Interesting view. I disagree with it completely. But interesting.
Re:No more compound documents?
on
XHTML 2 Cancelled
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Count me in as one of the "give me more expressiveness" crowd. Span, div, and object are good enough for most purposes, but have their own problems. Writing [X]HTML/CSS pages for all media--conventional browser, print, and screen readers--is a bear. Having sane defaults for tags like STRONG and EM--that is, a certain inflection for the screen reader, and a decent-looking print default--saves developers a lot of time.
So treat the B tag as the STRONG tag and the I tag as the EM tag (that is, semantically identical) and you have structural elements (because, unless I'm misunderstanding the point here, EM and the like were chosen to replace B, I, etc. because of screen readers and such, not because they weren't semantically important).
Seconded. Drupal doesn't parse it directly, but it does use regex replacement to strip out tags an administrator declares unacceptable (usually everything except tables, lists, the basic formatting tags, and links). The only user who defaults to having full HTML (unstripped) is the root user, and you still have to enable another module to allow direct insertion of PHP.
C/C++ is still very important, but for a lot of tasks it's becoming much less important. A lot of tools programming is moving toward.NET and other higher-level languages like Python.
That really doesn't matter for this Ask Slashdot, though: frankly, the OP is screwed. You don't just become a game designer. Virtually all the big-name designers started as a programmer (Miyamoto excepted, IIRC he came from the art side of things) and worked their way up. And most of them didn't get a chance to design games until they had put in quite a few years (the older ones at smaller places, like Meier and Microprose, obviously don't qualify). The only way to actually be a game designer in the OP's give-it-to-me mindset is an independent game developer, doing everything (or nearly everything) himself. And if he doesn't even know the answers to these questions (or doesn't actually care enough to look, preferring instead to Ask Slashdot), he's not going to be much of an indie designer either.
IE7 and IE8 use less memory than Firefox, in my experience. I don't think I'd recommend Firefox on a computer with those specs--it wouldn't work particularly well.
Plug in second monitor, select "System/Preferences/Display", set the resolutions and rotations on the two monitors, log out and log back in again, and you're done. What's the problem exactly?
That it...doesn't...work, on either Intel or ATI chips. (I don't have a modern nVidia chip in my main computer.) The second monitor fails to come up if it's not being driven at the same resolution as the primary, and also fails to rotate (just remains at standard orientation).
That's just flat-out false, and I'm not sure where you would have got that idea from.
From ever trying to run anything that's 3D-accelerated? When I say "can't run," I don't mean "crashes." I mean "is dog-slow and produces artifacting." I have no idea why something that is in theory a simple process produces artifacting, but I'm not a graphics guy or X engineer.
(There's also the pretty big problems with OpenGL on any new ATI cards, it seems, as Unreal Tournament and my company's own 3D engine don't render correctly--and don't say "that's ATI's fault," because an end user doesn't give two shits that the people saying "oh, your stuff will work great" want to pass the buck to the hardware manufacturer.)
Yes, they did; it was called GLX, and has been available on Linux since 2000. DRI is based on this system, but allows you to avoid some overhead when the client and server are running on the same computer.
You can save it somewhere else though and copy it over/etc/X11/xorg.conf, no big deal.
If you don't think this is a big deal, you do not understand end users.
You can bitch about X and DRI all day, but as long as there's no specs available, no-one can write a driver for any video card, that's not X's fault.
Why, exactly, should a user give a damn about this? It's not the user's problem that X doesn't support it. It's X's problem. Is that unfair? You bet it is. Is the world fair? You bet it ain't.
The whole X stack and things like DRI that bother you so much are there for a reason, which is to allow running network-transparent cross-platform X applications.
Have you even bothered to read what the fuck I'm writing? Yes, the ability to do network-transparent X applications is a good thing. I have said this. That does not mean it needs to be the display on a local machine. OS X does it correctly: run X as an application and field X applications through it. Its local desktop is handled much differently, and offers significantly more local flexibility and even better performance than an X-based desktop does.
I've listened to multiple rants from people who are intimately familiar with just how bad X is as a display mechanism. I trust them much more than you.
Yes, XFree86 was much of the problem. X.org doesn't really do themselves a lot of favors, but maybe, given ten years and a few million bucks, they'll fix it. But given the hoops you have to jump through in order to actually do anything with X, I am rapidly becoming of the opinion that the only real purpose X should serve is remote application display. It should not be the primary display interface for anything. OS X and xming on Windows have it right: run X as an application on the desktop and render through to a sane environment.
GNOME is an abortion, and will never be a credible competitor to Windows if it doesn't get its act together. I say this as somebody who's friends with a number of people in the GNOME and Mono communities.
