Sounds more like the problem is in the HTML spec, if no rendering engine can get it right. After delving into HTML for the past couple of years I'm amazed at how much people are willing to put up with. Maybe one day we'll have a spec that makes sense and have a lot more power. -- Q
I was driving down the road in a neighborhood. Happened to glance over at a house and noticed a guy standing in his underwear looking out his picture window.
If you don't want people to see you inside your house then blinds or curtains is the way to go. They've been around for a long time and this is exactly why they were made.
If you live in a glass house, then expect to be viewed. - Q
A good set of curtains or blinds would go a long way. Is she also worried about the hundreds of people who walk by her house and see inside her house? - Q
Someone else posted this link http://www.dash.net/. This looks like it uses a wide area network to connect to a centeralized server that the in car systems then can query about traffic pattern. I haven't looked at their site enough to figure out how real time it is and all the details.
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Q
What is needed is to turn the car navigator into small wireless device. Then traffic flow rates can be passed from car to car. Accidents can be reported in real time and traffic adjusted accordingly.
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Q
Back when I was in highschool (early 1980's) they were introducing BASIC. While, for the most part, kids were able to complete the course, they walked away with little in the way of real skills. Means skills they could use later in their professional life. Sure there were a few of us who excelled and went on into the software industry. But for most it's probably less used than the Spanish or French they learned.
The teacher of that class and myself discussed this and came to the conclusion that the language really wasn't what schools should be focusing on. What would have been more beneficial is using computer programming as an example of general problem solving. The ability to look at a problem break it down and decide how to solve it. And most would have been better served by teaching them how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and database if you were going for practical computer skills.
Problem solving skills were really lacking in most of the students. This was evident when hitting balancing trig equations and anything else that didn't have a formula based solution that you could remember to solve the problem.
I think a relatively simple language would server such a purpose. It doesn't have to be all that practical either.
I started off with BASIC before I took that class. I had already realized it's limitations and short cummings and had moved on to Pascal by the time I took that class.
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Q
When you interview at Google you walk away with various Google labelled items. So what are you supposed to do when someone sees you with a Google water bottle? Oh, I bought that at Wal-Mart along with my Google T-Shirt.
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Q
GIMP is definitely more powerful than what's available on Vista, but I think GIMP not as easy to use for basic functionality. If you're a graphics artist then definitely gimp is better, if you're trying to crop and touch up some photos and such you'd be better off with Microsoft's image editor or Picasa or something similar.
Until software developers realize that power isn't everything and can design an interface that satisifies the power users as well as not scare the beginner there's going to be a nice niche for simple tools. And on a basic computer aimed at average users, I'm not sure you want to put the high powered tools on it.
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Shoot 15 years ago I was working with MS Access databases around 750megs of data. (Not that was a good idea at the time). Took quite a while to run Access's repair utility on them.
I hope they never have to deal with AVI or other similar large 21 gig files. I guess you could chop them up as well and watch them individually.
Seriously the only reason I could see for splitting them up is load balancing. A high volume transaction rate might force one to do something like that.
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Q
C64 was a 6510 processor not a 6502. I owned the Timex Sinclair 1000, was my first real computer. Bought the 16k expansion. I even bought a flight simulator for the 1000. But it's membrane keyboard and problems with static causing the machine to die I ended up moving to the C64 fairly quickly.
I liked the z80 processor. I enjoyed writting z80 assembly better than the 6502 of the Apple I had worked with in the past. I always thought about hooking up the 1000 to the 64 to see if I could just use the CPU from the 64 to load and write programs
Oddly enough I just came across the 16k expansion pack, if anyone is in need of one. Haven't come across the 1000 itself, but I think it's around. If I do, I'll have to fire it up
--
Q
I've never met a Window's upgrade I liked. Things always seem to get bent out of shape down the road after the upgrade. I've always taken the approach to do fresh installs. So I guess I'll avoid these interim machines with XP and a forth coming Vista upgrade, since my only option is to upgrade in those cases.
Just too many bad experiences upgrading to Win95, WinNT 3.1, 3.5, 4.0. and so on. Sorry, Microsoft, I'm not going to trust your ability to upgrade yet. -- Q
I was just going to say the same thing. While I've often entertained getting a Mac because I figure my wife would have an easier time doing things, I can't play EverQuest, America's Army, and various other games that I and my son play.
