Why have developers made their RSS readers so that they query the master site at each hour sharp? Why haven't they done it like Opera or Konqueror, e.g. query the server every sixty minutes after the application has been started?
Or did the RSS reader authors hope that their applications wouldn't be used by anybody except for a few geeks?
"Buf of course Mono will be fine and M$ will leave it alone because M$ loves OSS."
Well, of course! Microsoft declared it an ECMA standard so that a Linux implementation would be made, but as it (just like X or QT) isn't built into the kernel like on Windows,.NET applications will perform worse on Linux than on Windows. The end result is that many popular Linux applications will be ported to Windows within no time, and they even perform better!
"That's the problem with OS9 and OSX. The users need permission to delete stories in order to have permission to modify stories."
That's actually not quite true. But it might as well be, under any OS - you can always modify the file by truncating it to zero bytes. Just as effective. Someone will always be stupid or malevolent enough to do this. (Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.)
You know just as well as me that there is a huge difference between truncating a huge amount of files to 0 bytes, and throwing a folder into the trash.
The best solution is using Netware. It has both versioning and separated write/delete permissions.
1. Quickly, register "X Windows" and get money from both Microsoft and the X Consortium!
2. www.windhose.com is still not owned by Microsoft. They don't sue it, even though they sued mikerowesoft.com. Now what is more similar, Windhose/Windows or Microsoft/Mikerowesoft? The former, i'd say!
3. Our Dutch government is idiotic pro-big-american-business. First with the vote about software patents (with which Microsoft, IBM and the like can sue smaller European companies out of the market). Then the case of MS against Lindows (it changed its product's name to Linspire because of the Dutch ruling, you know). It seems they care more about Microsoft than about the people that voted for them.
No funny key combinations. Repeat, no funny key combinations. Everything must be accessable through the menus. Yeah, I know you want to be able to bind any control key combination to any function. Don't. It doesn't really speed up use anyway. Read Apple's old studies on this. People blank out on the 500ms they're thinking about the control key combo. And never, ever use keyboard toggles that don't have a permanently visible state on screen.
Keyboard shortcuts are useful. The Delphi IDE is a good example. For me, it is routine to press Ctrl-S (save) before I press F9 (run). You know, during debugging the IDE can crash, and you don't want to loose your changes with that, do you?
One could do the same thing by clicking the Save button and then the Run button, but it simply takes more time, even if the buttons weren't as small as they are now. So if one would throw away the keyboard shortcuts from Delphi, I would probably never save anymore before running (takes too much time). And we all know that isn't a very good idea.
On the other hand, for keyboard shortcuts to work, they should be consistent, very consistent. For example, take Windows 98. In almost all applications you can use Control-S to save your document. There is one exception to this, and it is called Notepad. If you press Ctrl-S in it, nothing happens. And this is very bad, because I have often been editing webpages with Notepad and asked myself why Internet Explorer wouldn't show me the things I changed.
The user should never have to tell the computer something it already knows. This is basic, and routinely violated in the Open Source world. The user should never have to fill in a blank when the computer can find out what goes in that blank. Offer a choice if necessary. Yes, much of this comes from UNIX's crappy approach to system administration. Work on that.
This point is a very true one. If you use Windows and want a good example of this, look at the top two of
these screenshots. On the left one, you configure the ports and IP addresses on which the server starts listening. Then, on the right you can map folders to these sockets. Now look at the right screenshot, and especially at "On IP address:". Does it make sense that there is an edit box after it?
As I developed this UI, I thought it does make sense. You could either enter an IP address from the Ports tab to do real virtual hosting, or you could enter a domain name for HTTP header based virtual hosting (now that I look at the sources again, I removed the HTTP header based virtual hosting...) However, it is still bad usability. It is used for two kinds of entries, and what do we have for that: the radio button. So if this would be properly designed, you could choose the appropriate virtual hosting method with a radio button, and then you could either enter a domain name, or choose an IP address from a drop-down list. And of course the entry that you shouldn't use is grayed out.
Great that I have now found out one more usability problem in my application, but I only did because of this article. Normally you, as a developer, code and make sure the UI works for you, and maybe you even make sure that it looks clean and simple. Yet looks can certainly be deceiving.
It seems that you don't even need dial-up for uploading things. That was the biggest problem for sattelite internet until now, great that it has been solved!
Wait, please don't speak about me that way. Let me explain it.
So, we have bought a couple of E25K servers a few months ago, and it occured to me that they can quite well replace the heating of our office, and because of their design they don't have to be put away into the basement.
