What the grandparent means is that bug-fixing Service Packs and feature-adding upgrades should be kept separate so you can grab the bug fixes without worrying about the new features breaking shit. Both would ideally be free.
Hell, look at Apache; they're still updating the 1.3.x line just for security and using the 2.0.x branch for adding new features (which break a fair number of old things). If your site is already running 1.3.x reliably, you don't want to shake it up for no reason--servers are supposed to be reliable, not flashy--but you want the latest security patches. So you can keep grabbing the 1.3.x updates.
With Windows, you don't have the choice; you pick the devil you know or the devil you don't. Everyone says Microsoft is damned if they do or damned if they don't with the Service Packs, and it seems like their customers are in the same position.
Then you see those sites with mysql query errors when under heavy load or whichever silly programming mistakes.
Wow! So I guess other databases don't get Slashdotted? That's impressive! (note sarcasm).
I don't think the grandparent is trolling MySQL's ability to handle heavy loads but rather its tendency to attract n00bs.
You should disable display of PHP errors on production web sites, for instance ("php.ini" even tells you to), and use the server's error log instead (or a separate log for PHP if you prefer), but few webmasters seem to bother anymore. It's also easy enough to catch MySQL errors and code pretty error messages for them for when your site is getting Slashraped, so there's no excuse for letting PHP barf cryptic database error messages everywhere (no matter what you're database server is running) as many sites do.
Is the movie industry turning into the game industry?
Gabe of Penny Arcade said something relevant and insightful a while back: "I just don't understand the game industrie's fascination with 3D shit. The goddamn dimension has been around for ever but they act like they just fucking discovered it. When humans started sculpting they didn't give up painting."
Although I'm told that Disney's CG animators will also create 2D art (just quicker).
As far as Toy Story 3 goes, I really hope the freelance talent (mainly Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) chooses not to participate so that it's abundantly clear it's a low-rate money-grab and so its existence doesn't taint the other two movies. Failing that, I hope that snowball forms itself in Hell and it's actually good.
One thing I've consistently noticed about programmers is that they have no grasp of color theory. Witness the countlessridiculouslylow-contrastBlackboxthemes. Hell, look at Windows XP's primary color-filled default theme.
In general, get to know the basics. Just looking cool doesn't make something usable, and the best art brings together prettiness and usability.
Re:Disconnect and motivation
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
Of course, it's an impossible goal, but I think it's one of those "shoot for the moon, land among the stars" kind of things. Mind, I think the pirate guy is a nutcase, but impossible goals aren't a bad thing necessarily.
I would have to say that the sites at CSSZenGarden [csszengarden.com] look quite different.
Funny you should mention it. I followed your link and checked out the C-Note design, which has overlapping text in the sidebar in Opera 7.5. Whoops.
The grandparent is right in that CSS is not a panacea for designers and that it can be hard to guarantee perfect compatibility.
However, for the CSS Zen Garden, no matter how badly the CSS renders, I can always just drop into user mode and read the content thanks to its lovely semantic mark-up (of course, the design is the site's draw and not the content, but that's beside the point). In my opinion, flexible data is more important than pixel perfection, so I ultimately disagree with the grandparent's half-hearted tables-with-CSS approach. Clearly, you'll never, ever get pixel perfection for every user without a lot of hacks (using tables for anything other than tabular data is a hack), so you should really just give up and focus on fluid designs.
(And yes, I know, ideals don't get you far with clients and compromise is often necessary, but maybe you should be compromising your design whims for accessibility instead of the other way around?)
Windows can run at a hell of a lot of weird resolutions that are simply hidden from the Display control pannel applet. It'd get ridiculous if they crammed in every video mode your graphics card is capable of, so obviously, you have to draw the line somewhere. Many of the dialogue boxes, toolbars, and so forth in XP are huge compared to their Windows 95 counterparts. 640x480 is damn near unusable in Windows 2000, and I'd assume XP isn't much different.
