In my case, One guy offered to help, and mentioned that he'd implemented some feature which I was especially unenthusiastic about implementing myself, but was important nonetheless. I happily excepted his patch and integrated it, working through some style issues and modifying the visual layout of a dialog without making a fuss about it. That was the only help I got in the form of working code, and it worked out really well. What may have made the difference in my case was that my initial release was functional enough to be useful to most people, but left out enough features to push people to try and add them.
Nothing helps to set the boundaries as well as working code.
I don't think that setting a policy beforehand would have made any difference. Look at patches on a case by case basis, and decide.
And marijuana won't help your project schedule if you get arrested for using it. Beer might help you relax, and worry a little bit less, which is generally a good thing, in my opinion.
My advice: Take a deep breath. Relax. Drink some alcohol, or smoke a joint - you worry too much.
In most likelyhood, nobody's going to give a shit about your project, so you have nothing to worry about. Most people just download the code, compile and run it, and you never hear from them again. If somebody comes up with suggestions you don't like, you can either explain why you don't like their suggestion, or suggest that they implement it themselves. It's perfectly OK to tell people you don't like their work for some reason, as long as you make an effort to understand their point of view, and they understand that.
Offer to host patches that you don't like, as a way of saying "I may think your features are silly, but I respect your right to write silly features - I'll even point people to them!"
You worry about forks - they don't happen very often, you know. When they do happen, they tend to happen for a reason. Should you care? I wouldn't.
You're forgetting that this particular men's bathroom is in the offices of a defense contractor. Just because the technology is reduntdant, doesn't mean that they're not going to use it anyway.
And what are those things sticking out over the urinals?
Gravity generators. The game takes place on Mars, and since your peeing reflexes were honed through years of practice in 1G gravity, if you'll try using the urinals on Mars, you'll most likely overshoot, hit the wall, and make quite a mess. The gravity generators compensate for the difference, and keep everything nice and clean.
According to the story, at least, it's not the OS that gets borked - it's the CD-ROM drive's firmware. The firmware is written to spec, and expects to handle CDs. Throw something that's not a CD at it - something that's designed to cause it to malfunction, as a matter of fact, and it's anybody's guess how it will behave.
'Sheik Yerbouti' has a track like this ("Rubber Shirt") if anyone's not sure about prior art.:)
Not to mention the guitar solo on Yo' Mama, on the same album.
Zappa did it first
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Frank Zappa used to combine instrumental tracks from different shows, different songs, played at different speeds and time signatures. According to the liner notes to one of his albums, his engineer called this "the Fostex guitar", because instead of playing a guitar solo, Zappa would just press Play on the Fostex tape, and sit back.
Oh, come on - you of all people should know better than that. The MPEG-2 cable streams I've seen had a vertical resolution of 720 pixels. Cheap TVs just don't do that resolution.
Granted, when your feed comes from a satellite, at ~4 Mbps, you'll see compression artifacts, but only because the cable company wants to cram 6 programs into a 6MHz channel. That won't change until customers start complaining, which isn't likely to happen.
Besides, when you consider the poor state many cable systems' networks are in, you're more likely to get a reasonable image with a digital feed than with analog.
The Banias is a small river in northern Israel, which feeds the Jordan river. And Odem means "ruby". They're just continuing their "name everything after running water" trend.
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list...
That's not what I meant. The nicer development tools will choose sensible defaults for you. HTML, as an authoring environment, has at least one such sensible default: The back button works. People know, understand, and dearly love the back button. When a web design tool causes the back button to break by default, that's bad tool design.
So, if a tool forces you to repeatedly write code to do something that should have been the default behavior, is it still a good tool? Maybe, but If every single Flash site I've ever seen suffers from usability issues, I have to conclude that the tool used to create those sites encourages unusable design.
By way of analogy, you can look at Visual Basic. Many visual basic projects have business logic in widget callbacks. This is bad, because changing the UI involves moving and modifying code that has nothing to do with the UI, and just happens to be in the wrong place.
The primary reason for that is that Visual Basic's development environment encourages this design, because it's the most natural thing to do. Drag the pretty icon to the form, double click, spew out some code, done. Ship. Repeat.
Hang on a minute! A few lines ago you were moaning about having to add a line of script to emulate the back button, yet NOW you're complaining that some authors take the time to add extra code to disable the context menu (which I've never seen anywhere, BTW and didn't think possible but haven't checked).
