> The eye is much better at seeing fine detail in deciding where there isn't light
You are using too small a font size. All the fonts I see now on my screen are 3mm minimum, regardless of resolution. Anything smaller is harder to read and causes eyestrain, and eventually pain, just like white backgrounds.
> If you find there's too much light, may I suggest lowering the brightness on your > display? Or possibly spending more time outside and less time in the basement?
My display is already reasonably dim and there are no problems whatsoever in viewing any color other than white. Why should I adjust my monitor settings for your insensitive website design? And no, I'm not in the basement and there is plenty of natural light in the room.
Also, I am not insisting on black backgrounds. A slightly grayer white, like 0xC8C8C8 is perfectly acceptable, as are pastel colors otherwise matching your website scheme. It is the omnipresent 0xFFFFFF that is painful. Of course, since I customarily tell the browser to ignore website colors, this simply means that I will never see them anyway, no matter how pretty you think they are.
> I'd like to know how you deal with reading Slashdot?
Unlike the office suite, Mozilla is quite friendly about throwing away website colors. I haven't even seen what Slashdot color scheme looks like. The only drawback of doing it is that AJAX menus appear transparent, drawing only text over the webpage text, resulting in garbage.
> regard computers as fancy typewriters, so they insist on black-on-white even for websites
Actually there have been studies on what colors are easiest on the eye and black-on-white was it. Naturally, everyone ignores the fact that the study was done with documents printed on paper.
> If your display is causing you actual pain then you need to turn down the brightness or wear sunglasses.
It is already as dim as practical. There is no problem with viewing normal colors, and even 90% white is tolerable; it's only the 0xFFFFFF that is painful.
I just tried the demo, and it has no way to change the color scheme, which is black on white. Why does all the software these days switch to these totally uncustomizable browser-like color schemes? Don't they realize that those white backgrounds are REALLY painful on the eyes? In the old days the applications were nicer about using the Windows color scheme for everything, or at least offered some way to change the look. Now, nearly everything comes with those horrible white backgrounds, instantly and painfully making it impossible for me to use them. Great. I guess all those companies can live just fine without my money.
Slackware Slamd64 has had support for AMD64 for a while now and it works just fine, no driver problems or stability problems on the Linux side. On the Windows XP64 side things aren't as rosy, but not as bad as some people say either. I found drivers for all my hardware, including the graphics card (NV7600), and so the OS is functioning very well. Some games don't run, but all the ones I play do. Half Life 2 (64bit version), HL2E1, Sims 2, Flight Simulator 9 and X, all Civilization versions and CTP, Fallout 1 (F2 doesn't work), GTA 3 and SA, all work great.
If you are a programmer, you will definitely want to get on x86_64. You get twice (!) as many general purpose registers, twice as many SSE registers, and a much cleaner ABI with most things passed in registers instead of the stack. You also will no longer be using the 387 FPU, as the ABI supports doing pretty much everything through SSE, unlike the 32bit ABI that required returning floats in an FPU register. This should greatly reduce your EMMS headaches. Finally having native 64-bit types rocks! The premature optimization nut in you will crack with joy, I guarantee it.
What exactly is the business model of giving people unlimited free storage? Hard disks cost money, bandwidth costs money, and most people block ads anyway, so where is the profit? I find it difficult to believe that a company can run a business like that, with the exception of those companies, like Google, who can run it at a loss and support that loss with some other line of revenue. I suppose the service would have some prestige points, but I really see no way to make money that way.
There appear to be quite a few "wild" areas on the map. People keep complaining how IPv4 address space is running out, but there is actually grass growing in some of those areas!
Indeed, it really makes a difference in casting "social justice" into the same relationship with "communism" as "intelligent design" has with "creationism".
> Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children?
Children are the only way to buy something every living thing wants -- the continuation of the species in general, and of your own genes in particular. The act of procreation is, to put it bluntly, your biological purpose, and it really ought to have some value to you, and consequently, be worth paying quite a bit for.
> Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones?
In our culture giving presents is the way of telling your loved ones that they are your loved ones. If you don't give them presents, they just might think you no longer value the relationship. If you want to have a relationship, this is the way you "buy" it. And if some of you are screaming "how commercial!", well, just try not giving out any presents this Christmas and see whether people still like you just as much. You might be surprized.
> Where is the economy in giving education to minors?