Better question is how come that money isn't spent equally on diverse platforms (i.e. Mac, Linux, Sun, whatever). Instead, MS buys out the entire college.
I go to NCSU, which is primarily an engineering school. All of our servers run on Solaris, and there are Suns all over campus. There are also numerous Windows 2000 workstations (and even a handful of Win2k servers doing non-critical stuff). We have a lab full of Red Hat Linux machines (all the x86s are Dells). We also have a number of Macs, including a lab full of G5s in the design school (which also has an OS 9 lab with a few Cubes). Students in the College of Engineering are required to take a course on Unix their first semester.
Not all schools are Microsoft shills, if it makes you feel any better.
it also imports whatever it is that tells it that Flash is handled by that extension
That'd be userChrome.css, in the chrome directory of your profile directory. Just remove it.
The Weatherfox extension is pretty neat. It shows you your local weather in your status bar. I showed it to my sister so she wouldn't have to use crappy programs like WeatherBug.
Why would I ever want something on my screen to be harder to see?
Good point, but it's actually a neat idea. It's weird having to check the title bar of a window to see if it's focused or not. His idea takes its inspiration from the way our eyes work, so you can't get much more intuitive.
It'd be sort of like how Photoshop darkens the areas around your selection when you crop an image. It emphasizes what you're working on.
That said, I'm not sure the idea would even work that well. It's nice being able to read unfocused windows (although they don't have to be blurred to the point of being unreadable, just enough to guide the eye). But the idea shows an interesting way of thinking and suggests the possibilities flashy effects like transparency (which, face it, most of us think is worthless and would turn off) have for increasing productivity.
Not a bad list, but you really should "splurge" on the Happguage PVR-250 card. It does the encoding in hardware, so even a low end box could easily support two tuners. With the card you put in your list, all the encoding would fall on the CPU. Not only that, I'm not sure that nVidia's personal cinema is supported under Linux. An integrated video card (on the motherboard) would do fine as long as it had TV out that was supported under Linux (and looked half decent). Wouldn't even need that if you used a monitor.
Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to look around more before committing to any video hardware (I'm used to building servers, so I'm in foreign waters here).
Well, first, you didnt include shipping in any of the estimate. This is usually mistake #1.
Like the AC said, shipping is usually free if you don't mind waiting a little longer. I think of it as turning patience into money.
I'm mostly using Newegg to get a feel for what's out there anyway; when I actually break ground on this thing, I'll spend some more time hunting out the cheapest prices. (I guess I could've skipped a step on done this all on PriceWatch, but there's some shady shit on there; do I want a "House Brand" motherboard from some guys operating out of a pickup truck with the engine running?)
Hmm... what's the monthly fee for TiVo... $10 a month?
You'd have to wait four and a half years before you were monetarily ahead in that case.
No problem. Clearly, this thing'll be built to outlast the cockroaches, what with buying criteria like "cheap" and "adequate" and "I dunno." I don't think you'll be laughing so hard when my PVR has to rebuild civilization.
People blow money on expensive gaming rigs all the time when Sony and Nintendo are a step away from selling their consoles out of gumball machines. Value is subjective. If I want to spend extra cash on vendor independence, built-in MAME, hardware I know better than my immediate family, etc., then it's no skin off your ass. Hell, building computers in general is wasted capital when Dell and HP will give you a top-of-the-line PC, display, printer, and 24-hour support line with some confused Hindu guy for about a month's rent. If I have to explain the value of wasting time and money building things for no apparent reason, then I need to find a geekier clique than this. Maybe switch to Hurd and move to Tibet. Shit, people.
Worst case scenario: I get bored watching Simpsons episodes one frame at a time, and my PVR transforms into a headless web server with a $100 video card.
Anyway, thanks for the advice, everyone. Keep it coming since I'm just making this up as I go along.
(Oh, and I meant 3.5 mm instead of 3.5" with regards to headphone jacks. NASA-itis.)
The article argues that you'll save money by not having to pay TiVo a monthly fee. Besides, for some of us, building a cool machine is an end in and of itself.
