it in a commercial product which is used in retail shops, with thousands of sites so far. A few users find they reach the limits (e.g. database size of 4GB) for whatever reason, and they can upgrade to SQL server, but most don't need to care.
Stop wasting effort on character models
on
The High Cost of Gaming
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One thing they waste far too much time on in many games is character models. I guess it makes for nice screenshots, but how often are you right up close to a character examining the detail on their boots?
This is at least true for FPSes. I guess RPGs and other more interactive games can use close-up detail. But thinking of UT2004, the character models have obviously been slaved over for many months, and are works of art; but the most you ever see is a couple of quick flashes as someone runs past. To be honest, the character models in the original Unreal Tournament (99?) were perfectly fine for an FPS.
The same mostly goes for weapon and power-up models. Gratuitous transparency and pretty textures is interesting for maybe the first 30 seconds, and then it could just be a yellow circle for all the player cares.
That's a big chunk of graphics they could simplify and spend much less time on. Further, it would save wasting lots of polygons on them.
The thing that really makes a big impression is the landscapes, and a lot of those are at least partially machine generated, so I guess they are probably a lot more efficient in terms of results for time spent.
This slashdot article seems to be edging dangerously close to slander. Sure, Slashdot is not like the WSJ or a major newspaper, but it does get regularly linked and read in some circles.
There might be some evidence for this claim of "forcing", but not in that article. And it doesn't make it OK to say "the WSJ said"... in fact you might get sued by them as well.
You can't just make crap up about a person and post it on a hugely popular website, without thinking about the consequences.
You're making it sound worse and worse. Even if you don't consider this a code bug, it seems like a disastrous user interface for safety critical software - therefore a massive failure of requirements specification.
These things are well known and have been for decades, since both the US and Russia have had long term space stations before. The fact is that ISS adds nothing to this, other than doing things on a slightly larger scale.
Sure, they will be refining the engineering and tweaking designs. Not worth 100 billion dollars, sorry.
Ah yes, I remember that well. We didn't get to thousands, but my previous employer had hundreds of Notes databases. Everytime a new manager or developer with ideas arrived they would ignore existing databases and create new ones. I guess it's just an extension of standard IT behaviour, but Notes seems to make it worse somehow.
I used to go on a mission finding databases that were used a little bit or not at all and combine the useful stuff into a few common databases. After a while we got to the point where most people used about 5 databases regularly and the remaining hundreds were deleted or archived.
Of course it doesn't help that Notes has absolutely piss-poor tools for actual "database management". I remember having to write custom views to find replication conflicts and orphaned documents; renaming existing fields is impossible (you can change it on the "form", closest Notes gets to a table) but existing documents can't be changed without writing agents... all in all, it was pretty disastrous.
Like a lot of 4GLs, it was easy to start making databases to support business databases, but once you got down to the nitty-gritty, things which you'd take for granted in a real database were nowhere to be found (like link integrity, or renaming fields as I said). It was pretty clear that most of the Notes designers had no experience outside of their own product.
Re:Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perf
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 1
The only people that really care about load times and memory footprints are the technical people. Average Joe user, isn't even aware of it, or if he is, doesn't understand it.
Most people won't care about memory footprint (so long as it doesn't cause swapping, a big if), but every person notices slowness. There is a reason that UI guidelines suggest responding in 0.1seconds to user's actions, and that should ideally apply to loading programs as well.
Actually lots of programmers like to rewrite code, but it's not always true that the new code is significantly better:)
I imagine plenty of people have tried, on OOo and other projects, to rewrite big chunks, only to find that it's really hard to get it all working properly again, or that the result is actually worse, or all those seemingly simple patterns didn't quite work.
After all there are plenty of enthusiasts willing to hack into things, but not many people willing to do the 80% grind to get it back to the reliability it was before the rewrite.
It seems since the web got popular, nobody cares about making things you can manipulate look like it (e.g. buttons that look pressable). You just cram whatever pretty stuff on the screen you want, and [maybe] put some mouseover highlight so people can simply move the mouse over every item on the screen to tell what is clickable. So simple and efficient!:/
I don't know. I was quite excited when it happened, but really, they have solved only the small, easy part - going high. Getting to orbital speed is by far the hardest part, and there is no sign that their approach will lead to that any time soon.
