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2551

General Review Discussion / Re: Opinions on remote PC control software

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:32 AM »

Yes, I really love the "SingleClick" setup with UltraVNC. I put together a little helper app for my work, complete with our logo. I manage computers across 3 campuses for an educational insitution so it's extremely helpful. People have been blown away by it. They had no idea such things were possible.

- Oshyan

2552

Living Room / Re: interesting usability test videos for dif. linux desktop programs (gnome,etc.)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:20 AM »

OK, so maybe everyone is "totally biased and expects everything to work like their beloved Windows box" and maybe that's "wrong" in some sense. But which is more likely to succeed: trying to convince 95% of desktop computer users that their way of doing things is flawed and that they should learn a whole new system *or* closely emulating the existing system *while* introducing new features and functionality unobtrusively? One is almost certainly a losing proposition and thus is hardly worth considering for any serious advocate, *regardless* of the "righteousness" of the position. Being right doesn't make the world go around and it doesn't always get things done.

The point is the statistics/studies are not useless, in fact quite the opposite, they are just not useful *to everyone*.

If Linux does what you want then that's great and if you don't care if anyone else uses it then you needn't worry about such studies or their validity. As long as it works for you then hoorah! This ignores the fact that the level of platform support is directly influences how much software is available, how many hardware devices have driver support, etc. - you clearly need some critical mass. But Linux does very well even as a desktop OS despite the comparatively small installed user base.

In any case many people do not share the personally-focused perspective. They want Linux to succeed and to succeed big. Whether that just means "beating Micro$oft" (sic) or if they really think Linux could be a better desktop OS for the average user doesn't matter too much - in general the steps to get to the end goal are similar, at least for now: Make Linux a better *replacement for Windows*.

Why does a successful desktop OS for the average person need to replace Windows? Because Windows has ~95% market share and that's what everyone is used to, even if they don't like it. Those that really don't like it can move to a Mac if they want. So although Apple's numbers are rising, I think the still extreme dominance of the Windows platform says that there is *something* about it that makes it successful. *That* is what the Linux community needs to emulate if they hope to succeed in challenging Windows for the desktop.

Again not everyone shares that goal and if that's not you then this study isn't of interest. But it does have validity and could be useful to anyone trying to make Linux a better desktop solution. Arguments about whether a GUI(s) tested in this particular case are "standard" or "the best one" only lend weight to the argument that Linux just isn't ready for the average user - 99% people don't want to have to choose.

- Oshyan

2553

Living Room / Re: Creating Passionate Users: Don't give in to feature demands!

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 01:05 AM »

From the brief quote and headline you gave I wasn't sure I'd like this article but I ended up liking it a lot. The actual meat of the article is very balanced and reasonable and I agree with it pretty much 100%. Especially about customer service/tech support being listened to more (and testers)!

- Oshyan

2554

General Software Discussion / Re: Blog mirroring/syndication and aggregation help.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 08, 2006, 12:31 AM »

Hmm, Carol your idea sounds easiest and is actually feasible right now (with present skills). I still want a solution more like what I described, but I may play with this for now.

Anyone have any idea on the "blog aggregator" thing? Like a blog app/system that can already take RSS feeds to define its own blog post list?

- Oshyan

2555

General Software Discussion / Re: Blog mirroring/syndication and aggregation help.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 06, 2006, 02:46 AM »

Yeah, that could work for the "blog aggregator"/"meta blog" thing. I'll look into that, thanks.

- Oshyan

2556

General Software Discussion / Blog mirroring/syndication and aggregation help.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 06, 2006, 02:04 AM »

I'm new to the world of blogging so I have no idea if what I'm about to describe exists or is even possible but it seems like some of the features ought at least to already be implemented. Here's the brief summary first:

Basically what I want to do is setup an identical blog on 2 totally different sites/servers and have the content bi-directionally mirrored. So if a post is made on a blog it will be mirrored to the other and, more importantly, if a comment is made on a post on one blog, it automatically gets added to the other, so they're always in sync.

The second part of this, which I am guessing already exists, is some kind of web-based blog aggregator that will essentially be a "blog of blogs" - a date-sorted headline-and-story-intro display of the most recent entries in whatever blogs I choose.

On the off chance that my reasoning for this will help understand my need, here's the full story (note that I repeat most of what I said above in a different way ):

I just put up http://terrain.cg-arts.org/forum/ It's a forum for people in the terrain industry to talk about their work, tools, workflows, etc. We're inviting a bunch of terrain program developers, which is what brought up the idea.

One of said developers recently put up a blog http://www.world-machine.com/blog/ which has been rather successful and I've really enjoyed the info he's posted there as well as the discussion that has resulted. However it's really only immediately visible to the people who were already in the World Machine community. I think it should have wider exposure. More than that though I think other devs should strongly consider having such a "development diary" blog.

