And if you own a (non-NetMD) MiniDisc player or similar, you'd be used to doing that anyway...
Also, I might point out that some sound cards (my old SBLive for one) have a virtual loopback device which allows you to record anything the card is playing without having to use any cables. Very useful.
Rotary knobs are designed to be packed densely. Witness an audio mixer: each channel is made up of many knobs and small buttons, and one slider. Replace each knob with a slider and a text-entry box, and suddenly your channel density drops by a factor of four. It doesn't matter too much in normal applications, where if you've got that number of controls packed that densely, you're probably doing something wrong.
Possibly a better way to do things would be to use knobs, with some way of popping up a text entry box to enter a precise value.
I've used audio apps based on sliders-with-text-entry, namely GranuLab, which has an entire screenful of densely-packed, gray, blocky sliders. It looks awful.
You're right about the bitmap-based interface, however. I use Propellorheads' Reason, which has a beautiful bitmap interface that tries to emulate real-world devices as much as possible. It's great fun to use - but on a 1280x960 screen everything is tiny, and the device stack only occupies half the width of the monitor.
Yeah, they're a lot better... unfortunately, I got none with my Dremel, and my friend only got four with his (mains-powered, w00t) one. He'd used them to window his case, so we had none left when it came to the aluminium cutting, and we couldn't find any online or in the shops, which was annoying.
The next time I wanted to cut aluminium, I just bought a jigsaw. It's wonderful - used it to cut a sidepanel and two 120mm blowholes into an old steel full tower case. Took me about five minutes - I shudder to think how long it'd have taken with a Dremel...
It's pretty good for engraving metal. I make Naruto headbands from sheet aluminium, and carve the design with a Dremel (well, a cheap knockoff.)
That said, though, most of the tools appear to be targeted towards model makers more than anything else. For any decent-sized project, there is usually a better tool that can be found somewhere.
I've had bad experiences trying to get away with just a Dremel - trying to cut out rounded rectangles (for the above headbands) from sheet aluminium using only Dremel cutting discs and grinders is liable to cause more harm to the discs/grinders than the metal. They either wear down in seconds, or just explode...
Yeah, Dell prices are starting to look increasingly attractive to me - and that's from the perspective of someone who normally wouldn't touch a branded PC (had bad experiences with Packard Bells in the past.)
Right now, I can build a nicely-specced new computer for not that much over £200 (about $400) - less if I use spare parts I've got lying around, or expend a bit of effort to find the cheapest supplier for everything (rather than just buying everything from one place). To buy a copy of Windows for that computer will cost me almost half the price of the hardware - more if I can't get an OEM copy.
So MS is planning to sell stripped-down Windows for about $40. It's a lot better than a full version of Windows, but if the hardware costs $100, that's still the same unfavourable software:hardware ratio. I can see people thinking "WTF, I can buy another computer for the price of two and a half Windows licenses. Why am I paying for this when I could just pirate it?"
Windows' pricing is outdated. Back when PCs cost well over £1000 ($2000) for a new system, it was fine. But hardware prices have plummeted, and software prices haven't.
"What's this thing you wanted me to install, son? Uhm... anti-virus, it said, I think? Is that safe? I mean, I heard Bill Gates on the TV the other night saying that the reason thing go wrong with peoples' computers... it's all because of third party software. Nice guy, that Gates. Good mind for business.
"What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Third party software. I dunno. My computer's running pretty slow at the moment, ever since you came over a few months ago and installed all that stuff for me. What was it, Thunderfox or something?
"I remember you tried to show me how to use it, but I prefer that Outlook program. Doesn't try and stop me doing what I want to do, make all the images in my emails broken and stuff like that.
"D'you think that that's why my computer's slow? After all, that Gates guy was saying that third party software's what makes 'em go bad. Are you sure that stuff you installed was safe? I mean, I've heard there are a lot of viruses going around on the World Wide Web...
"Maybe you better just keep this anti-virus software, and take that Thunderfox thing off my machine, and see if it speeds up any. I'll just stick to Microsoft stuff, that should be safe enough.
