A list of perhaps lesser-known applications for PCs:
Productivity
- Dirkey - Free small utility that enables you to place invisible bookmarks on folders and go back to these bookmarked folders with shortcut key. It runs on startup and can be set to be invisible in your system tray. Works in Explorer and also Open/Save dialogue windows.
- ObjectDock - Free OSX-style dock for your PC!
- Windows Blinds - Skin your OS
- MS Alt-tab Powertoy - Alt-tab across open applications with an thumbnail preview of the open application.
Does the Udder-to-Bug ratio increase the chance of contracting cowpox, and, was the patch written with it in 1798 to prevent the virus smallpox a cheap hack of code?
True, but it is precisely because of the large capacity of iPods that they are popular. I had an iPaq 3800 series for 3 years, and used it to listen to MP3s, and play [short] videos on. I now have an iPod and am selling the iPaq in an online auction. I miss the ability to input text into the device, but for my personal situation I decided the iPaq wasn't the best answer. Don't underestimate what the freedom of giving people enormous amounts of space has on how and what they use their device for, and how they feel about their purchase.
"but WiFi, Bluetooth, Web browsing; or interface to your GPS, remote-control just about any IR device, print, use Word, Excel, read Ebooks, receive streamed video from your home server.... and of course, Solitaire."
Granted, the lack of wireless connectivity in all iPods is glaringly absent. Expect the next generation iPods to be connectable given this obvious feature hole. Pocket Word was useful, but you can read text with an iPod, copy video (albeit not as cool as streaming it), and my iPod does have Solitaire on it:)
"If you're not flush with extra cash, why get a less-capable device for more money?"
It's a matter of different strokes for different folks. If one wants a device to listen to music, podcasts and watch video on, then why pay good money for something you need to memory-manage constantly? That would be a fair question to ask people who buy a PDA to do what an iPod does.
The idea that developing in Rails is 'code generation' is a common misconception amongst/.ers - in fact the last time a Rails article was posted sometime last week I had to do battle with a number of people that thought this.
I hope that the number of highly-modded responses which have had the chance to clarify what code generation is in Rails, and what its purposes are within the development cycle, will allay some of the FUD. When I began learning Rails I was under no impression that code would be generated beyond the scaffold, and that the scaffold was only there to get some meaningful database interaction happening right away. This tutorial which I began learning Rails from explained it clearly:
Of course, these actions and views are very plain--not the sort of thing you'd want users to see (unless they are total geeks). The good news is that we can leave the scaffolding in place and slowly, one at a time, provide our own versions of the actions and views. Each time you create one of the actions or views it will override the scaffold's version. When you're done, simply remove the scaffold statement from the controller.
The way I imagine the misinformation formed is from certain people hearing the sentiment of "faster development in Rails" and jumping to the conclusion that there must be some sort of cheat involved. Watching the video demos probably fueled this, as the demos are showing Rails off, and the scaffolding is a selling point.
Some people navigate quite well in 3D, sure, but try handing a copy of blender (or any other modeling software) to someone and get them to navigate in 3D
the problem is, as you pointed out, that for most people their main means of navigation around a graphical interface is with their mouse on a two-dimensional surface. this translation of 2D movement to 3D interface is what can be counter-intuitive, not the hypothetical 3D interface itself.
let me put it to you this way, we navigate constantly in the real world through 3D, and never through 2D, so navigating a 3D interface using the conventions of our real world movement would be very intuitive i imagine. what needs to change in order for real progress to be made in the field of 3D interface design and concepts is for the tools we would use to interact with it to allow 3D movement. i'd like to one day be able to edit video and order files on my computer by motioning, grabbing and pointing with my hands, no gloves either.
2D is counter-intuitive to navigate, as anyone who has seen someone attempt to use a mouse and read the interface conventions we have all learnt to a seamless level for the first time will know. we just forget that once we've become experts in using it.
