to keep things in perspective i saw a documentary about the military working on equipping soldiers with "onboard" computing for realtime use in the field and the prototypes are still 50 lbs.
Heck no, they all use Palms. Haven't you ever played Splinter Cell?
You're one of the lucky ones -- my crash is every few minutes, and this is the experience of a number of players. This was after replacing the qmixer.dll with one from a more recent game, since the game was unplayable with the old qmixer.
I would be inclined to blame qsound, but other games work fine with it, and before the very last patch to the game, there was no problem. The last one broke it, and Bullfrog essentially refused to fix it after acknowledging the problem. Unfortunately, I cannot find a 1.0 version of the game now, with my first copy long gone. This was a game I bought twice... more the fool I. Maybe the blame lies solely with Bullfrog, but this is a repeating pattern with EA-owned companies (I'll be fair and say Eidos also had a similar effect).
As for Alpha Centauri, I should have just gone to Firaxis's current site. Downloads there work great.
Feh. Better than EA, who drops all support the instant the game hits the discount bin. Want to play Dungeon Keeper 2 on Windows XP? Too bad, it'll crash in minutes unless you turn off sound. Completely. This on a game where sound was one of its best features. These bastards even continue to sell this defective game to fill out a a multi-game-pack that claims to run on XP.
Looking for Alpha Centauri patches because you reinstalled it from your really old CD? Don't bother, Firaxis was published by EA at the time, and the site's busted. Try edonkey instead.
You used "messaging" as a verb. This sort of neologism cannot stand.
"The transmission of language, commercial in nature, through a service designated for the purpose of sending textual messages"
Actually, it's kind of a fun parlor game as a variation of "telephone". You take a sentence, blow it up into verbiage like that above, then have a different bunch collapse it back down and see if you get the original sentence back.
This reader says: the latter. Chaos, anarchy, dogs and cats living together. What a load of crap.
Even the rather loose grammatical constructions of incomplete sentences as seen above made their points perfectly clear, and they served for the purpose of being succinct. Yet neither is the ability to compose fully-formed sentences -- in more variety than any other language on the planet, I might add -- impacted in the slightest by such loose interpretations. In this very post, you're looking at a plethora of word constructions that challenge the reader's comprehension (perhaps overly so, and I would certainly fail an essay composition with such prose) as opposed to feeding them a limited number of standard, inflexible, and inexpressive language forms.
Standardized forms are Dick and Jane. Do you want a Dick and Jane language?
Python's 'is' operator tests the address. As does its 'is not' operator (it's distinct from "x is (not y)", a mostly meaningless op). No law says you can't have a two-token operator.
Maybe part of Microsoft's patent is spelling it with studlyCaps.
> The only emulator out of the whole bunch is bochs.
Replying to myself... obviously VirtualPC is an emulator as is PearPC. Looks like qemu started as a bochs clone, became more of a virtualizer on x86, but remained an emulator on other architectures. I never knew it even ran on other architectures.
OOh, Fabrice of tcc fame. tcc is really lots of fun, very useful when doing test compiles because it's just so fast. It's not perfect (seems to have problems compiling Python) but it's a nice little tool.
There was an effort to port it to Windows, but it went nowhere. It's not as important since cl.exe is quite fast, but it's great for testing C programs when you don't feel like waiting on pokey old gcc.
> It probably just runs user-mode code directly as a Linux process and then catches a signal when a privileged instruction is attempted and emulates OS code.
That's how all supervisor-mode virtualizers work, by only trapping certain instructions. The only emulator out of the whole bunch is bochs.
CoLinux is my favorite solution for Linux on Windows. It's basically a port of User Mode Linux to Windows. Fast as native, just no native devices (network is done through tunnelling or a pcap hack). KDE still runs fine over X to a cygwin X server.
And the story was a total lump of bullshit. It barely made sense, it never inspired me to complete the game (even though I did, out of pure frustrated desire to see something coherent happen), and the characters were useless and paper thin.
Sounds like George Lucas had a hand in it.
