Needless to say, the little guy loses to the commercial developer this case...
We didn't lose to the commercial developer, we lost to the fucking government! Maybe if we hadn't spent so much time worrying about Evil Business, we might have noticed that our government was reaching critical mass.
Business isn't the problem. Business don't have the power of eminent domain. Business don't have police and armies. And most of all, businesses don't have court systems arbitrarily deciding to take away the unalienable and natural rights you were born with. Only government does that.
Business didn't do this, the fucking government did this. And it wasn't the federal government that started it either, but some pissant little city council with too much time on their hands. For all your bitching about Bush or Kerry you never noticed that all the real tyrants in the US are your neighbors on the city council.
Yes, there are many businesses that lobby and court the government. But don't blame the addict, blame the pusher. Political power wouldn't be for sale if the government didn't put it up for auction to the highest bidder.
We're screwed now. This is a SCOTUS ruling. There's no one we can appeal this do. The only option we have to get our rights and property back is another revolution. The problem is that no one else but me cares. As long as the stop the Home Depot from building on the empty lot down the street, you guys will let the local government do whatever the fuck they want.
Emigrating to Iraq or Afghanistan is starting to look better and better. At least they have a future.
Nobody wants a draft. The Republicans don't. The Democrats don't. No one in office does. The only person in congress who actually proposed one only did it as (very poor) publicity stunt. In fact, the only serious proposal for a draft in the last two decades was from the *Democrats* calling for non-military national service.
Stop believing rumours about the draft, because they're not true. The radical left is concocting this story to panic students, since the radical left feeds off of negative emotions like some Star Trek alien. Sure, go ahead and attend the anti-draft rally on campus, it might get you laid. But don't actually believe any of the shit that gets posted up on campus bulletin boards.
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently.
But at least market forces are several magnitudes more efficient than bureaucratic fumblings in the economy. The free market may not be perfect, but no one else has yet managed to come up with anything better.
The web development community could learn from architects. You do NOT tell an architect how to design a building!
The web development community needs to learn from interior decorators. You NEVER go to an interior decorator with a complete finished specification for your new living room. You give them an idea of what you want, and then they come back with three or four proposals.
Bullshit. If you had nine million customers last year, each paying you one dollar, then you can earn an extra ONE MILLION DOLLARS per year catering to that last 10%. Do the math. It's not going to cost you anywhere close to that margin to write proper HTML.
Are sites IE only because IE has features that firefox does not, or because developers are lazy and don't check in multiple browsers.
Both, though the latter is more frequent. Everytime I come across an IE-only site in my work's intranet, and oftentimes when I encounter one outside of work, I fire off a message to the webmaster complaining about it. The responses I get back tell me a little bit about how they think.
My company is deeply in bed with Microsoft, so it's no surprise that many of the IE-only sites at work are due to IE-only applications and infrastructures. The prime example is Microsoft Sharepoint. You cannot use it without IE. Then there's our timecard application that is a IE-only Java applet. Yup, you read that one right: an IE-only Java applet. I guess they're getting in practice for a move to.NET.
I've never yet met a developer who deliberately used IE-only features. The culprit instead is laziness. They never test their pages. Sometimes they get very irate when you suggest they test their pages. As a software developer I have to test and have reviewed everything I check in. But to your average web developer, testing and reviewing (or even acknowledging bugs) is simply not done. For all you web developers that do practice quality, bless you! Unfortunately you're in the tiny minority.
I've even had one developer tell me he didn't have the financial resources to test on Mozilla. Being Free Software didn't deter him. "I'll have to get IT to install it and they'll charge my department..."
p.s. Some are even lazier than that, though, and transcend the bounds of mere monobrowserism. I've met more than one developer who hardcoded in a width of 800 pixels for the total width of their pages, just so the pages would be "guaranteed" to fit in 800x600 screens. If they had ever bothered to actually text their pages on such a screen, they would have discovered the rude fact that 800 pixel wide pages do not fit on 800 pixel wide screens.
