If I'm remembering correctly, the StrongArm has no floating point unit. All floating poing calculations are done in software. Probably not going to get a very high frame rate on something like that.:^)
Quite so. It's not too bad - I've played Quake through a couple of times on the Acorn Risc PC, which uses a similarly specced StrongARM, and it's playable, as long as resolution is kept fairly low. Quake II, III is out of the question.
So when is it OK to be anonymous? Is it OK to snitch on corporations when they're being bad, but not on people?
I think the difference is twofold: first, on/., AC postings are public. Everyone can read them (moderation permitting), and anyone can rebut them. Accusations made to WAVE are not necessarily passed on to anyone at all, and certainly the victim of the accusation is kept unaware.
Secondly, by being filtered through a high-profile, "respectable" third party like Pinkertons, more credence is attached to the report. It becomes "Bob Ince is potentially violent" instead of "An anonymous coward thinks Bob Ince may be potentially violent".
I'd be happier if schools treated WAVE America with the same level of credulity as/. users treat Anonymous Coward.
This is a great article which deserves wider coverage outside of slashdot. My favourite quote:
"If you see these immediate warning signs," WAVE America will announce, "violence is a serious possibility":
Under what circumstances does AOL have no control over the content of its servers?
When [...self-righteous crap deleted]
How about, when they are incapable of vetting every one of their customers' web page uploads?
It has the power to remove material at any time. If it wants to remove material it can
Hellooo... they did. That they can be sued even after complying with a request to remove material they were not previously aware of is absolutely astonishing.
>MDI is, IMHO, not a suitable interface for anything at all.
That's not a very humble opinion.
It was an Honest one though. I don't think I have any Humble opinions.;-)
(Blimey. MDI can open. Worms all over floor.)
A simple tabbed-MDI interface provides the only reasonable way for me to manage this scenario.
I don't, in this case, see how a tabbed MDI interface is much better than a tabbed SDI interface. In fact I've seen many Windows users work exactly like this; all windows maximised, and switching between them using tabbing or the taskbar.
This does not meet my needs.
I also work with many source files open at once, plus documentation, man pages, and so on. To program efficiently, I need to keep more than one open at once so I can edit one whilst reading information from another. This is what windowing was invented for, and a single-window-tabbed interface, whether MDI or SDI, just isn't good enough.
What MDI - in full, subwindow mode - does is to restrict the control I have over placement of windows, by confining all windows owned by one application to a rectangle, which itself obscures everything under it.
(an AC wrote:)
For one thing, there's an index to all toplevel windows, the taskbar; an MDI'd window isn't there, so I have to get at its main window, which usually has to be maximized (making all other windows unusable because of M$'s idiocy in tying focus to stacking order)
Having used WMs that obey this, ones with separate stacking order and focus, and ones with focus-follows-mouse, I'd have to agree with this. Many's the time I want to enter something into a big text window or something whilst looking at information in a small informational window positioned on top of the main one. Windows MDI makes this situation even more common.
(It also probably makes things considerably harder for the novice, as positionable windows within positionable windows can get terribly confusing.)
It's the same interface that generations of emacs programmers have used happily and productively, even if they never called it MDI.
I rather prefer using emacs in SDI mode though. That is, running more than one copy in X.
later in thread...
That's sort of my point: that virtual desktops and [maximised] MDI are mostly interchangeable.
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that with virtual desktops, you can choose how to group your windows, by project or task, and easily start doing some task on a different virtual desktop without affecting the others. With MDI, you're limited to grouping by owner application. I do not often find such grouping terribly useful.
...because they'll bring to Windows the same UI fragmentation and confusion that X has always had.
Skins themselves are not necessarily a bad thing. Global, desktop-wide skins where all apps are automatically customised to have a certain look, are clearly a Good Thing. Separate skins for every application causes nothing but pain. As the UI hall of shame repeatedly tries to get us to notice, no application is so important that it justifies having its own, completely different, style of UI. That includes Mozilla. Unfortunately, the desirable default state of "use whatever the current style settings for Windows or GTK or whatever I'm running on" is not easily codable.
James Sherman wrote:
Now even microsoft break their own UI guidelines (Have you noticed the way the latest office bypasses MDI?).
and though I agree with everthing he says, I still commend Microsoft for moving away from MDI. I just wish they'd done it by having a global option for MDI-or-separate-windows, rather than just stopping using it. MDI is, IMHO, not a suitable interface for anything at all.
One good use of skins and customisation in general, though, is to cut down on useless clutter. When you've got toolbars and toolbars full of crap put there by marketing people, as advertising space and to show the range of bloatware features available, it's great to be able to get rid of it.
The film will be directed at the hand of Simon West
Erk! Only the other day aicn was reporting that Simon West was to direct a film remake of The Prisoner.
Perhaps the Brit-property adaptation stories have got muddled up. Or perhaps they are the same film. Personally, the thought of a Hollywood version of The Prisoner is bad enough without Lara Croft starring.
Who is number one?
You are number fifty double D.
OT: OOG's post above seems to have attracted the following moderation:
Moderation Totals:Troll=3, Funny=3, Total=6
Last time I checked, Troll was normally negative. Unless minus three people have moderated it. Hello sid=moderation people; there really is something odd going on...
Having not read the article that has caused offence I'm not sure about the full facts.
Indeed not. Slow down!
However, from what I have read about the case this hinges around the fact that Outcast have printed as facts things which aren't true about the Pink Papers editor.
No, the whole point is it's a pre-emptive gag. Netbenefit have pulled the site just in case Outcast print something potentially libellous in the future. Because of Netbenefit's aversion to getting involved in any possible court case in the future, Outcast are now prevented from publishing on the web despite been *two* steps away from breaking the law: they haven't printing anything *potentially* libellous, and whoever they might print anything about in the future has not proved the hypothetical libel in court.
