I think a whitelist would be the correct approach here - most of the BMP and certain mathematical symbols would be good candidates. And they would certainly be useful.
Actually, Slashdot is pretty unique - even though < and > clearly demonstrate that it does support HTML entities, it does not do so for any character not found in latin-1. Not only does Slashdot not understand non-latin-1 characters, it actively suppresses even alternative ways of expressing them.
Slashdot doesn't enfore latin-1 because it has to but rather because it wants to. As to why I have no idea.
Actually, as a German I'd say that America could save a lot of money by actually building houses. Seriously, the typical US American house would be called a very large garden shed in Germany - sometimes the only thing between the facade and the interior is a bit of drywall. In comparison, in German houses you can usually expect about thirty centimeters (about twelve inches) of aerated autoclaved concrete, which is a very good insulator; the roof is usually insulated with mineral wool.
In general, our houses have greatly superior insulation and, if you're smart about when to open your windows, are mostly independent from the temperature outside. Granted, our houses cost half a million bucks but they're something you build to live the rest of your life in.
Of course Germany isn't Florida with its hellish^Wtropical climate, but even in areas where aerated concrete, mineral wool and properly insulated windows can't keep your house cool they can reduce the need for air conditioning.
Of course this doesn't work in those rather large parts of the USA where you have a fair chance of having your house destroyed by a tornado/hurricane/massive flood/earthquke/other natural disaster; at least not if you can't stand dropping a few hundred grand on a house every few years.
A comparatively cheap and easy thing you can do is to apply mineral wool wherever possible. If you can find them, that it; when my brother installed the stuff in his house a few years ago he couldn't find a retailer who carried it in the Indianapolis area.
Well, the finger-scrolling works really well on my MBP's 4"x2" trackpad. I can't really say anything about the more advanced features (as my MBP doesn't support them), but the MBA does come with a larger trackpad. I'd expect them to work on the smaller MBP trackpad as well, however; on a properly configured trackpad you don't need much space to get around.
By the way, what did your Thinkpad do for four years? Act as a scroll wheel when two fingers are present or do something meaningful when you place two fingers and drag them in different directions? Remember, I called the former a rudimentary approximation because that's what it is.
When did I say that Apple makes touchscreen notebooks? "Multitouch" simply means that a touch-based input system (in the case of Apple notebooks the trackpad) has suport for you using more than one finger/stylus/whatever to make inputs. My Santa Rosa MacBook Pro uses the trackpad as a two-dimensional scroll wheel when I use two fingers - that would be the rudimentary approximation. The MacBook Air (and, as far as I know, newer MBPs) allows stuff like resizing windows by performing a pinching motion on the trackpad.
Before you tell me that "true multitouch requires a touchscreen": I'm certainly not the only one whoconsidersthistobemultitouch.
Exactly what I was thinking. Good to see there are some level-headed people left around here.
I propose that we immediately start surveying our neighbor planets for their contents. Maybe we find out that Venus is filled with mustard -- we could then arrange it so that Galactus eats Venus first; once he's thoroughly disgusted we tell him that all planets in our solar system are mustard-filled. That might save us.
It is, however, abundantly clear that we must give NASA the funds to conduct this kind of exploratory mission.
In that case we shouldn't mix SI prefixes with non-SI units. When we use an SI prefix we tell people that our unit behaves like an SI unit as far as prefixes are concerned. It doesn't matter if we mean something entirely different; that is what we tell them. If we want the prefixes to mean something else we use different prefixes.
As for microcomputers: "Microcomputer" is not a unit of measurement. Nobody expects it to behave like one, much like nobody expects a microscope to be one millionth of a scope. And it tells a lot about your knowledge of the SI system of prefixes that you can't differentiate between "mini" and "milli".
Then write "MiB" and say something like "binary megabyte". But don't just carry on using an incorrect prefix because you don't like the way the correct one sounds.
But isn't it the industry that gets to define the "standard"? After all, what exactly is a "horsepower"? What if my horse is stronger than your horse? Who has the right horse? Then someone comes up with something completely new - called "brake horsepower" and decides to use a pony as a horse... what does it all mean then?