Instead of fixing the problem, you instead migrate stupidity into the Firefox domain. Not everyone can use Firefox, because some people do not have the ability to install Firefox on the systems they use. Others can use Firefox, but they're not about to stop everything and install and learn a new browser just because you cop an attitude.
And then there's people like me. We've got Firefox installed, but we happen to be using another browser (Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc). That's our right. It's our choice. It's our freedom. We're not going to shut down our current browser and start up Firefox, just to see you're site. They annoyance isn't worth it. So instead we make a mental note never to visit your site ever again.
The default file dialog in Qt uses its platforms native file dialog. But X11 doesn't have a native dialog. So it made one. If you don't like it QFileDialog, however, you can use KFileDialog instead. Or write your own. Problem solved. As for which kind of file dialog is best, I prefer Qt's native file dialog ot GTK+' dialog.
While you may not like any of the KDE themes, other people may not like any of the GNOME themes. This doesn't make them wrong and you right, however.
Knockoffs of Motif and Windows? WTF? There are only two Motif-like themes, one of which is a direct rippoff of the default GTK+ theme! Yes, you heard me right! If the MotifPlus look is good enough for GTK+, why isn't it good enough for KDE? And there's only one Windows like theme. Funny, GNOME has one Windows like theme too! You mention Keramik, but that's no longer the default. You never had to use it anyway. Yes, it is kind of ugly. But at the time it came out it created a splash in the community, because it was something new and different. It was only a matter of weeks before the GTK+ community came up with their Geramik clone. Plastik the new default, however, and I'm glad that you find is vaguely usable. But go look at some other themes. There's Phase which is another modern style in a different vein. There's a.NET and a few minimalist styles as well. Then go to kde-look.org and you'll find dozens more. Like Baghira, which is a continuation and immense improvement of the old Liquid. Also Alloy, Lipstick, Thin Keramik (a big improvement over its namesake), ActiveHeart, Krisp, Qinx, Comix, etc, etc.
Rewriting libraries? I'm not sure what you're talking about. In fact I'm completely confused. You must have KDE confused with something else. The tiny handful of core KDE libraries are dwarfed by the dozens needed by another desktop.
Dammit, that's the rationale my boss is giving me to move to Windows development! Seriously!
"Come on," he says, "you can learn C#, I know you can! Why be an old fart using C++ and Unix when you can be like those hip and savvy.NET developers down at Starbucks? Your career will be stunted if you don't modernize yourself!"
The FLOSS community in general loves, and has always loved, Qt. The only holdouts are GNU, Debian and Redhat. No one else has any problems with it.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that there will always be a miniscule but extremely shrill segment that hates Qt and will come up with any excuse to shit on it. For a while the excuse was that Trolltech didn't apologize to Richard Stallman (seriously!), then it was that it wasn't crossplatform enough (go figure). For a while it was that the Canopy Group owned a tiny fraction of their shares. The current excuse seems to be either that it's written in C++, or that it doesn't use all of C++'s features. People who hate it will always come up with a reason, no matter how absurd, to hate it.
All you need is a new Qt theme. Call it "Crunched" or "Sardines" or something. A Qt application can use its own theme, so it doesn't have to installed system wide.
KDE on Windows is coming. The purpose is not to run one desktop on top of another, but to provide the framework to run KDE applications on Windows. Such as KOffice.
It was Coolo that made that post. The khtml developers will of course listen. But don't expect them to drop everything. New bugs need fixing just as much as old bugs.
Ditto on Qt. I too have ported an application over to OSX using their native Aqua Qt. It gets you 95% of the way there. But that last 5% of integration seems to be the only thing some users care about. Most Mac users are quite willing to accept ported software that isn't 100% perfect. But there's a few that get genuinely offended if the software isn't the poster boy for the Apple Interface Guidelines.
Seriously though, I think current world events has lead to lack of interest/funding/training in space-related activies. The result is inevitable.
Actually, I think we're going about it the right way. It's up for private interests to fund space now, and they will do it. But only when it makes economic sense. I think that's going to be very very soon.
