>The bitmap pattern that forms the following icon >between the brackets [courage] is a better >graphical representation for the concept of >courage than a lion or some such nonsense. It isn't really, though, is it? Try this: Bake a cake. Put some poison in. Lots of it, you know, a lethal amount of poison, but make the cake look really nice. Label the cake and write the words "DEADLY POISON" on the label. Give it to an Argentinian. Oops! Now bake another, but instead of poison, draw a skull and crossbones on the label, or a medicine bottle with a large "X" on it. Try poisoning another Argentinian, you swine. See? Courage and cut and paste might mean something to you, but they require a much more powerful interpreter than a picture of a pair of scissors or some glue. Scissors look the same the world over (though I'm sure there's a website out there somewhere to prove me wrong). We don't naturally see things as words - we see the things, and we associate them with words. You can't cut your tongue off with "a pair of scissors", but you can with that two-bladed thing you refer to as a pair of scissors. By using an icon to graphically represent a function or a task, you're (hopefully, depending on how well you choose) using a layer of abstraction one step close to the 'truth' than words. And nicer to look at, as the top of the page will testify...
>When did it become so trendy to constantly >talk about how much Microsoft sucks?
This is just a natural reaction to release from as big an 'authority figure' as Microsoft. Microsoft is the doorkeeper from Kafka's 'Before the Law'. When you realise you can just walk right by, you trip out on endorphins for a while and rail against MS. You're out of your reins! All those blue screens, and all the time you could simply have WALKED ON BY. So you start crowing about your heroic defeat of MS, and overenthusiatically advocate emacs. What we need to do is catch people earlier, so they don't come TO Linux FROM Windows. I'd imagine if someone was used to Linux, they'd look at Windows and just shrug. "Can't think of a good reason to use it." But when they 'find' Linux after years of MS, they get discombobulated about having been on the wrong end of the stick for so long, and MS becomes The Evil Empire. What we clearly need are "My Little Linux" toy PCs. Tux gives us an immediate advantage in the preschool sector. Let's go!
MS's Office Assistant seems like a good starting point for attention-grabbing; have a designated area of the screen that will indicate when attention is needed. Of course, it doesn't have to be a bloaty animated paperclip, it could just be a (!) sign that pops up, equivalent to the * that Emacs and Vi use to show you a document has been modified but not saved. The user sees the sign, clicks it (or reacts to it some other way), and the information is relayed. There's also no reason why a speech synthesiser couldn't be employed to tell you when something's up - that's a more natural approach. Also, consider mobiles and pagers with vibration functions - how about a juddering keyboard to accompany the BSOD? What we could start by doing is taking the G out of GUI, and maybe replacing it with an S, for sensory. We've got (at least) five senses, we might as well use them. Except maybe smell.
I've noticed that PC Plus, a popular UK computer magazine, has taken to putting Mozilla releases on its cover DVDs (I'm not sure if they're on the CD versions). More of this kind of attention would go some way to beginning to redress the IE imbalance (as long at the distribution was clearly marked as a work in progress) - just by making people aware that there IS an alternative to IE other than the abysmal Netscape 4.x series. It's a shame that IEs predominance is almost certainly due to its Windows integration and 'default' status, and not to the fact that is is, basically, the best browser currently available (and not in extended beta). Konqueror looks pretty good, though...
This is true - but I'd wager the majority of 'first-time buyers' getting used to their brand new Time rigs are using 'dangerously defaulted' (defaulty?) Outlook Express configurations, and don't know any better. The software / package provider IS responsible for the default configuration. The fact that (for example) Outlook Express CAN be configured to be less hazardous without too much effort only land weight to the argument that the provider should configure it that way. A highly distorted analogy would be a car manufacturer turning out saloons in which you have to prepare the airbag by removing a couple of screws before you set off.
"...and this is where my groin hit the steering wheel..." "Oh, you should have taken some responsibility and configured the airbags."