This demonstrates the ludicrousness both of the current libel system, and of holding ISPs responsible for everything their customers do. It is worth noting that the print publishers promptly told the Pink Paper to get lost.
It has to be said that lible is very difficult to prove under UK law, see Neil Hamilton V M AlFayed, et al.
Et al? I would say Hamilton-al Fayed is very much the exception as far as prominent UK libel cases go. Hamilton lost his complaint as he had already been pretty thoroughly discredited; normally it has proven a lot easier to win libel cases, and in many high-profile cases, with absolutely ludicrous damages.
Maybe if Demon had bothered to acknowledge the complaints of the professor at the time then it would have not gone to court. If anything they were punished for their lack of customer care.
Whoa there. This is way off, like most of the posts here about the Godfrey case.
Demon settled with Lawrence Godfrey. No legal precedence has been set. It is unfortunate for everyone that they did so, but clearly they believe that they stand to lose more by fighting the case than by giving in. Demon used to be a strong opponent of censorship and had vowed to fight this case; things may be different now they are owned by Thus, but Demon still look really unhappy about this.
Godfrey was not a Demon customer. The offending post did not originate at Demon. Cancelling the post would, at that point, have achieved little, whilst opening the door to the necessity of removing any post anybody ever complained about.
At this point, that was not common practice. It's sad that we would now consider it normal.
Yes, the libel and slander laws in this country are flawed, but not in that way, if you can prove that what is printed or said is true you don't lose.
Except that you often do. Just ask Private Eye.
In fact the flaw with the legislation is that it costs too much for the average person to bring a case, and legal aid doesn't cover it.
It also costs too much for the average person or company to defend a case. The sums involved are so stupid it frightens people into retracting or just saying nothing in the first place. When responsibility for "publication" spreads unreasonably far - as in this case - it becomes impossible to say anything in the first place. That's why it's a freedom of speech issue; if all ISPs are forced to take the same legal view as Netbenefit, some people won't be able to speak at all.
On an completely unrelated point, is it just me who strongly dislikes the term "gays", or indeed any adjective turned into a plural noun? It seems to take a group of disparate individuals and classify them as a herd of identical people whose defining characteristic is their gayitude. Or something. "He is gay" means "he is a person, who is gay", as opposed to "he is a gay" which to me at least implies "he is a generic instantiation of the class gay".
Disclaimer: not being derived from class sexuality.gay myself, I may be totally missing the point.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't start supporting document.getElementById until version 5 of IE.
Indeed, though I'm not quite sure of the exact timeline here. The first DOM WD to mention getElementById was the July 1998 draft; IE4 predates that by some way doesn't it?
And while it's nice that IE5 now does pretty much support DOM, it also exposes a massive, overcomplex additional API, a lot of which is redundant. Go to MSDN's Web Workshop and look up DHTML Reference; woe betide anyone trying to learn DHTML from that.
Actually, woe betide anyone trying to learn DOM DHTML at all; I haven't found any good tutorials or references yet. Links, anyone?
One easy solution for this problem would be for Mozilla to suck it up and support document.all.
I concur, but as an optional compile-in "IE4 support" module so webmasters can more easily test their DOM code on Mozilla. This'd be nice. Especially if it had a few other bits in that people tend to use, like [client|offset]top|width|etc.
If Netscape suported document.all, developers could have one code path that supported IE4, IE5, and Netscape 6. Because they won't...
I don't know about "won't"; if someone were to contribute such a thing to the Moz codebase I'm sure no-one would complain.:-) For the moment, I guess standard compliance rightly has a higher priority than back compatibility.
(On the other hand, as soon as Netscape 6 ships, I can see sites deprecating their Netscape 4-specific DHTML code. It's non-standard, Netscape had the tendency to blow up while running it, and it's too different to be maintainable over a long period.)
Amen to that. I would not like to see any support whatsoever for Netscape 4's wrong-headed and in practice thoroughly broken layer model, ever. I want it to die. As soon as possible. It makes my gums throb.
Pity so many people over here are still running their horrible old T-Online Netscape setups. Curses.
You are right that it's probably just a browser sniffing issue
It's not, alas.
Mozilla supports W3's specification of the DOM. This interface is radically different from the object model implemented in IE4 and Netscape 4.
Therefore, if you want to be compatible with IE/Netscape 4+, you have to sniff for document.all, document.layers and document.getElementById, and write *three* different scripts.
No-one really knows how to write scripts under DOM yet, though hopefully that will improve with the release of Netscape 6. The DOM as it stands does have some weaknesses compared to previous object models; in particular it is - as far as I can work out - not possible to arbitrarily read the position and size of elements unless you set them explicitly yourself using CSS/JavaScript. This makes any dynamic layout code... a challenge.
Theoretically we can write DOM-compliant scripts and have them work properly under IE5+, NS6+ and some future version of Opera. But judging by the shocking mess I get when I look at the Netscape 6 startup page in IE5.01, I don't think we're quite there yet. (Yuck, will you look at that source?! This is hardly the elegant separation of content, style and behaviour HTML-CSS-DOM promised us.)
Anyway. Still downloading. Hmmmm. Think I'll go have a cuppa.
normalising all your waves will leave you with the loudest points of all your waves as loud as each other.
There's a further problem. As cmaxx says, some CDs have a greater dynamic range than others. Normalising a classical CD at the same apparent volume as a pop CD is likely to leave the classical piece effectively much quieter, since there may be just one short part of it that reaches the highest volume level.
Depending on the source, music may also be more or less compressed (in the audio sense; with quieter parts louder and vice versa); in general, more compression will make the music sound louder for the same apparent volume.