Anyway, I tried pricing a MythTV box a couple of days ago with a goal of keeping it under $500, and this is what I ended up with (copied right out of the link above):
CD/DVD drive ($52)--Combo CD and DVD-writer. DVD-recording isn't essential, so I might downgrade this to a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive.
Hard disk drive ($99)--160 GB, S-ATA, very quiet. A P-ATA drive with the same buffer is nearly the same price.
Video card ($109)--CATV in, composite out, works with Linux and FreeBSD. The only people who dislike it seem to be kids who want to play Doom III on it.
Sound card--Onboard might be good enough for now with a $5 3.5"-headphone-to-composite-audio cable from Radio Shack.
Processor ($65)--Athlon XP 2000+, cheap, adequate. Retail instead of OEM so I don't have to get a heatsink/fan separately.
Motherboard ($53)--Micro-ATX, S-ATA, AGP 8x. Committed to MSI because a motherboard without Engrish just isn't a motherboard. Three PCI slots for wireless adapter, eventually a sound card, and I dunno, 1394?
Memory ($76)--512 MB DDR333, cheaper than DDR266. Screw dual-channel.
Case/power supply--Needs something that can fit the video card (guess that entails finding a mobo that horizontally orients expansion cards if I don't want a lame-o tower).
Wireless adapter ($30)--802.11g, cheap, works with Linux and FreeBSD. Going wireless so it isn't stuck in the same room as the router (and no way I'm running cat-5 everywhere in 20-mother-fucking-04).
Subtotal: $484.
Still need a case--certainly won't be paying $100+ for one like the article did--and probably a sound card that isn't onboard crap. It probably won't make the $500 goal, but it looks alright (barring any major oversights on my part).
Just browsing the features listed on the Opera page I don't see much that firefox doesn't offer natively or by installing an extension, so I see no real reason to switch and a few good resons not to.
It's mind-bogglingly fast. I put it on my slower machines (<128 MB of RAM). It doesn't cost much to get rid of the adbar, and there are worse things to spend $40 on than software.
It also has a fairly slick built-in mail, news, and newsfeed reader that's also quite a bit less resource-hungry than Thunderbird. Regex filters are neat.
There also a lot of UI peculiarities that some folks might prefer. Just little things like how closing a tab switches you to the last tab you were viewing (instead of the tab next to the closed tab, as in Mozilla) or how everything--web pages, e-mails, the browser history--opens in a tab. F12 brings up a Quick Preferences menu that lets you toggle the pop-up blocker or change your user agent (I swear, there's a hotkey for everything). It's full of similarly cool little touches that add up to a pretty slick interface (all subjective, of course).
I use Firefox on my main machines, but there's no need to rag on Opera. If we learn anything from Microsoft, it ought to be that it's good to have choices.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing the point.
What the grandparent means is that bug-fixing Service Packs and feature-adding upgrades should be kept separate so you can grab the bug fixes without worrying about the new features breaking shit. Both would ideally be free.
Hell, look at Apache; they're still updating the 1.3.x line just for security and using the 2.0.x branch for adding new features (which break a fair number of old things). If your site is already running 1.3.x reliably, you don't want to shake it up for no reason--servers are supposed to be reliable, not flashy--but you want the latest security patches. So you can keep grabbing the 1.3.x updates.
With Windows, you don't have the choice; you pick the devil you know or the devil you don't. Everyone says Microsoft is damned if they do or damned if they don't with the Service Packs, and it seems like their customers are in the same position.
Pavlovian conditioning.
I'm getting off on a tangent here, but:
I don't think the grandparent is trolling MySQL's ability to handle heavy loads but rather its tendency to attract n00bs.
You should disable display of PHP errors on production web sites, for instance ("php.ini" even tells you to), and use the server's error log instead (or a separate log for PHP if you prefer), but few webmasters seem to bother anymore. It's also easy enough to catch MySQL errors and code pretty error messages for them for when your site is getting Slashraped, so there's no excuse for letting PHP barf cryptic database error messages everywhere (no matter what you're database server is running) as many sites do.
