> TV companies don't have to worry about whether viewers have 14-inch or 32-inch screens; the picture just scales to fit. It should be this way with web-sites too.
It doesn't "scale" anything. Your TV has a 648x486 resolution no matter what physical size it is. The problems with fixed resolution sites is because of applying the thinking that the web should work like a tv.
PDA's now surf the web, and though you often still have to make explicit "small screen" design decisions so it doesn't look like you just smooshed a big page down, the general trend is toward screen size independence, not some ridiculous 1024x768 size. Besides, my entire screen is 1024x768, and that's the default on most machines now (recall that most people never change the defaults). With all the borders, taskbars, toolbars, tabs, menus, and other visual chrome, most people don't have nearly that resolution left. I certainly don't, even in full-screen mode.
> For anything like a Blockbuster chain, these'd *cut profits*. Rental places don't want to be paying extra for the media that get thrown away, and they make a ton of their money on late fees.
Or on "keep it as long as you want" pricing structures. I get my DVD's from DVDStation (I can walk to the Metreon, so it's easy), and the way they work is each DVD rented is a dollar a day. Keep it long enough and you own it, they'll order another one. No way would they want the DVD's to degrade. Hell, they even offer a DVD resurfacing service to extend the life of your DVD's.
And if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's "official" latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn.
So if I'm interpreting accurately, Microsoft just pulled off a successful vaporware strike... on their own platform
The rest of Joel's rant is just way off track. Microsoft has ALWAYS pushed a new incompatible tech, while keeping old ones around. I mean hey even after I got COM, OLE2, COM+,.NET and some technologies that NEVER took off, I can still use DDE for my IPC needs. And even MS's own apps like IE still do.
People predicted MS was going to put itself out of business when it came out with NT, because well hey while you're learning a new API, you might just switch to Solaris (now on x86!) or that exciting OS/2 thing... Microsoft succeeded for two reasons: it kept trying ("third time is the charm" really applies to MS) and its competitors kept screwing up. I don't actually see that changing significantly.
MS is hardly doomed.. in fact, one major REASON it's moving to a new set of API's is to avoid the commodity the Win32API is becoming!
> open up about:config, set browser.block.target_new_window to true
That was basically a non-solution -- it now just loads everything in the same tab. It does nothing at all for my javascript bookmarklets that do open new windows, they proceed to open new windows as usual. TBE is the only extension that redirects all new windows to tabs.
Ok, now that I've vented my spleen... Turns out FF finally changed the profile directory name from "Phoenix" to "Mozilla/Firefox". I installed mozilla long ago, and uninstalled it. The mere presence of that old profile caused the problem.
I still consider this behavior of silent crashing and/or locking up to be totally unacceptable, especially when there purports to be a "safe mode".
I am now posting this from IE, because firefox completely fails to work on my system now. I believed that the problems I had before with firefox were solved... they're worse.
I moved my old profile out of my windows profile, so it's totally gone from firefox's view (at least I won't have lost all my bookmarks), and I followed the advice of the mozilla folks. I uninstalled my old firefox (0.8) from the control panel, and deleted the old app directory. There is now no trace of firefox.
I run the installer, it installs, starts to launch... and NOTHING HAPPENS. At all. I test this from my quicklaunch and the command line. Nada. I can see firefox.exe appear in task manager and immediately disappear. No output. Completely silent crash. Started firefox in the "safe mode", and it tells me it's finalizing extension installation and that it'll take "a while". Five minutes later, that dialog is still there. Zero I/O or CPU activity has occurred. This is what we call "locking up".
"Select new tabs opened from links" -- just what it says. If you click on a link and have it open in a tab (like middle-clicking a link), this option will select the new tab instead of loading it in the background.
Terrific. Now how about redirecting all new windows to tabs? I use the TabBrowser extension because it's the only one that does it correctly, but TBE is not available on 0.9. Last time I grabbed 0.9 and installed some old extensions with the "show old extensions" extension, firefox simply crashed on startup -- completely silently I might add.
> there's PLENTY of sites out there putting ad-ware XPI's out that prompt you every time you go to the site.
Firefox 0.9 simply won't install any XPI's from the web unless their source is from a whitelist. Out of the box, that whitelist contains only mozilla.org and texturizer.net. All others you have to download and install yourself.
> Chances are good it will put an end to protests and some of the crap the WTO pulls deserves to be protested.
