I see lots of people are putting down the Marathon trilogy in response to this post. They obviously haven't played it, or just prefer (for reasons God only knows) pure shoot-em-up games. I think the most important thing these folks need to remember was that, at that time (ca. 1995), the WinPC competition was DOOM. Frankly, DOOM sucked. No plot, bad graphics, no realism.
Marathon was a great game, and still is. M2 was so-so (lack of plot hurt, despite an improved game engine), and then M was a strong comeback. I'm not a hard-core gamer by any stretch, so let me say that I'm still working on M and having fun with it. I've seldom ever played on a network...the storyline of the solo game is fun enough for me.
As a sidenote, I played virtually the whole series on a 25 MHz Mac, just fine. I installed it on a 20 MHz Mac too, and it was acceptable after turning off some of the video options.
Man I wish I had that CGI Enterprise model! I'd make myself all kinds of neato scenes and desktop backgrounds. Some people didn't like the scene where Scotty flies Kirk to the new Enterprise and we get a good look at the redesign, but I loved that. Being able to position the Big E any way I wanted it and see any detail would be totally awesome.
Mozilla's getting better in its support for Semitic languages and other r-t-l scripts. I follow the BiDi development a little, because I have an interest in using Hebrew online. This isn't a perfect all-encompassing solution for you, but at least you should be able to surf the.il web by Mozilla 1.0.
Tangentially, support for Hebrew on the Mac is getting better also, from what I hear. Which is good, because the Mac is in a similar (extreme minority) position in Israel. I wonder how OS X is going to affect this.
There are lots of doling-outs of federal money that are of a dubious nature [,...] that somebody could object to. [...] We could start with the Republican and Democratic parties, if you like.
Exactly. This is what needs to be addressed in McCain's campaign finance reform bill. I applaud the Libertarian and Constitution parties for their stand on not accepting matching funds. The gov't is forcing all of us to finance the promotion of ideals we don't agree with, and that's wrong.
I have no sympathy for anyone who voted Green in November, either, since the point was about securing matching funds for next time. None for the Reform voters either, since Buchanan abandoned his principles in order to get to the money.
Rather than being worried that the feds are giving religious organizations money [...]
That's precisely how they'd like you to look at it. The truth is that once you start feeding at the federal trough, it's hard to get away from it. If you start accepting their money, they've already started exerting control over you. If the church starts accepting money, the next thing is the gov't will want to dictate acceptable doctrines to preach, or start wanting to collect taxes from churches. No, thanks. This would set a very dangerous precedent.
If GWB really wants to help religious (or any sort really) charities, cut taxes. If I had more money free to do with as I pleased, I'd do more to help others. I already give 10% of my gross to my church, and still pay taxes besides. With taxes reduced there's just that much more I could give directly to charities without gov't bureaucracy as the middleman.
I'm surprised nobody's hit on this yet. Ditch the x86 boxen and use PPC instead. The power savings could be significant, maybe 50% or better. (Unless you've been using the waste heat from your servers to supplement the office toaster and microwave.) No need to spin the drive up and down from sleep, just use an efficient processor.
Those millions of dollars that the gov't loaned out to the power companies could have been put to better use helping finance this upgrade. At least you'd have a better architecture to show for it, instead of 17 days later with no improvement.
If I had any mod points left, I'd give you one. However, let me take a slightly different POV just for the sake of discussion.
The OS philosophy is different than the MS philosophy. The MS philosophy is that of a traditional (closed) software shop. Consumers expect that when the doors open and a new product is released, that it be "good" and usable in all ways. We don't want to have to keep updating, patching, and fixing it. Isn't that what they were doing behind those closed doors, after all? In the OS world, everything's open for peer review. We know exactly how the process is coming along, and can participate in it. We don't have to wait for "perfection" because we understand that everything is just another step in the process. In fact, waiting for the "finished product" would mean waiting forever, because there's always one more feature or one more performance tweak to get in.
What I'm aiming at here is that the MS's of the world release products, but the OS world releases features. It's simply the difference in the philosophy of development between the two.
It should be wildly amusing to watch as the party of personal responsibility tries to explain government censorship of the internet. [...] I'm sick and tired of the right ranting about small government and then pulling shit like that. The only way to stop it is to vote for personal freedoms.
That's because the Republican party is not truly about small government any more. Both the Dems and Reps are centrists, the only difference is the rhetoric they spew.
If you really want smaller government, you should be voting Libertarian or Constitution. While they differ in philosophy, they agree on this point. If you don't vote for what you believe, you won't get what you want.
I agree with droleary. The MacOS has traditionally used an MDI whereas Windows has used an SDI. Some Windows applications however, like Word, Excel, and Opera, also use MDI, but have the kludgy "window in a window" interface. The MacOS is a better way to implement MDI.
