None of the facts quoted above really address the issue anyway.
What we are looking for is the count of distinct editors who made an edit per month. That's the only way to judge whether the number of active editors has declined or not... the blurb on this article doesn't seem to address that at all, instead giving a whole bunch of "feel-good" stats that are unrelated to the issue.
Well, since the vast, vast majority of programming is not systems programming, dismissing this product on that basis alone seems goofy to me. (Like the other guy in this thread who dismissed it because it won't run on 1K embedded chips... sheesh.)
I think your definition of "general purpose" and mine are different. I would argue that languages like C and C++ are specially purposed for systems programming, and shouldn't be used for anything else, whereas languages like C# or VB can and should be used for any purpose *other* than system programming. This relies on the fact that systems programming is a very small percentage of software development, though.
I still counter your assertion. VB is a general purpose programming language. It's not suited for systems programming, but then again, there are hundreds of programming languages that also have that distinction. It does include libraries for easy integration and automation of Office applications, but that isn't what it was designed to do. (You might be thinking of VBA, which is the scripting version of VB, and designed for that exact task. But it's a different language. Or maybe you're thinking of Access, I dunno.) There's nothing stopping you from using VB to, for example, reproduce Photoshop.
Now, VB might not be a general purpose programming language you *like*, or one that you feel has a userbase of solid programmers, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.
I don't think anybody has claimed that RunRev, even if it's a magical miracle tool, is going to replace every programmer evar. I don't know where you're pulling that from, and that's the point I was countering.
Yes, they'll always be demand for programmers who can write assembly. But what the holy heck does that have to do with the article?
Whoosh!! Totally missing the point. My comments had nothing to do with how many "bugs" you may have reported. (From your comments, I'm not convinced that you know the difference between a bug and a personal preference.)
The ones I reported were obvious bugs, had nothing to do with personal preferences.
Sorry to see that you're unable to accept the fact that other people have used many other tools and *choose/prefer* interfaces that you don't.
No, people say it's great because it's good in 1/3rd of the OSes it runs on. If you're using Inkscape in Linux, you've probably noticed no usability problems, and kudos. But... again... that only applies to 1/3rd of the platforms Inkscape runs on.
Then you say, "No way any program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X." Hmm.
That's a editing fail. I meant to add GTK+ in that sentence:
"No way any GTK+ program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X."
I think you have a problem with the word "usability." It doesn't refer to whether it's *possible* to use the program or not, it refers to how easy/consistent the program is to use. It's possible to use a program with terrible usability to get real work done-- see the Lotus Notes example I gave before. It's just unpleasant, and everything takes longer than it would if the program were usable.
I hope to God that you don't write software that you expect other human beings to use, if this has to be explained to you.
Leela: "Uh, g- uh, getting back to the, uh, matter, uh-uh, if it please the court... Fry, there's nothing else here. You only wrote two pages of dialogue!"
Fry: "Well, it took an hour to write. I thought it would take an hour to read."
Well if you're going to judge EVERY new technology with how appropriate it is to embedded applications, why should we bother developing anything high-level at all?
Relax, dude. Maybe this doesn't help you in your job. But you don't need to be so actively hostile to people trying to improve the frankly shitty state of programming.
What you're missing is that a UI can suck and be awful, and the program still be useful. For example, all of the Unix CLI sucks and is awful, but most of the posters here will defend it to the death. (Of course, they've never bothered to try anything different/better, but... I won't get into that.)
If you're using Inkscape in Windows, its UI sucks. I'm not going to mince words, that's really the correct level of description to use.
Am I saying it's useless? No.
Am I saying that people can't do work in it? Of course not.
Do *I* do work in it? Yes.
My point is that when people use words like "awful" and "sucks" when describing tools that actually do get the job done (even for those people), it tends to come across like bitching and moaning rather than useful input.
I've put in tons of input to the Inkscape project. Virtually all my issues were marked as being "GTK+" issues (as if I care, just FIX IT!), and shunted off to one of those lovely open source bug trackers where nobody ever reads or acts on the bugs. There's no point to copying all that input here, since this isn't a bug tracker and I'm too lazy to do all that typing. And Inkscape (for all practical purposes) ignores them on their own bug tracker, anyway.