So I figured hey, why not provide them a free, easy blogging service. Setup a wordpress (or whatever) site for them with their own subdomain or subdirectory (http://l3dt.cg-arts.org/blog for example) then give 'em access to it and set 'em loose. Here's where the rest comes in...

I figure some devs, like Stephen (of World Machine), wouldn't want to *only* have their blog on our site. The only way they'll even bother is if we make it super easy for them, like if the one on our site is a direct mirror of theirs or something. This would be optional, since some devs would *only* have their blog with us.

Furthermore I would want one central home page for all the blogs which would show in order of most recently updated all the various blogs. Sort of like a blog of blogs, but maybe color coded or with very obvious author/application titles so people don't get confused. Basically there would be headlines on this main page with snippets from the latest post, and it would say "Latest from Stephen Schmitt's World Machine Blog: "Alpha-2 went out to the testing group late last week. The GUI is getting closer to final quality, although theres still a few huge things left to get done. Click here to read more." And if that was the latest entry updated across all the blogs on the site/group, it would be at the top of the list. As soon as someone else updated, that one would be at the top. And so of course clicking on each entry would take you to the full blog of the person/program.

And of course all of it could be RSS'd - both the individual blogs as well as the aggregator/home page. Or "meta blog" as it might be called.

The intention is basically to provide a central location where people can find out about the latest developments in terrain apps. Probably not of interest to most of you, but it's a small obsession of mine.

If this kind of functionality doesn't exist I do think it could have wider appeal. Although there are already existing "meta blog" sites out there, it might be cool for basically anyone to be able to create their own customized meta blog. I am thinking there must already be some way to do this, but it is probably tied in with personalized home pages or something along those lines and I need something that doesn't require a login.

- Oshyan

2557

Living Room / Re: Animator vs Animation - one of the best flash animations i've seen in years.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 05, 2006, 09:57 PM »

Very cool indeed! I'm seeing the makings of an "outside the box" multiplayer game. Anyone else?

- Oshyan

2558

Living Room / Re: June 4 Podcast

« Last post by JavaJones on June 05, 2006, 09:45 PM »

Hehe, just finished a listen through of the whole thing. Lots of fun. Thanks for the welcome! I am well-known for my long posts on every forum and mailing list I subscribe to, so no surprise there. Just let me know if it gets excessive. I *do* try to cut things down sometimes but if I feel like what I've written is reasonably content rich I won't bother, lol.

Anyway, yeah audio quality is a bit inconsistent, but this is really hard to regulate. Everyone go get good mics! Plus as someone mentioned the variable audio quality imparts a unique quality to each segment that is kind of fun in itself. I especially liked the interview bits. I also *love* the lyrics to the programmer's blues, hehe.

- Oshyan

2559

Living Room / Re: Do we care about HD-DVD/Blu-Ray?

« Last post by JavaJones on June 05, 2006, 08:45 PM »

Well, there are two sides to this story, clearly - media use and data use. I might give this generation of optical discs a miss as far as data storage goes, unless speeds ever get really high (even though the storage is greater, speed is not *that* much greater as far as I know). Reliability is also a very important and little talked about issue with increasing media density, as others noted. As far as use for media purposes - movies, etc. - I will have to see what new TV I end up with and whether it is compatible with the high def outputs I am allowed to use. We'll see how the respective movie studios handle releases in each format. If they are reasonable about it, if the quality is high, and the amount of extras attractive, then I might take the plunge. But so far the high cost and immaturity of the product and market are very off-putting.

- Oshyan

2560

Living Room / Re: Extremely cool visualization of global statistics over time.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 05, 2006, 08:31 PM »

Hehe, yes this is very true. My example was not intended to be particularly serious. Nonetheless it's fun to look at.

- Oshyan

2561

Living Room / Re: troubling article: Adobe restricting pdf creation

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 04:49 PM »

Bah, Adobe has been too big for their britches for a long time. This comes as no surprise to me. Did anyone ever *really* consider PDF an "open" standard anyway? It's one of those Microsoft-esque "Open as long as it benefits us" standards, right?

- Oshyan

2562

Living Room / Re: well done but simplistic flash shooter where you shoot cute plush toys

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 04:47 PM »

Hmm, first time playing, ranked #359. Not bad.

- Oshyan

2563

Living Room / Re: registrar accused of widespread cyber squatting

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 04:40 PM »

Hoorah, strike back at these bastards! Domain squatters make me an angry, angry monkey. Frankly I'm not all that surprised it's a "major" registrar either. It seems like a lot of the businesses involved in the web market are kind of crooked. This is probably because it being so relatively new still, it's less regulated than other areas. For example the FCC exists to deal with so-called "public" spectrum and assigning licensing for it, etc (let's leave FCC corruption aside for now, lol). I think there's a similar organization that deals with some aspects of the WWW, but being an international network it's more complicated than that, and said organization (or organizations?) are also less mature and well-understand than the FCC. Both are susceptible to corruption, but it just seems like it's less often pointed out online.

