With the checkmark, you mean? True, that works, but I find the thing to be the most confusing part of the entire interface.
The iTunes help says that: "A black checkmark next to a song means the song will be included in your next action. For example, only songs with black checkmarks are transferred to your iPod or imported when you click the Import button. Or, when you're playing all the songs in a list, only the checked songs play."
But meanwhile, if I select a bunch of tracks and I set a rating via the context menu, all the tracks are rated, even those that aren't marked.
I'd prefer to use an explicit tag that does exactly what I want it too and no more or less, rather than this checkmark thingy that seemingly arbitrarily affects some things, but not others.
I was thinking about something like this myself. Basically, what I'd like to have are two flags:
1: Never play unless I explicitly say so. 2: Don't include in shuffle.
The first one I'd use to flag interviews etc. that are sometimes included on albums. Is not necessarily bad content, just something that you don't generally need to hear multiple times.
The second one is for flagging things like Beethoven's 9th. It's really good music, but you don't want 67 minute long pieces in a random playlist.
I currently just use the 1 and 2 star ratings for this, but it's not really ideal. It's too bad (but understandable) that iTunes has no option for looking at TXX frames or I could implement it in a better way.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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· Score: 1
I'll gladly admit that this would no doubt have been easier in perl. Unfortunately, I didn't know perl and didn't have the time to learn it. The thing had to be done and I knew how to do it with the standard *nix tools. Was an easy decision. (Though I admit that I cheated a bit and did some tricky parts in Java.)
Regardless, even with perl I doubt it would it would have been as easy as with WSH. That is not a knock against perl, but an acknowledgement that this problem is more naturally tackled in OO using tools that communicate in OO, which is what I can do extremely easily with WSH.
I don't see why such a thing would be impossible under *nix. I'm not asking for an overnight shift and I'm not asking for an abandonment of plaintext (far from it). Why would it be impossible for the gnu tools to be modified so that they're able to produce serialized objects in some common framework when the appropriate flag is set? That'd be a great start!
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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But with WSH I don't need to use 15000 API's either. It's no worse (better even IMO) than having to learn to use the various posix tools.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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Nah, not that bad. That would indeed not be something to be tackled through scripting. I'm talking about less than a gig of data.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
That's close to the truth. Going by the wikipedia description, OpenDoc was going to be the successor to OLE, which is the predecessor to ActiveX that Microsoft uses for all of this.
I only use it for scripting (I'm primarily a Java programmer), but it's pretty nifty.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Speed be damned. If I wanted speed, I sure wouldn't be using WSH. I'm using it because it makes my life easier.
Here's an example. I can easily do pretty much anything Word, PowerPoint and (especially) Excel are capable of from WSH. That's really nice when I want to analyse and generate reports on a metric ton of scientific data in CSV format.
This way I can treat the data in a natural way. If I want a row, I just ask the object representing Excel to give me that row. If I want the text in the row to be boldfaced, I set the Font.Bold property of that row to True. If I want the row to be displayed in PowerPoint, I just pass the object. Easy.
Now, I could certainly do all this analysis and report generation by piping the plaintext CSV data using bash, sed, grep, wc, gnuplot, latex, etc. but to say it's bloody tedious is an understatement. I know this because I've done it.
Another example is graphs. If I want to get the collection of great-grandparents of a node, I don't want to have to first parse a bloody list of nodes, values, arcs, etc. Why do I want to do that when my utilities have already done that work? Just let me access their internal representations through some API. It'd make my life a lot easier. Would probably result in better code as well.
Besides, objects and plaintext need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, in Java every object has a toString() method. Just expose the object to those utilties that want 'em and produce the String representation for those that don't. Everybody'll be happy.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
That's another discussion altogether. I was comparing plaintext vs objects, not one implementation vs another. I just happen to be more familiar with WSH than CPAN.
(By the way, WSH is just the scripting host, not a language. You can use a number of different languages with WSH, including perl.)
My main problem is that *nix apps in general still only want to communicate through plaintext, even when this really isn't the optimal solution. Nowadays, I can communicate using objects with nearly any useful application under WSH. Maybe CPAN makes up for this, I don't know. But even if it does, what if I don't want to program in perl? With WSH, I can use any language that has a frontend.
In short: I don't care about languages, I just want *nix applications to start communicating through objects where appropriate.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh come one. Sure, there are lots and lots of problems with Windows, but scripting objects is not one of them.
