The font rendering settings are locked in. There are some Google Groups discussions about why this is so, but it was all white noise -- every other application can use.fonts.conf (even if it is a workaround to do so) and Chrome can't/won't for a while, so it got promptly uninstalled.
The Manifold series predicted many of the problems we have here today; the aging Shuttle fleet, the private entrepreneurs trying to step up to the plate to supply heavy lifting capability, and all the political BS from "The Gun Club" (NASA) cock-blocking the private entrepreneurs.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines. If we want to head off-planet, it would be wise to take advantage of resources that aren't already at the bottom of a gravity well that costs what, $30,000/lb. to LEO?
Allow me to say "arigato gozaimas" on the score tip -- I've heard about it (from the "making of" video) but haven't played nor seen the game played yet. To be honest, I'm tossed between upgrading an AGP video card or just buying a '360 -- I'm not particularly keen on either approach, but I've been hankerin' since I last played System Shock 2, which was a good 3-4 years ago now.
Say what you will, but Ken Lavine is one of the good guys. I've had the opportunity to have a (brief) exchange with him in the past; he's no-nonsense but similarly no-bullshit; in other words, the kind of guy every nerd would want to work for or have a beer with, or both. Cheers, Ken, for doing the right thing.
I've installed and configured a couple Ubuntu systems now; one with the 64-bit Ubuntu and another with 32-bit Kubuntu, both Dapper (although the former I -- painfully -- upgraded to Edgy, at which point the computer started crashing often, which is why I switched back to Gentoo on my desktop -- Kubuntu is a temporary desktop for my dad while I do some maintenance on his PC).
A few of my personal experiences with running Ubuntu:
Installation, I grant you, is pretty easy. On modern hardware, almost all of my devices installed and worked just fine with no screwing around. The video driver was an exception; it worked, but the driver was generic VESA (when I had an integrated nVidia chip on an mATX motherboard). Not a deal-breaker, although the performance sucked until this was resolved.
Fonts are still a mess, not least of all because of Apple's patent on freetype's Byte Code Interpreter. I recently wrote a little article on my blog about how to improve font rendering in Linux, but this is far from a perfect solution--and it still involves a lot of fiddling around to get right. They should just render beautifully out-of-the-box given how particular Shuttleworth is about appearances.
Application choice. I understand there is the question about support, but shouldn't I be able to readily install what I want without having to jump through so many hoops? Users are forever editing their sources.list file to include repositories that contain the package they want, then you have to use Adept or Synaptic (no not that Adept/Synaptic, that one, which is much more cluttered and difficult to read/use). I'm not talking about the latest and greatest version of Beryl, either -- just stuff like browsers, mail clients or office utilities that didn't make Ubuntu/Kubuntu's "short-list".
There's always another package to solve functionality problems. For example, I had to install some user-created deb package just to get !@!&* FLAC working in Amarok. The same got replaced as soon as Ubuntu updated the library with something slightly newer--which of course had the FLAC functionality disabled again. Excuse my ignorance, but why the hell wouldn't FLAC support be included considering it's relatively commonly-used, compatibly licenced format? Why am I installing a user-compiled libraries to get this basic functionality so I can do "everyday user" stuff in Linux, like listening to music?
Suspend/Sleep/Hibernation. I know this still isn't well-supported under Linux, but again I would expect Ubuntu to do a better job. I've seen articles out there blaming Microsoft for wasting millions of dollars worth of the world's power because of their operating system's power management policy--but really, that's the user's fault for not employing the clearly visible feature, not the operating system's: At least sleep/suspend/hibernate works well on modern hardware under Windows. I can't say the same for Ubuntu: even on brand new hardware I can't get it to work, no matter how much time I spend tinkering with installing and configuring various packages. I confess, none of this was on a laptop (the primary support target for this functionality), but does that mean it shouldn't "just work" anyway? It's the desktops that are wasting >100W of power by being on all the time, not the laptops that draw perhaps 20W during heavy loads when plugged in.
Remember that time a couple months ago when Canonical pushed out a package that prevented X from loading properly? I do. A lot of Ubuntu users who had never seen the console (and never want to) filled their pants that day. I cringed when it happened; it wouldn't have bothered me much (inconvenienced, perhaps) but I doubt the same could be said for most of Ubuntu's target audience.