It's a slightly different situation here in the UK (assuming you're not in the UK) - we have the BBC (1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7, of course), so we pay a licence fee for that service, and they don't show adverts. The commercial stations don't have a fee, and they show ads. A number of subscription-only cable channels don't show ads, but some do. They shouldn't, and AOL shouldn't, because users are already paying for the service. I don't object when a 'free' TV station (I use quotes because in the UK you HAVE to pay the licence fee just for owning a TV set, but I digress) shows ads, because that's how they generate revenue to run a service I use but don't pay for. If I was paying for internet access and the provider kept hitting me with pop-ups on top of that, I'd be annoyed. If a free ISP used them, I'd live with it. It's like, say, Geocities vs., say, Demon - you don't pay for Geocities, so you put up with their ad layer. You pay Demon, so you wouldn't tolerate ads there.
KDE 1.91 certainly isn't stable in Slack 7.1, by any sense of the word, but then again it isn't advertised as being stable... it gets crash fever when you dig into the interface settings. It's still very nice, but not as nice as the GNOME/Sawfish duet 7.1 also offers. I hadn't used GNOME for months, tending to stick with E, but now I might just be converted... I can truthfully say, as many other users seem to, that I've tried a variety of distributions, and I *always* come back to Slack. No muss, no fuss.
If you want your page to look the same in any browser, use plain text. Redundant to point it out again (I would have thought / hoped), but... these pages will NOT look the same in any browser. They will be unusable in lynx, at least. If you don't like the way IE and NS bring up the ALT tag on mouseover, don't leave your mouse over the image - the pointer will be obscuring the image in that case, anyway. The bottom line is that ACCESSIBILITY IS ABOUT ACCESS. Anyone wanting to view the site has to access it. I assume this guy is either very misinformed or very ignorant, judging by his "stuck in the 70s" comments. And giving up on something because of the way IE and Netscape work is just plain weak, and didn't get us where we are today.
I've got to chip in and disagree with this mail, because when I made the decision to learn perl, I used Learning Perl and Perl in a Nutshell, and the whole process was painless and fun. The only problems Learning Perl poses are 1) the first chapter goes in a bit too deep if you're learning from scratch, and 2) there's not much OO info in there, but by and large it's a wonderful book that I go back to regularly to remind myself of certain things. I'd also recommend the Perl Cookbook, because I find that learn more effectively by studying examples... Anyway, you should definitely go for it and learn perl - it's great fun. It's geek Esperanto!
... by which I mean that if 'chocolate chip cookie' didn't bring up porn results before, it will after we've/.d the area and the pornbrokers catch on... then the Christians(tm) can come back, do a search, find the porn, and validate their point. We've done their work for them. We are dupes of the Christian(tm) Right! They didn't get this much power by being as dumb as they seem...
As I understand it - roughly, I've no official details - the right to silence is now gone here in the UK, in as much that your silence can now be as incriminating as anything you might say. Likewise, presumably, a lack of forthcoming plain text data, when it's required. Maybe some kind of endless encryption loop, where the details of your key are encrypted, and the details of that key are encrypted, and so on, leading back to the beginnning. Then the information has certainly been supplied, but the encrypted message remians undecipherable. It wouldn't work, but it might annoy for a while.
If you're after a modern sci-fi master-in-the-making, you owe it to yourself to check out Michael Marshall Smith - I think he caputures the zeitgeist of our age as well as Van Vogt et al captured the zeitgeist of the 40s and 50s. We won't see gloriously epic and optimistic rocket-to-the-stars sci-fi any more, because that subgenre has fallen too far towards fiction and lost the sci-angle. But we can still expect good sci-fi - it'll just be mutating all the time, much as science does... The Null-A series is a must for anyone, by the way... sci-fi + general semantics = good brain food.
I simply don't believe this is true - having extra information about the poster will just lead to stereotyping of the kind you provide an example of - all 14 year old students have nothing to say, and all 35 year old sysadmins deserve to be heard. There's not much difference between saying this and saying that knowing whether a post came from a white person or a black person would be helpful. You're judging whether or not someone is worth listening to without giving them a chance to speak. That's a quick and easy solution, but to an entirely different problem.
Re:Here's the Wu-Name script, hack and enjoy.
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Well, having a script described as 'nice' on/. is a Friday-maker for sure. I see the point about the 81 names, but there are four sets of 81 names to begin with, and a given input name will be assigned to two of those sets in a statistically fair fashion - unless I'm deluding myself. There are an awfull lot of Victorian Cows around. I'm no stats professor, but I ran the algorithm several thousand times with numbers and the distribution was even. Anyway, I'll certainly do my best to apply yr suggestions - might take me a while to get my head around x=(n%9==0)?9:n%9, but by God, I'll give it a go.