"Awful" makes for a useful abbreviation of the preceding paragraph.
What lies lower than "awful" on your scale of quality adjectives?
Godawful. Abominable. Shitty. Lotus Notes.
You might want to think about this if you want to be taken seriously instead of being seen as a whiner who's unable to adapt to minor differences in tools (or life's changes).
Oh yah. Maybe I should put some of my issues with Inkscape into the bug track-- OH WAIT I ALREADY DID THAT.
Look, as long as Inkscape is using GTK+ for their Windows and OS X ports, their software is going to suck on those platforms. It's X11 on OS X, and it's plain bad on Windows... there is: 1) No way any program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X 2) No way to fix any of the problems with GTK+, because they don't bother to read their bug tracker.
If Inkscape wants to improve the UI on Windows and OS X, they're going to have to port it to a better UI library. That's all there is to it. Firefox isn't perfect, but it's 95% there on Windows and OS X, for example. Using their UI library would get Inkscape a lot of mileage. Also note that this also applies to other GTK+ apps, Pidgin for example.
Sorry for coming across so harsh on Thanksgiving Day, but thought you should know how your continued use of extremes is interpreted. Have a good day!
It's a free country, you can interpret it however the fuck you want.
But on the same token, don't assume I haven't tried to improve Inkscape's UI, or that I'm complaining about something with no basis.
That's not easy in many cases because a lot of reliable sources are print-only, and a lot of reliable sources are subscription-only. Some people who watch an article have easier access to these sources and can defend claims in the article by citing them.
Whine whine whine. Nothing worth doing is easy. I'm sorry that the original author didn't serve up everything you need on a silver platter and pack your sack lunch while he was at it. "It's not very easy!" is the worst excuse for anything, ever.
The real issue is this: you read a fact in an article, and you need to know whether you can rely on that fact. No matter *what* you're using that fact for, you're going to have to find the original citation, yes? Nobody accepts a cite from Wikipedia. So find it. If you can't find it, delete it.
When I do add "citation needed" to a claim, I sometimes check back a week later to see if someone who cares about the subject cares about the unreferenced claim as well. Otherwise, I take it out with an edit summary: (Removed claim that had gone uncited for a week)
I'd much prefer you simply not put "citation needed" all over the article in the first place. Stop being so fucking lazy. If you're going to edit Wikipedia, EDIT WIKIPEDIA. Don't just shit out "someone else do this work for me" tags, that's totally useless and extremely annoying.
What kind of "editor" would put things like "citation needed" boxes on the *most visible* copy of the document they were editing? Only the worst editor ever. The purpose of editing a document is making it easier to read, you're doing the exact opposite.
I dunno. I did game testing on Forza Motorsport 2, and they just used a bog-standard MS SQL install. But then again, it has hundreds of car models (over 250, I believe), all the variations of each model, and the detailed simulation data for each variation.
A game like Warcraft 3 might not have a genuine relational database, it may be simple enough to not require one. My wager would be that they're either using a flat-file database of their own design, or a very light database engine like SQLite.
Actually, I do use it, and I struggle with it because it has a awful UI.
I just have to reply to people saying it has this great holy UI when, in fact, it sucks on 2/3rds of the platforms it runs on. (And possibly Linux too, but I don't have a Linux box to test it on.)
- Stop being so dependent on printed page measures.
If I want to make an Inkscape document 40' wide by 15' tall to sketch out a design for the side of my garage, I should be able to do that even if Office Depot doesn't sell reams of paper in that size. I shouldn't have to do my own hacks to make the dimensions fit. ("Well, if I just imagine 1cm = 1meter, then I can make it fit right...") If I want to make an Inkscape document to compare the size of the Empire State Building with the size of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I should be able to do it-- and use the real-world measures for it!
Why should there be any maximum? Let me make a document the size of Seattle to lay out a bike route, why the fuck not?
The best thing about it is the interface: very easy to pick-up, yet extremely flexible. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the UI design.
