Comment Re:eDonkey (Score 1) 260
If I am not wrong, you have to log into Opera before you are allowed to start the Unite server. So even if you don't need their proxy service, in case opera.com is down or blocked, you won't be able to use Unite.
Comment Story's title is flamebait (Score 5, Interesting) 414
It's not shutting down to force updates, it's shutting down when the trial period expires.
This is well known, was discussed here several times and is clearly mentioned on the Microsoft download page.
To be honest it seems like slashdot has more stories about Microsoft than about Free software.
Comment Guns Germs and Steel (Score 1) 451
I believe Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond will probably be regarded as a classic a couple of years from now.
Comment Re:An effort underway (Score 5, Funny) 685
Thanks for effort. I just hope you will have the time to do it while still following the other piece of news you have posted on your blog regarding the immediate annexation of Mexico by the U.S...
Comment Re:NoScript makes the web useless. (Score 1) 653
I don't use NoScript but I do use FlashGot which is made by the same company. The frequent updates really smell fishy and are getting quite annoying. I'll probably simply uninstall it the next time they update.
Comment Re:Hardware demands match? (Score 1) 785
I find that any new installation of Windows works better than the one I had installed previously, even if I am reinstalling the same version.
Windows performance tends to be slower as time goes by (the infamous windows rot
Submission + - RIAA Wins First Trial, Takes 220K for 24 songs
krelian writes: Sad but true.
Submission + - Microsoft to test ad-supported version of Works (reuters.com)
krelian writes: Works is the Microsoft's basic spreadsheet and word processing software. Microsoft now plans to offer a free but ad supported version of the software through OEM's.
"Unlike Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which are delivered through an Internet browser, Microsoft plans to pre-install Works on computers and display advertisements stored in cache. The software normally retails for $39.99. When a user connects to the Internet while using Works, that cache of ads will refresh, said Melissa Stern, a Microsoft senior product manager in the Office group."
"Unlike Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which are delivered through an Internet browser, Microsoft plans to pre-install Works on computers and display advertisements stored in cache. The software normally retails for $39.99. When a user connects to the Internet while using Works, that cache of ads will refresh, said Melissa Stern, a Microsoft senior product manager in the Office group."
Submission + - Microsoft Is Still Growing
krelian writes: Microsoft rarely breaks out its specific product revenue, but that's what the chief financial officer did yesterday. In a rare moment of nuts-and-bolts disclosure, Chris Liddell laid out fiscal year-end revenue for seven products during Microsoft's annual Financial Analysts Meeting.
Microsoft-Watch complains that Windows and Office are not on the list but I guess it is pretty difficult to show a 20% growth rate on a product that already has 90% market share.
Microsoft-Watch complains that Windows and Office are not on the list but I guess it is pretty difficult to show a 20% growth rate on a product that already has 90% market share.
Submission + - BeanShell gets renewed life from community
DalDei writes: "Developers following the BeanShell language got some excitement last week as a slew of posts on the beanshell-users forum brought up the old topic of updates.
Beanshell hasnt had an update in several years, causing many users to feel concerned with known bugs over 170 and very little comments from the authors. Suggestions about forking the source so that bugs could be fixed by the community brought the attention of the author, Patrick Niemeyer who commented about BeanShell's future. Userlist messages can be found on the Beanshell Archive. Particularly notworth are comments from Patrick namely,
=== Quote ======
Here are some things that have happened in the past few months:
1) We added a new member to the JSR-274 expert group: Tom Copeland, who recently wrote a book on JavaCC.
2) Oracle negotiated a non-LGPL license for BeanShell for use in their products.
3) Dan Leuck and I have resumed planning for a BeanShell book.
4) I have continued to make plans for how we're going to approach BeanShell 3.0. I want the next release to be a significant refactoring that rebases BeanShell on a newer Java version and makes it much more accessible and easier to work on for everyone.
========== End Quote ===========
The pace of progress, however, has not satisfied everyone so a BeanShell fork has been created at http://code.google.com/p/beanshell2/ for the purpose of bug fixes and enhancements of BeanShell. Only time will tell if this garners enough userbase to become successful."
=== Quote ======
Here are some things that have happened in the past few months:
1) We added a new member to the JSR-274 expert group: Tom Copeland, who recently wrote a book on JavaCC.
