Installing a printer on Windows isn't such a fun experience. I recently left a job working at a laser printer company. We made standard postscript laser printers that you should be able to get to work on Windows with included drivers. You certainly can on Linux:
Plug ethernet into printer
In LPR or CUPS select Network LPD Queue
Enter IP address or host name of the printer
On Windows:
From the Add Printer Wizard select "Local Printer" (Yes you have to select "local printer" to install a network printer
Create a local port for your printer that points at a networks LPD Queue
Set your printer to use the port
The linux install is simple compared to the Windows.
If you get a message from Bob that was also CC'ed to Alice, then it knows that you, Alice, and Bob a cluster and are likely to be friends. Emails from Alice would be whitelisted because of this.
To work, this means that your friends have to know each other and send out group emails using the CC field. You can see why it would only be able to whitelist about 50% of your email.
It also appears that spammers could fool this by adding another of their addresses to the CC field, sending you spam, and then sending you spam from the other address. At that point, the other address would be whitelisted. Although it may work now, once this starts to be widely used, spammers will find ways to pollute it.
Can you actually do anything in Mono yet? Last time I tried (admittedly about a year ago), I found that all the parts that let you interact with a user weren't written yet.
Windows.forms - not implemented
No apache module
That kind of left me stuck after hello world. There is only so much I want to do with a command line these days.
C# looked like a promising language and Java is playing catchup in 1.5 right now, but until it can be used on Linux for the stuff that I use java for, I won't abandon Java.
The economics of paying 0.01 cents per email makes it infeasable. The tracking, billing, and collection costs would far exceed the possible revenue. It could not be a sustainable system.
Look at the failure for any micropayment system to even get to the realm of being able to charge a penny at a time, let alone 1/100th that.
Google does deal with spammers of the sort that you pointed out. It does take some prodding though. Last time that I found one of these, I submitted it to their problem report form on google.com. After a month nothing had been done. I then posted it in a slashdot comment that got modded up. A day later all the spammers were gone.
As the type of person that likes to go to bed at 9 or 10 and get a full 8 hours of sleep, I had some roommates with vastly different sleep schedules.
During my freshman year, my roommate (also a computer geek) stayed up until at least 2 every morning, often playing computer games. Often he would invite a friend over to use my computer and he'd have somebody else on speakerphone from across campus while they played together. The game of the day was "Command and Conquer". All night it would be constant clicking, typing, swearing, explosions, and "I'm a Mechanical Man" game music.
There were a couple things that helped me sleep through all this:
I was dead tired every night. Getting exercise helps with this.
We had lofted beds. Being up above the noise really helps for some reason. Also keeps those friends from sitting on me, which would have woken me up.
My later roommates were then amazed that I could go to sleep with all the lights on, the music blaring, and basically a party going on in the room.
1.8% Gecko users: My employer, major travel website.
12% Gecko users: My personal site (1500 uniq a day, tech oriented)
20% Gecko users: Slashdot (at least the ones that slashdotted me)
I switched to Firebird some time ago from Mozilla and I noticed these things as well. I was upset about the lack of migration from Mozilla ind the need for two text areas at the top - one for urls and one for search.
There are several things that I have found that I love about it that mozilla didnt have:
The ability to move the toolbar elements around with drag and drop. Using this I have put my buttons for back, reload, stop etc, up next to the File menu and the search box on the other side of the menus. This means that my bookmarks have a whole line to themselves and the url bar has a whole line to itself. Much better use of space.
You can manage bookmarks in bookmark folders by right clicking on them. (I don't know why this never worked in Mozilla, but I always had to use the bookmark manager.
The "live headers" plugin that allows me to see post queries and cookies that get sent to the server.
Some plugin allows me to put a checkbox to enable/disable javascript right on the bookmark bar
Buikoler is unique, but you are correct, a good name has to make a good brand.
It has to be easy to remember
It has to be easy to pronounce
It has to be easy to spell
It can't sound like something nasty
It can't mean something nasty in some other language
Should actually remind people of something pleasant
Buikoler:
To many syllables to remember easily
Not pronouncable
Hard to spell. There could be multiple spellings. Even worse, there would be easier ways to spell it and have it sound the same.
Sounds too much like "buccaneer", "bukkake", or even "butt"
A good name is chosen through a brainstorming and making sure that everything coming out meets these criteria. An example of a good name that was chosen this way would be "Expedia" (the travel company):
It is part of "expediate" (to make easier) giving it posative connotation
Easy to remember for the same reason
Totally unique
Easy to spell (at least in English) because all the vowel combination are common and not easily mistaken.
It doesn't sound like another similar product (eg Lindows)
It doesn't have the name of the OS it was originally designed to run on in it. (eg WinZip)
It doesn't have the name of the programming language used to create it in it (eg JavaInvaders)
It is unlikely to cause confusion with another software product (except maybe the video game), unlike Firebird.
