Not at the moment, but it just occurred to me it'd be really cool if a couple of "organized accounts" were set up and managed some friends/foes lists that people could use as resources. For instance "REAL_TROLLS" could list all the interesting/clever trolls as its friends, "CRAPFLOOD_TROLLS" could list all the crapflooders/goatse posters as its friends etc... "FOES_OF_TROLLS" could list people like sheldonb whose only contribution is another list of "real" trolls... Hell, we could get totally recursive here. It would rock.
And what about the other 99 themes for Java that will be needed to fit in with all the X themes? And any other themes that may be introduced to Windows XP version 2? I'm not trying to be anti-Java here, i coded in it for over a year and enjoyed it, but please don't make out like Swing is going to solve all the cross-platform GUI development problems, because it just won't. (It would be nice if you read the rest of my post next time too, by the way.)
I wasn't aiming it at SWT, it was just a general comment about all cross-platform toolkits that use native widgets (note that using non-native widgets, a la Swing solves this problem). It's just something else to think about when you plan on developing a cross-platform GUI, and i thought it was pertinent to the discussion. The story poster needs to decide what's more important: that an application looks the same across each platform, or that an application "blends in" on each platform where it is deployed (knowing that it'll never look as good as it would've if it'd been coded for each platform specifically).
Dude, that guy is like one of the editors in disguise. I posted about it on the user-generated comments a few days ago. He seems to collect foes that score +5 by saying anything that isn't "LINUX R0X0RZZZ". I bet he's collecting names to just bitchslap in one big go. In the mean time it's cool to look up his foes and see what they're contributing, because it's usually pretty cool.
Here's the thing. So we have this fantabulous library that translates your widgets into native widgets. Now we want a Window to have a text box that is 80 chars wide, and below it a radio button with 2 choices. On one platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 150 pixels, so it looks damn good. On the other platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 100 pixels, so your radio buttons are left-aligned and it looks gay. So you center your radio buttons and it still looks gay. Then on another platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 200 pixels, so your text box is left-aligned and it looks gay. So you center you text box and it still looks gay. So you stretch your text box and then it's more than 80 characters and when the user types it wraps BEFORE the text gets to the edge of the text box and they call in complaining the app has bugs.
THESE ARE THE PROBLEMS, PEOPLE! It's all fine and dandy if you're using native widgets, but that doesn't count for anything if your widgets are different sized and/or shaped on different systems, because it'll screw up the whole layout of your app. There are very few real-world instances where the user interface design isn't explicitly tied to the underlying windowing system. Something is bound to look different or "wrong" if you design it cross-platform, and while that might not matter for an open source app, it matters Very Much when you're trying to sell a product.
Idiot. AWT uses native widgets. And Swing could be made to look practically identical to the native OS. It's all about how you draw the widgets and there's not much stopping Swing from getting it pixel perfect.
Except when you introduce "themes" a la 99% of X users or more and more Windows users (as XP is adopted). This renders Swing more or less useless if you want the application to blend in to the rest of the windowing system.
Additionally, Swing is still all tied up in The Way You Code It. We have an application that uses Swing but we have to force it to use the Metal/Steel/whatever-it's-called look-and-feel because we had expanded the widget set to do various other things that just Didn't Work when they were in the Windows look-and-feel. This is the reason why i coded it in AWT first, because it was supposed to run on Windows, but because Sun never fixed the bugs (i think there are still plenty in their bug database i entered that are still open or ignored) we had to convert to Swing... and now we have a weird-looking app for both Windows and X users.
One of the KEY problems in GUI development that i see is fonts. Fonts are fucked up and all different between the windowing systems, and this was precisely the reason why we needed to implement our own widgets in Java. The names of fonts are different, the sizes they are are different, the way they're rendered is different... Yuck. We ended up having to make a flakey, probably illegal font pack for Linux, made up out of MS fonts, just to use Linux as our development platform, and even then they didn't render exactly the same (especially when we needed a widget to be a specific fixed width). From what i understand, MacOS does it different all over again. This is even a problem in supposedly cross-platform HTML too. Fonts just suck.