Of course, this is not very secure (they, including the data within them, can be stolen rather easily), so therefore we have put a cluster of noname Celeron boxes running Linux in our basement. Yes, the apps we use are custom-built Sparc apps, but SparcEmu 0.6-RC2 runs them just fine. And besides that, I can't use my PS/2 keyboard on the Sun Fire, not to mention its proprietary 13W3 video connector. I mean, having bought such an expensive computer, I want to be at least able to attach my PC flatscreen and play Unreal Tournament on it!
Now that you can't play UT on it, letting those E25K servers do nothing would of course be a waste, so I thought, why not use it for monitoring the office, where they were put? So I wanted to order a few webcams, yet that DAMN PROPRIETARY SCSI-3 CONNECTOR#@&*!% NOWHERE I COULD FIND A WEBCAM HAVING IT!
I know what you need to do when you want a file server, use File Exchange! Sure, it is exploitable (can be crashed, vulnerable to DoS, possibly allows access to every file on the server to anybody) but heck, I haven't had the time to issue advisories yet! And if I had, the leaks are years old already! And if they hadn't, it would be only three advisories!
And sure it runs on Windows, but what OS has been "proven" to be the safest by Secunia:-P
Well, okay, take a look at the Netherlands. We have a speed limit, wide lanes, continuous asphalt and all other things modern highways should have.
And what is the result? Still about 40 traffic jams each day, so much that most news bulletins only talk about "the usual traffic jams".
On the other hand, near Liege in Belgium you have strange concrete highways, sometimes with same-level crossings and people cycling on them, yet I have never seen a traffic jam there when we went to France.
Well, theoretically you are right, but practically you are not.
As an example, let's take a home router.
1. The vendor chooses to use Linux for it, as it is such a wonderful operating system.
2. The network controllers of this home router aren't standard PCI cards. Therefore, the vendor writes a device driver for them.
3. The driver is part of the kernel. Therefore, it automatically falls under the GPL.
4. The router ships with this customised kernel in binary form. Therefore, the vendor must give the customer access to the source of the kernel, including the driver he wrote.
5. The customer can do anything with the kernel and the driver what the GPL allows, including giving it away to the public.
Your fault is the following: "GPL enpowers the customer, not the public." The GPL namely allows the customer, of which there are most likely very many, to give the code away to the public. And forbidding that is against the GPL.
Indeed, I bet that thing doesn't comply to the FCC rules...
Now the key point is whether the computer only interferes with your own devices or not. If it does, you have a little technical and practical problem, but if your neighbours start to complain, you can have a much bigger problem (think lawsuit).
Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help]
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
The power button is great, indeed. Luckily our 6400 still has it:-) And then to imagine that Apple's ADB, essentially USB with another connector, already existed 15 years ago...
The Mac keyboard misses something else, however, and that is the scroll wheel. My Logitech keyboard, when used with USB->PS/2 converter, has a scrollwheel which just generates arrow-up and arrow-down sequences. It is really practical for scrolling through longer lists.
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Or did the RSS reader authors hope that their applications wouldn't be used by anybody except for a few geeks?
"Buf of course Mono will be fine and M$ will leave it alone because M$ loves OSS." Well, of course! Microsoft declared it an ECMA standard so that a Linux implementation would be made, but as it (just like X or QT) isn't built into the kernel like on Windows, .NET applications will perform worse on Linux than on Windows. The end result is that many popular Linux applications will be ported to Windows within no time, and they even perform better!
That's actually not quite true. But it might as well be, under any OS - you can always modify the file by truncating it to zero bytes. Just as effective. Someone will always be stupid or malevolent enough to do this. (Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.)
You know just as well as me that there is a huge difference between truncating a huge amount of files to 0 bytes, and throwing a folder into the trash.
The best solution is using Netware. It has both versioning and separated write/delete permissions.
2. www.windhose.com is still not owned by Microsoft. They don't sue it, even though they sued mikerowesoft.com. Now what is more similar, Windhose/Windows or Microsoft/Mikerowesoft? The former, i'd say!
3. Our Dutch government is idiotic pro-big-american-business. First with the vote about software patents (with which Microsoft, IBM and the like can sue smaller European companies out of the market). Then the case of MS against Lindows (it changed its product's name to Linspire because of the Dutch ruling, you know). It seems they care more about Microsoft than about the people that voted for them.
Keyboard shortcuts are useful. The Delphi IDE is a good example. For me, it is routine to press Ctrl-S (save) before I press F9 (run). You know, during debugging the IDE can crash, and you don't want to loose your changes with that, do you?
One could do the same thing by clicking the Save button and then the Run button, but it simply takes more time, even if the buttons weren't as small as they are now. So if one would throw away the keyboard shortcuts from Delphi, I would probably never save anymore before running (takes too much time). And we all know that isn't a very good idea.