The fact is that Netscape 4.x breaks worse than any other browser on standards-based websites.
I've actually done quite well designing compliant sites that work acceptably in N4. It doesn't pick up all the advanced features, but that's OK. Graceful degradation and all that. The browser that really sucked was IE3. And if N4 really barfs that bad (which I agree it does on sites that make use of advanced CSS) I consider it incentive for the user to get a better browser. I'll build sites for the lowest common denominator - compliant HTML. If the browser can't even render that, IMO it's not my job to cater to it.
As far as Netscape 6? No thanks. I'm currently using Mozilla 0.7 (much improved over N6) and Opera 5. At home I use iCab.
My typical reaction upon hitting a site that rejects my browser is, "Idiots. I guess I'll try their competitor's site." I'm not going to adjust to them. I'm a busy guy. If they want me to use their website, it's their job to make it open and accessible.
I really don't think there's much more to it than writing good XHTML. It should be parseable by anything and displayable by anything, at least in some form that makes sense in the context. If it's not, the designer/developer screwed up.
I still don't understand. Do you want programs to spontaneously quit for no reason? If an app is supposed to quit itself without user intervention (StuffIt Expander comes to mind), it can. I'm glad that user intervention is required.
After a demo of Opera 5 I did for my company, the two Linux-heads have been running the latest betas as their primary browsers. They run into quirks occasionally, but it doesn't cause them much hassle.
And the checking is damn strict: one syntax error and all you see on the phone is 'invalid tag'. It would be nice if some popular browsers did that.
That's why I really hope Mozilla gets the iCab-like feature discussed in bug 6211. And I hope they put it right smack dab obvious in the UI like iCab, too.
In the real (i.e. commercial) world, in most cases it is not worth supporting Netscape or MacOS.
But it takes even more effort to exclude them than it would to simply let them in and see the crap that you couldn't be bothered to clean up.
Of course, we need to develop applications that work on browsers on PCs, WAP phones, STBs and suchlike, but no-one can afford to support every possible platform and configuration.
Get some decent tools, then. You know, one that produce valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and valid CSS2 to go along with it. Ones that don't let you set fixed sizes for fonts. You know, so that the design philosophy of "graceful degradation" would actually be realized, and the web would be accessible to everything. If there was just one decent tool like that to use, it would take no more effort than it currently does. Maybe Mozilla will come with a decent authoring tool. I bet the folks at Opera could do it if they wanted to.
I'd even argue against the.int TLD unless some
enforcable provision is enacted for resolving international disputes over it.
That's how I envisioned it, yes. Perhaps Coca-Cola feels they're too big to be merely coke.com.us so they want to register coke.com.int instead. They'd have to agree to some provision that they can't buy up their name in any ccTLD's because they've got the.int, and they'd have to agree to some external arbitration: disputes wouldn't be settled in US (or any other country's) courts. If they didn't like the sound of that, let them buy coke.com.<cc> for every country they feel they need to. And like you said, they can then fight in the courts in all those countries.
No, you've got it wrong. (IMHO.) The.web TLD is for sites on the web, but about the web. They're meta-web sites. The W3C should be w3.web, not w3.org. Many organizations have sprung up that are centered around the web; they wouldn't exist without it. They're about the web itself.
One could also argue that.web is for sites that don't fit any other existing TLD. That might be valid until we get a better choice of TLD's.
Another good point for having all sites be under a ccTLD, with only one international TLD:.int. Decide on a couple good 2LD's, like.com,.net, and.edu for example. Then the laws can apply where they're supposed to apply, and that's it.
Some will say, "But the web is about transcending national borders!" That's a load of junk. We still live in meatspace, and we still have to deal with those issues.
What? IE3's CSS support sucked rocks, dude. I developed sites in the summer of '97 that IE3 rendered totally plain-jane, but looked pretty swell in then-new NS4.
Targeted advertising isn't all bad, as long as it's targeted correctly.
I agree. I'm glad that Opera 5 allows you to customize the ads sent to you, instead of invading your privacy in an attempt to deduce that information like DoubleClick does. I hate the thought that people I don't know are compiling statistics about me. It happens all the time, I know, but I still don't like it.
That's part of my idea. Well at least for stories, but I suppose you could do the same for posts if you didn't mind the overhead of sorting on that criteria all the time. You'd have to assume that the users would enter the data, and enter it correctly.
Mac OS is a slow interface (easy to learn, hard to get things done really really quickly - no use of scripts or command line, etc)
I've found that using MacOS is faster than using Windows. Windows always seems to have an extra "Please confirm" click before it will do what I want. It always buries things one level deeper than I want, like putting the drives inside "My Computer" rather than on the desktop, and almost requiring that all my personal files go in "My Documents". The stupid file browser keeps forgetting where I was the last time I used it which forces me to navigate it all over again. I better stop before I start flaming Windows too badly. I haven't used *n*x as a desktop OS much, so I can't compare with that. I do like virtual desktops...IMO it's a killer feature.