Ever try to work with filenames containing spaces? Ever need to manipulate data that represents a graph or tree (other than a directory tree)? Ever need to manipulate a bunch of spreadsheets (including layout)?
I've done each of those in bash and in WSH and I infinitely prefer the latter.
Using plaintext when possible is a great idea that I support 100%, but for some things it just plain sucks. And as soon as piping objects is made easy (as MS claims to be doing with Monad), objects will become more desirable still.
Honestly, the *nix world is rediculously smug when it comes to these things. For ages scripting was way better under *nix, but in the past years it seems that MS is where all the progress is being made. They're still not entirely there, but they're gaining ground fast.
We do generally have a reasonable legal system. Unfortunately, even if a law is rediculous, then the court has no choice but to uphold it.
The people who signed the contract really couldn't do much about it. Artists can't sign away their right to object to defacement of their work. The law actually doesn't allow them to do so (to protect poor artists against big corporations and the like).
The only thing the contract-signers can be blamed for (and they are) is for consistantly choosing prestigious (mega-ego) architects. Problem is that the guy in charge of buildings wants to leave an architectural legacy and ousting him is near-impossible. You think regular politics are bad? University politics are worse. None of the dozens of faculties, departments, counsils, workgroups, magistrates, etc. ever wants to budge as much as an inch. Getting something done that involves more than 1 party is always a long term goal.
It's akin to buying a house and not being able to change the light bulbs or put an extension on without asking the original architect for his permission.
Unfortunately, this is actually a reality in many countries, my own (the Netherlands) included.
You see, copyright law states that artists can refuse others the right to "deface" their artwork. Since architects have somehow turned from engineers to artists, they have the right to prevent their customers from making adjustments to their buildings.
Thankfully, many architects don't use this right, but the ones with the biggest egos (the really expensive ones) do. My university built a huge library a couple of years ago, which cost them a couple dozen millions of euros. Turns out they're not even allowed to rearrange the bloody "designer" desks!
Does your code give your company a competitive advantage over the competition? In other words: is it something that could (directly or indirectly) convince a potential client to choose your company over the competition?
If so, then it will probably be hard to convince your CEO to open up the code. He will be worried about your competitors using your code against you. Rightly so, if you ask me. That's not to say that GPL'ing is necessarily a bad idea, just that's it's something that should be considered very carefully.
If not, then things are a lot easier. The usual arguments of (potentially) free testing, free coders and good PR should prove convincing. After all, there's little to lose and a lot to gain.
The spreading was indeed what I found so fascinating. You write a clever bit of software, release it, and if you've been clever enough, your bit of code will take on a life of its own. In time it could be all over the world, perhaps even mutating if you write it that way, all by itself.
Unsurprisingly, I decided to get a master's degree in AI:-)
Indeed, money is a motivation, but it's not the only one. It's also an intellectual challenge.
Back when I had learned to program in my early teens, I myself was quite fascinated by virii/trojans/etc. and wondered if I could create one. I probably could have written a moderately "successful" trojan by the standards of the time. It's not that hard.
Thankfully, I was responsible enough not to, but not everybody is. All it takes is one bad apple...
Both statements are true. However, given Mr Bush's convincing re-election, people over here are generally not optimistic about the chance of the next president of the US being saner. While the UN may not be our first choice, we unfortunately have more confidence in them than in the US right now.
Thank you for the compliment. I am not in fact a Brit though; I am Dutch. However, I must admit that I am a fan of British humour. (I do hope "Are you being served" is not the equivalent of Baywatch, because I quite like it. Have you ever seen "Man about the house"? Another good one.)
The conflicts between the US and the UN are well known. I can understand your concerns, but from our perspective, the matter looks like the US is childishly demanding an unequal say in things. (Europe actually pays a lot more than the US, and Japan doesn't pay much less. See here.) It's things like that that have a great effect on how the US is perceived by the rest of the world. No matter how valid your arguments may be, people are always wary of an ulterior motive.
I'm glad you took the post as intended: a funny parody that hopefully makes people think a little more about the issue.
My point was mostly directed at all those people who don't understand why many people outside of the US think its only reasonable to have the UN (or some other global organisation) in control over the network that we all built together. As a European, having the UN in control definitely sounds better to me than having the current US government in control. (During the Clinton administration, I might have felt differently.) I must admit that I do agree with you on the tax issue though. The UN is getting enough of my money already.
