Yay for uninformed belittling. The comment I made about outline drag in NO WAY said it wasn't possible to turn it off. It was in reference to the manifesto where the author bitched about how he thought it was an utter waste to include it. (There were other features he left off as not 'relevant', and he claimed outline drag should have been one of them, but he only left it in because there are too many people who are dumb enough to insist on it, not because he sees any real need for it. An attitude like that proves to me that the future of that project is going to make it even *worse* than it is already.)
I use KDE, and I assume you do too given that it's the only remotely customizeable WM.
I didn't before. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE, but I switched to KDE after the pile of dung that is Gnome 2.0 showed me that Gnome is a dead end now. What annoys me about the Metacity manifesto is how it ruined the future of what *had been* my preferred interface.
I'd use blackbox or icewm, except that I hate the look and feel of NeXT that they try to emulate. It doesn't waste computer resources to have resize bars on *all* sides of a window. There's no reason to make you have to use a little button down on the lower corners.
Do you move windows around so much that this actually makes a noticable difference?
Yup. Because, no matter how fast your computer is, if you are running a mathematically intense algorithm on it in the background, it will take as much CPU time as you let it, since the scheduler doesn't see it doing any I/O, it gets a very high percentage of the CPU time. That's not a problem if the UI isn't trying to also do things that require a lot of CPU cycles, but if it is, then you visually notice the sluggishness. Keep in mind that if a mathematical process takes 95% of the CPU on a slow machine, it will *STILL* typically take 95% of the CPU on a machine twice as fast - the fast CPU doesn't cause the program to use the CPU more sparingly, it just causes it to finish in half the time.
I think the more important news here is the death of two GNOME developers.
Strange that the article submitter doesn't agree with you, since that's not the title of the post. It's primarily about Miguel being left off the panel. It's *that* news (you know, the actual main point of the article rather than something mentioned briefly in passing) that prompted my "who cares" comment.
BTW, you are very adamant about having control over *your* computer. Why shouldn't he have control over *his* code?
Why can't you read well enough to understand what was written? He can have all the control he wants, but I will never use any of what he writes anymore. It was written with an attitude that ensures it's a a poor match for what I want and that this will never be fixed in future versions because the author doesn't see it as a problem, he sees it as a virtue.
I stopped caring about Gnome at about the time they started deciding Metacity is good and should be the default. When Metacity's maker puts out an egotistical manifesto that says all the features in a window manager that don't match up exactly to his way of working are just immature fluff to him, then I'm not going to want to use the thing he makes based on that philosophy. (Apparently, for example, he thinks that outline-dragged windows are frivolous fluff, while solid-dragged windows are the only useful way to do things productively, because of course all Linux users want to waste CPU cycles on the UI. And he uses the oft-repeated dodge that since computers are faster nowadays, you don't have to save CPU cycles. Bullshit. It's *my* computer, and those are *my* CPU cycles. If I'd rather use them on background processes like mathematical calculations rendering 3-D povray animations, then that's *my* business. And that doesn't change just because we measure speed by the gigahertz instead of the megahertz today. If the computer is ten times faster, I want that speed applied to the areas *I* want it applied. If I didn't care about stuff like that, I'd be using Windows.)
What used to tick me off was when a professor would require BOTH lint-free code AND clear easy to read code. Those were mutually exclusive becuase our lint made you do really DUMB things like cast your NULLs (I'm sorry, but *NO* - nothing can go wrong from failing to cast a NULL, since it isn't possible to follow it and use it's contents anyway it doesn't matter what "type" the compiler thinks it's pointing at. That's why it's defined to be void* - specifically so you *dont* have to cast it. Duhhh. I don't know if this was endemic of lint in general or just the version we had to use, but it kept making me have to uglify my code. Another one that bothered me was having to cast character literals to (char) since the compiler technically thinks of them as ints, leading to such stupid looking code as: if( str[i] == (char)'A' ) I mean , come ON! It's a literal char. It can't BE anything other than a valid ascii code that fits in 8 bits or less, so you *know* it will not lose anything when truncating from the int to a char, so don't worry about it, geeze.