I could go on forever about this, about how GTK applications look like shit under Windows (they don't "refresh" or "paint" properly for starters), most every client app written in Java that's more complex than a JDBC form looks weird under Windows, ugh. I think the original poster is conceptually correct in what he was saying. Unless MacOS, X and Windows all start using a common method to implement themes and font rendering, cross-platform GUI development is going to continue to be utter hell.
The problem with government-owned/funded stations like this is they become as much a clique as the commercial ones. Triple-J isn't too bad, but the local "community" stations are a joke - if you're not part of the in-crowd your stuff doesn't get played. This is one of the reasons i dislike college radio, community radio, etc etc. They're just as bad as commercial radio, but in reverse. Once you lose your "indie cred" (or if you aren't pretentious enough to build it up in the first place) you miss out.
I think it'd be a lot more interesting if they set it up like Red Hat's certification test - you get a really, really broken computer and you need to fix it. In the case of this it would be you get a really, really broken computer which still happens to be running TCP/IP, someone yells GO, then you need to get your webserver and mail server up before the bad dudes break in... I.e. both people start from 0 points and move up in real time, not someone starts with a 100 and it goes down.
To me the first "surprise" success that came out of Asia was Creative Labs (of SoundBlaster fame). I mean, sure, we all know Yamaha and Fuji and the rest, but Creative Labs was just a soundcard manufacter... Now their products run the gamut from digital cameras to MP3 players... and they own the two remaining American professional synthesizer companies - Ensoniq and E-mu. They have research labs in the States and "back home"... Mind-boggling, really.
Anyone who's hung out on the Analogue Heaven or Synth-DIY mailing lists has known about these kind of mods for years (i'm talking mid-90s and earlier here).
It is SO MUCH FUN to play with old sound-making gear and randomly bypass resistors and short chips just to see what will happen. I've broken one synth doing this randomly, after that i always bought schematics:-) But with schematics you can do All Sort Of Cool Shit. It doesn't really work with newer, "System On A Chip" kind of gear, but who cares - it's only the late 70s and early 80s stuff that you get at garage sales for $10 anyway. Even if you're not musical and just an EE head it's a ball to go in and connect shit up and make it go "wheeeeeee" "waaaarrgggghhhh" "w00t".
I'm sure some people could draw a vague parallel with protecting your home using lethal force here... but i don't buy it. I certainly believe if a hacker is inside your system you have every right to st0mp his ass out of there by whatever means necessary, but if your neighbor is coming round ten times a day knocking on your door you call the cops and get a restraining order taken out - you don't go over there and shoot him.
I don't think it's ever right to trespass, whether it's for the "common good" or not. If it's not yours, stay clear. If a worm is hammering your system, call the offending ISP. If they don't reply call their upstream provider. If they don't reply call your ISP and tell them to block it before it gets to you. If they don't reply - tough shit, get a new ISP. It's the same thing as the spam blacklists - ISPs will never learn to provide better service if people don't start voting with their wallets.
tar zxvf win32xp-i386.tar.gz
cd win32xp ./configure --prefix=/opt/windows
$ make make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop. $ make install make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop. $ ls COPYING $ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 anonymou hack 94759275 Jan 15 19:33 COPYING
Just out of curiousity, does Google really do business overseas? Do they operate Australian and British and Canadian etc subsidiaries? It's one thing to purchase or sell products (B2B) overseas, but i would think that you would need a physical presence in the country to be prosecuted for anything in that country (though i don't know for sure).
I understand getting tired of people here, but you gotta know that's your problem and not theirs. People have a right to post their opinion here. A lot of people know by posting "anti" opinions they get the opportunity to be "modded up" - it's just a game to them, and there's nothing you can do. Upping your threshold doesn't really help because trolls get modded up and a lot of good comments come too late to be modded at all. I read at 0 and just zoom down my scrollwheel until something catches my attention that looks interesting.