And then, there is the speed. I know performance isn't everything, but Ubuntu is almost painfully/embarassingly slow. I have only limited experience with Linux desktops; I've used Ub
Why not stream it? I generate a continuous stream of thunderstorms on a server tucked away in my basement that doesn't even have a sound card let alone speakers or anything hooked up to it. But I just pipe the raw sound output to a fifo, encode with LAME, then pipe to another process which sends the music to icecast--all on the same device. Since I only ever use the thing locally I want to switch to encoding to flac instead (the extra traffic isn't a problem) but I haven't got around to it yet.
That way, I can tune into my thunderstorms in the bedroom with the Squeezebox to help me sleep; in the at-home-office during the day to provide a bit of white noise to help the baby sleep, or in the living room using the HTPC to drown out a boring conversation.
... By a late gentleman who went by the name of Douglas Adams. The software, Anthem, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, used a company's stock as input data instead of server logs, but the idea was still there. I wonder if his writing influenced the author of this tool.
I can't help but wonder if the music generated by this software isn't going to sound like, in Mr. Adams own words, "a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor" -- to say nothing of what it must sound like to listen to hours of this stuff if 30 seconds is pure hell.
I would personally prefer to use Boodler for such purposes; instead of music you can use any waveforms you like. You program the software to do whatever you want, whether it's write music or (more likely) generate an environmental audioscape similar to what peep does, only much more sophisticated and flexible since you can program whatever events you want and send them to Boodler, which can be set to listen to a socket or port for commands.
Thanks a fucking lot, my 2-month-old kid was finally falling asleep now that it's nearly five in the morning, and then you had to go and write what you did.
I suggest submitting the name change recommendation to Microsoft along with a suggestion that the default skin should paint everything with orange gradients.
What a load of bollocks. What follows next is the sales pitch to glue some special crystals into the web server to help it reverberate with only good juju, like a cosmic drum... or whatever.
These are pretty tall words coming from someone with such a shitty website, too; http://www.webvastu.com/ needs more gradients, larger leading, more fonts, narrower columns, and definitely more orange. Especially the orange. For a special treat, disable style sheets: accessibility++. I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term, and (B) I'm assuming Dr. Smita is in fact already completely blind.
Is it wrong of me to also be cynical that the good doctor can't even spell their own gimmicky 15-seconds-of-fame loanword, "Vastu", consistently on their own website? No, go back to smoking your hookah, doc. Your website is awesome, dude--it's everyone else that's got it wrong.
Hardly a surprise, is it?
on
No Ice on the Moon
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· Score: 4, Informative
Science fiction writers (the hard- variety) like Stephen Baxter have been lamenting the likelyhood of this eventuality for years now. Not that it isn't nice to at least have some closure, but on the other hand it seems like the news is little more than the last nail in the coffin for the most obvious pas-de-terre between Earth and space.
There is one book--Manifold Space, I think it might be--that muses upon the notion that there may be some water deeply buried (e.g. 20+ kilometres) the surface, and all the difficulties involved in getting to it (e.g. standard mining techniques developed on Earth wouldn't work there for a host of reasons). Excellent book/series, incidentally. Strongly recommended for any space science enthusiasts.
I'm not a big gamer (nor an especially good one) but for a relaxing, immersive experience nothing beats the Myst games.
Reasons aren't difficult to list: No worries about perfect timing or tense edge-of-your seat action; you can navigate around using nothing more than a mouse in one hand leaving the other free for a warm/cold drink (or a newborn, which has been the case for me recently). You can pick up and play for 5 minutes or 5 hours, and the game isn't at all diminished by not having human opponents to play with (or against).
The immersive environments are what really do it for me, though -- the audio/visual design of the games is excellent. Sometimes I find myself sitting and listening to the sound of waves lapping a shore, observing a distant crackle of thunder, or watching the flame of a gas burner as it hisses and eventually boils the liquid above.
There are a few other games I absolutely love: Grim Fandango, most of the Clancy games from the past ~7 years, Star Control II/UQM, System Shock II, Armadillo Run... but none have anything close to the same comfort factor for me.
Sure, one layout. This is a product with n layouts, m skins, o colour schemes (each associated with a skin),... etc.
Each component is also described using style sheets -- the code that renders several variants of a tree component, for example, could be a thousand lines of CSS.
It's also worth noting that when you're dealing with pretty big style sheets for an enterprise product, coding standards becomes a bit of a bigger deal than when writing a one-off web site. We, for example, use longhand for specifying everything then compress to shorthand as a last step using csstidy (I won't get into explaining why but there are a number of functional reasons for doing so.)
Why would anything be wrong with a UI architect? It's the position I more-or-less created for myself where I work and I do more or less what you describe (and a number of other jobs, besides). I just don't have a lot of experience with AJAX and nearly none with Java.