Re:Get clipboard. Stand over shoulder. Watch.
on
What Makes a Good UI?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think we're actually in violent agreement here: When the interface gets in the way instead of helping, you lose efficiency. By being the most critical component of productivity, that productivity gets lost if the human isn't served by a proper interface. I sort of made a knee-jerk response to the perceived attitude that "dumbed down" is somehow better. Unfortunately, I do actually get to see that philosophy in action fairly often, and often it's hidden behind neologisms like YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It -- a glib way of dismissing requirements used by the exponents of a methodology that pretends to be responsive to them)
Re:Get clipboard. Stand over shoulder. Watch.
on
What Makes a Good UI?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In short, if you are trying to improve efficiency, then your human is your weakest link and your job is to minimize your human's input into the system. Whittle down their input to the bare minimum that cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, and then do the rest for them.
Spoken like a true non-user. The human is not the weakest link, the human is the one getting the job done. The machine is there to serve the user, not vice versa. If the user's needs are to have two buttons to click repeatedly, George Jetson style, throughout the day then that's the interface you need (I do a lot of manual QA stuff that's exactly like that). If the user needs a thousand knobs and dials, then you need to figure out how to organize those knobs and dials. It's not your job to tell the user to get out of the way and not worry their pretty little head while the computer works its magic.
I can't even get the engineers here to design a George Jetson interface properly. You'd think the button that everyone pushes literally several hundred times a day would be one they could make a little bigger, right? Nope, the point of the whole app is apparently about precise aim, not productivity.
> Because "All Caps" and "Small Caps" are mutually exclusive! That means you should have them as radio buttons, not checkboxes!
Radio buttons are for when you MUST select one of the options. If they were radio buttons, you would have to have a third that deselected all of them, or some kind of hierarchy with a checkbox of "use caps" and a radio button of "all caps" and "small caps". It's even more ridiculous and cumbersome than the checkbox trick. Word is chock full of UI disasters in all its dialogs. This is not one of them.
I learned a painful lesson trying to use WebDAV -- that webfolders are not supported in recent versions of XP. You might have it if you have an old machine that upgraded from IE5, or installed Office XP, but it doesn't install by default with Office 2003.
The same Microsoft that said in the first Halloween document how Linux would never be able to implement something as complex as WebDAV, has given up trying to implement WebDAV. Not that it ever did a very good job.
> In this light; is SQLLite really any faster than either MySQL or PostgreSQL in real-life, production situations?
You would never use it for "production situations" when you need an actual RDBMS. SQLite's niche is more like when you need something better than ndbm but not a full blown RDBMS (That said, it actually has more mature SQL support than MySQL). In that respect, it is blazing fast. I have stored a million-row logfile type of database on it and with some simple filter queries, got results literally 20 times faster than on MySQL. You can get away with a lot when you know you have the whole database locked. For complex queries, I'd move all the way up to postgresql. MySQL is pretty much a non-starter with me, but that's a rant all its own.
> They have to dust-off the old 'anti-netscape' playbook now.
And burn it. When the first browser war was fought, the web was a pretty new thing, net access was generally slow, and people stuck with whatever they had preinstalled on their desktop.
Now you can just google for firefox. Hell, just type "firefox" into the address bar of IE and it's the first thing to come up in msn search. In fact it's the whole first page, below all the news stories about how hot and fresh and hip and cool and sexy (ok ok) this whole firefox sensation is...
Actually the first thing that comes up is a paid advert for a commercial product called "secureIE". A browser you have to pay $30 for that fixes the numerous security holes in IE that it goes to great lengths to point out. Not exactly doing damage to Firefox.
MS has really given up on the standalone browser, and is working on other parts of the platform. Expect ASP.NET controls to start outputting XAML, for example. Oh sure, they'll still output HTML, but the XAML will be better. Some people seem to think there's something nasty and wrong about that, whereas I don't, but regardless, it's a likely course.
Star Trek predicted nothing. It was science fiction. Ever notice how the comm badges knew who who you were calling before you even finished the hail?
