"The big controversy up here in Canada right now is that everybody is going to need a passport to go across the border by next year. For me, this is a non-issue."
It may be a non-issue for you, but some people care about it. I live in the United States, in Michigan to be exact. Michigan borders Ontario. One of my friends lives in Ontario, about 310 miles (500km), as the car drives, away from me.
The new passport thing means I can no longer visit her and vice-versa as easily. I don't like it one bit.
Also remember that while the majority of programs install to/usr/local/bin, not all of them do. Therefore, you may have to cd to the appropriate directory, or type in the entire path.
Did I mention that I have a Windows XP desktop, but use Linux servers? (FreeBSD to a lesser extent)
Yes. It has to. My hand has to move over to the mouse, move the mouse cursor to the dialog, and click. My hands are already on the keyboard when working in a terminal program, so I do not need to interrupt my task to tell the computer it's OK. It takes a couple seconds longer to confirm via mouse than with keyboard, for sure.
You'd be in a terminal program in Windows? Regardless, you can see from the screenshots that Continue is the default button in the dialog, so pressing Enter would be the same thing as clicking it.
Besides, if you were in a terminal program in Windows, you'd probably use the runas command to start it rather than creating a shortcut.
How many average OSX users have an account in the admin group? Did you forget we were talking about average users?
Without an account in the admin group, you need to know the root user's password in OSX. Just like you need to know the Administrator's password in Vista.
In a sense, I like Vista's explanation dialog. It tells you why you need to type in a password. The explanations need to be dumbed down a bit, though.
I do think you're right about a single dialog. Merging a dumbed down explanation dialog together with the password prompt dialog would make considerably more sense from a usability point of view.
For example, it would make more sense if it said...
Programname wants to create a directory in a location it is not allowed to
C:\path\here
Do you wish to allow this?
Note: In order to allow this, you must have your Administrator password handy.
where clicking no makes the box larger and adds a username/password dialog.
The trick is more into getting the user to read the dialog each and every time it pops up...
How many original games has LucasArts had in the last three years? The only one I can think of was the one mentioned in the article, Mercenaries.
Everything else has been Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
LucasArts used to be known for its Adventure games, but under Mr. Ward's leadership, they flushed that down the toilet in favor of more Star Wars. They got such bad press from the Sam and Max 2 cancellation that they removed the Press Release from their site. LucasArts can claim that the genre is dead, but when companies like The Adventure Company continue to make money off of them, it would appear that LucasArts is wrong.
The question is, will LucasArts put its money where its mouth is, or simply continue to be the Star Wars company?
However, it is important to note that IE5 on Mac is more compliant than IE5 or IE6 on Windows, at least according to the Position is Everything Explorer page.
Yes, certain categories of programs aren't compatible.
I know a specific category of Win2K programs that don't work on XP: CD writing software. Microsoft dropped the ASPI interface in XP (although you can download it from Adaptec's site), which several major programs required. I imagine that Roxio and Nero weren't too happy about that.
In general, though, drivers and programs that perform hardware-related tasks are the least likely to work with newer versions of Windows. DOS programs are the only ones that fare worse.
Speaking of DOS programs, I left them out for a reason: Windows NT/2K/XP sucks at running them. DOSBox works much better.
I have experienced several general categories of programs that have problems in newer versions of Windows.
Drivers - Windows 2000/XP uses a different architecture for drivers.
Anything requiring direct hardware access. Windows 2000/XP requires all programs to use drivers and kills off programs that attempt direct hardware access.
DOS programs. Sound emulation for cmd.exe is iffy. Combined with the previous point, DOS programs are hit or miss. DOSBox is your friend in both *nix and Windows.
Programs that explicitly look for NT DLLs and refuse to run if they are located
Even though I only mentioned compatibility back to Windows 3.1, I mentioned DOS here because Theme Park is a DOS program.
On top of that, you can search for drivers for hardware. Google turned up something when I searched for Miro. It may help, or it may not. I can't tell, because I don't know which Miro model you have.
Since there is a good chance the current version of iTunes won't work on the final version of Vista, people would be forced to either give up their library of songs from iTunes, or upgrade from WinXP to OSX rather than Vista.
I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?
Please, tell this to one of my current instructors. He uses Powerpoint slides, but refuses to let the class have copies of them. Therefore, we all have to write/type everything that's on the slides in addition to anything else he might be saying on the matter.
ACID2 will be a useless test as long as it uses data urls. Although the HTML 4.01 standard mentioned data urls, web browsers are not required to implement them, just like they're not required to implement a python parser for the objects as examples earlier in the same section.
I personally dislike the idea of data urls, for the following reasons.
Embedded files can not be reused.
Embedded binary files are approximately 33% larger than their non-embedded versions, because they must be encoded first.
Back to Acid2 guided tour. Here are the problems I see right off the bat.