Disclosure: I'm not very knowledgeable about Java or AJAX. I'm a UI architect, but I've been avoiding AJAX until the accessibility issues with synchronous content updates get sorted out. That being said, I'm more familiar with DHTML, which -- for the purposes of interface design -- is the part of AJAX relevant to my point.
I especially know all about CSS and the nightmare of multiple browser support -- especially when CSS rendering support seems to be inversely proportional to a browser's popularity. It doesn't help my desire to push for web standards when the CEO doesn't give a hoot about every browser out there except the 800lb. gorilla -- going as far as to specifically forbid using anything but in demos because, "That's what our clients use."
I guess it goes without saying that the "people in the community" referred to in the article are developers and not designers; if you think JavaScript support in the popular browser application is bad, try writing 25,000 lines of CSS for a web application designed to work on the "big 4" browser platforms (e.g. MSIE, Firefox, Opera & Safari).
Clearly, Mr. Wei has a point about at least one thing -- anyone who develops for Java should be grateful about the homogenous nature of the JVM. Sure, you may still need to require a specific VM version to run your program, but my experience is that it's not quite such a big deal to bundle a specific VM with a desktop application (and no problem at all to pick and choose what JVM to use on an application server like Tomcat). Why someone would abandon that in favour of the uncertainty (and constant flux) of a browser is beyond me.
And I'm glad Weird Al isn't taking it too hard (or at least, he isn't showing it) -- it's a fantastic piece of work, and if it's popular it's because it's that good and chimes with a pretty wide audience.
I can't believe there were > 0 people who replied to Karma Farmer's comment thinking it was anything but an attempt at humour/troll, much less that any such poster would get their manties in a knot over it either.
I can't remember the last time I watched a DVD on my computer, so I'll focus on one of those "proprietary" CODECs that I do care about.
Preamble: just because I can and because someone always feels the need to point this out, it may as well be me this time: 'OGG' isn't a format, it's a file extension. You probably mean Ogg Vorbis (as opposed to Ogg Theora, FLAC, etc.).
The very same Ogg Vorbis is a sore point with me. I agree with a number of the salient benefits with the format:
Free as in Speech
Free as in beer
Supported by major software players on all platforms
Better sounding files than mp3 (especially at lower bitrates)
Faster encodes (way, way faster than LAME)
Perfect gapless playback with no tricks or hacks or guessing
So why the hell is it that at least 95% of portable mp3 players don't support Ogg Vorbis? I went out of my way to buy a model that specifically did support it (by Samsung) and the compatibility is lousy: Vorbis files cause the player to choke and often crash for no reason; mp3s and other formats play just fine. Other vendors (including the big boys like Apple) don't care enough to even bother; the only other vendor I know besides Samsung that has tried to support ogg is iRiver, and only on a select few of their devices at that.
Well, the justification just isn't there. They figure most people don't use Ogg Vorbis, they use mp3 or some other even trashier DRM format, so they'll support the masses -- who cares about the geeky
The article as stated is short on good grammar and spelling but states the facts plainly: Until Linux grows up and supports these basic operations Out Of The Box like playing an mp3 without having to go out of their way to "taint" their distro with non-free software/licences (or whatever else), Linux is going to stay in the nerd niche, and it's not going to be as slick an experience as that which the big businesses are willing to dump millions into making it work like people expect.
... And frankly, much of what makes it so nice to work with has been around since version 1.0. There are too many features to list out, but just a few of the things I love about it:
Unlike the big guy out there, Xara can actually export a bitmap of exactly what you see on the screen. Not something similar, not something pretty close: exactly what is there, pixel for pixel. Why Illustrator still can't do this is utterly beyond me; Xara has been doing it since version 1.0.
Ever have a drawing that needed guidelines that weren't a perfect horizontal or vertical line? No problem. In Xara, guidelines are just another layer: You can draw (or move) any vector shape whatsoever to the guide layer. This is also handy for exporting an "invisible" padding around an object, if you need one -- Of course you can create a truly invisible object which will work too, but this method is nicer since you can see what you're selecting.
Need to move something just a little? Use the arrow keys. Xara makes excellent use of the keyboard for nudging objects in a variety of different increments -- Right down to 0.2 pixels.
Zoom capability. Sorry, no other vector software (and in fact most bitmap software) doesn't even come 1/100th as close. Literally.
