Thunderbird is not stagnating, Thunderbird 3 is a major step up and I don't see any equivalent of Chrome threatening to beat it in terms of speed or functionality.
I was thinking you had a kid. If you don't, I can't imagine how busy you'll be if/when that happens:)
In all seriousness, you don't need to "have no life", be unemployed or single in order to do an activity for an hour or so without interruption. I find it very hard to believe that you are truly that busy, that's all.
Really sorry, but most of us can spare the time to play more than 5-10 minutes of gaming without interruption. What, you can't even do a couple of hours? Must suck for you.
Curious, I didn't know nVidia supported other shutter glass brands in the past. I thought they had written the drivers and the 2D -> 3D conversion specifically for their 3D Vision shutter glasses.
Previous glasses presumably didn't use 120hz monitors? Or did they only support specific games, rather than patching all DirectX games at the driver level? Either way, it's disappointing that nVidia have abandoned early adopters of desktop 3D.
They are separate downloads, but I don't think they have to be kept in sync. In any case, new 3D drivers continue to be released to patch games like Left 4 Dead 2.
I think nVidia are going to push this, it sells their overpriced shutter glasses and 120hz TVs from their partners, and it even encourages people to upgrade their GPU (3D naturally requires double the framerate). They've put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility and working with developers to get native 3D support in newer games.
Since so many of us geeks wear glasses, it's no surprise that most 3D glasses technologies are designed to comfortably slot over existing specs. It's not really a big deal in practice.
The nVidia 3D vision's only real weakness is that it darkens the screen because of the LCD shutters. Otherwise, it's exactly the same picture quality at native resolution, and I've found it to be fully worth the money.
The iPad isn't going to replace a music player, it's too large.
It's not going to replace a movie player, it's too small. Unless you're watching something on your own? Can't imagine that the sound is too great either.
It's not going to replace e-book readers, it doesn't use e-ink (iPad has a supposed battery life of "10 hours", Kindle is 7 days)
It's not going to replace video games for anything but the casual market, the hardware isn't up to scratch.
Plus it's completely locked-in and controlled by Apple, with proprietary formats, where you own nothing, only rent and agree to whatever terms Apple dictate. No thanks.
It really depends on what language you write your code in. Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well.... Perl and C code, on the other hand, can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable. Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Perl has support for OO, ranging from the built-in stuff to a full-blown object system like Moose. Perl also has an inline documentation system called POD that bears some similarity to Javadoc. This leads me to conclude that you either don't know what you're talking about, or have been working with very bad Perl programmers.
At my place of work, any code I write is likely going to be maintained for years, perhaps decades; even if it doesn't, someone else is going to end up having to fix something or add a feature, or perhaps it will be deprecated only to be pulled out of retirement later. I typically write a few paragraphs to describe the class (with example instantiation and usage) plus perhaps a sentence or two per method. None of that Javadoc-style documenting every argument and return value separately, though. But I make it decent, because even if the class is relatively simple, it might not be simple in a year's time - and if the documentation isn't there to begin with, future contributors might not bother to add their own.
Actually, English has exactly 7 vowel letters. I learned this in first grade, why didn't everyone else?
A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y, and sometimes W.
For example, Crwth, and Cwm. Look them up!
Because those last two words are Welsh, not English. You could also argue that é is a vowel letter because of words like café, but of course these words are French in origin, even though they show up in English usage.
This is not really a new thing. IE8 has no menubar by default. Chrome has no menubar. Both browsers succeed in usability.
Why? Think about what you do with your browser. For the vast majority, you'll want bookmarks, a back button and maybe access your history once in a while. This is not Microsoft Word, where there are hundreds of possible commands to run on a piece of text. Web browsers are perfect for the "Ribbon-style" interface because almost all functionality is encapsulated within the content window itself - i.e., viewing pages and clicking links.