Making louder music quieter to match music recorded with a larger dynamic range loses quality. Heavy compression of all music is unacceptable to all but the people who run popular radio stations. So the only solution I can think of is, as suggested, putting volume level metadata either in a database, in the filename, or somewhere in an extension field MP3 doesn't already use, if there is such a thing.
spiteful ? Because it doesn't reflect your personal opinion perhaps ?
No. Spiteful because it does not make any argument, simply an assertion on a tired and shallow political theme, whilst deliberately insulting a large section of the/. readership. Europeans, I mean, not Linux/open source bigots.
Personally, I find being called a has-been unix zealot quite funny.
When did the USA become so jealous ? It gets more like Europe day by day.
Goodness me! Who moderated this spiteful little post up?
where he can innovate great software free from the meddlesome interference of big govenrment.
Now I know it's probably a bit passé to accuse ACs of astroturfing these days. But just from a linguistic point of view, isn't this lovely marketing-speak?
And what has changed between the time MS's lawyers insisted IE was part of the OS and now?
Before, Microsoft wanted to use their power in the OS arena to gain power in the browser arena (no pun intended).
Internet Explorer has since become a considerably more popular (and, let's face it, simply better) browser than Netscape. At the same time Linux has begun to erode the popularity of Windows.
So now, Microsoft want to use their power in the browser arena to gain power in the OS arena. As long as IE doesn't run on Un*x, separating Win and IE does not affect this aim.
but why isn't offsite cookie rejection built into all browsers?
Microsoft is blackmailing DoubleClick.:-)
There's a thread on the www-talk list about this at the moment. Though it's easy to remove cookies from <img>-derived HTTP requests, other features such as frames are not as easy. For example, a banner ad frame at the top of the page is likely, and could easily be passed URI information from the frameset. Disallowing cookies on subframes, however, would break sites running under the likes of AskJeeves, where the 'real' site is viewed as part of a frameset.
I don't know if IDcide prevents cookies being passed to sites in subframes, or just images. Probably the latter since it's the most common case at the moment. But frame, layer, object, embed and applet have the same problems.
Given that we were discussing embedded-object-cookie-rejection on www-talk as an obvious way to circumvent cookie abuse, it's somewhat worrying that IDcide Inc. might have a patent on it:
IDcide's patent-pending technology allows cookies to be blocked according to the site you're visiting, not according to where the cookies came from!
(From the FAQ.)
but why isn't offsite cookie rejection built into all browsers?
Alternative answer: because IDcide have patented it?
I can't see anything on www.patents.ibm.com yet, so it's unclear whether IDcide have indeed applied for a patent on cookie rejection, or whether it's some technical implementation detail.
Abused tracking is, of course, but this is such a clumsy method that it is not likely to spread.
Indeed, I'm not too concerned about this being patented since the URL http://bgfv3wz0.software-patents-are-bad.com/ has no obvious advantage over http://www.software-patents-are-bad.com/bgfv3wz0/.
A few weeks ago I was on a talker (toth.org.uk) discussing ways of storing client information, and someone suggested "storing a session ID at the start of the URL", meaning the second URL above. We, of course, joked that he had meant at the start of the domain name and that could be done using DNS wildcards but - ho! ho! ho! - what a damned stupid idea that would be.
Not exactly prior art since it wasn't that long ago and in any case toth doesn't log, but still that makes it obvious in my book. Same problem as ever though: what's "obvious" to a bunch of web developers who read RFCs is not generally "obvious" to bunch of patent clerks who read the National Enquirer.
I see this thing going the way of the 3D0 and the CD-I.
An interesting comparison. Both of these were, like the X-Box, reference designs, to be manufactured by OEMs, rather than single, managed hardware platforms.
Has this strategy ever worked for games consoles? ISTR the MSX was supposed to have been quite popular in Japan, or something, but I never met one in Europe myself...
Why not? If the you (the user) don't know quite what you're looking for, you basically have to run a database request to find it.
Indeed, and I think this is a problem. People may be bad at hierarchies, but I personally find them worse at framing searches, and worst of all at creating logical queries such as for a database.
Part of the interface question is how much power to allow. In my current interface one can drill down in several hierarchies and narrow the search bit by bit, but you can't do things like say "I want all requests referred from slashdot.org OR made on the day a link was featured on slashdot", or "I want all requests made on this day but were NOT referred by slashdot.org AND NOT referred by another page on the site". I can't see an easy GUI-based way to construct queries like this, especially not one that'll work through a web browser.
One solution could be based on the 'precompiled search' paradigm [...] Allow the user to define commonly-used shortcuts containing the attributes to form a search. Such as "This month; referred from banner-ad- show.cgi"
You're right. This is something I was thinking about; I can see three possibilities here for my project, which are probably relevant to others too -
have no special precompiled search features, but allow the user to bookmark a particular query in their browsers;
have a built-in bookmark feature where the user can name searches they've made before and include them on the main page in the future as predefined searches;
as (2), but also allow predefined searches to contain "advanced" queries like the ones I mentioned above where the query expression is a complex boolean expression, not simply a drill-down expression such as "this month; referred from banner" which the user can make themselves fairly easily, for example, in a pseudo-hierarchy of "Date=/2000/March/Referrer=/slashdot.org/banner.cg i".
Damn, I'm rambling now. I wish I could use the "No +1" button on my non-cookies browser.:-)
Any thoughts? I suppose it would be easier to explain this if I got some screenshots out...
Great! Thanks for that; I was really curious about Nautilus was actually going to look like but the Eazel site seemed quite short on details.
Not quite sure I like the design so far but of course it is only work in progress. I personally find the left-pane area quite cluttered. But hey.
One of the things I find interesting about Nautilus is its idea of 'zooming in' on the standard icon/list views to reveal more information [...]
Okay, I probably still didn't understand this properly, but I don't currently see the advantage of this over either/both of the list view and something like an extended tooltip.
