• John Colvin (5/5) Jul 07 2013 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog
• Andrei Alexandrescu (12/16) Jul 07 2013 Nice idea! Comments:
• Andrei Alexandrescu (18/20) Jul 07 2013 Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O was
• John Colvin (18/39) Jul 07 2013 Right structure, wrong logic? Shouldn't it be:
• Andrei Alexandrescu (4/39) Jul 07 2013 Cool!
• Leandro Lucarella (14/36) Jul 07 2013 If you want the specification, here it is :)
• John Colvin (15/43) Jul 07 2013 I prefer this one :p http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html
• Leandro Lucarella (9/48) Jul 08 2013 That's not Linux, that's GNU coreutils :)
• John Colvin (3/50) Jul 08 2013 Sue me :p Strangely, it's in direct contradiction with the GNU
• Leandro Lucarella (15/32) Jul 08 2013 You mean the joke one, or the real one? :P
• John Colvin (12/42) Jul 08 2013 From the gnu page you just linked: "the normally-special argument
• John Colvin (7/25) Jul 07 2013 As mentioned in the blog, i'll be covering the various flags
• Baz (4/9) Jul 08 2013 That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting hundreds
• Joseph Rushton Wakeling (4/9) Jul 08 2013 blogs.dlang.org ... ?
• Dicebot (4/6) Jul 08 2013 http://planet.dsource.org has already been mentioned and it does
• Baz (16/25) Jul 08 2013 You're wrong, there's a real need for promoting D worldwide.
• John Colvin (9/16) Jul 08 2013 Where did that come from? I never knew there was such anger
• Joseph Rushton Wakeling (13/27) Jul 08 2013 Did I say otherwise? I am not sure you are reacting to what I
• Iain Buclaw (17/36) Jul 08 2013 Call me an inertial developer, but forums are an arcane place to
• Kagamin (2/2) Jul 08 2013 Not sure if a developer should look for excuses for sticking with
• Mr. Anonymous (3/15) Jul 08 2013 Planet D?
• John Colvin (7/12) Jul 09 2013 Seeing as most of the traffic I'm getting is from this thread, I
• Nick Sabalausky (22/38) Jul 13 2013 09.png
• Adam D. Ruppe (23/26) Jul 13 2013 Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash
• Nick Sabalausky (73/103) Jul 13 2013 =46rom a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, as long
• Adam D. Ruppe (131/153) Jul 14 2013 Eh, the UI was indeed pretty ok. Actually even modern firefox can
• Nick Sabalausky (121/238) Jul 15 2013 Interesting, either I never noticed that, or I had totally forgotten.
• Adam D. Ruppe (159/189) Jul 15 2013 Yup. I've found you can get around it somewhat well by right
• Nick Sabalausky (115/226) Jul 15 2013 For me, XP was the peak of Windows and Vista started the consistent
• Adam D. Ruppe (57/75) Jul 16 2013 Worth noting you can turn that off: I have 7 on the laptop I'm on
• Nick Sabalausky (61/145) Jul 16 2013 Yea, I did actually manage to get my Win7 taskbar (and file explorer
• Adam D. Ruppe (20/33) Jul 16 2013 I cannot for the life of me remember how. I'm looking at the user
• Nick Sabalausky (32/63) Jul 21 2013 Ahh cool, last I checked that add-on was pretty much useless, but it
• Nick Sabalausky (56/104) Jul 15 2013 They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's about being
• Adam D. Ruppe (31/39) Jul 16 2013 Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive
• Nick Sabalausky (41/87) Jul 19 2013 Yea. While they're desperately trying to hoard money...they're just
• Joakim (10/18) Jul 15 2013 I agree with much of what you say about how the web is broken,
• Nick Sabalausky (27/47) Jul 15 2013 I really have had problems with Chrome (and other Google software)
• Joakim (60/103) Jul 15 2013 Chrome, which is based on the open-source Chromium project, has a
• Nick Sabalausky (30/40) Jul 16 2013 Paranoia has nothing to do with it. I don't want it always running in
• Joakim (19/53) Jul 16 2013 Chromium is an open source project. Chrome is google's build of
• Nick Sabalausky (51/84) Jul 16 2013 Ok, good to know. I do still think they could have handled it without
• Michael (7/7) Jul 14 2013 New Opera uses chromium engine, so I don't know (like user agent
• John Colvin (7/12) Jul 15 2013 Turns out it got posted by some people on here:

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) 
started with echo.

http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 7/7/13 8:00 AM, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog about D,
 implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Nice idea! Comments:

- The imperative version writes an extra space at the end (the joiner 
version does not have that problem).

- The echo utility has an odd way to process the cmdline: if exactly the 
first argument is a -n, then do not writeln at the end.

- It's quite likely the joiner-based version will be slower because it 
writes one character at a time. (Would be great to test and discuss 
performance as well.)

Here's a conformant implementation for reference: 
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c


Andrei

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
 http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O was 
successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:

import std.stdout;
void main(string[] args)
{
     const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
     foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
     {
         if (i) write(' ');
         write(arg);
     }
     if (nl) writeln();
}

But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, see e.g. 
http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html. 
With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.


Andrei

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 16:06:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
 http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

 Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O 
 was successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:

 import std.stdout;
 void main(string[] args)
 {
     const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
     foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
     {
         if (i) write(' ');
         write(arg);
     }
     if (nl) writeln();
 }

Right structure, wrong logic? Shouldn't it be:

import std.stdio;
void main(string[] args)
{
     const noNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
     foreach (i, arg; args[noNewline + 1 .. $])
     {
         if (i) write(' ');
         write(arg);
     }
     if (!noNewline) writeln();
}

or am I being dumb?

 But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, 
 see e.g. 
 http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html. 
 With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.


 Andrei

Yeah, I reckon it will get quite interesting as I get in to the 
details. It's easy to see these basic utilities as trivial but 
they most certainly aren't, if you want to get them 100% right 
for all the options.

Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail erdani.org> writes:

On 7/7/13 10:08 AM, John Colvin wrote:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 16:06:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
 http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

 Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O was
 successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:

 import std.stdout;
 void main(string[] args)
 {
 const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
 foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
 {
 if (i) write(' ');
 write(arg);
 }
 if (nl) writeln();
 }

 Right structure, wrong logic? Shouldn't it be:

 import std.stdio;
 void main(string[] args)
 {
 const noNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
 foreach (i, arg; args[noNewline + 1 .. $])
 {
 if (i) write(' ');
 write(arg);
 }
 if (!noNewline) writeln();
 }

 or am I being dumb?

No, I am :o).

 Yeah, I reckon it will get quite interesting as I get in to the details.
 It's easy to see these basic utilities as trivial but they most
 certainly aren't, if you want to get them 100% right for all the options.

Cool!


Andrei

Leandro Lucarella <luca llucax.com.ar> writes:

Andrei Alexandrescu, el  7 de July a las 09:06 me escribiste:
 On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

 
 Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O was
 successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:
 
 import std.stdout;
 void main(string[] args)
 {
     const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
     foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
     {
         if (i) write(' ');
         write(arg);
     }
     if (nl) writeln();
 }
 
 But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, see
 e.g. http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html.
 With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.

If you want the specification, here it is :)
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145  104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
All fathers are intimidating. They're intimidating because they are
fathers.  Once a man has children, for the rest of his life, his
attitude is, "To hell with the world, I can make my own people. I'll eat
whatever I want. I'll wear whatever I want, and I'll create whoever
I want."
	-- Jerry Seinfeld

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 20:08:19 UTC, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
 Andrei Alexandrescu, el  7 de July a las 09:06 me escribiste:
 On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

 
 Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O 
 was
 successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:
 
 import std.stdout;
 void main(string[] args)
 {
     const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
     foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
     {
         if (i) write(' ');
         write(arg);
     }
     if (nl) writeln();
 }
 
 But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, 
 see
 e.g. 
 http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html.
 With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.

 If you want the specification, here it is :)
 http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html

I prefer this one :p http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html

 From the opengroup spec:
"If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a 
<backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined."

Ah...specifications...


I'm gonna stick with normal linux implementation, as described 
here: http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo

However, on my machine, "echo --version" claims it's part of the 
GNU coreutils, but when you look at the coreutils docs: 
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.
tml#echo-invocation 
  You get the sentence "the normally-special argument ‘--’ has no 
special meaning and is treated like any other string.", which 
should preclude the identifying message being printed in the 
first place!

Leandro Lucarella <luca llucax.com.ar> writes:

John Colvin, el  7 de July a las 22:39 me escribiste:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 20:08:19 UTC, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu, el  7 de July a las 09:06 me escribiste:
On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O was
successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:

import std.stdout;
void main(string[] args)
{
    const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
    foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
    {
        if (i) write(' ');
        write(arg);
    }
    if (nl) writeln();
}

But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, see
e.g. http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html.
With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.

If you want the specification, here it is :)
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html

 
 I prefer this one :p http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html
 
 From the opengroup spec:
 "If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a
 <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined."
 
 Ah...specifications...
 
 
 I'm gonna stick with normal linux implementation, as described here:
 http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo

That's not Linux, that's GNU coreutils :)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145  104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A buscar no lo voy a ir
	-- Rata (Pichi Traful, febrero de 2011)

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 09:08:18 UTC, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
 John Colvin, el  7 de July a las 22:39 me escribiste:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 20:08:19 UTC, Leandro Lucarella 
 wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu, el  7 de July a las 09:06 me escribiste:
On 7/7/13 8:55 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Here's a conformant implementation for reference:
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/src/pkg/echo/echo.c

Hmm, that's actually not so good, it doesn't ensure that I/O 
was
successful. Anyhow, here's a possibility:

import std.stdout;
void main(string[] args)
{
    const appendNewline = args.length > 1 && args[1] == "-n";
    foreach (i, arg; args[appendNewline + 1 .. $])
    {
        if (i) write(' ');
        write(arg);
    }
    if (nl) writeln();
}

But then I figured echo must do escape character processing, 
see
e.g. 
http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/minix/html/echo_8c-source.html.
With that the blog entry would become quite interesting.

If you want the specification, here it is :)
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html

 
 I prefer this one :p http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html
 
 From the opengroup spec:
 "If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain 
 a
 <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined."
 
 Ah...specifications...
 
 
 I'm gonna stick with normal linux implementation, as described 
 here:
 http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo

 That's not Linux, that's GNU coreutils :)

Sue me :p    Strangely, it's in direct contradiction with the GNU 
coreutils documentation, as hosted on the GNU site.

Leandro Lucarella <luca llucax.com.ar> writes:

John Colvin, el  8 de July a las 12:38 me escribiste:
I prefer this one :p http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html

From the opengroup spec:
"If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a
<backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined."

Ah...specifications...


I'm gonna stick with normal linux implementation, as described
here:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo

That's not Linux, that's GNU coreutils :)

 
 Sue me :p    Strangely, it's in direct contradiction with the GNU
 coreutils documentation, as hosted on the GNU site.

You mean the joke one, or the real one? :P

It seems to be the same as the real one (that I found at least), is just
they are worded differently because one is in manpage format and the
other one in info/html/manual format.
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.html

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145  104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Lo último que hay que pensar es que se desalinea la memoria
Hay que priorizar como causa la idiotez propia
Ya lo tengo asumido
	-- Pablete, filósofo contemporáneo desconocido

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 16:08:17 UTC, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
 John Colvin, el  8 de July a las 12:38 me escribiste:
I prefer this one :p 
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/echo-msg.html

From the opengroup spec:
"If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands 
contain a
<backslash> character, the results are 
implementation-defined."

Ah...specifications...


I'm gonna stick with normal linux implementation, as 
described
here:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo

That's not Linux, that's GNU coreutils :)

 
 Sue me :p    Strangely, it's in direct contradiction with the 
 GNU
 coreutils documentation, as hosted on the GNU site.

 You mean the joke one, or the real one? :P

 It seems to be the same as the real one (that I found at 
 least), is just
 they are worded differently because one is in manpage format 
 and the
 other one in info/html/manual format.
 http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.html

 From the gnu page you just linked: "the normally-special argument 
‘--’ has no special meaning and is treated like any other string."

 From http://linux.die.net/man/1/echo:
"--help
display this help and exit
--version
output version information and exit"

my terminals builtin echo seems to be compliant with the gnu 
site, but the seperate executable in /bin is the same as the 
linux.die.net one, whilst claiming on use of --version to be from 
gnu coreutils!!