Here's the Wu-Name script, hack and enjoy.
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 2
Okay, since you characters have/.d the poor domain that graciously hosted my beloved WuName, here's the stripped-down script for you to play with. I've taken out specific URLs etc. but left all the WuNames in. It should be ready to roll on Unix/Linux pending/usr/bin/perl being correct. Feel free to mail in any big improvements, but it's safe to assume I know the code isn't as great as it could be... have fun./. Geocities, for a change. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3803/wu/
Re:THE PLURAL OF LEGO IS LEGO YOU FUCKING IDIOTS
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Hey, I wrote that (not that well, I admit) and there are more than 81 - 324 names, in fact, for 26244 possible results. It breaks the names down to single figures using basic a=1 b=2 translation and then assigns a name based on that. The bank that a name is chosen from is selected in a similar way, using the product of the first and last name results, so Rob Name1 won't ALWAYS get the same first name as Rob Name2. Sadly, the way I've written it means I'd have to put in 2916 names for the next step up... some rethinking involved.
I agree with this post entirely - I started with Linux a couple of months ago, from scratch, with SAMS' Red Hat Linux Unleashed. Some of the installation instructions were wrong, to begin with... some of the text was useful, but now more so than the HOWTOs. And to top it all, the distro was Red Hat (I didn't know any better at the time). Now I use Slackware and the 2nd Edition of Running Linux (plus any other O'Reillys I can find) and nothing goes wrong. Well, nothing I haven't caused myself;^) I recommend this book without reservation, and I'm in middle England, too. Must be something in the water.
CNN are running a poll asking people whether there's any significance in the number of recent quakes - options are Yes, It's a Message and No, It's Nature. No option for it being, say, a message from nature. Nature is winning by a mile at the moment (64%). 37k have voted on it. Disclaimer at the bottom: This poll is not scientific.
Oxford University is running on RHL too, so all our major institutions are obviously catching on. Nice to see Microsoft running on a beta of NT5, you've got to admire their bravery.
Slashdot Mirror
>The bitmap pattern that forms the following icon
>between the brackets [courage] is a better
>graphical representation for the concept of
>courage than a lion or some such nonsense.
It isn't really, though, is it? Try this: Bake a cake. Put some poison in. Lots of it, you know, a lethal amount of poison, but make the cake look really nice. Label the cake and write the words "DEADLY POISON" on the label. Give it to an Argentinian. Oops! Now bake another, but instead of poison, draw a skull and crossbones on the label, or a medicine bottle with a large "X" on it. Try poisoning another Argentinian, you swine. See?
Courage and cut and paste might mean something to you, but they require a much more powerful interpreter than a picture of a pair of scissors or some glue. Scissors look the same the world over (though I'm sure there's a website out there somewhere to prove me wrong). We don't naturally see things as words - we see the things, and we associate them with words. You can't cut your tongue off with "a pair of scissors", but you can with that two-bladed thing you refer to as a pair of scissors. By using an icon to graphically represent a function or a task, you're (hopefully, depending on how well you choose) using a layer of abstraction one step close to the 'truth' than words. And nicer to look at, as the top of the page will testify...
>When did it become so trendy to constantly
>talk about how much Microsoft sucks?
This is just a natural reaction to release from as big an 'authority figure' as Microsoft. Microsoft is the doorkeeper from Kafka's 'Before the Law'. When you realise you can just walk right by, you trip out on endorphins for a while and rail against MS. You're out of your reins! All those blue screens, and all the time you could simply have WALKED ON BY. So you start crowing about your heroic defeat of MS, and overenthusiatically advocate emacs.
What we need to do is catch people earlier, so they don't come TO Linux FROM Windows. I'd imagine if someone was used to Linux, they'd look at Windows and just shrug. "Can't think of a good reason to use it." But when they 'find' Linux after years of MS, they get discombobulated about having been on the wrong end of the stick for so long, and MS becomes The Evil Empire.
What we clearly need are "My Little Linux" toy PCs. Tux gives us an immediate advantage in the preschool sector. Let's go!
