I'd rather have white text on a black background than the other way 'round; much, much easier on my poor eyes.
And you have total, utter, complete freedom to set that as your default if you so choose..... and wouldn't you be pissed if the people who wrote rxvt decided that they knew better than you, and fixed the font size and colour foreground/background combination to ignore what YOU prefered?
There's a more important question here that you're overlooking: how many people bother to change their default settings? Are those defaults optimal for all users; or were they just set to where they are because the committee of programmers who wrote the browser collectively decided, without doing any research or studies to support their decision, that they should be so?
Actually, it's NOT a more important question. It's just Yet Another(tm) rationalization. I would bet that most of those that don't change their defaults don't change them because they find the defaults reasonable, and they don't see the need for it. So again, by presuming that you know better than your audience, you're telling them they're wrong, and you know better. Arrogant, ignorant, and egotistical as hell.
So let's say one percent of users have bothered to change their default settings, am I suppose to design my site to cater to the whims of that handful of users most of whom probably won't bother to visit my site anyway?
No - you're supposed to respect the wishes of your audience, INCLUDING those who have decided to NOT make the change.
And to play devil's advocate for a second here - let's assume for the sake of argument that you are right, and that the lusers haven't changed their defaults because they're too stupid to figure out how to. From a usability standpoint, they will STILL tend to be put off by your site with it's finely crafted choice of fonts and sizes.... because what they see when they get there will not be what they are used to, and will therefore seem jarring to them.
Such considerations are the reason why there are accessibility guidelines.
Usually developed by people who a) know about graphic design but not other aspects of UI design, b) arogant "web programmers" who think that their taste is right, every body else's is wrong, and that if they just come and LOOK at your site, and admire it's incredibly gorgeous design, they will be overwhelmed by your l33tness.
It's easy to design a site that will address the needs of all users without having to slavishly adhere to defaults or cater to a slim minority whose preferences will unnecessarily detract from the experience of the overwhelming majority of people who don't need to have their fonts a certain size or their colors set a certain way.
Actually, it's a lot more difficult to design a site that will work well WITH the defaults, than it is to design one that ignores them. Which is exactly the reason so many people come up with bullcrap like this to justify not having to put forth the effort.
The web is NOT A STATIC MEDIUM - STOP TRYING TO PRETEND THAT IT IS
If web designers use the proper font size units in their CSS, such as in the guide above, there shouldn't be a problem--units like em and % allow the font to be resized by the viewer.
Both you, and the lad at the noodleincident, are still missing the point... and proving mine.
What looks good for you - what is a "reasonable" text size in your eyes - is NOT necessarily "reasonable" for me, or my grandmother, or my neighbor, or anybody else.
The web is a DYNAMIC medium - I'm sure you're more than familiar with all the appropriate buzzwords, Web 2.0, and all of that. So why do people insist on trying to control every aspect of what the user sees, and effectively telling them that their preferences are wrong?
A web page is not a static magazine layout. Deal with it, treat your users with some respect, and stop telling them that they're wrong and you know better. Because I can guarantee you that regardless of how pretty your site is, if it can't be read easily, you're not going to sell a damned thing.
In Firefox, it's view > text size, or ctrl++ to enlarge, ctrl+- to shrink.
I'm very well aware of that - and I had to learn that out of need. Just please try to understand that I shouldn't HAVE to. My browser and desktop defaults are set for my eyes, on my monitor, for my lighting conditions. And if you insist on setting the font size when there is absolutly no NEED to be setting them - via pixel or em settings - then the only thing I'm going to do on any site you develop is hit Ctrl-W.
To the dismay of typophiles everywhere, font support on the web is very poor. There are very few "web safe" fonts that designers can safely assume are on all computers. The Typography section shows readers how to make the most out of this situation by understanding letter spacing, justification, and font usage. Beaird also discusses the sIFR technique (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which uses Flash and Javascript to display fonts that may not be on the user's computer. The sIFR method is accessible and degrades gracefully. While the book does not discuss the specific implementation details of this method, just bringing it to my attention taught me something new.
And to the dismay of people who want to actually READ these pages, now long is it going to take some of you people to realise that not everybody can read your gorgeous 8 pt font, because we have a) crappy monitors, b) bi-focals, c) big monitors with large type, etc?
