You just don't understand. This is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing to John Gruber at the moment. Any failure to take up his offer is an admission of guilt.
Probably what, 1 in 100,000 people lose their phone or have it stolen?
Er, well, if that were true, then this means that there are at least 6.2 billion phones in use in London, UK. If you assume most people keep their phone for, say, 18 months, that actually works out at 18.6 billion phones. And that's just phones that are lost, not even stolen. And only the ones lost in black cabs.
FYI, there are approximately 10 million people in London. I think your estimate may be off.
Of course. As pointed out on/. only a week or so ago, that's step 4.5 in Sony's tried-and-tested New Media Format Launch Plan: "Blame it on the pirates".
Heh, reminds me of when I went to see Matrix II in IMAX format - you could see that Keanu's 5 o'clock shadow wasn't any such thing, but was actually strategically applied blue make-up:-)
Actually, the particle/wave duality of light means that the photons flow more easily in one direction than the other in most fibre optic cables, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, so you can often significantly improve signal quality just by turning the cable end to end.
Because when the metal part of the optical connector corrodes, the sound quality is drastically reduced. Once this happens, the only solution is to remove the plastic coating on the fibre optic cable, and get a green marker pen and colour in the fibre optic cable all the way along its length. Your ears will thank you.
Btw, is it me, or is FF unreliable at searching? Far too often it will not find something on a page - e.g. I saw your post and tried out ' to search for links. When I was done I searched for 'are for' to get back to your post. FF insisted it could not be found (despite that phrase appearing in the comment page twice). I usually have to randomly click around and select text on the page before FF will start finding text again. What's that about? Am I missing something? I'm guessing maybe it has something to do with frames or divs or something (i.e. it's not looking outside the current major block) but I haven't any forensic evidence to back that up.
Almost as annoying as the "From now on, I will not copy text to the clipboard" bug.
I just needed to type some text into the dialog editor for the error dialog. It was just one of the first things that popped into my head - we were working in a big house in the country, after all. It was only a few months into the project at the time, so there was no satire intended:-). Similarly for the buttons on that dialog - I believe the defaults were 'Peng', 'F'tang', 'Ni!' etc. Just the first things I thought of.
The point was that it was 'impossible' to see that text, as it would always be replaced by the actual error messages/button texts. And there was a lot of error checking in the error handler. Of course, never say 'impossible'. The only time I've ever seen that message appear after my initial tests was when I was demonstrating a feature to a few members of the public at the Windows Show '95. D'oh!
Interesting graph, btw:-) I remember when we celebrated when the ADC told us that we'd written half a million lines of code (or some such landmark). Of course, certain people at the company immediately lambasted all the developers for being so crap, but you know, some things never change.
Firstly, my comment was really just to say that SVG export is not amazingly difficult, but it is time-consuming. Xara as a company has (I assume this is still true) finite resources. Simply wanting to do something doesn't mean they can achieve it as soon as they might like.
Secondly, it's been a long time since I worked at Xara or on their products, so the chances of you offending me are vanishingly small:-)
(Aside: I'm fed up of using 'Xara' to refer to the company and the product, and the product name keeps changing and often annoys me, so I'll use the original codename the developers use, ok? So for this post, Camelot = Xara Studio/Xtreme/whatever, and Xara = the software company).
But, the few points in your comment that struck me:
But that built-in limitation isn't the right approach for everyone, as you point out: Camelot (and by extension, Xara) focuses on the smooth user experience at the sacrifice of some features, so maybe a couple other posters were right in suggesting that SVG interoperability should be via an external application instead of built into the software.
The external app would be possible, I guess. If enough of Camelot is open source, you could build a program (GUI or command line) that could load Camelot documents and export them as SVG. It's kind of a bad way to do it though, as when exporting you typically want control over the process, and that control tends to be of a GUI/visual/interactive nature. So ideally it would be part of Camelot itself.
My point generally was: you see the 'no SVG exporter' thing as an indication of something that perhaps it isn't. I'm saying the fact it has not shipped yet is possibly just an indication that it's not finished yet, rather than Xara aren't bothering to do it.
But the other alternative is shipping something earlier that is built-in but not working properly, which goes against the Xara philosophy really.
