Wow thanks for the explanation, so now.43's (very) broken PDF export makes total sense. I need to upgrade to.44 because emailing rasterized-then-PDFed documents isn't an ideal situation. I'll definitely have to check out the layer palette as well. =) Thanks for the info. One thing that frustrated me in the interface is that I always, ALWAYS forget where to set opacity, because I'm still coming at it from an Adobe CS frame of mind, and Gimp works in a similar way when it comes to layers. I just checked out the roadmap on inkscape.org and it looks like you folks have a really ambitious plan. I like Inkscape a lot (despite its misgivings compared to Illustrator) and use it quite a bit, but where it's fallen short, it's been primarily in layer handling/capability and in the export facilities.
What I want to know is this-- is Gundotra gonna get paid for the year that he's outta work?
Based on the position that he left at Microsoft, I think it's safe to presume that he can go quite a few years without working, without having to put a crimp in his lifestyle.
Question (no offense intended): why waste a mod point modding posts down, even grammar nazis or trolls, when there are so many great posts that need to be modded up to insighful or interesting to make the threshold settings actually useful?
(Again no offense intended, I am genuinely curious why people do this)
Aside from really racist crap I don't see the point of modding trolls down (or even just humor that some people don't find funny).
Well, how do you account for unknowns in your schedule? Here's a hint: listing all the unknowns is not possible because you don't know what you don't know. You also NEED to pad it for the inevitable feature creep (e.g., the GUI in the actual implementation doesn't work so well when put in front of x type of user, even THOUGH the PHB absolutely insisted that a deep tree control was a requirement against all advice from EVERYONE else). How do you account for a Microsoft class not working as documented, requiring you to spend weeks writing your own library to do the same thing CORRECTLY, or having to wrestle with Microsoft's memory manager eating up CPU time by context switching too much, and depending on other third-party libraries is unacceptable per PHB requirements, so you need to write your own?
A schedule is arrived at by putting on rose-coloured glasses saying "Oh sure, this will take me 12 hours, that will take me two, and that will take me about 80" when in reality that is pending:
- NOT spending all your time in meetings
- NOT having to mentor others
- NOT having to wait days for Microsoft support to come back and say "oh yeah, that's definitely a bug in the class, and there is no redistributable hotfix. However we will reverse the charge for this incident."
- NOT having to wait weeks for customer input
- performance will be stellar when you load test it
- NOT being told "Oh and by the way, client X needs Windows 98 support, and because they promised us $7.1mil we need to give it to them."
Multiplying your schedule by 2.5 is perfectly reasonable because as they say "shit happens." Welcome to the real world. The choices are to either allow for a reasonable schedule, scale back features, or ship a shoddy product. Unfortunately too many companies do the latter lately. Microsoft is doing it right this time around with Vista, as an example: rather than repeat past mistakes (WinMe anyone?) they are delaying it and delaying it until they get it right, AND have yanked features that everyone wants in favor of releasing a (hopefully) stable and secure product. Yes it's painful, and yes it takes longer, but if you deliver a quality product your customers will remain your customers down the road.
Oh, and the reason for multiplying by 2.5x up front is to (hopefully) avoid delay after delay after delay, pushing back the date even though clients have already paid for the product and the PHB committed to releasing it on Fooday, Septober 22 at 25:91, in the year fe88. Why? There WILL be delays if the schedule is based on perfection, 100% utilization of engineering time, but meetings, bugs, and interoperability issues DO crop up, and throwing more people into the mix usually does NOT alleviate any of those issues.
Some more really major features Illustrator has but Inkscape, etc. do not:
* Layer effects * Proper exporting to PDF, eps, etc. (try exporting with the alpha channel intact! Solution: export to a raster format then convert elsewhere. Ugh.) * an intuitive layer palette * Nested layers (this comes in VERY handy)
*shrug* I haven't bothered with my web site in months, and it's moved to another box. It doesn't earn me any money so I haven't checked on it since the move. Web sites that matter have been checked. However, thank you for the meta-sniping and attacking me rather than discussing the issue. Very, er, "admirable" of you to change the subject.
Actually the first Windows port of WordPerfect was far, far better than the Microsoft Word for Windows product of the time. it wasn't until 7.0 that WordPerfect began to suck. It's like they knew Microsoft Word stopped sucking and just gave up and handed the market to Microsoft.
If you call acquiring JASC then yes they have offered many new products. Paint Shop Pro is now a Corel product, and is a program I would LOVE to see ported to Linux.:)
Some would say emacs or vi, but then those are the types of people who think that everyone should learn TeX.
For the rest of the world who wants to just think about the document they're creating and not what happens behind the scenes, abiword was probably as good as it got.