As far as scripting goes, check out Applescript. It's there, even if most people don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that's it. Stories from non-"Articles" categories can still make the front page. I think it's just Linux-bias on part of the /. editors.
Of course, if the system I mention in my sig were implemented, we wouldn't have this much of a problem.
I see lots of people are putting down the Marathon trilogy in response to this post. They obviously haven't played it, or just prefer (for reasons God only knows) pure shoot-em-up games. I think the most important thing these folks need to remember was that, at that time (ca. 1995), the WinPC competition was DOOM. Frankly, DOOM sucked. No plot, bad graphics, no realism.
Marathon was a great game, and still is. M2 was so-so (lack of plot hurt, despite an improved game engine), and then M was a strong comeback. I'm not a hard-core gamer by any stretch, so let me say that I'm still working on M and having fun with it. I've seldom ever played on a network...the storyline of the solo game is fun enough for me.
As a sidenote, I played virtually the whole series on a 25 MHz Mac, just fine. I installed it on a 20 MHz Mac too, and it was acceptable after turning off some of the video options.
Man I wish I had that CGI Enterprise model! I'd make myself all kinds of neato scenes and desktop backgrounds. Some people didn't like the scene where Scotty flies Kirk to the new Enterprise and we get a good look at the redesign, but I loved that. Being able to position the Big E any way I wanted it and see any detail would be totally awesome.
Mozilla's getting better in its support for Semitic languages and other r-t-l scripts. I follow the BiDi development a little, because I have an interest in using Hebrew online. This isn't a perfect all-encompassing solution for you, but at least you should be able to surf the .il web by Mozilla 1.0.
Tangentially, support for Hebrew on the Mac is getting better also, from what I hear. Which is good, because the Mac is in a similar (extreme minority) position in Israel. I wonder how OS X is going to affect this.
Exactly. This is what needs to be addressed in McCain's campaign finance reform bill. I applaud the Libertarian and Constitution parties for their stand on not accepting matching funds. The gov't is forcing all of us to finance the promotion of ideals we don't agree with, and that's wrong.
I have no sympathy for anyone who voted Green in November, either, since the point was about securing matching funds for next time. None for the Reform voters either, since Buchanan abandoned his principles in order to get to the money.
That's precisely how they'd like you to look at it. The truth is that once you start feeding at the federal trough, it's hard to get away from it. If you start accepting their money, they've already started exerting control over you. If the church starts accepting money, the next thing is the gov't will want to dictate acceptable doctrines to preach, or start wanting to collect taxes from churches. No, thanks. This would set a very dangerous precedent.
If GWB really wants to help religious (or any sort really) charities, cut taxes. If I had more money free to do with as I pleased, I'd do more to help others. I already give 10% of my gross to my church, and still pay taxes besides. With taxes reduced there's just that much more I could give directly to charities without gov't bureaucracy as the middleman.
Personally, I'd be more inclined toward the American Center for Law and Justice than the ACLU.
I'm surprised nobody's hit on this yet. Ditch the x86 boxen and use PPC instead. The power savings could be significant, maybe 50% or better. (Unless you've been using the waste heat from your servers to supplement the office toaster and microwave.) No need to spin the drive up and down from sleep, just use an efficient processor.
Those millions of dollars that the gov't loaned out to the power companies could have been put to better use helping finance this upgrade. At least you'd have a better architecture to show for it, instead of 17 days later with no improvement.
for the humor-impaired.
If I had any mod points left, I'd give you one. However, let me take a slightly different POV just for the sake of discussion.
The OS philosophy is different than the MS philosophy. The MS philosophy is that of a traditional (closed) software shop. Consumers expect that when the doors open and a new product is released, that it be "good" and usable in all ways. We don't want to have to keep updating, patching, and fixing it. Isn't that what they were doing behind those closed doors, after all? In the OS world, everything's open for peer review. We know exactly how the process is coming along, and can participate in it. We don't have to wait for "perfection" because we understand that everything is just another step in the process. In fact, waiting for the "finished product" would mean waiting forever, because there's always one more feature or one more performance tweak to get in.
What I'm aiming at here is that the MS's of the world release products, but the OS world releases features. It's simply the difference in the philosophy of development between the two.
That's because the Republican party is not truly about small government any more. Both the Dems and Reps are centrists, the only difference is the rhetoric they spew.
If you really want smaller government, you should be voting Libertarian or Constitution. While they differ in philosophy, they agree on this point. If you don't vote for what you believe, you won't get what you want.