- Oshyan

2564

General Software Discussion / Re: something to save file/program/icon associations

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 04:37 PM »

This sounds like an excellent util idea. So excellent I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet. Anyone... anyone?

- Oshyan

2565

What's the Best? / Re: Anti-Virus Package

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 04:29 PM »

EZ Antivirus (eTrust) was mentioned several times earlier. We use it in my office on all our machines and it works great. Low resource use and no viruses in 3 or 4 years of use there. But most there aren't heavy users either.

Honestly I think it's pretty hard to pick a single winner or even a top 3 or something when there's so much variation between choices. First off there's so many different criteria. That most recently posted ranking had NOD32 way down the list, presumably for interface or cost reasons, but if you took into account performance, Kaspersky would surely not have been number one (rank 5). So first it depends on what criteria you take into account.

The other thing is that there are very few particularly accurate tests done on this stuff! You have to ask what the testing organization is using as test material, whether they are scanning only infected files (but not an infected machine, if that makes any sense), or whether they're actually purposefully infecting a machine with an active virus. That's a huge thing because a virus embedded in say a .dll that doesn't get activated should be cleaned easily by most antivirus programs. The real trick is whether it will continue working and properly clean an infection after it occurs. This is the hardest thing to deal with I think. I recently had to clean off a customer's machine that was totally riddled with viruses and it took no less than 6 security programs, from NOD32 (trial) to Ewido anti-trojan, several online scanners (bit defender, etc.), spybot, adaware, and other anti-spyware apps, etc. And eventually I still had to get in there and manually delete some stuff with Unlocker. It was messy. Now you may ask how a properly protected system would get to that state? Well, let's say someone accidentally (or stupidly) turns off their antivirus, or it crashes, or what have you. The circumstances are rare, but they're worth considering.

Also it might be worth distinguishing between which is a good *detection* system and which is a good *cleaning* system. A lot of apps can detect many viruses but not necessarily clean them all for example.

In any case properly reviewing and ranking A/V software is tricky.

P.S. I personally use AVG and have been very happy with it. No problems in 3 or 4 years of use. I've used Avast in the past but I frankly hate its skinned interface and which they just shipped with a bog standard simple one. I haven't tried Antivir for quite some time but apparently it's the best of the lot for pure detection.

- Oshyan

2566

Living Room / Re: I am in love with this wallpaper concept

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 03:44 PM »

I remember seeing these a while back. Very cool. It seems like some could look even better with some color tuning on the background image to match the weak areas of the monitor (color reproduction, brightness, etc.).

- Oshyan

2567

Living Room / Re: interesting usability test videos for dif. linux desktop programs (gnome,etc.)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 03, 2006, 03:40 PM »

Well, I'm certainly not one clamoring for a good alternative to Windows. Windows works fine for me. But there are a lot of people out there who want to see the Windows reign end. So the above is primarily directed at them. I do think Linux has a very appropriate place in the computing world and right now I believe its market share is increasing in that area, so it's doing just fine on its "core comptetency". If people want it to do other things, like be a good desktop replacement, it's just a fact that it still has a ways to come. People trying to put their grandma on Linux are fooling themselves - no matter how many geek success stories there are about it.

- Oshyan

2568

Living Room / Re: interesting usability test videos for dif. linux desktop programs (gnome,etc.)

« Last post by JavaJones on June 02, 2006, 06:40 PM »

For destop purposes Linux is meaningless without a desktop shell, so while saying "Linux" in this case instead of the specific shell may be inaccurate, it's not unreasonably by any means. As you yourself said Gnome is the most commonly used desktop shell, followed by KDE. Tests of both those shells should be highly instructive IMO and should not be discounted just because "there are other options" or "the default configuration is easily changed". 99% of people aren't going to look beyond their first desktop environment to even find out there are options. They're not looking for something they can tweak endlessly until it's how they like it, they want something that "just works". If they don't like it to begin with then they won't use it. So while your objections are certainly valid they are still largely irrelevant unfortunately. That's just the way the market works it seems.

- Oshyan

2569

Living Room / Re: usability test videos for linux desktop tasks - interesting

« Last post by JavaJones on June 02, 2006, 01:49 PM »

Considering the fact that Windows has a 95% desktop OS marketing share it may not mean that in concept, but in practice yes it does. In practice 95% of users will be migrating from Windows, so that is the single most important and fundamental metric for any desktop Linux solution to worry about if it's trying to gain market share. Not necessarily emulating Windows mind you, but doing things in a way that makes at least as much sense to Windows users as Windows does. This leaves a surprising amount of room for innovation though. MS does it themselves with their own OS. Their attrocious decisions to change the Start menu in XP are a great example. The very first thing I do on a new XP install is turn the "new, enhanced" start menu off and go back to the old, far more usable system. New ideas aren't always great but as long as there's a fallback it's ok. Linux can innovate on these things too, I just hope they do a better job of it than MS did.