Have you checked out their site? They are nothing more than a glorified link farm. They have NO useful content and if they would bother to read Google's site submission guidelines (you know, RTFM, much like RTFA but only regarding documentation) they would know instantly why they don't show up.
Come up with your estimate as usual (I'm talking your REAL time estimate, coordinating with your team members, not using the schedule handed down from on high PHBs) Multiply by 250%
Add at LEAST two weeks on top of that.
Tell your (un)friendly PHB "the schedule is NOT negotiable (for acceptable quality) unless they start cutting back features, oh and as a friendly reminder, PHB, throwing more programmers into the mix this late in the game will NOT speed things up, and outsourcing it whole or in part to India can guarantee that the schedule we just handed you will double or triple. Now, does this schedule look good for our shareholders or do we start scaling back features?"
Why stop at 64 bits? It may seem excessive now, but so did the 2GB limitation of the original IDE implementation (even though IDE included large-disk addressability in the original design the common implementation did not include the full feature set) when "huge" hard drives were just 80MB, and each time it has been extended we've hit the limit, with 32GB limits and 137GB limits. I realize there has to be some decision about where to draw the line but why not make it TWICE as wide as we can imagine technology can possibly be pushed, which will push any need for extension/amendment of the specification out to several decades away? Chances are we WILL hit any limit, and far sooner than anticipated, so make the limit exponentially higher. OS support may not be there to actually use all of that space, but software is a heck of a lot easier to change than embedded controllers, which are usually so upgradable. Some flashable controllers have been extended by third-party independent hackers to support 48-bit addressing but most required software workarounds in the OS. Remember having to pass HDD geometry on to kernels in your lilo config, and the concern of the kernel's having to be within the first 1024 cylinders of space back in the day?
Also, if choosing between data integrity and performance, one should choose integrity (unless doing something like heavy NLE where the data is not stored locally, just pulled down to get work done). Just as with RAID-5 vs. "RAID-0" there are advantages for performance and there are advantages of integrity with a (hopefully minor) performance penality with various filesystems.
I'm presuming that the "journalist" doesn't know the difference between a picture in a signature on a messageboard, in an IM window, or an application's icon on the desktop. It's an assumption.
Re:Why EXT4 ?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 2, Insightful
SUN has been using ZFS internally in their enterprise environment for a while.
Most people would not consider that to be "proven in the field"
By your logic, Windows Vista should have been released a year ago because it's long been "proven" stable via widespread deployment at Microsoft.
Internally, Sun has Sun software running mostly on Sun hardware, not the mis-mash of SANs, external and internal third-party hard drives, and custom RAIDs that many enterprises will have. When it's used and stable across a variety of configurations in real-world far-away-from-Sun's-debug-environements without a(n unreasable/unexpected) glitch, it can be considered "proven in the field."
For what it's worth, I'd suspect that if such amounts of storage were to become available, the current administration here in America could fill it up.
In addition to knowing who my friends are, whom I call, and that I'm interested in aviation and fast cars, they'll be able to track which brand of mouthwash I buy (and where I buy it), who my dentist is, how much I've spent on my teeth, which brand of toilet tissue I buy (because only terrorists buy Scotts, right?), how many times I've read 1984 over the years, which really bad sci-fi movies I buy (yes I bought Battlefield Earth, a great poorly-written b-movie experience), and that I've watched Lord of the G-Strings and Lord of the Rings back to back on OnDemand cable, not to mention cataloguing every post I've made here on slashdot.
Build the storage, and SOMEBODY will fill it up, probably the government (not necessarily just the current administration by the way) with tracking every inane detail of our lives in the name of "combating terrorism" and "increasing safety/security."
Didn't you mean to say the obligatory "but will it run Linux?"
However in this case we need to flip it:
"Will it run Vista, and will it come out before Duke Nukem Forever?"
Oh and to for a momentary instance of reason: is it GPL-compatible? If so then I'm sure that it will support Hurd, or the reverse, Hurd will support it.
Re:Sounds like a good idea.
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 1
I don't trust Ext3, because the journaling in it is a hack riding on top of Ext2, and if you mount the partition as Ext2 (say, from a rescue disk, or move the HDD to another partition) you lose the journal, or at least render it useless. What they ought to have done was made it NOT backwards-compatible so it could not be mounted as Ext2, then the journal and data remain intact and in sync. IMHO of course.
Re:Sounds like a good idea.