Unless you're using it on OS X, or Windows, in which case it's awful. It uses X11 in OS X, which is enough to indicate awfulness in that OS. On Windows, it doesn't support tablet PCs, voice recognition, has mutated Open/Save dialogs, etc. It's awful.
But implying the problem is that you were suggesting, whether on purpose or not, that the problem was "the people who care about the article went away" as opposed to "an article that was successfully defended needs to be defended again"
The real question is, why should it matter if the people interested in the article stayed or left?
What does it matter? Why should they HAVE to maintain interest?
You're totally distracting us from the real issue at hand here.
Either the article is notable or it's not. If it's survived one vote for notability, why should there be a second? Or third? Or fourth? The notability requirements don't change on a daily basis, do they? Why should a single article *ever* have more than one vote to delete it?
I generally read this as, "someone needs to look up a citation for this, and I'm too high and mighty to stoop to such a level! Do it for me, peons!"
Whatever happened to the encyclopedia *anybody* can edit? Either find and add the citation yourself, or delete the fact for having no citation. But shitting those little tags all over the pages doesn't accomplish anything except making the article hard to read.
Actually, most cities in the US don't have Internet kiosks anymore (except in the airports), because public wifi is becoming so ubiquitous. And Internet cafes are becoming very rare. It's not by any stretch a dumb question, don't be so defensive.
How about this... if he had asked about phone booths, would you get angry because you assume he's implying that the UK has no phones?
Slashdot Mirror
He reverted THE BIRTH DATE!!??! Christ almighty.
None of the facts quoted above really address the issue anyway.
What we are looking for is the count of distinct editors who made an edit per month. That's the only way to judge whether the number of active editors has declined or not... the blurb on this article doesn't seem to address that at all, instead giving a whole bunch of "feel-good" stats that are unrelated to the issue.
Maybe you should work on the ability to explain it clearly. Saying you can't explain it to a layperson is your failing, not theirs.
Well, since the vast, vast majority of programming is not systems programming, dismissing this product on that basis alone seems goofy to me. (Like the other guy in this thread who dismissed it because it won't run on 1K embedded chips... sheesh.)
I think your definition of "general purpose" and mine are different. I would argue that languages like C and C++ are specially purposed for systems programming, and shouldn't be used for anything else, whereas languages like C# or VB can and should be used for any purpose *other* than system programming. This relies on the fact that systems programming is a very small percentage of software development, though.
I still counter your assertion. VB is a general purpose programming language. It's not suited for systems programming, but then again, there are hundreds of programming languages that also have that distinction. It does include libraries for easy integration and automation of Office applications, but that isn't what it was designed to do. (You might be thinking of VBA, which is the scripting version of VB, and designed for that exact task. But it's a different language. Or maybe you're thinking of Access, I dunno.) There's nothing stopping you from using VB to, for example, reproduce Photoshop.
Now, VB might not be a general purpose programming language you *like*, or one that you feel has a userbase of solid programmers, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.
I don't think anybody has claimed that RunRev, even if it's a magical miracle tool, is going to replace every programmer evar. I don't know where you're pulling that from, and that's the point I was countering.
Yes, they'll always be demand for programmers who can write assembly. But what the holy heck does that have to do with the article?
Whoosh!! Totally missing the point. My comments had nothing to do with how many "bugs" you may have reported. (From your comments, I'm not convinced that you know the difference between a bug and a personal preference.)
The ones I reported were obvious bugs, had nothing to do with personal preferences.
Sorry to see that you're unable to accept the fact that other people have used many other tools and *choose/prefer* interfaces that you don't.
No, people say it's great because it's good in 1/3rd of the OSes it runs on. If you're using Inkscape in Linux, you've probably noticed no usability problems, and kudos. But... again... that only applies to 1/3rd of the platforms Inkscape runs on.
Then you say, "No way any program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X." Hmm.
That's a editing fail. I meant to add GTK+ in that sentence:
"No way any GTK+ program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X."
I think you have a problem with the word "usability." It doesn't refer to whether it's *possible* to use the program or not, it refers to how easy/consistent the program is to use. It's possible to use a program with terrible usability to get real work done-- see the Lotus Notes example I gave before. It's just unpleasant, and everything takes longer than it would if the program were usable.