Just as preservation of the species is your biological purpose, preservation of knowledge is your social purpose. Through knowledge passed to our descendants we achive an immortality of sorts. Quite worth paying for, I think. Furthermore, you will yourself reap the benefits of you children's education in your lifetime, since well-educated people tend to have well-paying jobs and not need you to support them. The multitude of educated people supports your life in every other way possible, by maintaining the infrastructure of our civilization; providing you with food, clothing, shelter, the computer you are now using, and the web browser which shows you these words.
> Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town?
The sooner he can find some place to spend his money, the sooner your town can benefit from the incoming monetary flow. Ask anyone living in a place supported by the tourism economy.
> Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table?
If you don't give them cards, they won't play with you. If the game is poker, this may win or lose you money, depending on how well you play.
> Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
In personal satisfaction. I might for instance get a pretty big ego boost right now by pointing out that you should spell that "advice", rather than "advise";) Nah, just kidding!
As you can see, we are always giving for some economic reason, all the time. Does that make us bad people?
I guess that makes you the anti-C++ bigot:) The kind who never bothered to learn C++ and simply repeats bad things he has heard from other people who have never bothered to learn C++.
> You sound like a mainframe programmer trying to extol the virtues of that dying breed.
Funny you should say that. My breed has been dying for twenty years now, and yet pretty much all the serious applications out there are still written in C++ (well, most were written in C before '90 or so, but we're a similar breed)
> C++ isn't going anywhere soon, it's blazing fast for desktop applications, > sucks hugely for server based web apps.
Only because there isn't a proper library for servlet development for C++ right now. Why not? Not enough interest, I suppose. Most people coming out of colleges only know Java, PHP, or some like language, so it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. If I ever have need of a web application, I'll probably write a C++ library for it. Until then, I guess C++ really will suck on the servlet end for newbie programmers.
> eBay's a pretty complex application, and it's backend is entirely Java.
As I asked before, what's your source?
> And using C++ for a website, you'd have to be insane. A single buffer overflow > could give someone access to your entire server.
Buffer overflows are a C problem. C++ programmers who know enough to use STL containers instead of malloc will have no buffer overflows. The only people to complain about buffer overflows in C++ are those who have never taken the time to learn how to properly handle memory management in it. Secondly, Java, PHP, and Python still offer plenty of other ways to put security holes into your application, and those are the ones that usually show up on security advisories. Finally, hacking a web application does not give you access to the entire server, except in very rare cases where the webserver is not set up properly.
> As for performance, in most areas Java keeps up with compiled C++ without a problem > because it's compiled to machine code at runtime, then cached until the actual code has changed.
JIT compilers are not a panacea. Just because you can in some cases get similar performance from compiled Java, doesn't give me any incentive to use it instead of C++, does it now? Performance is also affected by memory footprint. In C++ I can write a useful application with a memory footprint of less than 100k. In Java, the VM alone (which you are still using even when JIT is enabled) takes 10M minimum plus whatever virtual memory space you have allocated. Can your Java servlet run a million instances on the same machine? I thought not. A C++ servlet would be much smaller and probably faster, lessening the load on your server, allowing you to run fewer servers, and consequently saving you money.
> I can't believe you have a UID that low and still don't know the difference between applets and server side Java.
I can't believe you can't imagine that not all programmers are web programmers. Believe it or not, some of us are still writing desktop applications (you know, those other programs that aren't a browser), have been doing so for most of our career, and will probably still be doing so long after the current weblet fad dies.
> You most likely use websites running server side Java everyday (Google, Gmail, Ebay just to name a few).
May I ask how you know what Google backend is written in? Unless you work there you probably haven't seen the code. I don't necessarily doubt your assertion, you being such a web guru and all, but I'd like to see for myself.
> Seriously, who uses applets for anything anymore?
As far as I know, nobody ever used them for anything. Nevertheless, when somebody says "Java", "applet" is the first thing that comes to mind; me being such an old fart, you know. "Useless" and "bloated" are other things that come to mind next, me being a C++ old fart. But run along, you kids, no need to listen to my ravings; I've got some real work to do.
> Your comment leads me to believe that you are either trolling or do not know much about web-development.
Mostly the latter. I'm a systems programmer; the only websites I write are internal documentation web pages which are all static content. I guess everybody does nothing but web programming these days, considering how many scathing replies I got:)
> You are comparing Applets and Oranges (sorry, couldn't resist
Yes, I do know the difference between applets and server-side Java. But, not being a web developer, I naturally think "applet" when somebody says "Java", since that was its original application.
> Ever heard of eclipse?
The Java IDE used to develop Java applications? Sorry, it doesn't count; it's just a Java tool to make more Java. It doesn't make Java useful. I was talking about real applications, something an end-user might use. I wouldn't put most server-side HTML generators in that category. Those are either too simple to be called an application, or they should be. Because of that, if I had to write one, I'd probably use PHP. If performance mattered, I'd use C++, since that's what I know best.
