I accidentally brought a 4 inch buck knife onto an NWA flight... dunno how they missed that one, especially after searching my bag and removing my tube of toothpaste that was, *gasp*, not travel sized (but only 1/4 full). Security theater indeed.
Netflix has the subscription angle covered. They've definitely been pumping up their online offerings of late, likely in response to Hulu, iTunes, Amazon VOD, etc.
This is exactly what we want them to do. Virtualize the deprecated, old stuff, and get it out of the main operating system. Move on from the cruft of yore and build in some sweet new fundamentals that break backwards compatibility. We've been crying for them to do this for forever, so let's encourage it. It might add a bit of a support burden, but if it gives us a better product overall, what's the big deal?
Except the majority of the time I want to "Switch user" I really want to just go back to the login screen leaving your applications open for the next time you log in, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
You're right, XP does call the session-destroying option log out. An XP user will still be confused trying to find the equivalent of the "switch user" option, however. If there were a "switch user" menu item that returned you to the login screen, that would be one thing, but I don't see such a thing. All I see is "Log Out", "Suspend", "Hibernate", "Restart", and "Shut Down". Now think like a user: you want to log out so no one can mess with your open programs. What do you pick? Well, if I had no experience, I would first pick "Log Out". Then maybe I'd pick "Suspend", but that shuts the whole machine down. It's certainly not the other two... In reality, my only option is to pick "Lock Screen" as I mentioned, which is in a completely different part of the menu, and is an added pain for someone else when they want to use the computer. It's far from usable.
The whole logging in/out/shutting down process in Ubuntu (Gnome, I guess) needs some major improvements, that's for sure.
If you share a computer with multiple people, what's the most common task you'll be doing in this arena? Well, suspending the session and logging in. Those options are not at all clear in Gnome. Not even close. Log out will close all of my applications (thankfully I know that, but a novice user from Windows will definitely be frustrated). The only thing I can do is "lock screen", but then someone else in my household wants to use the computer, they're first prompted with a password dialog for my user.
The whole damn thing is confusing, I think. Which is weird considering that Gnome is supposed to be all about usability... there are so many usability problems with 9.04 I couldn't even list them all. I don't know whose grand vision Gnome is, but man, someone's gotta take the reign and really look at a lot of this stuff from actual users' perspectives.
I was skeptical about the usefulness of those notifications when Shuttleworth first blogged about them, and after a couple weeks with them, I can safely say they need a lot of improvements.
For one, they are way too obtrusive. They are so frequent (I agree that there is no reason to have every IM, every contact sign-in/out broadcast up on the screen), and there is no way to dismiss them. Yes, I can hover "under" them and they fade away, but sometimes I just want the distraction to go away entirely.
And, that fading behavior is pretty worthless too. It's completely unintuitive. I am always moving my mouse over to the notification to interact with it (dismiss it, or whatever) only to have it completely disappear.
It's such a wasted opportunity too. If I get an IM, wouldn't it be sweet if I could click on the notification to bring up the window? Or, better yet, wouldn't it be sweet if I could send a quick reply in the notification bubble itself? Digsby on windows does this and it's pretty fantastic. But no. Instead I have to hunt through my task bar/docky to find the application providing the notification and click on it in order to respond to the notification. Why can't the notification system make it easier to deal with notifications?
To me, it feels like Shuttleworth thought some growl-like notifications would help spruce up the system and implemented it half-assedly without really considering how people want to use the thing.
I just upgraded, and I gotta say, it's been pretty painful.
Had to reinstall sound drivers and get them working again (involves choosing a few settings here and there) and figure I need to restart to see any changes. Not the end of the world, but quite annoying, but then the fun began.
My System menu lacks a "Quit" option (no kidding).
During shutdown, my system speaker blared very quick (and LOUD) beeps during the entire shutdown process. When the final screen showed up, it changed to a constant tone for a couple seconds before dying away.
Booting up is very slow as it pauses at one place for 10 or more seconds, then the load screen bails. It says something about an IO error. Eventually it boots normally.
