I guess they can ding the Xbox, PS2, Gamecube and maybe Wii. But don't newer consoles use USB ports? The 360 doesn't even have joystick ports, it has (properly licensed and legally clear) USB ports instead.
How technically do you get the data from the cellphone to your laptop? Do you have a PCMCIA card that you have to move your SIM card to, or can you do it over a USB/Bluetooth link? What's Cingular's policy on doing so? It looks like this plan is intended only for browsing on the phone itself... if "caught" using it for a laptop, would they bill you for past data?
Ok, Cingular's plans are complete gibberish to me as to what they allow, but can you go into a little bit of detail?
What is the name of the $20/unlimited plan? I can't find it on the Cingular website. Is GPRS where you connect your phone via USB and dial it out like a modem? Or does it require a PCMCIA card?
I tried to figure out how to use my RAZR to provide internet service to my iBook while on the train once, and I nearly went insane between the vague, useless website and the idiotic operators who answer the phone.
Add to the end of my question... at the time Lotus 1-2-3 was still relevant. We're looking at maybe 1995 at the latest. How many of those toolkits existed then?
And of course, all of those *do* use the Windows API anyway, so it still doesn't really answer my question. The only way I know of to code a Windows app without using the Windows API is using Java.
I really don't see how it even matters. It's Microsoft's OS, they can do what they want with it. It's not like there's some kind of ANSI standard for Windows applications that they were violating or anything. Even more so since they weren't a monopoly at the time... it's not Microsoft's fault that Apple, GeOS, and Amiga all failed to catch on.
Hell, considering the stance of other computers makers at the time, you should feel lucky Microsoft let you write applications at all. A lot of them either didn't allow third party developers at all, or charged outrageous fees if you even wanted to start making a program for their system.
That's a dumb question. Office menus look the way they do because they're written from scratch to look that way. Hundreds of applications for every OS ever made do this, that doesn't mean that there's some huge conspiracy, just that the Office team spent more time getting their menus right than you did and enough time to QA is so that people like you would be tricked into thinking it's some hidden part of the OS. How paranoid are you? Programming menus isn't some "magic operation" that can only be performed by the OS, any decent programmer can make their own pull-down menu implementation. I'm sure Photoshop and other applications of Office's size do the same.
Now asking *why* Office does this, that might be a valid question. But implying that it's some kind of conspiracy is stupid.
Hell, Apple used to provide basically a plug-in architecture for drawing menus, windows and buttons since they knew overriding the default appearance and behavior would be popular. It was a code resource in Mac OS Classic and if you had one in there, Mac OS would automatically load your code whenever it needed to handle a click on menus. (Obviously a bad idea from a security standpoint... it was disabled long ago.)
Uh, ok. That doesn't sound like that much of a burden on developers, if that's the most important undocumented function in the Windows API. Really, the most amazing part is that Microsoft in the late 80s/early 90s could code a function *guaranteed* to return a timer no matter what else was happening in the computer... what did it do when there was no memory? Just randomly remove another program from RAM?
If you're writing an app for Windows, what is the alternative to using the Windows API? How could Microsoft develop Windows applications without using the Windows API? Was Lotus seriously considering developing Lotus 1-2-3 in Java? (Although that might explain the trainwreck called Lotus Notes.)
It's a plain old bug as far as I'm concerned. Bryce's comment suggests that just to cope with this, you need to careful plan how you're going to name your files... I say that's ridiculous. My computer should cope with what *I* do, not the other way around.
Or look at it from a usability standpoint... what is easier to remember? Whether a filename starts with S, or whether a filename starts with a capital or lowercase? Not only is S easier to remember, but it also narrowed the selection down tremendously.
The fact that it's the year 2007 and GNOME (apparently) doesn't sort filenames correctly is just... I don't even have a word for it. But the Linux worlds needs to HAMMER DOWN THE BASICS before they spend one more day talking about 'defeating Microsoft.'
It's unfortunate, but this is the only way to keep the ranking system fair and unbiased. Despite Zonk's complaints, this is a welcome fix, as it prevents people from 'gaming' the ranking system by setting up games with their buddies on one side and players who purposely play bad on the other to increase their ranking. In fact, it's surprising that Gears even put the host name there before, I'm pretty sure that violates some Xbox Live guidelines.
If you want to play with your friends, join unranked games. That's all there is to it.
I didn't say they produced more pollution. Well, maybe I did, but I meant they introduced new problems that weren't problems before, but in every other way were better than the alternative. Excuse me for momentarily forgetting how pedantic Slashdot posters are that they would ignore the POINT of a post to nitpick some detail.
Similarly, C++'s STL may introduce new problems, but it sure as hell fixes a metric ton of them in the process.