More recent format support (e.g. Adobe Illustrator 9-10 as opposed to Xara which tends to be 2-3 major versions behind the pack)
Doesn't surprise me. If it's anything like when I wrote the original AI filters, it's not like Adobe tell you what the format is. It all has to be reverse engineered. Obviously with AI being PostScript it was easier at the time - or rather, less hard; decoding arbitrary floating point transformation matrices is never that much fun. (I'm guessing AI is no longer PostScript format, but it's been so long since I checked). Xara has finite resources. As I may have mentioned:-).
whereas Xara seems to have many arcane and largely useless formats now -- How many people these days need to be able to export to WordPerfect Graphics format
It was a format in use when the original version of Xara shipped. Taking the feature out probably wouldn't be a great idea. I bet you someone still uses it:-)
and how many have tried exporting a WMF in desperation to find it doesn't even have remotely the same geometry as the original vector file?
Ah. WMF...come, let me stab at thee.
You've only really got a fighting chance of representing Xara documents in EMF - standard (16-bit, original and still the worst) WMF files will suck at this.
WMF should be able to represent many things - various transparency and effects probably won't work, but the geometry should be in the right place/right size etc. My knowledge of the history of the WMF exporter (i.e. I wrote it) is that it was one of the 'bastard child' exporters that was more a tick-box feature than anything else (a bit like the 'Acorn Draw' file exporter - included for hysterical reasons only). My guess is that nobody has touched that WMF exporter code in 5+ years. As Camelot itself has matured and expanded, etc, I imagine fewer and fewer Camelot features work correctly in
I dearly, sorely wish that Xara would figure out how to get SVG support into Xara. It's a glaring omission that isn't going to fly with the Linux crowd. At all. And it's annoying not to have it in Windows, either. Strangely enough, SVG support was one of the excuses I was given by Xara's product manager for not making a Linux version of Xara (e.g. SVG had priority). I wonder how that's shifted now, and if SVG support is still on the agenda, and for which version(s) of their software.
Well, it's a tricky thing, because Xara does some rampant* things with vectors, that are often hard to reproduce in other formats. Speaking as the person who designed the original file format filter (import/export) system, I'd have to say that writing a basic SVG exporter isn't hard, and would cover a lot of cases. However, it wouldn't cope with some of the fancier features very well (or at all) - handling everything properly is a lot of work. And producing something that 'kind of' works results in a poor user experience, which is something Xara (the company and product) tries to avoid.
But it would be nice to have a basic exporter for people who want SVG, as I still find Xara the easiest program to use for knocking up diagrams and illustrations (I admit I may be susceptible to some bias here). I still remember trying Visio (when it first came out!) to produce some architecture diagrams for Xara, and wishing that I had a good diagram/illustration package to use for the purpose (talk about catch-22). I try Visio every couple of years, but the UI is still akin to being poked in the eye with a sharp yacht.
* I use the word advisedly, as any of the original Xara developers will know:-)
I worked at Xara a few years back, and a more cynical person than I would say that the copy style used in the submission seems strangely familiar, especially bits like "you owe it to yourself".:-)
You think it if was Xara they would have better prepared themselves for the slashdotting.
I worked at Xara a few years back, and a more cynical person than I would say that...well, you can probably see where I'm going with this.
SoaP was a hell of a lot of fun when the audience is yelling things like "Red Bull gives your product placement wings!", counting down the last few seconds to snakularity, "First one to scream gets it in the tits!", throwing snakes around the theater at the appropriate moments, yelling "snakes on a cart!" when the beverage cart shows up, appending "Bitch!" to some of Sam's lines, and so on.
As a counterpoint - ideas are two a penny, but a good programmer is incredibly valuable.
(I may have a different definition of 'good programmer' to you, so YMMV).
I generally agree with the other poster that not having enough ideas is not usually the blocking factor. It's time and skill.
Such discussions always remind me of this:
"The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story
ideas, and now the sort of panic is, 'Can I do them all
in the rest of my career, given the speed at which
they're arriving at the moment?'"
-- Douglas Adams, April 2001
By the way, as for the value of patents - aren't patents a description of an actual implementation of an idea, rather than just an idea?
Er, by running them on a WinCE device? Failing that, use the CE device emulator that comes with Visual Studio 2005?
The latest version of Windows Mobile allows the seller of a device to lock it down such that only Mobile2Market-signed apps will run.
Who the hell would buy a PDA that won't let you install apps on it?* (Or is this more commonly used with Windows Mobile phone devices? I assume not as the original poster mentioned PDAs, but maybe you meant WM phones.)