I agree with droleary. The MacOS has traditionally used an MDI whereas Windows has used an SDI. Some Windows applications however, like Word, Excel, and Opera, also use MDI, but have the kludgy "window in a window" interface. The MacOS is a better way to implement MDI.
I've actually done quite well designing compliant sites that work acceptably in N4. It doesn't pick up all the advanced features, but that's OK. Graceful degradation and all that. The browser that really sucked was IE3. And if N4 really barfs that bad (which I agree it does on sites that make use of advanced CSS) I consider it incentive for the user to get a better browser. I'll build sites for the lowest common denominator - compliant HTML. If the browser can't even render that, IMO it's not my job to cater to it.
As far as Netscape 6? No thanks. I'm currently using Mozilla 0.7 (much improved over N6) and Opera 5. At home I use iCab.
Both browsers? Are there only two?
My typical reaction upon hitting a site that rejects my browser is, "Idiots. I guess I'll try their competitor's site." I'm not going to adjust to them. I'm a busy guy. If they want me to use their website, it's their job to make it open and accessible.
I really don't think there's much more to it than writing good XHTML. It should be parseable by anything and displayable by anything, at least in some form that makes sense in the context. If it's not, the designer/developer screwed up.
I still don't understand. Do you want programs to spontaneously quit for no reason? If an app is supposed to quit itself without user intervention (StuffIt Expander comes to mind), it can. I'm glad that user intervention is required.
After a demo of Opera 5 I did for my company, the two Linux-heads have been running the latest betas as their primary browsers. They run into quirks occasionally, but it doesn't cause them much hassle.
That's why I really hope Mozilla gets the iCab-like feature discussed in bug 6211. And I hope they put it right smack dab obvious in the UI like iCab, too.
But it takes even more effort to exclude them than it would to simply let them in and see the crap that you couldn't be bothered to clean up.
Get some decent tools, then. You know, one that produce valid HTML 4.01 Strict, and valid CSS2 to go along with it. Ones that don't let you set fixed sizes for fonts. You know, so that the design philosophy of "graceful degradation" would actually be realized, and the web would be accessible to everything. If there was just one decent tool like that to use, it would take no more effort than it currently does. Maybe Mozilla will come with a decent authoring tool. I bet the folks at Opera could do it if they wanted to.
That's how I envisioned it, yes. Perhaps Coca-Cola feels they're too big to be merely coke.com.us so they want to register coke.com.int instead. They'd have to agree to some provision that they can't buy up their name in any ccTLD's because they've got the .int, and they'd have to agree to some external arbitration: disputes wouldn't be settled in US (or any other country's) courts. If they didn't like the sound of that, let them buy coke.com.<cc> for every country they feel they need to. And like you said, they can then fight in the courts in all those countries.
No, you've got it wrong. (IMHO.) The .web TLD is for sites on the web, but about the web. They're meta-web sites. The W3C should be w3.web, not w3.org. Many organizations have sprung up that are centered around the web; they wouldn't exist without it. They're about the web itself.
One could also argue that .web is for sites that don't fit any other existing TLD. That might be valid until we get a better choice of TLD's.
Another good point for having all sites be under a ccTLD, with only one international TLD: .int. Decide on a couple good 2LD's, like .com, .net, and .edu for example. Then the laws can apply where they're supposed to apply, and that's it.
Some will say, "But the web is about transcending national borders!" That's a load of junk. We still live in meatspace, and we still have to deal with those issues.
What? IE3's CSS support sucked rocks, dude. I developed sites in the summer of '97 that IE3 rendered totally plain-jane, but looked pretty swell in then-new NS4.
I agree. I'm glad that Opera 5 allows you to customize the ads sent to you, instead of invading your privacy in an attempt to deduce that information like DoubleClick does. I hate the thought that people I don't know are compiling statistics about me. It happens all the time, I know, but I still don't like it.
That's part of my idea. Well at least for stories, but I suppose you could do the same for posts if you didn't mind the overhead of sorting on that criteria all the time. You'd have to assume that the users would enter the data, and enter it correctly.
ROFL! Intel hardware superior to PPC??? Micros~1 software superior to anything??? You are such a kidder!
I have to agree with chrischow and slashbrent. Some moderators will up anything that disses Apple.
I've found that using MacOS is faster than using Windows. Windows always seems to have an extra "Please confirm" click before it will do what I want. It always buries things one level deeper than I want, like putting the drives inside "My Computer" rather than on the desktop, and almost requiring that all my personal files go in "My Documents". The stupid file browser keeps forgetting where I was the last time I used it which forces me to navigate it all over again. I better stop before I start flaming Windows too badly. I haven't used *n*x as a desktop OS much, so I can't compare with that. I do like virtual desktops...IMO it's a killer feature.
As far as scripting goes, check out Applescript. It's there, even if most people don't use it.