Everything Else

hamei wrote: I am continuously getting websites that say "Our site requires javascriopt flash and stinkyschmutz. Please go install those and come back." The short answer to that is "Piss off."

Yet you are posting this to a phpBB forum not USENET or IRC. The technology changes and sooner or later you will have to deal with it if you want to get things done.

GL1zdA wrote: The technology changes and sooner or later you will have to deal with it if you want to get things done.

Luckily, I still work in the world of real things. We don't need the now-worthless www*. I will continue to use email because, at least so far, normal text gets transmitted without requiring additional crap. But the rest of that shit ? None of my customers needs it and I certainly don't. There is nothing valuable or informative left out there. It's all home shopping channel crap and 'social media', or will be within the foreseeable future.

That garbage is worthless. It's not how you buy expensive machinery.

It's too bad, too, because there was a lot of promise there. In fact, it was pretty neat for a while.

But no longer.

* I actually have a kind of funny story to illustrate that, but maybe not for here and now.

hamei wrote: shit worthless shit designed yet more crap down our throats. do shit Mentally-retarded created by imbeciles dickwad infuriating idiotic Fuck you morons stupid shits Piss off shit lurking garbage disgusting crap.

This must be so hard to be you.

hamei wrote: * I actually have a kind of funny story to illustrate that, but maybe not for here and now.

Oh please do share

nongrato wrote: This must be so hard to be you.

It would be a lot easier without initiates from the Cult of the Great Goddess Progress constantly yawping about how everybody must use all the latest software at all times and enable Javascript so that every idiot website can display its static page content like this so whatever idiot designed the page can feel validated that he put his own personal stamp on everybody's interaction with his page whether they want it or not and must search diligently for whatever unintelligible icon has taken the place of coherent, readable text labels for hiding crucial website functionality and like it , dammit, and everyone must face Cupertino five times daily and offer prayer to the Prophet and AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH .

Seriously, this is not just one of hamei's Board-Certified Crank rant topics, this is genuinely irritating shit that gets to pretty much any sensible human being who values their time more than some web designer's ego-masturbation. My parents are just as irritated by it, and they're a far cry from any of us nerds who understand exactly why it's so perverse; they just don't have time for that shit, but they have to put up with it anyway (I'd introduce them to NoScript like I did for my brother, but they're not savvy to the point where it would save them time compared to having to dick around with manually enabling things one at a time to see which magic combination of completely unrelated domains have to be whitelisted to make voodoo happen.)

hamei wrote: On the OtherDuck Front, thank you both to GL1zda and smj : here's the initial duckduck screen -

quackquack.jpg

Well, that's a big help. Let's go over to Winders and turn off NoScript -

quackscreen.jpg

Now I have used duck duck before but I never in a meeleon years would have noticed that, much less clicked on it to find out what it does. I always thought three strips was something the germans put on their running shoes and how do you come up with "settings" from that?? Especially since there are already other buttons at the bottom, I assumed if they had any settings (and why would they, since they supposedly "don't track" you) They could come up with a gear icon down there that said... settings... under it. I always thought gears was the icon for settings, which is almost as silly as random lines, but we are used to gears for settings by now, so it works.

nongrato wrote: This must be so hard to be you.

Nah. Or well, maybe it does but not for this reason.

See, the whole thing is pointless because the little shitforbrains dickwads are going to do whatever they want anyhow. Plus the entire computing "culture" is driven by nitwits so in fact, it's all pointless.

But we don't have to go quiet into that dark night, ya know ? There are two approaches you can take here.

Numbah One : "Oh gosh, Mr Estemed Programmer Sir, I am so impressed with your skill and talent ! By golly, you've really got it together ! But do you suppose in the next release you could possibly put the fonts back to rightside -up ? It's innovative and high-tech to display the screen upside-down and I think you are sooo talented to make me hang from the ceiling to read my mail ! Gosh, that's cool ! But I'm getting a crick in my neck so if you wouldn't mind ..."

The other approach is to tell the truth. We have a serious problem with that in this society. For instance, the managers of NASA that launched for political reasons despite all the concerns of the engineers are actually murdering scum. Period, end of sentence. And the asshole who lied to Congress, lied to the people of the US, and pissed away four trillion dollars on a truly stupid war just cuz somebody dissed his daddy, well ... use whatever word you like but 'brilliant leader of the free world' best not be in that job description. People talk around everything these days but underneath, there really is a truth. That tree did fall down.

It makes no real difference - no matter what, the mentally-retarded teenagers writing and designing and paying for software are going to do whatever they want. But at least if you honestly describe exactly what they are, they can't Biff-and-Muffy your comments into oblivion.

It's a small satisfaction but better than nothing.

guardian452 wrote: Now I have used duck duck before but I never in a meeleon years would have noticed that, much less clicked on it to find out what it does. I always thought three strips was something the germans put on their running shoes and how do you come up with "settings" from that??

It's fairly common. (That still doesn't mean it's logical, though!) Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chromium (at least their Linux versions) all use the same "3 lines" icon for "Settings". Probably lots of other software, too. Those are just the examples I can see in front of me right now. It took me a while to figure out what the icon was the first time I encountered one.

The technical term is "hamburger menu."

Because, you know, hamburgers suggest settings. Maybe toppings.

GL1zdA wrote: (PS. do we have a youtube embedding tag?)