Tog's latest column discusses [...] piles, notebooks and scrapbooks
Yep, indeed. I'm a regular reader of asktog.com too.:-) But I still didn't understand how this was terribly different to what we have now; they're still objects that contain other objects, aren't they? So, still hierarchies?
how to convery time to the user through icons. He suggests having cobwebs or dust pile up
Yes! I loved this! You keep the arrangement of icons unchanging so users still know where everything is, and just make some icons more eye-catching than others, mostly through use of colour. This is way better than, say, the O2K menus, which make commonly used objects more prominent by moving them around.
I will definitely be stealing this idea. Unless Bruce has patented it, natch.:-)
Well, it would do if web design was done in an ideal world. Where the content came first, and then was marked up with a bit of style sheet or something. But that's just not the way it happens in reality, sadly.
You have to pay those techies to crank out huge graphics and nonportable JabbaTripe
Yes, of course. But in the eyes of most managers, customers, and other people who are actually in charge of what happens to the site, the graphics and DHTML are the non-negotiable part of a website. It must look and behave nicely on their browser. They'll happily have you add something or change something so it looks better on their desktop, even if you explain until you're blue in the face why it will break on everyone else's browser. God, most of them still don't understand the difference between a printed fixed-size page and a resizable web page, and will insist that the layout be fixed to whatever their screen size is.
Not that I'm bitter, or sick of having to argue against this, or anything.
which can only reduce the number of people that can or will want to use the site.
This is perfectly true for a site where content is the purpose. Where you want people to be able to access information easily. But that's not what many corporate (non e-commerce) sites are about. Because there's bugger all content there anyway. The site exists only to make the company look good to other companies. Who are probably all using IE4+ anyway.
I've nothing against making a good-looking site... But that can easily done without breaking it!
Not if it involves table layouts, CSS-P and JavaScript, I'm afraid. Getting them to work consistently on IE/Netscape 4 and degrade nicely on other browsers is a big, big task. Personally I still do it. But I can see why other people don't.
(As it happens, I'm posting this from home using a browser that doesn't support cookies. So I *hope* this post works. I know lots of bits of/. don't though.)
Almost without fail, the problem was that they clicked somewhere they shouldn't have, and executed some obscure command, or moved a toolbar, or some other nonsense.
Ohh yeah. I been there.
As I said. Those toolbars are really in need of some downsizing. But I guess people have forgotten how to use menus now.;-)
Of course, upgrading them to Word 2000 would help.
I haven't played with O2K, but I have to say I'm a bit dubious about its idea of feature hiding. Especially with the items on the menu actually moving around; doesn't it make it harder to find what you want?
Once, Word and Excel had a Tip Wizard that watched what the user did, and suggested alternative methods for some tasks.
Gosh. This suggests MS did some usability testing at some point, to see what tasks users commonly did wrong.
When Office has a tip for you, the Paper Clip makes some animated noise to get your attention. You have to stop what you're doing, and click on the little light bulb next to the Paper Clip to get to the tip.
Yes. The product lifecycle must be too short for usability testing now. It's not just this unhelpfulness that's wrong with the Assistant. I mean, what's the first thing any new Word user does? Click on the close icon to get rid of the Assistant so they can get on with their work. Only of course this doesn't actually work. You have to click on one of the buttons that doesn't look like a button inside the speech bubble that most people don't read. So they sit there clicking on the close icon for a bit longer. Gagh. Has this been fixed in O2K?
Leave it to Microsoft to come up with software with the personality of a surly DMV clerk or a clingy, co-dependent girlfriend, with no useful middle ground.
Hey, that's not a bad idea. I don't want a bouncing paperclip or a dog in pants to give me tips - give me an officious clerk or a clingy girlfriend for an Office Assistant! At least software that's being deliberately user-hostile is more honest.
I've been reading the guy's site for donkey's, and still I spell his name wrong. Curse me!
The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users.
The reason proprietary extensions aren't used so much these days is, of course, because W3C took the proprietary extensions and made them the official standard.;-)
Unfortunately, though Jakob (yay, I got it right this time) is correct that sites don't like to turn the majority of users away, they still don't care much about minority users. If your browser doesn't support images, or frames, or tables, or cookies, or JavaScript, or if your body does not support vision, you're in trouble.
This isn't just because the designers are simply stupid (although some are, natch), it's a business decision. If the amount of revenue we gain by making the site degrade gracefully is less than the amount of time we'll have to pay our techies for to get it done, it ain't gonna happen.
Not seeing something during initial use of the system would result in better use of the hidden features later.
This is an interesting point. Most people seem to be very bad at forming a mental model of how software works. Of course, this is partly because there is a lot of software which does not have any consistent model, but still a lot of users will only do a few linear operations they have learnt, and have to be taught further operations, rather than grokking the whole program. And then you end up with horrible, horrible "wizards" as the only way of getting things done.
Starting with a simplified system would perhaps alleviate this. But how can this be done? Simply taking out half the menu options seems a bit crude.:-)
What would, I think, help, would be to take away the majority of those blasted button bars. Most Word users still have half their screens taken up with rows upon rows of toolbar buttons, most of which they never use, and which are only marginally faster than going to the menu. All these unexplained options must be terribly intimidating to new users.
I am starting to think that the solution is to treat information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes rather than by hierarchy and name.
I'm a great fan of hierarchies. Many users are indeed bad at managing them, but I think this is as much to do with bad interfaces onto them as anything else. New users are always confused as to where files are, not because they don't understand the concept of a hierarchy, but because their applications give them many views of the same hierarchy that all look completely different.