I'm sorry, folks. I don't care what graphic design principals you're following. Overriding the users font settings when there is no overriding reason for it (and there seldom is), just because it "looks purdy", makes it a bad design. Period.
And I swear that if I EVER get my hands on the idiot that started this trend to black type on gray/colour backgrounds, or white text on a black background.............
However all but the most severely mentally disabled are born with free will and the ability to reason.
Wrong. Different people have different capabilities. Some are stronger logically - some artistically, some empathetically, etc.
And just as some people are better at some things than others (like being able to reason), the corollary is that some are WORSE than others.
Reality check: All men are NOT born equal.
People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
Again - not true. Some people are literally incapable of having that knowledge, because that part of their brain just don't work properly. And even more, although they may be capable of knowing, don't *care*... because THAT part of their brain isn't wired properly.
Environment Canada just released the results of a study that show that the Canada Goose does NOT, in fact, migrate south in the winter and back north in the summer.
Seems they're just following the old folks that feed them.....
Even if they were accepted, Linus has already demonstrated that he is intolerant of the project leadership of other open source projects, while demanding tight control over his own pet project himself. (And I think he's actually doing a poor job on his own project.)
OK - back it up a bit here for me. Linus doesn't like where GNOME is now, or where it's headed. He thinks they're wrong.
But WHERE DOES HE QUESTION THEIR RIGHT TO MAKE THE DECISIONS THEY DO?
And the patches will not get accepted because a bad idea doesn't become any better by submitting patches implementing them.
Intolerance: Calling something bad when you haven't seen it, just because of who it's from.
The article talked about Linus submitting the patches, but nowhere did it mention if they had been accepted OR rejected yet.
Assuming that they WILL be (major assumption), I doubt that anybody - Linus included - is about to bitch about that happening until it actually happens.
he's a great kernel developer, but his opinion on desktop environments isn't worth any more than anybody else's, and constant bitching only antagonises people.
Yes, he is a great kernel developer.
And when it comes to desktop environments, he opinion is worth as much as any other user's.... like you
Being a great kernel developer - or anything else - doesn't mean that he can't have opinions, or express them, about other aspects of the operating system and environment.
He certainly shouldn't be shat upon for HAVING the opinion or expressing it - and let's face it, folks. We've all seen a hellova lot worse attitudes in some of the UI debates, both in GNOME *and* KDE.
Perhaps if he tried submitting it as a patch it might even get accepted, but it would be silly for any project to accept all patches with complete disregard of any wider goals that the project might have.
Ummmm.... he did. Whether the patches are accepted or not is another matter. Given the flame-fest, I'd bet they won't, regardless of their desirability (or lack thereof).
Linus already uses KDE, so why does he care what GNOME is doing?
Maybe he would LIKE to use GNOME - who knows. And when it really comes down to it, does it really *matter* why he cares? I was under the distinct impression that most projects encouraged user feedback.
Linus is good. Linus contributes a lot, but untimately that does not give him the right to be a fuckwit in someone elses project, any more than it gives anyone else the right to be a fuckwit in his project.
Roll over and be nice to Linus is a poor way to handle things.
Funny. One of the biggest cries you hear when somebody trashes something else in open source is "You don't like it? Fix it and submit a patch, and stop expecting these hard-working volunteers who give up all of their free time to develop something out of the goodness of their heart to babysit you"
So - let's see what happened here.
a) Linus bitches about something he doesn't like
b) Somebody says "Use it for a month and THEN see if you like it (which totally ignores the fact that what he's bitching about shows that he HAS, in fact, used it). Others tell him that if he's not using it, or doing something about it, he has no right to complain.
c) Linus turns around and does what he's told to - he submits patches to fix what he thinks is broken
I don't see anything wrong here. I don't see evidence of an ego. What *I* see is somebody with very strong opinions, and grounded with a basis in fact (even if you don't agree with his conclusions - which I don't), doing something about it instead of just whining.
I wish MORE people had this particular "ego problem" of Linus' - Open Source would be much further along.
I'm personally impress with efficiency not bulkyness. Write me a competent word processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot.
Reality check: 99% of all "work" done on office computers could be done just as quckly, and just as efficiently (and just as well) on an hold 4 mhz Z80 CPM machine running Visicalc and WordStar.