Anyway, look at the MS Agent API (yes, that's our good friend Clippy). It makes voice commands a snap. The recognition is quite good, and it supports context-sensitive phrasebooks. Yet no one uses it. Gee, could it be that complex interaction with a HUMAN through simple voice commands is frustrating enough, let alone with a very dumb computer?
Yes, once we have strong AI that will perfectly understand natural language and extrapolate from other things you've said to direct semi-independent behavior, then I'm sure we'll all be in a productivity and usability nirvana. But just talking to the Indians (very smart people mind you, degrees and all) I work with, that sort of communication interface ain't perfect with respect to OTHER HUMANS, let alone computers.
It's ridiculous, really. People who want computers and can afford them have them. There does not need to be a second revolution. I can't speak to my bandsaw to tell it to cut a half-inch groove at eight inch intervals in my shelf rail, but that didn't stop me and anyone else from buying the bandsaw. And hey, in a way, I can do that already -- I ask a human to do it. Sure I wouldn't mind having a 3D milling machine taking voice instructions, but it's hardly what I call a barrier to entry.
Somehow, I doubt Microsoft has a problem with petty and immature spellings of its name. In fact, it pretty much only reveals something about the writer, not the company. If you spent half the effort giving Microsoft bad press with decently composed prose as you do justifying the Micro$oft spelling, you'd do ten times the damage to their brand image.
Thing about flinging shit is, you tend to miss, but you always get shit on your hands.
I think those are more or less balanced out by the folks who download it multiple times on the same computer. Upgrades, system reimages, etc. Probably more than balanced out.
Alt-f Alt-e only switches to the edit menu if you let go of alt first, then press it again. Keep it down, and it behaves as I described. Tapping alt while in a menu gets out of all menus, including cascades, while esc backs out of one level of cascade, and the whole menu if no cascade was active. GTK+ apps might not have the exact behavior, but I suspect it's consistent.
I bet it behaves slightly differently than Qt though, but frankly with MS and Apple also shipping apps with different look and feel (though it's hard for an apple app to have a menu that behaves differently), users aren't clamoring for consistency as much as we'd think.
A member of OSDL... so what does that make him with respect to OSI?
Some of us know there's perfectly good reasons for the MPL, LGPL, and even the Artistic License. The OSI wants to trim down the licenses to reflect ones that are in actual use, not make them conform to the ideological purity of the FSF.
ah, but I have been trolled. Pardon me, mister Greenblatt, you really pulled that off quite nicely.
2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle. Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu. Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.
This is coming from a windows background? I can't find a single windows app that behaves the way you're expecting. Alt indeed toggles menu navigation on windows (a distinct difference from the mac, and actually this behavior goes all the way back to WordPerfect for DOS, possibly even Lotus 1-2-3). Alt-f pulls up the file menu, but alt-f again does not dismiss it. Alt-f Alt-e acted as if I had not held "alt" for the Alt-e, and activated the "e" accelerator in Mozilla, namely "Send Link". The same behavior held for standard windows apps (explorer.exe was my test here). I bet even WordPerfect for DOS behaves like this. The rationale for this behavior is fairly obvious, as novice users don't have to be told to release the Alt key. Although having the menu accellerators toggle menu activation sounds like a nice idea, the previous behavior gets in the way of this.
> Having to wait a couple of seconds everytime you make a change sucks.
Solution: use jikes instead of javac to recompile your JSPs. It's blazing fast. I know resin makes this dead simple, but it should be doable on tomcat. Heck, resin will even automatically recompile your servlets and EJBs, deployment descriptors and all (if you use xdoclet for them). You hardly ever have to manually rebuild. It's almost as nice as using ASP.NET.
Slashdot Mirror
to keep things in perspective i saw a documentary about the military working on equipping soldiers with "onboard" computing for realtime use in the field and the prototypes are still 50 lbs.
Heck no, they all use Palms. Haven't you ever played Splinter Cell?
Or maybe it's just the NSA that gets 'em.
Honest people with honest opinions don't have to create shill accounts for them.