There's a big difference between wanting to have a fair say in things that you've contributed a lot to and cutting yourself off from the people who started it all. Nobody is proposing to create a separate internet. We just don't want the US government to make all the important decisions all by itself.
And the comparison between the current feelings towards the US and the Jews in the 1930s (based on the opinion of a woman who was born in 1929, I should add) is nonsense. Nobody has anything against individual Americans. People just really dislike your current government.
I recognize that the colonists make a valuable contribution to the new world, however: The British developed North America, with many large investments (buying New York from the Dutch etc.), and now we are expected to just give it up? The British empire has perhaps the most to lose, economically, if the new world were to "go down(whatever that means)" No taxation without representation scares me. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see why no taxation without representation is a bad idea and an awful precedent. The new world has become a security issue- Aside from all the defense networks etc, we need to be able to keep tabs on extremist groups in the new world, note that there is a widely circulating how to pamphlet about how to cause the most damage with a b#mb on a coach. As popular as "Britain is an Imperialist" sentiment has become, we still believe in freedom of speech. What happens when New York decides that no one should use the word teatime? What happens when Boston decides that the words Your Majesty can't be used? Just some thoughts.
The numbers do sound silly and are certainly untrue in the general case, but in some corporations they are true.
I have a part-time job at a place where about one in 10 computers has a cd drive and just about every one has a usb drive. The reason: the IT department in their infinite wisdom decided that cd drives would be used for installing unauthorised software, so they took them out of every box that did not absolutely required one. (Yes, the IT department is universally reviled and mocked.)
Disturbing to see how the distro that was always renowned for its reliability is now having such troubles.
I wish the debian team all the luck in the world in fixing this matter. They're in a difficult position now that they're both lagging behind (though much less so than a while back) and cannot claim unparalleled reliability.
Very true. This is especially annoying for people who are not native English speakers. For some of these people it's a remarkable achievement that they speak the language as well as they do, yet nowadays they are constantly being abused by people who, more often than not, cannot form a single coherent sentence in a language other than English.
There's nothing inherently wrong with pointing out mistakes - in fact many non-native English speakers appreciate it, as it helps them to improve their command of the language - but please do so in a respectful manner.
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With the checkmark, you mean? True, that works, but I find the thing to be the most confusing part of the entire interface.
The iTunes help says that:
"A black checkmark next to a song means the song will be included in your next action. For example, only songs with black checkmarks are transferred to your iPod or imported when you click the Import button. Or, when you're playing all the songs in a list, only the checked songs play."
But meanwhile, if I select a bunch of tracks and I set a rating via the context menu, all the tracks are rated, even those that aren't marked.
I'd prefer to use an explicit tag that does exactly what I want it too and no more or less, rather than this checkmark thingy that seemingly arbitrarily affects some things, but not others.
I was thinking about something like this myself. Basically, what I'd like to have are two flags:
1: Never play unless I explicitly say so.
2: Don't include in shuffle.
The first one I'd use to flag interviews etc. that are sometimes included on albums. Is not necessarily bad content, just something that you don't generally need to hear multiple times.
The second one is for flagging things like Beethoven's 9th. It's really good music, but you don't want 67 minute long pieces in a random playlist.
I currently just use the 1 and 2 star ratings for this, but it's not really ideal. It's too bad (but understandable) that iTunes has no option for looking at TXX frames or I could implement it in a better way.
I'll gladly admit that this would no doubt have been easier in perl. Unfortunately, I didn't know perl and didn't have the time to learn it. The thing had to be done and I knew how to do it with the standard *nix tools. Was an easy decision. (Though I admit that I cheated a bit and did some tricky parts in Java.)
Regardless, even with perl I doubt it would it would have been as easy as with WSH. That is not a knock against perl, but an acknowledgement that this problem is more naturally tackled in OO using tools that communicate in OO, which is what I can do extremely easily with WSH.
I don't see why such a thing would be impossible under *nix. I'm not asking for an overnight shift and I'm not asking for an abandonment of plaintext (far from it). Why would it be impossible for the gnu tools to be modified so that they're able to produce serialized objects in some common framework when the appropriate flag is set? That'd be a great start!
But with WSH I don't need to use 15000 API's either. It's no worse (better even IMO) than having to learn to use the various posix tools.
Nah, not that bad. That would indeed not be something to be tackled through scripting. I'm talking about less than a gig of data.
That's close to the truth. Going by the wikipedia description, OpenDoc was going to be the successor to OLE, which is the predecessor to ActiveX that Microsoft uses for all of this.