And actually my parents have done quite well on Windows. My dad at nearly 70 went out and bought himself a laptop. It would be pretty easy for them to switch since they have no interest in games, but at this point they're getting along just fine with Windows.
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Q
If I decide that I like Canada's government better than mine, I can apply for citizenship. I know people who have moved out of the US due to the US tax structure. They didn't have any problems doing it.
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Q
In other words, software developers aught not be paid for their efforts; it should be something they freely contribute to some global software collective.
That's all fine and good. I'll do that as soon as someone volunteers to come and clean my house and mow my lawn. If someone's willing to free up my time I'll be more than happy to donate the software I create with that time.
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Q
Good point, possibly, depends on how far the telco responsibilities go. Is the company responsible for the lines within a building? Or is that the building's responsibility? I've only had to deal with my home, and I know I have options as a residential customer, I can assume responsibility or I can pay the phone company to do that. Not sure how it's handled in a large building with hundreds of tenants. I've never lived in an apartment before.
What I'm getting at is that the phone company may only have to connect a "building" and suddenly they have hundred's of paying customers. Where as in a rural area they have to string miles of cable to get that same volume.
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I imagine the company providing broadband isn't just supplying it to that high density area. They're also providing it to more rural areas. Essentially Manhattan is subsidising part of the cost of providing it to more rural areas.
Whoever did the install for you fscked up, as the docu for the installed version should be available
That's quite possible. This was a few years ago, as I said I hope such things have been fixed since then. Especially since this distro wasn't free. I will say the Apache web server was one of the few things this distro had working correctly. But that was the only thing that I didn't have problems with. I need to get a recent version and take Linux for another test drive.
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Q
I do know but your average user does not. For me in both cases the alternatives were cheaper than open source. My time is valuable and a few hours of milling around news groups, googling, and IRC chat sessions costs me more than the commercial alternatives.
And documentation that is incorrect (and I'm not talking just typos and wrong names), which was the case with my Linux distro, is worse than no documentation at all. It lead me to believe I wouldn't need to go searching news groups, and hanging out in IRC and such. What was rather commical is that I had 4 sources of information and none of them agreed. I ended up piecing information together from all of them and a fair bit of trial and error. While I did get my kernel recompiled, hitting this same scenario with Postgre SQL caused me to abandon the project. Again this was many years ago and I would expect things have improved somewhat.
I hope to revist and play with some of the current distro and see how they fair. I've found the VM image distrobutions and interesting way to get ones feat wet without having to go through all the pains of setting up a full system.
--
Q
Interesting, I've never had need to talk to a MS-SQL or any database developer to use any of the database products I've used. I've worked on some pretty complex databases and queries as well.
My experience with PostgreSQL some time back was much worse than any experience I had with SQL Server. The online documentation failed to match anything resembling the actually installation that existed. After having expending a fair amount of time figuring out my Linux install and how to build the kernel hitting this with Postgre SQL put me over the edge. This was a side project I was working on and I just didn't have the time to go searching across the Net to figure the mess out. This was sometime back, hopefully things have changed.
Having contributed to open source, what I found is a lack of coherent design. Often, it seems, the way things get done is for some "smart" person to come along and take on something and complete it. Unfortunatley usually these "smart" people don't enjoy creating designs and documentation so after they move on to the next fun project, the lesser people poke and prod what they have created trying to add features and fix issues but never really understanding it. Eventually it gets to the point where another "smart" person comes along and rewrites it because it's become a mess and no one really understands it.
The fit and finish often seems lacking in open source. I tried to convert my wife to Open Office. It just didn't work. The spreadsheet just had too many issues for what we were doing. I ended up reinstalling MS Office. I think some of this may be due to the lack of coherent design of the system as a whole, but I'm not familiar enough with Open Office to make a call on it.
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Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the same thing. Any technology is going to have some kind of impact on something.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with something with zero impact.
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Maybe it also explains why I'm posting this from jail. ;-)
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Q
Or my whole 7th grade science class that played with mercury in a petry dish.
