With regards to paradoxes, I see four possible scenarios:
It's not possible to change anything. When you're in the past, everything you do is the same as it happened last time, the only difference is this time you know who that lunatic that nobody listened to is (it's you).
Whenever you go back in time you create an parallel universe. What this means is that you can't really change anything in your own universe, you can just leave it and try to make a place that you do like. You screw up, you get somewhere even worse than before, but don't fret, the 'original' universe is still running its course. In this scenario, it seems likely to me that lots of naturally occuring subatomic particles travelling back in time have created gazillions of these universes, in which case what the hell difference does one more or less make?
It is entirely possible to "change" the past, and thus the present. In this universe the only stable timeline is one in which the time machine is never invented. "Eventually" it will stabilize on that. All the scare quotes are because they're describing notions which don't really make sense without a sense of meta-time.
It's not possible to make a time machine. Physics doesn't work that way. But don't worry, we're all travelling through time on our own okay anyways.
None of these cases really leave much room for time travel having much point, other than "I wanted to see what Yellowstone was like before it was overrun by tourists" (this doesn't work if other people think of this too).
Unless it coppies the CD covers too. And then prints them out A1 poster sized...
Sadly, it's very difficult to blow up CD liner notes that large, since they're only half-toned at 300 dpi or so. So, you're reducing them to like 40 dpi plus some extra half-toning artifacts. It's a crying shame.
Well, assuming that you absolutely must design a plugin system, lookin into some runtime aggregation systems (COM or CORBA depending on your platform and needs). That's basically with these techologies are for. (Well there are other uses as well, no flames on this please.)
Question: How many of you have worked on a project that's designed your own damned COM-like system?
It's not the actual 900K (iexplore.exe) or 500K (wmplayer.exe) exes that anyone cares about. The majority of what is Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player resides in reusable components. These exes are basically just user interfaces for instantiating, controlling, and configuring those components. When people are talking about removing Internet Explorer they're not talking about removing iexplore.exe. Doing that is about equivalent to setting your default browser to Netscape, which you already can do.
Well, let's see. The desktop has explorer integration (Active Desktop), the file explorer (and thus the file open dialog) CAN use explorer integration (view as web page), and, perhaps most difficult of all for MS to fix: Many 3rd party applications use explorer to embed web pages in their application (For instance: eDonkey2000, Quintissential CD, WinAmp, to enumerate the ones that I have installed that I am aweare use browser components directly. I am sure there are a lot lot more).
FWIW, Windows Media Player is the same way. Want to show video under windows? Most of the codecs and filter structure is basically windows media player. Certainly the EXE which draws a window and instantiates the published video stream objects isn't the problem. That's why it's easy for windows applications to show windows media files in their windows but not QuickTime or Real.
Boltz makes DVD and VHS shelves too. They also make LP shelves which I imagine would fit LD's fine. But since you only have 20 I guess that doesn't really matter.
I have over 800 cds (811 at the time of this posting). I use a 1 disc player in my office, a 1 disc player in my bedroom (plus another cd player in my alarm clock!), and a 5 disc changer downstairs in the living room, and a 1 disc player (well apex dvd player) in the kitchen. I do NOT use a 200 disc changer, because I hate them. I hate them because unless you actually want to store your music in them and never remove them, they're a huge pain in the ass. If you have more than 200 cds, they're not a viable option (you could get multiple changes are use S-Link or something to connect them, but $$$). If you have more than one listening location, they're not a viable option (centralized audio is not a solution in a house with roommates). If you listen in your car cd player, if you bring them into the office, if you like the liner notes & packaging,...
For actual storage, I use shelves. Boltz makes some truly great cd racks that hold about 600 jewel cases. Run out of room? You can expand it to 1200, though it takes up a fair amount of wall space in this configuration.
I have several pieces of furniture by these guys, and they're great. Sturdy, attractive, and their customer relations policies can't be beat - They've actually changed their product line because of someone I know's feedback. Their prices INCLUDE shipping and tax. And so on. They're not dirt cheap or anything, but they're worth more than what they cost. I don't work for them or anything, but they get the highest recommendation I have.
If you really are strapped for space, you could use those caselogic books, but they're a big pain if you want to keep your music sorted (with shelves with a little extra room, insertion is basically O(1) rather than O(n) ).
You haven't heard of Ambrosia? They're the good people that brought us Apeiron and Maelstrom. If you don't recognize those, then you need to put more skill points into Mac Gaming.
Never minding any possible semantic problems with your sig, you should switch all colons an double colons for that to represent a properly formed analogy.
If you're going to be using it through the CVS protocol, you might as well just use CVS - you're not exposing any new features or anything (such as filesystem integration, automatic dependency detection, atomic multi-file checkins, password encryption, whatever else that might prompt you to not use CVS's crappy protocol).