Already have done. I don't have the URL handy, but it's bookmarked on my home computer... look under OS X bugs. I believe an Inkscape developer actually pushed the bug to the GNOME project, but I haven't checked that yet.
And automobiles can introduce problems (air pollution) that didn't previously exist with the form of transportation they replaced. But I think we all agree that a little bit of air pollution is better than thousands of people a day being trampled by horses in city streets.
From my experience, open source software may be released early and often, but it sure isn't tested thoroughly. Sometimes it seems to me that it's not tested at all, when extremely blatant bugs appear in releases. (One of the recent ones I found is a Import dialog in Inkscape that doesn't alphabetize correctly. This isn't 1985, open source developers, alphabetization of a list of files is a solved problem!)
Of course, I also don't think "release early and often" is a good philosophy. If you release early, by definition you're releasing something that isn't yet ready for the public, and when the public uses it they're going to be disappointed and a lot less likely to try your next version.
If you're seeing what you're claiming to see (which, frankly, I doubt-- and yes I am calling you a liar), then it's the result of something happening outside of Microsoft's control. Perhaps some kind of proxy mangling the HTML before it gets to the browser, or perhaps an add-on (and not a common one, like Yahoo Toolbar or Quicktime) is screwing with the browser's behavior.
Do you seriously think a problem this critical could sneak through dozens and dozens of layers of QA *and* all 70,000 employees at Microsoft who have been "eating their own dogfood" for a solid year now? Do you seriously believe that? What's more likely, that 100,000 people have used IE7 during development and never noticed this, or that you're dead wrong?
Uh, Photoshop Elements is available for Mac. I have it running right now. And it does hundreds more things than iPhoto can... it's a long stretch to say that it compete with "things that come free on every Mac."
1) Microsoft Hardware has always been pretty damned good. Even their first keyboards and mouses were well-designed and reliable.
2) Microsoft Games has always been pretty good. Sure they made some stinkers, but so has everybody-- on average, most Microsoft Games are very well-done.
3) Xbox is a combination of Microsoft Hardware and Microsoft Games. Therefore, you'd expect it to be very good.
You can tell if someone's hatred for Microsoft is moderately rational (having a monopoly, perceived low quality, etc.) or irrational by asking their opinion of the Xbox. Or of Rise of Nations, if they're a gamer. Or of a Microsoft bluetooth keyboard if they're hardware buffs. Hint: If they hate everything Microsoft just because of the logo on the front, that's irrational.
Or perhaps you meant to say badly-designed web interfaces suck and I should say badly-designed text interfaces suck ?
Fair enough. The fact remains that most of the text-based UIs I've used are actually usable and easy to install where most of the webapps I've used either:
1) Are incompatible with another webapp that needs to run on the same browser. (The Sun vs. MS Java problem mentioned above, for instance, or conflicting browser settings.)
2) Requires me to turn off EVERY SINGLE SECURITY FEATURE the browser has. I love the webapps that have 5 pages of "installation instructions" which basically sum up to "go into Internet Options and turn every security feature to low or off."
3) Has sessions that time-out remarkably quickly, considering the amount of data that's supposed to be entered on the form. Yes, there are ways around there. No, most webapps (from my experience) don't use them and instead just set a timeout of around 5 minutes.
4) Are completely un-interactive, requiring a page load for every single submitted field. Try entering a bunch of records into a typical webapp... waiting for page reloads alone is enough to drive you crazy.
For every one Gmail, there's a dozen webapps that suck to high heaven and are sold as golden panaceas to resolve all your problems by huge corporations that should know better, such as IBM. In reality, all they do is add another layer of abstraction to your problems.
I hate to break this to you, but there are still tons of huge medical software corporations using 1997's applets. Next time I come across the problem, I'll be sure to forward your message on to IBM and Siemens, k?
Here in the real world, I came across that real problem in the recent year of 2004. Maybe even early 2005.
Web interfaces suck in so many novel and unique ways. There's the session timeouts. There's the non-interactivity. There's the random bugs on every browser, and the huge mass of compatibility code required to support all of them. Then there's the web app that requires Sun Java and the web app that requires MS Java, both of which run only in IE, and both of which are supposed to run ON THE SAME MACHINE! (I have to deal with that situation once. Royal pain in the rear-end. I don't remember how I solved it, actually...)
If you want a decent UI, don't bother with web-based stuff. Use a product like RealBasic, do it quick and make a CLI to do all the heavy lifting on the back-end.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess they can ding the Xbox, PS2, Gamecube and maybe Wii. But don't newer consoles use USB ports? The 360 doesn't even have joystick ports, it has (properly licensed and legally clear) USB ports instead.