And that's bad exactly why? I'd MUCH rather see an ugly section of code prefixed with the author's admission that it's ugly and messy than with no warning at all. The admission of ugliness helps to remove a bit of the frustration over not being able to understand it easily. (Granted, I'd rather not have the ugly code at all, but if it's there, the comment admitting it's ugly is helpful as an apology and a word of understanding sympathy from the previous author.)
If it was on a BSD-style license, some closed-source companies would consider using it.
That's not a good thing, because in the minds of the users, the credit doesn't end up going where it belongs. Look at how many ignoramuses credit Microsoft with the explosion of the internet, as opposed to UNIX, when Microsoft didn't become truly useful for internet work until after it scrapped it's own garbagy network protocols and instead started building off the BSD networking code.
Usability is THE REASON (well, ok, marketing too, to a lesser degree) that Windows runs 90%+ of the world's PC's.
Bullshit. If usability was the key issue, MacOS would beat Windows, and the entire IBM-compatable PC line would have died out in the '80s when it was still young because the competitors like Amiga, Atari ST, and the like were a LOT easier, and prettier, and more powerful. Open Hardware is the reason Windows won. The IBM PC was (despite the best efforts of IBM) an open spec that everyone knew how to exploit, and all the advantages that gives to the consumer came out of that. Microsoft was just lucky enough to be the one providing the OS for it.
It doesn't matter how many competitors there are. The fact remains that it's always relative and you cannot state how good a thing is without simultaneously comparing it to the other possible choices out there. The notion that it is possible to concentrate on what makes one "better" without also saying that the others are "worse" is not true. I'd rather see people being more honest about what they're really thinking and actually *saying* something is worse if that's what they're thinking, as opposed to trying to pussyfoot around the issue by finding alternate happier ways to say the exact same thing only using posative terms.
(grrr. Anti-HTMLizer ate my final line even though I said it was posted in plaintext. Let me try again: It's supposed to read "X > Y" is identical to saying "Y < X".)
"Fully detached housing" is not an expensive commodity in many US cities. Los Angeles especially so, since it's built "out" rather than "up". (Despite being the second largest populated urban zone in the country after New York, it has no skyscrapers at all. That's partly because of the earthquake risk, but it's also because there's lots and lots of room out there, so buying more land is cheaper than building taller buildings. That's the main reason that LA freeways are such a traffic mess - millions of people typically live 30 to 50 miles from work, and commute that distance by car every day. They keep talking about putting in types of public transit, but they just aren't profitable when the population is spread out so evenly that there's no good places to consolidate lots of passengers together.)
So, in LA, it's perfectly possible to have detached housing and still be in a slum - the land is cheaper than what you're used to in the UK.
What is the definition of "road"? I don't think of city streets as "roads". If you are merely measuring miles of "pavement" of any kind, then the claim makes sense, but if you are only including "roads", then low population density countries would come up higher.
(And I thought the UK was metric. Why do you guys still refer to distances in miles?)
VIM is self documented. VI was not. What you were thinking is that you wanted an editor you can actually learn. (I love VIM and hate vanilla VI, because with VIM I don't need a manual - it's all there in:help.)
It's a classic tactic to make your side look better and belittle the competition.
Duhhh. To compare things, and say yours is better, is to simultaneously say the competitor is worse. Regardless of whether you phrase it as "mine does the following things better" or "theirs does the following things worse", it's really the same exact thing since you are comparing two relative points to each other. "X > Y" is identical to saying "Y X".
Where I vote they require any piece of mail that has your name and address on it so that it ties you to the location (so they know you are living in the voting district you claim to be living in.) A phone bill or electrical bill will do just fine. I guess they also figure that it's unlikely someone will steal someone else's mail so that they can vote as them.
My point was that this wonderful new technology *could* have been just as simple to use as older technology, but it's not. And there's really no good reason why it's not.
There's a very good reason why it's not. Autoplay is incredibly annoying when your computer does it, so why is it a good thing when your DVD player does it? I don't want DVD's to start playing as soon as I stick them in. I want the menu so I can pick wide/full, and select an audio track, THEN start the movie. If it started by itself, then I'd have to get it to stop to go back to the menu EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I, for one, hated the fact that VCRs would automatically hit 'play' when you stick in a read-only tape. That was annoying more often than it was helpful.
I would assert that *both* sides in this debate tend to make positive claims: one insists that private gun ownership creates a deterent against criminals, the other side insists that private gun ownership makes it easier for people to become criminals, more likely to commit crimes on impulse.