WINE does more to hurt any Linux-on-the-desktop arguments than it helps. "I should use my Windows applications on a system with relatively bad native apps, and use a suboptimal interface for my Windows applications? Sign me up!"
SDL is not a credible competitor to DirectX, if only because it's in so many goddamn pieces (and some of them are pretty crap, like SDL_net--to be fair, Microsoft abandoned DirectPlay when it realized it was a bad alternative to handling networking outside of the DirectX framework; that's no excuse for SDL_input though). A notable problem is that it's chock full of goddamnfucking C-isms. DirectX sure isn't perfect, but at least you're expected to use something remotely type-safe and sane with it (C++, C#, Python, whatever). The SDL documentation is a piece of shit, the API is pretty illogical and weird (when the OpenGL API looks sane and appealing you know you've fucked up).
I'm not saying that this is their fault or should necessarily be in their scope: SDL was designed for a fairly limited problem set--Loki Games needed a framework for their porting efforts. It does not stretch to more modern goals seamlessly, but it also never was intended to.
But the worst part, I think, is how it's presented. It's a bunch of volunteers. That's fine and dandy, but there's no commercial support and no Big Name behind it. It looks chintzy and doesn't exactly inspire confidence when trying to sell it to a PHB type.
Google News had no capacity or throughput issues. It thought that it was a distributed denial of service attack and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.
Shuttleworth does come close, but I think the community needs a "god like" figure who can 1) do no wrong, 2) listen to the users, and 3) encourage developers to do the Right Thing. Maybe someone Jobs-like in the respect of "That UI is crap, what are you thinking?" would be good. However, it wouldn't work. The project would fork. Over egos.
Essentially true. They need a hardnosed bastard who isn't afraid of bruising egos, and has the money to pay for what he can't con the community into doing. They do need a Steve Jobs.
KDE 4 really isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. There are some changes I don't necessarily agree with, but all things considered I'm pleased with the direction it's taking and look forward to when the release a feature-complete version (4.2 is getting close, though!).
It is as bad, and I'm not going near it while the current bunch of idiots is running the show.
Your last sentence is kind of comical. Have you ever _read_ the Gnome mailing lists? If you want condescending, disdainful discourse, that's a great place to start.
The GNOME mailing lists are immaterial as long as they treat their users with respect in normal discourse. I don't care what assholes they are to each other. Meanwhile, KDE insists that "they don't need users." I have contributed to KDE applications in the past, and there are two 3.5 themes on KDELook that I have authored. Fuck 'em. They don't want users, they don't want me, because I'm a user first and a contributor second, and their hedging bullshit regarding "well, contributors aren't users" is unacceptable.
Alright, so it's possible. The fact that you had to do that essentially means it's impossible for most users.
If you ever have to go manually edit configuration files, the OS has fucked up. If you ever have to go to it for something so trivial, the OS has catastrophically fucked up.
Yes, I know, but Ubuntu's marketing is still aimed primarily at the desktop. Ubuntu Server is arguably the best part of Ubuntu, but they don't really have much of a market. No real enterprise support (Canonical can't step to Red Hat, I'm sorry, but they do have potential in the future).
Yet it works far better on Windows than it does on Linux. Firefox makes its money off Windows; Linux is a second-class citizen
Evolution: Email client and reminders.
Inferior in every way to Outlook, absolutely crash-tastic, and poor interfacing with Exchange Server (which the rest of the world uses, so that's kind of important).
Tomboy (oops it uses mono): Keep track of notes, can load specific notes for a day. Helpful for Todo lists.
Also runs on Windows.
Calculator: Normal 4 function calculator with scientific mode if needed.
Is this a fucking joke? Is this supposed to be a good reason to use Linux? Come on.
CD/DVD Burner: works well.
It's gotten a lot better, yes. Not being able to use something like Alex Feinman's ISO Recorder kind of sucks, though. Shell extensions are (sometimes) a good thing.
Screenshot Tool: press printscreen, save picture. Much better than Windows where you press the printscreen button and open up Paint to save it.
You cannot be serious about this being something important. There are also ten thousand similar tools on Windows, and no, it coming packaged with the distribution means precisely shit-all.
Pidgin: All in one IM client. Very customizable.
Works on Windows. Works better on Windows.
OpenOffice Word: can open all MS Office documents and is a good Office clone.