I don't think there's really a solution other than to move on. Either put up with it here, or go somewhere else where the conversation is more intelligent. Unfortunately i'm not sure many other sites online have this kind of feel to them. OpenBSD Journal can be nice, but a lot of foul-mouthed children have turned up recently. kuro5hin used to be okay, but in my eyes it's gotten way too clique-y and faux intellectual for me. A friend of mine loves InfoAnarchy but that's very specific to "Your Rights Online" kind of posts. I don't know, i don't have any solutions. For the time being i pop in here every day or two and see what's going on. Whatever, you know? It's just a website.
Because this is a linux-centric/Free Software/Open Source Website. That's why we care.
No, no it's not and what bothers me is people who think it is. Certainly, it's a part of OSDN, but it's not a Linux members-only club. From the FAQ:
Slashdot is many things to many people. Some people think it's a Linux site. To others, it's a geek hangout. I've always worked very hard to make sure that Slashdot matches up with my interests and the interests of my authors.
In other words, it's whatever the hell CmdrTaco, the editors and the story submitters feel like it should be on the day. I don't agree with the initial poster who was like "big wow", but i don't agree with you either. Yeah often a lot of the "LINUX RUNS ON TOASTER X" stories don't thrill me in the slightest, i ain't bitching, but remember we're out there.
I code in Linux every day for work, but when i go home i use Windows. I buy my CDs and loathe MP3s and pirated music. I watch wrestling. Most anime bores me. I'm not the only one. Big deal, you know? We're all people who read Slashdot, and whatever it is it's gotta be something cool because we keep coming back. (Since late 99 for me.)
I can assure you we can still browse porn here:-) I think the Australian laws are more of a token effort to stamp out child porn and other types of extreme porn that aren't legal in any media here. The thing is, these laws are targeted at the ISPs specifically - the way it SHOULD be. It's not Google's responsibility to ensure it's following the laws of a country that it doesn't do business in.
Sorry for the super-long delay in replying (going by Slashdot time), i was offline.
The point is that some content is changing. It might not seem like a big deal now, but what happens when the search results change depending on your country? How would Australian users know any better if that's the only site they can reach? I thought one of the amazing things about the internet was that people from all over the world could access information from all over the world. If i wanted to look at local information i'd just go to the bulletin board (not BBS) at the public library.
Additionally, as another poster mentioned, certain countries do have laws banning users from browsing certain sites... but that's the country's problem, not Google's! The country should set up a "Great Firewall" a la China, not the portals (who are for the most part governed by US law). Google have no obligation to fix that, and on the contrary, i think by attempting to do so they're going to lose users.
I totally agree. In fact, i just wrote about this exact thing back here. To "turn it off" you have to either accept cookies and explicitly change your language to English in the preferences (yay, cookies, FEEL MY JOY!@~#) or you have to go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/. It sucks and i hate it.
3. Google loads quickly and does not attempt to invasively control your machine with javascript or other methods.
This is not true, as many Canadian users have known for a while and many Australian users such as myself have just discovered. Google now redirects the front page (www.google.com) to a country-specific front page based on your IP address. Sure, it's a nice service to have local information available (the paid advertisements down the side change to local advertisements, amongst other things), but it really sucks that you're forced to use it. Most users don't know to change their bookmark to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ to return to the "real" Google, so they're stuck with it. This was the number one reason why i changed from Alta Vista to Google in the first place, and now i'm really wondering whether i should stick with it. raging.com is Alta Vista's minimal search, and it's just as fast and sleek as google, AND it doesn't assume just because you come from 203.x.x.whatever you're automatically interested in Australian content.
I think one of the key things Google had going for it from the start was a funky, easy-to-say name. The marketing guys thought up a wonder there. Probably the only reason it has become "verbified" is because it's the only damn search engine that's easy to say. Remember when Alta Vista was the shiznit? Anyone ever try to say "i'm gonna altavistararaaadiddlyah some page"? It just doesn't work.
Dude, "Beastmaster" and the like were fucking cool! SWORDS! BREASTS! MONSTERS! HOOTERS! I'm telling you man, that shit was better than the tentacle-reaming anime the kids are watching these days.
Or maybe people have learned and they don't care? Some people don't care about Changing The World, some people don't want to "get personal".
