This awful help tool is as bad as they come. It's clumsy, slow, and most of the help appears to be online anyway. Apple should just make Safari the help browser to begin with. I haven't examined this much, but it looks like thelp documentation is XML or HTML anyway.
I can't read that article, the site is too painful to look at. That orange and black checkered background strobes violently when the pages is scrolled on a flat panel screen. It's like watching Pokemon with one eye while someone rubs salt in the other.
Interesting though, two of the embedded ads were error pages from IIS. "Too many users are accessing the site at this time" or something. Clearly, whoever is advertising on linuxworld.com is a true believer.
I recognise the difference between kernel and distribution, which is exactly why I called it XP. 2000 was adopted so readily because Microsoft chose not to support USB on NT 4.0. That's part of the reason why 2000 has so much staying power; there isn't any hardware AFAIK that works on XP but not 2K.
I seriously doubt anyone is running the NT shell on the XP kernel or vice versa.
Compare that to the free alternatives. It's not unthinkable that someone might be running the 2.6 kernel on a Slackware install from 18 months ago. Referring to XP and NT 5.1.x is asinine and complicates things needlessly.
Geeks communicate as effeciantly as possible. There's business jargon, and then there's being pragmatic.
Isn't "NT 5.1.x" more commonly known as Windows XP? I know that "ver" under Windows 2000 reports 5.00.2195. When people talk about what "NT" supports, they usually mean "NT 4.0" or in rare occasions, "NT 3.51."
Yesterday at my local Super Stop & Shop grocery store, all 6 of the self-checkout lanes were down, and all of the human checkout lanes were directing people to the service desk, where one poor woman was hand-imprinting who knows how many hundreds of credit card transactions per hour.
Why?
Apparently the system that reads my credit card number around four times a week for the past year has been running unpatched and unfirewalled.
You're completely correct. The real victims here are the smallish ISPs, where the founder is still the chief tech, and the company has like 20 employees total. That's why I'm a proud cape.com subscriber. Not the cheapest on Cape Cod, but the service is worth it and they're an all open-source shop to boot. I much prefer giving my money to cape.com than Verizon or Earthlink.
Spam is a problem, sure. It's not nearly as big a problem as a few people seem to think it is, but it's a problem.
I bet you don't work for an ISP. If you did, you would probably be aware of the incredible financial burden that ISPs have to carry in the wake of junk mass mailings. The bottom line is that the spammers are putting the livelyhoods of Mom & Pop ISPs in serious jeapordy. Adherence to the RFCs seems pretty fair if it means saving jobs.
Speaking pragmaticly, however, I wouldn't block mail ONLY because the PTR record is bunk. Plug this into SpamAssassin and MAYBE you've got a workable solution. Do this for 24 months ot so, and only then starting blocking the suckers with bad PTRs.
A few months ago, there was an Ask Slashdot about house plants or somesuch. Bored beyond belief, I read it, acted on it, and discovered the joy of owning a philodendron. Anyone who likes taking care of a network will find the same sort of satisfaction in taking care of philodendrons.
They're hardy canopy plants that deal well with low light but freaking explode when you given them some sun. I keep an washed Dr. Pepper bottle with a mild Miricle Grow solution under my desk, and water my philo before I leave the office each day. I think it's probably doubled in size since I bought it, but most of the new leaves are quite a bit smaller than the original ones, probably because of the low light. It's spidering all over my cubicle now and it really makes the area feel warm and welcoming.
The builder for my company's new site tells me that the server room will have a nice east-facing window, and I fully intend to have a Philo in there.
Also look out for spider plants. Just as hardy, but they grow in a neat way. And if you work for a search engine or whatever, you could make puns. Not that you should, but you could.
Okay, let me start out by saying that I am a bleeding-heart environmentalist (and someone who has owned dozens of computers). This is great news, and I'm very glad to hear that someone with so much weight to throw around is behind it.
However! Let's think about why this is in HP's stockholders' best interest. Is it possible that HP likes this plan because it will increase someone's cost of doing business? Big guys like HP can surely handle the price tag for this greenwashing, but if you're a small-time Mom & Pop computer store, this could be very bad news.
Anybody have any other guesses at HP's motivation?
I have always wondered why even with today's massive storage media, vendors still insist on having a seperate package for each platform supported by their product. This is exactly why commercial games on Linux failed. Too few Linux users were willing to pay for software, so hardly any stores were willing to waste the shelf space.
Your product runs on Linux? Great. Put a penguin on the box and ship it. End of story. Same for OSX, get Steve's permission and put that puffy blue X between Tux and that other OS's logo, and ship it! Don't tell me that massive box isn't big enough for 3 CDs.