Do you even know what the fuck you're using? It's OpenOffice Writer. It is also a substandard Office 2003 clone at best. OO.o nitwits sneer at Office 2007, but guess what? The ribbon is really, really awesome, the ability to separate content from presentation has never been better, on-the-fly theming is leaps and bounds better than anything ever done by Microsoft or the open-source world before, and--oh yeah--people actually use Office, so there are a ton of handy plugins for a lot of different uses.
OpenOffice Calc is also a really bad Excel knockoff, and doesn't even bother to be compatible with the overwhelming majority of Excel features. OpenOffice doesn't even have anything remotely similar to OneNote or Groove, both of which are incredibly useful, albeit in different contexts (I keep all my school notes in OneNote, and Groove is a great wide-area document synchronization system). About the only part of OpenOffice that is better than Microsoft Office is Base, and frankly you shouldn't be using Access or Base.
Rhythmbox Music Player: Keep track of music, works with lots of USB MP3 players (including iPods).
And yet it doesn't fucking approach the level of user-friendliness or compatibility that even Windows Media Player does. And I hate Windows Media Player. For fuck's sake, it isn't even as good as iTunes! At least if you'd said Banshee you would have been talking about a project done by good people who have the potential to come up with something really cool. (Banshee is getting really good really fast, but I still wouldn't want it over Winamp.)
Totem Movie Player: Limited at first, but when you can't play something, it will prompt you to install the needed codec.
Again, you offer as a "good thing" one of the worst possible options! Then again, if you'd said VLC (the only really decent option on Linux), I could have just pointed out that it runs on Windows too...
Add/Remove: Miles ahead of anything MacOSX and Microsoft has EVER done. Takes care of everything FOR you: downloading, updating, installing, etc. Just search for what you want through the left side or in the search tab.
Yes, the ability to handle packages is nice. Unless what you want isn't in the repositories, in which case you
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting view. I disagree with it completely. But interesting.
Count me in as one of the "give me more expressiveness" crowd. Span, div, and object are good enough for most purposes, but have their own problems. Writing [X]HTML/CSS pages for all media--conventional browser, print, and screen readers--is a bear. Having sane defaults for tags like STRONG and EM--that is, a certain inflection for the screen reader, and a decent-looking print default--saves developers a lot of time.
So treat the B tag as the STRONG tag and the I tag as the EM tag (that is, semantically identical) and you have structural elements (because, unless I'm misunderstanding the point here, EM and the like were chosen to replace B, I, etc. because of screen readers and such, not because they weren't semantically important).
Something wrong with doing this?
Seconded. Drupal doesn't parse it directly, but it does use regex replacement to strip out tags an administrator declares unacceptable (usually everything except tables, lists, the basic formatting tags, and links). The only user who defaults to having full HTML (unstripped) is the root user, and you still have to enable another module to allow direct insertion of PHP.
Why are you trying to install software to a non-native partition? It sounds more like you're the problem here.
Oh please. He can do anything that thing can do on a PC, just blitting to the damn screen with DirectDraw.
C/C++ is still very important, but for a lot of tasks it's becoming much less important. A lot of tools programming is moving toward .NET and other higher-level languages like Python.
That really doesn't matter for this Ask Slashdot, though: frankly, the OP is screwed. You don't just become a game designer. Virtually all the big-name designers started as a programmer (Miyamoto excepted, IIRC he came from the art side of things) and worked their way up. And most of them didn't get a chance to design games until they had put in quite a few years (the older ones at smaller places, like Meier and Microprose, obviously don't qualify). The only way to actually be a game designer in the OP's give-it-to-me mindset is an independent game developer, doing everything (or nearly everything) himself. And if he doesn't even know the answers to these questions (or doesn't actually care enough to look, preferring instead to Ask Slashdot), he's not going to be much of an indie designer either.
Does Ruby have an equivalent of APC yet? (JRuby doesn't count.)
IE7 and IE8 use less memory than Firefox, in my experience. I don't think I'd recommend Firefox on a computer with those specs--it wouldn't work particularly well.
Firefox is great, but svelte it ain't.
They pay taxes on fuel when in the state.
It's also slow as shit, has bad/no real professional support, and looks even worse than PHP.
Ruby tards are even worse than Python tards.
Plug in second monitor, select "System/Preferences/Display", set the resolutions and rotations on the two monitors, log out and log back in again, and you're done. What's the problem exactly?
That it...doesn't...work, on either Intel or ATI chips. (I don't have a modern nVidia chip in my main computer.) The second monitor fails to come up if it's not being driven at the same resolution as the primary, and also fails to rotate (just remains at standard orientation).
That's just flat-out false, and I'm not sure where you would have got that idea from.