I only use it for scripting (I'm primarily a Java programmer), but it's pretty nifty.
Speed be damned. If I wanted speed, I sure wouldn't be using WSH. I'm using it because it makes my life easier.
Here's an example. I can easily do pretty much anything Word, PowerPoint and (especially) Excel are capable of from WSH. That's really nice when I want to analyse and generate reports on a metric ton of scientific data in CSV format.
This way I can treat the data in a natural way. If I want a row, I just ask the object representing Excel to give me that row. If I want the text in the row to be boldfaced, I set the Font.Bold property of that row to True. If I want the row to be displayed in PowerPoint, I just pass the object. Easy.
Now, I could certainly do all this analysis and report generation by piping the plaintext CSV data using bash, sed, grep, wc, gnuplot, latex, etc. but to say it's bloody tedious is an understatement. I know this because I've done it.
Another example is graphs. If I want to get the collection of great-grandparents of a node, I don't want to have to first parse a bloody list of nodes, values, arcs, etc. Why do I want to do that when my utilities have already done that work? Just let me access their internal representations through some API. It'd make my life a lot easier. Would probably result in better code as well.
Besides, objects and plaintext need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, in Java every object has a toString() method. Just expose the object to those utilties that want 'em and produce the String representation for those that don't. Everybody'll be happy.
That's another discussion altogether. I was comparing plaintext vs objects, not one implementation vs another. I just happen to be more familiar with WSH than CPAN.
(By the way, WSH is just the scripting host, not a language. You can use a number of different languages with WSH, including perl.)
My main problem is that *nix apps in general still only want to communicate through plaintext, even when this really isn't the optimal solution. Nowadays, I can communicate using objects with nearly any useful application under WSH. Maybe CPAN makes up for this, I don't know. But even if it does, what if I don't want to program in perl? With WSH, I can use any language that has a frontend.
In short: I don't care about languages, I just want *nix applications to start communicating through objects where appropriate.
Oh come one. Sure, there are lots and lots of problems with Windows, but scripting objects is not one of them.
Ever try to work with filenames containing spaces? Ever need to manipulate data that represents a graph or tree (other than a directory tree)? Ever need to manipulate a bunch of spreadsheets (including layout)?
I've done each of those in bash and in WSH and I infinitely prefer the latter.
Using plaintext when possible is a great idea that I support 100%, but for some things it just plain sucks. And as soon as piping objects is made easy (as MS claims to be doing with Monad), objects will become more desirable still.
Honestly, the *nix world is rediculously smug when it comes to these things. For ages scripting was way better under *nix, but in the past years it seems that MS is where all the progress is being made. They're still not entirely there, but they're gaining ground fast.
We do generally have a reasonable legal system. Unfortunately, even if a law is rediculous, then the court has no choice but to uphold it.
The people who signed the contract really couldn't do much about it. Artists can't sign away their right to object to defacement of their work. The law actually doesn't allow them to do so (to protect poor artists against big corporations and the like).
The only thing the contract-signers can be blamed for (and they are) is for consistantly choosing prestigious (mega-ego) architects. Problem is that the guy in charge of buildings wants to leave an architectural legacy and ousting him is near-impossible. You think regular politics are bad? University politics are worse. None of the dozens of faculties, departments, counsils, workgroups, magistrates, etc. ever wants to budge as much as an inch. Getting something done that involves more than 1 party is always a long term goal.
Unfortunately, this is actually a reality in many countries, my own (the Netherlands) included.
You see, copyright law states that artists can refuse others the right to "deface" their artwork. Since architects have somehow turned from engineers to artists, they have the right to prevent their customers from making adjustments to their buildings.
Thankfully, many architects don't use this right, but the ones with the biggest egos (the really expensive ones) do. My university built a huge library a couple of years ago, which cost them a couple dozen millions of euros. Turns out they're not even allowed to rearrange the bloody "designer" desks!
Does your code give your company a competitive advantage over the competition? In other words: is it something that could (directly or indirectly) convince a potential client to choose your company over the competition?
If so, then it will probably be hard to convince your CEO to open up the code. He will be worried about your competitors using your code against you. Rightly so, if you ask me. That's not to say that GPL'ing is necessarily a bad idea, just that's it's something that should be considered very carefully.
If not, then things are a lot easier. The usual arguments of (potentially) free testing, free coders and good PR should prove convincing. After all, there's little to lose and a lot to gain.