That's a good point too. I paid for 3dgamers, but even after signing up there were still ads. I had to go into preferences to disable them. Hello? Web designer? Brain?
Good for you, but I offer a different anecdote: with the official ICQLite client I would get maybe half a dozen spams every day. I turned off accepting messages from strangers, but ICQ doesn't allow turning off requests to be added to your contact list, so I kept getting half-a-dozen contact list requests from spammers every day.
This was another reason to install Miranda, besides the multi-protocol support and very light footprint.
I agree. The only thing that really bothers me is sites that become popular (and hence need lots of ads to support themselves), but don't bother to offer any subscription option so that people who are really interested can pay to get rid of the ads. It's really not all that hard. I imagine it's similar to setting up an ad account (assuming you get someone else to handle the financial aspects).
Slashdot Mirror
MSM seems like a bit of an obscure acronym. I guess you mean "mainstream media"? I doubt that is well known outside blog circles.
I can second that. We run a IT company with global customers from New Zealand and IM helps a lot to build customer relationships, solve tricky support issues more quickly, and makes up to some extent for being thousands of miles away.
That is for the customers who are comfortable with it; many are not.
I can also second the problem of people interrupting you however; just like the phone, it quickly becomes a downside if people aren't thoughtful about using it.
And it's my contention ... that in most (read: almost all) circumstances copyright infringement IS wrong.
This is where you make a big assumption that many people no longer agree with. A lot of people now think that copyright, as it stands now, is not working right and therefore infringing it is not necessarily wrong.
This is not my opinion, but you seem to misunderstand the level the debate has moved to.
Superficially that seems nice, but there are some serious problems.
1. The back button doesn't go back anymore.
This is really reason enough to dismiss it immediately, but we'll continue to some details...
2. Clicking on the left and right column to change page is totally unexpected. Did you know some people compulsively select areas of text? They will constantly be moved to the next page.
3. The previous and next links are very small text-embedded images in a faint colour, beloved of graphic designers but actually very annoying and difficult to read.
4. You can't select the whole article (e.g. to paste into an email)
Sorry, but no.
but I worry that some of the features will ecourage neophytes to create code that is difficult to maintain or understand.
Sounds like C++...
When you want a real database but aren't using it heavily e.g. single or a few users, then Server Express is fine. We use it in a commercial product which is used in retail shops, with thousands of sites so far. A few users find they reach the limits (e.g. database size of 4GB) for whatever reason, and they can upgrade to SQL server, but most don't need to care.
One thing they waste far too much time on in many games is character models. I guess it makes for nice screenshots, but how often are you right up close to a character examining the detail on their boots?
This is at least true for FPSes. I guess RPGs and other more interactive games can use close-up detail. But thinking of UT2004, the character models have obviously been slaved over for many months, and are works of art; but the most you ever see is a couple of quick flashes as someone runs past. To be honest, the character models in the original Unreal Tournament (99?) were perfectly fine for an FPS.
The same mostly goes for weapon and power-up models. Gratuitous transparency and pretty textures is interesting for maybe the first 30 seconds, and then it could just be a yellow circle for all the player cares.
That's a big chunk of graphics they could simplify and spend much less time on. Further, it would save wasting lots of polygons on them.
The thing that really makes a big impression is the landscapes, and a lot of those are at least partially machine generated, so I guess they are probably a lot more efficient in terms of results for time spent.
I wonder how much you would have to pay to get a good font like Tahoma made from scratch? With hinting and such?
$250k?
Maybe the open source community could pool some money and fund it. 10,000 people $25 each doesn't sound impossible with millions of Linux users.
Man, won't someone buy those poor guys at Baikonur a decent camera! What were those shots taken with, a camera phone?
v ex_launch_H.jpg
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/venusexpress/
Pity they don't have any samples on their website.
http://www.bisnation.com/
Fairly useless site, they have a lot to learn about marketing
This slashdot article seems to be edging dangerously close to slander. Sure, Slashdot is not like the WSJ or a major newspaper, but it does get regularly linked and read in some circles.