We've already been the moon. We've already demonstrated a resuable orbiter. So what are we proving with all those additional billions of dollars? Now is the time for NASA and the government to step back.
If the government had been in charge of highways in the same way they're in charge of space exploration, then the only automobiles we would have would be billion dollar state owned behemoths lumbering along grossly polluted roads. Every decade or so an automobile would blow up killing a half dozen courageous autonauts, whereupon congress would wring its hangs worrying if driving was a good idea to begin with.
We don't need a line item veto, we need presidents with the cojones to tell congress they'll veto the whole ball of wax if they try to slip something through. Reagan threatened to do this, but he never followed through.
It's not even politically damaging to do this, if you're smart about it. Just go on television and tell the public, "I vetoed the bill because some rat in congress tried to sneak through a bad law. Good laws don't need the cover of darkness and secrecy. When congress removes those riders, I'll sign the bill."
so your now comparing hacking to rape, theft, break and enter, and assult?
We were talking about breaking and entering, not hacking. If you want to blame someone for hijacking the thread, blame Jedidiah who first brought it up.
I'm not sneering at fairness, I'm sneering at the idea that dragging people down to the lowest level is fair. Go read (or watch the movie) Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut. You don't make everyone equally beautiful by mutilating those who are beautiful so that everyone is equally ugly. Yet that's how some people would have us behave with wealth. They want equality of destitution. They are not happy that some of humanity has managed crawl it way out of abject poverty.
It's not that they don't know what "Yes" and "No" mean, it's that it's clearer and easier if they don't have to connect the "Yes" and "No" with choices given by the message in the dialog.
In real life conversations, outside of software, we ask yes/no questions ALL THE TIME. It doesn't confuse the people we are talking to. It doesn't make it easier for them if we hand them a cue card with possible answers on it.
Question: "Are you coming to the party?" Answer: "Yes."
See how simple that is? I fail to understand how I can make a dialog asking the same question any easier for the user.
Again, it's not about defects, it's about making the UI easier to use.
As near as I can tell, it's about slavish adherence to someone's made up rule. Where are the studies demonstrating that yes/no is more difficult than verb/verb? Merely pointing to the Apple interface guidelines is not good enough. I'm not going to rewrite all of my dialogs just because you say so. Show me the evidence!
Merely saying something isn't usable isn't good enough. Merely saying it confuses users isn't good enough. Merely saying that Apple does it one way isn't good enough. I want to know way yes/no is acceptable in spoken language but unacceptable if used as labels in a dialog.
p.s. I have personally received letters of praise from my users, remarking on how much more usable my software is from my competitors. I take pride in that. It therefore is somewhat insulting for you to come along, who has probably never even seen my software, and claim that it's all wrong because I don't have Apple's Seal of Approval on my interface.
Most people certainly don't use these lists for killfile functionality. They don't put people in their foes list for trolling, they put people in their foes list for disagreeing with them or posting contrary opinions.
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Okay, end of advertisement. Gee I feel all cheap and dirty whoring myself like that...
Seriously, brewing is easy to do. It was probably the first "technology". With modern malt extracts, all you need is a pot to boil in and a container to ferment in. Oh, and bottles or a keg to store in. But I'm sure true geeks will want to mash from scratch. Some even make their own malt and grow their own hops.
For millenia all of humanity lived in squalor. Today a portion of humanity has managed to crawl above that squalor. But to talk to so some people, the capitalism that has enabled this unprecedented rise in humanity's fortunes is grossly unfair. It almost sounds like they wish everyone was still down in the mud grubbing around for survival.
Slashdot Mirror
Needless to say, the little guy loses to the commercial developer this case...
We didn't lose to the commercial developer, we lost to the fucking government! Maybe if we hadn't spent so much time worrying about Evil Business, we might have noticed that our government was reaching critical mass.
Business isn't the problem. Business don't have the power of eminent domain. Business don't have police and armies. And most of all, businesses don't have court systems arbitrarily deciding to take away the unalienable and natural rights you were born with. Only government does that.