We've got the filer (with its view options that Windows by default changes pseudo-randomly), common file dialogues (which only show files of the type their application is associated with, thus losing any 'sense-of-place' the user may acquire), Explorer (which put directories and files in different panes, again destroying the comfortable feeling of seeing a directory and knowing exactly where you are), and uncommon file dialogues of various shapes and unpleasant flavours. Consistency: zero. Plus of course Windows and Unix both take over the root directory and fill it with stuff one doesn't understand, and applications happily open up unlikely directories like root, a directory hidden inside the application's own domain, or - God help us - C:\WINDOWS\ as the default place to save/open a file, thus making the user totally lost.
Give the user one filer application for doing everything to do with hierarchies and lists - not just files, but, using a VFS, all hierarchical datatypes in applications - and I predict the world will be a happier place.
I'm quite interested in Jacob's idea of an information soup, because I'm currently working on an interactive web log analyser, and its data is inherently both multiple-hierarchical (eg. file request:/dir/dir/file, client host:/com/altavista/spider653, and so on) and loaded with other properties, which one may wish to sort and view in many different ways. The interface is still quite hierarchical in nature, because I really can't think of a better way to structure the data. An infosoup is a great idea but you can't expect the user to issue what amounts to a database request every time they want to edit a document or something.
Anyone got any good examples of interfaces for property-rich data without a strict single hierarchy?
I'd say consciousness was a far more widespread condition than we give it credit for.
Maybe - the problem is the definition of consciousness; saying who has it before we can agree on what it actually is might be considered premature.
Animals can indeed display much behaviour that is similar to humans. However though this may be proof of emotions and the mind at an animal level we do not need to invoke consciousness to explain this behaviour.
We only need to invoke the concept of consciousness to explain that odd feeling we have that we are experiencing things and controlling our actions. Animals might experience the same feeling of consciousness, but since we are unable to communicate with them we cannot tell. The only way we can tell other humans experience the feeling is because they say so. Describing consciousness without verbal language seems tricky.
The question is: is consciousness something "real" (for want of a better term), or just a meme we have evolved? (Because to not believe in consciousness makes bothering to eat, drink, procreate, etc., fairly pointless, and hence unlikely to promote the continuance of our genes.)
Which doesn't strike me as being a question anyone can answer, at least until we've got a GUTE and a hefty computing device to model it on. Which is a few years off, I fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite so. It's not too bad - I've played Quake through a couple of times on the Acorn Risc PC, which uses a similarly specced StrongARM, and it's playable, as long as resolution is kept fairly low. Quake II, III is out of the question.
There are ARM designs with FP, though...
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I think the difference is twofold: first, on /., AC postings are public. Everyone can read them (moderation permitting), and anyone can rebut them. Accusations made to WAVE are not necessarily passed on to anyone at all, and certainly the victim of the accusation is kept unaware.
Secondly, by being filtered through a high-profile, "respectable" third party like Pinkertons, more credence is attached to the report. It becomes "Bob Ince is potentially violent" instead of "An anonymous coward thinks Bob Ince may be potentially violent".
I'd be happier if schools treated WAVE America with the same level of credulity as /. users treat Anonymous Coward.
This is a great article which deserves wider coverage outside of slashdot. My favourite quote:
Well move over Sherlock.
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How about, when they are incapable of vetting every one of their customers' web page uploads?
Hellooo... they did. That they can be sued even after complying with a request to remove material they were not previously aware of is absolutely astonishing.
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It was an Honest one though. I don't think I have any Humble opinions. ;-)
(Blimey. MDI can open. Worms all over floor.)
I don't, in this case, see how a tabbed MDI interface is much better than a tabbed SDI interface. In fact I've seen many Windows users work exactly like this; all windows maximised, and switching between them using tabbing or the taskbar.
This does not meet my needs.
I also work with many source files open at once, plus documentation, man pages, and so on. To program efficiently, I need to keep more than one open at once so I can edit one whilst reading information from another. This is what windowing was invented for, and a single-window-tabbed interface, whether MDI or SDI, just isn't good enough.
What MDI - in full, subwindow mode - does is to restrict the control I have over placement of windows, by confining all windows owned by one application to a rectangle, which itself obscures everything under it.
(an AC wrote:)
Having used WMs that obey this, ones with separate stacking order and focus, and ones with focus-follows-mouse, I'd have to agree with this. Many's the time I want to enter something into a big text window or something whilst looking at information in a small informational window positioned on top of the main one. Windows MDI makes this situation even more common.
(It also probably makes things considerably harder for the novice, as positionable windows within positionable windows can get terribly confusing.)
I rather prefer using emacs in SDI mode though. That is, running more than one copy in X.
later in thread...
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that with virtual desktops, you can choose how to group your windows, by project or task, and easily start doing some task on a different virtual desktop without affecting the others. With MDI, you're limited to grouping by owner application. I do not often find such grouping terribly useful.
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HOORAY FOR SKINS!!! SKINS GOOD FOR LINUX!!!
Skins themselves are not necessarily a bad thing. Global, desktop-wide skins where all apps are automatically customised to have a certain look, are clearly a Good Thing. Separate skins for every application causes nothing but pain. As the UI hall of shame repeatedly tries to get us to notice, no application is so important that it justifies having its own, completely different, style of UI. That includes Mozilla. Unfortunately, the desirable default state of "use whatever the current style settings for Windows or GTK or whatever I'm running on" is not easily codable.
James Sherman wrote:
and though I agree with everthing he says, I still commend Microsoft for moving away from MDI. I just wish they'd done it by having a global option for MDI-or-separate-windows, rather than just stopping using it. MDI is, IMHO, not a suitable interface for anything at all.
One good use of skins and customisation in general, though, is to cut down on useless clutter. When you've got toolbars and toolbars full of crap put there by marketing people, as advertising space and to show the range of bloatware features available, it's great to be able to get rid of it.
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Yeah okay. doh. Should've previewed that and turned brane on. That's not how it appears in the mod totals. mm.