On the other hand, for keyboard shortcuts to work, they should be consistent, very consistent. For example, take Windows 98. In almost all applications you can use Control-S to save your document. There is one exception to this, and it is called Notepad. If you press Ctrl-S in it, nothing happens. And this is very bad, because I have often been editing webpages with Notepad and asked myself why Internet Explorer wouldn't show me the things I changed.
The user should never have to tell the computer something it already knows. This is basic, and routinely violated in the Open Source world. The user should never have to fill in a blank when the computer can find out what goes in that blank. Offer a choice if necessary. Yes, much of this comes from UNIX's crappy approach to system administration. Work on that.This point is a very true one. If you use Windows and want a good example of this, look at the top two of these screenshots. On the left one, you configure the ports and IP addresses on which the server starts listening. Then, on the right you can map folders to these sockets. Now look at the right screenshot, and especially at "On IP address:". Does it make sense that there is an edit box after it?
As I developed this UI, I thought it does make sense. You could either enter an IP address from the Ports tab to do real virtual hosting, or you could enter a domain name for HTTP header based virtual hosting (now that I look at the sources again, I removed the HTTP header based virtual hosting...) However, it is still bad usability. It is used for two kinds of entries, and what do we have for that: the radio button. So if this would be properly designed, you could choose the appropriate virtual hosting method with a radio button, and then you could either enter a domain name, or choose an IP address from a drop-down list. And of course the entry that you shouldn't use is grayed out.
Great that I have now found out one more usability problem in my application, but I only did because of this article. Normally you, as a developer, code and make sure the UI works for you, and maybe you even make sure that it looks clean and simple. Yet looks can certainly be deceiving.
It seems that you don't even need dial-up for uploading things. That was the biggest problem for sattelite internet until now, great that it has been solved!
Wait, please don't speak about me that way. Let me explain it.
So, we have bought a couple of E25K servers a few months ago, and it occured to me that they can quite well replace the heating of our office, and because of their design they don't have to be put away into the basement.
Of course, this is not very secure (they, including the data within them, can be stolen rather easily), so therefore we have put a cluster of noname Celeron boxes running Linux in our basement. Yes, the apps we use are custom-built Sparc apps, but SparcEmu 0.6-RC2 runs them just fine. And besides that, I can't use my PS/2 keyboard on the Sun Fire, not to mention its proprietary 13W3 video connector. I mean, having bought such an expensive computer, I want to be at least able to attach my PC flatscreen and play Unreal Tournament on it!
Now that you can't play UT on it, letting those E25K servers do nothing would of course be a waste, so I thought, why not use it for monitoring the office, where they were put? So I wanted to order a few webcams, yet that DAMN PROPRIETARY SCSI-3 CONNECTOR#@&*!% NOWHERE I COULD FIND A WEBCAM HAVING IT!
I know what you need to do when you want a file server, use File Exchange! Sure, it is exploitable (can be crashed, vulnerable to DoS, possibly allows access to every file on the server to anybody) but heck, I haven't had the time to issue advisories yet! And if I had, the leaks are years old already! And if they hadn't, it would be only three advisories!
:-P
And sure it runs on Windows, but what OS has been "proven" to be the safest by Secunia
Well, okay, take a look at the Netherlands. We have a speed limit, wide lanes, continuous asphalt and all other things modern highways should have. And what is the result? Still about 40 traffic jams each day, so much that most news bulletins only talk about "the usual traffic jams". On the other hand, near Liege in Belgium you have strange concrete highways, sometimes with same-level crossings and people cycling on them, yet I have never seen a traffic jam there when we went to France.
As an example, let's take a home router.
1. The vendor chooses to use Linux for it, as it is such a wonderful operating system.
2. The network controllers of this home router aren't standard PCI cards. Therefore, the vendor writes a device driver for them.
3. The driver is part of the kernel. Therefore, it automatically falls under the GPL.
4. The router ships with this customised kernel in binary form. Therefore, the vendor must give the customer access to the source of the kernel, including the driver he wrote.
5. The customer can do anything with the kernel and the driver what the GPL allows, including giving it away to the public.
Your fault is the following: "GPL enpowers the customer, not the public." The GPL namely allows the customer, of which there are most likely very many, to give the code away to the public. And forbidding that is against the GPL.
Indeed, I bet that thing doesn't comply to the FCC rules... Now the key point is whether the computer only interferes with your own devices or not. If it does, you have a little technical and practical problem, but if your neighbours start to complain, you can have a much bigger problem (think lawsuit).
The power button is great, indeed. Luckily our 6400 still has it :-) And then to imagine that Apple's ADB, essentially USB with another connector, already existed 15 years ago...
The Mac keyboard misses something else, however, and that is the scroll wheel. My Logitech keyboard, when used with USB->PS/2 converter, has a scrollwheel which just generates arrow-up and arrow-down sequences. It is really practical for scrolling through longer lists.