How about not learning legacy skills? Then all you have to do is wait a few years, watch all the old programmers retire, and all the companies still stuck in the stone age go out of business. Then we can go and get a job doing something actually enjoyable.
I don't know about most people, but I always turn off Java in my browser. It increases startup times, has security problems (or so I have heard when people actually used Java, back in the last century), and there really aren't any sites that have useful applets. For all the hype surrounding it, I have still to see any functional Java-based application, in the browser or otherwise. Of course, you are a Java developer, so this will not apply to you. But consider that most CMSs are designed for regular people, who would probably rather use a regular HTML-based interface that works in any browser, including lynx, which even I still use on occasion.
Productivity (as reported by the BLS) is measured in dollars per hour per person. Since the Federal Reserve has the ability and the desire to expand the monetary supply without limit, productivity can likewise be increased without limit. Or, at least, as long as China keeps buying our treasury bonds...
In the old times, you strived to prove to your customers how good your products were and how intelligent and talented your workers are. These days you have to show that your products are garbage, your workers are dumb and inept, and you yourself have no talent whatsoever for running the company. I suppose that is what they call "truth in advertising".
There has been no need to redesign the phone to "cope with modern systems and security needs" just because con artists are using it. Every scam has a beneficiary; find where the money goes and who benefits, and you've found the source. Penis enlargement scams will sell pills or something from a physical address, penny stock scams will have company addresses on file with the stock exchange, pyramid scams will have a list of addresses the money should be sent to. THESE PEOPLE CAN BE FOUND! They are committing the crime of fraud. Why aren't they being arrested?
A treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by Maxwell - an applied mathematician's brain at work. Most mathematicians don't care about the real world and just throw equations at you. In this book you'll find out how to actually make use of higher mathematics.
Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham - this is considerably more fun to read than you think. Ever wanted to see a picture of a complex derivative?
And it won't be long before we get a Waldo who can show us all how to get power for free! My Evil Plans will no longer require a gigawatt power source! Bwahaha!
Slashdot Mirror
> The eye is much better at seeing fine detail in deciding where there isn't light
You are using too small a font size. All the fonts I see now on my screen are 3mm minimum, regardless of resolution. Anything smaller is harder to read and causes eyestrain, and eventually pain, just like white backgrounds.
> If you find there's too much light, may I suggest lowering the brightness on your
> display? Or possibly spending more time outside and less time in the basement?
My display is already reasonably dim and there are no problems whatsoever in viewing any color other than white. Why should I adjust my monitor settings for your insensitive website design? And no, I'm not in the basement and there is plenty of natural light in the room.
Also, I am not insisting on black backgrounds. A slightly grayer white, like 0xC8C8C8 is perfectly acceptable, as are pastel colors otherwise matching your website scheme. It is the omnipresent 0xFFFFFF that is painful. Of course, since I customarily tell the browser to ignore website colors, this simply means that I will never see them anyway, no matter how pretty you think they are.
> I'd like to know how you deal with reading Slashdot?
Unlike the office suite, Mozilla is quite friendly about throwing away website colors. I haven't even seen what Slashdot color scheme looks like. The only drawback of doing it is that AJAX menus appear transparent, drawing only text over the webpage text, resulting in garbage.
> regard computers as fancy typewriters, so they insist on black-on-white even for websites
Actually there have been studies on what colors are easiest on the eye and black-on-white was it. Naturally, everyone ignores the fact that the study was done with documents printed on paper.
> If your display is causing you actual pain then you need to turn down the brightness or wear sunglasses.
It is already as dim as practical. There is no problem with viewing normal colors, and even 90% white is tolerable; it's only the 0xFFFFFF that is painful.
I just tried the demo, and it has no way to change the color scheme, which is black on white. Why does all the software these days switch to these totally uncustomizable browser-like color schemes? Don't they realize that those white backgrounds are REALLY painful on the eyes? In the old days the applications were nicer about using the Windows color scheme for everything, or at least offered some way to change the look. Now, nearly everything comes with those horrible white backgrounds, instantly and painfully making it impossible for me to use them. Great. I guess all those companies can live just fine without my money.
Slackware Slamd64 has had support for AMD64 for a while now and it works just fine, no driver problems or stability problems on the Linux side. On the Windows XP64 side things aren't as rosy, but not as bad as some people say either. I found drivers for all my hardware, including the graphics card (NV7600), and so the OS is functioning very well. Some games don't run, but all the ones I play do. Half Life 2 (64bit version), HL2E1, Sims 2, Flight Simulator 9 and X, all Civilization versions and CTP, Fallout 1 (F2 doesn't work), GTA 3 and SA, all work great.