So basically, you mean to say, we are evolved from apes, and there are some apes that didn't evolve, so they are still around. Many species of apes, really.
yeah, basically.
but we never diverged into seperate population groups, and every single population group (dispersed throughout Africa) simultaneously evolved (with variations of a thousand years here or there)...... then as we moved out of Africa, we had no splinter groups, all over the world... no lost chains
well actually there are plenty of bones to suggest that our species' family tree was not linear at all, and quite messy really with possibly many branches existing at the same time. digs and new finds have suggested that contrary to the perception our growth was one variation after the other, than many variations existed at the same time, and perhaps coexisted. now, on the fact that there is only one variation of human today that makes finding out how the variations either merged, or died off, a fascinating journey.
the question of why variations of apes haven't evolved since the breakoff group that initially formed the family tree of humans, is a very good one. but is only baffling under the assumption that evolution is a constant and steady process with no speeding ups nor slowings down, which of course is clearly not the case given the sequences suggested in the fossil record. whatever evolution is, it appears to happen sporadically, but it does appear to happen (and be happening). i feel like i'm in a shampoo ad.
"If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes and not more people?"
following that line of logic your question should ultimately be: "if everything evolved from primitive life then how is it that there has been more than one species of animal in existence at any one time?". the answer is probably easily understood if you bring to mind the fact that children descend from, in our case, 2 animals and not the entire species.
So, you are saying that RoR is only suitable for internet projects?
no, i was replying to your opinion about (and i get to quote another good line) "socially impacting fluffy websites" being not of the "real world".
But don't try to tell me with a straight face that it is the cure all for corporate webapp development.
i didn't. ahem.. read the post and you'll see i never did. instead, i did reply "fair enough".
...RoR crowd goes swaggering down the middle of the street stark naked yelling about their new clothes
well this is interesting, because going through the comments posted to this slashdot article, or at least, the ones moderators have given points to, it's hard to say this has happened here. what has happened is instead what i would consider a rails backlash to the article. most of the comments, many FUD, many valid, are not particularly nude, nor swaggering. slashdot has hardly be thronged by hordes of rails sympathisers. in this case i believe you to be part of any unruly mob, if an unruly mob has indeed formed.
I disagree with the Arial/Helvetica crowd: Serifs make large quantities of text more readable.
readable text is a major issue for people with dyslexia and so it's interesting to read the many sites that have guidelines for dyslexic-friendly text content when discussing 'readability', since it seems a fairly precedented way of judging this. they all say to use sans-serif (arial/helvetic/verdana/tahoma/trebuchet etc.) fonts.
So what is it a fit for? Folks push it as a J2EE killer but under pressure start saying it's more suitable for things like "Name a Star for your Pet" website. [...] No, I don't consider websites that help you organize your class reunion or camping trip to be the real world.
perhaps these comments weren't meant to be analysed or taken seriously, but if your position is that community-minded sites facilitating an exchange of information are not a real world use of the internet then that seems at odds with, well, the internet. ask yourself why you are compelled to keep visiting a website that appears to fall into your category of not being of the 'real world' to post your opinion to. then probably visit this link to compare your ideas with some others.
When I see a company with > 50 million USD in revenue using it for mission critical apps, I'll sit up and pay attention. Until then, it seems best suited for "10 Things To Do Before I Die" type websites
fair enough. then sit on the fence rather than slinging mud.
I love it's lack of "funny" characters (for the most part).
if you're referring to a lack of odd people in the ruby community you'll be horrified to know there's many.
thanks for your post, all valid opinion.. i just suspect you're one of these highly intelligent programmers that trip over some minor features you find annoying and then blow your frustrations out of perspective.
(anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores)
granted some of the method names are overly verbose! i've thought that often when looking through the APIs and docs. but that criticism needs to be tempered by pointing out the verbose methods are used very infrequently. 99% of the methods i use are small and concise, like: truncate(), h(), link_to(), redirect() etc.