Business didn't do this, the fucking government did this. And it wasn't the federal government that started it either, but some pissant little city council with too much time on their hands. For all your bitching about Bush or Kerry you never noticed that all the real tyrants in the US are your neighbors on the city council.
Yes, there are many businesses that lobby and court the government. But don't blame the addict, blame the pusher. Political power wouldn't be for sale if the government didn't put it up for auction to the highest bidder.
We're screwed now. This is a SCOTUS ruling. There's no one we can appeal this do. The only option we have to get our rights and property back is another revolution. The problem is that no one else but me cares. As long as the stop the Home Depot from building on the empty lot down the street, you guys will let the local government do whatever the fuck they want.
Emigrating to Iraq or Afghanistan is starting to look better and better. At least they have a future.
Nobody wants a draft. The Republicans don't. The Democrats don't. No one in office does. The only person in congress who actually proposed one only did it as (very poor) publicity stunt. In fact, the only serious proposal for a draft in the last two decades was from the *Democrats* calling for non-military national service.
Stop believing rumours about the draft, because they're not true. The radical left is concocting this story to panic students, since the radical left feeds off of negative emotions like some Star Trek alien. Sure, go ahead and attend the anti-draft rally on campus, it might get you laid. But don't actually believe any of the shit that gets posted up on campus bulletin boards.
Actually, free-rider situations like this are precisely where market forces don't work efficiently.
But at least market forces are several magnitudes more efficient than bureaucratic fumblings in the economy. The free market may not be perfect, but no one else has yet managed to come up with anything better.
The web development community could learn from architects. You do NOT tell an architect how to design a building!
The web development community needs to learn from interior decorators. You NEVER go to an interior decorator with a complete finished specification for your new living room. You give them an idea of what you want, and then they come back with three or four proposals.
Bullshit. If you had nine million customers last year, each paying you one dollar, then you can earn an extra ONE MILLION DOLLARS per year catering to that last 10%. Do the math. It's not going to cost you anywhere close to that margin to write proper HTML.
Are sites IE only because IE has features that firefox does not, or because developers are lazy and don't check in multiple browsers.
.NET.
Both, though the latter is more frequent. Everytime I come across an IE-only site in my work's intranet, and oftentimes when I encounter one outside of work, I fire off a message to the webmaster complaining about it. The responses I get back tell me a little bit about how they think.
My company is deeply in bed with Microsoft, so it's no surprise that many of the IE-only sites at work are due to IE-only applications and infrastructures. The prime example is Microsoft Sharepoint. You cannot use it without IE. Then there's our timecard application that is a IE-only Java applet. Yup, you read that one right: an IE-only Java applet. I guess they're getting in practice for a move to
I've never yet met a developer who deliberately used IE-only features. The culprit instead is laziness. They never test their pages. Sometimes they get very irate when you suggest they test their pages. As a software developer I have to test and have reviewed everything I check in. But to your average web developer, testing and reviewing (or even acknowledging bugs) is simply not done. For all you web developers that do practice quality, bless you! Unfortunately you're in the tiny minority.
I've even had one developer tell me he didn't have the financial resources to test on Mozilla. Being Free Software didn't deter him. "I'll have to get IT to install it and they'll charge my department..."
p.s. Some are even lazier than that, though, and transcend the bounds of mere monobrowserism. I've met more than one developer who hardcoded in a width of 800 pixels for the total width of their pages, just so the pages would be "guaranteed" to fit in 800x600 screens. If they had ever bothered to actually text their pages on such a screen, they would have discovered the rude fact that 800 pixel wide pages do not fit on 800 pixel wide screens.
Instead of fixing the problem, you instead migrate stupidity into the Firefox domain. Not everyone can use Firefox, because some people do not have the ability to install Firefox on the systems they use. Others can use Firefox, but they're not about to stop everything and install and learn a new browser just because you cop an attitude.