It's funny that other posters bring up extensions to fix this. Many Firefox extensions eschew the menu bar entirely, because they know that users will ignore it. The extension is instead visible in the status bar, as a browser "tray icon", in the context menu, or in the toolbar itself.
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
A large number of modern Linux applications have already adopted the 'no menu bar' style, most noticeably for GNOME. I don't think having a menu bar just to be consistent with other applications, regardless of OS, is a positive goal for the Firefox developers.
Crysis Warhead is a good example of this - they invested so much into the engine and assets for the first game, it was good to see an extra set of levels that built upon Crytek's experience and was a vast improvement in level design and pacing. The problem with FPS games is they tend to get boring unless they regularly switch up the game play (e.g. Half-Life 2), which seems to be difficult for most designers who are content with churning out level after level of the same thing.
You're right, that's exactly what we need, shorter games. Never mind that most FPSs out today can be completed in an afternoon, and have very little depth (exploration, multiple routes, etc.) compared to the 20-60 hour RPGs on the market. I'm sorry that you can't spare the time in your busy life to play something longer than a couple of hours, but I think most of us want value for our money - especially if we're paying £35+ for the game.
Unfortunately in the UK, if you go into Currys, Argos, Maplin, pretty much anywhere and buy a netbook, it'll have Windows XP on it. The only way to get Linux on a netbook is to purchase an Acer Aspire One, buy Windows and install over it, or go to Amazon or another online seller and hope you can find a Linux version of the model you want.
1) An increase in use of Centmail points could be flagged as suspicious
...after the fact? Or will you have an automated system that prevents the mails from being sent if they seem suspicious? Otherwise a spammer can simply do a hit and run and exhaust the user's account. Regardless of that, spammers are more likely to control a very large amount of zombie Windows boxes, sending out a small number of e-mails on each machine.
2) If a user gets hacked, he just ends up donating more money to charity
Which is wonderful and all, but doesn't really solve the problem.
3) Hackers are more likely to be interested in other aspects of the user's computer
Spammers have demonstrably took over swathes of Windows machines exclusively to send out spam. Even if they didn't, centmail offers the chance to send a mail that is practically verified as genuine, which is very rare, and worth hacking a computer for.
First and foremost Qt is not just a widget toolkit. It is a full development environment: it has a build system (qmake), a fully-developed IDE and widget layout editor (Qt Creator) and many, many extra libraries. To quote just a few examples, there are classes to handle tray icons (whether in KDE, GNOME, Mac OS X or Windows), classes for running TCP servers, integration with the Phonon media framework, the WebKit browser, SVG, databases, multi-threaded code and even scripting support using QtScript, an implementation of ECMAScript (JavaScript).
Qt is written in C++. GTK attempts to do object-oriented code in C and the result is a mess of explicit casting and macros. Seriously, most GTK C code looks horrible and is far less terse than the equivalent Qt program. This is mitigated when Python or Perl is used, but then you're sacrificing speed. With Qt writing C++ is basically as easy as using Java, C# or any other 'modern' language. All of the nasty stuff is taken care of. For example, Qt code is generally cross-platform.
Its signal and slot system is also very powerful. For example, you connect a button's click() signal to the QApplication's quit() slot, and the button will cause the app to close when clicked. These signal/slot pairs can even be set via the Qt Creator IDE, just like Visual Basic! Or you might start up a webpage download and assign a slot to handle the signal sent when the page has been downloaded. Qt's signal/slots are introspective and modifiable at runtime, and you define new signals and slots just like you define new methods for a C++ class. The drawback there is that Qt programs require a pre-processing pass by moc (the meta-object compiler), in order to generate meta-data for runtime signal/slot manipulation, and to offer some syntactic sugar around Qt's features. As a side-effect, Qt adds syntactic sugar for features some might find questionable, for example adding a foreach() loop for lists.