I'm just trying to be consistent. I'm complaining about people designing unusable sites. In the first case, I point out that many people neglect to write some code that could have made their site a little more tolerable. In the second case, I complain about SOME people, who choose to waste their time writing code that specifically impairs usability.
However, I just leave an unreadable site - if the author can't be bothered to test the site out, I can't be bothered to jump through hoops to use it.
Of course. Bad design is only a problem for a web designer if she wants people to use her sites.
This goes for Flash and HTML. Bad design is possible using either platform, but there's a hell of a lot more of it created in HTML, as any fool with a text editor can slap something up on Geocities.
Lies, damn lies and statistics... Of course there is a lot more bad design that was done in HTML - the vast majority of web content today is still created in HTML! I still maintain that most Flash content is just plain bad, from a usability perspective. I can't remember seeing a single Flash site that I liked, but that could just be me being too critical, or just losing my memory.
Now, mostly as an illustration of how bad things can get with Flash, take a look at http://www.ysub.com - I know it doesn't prove anything, but just look at the blasted thing! There's actually some content on that page. Can anyone find it without looking at the.swf file with a hex editor? I sure can't.
If Flash can be used to create usable web sites, how come nobody uses it to create usable web sites? The only Flash application I've ever seen that came close was the one with the frog in the blender, and that was only because it used an established user interface metaphore (The Blender), and it had an on-screen animated character (the frog), that practically TOLD you what to do.
Blame the author. It's simple to add the same functionality to the Flash movie (it can call javascript which in turn would call history.back()).
No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Again, there's nothing to stop a flash movie searching itself. There is a DOM, and scripting is always active (obviously).
See my previous point. It's not the default behavior, and nobody bothers to do it.
This is just wrong. Depending upon the parameters used in the embed/object tags, a movie can be resizable, or of fixed dimensions (like java).
Can you resize the text? Sure, you can zoom, but I've seen sites that disable most of the context menu functions. Some people can't read itsy bitsy teensy weensy fonts, you know.
Hardly flash's fault! When I browse with my linux box I often come across html only sites with unreadable text, broken javascript and other multimedia elements that don't work. If anything, flash helps sites to be more accessable across platforms.
Most browsers will allow you to work around those issues by overriding certain (poort) choices made by the HTML author. With Flash, you're just stuck with what they shovel your way. Now, Javascript... that's a whole other issue.
All you need is a long fishing rod attached to your hat (you do wear a hat, don't you?) with the cell phone dangling from it, a good six to nine feet away.
That's what I plan to do when I get a leash... Urrr...cell phone.
Re:Your lawyer is a fucking retard
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
why can't anybody on slashdot hold a conversation without comparing apples to volvos?
Ah! An easy one! That's because Volvos are the best cars ever made, and nothing compares to them. So, they make a nice extreme data points to compare things against.
Volvos are so spiffy, in fact, that I suspect that even you won't be able to wreck one.
Are you telling me a color blind person is unable to see colored text on a background of an entirely different color? I'm no expert, but I don't think color-blindness works like that.
Yep, that's exactly what I'm saying. What you call "an entirely different color" may look like exactly the same color to a color blind person. Time to do some reading.
As the font controls: Changing a font can change how much space a whole block of text takes up, which can fuck up a whole layout. Flash isnt meant for that kind of user control! If the user had control of fonts, it would defeat a lot of the benefits of using flash. (like absolute platform independent control of how your content is gonna look)
My dad can't use my desktop because the fonts are about 10% the size they should be for him to be able to read them comfortably. Mozilla's font settings at least make it possible for him to read the content. Who gives a shit whether the sacred page layout gets messed up, if you can't read the content?
No, that's all the control you need. How do you change the fonts? Zoom into content without having to make do with a tiny window into a large page? (see Mozilla's View->Text Zoom option) How do you tell Flash to ignore the colors set by the page "designer", if you happen to be color blind, and you can't see the damn text?
Just because you can use it, doesn't make it useable.
Re:No "legal" closed-source C++ programs for Linux
on
GCC 3.0.4 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Or look here:
libstdc++ FAQ
For the same information, with annotations.
Slashdot Mirror
In my case, One guy offered to help, and mentioned that he'd implemented some feature which I was especially unenthusiastic about implementing myself, but was important nonetheless. I happily excepted his patch and integrated it, working through some style issues and modifying the visual layout of a dialog without making a fuss about it. That was the only help I got in the form of working code, and it worked out really well. What may have made the difference in my case was that my initial release was functional enough to be useful to most people, but left out enough features to push people to try and add them.
