> Make your app skinnable. You'll never please everyone otherwise.
For most commercial software, you don't have to. You just have to make enough people happy with the way your app looks. Believe it or not, it can be done, e.g.: iTunes, OSX, Office 2007.
The idea of developing a dead-simple default look and letting "the community" come up with a skin mostly never works because the community can't devote as much time to QA (i18n, l10n, accessibility, as is necessary for a top-flight app). Example: Firefox -- they're skinnable, but they spend a lot of time and effort on the default skin because they want the app to look good out of the box. Even Winamp, which once came with a dead simple default skin, these days ships with a fairly elaborate skin (not that I like it, but it shows where the market's headed) that shows off its newer capabilities like album-art, podcasting and ripping.
Interestingly, apps which *do* have dead-simple default looks, like Foobar2000, languish because most users want something that works out of the box.
The point is: if you have skins, fine. But don't think that gives you a free pass on developing a sensible default look, and spending time and money researching what that look should be, and QA'ing the hell out of it.
Hey, what's wrong with a PT Cruiser? It harks back to the classic hardtops of the 40s. Thanks to aerodynamic styling most sedans these days end up looking alike, and I for one am happy to see a distinctive design on the road.
I accept your point, although "Asian" includes several Indo-European languages, most of whom are gender-inflected (or did you mean "Asian" in the US sense, i.e., East Asian?).
In any case, learning Mandarin as a 2nd language to avoid the rigours of English orthography seems... misguided, because you've only traded one set of problems for a another, bigger set of problems.
Folk who learn other languages bust their nuts on noun gender and verb forms. English is pretty easy in that respect, at least at beginner level. So yeah, spelling it can be a little problematic, but given its other advantages I would say most ESL learners should count themselves lucky.
Native English speakers are also remarkably tolerant of bad spelling, esp when you tell them you're learning. At work (an American+British firm) people email with abominable spelling all the time (including senior folk) and no one has a problem (ever since the "phonics" fad caught on in the UK spelling's gone to the dogs anyway).
So if you're a second language speaker struggling with spelling - do what I did when I was in school -- buy a dead-tree pocket dictionary and use it when unsure. Read a lot (at least a *non-tabloid* newspaper. at least online if not on paper.). Use a online dictionary that pronounces words for you. Talk/skype to people in English. Remember: learning any language is a lot harder when you have no one to practice with.
Those complaining about having to see Idle stories in the RSS feed, use Yahoo Pipes (or write your own script, this is a geek site after all) and filter out any RSS item that contains "<slash:section>idle</slash:section>". Processing XML isn't exactly rocket science. Doing it using Yahoo Pipes is probably best, they'll host a synthesized feed for you that other Idle-haters can mooch off.
But officials said the previously unacknowledged devices have become a powerful part of the American arsenal, allowing the tracking of human targets even when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras.... the systems have significantly speeded up decisions on when to strike. The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator's lens of confirming a target's identity and precise location.
A military official familiar with the systems said they had a profound effect, both militarily and psychologically, on the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq.
"It is like they are living with a red dot on their head,"... "With the quietness of the Predator, you never knew when a Hellfire [missile] would come through your window."
Hmm, using heat signatures to detect persons within buildings is old hat. Any slashdotters care to comment on how one could, even theoretically, see within buildings and identify targets with any degree of precision?
Because the NPT says only the US, Russia, China, France and the UK are allowed to have nuclear weapons. Everyone else can commit to *not* building nukes, and get nuclear tech for civilian use in the bargain (N Korea signed the treaty but reneged and pulled out).
Indian leaders from the 1960s have never accepted this "discrimination" as they see it -- especially after China invaded India in 1961.
China, India and Pakistan are large, populous countries. Invading them isn't as easy as you think (with India and China, even airstrikes will need to cover a lot of surface area).