To answer my own post, it looks like the only Cingular plan that provides unlimited data for $20 a month is their Smartphone Connect plan. (Link: http://www.cingular.com/cell-phone-service/cell-ph one-plan-details/?q_sku=sku1030047&q_planCategory= cat50005 )
How technically do you get the data from the cellphone to your laptop? Do you have a PCMCIA card that you have to move your SIM card to, or can you do it over a USB/Bluetooth link? What's Cingular's policy on doing so? It looks like this plan is intended only for browsing on the phone itself... if "caught" using it for a laptop, would they bill you for past data?
Ok, Cingular's plans are complete gibberish to me as to what they allow, but can you go into a little bit of detail?
What is the name of the $20/unlimited plan? I can't find it on the Cingular website. Is GPRS where you connect your phone via USB and dial it out like a modem? Or does it require a PCMCIA card?
I tried to figure out how to use my RAZR to provide internet service to my iBook while on the train once, and I nearly went insane between the vague, useless website and the idiotic operators who answer the phone.
Add to the end of my question ... at the time Lotus 1-2-3 was still relevant. We're looking at maybe 1995 at the latest. How many of those toolkits existed then?
And of course, all of those *do* use the Windows API anyway, so it still doesn't really answer my question. The only way I know of to code a Windows app without using the Windows API is using Java.
I really don't see how it even matters. It's Microsoft's OS, they can do what they want with it. It's not like there's some kind of ANSI standard for Windows applications that they were violating or anything. Even more so since they weren't a monopoly at the time... it's not Microsoft's fault that Apple, GeOS, and Amiga all failed to catch on.
Hell, considering the stance of other computers makers at the time, you should feel lucky Microsoft let you write applications at all. A lot of them either didn't allow third party developers at all, or charged outrageous fees if you even wanted to start making a program for their system.
That's a dumb question. Office menus look the way they do because they're written from scratch to look that way. Hundreds of applications for every OS ever made do this, that doesn't mean that there's some huge conspiracy, just that the Office team spent more time getting their menus right than you did and enough time to QA is so that people like you would be tricked into thinking it's some hidden part of the OS. How paranoid are you? Programming menus isn't some "magic operation" that can only be performed by the OS, any decent programmer can make their own pull-down menu implementation. I'm sure Photoshop and other applications of Office's size do the same.
Now asking *why* Office does this, that might be a valid question. But implying that it's some kind of conspiracy is stupid.
Hell, Apple used to provide basically a plug-in architecture for drawing menus, windows and buttons since they knew overriding the default appearance and behavior would be popular. It was a code resource in Mac OS Classic and if you had one in there, Mac OS would automatically load your code whenever it needed to handle a click on menus. (Obviously a bad idea from a security standpoint... it was disabled long ago.)
Uh, ok. That doesn't sound like that much of a burden on developers, if that's the most important undocumented function in the Windows API. Really, the most amazing part is that Microsoft in the late 80s/early 90s could code a function *guaranteed* to return a timer no matter what else was happening in the computer... what did it do when there was no memory? Just randomly remove another program from RAM?
If you're writing an app for Windows, what is the alternative to using the Windows API? How could Microsoft develop Windows applications without using the Windows API? Was Lotus seriously considering developing Lotus 1-2-3 in Java? (Although that might explain the trainwreck called Lotus Notes.)
It's a plain old bug as far as I'm concerned. Bryce's comment suggests that just to cope with this, you need to careful plan how you're going to name your files... I say that's ridiculous. My computer should cope with what *I* do, not the other way around.
Or look at it from a usability standpoint... what is easier to remember? Whether a filename starts with S, or whether a filename starts with a capital or lowercase? Not only is S easier to remember, but it also narrowed the selection down tremendously.
The fact that it's the year 2007 and GNOME (apparently) doesn't sort filenames correctly is just... I don't even have a word for it. But the Linux worlds needs to HAMMER DOWN THE BASICS before they spend one more day talking about 'defeating Microsoft.'
This has been on Wired's vaporware list for like 3 years now. I'll believe it when I see it installed on a computer and working.
It's unfortunate, but this is the only way to keep the ranking system fair and unbiased. Despite Zonk's complaints, this is a welcome fix, as it prevents people from 'gaming' the ranking system by setting up games with their buddies on one side and players who purposely play bad on the other to increase their ranking. In fact, it's surprising that Gears even put the host name there before, I'm pretty sure that violates some Xbox Live guidelines.
If you want to play with your friends, join unranked games. That's all there is to it.
That's a possibility, and is probably good advice unless your build system is especially cumbersome.
I didn't say they produced more pollution. Well, maybe I did, but I meant they introduced new problems that weren't problems before, but in every other way were better than the alternative. Excuse me for momentarily forgetting how pedantic Slashdot posters are that they would ignore the POINT of a post to nitpick some detail.
Similarly, C++'s STL may introduce new problems, but it sure as hell fixes a metric ton of them in the process.