And the only reasoning they give to back that up is really rather nebulous, and can be paraphrased as "you can't run task manager or regedit on Windows Mobile machines easily".
Do they really think any significant number of Windows users run those programs, or that if they were available on Windows Mobile, that they would run them on that platform?
To be honest, I've seen horse-shit that had less horse-shit in it. If your OS being secure requires users to run regedit/taskman type programs on a regular basis to see 'what's going on', then you've already lost anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
We certainly are
Gosh, do people really still use 'communist' as an insult?
How terribly quaint.
I expect I should get back to Russia, or something.
You must be new here.
You just don't understand. This is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing to John Gruber at the moment. Any failure to take up his offer is an admission of guilt.
It has absolutely nothing to do with this
So, er, that was kind of my point.
I had thought that was obvious. Maybe I shouldn't have assumed that.
Er, well, if that were true, then this means that there are at least 6.2 billion phones in use in London, UK. If you assume most people keep their phone for, say, 18 months, that actually works out at 18.6 billion phones. And that's just phones that are lost, not even stolen. And only the ones lost in black cabs.
FYI, there are approximately 10 million people in London. I think your estimate may be off.
I managed to get a copy of Beta 2 before they closed the preview. You're not missing much.
Of course. As pointed out on /. only a week or so ago, that's step 4.5 in Sony's tried-and-tested New Media Format Launch Plan: "Blame it on the pirates".
You also need to shop around for your cables. $45 for an HDMI cable? $24 for an optical cable? What, does it carry famous photons? :-)
Heh, reminds me of when I went to see Matrix II in IMAX format - you could see that Keanu's 5 o'clock shadow wasn't any such thing, but was actually strategically applied blue make-up :-)
Actually, the particle/wave duality of light means that the photons flow more easily in one direction than the other in most fibre optic cables, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, so you can often significantly improve signal quality just by turning the cable end to end.
Yeah, but up until that post, I'd only ever used '/' to search for text.
Which you'd know if you'd been paying attention :-)
Because when the metal part of the optical connector corrodes, the sound quality is drastically reduced. Once this happens, the only solution is to remove the plastic coating on the fibre optic cable, and get a green marker pen and colour in the fibre optic cable all the way along its length. Your ears will thank you.
Hey, I never knew about ' - thanks!
Btw, is it me, or is FF unreliable at searching? Far too often it will not find something on a page - e.g. I saw your post and tried out ' to search for links. When I was done I searched for 'are for' to get back to your post. FF insisted it could not be found (despite that phrase appearing in the comment page twice). I usually have to randomly click around and select text on the page before FF will start finding text again. What's that about? Am I missing something? I'm guessing maybe it has something to do with frames or divs or something (i.e. it's not looking outside the current major block) but I haven't any forensic evidence to back that up.
Almost as annoying as the "From now on, I will not copy text to the clipboard" bug.
You might want to look at this.
And possibly this.
I just needed to type some text into the dialog editor for the error dialog. It was just one of the first things that popped into my head - we were working in a big house in the country, after all. It was only a few months into the project at the time, so there was no satire intended :-). Similarly for the buttons on that dialog - I believe the defaults were 'Peng', 'F'tang', 'Ni!' etc. Just the first things I thought of.
The point was that it was 'impossible' to see that text, as it would always be replaced by the actual error messages/button texts. And there was a lot of error checking in the error handler. Of course, never say 'impossible'. The only time I've ever seen that message appear after my initial tests was when I was demonstrating a feature to a few members of the public at the Windows Show '95. D'oh!
Interesting graph, btw :-) I remember when we celebrated when the ADC told us that we'd written half a million lines of code (or some such landmark). Of course, certain people at the company immediately lambasted all the developers for being so crap, but you know, some things never change.
Firstly, my comment was really just to say that SVG export is not amazingly difficult, but it is time-consuming. Xara as a company has (I assume this is still true) finite resources. Simply wanting to do something doesn't mean they can achieve it as soon as they might like.
Secondly, it's been a long time since I worked at Xara or on their products, so the chances of you offending me are vanishingly small :-)
(Aside: I'm fed up of using 'Xara' to refer to the company and the product, and the product name keeps changing and often annoys me, so I'll use the original codename the developers use, ok? So for this post, Camelot = Xara Studio/Xtreme/whatever, and Xara = the software company).