Speed. People are always amazed at how quickly Xara can be worked with -- Enough for me to be able to impress a boss looking over my shoulder and suggesting a change, then being able to do it in realtime right in front of their eyes. There are hundreds of tricks for working quick in Xara, and none of them will beat familiarity with the product -- but Xara is aces for being able to work quickly. Illustrator is extremely clunky in comparison (even thought it admittedly does sport more features, especially benefitting from interoperability with Photoshop, layer effects, and drafting-capable features). For just one concrete example, if you want to copy something in Xara, just drag it with the mouse then click the right mouse button to "stamp" down a quick copy somewhere else.
Colour management. No, it doesn't do ICM (and more's the pity, it would be nice to have) but rather the ability to quickly but powerfully manage colours in your drawings. Illustrator has a similar (but much more complex and slow) functionality but Inkscape doesn't -- being able to make a complete drawing with 'assigned' and co-dependent colours, then changing the colours in the palette afterward to affect the entire drawing is immensely powerful and gratifying (as it pays off often, especially during the comprehensive and implementation phases of a design).
I do hope you enjoy playing with Xara; I know how "high" I felt when it dawned on me what great software it was to use in 1997 when I was first introduced to it. I think this company has written some great software; their products command a near-cult status following already (many of their followers dating all the way back to 'Acorn Draw'). Developing a port of their flagship product for Linux is quite definitely not going to hurt their reputation in the latter respect, at least.;)
... but they have stated since early on that it is on the backburner until they make more significant progress with the Linux version (after which there will presumably be less to do with getting the code to run on OSX). It makes sense, if it means they will have less concurrent re-work of similar code (and bugs) to work through so that writing the Mac version is more of a port than a rework.
It's also not unthinkable that the same app could even be backported to Windows, although that seems highly unlikely for the moment: Windows is and has been Xara's bread and butter for a long time, so they probably aren't eager to see their paying customers (like me) slip away to free versions the next time around.
That said, I'd gladly pay for a licence to be able to run the software on Linux, and I had told them as much a couple years ago. (Their product manager at the time disagreed and said that Linux users tended to want everything for free because of the philosophy behind the OS, but they have obviously changed their tune since).
I wish them the best of luck for successfully completing their Linux as well as Mac versions: As a long-time user of the software myself, it's in my own interests to see them continue to do well and improve their software (and their supported OSes, as I have been dying to move to Linux for a long time now and Xara has been one of the biggest packages tying me down to Windows) -- and in theirs, if they're to stand up to the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.
... But probably not more so than exporting any other vector format from Xara -- take AI, EPS, or PDF for example, and they're already handling those. But I'm being rude:
Speaking as the person who designed the original file format filter (import/export) system
I'm honoured to make your acquaintance, Tim -- and I agree, Xara certainly does some "vector-banging" that other software probably didn't do at the time, and doesn't do still -- but packages like Inkscape seem nearly equally capable to Xara in many respects, and they are able to handle SVG import/export. Xara also already handles exports to other (more limited) vector formats as well, and has algorithms for handling elements that aren't supported by the exported format.
To be clear: I'm okay with losing some of the information in my file by exporting to SVG or having other limitations imposed on my work (e.g. no fancy drop shadow tools, feathering, etc.) if I have the basic functionality and interoperability -- after all, I don't like Xara just because of the extended features, but because it is fast, I like how it handles colours in a palette (another terrible weakness of other vector packages like Inkscape, that have no palette management, or Illustrator, where colour is ridiculously tedious and overly complex). But that built-in limitation isn't the right approach for everyone, as you point out: Xara focuses on the smooth user experience at the sacrifice of some features, so maybe a couple other posters were right in suggesting that SVG interoperability should be via an external application instead of built into the software.
It should be obvious by now that I'm a Xara lover too, and I use it for nearly everything I can accomplish with vector graphics -- even silly stuff like calculating driving distance between two points on a roadmap, because of Xara's incredibly simple yet powerful arbitrary unit system. I confess to using Visio on occasion for drawing charts/diagrams (because it is easier to draw and alter quickly with its snapping nodes and automatic connector recalculation), but I often end up redrawing the finished graph in Xara to make it look attractive enough to put into my bosses' slideshows.
That said, the reason for my whine about SVG has to do chiefly with the import/export functionality, and I am afraid of hitting a nerve with you, but here's hoping you appreciate the problem without being offended:
I work at an online learning company as a UI architect from a home office -- and the other designers at H.Q. have opted to use other software despite my having earlier chosen to use Xara to design our software (I can't really do much about it as I can't browbeat them from here). They argue it shouldn't matter so long as the formats are interoperable, which I agree with in principle -- but in practice doing so puts me in an untenable position because Xara's vector export functionality (and much of its import) is... well, not so good. The other major vector illustration packages out there have:
More recent format support (e.g. Adobe Illustrator 9-10 as opposed to Xara which tends to be 2-3 major versions behind the pack)
Modern/popular format support like AI, EPS, PDF, and SVG (whereas Xara seems to have many arcane and largely useless formats now -- How many people these days need to be able to export to WordPerfect Graphics format, and how many have tried exporting a WMF in desperation to find it doesn't even have remotely the same geometry as the original vector file?). In Xara's defense, the most recent version (X1) does now export to PDF and Flash, but again they are older versions of the formats, and of limited use when they only interoperate in one direction.
