IMHO, Pascal would be the teaching language of choice.
The first-year programming course where I was was indeed Pascal, and I have to disagree on it being a good teaching language - especially if confined to standard level 0 Pascal.
I find learning Pascal gives one a very restricted mindset about what programming languages can do, which is very useful in understanding the weaknesses of many languages and how to get around them, but not very good at encouraging one to break down a task into smaller subtasks in the most logical way available, which is the essence of programming. (Not that the former skill isn't also very useful, it's just I don't think it should be the first thing to teach.)
Python's pretty good, I think, as an introduction to modern-ish languages, as it is a sort of cleaned-up conglomeration of standard language features. But sometimes I think starting with a functional language might be better. (Not convinced that any current functional languages are that great for such a task, but then I've only met a few of 'em.)
Oh my god. They killed FreeType. Lawyer bastard scum strike again, and I didn't even notice.
Of course this doesn't stop me using FreeType since it has been released widely already, and you can't put it back in its box. What this does do is to stop me releasing any software I might have written based *around* FreeType. So it's lucky I never got around to writing my Truetype->RISC OS font converter, because I couldn't, now, distribute it.
Looking at these patents I don't know how enforcable they are, except that they are fairly obvious and are implemented in all recent font systems I know of. But it is not the legal enforcability that matters of course - just the threat of legal action is enough to kill a project. The little man cannot afford to go to court to fight a medium-sized company. And hence the law is useless.
Strikes me as being the pinnacle of vanity to think that there's any real danger of having your privacy invaded by the Govt.
But for god's sake, I'm not a friggin' mob boss. I don't break the law
It strikes me as being the pinnacle of complacency to believe that the Government will only use surveillance on those it genuinely suspects of committing serious crime.
Here in the UK, there are many cases of people being monitored for heinous crimes such, say, attending a demonstration, or, to pick out a particularly grim case, complaining about British Airways. They have ended up being followed, harrassed by the Police, put on credit blacklists, and what-have-you.
I rather suspect the US Powers That Be (to slip into X-Files phoney paranoia mode) will also use wiretapping powers to go after just about anybody they don't like.
Adding users should not require me to insert data directly into the system tables.
Yeah, I found this method of setting up MySQL pretty inconvenient. The three-tables structure seems way overcomplicated to me and especially confusing when learning the system. The necessity to keep asking mysqladmin to reload in order to make the new grant tables work was a pain, too, especially when I forgot to do it and got confused. Erm.
And since localhost doesn't seem to be detected correctly all the time I often ended up having no access at all. I'd prefer a root user guaranteed to have total access available. Otherwise I have to shutdown and restart the server with no grant tables again, gagh.
Other than that I've quite liked using MySQL. For the money...:-)
What an odd post. If it weren't for the San Francisco point I'd think it a simple troll. Anyway...
Don't use Oracle - the "certified" Oracle people are more than twice as expensive than the MS SQL people
There are plenty of non-Oracle, non-MS database managers. There are lots of cheaper RDBMSs than Oracle too. Most people don't need the sort of scalability SQL Server provides, let alone Oracle.
[This stuff gets almost on-topic by the bottom, you know. No, really.]
I mean think about how easy one could screw up a good Unix setup vs screwing up a good NT setup. Editing.config and.rc files vs clicking checkboxes.
ROTFL. Having a GUI interface to configuration settings does not magically make the configuration settings easy to choose. A single clicked checkbox out of place could nadger the system just as easily as a line wrong in a.rc file. And a really knackered NT system means you have to reinstall the whole OS and all your apps all over again. I can cause this situation just be installing and de-installing parts of NT Option Pack - great eh?
Try, GUI interfaces could provide a nice, friendly, safe-ish interface to configuration. But Microsoft don't use them like that. They use them to hide your settings away in the registry and metabase, rather than have them available in a textfile. So if you want to get the settings out and move to another platform - or just keep your settings over yet another OS reinstall - you are screwed. You are locked in not only to MS software, but one MS box too.