You're one of the lucky ones -- my crash is every few minutes, and this is the experience of a number of players. This was after replacing the qmixer.dll with one from a more recent game, since the game was unplayable with the old qmixer.
... more the fool I. Maybe the blame lies solely with Bullfrog, but this is a repeating pattern with EA-owned companies (I'll be fair and say Eidos also had a similar effect).
I would be inclined to blame qsound, but other games work fine with it, and before the very last patch to the game, there was no problem. The last one broke it, and Bullfrog essentially refused to fix it after acknowledging the problem. Unfortunately, I cannot find a 1.0 version of the game now, with my first copy long gone. This was a game I bought twice
As for Alpha Centauri, I should have just gone to Firaxis's current site. Downloads there work great.
Feh. Better than EA, who drops all support the instant the game hits the discount bin. Want to play Dungeon Keeper 2 on Windows XP? Too bad, it'll crash in minutes unless you turn off sound. Completely. This on a game where sound was one of its best features. These bastards even continue to sell this defective game to fill out a a multi-game-pack that claims to run on XP.
Looking for Alpha Centauri patches because you reinstalled it from your really old CD? Don't bother, Firaxis was published by EA at the time, and the site's busted. Try edonkey instead.
You used "messaging" as a verb. This sort of neologism cannot stand.
"The transmission of language, commercial in nature, through a service designated for the purpose of sending textual messages"
Actually, it's kind of a fun parlor game as a variation of "telephone". You take a sentence, blow it up into verbiage like that above, then have a different bunch collapse it back down and see if you get the original sentence back.
This reader says: the latter. Chaos, anarchy, dogs and cats living together. What a load of crap.
Even the rather loose grammatical constructions of incomplete sentences as seen above made their points perfectly clear, and they served for the purpose of being succinct. Yet neither is the ability to compose fully-formed sentences -- in more variety than any other language on the planet, I might add -- impacted in the slightest by such loose interpretations. In this very post, you're looking at a plethora of word constructions that challenge the reader's comprehension (perhaps overly so, and I would certainly fail an essay composition with such prose) as opposed to feeding them a limited number of standard, inflexible, and inexpressive language forms.
Standardized forms are Dick and Jane. Do you want a Dick and Jane language?
Python's 'is' operator tests the address. As does its 'is not' operator (it's distinct from "x is (not y)", a mostly meaningless op). No law says you can't have a two-token operator.
Maybe part of Microsoft's patent is spelling it with studlyCaps.
> The only emulator out of the whole bunch is bochs.
... obviously VirtualPC is an emulator as is PearPC. Looks like qemu started as a bochs clone, became more of a virtualizer on x86, but remained an emulator on other architectures. I never knew it even ran on other architectures.
Replying to myself
OOh, Fabrice of tcc fame. tcc is really lots of fun, very useful when doing test compiles because it's just so fast. It's not perfect (seems to have problems compiling Python) but it's a nice little tool.
There was an effort to port it to Windows, but it went nowhere. It's not as important since cl.exe is quite fast, but it's great for testing C programs when you don't feel like waiting on pokey old gcc.
> It probably just runs user-mode code directly as a Linux process and then catches a signal when a privileged instruction is attempted and emulates OS code.
That's how all supervisor-mode virtualizers work, by only trapping certain instructions. The only emulator out of the whole bunch is bochs.
CoLinux is my favorite solution for Linux on Windows. It's basically a port of User Mode Linux to Windows. Fast as native, just no native devices (network is done through tunnelling or a pcap hack). KDE still runs fine over X to a cygwin X server.
And the story was a total lump of bullshit. It barely made sense, it never inspired me to complete the game (even though I did, out of pure frustrated desire to see something coherent happen), and the characters were useless and paper thin.
Sounds like George Lucas had a hand in it.