I bet you read the article too.
Yeah, but...they're spammers.
It's like the Indiana Jones movies. Melting people's faces is bad. Melting Nazi's faces is awesome. Because, honestly, they're Nazis.
I'm not saying spammers are Nazis, just that we should melt their faces.
You can't build a house in a week no matter how many men you throw on it. After a point, your returns diminish.
Is the movie industry turning into the game industry?
Gabe of Penny Arcade said something relevant and insightful a while back: "I just don't understand the game industrie's fascination with 3D shit. The goddamn dimension has been around for ever but they act like they just fucking discovered it. When humans started sculpting they didn't give up painting."
Although I'm told that Disney's CG animators will also create 2D art (just quicker).
As far as Toy Story 3 goes, I really hope the freelance talent (mainly Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) chooses not to participate so that it's abundantly clear it's a low-rate money-grab and so its existence doesn't taint the other two movies. Failing that, I hope that snowball forms itself in Hell and it's actually good.
One thing I've consistently noticed about programmers is that they have no grasp of color theory. Witness the countless ridiculously low-contrast Blackbox themes. Hell, look at Windows XP's primary color-filled default theme.
In general, get to know the basics. Just looking cool doesn't make something usable, and the best art brings together prettiness and usability.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
Of course, it's an impossible goal, but I think it's one of those "shoot for the moon, land among the stars" kind of things. Mind, I think the pirate guy is a nutcase, but impossible goals aren't a bad thing necessarily.
One minute.
NCSA Mosaic was programmed by Marc Andreessen, who, of course, created Netscape Communications, so I guess it's all in the family.
Or they could make it impossible to uninstall, make it the file manager, require it for security updates, and make the help system dependent upon it.
OH, WAIT. The only way could integrate IE more into my Windows "experience" is if they soldered a big metal "e" onto my ass.
Funny you should mention it. I followed your link and checked out the C-Note design, which has overlapping text in the sidebar in Opera 7.5. Whoops.
The grandparent is right in that CSS is not a panacea for designers and that it can be hard to guarantee perfect compatibility.
However, for the CSS Zen Garden, no matter how badly the CSS renders, I can always just drop into user mode and read the content thanks to its lovely semantic mark-up (of course, the design is the site's draw and not the content, but that's beside the point). In my opinion, flexible data is more important than pixel perfection, so I ultimately disagree with the grandparent's half-hearted tables-with-CSS approach. Clearly, you'll never, ever get pixel perfection for every user without a lot of hacks (using tables for anything other than tabular data is a hack), so you should really just give up and focus on fluid designs.
(And yes, I know, ideals don't get you far with clients and compromise is often necessary, but maybe you should be compromising your design whims for accessibility instead of the other way around?)
Yeah, they've forced other free e-mail providers to compete, and the consumers are benefiting.
What a rip.
The submitter had trouble working in the obligatory iPod plug. Give him a break.
Windows can run at a hell of a lot of weird resolutions that are simply hidden from the Display control pannel applet. It'd get ridiculous if they crammed in every video mode your graphics card is capable of, so obviously, you have to draw the line somewhere. Many of the dialogue boxes, toolbars, and so forth in XP are huge compared to their Windows 95 counterparts. 640x480 is damn near unusable in Windows 2000, and I'd assume XP isn't much different.
Supported too.
ACs are stupid.
But yes, Exchange also does SMTP (in addition to MAPI, POP3, and IMAP).
IIS does HTTP, FTP, and SMTP.
I go to NCSU, which is primarily an engineering school. All of our servers run on Solaris, and there are Suns all over campus. There are also numerous Windows 2000 workstations (and even a handful of Win2k servers doing non-critical stuff). We have a lab full of Red Hat Linux machines (all the x86s are Dells). We also have a number of Macs, including a lab full of G5s in the design school (which also has an OS 9 lab with a few Cubes). Students in the College of Engineering are required to take a course on Unix their first semester.