"Besides, I don't think I need anti-virus stuff, really. My doctor always tells me to get a flu jag, and I ignore him. Hate needles. But I've not been ill for twenty years and I'm not intending to be ill any time soon. I don't go out in the rain without a scarf on, I cover my mouth when I'm sitting on a train next to a guy who's coughing and sneezing away. Sensible, see?
"It's like that with the computer. I don't use the Internet Explorer much - mostly I just use the computer for email and typing up letters and stuff. And I've never been on this World Wide Web thing - I remember a guy at work saying that you could get a lot of viruses off this Web, so I stayed away from it. So I'm pretty safe, right?
"Anyway, I'll see you next week. Oh, and hey, while you're at it... I have something I want you to check out when you're down at mine. There's this window that keeps popping up in the middle of my screen, telling me that my Internet is slow. It's been doing it for about a year and I keep closing it, but I got to wondering - d'you think it's right? I mean, when I use my Internet Explorer at work it's a lot faster. The little picture in the top right is different, too. Does that have anything to do with it?
"Yeah, anyway, see you next week. Sure, I'll say hi to your Mom for you. Alright, bye."
Yeah, I hacked mine up from scratch to output proper styleable HTML.
That said, LJ just debuted a new style which does the same thing, but better (my own style had a lot of hardcoded stuff.) They're obviously getting a clue, which is rather nifty.
"After all, everyone knows that CSS is for LiveJournal lusers to set their scroll bar colors" Hey, I use Livejournal. I've never set scrollbar colours in my life, I care about usable design and accessibility, and try to design my pages to look decent with CSS, but usable if you need to turn CSS off. Admittedly, I may be in a minority...
"...and could not possibly have any practical application. Real men use tables for layout, and that's that. A real programmer would never prefer CSS's long spelled out english words like border-color in favor of HTML's ULs and TDs. People who use CSS to obtain some result that could be possible with straight HTML are obviously being inefficient. They are probably wasting several bytes on those long, spelled out words." Actually, CSS is cached (if used properly) so it's not loaded every pageload. Plus, you can achieve some effects with a few lines of CSS that would take hundreds of lines of nested tables and Javascript.
"The content is the only thing matters is the content anyway." Yep, that's why separation of content and presentation is so cool:)
"If it's so bad, why don't you make your own front end for the RSS feed? That's the true Open Source way!" 'cos I'm lazy... =P
"Plus, what if someone tries to access/. in Netscape Navigator 3.0. It will surely choke on the CSS, and give some unpredictable result. Better safe than sorry." You can design a CSS page to gracefully degrade, so that users whose browsers don't support all CSS features (or don't support them properly) will still be able to use the site.
That said, I don't go so far as to declare "Tables are eeeevil! Never use them!" - they're pretty useful in quite a few contexts (outside the obvious ones of presenting tabular data). It's still tricky to implement a nice column design in CSS under certain circumstances, for instance.
Um. I think I had a point at some point, but I've forgotten it now... never mind.
Bic are French, incidentally, lending even more force to the "God-fearing, red-blooded, honest Americans would never use a Bic pen" argument... if you're a Real American, you'd use a pen that was Made in the US of A, as you sit and eat your Freedom Fries...
Actually, that article states that it's only older models wind generators that are noisy, usually because of being rushed to market in order to gain federal tax credits. It goes into a lot of detail defending modern wind turbines against accusations of excess noise.
Basically, at wind speeds high enough to drive a wind turbine, the environment makes more noise (trees rustling, wind howling etc) than the turbine itself.
The article does note that there are conditions where turbines may become noisy, but these only occur under conditions when the turbine has no load (either due to its grid connection being lost, or the batteries it is charging becoming full.) Either of these conditions can be easily remedied by simply shutting down the turbine.
I thought Apple basically made little-to-no profit on iTunes, relying on it mainly to sell iPods, which *do* have a high profit margin. Most of the money from iTunes probably goes to the record companies.