CVS works "good enough" for that most important step - from no version control to some. This is much more significant than the differences between bad version control and good version control. It's gratis, it's libre, so a lot of people use it.
DOS used to be universal too. Aren't you glad we've moved on?
On the other hand, I'm certainly not going to switch anything over to Vesta until it has been ported the OS I do my development under! Until then, I heartily recommend TortoiseCVS.
You mean, the same way that BeOS and MacOS did, by storing extra information?
On windows machines open source projects will use standard fopen and so on (I cannot imagine that MS would spurn so many developers by breaking that). If that open source project wants to take advantage of the new features which don't exist on every other OS, they will need platform specific code.
I don't know farther back than windows 3.1, but as early as that, a lot of apps shared DLLs. MacOS has always had the "everything for an app in its folder" philosophy, but I don't recall that ever being the case for Windows.
For something like a browser control, the arguments for code sharing are much stronger.
Adding 2 megs to every app that wants to render a web pages is dumb. The biggest problem with that is not total size on disk, but download time.
Upgradability. What happens in the unlikely event that a bug is uncovered in the relevant control? Do I need to download 15 patches from various vendors, all of whom got the patch from Microsoft, or can I just download it once from Microsoft directly? Let's say the bug is a severe security hole.. then which is better?
Consistency of user experience. Forcing vendors to distribute the browser control themselves encourages them to all use different ones - all of which will have slightly different UI semantics. If everything that does the same thing behaves the same, the system is easier to learn and to use.
You could say that. I chose not to. Double negatives have been prescribed against only by relatively recent grammarians who sought to make english conform to the same rules as symbolic logic (similar to how the rules against the split infinitive are based on an erroneous analogy between english and latin).
But the fact is that the double negative has a long, illustrious use, going back to the very beginnings of Modern English (Shakespeare) and beyond (Chaucer). The nuns teaching grammar may have relegated this construct to informal use, but it's still widely used and universally understood. I have no remose for having used it.
I go to that website and it says "Hey! We have an ActiveX control that's digitally signed by Microsoft Corp. Do you want to run it?" If I say yes, I am running local code just like if I opened a control panel. If I say no, nobody runs nothing.
Now, I could streamline the process a bit further by checking "Always trust content from Microsoft Corp", but I haven't checked that box ever. I always trust content from Microsoft Corp manually, rather than having my browser do it for me.
You're confusing HTTP and HTML. HTTP is a protocol that information is transfered through. Outlook doesn't even use HTTP. HTML is a format for marking up, formatting, and now adding scripting to data. This and MIME are where problems come in.
I don't know much about SOAP, but in.NET security is not written into each app, so much as being written into system call invocation. This IS reasonable.
It sounds like Adobe is actually doing some additions which amount to more than bells and whistles.
The first version of photoshop I ever used is 3.0. I don't know about versions previous to that. But since then, every release (4.0, 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0) have made significant improvements to Photoshop. Every version the font engine has gotten better (though the UI for it has been up and down). They've added automation and batch processing, multiple levels of undo with a reasonable interface, support for vector shapes (more than just paths), previewing various levels of compression, the Extract tool, layer effects, text effects, slices (the ability to partition up an image and automatically save various parts of it to different files), as well as increasing stuff like how much virtual memory photoshop can use.
To you they may be bells and whistles or bloat. To me they are features that I have found extremely useful on countless occasions.
If you compile code to a native level then it seems to be much more dificult to check for security.
Not really. Each.NET assembly (a module, rougly analogous to a.dll a.class or a.so) has a section which lists which external functions are imported. From there, you certainly can do access control on a finer scale from within the imported functions.
Well, 5-10% of the people ever born are still alive today. In other words humans have only demonstrated about a 92% death rate, not the 100% you imply. That means I've got a 1 in 12 chance of being immortal.
There's no sense in arguing with me, I'm clearly a master of statistics!
I am not taking both sides. That was the only comment I have posted in this thread. I believe that many shareholders in Vivendi Universal don't even know that Blizzard exists or that they own part of it. What I think is a likely scenario is that there is some high level management pressure on Blizzard for profitability, but that Blizzard itself is, for the most part, autonomous.
My point is not that a boycott cannot work (though in this case I do believe that) but that even if it does work, the shareholders won't be part of the equation.
Re:Pet Peeves/requests of an HCI designer
on
Computing Pet Peeves?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I want a progress bar, and I want it to be accurate
You can't always. Sorry. Your example illustrates why, even. MSIE doesn't know how long connecting to a web site and downloading a page is going to take. Neither does Netscape or Opera. that's why none of these have an accurate thermometer bar as a progress indicator. They do have a 'I'm still doing something' animation, though. Which is about as good as you're going to get for some tasks.