MS's Office Assistant seems like a good starting point for attention-grabbing; have a designated area of the screen that will indicate when attention is needed. Of course, it doesn't have to be a bloaty animated paperclip, it could just be a (!) sign that pops up, equivalent to the * that Emacs and Vi use to show you a document has been modified but not saved. The user sees the sign, clicks it (or reacts to it some other way), and the information is relayed. There's also no reason why a speech synthesiser couldn't be employed to tell you when something's up - that's a more natural approach. Also, consider mobiles and pagers with vibration functions - how about a juddering keyboard to accompany the BSOD?
What we could start by doing is taking the G out of GUI, and maybe replacing it with an S, for sensory. We've got (at least) five senses, we might as well use them. Except maybe smell.
I've noticed that PC Plus, a popular UK computer magazine, has taken to putting Mozilla releases on its cover DVDs (I'm not sure if they're on the CD versions). More of this kind of attention would go some way to beginning to redress the IE imbalance (as long at the distribution was clearly marked as a work in progress) - just by making people aware that there IS an alternative to IE other than the abysmal Netscape 4.x series.
It's a shame that IEs predominance is almost certainly due to its Windows integration and 'default' status, and not to the fact that is is, basically, the best browser currently available (and not in extended beta). Konqueror looks pretty good, though...
This is true - but I'd wager the majority of 'first-time buyers' getting used to their brand new Time rigs are using 'dangerously defaulted' (defaulty?) Outlook Express configurations, and don't know any better. The software / package provider IS responsible for the default configuration. The fact that (for example) Outlook Express CAN be configured to be less hazardous without too much effort only land weight to the argument that the provider should configure it that way. A highly distorted analogy would be a car manufacturer turning out saloons in which you have to prepare the airbag by removing a couple of screws before you set off.
"...and this is where my groin hit the steering wheel..."
"Oh, you should have taken some responsibility and configured the airbags."
It's a slightly different situation here in the UK (assuming you're not in the UK) - we have the BBC (1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7, of course), so we pay a licence fee for that service, and they don't show adverts. The commercial stations don't have a fee, and they show ads. A number of subscription-only cable channels don't show ads, but some do. They shouldn't, and AOL shouldn't, because users are already paying for the service. I don't object when a 'free' TV station (I use quotes because in the UK you HAVE to pay the licence fee just for owning a TV set, but I digress) shows ads, because that's how they generate revenue to run a service I use but don't pay for. If I was paying for internet access and the provider kept hitting me with pop-ups on top of that, I'd be annoyed. If a free ISP used them, I'd live with it. It's like, say, Geocities vs., say, Demon - you don't pay for Geocities, so you put up with their ad layer. You pay Demon, so you wouldn't tolerate ads there.
KDE 1.91 certainly isn't stable in Slack 7.1, by any sense of the word, but then again it isn't advertised as being stable... it gets crash fever when you dig into the interface settings. It's still very nice, but not as nice as the GNOME/Sawfish duet 7.1 also offers. I hadn't used GNOME for months, tending to stick with E, but now I might just be converted... I can truthfully say, as many other users seem to, that I've tried a variety of distributions, and I *always* come back to Slack. No muss, no fuss.
If you want your page to look the same in any browser, use plain text. Redundant to point it out again (I would have thought / hoped), but... these pages will NOT look the same in any browser. They will be unusable in lynx, at least. If you don't like the way IE and NS bring up the ALT tag on mouseover, don't leave your mouse over the image - the pointer will be obscuring the image in that case, anyway. The bottom line is that ACCESSIBILITY IS ABOUT ACCESS. Anyone wanting to view the site has to access it. I assume this guy is either very misinformed or very ignorant, judging by his "stuck in the 70s" comments. And giving up on something because of the way IE and Netscape work is just plain weak, and didn't get us where we are today.
I've got to chip in and disagree with this mail, because when I made the decision to learn perl, I used Learning Perl and Perl in a Nutshell, and the whole process was painless and fun. The only problems Learning Perl poses are 1) the first chapter goes in a bit too deep if you're learning from scratch, and 2) there's not much OO info in there, but by and large it's a wonderful book that I go back to regularly to remind myself of certain things. I'd also recommend the Perl Cookbook, because I find that learn more effectively by studying examples... Anyway, you should definitely go for it and learn perl - it's great fun. It's geek Esperanto!