Thing is... in Mozilla, if I remember right, the option to change image looping to once-only *was* actually in the options dialogue. I think the Firefox designers took a policy decision that Mozilla's prefs dialogue was too crowded, so Firefox options would be limited to things which most users would regularly want to change.
In one way it's a step in the right direction - Open Source projects are often criticised for having too many options without enough organisation. However, I prefer the approach of other projects - instead of removing the options altogether, have a switch you can use to show or hide 'advanced user' options, which novice users wouldn't need to use.
I agree with your points - I don't think I'd ever run a proper mailserver off my home machine. The only time mail went from that machine was when it was generated by website scripts. It never accepted email.
I run a server from a dynamic connection. That's what services such as DynDNS are for - allowing you to have a domain that points to a moving target like a server on a dynamic connection. I've run into situations where mail sent from my machine (from a PHPBB) has bounced from mail servers just because it's from a dynamic IP. PHPBB *can* be set to use an SMTP server, but I ran into a lot of problems with my ISP's mailservers being down a lot or taking forever to respond (during which time the PHP script times out.)
Of course, the ISPs have a very valid reason for blocking said mail - the ratio of genuine mail to spam/worm-mail coming from dynamic users is probably vanishingly small.
I didn't say anything about geographical availability, and I was pretty wrong on the timeline - it just *seems* like a couple of years, I guess, since a couple of years ago was when I began hearing about broadband as a consumer thing (versus something only for high-budget business users.)
"I think you forget that delivering broadband isn't as easy as flicking a switch. There's infrastructure, etc to worry about, so it's only to be expected that things take a little time."
Please don't patronise me. I've been following the progress of broadband for a couple of years, starting back when I was still on dialup and wishing I had something better. I'm happy with the fact that progress *has* been made.
A couple of years ago I couldn't get ADSL at all, because I was too far from the exchange (and I'm not even in the Highlands - just a suburb of Glasgow.) Luckily, NTL (well, Cable & Wireless) cabled my street several years ago. However, the lack of ADSL meant that my only option for broadband was NTL.
What I was mainly pointing out is that the US is by no means the worst off for broadband. Even the UK is pretty decent. I'm delighted at the fact that I can get broadband at all - I recently had the task of de-spyware-ing a computer attached to a dialup connection. I forgot how painful dialup was - I'm only on a 150kbit connection, but even so I still take things for granted such as being able to download software without much of a wait.
The US a broadband backwater? Hah! The UK has only just started getting broadband in the last couple of years, and 512kbit is still considered 'high speed'. A 128kbit connection is considered broadband by the definition of the government (for the purposes of being able to say "We've made sure that over 90% of the population has broadband available to them.")
I'm pretty tired of hearing people from the US complain about their >1Mbit connections being slow.
In other news, every time I hear a web developer say "My page loads fast enough on my 4Mbit connection. If you're on dialup... UPGRADE!! LOL." I wish for a shotgun...
I definately wouldn't use a mouse or keyboard which didn't have a built-in charger, and I probably wouldn't use one which had a cradle charger instead. My own wireless mouse has a simple power port on the top of the mouse, so when it runs out of battery I just plug in a charger (5V, tip positive, standard 1mm barrel plug - the charger I use cost me a few quid from Maplin, since the mouse only came with a USB charger.)
This means that I can continue using the mouse while it's charging, with only a thin power cable protruding from below the scroll wheel. With a power cradle, I'd have to switch to a different mouse while it charged. And if the batteries run out of capacity, they're just AAA rechargables, so I can pop them out and replace them.
My mouse is about a year and a half old, from A4Tech, and cost about a fifth of what the equivalent Logitech cost at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
LJ is remarkably like the Internet, in fact: there may be many gems, but there's a hell of a lot of shit.
Hacked-up microwave on one end, parabolic dish on the other end ... just don't cross the beam ;)
:) )
(This probably wouldn't work in real life, but I used to play Sim City far too much
And if you own a (non-NetMD) MiniDisc player or similar, you'd be used to doing that anyway...
Also, I might point out that some sound cards (my old SBLive for one) have a virtual loopback device which allows you to record anything the card is playing without having to use any cables. Very useful.