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Sounds more like the problem is in the HTML spec, if no rendering engine can get it right. After delving into HTML for the past couple of years I'm amazed at how much people are willing to put up with. Maybe one day we'll have a spec that makes sense and have a lot more power.
--
Q
I was driving down the road in a neighborhood. Happened to glance over at a house and noticed a guy standing in his underwear looking out his picture window.
If you don't want people to see you inside your house then blinds or curtains is the way to go. They've been around for a long time and this is exactly why they were made.
If you live in a glass house, then expect to be viewed.
-
Q
A good set of curtains or blinds would go a long way. Is she also worried about the hundreds of people who walk by her house and see inside her house?
-
Q
Someone else posted this link http://www.dash.net/. This looks like it uses a wide area network to connect to a centeralized server that the in car systems then can query about traffic pattern. I haven't looked at their site enough to figure out how real time it is and all the details.
-
Q
What is needed is to turn the car navigator into small wireless device. Then traffic flow rates can be passed from car to car. Accidents can be reported in real time and traffic adjusted accordingly. - Q
Knowing when to use a comma? ;-)
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Q
Back when I was in highschool (early 1980's) they were introducing BASIC. While, for the most part, kids were able to complete the course, they walked away with little in the way of real skills. Means skills they could use later in their professional life. Sure there were a few of us who excelled and went on into the software industry. But for most it's probably less used than the Spanish or French they learned.
The teacher of that class and myself discussed this and came to the conclusion that the language really wasn't what schools should be focusing on. What would have been more beneficial is using computer programming as an example of general problem solving. The ability to look at a problem break it down and decide how to solve it. And most would have been better served by teaching them how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and database if you were going for practical computer skills.
Problem solving skills were really lacking in most of the students. This was evident when hitting balancing trig equations and anything else that didn't have a formula based solution that you could remember to solve the problem.
I think a relatively simple language would server such a purpose. It doesn't have to be all that practical either.
I started off with BASIC before I took that class. I had already realized it's limitations and short cummings and had moved on to Pascal by the time I took that class.
--
Q
When you interview at Google you walk away with various Google labelled items. So what are you supposed to do when someone sees you with a Google water bottle? Oh, I bought that at Wal-Mart along with my Google T-Shirt.
-
Q
GIMP is definitely more powerful than what's available on Vista, but I think GIMP not as easy to use for basic functionality. If you're a graphics artist then definitely gimp is better, if you're trying to crop and touch up some photos and such you'd be better off with Microsoft's image editor or Picasa or something similar.
Until software developers realize that power isn't everything and can design an interface that satisifies the power users as well as not scare the beginner there's going to be a nice niche for simple tools. And on a basic computer aimed at average users, I'm not sure you want to put the high powered tools on it.
-
Q
Shoot 15 years ago I was working with MS Access databases around 750megs of data. (Not that was a good idea at the time). Took quite a while to run Access's repair utility on them.
I hope they never have to deal with AVI or other similar large 21 gig files. I guess you could chop them up as well and watch them individually.
Seriously the only reason I could see for splitting them up is load balancing. A high volume transaction rate might force one to do something like that.
-
Q
C64 was a 6510 processor not a 6502. I owned the Timex Sinclair 1000, was my first real computer. Bought the 16k expansion. I even bought a flight simulator for the 1000. But it's membrane keyboard and problems with static causing the machine to die I ended up moving to the C64 fairly quickly.
I liked the z80 processor. I enjoyed writting z80 assembly better than the 6502 of the Apple I had worked with in the past. I always thought about hooking up the 1000 to the 64 to see if I could just use the CPU from the 64 to load and write programs
Oddly enough I just came across the 16k expansion pack, if anyone is in need of one. Haven't come across the 1000 itself, but I think it's around. If I do, I'll have to fire it up
--
Q
I've never met a Window's upgrade I liked. Things always seem to get bent out of shape down the road after the upgrade. I've always taken the approach to do fresh installs. So I guess I'll avoid these interim machines with XP and a forth coming Vista upgrade, since my only option is to upgrade in those cases.
Just too many bad experiences upgrading to Win95, WinNT 3.1, 3.5, 4.0. and so on. Sorry, Microsoft, I'm not going to trust your ability to upgrade yet.