I have seen the same non-moderation-related karma weirdnesses they mention, though. Hmm.
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Erk! Only the other day aicn was reporting that Simon West was to direct a film remake of The Prisoner.
Perhaps the Brit-property adaptation stories have got muddled up. Or perhaps they are the same film. Personally, the thought of a Hollywood version of The Prisoner is bad enough without Lara Croft starring.
OT: OOG's post above seems to have attracted the following moderation:
Last time I checked, Troll was normally negative. Unless minus three people have moderated it. Hello sid=moderation people; there really is something odd going on...
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Indeed not. Slow down!
No, the whole point is it's a pre-emptive gag. Netbenefit have pulled the site just in case Outcast print something potentially libellous in the future. Because of Netbenefit's aversion to getting involved in any possible court case in the future, Outcast are now prevented from publishing on the web despite been *two* steps away from breaking the law: they haven't printing anything *potentially* libellous, and whoever they might print anything about in the future has not proved the hypothetical libel in court.
This demonstrates the ludicrousness both of the current libel system, and of holding ISPs responsible for everything their customers do. It is worth noting that the print publishers promptly told the Pink Paper to get lost.
Et al? I would say Hamilton-al Fayed is very much the exception as far as prominent UK libel cases go. Hamilton lost his complaint as he had already been pretty thoroughly discredited; normally it has proven a lot easier to win libel cases, and in many high-profile cases, with absolutely ludicrous damages.
Whoa there. This is way off, like most of the posts here about the Godfrey case.
Demon settled with Lawrence Godfrey. No legal precedence has been set. It is unfortunate for everyone that they did so, but clearly they believe that they stand to lose more by fighting the case than by giving in. Demon used to be a strong opponent of censorship and had vowed to fight this case; things may be different now they are owned by Thus, but Demon still look really unhappy about this.
Godfrey was not a Demon customer. The offending post did not originate at Demon. Cancelling the post would, at that point, have achieved little, whilst opening the door to the necessity of removing any post anybody ever complained about.
At this point, that was not common practice. It's sad that we would now consider it normal.
Except that you often do. Just ask Private Eye.
It also costs too much for the average person or company to defend a case. The sums involved are so stupid it frightens people into retracting or just saying nothing in the first place. When responsibility for "publication" spreads unreasonably far - as in this case - it becomes impossible to say anything in the first place. That's why it's a freedom of speech issue; if all ISPs are forced to take the same legal view as Netbenefit, some people won't be able to speak at all.
On an completely unrelated point, is it just me who strongly dislikes the term "gays", or indeed any adjective turned into a plural noun? It seems to take a group of disparate individuals and classify them as a herd of identical people whose defining characteristic is their gayitude. Or something. "He is gay" means "he is a person, who is gay", as opposed to "he is a gay" which to me at least implies "he is a generic instantiation of the class gay".
Disclaimer: not being derived from class sexuality.gay myself, I may be totally missing the point.
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Indeed, though I'm not quite sure of the exact timeline here. The first DOM WD to mention getElementById was the July 1998 draft; IE4 predates that by some way doesn't it?
And while it's nice that IE5 now does pretty much support DOM, it also exposes a massive, overcomplex additional API, a lot of which is redundant. Go to MSDN's Web Workshop and look up DHTML Reference; woe betide anyone trying to learn DHTML from that.
Actually, woe betide anyone trying to learn DOM DHTML at all; I haven't found any good tutorials or references yet. Links, anyone?
I concur, but as an optional compile-in "IE4 support" module so webmasters can more easily test their DOM code on Mozilla. This'd be nice. Especially if it had a few other bits in that people tend to use, like [client|offset]top|width|etc.
I don't know about "won't"; if someone were to contribute such a thing to the Moz codebase I'm sure no-one would complain. :-) For the moment, I guess standard compliance rightly has a higher priority than back compatibility.
Amen to that. I would not like to see any support whatsoever for Netscape 4's wrong-headed and in practice thoroughly broken layer model, ever. I want it to die. As soon as possible. It makes my gums throb.
Pity so many people over here are still running their horrible old T-Online Netscape setups. Curses.
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It's not, alas.
Mozilla supports W3's specification of the DOM. This interface is radically different from the object model implemented in IE4 and Netscape 4.
Therefore, if you want to be compatible with IE/Netscape 4+, you have to sniff for document.all, document.layers and document.getElementById, and write *three* different scripts.
No-one really knows how to write scripts under DOM yet, though hopefully that will improve with the release of Netscape 6. The DOM as it stands does have some weaknesses compared to previous object models; in particular it is - as far as I can work out - not possible to arbitrarily read the position and size of elements unless you set them explicitly yourself using CSS/JavaScript. This makes any dynamic layout code... a challenge.
Theoretically we can write DOM-compliant scripts and have them work properly under IE5+, NS6+ and some future version of Opera. But judging by the shocking mess I get when I look at the Netscape 6 startup page in IE5.01, I don't think we're quite there yet. (Yuck, will you look at that source?! This is hardly the elegant separation of content, style and behaviour HTML-CSS-DOM promised us.)
Anyway. Still downloading. Hmmmm. Think I'll go have a cuppa.
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There's a further problem. As cmaxx says, some CDs have a greater dynamic range than others. Normalising a classical CD at the same apparent volume as a pop CD is likely to leave the classical piece effectively much quieter, since there may be just one short part of it that reaches the highest volume level.
Depending on the source, music may also be more or less compressed (in the audio sense; with quieter parts louder and vice versa); in general, more compression will make the music sound louder for the same apparent volume.
Making louder music quieter to match music recorded with a larger dynamic range loses quality. Heavy compression of all music is unacceptable to all but the people who run popular radio stations. So the only solution I can think of is, as suggested, putting volume level metadata either in a database, in the filename, or somewhere in an extension field MP3 doesn't already use, if there is such a thing.