Oh yeah, that'll play real well. Let's see, you can see a crowd of people with bandanas in the tear gas, throwing rocks, running around, looking disorderly, with the cops looking like they're trying to just rein in the chaos these punks started... or you can see on the evening news an entire crowd falling to the ground in screaming agony. Not good PR.
The threat of these weapons would still be there, but I doubt they'd pull them out in the place of water cannons and good ol manpower, nothing like a couple thousand truncheons and plexi shields to do it (check how many cops are protecting the G8 summit sometime). Maybe not for a couple more decades anyway.
Great idea, but... send them a money order. The dev house might get excited and leak this to their publisher in conversation, and the publisher might just sic lawyers on you for the principle of it. Game developers are hoopy froods. Media publishers as a rule almost never are.
It's not like you'll be able to justify your cracked copy to the Disney Police when they come through your door with a warrant for mandatory copyright violation inspections anyway...
I don't know if this is a legend, but I have read that, according to the formulas used by aerospace engineers, a bumblebee can't fly.
I should really just get a an account for this... It's myth, sort of. In a nutshell, yes the wings could never generate lift if they were fixed. Good thing for the insect they're not. When was the last time you saw a bug glide?
The scientist who supposedly made that claim just stated that the current science of aerodynamics could not explain insect flight (for ALL insects, not just bees). This was of course true, but science takes such discrepancies to mean that either a theory is wrong, or we don't have the data. Turned out to be the data -- aerodynamics (and fluid dynamics) is just plain weird at the insect scale and smaller. Seems bug wings are more aerodynamic for the same reason bumpy golf balls fly further.
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/aero/w el lman/bumblebee.html
This next link goes into the dragonfly trick of hovering, which is a very different and even more bogglingly strange phenomenom.
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/science/physics/wwwli nk s/updates/archives/ch13robofly.php?yr=
> Now some in India are worried about their youngsters doing the same thing to join the "call center bubble". Kindof struck me as funny, I guess.
The bubble's already deflating somewhat in India -- cheap work is now being done in China and the Phillipines instead. Choice quote from one Indian: "are there places in the world where people will work for free?"
China's great for industry: they can pollute all they want, pay slave wages, no benefits, poison their workers, and if any of 'em stand up and unite like the good Workers Of The World they are, they'll be jailed or killed. Love them, ah, free markets.
Corporations are amoral, neither good nor bad intrinsically. However, they're chartered to and in many cases legally required to pursue the profit motive over any human interest. This used to be about giving only a week's vacation instead of two... In today's world, it's about supporting repressive and murderous governments. People are killed for a penny increase in stock price.
You'll never see me dressing up as a sea turtle and calling for collectivism and Universal Peace and Brotherhood in some anti-WTO rally, but I'm damn glad there's some movement now that's acting as a counterweight to the excesses that the largest corporations are obliged to engage in. I'm all for globalization, but markets will never be free until people are. I've seen enough abuse to stop believing the converse is true.
The infinity-engine-ish remake of U4 has an awesome title: The Dawn of Virtue. Heck, that's better than the original (Quest of the Avatar). I thought Ultima 5's original title sounded like a bad heavy metal band (Warriors of Destiny), but this one makes even less sense. Lazarus? Was there even such a character in U5, or is he making some kind of obscure reference to resurrection?
U5 was... okay. I found the underworld to be mostly a big winding corridor full of monsters, and not that engrossing. I found it pretty anticlimactic after the blackthorn plot (which unfortunately never gets that deep if you play the virtual plot) and the slaying of the shadowlords. Then again U4 had The Akalabeth Dungeon That Never Ended (those 3d dungeons were put in because U1's dungeons were just an embedded game of Akalabeth) so I suppose it was nice to wind my way through 2D for the endgame...
downloaded. curled my lip at the theme. installed qute. restarted. installed some of my old extensions. restarted. restarted. restarted....
hm. nothing happening. yep, one of the extensions crashes it. silently. not a lick of output, process starts, process stops immediately. not even a window. yep, that's sure user-friendly.
I think i'll let 0.9 bake for a few more MONTHS. I'm sure as hell not going to jump on the final release they plan for monday.
I can't send email to *anyone* at AOL now, despite running an OpenBSD firewalled Linux server for our business. It's doesn't even bounce, just disappears into the void. There are *no* Windows worms or spam coming out of my network, but some ass at AOL decided to block the whole ADSL subnet anyway. Nice way to break the Internet guys. And THANKS AOL for replying to my question about it - NOT!
Yes, AOL is supposed to know who owns what dynamic address at any one moment. You want to run a mail server, go get yourself a static IP.