As long as we don't have to deal with those 8 inch floppies, we're golden.
I think the point is that there are only a couple of dozen isolated locations like that in Canada whereas there are thousands in the US. Expanding broadband to those couple dozen locations is trivial and cheap compared to doing the same thing to thousands of locations
You've never been to Newfoundland, have you?
Try looking at a map of Canada sometime. You'd be surprised at just how isolated a large chunk of the population really is
I personally grew up in a town of 3,500 in the middle of Labrador. The only way to get in or out until about 15 years ago was to fly - there were no roads.
Now, you can drive up the North Shore of the St Lawrance River to Baie Comeau, turn north, and be in town after driving 600 km of high grade dirt "highway".
Just don't be stupid enough to try it in winter unless you're in a convoy
Meanwhile, Vista requires pretty stiff hardware upgrades, and even most systems IN STORES NOW are underpowered with regards to what Vista requires. Consumers don't run bleeding edge hardware. How is Vista for them?
Newflash: most systems IN STORES NOW are underpowered with regards to what Windows XP requires.
Any idiot trying to flog a machine with only 256meg of memory should be... well... flogged.
Well, for one thing, how would someone exploit this situation?
Hole in the IDE or something. Fine. But that's about running additional software as an admin. It has nothing to do with whether that software is a compiler, an IDE, a debugger, or anything.
But that's irrelevant. I never said that running a compiler/IDE as admin is OK. I said that having a compiler/IDE, period, doesn't automatically make you insecure. I said this because you implied the opposite
yes, i did imply that - bad editing on my part. I meant to trying to say
Running a development environment as an administrator is the LAST thing you want to do if you want your system to remain secure.
I'm assuming that the remainder of your comments are based on my poor proofreading before I posted, so I'll leave it at that.
See, this, I agree with. Certainly, it's not a good idea, security-wise, to run a development environment as admin. But under no circumstances should the availability of a compiler make your system less secure.
And how does running a compiler and doing your development as an administrator NOT make your system less secure?
I've noticed a number of people these days saying something to this effect: that you must be willing to be arrested and accept your punishment to engage in any kind of protest. I suspect that it's a meme that Fox News/Republican Party/Religious Fundamentalists are throwing around to convince citizens that any type of protest is an arrestable offense.
Canada's last federal election used machine-read paper. A sheed of paper with circles you mark an X in. They are put in an envelope you can't see through, then given to the election official who feeds the paper into a reader. You get a green light if the machine was able to read your vote, at which point the paper is sucked into the lock box in case a manual recount is needed. If it didn't read it, it is spat back out and you are given the option of destroying the ballot and getting a new one.
A certain number of polling stations in each area randomly have their machines opened and their electronic count matched against a manual count. If they are off by one, the entire district is manually counted.
All in all, this is the best voting system I have ever seen. Quietly implemented, without a fuss. Designed by people who are more interested in an accurate, quick, efficient system than they are interested in partisan politics or winning contracts for their favourite corporation.
I love living here.
BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT
That is not, in ANY way, shape for form, how the Canadian System works. NO machines are used IN ANY PART of the federal electoral process. Period. End Of Story. I have no idea where the bloody hell you got that fiction, but you obviously have not, nor have you ever been, a voter in Canada.
OK - Here's how a Federal election works in Canada. Obviously, some of the fine details vary from election to election, as things are fine tuned/adjusted, but this is basically it.
Canadian Federal elections are run by Elections Canada http://www.elections.ca/, which is an arm of the Federal Government. It is responsible for printing up ballots, distributing them, recording the vote totals, yadda yadda yadda.
The Cole's Notes version of how an election is run at the riding level is as follows:
Each riding is split into polls, each containing 100-300 voters. The returning officer for a riding (picked from a list traditionally supplied by the winning party in the last election) and his deputy (picked from a list traditionally supplied by the party that finished 2nd in the riding) decide where each poll will be physically located. For example, a church basement, legion hall, school gym etc, may contain 10 or 15 different polls - few people, if any, will be required to walk more than 10 minutes to reach the place where they have to vote.
When you walk in, you are given a ballot. You go behind a screen, mark it, give it back to the poll clerk. The poll clerk, in your view, rips off a strip of paper containing the ballot's serial number and places your vote in the ballot box.