Isn't one of the idioms of user interface design that users should never have to know or care about the implimentation?
On the other hand, earlier posters are right. What the heck are you smoking? The last thing this world needs is another proprietary IM system.
Code reuse. If you're the first person to even think about using PHP in a given context, you can bet you'll have to write just about everything from scratch.
A few years ago, I wrote a CMS in PHP3 that's still in use today, along with a handfull of other lesser web apps. When I last used it, there were a number of misfeatures that made it uncomfortable to use.
Nothing like CPAN.
No DBI or ODBC, eash DB has it's own API.
Hardly anyone uses it outside the webserver context.
This thread is a couple of days old now, so I doubt anyone will read this. Anyway...
If you really must have a consistent system, you can do it with X - just pick one toolkit and make sure every app you run uses it.
That will work to get you pretty consistent looking screenshots, no doubt. There's more to consistency that the pictures on the back of the box. But that's a different rant all together.
XUL is a wrongheaded monstrosity
Hooray! I'm not alone! That's exactly why galeon is getting so popular. Now if we could only win back our scroll bars and stuff from gtkmozembed.
It's true, I did make the choise to use free software over the in some ways superior commercial alternatives. It's quite likely that the next computer I purchase will run OSX. I'm not happy about this, but unless Gnome improves dramatically before my current hotness is obsolete, I don't have a lot of options. At least its partly open source...
I think you're right on target here. However, I'm a Linux user, and have been since 1996. Unless QT or GTK get adopted by the overwhelmingly vast majority of application developers, even system wide themes won't work for Linux.
"System wide" can't mean "except GTK, Lesstif, OPENStep, and Tk" Nobody except developers and the curious should be exposed to the fact that your word processor, printer setup tool, and web browser were written by people that don't cooperate or even communicate about UI design.
And Mozilla, XMMS, please go in a hole and die until you can look like the rest of my computer.
You miss my point. I'm more interested in being able to interact with all of the software on my computer without having to decypher each individual developer's interface concepts.
If you want to load a different keymap so you don't have to relearn how to type, or change a few gloabal keybindings to shave a few seconds off your workday, more power to you.
But, developers who spend weeks making their apps themable instead of making them easier to use in the first place should really take a moment to think about their goals. Themes (within free software at least) are mostly a bandaid measure for bad UI design and poor cooperation. I wouldn't be surprised if they exist in XP so prominently because they exist in Linux so cancerously.
Tigert, can't we please just have a "Linux" theme and be done with it?
If anyone out there has a good explanation as to why a themable interface is more powerfull or easy to use than a consistent, static interface, I would love to read it.
Personally, I think themed interfaces are the worst idea since... well I can't think of anything that comes close. For an interface to be usefull, and trusted by it's audience, it has to be predictable.
Why does my music player look completely different than my web browser or my word processor? I guess it kinda looks cool in a screenshot by itself. But I embrace computers in my life to get stuff done, rather than to post slick screen shots. Exploring and customising a new computer or software package can be fun, but for most people it's not the end goal of having a computer.
I can see how some OSX users on older hardware would like to be able to turn off text smoothing and gain a little speed. UI options for hardware compatibility or for people with low vision are fine, but "themes" as we think of them today have to go.
Themes basically exist for two reasons (warning: opinions)
Lack of concensus amoung the developers about what looks "pretty."
Users who want different packages from different vendors to have the same look and feel (although themes don't usually bring a "feel" with the "look").
In other words, UI designers lack leadership, and users crave consistency.
A few years ago, it was practically impossible to sit down at a friends X11 workstation and know what any of the keymappings were or how the menus worked, or even start a program. It's gotten much better now with most people using either KDE or Gnome, but massive improvements are needed before free software will be as easy to pick up and use as OSX and Windows are.
RH's choise to theme KDE and Gnome similarly was inspired, as are Steve Jobs' comments on themes. Thanks guys, keep it up!
One insanely great use for a union filesystem would be fully usable, ramdisk-free systems that boot from CD-ROM. Union mount a ramfs over the iso9660 filesystem and you end up with the same semantics of a normal system, but without all of the wasted memory of ramdisks. This would be great, but I think only the BSDs have this. The only patches I found for Linux dated back to like 1997.
To be fair to Microsoft (shudder), a big selling point for The Weather Channel is that their SGI admins already have most of the right instincts for taking care of 5,000 GNU/Linux installations.
Even in situations were people say "don't bother me with politics," I'm sure most would choose to make the jump to another unix-workalike rather than the jump to Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, i really haven't examined this much. Thanks to those who pointed out the correct path to the help browser.