India has a declared nuclear no-first-use policy and is in the process of developing a nuclear doctrine based on "credible minimum deterrence." In August 1999, the Indian government released a draft of the doctrine which asserts that nuclear weapons are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of "retaliation only." The document also maintains that India "will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail" and that decisions to authorize the use of nuclear weapons would be made by the Prime Minister or his 'designated successor(s).'" According to the NRDC, despite the escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan in 2001-2002, India remains committed to its nuclear no-first-use policy.
And by the way, that "consenting to international oversight of nuclear facilities" that you so helpfully bolded only applies to facilities of their own choosing...
Right now 0 of their reactors are under international supervision. After this deal about half of all their reactors will come under international supervision, and ALL of the reactors that'll use international uranium in the future will come under international supervision.
Condi Rice isn't joking when she says this is a good deal for the international community. It's definitely better than the situation now.
The problem with Thorium is that it's a decade or two away from commercial use. India needs power NOW. And oh, they aren't mothballing their Thorium programme -- if anything progress has been good.
> Its wrong to say that caste is a purely Hindu system. In India, even Christians and Muslims have castes.
Good point! Although I suspect that underdeveloped Muslim/Christian folk tend to organize into "castes" because that gives them a chance to get on board the quotas gravy train.
But yeah, for anyone who thinks Muslims/Christians are monolithic communities -- check the the numerous sects Muslims and Christians have formed in the Middle East. Or Europe. Or America.
I think there's a lot of misinformation about caste in India, but honestly I don't know of any good internet resources to get a good idea about it. (Wikipedia's article on this is just not good enough imho).
> There is a difference between passing equality laws and > ENFORCING equality laws. India does not do the latter.
Please clarify what you mean about enforcing laws. I think you need to get a reality check about how efficient legal systems are. In large countries, lots of poor people often fall through the cracks -- the way to fix this is legal aid, social outreach programmes and political organization -- ALL of which are done in India.
As a matter of fact, the laws are enforced as well. The problem is that India is a big, poor country and enforcement -- especially in poor rural areas -- is not as good as it should be. It is getting better thanks to a fiercely independent media and greater rights-awareness among the discriminated castes. Is it perfect? No. Is nothing being done? Also no.
But yeah, by your logic almost every country in Europe and America is racist country -- because Google will turn up lots of hits for white supremacist/neo-nazi incidents occurring in ALL of them -- and not all the culprits are punished.
Caste-based discrimination has been illegal and enshrined in the law ever since India became an independent country. Most of the political discussion over caste these days is over how much affirmative action should be provided to historically discriminated caste (the thumb rule as I understand it is that quotas for historically-discriminated-against castes cannot be greater than 50%, many folk want to raise this limit). These castes today have more political power than at any time in Indian history, thanks to democracy and aggressive leaders who look out for their interests. In short, yes, caste has been a reality in India for thousands of years but they've been working very hard to fix it.
And secularism (freedom of religion) is enshrined in the Indian constitution -- when you're the birthplace of 4 major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), and have historically large Muslim and Christian populations, there's really no way things could be different.
Yeah, India is messy. No, they can't do "image management" like the Chinese can. But what India is today -- remembering that 60 years ago it was written off as a basket-case that couldn't feed itself -- is a bloody miracle.
Exactly. And with Google's Chrome where tabs are actually isolated across processes, Firefox's crash-one-tab-crash-all is looking a little old-fashioned.
Also, I'm currently running IE8 Beta 2 with 10 tabs across 3 windows -- task manager** reports 25840K Mem usage and 16 threads (peak mem 25952K, VM 16948K). So I'm not sure I buy this IE8-is-a-hog argument, if anything IE8 Beta 2 has been a pleasure to use.
**I know task manager's reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but it usually over (not under) estimates.
Quit being so judgemental. How sentient creatures choose to lead their lives has no bearing with how smart they are. As it happens, members of homo sapiens has been able to lead useful productive lives despite not having too much upstairs, so to speak.
> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?
Firefox already understands RSS feeds. Podcasts are RSS feeds with a <media> element. All Firefox has to do is queue up all files mentioned in the media element using its download manager, and provide a bit of UI to manage/play the media.