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No. Spiteful because it does not make any argument, simply an assertion on a tired and shallow political theme, whilst deliberately insulting a large section of the /. readership. Europeans, I mean, not Linux/open source bigots.
Personally, I find being called a has-been unix zealot quite funny.
(Rest of this reply deleted. dontfeedthetrolls)
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Goodness me! Who moderated this spiteful little post up?
Now I know it's probably a bit passé to accuse ACs of astroturfing these days. But just from a linguistic point of view, isn't this lovely marketing-speak?
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Quite so. :-)
And what has changed between the time MS's lawyers insisted IE was part of the OS and now?
Before, Microsoft wanted to use their power in the OS arena to gain power in the browser arena (no pun intended).
Internet Explorer has since become a considerably more popular (and, let's face it, simply better) browser than Netscape. At the same time Linux has begun to erode the popularity of Windows.
So now, Microsoft want to use their power in the browser arena to gain power in the OS arena. As long as IE doesn't run on Un*x, separating Win and IE does not affect this aim.
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Microsoft is blackmailing DoubleClick. :-)
There's a thread on the www-talk list about this at the moment. Though it's easy to remove cookies from <img>-derived HTTP requests, other features such as frames are not as easy. For example, a banner ad frame at the top of the page is likely, and could easily be passed URI information from the frameset. Disallowing cookies on subframes, however, would break sites running under the likes of AskJeeves, where the 'real' site is viewed as part of a frameset.
I don't know if IDcide prevents cookies being passed to sites in subframes, or just images. Probably the latter since it's the most common case at the moment. But frame, layer, object, embed and applet have the same problems.
Given that we were discussing embedded-object-cookie-rejection on www-talk as an obvious way to circumvent cookie abuse, it's somewhat worrying that IDcide Inc. might have a patent on it:
(From the FAQ.)
Alternative answer: because IDcide have patented it?
I can't see anything on www.patents.ibm.com yet, so it's unclear whether IDcide have indeed applied for a patent on cookie rejection, or whether it's some technical implementation detail.
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Indeed, I'm not too concerned about this being patented since the URL http://bgfv3wz0.software-patents-are-bad.com/ has no obvious advantage over http://www.software-patents-are-bad.com/bgfv3wz0/.
A few weeks ago I was on a talker (toth.org.uk) discussing ways of storing client information, and someone suggested "storing a session ID at the start of the URL", meaning the second URL above. We, of course, joked that he had meant at the start of the domain name and that could be done using DNS wildcards but - ho! ho! ho! - what a damned stupid idea that would be.
Not exactly prior art since it wasn't that long ago and in any case toth doesn't log, but still that makes it obvious in my book. Same problem as ever though: what's "obvious" to a bunch of web developers who read RFCs is not generally "obvious" to bunch of patent clerks who read the National Enquirer.
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An interesting comparison. Both of these were, like the X-Box, reference designs, to be manufactured by OEMs, rather than single, managed hardware platforms.
Has this strategy ever worked for games consoles? ISTR the MSX was supposed to have been quite popular in Japan, or something, but I never met one in Europe myself...
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Indeed, and I think this is a problem. People may be bad at hierarchies, but I personally find them worse at framing searches, and worst of all at creating logical queries such as for a database.
Part of the interface question is how much power to allow. In my current interface one can drill down in several hierarchies and narrow the search bit by bit, but you can't do things like say "I want all requests referred from slashdot.org OR made on the day a link was featured on slashdot", or "I want all requests made on this day but were NOT referred by slashdot.org AND NOT referred by another page on the site". I can't see an easy GUI-based way to construct queries like this, especially not one that'll work through a web browser.
You're right. This is something I was thinking about; I can see three possibilities here for my project, which are probably relevant to others too -
Damn, I'm rambling now. I wish I could use the "No +1" button on my non-cookies browser. :-)
Any thoughts? I suppose it would be easier to explain this if I got some screenshots out...
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Great! Thanks for that; I was really curious about Nautilus was actually going to look like but the Eazel site seemed quite short on details.
Not quite sure I like the design so far but of course it is only work in progress. I personally find the left-pane area quite cluttered. But hey.
Okay, I probably still didn't understand this properly, but I don't currently see the advantage of this over either/both of the list view and something like an extended tooltip.
Yep, indeed. I'm a regular reader of asktog.com too. :-) But I still didn't understand how this was terribly different to what we have now; they're still objects that contain other objects, aren't they? So, still hierarchies?
Yes! I loved this! You keep the arrangement of icons unchanging so users still know where everything is, and just make some icons more eye-catching than others, mostly through use of colour. This is way better than, say, the O2K menus, which make commonly used objects more prominent by moving them around.
I will definitely be stealing this idea. Unless Bruce has patented it, natch. :-)
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Well, it would do if web design was done in an ideal world. Where the content came first, and then was marked up with a bit of style sheet or something. But that's just not the way it happens in reality, sadly.
Yes, of course. But in the eyes of most managers, customers, and other people who are actually in charge of what happens to the site, the graphics and DHTML are the non-negotiable part of a website. It must look and behave nicely on their browser. They'll happily have you add something or change something so it looks better on their desktop, even if you explain until you're blue in the face why it will break on everyone else's browser. God, most of them still don't understand the difference between a printed fixed-size page and a resizable web page, and will insist that the layout be fixed to whatever their screen size is.
Not that I'm bitter, or sick of having to argue against this, or anything.
This is perfectly true for a site where content is the purpose. Where you want people to be able to access information easily. But that's not what many corporate (non e-commerce) sites are about. Because there's bugger all content there anyway. The site exists only to make the company look good to other companies. Who are probably all using IE4+ anyway.