Why does it matter that the companies/government agencies in the California lawsuit all agreed on receiving a settlement? They don't have an obligation to "kill Microsoft", and probably not much of a desire to either. If you, personally, are upset about it, and you know enough other people who are too, then start your own lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at the moment, but it just occurred to me it'd be really cool if a couple of "organized accounts" were set up and managed some friends/foes lists that people could use as resources. For instance "REAL_TROLLS" could list all the interesting/clever trolls as its friends, "CRAPFLOOD_TROLLS" could list all the crapflooders/goatse posters as its friends etc... "FOES_OF_TROLLS" could list people like sheldonb whose only contribution is another list of "real" trolls... Hell, we could get totally recursive here. It would rock.
And what about the other 99 themes for Java that will be needed to fit in with all the X themes? And any other themes that may be introduced to Windows XP version 2? I'm not trying to be anti-Java here, i coded in it for over a year and enjoyed it, but please don't make out like Swing is going to solve all the cross-platform GUI development problems, because it just won't. (It would be nice if you read the rest of my post next time too, by the way.)
I wasn't aiming it at SWT, it was just a general comment about all cross-platform toolkits that use native widgets (note that using non-native widgets, a la Swing solves this problem). It's just something else to think about when you plan on developing a cross-platform GUI, and i thought it was pertinent to the discussion. The story poster needs to decide what's more important: that an application looks the same across each platform, or that an application "blends in" on each platform where it is deployed (knowing that it'll never look as good as it would've if it'd been coded for each platform specifically).
Dude, that guy is like one of the editors in disguise. I posted about it on the user-generated comments a few days ago. He seems to collect foes that score +5 by saying anything that isn't "LINUX R0X0RZZZ". I bet he's collecting names to just bitchslap in one big go. In the mean time it's cool to look up his foes and see what they're contributing, because it's usually pretty cool.
Here's the thing. So we have this fantabulous library that translates your widgets into native widgets. Now we want a Window to have a text box that is 80 chars wide, and below it a radio button with 2 choices. On one platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 150 pixels, so it looks damn good. On the other platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 100 pixels, so your radio buttons are left-aligned and it looks gay. So you center your radio buttons and it still looks gay. Then on another platform your text box is 300 pixels and one radio button choice is 200 pixels, so your text box is left-aligned and it looks gay. So you center you text box and it still looks gay. So you stretch your text box and then it's more than 80 characters and when the user types it wraps BEFORE the text gets to the edge of the text box and they call in complaining the app has bugs.
THESE ARE THE PROBLEMS, PEOPLE! It's all fine and dandy if you're using native widgets, but that doesn't count for anything if your widgets are different sized and/or shaped on different systems, because it'll screw up the whole layout of your app. There are very few real-world instances where the user interface design isn't explicitly tied to the underlying windowing system. Something is bound to look different or "wrong" if you design it cross-platform, and while that might not matter for an open source app, it matters Very Much when you're trying to sell a product.
Except when you introduce "themes" a la 99% of X users or more and more Windows users (as XP is adopted). This renders Swing more or less useless if you want the application to blend in to the rest of the windowing system.
Additionally, Swing is still all tied up in The Way You Code It. We have an application that uses Swing but we have to force it to use the Metal/Steel/whatever-it's-called look-and-feel because we had expanded the widget set to do various other things that just Didn't Work when they were in the Windows look-and-feel. This is the reason why i coded it in AWT first, because it was supposed to run on Windows, but because Sun never fixed the bugs (i think there are still plenty in their bug database i entered that are still open or ignored) we had to convert to Swing... and now we have a weird-looking app for both Windows and X users.
One of the KEY problems in GUI development that i see is fonts. Fonts are fucked up and all different between the windowing systems, and this was precisely the reason why we needed to implement our own widgets in Java. The names of fonts are different, the sizes they are are different, the way they're rendered is different... Yuck. We ended up having to make a flakey, probably illegal font pack for Linux, made up out of MS fonts, just to use Linux as our development platform, and even then they didn't render exactly the same (especially when we needed a widget to be a specific fixed width). From what i understand, MacOS does it different all over again. This is even a problem in supposedly cross-platform HTML too. Fonts just suck.