The monitor will not go to sleep. Instead the entire screen turns pure white. Thankfully the login box is there, you just can't see it, so it's possible to log in and clear the issue.
There's also been a million smaller gripes here and there, and this is only after an hour or so. Basically, the user experience could use a major amount of work in my estimation:(
Acceleration is a damn good reason to go electric. Electric motors produce consistent torque independent of RPM, and the torque is applied instantaneously. The result is instant acceleration regardless of current speed, and is also why the newer Tesla only need one gear. Such acceleration is useful in many day-to-day driving situations.
Right, but unless I'm mistaken, there is no way to send a screenshot to all of the people in a multi-user chat without initiating individual file transfers. Collaboration between two people seems fairly well supported, especially when you include the above-mentioned whiteboard application, but nothing I've found works when you want to collaborate among three or more people.
I work at a small business with 10 or so employees. Recently, people have been getting more and more used to Instant Messaging as a way to provide non-intrusive information that is more instant than email. Lately we've even taken to setting up chat rooms to bring together three or four stakeholders to have a short conversation about something.
Now, I know XMPP and OpenFire support Multi-User chats, but what about more robust conferencing? The other day, I wanted to send a screenshot of an application I was working on to everyone in the MU chat. From what I could tell, this is not possible in OpenFire, and perhaps not supported in XMPP. Also, it would be great to collaborate on or point to a file that exists in our shared filesystem, which I would think is a fairly common use case, but I could not find a way to do that either.
So, I suppose what I'm wondering is, are there any solutions similar to Openfire but provide more robust conferencing? It'd be killer to be able to toss revisions around and maybe do some whiteboarding or something...
And if not, who wants to help me write an XEP that will address these use cases?;)
I think, speaking from users' standpoint, it's better to think of it as removing the TLD. I suspect that people will identify philly as the "domain name". In that light, Google doesn't need or want google.philly any more than they need or want google.mydomain.com.
Any RoR developer I've ever talked to was just into it because it was "hip".
That's funny, none of the ones I've talked to chose it for that reason, and I haven't even heard of people choosing it for that reason. Also I think it's fair to guess that I've talked to more Rails developers than you have.
In fact, that'd be difficult for me to say either way, because I have not used it.
Which is obvious considering the following paragraphs...
Really, it doesn't take a lot of code to setup an object that can use a DB in an optimized fashion if you just write that code yourself, and it'll be a lot clearer without all the "magic objects" floating around.
Do you have any idea what ActiveRecord, even does? Firstly, it's only slightly slower than doing everything you need it to do by yourself with optimized SQL statements. If you need that level of optimization, you can do it within AR. You don't even need to use an ORM in Rails if you don't want to, you could just write standard classes that execute SQL directly on the database connection, again, if you wanted to.
Your magic objects assertion is definitely born of not having any experience with what you're talking about. The reason that there are so many ORMs around is that they are extremely helpful, and indeed at least half of the benefit of using something like Rails is a direct result of the ORM. You would know that if you spent any time getting to know it before talking about it.
Pointing out that the "heavy lifting" is done outside RoR isn't saying much. If you consider the heavy lifting of the entire Hulu service to be video encoding and streaming, well, obviously that's not done in Rails, that'd be stupid.
Personally, I would consider pushing that many web requests "heavy lifting" in the domain of problems for which Rails is a potential solution.
Re:There you go again!
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Anyone who thinks RubyonRailscan'tscale is as dogmatic in their anti-hype as the original hypers were. The right tool for the right job and all that.
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find your assertion of differentness being the main reason to use Ruby on Rails to be somewhat offensive let alone uninformed, as it suggests that the multitudes of developers using it are doing so not because of technical merits but because they're buying in to some image of differentness. A cursory examination of the typical Rails project and developer should indicate otherwise. Because you don't find it helpful in your work doesn't mean others don't find it helpful or see real benefits from using the system. Perhaps you should be less dismissive -- you'd find yourself with a lot more interesting stuff to discover!
This isn't a nail in any coffin. The fact of the matter is that Twitter's implementation sucked, and sucked hard. It was not designed to scale in the least, and its authors had no idea how to build scalable websites, but instead learned as they went along.