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:55:31 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 On 7/7/13 8:00 AM, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
 about D,
 implementing some unix utilities. I've (unsurprisingly) 
 started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

 Nice idea! Comments:

 - The imperative version writes an extra space at the end (the 
 joiner version does not have that problem).

Woops, missed that.

 - The echo utility has an odd way to process the cmdline: if 
 exactly the first argument is a -n, then do not writeln at the 
 end.

As mentioned in the blog, i'll be covering the various flags 
later.

 - It's quite likely the joiner-based version will be slower 
 because it writes one character at a time. (Would be great to 
 test and discuss performance as well.)

I plan on continuing both versions through successive posts, so 
when they're complete I'll do a head-to-head between them, 
including performance.

"Baz" <burg.basile yahoo.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
 about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've 
 (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting hundreds
of links...I think that someone should create something like
http://www.delphifeeds.com/ but for D...

"Joseph Rushton Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling webdrake.net> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:39:46 UTC, Baz wrote:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC,
 That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting 
 hundreds
 of links...I think that someone should create something like
 http://www.delphifeeds.com/ but for D...


blogs.dlang.org ... ?

There'd need to be some way of filtering upstreams by topic. I 
blog about D, but not _just_ about D.

"Dicebot" <public dicebot.lv> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:53:45 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
 There'd need to be some way of filtering upstreams by topic. I 
 blog about D, but not _just_ about D.

http://planet.dsource.org has already been mentioned and it does 
filter by tags.

"Baz" <burg.basile yahoo.com> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:53:45 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling 
wrote:
 On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:39:46 UTC, Baz wrote:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC,
 That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting 
 hundreds
 of links...I think that someone should create something like
 http://www.delphifeeds.com/ but for D...


 blogs.dlang.org ... ?

 There'd need to be some way of filtering upstreams by topic. I 
 blog about D, but not _just_ about D.

You're wrong, there's a real need for promoting D worldwide.
Just for example, this mainstream (french) programming site has 
(had?) a forum for D which is not updated or used at all: 
http://www.developpez.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fadd36f8505c59f0714e4e24a0c5a195&f=1180

Fedora a few years ago has proposed the D language as a part of 
their very "extremist open source ashole repository". The fact is 
that D is totally missing from their dev packages ("sudo yum i 
want some only opensource douche stuff even if I have to type 
make make install every two minutes"). And If you setup dmd 
manually they'll propose you to setup ldc, which is not possible 
due to some broken package dependencies...

Blogs are usefull, D can be used in many editors and compiled in 
two portables IDE (Xamarin and Geany) and in another mainstream 
win-only-IDE(VS)...

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 18:54:30 UTC, Baz wrote:
 Fedora a few years ago has proposed the D language as a part of 
 their very "extremist open source ashole repository". The fact 
 is that D is totally missing from their dev packages ("sudo yum 
 i want some only opensource douche stuff even if I have to type 
 make make install every two minutes"). And If you setup dmd 
 manually they'll propose you to setup ldc, which is not 
 possible due to some broken package dependencies...

Where did that come from? I never knew there was such anger 
against strict open-source movements, but recently I've been 
rudely awakened.

I use fedora for everything I do with D. I have dmd, ldc and gdc 
all set up, no significant problems. I also make use of yum a 
great deal, and generally find everything I need with little to 
no trouble, no make involved. Sure, dmd isn't gonna go in the 
official repositories, but rpmfusion exists for a reason...

"Joseph Rushton Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling webdrake.net> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 18:54:30 UTC, Baz wrote:
 You're wrong, there's a real need for promoting D worldwide.

Did I say otherwise? I am not sure you are reacting to what I 
actually wrote.

 Just for example, this mainstream (french) programming site has 
 (had?) a forum for D which is not updated or used at all: 
 http://www.developpez.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fadd36f8505c59f0714e4e24a0c5a195&f=1180

That's a shame.

 Fedora a few years ago has proposed the D language as a part of 
 their very "extremist open source ashole repository". The fact 
 is that D is totally missing from their dev packages ("sudo yum 
 i want some only opensource douche stuff even if I have to type 
 make make install every two minutes"). And If you setup dmd 
 manually they'll propose you to setup ldc, which is not 
 possible due to some broken package dependencies...

I don't understand your visceral hostility here. No one is 
excluding D on licensing grounds -- there might be some distros 
that would prefer not to include DMD, but they'd be happy to 
include GDC and/or LDC.

If D compilers are missing from a distro, or have broken 
dependencies, it's because no one is stepping up to take 
responsibility for packaging.

 Blogs are usefull, D can be used in many editors and compiled 
 in two portables IDE (Xamarin and Geany) and in another 
 mainstream win-only-IDE(VS)...

Yes, blogs are useful. I'm still not sure who your argument is 
with, though.

Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw ubuntu.com> writes:

On 8 July 2013 19:54, Baz <burg.basile yahoo.com> wrote:
 On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:53:45 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
 On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:39:46 UTC, Baz wrote:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC,
 That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting hundreds
 of links...I think that someone should create something like
 http://www.delphifeeds.com/ but for D...



 blogs.dlang.org ... ?

 There'd need to be some way of filtering upstreams by topic. I blog about
 D, but not _just_ about D.


 You're wrong, there's a real need for promoting D worldwide.
 Just for example, this mainstream (french) programming site has (had?) a
 forum for D which is not updated or used at all:
 http://www.developpez.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=fadd36f8505c59f0714e4e24a0c5a195&f=1180

Call me an inertial developer, but forums are an arcane place to
discussion programming languages... unlike mailing lists :o)

Saying that,there's an amazing depth of information on forums, for
example (taken from coding horror):

- A 12 year old girl who finds a forum community of rabid enthusiasts
willing to help her rebuild a Fiero from scratch? Check.
- The most obsessive breakdown of Lego collectible minifig kits you'll
find anywhere on the Internet? Check.
- Some of the most practical information on stunt kiting in the world? Check.
- The only place I could find with scarily powerful squirt gun
instructions and advice? Check.
- The underlying research for a New Yorker article outing a potential
serial marathon cheater? Check.

--
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';

"Kagamin" <spam here.lot> writes:

Not sure if a developer should look for excuses for sticking with 
suboptimal design.

"Mr. Anonymous" <mailnew4ster gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 17:39:46 UTC, Baz wrote:
 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
 about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've 
 (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

 That's interesting...but I'm not a big fan of collecting 
 hundreds
 of links...I think that someone should create something like
 http://www.delphifeeds.com/ but for D...

Planet D?
http://planet.dsource.org/

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
 about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've 
 (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Seeing as most of the traffic I'm getting is from this thread, I 
thought it might be interesting for people to see some stats 
about where people are from, what browsers they're using etc.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/910836/Webstats_02072013-10_09072013-09.png

A lot of windows users, although that's skewed by people browsing 
from work. I hope that accounts for the IE contingent as well!

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 09 Jul 2013 11:35:17 +0200
"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> wrote:

 On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog=20
 about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've=20
 (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

=20
 Seeing as most of the traffic I'm getting is from this thread, I=20
 thought it might be interesting for people to see some stats=20
 about where people are from, what browsers they're using etc.
=20
 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/910836/Webstats_02072013-10_09072013-=

09.png

Interesting!

 A lot of windows users, although that's skewed by people browsing=20
 from work. I hope that accounts for the IE contingent as well!

=46rom the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as bad as
people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much trouble with FF as
I've had with IE. In fact, the only *big* problems I've had with IE7+
were in conjunction with Flash.

I've found that when you do have a problem with a browser (whether IE or
anything else), then it's almost always just an indication that you're
overengineering something. Just take a step back, tone down the fancy
stuff (you'll almost always find you didn't need it), and the idealism
(most of webdev's "best practices" are a total load of crap - and
they're mostly spread by the same clowns who think PHP and JS are good
languages), and everything will work out just fine on all browsers,
including IE.

One thing to always keep in mind is that using newer web features and
techniques will always lead you into all sorts of bugs and
compatibility issues and such (it's just a natural consequence), but
most of the older features and techniques have become totally rock
solid (and fast) on pretty much damn near *anything* and aren't even
any harder to use (heck, frequently they're easier).

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Saturday, 13 July 2013 at 23:40:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as 
 bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much 
 trouble with FF as I've had with IE.

Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash 
back in the day, I'd rather use IE6 as a user and a developer 
(IE6 had bugs and incomplete implementations, sure, but there 
were pretty easy workarounds for all of them - they were annoying 
at worst, rather than show-stoppers. FF2 just simply didn't offer 
the features I wanted at all, despite them being in the CSS 
standard.)


As in virtually every bug I get for my work sites is a Chrome bug 
in their basic html (they, I kid you not, broke <form> with 
multiple submit buttons in one of their releases, and <a 
target="_BLANK"> in one shortly thereafter). Bog simple html, 
worked everywhere else, failed in Chrome after one of their waaay 
too frequent automatic updates) or css handling. And all bets are 
off if you do try to get fancy, even if it works today on chrome 
1337, who knows how many bugs they'll introduce in the 236 
releases that will auto-update by this time next week.

but it can run DOOM..... at a frame rate similar to my old 
Pentium 1 computer despite being on a 100x faster processor. lol, 
what a joke. I can't believe so many people actually use that 
crap.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 02:20:12 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:
 On Saturday, 13 July 2013 at 23:40:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as=20
 bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much=20
 trouble with FF as I've had with IE.

=20
 Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash=20
 back in the day, I'd rather use IE6 as a user and a developer=20
 (IE6 had bugs and incomplete implementations, sure, but there=20
 were pretty easy workarounds for all of them - they were annoying=20
 at worst, rather than show-stoppers. FF2 just simply didn't offer=20
 the features I wanted at all, despite them being in the CSS=20
 standard.)
=20

=46rom a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, as long
as it's loaded up (or rather, bogged down) with all my usual extensions.

But you're right, from an implementation standpoint it could be much
better. All sorts of bugs and leeks and inefficiencies and such (I'd
*love* a modern browser with a FF2+Winestripe/NoScript/AdblockPlus
interface). As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
"inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete implementation
of "(min|max)-(width|height)". And, maybe I'm wrong, but my
understanding is that those are all old enough that they
could've/should've been there even at the time. (Although I *just* now
stumbled on a "display:-moz-inline-stack" that's supposed to work. I'll
have to check into that.)

I even had one PITA problem where FF2 (*and* later versions IIRC) would
magically fail to show any auto-resizing Flash applet if the
height/width setting of all the containers up through the chain weren't
exactly as it expected. *Nothing* else had a problem with it except a
bunch of versions of FF.

But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables easily
solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with zero non-imaginary
downsides (yea, they're a bit verbose, but *HTML* is freaking verbose
anyway so whatever). Sure, layout tables are web heresy, but hey,
irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of the
compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!


 As in virtually every bug I get for my work sites is a Chrome bug=20
 in their basic html (they, I kid you not, broke <form> with=20
 multiple submit buttons in one of their releases, and <a=20
 target=3D"_BLANK"> in one shortly thereafter). Bog simple html,=20
 worked everywhere else, failed in Chrome after one of their waaay=20
 too frequent automatic updates) or css handling. And all bets are=20
 off if you do try to get fancy, even if it works today on chrome=20
 1337, who knows how many bugs they'll introduce in the 236=20
 releases that will auto-update by this time next week.
=20

Yea, if there were one browser I could eradicate from all history, it
wouldn't be IE, it would be Chrome (IE actually had some good stuff:
its box model and its JS interface for mouse buttons were actually sane
- unlike W3C's absolute dumbshit box model and mouse interface).

In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers. I use SRWare
Iron instead (it literally is Chrome but with most of the "take over
your computer" shitware removed). And even that I still never touch for
anything but compatibility testing because the interface is the
absolute biggest piece of shit of any web browser in history...or at
least it was until all the other dumbfuck browser developers decided to
ape Google's moronic UI abominations (although the unified forward/back
button was originally MS's abomination, and AwfulBars are Mozilla's
fault, but the disregard for system settings and the whole
"hide/shrink/conflate fucking everything we can" trend are mainly
Google's doing).