When voting ends, the poll clerk (picked from a list supplied by one of the parties who ran a candidate in the last election) and his assistant (picked from a list supplied by one of the OTHER parties that ran a candidate in the last election) open the box and start counting.
During this process, each party or individual candidate who is running in that riding can nominate individuals called scrutineers to represent him at EACH AND EVERY POLL. The scrutineer is allowed full access to the polling place, and can watch anything and everything. The only restrictions are that he is not permitted to touch either the ballot box or the ballots, for any reason.
In a typical riding, you'll have candidates for the Liberals, NDP, and Conservatives. In most urban ridings, you may also have an independent, and candidates from the Green Party, Communist Party, Tin Foil Hat Party, etc.
So
You have a supporter of two parties actually handling the votes, sorting them, and counting them (the poll clerk and his assistant)
You have anywhere between 1, and 10 people from every OTHER party watching them very, very closely.
It doesn't take more than a half hour to an hour to sort at most 300 ballots (assuming a large poll and 100% voter turnout) and coun
What is important, though, is that this is a perfectly valid model which is very useful in many scenarios
He never said it *wasn't* a valid model. He said (effectivly) it wasn't anywhere near as *efficient* a model when you have many queries touching the same records, when at least one of them is a writer.
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No - you're supposed to respect the wishes of your audience, INCLUDING those who have decided to NOT make the change.
And to play devil's advocate for a second here - let's assume for the sake of argument that you are right, and that the lusers haven't changed their defaults because they're too stupid to figure out how to. From a usability standpoint, they will STILL tend to be put off by your site with it's finely crafted choice of fonts and sizes
The web is NOT A STATIC MEDIUM - STOP TRYING TO PRETEND THAT IT IS
What looks good for you - what is a "reasonable" text size in your eyes - is NOT necessarily "reasonable" for me, or my grandmother, or my neighbor, or anybody else.
The web is a DYNAMIC medium - I'm sure you're more than familiar with all the appropriate buzzwords, Web 2.0, and all of that. So why do people insist on trying to control every aspect of what the user sees, and effectively telling them that their preferences are wrong?
A web page is not a static magazine layout. Deal with it, treat your users with some respect, and stop telling them that they're wrong and you know better. Because I can guarantee you that regardless of how pretty your site is, if it can't be read easily, you're not going to sell a damned thing. I'm very well aware of that - and I had to learn that out of need. Just please try to understand that I shouldn't HAVE to. My browser and desktop defaults are set for my eyes, on my monitor, for my lighting conditions. And if you insist on setting the font size when there is absolutly no NEED to be setting them - via pixel or em settings - then the only thing I'm going to do on any site you develop is hit Ctrl-W.
I'm sorry, folks. I don't care what graphic design principals you're following. Overriding the users font settings when there is no overriding reason for it (and there seldom is), just because it "looks purdy", makes it a bad design. Period.
And I swear that if I EVER get my hands on the idiot that started this trend to black type on gray/colour backgrounds, or white text on a black background
And just as some people are better at some things than others (like being able to reason), the corollary is that some are WORSE than others.
Reality check: All men are NOT born equal. Again - not true. Some people are literally incapable of having that knowledge, because that part of their brain just don't work properly. And even more, although they may be capable of knowing, don't *care*
This just in:
.....
Environment Canada just released the results of a study that show that the Canada Goose does NOT, in fact, migrate south in the winter and back north in the summer.
Seems they're just following the old folks that feed them
Every time you SEE one
It's not necessarily the same thing.
But WHERE DOES HE QUESTION THEIR RIGHT TO MAKE THE DECISIONS THEY DO?
The article talked about Linus submitting the patches, but nowhere did it mention if they had been accepted OR rejected yet.
Assuming that they WILL be (major assumption), I doubt that anybody - Linus included - is about to bitch about that happening until it actually happens.
Yes, he is a great kernel developer.
And when it comes to desktop environments, he opinion is worth as much as any other user's
Being a great kernel developer - or anything else - doesn't mean that he can't have opinions, or express them, about other aspects of the operating system and environment.