If you are a programmer, you will definitely want to get on x86_64. You get twice (!) as many general purpose registers, twice as many SSE registers, and a much cleaner ABI with most things passed in registers instead of the stack. You also will no longer be using the 387 FPU, as the ABI supports doing pretty much everything through SSE, unlike the 32bit ABI that required returning floats in an FPU register. This should greatly reduce your EMMS headaches. Finally having native 64-bit types rocks! The premature optimization nut in you will crack with joy, I guarantee it.
What exactly is the business model of giving people unlimited free storage? Hard disks cost money, bandwidth costs money, and most people block ads anyway, so where is the profit? I find it difficult to believe that a company can run a business like that, with the exception of those companies, like Google, who can run it at a loss and support that loss with some other line of revenue. I suppose the service would have some prestige points, but I really see no way to make money that way.
No, but there are other places you can stick it...
There appear to be quite a few "wild" areas on the map. People keep complaining how IPv4 address space is running out, but there is actually grass growing in some of those areas!
Indeed, it really makes a difference in casting "social justice" into the same relationship with "communism" as "intelligent design" has with "creationism".
> You know what stops genocide? Functioning governments with the ability to combat rogue elements within the country
Uh, you do know that all genocides that have ever been committed in history, were committed by governments?
> Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children?
;) Nah, just kidding!
Children are the only way to buy something every living thing wants -- the continuation of the species in general, and of your own genes in particular. The act of procreation is, to put it bluntly, your biological purpose, and it really ought to have some value to you, and consequently, be worth paying quite a bit for.
> Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones?
In our culture giving presents is the way of telling your loved ones that they are your loved ones. If you don't give them presents, they just might think you no longer value the relationship. If you want to have a relationship, this is the way you "buy" it. And if some of you are screaming "how commercial!", well, just try not giving out any presents this Christmas and see whether people still like you just as much. You might be surprized.
> Where is the economy in giving education to minors?
Just as preservation of the species is your biological purpose, preservation of knowledge is your social purpose. Through knowledge passed to our descendants we achive an immortality of sorts. Quite worth paying for, I think. Furthermore, you will yourself reap the benefits of you children's education in your lifetime, since well-educated people tend to have well-paying jobs and not need you to support them. The multitude of educated people supports your life in every other way possible, by maintaining the infrastructure of our civilization; providing you with food, clothing, shelter, the computer you are now using, and the web browser which shows you these words.
> Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town?
The sooner he can find some place to spend his money, the sooner your town can benefit from the incoming monetary flow. Ask anyone living in a place supported by the tourism economy.
> Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table?
If you don't give them cards, they won't play with you. If the game is poker, this may win or lose you money, depending on how well you play.
> Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
In personal satisfaction. I might for instance get a pretty big ego boost right now by pointing out that you should spell that "advice", rather than "advise"
As you can see, we are always giving for some economic reason, all the time. Does that make us bad people?
> Just the ramblings of a C++ bigot.
:) The kind who never bothered to learn C++ and simply repeats bad things he has heard from other people who have never bothered to learn C++.
I guess that makes you the anti-C++ bigot
> You sound like a mainframe programmer trying to extol the virtues of that dying breed.
Funny you should say that. My breed has been dying for twenty years now, and yet pretty much all the serious applications out there are still written in C++ (well, most were written in C before '90 or so, but we're a similar breed)
> C++ isn't going anywhere soon, it's blazing fast for desktop applications,
> sucks hugely for server based web apps.
Only because there isn't a proper library for servlet development for C++ right now. Why not? Not enough interest, I suppose. Most people coming out of colleges only know Java, PHP, or some like language, so it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. If I ever have need of a web application, I'll probably write a C++ library for it. Until then, I guess C++ really will suck on the servlet end for newbie programmers.
> eBay's a pretty complex application, and it's backend is entirely Java.
As I asked before, what's your source?
> And using C++ for a website, you'd have to be insane. A single buffer overflow
> could give someone access to your entire server.
Buffer overflows are a C problem. C++ programmers who know enough to use STL containers instead of malloc will have no buffer overflows. The only people to complain about buffer overflows in C++ are those who have never taken the time to learn how to properly handle memory management in it. Secondly, Java, PHP, and Python still offer plenty of other ways to put security holes into your application, and those are the ones that usually show up on security advisories. Finally, hacking a web application does not give you access to the entire server, except in very rare cases where the webserver is not set up properly.