"Horsepower" is a new unit. The car manufacturers didn't decide to use "joule" in a nonstandard way, the defined a new unit. I'm fine with that as it avoids confusion. When you make up a new unit you can be as arbitrary as you want as long as your unit doesn't interfere with an already established one.
Kilo in computer terms has always meant the closest approximation available in powers of 2, because digital things can only have 2 states - on or off.
Except when you're talking about frequencies. Or bandwidths. Or just about everything that isn't a RAM chip or a file. Don't create the impression that the binary "kilo-" is universal in IT; it's only relevant in a few cases. Certainly not enough to decide that we can arbitrarily overrule the SI.
Except that Creative did sell the stated quantity; the customers simply expected that number to have a different meaning. It's as if in the automobile industry one gallon of motor oil (but not gasoline) equals 1.2 regular gallons and then someone sues a motor oil manufacturer for selling one regular gallon of motor oil as "one gallon of motor oil".
Yes, I know that motor oil isn't sold by the gallon. Substitute "0.1 gallons" or whatever an appropriate smaller amount would be.
But the lawsuits shouldnt't be against Seagate, Creative et al. but rather against Microsoft, Apple and RAM manufacturers. I think the OSes are actually misleading the user by constantly lying about what a (kilo|mega|giga|tera)byte is. Telling the user that a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes might have been okay before the SI created the binary prefixes, but today it's simply wrong.
And don't tell me that "but we always used the short prefixes" is an excuse. We're the IT industry. Five years ago is to us what fifty years ago is to other industries. We don't write hand-optimized assembler code because that's how we used to do it somewhere in the past - so why should be stick to an obsolete mis-definition of a standard prefix when the issue was fixed ages ago?
I say that someone (maybe Seagate) should slap the OS manufacturers with a lawsuit for telling users that 1 MB is not equal to 1,000,000 bytes and thus causing harm (thorugh unneccessary legal battles) for the hard drive manufacturers. The OS manufacturers arguably are at fault here.
Mebibytes and gibibytes will NEVER catch on. The geeks would have to spearhead something like this, and they never will because the words sound stupid and you sound stupid and unprofessional using them.
Except for those geeks who think that sticking to ambiguity because the unambiguous prefix doesn't pass arbitrary coolness standards is unprofessional. "I don't support it because the name isn't cool enough" is not a best practice.
Even though when talking I still use "megabyte" for both MB and MiB (prefixing it with "decimal" or "binary" if neccessary), when writing I do take care to differentiate between MB and MiB because they describe different things and things are clearer when using them.
What the hard drive manufacturers should do is give the capacity in both GB and GiB. That way there is no confusion and everyone is happy. Well, except for those who think that the GiB figure isn't stylish enough.
I'm not sure how it works in that legal system, but couldn't the court find that while third-party encyclopedias in general are acceptable, this particular one isn't because it mostly consists of direct or barely reworded quotes?
With that kind of ruling it'd be hard to sue random encyclopedias because you'd still have to prove that their contents aren't original and at the same time it'd be hard to use it as a carte blanche for copyright infringement because the precedent states that it's not okay.
Of course I don't know whether the court can make such detailed decicions, although I suspect it does. And the case might come to a less fortunate conclusion. But in theory the ruling does not have to be as destructive as some predict.
No, that only happens if the code is insane. If the program is sane the solution to that issue is "grab the splitter and make the input box smaller". The only reasons I can imagine for the splitter to be inaccessible are bugs that can happen with any kind of resizable input box.
Not allowing the conversation to be smaller than one line might be an additional safeguard because that way the user doesn't think it has disappeared, he definitely knows it's just too small.
Also, it has been suggested that "manual-size mode" should be the same as "auto-size mode" - the user merely decides what the minimal size of the input box is. That way the app does't even need to toggle between states (which would be just as evil as letting the user toggle between them with a checkbox).
That would probably be rejected because it violates the Holy Concept of Letting Pidgin Decide the Size of the Box. It's not that rare for a developer flat-out rejecting anything that means his feature will not be implemented 100.00000% as he intended. If said developer happens to be one of the lead developers that means his feature stays That Way, because it's the One True Way.