And it's 100% Chrome's fault that there's no longer any
widely-compatible way to embed non-flash media. The <object> tag had
been working everywhere relevant for ages (Netscape's <embed> died a
loooong time ago.) But then the assholes from Google came along, got
the W3C to standardize a completely incompatible and unneeded
alternative, included that in Chrome and did NOT include a working
<object> tag. Why disregard standards like MS does when you can just
bend the "standard" to your own whim? Yea, Google likes standards as
long as Google creates them.

So thanks for all that, Chrome.

 but it can run DOOM..... at a frame rate similar to my old=20
 Pentium 1 computer despite being on a 100x faster processor. lol,=20
 what a joke. I can't believe so many people actually use that=20
 crap.
=20

Hah! I know, right? Shit, my 2005 *MP3 player* can run DOOM.

Plus playing a game in a browser is just simply bad user experience,
whether good framerate or not. And yea, like JS is something we really
should be encouraging anyway.

I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time back:
https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/quake-shows-javascript-is-slow-=
not-fast

Although you've just said essentially the same thing far, far more
succinctly ;)



Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the web on
a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and such an
orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy with whatever just
happens to actually work.

I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to finally kill
off Flash even if it's what would normally be a dumb design decision
("Uhh, hello, let the *user* opt-in with a big flashing 'you're about
to kill your battery, security and stability' warning if they have
reason to do so."). But Flash was never *really* going to start going
away without some major player finally saying "Ok, you know what?
That's it. No more Flash. Fuck Flash. Go screw yourself, Adobe."
Ultimately though, that only means Flash gets replaced by HTML5, so
it's kinda like replacing Hitler with Napoleon - technically a win, but
not much.

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 03:52:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 From a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, 
 as long as it's loaded up (or rather, bogged down) with all my 
 usual extensions.

Eh, the UI was indeed pretty ok. Actually even modern firefox can
look pretty similar to it, so I don't hate firefox with a passion
the way I do chrome, since it is a pretty decent ui.

But I, believe it or not, have a soft spot for IE6. Its interface
was simple enough, it did separate processes for each site way
before chrome "invented" it (IE6 did it the sane way: one process
per window, something Firefox actively prevents you from doing
even if you specifically ask for it! "Program X has detected an
instance already running" should be a crime.) so while IE6 was
prone to crashing somewhat often, it at least had limited damage.

Important note though: change the security settings to disable
scripts on non-trusted sites. But that's not just an IE6 tip,
that is even more necessary today than it was ten years ago...
computers have gotten faster, javascript has gotten faster, but
websites have gotten slower. And I actually like noscript a bit
better than IE's security settings screen, it is more convenient,
but at least IE's functionality is built in.

I find news websites especially, but also other ones like
dlang.org, are completely unusable without JS blocked.
dlang.org's stupid hypenation thing drags it to a crawl. News
sites put up 1,000 bars for twitter and facebook and whatever
else that slow them brutally.

Hey, webmasters, if you have content I actually like and want to
share, I'll copy paste the link. I don't need those useless
buttons.... and if they slow the loading so much, I'll just close
the site, so you lose.

But with js disabled it isn't so bad.

 As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
 "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete

YES. inline-block makes css useful. I'm not even really
exaggerating there, that's how important I think it is. floats
are waaay too painful to deal with.

The moz-inline-stack thing doesn't quite work the same iirc, I
remember trying it and finding it didn't make it a real block, so
you couldn't center text or something like that inside it. But
meh, FF2 is virtually dead so I just ignore it.


inline-block btw was in CSS 2.0. Microsoft implemented it
buggily, but the functionality was there. konqueror did it right
(khtml used to be really nice until Apple and Google got their
filthy paws all over it).

But the standards committee was always biased toward Netscape,
and Firefox was Netscape's successor so they inherited that bias.
This is a kinda strong charge that I can't prove, but I think the
case is pretty good: look at how many times IE did something
clearly superior to Netscape/early Firefox, the box model, the
mouse buttons that you mentioned, and there's more too.... but
the standard always seemed to prefer the NS/FF way. And when FF
didn't implement something, you could count on the standard to be
revised some time later. It happened with CSS 2.0 -> CSS 2.1,
conveniently dropping features FF never implemented (thus making
them "standards compliant"), and recently happened again with
display: run-in, which they said was unimplementable, but
Microsoft managed to do it right years ago. Firefox never did,
and instead of being lambasted for not following the standard,
the standard just got revised again to agree with FF.

(and of course, one defense is "it is useless anyway".... well
yes, but only because you idiots somehow managed to get
significant market share and never bothered to implement it!
There's been more than one time I wanted to use it, saw it
working in IE8 and rejoiced, just to see it fail in firefox 9 or
whatever the hell it was at last year when I tried this. Ugh.)

If the standard got revised to agree with IE6's implementation
back in the day, I'd be for that. IE6 was a de-facto standard
anyway. But that rarely happened. The other way around though,
common. (one thing I'll praise HTML5 for doing though is writing
down some IE implementations as the standard, finally making
something that works in practice, standards-compliant too, like
drag and drop for instance. But even then they managed to muck
some things up.)


 But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables 
 easily solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with 
 zero non-imaginary downsides


I can't agree with you there, I dislike layout tables and here's
why: one week, the client says 3 columns are in. Next week, he
changes his mind and wants it back to 2 columns. Not too hard
with the css things. A lot of boring work with tables. Or "add a
row there", not too hard when you can just throw it in with a
clean html file, but very difficult to find the right place in a
mess of nested tables.

(Perhaps I've just had bad experience because the html is ugly as
sin, but I've never seen clean layout table code except isolated
in specific instances. I find writing clean css based html to be
very easy.)

There *are* times when I think they are right, but usually these
are very limited places, and I actually prefer the whole display:
table thing now. Then when (not if!) the client changes his mind
again, there's a moderate chance that it can be changed: for
instance, changing a form from:

Name: ___________
Email: ___________

to

Name:
_______________

Email:
______________


With <table> is a pain. But with the css, you can change it form
display: table-cell to display:block in the appropriate place and
be done with it. (Now display: table still leaves some to be
desired, I prefer inline-block when I can, but still it is a good
step.)

 irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of 
 the compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!

I'll agree with that though, it does make me smile to say "just
ignore the standard lol".

 In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers.

I wish I could, but one of my big clients uses it religiously so
I need to have a copy every so often to track down the bugs he'll
inevitably find.

For a while I started replying "get a better browser" whenever
this came up, but alas even if he personally did, there's enough
marketshare of it out there now that it wouldn't really solve the
problem business-wise.

 Why disregard standards like MS does when you can just bend the 
 "standard" to your own whim? Yea, Google likes standards as 
 long as Google creates them.

Aye, Google has really taken over from Netscape in my above rant
now.


 I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time 
 back:

heh I'm pretty sure I read it a while ago too.


 Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the 
 web on a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and
 such an orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy 
 with whatever just happens to actually work.


Aye, but again, what the bosses use, I have to use. And he went
so far as to buy me one of those ipads so I wouldn't have any
excuses to ignore it any more too :(

(On the bright side though, I do like watching sports on it.
Almost completely useless for doing actual work with it,
touchscreens are terrible, but not bad to prop up like a little
tv and watch stuff on.)

 I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to 
 finally kill off Flash

Blargh, I wish Flash was dead, but it keeps coming back up.
There's the ogg vs mpeg format war that is a huge hassle that
means now all my work sites are forced to write even more code:

<video>
<source mp4> (most things)
<source mp4 lower res> (the iphone refuses to play higher res)
<source ogv> (firefox)
<object> (flash fallback)
   <embed /> (i think this is useless)
     <a href="download"></a> (finally the only one that should be
there IMO)
    </object>
</video>


Blargh. And then "the ipad video UI doesn't match the Chrome
which doesn't match the Firefox which doesn't match the Flash"

Just shoot me.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 20:56:40 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:
 
 But I, believe it or not, have a soft spot for IE6. Its interface
 was simple enough, it did separate processes for each site way
 before chrome "invented" it 

Interesting, either I never noticed that, or I had totally forgotten.
Very good point.

 "Program X has detected an
 instance already running" should be a crime.

Yea, I'm not a fan of that either. There have been some cases where I
felt it was sensible: sometimes there's a very resource-hungry program
that doesn't make much sense to have multiple copies running anyway.
For example, a lot of games. But normally it's just an asinine pain.

The one that bugs me most is actually Win7 itself. On XP, if I tell the
start menu or quick launch to open a file manager window to a
particular starting directory, then it just does so. Always. But Win7
is just "smart" enough to be stupid, so it'll *only* obey that command
*if* it first goes behind my back and detects that none of my existing
windows just happen to be showing my chosen "starting point" directory.
If there is one, it'll *refuse* my command to open a file manager
window and instead just switch to the one I already know damn well I
already have open (Because clearly, according to my computer, I
apparently don't know what the hell I'm doing).

Which means *every* time I want to open two or more file manager
windows, I have fool this stupid fucking piece of shit NannyOS into
doing so, instead of you know, just clicking the damn button however
many times I need.

God dammit I fucking *hate* post-XP Windows.

 
 Important note though: change the security settings to disable
 scripts on non-trusted sites.

Ah, good tip. I hadn't thought of that. (For me, it was just "IE
doesn't have NoScript, therefore I shouldn't use IE for anything unless
I have to.")

But that's not just an IE6 tip,
 that is even more necessary today than it was ten years ago...
 computers have gotten faster, javascript has gotten faster, but
 websites have gotten slower.

Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it is that a
LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding up the site
("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of HTML on every link!")

Are these people really *that* incapable of perceiving the difference
between a 5-10+ second "JS extravaganza page" load and a <= 1sec static
page load? You'd think that would clue them in to "Gee, maybe this shit
*isn't* actually making my page faster like people are telling me it
should."

And what's the extra bonus for that pessimization? Broken "back",
broken "forward", broken bookmarking, and broken link sharing.
Congratulations, you've just "best practiced" your website into a
slow-motion garbage heap.

 I find news websites especially, but also other ones like
 dlang.org, are completely unusable without JS blocked.
 dlang.org's stupid hypenation thing drags it to a crawl. News
 sites put up 1,000 bars for twitter and facebook and whatever
 else that slow them brutally.
 
 Hey, webmasters, if you have content I actually like and want to
 share, I'll copy paste the link. I don't need those useless
 buttons.... and if they slow the loading so much, I'll just close
 the site, so you lose.
 

Yup. And speaking of:
https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/we-need-browsers-with-built-in-share-on-site-x

 But with js disabled it isn't so bad.
 

Exactly. And so much for the "Eh, it'll be fast because it's already in
most user's caches anyway." Yea, well, even if so it still has to get
executed. JS's bottleneck was never bandwidth.

 As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
 "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete

 
 YES. inline-block makes css useful. I'm not even really
 exaggerating there, that's how important I think it is. floats
 are waaay too painful to deal with.
 

Floats are good for what they were originally intended for (wrapping
text around an image) and for nothing else.

I've fumbled around with layouts that involved float, and I don't
think a single attempt ever made it into my local VCS commits, let
alone production.

 The moz-inline-stack thing doesn't quite work the same iirc, I
 remember trying it and finding it didn't make it a real block, so
 you couldn't center text or something like that inside it. But
 meh, FF2 is virtually dead so I just ignore it.
 

While I do code for FF2, I've accepted that I'm probably doing it only
for my own sake. Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up
with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with
unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI
over-minimalism.

But layout tables solve any issues I have easily enough, and nothing
ever chokes on them, so I don't really find it to be any extra trouble. 

 
 inline-block btw was in CSS 2.0.

That's what I thought, but then I couldn't find any source for that
info so I started second-guessing it. Good to hear it's not just my
imagination then :)

 But the standards committee was always biased toward Netscape,
 and Firefox was Netscape's successor so they inherited that bias.
 This is a kinda strong charge that I can't prove, but I think the
 case is pretty good: look at how many times IE did something
 clearly superior to Netscape/early Firefox, the box model, the
 mouse buttons that you mentioned, and there's more too.... but
 the standard always seemed to prefer the NS/FF way. And when FF
 didn't implement something, you could count on the standard to be
 revised some time later. It happened with CSS 2.0 -> CSS 2.1,
 conveniently dropping features FF never implemented (thus making
 them "standards compliant"), and recently happened again with
 display: run-in, which they said was unimplementable, but
 Microsoft managed to do it right years ago. Firefox never did,
 and instead of being lambasted for not following the standard,
 the standard just got revised again to agree with FF.
 