From ever trying to run anything that's 3D-accelerated? When I say "can't run," I don't mean "crashes." I mean "is dog-slow and produces artifacting." I have no idea why something that is in theory a simple process produces artifacting, but I'm not a graphics guy or X engineer.
(There's also the pretty big problems with OpenGL on any new ATI cards, it seems, as Unreal Tournament and my company's own 3D engine don't render correctly--and don't say "that's ATI's fault," because an end user doesn't give two shits that the people saying "oh, your stuff will work great" want to pass the buck to the hardware manufacturer.)
Yes, they did; it was called GLX, and has been available on Linux since 2000. DRI is based on this system, but allows you to avoid some overhead when the client and server are running on the same computer.
Then why did that work and this doesn't? ;)
You can save it somewhere else though and copy it over /etc/X11/xorg.conf, no big deal.
If you don't think this is a big deal, you do not understand end users.
You can bitch about X and DRI all day, but as long as there's no specs available, no-one can write a driver for any video card, that's not X's fault.
Why, exactly, should a user give a damn about this? It's not the user's problem that X doesn't support it. It's X's problem. Is that unfair? You bet it is. Is the world fair? You bet it ain't.
The whole X stack and things like DRI that bother you so much are there for a reason, which is to allow running network-transparent cross-platform X applications.
Have you even bothered to read what the fuck I'm writing? Yes, the ability to do network-transparent X applications is a good thing. I have said this. That does not mean it needs to be the display on a local machine. OS X does it correctly: run X as an application and field X applications through it. Its local desktop is handled much differently, and offers significantly more local flexibility and even better performance than an X-based desktop does.
I've listened to multiple rants from people who are intimately familiar with just how bad X is as a display mechanism. I trust them much more than you.
Yes, XFree86 was much of the problem. X.org doesn't really do themselves a lot of favors, but maybe, given ten years and a few million bucks, they'll fix it. But given the hoops you have to jump through in order to actually do anything with X, I am rapidly becoming of the opinion that the only real purpose X should serve is remote application display. It should not be the primary display interface for anything. OS X and xming on Windows have it right: run X as an application on the desktop and render through to a sane environment.
GNOME is an abortion, and will never be a credible competitor to Windows if it doesn't get its act together. I say this as somebody who's friends with a number of people in the GNOME and Mono communities.
WINE does more to hurt any Linux-on-the-desktop arguments than it helps. "I should use my Windows applications on a system with relatively bad native apps, and use a suboptimal interface for my Windows applications? Sign me up!"
SDL is not a credible competitor to DirectX, if only because it's in so many goddamn pieces (and some of them are pretty crap, like SDL_net--to be fair, Microsoft abandoned DirectPlay when it realized it was a bad alternative to handling networking outside of the DirectX framework; that's no excuse for SDL_input though). A notable problem is that it's chock full of goddamnfucking C-isms. DirectX sure isn't perfect, but at least you're expected to use something remotely type-safe and sane with it (C++, C#, Python, whatever). The SDL documentation is a piece of shit, the API is pretty illogical and weird (when the OpenGL API looks sane and appealing you know you've fucked up).
I'm not saying that this is their fault or should necessarily be in their scope: SDL was designed for a fairly limited problem set--Loki Games needed a framework for their porting efforts. It does not stretch to more modern goals seamlessly, but it also never was intended to.
But the worst part, I think, is how it's presented. It's a bunch of volunteers. That's fine and dandy, but there's no commercial support and no Big Name behind it. It looks chintzy and doesn't exactly inspire confidence when trying to sell it to a PHB type.
Windows has been doing it for most patches since Server 2003. Thanks, but feel free to go die in a fire.
I may not be a regular user--but I have no interest in dealing with the stupid parts of Linux, so I may as well be.
And nVidia's settings manager is irrelevant, or is at least a symptom of the problem--namely, all of X.
I was looking for places to troll.
Why did Michael Jackson cross the road?
Because his dick was still stuck in the kid.
Michael Jackson was a fairly formative musical influence to a lot of modern music. The importance of "Thriller" can't really be overestimated.
So, you're a fucking retard, huh?
Google News had no capacity or throughput issues. It thought that it was a distributed denial of service attack and forced users searching for Michael Jackson to enter a captcha. I know, I saw it.
Even Fox News had the information on Friday.
Slashdot: Slower Than Fox News.
Forgot this:
Shuttleworth does come close, but I think the community needs a "god like" figure who can 1) do no wrong, 2) listen to the users, and 3) encourage developers to do the Right Thing. Maybe someone Jobs-like in the respect of "That UI is crap, what are you thinking?" would be good. However, it wouldn't work. The project would fork. Over egos.