[Don't believe me? I can get this on topic by the end. Betcha.]
Don't use Unix (any flavor) Use NT. I don't meaan to sound like a Microsoft-lover
Really. Odd, then, that you choose to list all the major systems that aren't by Microsoft and manage to systemically diss them without justification. I mean what's this all about:
Real Player puts seven icons, links, and shortcuts on your computer when you install it. - Is this really necessary? This is how they prove that they are anti-Microsoft? WHY are they so antimicrosoft?
Obviously this makes no sense (how does having icons make one anti-MS?) but you also forgot to tie it into the theme for today, namely What it takes to be a profitable company on the internet.
And the answer, of course, is this:
Get yourself bought out by Microsoft.
Or any other big internet company. AOL is good. But Microsoft is still best.
You can't really make much of a profit on a purely internet business at this point in time. But if you create an innovative new bit of kit you can get Microsoft or one of Microsoft's enemies to buy it to use in their little fight. Then cash in your MS shares and take a nice holiday.
Object hierarchies (preferably with some links) are great. They are the best way known to mankind to organise to general everyday stuff a user might accrue. It is my opinion that the the desktop would be a much better place for everyone if all hierarchical and list-based data was available for manipulation in one object tree.
Sadly Windows makes hierarchies seem really complicated and hard-to-use for nontechnical users thanks to its unstoppable spreading of system data around the place, its habit of partitioning the hierarchy into different spaces for different applications, using confusing 'other' hierarchies like the way the Desktop area works, and the registry, metabase and Start menu.
Windows and Unix both also make hierarchies less useful through their complete lack of encapsulation. So when you install a new program, it'll stick something in bin, something in lib, something in the registry, something on the start menu. On Windows, uninstalling it then requires a special uninstaller, that often doesn't work, leaving your system in a limbo where you can't install or uninstall and unless you're capable of tracking down everything the app installed by hand, you'll have to reinstall the OS again.
This is why appliances like this and the network computer are marketed as 'hierarchy-free! You don't have to manage your applications!' - if installing a program was simply a case of copying one (1) object onto your HD, de-installing it meant deleting it, and you could easily move it into a different directory if, say, you acquired a few other similar applications and wanted to group them, then people might even *like* managing their applications.
RISC OS was a bit like this, once. (But that's enough minority-platform whinging for now. -Ed.)
Let's inject a little reality here. Most of the world's application seats are green screens. Think bank, think ATM, think fast-food. These work and work fine. Web applications using forms can replace these quite well.
Okay, I suppose that's our different assumptions behind the word 'application'. I was considering only the kinds of software tradionally thought of as 'computer' software; your definition is somewhat wider, encompassing, presumably, a range of single-purpose and consumer devices.
I've no problem with web applications replacing forms-based interfaces; their speed is not a great handicap in this sphere and hiding the browser navigation isn't difficult. This is essentially replacing a forms interface with a somewhat better-looking forms interface. The only problem is a minor one of implementation thanks to browser problems in forms/Javascript.
Going up from there, there a whole slew of applications on the web that work fine for me. Mapquest is a bit clunky, but I'm glad I have it.
Again I think the difference is semantic. I don't consider Mapquest an 'application' as such, I consider it a 'document' - the map data - with a front-end on the web to display it.
The model of viewing everything meant to be read by humans as a document and then having the one ubiquitous client that does a good job of serving up documents is incredibly powerful.
I agree with this. But! HTML is too loose and hacky to be the universal document language, and it's so fragmented there is no universal client for it. (XML is promising in this regard.) And HTML is not geared up to providing complex application logic; Javascript is a syntactically ugly, fragmented language with a poor development path and debugging tools. CGI (and ASP, and the like) mixes document, application and presentation together making development and maintenance costly.