The spreading was indeed what I found so fascinating. You write a clever bit of software, release it, and if you've been clever enough, your bit of code will take on a life of its own. In time it could be all over the world, perhaps even mutating if you write it that way, all by itself.
:-)
Unsurprisingly, I decided to get a master's degree in AI
Indeed, money is a motivation, but it's not the only one. It's also an intellectual challenge.
Back when I had learned to program in my early teens, I myself was quite fascinated by virii/trojans/etc. and wondered if I could create one. I probably could have written a moderately "successful" trojan by the standards of the time. It's not that hard.
Thankfully, I was responsible enough not to, but not everybody is. All it takes is one bad apple...
'Fraid you're misremembering then, 'cause it's from Januari 2003. See http://www.ubergeek.tv/listing.php?list=animation
Both statements are true. However, given Mr Bush's convincing re-election, people over here are generally not optimistic about the chance of the next president of the US being saner. While the UN may not be our first choice, we unfortunately have more confidence in them than in the US right now.
Thank you for the compliment. I am not in fact a Brit though; I am Dutch. However, I must admit that I am a fan of British humour. (I do hope "Are you being served" is not the equivalent of Baywatch, because I quite like it. Have you ever seen "Man about the house"? Another good one.)
The conflicts between the US and the UN are well known. I can understand your concerns, but from our perspective, the matter looks like the US is childishly demanding an unequal say in things. (Europe actually pays a lot more than the US, and Japan doesn't pay much less. See here.) It's things like that that have a great effect on how the US is perceived by the rest of the world. No matter how valid your arguments may be, people are always wary of an ulterior motive.
I'm glad you took the post as intended: a funny parody that hopefully makes people think a little more about the issue. My point was mostly directed at all those people who don't understand why many people outside of the US think its only reasonable to have the UN (or some other global organisation) in control over the network that we all built together. As a European, having the UN in control definitely sounds better to me than having the current US government in control. (During the Clinton administration, I might have felt differently.) I must admit that I do agree with you on the tax issue though. The UN is getting enough of my money already.
There's a big difference between wanting to have a fair say in things that you've contributed a lot to and cutting yourself off from the people who started it all. Nobody is proposing to create a separate internet. We just don't want the US government to make all the important decisions all by itself.
And the comparison between the current feelings towards the US and the Jews in the 1930s (based on the opinion of a woman who was born in 1929, I should add) is nonsense. Nobody has anything against individual Americans. People just really dislike your current government.
I recognize that the colonists make a valuable contribution to the new world, however:
The British developed North America, with many large investments (buying New York from the Dutch etc.), and now we are expected to just give it up?
The British empire has perhaps the most to lose, economically, if the new world were to "go down(whatever that means)"
No taxation without representation scares me. You don't need a tinfoil hat to see why no taxation without representation is a bad idea and an awful precedent.
The new world has become a security issue- Aside from all the defense networks etc, we need to be able to keep tabs on extremist groups in the new world, note that there is a widely circulating how to pamphlet about how to cause the most damage with a b#mb on a coach.
As popular as "Britain is an Imperialist" sentiment has become, we still believe in freedom of speech. What happens when New York decides that no one should use the word teatime? What happens when Boston decides that the words Your Majesty can't be used?
Just some thoughts.
The numbers do sound silly and are certainly untrue in the general case, but in some corporations they are true.
I have a part-time job at a place where about one in 10 computers has a cd drive and just about every one has a usb drive. The reason: the IT department in their infinite wisdom decided that cd drives would be used for installing unauthorised software, so they took them out of every box that did not absolutely required one. (Yes, the IT department is universally reviled and mocked.)
Really? Could you please name the brand and type of player so we can avoid it?
Forget about the carbonite. All I care about is that bikini!
/. poster, I'd have a get a Russian mail order bride to fully enjoy the thing. Oh well...
Course, me being a
Disturbing to see how the distro that was always renowned for its reliability is now having such troubles.
I wish the debian team all the luck in the world in fixing this matter. They're in a difficult position now that they're both lagging behind (though much less so than a while back) and cannot claim unparalleled reliability.
Very true. This is especially annoying for people who are not native English speakers. For some of these people it's a remarkable achievement that they speak the language as well as they do, yet nowadays they are constantly being abused by people who, more often than not, cannot form a single coherent sentence in a language other than English.
There's nothing inherently wrong with pointing out mistakes - in fact many non-native English speakers appreciate it, as it helps them to improve their command of the language - but please do so in a respectful manner.