Better colour support. I think I have taken the most licks due to the fact that Xara somehow manages to import neon colours from illustrator files. I know that NO package out there seems to be able to agree on colours in AI/EPS files
It's good for creating a stylised sort of look to stuff but there will never be a 100% solution to replacing manual tracing: Software just isn't good enough, it seems, to do the job as well as a human can.
That said, the best software I've ever used for doing traces is Adobe Streamline, but that product seems to be abandoned (maybe it's part of Illustrator now? I don't know) and that's not saying much. I can usually trace out/recreate wordmarks and logotype etc. faster than I can get a tracing program to come close. Xara is damn fast for doing this kind of work, so maybe consider that to be a silver lining.
... But they're a relatively small shop, which is probably the only reason they're having anything to do with Linux at all (trying to get leverage in a growing niche market). I'm sure they like the press regardless, but I'm guessing nobody's in the office now that it's nearly midnight in Britain.
I am doubtless one of the reasons that Xara LX exists at all -- I wrote their product manager a couple years ago to state I intended to switch to Linux, and would really love it if their product could at least run under WINE; at the time they said they had no intentions on working on a Linux version in the future and that "Linux users seem to expect everything for free". That they are upping the ante and actually making a Linux version that is indeed free is puzzling, but I'm not complaining: I've bought every revision of the software since 1.0 back in the 90s and still prefer it to Inkscape, Illustrator, and all the other competitors on the block.
My only beefs, if I could be said to have any:
Inkscape has more intelligent handling of shapes. For example, the corner radius of a rounded corner is preserved once a shape is resized; in Xara it changes proportional to the altered dimensions from the original shape. Yuck.
Inkscape also has a kick-ass calligraphy tool, which isn't useless -- I've already used it to design a product logo for a very real product of a relatively large company. No other vector-based tool for calligraphy comes close.
I dearly, sorely wish that Xara would figure out how to get SVG support into Xara. It's a glaring omission that isn't going to fly with the Linux crowd. At all. And it's annoying not to have it in Windows, either. Strangely enough, SVG support was one of the excuses I was given by Xara's product manager for not making a Linux version of Xara (e.g. SVG had priority). I wonder how that's shifted now, and if SVG support is still on the agenda, and for which version(s) of their software.
Finally, I know that Xara had earlier pledged to support another open-source application named UberConverter which was supposed to be the Rosetta stone to format interoperability. According to the status page, "xar" file read and write capability is there (at least for the LX format) -- so when is the result going to be integrated directly into Xara?
All told, though, I am grateful to Xara for their decision -- and to all the developers who have contributed to the success of the project. If I could code my way out of a proverbial wet paper bag I would have helped by now, but unfortunately I am one of those individuals who is happy to use Xara's products without having the faintest idea of how to make them (or make them better, in this case).
Munin isn't at all different from Cacti, really, except that Cacti is 100% web based and perhaps a bit more mature (I use Cacti and like it a lot more than at least 4-5 other similar products out there). Cacti won't do service-testing though; maybe this is a good walkthrough for people who just want something up and running in 15 minutes (I wouldn't know, I'm not inclined to read the whole thing since a cursory glance shows there's nothing here that I don't have a running alternative for already).
Accessibility changes are mostly going to be to templates and not style sheets, unfortunately (although there are some design things that can be done for accessibility purposes as well) -- I'd like to think Slashdot would be willing to set an example in this regard, even if some of the changes happen now and others happen in future incarnations of slashcode.
Also good to hear a complete redesigned icon set would be allowed -- I think this is a positive move; even if you don't pick the skin that uses them as the winner, another set or three of icons to use/choose from would be a "good thing" -- Especially if it standardizes on icon dimensions, an obvious problem with the current set.
Slashdot Mirror
The font rendering settings are locked in. There are some Google Groups discussions about why this is so, but it was all white noise -- every other application can use .fonts.conf (even if it is a workaround to do so) and Chrome can't/won't for a while, so it got promptly uninstalled.