The arrogance of IT geeks and uninformed management strikes again. How about thinking a little harder about it, and implementing reverse host checks based on sender address, or rate limiting with temporary blocking - a real email server can cope with that just fine. There's lots of alternatives other than just shutting yourself off from a chunk of the Internet.
So go take your wonderful ideas to AOL, who no doubt always has one or two technical positions open... You know so much better about how to run THEIR network, given your vast experience managing... a single dynamic IP.
Here's a clue, the first one's free. You got any idea how many sockets AOL would have to hold open if it rate-limited? The rest of your brilliant suggestions are left as exercises.
> Some people on the XFree86 Forum list claim it's the vendors using Xorg for their own interests.
Speaking as someone who used a vendor that XF86 ignored for years and years... fine. You can make a statement that you won't support proprietary drivers (not so), that you'll only support a certain interface (pretty much true), and so on, but you can't just sit there and refuse to take perfectly good patches WITHOUT COMMENT.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. I for one welcome my new conspiratorial corporate overlords, whoever they are.
> The Church of Scientology (which owns Earthlink)
They do not. Their founder is a scientologist, and he's probably funnelled some of his share back. This is far from ownership or even control. The vast majority of their shares are in public hands.
You know, googlebombing might have some better effect if you did it in reverse, e.g. SCO. Right now the second link for "litigous bastards" after sco.com is... a page urging people to googlebomb. Gee, how subversive, no one will figure out how that worked... Hell every time you mention SCO come up with a different link for SCO so their google results will be peppered with such commentary after... People search for "SCO", not "litigous bastards".
"Dumb fucker", "miserable failure", etc... that was funny. Once. Get over it and take some real action against these, uh, litigous bastards, or at least improve the trick a little.
Slashdot Mirror
> 648 x 486? I can pull better numbers out of my ass.
& q= ntsc+resolution+486
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
asshole.
> TV companies don't have to worry about whether viewers have 14-inch or 32-inch screens; the picture just scales to fit. It should be this way with web-sites too.
It doesn't "scale" anything. Your TV has a 648x486 resolution no matter what physical size it is. The problems with fixed resolution sites is because of applying the thinking that the web should work like a tv.
PDA's now surf the web, and though you often still have to make explicit "small screen" design decisions so it doesn't look like you just smooshed a big page down, the general trend is toward screen size independence, not some ridiculous 1024x768 size. Besides, my entire screen is 1024x768, and that's the default on most machines now (recall that most people never change the defaults). With all the borders, taskbars, toolbars, tabs, menus, and other visual chrome, most people don't have nearly that resolution left. I certainly don't, even in full-screen mode.
> For anything like a Blockbuster chain, these'd *cut profits*. Rental places don't want to be paying extra for the media that get thrown away, and they make a ton of their money on late fees.
Or on "keep it as long as you want" pricing structures. I get my DVD's from DVDStation (I can walk to the Metreon, so it's easy), and the way they work is each DVD rented is a dollar a day. Keep it long enough and you own it, they'll order another one. No way would they want the DVD's to degrade. Hell, they even offer a DVD resurfacing service to extend the life of your DVD's.
And if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's "official" latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn.
... on their own platform
.NET and some technologies that NEVER took off, I can still use DDE for my IPC needs. And even MS's own apps like IE still do.
.. in fact, one major REASON it's moving to a new set of API's is to avoid the commodity the Win32API is becoming!
So if I'm interpreting accurately, Microsoft just pulled off a successful vaporware strike
The rest of Joel's rant is just way off track. Microsoft has ALWAYS pushed a new incompatible tech, while keeping old ones around. I mean hey even after I got COM, OLE2, COM+,
People predicted MS was going to put itself out of business when it came out with NT, because well hey while you're learning a new API, you might just switch to Solaris (now on x86!) or that exciting OS/2 thing... Microsoft succeeded for two reasons: it kept trying ("third time is the charm" really applies to MS) and its competitors kept screwing up. I don't actually see that changing significantly.
MS is hardly doomed
> open up about:config, set browser.block.target_new_window to true
That was basically a non-solution -- it now just loads everything in the same tab. It does nothing at all for my javascript bookmarklets that do open new windows, they proceed to open new windows as usual. TBE is the only extension that redirects all new windows to tabs.
Ok, now that I've vented my spleen ... Turns out FF finally changed the profile directory name from "Phoenix" to "Mozilla/Firefox". I installed mozilla long ago, and uninstalled it. The mere presence of that old profile caused the problem.