The build system, qmake, is quite simple: you list your source files, libraries and headers to link in a short configuration file (qmake can even generate this for you). qmake then generates a makefile from this data. This is useful as it also includes the 'moc' pass, but can be constrictive in some cases. You are, of course, not obligated to use qmake in your Qt project.
As far as widgets go, Qt's are comparable with GTK or any other toolkit out there. Qt does a better job of looking good on non-Linux platforms, such as Windows. It has a simple but flexible widget system that is much easier to use than GridBagLayout or any of Swing's more poweful layouts.
The main issue with Qt was that, up until recently, it was licensed under the LGPL and before that, it was under the restrictive 'Qt license'. This is no longer the case, so jump in!
Yes, because people love to read long pages of text and never just click the first button at the bottom of the dialog. More importantly, plenty of Firefox users don't know they're using Firefox, or don't care, and won't know how to react to such security notices.
The first notice is much simpler: users will recognise that they are 'upgrading' to a new version, almost all will allow it, and people who don't like the awesomebar or something have the option to deny. The second notice is just confusing to novice and casual users.
When I learned BASIC it had line numbers, GOTOs, and some versions didn't even have functions (just GOSUB). This is a far cry from PHP which effectively retains all of C's syntax.
Yes, it has inconsistent function names and register_globals/magic_quotes are really stupid from a security point of view. But neither of these are relevant when teaching a kid.
Plus, web programming is a much more visible way of using those newfound skills. A child who's learned PHP can write a cool webpage and show his friends. A child who's learned C can write maybe a text-mode executable, but it's going to be hard to pass it around.
I have moderated hundreds of times but only received a handful of meta mod e-mails -- all unfair (perhaps you only get a mail when your moderation is marked unfair).
Slashdot Mirror
Thunderbird is not stagnating, Thunderbird 3 is a major step up and I don't see any equivalent of Chrome threatening to beat it in terms of speed or functionality.
I was thinking you had a kid. If you don't, I can't imagine how busy you'll be if/when that happens :)
In all seriousness, you don't need to "have no life", be unemployed or single in order to do an activity for an hour or so without interruption. I find it very hard to believe that you are truly that busy, that's all.
Really sorry, but most of us can spare the time to play more than 5-10 minutes of gaming without interruption. What, you can't even do a couple of hours? Must suck for you.
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary, and those who have regular sex.
Curious, I didn't know nVidia supported other shutter glass brands in the past. I thought they had written the drivers and the 2D -> 3D conversion specifically for their 3D Vision shutter glasses.
Previous glasses presumably didn't use 120hz monitors? Or did they only support specific games, rather than patching all DirectX games at the driver level? Either way, it's disappointing that nVidia have abandoned early adopters of desktop 3D.
They are separate downloads, but I don't think they have to be kept in sync. In any case, new 3D drivers continue to be released to patch games like Left 4 Dead 2.
I think nVidia are going to push this, it sells their overpriced shutter glasses and 120hz TVs from their partners, and it even encourages people to upgrade their GPU (3D naturally requires double the framerate). They've put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility and working with developers to get native 3D support in newer games.
Since so many of us geeks wear glasses, it's no surprise that most 3D glasses technologies are designed to comfortably slot over existing specs. It's not really a big deal in practice.
The nVidia 3D vision's only real weakness is that it darkens the screen because of the LCD shutters. Otherwise, it's exactly the same picture quality at native resolution, and I've found it to be fully worth the money.
I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode
Yeah, I think you said just about all that needs to be said.
The iPad isn't going to replace a music player, it's too large.
It's not going to replace a movie player, it's too small. Unless you're watching something on your own? Can't imagine that the sound is too great either.
It's not going to replace e-book readers, it doesn't use e-ink (iPad has a supposed battery life of "10 hours", Kindle is 7 days)
It's not going to replace video games for anything but the casual market, the hardware isn't up to scratch.
Plus it's completely locked-in and controlled by Apple, with proprietary formats, where you own nothing, only rent and agree to whatever terms Apple dictate. No thanks.