Starling, for example, was Twitter's initial solution to their scaling problems. It was a way for them to offload tasks into a queue to be completed by workers. Pretty common use case, and indeed there are plenty of industry standard tools to do the job, and do it quickly. Twitter, however, decided to implement their own queue for reasons unknown, and guess what, it sucked. Starling was slow as molasses until it was almost entirely rewritten (still in Ruby, mind) somewhat recently.
Not to mention that listening to a Twitter developer blame Ruby for Twitters problems and pimping Scala is unsurprising. Not only is it typical for an engineer to blame his tools for his own failure, but Payne also has a vested financial interest in pimping Scala as the next big thing due to his book deal.
Basically, Twitter blaming Ruby is absurd. The problem lies with the developers and their lack of experience building scalable web infrastructure. You put the same developers in front of PHP and I guarantee you they'd have failed just as hard.
While I agree that that is partially the goal of the desktop version of chrome, let's not forget that Chrome is pretty important for Android, at least right now.
Why is parent getting modded up? It's incorrect. Adobe already has a working, native 64 bit flash player for Linux. Give them some credit where it's due. We spend years complaining about no native 64 bit flash clients, and then Adobe actually releases it (!) and it's solid (!), and still people complain. I don't get it.
I've had no problems whatsoever with the 64bit flash 10 'alpha' Adobe released. It's better in every way than any previous version of flash on Linux, and especially better than NSPluginWrapped 32bit flash. I don't see flash as a problem on 64 bit Linux systems anymore, as 64 bit Linux users are better off that 64 bit Windows users at the moment.
So, my message to Adobe is instead, "Thanks a ton for finally getting native 64bit flash to us". We complained for ages, and they finally listened:)
I've noticed a lot (A LOT) of problems along these lines, and it really gets to me (I suspect that the metrics for a lot of the fonts that are distributed with Ubuntu are completely off)... but how do I categorize and report the bug in such a way that it's useful? Take a screencap of a website that uses a specific font that looks terrible? Is that a bug in Firefox, Cairo, the font itself, Ubuntu, or what?
Actually, while Intel CPUs have very low power draw, the current crop of Intel chipsets are comparatively power hungry. When considering system power draw in its entirety, an AMD system will use less power.
Specifically, the Germans launched Operation Greif, which involved using captured allied vehicles and uniforms behind allied lines. Under the Hague Conventions, executions were allowed, and indeed, 16 people were executed after military trials.
Slashdot Mirror
I accidentally brought a 4 inch buck knife onto an NWA flight... dunno how they missed that one, especially after searching my bag and removing my tube of toothpaste that was, *gasp*, not travel sized (but only 1/4 full). Security theater indeed.
Netflix has the subscription angle covered. They've definitely been pumping up their online offerings of late, likely in response to Hulu, iTunes, Amazon VOD, etc.
This is exactly what we want them to do. Virtualize the deprecated, old stuff, and get it out of the main operating system. Move on from the cruft of yore and build in some sweet new fundamentals that break backwards compatibility. We've been crying for them to do this for forever, so let's encourage it. It might add a bit of a support burden, but if it gives us a better product overall, what's the big deal?
Except the majority of the time I want to "Switch user" I really want to just go back to the login screen leaving your applications open for the next time you log in, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
You're right, XP does call the session-destroying option log out. An XP user will still be confused trying to find the equivalent of the "switch user" option, however. If there were a "switch user" menu item that returned you to the login screen, that would be one thing, but I don't see such a thing. All I see is "Log Out", "Suspend", "Hibernate", "Restart", and "Shut Down". Now think like a user: you want to log out so no one can mess with your open programs. What do you pick? Well, if I had no experience, I would first pick "Log Out". Then maybe I'd pick "Suspend", but that shuts the whole machine down. It's certainly not the other two... In reality, my only option is to pick "Lock Screen" as I mentioned, which is in a completely different part of the menu, and is an added pain for someone else when they want to use the computer. It's far from usable.
The whole logging in/out/shutting down process in Ubuntu (Gnome, I guess) needs some major improvements, that's for sure.