(The iBook is at home and I'm at work, where the only apples are in the breakroom.)
I can't read that article, the site is too painful to look at. That orange and black checkered background strobes violently when the pages is scrolled on a flat panel screen. It's like watching Pokemon with one eye while someone rubs salt in the other.
Interesting though, two of the embedded ads were error pages from IIS. "Too many users are accessing the site at this time" or something. Clearly, whoever is advertising on linuxworld.com is a true believer.
I recognise the difference between kernel and distribution, which is exactly why I called it XP. 2000 was adopted so readily because Microsoft chose not to support USB on NT 4.0. That's part of the reason why 2000 has so much staying power; there isn't any hardware AFAIK that works on XP but not 2K.
I seriously doubt anyone is running the NT shell on the XP kernel or vice versa.
Compare that to the free alternatives. It's not unthinkable that someone might be running the 2.6 kernel on a Slackware install from 18 months ago. Referring to XP and NT 5.1.x is asinine and complicates things needlessly.
Geeks communicate as effeciantly as possible. There's business jargon, and then there's being pragmatic.
Isn't "NT 5.1.x" more commonly known as Windows XP? I know that "ver" under Windows 2000 reports 5.00.2195. When people talk about what "NT" supports, they usually mean "NT 4.0" or in rare occasions, "NT 3.51."
And then there's the issue that NT doesn't even support USB.
Yesterday at my local Super Stop & Shop grocery store, all 6 of the self-checkout lanes were down, and all of the human checkout lanes were directing people to the service desk, where one poor woman was hand-imprinting who knows how many hundreds of credit card transactions per hour.
Why?
Apparently the system that reads my credit card number around four times a week for the past year has been running unpatched and unfirewalled.
Coool! Thanks, Stop & Shop IT!
You're completely correct. The real victims here are the smallish ISPs, where the founder is still the chief tech, and the company has like 20 employees total. That's why I'm a proud cape.com subscriber. Not the cheapest on Cape Cod, but the service is worth it and they're an all open-source shop to boot. I much prefer giving my money to cape.com than Verizon or Earthlink.
Spam is a problem, sure. It's not nearly as big a problem as a few people seem to think it is, but it's a problem.
I bet you don't work for an ISP. If you did, you would probably be aware of the incredible financial burden that ISPs have to carry in the wake of junk mass mailings. The bottom line is that the spammers are putting the livelyhoods of Mom & Pop ISPs in serious jeapordy. Adherence to the RFCs seems pretty fair if it means saving jobs.
Speaking pragmaticly, however, I wouldn't block mail ONLY because the PTR record is bunk. Plug this into SpamAssassin and MAYBE you've got a workable solution. Do this for 24 months ot so, and only then starting blocking the suckers with bad PTRs.
Left wing? My God, I hope you're trolling. CNN and the Fox "News Channel" are almost as much right wing propaganda spigots as Colin Powell himself.
A few months ago, there was an Ask Slashdot about house plants or somesuch. Bored beyond belief, I read it, acted on it, and discovered the joy of owning a philodendron. Anyone who likes taking care of a network will find the same sort of satisfaction in taking care of philodendrons.
They're hardy canopy plants that deal well with low light but freaking explode when you given them some sun. I keep an washed Dr. Pepper bottle with a mild Miricle Grow solution under my desk, and water my philo before I leave the office each day. I think it's probably doubled in size since I bought it, but most of the new leaves are quite a bit smaller than the original ones, probably because of the low light. It's spidering all over my cubicle now and it really makes the area feel warm and welcoming.
The builder for my company's new site tells me that the server room will have a nice east-facing window, and I fully intend to have a Philo in there.
Also look out for spider plants. Just as hardy, but they grow in a neat way. And if you work for a search engine or whatever, you could make puns. Not that you should, but you could.
Okay, let me start out by saying that I am a bleeding-heart environmentalist (and someone who has owned dozens of computers). This is great news, and I'm very glad to hear that someone with so much weight to throw around is behind it.
However! Let's think about why this is in HP's stockholders' best interest. Is it possible that HP likes this plan because it will increase someone's cost of doing business? Big guys like HP can surely handle the price tag for this greenwashing, but if you're a small-time Mom & Pop computer store, this could be very bad news.
Anybody have any other guesses at HP's motivation?
I have always wondered why even with today's massive storage media, vendors still insist on having a seperate package for each platform supported by their product. This is exactly why commercial games on Linux failed. Too few Linux users were willing to pay for software, so hardly any stores were willing to waste the shelf space.