Yea, the non-IE browsers always went off doing their own thing, too.
But IE's the one that gets condemned as "non-standard" just because web
standards are pretty much defined as "whatever big bad MS *isn't*
doing".

Not that MS doesn't deserve the "big bad" label, but standards need to
be a meritocracy - there's no room for politics. Unfortunately, the W3C
clearly hasn't been doing that consistently. Now I don't know, it may
not have anything to do with bias against MS, maybe MS just hadn't been
very active or very sensible in W3C proceedings, or whatever, but
whatever the reason, W3C hasn't been a case of "the motion with the
best merit wins".

 
 But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables 
 easily solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with 
 zero non-imaginary downsides

 
 
 I can't agree with you there, I dislike layout tables and here's
 why: one week, the client says 3 columns are in. Next week, he
 changes his mind and wants it back to 2 columns. Not too hard
 with the css things. A lot of boring work with tables. Or "add a
 row there", not too hard when you can just throw it in with a
 clean html file, but very difficult to find the right place in a
 mess of nested tables.
 [...]
 With <table> is a pain. But with the css, you can change it form
 display: table-cell to display:block in the appropriate place and
 be done with it. (Now display: table still leaves some to be
 desired, I prefer inline-block when I can, but still it is a good
 step.)
 

I do actually see your point there, and can relate to a certain extent
(particularly with "inline-block"). But my experience has been that
manually re-jiggering HTML (including layout tables), while imperfect,
has always been pretty minor and quick when compared to most of my
other tasks.

And those minor annoyances have been more than made up for by all the
times I've banged my head against the wall over some PITA HTML/CSS
problem, then decided "fuck this shit, I'm using tables" and wound up
with a working, ultra-compatible, (and often conceptually simpler!)
solution within minutes.

YMMV, I guess. And I'll admit I have been lucky lately with minimal
nitpickery from clients and armchair-expert designers.


 In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers.

 
 I wish I could, but one of my big clients uses it religiously so
 I need to have a copy every so often to track down the bugs he'll
 inevitably find.
 

I use SRWare Iron in place of Chrome (as I said, it literally is
Chrome), but if you have to put up with Chrome's "bug of the day" junk
then yea I guess that wouldn't work. Although at that point I would
reach for VirtualBox. If I ever have to run the real Chrome, it's
getting its ass sandboxed.

 Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the 
 web on a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and
 such an orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy 
 with whatever just happens to actually work.

 
 
 Aye, but again, what the bosses use, I have to use. And he went
 so far as to buy me one of those ipads so I wouldn't have any
 excuses to ignore it any more too :(
 

Certainly true. I had a similar thing last year: A project I was
getting involved in needed to work on iOS (for very valid business
reasons that I do actually agree with), so the guy got me a loaner
iPhone that I pretty much ended up having to tote around for much of
the year. I don't miss that thing one bit.

 (On the bright side though, I do like watching sports on it.
 Almost completely useless for doing actual work with it,

Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable game
systems). They do have some nice uses (Shazam is just as awesome as its
name is awful), but I've been spoiled enough by some of the best
aspects of the now-dead PalmOS that I can't help seeing them as
dumbed-down orwellian toy versions of what an internet-connected Palm
could have been. I just don't like the iOS/Android interfaces *at all*,
and the iOS lock-downs are just inexcusable.

 touchscreens are terrible, 

The capacitive ones are the worst. (And they're all capacitive now.)

And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with the
idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* tactile
sensation.


 I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to 
 finally kill off Flash

 
 Blargh, I wish Flash was dead, but it keeps coming back up.
 There's the ogg vs mpeg format war that is a huge hassle that
 means now all my work sites are forced to write even more code:
 
 <video>
 <source mp4> (most things)
 <source mp4 lower res> (the iphone refuses to play higher res)
 <source ogv> (firefox)
 <object> (flash fallback)
    <embed /> (i think this is useless)
      <a href="download"></a> (finally the only one that should be
 there IMO)
     </object>
 </video>
 

True...There was one point on a site I was doing where [strongly
against my normal design principles] we needed some pages with embedded
audio. I tossed in an <object> tag pointing to an mp3 and it worked
great on every browser I threw at it...except Chrome. Ugh.

The site already required Flash for some other stuff (things that JS
just wasn't up to, certainly not at the time), so not wanting to deal
with any browser-conditional stuff, I ended up playing the audio via a
trivial flash applet. "Ugh" again.

 
 Blargh. And then "the ipad video UI doesn't match the Chrome
 which doesn't match the Firefox which doesn't match the Flash"
 

Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches (or
rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player program. One
of the things I loathe most about the modern web is how choice of
viewer application has been stolen from the end user and given to the
content provider instead. I still blame YouTube for kicking off that
awful trend.

Although if you're actually creating, for example, some sort of
multimedia thing where video is simply part of a bigger whole (Like the
old Phillips CD-I stuff), then that's a completely different matter and
UI then *does* belong under the control of the creator (aside from any
matters of matching the local device's look-and-feel).

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 09:56:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Which means *every* time I want to open two or more file manager
 windows, I have fool this stupid fucking piece of shit NannyOS 
 into doing so, instead of you know, just clicking the damn 
 button however many times I need.

Yup. I've found you can get around it somewhat well by right 
clicking and open in new window from the parent directory. Still 
somewhat annoying - I think XP started the downhill trend, maybe 
even 2000, with changing the explorer around. I really liked it 
in Win95 - it just got the job done in a simple, straightforward 
way.

That said though, I don't have too much trouble with the newer 
Windowses. I actually like Vista!

 Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it 
 is that a LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding
 up the site ("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of
 HTML on every link!")

Oh yeah, I have to deal with this a lot too. The big thing is 
even in ideal situations, an ajax request is likely about the 
same speed as a full refresh, since on most sites, it is 
dominated by request latency anyway! If it takes 50 ms for your 
signal to cross the internet and 5ms to generate the ajax and 
10ms to generate the full page.... the whole ajax thing only 
saved you maybe 10% of the already very fast speed.

(If your site takes longer than 50ms to load, I think you've 
gotta spend some time in the profiler regardless.)


It just seems to be psychological, because sometimes the browser 
will white out the background or jump around the scrollbar while 
loading the full page, it feels more jarring. But they don't even 
always do that.


Important to get this working though is to set the right cache 
headers on everything. And I betcha that's where people make 
mistakes. I like to cache those ajax answers too when I do have 
to use them, because killing the server round trip latency is a 
huge win.

 And what's the extra bonus for that pessimization? Broken 
 "back", broken "forward", broken bookmarking, and broken link 
 sharing.

But you see, this is why those FB share + tweet buttons are so 
important! Otherwise people will copy/paste the wrong link :<

blargh.

 JS's bottleneck was never bandwidth.


Indeed, and this is one reason why I absolutely refuse to use 
jQuery. (The other being it isn't even significantly different 
than the built in DOM! IMO most of jquery is just pointless 
wrappers and name changes.)

If you're using it from a CDN so the browser has cached bytecode 
(or whatever they do), you can get it reasonably quickly, about 
10ms added if you reference it.

....but that's actually pretty rare. I don't remember the number, 
but there was a survey of web traffic that found a big percentage 
of users aren't cached. And if you are slow for first time users, 
how much you want to bet they'll just hit back, try the next 
guy's link, and never return?

jQuery in file cache but not pre-compiled is brutally slow, 
something like 150ms on my laptop, on top of everything else it 
has to load. So the page is loaded, but it won't actually work 
until that pretty noticeable delay. (And then it still has to do 
whatever work you wanted jquery for in the first place! Since js 
is usually loaded sequentially, the other stuff has to wait for 
this to complete)


It has some nice things in it, but just isn't worth making my 
site 5x slower than it would be without it.

 Floats are good for what they were originally intended for 
 (wrapping text around an image) and for nothing else.

Amen.

 Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up
 with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with
 unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI
 over-minimalism.

Let me show you what my firefox looks like:

http://arsdnet.net/firefox.png

I had to change a few settings to get it there, but I think this 
isn't too bad at all, and as you can see, it is a fairly new 
version. (I'm probably 10 versions behind again, it has been like 
three months!!!!! but meh.)


 And those minor annoyances have been more than made up for by 
 all the times I've banged my head against the wall over some 
 PITA HTML/CSS problem, then decided "fuck this shit, I'm using 
 tables" and

Eh, I haven't that that, at least not for a long time, but it 
could be because I know a lot of arcane css crap so it isn't a 
head banger anymore.

Could also be that I'm given simpler designs too!


 Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable 
 game systems).

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like *big* tvs. Too much light, 
weird movement just looks wrong to my eyes, and watching them for 
a while hurts my brain, literally, I get headaches.

Might not all be size itself, could be the high def, frame 
interpolation, lcd tech, whatever, but I just really prefer my 
old tvs. I have a 19" that I watch when I'm on the other side of 
the house (the room it is in is a long one, spanning the house's 
entire 30-some foot width) and a 13" one that is about 7 feet 
away from my computer desk that I watch a lot when sitting here.

Both televisions are from the 80's, but they still work quite 
well so like Rick Astley, I'm never gonna give them up.


Interestingly too, I had a PS3 briefly. I say briefly because the 
piece of shit died on my before I even owned it for two full 
months. Maybe that's what I get for getting a cheap one on ebay, 
but the new prices are just unacceptably high. Regardless, my 
playstation (one) was used too, and it still works. So was my 
super nintendo, etc. They all still work. I think they just don't 
make 'em like they used to.

Anyway, playing the ps3 on my friend's 32 inch high def tv hurts 
me horribly. My eyes get tired after about an hour. I thought it 
was maybe just because I'm getting too old for this shit, but 
then I played the very same game at my house on my little tv and 
was able to go 5 hours before feeling tired. It still fucked me 
up - lost sleep (I played an FPS for a while and started having 
nightmares about shooting people in real life.... that never 
happened playing the NES), got sore, clearly I can't sit on the 
video games for 10 hours a day like I used to do, but I'm 
convinced there's something different about the new vs old tvs 
that affect me physically. My score tended to be better on the 
old tv too!


 And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with 
 the idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* 
 tactile sensation.

Yup. And it is too easy to accidentally hit "buttons" and not 
know it. I was watching the tour de france on the ipad yesterday 
when the puppy had to go outside. I carried it with me figuring I 
can still watch it... but apparently my shirt brushed up against 
the screen and it interpreted that as a swipe motion that turned 
off the live stream!

Ugh! And there's other crap about the ipad too: changing the 
brightness means turning off the stream, slowly finding your way 
to settings, hitting that thing, sliding the bar up, then getting 
back to the video.

So if I go outside and want to turn up the brightness, better 
hope no action happens in that next minute cuz I'll miss it. 
Contrast to a real keyboard, where you can just put that on a 
hotkey. Or hell, a multitasking OS where you could still play the 
commentary audio in the background at least while adjusting 
settings.


And yesterday too, right at the finish line, it decided to pop up 
a MODAL DIALOG BOX saying "battery level has reached 10% 
[dismiss]"... and it stopped the video while it was up!

So I'm like I DON'T CARE I JUST NEED ONE MORE MINUTE COME BACK 
COME BACK!!!!!! But by the time it did, the first place rider had 
already crossed. (Of course, they replayed the finish a couple 
minutes later, but still.)


Anyway I could complain about the flaws in this thing all day 
long. But the bright side is that I can watch the sports on it, 
and there's a huge difference without the horribly repetitive 
commercials. The tour de france is like a 90 hour event, and I 
like to watch a good bulk of it. Now let me tell you, seeing the 
same dozen sponsor's commercials over and over and over again, 
every 15 minutes watching it on cable just kills the joy. But 
forking over $15 for their ipad app skips that crap. Totally 
worth it. (Especially since cable is $70 / month. Really, at that 
obscene price, do they even need commercials anymore to turn a 
profit? I canceled it in christmas 2011 and set up an antenna. I 
still get most the shows I watch over the air (higher quality 
too*) and can get the rest on the internet or the ipad thing, and 
much lower price.)


* The new digital tv over the air signal looks great, even on my 
old tvs, compared to digital cable. Which kinda amazes me, but it 
does. I guess it has to do with cable compression. The problem is 
if you don't get a good signal, it is unwatchable. And when it 
gets hot and/or windy, my signal gets crappy.

With the old analog tv, it was almost always watchable. Maybe 
fuzzy or ghosting picture, but watchable, even in imperfect 
weather.