I think we're actually in violent agreement here: When the interface gets in the way instead of helping, you lose efficiency. By being the most critical component of productivity, that productivity gets lost if the human isn't served by a proper interface. I sort of made a knee-jerk response to the perceived attitude that "dumbed down" is somehow better. Unfortunately, I do actually get to see that philosophy in action fairly often, and often it's hidden behind neologisms like YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It -- a glib way of dismissing requirements used by the exponents of a methodology that pretends to be responsive to them)
In short, if you are trying to improve efficiency, then your human is your weakest link and your job is to minimize your human's input into the system. Whittle down their input to the bare minimum that cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, and then do the rest for them.
Spoken like a true non-user. The human is not the weakest link, the human is the one getting the job done. The machine is there to serve the user, not vice versa. If the user's needs are to have two buttons to click repeatedly, George Jetson style, throughout the day then that's the interface you need (I do a lot of manual QA stuff that's exactly like that). If the user needs a thousand knobs and dials, then you need to figure out how to organize those knobs and dials. It's not your job to tell the user to get out of the way and not worry their pretty little head while the computer works its magic.
I can't even get the engineers here to design a George Jetson interface properly. You'd think the button that everyone pushes literally several hundred times a day would be one they could make a little bigger, right? Nope, the point of the whole app is apparently about precise aim, not productivity.
> Because "All Caps" and "Small Caps" are mutually exclusive! That means you should have them as radio buttons, not checkboxes!
Radio buttons are for when you MUST select one of the options. If they were radio buttons, you would have to have a third that deselected all of them, or some kind of hierarchy with a checkbox of "use caps" and a radio button of "all caps" and "small caps". It's even more ridiculous and cumbersome than the checkbox trick. Word is chock full of UI disasters in all its dialogs. This is not one of them.
I learned a painful lesson trying to use WebDAV -- that webfolders are not supported in recent versions of XP. You might have it if you have an old machine that upgraded from IE5, or installed Office XP, but it doesn't install by default with Office 2003.
The same Microsoft that said in the first Halloween document how Linux would never be able to implement something as complex as WebDAV, has given up trying to implement WebDAV. Not that it ever did a very good job.
Like, uhh, don't you mean back-bacon, eh hoser?
> In this light; is SQLLite really any faster than either MySQL or PostgreSQL in real-life, production situations?
You would never use it for "production situations" when you need an actual RDBMS. SQLite's niche is more like when you need something better than ndbm but not a full blown RDBMS (That said, it actually has more mature SQL support than MySQL). In that respect, it is blazing fast. I have stored a million-row logfile type of database on it and with some simple filter queries, got results literally 20 times faster than on MySQL. You can get away with a lot when you know you have the whole database locked. For complex queries, I'd move all the way up to postgresql. MySQL is pretty much a non-starter with me, but that's a rant all its own.
> They have to dust-off the old 'anti-netscape' playbook now.
And burn it. When the first browser war was fought, the web was a pretty new thing, net access was generally slow, and people stuck with whatever they had preinstalled on their desktop.
Now you can just google for firefox. Hell, just type "firefox" into the address bar of IE and it's the first thing to come up in msn search. In fact it's the whole first page, below all the news stories about how hot and fresh and hip and cool and sexy (ok ok) this whole firefox sensation is...
Actually the first thing that comes up is a paid advert for a commercial product called "secureIE". A browser you have to pay $30 for that fixes the numerous security holes in IE that it goes to great lengths to point out. Not exactly doing damage to Firefox.
MS has really given up on the standalone browser, and is working on other parts of the platform. Expect ASP.NET controls to start outputting XAML, for example. Oh sure, they'll still output HTML, but the XAML will be better. Some people seem to think there's something nasty and wrong about that, whereas I don't, but regardless, it's a likely course.
Star Trek predicted nothing. It was science fiction. Ever notice how the comm badges knew who who you were calling before you even finished the hail?
Anyway, look at the MS Agent API (yes, that's our good friend Clippy). It makes voice commands a snap. The recognition is quite good, and it supports context-sensitive phrasebooks. Yet no one uses it. Gee, could it be that complex interaction with a HUMAN through simple voice commands is frustrating enough, let alone with a very dumb computer?