Your product runs on Linux? Great. Put a penguin on the box and ship it. End of story. Same for OSX, get Steve's permission and put that puffy blue X between Tux and that other OS's logo, and ship it! Don't tell me that massive box isn't big enough for 3 CDs.
Isn't one of the idioms of user interface design that users should never have to know or care about the implimentation?
On the other hand, earlier posters are right. What the heck are you smoking? The last thing this world needs is another proprietary IM system.
- Nothing like CPAN.
- No DBI or ODBC, eash DB has it's own API.
- Hardly anyone uses it outside the webserver context.
- Few if any bindings for GUI interfaces.
Have any of these improved?This thread is a couple of days old now, so I doubt anyone will read this. Anyway...
That will work to get you pretty consistent looking screenshots, no doubt. There's more to consistency that the pictures on the back of the box. But that's a different rant all together.
Hooray! I'm not alone! That's exactly why galeon is getting so popular. Now if we could only win back our scroll bars and stuff from gtkmozembed.
It's true, I did make the choise to use free software over the in some ways superior commercial alternatives. It's quite likely that the next computer I purchase will run OSX. I'm not happy about this, but unless Gnome improves dramatically before my current hotness is obsolete, I don't have a lot of options. At least its partly open source...
I think you're right on target here. However, I'm a Linux user, and have been since 1996. Unless QT or GTK get adopted by the overwhelmingly vast majority of application developers, even system wide themes won't work for Linux.
"System wide" can't mean "except GTK, Lesstif, OPENStep, and Tk" Nobody except developers and the curious should be exposed to the fact that your word processor, printer setup tool, and web browser were written by people that don't cooperate or even communicate about UI design.
And Mozilla, XMMS, please go in a hole and die until you can look like the rest of my computer.
Thank you.
You miss my point. I'm more interested in being able to interact with all of the software on my computer without having to decypher each individual developer's interface concepts.
If you want to load a different keymap so you don't have to relearn how to type, or change a few gloabal keybindings to shave a few seconds off your workday, more power to you.
But, developers who spend weeks making their apps themable instead of making them easier to use in the first place should really take a moment to think about their goals. Themes (within free software at least) are mostly a bandaid measure for bad UI design and poor cooperation. I wouldn't be surprised if they exist in XP so prominently because they exist in Linux so cancerously.
Tigert, can't we please just have a "Linux" theme and be done with it?
If anyone out there has a good explanation as to why a themable interface is more powerfull or easy to use than a consistent, static interface, I would love to read it.
Personally, I think themed interfaces are the worst idea since... well I can't think of anything that comes close. For an interface to be usefull, and trusted by it's audience, it has to be predictable.
Why does my music player look completely different than my web browser or my word processor? I guess it kinda looks cool in a screenshot by itself. But I embrace computers in my life to get stuff done, rather than to post slick screen shots. Exploring and customising a new computer or software package can be fun, but for most people it's not the end goal of having a computer.
I can see how some OSX users on older hardware would like to be able to turn off text smoothing and gain a little speed. UI options for hardware compatibility or for people with low vision are fine, but "themes" as we think of them today have to go.
Themes basically exist for two reasons (warning: opinions)
In other words, UI designers lack leadership, and users crave consistency.
A few years ago, it was practically impossible to sit down at a friends X11 workstation and know what any of the keymappings were or how the menus worked, or even start a program. It's gotten much better now with most people using either KDE or Gnome, but massive improvements are needed before free software will be as easy to pick up and use as OSX and Windows are.
RH's choise to theme KDE and Gnome similarly was inspired, as are Steve Jobs' comments on themes. Thanks guys, keep it up!
One insanely great use for a union filesystem would be fully usable, ramdisk-free systems that boot from CD-ROM. Union mount a ramfs over the iso9660 filesystem and you end up with the same semantics of a normal system, but without all of the wasted memory of ramdisks. This would be great, but I think only the BSDs have this. The only patches I found for Linux dated back to like 1997.
As a professional breakdancer, yes, I would be happier living in 1984.
I'm sorry, but telling an engineer that something is unfixable is probably the single best way to get them to fix it.
To be fair to Microsoft (shudder), a big selling point for The Weather Channel is that their SGI admins already have most of the right instincts for taking care of 5,000 GNU/Linux installations.
Even in situations were people say "don't bother me with politics," I'm sure most would choose to make the jump to another unix-workalike rather than the jump to Windows.
Very well said, both of you. To the rest of the audience, please go read this book:
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Gore Vidal
(ISBN 156025405X for those of you boycotting Amazon)