And then there's people like me. We've got Firefox installed, but we happen to be using another browser (Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc). That's our right. It's our choice. It's our freedom. We're not going to shut down our current browser and start up Firefox, just to see you're site. They annoyance isn't worth it. So instead we make a mental note never to visit your site ever again.
Troll!
.NET and a few minimalist styles as well. Then go to kde-look.org and you'll find dozens more. Like Baghira, which is a continuation and immense improvement of the old Liquid. Also Alloy, Lipstick, Thin Keramik (a big improvement over its namesake), ActiveHeart, Krisp, Qinx, Comix, etc, etc.
The default file dialog in Qt uses its platforms native file dialog. But X11 doesn't have a native dialog. So it made one. If you don't like it QFileDialog, however, you can use KFileDialog instead. Or write your own. Problem solved. As for which kind of file dialog is best, I prefer Qt's native file dialog ot GTK+' dialog.
While you may not like any of the KDE themes, other people may not like any of the GNOME themes. This doesn't make them wrong and you right, however.
Knockoffs of Motif and Windows? WTF? There are only two Motif-like themes, one of which is a direct rippoff of the default GTK+ theme! Yes, you heard me right! If the MotifPlus look is good enough for GTK+, why isn't it good enough for KDE? And there's only one Windows like theme. Funny, GNOME has one Windows like theme too! You mention Keramik, but that's no longer the default. You never had to use it anyway. Yes, it is kind of ugly. But at the time it came out it created a splash in the community, because it was something new and different. It was only a matter of weeks before the GTK+ community came up with their Geramik clone. Plastik the new default, however, and I'm glad that you find is vaguely usable. But go look at some other themes. There's Phase which is another modern style in a different vein. There's a
Rewriting libraries? I'm not sure what you're talking about. In fact I'm completely confused. You must have KDE confused with something else. The tiny handful of core KDE libraries are dwarfed by the dozens needed by another desktop.
Dammit, that's the rationale my boss is giving me to move to Windows development! Seriously!
.NET developers down at Starbucks? Your career will be stunted if you don't modernize yourself!"
"Come on," he says, "you can learn C#, I know you can! Why be an old fart using C++ and Unix when you can be like those hip and savvy
Sigh.
The FLOSS community in general loves, and has always loved, Qt. The only holdouts are GNU, Debian and Redhat. No one else has any problems with it.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that there will always be a miniscule but extremely shrill segment that hates Qt and will come up with any excuse to shit on it. For a while the excuse was that Trolltech didn't apologize to Richard Stallman (seriously!), then it was that it wasn't crossplatform enough (go figure). For a while it was that the Canopy Group owned a tiny fraction of their shares. The current excuse seems to be either that it's written in C++, or that it doesn't use all of C++'s features. People who hate it will always come up with a reason, no matter how absurd, to hate it.
All you need is a new Qt theme. Call it "Crunched" or "Sardines" or something. A Qt application can use its own theme, so it doesn't have to installed system wide.
KDE on Windows is coming. The purpose is not to run one desktop on top of another, but to provide the framework to run KDE applications on Windows. Such as KOffice.
All of the momentum and best coders are behind Microsoft. Does the market really need another operating system?
It was Coolo that made that post. The khtml developers will of course listen. But don't expect them to drop everything. New bugs need fixing just as much as old bugs.
The current meme among left wing academia is that capitalism gives consumers too many choices. Oh the tyranny of having too many brands of toothpaste to choose from! Microsoft is merely providing a service, by eliminating choice. We should thank them for not being greedy capitalists and burdening us with the tryanny of choice!
Ditto on Qt. I too have ported an application over to OSX using their native Aqua Qt. It gets you 95% of the way there. But that last 5% of integration seems to be the only thing some users care about. Most Mac users are quite willing to accept ported software that isn't 100% perfect. But there's a few that get genuinely offended if the software isn't the poster boy for the Apple Interface Guidelines.
Seriously though, I think current world events has lead to lack of interest/funding/training in space-related activies. The result is inevitable.
Actually, I think we're going about it the right way. It's up for private interests to fund space now, and they will do it. But only when it makes economic sense. I think that's going to be very very soon.