I'll wager MapQuest's implementation is pretty damned hairy, and, good though the service is, it doesn't (and can't) do the range of tasks you could do with some map documents and a desktop viewer app. What if I wanted to print a vector version of a map, or calculate route distances, or stuff. Features like this take *much* longer to add to a web application because there is so much more interface work. Where MapQuest scores over a traditional application is that it can build in pointers to "virtual community" stuff (erk! buzzword!) like local guides and gubbins.
I'm getting more and more long-winded and off-topic. Ah, well, what's Slashdot for?
Like with Web-based Help systems, you can connect to updated, corrected documentation somewhere out there on the Web.
Okay, using the MS help system as an example may have been a bit disingenuous, but I was annoyed with it.:-) Though a help system is indeed something that could work well on the web(*) - since it is, more or less, a document rather than an application - MS's help system exhibits many of the bad points of web applications, and doesn't actually use any of the advantages!
(The HTML administration interface to IIS might be a better example of applications been moved to the web for no good reason; there is a *reason* for it, just not a good one - viz. Windows being so poor at remote admin. And my argument may be undermined by the fact that the non-web version of the application, MMC, is also very, very bad!)
It would be nice if the help system *did* connect to updated help information on the MS site. Unfortunately it connects to the information it came with when you installed it on your system. And requires your system to work properly to access it. Which might be considered a Bad Thing when the help is for the system itself. D'oh!
(*) I like to think the manual for one of my applications is more effective; that went on-line ages ago and seems to work fine. MS are, verily, poo.
This just shows that one interface isn't ideal for all applications, which is a point you are trying to make, I think.
Yes, exactly. I was frustrated with the blind rush towards making everything webby, throwing out years of UI design experience. I fear that web applications will be more oriented to performing single tasks; instead of having a window full of objects to interact with, we'll get a few, limited commands, because of the difficulty of using direct manipulation methods on the web, and the large effort required to implement features. This will result in a much more modal interface than we're used to now, although horrible horrible wizards are heading in that direction too. (The fact the anyone needs wizards in the first place proves how broken MS's original interfaces were.)
Actually putting applications out there is harder and opens you up to criticism.
Yep. I'm there. By your definition of application, I suppose one of the things I'm working on is just that. http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/ if you're really interested, though without a privileged account there's not a lot you can see at the moment since we haven't really launched yet.
I find it ironic that you use all this HTML formatting in your post and then seem to imply that the web is not good for documentation creation and e-mail.
Heh! Actually, I think it's not. Slashdot is a great resource, an example of the web doing what it does best - quickly-updating documents, and communications - but it's a pig for creating these comments. I'm typing an over-long (sorry) message here in a tiny little <textarea> that's pretty inconvenient. I can't use the usual text editor tools I like. I have to use 'Preview' to check whether it works properly, and I'm only using HTML formatting at all because I wanted to quote parts of your message, and the wrapping style of the web means I can't use the Usenet '>' convention reliably.
And if that damned broken blockstackers object causes IE to drop the page and display an error message once more I'll... ooh, I'll... be quite cross. Probably.
What do you propose as the interchange format for email that has the features that you seem to want? RTF?
sob.
No, that's not fair, you weren't to know what problems the RTF format has given me recently. Parsing RTF gives one a really, really good insight into how smegged up the internal design of MS Word must be.
Something like HTML might be good for marking up e-mail. Perhaps a subset of HTML, au Slashdot. But that's a different thing to actually using the web to send the mail. And it's also a different thing to the kind of HTML e-mail I receive in my mailbox which makes elm very unhappy and contains a ton of <font> tags, tables, <br>s and other crud.
But that's another complaint altogether. And I've already gone on far too long.
Erm, we were talking about X, yeah? Erm... ObX: isn't Netscape for X slow and buggy?! Blimey!
Yes, there are X servers for lots of platforms that aren't Unix.
Unfortunately they tend to be:
commercial; or
crap; or
both.