I still consider this behavior of silent crashing and/or locking up to be totally unacceptable, especially when there purports to be a "safe mode".
I am now posting this from IE, because firefox completely fails to work on my system now. I believed that the problems I had before with firefox were solved ... they're worse.
... and NOTHING HAPPENS. At all. I test this from my quicklaunch and the command line. Nada. I can see firefox.exe appear in task manager and immediately disappear. No output. Completely silent crash. Started firefox in the "safe mode", and it tells me it's finalizing extension installation and that it'll take "a while". Five minutes later, that dialog is still there. Zero I/O or CPU activity has occurred. This is what we call "locking up".
I moved my old profile out of my windows profile, so it's totally gone from firefox's view (at least I won't have lost all my bookmarks), and I followed the advice of the mozilla folks. I uninstalled my old firefox (0.8) from the control panel, and deleted the old app directory. There is now no trace of firefox.
I run the installer, it installs, starts to launch
This is absolutely unacceptable.
"Select new tabs opened from links" -- just what it says. If you click on a link and have it open in a tab (like middle-clicking a link), this option will select the new tab instead of loading it in the background.
Terrific. Now how about redirecting all new windows to tabs? I use the TabBrowser extension because it's the only one that does it correctly, but TBE is not available on 0.9. Last time I grabbed 0.9 and installed some old extensions with the "show old extensions" extension, firefox simply crashed on startup -- completely silently I might add.
speak for yourself. I do read in flat mode. I rather wish I could expand or collapse the threads and have a tree view tho...
> there's PLENTY of sites out there putting ad-ware XPI's out that prompt you every time you go to the site.
Firefox 0.9 simply won't install any XPI's from the web unless their source is from a whitelist. Out of the box, that whitelist contains only mozilla.org and texturizer.net. All others you have to download and install yourself.
One of the most beautiful ... games.
Bah. Got me all excited over a game?
> Chances are good it will put an end to protests and some of the crap the WTO pulls deserves to be protested.
Oh yeah, that'll play real well. Let's see, you can see a crowd of people with bandanas in the tear gas, throwing rocks, running around, looking disorderly, with the cops looking like they're trying to just rein in the chaos these punks started... or you can see on the evening news an entire crowd falling to the ground in screaming agony. Not good PR.
The threat of these weapons would still be there, but I doubt they'd pull them out in the place of water cannons and good ol manpower, nothing like a couple thousand truncheons and plexi shields to do it (check how many cops are protecting the G8 summit sometime). Maybe not for a couple more decades anyway.
Great idea, but ... send them a money order. The dev house might get excited and leak this to their publisher in conversation, and the publisher might just sic lawyers on you for the principle of it. Game developers are hoopy froods. Media publishers as a rule almost never are.
It's not like you'll be able to justify your cracked copy to the Disney Police when they come through your door with a warrant for mandatory copyright violation inspections anyway...
I don't know if this is a legend, but I have read that, according to the formulas used by aerospace engineers, a bumblebee can't fly.
w el lman/bumblebee.html
i nk s/updates/archives/ch13robofly.php?yr=
I should really just get a an account for this... It's myth, sort of. In a nutshell, yes the wings could never generate lift if they were fixed. Good thing for the insect they're not. When was the last time you saw a bug glide?
The scientist who supposedly made that claim just stated that the current science of aerodynamics could not explain insect flight (for ALL insects, not just bees). This was of course true, but science takes such discrepancies to mean that either a theory is wrong, or we don't have the data. Turned out to be the data -- aerodynamics (and fluid dynamics) is just plain weird at the insect scale and smaller. Seems bug wings are more aerodynamic for the same reason bumpy golf balls fly further.
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/aero/
This next link goes into the dragonfly trick of hovering, which is a very different and even more bogglingly strange phenomenom.
http://www.glencoe.com/sec/science/physics/wwwl
> but surely India will eventually go to war and completely shoot their bustling economy directly in the foot
Pop quiz: Which country is currently running a massive deficit to cover the costs of their ongoing war?
> Now some in India are worried about their youngsters doing the same thing to join the "call center bubble". Kindof struck me as funny, I guess.
The bubble's already deflating somewhat in India -- cheap work is now being done in China and the Phillipines instead. Choice quote from one Indian: "are there places in the world where people will work for free?"
China's great for industry: they can pollute all they want, pay slave wages, no benefits, poison their workers, and if any of 'em stand up and unite like the good Workers Of The World they are, they'll be jailed or killed. Love them, ah, free markets.