... by which I mean that if 'chocolate chip cookie' didn't bring up porn results before, it will after we've /.d the area and the pornbrokers catch on... then the Christians(tm) can come back, do a search, find the porn, and validate their point. We've done their work for them. We are dupes of the Christian(tm) Right! They didn't get this much power by being as dumb as they seem...
As I understand it - roughly, I've no official details - the right to silence is now gone here in the UK, in as much that your silence can now be as incriminating as anything you might say. Likewise, presumably, a lack of forthcoming plain text data, when it's required.
Maybe some kind of endless encryption loop, where the details of your key are encrypted, and the details of that key are encrypted, and so on, leading back to the beginnning. Then the information has certainly been supplied, but the encrypted message remians undecipherable. It wouldn't work, but it might annoy for a while.
If you're after a modern sci-fi master-in-the-making, you owe it to yourself to check out Michael Marshall Smith - I think he caputures the zeitgeist of our age as well as Van Vogt et al captured the zeitgeist of the 40s and 50s. We won't see gloriously epic and optimistic rocket-to-the-stars sci-fi any more, because that subgenre has fallen too far towards fiction and lost the sci-angle. But we can still expect good sci-fi - it'll just be mutating all the time, much as science does... The Null-A series is a must for anyone, by the way... sci-fi + general semantics = good brain food.
I simply don't believe this is true - having extra information about the poster will just lead to stereotyping of the kind you provide an example of - all 14 year old students have nothing to say, and all 35 year old sysadmins deserve to be heard. There's not much difference between saying this and saying that knowing whether a post came from a white person or a black person would be helpful. You're judging whether or not someone is worth listening to without giving them a chance to speak. That's a quick and easy solution, but to an entirely different problem.
Well, having a script described as 'nice' on /. is a Friday-maker for sure. I see the point about the 81 names, but there are four sets of 81 names to begin with, and a given input name will be assigned to two of those sets in a statistically fair fashion - unless I'm deluding myself. There are an awfull lot of Victorian Cows around. I'm no stats professor, but I ran the algorithm several thousand times with numbers and the distribution was even. Anyway, I'll certainly do my best to apply yr suggestions - might take me a while to get my head around x=(n%9==0)?9:n%9, but by God, I'll give it a go.
Okay, since you characters have /.d the poor domain that graciously hosted my beloved WuName, here's the stripped-down script for you to play with. I've taken out specific URLs etc. but left all the WuNames in. It should be ready to roll on Unix/Linux pending /usr/bin/perl being correct. Feel free to mail in any big improvements, but it's safe to assume I know the code isn't as great as it could be... have fun. /. Geocities, for a change.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3803/wu/
This is the best re: line of the century, so far.
Hey, I wrote that (not that well, I admit) and there are more than 81 - 324 names, in fact, for 26244 possible results. It breaks the names down to single figures using basic a=1 b=2 translation and then assigns a name based on that. The bank that a name is chosen from is selected in a similar way, using the product of the first and last name results, so Rob Name1 won't ALWAYS get the same first name as Rob Name2. Sadly, the way I've written it means I'd have to put in 2916 names for the next step up... some rethinking involved.
I agree with this post entirely - I started with Linux a couple of months ago, from scratch, with SAMS' Red Hat Linux Unleashed. Some of the installation instructions were wrong, to begin with... some of the text was useful, but now more so than the HOWTOs. And to top it all, the distro was Red Hat (I didn't know any better at the time). Now I use Slackware and the 2nd Edition of Running Linux (plus any other O'Reillys I can find) and nothing goes wrong. Well, nothing I haven't caused myself ;^) I recommend this book without reservation, and I'm in middle England, too. Must be something in the water.
CNN are running a poll asking people whether there's any significance in the number of recent quakes - options are Yes, It's a Message and No, It's Nature. No option for it being, say, a message from nature. Nature is winning by a mile at the moment (64%). 37k have voted on it. Disclaimer at the bottom: This poll is not scientific.
Oxford University is running on RHL too, so all our major institutions are obviously catching on. Nice to see Microsoft running on a beta of NT5, you've got to admire their bravery.