In other words: It's a pragmatic comment in an ideological debate. Of course the arguing parties are going to reject it, but maybe enough people flock to your side of the argument to turn it into a third One True Way.
If I have learned one thing from Slashdot discussions about how popular IM protocols are it's that it's virtually impossible to project what you know onto the world. I hear that a lot of people are using YIM and AIM, even though I personally would say bot networks are dead as I haven't seen a user in years. Others say that nobody uses Jabber when from my experience it's the network of choice for techies.
IM usage fluctuates wildly by region and demographic. It's very hard to make any accurate global statements without data from a very large survey to back them up.
Er, you do know that Apple sells a multi-button mouse and all Apple notebooks use multitouch (in the case of older ones, a rudimentary approximation) to emulate a second mouse button? OS X supports more than one mouse button and plenty of apps require more than one mouse button.
The "Mac OS only supports one mouse button" argument stopped being true ages ago.
As for the menu: I actually prefer it, especially when working with apps like Gimp where the window resizes with the document. In fact that's the biggest issue I have with Gimp - as an X11 app it doesn't use the system menubar, so I constantly have to resize windows just to get at the menus I want.
Of couse, your experience with Mac-style menus might have been worse.
As for the hardware: Only supporting their own hardware makes sense for Apple. They already got burned once by clones and they don't want to go through that again. Calling it paranoia might not be too far from the truth. Of course, having control over the whole platform makes support easier, as well; that's nother plus for them.
I expect both forks to use the same backend library. The argument was entirely over a GUI detail and Pidgin already is split into libpurple and the frontend, so if the forkers are sensible they'll just keep using the official libpurple and offer an alternative frontend.
Configurable shortcuts shouldn't be a feature, they should be a basic requirement for any application that has a GUI. I don't care if some developer thinks it's a good idea to have Alt-Right Arrow do something in his app; I have a global shortcut bound to that key combination, so it's a better idea to bind some other combination to that command. Applications should make changing the key bindings easy, if not trivial.
I love how Gimp does it (if you enable it): You just hover over the menu item and press the desired key(s). Voilà, you've set the shortcut. Very easy and intuitive. This should be much more common, really. It's the kind of functionality I'd expect Apple to build into Cocoa.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a whitelist would be the correct approach here - most of the BMP and certain mathematical symbols would be good candidates. And they would certainly be useful.
Actually, Slashdot is pretty unique - even though < and > clearly demonstrate that it does support HTML entities, it does not do so for any character not found in latin-1. Not only does Slashdot not understand non-latin-1 characters, it actively suppresses even alternative ways of expressing them.
Slashdot doesn't enfore latin-1 because it has to but rather because it wants to. As to why I have no idea.
Actually, as a German I'd say that America could save a lot of money by actually building houses. Seriously, the typical US American house would be called a very large garden shed in Germany - sometimes the only thing between the facade and the interior is a bit of drywall. In comparison, in German houses you can usually expect about thirty centimeters (about twelve inches) of aerated autoclaved concrete, which is a very good insulator; the roof is usually insulated with mineral wool.
In general, our houses have greatly superior insulation and, if you're smart about when to open your windows, are mostly independent from the temperature outside. Granted, our houses cost half a million bucks but they're something you build to live the rest of your life in.
Of course Germany isn't Florida with its hellish^Wtropical climate, but even in areas where aerated concrete, mineral wool and properly insulated windows can't keep your house cool they can reduce the need for air conditioning.
Of course this doesn't work in those rather large parts of the USA where you have a fair chance of having your house destroyed by a tornado/hurricane/massive flood/earthquke/other natural disaster; at least not if you can't stand dropping a few hundred grand on a house every few years.
A comparatively cheap and easy thing you can do is to apply mineral wool wherever possible. If you can find them, that it; when my brother installed the stuff in his house a few years ago he couldn't find a retailer who carried it in the Indianapolis area.
Yes. They also advocated heterosexual relationships, which is why you're either gay or a Nazi. That's scientific fact.