The OSO article makes play of the fact that X will run under Macs, Linux and even - no! but yes! - RISC OS. But fails to notice that the RISC OS X server is totally useless for any real work, being slow (even for X;-) ), unconfigurable to different screen modes, and not interacting with the RISC OS desktop in any way.
For my crash-prone experience with eXceed, I don't think much of even the Windows X experience, either. Give me X on Unix or give me death! Erm, if you want.
The web is just plain gross. HTML is horrific. Writing CGI software is inefficient, tramatic, and very limiting.
Aboslutely! I've become increasingly worried about the trend of moving applications to the web. While X is big, nasty and old, and Windows is big, unreliable and proprietary, they were at least designed to run applications on.
The web was not, and the pots of liquid kludge required to get any half-decent application running on the web make it extremely unfriendly and unreliable. Even on modern GUI systems there are to many layers, too much to go wrong, between the application code and the machine. Add to that HTML, Javascript, DOM, the web browser and the HTTP layer, and you've got a teetering stack of systems. Any layer goes wrong, and your application won't work, usually in some obscure and hard-to-correct way. Add to this the abysmal level of support for standards in web browsers and you'll be lucky to get anything to work at all.
Not to mention that having to go through HTTP makes web apps excruciatingly slow. Used a web-based mail service lately? Marvel at how long it takes you to go through your mailbox, weeding out spam and organising the mail. Each small operation, which would happen almost instantaneously on a decent client-side mailreader application, now takes five to ten seconds to perform, making mail a chore. And you thought *X* was slow!
Another case: MS NT Option Pack (after a tortous install procedure) has no help files. Instead, it installs a bunch of help web pages on your server, and expects you to use a web browser to read them. Except you need a web browser with MS's VM installed, which it isn't by default. So you have to go through another install. (And the first thing any webmaster does is automatically remove all the stupid samples and crap IIS installs. So then the help system isn't even usable.)
When the help system does work, it's still miles worse than the Windows Help application MS have had since Windows 3. The contents list becomes unresizable. The search feature requires that you haven't messed up something in the configuration (which might, for example, be a reason why you'd be reading the help files? do you see? DO YOU SEE?). When you do a search and find something related to what you want to know, you can't pop up a level to see related documents, because there are no links. And if you go back to the contents pane, you ca't actually see where the document you are viewing is in the hierarchy.
Usability factor zero. But hey, it's on the web. So it must be cool, right?
The web is *not* a way to make interfaces easier. What is needed is consistency of interfaces, but the only consistency the web gives you is that you get a few navigation buttons at the top. That doesn't teach you how to use a new piece of software on the web. In fact it often breaks the software if you use them.
Remember every program does one thing and does it well? That was a good idea. A file manager is not a web browser is not a word processor is not a mail reader.
Damn right. It's a pity the idea never quite caught on, with most commercial packages becoming bloated with totally unnecessary features, so that any particular task can be done badly by a dozen applications, but done well by none.
I don't want an unfriendly text editor in my C compiler, damn it! I don't want a bad mailer in my web browser!
I'm rambling now. I'll stop.
Programs are not documents either.
The web is good for two things:
distributing documents.
communicating with others in more complex ways than simple e-mail allows (for example sites, like/.).
The web is not the future for document creation, processing or e-mail. Or if it is, I want to stick my head under the pillow and hope the future will go away.
Reading the X debate, on OSO and elsewhere, I've read the same two opposing opinions again and again:
1. X is an extremely capable protocol that does all the things you could want it to do, so why change?
2. X is an inelegant, slow behemoth.
The first argument seems to come from experienced X developers who are used to the way it works; the second from people who've written a few small applications and found it amazingly ugly.
I count myself in the latter category, and accordingly dislike the X Window System with a passion. (NB: being a cynical, bitter type I hate almost everything with a passion. Even Linux. Sorry. Don't even mention Windows.)
As a developer, I was repelled by the way chunks of text were copied all around the shop, seemingly needlessly, and the multiplicitous complicated ways applications, libraries, and the server has to communicate to get even the simplest of operations to work.