Corporations are amoral, neither good nor bad intrinsically. However, they're chartered to and in many cases legally required to pursue the profit motive over any human interest. This used to be about giving only a week's vacation instead of two... In today's world, it's about supporting repressive and murderous governments. People are killed for a penny increase in stock price.
You'll never see me dressing up as a sea turtle and calling for collectivism and Universal Peace and Brotherhood in some anti-WTO rally, but I'm damn glad there's some movement now that's acting as a counterweight to the excesses that the largest corporations are obliged to engage in. I'm all for globalization, but markets will never be free until people are. I've seen enough abuse to stop believing the converse is true.
er, s/virtual plot/virtuous path/ ... i should learn to profread :p
The infinity-engine-ish remake of U4 has an awesome title: The Dawn of Virtue. Heck, that's better than the original (Quest of the Avatar). I thought Ultima 5's original title sounded like a bad heavy metal band (Warriors of Destiny), but this one makes even less sense. Lazarus? Was there even such a character in U5, or is he making some kind of obscure reference to resurrection?
... okay. I found the underworld to be mostly a big winding corridor full of monsters, and not that engrossing. I found it pretty anticlimactic after the blackthorn plot (which unfortunately never gets that deep if you play the virtual plot) and the slaying of the shadowlords. Then again U4 had The Akalabeth Dungeon That Never Ended (those 3d dungeons were put in because U1's dungeons were just an embedded game of Akalabeth) so I suppose it was nice to wind my way through 2D for the endgame...
U5 was
But why are MS always trying to put all the other browsers out of business for something they get nothing back from?
"It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail" -- Atilla the Hun
downloaded. ....
curled my lip at the theme.
installed qute.
restarted.
installed some of my old extensions.
restarted.
restarted.
restarted
hm. nothing happening. yep, one of the extensions crashes it. silently. not a lick of output, process starts, process stops immediately. not even a window. yep, that's sure user-friendly.
I think i'll let 0.9 bake for a few more MONTHS. I'm sure as hell not going to jump on the final release they plan for monday.
I can't send email to *anyone* at AOL now, despite running an OpenBSD firewalled Linux server for our business. It's doesn't even bounce, just disappears into the void. There are *no* Windows worms or spam coming out of my network, but some ass at AOL decided to block the whole ADSL subnet anyway. Nice way to break the Internet guys. And THANKS AOL for replying to my question about it - NOT!
... a single dynamic IP.
Yes, AOL is supposed to know who owns what dynamic address at any one moment. You want to run a mail server, go get yourself a static IP.
The arrogance of IT geeks and uninformed management strikes again. How about thinking a little harder about it, and implementing reverse host checks based on sender address, or rate limiting with temporary blocking - a real email server can cope with that just fine. There's lots of alternatives other than just shutting yourself off from a chunk of the Internet.
So go take your wonderful ideas to AOL, who no doubt always has one or two technical positions open... You know so much better about how to run THEIR network, given your vast experience managing
Here's a clue, the first one's free. You got any idea how many sockets AOL would have to hold open if it rate-limited? The rest of your brilliant suggestions are left as exercises.
> Some people on the XFree86 Forum list claim it's the vendors using Xorg for their own interests.
... fine. You can make a statement that you won't support proprietary drivers (not so), that you'll only support a certain interface (pretty much true), and so on, but you can't just sit there and refuse to take perfectly good patches WITHOUT COMMENT.
Speaking as someone who used a vendor that XF86 ignored for years and years
Good riddance to bad rubbish. I for one welcome my new conspiratorial corporate overlords, whoever they are.
> I'd say that there's no more market tested and carefully chosen names than car model names. The Chevy Nova notwithstanding. :)
Urban legend actually. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
> The Church of Scientology (which owns Earthlink)
They do not. Their founder is a scientologist, and he's probably funnelled some of his share back. This is far from ownership or even control. The vast majority of their shares are in public hands.
You know, googlebombing might have some better effect if you did it in reverse, e.g. SCO. Right now the second link for "litigous bastards" after sco.com is ... a page urging people to googlebomb. Gee, how subversive, no one will figure out how that worked... Hell every time you mention SCO come up with a different link for SCO so their google results will be peppered with such commentary after... People search for "SCO", not "litigous bastards".
... that was funny. Once. Get over it and take some real action against these, uh, litigous bastards, or at least improve the trick a little.
"Dumb fucker", "miserable failure", etc