I hope to God that you don't write software that you expect other human beings to use, if this has to be explained to you.
Since they both come from HyperTalk, I'd be surprised if it *didn't* look like AppleScript.
These topics seem to be ignored. This is a VisualBasic clone, not an attempt at a language that you would create "real" programs in.
I love snobbery.
Praytell, what would make an application written in VB *not* a "real" program? What definition of the word "real" are you using here, exactly?
Obligatory Futurama:
Leela: "Uh, g- uh, getting back to the, uh, matter, uh-uh, if it please the court... Fry, there's nothing else here. You only wrote two pages of dialogue!"
Fry: "Well, it took an hour to write. I thought it would take an hour to read."
Well if you're going to judge EVERY new technology with how appropriate it is to embedded applications, why should we bother developing anything high-level at all?
Relax, dude. Maybe this doesn't help you in your job. But you don't need to be so actively hostile to people trying to improve the frankly shitty state of programming.
What you're missing is that a UI can suck and be awful, and the program still be useful. For example, all of the Unix CLI sucks and is awful, but most of the posters here will defend it to the death. (Of course, they've never bothered to try anything different/better, but... I won't get into that.)
If you're using Inkscape in Windows, its UI sucks. I'm not going to mince words, that's really the correct level of description to use.
Am I saying it's useless? No.
Am I saying that people can't do work in it? Of course not.
Do *I* do work in it? Yes.
My point is that when people use words like "awful" and "sucks" when describing tools that actually do get the job done (even for those people), it tends to come across like bitching and moaning rather than useful input.
I've put in tons of input to the Inkscape project. Virtually all my issues were marked as being "GTK+" issues (as if I care, just FIX IT!), and shunted off to one of those lovely open source bug trackers where nobody ever reads or acts on the bugs. There's no point to copying all that input here, since this isn't a bug tracker and I'm too lazy to do all that typing. And Inkscape (for all practical purposes) ignores them on their own bug tracker, anyway.
"Awful" makes for a useful abbreviation of the preceding paragraph.
What lies lower than "awful" on your scale of quality adjectives?
Godawful. Abominable. Shitty. Lotus Notes.
You might want to think about this if you want to be taken seriously instead of being seen as a whiner who's unable to adapt to minor differences in tools (or life's changes).
Oh yah. Maybe I should put some of my issues with Inkscape into the bug track-- OH WAIT I ALREADY DID THAT.
Look, as long as Inkscape is using GTK+ for their Windows and OS X ports, their software is going to suck on those platforms. It's X11 on OS X, and it's plain bad on Windows... there is:
1) No way any program, no matter how great the usability in Linux, can be usable in Windows or OS X
2) No way to fix any of the problems with GTK+, because they don't bother to read their bug tracker.
If Inkscape wants to improve the UI on Windows and OS X, they're going to have to port it to a better UI library. That's all there is to it. Firefox isn't perfect, but it's 95% there on Windows and OS X, for example. Using their UI library would get Inkscape a lot of mileage. Also note that this also applies to other GTK+ apps, Pidgin for example.
Sorry for coming across so harsh on Thanksgiving Day, but thought you should know how your continued use of extremes is interpreted. Have a good day!
It's a free country, you can interpret it however the fuck you want.
But on the same token, don't assume I haven't tried to improve Inkscape's UI, or that I'm complaining about something with no basis.
That's not easy in many cases because a lot of reliable sources are print-only, and a lot of reliable sources are subscription-only. Some people who watch an article have easier access to these sources and can defend claims in the article by citing them.
Whine whine whine. Nothing worth doing is easy. I'm sorry that the original author didn't serve up everything you need on a silver platter and pack your sack lunch while he was at it. "It's not very easy!" is the worst excuse for anything, ever.
The real issue is this: you read a fact in an article, and you need to know whether you can rely on that fact. No matter *what* you're using that fact for, you're going to have to find the original citation, yes? Nobody accepts a cite from Wikipedia. So find it. If you can't find it, delete it.