I think digital tv, maybe the PS3 too now that I'm thinking about 
it, are examples of where we're going toward more more more at 
the peak, more pixels, more channels, etc., while ignoring 
graceful degradation for an acceptable average.

Yes, with a strong signal, 1080p might be great. But getting a 
black screen when the signal weakens sucks. I betcha if they 
broadcast a highly error resistant 480i (or whatever standard tv 
resolution used to be) on that same data stream, they could have 
gotten a much more reliable stream, giving a very consistent 
quality even in poor weather.

But then how would they sell people new high def equipment every 
other year?


Wow I'm getting off topic even for an off topic thread! Oh well.

 Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches 
 (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player 
 program.

Yes, I like to use mplayer for things so I can skip and speed up 
easily. I don't like watching videos at normal speed (most the 
time), it just takes too long. With text, I can skim it for 
interesting parts. With video, I'd like to do the same but can't. 
Best I can do is play it at like 1.5x speed.... mplayer can do 
that. youtube/html5 (amazingly though, firefox apparently 
*can*)/flash generally can't.

And mplayer takes like 1% cpu to play it. Flash takes like 110% 
cpu to do the same job. What trash.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:23:39 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:
 I think XP started the downhill trend, maybe 
 even 2000, with changing the explorer around. I really liked it 
 in Win95 - it just got the job done in a simple, straightforward 
 way.
 

For me, XP was the peak of Windows and Vista started the consistent
decline. I do like how from 2k on you can take a non-dual pane explorer
window and make the treeview pane appear by just clicking one button.
The "tasks" pane is useless, but you can easily make the treeview pane
the default. OTOH, one of my biggest XP annoyances is that unlike Win7,
XP doesn't *always* respect your "default to treeview instead of tasks
pane" setting (ex: if you open a directory via an icon on the desktop).

 That said though, I don't have too much trouble with the newer 
 Windowses. I actually like Vista!
 

Heh, I tend to be kinda mixed on "Vista vs Win7". Win7 is a little less
buggy (I'm actually trying to repair my mom's Vista machine even as I
type this), but Vista doesn't have that horrible MS Dock taskbar
replacement, or that infinitely obnoxious and never helpful "popup
window screenshots *every* freaking time your mouse goes near the
dock" (I went through soooo much trouble to finally get rid of those on
my Win7 machine - which I would have already converted to an XP box if
it wasn't a laptop.)

Neither Vista nor 7 let me have my XP-style "all programs" menu without
using the third party "Classic Shell" utility (which I *highly*
recommend for any post-XP user - it's an essential part of making Win7
tolerable IMO.)

I do actually like a lot of the ribbon stuff though. I don't see what
the big problem is, it's just a toolbar with better grouping and a
better more varied set of UI controls. Win7's MS Paint is the best
version by far. (not that that's saying a lot being MS paint, but it's
always come in handy now and then.)

 Yup. So depressingly true. And what's really bizarre about it 
 is that a LOT of that JS is specifically in the name of speeding
 up the site ("Because you don't have to redownload *all* 1k of
 HTML on every link!")

 
 Oh yeah, I have to deal with this a lot too. The big thing is 
 even in ideal situations, an ajax request is likely about the 
 same speed as a full refresh, since on most sites, it is 
 dominated by request latency anyway! If it takes 50 ms for your 
 signal to cross the internet and 5ms to generate the ajax and 
 10ms to generate the full page.... the whole ajax thing only 
 saved you maybe 10% of the already very fast speed.
 

Exactly.

And on top of that, most ajaxy sites will actually perform ajax
requests *during initial page load*! That's so damn pointless. For
god's sake, if something's supposed to show by default, then *just bake
it into the page itself*! The only time JS *ever* needs to run upon
page load is to undo any non-JS fallbacks.

 (If your site takes longer than 50ms to load, I think you've 
 gotta spend some time in the profiler regardless.)
 

I don't think anyone who uses Ajax ever does any profiling. (I'm not
even being sarcastic. I really doubt that any more than maybe 0.1% of
Ajax devs do even basic handheld-stopwatch profiling, especially on any
browser that isn't V8.)

 
 Important to get this working though is to set the right cache 
 headers on everything. And I betcha that's where people make 
 mistakes. I like to cache those ajax answers too when I do have 
 to use them, because killing the server round trip latency is a 
 huge win.
 

Yea, it is easy (and frankly, very tempting!) to overlook HTTP cache
settings.

 If you're using it from a CDN so the browser has cached bytecode 
 (or whatever they do), you can get it reasonably quickly, about 
 10ms added if you reference it.
 
 ....but that's actually pretty rare. I don't remember the number, 
 but there was a survey of web traffic that found a big percentage 
 of users aren't cached.

Interesting. I wonder why exactly that is.

 And if you are slow for first time users, 
 how much you want to bet they'll just hit back, try the next 
 guy's link, and never return?
 

Yup. Hell, I know *I* do that. Why go playing some random web
developer's game of "set up your browser to be how I think it should
be" when there's twenty other search hits I can just use instead?

 [JQuery] has some nice things in it, but just isn't worth making my 
 site 5x slower than it would be without it.

That's a pretty good summary of it.

 Just so I can do as much as I can without putting up
 with a unified forward/back, browser skin, address bar with
 unicorn-rainbow-vomit Fisher-Price-sized text, or all that UI
 over-minimalism.

 
 Let me show you what my firefox looks like:
 
 http://arsdnet.net/firefox.png
 
 I had to change a few settings to get it there, but I think this 
 isn't too bad at all, and as you can see, it is a fairly new 
 version. (I'm probably 10 versions behind again, it has been like 
 three months!!!!! but meh.)
 

Hmm, yea, that's not too bad, although I have found Linux FF tends to
have a better default UI (that is, matches the system better) than
Windows FF anyway. The whole unified forward/back still annoys the hell
out of me though (actually, that doesn't appear to even *have* the
dropdown thing - another "modern FF" blunder), and so does the unified
"stop/reload" (not that browser "stop" buttons have *ever* actually
worked at all).

(I'm probably 10 versions behind again, it has been like 
 three months!!!!! but meh.)

Heh, yea, that's the whole Chrome-envy thing again. Everyone wants to
be Chrome, even if their users use the browser because it *isn't*
Chrome. Kinda like how MS is obsessively trying to be Apple even though
90% of desktops are Windows *because* Windows isn't Mac.

 Heh, I can't stand tiny TVs (I don't even like using portable 
 game systems).

 
 Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like *big* tvs. Too much light, 
 weird movement just looks wrong to my eyes, and watching them for 
 a while hurts my brain, literally, I get headaches.
 
 Might not all be size itself, could be the high def, frame 
 interpolation, lcd tech, whatever, but I just really prefer my 
 old tvs.

TVs are another thing I could go on and on about. My XBox1 and Wii look
great on my 30ish-inch SD CRT (especially XBox Doom3 - that looks like
a freaking PS3 game), but using the exact same connectors they look
like total shit on my sister's fancy new Samsung 1080p LCD. Blurry as
hell no matter what the settings, and ghosts like crazy in any dark
scenes. Remember the old Sega GameGear's crappy LCD? That's what the
normally-great-looking Doom3 looks like on that "modern" HD LCD.

The PS3, of course, looks much better on the HD LCD than an SD CRT (at
least when HDMI is used). Although for most games it's not nearly as
much of a difference as you'd think. Call of Duty Modern Warfare on PS3
looks pretty much equally fantastic either way.

Screen size makes much more of a difference on PS3 than resolution.
Probably at least 95% of PS3 games I've tried include text that's so
damn *small* that's it's barely readable on even a 29" set *regardless*
of resolution, and 29" *is* a perfectly respectable size. Gamedevs
don't seem to realize that higher resolution doesn't make miniature
text any bigger. They seem to think that everyone's playing on a
fucking 45+" screen or sitting two feet away like they do during
development. Or (like CliffyB) just don't give a shit about anyone who
isn't just as much of a graphics whore and tech geek as they are.

 I have a 19" that I watch when I'm on the other side of 
 the house (the room it is in is a long one, spanning the house's 
 entire 30-some foot width) and a 13" one that is about 7 feet 
 away from my computer desk that I watch a lot when sitting here.
 
 Both televisions are from the 80's, but they still work quite 
 well so like Rick Astley, I'm never gonna give them up.
 

I would actually like to have a huge fancy HD set (provided I didn't
have to pay much for it). *But* only in *addition* to my SD CRT (if I
could find a way to actually fit them both in the living room). There's
so much SD content out there that will never magically become HD (at
least without requiring me to re-purchase the same damn stuff), and
such things just look like absolute total shit on these supposedly
great HD sets.

It's no wonder so many people think HD is such an *enormous*
improvement over SD - they've been brainwashed by their HD sets into
thinking that SD is far far worse than what it *really* was. Really HD
is only a moderate improvement if you compare it to a *real* SD set
instead of "SD on an HD set".

 
 Interestingly too, I had a PS3 briefly. I say briefly because the 
 piece of shit died on my before I even owned it for two full 
 months.

Ouch. Usually it's the MS hardware that dies. And I don't just mean 360
red-rings. The Zune1 practically had an always-on self-destruct
sequence. And I've had to do far more repairs to my XBox1 than my PS2
or GameCube (One bent controller port pin on my PS2, and no problems
ever on the GC, but lots of issues on the XBox1 even though it's my
favorite from that generation.)

 Maybe that's what I get for getting a cheap one on ebay, 
 but the new prices are just unacceptably high.

Yea, it's nearly EOL and the new price is *still* what a launch-day
system should cost. There's a good chain of used-game/video stores out
my way call The Exchange <http://theexchange.com/> which tend to be
very good. Used PS3s there are only around $120-$150 depending on model
and stock. I assume GameStop is probably similar, though I haven't
looked. That's still high for a, what, 7-year-old system, but
ultimately a decent buy all things considered.  That's where mine is
from and it's been working fine.

The problem with buying hardware on ebay is that there's no middle
party trying to prevent the buyer from ending up with a dud. (There's
ebay itself, but they can't do as much as a brick-and-mortar trade shop
can.) With ebay, unless there's a failure out-of-the-box then you're
pretty much screwed. I've been bitten by that before, too.

 Regardless, my 
 playstation (one) was used too, and it still works. So was my 
 super nintendo, etc. They all still work. I think they just don't 
 make 'em like they used to.

Yup. 'Course, cartridge contacts wear out, and so do lasers, but still
hardware is designed to be constantly replaced now and stuff just
doesn't last. Especially smartphones - reliability on those is by far
the worst. They're probably about on par with the older XBox 360 models.

 
 Anyway, playing the ps3 on my friend's 32 inch high def tv hurts 
 me horribly. My eyes get tired after about an hour. I thought it 
 was maybe just because I'm getting too old for this shit, but 
 then I played the very same game at my house on my little tv and 
 was able to go 5 hours before feeling tired. It still fucked me 
 up - lost sleep

That's strange. I wonder if maybe you're one of those people that's
sensitive to the subtle flicker in backlights. Or maybe there's
something about the lighting in the room that just doesn't mix well
with the LCD, I've heard of that sort of issue before.

 And it really gets me how touchscreen devices are promoted with 
 the idealized concept of "touch" even though they *eliminate* 
 tactile sensation.

 
 Yup. And it is too easy to accidentally hit "buttons" and not 
 know it. I was watching the tour de france on the ipad yesterday 
 when the puppy had to go outside. I carried it with me figuring I 
 can still watch it... but apparently my shirt brushed up against 
 the screen and it interpreted that as a swipe motion that turned 
 off the live stream!
 

Yea, they need a "hold" switch like my portable music player has.

 Ugh! And there's other crap about the ipad too: changing the 
 brightness means turning off the stream, slowly finding your way 
 to settings, hitting that thing, sliding the bar up, then getting 
 back to the video.
 

I could go on forever about iOS goofiness.

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:26:51 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Vista doesn't have that horrible MS Dock taskbar

Worth noting you can turn that off: I have 7 on the laptop I'm on 
now and after a few settings changes, it is very similar to 
vista. To get a good taskbar you need to turn off the group 
similar windows function (which I hated when it was introduced in 
XP anyway).

Your quick launch still keeps their place but that doesn't bug me 
like I thought it would, it is actually kinda nice.

 window screenshots *every* freaking time your mouse goes near

Oh yeah, that is annoying. I hate hover things in general. The 
worst of them is on websites. My bank website used to have hover 
menus right above the login thing...