The Manifold series predicted many of the problems we have here today; the aging Shuttle fleet, the private entrepreneurs trying to step up to the plate to supply heavy lifting capability, and all the political BS from "The Gun Club" (NASA) cock-blocking the private entrepreneurs.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines. If we want to head off-planet, it would be wise to take advantage of resources that aren't already at the bottom of a gravity well that costs what, $30,000/lb. to LEO?
... Then offer them an Energon goody. Works (almost) every time.
Allow me to say "arigato gozaimas" on the score tip -- I've heard about it (from the "making of" video) but haven't played nor seen the game played yet. To be honest, I'm tossed between upgrading an AGP video card or just buying a '360 -- I'm not particularly keen on either approach, but I've been hankerin' since I last played System Shock 2, which was a good 3-4 years ago now.
Say what you will, but Ken Lavine is one of the good guys. I've had the opportunity to have a (brief) exchange with him in the past; he's no-nonsense but similarly no-bullshit; in other words, the kind of guy every nerd would want to work for or have a beer with, or both. Cheers, Ken, for doing the right thing.
A few of my personal experiences with running Ubuntu:
Why not stream it? I generate a continuous stream of thunderstorms on a server tucked away in my basement that doesn't even have a sound card let alone speakers or anything hooked up to it. But I just pipe the raw sound output to a fifo, encode with LAME, then pipe to another process which sends the music to icecast--all on the same device. Since I only ever use the thing locally I want to switch to encoding to flac instead (the extra traffic isn't a problem) but I haven't got around to it yet.
That way, I can tune into my thunderstorms in the bedroom with the Squeezebox to help me sleep; in the at-home-office during the day to provide a bit of white noise to help the baby sleep, or in the living room using the HTPC to drown out a boring conversation.
I included a quote from the book in my own post a bit further down.
... By a late gentleman who went by the name of Douglas Adams. The software, Anthem, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, used a company's stock as input data instead of server logs, but the idea was still there. I wonder if his writing influenced the author of this tool.
I can't help but wonder if the music generated by this software isn't going to sound like, in Mr. Adams own words, "a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor" -- to say nothing of what it must sound like to listen to hours of this stuff if 30 seconds is pure hell.
I would personally prefer to use Boodler for such purposes; instead of music you can use any waveforms you like. You program the software to do whatever you want, whether it's write music or (more likely) generate an environmental audioscape similar to what peep does, only much more sophisticated and flexible since you can program whatever events you want and send them to Boodler, which can be set to listen to a socket or port for commands.
Thanks a fucking lot, my 2-month-old kid was finally falling asleep now that it's nearly five in the morning, and then you had to go and write what you did.
I suggest submitting the name change recommendation to Microsoft along with a suggestion that the default skin should paint everything with orange gradients.
What a load of bollocks. What follows next is the sales pitch to glue some special crystals into the web server to help it reverberate with only good juju, like a cosmic drum ... or whatever.
These are pretty tall words coming from someone with such a shitty website, too; http://www.webvastu.com/ needs more gradients, larger leading, more fonts, narrower columns, and definitely more orange. Especially the orange. For a special treat, disable style sheets: accessibility++. I would make some statement about karma here but (A) I don't know the Indian-equivalent term, and (B) I'm assuming Dr. Smita is in fact already completely blind.
Is it wrong of me to also be cynical that the good doctor can't even spell their own gimmicky 15-seconds-of-fame loanword, "Vastu", consistently on their own website? No, go back to smoking your hookah, doc. Your website is awesome, dude--it's everyone else that's got it wrong.
Science fiction writers (the hard- variety) like Stephen Baxter have been lamenting the likelyhood of this eventuality for years now. Not that it isn't nice to at least have some closure, but on the other hand it seems like the news is little more than the last nail in the coffin for the most obvious pas-de-terre between Earth and space.
There is one book--Manifold Space, I think it might be--that muses upon the notion that there may be some water deeply buried (e.g. 20+ kilometres) the surface, and all the difficulties involved in getting to it (e.g. standard mining techniques developed on Earth wouldn't work there for a host of reasons). Excellent book/series, incidentally. Strongly recommended for any space science enthusiasts.
I'm not a big gamer (nor an especially good one) but for a relaxing, immersive experience nothing beats the Myst games.
Reasons aren't difficult to list: No worries about perfect timing or tense edge-of-your seat action; you can navigate around using nothing more than a mouse in one hand leaving the other free for a warm/cold drink (or a newborn, which has been the case for me recently). You can pick up and play for 5 minutes or 5 hours, and the game isn't at all diminished by not having human opponents to play with (or against).