There might be some evidence for this claim of "forcing", but not in that article. And it doesn't make it OK to say "the WSJ said"... in fact you might get sued by them as well.
You can't just make crap up about a person and post it on a hugely popular website, without thinking about the consequences.
You're making it sound worse and worse. Even if you don't consider this a code bug, it seems like a disastrous user interface for safety critical software - therefore a massive failure of requirements specification.
These things are well known and have been for decades, since both the US and Russia have had long term space stations before. The fact is that ISS adds nothing to this, other than doing things on a slightly larger scale.
Sure, they will be refining the engineering and tweaking designs. Not worth 100 billion dollars, sorry.
Ah yes, I remember that well. We didn't get to thousands, but my previous employer had hundreds of Notes databases. Everytime a new manager or developer with ideas arrived they would ignore existing databases and create new ones. I guess it's just an extension of standard IT behaviour, but Notes seems to make it worse somehow.
I used to go on a mission finding databases that were used a little bit or not at all and combine the useful stuff into a few common databases. After a while we got to the point where most people used about 5 databases regularly and the remaining hundreds were deleted or archived.
Of course it doesn't help that Notes has absolutely piss-poor tools for actual "database management". I remember having to write custom views to find replication conflicts and orphaned documents; renaming existing fields is impossible (you can change it on the "form", closest Notes gets to a table) but existing documents can't be changed without writing agents... all in all, it was pretty disastrous.
Like a lot of 4GLs, it was easy to start making databases to support business databases, but once you got down to the nitty-gritty, things which you'd take for granted in a real database were nowhere to be found (like link integrity, or renaming fields as I said). It was pretty clear that most of the Notes designers had no experience outside of their own product.
The only people that really care about load times and memory footprints are the technical people. Average Joe user, isn't even aware of it, or if he is, doesn't understand it.
Most people won't care about memory footprint (so long as it doesn't cause swapping, a big if), but every person notices slowness. There is a reason that UI guidelines suggest responding in 0.1seconds to user's actions, and that should ideally apply to loading programs as well.
Actually lots of programmers like to rewrite code, but it's not always true that the new code is significantly better :)
I imagine plenty of people have tried, on OOo and other projects, to rewrite big chunks, only to find that it's really hard to get it all working properly again, or that the result is actually worse, or all those seemingly simple patterns didn't quite work.
After all there are plenty of enthusiasts willing to hack into things, but not many people willing to do the 80% grind to get it back to the reliability it was before the rewrite.
"You also want the presentation of your controls to be as similar as possible."
Maybe you do, but I and most users don't: they want the controls to look like other applications and the operating system.
It seems since the web got popular, nobody cares about making things you can manipulate look like it (e.g. buttons that look pressable). You just cram whatever pretty stuff on the screen you want, and [maybe] put some mouseover highlight so people can simply move the mouse over every item on the screen to tell what is clickable. So simple and efficient! :/
I don't know. I was quite excited when it happened, but really, they have solved only the small, easy part - going high. Getting to orbital speed is by far the hardest part, and there is no sign that their approach will lead to that any time soon.
That's a good point too. I paid for 3dgamers, but even after signing up there were still ads. I had to go into preferences to disable them. Hello? Web designer? Brain?
Or Miranda if you want something less bloated than Trillian, and open source (still Windows only).
IM has been virtually free of direct spam attacks
Good for you, but I offer a different anecdote: with the official ICQLite client I would get maybe half a dozen spams every day. I turned off accepting messages from strangers, but ICQ doesn't allow turning off requests to be added to your contact list, so I kept getting half-a-dozen contact list requests from spammers every day.
This was another reason to install Miranda, besides the multi-protocol support and very light footprint.
I agree.
The only thing that really bothers me is sites that become popular (and hence need lots of ads to support themselves), but don't bother to offer any subscription option so that people who are really interested can pay to get rid of the ads. It's really not all that hard. I imagine it's similar to setting up an ad account (assuming you get someone else to handle the financial aspects).
If only you had been able to watch the Buran launch! Although the weather looked pretty miserable.
Thanks for pointing this out. I always thought the stuff about pressure above and below seemed somehow wrong.