It doesn't use a famous trademark (at least they didn't name it Nike)
I've said this in the past, and I will say it again. If you are naming your open source software, make it something unique. Why would you want to compete for search terms with all these other people, products, corporations, and organizations. If your product has merit, then people will recognize the name that you give it and you will get brand loyalty. There is no need show your similarity to other products or your system requirements in your name.
Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.
Are slashdot editors really qualified to make such a request?
Although I think that number of spelling mistakes and duplicate articles has gone down in the last six months. Maybe all the subscribers are keeping a close watch and getting stuff changed before it is widely seen.
If you can't trust the content in the frames you can't do that. For example: You want to open four windows to different vendors that sell the same product so the user can compare prices.
If you were doing it in frames, any of the vendors could dectect this (window.href) and set themselves to be at the top of the frame.
With popups, the most evil thing that I've seen is a self.focus() call that causes the vendor window to move to the top.
When I design a DHTML web page I want to make the best user experience possoible. In some cases that involves a pop-up. You know the kind where you click something and you expect to get a popup.
So people want to block popups. That's fine. I block pop-ups. It just irks me that some of the blockers are not implemented properly. As a designer, I want to be able to detect that the popup has been block and and provide feedback to the user in the form of a message or an alternative. Popups are not appropriate in all cases and some folks don't like them at all. I'm willing to work with blockers. Some of the blockers just don't want to work with me.
Detecting blocked popups with Mozilla/Firebird this is very easy. It throws an exception that you have to catch. With the Google toolbar it isn't that bad, you get back a null pointer from your window.open call.
Hower, I can't for the life of me figure out how to deal with either Earthlink or AOL's popup blockers. When they block something you get a window handle back that looks very legit. It has all the field filled in (width, height, content, screen, etc) but the window just doesn't show up to the user.
Somebody needs to sit down and bitchslap the developers who did the AOL and the Earthlink blockers. They are making the web a mess. Tell them to look over the shoulders of the Google/Mozilla folks.
Yes it is a "porny" search term, but the site that has listing 1-300 demonstrates that it is possible (and easy) to really truly spam google.
It looks like some enterprising young porn pusher, has made a page generator. They put very similar pages on a variety of porny domain names then linked them all together. Google sucks it in and slurps it up like you wouldn't believe.
It is more strict than the Mozilla popup blocking though. It will only allow popups on a click event (as opposed to a page load) and it will only allow one per click.
It really sucks to try to implement a page that opens four windows, each with a different vendor selling the same item at a different price. Google blocks all but one of them, even though the user would be much happier with the comparison of all.
If you really want to see how greedy corporations are, write a software library and license it under the GNU General Public License (not the Lesser, GNU Public License, not a BSD license, not a Mozilla license).
I use the GPL for my popular Java Utilities. I was getting about three inquiries a week from folks asking for my libraries under some license that doesn't require the company to open source their software. I had to put up a FAQ down by the license saying that I would not license the code under anything other than the GPL.
If you are going to make a closed source product, you better well be paying for closed source libraries. Thats the cost of doing business. Don't expect the open source comunity to bend over backwards to help make non-free programs.
My only foray into the Windows APIs was trying to write an installer for a printer. The printer could be installed using the add printer wizard but it required the user to browse for the driver, set up a network printer as a local printer connected to a mapped network port, and several other difficult or unintuitive settings (postscript vs pcl) that needed to be chosen correctly. The idea is that we would put an installer on the cd that would require one click to install the printer with the default options.
The Windows APIs in that area are horrible. There are functions for enumerating installed printers, adding printers, and all the other things you might expect. However, none of the APIs are documented well enough to be usable. I found several instances in which the documentation was actually *wrong*. There were significant differences between the APIs for Win95 and win98 and then ever bigger differences for NT.
All in all it was a nightmare and I would have killed for the source code for the add printer wizard. Even better if we could have just called the add printer wizard with bunch of command line options that answered all the questions that would have otherwise been asked of the user.
Slashdot Mirror
On Windows:
- From the Add Printer Wizard select "Local Printer" (Yes you have to select "local printer" to install a network printer
- Create a local port for your printer that points at a networks LPD Queue
- Set your printer to use the port
The linux install is simple compared to the Windows.Does anybody else find it odd that to read about wsj.com bragging about its subscriber base, you have to spend a $59 registration?
If you get a message from Bob that was also CC'ed to Alice, then it knows that you, Alice, and Bob a cluster and are likely to be friends. Emails from Alice would be whitelisted because of this.
To work, this means that your friends have to know each other and send out group emails using the CC field. You can see why it would only be able to whitelist about 50% of your email.
It also appears that spammers could fool this by adding another of their addresses to the CC field, sending you spam, and then sending you spam from the other address. At that point, the other address would be whitelisted. Although it may work now, once this starts to be widely used, spammers will find ways to pollute it.
- Windows.forms - not implemented
- No apache module
That kind of left me stuck after hello world. There is only so much I want to do with a command line these days.C# looked like a promising language and Java is playing catchup in 1.5 right now, but until it can be used on Linux for the stuff that I use java for, I won't abandon Java.