That said, just because Firefox *can* do this doesn't mean it *should*. To do this properly and not in a half-assed way, Firefox would have to essentially turn into Songbird (or iTunes) and bundle its own codecs etc. And that'd just bloat the browser.
As long as Firefox depends on third party apps to play the media, this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
Um, advanced societies (just like less-advanced societies) have plenty of sex. The only difference they know a lot more about birth control (and are more accepting of the idea) than less-advanced societies.
Browser-based OS? How about Inferno, open source since 2005, from the guys who brought you Unix. They even had an ActiveX plugin available back in the day.
You can actually install AVG 8 without the 'Safe Search' feature that crawls websites (it's essentially a BHO/Firefox extension). Even if you already have AVG 8, you can uninstall it and reinstall:
At a Command Prompt window, type c:\downloads\avg_free_stf_xxxxxxxxxx.exe/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
where c:\downloads\avg_free_stf_xxxxxxxxxx.exe is the full path of your AVG 8 installer.
It's astonishing how tripe like this continues to get modded up on Slashdot. First, modern 32-bit preemptive OSs don't do "TSRs". Secondly, Office hasn't had a startup helper since Office 2003. (OSA.EXE is still there but individual Office apps run it when they need to).
Also, it's pretty pathetic to see the TSR excuse trotted out to defend OO.o's slowness -- it's pretty much the same excuses we heard when Seamonkey came out, i.e., ooh, Microsoft uses "s3kr3t" tricks to make IE faster. Today, Firefox starts pretty fast, thanks to extensive tuning and optimisation and no-one needs that excuse any more. What the OO.o guys should do is take a page from Mozilla.com's book and improve their own engineering.
> It's still not fancy but it's a great workhorse, gets the > job done, and is free.
When I need something that's not fancy and is free, I'll use Google Docs, thank you very much. Or (for offline) Abiword. Simply saying "try OO.o because it's not MSO" isn't helpful. Note that this is exactly like Seamonkey/Firefox: Seamonkey didn't get wide adoption because it was slow and unwieldly. Firefox gave users the same engine in a slimmer browser, and surprise surprise, it became very popular.
Slashdot Mirror
> Make your app skinnable. You'll never please everyone otherwise.
For most commercial software, you don't have to. You just have to make enough people happy with the way your app looks. Believe it or not, it can be done, e.g.: iTunes, OSX, Office 2007.
The idea of developing a dead-simple default look and letting "the community" come up with a skin mostly never works because the community can't devote as much time to QA (i18n, l10n, accessibility, as is necessary for a top-flight app). Example: Firefox -- they're skinnable, but they spend a lot of time and effort on the default skin because they want the app to look good out of the box. Even Winamp, which once came with a dead simple default skin, these days ships with a fairly elaborate skin (not that I like it, but it shows where the market's headed) that shows off its newer capabilities like album-art, podcasting and ripping.
Interestingly, apps which *do* have dead-simple default looks, like Foobar2000, languish because most users want something that works out of the box.
The point is: if you have skins, fine. But don't think that gives you a free pass on developing a sensible default look, and spending time and money researching what that look should be, and QA'ing the hell out of it.
> when coupled with mxmlc or mtasc you have everything you need to develop swfs in eclipse.
Dude, you probably have some keys stuck on your keyboard or something :-)
Hey, what's wrong with a PT Cruiser? It harks back to the classic hardtops of the 40s. Thanks to aerodynamic styling most sedans these days end up looking alike, and I for one am happy to see a distinctive design on the road.
I accept your point, although "Asian" includes several Indo-European languages, most of whom are gender-inflected (or did you mean "Asian" in the US sense, i.e., East Asian?).
In any case, learning Mandarin as a 2nd language to avoid the rigours of English orthography seems ... misguided, because you've only traded one set of problems for a another, bigger set of problems.
Folk who learn other languages bust their nuts on noun gender and verb forms. English is pretty easy in that respect, at least at beginner level. So yeah, spelling it can be a little problematic, but given its other advantages I would say most ESL learners should count themselves lucky.