Nothing helps to set the boundaries as well as working code.
I don't think that setting a policy beforehand would have made any difference. Look at patches on a case by case basis, and decide.
And marijuana won't help your project schedule if you get arrested for using it. Beer might help you relax, and worry a little bit less, which is generally a good thing, in my opinion.
My advice: Take a deep breath. Relax. Drink some alcohol, or smoke a joint - you worry too much.
In most likelyhood, nobody's going to give a shit about your project, so you have nothing to worry about. Most people just download the code, compile and run it, and you never hear from them again. If somebody comes up with suggestions you don't like, you can either explain why you don't like their suggestion, or suggest that they implement it themselves. It's perfectly OK to tell people you don't like their work for some reason, as long as you make an effort to understand their point of view, and they understand that.
Offer to host patches that you don't like, as a way of saying "I may think your features are silly, but I respect your right to write silly features - I'll even point people to them!"
You worry about forks - they don't happen very often, you know. When they do happen, they tend to happen for a reason. Should you care? I wouldn't.
And drink plenty of beer. It really helps.
You're forgetting that this particular men's bathroom is in the offices of a defense contractor. Just because the technology is reduntdant, doesn't mean that they're not going to use it anyway.
And what are those things sticking out over the urinals?
Gravity generators. The game takes place on Mars, and since your peeing reflexes were honed through years of practice in 1G gravity, if you'll try using the urinals on Mars, you'll most likely overshoot, hit the wall, and make quite a mess. The gravity generators compensate for the difference, and keep everything nice and clean.
Except for the blood, of course.
No, we want the X-box to be such a wild success, that Microsoft drops all its other products, and concentrates on gaming.
According to the story, at least, it's not the OS that gets borked - it's the CD-ROM drive's firmware. The firmware is written to spec, and expects to handle CDs. Throw something that's not a CD at it - something that's designed to cause it to malfunction, as a matter of fact, and it's anybody's guess how it will behave.
The little glowing thingy? I didn't know it was a network.
'Sheik Yerbouti' has a track like this ("Rubber :)
Shirt") if anyone's not sure about prior art.
Not to mention the guitar solo on Yo' Mama, on the same album.
Frank Zappa used to combine instrumental tracks from different shows, different songs, played at different speeds and time signatures. According to the liner notes to one of his albums, his engineer called this "the Fostex guitar", because instead of playing a guitar solo, Zappa would just press Play on the Fostex tape, and sit back.
Hey, that circumvents a technological measure that controls access to copyrighted work!
Oh, come on - you of all people should know better than that. The MPEG-2 cable streams I've seen had a vertical resolution of 720 pixels. Cheap TVs just don't do that resolution.
Granted, when your feed comes from a satellite, at ~4 Mbps, you'll see compression artifacts, but only because the cable company wants to cram 6 programs into a 6MHz channel. That won't change until customers start complaining, which isn't likely to happen.
Besides, when you consider the poor state many cable systems' networks are in, you're more likely to get a reasonable image with a digital feed than with analog.
I don't remember that scene... You must have seen the uncut version.
You're thinking of Onan.
The Banias is a small river in northern Israel, which feeds the Jordan river. And Odem means "ruby". They're just continuing their "name everything after running water" trend.
Why, is there another way?
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list...
.swf file with a hex editor? I sure can't.
That's not what I meant. The nicer development tools will choose sensible defaults for you. HTML, as an authoring environment, has at least one such sensible default: The back button works. People know, understand, and dearly love the back button. When a web design tool causes the back button to break by default, that's bad tool design.
So, if a tool forces you to repeatedly write code to do something that should have been the default behavior, is it still a good tool? Maybe, but If every single Flash site I've ever seen suffers from usability issues, I have to conclude that the tool used to create those sites encourages unusable design.
By way of analogy, you can look at Visual Basic. Many visual basic projects have business logic in widget callbacks. This is bad, because changing the UI involves moving and modifying code that has nothing to do with the UI, and just happens to be in the wrong place.
The primary reason for that is that Visual Basic's development environment encourages this design, because it's the most natural thing to do. Drag the pretty icon to the form, double click, spew out some code, done. Ship. Repeat.
Hang on a minute! A few lines ago you were moaning about having to add a line of script to emulate the back button, yet NOW you're complaining that some authors take the time to add extra code to disable the context menu (which I've never seen anywhere, BTW and didn't think possible but haven't checked).