Given that significanlty more than 150K humans are being born every day, there's really no avoiding that, in the long run, many of those people will die.
A serious answer to your jokey question is that it wouldn't really. When galaxies 'collide' they mostly just pass through one another. Consider for a moment what percentage of a galaxy is actually matter (0% to a fairly large number of decimal places), and then this makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Does something like this even stand a chance of working?
That sort of thing is very very illegal.
Unless it coppies the CD covers too. And then prints them out A1 poster sized...
Sadly, it's very difficult to blow up CD liner notes that large, since they're only half-toned at 300 dpi or so. So, you're reducing them to like 40 dpi plus some extra half-toning artifacts. It's a crying shame.
Well, assuming that you absolutely must design a plugin system, lookin into some runtime aggregation systems (COM or CORBA depending on your platform and needs). That's basically with these techologies are for. (Well there are other uses as well, no flames on this please.)
Question: How many of you have worked on a project that's designed your own damned COM-like system?
It's not the actual 900K (iexplore.exe) or 500K (wmplayer.exe) exes that anyone cares about. The majority of what is Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player resides in reusable components. These exes are basically just user interfaces for instantiating, controlling, and configuring those components. When people are talking about removing Internet Explorer they're not talking about removing iexplore.exe. Doing that is about equivalent to setting your default browser to Netscape, which you already can do.
Well, let's see. The desktop has explorer integration (Active Desktop), the file explorer (and thus the file open dialog) CAN use explorer integration (view as web page), and, perhaps most difficult of all for MS to fix: Many 3rd party applications use explorer to embed web pages in their application (For instance: eDonkey2000, Quintissential CD, WinAmp, to enumerate the ones that I have installed that I am aweare use browser components directly. I am sure there are a lot lot more).
FWIW, Windows Media Player is the same way. Want to show video under windows? Most of the codecs and filter structure is basically windows media player. Certainly the EXE which draws a window and instantiates the published video stream objects isn't the problem. That's why it's easy for windows applications to show windows media files in their windows but not QuickTime or Real.
Boltz makes DVD and VHS shelves too. They also make LP shelves which I imagine would fit LD's fine. But since you only have 20 I guess that doesn't really matter.
I have over 800 cds (811 at the time of this posting). I use a 1 disc player in my office, a 1 disc player in my bedroom (plus another cd player in my alarm clock!), and a 5 disc changer downstairs in the living room, and a 1 disc player (well apex dvd player) in the kitchen. I do NOT use a 200 disc changer, because I hate them. I hate them because unless you actually want to store your music in them and never remove them, they're a huge pain in the ass. If you have more than 200 cds, they're not a viable option (you could get multiple changes are use S-Link or something to connect them, but $$$). If you have more than one listening location, they're not a viable option (centralized audio is not a solution in a house with roommates). If you listen in your car cd player, if you bring them into the office, if you like the liner notes & packaging, ...
For actual storage, I use shelves. Boltz makes some truly great cd racks that hold about 600 jewel cases. Run out of room? You can expand it to 1200, though it takes up a fair amount of wall space in this configuration.
I have several pieces of furniture by these guys, and they're great. Sturdy, attractive, and their customer relations policies can't be beat - They've actually changed their product line because of someone I know's feedback. Their prices INCLUDE shipping and tax. And so on. They're not dirt cheap or anything, but they're worth more than what they cost. I don't work for them or anything, but they get the highest recommendation I have.
If you really are strapped for space, you could use those caselogic books, but they're a big pain if you want to keep your music sorted (with shelves with a little extra room, insertion is basically O(1) rather than O(n) ).
You haven't heard of Ambrosia? They're the good people that brought us Apeiron and Maelstrom. If you don't recognize those, then you need to put more skill points into Mac Gaming.
Never minding any possible semantic problems with your sig, you should switch all colons an double colons for that to represent a properly formed analogy.
If you're going to be using it through the CVS protocol, you might as well just use CVS - you're not exposing any new features or anything (such as filesystem integration, automatic dependency detection, atomic multi-file checkins, password encryption, whatever else that might prompt you to not use CVS's crappy protocol).
CVS works "good enough" for that most important step - from no version control to some. This is much more significant than the differences between bad version control and good version control. It's gratis, it's libre, so a lot of people use it.
DOS used to be universal too. Aren't you glad we've moved on?
On the other hand, I'm certainly not going to switch anything over to Vesta until it has been ported the OS I do my development under! Until then, I heartily recommend TortoiseCVS.
Haha! If microsoft had to code up a simple compression library it would take them a WEEK! HAHAH!!!!