Native English speakers are also remarkably tolerant of bad spelling, esp when you tell them you're learning. At work (an American+British firm) people email with abominable spelling all the time (including senior folk) and no one has a problem (ever since the "phonics" fad caught on in the UK spelling's gone to the dogs anyway).
So if you're a second language speaker struggling with spelling - do what I did when I was in school -- buy a dead-tree pocket dictionary and use it when unsure. Read a lot (at least a *non-tabloid* newspaper. at least online if not on paper.). Use a online dictionary that pronounces words for you. Talk/skype to people in English. Remember: learning any language is a lot harder when you have no one to practice with.
Those complaining about having to see Idle stories in the RSS feed, use Yahoo Pipes (or write your own script, this is a geek site after all) and filter out any RSS item that contains "<slash:section>idle</slash:section>". Processing XML isn't exactly rocket science. Doing it using Yahoo Pipes is probably best, they'll host a synthesized feed for you that other Idle-haters can mooch off.
Ah, this PDF pointed to by Bruce Schneier is very interesting:
Continuous Tagging Tracking Locating
Key bit from TFA:
Hmm, using heat signatures to detect persons within buildings is old hat. Any slashdotters care to comment on how one could, even theoretically, see within buildings and identify targets with any degree of precision?
Because the NPT says only the US, Russia, China, France and the UK are allowed to have nuclear weapons. Everyone else can commit to *not* building nukes, and get nuclear tech for civilian use in the bargain (N Korea signed the treaty but reneged and pulled out).
Indian leaders from the 1960s have never accepted this "discrimination" as they see it -- especially after China invaded India in 1961.
China, India and Pakistan are large, populous countries. Invading them isn't as easy as you think (with India and China, even airstrikes will need to cover a lot of surface area).
Re India's first strike policy:
Right now 0 of their reactors are under international supervision. After this deal about half of all their reactors will come under international supervision, and ALL of the reactors that'll use international uranium in the future will come under international supervision.
Condi Rice isn't joking when she says this is a good deal for the international community. It's definitely better than the situation now.
This is more insightful than half the mindbendingly ignorant rants I have to read on /.
The problem with Thorium is that it's a decade or two away from commercial use. India needs power NOW. And oh, they aren't mothballing their Thorium programme -- if anything progress has been good.
> Its wrong to say that caste is a purely Hindu system. In India, even Christians and Muslims have castes.
Good point! Although I suspect that underdeveloped Muslim/Christian folk tend to organize into "castes" because that gives them a chance to get on board the quotas gravy train.
But yeah, for anyone who thinks Muslims/Christians are monolithic communities -- check the the numerous sects Muslims and Christians have formed in the Middle East. Or Europe. Or America.
I think there's a lot of misinformation about caste in India, but honestly I don't know of any good internet resources to get a good idea about it. (Wikipedia's article on this is just not good enough imho).
> There is a difference between passing equality laws and
> ENFORCING equality laws. India does not do the latter.
Please clarify what you mean about enforcing laws. I think you need to get a reality check about how efficient legal systems are. In large countries, lots of poor people often fall through the cracks -- the way to fix this is legal aid, social outreach programmes and political organization -- ALL of which are done in India.
As a matter of fact, the laws are enforced as well. The problem is that India is a big, poor country and enforcement -- especially in poor rural areas -- is not as good as it should be. It is getting better thanks to a fiercely independent media and greater rights-awareness among the discriminated castes. Is it perfect? No. Is nothing being done? Also no.
But yeah, by your logic almost every country in Europe and America is racist country -- because Google will turn up lots of hits for white supremacist/neo-nazi incidents occurring in ALL of them -- and not all the culprits are punished.
What a non-sequitur. And boneheadedly ignorant.