Well, the finger-scrolling works really well on my MBP's 4"x2" trackpad. I can't really say anything about the more advanced features (as my MBP doesn't support them), but the MBA does come with a larger trackpad. I'd expect them to work on the smaller MBP trackpad as well, however; on a properly configured trackpad you don't need much space to get around.
By the way, what did your Thinkpad do for four years? Act as a scroll wheel when two fingers are present or do something meaningful when you place two fingers and drag them in different directions? Remember, I called the former a rudimentary approximation because that's what it is.
When did I say that Apple makes touchscreen notebooks? "Multitouch" simply means that a touch-based input system (in the case of Apple notebooks the trackpad) has suport for you using more than one finger/stylus/whatever to make inputs. My Santa Rosa MacBook Pro uses the trackpad as a two-dimensional scroll wheel when I use two fingers - that would be the rudimentary approximation. The MacBook Air (and, as far as I know, newer MBPs) allows stuff like resizing windows by performing a pinching motion on the trackpad.
Before you tell me that "true multitouch requires a touchscreen": I'm certainly not the only one who considers this to be multitouch.
Trademarks that behave exactly like generic trademarks without being generic trademarks? Do you have examples?
Exactly what I was thinking. Good to see there are some level-headed people left around here.
I propose that we immediately start surveying our neighbor planets for their contents. Maybe we find out that Venus is filled with mustard -- we could then arrange it so that Galactus eats Venus first; once he's thoroughly disgusted we tell him that all planets in our solar system are mustard-filled. That might save us.
It is, however, abundantly clear that we must give NASA the funds to conduct this kind of exploratory mission.
In that case we shouldn't mix SI prefixes with non-SI units. When we use an SI prefix we tell people that our unit behaves like an SI unit as far as prefixes are concerned. It doesn't matter if we mean something entirely different; that is what we tell them. If we want the prefixes to mean something else we use different prefixes.
As for microcomputers: "Microcomputer" is not a unit of measurement. Nobody expects it to behave like one, much like nobody expects a microscope to be one millionth of a scope. And it tells a lot about your knowledge of the SI system of prefixes that you can't differentiate between "mini" and "milli".
Then write "MiB" and say something like "binary megabyte". But don't just carry on using an incorrect prefix because you don't like the way the correct one sounds.
I say we also get rid of our ridiculous "byte" units. "Meter" sound much nicer and that way we can sell MP3 players with capacities of 10 kilometers.
Except when you're talking about frequencies. Or bandwidths. Or just about everything that isn't a RAM chip or a file. Don't create the impression that the binary "kilo-" is universal in IT; it's only relevant in a few cases. Certainly not enough to decide that we can arbitrarily overrule the SI.
Except that Creative did sell the stated quantity; the customers simply expected that number to have a different meaning. It's as if in the automobile industry one gallon of motor oil (but not gasoline) equals 1.2 regular gallons and then someone sues a motor oil manufacturer for selling one regular gallon of motor oil as "one gallon of motor oil".
Yes, I know that motor oil isn't sold by the gallon. Substitute "0.1 gallons" or whatever an appropriate smaller amount would be.
But the lawsuits shouldnt't be against Seagate, Creative et al. but rather against Microsoft, Apple and RAM manufacturers. I think the OSes are actually misleading the user by constantly lying about what a (kilo|mega|giga|tera)byte is. Telling the user that a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes might have been okay before the SI created the binary prefixes, but today it's simply wrong.
And don't tell me that "but we always used the short prefixes" is an excuse. We're the IT industry. Five years ago is to us what fifty years ago is to other industries. We don't write hand-optimized assembler code because that's how we used to do it somewhere in the past - so why should be stick to an obsolete mis-definition of a standard prefix when the issue was fixed ages ago?
I say that someone (maybe Seagate) should slap the OS manufacturers with a lawsuit for telling users that 1 MB is not equal to 1,000,000 bytes and thus causing harm (thorugh unneccessary legal battles) for the hard drive manufacturers. The OS manufacturers arguably are at fault here.
Even though when talking I still use "megabyte" for both MB and MiB (prefixing it with "decimal" or "binary" if neccessary), when writing I do take care to differentiate between MB and MiB because they describe different things and things are clearer when using them.