He certainly shouldn't be shat upon for HAVING the opinion or expressing it - and let's face it, folks. We've all seen a hellova lot worse attitudes in some of the UI debates, both in GNOME *and* KDE.
Maybe he would LIKE to use GNOME - who knows. And when it really comes down to it, does it really *matter* why he cares? I was under the distinct impression that most projects encouraged user feedback.
So - let's see what happened here.
a) Linus bitches about something he doesn't like
b) Somebody says "Use it for a month and THEN see if you like it (which totally ignores the fact that what he's bitching about shows that he HAS, in fact, used it). Others tell him that if he's not using it, or doing something about it, he has no right to complain.
c) Linus turns around and does what he's told to - he submits patches to fix what he thinks is broken
I don't see anything wrong here. I don't see evidence of an ego. What *I* see is somebody with very strong opinions, and grounded with a basis in fact (even if you don't agree with his conclusions - which I don't), doing something about it instead of just whining.
I wish MORE people had this particular "ego problem" of Linus' - Open Source would be much further along.
As long as we don't have to deal with those 8 inch floppies, we're golden.
Try looking at a map of Canada sometime. You'd be surprised at just how isolated a large chunk of the population really is
I personally grew up in a town of 3,500 in the middle of Labrador. The only way to get in or out until about 15 years ago was to fly - there were no roads.
Now, you can drive up the North Shore of the St Lawrance River to Baie Comeau, turn north, and be in town after driving 600 km of high grade dirt "highway".
Just don't be stupid enough to try it in winter unless you're in a convoy
Any idiot trying to flog a machine with only 256meg of memory should be
yes, i did imply that - bad editing on my part. I meant to trying to say
I'm assuming that the remainder of your comments are based on my poor proofreading before I posted, so I'll leave it at that.
And how does running a compiler and doing your development as an administrator NOT make your system less secure?
And just WHY should it be run as admin? Why the bloody hell do you need admin privileges to edit/compile/link?
Go figure.
BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT
That is not, in ANY way, shape for form, how the Canadian System works. NO machines are used IN ANY PART of the federal electoral process. Period. End Of Story. I have no idea where the bloody hell you got that fiction, but you obviously have not, nor have you ever been, a voter in Canada.
OK - Here's how a Federal election works in Canada. Obviously, some of the fine details vary from election to election, as things are fine tuned/adjusted, but this is basically it.
Canadian Federal elections are run by Elections Canada http://www.elections.ca/, which is an arm of the Federal Government. It is responsible for printing up ballots, distributing them, recording the vote totals, yadda yadda yadda.
The Cole's Notes version of how an election is run at the riding level is as follows:
Each riding is split into polls, each containing 100-300 voters. The returning officer for a riding (picked from a list traditionally supplied by the winning party in the last election) and his deputy (picked from a list traditionally supplied by the party that finished 2nd in the riding) decide where each poll will be physically located. For example, a church basement, legion hall, school gym etc, may contain 10 or 15 different polls - few people, if any, will be required to walk more than 10 minutes to reach the place where they have to vote.
When you walk in, you are given a ballot. You go behind a screen, mark it, give it back to the poll clerk. The poll clerk, in your view, rips off a strip of paper containing the ballot's serial number and places your vote in the ballot box.
When voting ends, the poll clerk (picked from a list supplied by one of the parties who ran a candidate in the last election) and his assistant (picked from a list supplied by one of the OTHER parties that ran a candidate in the last election) open the box and start counting.
During this process, each party or individual candidate who is running in that riding can nominate individuals called scrutineers to represent him at EACH AND EVERY POLL. The scrutineer is allowed full access to the polling place, and can watch anything and everything. The only restrictions are that he is not permitted to touch either the ballot box or the ballots, for any reason.
In a typical riding, you'll have candidates for the Liberals, NDP, and Conservatives. In most urban ridings, you may also have an independent, and candidates from the Green Party, Communist Party, Tin Foil Hat Party, etc.
So
You have a supporter of two parties actually handling the votes, sorting them, and counting them (the poll clerk and his assistant)
You have anywhere between 1, and 10 people from every OTHER party watching them very, very closely.
It doesn't take more than a half hour to an hour to sort at most 300 ballots (assuming a large poll and 100% voter turnout) and coun
Football is what people play when they can't afford the ice time.
And he's absolutely correct.