As an X user, I am annoyed by the laggardly response time to do anything at all in X applications and the amount of resources everything takes to run. Also the lack of simple usability testing in window managers and most X applications bugs my balls. I end up doing what most people seem to do in X - I just run a brace of xterms, running command-line applications in each.
(And when I do run a GUI application, it takes twenty seconds to start up, and then when it does appear it eats the input focus and claims the last twenty keypresses I had hoped would end up in an xterm. And then it usually goes beep-beep-beep to tell me it has done it. The malicious little sod. I'm rambling now; I'll stop.)
Also Sun optical mice are horrible. That's not strictly speaking relevant, but adds local flavour.
The problems affecting X as a protocol are the same problems that hinder most big, old system designs: they're built as layers on top of layers, with the cruft accumulating as more extensions are added.
I would like to see a much more responsive, much less baroque alternative to X. But it'll have to be able to X apps as well I guess.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
The first-year programming course where I was was indeed Pascal, and I have to disagree on it being a good teaching language - especially if confined to standard level 0 Pascal.
I find learning Pascal gives one a very restricted mindset about what programming languages can do, which is very useful in understanding the weaknesses of many languages and how to get around them, but not very good at encouraging one to break down a task into smaller subtasks in the most logical way available, which is the essence of programming. (Not that the former skill isn't also very useful, it's just I don't think it should be the first thing to teach.)
Python's pretty good, I think, as an introduction to modern-ish languages, as it is a sort of cleaned-up conglomeration of standard language features. But sometimes I think starting with a functional language might be better. (Not convinced that any current functional languages are that great for such a task, but then I've only met a few of 'em.)
--
Oh my god. They killed FreeType. Lawyer bastard scum strike again, and I didn't even notice.
Of course this doesn't stop me using FreeType since it has been released widely already, and you can't put it back in its box. What this does do is to stop me releasing any software I might have written based *around* FreeType. So it's lucky I never got around to writing my Truetype->RISC OS font converter, because I couldn't, now, distribute it.
Looking at these patents I don't know how enforcable they are, except that they are fairly obvious and are implemented in all recent font systems I know of. But it is not the legal enforcability that matters of course - just the threat of legal action is enough to kill a project. The little man cannot afford to go to court to fight a medium-sized company. And hence the law is useless.
This stinks. It cannot stand.
--
It strikes me as being the pinnacle of complacency to believe that the Government will only use surveillance on those it genuinely suspects of committing serious crime.
Here in the UK, there are many cases of people being monitored for heinous crimes such, say, attending a demonstration, or, to pick out a particularly grim case, complaining about British Airways. They have ended up being followed, harrassed by the Police, put on credit blacklists, and what-have-you.
I rather suspect the US Powers That Be (to slip into X-Files phoney paranoia mode) will also use wiretapping powers to go after just about anybody they don't like.
--
Yeah, I found this method of setting up MySQL pretty inconvenient. The three-tables structure seems way overcomplicated to me and especially confusing when learning the system. The necessity to keep asking mysqladmin to reload in order to make the new grant tables work was a pain, too, especially when I forgot to do it and got confused. Erm.
And since localhost doesn't seem to be detected correctly all the time I often ended up having no access at all. I'd prefer a root user guaranteed to have total access available. Otherwise I have to shutdown and restart the server with no grant tables again, gagh.
Other than that I've quite liked using MySQL. For the money... :-)
What an odd post. If it weren't for the San Francisco point I'd think it a simple troll. Anyway...
There are plenty of non-Oracle, non-MS database managers. There are lots of cheaper RDBMSs than Oracle too. Most people don't need the sort of scalability SQL Server provides, let alone Oracle.
[This stuff gets almost on-topic by the bottom, you know. No, really.]