Look at the failure for any micropayment system to even get to the realm of being able to charge a penny at a time, let alone 1/100th that.
Google search: 711 error
Come on, Google. Stop reading slashdot and fix the problems.
Well it certainly isn't a Linux Slashdotter's list. Otherwise it would contain:
6. ???
7. Profit
Fool.
FireFox features I can't live without:
All that boils down to:
As the type of person that likes to go to bed at 9 or 10 and get a full 8 hours of sleep, I had some roommates with vastly different sleep schedules.
During my freshman year, my roommate (also a computer geek) stayed up until at least 2 every morning, often playing computer games. Often he would invite a friend over to use my computer and he'd have somebody else on speakerphone from across campus while they played together. The game of the day was "Command and Conquer". All night it would be constant clicking, typing, swearing, explosions, and "I'm a Mechanical Man" game music.
There were a couple things that helped me sleep through all this:
My later roommates were then amazed that I could go to sleep with all the lights on, the music blaring, and basically a party going on in the room.
Peter Venkman was the character played by Bill Murray in the movie Ghostbusters.
1.8% Gecko users: My employer, major travel website.
12% Gecko users: My personal site (1500 uniq a day, tech oriented)
20% Gecko users: Slashdot (at least the ones that slashdotted me)
There are several things that I have found that I love about it that mozilla didnt have:
- It has to be easy to remember
- It has to be easy to pronounce
- It has to be easy to spell
- It can't sound like something nasty
- It can't mean something nasty in some other language
- Should actually remind people of something pleasant
Buikoler:- To many syllables to remember easily
- Not pronouncable
- Hard to spell. There could be multiple spellings. Even worse, there would be easier ways to spell it and have it sound the same.
- Sounds too much like "buccaneer", "bukkake", or even "butt"
A good name is chosen through a brainstorming and making sure that everything coming out meets these criteria. An example of a good name that was chosen this way would be "Expedia" (the travel company):The good things about the name:
I've said this in the past, and I will say it again. If you are naming your open source software, make it something unique. Why would you want to compete for search terms with all these other people, products, corporations, and organizations. If your product has merit, then people will recognize the name that you give it and you will get brand loyalty. There is no need show your similarity to other products or your system requirements in your name.
Google folks must read slashdot. The problem is now fixed. There were about 300 additional search results all from a related set of domains.
Google folks must read slashdot. The problem is now fixed.
If you were doing it in frames, any of the vendors could dectect this (window.href) and set themselves to be at the top of the frame.
With popups, the most evil thing that I've seen is a self.focus() call that causes the vendor window to move to the top.
So people want to block popups. That's fine. I block pop-ups. It just irks me that some of the blockers are not implemented properly. As a designer, I want to be able to detect that the popup has been block and and provide feedback to the user in the form of a message or an alternative. Popups are not appropriate in all cases and some folks don't like them at all. I'm willing to work with blockers. Some of the blockers just don't want to work with me.
Detecting blocked popups with Mozilla/Firebird this is very easy. It throws an exception that you have to catch. With the Google toolbar it isn't that bad, you get back a null pointer from your window.open call.
Hower, I can't for the life of me figure out how to deal with either Earthlink or AOL's popup blockers. When they block something you get a window handle back that looks very legit. It has all the field filled in (width, height, content, screen, etc) but the window just doesn't show up to the user.
Somebody needs to sit down and bitchslap the developers who did the AOL and the Earthlink blockers. They are making the web a mess. Tell them to look over the shoulders of the Google/Mozilla folks.
Google Search: "monty python" "usage of fuck"
Yes it is a "porny" search term, but the site that has listing 1-300 demonstrates that it is possible (and easy) to really truly spam google.
It looks like some enterprising young porn pusher, has made a page generator. They put very similar pages on a variety of porny domain names then linked them all together. Google sucks it in and slurps it up like you wouldn't believe.
It really sucks to try to implement a page that opens four windows, each with a different vendor selling the same item at a different price. Google blocks all but one of them, even though the user would be much happier with the comparison of all.
I use the GPL for my popular Java Utilities. I was getting about three inquiries a week from folks asking for my libraries under some license that doesn't require the company to open source their software. I had to put up a FAQ down by the license saying that I would not license the code under anything other than the GPL.
If you are going to make a closed source product, you better well be paying for closed source libraries. Thats the cost of doing business. Don't expect the open source comunity to bend over backwards to help make non-free programs.
The Windows APIs in that area are horrible. There are functions for enumerating installed printers, adding printers, and all the other things you might expect. However, none of the APIs are documented well enough to be usable. I found several instances in which the documentation was actually *wrong*. There were significant differences between the APIs for Win95 and win98 and then ever bigger differences for NT.
All in all it was a nightmare and I would have killed for the source code for the add printer wizard. Even better if we could have just called the add printer wizard with bunch of command line options that answered all the questions that would have otherwise been asked of the user.