I could go on forever about this, about how GTK applications look like shit under Windows (they don't "refresh" or "paint" properly for starters), most every client app written in Java that's more complex than a JDBC form looks weird under Windows, ugh. I think the original poster is conceptually correct in what he was saying. Unless MacOS, X and Windows all start using a common method to implement themes and font rendering, cross-platform GUI development is going to continue to be utter hell.
The problem with government-owned/funded stations like this is they become as much a clique as the commercial ones. Triple-J isn't too bad, but the local "community" stations are a joke - if you're not part of the in-crowd your stuff doesn't get played. This is one of the reasons i dislike college radio, community radio, etc etc. They're just as bad as commercial radio, but in reverse. Once you lose your "indie cred" (or if you aren't pretentious enough to build it up in the first place) you miss out.
I think it'd be a lot more interesting if they set it up like Red Hat's certification test - you get a really, really broken computer and you need to fix it. In the case of this it would be you get a really, really broken computer which still happens to be running TCP/IP, someone yells GO, then you need to get your webserver and mail server up before the bad dudes break in... I.e. both people start from 0 points and move up in real time, not someone starts with a 100 and it goes down.
To me the first "surprise" success that came out of Asia was Creative Labs (of SoundBlaster fame). I mean, sure, we all know Yamaha and Fuji and the rest, but Creative Labs was just a soundcard manufacter... Now their products run the gamut from digital cameras to MP3 players... and they own the two remaining American professional synthesizer companies - Ensoniq and E-mu. They have research labs in the States and "back home"... Mind-boggling, really.
Yeah, i mean, just imagine a beowulf cl... err never mind.
Fatality?
Anyone who's hung out on the Analogue Heaven or Synth-DIY mailing lists has known about these kind of mods for years (i'm talking mid-90s and earlier here).
It is SO MUCH FUN to play with old sound-making gear and randomly bypass resistors and short chips just to see what will happen. I've broken one synth doing this randomly, after that i always bought schematics :-) But with schematics you can do All Sort Of Cool Shit. It doesn't really work with newer, "System On A Chip" kind of gear, but who cares - it's only the late 70s and early 80s stuff that you get at garage sales for $10 anyway. Even if you're not musical and just an EE head it's a ball to go in and connect shit up and make it go "wheeeeeee" "waaaarrgggghhhh" "w00t".
I'm sure some people could draw a vague parallel with protecting your home using lethal force here... but i don't buy it. I certainly believe if a hacker is inside your system you have every right to st0mp his ass out of there by whatever means necessary, but if your neighbor is coming round ten times a day knocking on your door you call the cops and get a restraining order taken out - you don't go over there and shoot him.
I don't think it's ever right to trespass, whether it's for the "common good" or not. If it's not yours, stay clear. If a worm is hammering your system, call the offending ISP. If they don't reply call their upstream provider. If they don't reply call your ISP and tell them to block it before it gets to you. If they don't reply - tough shit, get a new ISP. It's the same thing as the spam blacklists - ISPs will never learn to provide better service if people don't start voting with their wallets.
Hmm...
Hmm. Sounds like Europe :-)
I prefer self-governing too :)
Just out of curiousity, does Google really do business overseas? Do they operate Australian and British and Canadian etc subsidiaries? It's one thing to purchase or sell products (B2B) overseas, but i would think that you would need a physical presence in the country to be prosecuted for anything in that country (though i don't know for sure).
I understand getting tired of people here, but you gotta know that's your problem and not theirs. People have a right to post their opinion here. A lot of people know by posting "anti" opinions they get the opportunity to be "modded up" - it's just a game to them, and there's nothing you can do. Upping your threshold doesn't really help because trolls get modded up and a lot of good comments come too late to be modded at all. I read at 0 and just zoom down my scrollwheel until something catches my attention that looks interesting.
I don't think there's really a solution other than to move on. Either put up with it here, or go somewhere else where the conversation is more intelligent. Unfortunately i'm not sure many other sites online have this kind of feel to them. OpenBSD Journal can be nice, but a lot of foul-mouthed children have turned up recently. kuro5hin used to be okay, but in my eyes it's gotten way too clique-y and faux intellectual for me. A friend of mine loves InfoAnarchy but that's very specific to "Your Rights Online" kind of posts. I don't know, i don't have any solutions. For the time being i pop in here every day or two and see what's going on. Whatever, you know? It's just a website.