The biggest annoyance was automated code generation
see this i'm finding hard to understand. when i want to start a new model and controller, i type a line in a prompt, and it makes the few files i need to begin. 'begin' being the operative word. there endeth the code generation.
my method of automated code generation is copy and paste.
If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database
i've NEVER experienced this. never never never. and i have no idea what you're talking about. one of the real clinchers of rails for me is its use of ActionRecord to interface with the database. i modify my database constantly without breaking any code. the only case i can think of when what you describe could happen is if i were to rename a column in the database, then my row.name object wouldn't match. but i would consider a broken website due to this the fault of a stupid developer.
to be able to connect to my database, retrieve a record and update it, in 1 line in some cases, becomes rather neccessary for a developer once they've tried it.
Mydb.update(id,:name => 'John')
will do all of these. i take a wee dance on the grave of large-scale php development everytime i use that.
But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails
and here is where i'm convinced that you are what i think you are (an intelligent programmer who's taken big issue over minor irritations). large scale use of rails is very easy to find if you visit the rails site . It's also very easy to find a larger list, and a list of interesting apps to boot. granted, not moving pictures, but.. oh go away.
So if this is standard practise, then why not give 4 weeks notice next time and get paid for 4 weeks without working? It seems to me the only reason they paid out 2 weeks was because that was the period of notice that was given. Heck, why not try 6 weeks notice?
I'm curious what anyone out there who would consider themselves to be pretty expert at optimising for search engines thinks of this article. Are there some things that have been left out? Have some things been overplayed? It's alright if you don't want to actually disclose any secrets you know that were not mentioned, but if you could just signal how complete the article is.
Granted, for a number of years meta keywords have been only vaguely relevant for gaining a good search engine ranking. They're only one thing amongst many that are necessary to do in order to gain the best ranking possible, and definately down the list in terms of the most effective. Anyone reading through the linked article, or already familiar with search engine optimisation methods, will have come to the conclusion that ultimately (besides the notorious google-bomb method) the best way to have your site rank highly is to make an important and worthy site! So sophisticated are the algorithms used to judge search rankings.
That's not to say keywords aren't important, it's just where they're placed that will make the difference. Try placing keywords in the 'alt' text of images, in links between pages, in-the-URLs.html of your site. Even then, I've told some customers that their expectation of getting their site shelved in 1st place in Google are completely unrealistic unless they are indeed something of an authority on the subject searched for. And this is the way it should be! Being someone who uses Google everyday to find content, I'm glad optimisation has its limits.
Wow a life-sized version of a HotWheels car I owned as a kid, one that changed from red when warmed, to white when cooled. So I left it in the fridge for a few days and it never reverted back to red ever again.
So don't place your ion bombarded car in your fridge (for too long).
Re:I think I buy into this "ajax" thing
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 1
Sometimes when I'm at a web page that uses Ajax, I'm expecting the page to refresh, or do something else when I, say, click on button. Sometimes you don't even notice stuff happening, and you're sitting there waiting for some page to load, that is never going to load.
This is actually a very good point that you raise about Ajax, that has less to do with the failings of the technologies than it does way some people employ them. Clicking an Ajax link won't cause the browser to refresh, and since most users look to the top-right corner of their browser, or their status bar, for visual feedback on the connection and retrieval status of the result of their mouse click, this can leave an Ajax-enabled site feeling broken.
The best solution is for web developers and designers to provide some simple feedback of their own that could be a simple small animated gif of some kind, perhaps with some text saying 'loading...' 'updating...' or 'sending...' nearby that is switched on when a link is clicked.
http://script.aculo.us/ has a JavaScript library that can be used with links to switch on or off content in <div> or <span> tags with mouse clicks, which works very well with an Ajax-enabled site.
Bird flu: Doesn't exist at the moment in a form that can be passed from human to human. The fear is the virus will mutate to gain this ability.
Poodles: Weren't around at the beginning of time, and now they are. Most other breeds of dogs we see on the street are the same. Many of the varieties of flowers in your garden likewise came into existance in recordable history, some within the past 50 years.