So I go to the address bar and type in my bank dot com. Then i 
move the mouse down toward the login form and click it.... but 
oops, on the way down, I hovered over the stupid menu, so now by 
click is redirecting me to some new site! AAAARGGGTHHHH!

The taskbar thing is similarly annoying but at least it pops up 
above, so you are less likely to accidentally click it in 
transit. Though I have many times clicked one window then went up 
and clicked another window because it popped up. God I hate hover 
crap.


 I do actually like a lot of the ribbon stuff though. I don't 
 see what the big problem is

It's different. I still haven't really figured out the new Paint 
UI. I don't think it sucks, but it does take some getting used to.

 Interesting. I wonder why exactly that is.

IIRC it was because a lot of browsers clear cache on close, or 
the cache expired too soon.


 Hmm, yea, that's not too bad, although I have found Linux FF 
 tends to have a better default UI (that is, matches the system 
 better) than Windows FF anyway.

Yes, I agree. And even there, I had to do an about:config thing 
to kill the unified back/forward nonsense.

On Windows, firefox can look ok by doing the same adjustments, 
but one thing that still annoys me is that there's a weird shadow 
thing behind the menu. It isn't too bad but just seems pointless.

 and so does the unified "stop/reload"

Oh yeah, that's annoying. But the keyboard is a bit better there, 
f5+esc are easy to hit and more reliable anyway.

 Remember the old Sega GameGear's crappy LCD?

lol I actually liked it because it was backlit! Ate through 
batteries like mad but it was usable in varied lighting 
conditions.

 Screen size makes much more of a difference on PS3 than 
 resolution. Probably at least 95% of PS3 games I've tried
 include text that's so damn *small* that's it's barely
 readable on even a 29" set

Yes, I can barely even read it on my friend's larger tv in the 
call of duty game (especially when we play split screen, no point 
even trying to read the score, 8, 3, and 11 all look the same to 
me at those sizes)


 Really HD is only a moderate improvement if you compare
 it to a *real* SD set instead of "SD on an HD set".

Aye. And even so, meh. I was called a troll a while ago because 
somebody on youtube did a cgi remake of some Star Trek 2 scenes, 
and I said my old VHS copy looked better.

But it did. The cgi artist did a fine job, sure, but the original 
director and model makers did a *better* job and the VHS captured 
it just fine. (One thing I think the cgi artist missed was the 
deliberate angles and coloring choices the director made in the 
original movie, to get across the contrast of hero and villain. 
If you've seen the movie, you might remember what I mean - the 
Enterprise was often shot with bluer light and taller angles (if 
that's the right term), making it look more good and innocent, 
whereas the Reliant had low angles and redder lights to look 
menacing - a perfect fit for the scene. The cgi artist had 
bazillion polygons but didn't capture the same atmosphere.

Then there were things that just looked silly, like cgi smoke. 
Bah, the original effects were kinda cheesy too but I bought 
them. Maybe thanks to the actors but still, my old tape looked 
fine whatever the reason.)




 That's strange. I wonder if maybe you're one of those people 
 that's sensitive to the subtle flicker in backlights.

Maybe, but the lcd computer screen doesn't bug me the same. idk.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:22:46 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:

 On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:26:51 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Vista doesn't have that horrible MS Dock taskbar

 
 Worth noting you can turn that off: I have 7 on the laptop I'm on 
 now and after a few settings changes, it is very similar to 
 vista. To get a good taskbar you need to turn off the group 
 similar windows function (which I hated when it was introduced in 
 XP anyway).

Yea, I did actually manage to get my Win7 taskbar (and file explorer
and start menu) into a fairly XP state (and I do actually like being
able to manually rearrange the taskbar tasks now), but it took an
enormous amount of obscure, and often third-party, hacks.

 Your quick launch still keeps their place but that doesn't bug me 
 like I thought it would, it is actually kinda nice.
 

Win7 doesn't even have quick launch unless you hack it back in. (Which
I've done of course.) But MS sure as hell doesn't make "No I don't want
your idiotic new UI ideas, just the kernel" easy.

 window screenshots *every* freaking time your mouse goes near

 
 Oh yeah, that is annoying. I hate hover things in general.

Me too. :/

 The 
 worst of them is on websites. My bank website used to have hover 
 menus right above the login thing...
 
 So I go to the address bar and type in my bank dot com. Then i 
 move the mouse down toward the login form and click it.... but 
 oops, on the way down, I hovered over the stupid menu, so now by 
 click is redirecting me to some new site! AAAARGGGTHHHH!
 

Yea. Makes no sense to me how *all* menu bars *everywhere* work on a
"click to open" concept, including the web browsers themselves, but
then the entire web decided "No, we have to make menu bars operate on
an incredibly inconvenient, distracting AND non-standard "hover" basis.

 God I hate hover crap.
 

My sentiments exactly :)

 I do actually like a lot of the ribbon stuff though. I don't 
 see what the big problem is

 
 It's different. I still haven't really figured out the new Paint 
 UI. I don't think it sucks, but it does take some getting used to.
 

One useful tip to minimize clicking: You can switch between
tabs^H^H^H^Hribbons with the mouse's scroll wheel. The occasional extra
clicking to switch ribbons was probably the one thing I can understand
people not liking about the ribbons.

 
 Hmm, yea, that's not too bad, although I have found Linux FF 
 tends to have a better default UI (that is, matches the system 
 better) than Windows FF anyway.

 
 Yes, I agree. And even there, I had to do an about:config thing 
 to kill the unified back/forward nonsense.
 

THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back
dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs me.

 and so does the unified "stop/reload"

 
 Oh yeah, that's annoying. But the keyboard is a bit better there, 
 f5+esc are easy to hit and more reliable anyway.
 

Good tip, although my hand and mind are usually in mouse-mode when I'm
on the web.

I can understand the rationale for unified stop/reload: There's never a
time when *both* make sense to use. No point in reloading while loading
(gotta stop first), and makes so sense to stop when it's not loading.

But that reasoning falls apart the first time you reach for "stop" and
the damn thing changes to "reload" just before you click. I'll take
them separate, thank you.

 Remember the old Sega GameGear's crappy LCD?

 
 lol I actually liked it because it was backlit! Ate through 
 batteries like mad but it was usable in varied lighting 
 conditions.
 

And it was color! (One of my all-time favorite commercials is the old
GameGear one where a kid is sitting outside playing a GameBoy, grabs a
big thick fallen tree branch, clonks himself over the head with it,
turns back to the game, and goes "Whoa! Color!") I had a GameGear. I
liked it. It was even blurrier than GameBoy though. And you're right
about the batteries. Shit, it went through them *six* at a time! I
usually just used the power cord though.

 Screen size makes much more of a difference on PS3 than 
 resolution. Probably at least 95% of PS3 games I've tried
 include text that's so damn *small* that's it's barely
 readable on even a 29" set

 
 Yes, I can barely even read it on my friend's larger tv in the 
 call of duty game (especially when we play split screen, no point 
 even trying to read the score, 8, 3, and 11 all look the same to 
 me at those sizes)
 

I never played CoD multiplayer. But I have to give them *huge* credit
for how (with the exception of multiplayer I guess, and maybe it's only
the Modern Warfare series) there is *no* tiny text at all, unlike most
PS3 games.

It always perplexes me how so many PS3 games will have a big 'ol box or
area for text, and then the text is so small that 90% of it is just
margins and padding.

 
 Really HD is only a moderate improvement if you compare
 it to a *real* SD set instead of "SD on an HD set".

 
 Aye. And even so, meh. I was called a troll a while ago because 
 somebody on youtube did a cgi remake of some Star Trek 2 scenes, 
 and I said my old VHS copy looked better.

lol!

Of course normally, calling a youtube commenter a troll is kind of
like calling a sasquatch "hairy". ;)

 But it did. The cgi artist did a fine job, sure, but the original 
 director and model makers did a *better* job and the VHS captured 
 it just fine. (One thing I think the cgi artist missed was the 
 deliberate angles and coloring choices the director made in the 
 original movie, to get across the contrast of hero and villain. 
 If you've seen the movie, you might remember what I mean - the 
 Enterprise was often shot with bluer light and taller angles (if 
 that's the right term), making it look more good and innocent, 
 whereas the Reliant had low angles and redder lights to look 
 menacing - a perfect fit for the scene. The cgi artist had 
 bazillion polygons but didn't capture the same atmosphere.
 
 Then there were things that just looked silly, like cgi smoke. 
 Bah, the original effects were kinda cheesy too but I bought 
 them. Maybe thanks to the actors but still, my old tape looked 
 fine whatever the reason.)
 

Yea, I'm actually not a fan of CG effects. *Sometimes* they work well
(There's a giant compressed-air canister that breaks loose in "Gone in
60 Seconds" that I *never* would have guessed was CG.) But usually, even
today, they lack the "realism" sense you get from more traditional
effects.

Some of my favorite visual effects are in Terry Gilliam's old
early-80's movie "Time Bandits". It not exactly the best movie I've
seen, but I love the visual effects. They have a certain "real, yet
otherworldly" quality that you just don't get from CG.

Actually, I'm not big on GC movies in general. I think cell-style just
looks a lot better. Something about the smoothness of the animation in
GC cartoons just doesn't look right (I've never figured out what
exactly it is about it), and really takes away from the experience.
(Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits
Within...go figure.)

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 21:33:33 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 One useful tip to minimize clicking: You can switch between
 tabs^H^H^H^Hribbons with the mouse's scroll wheel.

cool, I'll have to try that.

 THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back
 dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs 
 me.

I cannot for the life of me remember how. I'm looking at the user 
set about:config values and can't find it there either. But it is 
obviously still in force!

The dropdowns are unified, but I searched for the thing and came 
across this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noun-buttons/

which claims to separate that too. idk if it is crap though. My 
general assumption with [s]add-ons[/s] [s]software[/s] most 
everyhing is that it is until proven otherwise, but maybe it will 
be good.


 But that reasoning falls apart the first time you reach for 
 "stop" and the damn thing changes to "reload" just before you 
 click.

Yeah, I've done that before.

 And it was color!

indeed. And nice bright colors too, going back to the backlight 
but just the palettes in a lot of the older games seemed so much 
brighter than they do nowadays.


 Of course normally, calling a youtube commenter a troll is kind 
 of like calling a sasquatch "hairy". ;)

hehehe

 (Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits
 Within...go figure.)

That's a film I feel that I should give another try. I watched it 
once a while ago and was meh, but that could be due to bias since 
I've heard a few people say it really wasn't that bad.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Wed, 17 Jul 2013 04:31:40 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:

 On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 21:33:33 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 
 THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back
 dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs 
 me.

 
 I cannot for the life of me remember how. I'm looking at the user 
 set about:config values and can't find it there either. But it is 
 obviously still in force!
 
 The dropdowns are unified, but I searched for the thing and came 
 across this:
 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noun-buttons/
 
 which claims to separate that too. idk if it is crap though. My 
 general assumption with [s]add-ons[/s] [s]software[/s] most 
 everyhing is that it is until proven otherwise, but maybe it will 
 be good.
 

Ahh cool, last I checked that add-on was pretty much useless, but it
looks like it finally got a major improvement last year.

Hot damn! I think I actually managed to get FF *v22* to not suck! It was
an absolute royal fucking PITA though. It's amazing how much new
idiotic bullshit Mozilla manages to cram in and accumulate with every
new release, and never with any clear way to disable. FF has more dumb
shit to undo now than ever. But it seems to finally be possible, and the
under-the-hood improvements do counteract the problem pf needing to
load it down with so many more "undo Mozilla's latest brilliant idea"
add-ons. I think I'm going to make a little article soon explaining how
to do it all.


 And it was color!

 
 indeed. And nice bright colors too, going back to the backlight 
 but just the palettes in a lot of the older games seemed so much 
 brighter than they do nowadays.
 

Haven't you heard? Real is brown!:

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222

The worst offender I've seen so far (of both the ultra-brown and the
ultra-bloom) is Need for Speed: Undercover (at least the PS3 version
anyway). It's somewhat of an older one though, and luckily Need for
Speed visual styles have gotten a lot better since then.


 (Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits
 Within...go figure.)