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Well, for what it's worth, based on ReiserFS 3.6, I'd trust Reiser4 before I'd trust Ext2 (and derivatives - Ext3 is Ext2 with journaling on top) again. I've lost data more than once on Ext2, but never on Reiser. In fact, Reiser's journaling was able to rescue data for me when an ABIT motherboard caught fire (bad caps burst, the motherboard started smouldering, and one of the processors exploded and punched a hole through the board). One of the NTFS drives got scrambled, yet the Reiser drives on the same controller were intact. I could not access the data, but reiserfsck --fix-fixable brought the data back, to its latest-saved state. Very nice. I'd call that stable. Ext2 has lost data on me due to lesser mishaps. Also, I LOVE the zero-slack feature of Reiser. Why do most systems STILL have fixed block sizes? Why can they not just map to sectors instead? No, you have to waste an ENTIRE 64K/32K/16K/8K/4K/etc. block of disk space when it's only partially filled.
Of course I haven't read up on Ext4 yet to see if it's significantly changed. but based on the hack that is Ext3's journaling I personally wouldn't run it (Disclaimer: I WILL read up on it when it's released in a "stable" kernel and give it a fair chance if it's something more than Ext2 plus journaling). Granted, much of the work that went into making the implementation of ReiserFS stable is Novell's doing, but it's still a good design to start with.
Where does the current "Stable" Reiser fall short? Lack of the immutable bit, compression, and other extended attributes supported by Ext2/3. I do miss those, but IMHO the gain in data integrity and AVAILABLE usable space is worth the tradeoff. Reiser does have its faults, but in my experience it's been very, very stable. I have not tried Reiser4 yet but the documents outlining the design show a lot of promise.
(Note: this is not intended to be a troll, just my anecdotal experience, so Ext3 fanboys can just chill. If you disagree, you're welcome to post your own opinions.)
Hell, even joke IM client avatars made in poor taste are perceived as threats now thanks to the idiotic "zero tolerance" policies.
Meanwhile, back in the '50s when my dad was in school, they actually brought guns into schools for sanctioned shooting club events.
Blame today's society on poor parenting, with idiotic lazy parents expecting the government to raise their kids and teach them decent morals (or at minimum ethics) which led to today's paranoia which is so prevalent.
oh NO, that means we would have to invest in a manufacturing base here and create jobs for Americans, and possibly even start exporting to other countries again. Oh the horror!
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Wow thanks for the explanation, so now .43's (very) broken PDF export makes total sense. I need to upgrade to .44 because emailing rasterized-then-PDFed documents isn't an ideal situation. I'll definitely have to check out the layer palette as well. =) Thanks for the info. One thing that frustrated me in the interface is that I always, ALWAYS forget where to set opacity, because I'm still coming at it from an Adobe CS frame of mind, and Gimp works in a similar way when it comes to layers. I just checked out the roadmap on inkscape.org and it looks like you folks have a really ambitious plan. I like Inkscape a lot (despite its misgivings compared to Illustrator) and use it quite a bit, but where it's fallen short, it's been primarily in layer handling/capability and in the export facilities.
Based on the position that he left at Microsoft, I think it's safe to presume that he can go quite a few years without working, without having to put a crimp in his lifestyle.
Question (no offense intended): why waste a mod point modding posts down, even grammar nazis or trolls, when there are so many great posts that need to be modded up to insighful or interesting to make the threshold settings actually useful?
(Again no offense intended, I am genuinely curious why people do this)
Aside from really racist crap I don't see the point of modding trolls down (or even just humor that some people don't find funny).
Well, how do you account for unknowns in your schedule? Here's a hint: listing all the unknowns is not possible because you don't know what you don't know. You also NEED to pad it for the inevitable feature creep (e.g., the GUI in the actual implementation doesn't work so well when put in front of x type of user, even THOUGH the PHB absolutely insisted that a deep tree control was a requirement against all advice from EVERYONE else). How do you account for a Microsoft class not working as documented, requiring you to spend weeks writing your own library to do the same thing CORRECTLY, or having to wrestle with Microsoft's memory manager eating up CPU time by context switching too much, and depending on other third-party libraries is unacceptable per PHB requirements, so you need to write your own?
A schedule is arrived at by putting on rose-coloured glasses saying "Oh sure, this will take me 12 hours, that will take me two, and that will take me about 80" when in reality that is pending:
- NOT spending all your time in meetings
- NOT having to mentor others
- NOT having to wait days for Microsoft support to come back and say "oh yeah, that's definitely a bug in the class, and there is no redistributable hotfix. However we will reverse the charge for this incident."
- NOT having to wait weeks for customer input
- performance will be stellar when you load test it
- NOT being told "Oh and by the way, client X needs Windows 98 support, and because they promised us $7.1mil we need to give it to them."