And what about everyone else who uses zlib but not the GPL? I know of several commercial products that do.
You mean, the same way that BeOS and MacOS did, by storing extra information?
On windows machines open source projects will use standard fopen and so on (I cannot imagine that MS would spurn so many developers by breaking that). If that open source project wants to take advantage of the new features which don't exist on every other OS, they will need platform specific code.
For something like a browser control, the arguments for code sharing are much stronger.
Adding 2 megs to every app that wants to render a web pages is dumb. The biggest problem with that is not total size on disk, but download time.
Upgradability. What happens in the unlikely event that a bug is uncovered in the relevant control? Do I need to download 15 patches from various vendors, all of whom got the patch from Microsoft, or can I just download it once from Microsoft directly? Let's say the bug is a severe security hole.. then which is better?
Consistency of user experience. Forcing vendors to distribute the browser control themselves encourages them to all use different ones - all of which will have slightly different UI semantics. If everything that does the same thing behaves the same, the system is easier to learn and to use.
You could say that. I chose not to. Double negatives have been prescribed against only by relatively recent grammarians who sought to make english conform to the same rules as symbolic logic (similar to how the rules against the split infinitive are based on an erroneous analogy between english and latin).
But the fact is that the double negative has a long, illustrious use, going back to the very beginnings of Modern English (Shakespeare) and beyond (Chaucer). The nuns teaching grammar may have relegated this construct to informal use, but it's still widely used and universally understood. I have no remose for having used it.
I go to that website and it says "Hey! We have an ActiveX control that's digitally signed by Microsoft Corp. Do you want to run it?" If I say yes, I am running local code just like if I opened a control panel. If I say no, nobody runs nothing.
Now, I could streamline the process a bit further by checking "Always trust content from Microsoft Corp", but I haven't checked that box ever. I always trust content from Microsoft Corp manually, rather than having my browser do it for me.
You're confusing HTTP and HTML. HTTP is a protocol that information is transfered through. Outlook doesn't even use HTTP. HTML is a format for marking up, formatting, and now adding scripting to data. This and MIME are where problems come in.
.NET security is not written into each app, so much as being written into system call invocation. This IS reasonable.
I don't know much about SOAP, but in
It sounds like Adobe is actually doing some additions which amount to more than bells and whistles.
The first version of photoshop I ever used is 3.0. I don't know about versions previous to that. But since then, every release (4.0, 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0) have made significant improvements to Photoshop. Every version the font engine has gotten better (though the UI for it has been up and down). They've added automation and batch processing, multiple levels of undo with a reasonable interface, support for vector shapes (more than just paths), previewing various levels of compression, the Extract tool, layer effects, text effects, slices (the ability to partition up an image and automatically save various parts of it to different files), as well as increasing stuff like how much virtual memory photoshop can use.
To you they may be bells and whistles or bloat. To me they are features that I have found extremely useful on countless occasions.
FWIW, that woman is Rikki Lee Jones being interviewed by Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow (what she was doing on Reading Rainbow, I can only guess).
If you compile code to a native level then it seems to be much more dificult to check for security.
.NET assembly (a module, rougly analogous to a .dll a .class or a .so) has a section which lists which external functions are imported. From there, you certainly can do access control on a finer scale from within the imported functions.
Not really. Each
Well, 5-10% of the people ever born are still alive today. In other words humans have only demonstrated about a 92% death rate, not the 100% you imply. That means I've got a 1 in 12 chance of being immortal.
There's no sense in arguing with me, I'm clearly a master of statistics!
I am not taking both sides. That was the only comment I have posted in this thread. I believe that many shareholders in Vivendi Universal don't even know that Blizzard exists or that they own part of it. What I think is a likely scenario is that there is some high level management pressure on Blizzard for profitability, but that Blizzard itself is, for the most part, autonomous.
My point is not that a boycott cannot work (though in this case I do believe that) but that even if it does work, the shareholders won't be part of the equation.
I want a progress bar, and I want it to be accurate
You can't always. Sorry. Your example illustrates why, even. MSIE doesn't know how long connecting to a web site and downloading a page is going to take. Neither does Netscape or Opera. that's why none of these have an accurate thermometer bar as a progress indicator. They do have a 'I'm still doing something' animation, though. Which is about as good as you're going to get for some tasks.
Given that significanlty more than 150K humans are being born every day, there's really no avoiding that, in the long run, many of those people will die.
Sorry, it's a harsh world.
Haha.
A serious answer to your jokey question is that it wouldn't really. When galaxies 'collide' they mostly just pass through one another. Consider for a moment what percentage of a galaxy is actually matter (0% to a fairly large number of decimal places), and then this makes sense.