The immersive environments are what really do it for me, though -- the audio/visual design of the games is excellent. Sometimes I find myself sitting and listening to the sound of waves lapping a shore, observing a distant crackle of thunder, or watching the flame of a gas burner as it hisses and eventually boils the liquid above.
There are a few other games I absolutely love: Grim Fandango, most of the Clancy games from the past ~7 years, Star Control II/UQM, System Shock II, Armadillo Run ... but none have anything close to the same comfort factor for me.
Each component is also described using style sheets -- the code that renders several variants of a tree component, for example, could be a thousand lines of CSS.
It's also worth noting that when you're dealing with pretty big style sheets for an enterprise product, coding standards becomes a bit of a bigger deal than when writing a one-off web site. We, for example, use longhand for specifying everything then compress to shorthand as a last step using csstidy (I won't get into explaining why but there are a number of functional reasons for doing so.)
Why would anything be wrong with a UI architect? It's the position I more-or-less created for myself where I work and I do more or less what you describe (and a number of other jobs, besides). I just don't have a lot of experience with AJAX and nearly none with Java.
I especially know all about CSS and the nightmare of multiple browser support -- especially when CSS rendering support seems to be inversely proportional to a browser's popularity. It doesn't help my desire to push for web standards when the CEO doesn't give a hoot about every browser out there except the 800lb. gorilla -- going as far as to specifically forbid using anything but in demos because, "That's what our clients use."
I guess it goes without saying that the "people in the community" referred to in the article are developers and not designers; if you think JavaScript support in the popular browser application is bad, try writing 25,000 lines of CSS for a web application designed to work on the "big 4" browser platforms (e.g. MSIE, Firefox, Opera & Safari).
Clearly, Mr. Wei has a point about at least one thing -- anyone who develops for Java should be grateful about the homogenous nature of the JVM. Sure, you may still need to require a specific VM version to run your program, but my experience is that it's not quite such a big deal to bundle a specific VM with a desktop application (and no problem at all to pick and choose what JVM to use on an application server like Tomcat). Why someone would abandon that in favour of the uncertainty (and constant flux) of a browser is beyond me.
And I'm glad Weird Al isn't taking it too hard (or at least, he isn't showing it) -- it's a fantastic piece of work, and if it's popular it's because it's that good and chimes with a pretty wide audience.
I can't believe there were > 0 people who replied to Karma Farmer's comment thinking it was anything but an attempt at humour/troll, much less that any such poster would get their manties in a knot over it either.
I can't remember the last time I watched a DVD on my computer, so I'll focus on one of those "proprietary" CODECs that I do care about.
Preamble: just because I can and because someone always feels the need to point this out, it may as well be me this time: 'OGG' isn't a format, it's a file extension. You probably mean Ogg Vorbis (as opposed to Ogg Theora, FLAC, etc.).
The very same Ogg Vorbis is a sore point with me. I agree with a number of the salient benefits with the format:
So why the hell is it that at least 95% of portable mp3 players don't support Ogg Vorbis? I went out of my way to buy a model that specifically did support it (by Samsung) and the compatibility is lousy: Vorbis files cause the player to choke and often crash for no reason; mp3s and other formats play just fine. Other vendors (including the big boys like Apple) don't care enough to even bother; the only other vendor I know besides Samsung that has tried to support ogg is iRiver, and only on a select few of their devices at that.
Well, the justification just isn't there. They figure most people don't use Ogg Vorbis, they use mp3 or some other even trashier DRM format, so they'll support the masses -- who cares about the geeky The article as stated is short on good grammar and spelling but states the facts plainly: Until Linux grows up and supports these basic operations Out Of The Box like playing an mp3 without having to go out of their way to "taint" their distro with non-free software /licences (or whatever else), Linux is going to stay in the nerd niche, and it's not going to be as slick an experience as that which the big businesses are willing to dump millions into making it work like people expect.
I do hope you enjoy playing with Xara; I know how "high" I felt when it dawned on me what great software it was to use in 1997 when I was first introduced to it. I think this company has written some great software; their products command a near-cult status following already (many of their followers dating all the way back to 'Acorn Draw'). Developing a port of their flagship product for Linux is quite definitely not going to hurt their reputation in the latter respect, at least. ;)
It's also not unthinkable that the same app could even be backported to Windows, although that seems highly unlikely for the moment: Windows is and has been Xara's bread and butter for a long time, so they probably aren't eager to see their paying customers (like me) slip away to free versions the next time around.