If you share a computer with multiple people, what's the most common task you'll be doing in this arena? Well, suspending the session and logging in. Those options are not at all clear in Gnome. Not even close. Log out will close all of my applications (thankfully I know that, but a novice user from Windows will definitely be frustrated). The only thing I can do is "lock screen", but then someone else in my household wants to use the computer, they're first prompted with a password dialog for my user.
The whole damn thing is confusing, I think. Which is weird considering that Gnome is supposed to be all about usability... there are so many usability problems with 9.04 I couldn't even list them all. I don't know whose grand vision Gnome is, but man, someone's gotta take the reign and really look at a lot of this stuff from actual users' perspectives.
I was skeptical about the usefulness of those notifications when Shuttleworth first blogged about them, and after a couple weeks with them, I can safely say they need a lot of improvements.
For one, they are way too obtrusive. They are so frequent (I agree that there is no reason to have every IM, every contact sign-in/out broadcast up on the screen), and there is no way to dismiss them. Yes, I can hover "under" them and they fade away, but sometimes I just want the distraction to go away entirely.
And, that fading behavior is pretty worthless too. It's completely unintuitive. I am always moving my mouse over to the notification to interact with it (dismiss it, or whatever) only to have it completely disappear.
It's such a wasted opportunity too. If I get an IM, wouldn't it be sweet if I could click on the notification to bring up the window? Or, better yet, wouldn't it be sweet if I could send a quick reply in the notification bubble itself? Digsby on windows does this and it's pretty fantastic. But no. Instead I have to hunt through my task bar/docky to find the application providing the notification and click on it in order to respond to the notification. Why can't the notification system make it easier to deal with notifications?
To me, it feels like Shuttleworth thought some growl-like notifications would help spruce up the system and implemented it half-assedly without really considering how people want to use the thing.
I just upgraded, and I gotta say, it's been pretty painful.
There's also been a million smaller gripes here and there, and this is only after an hour or so. Basically, the user experience could use a major amount of work in my estimation :(
Acceleration is a damn good reason to go electric. Electric motors produce consistent torque independent of RPM, and the torque is applied instantaneously. The result is instant acceleration regardless of current speed, and is also why the newer Tesla only need one gear. Such acceleration is useful in many day-to-day driving situations.
Right, but unless I'm mistaken, there is no way to send a screenshot to all of the people in a multi-user chat without initiating individual file transfers. Collaboration between two people seems fairly well supported, especially when you include the above-mentioned whiteboard application, but nothing I've found works when you want to collaborate among three or more people.
I work at a small business with 10 or so employees. Recently, people have been getting more and more used to Instant Messaging as a way to provide non-intrusive information that is more instant than email. Lately we've even taken to setting up chat rooms to bring together three or four stakeholders to have a short conversation about something.
Now, I know XMPP and OpenFire support Multi-User chats, but what about more robust conferencing? The other day, I wanted to send a screenshot of an application I was working on to everyone in the MU chat. From what I could tell, this is not possible in OpenFire, and perhaps not supported in XMPP. Also, it would be great to collaborate on or point to a file that exists in our shared filesystem, which I would think is a fairly common use case, but I could not find a way to do that either.
So, I suppose what I'm wondering is, are there any solutions similar to Openfire but provide more robust conferencing? It'd be killer to be able to toss revisions around and maybe do some whiteboarding or something...
And if not, who wants to help me write an XEP that will address these use cases? ;)
I think, speaking from users' standpoint, it's better to think of it as removing the TLD. I suspect that people will identify philly as the "domain name". In that light, Google doesn't need or want google.philly any more than they need or want google.mydomain.com.
That's funny, none of the ones I've talked to chose it for that reason, and I haven't even heard of people choosing it for that reason. Also I think it's fair to guess that I've talked to more Rails developers than you have.
Which is obvious considering the following paragraphs...
Do you have any idea what ActiveRecord, even does? Firstly, it's only slightly slower than doing everything you need it to do by yourself with optimized SQL statements. If you need that level of optimization, you can do it within AR. You don't even need to use an ORM in Rails if you don't want to, you could just write standard classes that execute SQL directly on the database connection, again, if you wanted to.