- Oshyan

2570

Living Room / Re: VisualComplexity gallery collection - very cool

« Last post by JavaJones on June 02, 2006, 02:18 AM »

Oh my, what a tremendous resource! This goes in my "Cool stuff" bookmarks folder for stuff that's too cool to bother classifying by anything else.

- Oshyan

2571

Living Room / Re: nice long review of music recommendation sites

« Last post by JavaJones on June 02, 2006, 01:03 AM »

Yeah, that's one of those things about Last.fm. To be honest I was only familiar with this aspect of it until reading this review - basically the "stats system" that reads what people are listening to and reports it. That didn't seem terribly interesting to me, it doesn't inherently help you find new, good music. It seems like Last.fm does have some other faclities for finding new tunes, but Pandora seems much more purpose-built for this. That's part of why I'm kind of annoyed at this review for its focus on the community aspect. There are lots of "music communities" that can help you find new music through peer recommendation, many of which aren't reviewed here (they don't qualify on all points in most cases). I kind of think of a "music recommendation site" as a place that has some custom system that *itself* recommends new music, so going into the review I was expecting to see some other cool technical solutions like Pandora's. To be honest I was excited to see what others might be doing along these lines - sophisticated technical solutions. Most of them aren't though, they're just regurgitations of existing systems, often times based in the likely-to-be-highly-flawed individual perception and opinion of non-experts. Not that only experts can determine what good music is, but the premise of Pandora is that people like music for a reason and that you can find out scientifically what that reason is. I think that's exciting, more so than any other project, and it seems to work fairly well in practice. Even if it does slip up sometimes the sheer promise and idea of it is IMO far more worthwhile to support than most of the other examples.

- Oshyan

2572

Living Room / Extremely cool visualization of global statistics over time.

« Last post by JavaJones on June 01, 2006, 10:48 PM »

Google and Gapminder have gotten together to create a very cool graphing visualizer of a bunch of interesting world statistics. And the coolest part is you can graph it over time and actually watch as the stats change! Compare average lifespan to number of physicians per capita and see if doctors really make us live longer - then watch the graph change over up to 50 years of data. Cool stuff.

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/



- Oshyan

2573

DonationCoder Projects / Re: SMF addon - attach images to personal messages

« Last post by JavaJones on June 01, 2006, 09:26 PM »

Not a bad idea. I can't say it's a real big concern for me but I might be willing to contribute torward it nonetheless as it's definitely a good feature to have.

- Oshyan

2574

Living Room / Re: nice long review of music recommendation sites

« Last post by JavaJones on June 01, 2006, 09:16 PM »

Good idea for a review. I honestly wasn't aware of any such systems besides Pandora. Having read the review I'm not sure I care though. Most of the other services either have limited media (30 second clips) or none at all. Personally I think their scoring was too lenient, or at least bunched at one end of the spectrum - above 5 of 10 (this is a common flaw in reviews). For example I would have expected LivePlasma to get a 5 at best from their description, but it got a 7. Pandora on the other hand scored only 2 points better than LivePlasma with a 9, yet they seemed quite impressed by it for the most part (aside some IMO minor complaints about recommendations getting old). But I guess their standards/needs aren't the same as mine. Personally I think if you're being recommended new music it's absolutely vital that you get to hear at least a little of it! Without that the recommendation is largely useless IMO, or at worst it encourages piracy.

Anyway I think I figured out what weighted their review most and that was the recommendations they received, followed closely by community support. The features and in fact most of the other criteria they listed seemed to weigh less heavily. Looking at Yahoo's low score of a 5 it seems largely due to the fact that it didn't introduce them to much new music. This may also explain their choice of Last.fm for the "winner", despite the fact that Pandora had a 9/10 score as well, and seemed to offer them a lot of good recommendations too. I can understand that leaning, it would just be nice if they were more up-front about it.

Nonetheless it does sound like Last.fm is great at what it does. Basically it's Pandora with community features but no "expert reviewed music recommendations", which is really what I like about Pandora. The Music Genome Project is an amazing idea IMO. Anyway so I don't personally feel Last.fm eclipses Pandora for *my* needs and interests, but it is more feature-rich which is nice.

Overall a decent review, just seemed a bit tilted. But maybe that's just because I like Pandora so much.

- Oshyan

2575

Developer's Corner / Re: web-based logo design companies

« Last post by JavaJones on June 01, 2006, 07:53 PM »

Freelance artists, coders, designers, etc. abound at http://www.getafreelancer.com/ and http://www.elance.com/ (the latter has the nicer system and probably higher quality talent in general).

- Oshyan