That said, I'd gladly pay for a licence to be able to run the software on Linux, and I had told them as much a couple years ago. (Their product manager at the time disagreed and said that Linux users tended to want everything for free because of the philosophy behind the OS, but they have obviously changed their tune since).
I wish them the best of luck for successfully completing their Linux as well as Mac versions: As a long-time user of the software myself, it's in my own interests to see them continue to do well and improve their software (and their supported OSes, as I have been dying to move to Linux for a long time now and Xara has been one of the biggest packages tying me down to Windows) -- and in theirs, if they're to stand up to the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.
I'm honoured to make your acquaintance, Tim -- and I agree, Xara certainly does some "vector-banging" that other software probably didn't do at the time, and doesn't do still -- but packages like Inkscape seem nearly equally capable to Xara in many respects, and they are able to handle SVG import/export. Xara also already handles exports to other (more limited) vector formats as well, and has algorithms for handling elements that aren't supported by the exported format.
To be clear: I'm okay with losing some of the information in my file by exporting to SVG or having other limitations imposed on my work (e.g. no fancy drop shadow tools, feathering, etc.) if I have the basic functionality and interoperability -- after all, I don't like Xara just because of the extended features, but because it is fast, I like how it handles colours in a palette (another terrible weakness of other vector packages like Inkscape, that have no palette management, or Illustrator, where colour is ridiculously tedious and overly complex). But that built-in limitation isn't the right approach for everyone, as you point out: Xara focuses on the smooth user experience at the sacrifice of some features, so maybe a couple other posters were right in suggesting that SVG interoperability should be via an external application instead of built into the software.
It should be obvious by now that I'm a Xara lover too, and I use it for nearly everything I can accomplish with vector graphics -- even silly stuff like calculating driving distance between two points on a roadmap, because of Xara's incredibly simple yet powerful arbitrary unit system. I confess to using Visio on occasion for drawing charts/diagrams (because it is easier to draw and alter quickly with its snapping nodes and automatic connector recalculation), but I often end up redrawing the finished graph in Xara to make it look attractive enough to put into my bosses' slideshows.
That said, the reason for my whine about SVG has to do chiefly with the import/export functionality, and I am afraid of hitting a nerve with you, but here's hoping you appreciate the problem without being offended:
I work at an online learning company as a UI architect from a home office -- and the other designers at H.Q. have opted to use other software despite my having earlier chosen to use Xara to design our software (I can't really do much about it as I can't browbeat them from here). They argue it shouldn't matter so long as the formats are interoperable, which I agree with in principle -- but in practice doing so puts me in an untenable position because Xara's vector export functionality (and much of its import) is ... well, not so good. The other major vector illustration packages out there have:
It's good for creating a stylised sort of look to stuff but there will never be a 100% solution to replacing manual tracing: Software just isn't good enough, it seems, to do the job as well as a human can.
That said, the best software I've ever used for doing traces is Adobe Streamline, but that product seems to be abandoned (maybe it's part of Illustrator now? I don't know) and that's not saying much. I can usually trace out/recreate wordmarks and logotype etc. faster than I can get a tracing program to come close. Xara is damn fast for doing this kind of work, so maybe consider that to be a silver lining.
I am doubtless one of the reasons that Xara LX exists at all -- I wrote their product manager a couple years ago to state I intended to switch to Linux, and would really love it if their product could at least run under WINE; at the time they said they had no intentions on working on a Linux version in the future and that "Linux users seem to expect everything for free". That they are upping the ante and actually making a Linux version that is indeed free is puzzling, but I'm not complaining: I've bought every revision of the software since 1.0 back in the 90s and still prefer it to Inkscape, Illustrator, and all the other competitors on the block.
My only beefs, if I could be said to have any:
All told, though, I am grateful to Xara for their decision -- and to all the developers who have contributed to the success of the project. If I could code my way out of a proverbial wet paper bag I would have helped by now, but unfortunately I am one of those individuals who is happy to use Xara's products without having the faintest idea of how to make them (or make them better, in this case).
Munin isn't at all different from Cacti, really, except that Cacti is 100% web based and perhaps a bit more mature (I use Cacti and like it a lot more than at least 4-5 other similar products out there). Cacti won't do service-testing though; maybe this is a good walkthrough for people who just want something up and running in 15 minutes (I wouldn't know, I'm not inclined to read the whole thing since a cursory glance shows there's nothing here that I don't have a running alternative for already).
Also good to hear a complete redesigned icon set would be allowed -- I think this is a positive move; even if you don't pick the skin that uses them as the winner, another set or three of icons to use/choose from would be a "good thing" -- Especially if it standardizes on icon dimensions, an obvious problem with the current set.