Not all schools are Microsoft shills, if it makes you feel any better.
That'd be userChrome.css, in the chrome directory of your profile directory. Just remove it.
The Weatherfox extension is pretty neat. It shows you your local weather in your status bar. I showed it to my sister so she wouldn't have to use crappy programs like WeatherBug.
Good point, but it's actually a neat idea. It's weird having to check the title bar of a window to see if it's focused or not. His idea takes its inspiration from the way our eyes work, so you can't get much more intuitive.
It'd be sort of like how Photoshop darkens the areas around your selection when you crop an image. It emphasizes what you're working on.
That said, I'm not sure the idea would even work that well. It's nice being able to read unfocused windows (although they don't have to be blurred to the point of being unreadable, just enough to guide the eye). But the idea shows an interesting way of thinking and suggests the possibilities flashy effects like transparency (which, face it, most of us think is worthless and would turn off) have for increasing productivity.
Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to look around more before committing to any video hardware (I'm used to building servers, so I'm in foreign waters here).
Like the AC said, shipping is usually free if you don't mind waiting a little longer. I think of it as turning patience into money.
I'm mostly using Newegg to get a feel for what's out there anyway; when I actually break ground on this thing, I'll spend some more time hunting out the cheapest prices. (I guess I could've skipped a step on done this all on PriceWatch, but there's some shady shit on there; do I want a "House Brand" motherboard from some guys operating out of a pickup truck with the engine running?)
No problem. Clearly, this thing'll be built to outlast the cockroaches, what with buying criteria like "cheap" and "adequate" and "I dunno." I don't think you'll be laughing so hard when my PVR has to rebuild civilization.
People blow money on expensive gaming rigs all the time when Sony and Nintendo are a step away from selling their consoles out of gumball machines. Value is subjective. If I want to spend extra cash on vendor independence, built-in MAME, hardware I know better than my immediate family, etc., then it's no skin off your ass. Hell, building computers in general is wasted capital when Dell and HP will give you a top-of-the-line PC, display, printer, and 24-hour support line with some confused Hindu guy for about a month's rent. If I have to explain the value of wasting time and money building things for no apparent reason, then I need to find a geekier clique than this. Maybe switch to Hurd and move to Tibet. Shit, people.
Worst case scenario: I get bored watching Simpsons episodes one frame at a time, and my PVR transforms into a headless web server with a $100 video card.
Anyway, thanks for the advice, everyone. Keep it coming since I'm just making this up as I go along.
(Oh, and I meant 3.5 mm instead of 3.5" with regards to headphone jacks. NASA-itis.)
The article argues that you'll save money by not having to pay TiVo a monthly fee. Besides, for some of us, building a cool machine is an end in and of itself.
Anyway, I tried pricing a MythTV box a couple of days ago with a goal of keeping it under $500, and this is what I ended up with (copied right out of the link above):
Subtotal: $484.
Still need a case--certainly won't be paying $100+ for one like the article did--and probably a sound card that isn't onboard crap. It probably won't make the $500 goal, but it looks alright (barring any major oversights on my part).
It's mind-bogglingly fast. I put it on my slower machines (<128 MB of RAM). It doesn't cost much to get rid of the adbar, and there are worse things to spend $40 on than software.
It also has a fairly slick built-in mail, news, and newsfeed reader that's also quite a bit less resource-hungry than Thunderbird. Regex filters are neat.
There also a lot of UI peculiarities that some folks might prefer. Just little things like how closing a tab switches you to the last tab you were viewing (instead of the tab next to the closed tab, as in Mozilla) or how everything--web pages, e-mails, the browser history--opens in a tab. F12 brings up a Quick Preferences menu that lets you toggle the pop-up blocker or change your user agent (I swear, there's a hotkey for everything). It's full of similarly cool little touches that add up to a pretty slick interface (all subjective, of course).
I use Firefox on my main machines, but there's no need to rag on Opera. If we learn anything from Microsoft, it ought to be that it's good to have choices.