No, no it's not and what bothers me is people who think it is. Certainly, it's a part of OSDN, but it's not a Linux members-only club. From the FAQ:
Slashdot is many things to many people. Some people think it's a Linux site. To others, it's a geek hangout. I've always worked very hard to make sure that Slashdot matches up with my interests and the interests of my authors.
In other words, it's whatever the hell CmdrTaco, the editors and the story submitters feel like it should be on the day. I don't agree with the initial poster who was like "big wow", but i don't agree with you either. Yeah often a lot of the "LINUX RUNS ON TOASTER X" stories don't thrill me in the slightest, i ain't bitching, but remember we're out there.
I code in Linux every day for work, but when i go home i use Windows. I buy my CDs and loathe MP3s and pirated music. I watch wrestling. Most anime bores me. I'm not the only one. Big deal, you know? We're all people who read Slashdot, and whatever it is it's gotta be something cool because we keep coming back. (Since late 99 for me.)
I can assure you we can still browse porn here :-) I think the Australian laws are more of a token effort to stamp out child porn and other types of extreme porn that aren't legal in any media here. The thing is, these laws are targeted at the ISPs specifically - the way it SHOULD be. It's not Google's responsibility to ensure it's following the laws of a country that it doesn't do business in.
Sorry for the super-long delay in replying (going by Slashdot time), i was offline.
The point is that some content is changing. It might not seem like a big deal now, but what happens when the search results change depending on your country? How would Australian users know any better if that's the only site they can reach? I thought one of the amazing things about the internet was that people from all over the world could access information from all over the world. If i wanted to look at local information i'd just go to the bulletin board (not BBS) at the public library.
Additionally, as another poster mentioned, certain countries do have laws banning users from browsing certain sites... but that's the country's problem, not Google's! The country should set up a "Great Firewall" a la China, not the portals (who are for the most part governed by US law). Google have no obligation to fix that, and on the contrary, i think by attempting to do so they're going to lose users.
I totally agree. In fact, i just wrote about this exact thing back here. To "turn it off" you have to either accept cookies and explicitly change your language to English in the preferences (yay, cookies, FEEL MY JOY!@~#) or you have to go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/. It sucks and i hate it.
This is not true, as many Canadian users have known for a while and many Australian users such as myself have just discovered. Google now redirects the front page (www.google.com) to a country-specific front page based on your IP address. Sure, it's a nice service to have local information available (the paid advertisements down the side change to local advertisements, amongst other things), but it really sucks that you're forced to use it. Most users don't know to change their bookmark to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ to return to the "real" Google, so they're stuck with it. This was the number one reason why i changed from Alta Vista to Google in the first place, and now i'm really wondering whether i should stick with it. raging.com is Alta Vista's minimal search, and it's just as fast and sleek as google, AND it doesn't assume just because you come from 203.x.x.whatever you're automatically interested in Australian content.
I think one of the key things Google had going for it from the start was a funky, easy-to-say name. The marketing guys thought up a wonder there. Probably the only reason it has become "verbified" is because it's the only damn search engine that's easy to say. Remember when Alta Vista was the shiznit? Anyone ever try to say "i'm gonna altavistararaaadiddlyah some page"? It just doesn't work.
Dude, "Beastmaster" and the like were fucking cool! SWORDS! BREASTS! MONSTERS! HOOTERS! I'm telling you man, that shit was better than the tentacle-reaming anime the kids are watching these days.
Or maybe people have learned and they don't care? Some people don't care about Changing The World, some people don't want to "get personal".
Why does it matter that the companies/government agencies in the California lawsuit all agreed on receiving a settlement? They don't have an obligation to "kill Microsoft", and probably not much of a desire to either. If you, personally, are upset about it, and you know enough other people who are too, then start your own lawsuit.
It's cool dude, i've got a hangover so i'm not at my best either :-)