> As for performance, in most areas Java keeps up with compiled C++ without a problem
> because it's compiled to machine code at runtime, then cached until the actual code has changed.
JIT compilers are not a panacea. Just because you can in some cases get similar performance from compiled Java, doesn't give me any incentive to use it instead of C++, does it now? Performance is also affected by memory footprint. In C++ I can write a useful application with a memory footprint of less than 100k. In Java, the VM alone (which you are still using even when JIT is enabled) takes 10M minimum plus whatever virtual memory space you have allocated. Can your Java servlet run a million instances on the same machine? I thought not. A C++ servlet would be much smaller and probably faster, lessening the load on your server, allowing you to run fewer servers, and consequently saving you money.
> I can't believe you have a UID that low and still don't know the difference between applets and server side Java.
I can't believe you can't imagine that not all programmers are web programmers. Believe it or not, some of us are still writing desktop applications (you know, those other programs that aren't a browser), have been doing so for most of our career, and will probably still be doing so long after the current weblet fad dies.
> You most likely use websites running server side Java everyday (Google, Gmail, Ebay just to name a few).
May I ask how you know what Google backend is written in? Unless you work there you probably haven't seen the code. I don't necessarily doubt your assertion, you being such a web guru and all, but I'd like to see for myself.
> Seriously, who uses applets for anything anymore?
As far as I know, nobody ever used them for anything. Nevertheless, when somebody says "Java", "applet" is the first thing that comes to mind; me being such an old fart, you know. "Useless" and "bloated" are other things that come to mind next, me being a C++ old fart. But run along, you kids, no need to listen to my ravings; I've got some real work to do.
> Your comment leads me to believe that you are either trolling or do not know much about web-development.
:)
Mostly the latter. I'm a systems programmer; the only websites I write are internal documentation web pages which are all static content. I guess everybody does nothing but web programming these days, considering how many scathing replies I got
> You are comparing Applets and Oranges (sorry, couldn't resist
Yes, I do know the difference between applets and server-side Java. But, not being a web developer, I naturally think "applet" when somebody says "Java", since that was its original application.
> Ever heard of eclipse?
The Java IDE used to develop Java applications? Sorry, it doesn't count; it's just a Java tool to make more Java. It doesn't make Java useful. I was talking about real applications, something an end-user might use. I wouldn't put most server-side HTML generators in that category. Those are either too simple to be called an application, or they should be. Because of that, if I had to write one, I'd probably use PHP. If performance mattered, I'd use C++, since that's what I know best.
How about not learning legacy skills? Then all you have to do is wait a few years, watch all the old programmers retire, and all the companies still stuck in the stone age go out of business. Then we can go and get a job doing something actually enjoyable.
I don't know about most people, but I always turn off Java in my browser. It increases startup times, has security problems (or so I have heard when people actually used Java, back in the last century), and there really aren't any sites that have useful applets. For all the hype surrounding it, I have still to see any functional Java-based application, in the browser or otherwise. Of course, you are a Java developer, so this will not apply to you. But consider that most CMSs are designed for regular people, who would probably rather use a regular HTML-based interface that works in any browser, including lynx, which even I still use on occasion.
Big Blue Building a Baffling, Buggy, and Bloated Behemoth Befitting Betterment of the Big Bang theories.
> What has six sigma added to this paradigm?
A word that we, monolingual americans, can understand.
I'd like to see what his grandson Zephram has to say about this...
Productivity (as reported by the BLS) is measured in dollars per hour per person. Since the Federal Reserve has the ability and the desire to expand the monetary supply without limit, productivity can likewise be increased without limit. Or, at least, as long as China keeps buying our treasury bonds...
In the old times, you strived to prove to your customers how good your products were and how intelligent and talented your workers are. These days you have to show that your products are garbage, your workers are dumb and inept, and you yourself have no talent whatsoever for running the company. I suppose that is what they call "truth in advertising".
There has been no need to redesign the phone to "cope with modern systems and security needs" just because con artists are using it. Every scam has a beneficiary; find where the money goes and who benefits, and you've found the source. Penis enlargement scams will sell pills or something from a physical address, penny stock scams will have company addresses on file with the stock exchange, pyramid scams will have a list of addresses the money should be sent to. THESE PEOPLE CAN BE FOUND! They are committing the crime of fraud. Why aren't they being arrested?
And it won't be long before we get a Waldo who can show us all how to get power for free! My Evil Plans will no longer require a gigawatt power source! Bwahaha!