ROTFL. Having a GUI interface to configuration settings does not magically make the configuration settings easy to choose. A single clicked checkbox out of place could nadger the system just as easily as a line wrong in a .rc file. And a really knackered NT system means you have to reinstall the whole OS and all your apps all over again. I can cause this situation just be installing and de-installing parts of NT Option Pack - great eh?
Try, GUI interfaces could provide a nice, friendly, safe-ish interface to configuration. But Microsoft don't use them like that. They use them to hide your settings away in the registry and metabase, rather than have them available in a textfile. So if you want to get the settings out and move to another platform - or just keep your settings over yet another OS reinstall - you are screwed. You are locked in not only to MS software, but one MS box too.
[Don't believe me? I can get this on topic by the end. Betcha.]
Really. Odd, then, that you choose to list all the major systems that aren't by Microsoft and manage to systemically diss them without justification. I mean what's this all about:
Obviously this makes no sense (how does having icons make one anti-MS?) but you also forgot to tie it into the theme for today, namely What it takes to be a profitable company on the internet.
And the answer, of course, is this:
Get yourself bought out by Microsoft.
Or any other big internet company. AOL is good. But Microsoft is still best.
You can't really make much of a profit on a purely internet business at this point in time. But if you create an innovative new bit of kit you can get Microsoft or one of Microsoft's enemies to buy it to use in their little fight. Then cash in your MS shares and take a nice holiday.
That is all.
[Once again, I win. Give me yoghurt!!]
Object hierarchies (preferably with some links) are great. They are the best way known to mankind to organise to general everyday stuff a user might accrue. It is my opinion that the the desktop would be a much better place for everyone if all hierarchical and list-based data was available for manipulation in one object tree.
Sadly Windows makes hierarchies seem really complicated and hard-to-use for nontechnical users thanks to its unstoppable spreading of system data around the place, its habit of partitioning the hierarchy into different spaces for different applications, using confusing 'other' hierarchies like the way the Desktop area works, and the registry, metabase and Start menu.
Windows and Unix both also make hierarchies less useful through their complete lack of encapsulation. So when you install a new program, it'll stick something in bin, something in lib, something in the registry, something on the start menu. On Windows, uninstalling it then requires a special uninstaller, that often doesn't work, leaving your system in a limbo where you can't install or uninstall and unless you're capable of tracking down everything the app installed by hand, you'll have to reinstall the OS again.
This is why appliances like this and the network computer are marketed as 'hierarchy-free! You don't have to manage your applications!' - if installing a program was simply a case of copying one (1) object onto your HD, de-installing it meant deleting it, and you could easily move it into a different directory if, say, you acquired a few other similar applications and wanted to group them, then people might even *like* managing their applications.
RISC OS was a bit like this, once. (But that's enough minority-platform whinging for now. -Ed.)
Okay, I suppose that's our different assumptions behind the word 'application'. I was considering only the kinds of software tradionally thought of as 'computer' software; your definition is somewhat wider, encompassing, presumably, a range of single-purpose and consumer devices.
I've no problem with web applications replacing forms-based interfaces; their speed is not a great handicap in this sphere and hiding the browser navigation isn't difficult. This is essentially replacing a forms interface with a somewhat better-looking forms interface. The only problem is a minor one of implementation thanks to browser problems in forms/Javascript.
Again I think the difference is semantic. I don't consider Mapquest an 'application' as such, I consider it a 'document' - the map data - with a front-end on the web to display it.
I agree with this. But! HTML is too loose and hacky to be the universal document language, and it's so fragmented there is no universal client for it. (XML is promising in this regard.) And HTML is not geared up to providing complex application logic; Javascript is a syntactically ugly, fragmented language with a poor development path and debugging tools. CGI (and ASP, and the like) mixes document, application and presentation together making development and maintenance costly.
I'll wager MapQuest's implementation is pretty damned hairy, and, good though the service is, it doesn't (and can't) do the range of tasks you could do with some map documents and a desktop viewer app. What if I wanted to print a vector version of a map, or calculate route distances, or stuff. Features like this take *much* longer to add to a web application because there is so much more interface work. Where MapQuest scores over a traditional application is that it can build in pointers to "virtual community" stuff (erk! buzzword!) like local guides and gubbins.