Can I reduce the argument against evolution to something as flippant as likening it to refuting the existance of poodles?
Release them? As part of a coordinated tag and release programme I assume. We'll soon be seeing poor tagged IT professionals with broken wings and tracking bands for anklets arriving in flocks all round the country, perhaps stopping at a workplace near you. A pity.
If you take the total number of people in the world who are interested in and capable of doing OSS programming, and divide by the number of OSS projects, the result is a number close to 1. This is why most OSS projects have a single author. Imagining that "only a couple of people" have the privileges to fix a bug is actually optimistic -- the most likely case is that only one person is interested.
If you took the total number of people who contribute to the Wikipedia, and divide by the total number of Wikipedia articles, you get a result much less than 1--0.6. So, how does 0.6 of a person write an article? They don't. Groups of people work on articles not as individuals, but as a community. And when they have added their bit to that article, they move to another one.
Slashdot Mirror
Productivity
- Dirkey - Free small utility that enables you to place invisible bookmarks on folders and go back to these bookmarked folders with shortcut key. It runs on startup and can be set to be invisible in your system tray. Works in Explorer and also Open/Save dialogue windows.
- ObjectDock - Free OSX-style dock for your PC!
- Windows Blinds - Skin your OS
- MS Alt-tab Powertoy - Alt-tab across open applications with an thumbnail preview of the open application.
Graphics
- Paint.Net - Free image editing program
Utilities (spam, anti-virus, FTP etc)
- Avast Antivirus - Free and better than AVG
Does the Udder-to-Bug ratio increase the chance of contracting cowpox, and, was the patch written with it in 1798 to prevent the virus smallpox a cheap hack of code?
Granted, the lack of wireless connectivity in all iPods is glaringly absent. Expect the next generation iPods to be connectable given this obvious feature hole. Pocket Word was useful, but you can read text with an iPod, copy video (albeit not as cool as streaming it), and my iPod does have Solitaire on it :)
It's a matter of different strokes for different folks. If one wants a device to listen to music, podcasts and watch video on, then why pay good money for something you need to memory-manage constantly? That would be a fair question to ask people who buy a PDA to do what an iPod does.Some things that aren't inluded in that list:
- Convert large text files and into notes for use on iPod
- Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software
- Use your iPod Photo or Nano as a Yahoo! Maps directions viewer
- How-To: Get TV shows off of your TiVo and onto your iPod
And that's just from clicking through del.icio.us search results for iPod a few times.I hope that the number of highly-modded responses which have had the chance to clarify what code generation is in Rails, and what its purposes are within the development cycle, will allay some of the FUD. When I began learning Rails I was under no impression that code would be generated beyond the scaffold, and that the scaffold was only there to get some meaningful database interaction happening right away. This tutorial which I began learning Rails from explained it clearly:
Of course, these actions and views are very plain--not the sort of thing you'd want users to see (unless they are total geeks). The good news is that we can leave the scaffolding in place and slowly, one at a time, provide our own versions of the actions and views. Each time you create one of the actions or views it will override the scaffold's version. When you're done, simply remove the scaffold statement from the controller.
The way I imagine the misinformation formed is from certain people hearing the sentiment of "faster development in Rails" and jumping to the conclusion that there must be some sort of cheat involved. Watching the video demos probably fueled this, as the demos are showing Rails off, and the scaffolding is a selling point.
let me put it to you this way, we navigate constantly in the real world through 3D, and never through 2D, so navigating a 3D interface using the conventions of our real world movement would be very intuitive i imagine. what needs to change in order for real progress to be made in the field of 3D interface design and concepts is for the tools we would use to interact with it to allow 3D movement. i'd like to one day be able to edit video and order files on my computer by motioning, grabbing and pointing with my hands, no gloves either.