No thanks.
It really depends on what language you write your code in. Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well .... Perl and C code, on the other hand, can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable. Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.
Perl has support for OO, ranging from the built-in stuff to a full-blown object system like Moose. Perl also has an inline documentation system called POD that bears some similarity to Javadoc. This leads me to conclude that you either don't know what you're talking about, or have been working with very bad Perl programmers.
At my place of work, any code I write is likely going to be maintained for years, perhaps decades; even if it doesn't, someone else is going to end up having to fix something or add a feature, or perhaps it will be deprecated only to be pulled out of retirement later. I typically write a few paragraphs to describe the class (with example instantiation and usage) plus perhaps a sentence or two per method. None of that Javadoc-style documenting every argument and return value separately, though. But I make it decent, because even if the class is relatively simple, it might not be simple in a year's time - and if the documentation isn't there to begin with, future contributors might not bother to add their own.
Actually, English has exactly 7 vowel letters. I learned this in first grade, why didn't everyone else? A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y, and sometimes W.
For example, Crwth, and Cwm. Look them up!
Because those last two words are Welsh, not English. You could also argue that é is a vowel letter because of words like café, but of course these words are French in origin, even though they show up in English usage.
This is not really a new thing. IE8 has no menubar by default. Chrome has no menubar. Both browsers succeed in usability.
Why? Think about what you do with your browser. For the vast majority, you'll want bookmarks, a back button and maybe access your history once in a while. This is not Microsoft Word, where there are hundreds of possible commands to run on a piece of text. Web browsers are perfect for the "Ribbon-style" interface because almost all functionality is encapsulated within the content window itself - i.e., viewing pages and clicking links.
It's funny that other posters bring up extensions to fix this. Many Firefox extensions eschew the menu bar entirely, because they know that users will ignore it. The extension is instead visible in the status bar, as a browser "tray icon", in the context menu, or in the toolbar itself.
Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.
A large number of modern Linux applications have already adopted the 'no menu bar' style, most noticeably for GNOME. I don't think having a menu bar just to be consistent with other applications, regardless of OS, is a positive goal for the Firefox developers.
Crysis Warhead is a good example of this - they invested so much into the engine and assets for the first game, it was good to see an extra set of levels that built upon Crytek's experience and was a vast improvement in level design and pacing. The problem with FPS games is they tend to get boring unless they regularly switch up the game play (e.g. Half-Life 2), which seems to be difficult for most designers who are content with churning out level after level of the same thing.
You're right, that's exactly what we need, shorter games. Never mind that most FPSs out today can be completed in an afternoon, and have very little depth (exploration, multiple routes, etc.) compared to the 20-60 hour RPGs on the market. I'm sorry that you can't spare the time in your busy life to play something longer than a couple of hours, but I think most of us want value for our money - especially if we're paying £35+ for the game.
Unfortunately in the UK, if you go into Currys, Argos, Maplin, pretty much anywhere and buy a netbook, it'll have Windows XP on it. The only way to get Linux on a netbook is to purchase an Acer Aspire One, buy Windows and install over it, or go to Amazon or another online seller and hope you can find a Linux version of the model you want.
You offer three points in rebuttal:
...after the fact? Or will you have an automated system that prevents the mails from being sent if they seem suspicious? Otherwise a spammer can simply do a hit and run and exhaust the user's account. Regardless of that, spammers are more likely to control a very large amount of zombie Windows boxes, sending out a small number of e-mails on each machine.
1) An increase in use of Centmail points could be flagged as suspicious
2) If a user gets hacked, he just ends up donating more money to charity
Which is wonderful and all, but doesn't really solve the problem.
3) Hackers are more likely to be interested in other aspects of the user's computer
Spammers have demonstrably took over swathes of Windows machines exclusively to send out spam. Even if they didn't, centmail offers the chance to send a mail that is practically verified as genuine, which is very rare, and worth hacking a computer for.