I'm getting more and more long-winded and off-topic. Ah, well, what's Slashdot for?
Okay, using the MS help system as an example may have been a bit disingenuous, but I was annoyed with it. :-) Though a help system is indeed something that could work well on the web(*) - since it is, more or less, a document rather than an application - MS's help system exhibits many of the bad points of web applications, and doesn't actually use any of the advantages!
(The HTML administration interface to IIS might be a better example of applications been moved to the web for no good reason; there is a *reason* for it, just not a good one - viz. Windows being so poor at remote admin. And my argument may be undermined by the fact that the non-web version of the application, MMC, is also very, very bad!)
It would be nice if the help system *did* connect to updated help information on the MS site. Unfortunately it connects to the information it came with when you installed it on your system. And requires your system to work properly to access it. Which might be considered a Bad Thing when the help is for the system itself. D'oh!
(*) I like to think the manual for one of my applications is more effective; that went on-line ages ago and seems to work fine. MS are, verily, poo.
Yes, exactly. I was frustrated with the blind rush towards making everything webby, throwing out years of UI design experience. I fear that web applications will be more oriented to performing single tasks; instead of having a window full of objects to interact with, we'll get a few, limited commands, because of the difficulty of using direct manipulation methods on the web, and the large effort required to implement features. This will result in a much more modal interface than we're used to now, although horrible horrible wizards are heading in that direction too. (The fact the anyone needs wizards in the first place proves how broken MS's original interfaces were.)
Yep. I'm there. By your definition of application, I suppose one of the things I'm working on is just that. http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/ if you're really interested, though without a privileged account there's not a lot you can see at the moment since we haven't really launched yet.
Heh! Actually, I think it's not. Slashdot is a great resource, an example of the web doing what it does best - quickly-updating documents, and communications - but it's a pig for creating these comments. I'm typing an over-long (sorry) message here in a tiny little <textarea> that's pretty inconvenient. I can't use the usual text editor tools I like. I have to use 'Preview' to check whether it works properly, and I'm only using HTML formatting at all because I wanted to quote parts of your message, and the wrapping style of the web means I can't use the Usenet '>' convention reliably.
And if that damned broken blockstackers object causes IE to drop the page and display an error message once more I'll... ooh, I'll... be quite cross. Probably.
sob.
No, that's not fair, you weren't to know what problems the RTF format has given me recently. Parsing RTF gives one a really, really good insight into how smegged up the internal design of MS Word must be.
Something like HTML might be good for marking up e-mail. Perhaps a subset of HTML, au Slashdot. But that's a different thing to actually using the web to send the mail. And it's also a different thing to the kind of HTML e-mail I receive in my mailbox which makes elm very unhappy and contains a ton of <font> tags, tables, <br>s and other crud.
But that's another complaint altogether. And I've already gone on far too long.
Erm, we were talking about X, yeah? Erm... ObX: isn't Netscape for X slow and buggy?! Blimey!
Yes, there are X servers for lots of platforms that aren't Unix.
Unfortunately they tend to be:
The OSO article makes play of the fact that X will run under Macs, Linux and even - no! but yes! - RISC OS. But fails to notice that the RISC OS X server is totally useless for any real work, being slow (even for X ;-) ), unconfigurable to different screen modes, and not interacting with the RISC OS desktop in any way.
For my crash-prone experience with eXceed, I don't think much of even the Windows X experience, either. Give me X on Unix or give me death! Erm, if you want.
Aboslutely! I've become increasingly worried about the trend of moving applications to the web. While X is big, nasty and old, and Windows is big, unreliable and proprietary, they were at least designed to run applications on.