I've added an extension that automatically embeds Youtube - just leave the url tag off completely.

jpstewart wrote: all use the same "3 lines" icon for "Settings". Probably lots of other software, too. Those are just the examples I can see in front of me right now. It took me a while to figure out what the icon was the first time I encountered one.

that's supposed to be an abstract representation of a list (of options). the gfx guys these days must be more lazy than ever

foetz wrote: that's supposed to be an abstract representation of a list (of options). the gfx guys these days must be more lazy than ever

It's this Windows 8 fetishism for ultra-ultra-ultra-abstraction and single-color shapes with no lines on them. Because, you know, it looks modern, or futuristic, or European, or "globalist," or whatever the hell thing they come up with to describe it next.

God, I miss the days of icons you could actually tell what they were .

hamei wrote: Checked the error message : gcc not only allows, it encourages illegal code. C++ defines an array using positive integers . But gcc is way too cool for that, they have "extensions" which allow anything. Excuse me. C++ is a language. It has rules. These aren't 'extensions', they are violations .

Nope. C++ as such is just an extension of C, violating certain C-rules [although Str. calls them "modifications"]. Any open-source implementation should be free to add or delete features to their own liking...

ClassicHasClass wrote: The technical term is "hamburger menu."

Because, you know, hamburgers suggest settings. Maybe toppings.

If it doesn't make me hungry it isn't a very good hamburger. Why don't they call it a settings menu?? Anyways, I've been conditioned to act upon just blindly clicking at a picture if I don't know what it means, the problem is I didn't see it at all. Never knew they had any settings. Why don't they put their hamburger , adidas , settings menu, with their other links at the bottom?

I guess I'm not the only one who misses the days only 5-10 years ago when this was an icon :

Specifically the icon in Apple-Land of a mounted HDD circa. 2007-2011. I wonder how much work it would take to get some of that art put back in a modern version?? Especially since we have retina macs now...


Windows 7 was just as beautiful from around the same time. The wallpaper pictures that came with it are gorgeous.

Oskar45 wrote: Nope. C++ as such is just an extension of C, violating certain C-rules [although Str. calls them "modifications"]. Any open-source implementation should be free to add or delete features to their own liking...

Umm, yes, well ... there are quite a few people who would disagree with you. Here's a quick sampler :

http://objectmix.com/c/39183- [c-]-definition-constant-expression-array-dimension.html
http://bytes.com/topic/c/answers/782022 ... expression
http://answer.techwikihow.com/251036/vs ... e-gcc.html

There seem to be two camps on this ; one is, "oh goody, here's some lovely new things I can do" while the other is "that's nice, just don't call it C (or C++ or Lisp or Fortran or whatever) because it isn't and won't be portable in any way, shape or form."

To me, it is obvious that Group One has no discipline and will eventually lead to disaster, so that is not the path to choose. Mickey habitually used that method to subsume anything that was not under its control. I see no difference here.

But hamei, these are the Good Guys doing it! That makes it Right and Just!

commodorejohn wrote: But hamei, these are the Good Guys doing it! That makes it Right and Just!

In the 90's Mickey succesfully disguised themselves under the white hat. That was in opposition to the Evil Empire of IBM.

Of course, behind the scenes they were kneecapping anyone who looked at them crosswise.

There seems to be some persistent fascination with cowboy coders ?

commodorejohn wrote: God, I miss the days of icons you could actually tell what they were .

So don't upgrade to Windows 8 /10 / OSX Mavericks /Yosemite - instead just wait a couple of years. They'll need to make everything look "new" and "fresh" again, and they'll invent this brilliant new design aesthetic of rich graphics and skeuomorphism , which is of course totally novel and never before seen, because they'll need a hook to sell Windows 11 / OSX Annapurna...

hamei wrote: Web browsers : they are shit. All of them. With 300 million people in the US and just as many in Europe, at least half those people use a web browser on occasion -- but there is not a single one that is worth two pennies. Absolutely worthless shit designed and implemented solely for the purpose of jamming advertising down our throats, while conveniently using our hardware and $50/mo connections to supply them with ever more data for targeting yet more crap down our throats. I'm tired of being a foie gras goose.

It would definitely help if more people would understand this simple truth. Because advertising is running rampant on the internet, everybody is forced to buy new hardware - for the simple fact that otherwise advertising makes your machine crawl while all you want is some simple plain information. I think the signal-noise-ratio of most websites is so bad, we need out high performance machines mainly to display all this noise. (And our brain is tasked with filtering for information within all this noise.)

hamei wrote: The other approach is to tell the truth. We have a serious problem with that in this society. For instance, the managers of NASA that launched for political reasons despite all the concerns of the engineers are actually murdering scum.

This happens all the time, however most of the times the result is not such dire. Experts are asked, they tell (mostly) the truth which does not fit the shiny truth management likes to see, so a different kind of truth is told by management. Sooner or later, the discrepancy between management truth and "the" truth is too obvious to ignore. At this point in time, someone defines this discrepancy as a problem and asks the expert. Which is the point where this process lapses into recursion.

Eventually everyone reinvents Gopherspace, but poorly.

tomvos wrote: It would definitely help if more people would understand this simple truth. Because advertising is running rampant on the internet, everybody is forced to buy new hardware - for the simple fact that otherwise advertising makes your machine crawl while all you want is some simple plain information. I think the signal-noise-ratio of most websites is so bad, we need out high performance machines mainly to display all this noise. (And our brain is tasked with filtering for information within all this noise.)

Ah, the joys of visiting a web page for a 250 word article, and receiving ten megabytes of "content."

I recall watching full screen video on my 2006 MacBook Pro without the MBP breaking a sweat. Now, simply watching a low resolution YouTube video pegs the CPU and triggers "wind tunnel mode" on the fans.