Whoops, thanks for pointing that out.
First and foremost Qt is not just a widget toolkit. It is a full development environment: it has a build system (qmake), a fully-developed IDE and widget layout editor (Qt Creator) and many, many extra libraries. To quote just a few examples, there are classes to handle tray icons (whether in KDE, GNOME, Mac OS X or Windows), classes for running TCP servers, integration with the Phonon media framework, the WebKit browser, SVG, databases, multi-threaded code and even scripting support using QtScript, an implementation of ECMAScript (JavaScript).
Qt is written in C++. GTK attempts to do object-oriented code in C and the result is a mess of explicit casting and macros. Seriously, most GTK C code looks horrible and is far less terse than the equivalent Qt program. This is mitigated when Python or Perl is used, but then you're sacrificing speed. With Qt writing C++ is basically as easy as using Java, C# or any other 'modern' language. All of the nasty stuff is taken care of. For example, Qt code is generally cross-platform.
Its signal and slot system is also very powerful. For example, you connect a button's click() signal to the QApplication's quit() slot, and the button will cause the app to close when clicked. These signal/slot pairs can even be set via the Qt Creator IDE, just like Visual Basic! Or you might start up a webpage download and assign a slot to handle the signal sent when the page has been downloaded. Qt's signal/slots are introspective and modifiable at runtime, and you define new signals and slots just like you define new methods for a C++ class. The drawback there is that Qt programs require a pre-processing pass by moc (the meta-object compiler), in order to generate meta-data for runtime signal/slot manipulation, and to offer some syntactic sugar around Qt's features. As a side-effect, Qt adds syntactic sugar for features some might find questionable, for example adding a foreach() loop for lists.
The build system, qmake, is quite simple: you list your source files, libraries and headers to link in a short configuration file (qmake can even generate this for you). qmake then generates a makefile from this data. This is useful as it also includes the 'moc' pass, but can be constrictive in some cases. You are, of course, not obligated to use qmake in your Qt project.
As far as widgets go, Qt's are comparable with GTK or any other toolkit out there. Qt does a better job of looking good on non-Linux platforms, such as Windows. It has a simple but flexible widget system that is much easier to use than GridBagLayout or any of Swing's more poweful layouts.
The main issue with Qt was that, up until recently, it was licensed under the LGPL and before that, it was under the restrictive 'Qt license'. This is no longer the case, so jump in!
Yes, because people love to read long pages of text and never just click the first button at the bottom of the dialog. More importantly, plenty of Firefox users don't know they're using Firefox, or don't care, and won't know how to react to such security notices.
The first notice is much simpler: users will recognise that they are 'upgrading' to a new version, almost all will allow it, and people who don't like the awesomebar or something have the option to deny. The second notice is just confusing to novice and casual users.
Google column layout for your Firefox user.css:
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.google.co.uk/search") {
body > table + div {
-moz-column-count: 2 !important;
-moz-column-gap: 1em !important;
}
}
All three of his examples go directly to the most official site for Firefox, Linux and OpenOffice respectively. Nice try though.
That said, Google's results are still generally better.
When I learned BASIC it had line numbers, GOTOs, and some versions didn't even have functions (just GOSUB). This is a far cry from PHP which effectively retains all of C's syntax.
Yes, it has inconsistent function names and register_globals/magic_quotes are really stupid from a security point of view. But neither of these are relevant when teaching a kid.
Plus, web programming is a much more visible way of using those newfound skills. A child who's learned PHP can write a cool webpage and show his friends. A child who's learned C can write maybe a text-mode executable, but it's going to be hard to pass it around.
I have moderated hundreds of times but only received a handful of meta mod e-mails -- all unfair (perhaps you only get a mail when your moderation is marked unfair).
In the same e-mail is a score, e.g.
Summary of your recent moderation: 100% Fair
Moderator points are dealt more often to people with high meta-mod scores (but not too high). The peak is probably something like 90% approved.