Not if it involves table layouts, CSS-P and JavaScript, I'm afraid. Getting them to work consistently on IE/Netscape 4 and degrade nicely on other browsers is a big, big task. Personally I still do it. But I can see why other people don't.
(As it happens, I'm posting this from home using a browser that doesn't support cookies. So I *hope* this post works. I know lots of bits of /. don't though.)
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Ohh yeah. I been there.
As I said. Those toolbars are really in need of some downsizing. But I guess people have forgotten how to use menus now. ;-)
I haven't played with O2K, but I have to say I'm a bit dubious about its idea of feature hiding. Especially with the items on the menu actually moving around; doesn't it make it harder to find what you want?
Gosh. This suggests MS did some usability testing at some point, to see what tasks users commonly did wrong.
Yes. The product lifecycle must be too short for usability testing now. It's not just this unhelpfulness that's wrong with the Assistant. I mean, what's the first thing any new Word user does? Click on the close icon to get rid of the Assistant so they can get on with their work. Only of course this doesn't actually work. You have to click on one of the buttons that doesn't look like a button inside the speech bubble that most people don't read. So they sit there clicking on the close icon for a bit longer. Gagh. Has this been fixed in O2K?
Hey, that's not a bad idea. I don't want a bouncing paperclip or a dog in pants to give me tips - give me an officious clerk or a clingy girlfriend for an Office Assistant! At least software that's being deliberately user-hostile is more honest.
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s/Jacob/Jakob.
I've been reading the guy's site for donkey's, and still I spell his name wrong. Curse me!
The reason proprietary extensions aren't used so much these days is, of course, because W3C took the proprietary extensions and made them the official standard. ;-)
Unfortunately, though Jakob (yay, I got it right this time) is correct that sites don't like to turn the majority of users away, they still don't care much about minority users. If your browser doesn't support images, or frames, or tables, or cookies, or JavaScript, or if your body does not support vision, you're in trouble.
This isn't just because the designers are simply stupid (although some are, natch), it's a business decision. If the amount of revenue we gain by making the site degrade gracefully is less than the amount of time we'll have to pay our techies for to get it done, it ain't gonna happen.
Now where did that Preview button get to again?
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This is an interesting point. Most people seem to be very bad at forming a mental model of how software works. Of course, this is partly because there is a lot of software which does not have any consistent model, but still a lot of users will only do a few linear operations they have learnt, and have to be taught further operations, rather than grokking the whole program. And then you end up with horrible, horrible "wizards" as the only way of getting things done.
Starting with a simplified system would perhaps alleviate this. But how can this be done? Simply taking out half the menu options seems a bit crude. :-)
What would, I think, help, would be to take away the majority of those blasted button bars. Most Word users still have half their screens taken up with rows upon rows of toolbar buttons, most of which they never use, and which are only marginally faster than going to the menu. All these unexplained options must be terribly intimidating to new users.
I'm a great fan of hierarchies. Many users are indeed bad at managing them, but I think this is as much to do with bad interfaces onto them as anything else. New users are always confused as to where files are, not because they don't understand the concept of a hierarchy, but because their applications give them many views of the same hierarchy that all look completely different.
We've got the filer (with its view options that Windows by default changes pseudo-randomly), common file dialogues (which only show files of the type their application is associated with, thus losing any 'sense-of-place' the user may acquire), Explorer (which put directories and files in different panes, again destroying the comfortable feeling of seeing a directory and knowing exactly where you are), and uncommon file dialogues of various shapes and unpleasant flavours. Consistency: zero. Plus of course Windows and Unix both take over the root directory and fill it with stuff one doesn't understand, and applications happily open up unlikely directories like root, a directory hidden inside the application's own domain, or - God help us - C:\WINDOWS\ as the default place to save/open a file, thus making the user totally lost.
Give the user one filer application for doing everything to do with hierarchies and lists - not just files, but, using a VFS, all hierarchical datatypes in applications - and I predict the world will be a happier place.
I'm quite interested in Jacob's idea of an information soup, because I'm currently working on an interactive web log analyser, and its data is inherently both multiple-hierarchical (eg. file request: /dir/dir/file, client host: /com/altavista/spider653, and so on) and loaded with other properties, which one may wish to sort and view in many different ways. The interface is still quite hierarchical in nature, because I really can't think of a better way to structure the data. An infosoup is a great idea but you can't expect the user to issue what amounts to a database request every time they want to edit a document or something.
Anyone got any good examples of interfaces for property-rich data without a strict single hierarchy?
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I think you need to put a little more emphasis on that.
nine separate groups within Microsoft Research contributed more than 15 innovations to Windows 2000
Wow! OVER FIFTEEN separate innovations, that's amazing isn't it! How can one company come up with such a staggering number of innovations?! Hooray!
I mean, I thought I came up with an innovation the other day, but actually it wasn't. Innovations are hard, oh boy!
Indeed. And with 63,000 "issues", that's more than four thousand bugs per innovation, folks.
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Maybe - the problem is the definition of consciousness; saying who has it before we can agree on what it actually is might be considered premature.
Animals can indeed display much behaviour that is similar to humans. However though this may be proof of emotions and the mind at an animal level we do not need to invoke consciousness to explain this behaviour.
We only need to invoke the concept of consciousness to explain that odd feeling we have that we are experiencing things and controlling our actions. Animals might experience the same feeling of consciousness, but since we are unable to communicate with them we cannot tell. The only way we can tell other humans experience the feeling is because they say so. Describing consciousness without verbal language seems tricky.
The question is: is consciousness something "real" (for want of a better term), or just a meme we have evolved? (Because to not believe in consciousness makes bothering to eat, drink, procreate, etc., fairly pointless, and hence unlikely to promote the continuance of our genes.)
Which doesn't strike me as being a question anyone can answer, at least until we've got a GUTE and a hefty computing device to model it on. Which is a few years off, I fear.
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