 
 That's a film I feel that I should give another try. I watched it 
 once a while ago and was meh, but that could be due to bias since 
 I've heard a few people say it really wasn't that bad.

It had a major audience problem: Gamers didn't like it because, aside
from having a Cid, there was nothing Final Fantasy about it (kind of a
strange complaint though, since at the time none of the FF games ever
had anything to do with each other.) And non-gamers weren't into it
because it was a movie that was (allegedly) based on a game, which is
never a good sign.

So it was disliked because it was based on Final Fantasy *and* because
it *wasn't* based on Final Fantasy. Quite an unfortunate situation.

Some of the animations were a little awkward sometimes, but considering
the state-of-the-art at the time, I thought it was entirely forgivable.
And hell, even if it had been crap, I'd still have loved it just
because it was a CG movie that *wasn't* a cartoon (or a mix of
live action with tons of obvious CG effects).

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:23:39 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:
 (Especially since cable is $70 / month. Really, at that 
 obscene price, do they even need commercials anymore to turn a 
 profit? 

They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's about being
under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract *as much* money as
possible. ('Course I think their current practices are *still* failing
at that by running themselves into the ground.)

The worst thing wasn't paying a huge bill to get commercial breaks. The
worst thing was paying a huge bill to get commercials *overlaid* on top
of the actual shows. That was the tipping point for me. Plus the fact
that there's no longer anything on cable that *isn't* a reality show.
Even Food Network is pretty much 100% reality shows these days.

 canceled it in christmas 2011 and set up an antenna. I 
 still get most the shows I watch over the air

Yea, we got rid of cable about a year ago and haven't regretted it
(Well, except I do genuinely miss that two-month free trial of NHK they
once gave us. I didn't understand most of the talking, I'm not fluent,
but it still became my favorite channel. I watched it far too much.)

Honestly, I don't even watch over-the-air anymore anyway. If my digital
converter box stopped working, I probably wouldn't notice. All I ever
use my TV for is videogames and DVDs (usually anime) from the library.
And sometimes netflix, but they keep making their PS3 UI worse and
worse, and they're crap for anime anyway (netflix never does dual-audio
tracks for anime).

 (higher quality too*)
 * The new digital tv over the air signal looks great, even on my 
 old tvs, compared to digital cable. Which kinda amazes me, but it 
 does. I guess it has to do with cable compression. The problem is 
 if you don't get a good signal, it is unwatchable. And when it 
 gets hot and/or windy, my signal gets crappy.

Yea, I absolutely couldn't believe how horrible cable's video quality
suddenly became a couple years ago. I genuinely suspect that it may
actually be MPEG 1, it really is that bad. And the A/V sync is almost
always botched. And even after a replacement, the settop box's
interface will would go completely unresponsive for up to a full minute
at a time. Completely worthless service at any price.

 
 With the old analog tv, it was almost always watchable. Maybe 
 fuzzy or ghosting picture, but watchable, even in imperfect 
 weather.
 

Yea. Over-the-air digital is a bad deal. With OTA, there's *always*
going to be periods of significant interference. And analog signals
degrade *far* better with decreasing signal quality than digital
signals do. And digital signals require a much stronger signal in the
first place (Both my dad and grandmother went from plenty of channels
to nearly no channels after the digital switch until they shelled out
for ultra fancy new antennas). It was a questionable tradeoff at best.

 I think digital tv, maybe the PS3 too now that I'm thinking about 
 it, are examples of where we're going toward more more more at 
 the peak, more pixels, more channels, etc., while ignoring 
 graceful degradation for an acceptable average.
 

Yea.

 Yes, with a strong signal, 1080p might be great. But getting a 
 black screen when the signal weakens sucks.

Or that awful digital "stutter". Analog interference is perfectly
watchable and listenable. Digital interference (ie, the stuttering)
just simply isn't.

I betcha if they 
 broadcast a highly error resistant 480i (or whatever standard tv 
 resolution used to be)

Yea, for NTSC it's basically 480i. Slightly more for PAL (520i?) at the
cost of a few less frames per second.

 on that same data stream, they could have 
 gotten a much more reliable stream, giving a very consistent 
 quality even in poor weather.
 

Yea, I'm sure there's a lot they could have done. NTSC/PAL were
invented how long ago? And look at what they've been able to do with
cellular signals since then. Obviously the different operating
frequencies make a HUGE difference in how much can be done, but if they
were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
something far better than the non-degradable new system we ended up
with.

 But then how would they sell people new high def equipment every 
 other year?
 

Same way cell phone industry does it. Make the quality of the design
and manufacturing bad enough that they break down in around a year. ;)

 
 Wow I'm getting off topic even for an off topic thread! Oh well.
 

I'm probably becoming famous for that ;)

 Actually, I think that's preferable as long as the UI matches 
 (or rather, *is*) that of the user's associated video player 
 program.

 
 Yes, I like to use mplayer for things so I can skip and speed up 
 easily. I don't like watching videos at normal speed (most the 
 time), it just takes too long. With text, I can skim it for 
 interesting parts. With video, I'd like to do the same but can't. 
 Best I can do is play it at like 1.5x speed.... mplayer can do 
 that.

So does PS3 I was surprised to discover. That may come in handy.

For PC, I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema. I only wish it
supported Linux :(

 And mplayer takes like 1% cpu to play it. Flash takes like 110% 
 cpu to do the same job. What trash.

Yea, Flash makes JS seem fast. Adobe never should have ventured outside
of media production tools and into developer tools. It's clearly not
within their area of expertise.

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> writes:

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's 
 about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract
 *as much* money as possible.

Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive 
with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to 
shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their 
rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.


And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch 
are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv 
over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win 
with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like 
commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could 
pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh 
the regular tv is nice and mindless.

 (usually anime)

Sailor Moon rocks btw!


 Or that awful digital "stutter".

Ugh, yeah. It is beautiful with a good signal, but just awful 
otherwise.

 were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
 something far better than the non-degradable new system we 
 ended up with.

Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames, 
using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high 
res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and 
error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:

1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2

well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution 
is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4 
times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut 
out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another 
chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like 
16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to 
recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame 
checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth 
picture.


Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability 
engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:35:47 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator gmail.com> wrote:
 On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's 
 about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract
 *as much* money as possible.

 
 Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive 
 with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to 
 shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their 
 rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.
 

Yea. While they're desperately trying to hoard money...they're just
doing it very stupidly ;) The action of "squeezing sand" comes to mind.

 And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch 
 are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv 
 over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win 
 with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like 
 commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could 
 pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh 
 the regular tv is nice and mindless.
 

PUO's do piss me off. I wish I could find a (likely of sketchy
pedigree) player that would let me disable PUOs so I wouldn't have to
waste a DVD+/-R (and often downsample to single-layer) just to get rid
of them (well, I *think* Media Player Classic *might* be able to, but I
mean a proper set-top player). It's kinda weird how it's easier to
find a regionless player, or a player with a hidden regionless setting,
than one with a way to kill PUOs. (Not that I like region coding any
better.)

 (usually anime)

 
 Sailor Moon rocks btw!
 

Maybe I just haven't seen far enough through, but I always thought it
was weird how it seemed like every episode Tuxedo Mask would end up
having to come save her sorry ass. :)

Pretty Cure isn't bad either as a slightly later "Magic Girl" show, at
least the sub version anyway. The fighting is standard generic
stuff, but aside from that it's just very cute. Actually, there was a
fantastic GBA game based on it, which is what originally drew my
attention to the series: "Futari wa PreCure: Arienaii: Yume no sono
wa dai...something" Umm I forget the rest of the name, but it's a
side-scrolling platform puzzle game with a "co-op but only
one-player" concept. Quite brilliant IMO. A shame it never had a
western release.

It is interesting though, how compared to live action stuff and most
western works in general, animes/mangas tend to have much broader
demographic appeal beyond just the "core" audience for a given work.
For example, While there's certainly some good Seinen I like (like
Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, and Ghost in the Shell, as far as the really
obvious examples go), there's also been a bunch of Shojo that's managed
to really hook me: Kodocha, Marmalade Boy (the manga, haven't seen the
anime), Clamp's Suki Dakara Suki, and some others. And that's not an
uncommon phenomenon at all.

('Course, then there's other great ones that I'm not really even sure
what category they'd *technically* fall under: Like FullMetal Alchemist
and K-On.)

 were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
 something far better than the non-degradable new system we 
 ended up with.

 
 Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames, 
 using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high 
 res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and 
 error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:
 
 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2
 
 well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution 
 is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4 
 times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut 
 out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another 
 chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like 
 16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to 
 recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame 
 checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth 
 picture.
 
 
 Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability 
 engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.

I was initially thinking along the lines of "there's gotta be a way
these days to make a better analog format than NTSC/PAL", but yea, that
certainly sounds like a direction to pursue as well. And frankly I
barely know shit about analog EM signals, so I could be wrong about
that part anyway.

"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> writes:

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 09:56:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I use SRWare Iron in place of Chrome (as I said, it literally is
 Chrome), but if you have to put up with Chrome's "bug of the 
 day" junk
 then yea I guess that wouldn't work. Although at that point I 
 would
 reach for VirtualBox. If I ever have to run the real Chrome, 
 it's
 getting its ass sandboxed.

I agree with much of what you say about how the web is broken, 
though I don't understand your disdain for Chrome, but there's 
absolutely no reason to use Iron.  I analyzed its source a couple 
years back and it's basically a scam:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120331155237/http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

You're getting delayed Chrome source with a different theme.  
There's almost no difference, other than being exposed to 
security bugs longer, which are patched in Chrome's constant 
releases.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 16:47:45 +0200
"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> wrote:

 On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 09:56:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I use SRWare Iron in place of Chrome (as I said, it literally is
 Chrome), but if you have to put up with Chrome's "bug of the 
 day" junk
 then yea I guess that wouldn't work. Although at that point I 
 would
 reach for VirtualBox. If I ever have to run the real Chrome, 
 it's
 getting its ass sandboxed.

 I agree with much of what you say about how the web is broken, 
 though I don't understand your disdain for Chrome, but there's 
 absolutely no reason to use Iron.  I analyzed its source a couple 
 years back and it's basically a scam:
 
 http://web.archive.org/web/20120331155237/http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam
 
 You're getting delayed Chrome source with a different theme.  
 There's almost no difference, other than being exposed to 
 security bugs longer, which are patched in Chrome's constant 
 releases.

I really have had problems with Chrome (and other Google software)
forcefully installing always-resident processes before, and giving me
trouble getting rid of it. Never had such a problem with Iron. Even if
Iron is just a few better defaults and some options I don't even want
anyway removed, that certainly doesn't qualify as a "scam". Hell,
Iron's website is already perfectly clear about the settings existing
in Chrome but being forced to a specific setting in Iron:
<http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php> The
article makes it sound like SRWare is being deliberately deceptive,
which is verifiably untrue.

Plus Chrome introduces bugs almost as much as it fixes them, so less
frequent releases doesn't really bother me. And I wouldn't be using
Chrome's auto-updater anyway (and if I did, I would only do it in a VM).

Iron may not be a big change, but it's proven itself to me in
real-world usage to still be worthwhile.

And that archived article seems pretty biased. Ex: "...likely only to
evade source analysis like I'm doing..." Uhh, accusational and
speculative anyone? Especially since it's perfectly reasonable to
figure the different version numbers could have more to do with
divergent forks than actually "Iron deliberately changed the version
number to be sneaky". Perfectly likely that Iron had merged in v4.x,
then merged in various other changes, and just missed a line diff
involving the v4->v5 version number change. But no, we're supposed to
just *assume* it was intentional deception because that better supports
the initial "Iron is a scam" position.

"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> writes:

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 01:09:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 I really have had problems with Chrome (and other Google 
 software)
 forcefully installing always-resident processes before, and 
 giving me
 trouble getting rid of it. Never had such a problem with Iron.

Chrome, which is based on the open-source Chromium project, has a 
built-in auto-updater which always stays resident and checks for 
updates.  Since Iron is based on Chromium, not Chrome, it may not 
have the auto-updater.

 Even if
 Iron is just a few better defaults and some options I don't 
 even want
 anyway removed, that certainly doesn't qualify as a "scam". 
 Hell,
 Iron's website is already perfectly clear about the settings 
 existing
 in Chrome but being forced to a specific setting in Iron:
 <http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php> 
 The
 article makes it sound like SRWare is being deliberately 
 deceptive,
 which is verifiably untrue.