I really can't see why either claim should be considered a default case. If you play this game fairly, you don't award points to a theory just because it's established, you're supposed to be reviewing the reasons it became established.
But that's NOT what the issue was labelled as. What you are describing would make sense if the issue was "gun controll is good" versus "gun controll is bad". But that's not what you said. You talked about the specific proposition that "more guns means less crime". In that context, the "anti" side is NOT composed of just gun control proponents, but also of anyone who might not care one way or the other, or anyone who might think there are good reasons for gun control laws, but that this isn't one of them, or anyone who thinks the issue is undecided.
In other words, your phrasing was concise and specfic enough that the group of people who are "pro" is going to be more narrowly defined than the group who say "I don't think so", and the ones who say "I don't think so" are NOT NECESSARILY asserting the opposite claim.
This isn't so much a comment about the book as about the person who reviewed it here on slashdot and posted the article. The reviewer makes the same mistake repeatedly, of assuming that if an idea hasn't been proven wrong, than it's proponents don't deserve a cukoo rating at all - it should be zero.
No. That's not how it works. When positing the existence of things, or putting forth an explanative theory to describe why things that are there got that way, the burden of proof is always on the positor. Therefore someone who is willing to believe a theory purely because it hasn't been proven wrong DOES deserve at least a little cukoo rating for that.
scientific community has been wrong more often than right
(followed by) For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The "scientific community" as we know it didn't even exist 2000 years ago. Blaming science for the mistakes of it's predicessors makes as much sense as blaming Christians for feeding Socrates Hemlock for daring to question the established order of things. It happened before they were even around yet.
It is possible to blame two things, you ass. And if you will note, not once did I blame the passengers. I blamed their optomism. Before throwing around insults, learn to read.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay for uninformed belittling. The comment I made about outline drag in NO WAY said it wasn't possible to turn it off. It was in reference to the manifesto where the author bitched about how he thought it was an utter waste to include it. (There were other features he left off as not 'relevant', and he claimed outline drag should have been one of them, but he only left it in because there are too many people who are dumb enough to insist on it, not because he sees any real need for it. An attitude like that proves to me that the future of that project is going to make it even *worse* than it is already.)
I use KDE, and I assume you do too given that it's the only remotely customizeable WM.
I didn't before. I used to prefer Gnome over KDE, but I switched to KDE after the pile of dung that is Gnome 2.0 showed me that Gnome is a dead end now. What annoys me about the Metacity manifesto is how it ruined the future of what *had been* my preferred interface.
I'd use blackbox or icewm, except that I hate the look and feel of NeXT that they try to emulate. It doesn't waste computer resources to have resize bars on *all* sides of a window. There's no reason to make you have to use a little button down on the lower corners.
Do you move windows around so much that this actually makes a noticable difference?
Yup. Because, no matter how fast your computer is, if you are running a mathematically intense algorithm on it in the background, it will take as much CPU time as you let it, since the scheduler doesn't see it doing any I/O, it gets a very high percentage of the CPU time. That's not a problem if the UI isn't trying to also do things that require a lot of CPU cycles, but if it is, then you visually notice the sluggishness. Keep in mind that if a mathematical process takes 95% of the CPU on a slow machine, it will *STILL* typically take 95% of the CPU on a machine twice as fast - the fast CPU doesn't cause the program to use the CPU more sparingly, it just causes it to finish in half the time.
I think the more important news here is the death of two GNOME developers.
Strange that the article submitter doesn't agree with you, since that's not the title of the post. It's primarily about Miguel being left off the panel. It's *that* news (you know, the actual main point of the article rather than something mentioned briefly in passing) that prompted my "who cares" comment.
BTW, you are very adamant about having control over *your* computer. Why shouldn't he have control over *his* code?
Why can't you read well enough to understand what was written? He can have all the control he wants, but I will never use any of what he writes anymore. It was written with an attitude that ensures it's a a poor match for what I want and that this will never be fixed in future versions because the author doesn't see it as a problem, he sees it as a virtue.