The web was not, and the pots of liquid kludge required to get any half-decent application running on the web make it extremely unfriendly and unreliable. Even on modern GUI systems there are to many layers, too much to go wrong, between the application code and the machine. Add to that HTML, Javascript, DOM, the web browser and the HTTP layer, and you've got a teetering stack of systems. Any layer goes wrong, and your application won't work, usually in some obscure and hard-to-correct way. Add to this the abysmal level of support for standards in web browsers and you'll be lucky to get anything to work at all.
Not to mention that having to go through HTTP makes web apps excruciatingly slow. Used a web-based mail service lately? Marvel at how long it takes you to go through your mailbox, weeding out spam and organising the mail. Each small operation, which would happen almost instantaneously on a decent client-side mailreader application, now takes five to ten seconds to perform, making mail a chore. And you thought *X* was slow!
Another case: MS NT Option Pack (after a tortous install procedure) has no help files. Instead, it installs a bunch of help web pages on your server, and expects you to use a web browser to read them. Except you need a web browser with MS's VM installed, which it isn't by default. So you have to go through another install. (And the first thing any webmaster does is automatically remove all the stupid samples and crap IIS installs. So then the help system isn't even usable.)
When the help system does work, it's still miles worse than the Windows Help application MS have had since Windows 3. The contents list becomes unresizable. The search feature requires that you haven't messed up something in the configuration (which might, for example, be a reason why you'd be reading the help files? do you see? DO YOU SEE?). When you do a search and find something related to what you want to know, you can't pop up a level to see related documents, because there are no links. And if you go back to the contents pane, you ca't actually see where the document you are viewing is in the hierarchy.
Usability factor zero. But hey, it's on the web. So it must be cool, right?
The web is *not* a way to make interfaces easier. What is needed is consistency of interfaces, but the only consistency the web gives you is that you get a few navigation buttons at the top. That doesn't teach you how to use a new piece of software on the web. In fact it often breaks the software if you use them.
Damn right. It's a pity the idea never quite caught on, with most commercial packages becoming bloated with totally unnecessary features, so that any particular task can be done badly by a dozen applications, but done well by none.
I don't want an unfriendly text editor in my C compiler, damn it! I don't want a bad mailer in my web browser!
I'm rambling now. I'll stop.
The web is good for two things:
The web is not the future for document creation, processing or e-mail. Or if it is, I want to stick my head under the pillow and hope the future will go away.
Reading the X debate, on OSO and elsewhere, I've read the same two opposing opinions again and again:
:-(
1. X is an extremely capable protocol that does all the things you could want it to do, so why change?
2. X is an inelegant, slow behemoth.
The first argument seems to come from experienced X developers who are used to the way it works; the second from people who've written a few small applications and found it amazingly ugly.
I count myself in the latter category, and accordingly dislike the X Window System with a passion. (NB: being a cynical, bitter type I hate almost everything with a passion. Even Linux. Sorry. Don't even mention Windows.)
As a developer, I was repelled by the way chunks of text were copied all around the shop, seemingly needlessly, and the multiplicitous complicated ways applications, libraries, and the server has to communicate to get even the simplest of operations to work.
As an X user, I am annoyed by the laggardly response time to do anything at all in X applications and the amount of resources everything takes to run. Also the lack of simple usability testing in window managers and most X applications bugs my balls. I end up doing what most people seem to do in X - I just run a brace of xterms, running command-line applications in each.
(And when I do run a GUI application, it takes twenty seconds to start up, and then when it does appear it eats the input focus and claims the last twenty keypresses I had hoped would end up in an xterm. And then it usually goes beep-beep-beep to tell me it has done it. The malicious little sod. I'm rambling now; I'll stop.)
Also Sun optical mice are horrible. That's not strictly speaking relevant, but adds local flavour.
The problems affecting X as a protocol are the same problems that hinder most big, old system designs: they're built as layers on top of layers, with the cruft accumulating as more extensions are added.
I would like to see a much more responsive, much less baroque alternative to X. But it'll have to be able to X apps as well I guess.