Already have done. I don't have the URL handy, but it's bookmarked on my home computer... look under OS X bugs. I believe an Inkscape developer actually pushed the bug to the GNOME project, but I haven't checked that yet.
And automobiles can introduce problems (air pollution) that didn't previously exist with the form of transportation they replaced. But I think we all agree that a little bit of air pollution is better than thousands of people a day being trampled by horses in city streets.
From my experience, open source software may be released early and often, but it sure isn't tested thoroughly. Sometimes it seems to me that it's not tested at all, when extremely blatant bugs appear in releases. (One of the recent ones I found is a Import dialog in Inkscape that doesn't alphabetize correctly. This isn't 1985, open source developers, alphabetization of a list of files is a solved problem!)
Of course, I also don't think "release early and often" is a good philosophy. If you release early, by definition you're releasing something that isn't yet ready for the public, and when the public uses it they're going to be disappointed and a lot less likely to try your next version.
That only signifies that people hate stupidity (the linked article, the editors who posted it, etc) more than they hate Microsoft. In general.
If you're seeing what you're claiming to see (which, frankly, I doubt-- and yes I am calling you a liar), then it's the result of something happening outside of Microsoft's control. Perhaps some kind of proxy mangling the HTML before it gets to the browser, or perhaps an add-on (and not a common one, like Yahoo Toolbar or Quicktime) is screwing with the browser's behavior.
Do you seriously think a problem this critical could sneak through dozens and dozens of layers of QA *and* all 70,000 employees at Microsoft who have been "eating their own dogfood" for a solid year now? Do you seriously believe that? What's more likely, that 100,000 people have used IE7 during development and never noticed this, or that you're dead wrong?
Think about it.
The US never had any jobs or industries, and we did just fine!
Uh, Photoshop Elements is available for Mac. I have it running right now. And it does hundreds more things than iPhoto can... it's a long stretch to say that it compete with "things that come free on every Mac."
Well, there are a few things.
1) Microsoft Hardware has always been pretty damned good. Even their first keyboards and mouses were well-designed and reliable.
2) Microsoft Games has always been pretty good. Sure they made some stinkers, but so has everybody-- on average, most Microsoft Games are very well-done.
3) Xbox is a combination of Microsoft Hardware and Microsoft Games. Therefore, you'd expect it to be very good.
You can tell if someone's hatred for Microsoft is moderately rational (having a monopoly, perceived low quality, etc.) or irrational by asking their opinion of the Xbox. Or of Rise of Nations, if they're a gamer. Or of a Microsoft bluetooth keyboard if they're hardware buffs. Hint: If they hate everything Microsoft just because of the logo on the front, that's irrational.
I love how he capitalizes "Shell" in "shell script" but not "Slackware", which is actually a proper noun.
It truly is a work of art.
Or perhaps you meant to say badly-designed web interfaces suck and I should say badly-designed text interfaces suck ?
Fair enough. The fact remains that most of the text-based UIs I've used are actually usable and easy to install where most of the webapps I've used either:
1) Are incompatible with another webapp that needs to run on the same browser. (The Sun vs. MS Java problem mentioned above, for instance, or conflicting browser settings.)
2) Requires me to turn off EVERY SINGLE SECURITY FEATURE the browser has. I love the webapps that have 5 pages of "installation instructions" which basically sum up to "go into Internet Options and turn every security feature to low or off."
3) Has sessions that time-out remarkably quickly, considering the amount of data that's supposed to be entered on the form. Yes, there are ways around there. No, most webapps (from my experience) don't use them and instead just set a timeout of around 5 minutes.
4) Are completely un-interactive, requiring a page load for every single submitted field. Try entering a bunch of records into a typical webapp... waiting for page reloads alone is enough to drive you crazy.
For every one Gmail, there's a dozen webapps that suck to high heaven and are sold as golden panaceas to resolve all your problems by huge corporations that should know better, such as IBM. In reality, all they do is add another layer of abstraction to your problems.
I hate to break this to you, but there are still tons of huge medical software corporations using 1997's applets. Next time I come across the problem, I'll be sure to forward your message on to IBM and Siemens, k?
Here in the real world, I came across that real problem in the recent year of 2004. Maybe even early 2005.
Web interfaces suck in so many novel and unique ways. There's the session timeouts. There's the non-interactivity. There's the random bugs on every browser, and the huge mass of compatibility code required to support all of them. Then there's the web app that requires Sun Java and the web app that requires MS Java, both of which run only in IE, and both of which are supposed to run ON THE SAME MACHINE! (I have to deal with that situation once. Royal pain in the rear-end. I don't remember how I solved it, actually...)
If you want a decent UI, don't bother with web-based stuff. Use a product like RealBasic, do it quick and make a CLI to do all the heavy lifting on the back-end.