2D is counter-intuitive to navigate, as anyone who has seen someone attempt to use a mouse and read the interface conventions we have all learnt to a seamless level for the first time will know. we just forget that once we've become experts in using it.
yeah, basically.
but we never diverged into seperate population groups, and every single population group (dispersed throughout Africa) simultaneously evolved (with variations of a thousand years here or there)... ... then as we moved out of Africa, we had no splinter groups, all over the world... no lost chains
well actually there are plenty of bones to suggest that our species' family tree was not linear at all, and quite messy really with possibly many branches existing at the same time. digs and new finds have suggested that contrary to the perception our growth was one variation after the other, than many variations existed at the same time, and perhaps coexisted. now, on the fact that there is only one variation of human today that makes finding out how the variations either merged, or died off, a fascinating journey.
the question of why variations of apes haven't evolved since the breakoff group that initially formed the family tree of humans, is a very good one. but is only baffling under the assumption that evolution is a constant and steady process with no speeding ups nor slowings down, which of course is clearly not the case given the sequences suggested in the fossil record. whatever evolution is, it appears to happen sporadically, but it does appear to happen (and be happening). i feel like i'm in a shampoo ad.
"If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes and not more people?"
following that line of logic your question should ultimately be: "if everything evolved from primitive life then how is it that there has been more than one species of animal in existence at any one time?". the answer is probably easily understood if you bring to mind the fact that children descend from, in our case, 2 animals and not the entire species.
yeah yeah, mark me down as off-topic.
why? you anglophonic baffoon you.
would you be happy with an icon with equivalent letters for R,S, and S written in cyrillic, or greek?
is this slashdot's version of "embrace, extend, extinguish"? :)
no, i was replying to your opinion about (and i get to quote another good line) "socially impacting fluffy websites" being not of the "real world".
But don't try to tell me with a straight face that it is the cure all for corporate webapp development.
i didn't. ahem .. read the post and you'll see i never did. instead, i did reply "fair enough".
well this is interesting, because going through the comments posted to this slashdot article, or at least, the ones moderators have given points to, it's hard to say this has happened here. what has happened is instead what i would consider a rails backlash to the article. most of the comments, many FUD, many valid, are not particularly nude, nor swaggering. slashdot has hardly be thronged by hordes of rails sympathisers. in this case i believe you to be part of any unruly mob, if an unruly mob has indeed formed.
readable text is a major issue for people with dyslexia and so it's interesting to read the many sites that have guidelines for dyslexic-friendly text content when discussing 'readability', since it seems a fairly precedented way of judging this. they all say to use sans-serif (arial/helvetic/verdana/tahoma/trebuchet etc.) fonts.
perhaps these comments weren't meant to be analysed or taken seriously, but if your position is that community-minded sites facilitating an exchange of information are not a real world use of the internet then that seems at odds with, well, the internet. ask yourself why you are compelled to keep visiting a website that appears to fall into your category of not being of the 'real world' to post your opinion to. then probably visit this link to compare your ideas with some others.
When I see a company with > 50 million USD in revenue using it for mission critical apps, I'll sit up and pay attention. Until then, it seems best suited for "10 Things To Do Before I Die" type websites
fair enough. then sit on the fence rather than slinging mud.
here's one place to start that i found useful
another method is to go to the rails website, linked in the slashdot article, and click the very large 'get better' link.
</holds hand>
if you're referring to a lack of odd people in the ruby community you'll be horrified to know there's many.
thanks for your post, all valid opinion .. i just suspect you're one of these highly intelligent programmers that trip over some minor features you find annoying and then blow your frustrations out of perspective.
(anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores)
granted some of the method names are overly verbose! i've thought that often when looking through the APIs and docs. but that criticism needs to be tempered by pointing out the verbose methods are used very infrequently. 99% of the methods i use are small and concise, like: truncate(), h(), link_to(), redirect() etc.
The biggest annoyance was automated code generation
see this i'm finding hard to understand. when i want to start a new model and controller, i type a line in a prompt, and it makes the few files i need to begin. 'begin' being the operative word. there endeth the code generation.
my method of automated code generation is copy and paste.