Caste-based discrimination has been illegal and enshrined in the law ever since India became an independent country. Most of the political discussion over caste these days is over how much affirmative action should be provided to historically discriminated caste (the thumb rule as I understand it is that quotas for historically-discriminated-against castes cannot be greater than 50%, many folk want to raise this limit). These castes today have more political power than at any time in Indian history, thanks to democracy and aggressive leaders who look out for their interests. In short, yes, caste has been a reality in India for thousands of years but they've been working very hard to fix it.
And secularism (freedom of religion) is enshrined in the Indian constitution -- when you're the birthplace of 4 major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), and have historically large Muslim and Christian populations, there's really no way things could be different.
Yeah, India is messy. No, they can't do "image management" like the Chinese can. But what India is today -- remembering that 60 years ago it was written off as a basket-case that couldn't feed itself -- is a bloody miracle.
Exactly. And with Google's Chrome where tabs are actually isolated across processes, Firefox's crash-one-tab-crash-all is looking a little old-fashioned.
Also, I'm currently running IE8 Beta 2 with 10 tabs across 3 windows -- task manager** reports 25840K Mem usage and 16 threads (peak mem 25952K, VM 16948K). So I'm not sure I buy this IE8-is-a-hog argument, if anything IE8 Beta 2 has been a pleasure to use.
**I know task manager's reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but it usually over (not under) estimates.
Quit being so judgemental. How sentient creatures choose to lead their lives has no bearing with how smart they are. As it happens, members of homo sapiens has been able to lead useful productive lives despite not having too much upstairs, so to speak.
> How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?
Firefox already understands RSS feeds. Podcasts are RSS feeds with a <media> element. All Firefox has to do is queue up all files mentioned in the media element using its download manager, and provide a bit of UI to manage/play the media.
That said, just because Firefox *can* do this doesn't mean it *should*. To do this properly and not in a half-assed way, Firefox would have to essentially turn into Songbird (or iTunes) and bundle its own codecs etc. And that'd just bloat the browser.
As long as Firefox depends on third party apps to play the media, this sort of functionality is best handled by an extension. There's probably one out there already.
D'oh. Totally misread your parent comment. Sorry about that.
Um, advanced societies (just like less-advanced societies) have plenty of sex. The only difference they know a lot more about birth control (and are more accepting of the idea) than less-advanced societies.
Browser-based OS? How about Inferno, open source since 2005, from the guys who brought you Unix. They even had an ActiveX plugin available back in the day.
> if you don't mind a tray icon that says "warning, something is horribly wrong!"
Using the command line above avoids this.
You can actually install AVG 8 without the 'Safe Search' feature that crawls websites (it's essentially a BHO/Firefox extension). Even if you already have AVG 8, you can uninstall it and reinstall:
At a Command Prompt window, type /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
c:\downloads\avg_free_stf_xxxxxxxxxx.exe
where c:\downloads\avg_free_stf_xxxxxxxxxx.exe is the full path of your AVG 8 installer.
It's astonishing how tripe like this continues to get modded up on Slashdot. First, modern 32-bit preemptive OSs don't do "TSRs". Secondly, Office hasn't had a startup helper since Office 2003. (OSA.EXE is still there but individual Office apps run it when they need to).
Also, it's pretty pathetic to see the TSR excuse trotted out to defend OO.o's slowness -- it's pretty much the same excuses we heard when Seamonkey came out, i.e., ooh, Microsoft uses "s3kr3t" tricks to make IE faster. Today, Firefox starts pretty fast, thanks to extensive tuning and optimisation and no-one needs that excuse any more. What the OO.o guys should do is take a page from Mozilla.com's book and improve their own engineering.
> It's still not fancy but it's a great workhorse, gets the
> job done, and is free.
When I need something that's not fancy and is free, I'll use Google Docs, thank you very much. Or (for offline) Abiword. Simply saying "try OO.o because it's not MSO" isn't helpful. Note that this is exactly like Seamonkey/Firefox: Seamonkey didn't get wide adoption because it was slow and unwieldly. Firefox gave users the same engine in a slimmer browser, and surprise surprise, it became very popular.