Iron has always billed itself as some sort of privacy fork.  For 
example, their FAQ says:

"Can't i just use an precompiled unchanged Chromium-Build from 
the Google Server?

This is not useful because the original Chromium-Builds have 
nearly the same functions inside than the original Chrome. We can 
only provide Iron because we massively modified the source."
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_faq.php

I verified that this is untrue in the linked article, at least 
back when they released Iron 3 and 4.  Nobody can verify it 
anymore, because even though there are still links for source 
download, they don't work, ie you can't download the source.  
This probably breaks the LGPL license, but I've read that they 
stopped providing source a while back, likely after I analyzed it:

http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-real-private-alternative-to-chrome-21/

 Plus Chrome introduces bugs almost as much as it fixes them, so 
 less
 frequent releases doesn't really bother me. And I wouldn't be 
 using
 Chrome's auto-updater anyway (and if I did, I would only do it 
 in a VM).

I don't track Iron closely, but I think they follow the same 
release schedule for major stable releases, only delayed, and 
likely without all the smaller point releases with security fixes 
that Chrome provides.  So you have all the disadvantages of 
google's six-week release schedule, with the added disadvantages 
of Iron's delays and omissions: I don't see the benefit.

Chrome does introduce some bugs as it updates, but I don't think 
any other browser is any better.  I don't get your paranoia about 
the auto-updater: what makes you think it does anything other 
than check for updates?  My understanding is that the source for 
the updater is available.

 Iron may not be a big change, but it's proven itself to me in
 real-world usage to still be worthwhile.

There is one advantage to Iron: it provides occasional builds of 
the stable branch of Chromium, which google does not provide 
except as part of the Chrome Stable channel.  You could build the 
stable branch of Chromium yourself, but I understand if you don't 
want to put in the effort.  I suspect you would be as happy with 
the Chromium builds that are provided, which are only from the 
trunk branch:

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html

 And that archived article seems pretty biased. Ex: "...likely 
 only to
 evade source analysis like I'm doing..." Uhh, accusational and
 speculative anyone? Especially since it's perfectly reasonable 
 to
 figure the different version numbers could have more to do with
 divergent forks than actually "Iron deliberately changed the 
 version
 number to be sneaky". Perfectly likely that Iron had merged in 
 v4.x,
 then merged in various other changes, and just missed a line 
 diff
 involving the v4->v5 version number change. But no, we're 
 supposed to
 just *assume* it was intentional deception because that better 
 supports
 the initial "Iron is a scam" position.

The reason it's intentional deception is because I analyzed the 
Iron source, which certainly doesn't "massively modify the 
source" for Chromium, as they claim.  I made a guess that they 
chose to go in and change the version number to evade such 
analysis, which fits the pattern of deception.

I didn't get into all this in the article, but they've never had 
a public source code repo, which is suspicious for someone who 
claims to be "open source."  They were dumping code in 7z 
archives on rapidshare instead!  Without a repo where I could 
track commits, I had to download the Iron source then manually 
track down which version of Chromium corresponded to that version 
of Iron, since the version number was changed.  That took time, 
and given their pattern of deception, I can only assume it was a 
deliberate move to throw off such analysis.

I understand your suspicion of google.  I don't use their 
services other than search and have never signed up for facebook 
either, but that's no reason to use shady software just because 
it's "not google."  There are real privacy concerns with all 
these services, but if we don't stick to the facts, we damage our 
case.  I don't like what the Iron guy did and have documented the 
issues, it is up to you and others to decide what to believe.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 07:28:35 +0200
"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> wrote:
 
 I don't get your paranoia about the auto-updater:

Paranoia has nothing to do with it. I don't want it always running in
the background, I don't want it auto-updating, and I certainly don't
want a program installing an always running service I never asked it to
install in the first place.

what makes you think it does anything other than check for updates? 

I never said it did.

 I understand your suspicion of google.  I don't use their 
 services other than search and have never signed up for facebook 
 either, but that's no reason to use shady software just because 
 it's "not google."  There are real privacy concerns with all 
 these services, but if we don't stick to the facts, we damage our 
 case.  I don't like what the Iron guy did and have documented the 
 issues, it is up to you and others to decide what to believe.

"Because it isn't Google" has nothing to do with my usage of Iron. I
use it because I've had problems with Chrome that I haven't had with
Iron. And if I don't have to go through the bother of configuring those
settings in the first place and making sure to get Chromium instead of
Chrome then all the better (Seriously, why the fuck does Google have
two basically-identical browsers and the whole "Chrome vs Chromium"
bullshit anyway? Makes no fucking sense.)

I don't give a shit what the primary motivation of Iron's creator is or
how much work it did or didn't take to create. I use it because it works
the way I want it to and Chrome doesn't.

Honestly, I don't get all the FUD about Iron. A lot of stuff uses
ad-supported models, big freaking deal, welcome to the web. There's no
malware and no money charged, so there's clearly no "scam". Maybe some
stuff is overstated, but try finding a "legit" corporation that doesn't
twist and spin facts in their marketing. Not that I like that, but it
just means that SRWare is no more of a scam than Johnson & Johnson, or
General Mills or whatever. It all just sounds like a big overreaction
to a tool that just simply isn't *as* large of an improvement as it
makes itself out to be (which again, is a pretty common thing).
Overstatements or not, worries about him being some sort of "sellout"
or not (it's not as if Google is there for pure altruism instead of
trying to make a buck either), regardless of any of that it's a useful
Chromium distro.

"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> writes:

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 09:02:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Chrome then all the better (Seriously, why the fuck does Google 
 have
 two basically-identical browsers and the whole "Chrome vs 
 Chromium"
 bullshit anyway? Makes no fucking sense.)

Chromium is an open source project.  Chrome is google's build of 
Chromium, with some additional proprietary bits added, like a 
closed-source pdf viewer or licensed audio/video codecs compiled 
in:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

They use a hybrid model with Chrome, where it's 99% open with 
added proprietary bits, a subject I've talked about before on 
this NG.

 I don't give a shit what the primary motivation of Iron's 
 creator is or
 how much work it did or didn't take to create. I use it because 
 it works
 the way I want it to and Chrome doesn't.

You are free to use whatever you want, but when you say you don't 
care about what this guy has done, you lose all credibility on 
privacy and security.

 Honestly, I don't get all the FUD about Iron. A lot of stuff 
 uses
 ad-supported models, big freaking deal, welcome to the web. 
 There's no
 malware and no money charged, so there's clearly no "scam". 
 Maybe some
 stuff is overstated, but try finding a "legit" corporation that 
 doesn't
 twist and spin facts in their marketing. Not that I like that, 
 but it
 just means that SRWare is no more of a scam than Johnson & 
 Johnson, or
 General Mills or whatever. It all just sounds like a big 
 overreaction
 to a tool that just simply isn't *as* large of an improvement 
 as it
 makes itself out to be (which again, is a pretty common thing).
 Overstatements or not, worries about him being some sort of 
 "sellout"
 or not (it's not as if Google is there for pure altruism 
 instead of
 trying to make a buck either), regardless of any of that it's a 
 useful
 Chromium distro.

Haha, now outright lying about how you "massively modified the 
source" or that you're still "open source" is merely overblown 
"marketing?"

You're twisting yourself into pretzels to try and justify this 
choice.  Maybe you didn't know all this about Iron before, but it 
seems like an irrational, personal attachment to keep using and 
defending this browser after all this.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 15:11:21 +0200
"Joakim" <joakim airpost.net> wrote:

 On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 09:02:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 Chrome then all the better (Seriously, why the fuck does Google 
 have
 two basically-identical browsers and the whole "Chrome vs 
 Chromium"
 bullshit anyway? Makes no fucking sense.)

 Chromium is an open source project.  Chrome is google's build of 
 Chromium, with some additional proprietary bits added, like a 
 closed-source pdf viewer or licensed audio/video codecs compiled 
 in:
 
 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome
 
 They use a hybrid model with Chrome, where it's 99% open with 
 added proprietary bits, a subject I've talked about before on 
 this NG.

Ok, good to know. I do still think they could have handled it without
splitting it into two barely-different projects. And from what I'm
seen, Google gives off a very strong impression that "Chrome" is their
browser for end-users to actually use, and "Chromium" is
just...some..."thing" for developers (from what I've seen, Google hasn't
been particularly clear on it, ever even really say much about it at
all on their Chrome site, but I do appreciate your clarification).

So if someone came along with a "basically Chrome with some stuff
removed" that's *really* just minor tweaks on Chromium, then I do think
Google kind of brought that situation on themselves. And I don't think
it's necessarily bad, either. Yes, it would be better if SRWare was
more accurate in stating what Iron exactly is, but still, a prebuilt
distro of Chromium, without the lack of clarity on what Chromium is,
and with default settings changed to what a lot of people would change
them to anyway - I do think there is genuine value in that.

Of course, Google could easily counteract that value by saying right
there on their Chrome site "Ok, and here we also have a pre-built
Chromium which is Chrome but without the auto-updater and non-OSS bits,
etc". Or better yet: "Here's the Chrome installer, and it lets
you choose whether or not to install the auto-updater, and whether or
not to include the non-OSS extensions, and has an option for "ultra
privacy" defaults where none of the controversial settings are enabled
and nothing is ever implicitly sent to Google" (Obviously wording can
be adjusted).

But last I looked, Google didn't have anything like that, but Iron
does, so there's value in it.

 I don't give a shit what the primary motivation of Iron's 
 creator is or
 how much work it did or didn't take to create. I use it because 
 it works
 the way I want it to and Chrome doesn't.

 You are free to use whatever you want, but when you say you don't 
 care about what this guy has done, you lose all credibility on 
 privacy and security.
 

Not that I'm trying to change your mind here, but what I'm seeing here
is: Some guy created a useful product (even if it is only minimally
useful) because he wanted to generate ad revenue. There's nothing
questionable or even remotely uncommon about that.

 Haha, now outright lying about how you "massively modified the 
 source" or that you're still "open source" is merely overblown 
 "marketing?"
 

"Massively" is a highly subjective term. Now I agree with you that if
the changes are indeed what your articles say (and I'm not doubting
that) than that doesn't match what I, or most people, would consider
"massively". But it *is* a subjective term and business *do* exploit
that all the time. I don't like that they do, I wish they didn't, but
we don't go calling every such thing a "scam".

As far as the "open source" thing, well if the source really is closed
off now (and not just some site snafu or something) then yea, that is a
license violation and needs to be changed. And proper public VCS would
be good, although I've seen a LOT of developers who are still stuck in
pre-VCS mode and unfortunately don't really "get" the whole GitHub
thing. Not an ideal way for Iron to work, but since I'm only interested
in using it, not building or modifying it, then it's not a deal-breaker
for me. There's a lot of useful freeware that, for some ridiculous
reason I've never understood, was closed-source. 'Course, most of those
aren't license-bound to *be* OSS.

 You're twisting yourself into pretzels to try and justify this 
 choice.  Maybe you didn't know all this about Iron before, but it 
 seems like an irrational, personal attachment to keep using and 
 defending this browser after all this.

Just because I'm not knee-jerking at some new information (that really
isn't anywhere near as condemning as you make it out to be) hardly
qualifies as "twisting...irrational, personal attachment", etc.

"Michael" <pr m1xa.com> writes:

New Opera uses chromium engine, so I don't know (like user agent 
detection tools too) it's still the same Opera or not ;)
IE11 maybe masks like Mozilla/gecko too (according to html 5).

Often os virtualization tools used with desktop integration (one 
desktop - two os; VirtualBox VMware etc).


I think that viewers number is representative only. OS number 
means that this platform should be supported.

"John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 15:00:43 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
 I had some free time so I decided I should start a simple blog 
 about D, implementing some unix utilities. I've 
 (unsurprisingly) started with echo.

 http://foreach-hour-life.blogspot.co.uk/

 It's nothing ground-breaking, but every little helps :)

Turns out it got posted by some people on here: 
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Developer-Break-Nokla-Imaging-Perforce-QML-REST-AWS-SDKs-1916580.html
and here: 
http://www.heise.de/developer/meldung/Developer-Snapshots-Programmierer-News-in-ein-zwei-Saetzen-1916317.html

which has created a rather large bump in viewers :)

Second instalment is coming soon.