Yes, once we have strong AI that will perfectly understand natural language and extrapolate from other things you've said to direct semi-independent behavior, then I'm sure we'll all be in a productivity and usability nirvana. But just talking to the Indians (very smart people mind you, degrees and all) I work with, that sort of communication interface ain't perfect with respect to OTHER HUMANS, let alone computers.
It's ridiculous, really. People who want computers and can afford them have them. There does not need to be a second revolution. I can't speak to my bandsaw to tell it to cut a half-inch groove at eight inch intervals in my shelf rail, but that didn't stop me and anyone else from buying the bandsaw. And hey, in a way, I can do that already -- I ask a human to do it. Sure I wouldn't mind having a 3D milling machine taking voice instructions, but it's hardly what I call a barrier to entry.
Somehow, I doubt Microsoft has a problem with petty and immature spellings of its name. In fact, it pretty much only reveals something about the writer, not the company. If you spent half the effort giving Microsoft bad press with decently composed prose as you do justifying the Micro$oft spelling, you'd do ten times the damage to their brand image.
Thing about flinging shit is, you tend to miss, but you always get shit on your hands.
I think those are more or less balanced out by the folks who download it multiple times on the same computer. Upgrades, system reimages, etc. Probably more than balanced out.
People still use jigdo?
Alt-f Alt-e only switches to the edit menu if you let go of alt first, then press it again. Keep it down, and it behaves as I described. Tapping alt while in a menu gets out of all menus, including cascades, while esc backs out of one level of cascade, and the whole menu if no cascade was active. GTK+ apps might not have the exact behavior, but I suspect it's consistent.
I bet it behaves slightly differently than Qt though, but frankly with MS and Apple also shipping apps with different look and feel (though it's hard for an apple app to have a menu that behaves differently), users aren't clamoring for consistency as much as we'd think.
A member of OSDL ... so what does that make him with respect to OSI?
Some of us know there's perfectly good reasons for the MPL, LGPL, and even the Artistic License. The OSI wants to trim down the licenses to reflect ones that are in actual use, not make them conform to the ideological purity of the FSF.
ah, but I have been trolled. Pardon me, mister Greenblatt, you really pulled that off quite nicely.
2). Hot keys. For the love of god can someone fix hotkeys in gnome! Ok again this is coming from a windows background but bare with me. I was used to the alt key toggling the menu of whatever is the active app. Toggles are good, they are efficient and I believe intuitive. Just like play/pause on almost every player that exists. Ok so when I first used gnome, no alt hotkey toggle. Ok fair enough, I have to actually press alt f, but then I try alt f again to get out of the menu and nothing. I have to press escape to get out of the menu. Ok ignoring that, once I'm in the menu the other hot keys are rendered useless. Go ahead try it, press alt f, and then press alt e to get to say edit. Nothing. This is clunky. Once you are in the menu only the arrow keys navigate the menu's.
This is coming from a windows background? I can't find a single windows app that behaves the way you're expecting. Alt indeed toggles menu navigation on windows (a distinct difference from the mac, and actually this behavior goes all the way back to WordPerfect for DOS, possibly even Lotus 1-2-3). Alt-f pulls up the file menu, but alt-f again does not dismiss it. Alt-f Alt-e acted as if I had not held "alt" for the Alt-e, and activated the "e" accelerator in Mozilla, namely "Send Link". The same behavior held for standard windows apps (explorer.exe was my test here). I bet even WordPerfect for DOS behaves like this. The rationale for this behavior is fairly obvious, as novice users don't have to be told to release the Alt key. Although having the menu accellerators toggle menu activation sounds like a nice idea, the previous behavior gets in the way of this.
> Having to wait a couple of seconds everytime you make a change sucks.
Solution: use jikes instead of javac to recompile your JSPs. It's blazing fast. I know resin makes this dead simple, but it should be doable on tomcat. Heck, resin will even automatically recompile your servlets and EJBs, deployment descriptors and all (if you use xdoclet for them). You hardly ever have to manually rebuild. It's almost as nice as using ASP.NET.