If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database
i've NEVER experienced this. never never never. and i have no idea what you're talking about. one of the real clinchers of rails for me is its use of ActionRecord to interface with the database. i modify my database constantly without breaking any code. the only case i can think of when what you describe could happen is if i were to rename a column in the database, then my row.name object wouldn't match. but i would consider a broken website due to this the fault of a stupid developer.
to be able to connect to my database, retrieve a record and update it, in 1 line in some cases, becomes rather neccessary for a developer once they've tried it.
will do all of these. i take a wee dance on the grave of large-scale php development everytime i use that.But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails
and here is where i'm convinced that you are what i think you are (an intelligent programmer who's taken big issue over minor irritations). large scale use of rails is very easy to find if you visit the rails site . It's also very easy to find a larger list, and a list of interesting apps to boot. granted, not moving pictures, but .. oh go away.
So if this is standard practise, then why not give 4 weeks notice next time and get paid for 4 weeks without working? It seems to me the only reason they paid out 2 weeks was because that was the period of notice that was given. Heck, why not try 6 weeks notice?
I'm curious what anyone out there who would consider themselves to be pretty expert at optimising for search engines thinks of this article. Are there some things that have been left out? Have some things been overplayed? It's alright if you don't want to actually disclose any secrets you know that were not mentioned, but if you could just signal how complete the article is.
That's not to say keywords aren't important, it's just where they're placed that will make the difference. Try placing keywords in the 'alt' text of images, in links between pages, in-the-URLs.html of your site. Even then, I've told some customers that their expectation of getting their site shelved in 1st place in Google are completely unrealistic unless they are indeed something of an authority on the subject searched for. And this is the way it should be! Being someone who uses Google everyday to find content, I'm glad optimisation has its limits.
: ) When did Fox ever report something that was true?
Wow a life-sized version of a HotWheels car I owned as a kid, one that changed from red when warmed, to white when cooled. So I left it in the fridge for a few days and it never reverted back to red ever again.
So don't place your ion bombarded car in your fridge (for too long).
This is actually a very good point that you raise about Ajax, that has less to do with the failings of the technologies than it does way some people employ them. Clicking an Ajax link won't cause the browser to refresh, and since most users look to the top-right corner of their browser, or their status bar, for visual feedback on the connection and retrieval status of the result of their mouse click, this can leave an Ajax-enabled site feeling broken.
The best solution is for web developers and designers to provide some simple feedback of their own that could be a simple small animated gif of some kind, perhaps with some text saying 'loading...' 'updating...' or 'sending...' nearby that is switched on when a link is clicked.
http://script.aculo.us/ has a JavaScript library that can be used with links to switch on or off content in <div> or <span> tags with mouse clicks, which works very well with an Ajax-enabled site.
Bird flu: Doesn't exist at the moment in a form that can be passed from human to human. The fear is the virus will mutate to gain this ability.
Poodles: Weren't around at the beginning of time, and now they are. Most other breeds of dogs we see on the street are the same. Many of the varieties of flowers in your garden likewise came into existance in recordable history, some within the past 50 years.
Can I reduce the argument against evolution to something as flippant as likening it to refuting the existance of poodles?
On ID theory, it seems like very little new ground is uncovered than was in William Paley's teleological Watchmaker analogy http://members.aol.com/plweiss1/paley.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy of 1802, and of William Derham's of 1696.
Release them? As part of a coordinated tag and release programme I assume. We'll soon be seeing poor tagged IT professionals with broken wings and tracking bands for anklets arriving in flocks all round the country, perhaps stopping at a workplace near you. A pity.
I resent that comment! I'll have you know that we use styrofoam cups.
If you took the total number of people who contribute to the Wikipedia, and divide by the total number of Wikipedia articles, you get a result much less than 1--0.6. So, how does 0.6 of a person write an article? They don't. Groups of people work on articles not as individuals, but as a community. And when they have added their bit to that article, they move to another one.