I stopped caring about Gnome at about the time they started deciding Metacity is good and should be the default. When Metacity's maker puts out an egotistical manifesto that says all the features in a window manager that don't match up exactly to his way of working are just immature fluff to him, then I'm not going to want to use the thing he makes based on that philosophy. (Apparently, for example, he thinks that outline-dragged windows are frivolous fluff, while solid-dragged windows are the only useful way to do things productively, because of course all Linux users want to waste CPU cycles on the UI. And he uses the oft-repeated dodge that since computers are faster nowadays, you don't have to save CPU cycles. Bullshit. It's *my* computer, and those are *my* CPU cycles. If I'd rather use them on background processes like mathematical calculations rendering 3-D povray animations, then that's *my* business. And that doesn't change just because we measure speed by the gigahertz instead of the megahertz today. If the computer is ten times faster, I want that speed applied to the areas *I* want it applied. If I didn't care about stuff like that, I'd be using Windows.)
What used to tick me off was when a professor would require BOTH lint-free code AND clear easy to read code. Those were mutually exclusive becuase our lint made you do really DUMB things like cast your NULLs (I'm sorry, but *NO* - nothing can go wrong from failing to cast a NULL, since it isn't possible to follow it and use it's contents anyway it doesn't matter what "type" the compiler thinks it's pointing at. That's why it's defined to be void* - specifically so you *dont* have to cast it. Duhhh. I don't know if this was endemic of lint in general or just the version we had to use, but it kept making me have to uglify my code. Another one that bothered me was having to cast character literals to (char) since the compiler technically thinks of them as ints, leading to such stupid looking code as:
if( str[i] == (char)'A' )
I mean , come ON! It's a literal char. It can't BE anything other than a valid ascii code that fits in 8 bits or less, so you *know* it will not lose anything when truncating from the int to a char, so don't worry about it, geeze.
And that's bad exactly why? I'd MUCH rather see an ugly section of code prefixed with the author's admission that it's ugly and messy than with no warning at all. The admission of ugliness helps to remove a bit of the frustration over not being able to understand it easily. (Granted, I'd rather not have the ugly code at all, but if it's there, the comment admitting it's ugly is helpful as an apology and a word of understanding sympathy from the previous author.)
To get as many people as possible to use your code instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel?
For many people, it's to *share* their code, not just *give* their code. And sharing is a two-way street.
If it was on a BSD-style license, some closed-source companies would consider using it.
That's not a good thing, because in the minds of the users, the credit doesn't end up going where it belongs. Look at how many ignoramuses credit Microsoft with the explosion of the internet, as opposed to UNIX, when Microsoft didn't become truly useful for internet work until after it scrapped it's own garbagy network protocols and instead started building off the BSD networking code.
Usability is THE REASON (well, ok, marketing too, to a lesser degree) that Windows runs 90%+ of the world's PC's.
Bullshit. If usability was the key issue, MacOS would beat Windows, and the entire IBM-compatable PC line would have died out in the '80s when it was still young because the competitors like Amiga, Atari ST, and the like were a LOT easier, and prettier, and more powerful. Open Hardware is the reason Windows won. The IBM PC was (despite the best efforts of IBM) an open spec that everyone knew how to exploit, and all the advantages that gives to the consumer came out of that. Microsoft was just lucky enough to be the one providing the OS for it.
It doesn't matter how many competitors there are. The fact remains that it's always relative and you cannot state how good a thing is without simultaneously comparing it to the other possible choices out there. The notion that it is possible to concentrate on what makes one "better" without also saying that the others are "worse" is not true. I'd rather see people being more honest about what they're really thinking and actually *saying* something is worse if that's what they're thinking, as opposed to trying to pussyfoot around the issue by finding alternate happier ways to say the exact same thing only using posative terms.
(grrr. Anti-HTMLizer ate my final line even though I said it was posted in plaintext. Let me try again: It's supposed to read "X > Y" is identical to saying "Y < X".)
"Fully detached housing" is not an expensive commodity in many US cities. Los Angeles especially so, since it's built "out" rather than "up". (Despite being the second largest populated urban zone in the country after New York, it has no skyscrapers at all. That's partly because of the earthquake risk, but it's also because there's lots and lots of room out there, so buying more land is cheaper than building taller buildings. That's the main reason that LA freeways are such a traffic mess - millions of people typically live 30 to 50 miles from work, and commute that distance by car every day. They keep talking about putting in types of public transit, but they just aren't profitable when the population is spread out so evenly that there's no good places to consolidate lots of passengers together.)