I'm just trying to be consistent. I'm complaining about people designing unusable sites. In the first case, I point out that many people neglect to write some code that could have made their site a little more tolerable. In the second case, I complain about SOME people, who choose to waste their time writing code that specifically impairs usability.
However, I just leave an unreadable site - if the author can't be bothered to test the site out, I can't be bothered to jump through hoops to use it.
Of course. Bad design is only a problem for a web designer if she wants people to use her sites.
This goes for Flash and HTML. Bad design is possible using either platform, but there's a hell of a lot more of it created in HTML, as any fool with a text editor can slap something up on Geocities.
Lies, damn lies and statistics... Of course there is a lot more bad design that was done in HTML - the vast majority of web content today is still created in HTML! I still maintain that most Flash content is just plain bad, from a usability perspective. I can't remember seeing a single Flash site that I liked, but that could just be me being too critical, or just losing my memory.
Now, mostly as an illustration of how bad things can get with Flash, take a look at http://www.ysub.com - I know it doesn't prove anything, but just look at the blasted thing! There's actually some content on that page. Can anyone find it without looking at the
If Flash can be used to create usable web sites, how come nobody uses it to create usable web sites? The only Flash application I've ever seen that came close was the one with the frog in the blender, and that was only because it used an established user interface metaphore (The Blender), and it had an on-screen animated character (the frog), that practically TOLD you what to do.
Blame the author. It's simple to add the same functionality to the Flash movie (it can call javascript which in turn would call history.back()).
No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Again, there's nothing to stop a flash movie searching itself. There is a DOM, and scripting is always active (obviously).
See my previous point. It's not the default behavior, and nobody bothers to do it.
This is just wrong. Depending upon the parameters used in the embed/object tags, a movie can be resizable, or of fixed dimensions (like java).
Can you resize the text? Sure, you can zoom, but I've seen sites that disable most of the context menu functions. Some people can't read itsy bitsy teensy weensy fonts, you know.
Hardly flash's fault! When I browse with my linux box I often come across html only sites with unreadable text, broken javascript and other multimedia elements that don't work. If anything, flash helps sites to be more accessable across platforms.
Most browsers will allow you to work around those issues by overriding certain (poort) choices made by the HTML author. With Flash, you're just stuck with what they shovel your way. Now, Javascript... that's a whole other issue.
it is an arabic letter that is not pronouncable in
:-D.
/.? You obviously don't read much at -1...
most other languages, and it is writen like a 3
but facing rightward.
:-) I was hoping you'd tell me which letter it was...
I know just enough Arabic to understand what was said, (not much more than that, though), but I'm not familiar with the transliteration conventions.
Sorry for being rude by posting in foreign, I just thought it was cute
You call this rude? On
What does the 3 stand for?
Basic freedom. It's nobody's business what I do with my property and with my time.
All you need is a long fishing rod attached to your hat (you do wear a hat, don't you?) with the cell phone dangling from it, a good six to nine feet away.
That's what I plan to do when I get a leash... Urrr...cell phone.
Ah! An easy one! That's because Volvos are the best cars ever made, and nothing compares to them. So, they make a nice extreme data points to compare things against.
Volvos are so spiffy, in fact, that I suspect that even you won't be able to wreck one.
No, wait - I take that back...
Are you telling me a color blind person is unable to see colored text on a background of an entirely different color? I'm no expert, but I don't think color-blindness works like that.
Yep, that's exactly what I'm saying. What you call "an entirely different color" may look like exactly the same color to a color blind person. Time to do some reading.
As the font controls: Changing a font can change how much space a whole block of text takes up, which can fuck up a whole layout. Flash isnt meant for that kind of user control! If the user had control of fonts, it would defeat a lot of the benefits of using flash. (like absolute platform independent control of how your content is gonna look)
My dad can't use my desktop because the fonts are about 10% the size they should be for him to be able to read them comfortably. Mozilla's font settings at least make it possible for him to read the content. Who gives a shit whether the sacred page layout gets messed up, if you can't read the content?
No, that's all the control you need. How do you change the fonts? Zoom into content without having to make do with a tiny window into a large page? (see Mozilla's View->Text Zoom option) How do you tell Flash to ignore the colors set by the page "designer", if you happen to be color blind, and you can't see the damn text?
Just because you can use it, doesn't make it useable.
Or look here: libstdc++ FAQ For the same information, with annotations.