What the hard drive manufacturers should do is give the capacity in both GB and GiB. That way there is no confusion and everyone is happy. Well, except for those who think that the GiB figure isn't stylish enough.
I'm not sure how it works in that legal system, but couldn't the court find that while third-party encyclopedias in general are acceptable, this particular one isn't because it mostly consists of direct or barely reworded quotes?
With that kind of ruling it'd be hard to sue random encyclopedias because you'd still have to prove that their contents aren't original and at the same time it'd be hard to use it as a carte blanche for copyright infringement because the precedent states that it's not okay.
Of course I don't know whether the court can make such detailed decicions, although I suspect it does. And the case might come to a less fortunate conclusion. But in theory the ruling does not have to be as destructive as some predict.
Probably not right now. Right now, neither side of the fork is likely to be happy about the suggestion.
No, that only happens if the code is insane. If the program is sane the solution to that issue is "grab the splitter and make the input box smaller". The only reasons I can imagine for the splitter to be inaccessible are bugs that can happen with any kind of resizable input box.
Not allowing the conversation to be smaller than one line might be an additional safeguard because that way the user doesn't think it has disappeared, he definitely knows it's just too small.
Also, it has been suggested that "manual-size mode" should be the same as "auto-size mode" - the user merely decides what the minimal size of the input box is. That way the app does't even need to toggle between states (which would be just as evil as letting the user toggle between them with a checkbox).
Judging fro my experiences with the GIMP plugin API I'd say that the GIMP devs also hate users who can code.
Ths is clearly an either/or decision, so we should use radio buttons:
(_) Allow resizing of chat input area
(_) Automaticaly control chat input window size
(_) Neither
(X) Both
That would probably be rejected because it violates the Holy Concept of Letting Pidgin Decide the Size of the Box. It's not that rare for a developer flat-out rejecting anything that means his feature will not be implemented 100.00000% as he intended. If said developer happens to be one of the lead developers that means his feature stays That Way, because it's the One True Way.
In other words: It's a pragmatic comment in an ideological debate. Of course the arguing parties are going to reject it, but maybe enough people flock to your side of the argument to turn it into a third One True Way.
If I have learned one thing from Slashdot discussions about how popular IM protocols are it's that it's virtually impossible to project what you know onto the world. I hear that a lot of people are using YIM and AIM, even though I personally would say bot networks are dead as I haven't seen a user in years. Others say that nobody uses Jabber when from my experience it's the network of choice for techies.
IM usage fluctuates wildly by region and demographic. It's very hard to make any accurate global statements without data from a very large survey to back them up.
Er, you do know that Apple sells a multi-button mouse and all Apple notebooks use multitouch (in the case of older ones, a rudimentary approximation) to emulate a second mouse button? OS X supports more than one mouse button and plenty of apps require more than one mouse button.
The "Mac OS only supports one mouse button" argument stopped being true ages ago.
As for the menu: I actually prefer it, especially when working with apps like Gimp where the window resizes with the document. In fact that's the biggest issue I have with Gimp - as an X11 app it doesn't use the system menubar, so I constantly have to resize windows just to get at the menus I want.
Of couse, your experience with Mac-style menus might have been worse.
As for the hardware: Only supporting their own hardware makes sense for Apple. They already got burned once by clones and they don't want to go through that again. Calling it paranoia might not be too far from the truth. Of course, having control over the whole platform makes support easier, as well; that's nother plus for them.
I expect both forks to use the same backend library. The argument was entirely over a GUI detail and Pidgin already is split into libpurple and the frontend, so if the forkers are sensible they'll just keep using the official libpurple and offer an alternative frontend.
Configurable shortcuts shouldn't be a feature, they should be a basic requirement for any application that has a GUI. I don't care if some developer thinks it's a good idea to have Alt-Right Arrow do something in his app; I have a global shortcut bound to that key combination, so it's a better idea to bind some other combination to that command. Applications should make changing the key bindings easy, if not trivial.
I love how Gimp does it (if you enable it): You just hover over the menu item and press the desired key(s). Voilà, you've set the shortcut. Very easy and intuitive. This should be much more common, really. It's the kind of functionality I'd expect Apple to build into Cocoa.