The "version without data URLs" link brings you to a page that uses a data url in one of the tests. Oops.
The ACID2 page does not include the URI in the DTD line. This is in violation of HTML 4.01 Section 7.2, which states "HTML 4.01 specifies three DTDs, so authors must include one of the following document type declarations in their documents." (Emphasis mine) All 3 DTDs listed include URLs.
Acid2 claims "Acid2 assumes basic support for... CSS1..." but actually tests against CSS2.
The Acid2 test intentionally has an object of type application/x-unknown. This has a nasty tendancy to launch plugin finders in most browsers. application/octet-stream is the "official" unknown type.
I'm sure I'll find more later, but it's getting late here.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl 6 has been in development for what, 7 years? Perhaps it's time someone looked into finishing it?
IBM has made JVMs in the past. I wouldn't put it past them to make them again if Sun becomes Sue.
It may be a non-issue for you, but some people care about it. I live in the United States, in Michigan to be exact. Michigan borders Ontario. One of my friends lives in Ontario, about 310 miles (500km), as the car drives, away from me.
The new passport thing means I can no longer visit her and vice-versa as easily. I don't like it one bit.
P.S. I intentionally omitted the city names.
Uh oh, 3D Realms is going to sue you for posting the game's entire source code!
...because I already replied elsewhere in this thread and can't.
I can't help but wonder if the only way to pass that interview is to point that out...
Did I mention that I have a Windows XP desktop, but use Linux servers? (FreeBSD to a lesser extent)
You'd be in a terminal program in Windows? Regardless, you can see from the screenshots that Continue is the default button in the dialog, so pressing Enter would be the same thing as clicking it.
Besides, if you were in a terminal program in Windows, you'd probably use the runas command to start it rather than creating a shortcut.
Without an account in the admin group, you need to know the root user's password in OSX. Just like you need to know the Administrator's password in Vista.
In a sense, I like Vista's explanation dialog. It tells you why you need to type in a password. The explanations need to be dumbed down a bit, though.
I do think you're right about a single dialog. Merging a dumbed down explanation dialog together with the password prompt dialog would make considerably more sense from a usability point of view.
For example, it would make more sense if it said...
where clicking no makes the box larger and adds a username/password dialog.The trick is more into getting the user to read the dialog each and every time it pops up...
Everything else has been Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
LucasArts used to be known for its Adventure games, but under Mr. Ward's leadership, they flushed that down the toilet in favor of more Star Wars. They got such bad press from the Sam and Max 2 cancellation that they removed the Press Release from their site. LucasArts can claim that the genre is dead, but when companies like The Adventure Company continue to make money off of them, it would appear that LucasArts is wrong.
The question is, will LucasArts put its money where its mouth is, or simply continue to be the Star Wars company?
However, it is important to note that IE5 on Mac is more compliant than IE5 or IE6 on Windows, at least according to the Position is Everything Explorer page.
Wouldn't doing something like this get him automatically disbarred with no appeal?
Having said that, I have lots of LucasArts games, so ScummVM is a great help.
I know a specific category of Win2K programs that don't work on XP: CD writing software. Microsoft dropped the ASPI interface in XP (although you can download it from Adaptec's site), which several major programs required. I imagine that Roxio and Nero weren't too happy about that.
In general, though, drivers and programs that perform hardware-related tasks are the least likely to work with newer versions of Windows. DOS programs are the only ones that fare worse.
Speaking of DOS programs, I left them out for a reason: Windows NT/2K/XP sucks at running them. DOSBox works much better.
Anonymous users aren't exactly considered a reliable source. Hence why professors don't allow you to cite Wikipedia in research papers.
Even though I only mentioned compatibility back to Windows 3.1, I mentioned DOS here because Theme Park is a DOS program.
On top of that, you can search for drivers for hardware. Google turned up something when I searched for Miro. It may help, or it may not. I can't tell, because I don't know which Miro model you have.
I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?
Let me repeat what the grandparent said, with emphasis.
I just wish mysql could use /etc/passwd for authentication of users/passwords, I hate that it has to use its own internal user/pass database.
How about Absoluts? Can Jedis have alcoholic drinks?
Have you tried here?
You missed CD in that list. You did remember that Sony was involved in the creation of the CD, right? Oh right, that one didn't fail.
Please, tell this to one of my current instructors. He uses Powerpoint slides, but refuses to let the class have copies of them. Therefore, we all have to write/type everything that's on the slides in addition to anything else he might be saying on the matter.
I personally dislike the idea of data urls, for the following reasons.
Back to Acid2 guided tour. Here are the problems I see right off the bat.
I'm sure I'll find more later, but it's getting late here.
Dude, they couldn't be any less standards compliant than previous versions. They had nowhere to go but up.
I take it that you've never used Netscape 4...