So, in LA, it's perfectly possible to have detached housing and still be in a slum - the land is cheaper than what you're used to in the UK.
What is the definition of "road"? I don't think of city streets as "roads". If you are merely measuring miles of "pavement" of any kind, then the claim makes sense, but if you are only including "roads", then low population density countries would come up higher.
(And I thought the UK was metric. Why do you guys still refer to distances in miles?)
VIM is self documented. VI was not. What you were thinking is that you wanted an editor you can actually learn. (I love VIM and hate vanilla VI, because with VIM I don't need a manual - it's all there in :help.)
It's a classic tactic to make your side look better and belittle the competition.
Duhhh. To compare things, and say yours is better, is to simultaneously say the competitor is worse. Regardless of whether you phrase it as "mine does the following things better" or "theirs does the following things worse", it's really the same exact thing since you are comparing two relative points to each other. "X > Y" is identical to saying "Y X".
Where I vote they require any piece of mail that has your name and address on it so that it ties you to the location (so they know you are living in the voting district you claim to be living in.) A phone bill or electrical bill will do just fine. I guess they also figure that it's unlikely someone will steal someone else's mail so that they can vote as them.
And just like autoplay, it could be toggleable.
Yeah, but who wants to edit the registry on a DVD player?
My point was that this wonderful new technology *could* have been just as simple to use as older technology, but it's not. And there's really no good reason why it's not.
There's a very good reason why it's not. Autoplay is incredibly annoying when your computer does it, so why is it a good thing when your DVD player does it? I don't want DVD's to start playing as soon as I stick them in. I want the menu so I can pick wide/full, and select an audio track, THEN start the movie. If it started by itself, then I'd have to get it to stop to go back to the menu EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I, for one, hated the fact that VCRs would automatically hit 'play' when you stick in a read-only tape. That was annoying more often than it was helpful.
I would assert that *both* sides in this debate tend to make positive claims: one insists that private gun ownership creates a deterent against criminals, the other side insists that private gun ownership makes it easier for people to become criminals, more likely to commit crimes on impulse.
I really can't see why either claim should be considered a default case. If you play this game fairly, you don't award points to a theory just because it's established, you're supposed to be reviewing the reasons it became established.
But that's NOT what the issue was labelled as. What you are describing would make sense if the issue was "gun controll is good" versus "gun controll is bad". But that's not what you said. You talked about the specific proposition that "more guns means less crime". In that context, the "anti" side is NOT composed of just gun control proponents, but also of anyone who might not care one way or the other, or anyone who might think there are good reasons for gun control laws, but that this isn't one of them, or anyone who thinks the issue is undecided.
In other words, your phrasing was concise and specfic enough that the group of people who are "pro" is going to be more narrowly defined than the group who say "I don't think so", and the ones who say "I don't think so" are NOT NECESSARILY asserting the opposite claim.
From the article summary:
spent $US300million ($415 million) making the films,
Huh? Was one of those US dollars and the other some other kind of unlabelled dollar?
I'd like to know how a company that makes intuitive and easy-to-use products,
I thought you were talking about Microsoft. Make up your mihd.
This isn't so much a comment about the book as about the person who reviewed it here on slashdot and posted the article. The reviewer makes the same mistake repeatedly, of assuming that if an idea hasn't been proven wrong, than it's proponents don't deserve a cukoo rating at all - it should be zero.
No. That's not how it works. When positing the existence of things, or putting forth an explanative theory to describe why things that are there got that way, the burden of proof is always on the positor. Therefore someone who is willing to believe a theory purely because it hasn't been proven wrong DOES deserve at least a little cukoo rating for that.
scientific community has been wrong more often than right
(followed by)
For nearly 2,000 years the best Western thinkers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
The "scientific community" as we know it didn't even exist 2000 years ago. Blaming science for the mistakes of it's predicessors makes as much sense as blaming Christians for feeding Socrates Hemlock for daring to question the established order of things. It happened before they were even around yet.
blame the terrorists, you cock
It is possible to blame two things, you ass. And if you will note, not once did I blame the passengers. I blamed their optomism. Before throwing around insults, learn to read.