--
Q
I was just going to say the same thing. While I've often entertained getting a Mac because I figure my wife would have an easier time doing things, I can't play EverQuest, America's Army, and various other games that I and my son play.
And actually my parents have done quite well on Windows. My dad at nearly 70 went out and bought himself a laptop. It would be pretty easy for them to switch since they have no interest in games, but at this point they're getting along just fine with Windows.
--
Q
If I decide that I like Canada's government better than mine, I can apply for citizenship. I know people who have moved out of the US due to the US tax structure. They didn't have any problems doing it.
--
Q
In other words, software developers aught not be paid for their efforts; it should be something they freely contribute to some global software collective.
That's all fine and good. I'll do that as soon as someone volunteers to come and clean my house and mow my lawn. If someone's willing to free up my time I'll be more than happy to donate the software I create with that time.
--
Q
Then why are people so against Microsoft's monoply? Wouldn't the same happy nervanna happen in the computer world if there was only one OS.
--
Q
Why use CGI, shouldn't they be doing it with Ruby on Rails?
--
Q
Good point, possibly, depends on how far the telco responsibilities go. Is the company responsible for the lines within a building? Or is that the building's responsibility? I've only had to deal with my home, and I know I have options as a residential customer, I can assume responsibility or I can pay the phone company to do that. Not sure how it's handled in a large building with hundreds of tenants. I've never lived in an apartment before.
What I'm getting at is that the phone company may only have to connect a "building" and suddenly they have hundred's of paying customers. Where as in a rural area they have to string miles of cable to get that same volume.
--
Q
I imagine the company providing broadband isn't just supplying it to that high density area. They're also providing it to more rural areas. Essentially Manhattan is subsidising part of the cost of providing it to more rural areas.
That's quite possible. This was a few years ago, as I said I hope such things have been fixed since then. Especially since this distro wasn't free. I will say the Apache web server was one of the few things this distro had working correctly. But that was the only thing that I didn't have problems with. I need to get a recent version and take Linux for another test drive.
--
Q
I do know but your average user does not. For me in both cases the alternatives were cheaper than open source. My time is valuable and a few hours of milling around news groups, googling, and IRC chat sessions costs me more than the commercial alternatives.
And documentation that is incorrect (and I'm not talking just typos and wrong names), which was the case with my Linux distro, is worse than no documentation at all. It lead me to believe I wouldn't need to go searching news groups, and hanging out in IRC and such. What was rather commical is that I had 4 sources of information and none of them agreed. I ended up piecing information together from all of them and a fair bit of trial and error. While I did get my kernel recompiled, hitting this same scenario with Postgre SQL caused me to abandon the project. Again this was many years ago and I would expect things have improved somewhat.
I hope to revist and play with some of the current distro and see how they fair. I've found the VM image distrobutions and interesting way to get ones feat wet without having to go through all the pains of setting up a full system.
--
Q
Interesting, I've never had need to talk to a MS-SQL or any database developer to use any of the database products I've used. I've worked on some pretty complex databases and queries as well.
My experience with PostgreSQL some time back was much worse than any experience I had with SQL Server. The online documentation failed to match anything resembling the actually installation that existed. After having expending a fair amount of time figuring out my Linux install and how to build the kernel hitting this with Postgre SQL put me over the edge. This was a side project I was working on and I just didn't have the time to go searching across the Net to figure the mess out. This was sometime back, hopefully things have changed.
Having contributed to open source, what I found is a lack of coherent design. Often, it seems, the way things get done is for some "smart" person to come along and take on something and complete it. Unfortunatley usually these "smart" people don't enjoy creating designs and documentation so after they move on to the next fun project, the lesser people poke and prod what they have created trying to add features and fix issues but never really understanding it. Eventually it gets to the point where another "smart" person comes along and rewrites it because it's become a mess and no one really understands it.
The fit and finish often seems lacking in open source. I tried to convert my wife to Open Office. It just didn't work. The spreadsheet just had too many issues for what we were doing. I ended up reinstalling MS Office. I think some of this may be due to the lack of coherent design of the system as a whole, but I'm not familiar enough with Open Office to make a call on it.
--
Q