Multiplying your schedule by 2.5 is perfectly reasonable because as they say "shit happens." Welcome to the real world. The choices are to either allow for a reasonable schedule, scale back features, or ship a shoddy product. Unfortunately too many companies do the latter lately. Microsoft is doing it right this time around with Vista, as an example: rather than repeat past mistakes (WinMe anyone?) they are delaying it and delaying it until they get it right, AND have yanked features that everyone wants in favor of releasing a (hopefully) stable and secure product. Yes it's painful, and yes it takes longer, but if you deliver a quality product your customers will remain your customers down the road.
Oh, and the reason for multiplying by 2.5x up front is to (hopefully) avoid delay after delay after delay, pushing back the date even though clients have already paid for the product and the PHB committed to releasing it on Fooday, Septober 22 at 25:91, in the year fe88. Why? There WILL be delays if the schedule is based on perfection, 100% utilization of engineering time, but meetings, bugs, and interoperability issues DO crop up, and throwing more people into the mix usually does NOT alleviate any of those issues.
Some more really major features Illustrator has but Inkscape, etc. do not:
* Layer effects
* Proper exporting to PDF, eps, etc. (try exporting with the alpha channel intact! Solution: export to a raster format then convert elsewhere. Ugh.)
* an intuitive layer palette
* Nested layers (this comes in VERY handy)
*shrug* I haven't bothered with my web site in months, and it's moved to another box. It doesn't earn me any money so I haven't checked on it since the move. Web sites that matter have been checked. However, thank you for the meta-sniping and attacking me rather than discussing the issue. Very, er, "admirable" of you to change the subject.
Actually the first Windows port of WordPerfect was far, far better than the Microsoft Word for Windows product of the time. it wasn't until 7.0 that WordPerfect began to suck. It's like they knew Microsoft Word stopped sucking and just gave up and handed the market to Microsoft.
If you call acquiring JASC then yes they have offered many new products. Paint Shop Pro is now a Corel product, and is a program I would LOVE to see ported to Linux. :)
Some would say emacs or vi, but then those are the types of people who think that everyone should learn TeX.
For the rest of the world who wants to just think about the document they're creating and not what happens behind the scenes, abiword was probably as good as it got.
Go to google and type in this query:
site:kinderstart.com
Click on some of the page 1 hits. Yep, 404 pages, and the pages which DO exist, there is nothing but hyperlinks.
Next, read Google's site submission guidelines.
There is NO reason that site should be listed at all, let alone actually achieve good SERPS.
Google for "search engine" - I just did it out of curiousity. Surprisingly enough Google does NOT rank first. Crappy search engines rank higher.
Have you checked out their site? They are nothing more than a glorified link farm. They have NO useful content and if they would bother to read Google's site submission guidelines (you know, RTFM, much like RTFA but only regarding documentation) they would know instantly why they don't show up.
Come up with your estimate as usual (I'm talking your REAL time estimate, coordinating with your team members, not using the schedule handed down from on high PHBs)
Multiply by 250%
Add at LEAST two weeks on top of that.
Tell your (un)friendly PHB "the schedule is NOT negotiable (for acceptable quality) unless they start cutting back features, oh and as a friendly reminder, PHB, throwing more programmers into the mix this late in the game will NOT speed things up, and outsourcing it whole or in part to India can guarantee that the schedule we just handed you will double or triple. Now, does this schedule look good for our shareholders or do we start scaling back features?"
Why stop at 64 bits? It may seem excessive now, but so did the 2GB limitation of the original IDE implementation (even though IDE included large-disk addressability in the original design the common implementation did not include the full feature set) when "huge" hard drives were just 80MB, and each time it has been extended we've hit the limit, with 32GB limits and 137GB limits. I realize there has to be some decision about where to draw the line but why not make it TWICE as wide as we can imagine technology can possibly be pushed, which will push any need for extension/amendment of the specification out to several decades away? Chances are we WILL hit any limit, and far sooner than anticipated, so make the limit exponentially higher. OS support may not be there to actually use all of that space, but software is a heck of a lot easier to change than embedded controllers, which are usually so upgradable. Some flashable controllers have been extended by third-party independent hackers to support 48-bit addressing but most required software workarounds in the OS. Remember having to pass HDD geometry on to kernels in your lilo config, and the concern of the kernel's having to be within the first 1024 cylinders of space back in the day?
Also, if choosing between data integrity and performance, one should choose integrity (unless doing something like heavy NLE where the data is not stored locally, just pulled down to get work done). Just as with RAID-5 vs. "RAID-0" there are advantages for performance and there are advantages of integrity with a (hopefully minor) performance penality with various filesystems.