So change the icon on whatever alternate browser you're using to the blue E, and tell her it's a new version =P
Rotary knobs are designed to be packed densely. Witness an audio mixer: each channel is made up of many knobs and small buttons, and one slider. Replace each knob with a slider and a text-entry box, and suddenly your channel density drops by a factor of four. It doesn't matter too much in normal applications, where if you've got that number of controls packed that densely, you're probably doing something wrong.
Possibly a better way to do things would be to use knobs, with some way of popping up a text entry box to enter a precise value.
I've used audio apps based on sliders-with-text-entry, namely GranuLab, which has an entire screenful of densely-packed, gray, blocky sliders. It looks awful.
You're right about the bitmap-based interface, however. I use Propellorheads' Reason, which has a beautiful bitmap interface that tries to emulate real-world devices as much as possible. It's great fun to use - but on a 1280x960 screen everything is tiny, and the device stack only occupies half the width of the monitor.
Yeah, they're a lot better ... unfortunately, I got none with my Dremel, and my friend only got four with his (mains-powered, w00t) one. He'd used them to window his case, so we had none left when it came to the aluminium cutting, and we couldn't find any online or in the shops, which was annoying.
The next time I wanted to cut aluminium, I just bought a jigsaw. It's wonderful - used it to cut a sidepanel and two 120mm blowholes into an old steel full tower case. Took me about five minutes - I shudder to think how long it'd have taken with a Dremel...
Only eight hours? Impressive. Usually takes about a month before cool stuff which has been making the rounds of IRC chans makes it onto /. ...
It's pretty good for engraving metal. I make Naruto headbands from sheet aluminium, and carve the design with a Dremel (well, a cheap knockoff.)
That said, though, most of the tools appear to be targeted towards model makers more than anything else. For any decent-sized project, there is usually a better tool that can be found somewhere.
I've had bad experiences trying to get away with just a Dremel - trying to cut out rounded rectangles (for the above headbands) from sheet aluminium using only Dremel cutting discs and grinders is liable to cause more harm to the discs/grinders than the metal. They either wear down in seconds, or just explode...
Yeah, Dell prices are starting to look increasingly attractive to me - and that's from the perspective of someone who normally wouldn't touch a branded PC (had bad experiences with Packard Bells in the past.)
And yeah, Office Pro is insane.
Right now, I can build a nicely-specced new computer for not that much over £200 (about $400) - less if I use spare parts I've got lying around, or expend a bit of effort to find the cheapest supplier for everything (rather than just buying everything from one place). To buy a copy of Windows for that computer will cost me almost half the price of the hardware - more if I can't get an OEM copy.
So MS is planning to sell stripped-down Windows for about $40. It's a lot better than a full version of Windows, but if the hardware costs $100, that's still the same unfavourable software:hardware ratio. I can see people thinking "WTF, I can buy another computer for the price of two and a half Windows licenses. Why am I paying for this when I could just pirate it?"
Windows' pricing is outdated. Back when PCs cost well over £1000 ($2000) for a new system, it was fine. But hardware prices have plummeted, and software prices haven't.
This sounds something similar...
m
http://www.conferencebike.com/Page3/frameset-3.ht
To be honest, I wouldn't get on one of those. Horribly flimsy-looking things.
Give me a Beer Bike any day.
"What's this thing you wanted me to install, son? Uhm ... anti-virus, it said, I think? Is that safe? I mean, I heard Bill Gates on the TV the other night saying that the reason thing go wrong with peoples' computers... it's all because of third party software. Nice guy, that Gates. Good mind for business.
... I have something I want you to check out when you're down at mine. There's this window that keeps popping up in the middle of my screen, telling me that my Internet is slow. It's been doing it for about a year and I keep closing it, but I got to wondering - d'you think it's right? I mean, when I use my Internet Explorer at work it's a lot faster. The little picture in the top right is different, too. Does that have anything to do with it?
"What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Third party software. I dunno. My computer's running pretty slow at the moment, ever since you came over a few months ago and installed all that stuff for me. What was it, Thunderfox or something?