Your magic objects assertion is definitely born of not having any experience with what you're talking about. The reason that there are so many ORMs around is that they are extremely helpful, and indeed at least half of the benefit of using something like Rails is a direct result of the ORM. You would know that if you spent any time getting to know it before talking about it.
Roger, good point.
Actually, Scribd is the closest, and had more traffic than twitter until the recent media frenzy.
Pointing out that the "heavy lifting" is done outside RoR isn't saying much. If you consider the heavy lifting of the entire Hulu service to be video encoding and streaming, well, obviously that's not done in Rails, that'd be stupid.
Personally, I would consider pushing that many web requests "heavy lifting" in the domain of problems for which Rails is a potential solution.
Anyone who thinks Ruby on Rails can't scale is as dogmatic in their anti-hype as the original hypers were. The right tool for the right job and all that.
I find your assertion of differentness being the main reason to use Ruby on Rails to be somewhat offensive let alone uninformed, as it suggests that the multitudes of developers using it are doing so not because of technical merits but because they're buying in to some image of differentness. A cursory examination of the typical Rails project and developer should indicate otherwise. Because you don't find it helpful in your work doesn't mean others don't find it helpful or see real benefits from using the system. Perhaps you should be less dismissive -- you'd find yourself with a lot more interesting stuff to discover!
This isn't a nail in any coffin. The fact of the matter is that Twitter's implementation sucked, and sucked hard. It was not designed to scale in the least, and its authors had no idea how to build scalable websites, but instead learned as they went along.
Starling, for example, was Twitter's initial solution to their scaling problems. It was a way for them to offload tasks into a queue to be completed by workers. Pretty common use case, and indeed there are plenty of industry standard tools to do the job, and do it quickly. Twitter, however, decided to implement their own queue for reasons unknown, and guess what, it sucked. Starling was slow as molasses until it was almost entirely rewritten (still in Ruby, mind) somewhat recently.
Not to mention that listening to a Twitter developer blame Ruby for Twitters problems and pimping Scala is unsurprising. Not only is it typical for an engineer to blame his tools for his own failure, but Payne also has a vested financial interest in pimping Scala as the next big thing due to his book deal.
Basically, Twitter blaming Ruby is absurd. The problem lies with the developers and their lack of experience building scalable web infrastructure. You put the same developers in front of PHP and I guarantee you they'd have failed just as hard.
Submit documents anonymously to Wikileaks, then use Wikileaks documents as a primary source for a report.
While I agree that that is partially the goal of the desktop version of chrome, let's not forget that Chrome is pretty important for Android, at least right now.
Why is parent getting modded up? It's incorrect. Adobe already has a working, native 64 bit flash player for Linux. Give them some credit where it's due. We spend years complaining about no native 64 bit flash clients, and then Adobe actually releases it (!) and it's solid (!), and still people complain. I don't get it.
I've had no problems whatsoever with the 64bit flash 10 'alpha' Adobe released. It's better in every way than any previous version of flash on Linux, and especially better than NSPluginWrapped 32bit flash. I don't see flash as a problem on 64 bit Linux systems anymore, as 64 bit Linux users are better off that 64 bit Windows users at the moment.
So, my message to Adobe is instead, "Thanks a ton for finally getting native 64bit flash to us". We complained for ages, and they finally listened :)
I've noticed a lot (A LOT) of problems along these lines, and it really gets to me (I suspect that the metrics for a lot of the fonts that are distributed with Ubuntu are completely off)... but how do I categorize and report the bug in such a way that it's useful? Take a screencap of a website that uses a specific font that looks terrible? Is that a bug in Firefox, Cairo, the font itself, Ubuntu, or what?
Actually, while Intel CPUs have very low power draw, the current crop of Intel chipsets are comparatively power hungry. When considering system power draw in its entirety, an AMD system will use less power.
Specifically, the Germans launched Operation Greif, which involved using captured allied vehicles and uniforms behind allied lines. Under the Hague Conventions, executions were allowed, and indeed, 16 people were executed after military trials.