I'm presuming that the "journalist" doesn't know the difference between a picture in a signature on a messageboard, in an IM window, or an application's icon on the desktop. It's an assumption.
Most people would not consider that to be "proven in the field"
By your logic, Windows Vista should have been released a year ago because it's long been "proven" stable via widespread deployment at Microsoft.
Internally, Sun has Sun software running mostly on Sun hardware, not the mis-mash of SANs, external and internal third-party hard drives, and custom RAIDs that many enterprises will have. When it's used and stable across a variety of configurations in real-world far-away-from-Sun's-debug-environements without a(n unreasable/unexpected) glitch, it can be considered "proven in the field."
For what it's worth, I'd suspect that if such amounts of storage were to become available, the current administration here in America could fill it up.
In addition to knowing who my friends are, whom I call, and that I'm interested in aviation and fast cars, they'll be able to track which brand of mouthwash I buy (and where I buy it), who my dentist is, how much I've spent on my teeth, which brand of toilet tissue I buy (because only terrorists buy Scotts, right?), how many times I've read 1984 over the years, which really bad sci-fi movies I buy (yes I bought Battlefield Earth, a great poorly-written b-movie experience), and that I've watched Lord of the G-Strings and Lord of the Rings back to back on OnDemand cable, not to mention cataloguing every post I've made here on slashdot.
Build the storage, and SOMEBODY will fill it up, probably the government (not necessarily just the current administration by the way) with tracking every inane detail of our lives in the name of "combating terrorism" and "increasing safety/security."
Didn't you mean to say the obligatory "but will it run Linux?"
However in this case we need to flip it:
"Will it run Vista, and will it come out before Duke Nukem Forever?"
Oh and to for a momentary instance of reason: is it GPL-compatible? If so then I'm sure that it will support Hurd, or the reverse, Hurd will support it.
I don't trust Ext3, because the journaling in it is a hack riding on top of Ext2, and if you mount the partition as Ext2 (say, from a rescue disk, or move the HDD to another partition) you lose the journal, or at least render it useless. What they ought to have done was made it NOT backwards-compatible so it could not be mounted as Ext2, then the journal and data remain intact and in sync. IMHO of course.
Well, for what it's worth, based on ReiserFS 3.6, I'd trust Reiser4 before I'd trust Ext2 (and derivatives - Ext3 is Ext2 with journaling on top) again. I've lost data more than once on Ext2, but never on Reiser. In fact, Reiser's journaling was able to rescue data for me when an ABIT motherboard caught fire (bad caps burst, the motherboard started smouldering, and one of the processors exploded and punched a hole through the board). One of the NTFS drives got scrambled, yet the Reiser drives on the same controller were intact. I could not access the data, but reiserfsck --fix-fixable brought the data back, to its latest-saved state. Very nice. I'd call that stable. Ext2 has lost data on me due to lesser mishaps. Also, I LOVE the zero-slack feature of Reiser. Why do most systems STILL have fixed block sizes? Why can they not just map to sectors instead? No, you have to waste an ENTIRE 64K/32K/16K/8K/4K/etc. block of disk space when it's only partially filled.
Of course I haven't read up on Ext4 yet to see if it's significantly changed. but based on the hack that is Ext3's journaling I personally wouldn't run it (Disclaimer: I WILL read up on it when it's released in a "stable" kernel and give it a fair chance if it's something more than Ext2 plus journaling). Granted, much of the work that went into making the implementation of ReiserFS stable is Novell's doing, but it's still a good design to start with.
Where does the current "Stable" Reiser fall short? Lack of the immutable bit, compression, and other extended attributes supported by Ext2/3. I do miss those, but IMHO the gain in data integrity and AVAILABLE usable space is worth the tradeoff. Reiser does have its faults, but in my experience it's been very, very stable. I have not tried Reiser4 yet but the documents outlining the design show a lot of promise.
(Note: this is not intended to be a troll, just my anecdotal experience, so Ext3 fanboys can just chill. If you disagree, you're welcome to post your own opinions.)
Hell, even joke IM client avatars made in poor taste are perceived as threats now thanks to the idiotic "zero tolerance" policies.
Meanwhile, back in the '50s when my dad was in school, they actually brought guns into schools for sanctioned shooting club events.
Blame today's society on poor parenting, with idiotic lazy parents expecting the government to raise their kids and teach them decent morals (or at minimum ethics) which led to today's paranoia which is so prevalent.
oh NO, that means we would have to invest in a manufacturing base here and create jobs for Americans, and possibly even start exporting to other countries again. Oh the horror!
Some people find meta-snark funny, you insensitive clod!
I guess those flash games where you shoot or punch or kick George W. Bush are threats as well, too. ;)