"I remember you tried to show me how to use it, but I prefer that Outlook program. Doesn't try and stop me doing what I want to do, make all the images in my emails broken and stuff like that.
"D'you think that that's why my computer's slow? After all, that Gates guy was saying that third party software's what makes 'em go bad. Are you sure that stuff you installed was safe? I mean, I've heard there are a lot of viruses going around on the World Wide Web...
"Maybe you better just keep this anti-virus software, and take that Thunderfox thing off my machine, and see if it speeds up any. I'll just stick to Microsoft stuff, that should be safe enough.
"Besides, I don't think I need anti-virus stuff, really. My doctor always tells me to get a flu jag, and I ignore him. Hate needles. But I've not been ill for twenty years and I'm not intending to be ill any time soon. I don't go out in the rain without a scarf on, I cover my mouth when I'm sitting on a train next to a guy who's coughing and sneezing away. Sensible, see?
"It's like that with the computer. I don't use the Internet Explorer much - mostly I just use the computer for email and typing up letters and stuff. And I've never been on this World Wide Web thing - I remember a guy at work saying that you could get a lot of viruses off this Web, so I stayed away from it. So I'm pretty safe, right?
"Anyway, I'll see you next week. Oh, and hey, while you're at it
"Yeah, anyway, see you next week. Sure, I'll say hi to your Mom for you. Alright, bye."
Yeah, I hacked mine up from scratch to output proper styleable HTML. That said, LJ just debuted a new style which does the same thing, but better (my own style had a lot of hardcoded stuff.) They're obviously getting a clue, which is rather nifty.
I know this is not totally serious, but ...
:)
/. in Netscape Navigator 3.0. It will surely choke on the CSS, and give some unpredictable result. Better safe than sorry."
"After all, everyone knows that CSS is for LiveJournal lusers to set their scroll bar colors"
Hey, I use Livejournal. I've never set scrollbar colours in my life, I care about usable design and accessibility, and try to design my pages to look decent with CSS, but usable if you need to turn CSS off. Admittedly, I may be in a minority...
"...and could not possibly have any practical application. Real men use tables for layout, and that's that. A real programmer would never prefer CSS's long spelled out english words like border-color in favor of HTML's ULs and TDs. People who use CSS to obtain some result that could be possible with straight HTML are obviously being inefficient. They are probably wasting several bytes on those long, spelled out words."
Actually, CSS is cached (if used properly) so it's not loaded every pageload. Plus, you can achieve some effects with a few lines of CSS that would take hundreds of lines of nested tables and Javascript.
"The content is the only thing matters is the content anyway."
Yep, that's why separation of content and presentation is so cool
"If it's so bad, why don't you make your own front end for the RSS feed? That's the true Open Source way!"
'cos I'm lazy... =P
"Plus, what if someone tries to access
You can design a CSS page to gracefully degrade, so that users whose browsers don't support all CSS features (or don't support them properly) will still be able to use the site.
That said, I don't go so far as to declare "Tables are eeeevil! Never use them!" - they're pretty useful in quite a few contexts (outside the obvious ones of presenting tabular data). It's still tricky to implement a nice column design in CSS under certain circumstances, for instance.
Um. I think I had a point at some point, but I've forgotten it now... never mind.
..."Slashdot updates their 2001 for HTML"?
Bic are French, incidentally, lending even more force to the "God-fearing, red-blooded, honest Americans would never use a Bic pen" argument... if you're a Real American, you'd use a pen that was Made in the US of A, as you sit and eat your Freedom Fries...
Tritium or Deuterium, not triterium. Both are isotopes of hydrogen, with two extra and one extra neutron respectively.
Actually, that article states that it's only older models wind generators that are noisy, usually because of being rushed to market in order to gain federal tax credits. It goes into a lot of detail defending modern wind turbines against accusations of excess noise.
Basically, at wind speeds high enough to drive a wind turbine, the environment makes more noise (trees rustling, wind howling etc) than the turbine itself.