Essentially true. They need a hardnosed bastard who isn't afraid of bruising egos, and has the money to pay for what he can't con the community into doing. They do need a Steve Jobs.
But it'll never happen. Too bad.
KDE 4 really isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. There are some changes I don't necessarily agree with, but all things considered I'm pleased with the direction it's taking and look forward to when the release a feature-complete version (4.2 is getting close, though!).
It is as bad, and I'm not going near it while the current bunch of idiots is running the show.
Your last sentence is kind of comical. Have you ever _read_ the Gnome mailing lists? If you want condescending, disdainful discourse, that's a great place to start.
The GNOME mailing lists are immaterial as long as they treat their users with respect in normal discourse. I don't care what assholes they are to each other. Meanwhile, KDE insists that "they don't need users." I have contributed to KDE applications in the past, and there are two 3.5 themes on KDELook that I have authored. Fuck 'em. They don't want users, they don't want me, because I'm a user first and a contributor second, and their hedging bullshit regarding "well, contributors aren't users" is unacceptable.
Alright, so it's possible. The fact that you had to do that essentially means it's impossible for most users.
If you ever have to go manually edit configuration files, the OS has fucked up. If you ever have to go to it for something so trivial, the OS has catastrophically fucked up.
Yes, I know, but Ubuntu's marketing is still aimed primarily at the desktop. Ubuntu Server is arguably the best part of Ubuntu, but they don't really have much of a market. No real enterprise support (Canonical can't step to Red Hat, I'm sorry, but they do have potential in the future).
Firefox: Good internet browser.
Yet it works far better on Windows than it does on Linux. Firefox makes its money off Windows; Linux is a second-class citizen
Evolution: Email client and reminders.
Inferior in every way to Outlook, absolutely crash-tastic, and poor interfacing with Exchange Server (which the rest of the world uses, so that's kind of important).
Tomboy (oops it uses mono): Keep track of notes, can load specific notes for a day. Helpful for Todo lists.
Also runs on Windows.
Calculator: Normal 4 function calculator with scientific mode if needed.
Is this a fucking joke? Is this supposed to be a good reason to use Linux? Come on.
CD/DVD Burner: works well.
It's gotten a lot better, yes. Not being able to use something like Alex Feinman's ISO Recorder kind of sucks, though. Shell extensions are (sometimes) a good thing.
Screenshot Tool: press printscreen, save picture. Much better than Windows where you press the printscreen button and open up Paint to save it.
You cannot be serious about this being something important. There are also ten thousand similar tools on Windows, and no, it coming packaged with the distribution means precisely shit-all.
Pidgin: All in one IM client. Very customizable.
Works on Windows. Works better on Windows.
OpenOffice Word: can open all MS Office documents and is a good Office clone.
Do you even know what the fuck you're using? It's OpenOffice Writer. It is also a substandard Office 2003 clone at best. OO.o nitwits sneer at Office 2007, but guess what? The ribbon is really, really awesome, the ability to separate content from presentation has never been better, on-the-fly theming is leaps and bounds better than anything ever done by Microsoft or the open-source world before, and--oh yeah--people actually use Office, so there are a ton of handy plugins for a lot of different uses.
OpenOffice Calc is also a really bad Excel knockoff, and doesn't even bother to be compatible with the overwhelming majority of Excel features. OpenOffice doesn't even have anything remotely similar to OneNote or Groove, both of which are incredibly useful, albeit in different contexts (I keep all my school notes in OneNote, and Groove is a great wide-area document synchronization system). About the only part of OpenOffice that is better than Microsoft Office is Base, and frankly you shouldn't be using Access or Base.
Rhythmbox Music Player: Keep track of music, works with lots of USB MP3 players (including iPods).
And yet it doesn't fucking approach the level of user-friendliness or compatibility that even Windows Media Player does. And I hate Windows Media Player. For fuck's sake, it isn't even as good as iTunes! At least if you'd said Banshee you would have been talking about a project done by good people who have the potential to come up with something really cool. (Banshee is getting really good really fast, but I still wouldn't want it over Winamp.)
Totem Movie Player: Limited at first, but when you can't play something, it will prompt you to install the needed codec.
Again, you offer as a "good thing" one of the worst possible options! Then again, if you'd said VLC (the only really decent option on Linux), I could have just pointed out that it runs on Windows too...
Add/Remove: Miles ahead of anything MacOSX and Microsoft has EVER done. Takes care of everything FOR you: downloading, updating, installing, etc. Just search for what you want through the left side or in the search tab.
Yes, the ability to handle packages is nice. Unless what you want isn't in the repositories, in which case you