We've already been the moon. We've already demonstrated a resuable orbiter. So what are we proving with all those additional billions of dollars? Now is the time for NASA and the government to step back.
If the government had been in charge of highways in the same way they're in charge of space exploration, then the only automobiles we would have would be billion dollar state owned behemoths lumbering along grossly polluted roads. Every decade or so an automobile would blow up killing a half dozen courageous autonauts, whereupon congress would wring its hangs worrying if driving was a good idea to begin with.
We don't need a line item veto, we need presidents with the cojones to tell congress they'll veto the whole ball of wax if they try to slip something through. Reagan threatened to do this, but he never followed through.
It's not even politically damaging to do this, if you're smart about it. Just go on television and tell the public, "I vetoed the bill because some rat in congress tried to sneak through a bad law. Good laws don't need the cover of darkness and secrecy. When congress removes those riders, I'll sign the bill."
so your now comparing hacking to rape, theft, break and enter, and assult?
We were talking about breaking and entering, not hacking. If you want to blame someone for hijacking the thread, blame Jedidiah who first brought it up.
Slashdot announced an unfounded rumour as an imminent fact? Tell me it ain't so!
I'm not sneering at fairness, I'm sneering at the idea that dragging people down to the lowest level is fair. Go read (or watch the movie) Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut. You don't make everyone equally beautiful by mutilating those who are beautiful so that everyone is equally ugly. Yet that's how some people would have us behave with wealth. They want equality of destitution. They are not happy that some of humanity has managed crawl it way out of abject poverty.
It's not that they don't know what "Yes" and "No" mean, it's that it's clearer and easier if they don't have to connect the "Yes" and "No" with choices given by the message in the dialog.
In real life conversations, outside of software, we ask yes/no questions ALL THE TIME. It doesn't confuse the people we are talking to. It doesn't make it easier for them if we hand them a cue card with possible answers on it.
Question: "Are you coming to the party?"
Answer: "Yes."
See how simple that is? I fail to understand how I can make a dialog asking the same question any easier for the user.
Again, it's not about defects, it's about making the UI easier to use.
As near as I can tell, it's about slavish adherence to someone's made up rule. Where are the studies demonstrating that yes/no is more difficult than verb/verb? Merely pointing to the Apple interface guidelines is not good enough. I'm not going to rewrite all of my dialogs just because you say so. Show me the evidence!
Merely saying something isn't usable isn't good enough. Merely saying it confuses users isn't good enough. Merely saying that Apple does it one way isn't good enough. I want to know way yes/no is acceptable in spoken language but unacceptable if used as labels in a dialog.
p.s. I have personally received letters of praise from my users, remarking on how much more usable my software is from my competitors. I take pride in that. It therefore is somewhat insulting for you to come along, who has probably never even seen my software, and claim that it's all wrong because I don't have Apple's Seal of Approval on my interface.
Most people certainly don't use these lists for killfile functionality. They don't put people in their foes list for trolling, they put people in their foes list for disagreeing with them or posting contrary opinions.
Never brewed beer? Want to brew beer? No problem! Pardon my self promotion while I introduce you to QBrew, the world's premier Open Source homebrewing software. Available for Unix, Linux, Windows and Macintosh, QBrew not only helps you figure out a recipes, it comes with a brewing primer. So stop dreaming about it and start brewing!
Okay, end of advertisement. Gee I feel all cheap and dirty whoring myself like that...
Seriously, brewing is easy to do. It was probably the first "technology". With modern malt extracts, all you need is a pot to boil in and a container to ferment in. Oh, and bottles or a keg to store in. But I'm sure true geeks will want to mash from scratch. Some even make their own malt and grow their own hops.
More than don't, in fact.
For millenia all of humanity lived in squalor. Today a portion of humanity has managed to crawl above that squalor. But to talk to so some people, the capitalism that has enabled this unprecedented rise in humanity's fortunes is grossly unfair. It almost sounds like they wish everyone was still down in the mud grubbing around for survival.