The article does note that there are conditions where turbines may become noisy, but these only occur under conditions when the turbine has no load (either due to its grid connection being lost, or the batteries it is charging becoming full.) Either of these conditions can be easily remedied by simply shutting down the turbine.
I thought Apple basically made little-to-no profit on iTunes, relying on it mainly to sell iPods, which *do* have a high profit margin. Most of the money from iTunes probably goes to the record companies.
Thing is ... in Mozilla, if I remember right, the option to change image looping to once-only *was* actually in the options dialogue. I think the Firefox designers took a policy decision that Mozilla's prefs dialogue was too crowded, so Firefox options would be limited to things which most users would regularly want to change.
In one way it's a step in the right direction - Open Source projects are often criticised for having too many options without enough organisation. However, I prefer the approach of other projects - instead of removing the options altogether, have a switch you can use to show or hide 'advanced user' options, which novice users wouldn't need to use.
I agree with your points - I don't think I'd ever run a proper mailserver off my home machine. The only time mail went from that machine was when it was generated by website scripts. It never accepted email.
I run a server from a dynamic connection. That's what services such as DynDNS are for - allowing you to have a domain that points to a moving target like a server on a dynamic connection. I've run into situations where mail sent from my machine (from a PHPBB) has bounced from mail servers just because it's from a dynamic IP. PHPBB *can* be set to use an SMTP server, but I ran into a lot of problems with my ISP's mailservers being down a lot or taking forever to respond (during which time the PHP script times out.)
Of course, the ISPs have a very valid reason for blocking said mail - the ratio of genuine mail to spam/worm-mail coming from dynamic users is probably vanishingly small.
I didn't say anything about geographical availability, and I was pretty wrong on the timeline - it just *seems* like a couple of years, I guess, since a couple of years ago was when I began hearing about broadband as a consumer thing (versus something only for high-budget business users.)
"I think you forget that delivering broadband isn't as easy as flicking a switch. There's infrastructure, etc to worry about, so it's only to be expected that things take a little time."
Please don't patronise me. I've been following the progress of broadband for a couple of years, starting back when I was still on dialup and wishing I had something better. I'm happy with the fact that progress *has* been made.
A couple of years ago I couldn't get ADSL at all, because I was too far from the exchange (and I'm not even in the Highlands - just a suburb of Glasgow.) Luckily, NTL (well, Cable & Wireless) cabled my street several years ago. However, the lack of ADSL meant that my only option for broadband was NTL.
What I was mainly pointing out is that the US is by no means the worst off for broadband. Even the UK is pretty decent. I'm delighted at the fact that I can get broadband at all - I recently had the task of de-spyware-ing a computer attached to a dialup connection. I forgot how painful dialup was - I'm only on a 150kbit connection, but even so I still take things for granted such as being able to download software without much of a wait.
As to what I'm on - tea. Many mugs of tea.
The US a broadband backwater? Hah! The UK has only just started getting broadband in the last couple of years, and 512kbit is still considered 'high speed'. A 128kbit connection is considered broadband by the definition of the government (for the purposes of being able to say "We've made sure that over 90% of the population has broadband available to them.")
... UPGRADE!! LOL." I wish for a shotgun...
I'm pretty tired of hearing people from the US complain about their >1Mbit connections being slow.
In other news, every time I hear a web developer say "My page loads fast enough on my 4Mbit connection. If you're on dialup
I definately wouldn't use a mouse or keyboard which didn't have a built-in charger, and I probably wouldn't use one which had a cradle charger instead. My own wireless mouse has a simple power port on the top of the mouse, so when it runs out of battery I just plug in a charger (5V, tip positive, standard 1mm barrel plug - the charger I use cost me a few quid from Maplin, since the mouse only came with a USB charger.) This means that I can continue using the mouse while it's charging, with only a thin power cable protruding from below the scroll wheel. With a power cradle, I'd have to switch to a different mouse while it charged. And if the batteries run out of capacity, they're just AAA rechargables, so I can pop them out and replace them. My mouse is about a year and a half old, from A4Tech, and cost about a fifth of what the equivalent Logitech cost at the time.