But, the few points in your comment that struck me:
The external app would be possible, I guess. If enough of Camelot is open source, you could build a program (GUI or command line) that could load Camelot documents and export them as SVG. It's kind of a bad way to do it though, as when exporting you typically want control over the process, and that control tends to be of a GUI/visual/interactive nature. So ideally it would be part of Camelot itself.
My point generally was: you see the 'no SVG exporter' thing as an indication of something that perhaps it isn't. I'm saying the fact it has not shipped yet is possibly just an indication that it's not finished yet, rather than Xara aren't bothering to do it.
But the other alternative is shipping something earlier that is built-in but not working properly, which goes against the Xara philosophy really.
Doesn't surprise me. If it's anything like when I wrote the original AI filters, it's not like Adobe tell you what the format is. It all has to be reverse engineered. Obviously with AI being PostScript it was easier at the time - or rather, less hard; decoding arbitrary floating point transformation matrices is never that much fun. (I'm guessing AI is no longer PostScript format, but it's been so long since I checked). Xara has finite resources. As I may have mentioned :-).
It was a format in use when the original version of Xara shipped. Taking the feature out probably wouldn't be a great idea. I bet you someone still uses it :-)
Ah. WMF...come, let me stab at thee.
You've only really got a fighting chance of representing Xara documents in EMF - standard (16-bit, original and still the worst) WMF files will suck at this.
WMF should be able to represent many things - various transparency and effects probably won't work, but the geometry should be in the right place/right size etc. My knowledge of the history of the WMF exporter (i.e. I wrote it) is that it was one of the 'bastard child' exporters that was more a tick-box feature than anything else (a bit like the 'Acorn Draw' file exporter - included for hysterical reasons only). My guess is that nobody has touched that WMF exporter code in 5+ years. As Camelot itself has matured and expanded, etc, I imagine fewer and fewer Camelot features work correctly in
Well, it's a tricky thing, because Xara does some rampant* things with vectors, that are often hard to reproduce in other formats. Speaking as the person who designed the original file format filter (import/export) system, I'd have to say that writing a basic SVG exporter isn't hard, and would cover a lot of cases. However, it wouldn't cope with some of the fancier features very well (or at all) - handling everything properly is a lot of work. And producing something that 'kind of' works results in a poor user experience, which is something Xara (the company and product) tries to avoid.
But it would be nice to have a basic exporter for people who want SVG, as I still find Xara the easiest program to use for knocking up diagrams and illustrations (I admit I may be susceptible to some bias here). I still remember trying Visio (when it first came out!) to produce some architecture diagrams for Xara, and wishing that I had a good diagram/illustration package to use for the purpose (talk about catch-22). I try Visio every couple of years, but the UI is still akin to being poked in the eye with a sharp yacht.
* I use the word advisedly, as any of the original Xara developers will know :-)
I worked at Xara a few years back, and a more cynical person than I would say that the copy style used in the submission seems strangely familiar, especially bits like "you owe it to yourself". :-)
I worked at Xara a few years back, and a more cynical person than I would say that...well, you can probably see where I'm going with this.
I also liked their amazingly intuitive suggestion that was doubtless the fruit of much in-depth research:
No kidding, professor!
The long winter evenings must just fly by.
As a counterpoint - ideas are two a penny, but a good programmer is incredibly valuable.
(I may have a different definition of 'good programmer' to you, so YMMV).
I generally agree with the other poster that not having enough ideas is not usually the blocking factor. It's time and skill.
Such discussions always remind me of this:
By the way, as for the value of patents - aren't patents a description of an actual implementation of an idea, rather than just an idea?
Er, by running them on a WinCE device? Failing that, use the CE device emulator that comes with Visual Studio 2005?
Who the hell would buy a PDA that won't let you install apps on it?* (Or is this more commonly used with Windows Mobile phone devices? I assume not as the original poster mentioned PDAs, but maybe you meant WM phones.)
* ok, ok, don't answer that :-(
I pray you never have to interface with an English department.
And the only reasoning they give to back that up is really rather nebulous, and can be paraphrased as "you can't run task manager or regedit on Windows Mobile machines easily".
Do they really think any significant number of Windows users run those programs, or that if they were available on Windows Mobile, that they would run them on that platform?
To be honest, I've seen horse-shit that had less horse-shit in it. If your OS being secure requires users to run regedit/taskman type programs on a regular basis to see 'what's going on', then you've already lost anyway.
The rest of the article seems fair though.