When I do add "citation needed" to a claim, I sometimes check back a week later to see if someone who cares about the subject cares about the unreferenced claim as well. Otherwise, I take it out with an edit summary: (Removed claim that had gone uncited for a week)
I'd much prefer you simply not put "citation needed" all over the article in the first place. Stop being so fucking lazy. If you're going to edit Wikipedia, EDIT WIKIPEDIA. Don't just shit out "someone else do this work for me" tags, that's totally useless and extremely annoying.
What kind of "editor" would put things like "citation needed" boxes on the *most visible* copy of the document they were editing? Only the worst editor ever. The purpose of editing a document is making it easier to read, you're doing the exact opposite.
I dunno. I did game testing on Forza Motorsport 2, and they just used a bog-standard MS SQL install. But then again, it has hundreds of car models (over 250, I believe), all the variations of each model, and the detailed simulation data for each variation.
A game like Warcraft 3 might not have a genuine relational database, it may be simple enough to not require one. My wager would be that they're either using a flat-file database of their own design, or a very light database engine like SQLite.
Actually, I do use it, and I struggle with it because it has a awful UI.
I just have to reply to people saying it has this great holy UI when, in fact, it sucks on 2/3rds of the platforms it runs on. (And possibly Linux too, but I don't have a Linux box to test it on.)
They also generally don't teach:
1) Development methodologies
2) Source control
3) Working in teams
4) Interfacing with non-programmers
There are lots of skills required for software development that 4-year programs don't even start covering.
Games use databases.
Just sayin'.
I have a suggestion too:
- Stop being so dependent on printed page measures.
If I want to make an Inkscape document 40' wide by 15' tall to sketch out a design for the side of my garage, I should be able to do that even if Office Depot doesn't sell reams of paper in that size. I shouldn't have to do my own hacks to make the dimensions fit. ("Well, if I just imagine 1cm = 1meter, then I can make it fit right...") If I want to make an Inkscape document to compare the size of the Empire State Building with the size of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I should be able to do it-- and use the real-world measures for it!
Why should there be any maximum? Let me make a document the size of Seattle to lay out a bike route, why the fuck not?
The best thing about it is the interface: very easy to pick-up, yet extremely flexible. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the UI design.
Unless you're using it on OS X, or Windows, in which case it's awful. It uses X11 in OS X, which is enough to indicate awfulness in that OS. On Windows, it doesn't support tablet PCs, voice recognition, has mutated Open/Save dialogs, etc. It's awful.
Well, I didn't mean it that way.
But implying the problem is that you were suggesting, whether on purpose or not, that the problem was "the people who care about the article went away" as opposed to "an article that was successfully defended needs to be defended again"
The real question is, why should it matter if the people interested in the article stayed or left?
What does it matter? Why should they HAVE to maintain interest?
You're totally distracting us from the real issue at hand here.
Either the article is notable or it's not. If it's survived one vote for notability, why should there be a second? Or third? Or fourth? The notability requirements don't change on a daily basis, do they? Why should a single article *ever* have more than one vote to delete it?
My favorite tag is "citation needed."
I generally read this as, "someone needs to look up a citation for this, and I'm too high and mighty to stoop to such a level! Do it for me, peons!"
Whatever happened to the encyclopedia *anybody* can edit? Either find and add the citation yourself, or delete the fact for having no citation. But shitting those little tags all over the pages doesn't accomplish anything except making the article hard to read.
FAIL!
LOLCAT font is IMPACT. Fool! Every cat should know that.
The brain size of the average cat is 5 centimeters in length and 30 grams. ... which is small enough to fit inside a baseball.
So, uh... thanks for correcting the already-correct post? I guess?
Actually, most cities in the US don't have Internet kiosks anymore (except in the airports), because public wifi is becoming so ubiquitous. And Internet cafes are becoming very rare. It's not by any stretch a dumb question, don't be so defensive.
How about this... if he had asked about phone booths, would you get angry because you assume he's implying that the UK has no phones?
Old joke (Dave Barry, I think):
In the US, people drive on the RIGHT side of the street. But in London, it turns out that people drive on BOTH sides of the street!