2) Oracle negotiated a non-LGPL license for BeanShell for use in their products.
3) Dan Leuck and I have resumed planning for a BeanShell book.
4) I have continued to make plans for how we're going to approach BeanShell 3.0. I want the next release to be a significant refactoring that rebases BeanShell on a newer Java version and makes it much more accessible and easier to work on for everyone.
========== End Quote ===========
The pace of progress, however, has not satisfied everyone so a BeanShell fork has been created at http://code.google.com/p/beanshell2/ for the purpose of bug fixes and enhancements of BeanShell. Only time will tell if this garners enough userbase to become successful."
Submission + - Sun Says OSS Developers Need To Be Compensated
krelian writes: "Talking at Netbeans Day, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doubts about the current model in which open-source developers create free intellectual property and have others scoop it up to generate huge amounts of revenue.
"It really is a worrisome social artifact," Green said. "I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do.""
Submission + - Brazil to break AIDS drug patents
Lisandro writes: "BBC News reports that Brazil will become the first country to to break patents on an AIDS treatment drug. The drug, called Nelfinavir, is patented by Roche, and the move aims to reduce its' cost as much as 40% by allowing generic versions of the drug to be produced by third parties."
Submission + - The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Trent Lucier writes: "NOTE TO EDITORS: Hello, my name is Trent Lucier. I've reviewed several books for you in the past. This is a review of a new book that would probably be of interest to some of your readers. If you need to reach me, my email is spacerook@gmail.com. Thanks!
Fellow programmers, beware! Graphic designers have been invading our territory. A flood of books have been released aimed at artists who want to learn web development skills. Oh, it starts innocently enough, usually with CSS and XHTML. But soon they are learning JavaScript, PHP, and even SQL! What have we techies fought back with? What material is there for us to boost our artistic right-brain power? Sadly, our motley collection of Gimp tutorials alone will not win this battle. We need something stronger. We need to understand the principles of graphic design. But the shelves have been empty of books that make this topic accessible to tech-minded people. Well, empty until now, that is.
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird is aimed at developers who want to learn how to make websites look more attractive. The 5 chapters each cover one of the pillars of graphic design theory: Layout, Color, Texture, Typography, and Imagery. Full-color and packed with lots of great examples, the book contains screenshots from dozens of modern websites to illustrate graphic design principles. A cumulative case-study ends each chapter, where the author shows you how the theories he just explained can be applied to a real site he is developing for a client.
Except for some CSS sprinkled here and there, the book contains no code. Don't look for tips on creating 3-column layouts or other stylesheet wizardry, because you won't find it here. The author assumes that you know how to take an image mock-up and convert it into an HTML/CSS document. This is a strong point of the book, since the focus can remain on graphic design techniques and not unnecessary code listings Additionally, there isn't much discussion of tool usage. A few examples use Photoshop, but the book focuses mostly on theory and case studies, not step-by-step program tutorials.
The book starts with Layout and Composition. If you have ever wondered why some websites just look better organized than others, this chapter will explain why. Beaird discusses the concepts of grid theory, and how using the golden ratio to divide page elements can improve the visual appeal. Plenty of examples are given that illustrate the principles of balance, unity, and emphasis.
The Color chapter contains my favorite example, where Beaird uses different versions of the same drawing to describe monochromatic, analogous, and complementary colors. As with the previous chapter on layout, this part of the book does an excellent job of teaching you how to learn from attractive websites, instead of mindlessly imitating them. Color is a hard topic to understand, but there are some good tips here that teach readers how to create an appealing palette for a website.
Relying solely on solid colors and grid layouts can make a website look flat. The Texture chapter discusses ways to use style and make your designs much more eye catching. This chapter is probably the most "Web 2.0" chapter in the book. Gel buttons, gradients, and backgrounds are all discussed.
To the dismay of typophiles everywhere, font support on the web is very poor. There are very few "web safe" fonts that designers can safely assume are on all computers. The Typography section shows readers how to make the most out of this situation by understanding letter spacing, justification, and font usage. Beaird also discusses the sIFR technique (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which uses Flash and Javascript to display fonts that may not be on the user's computer. The sIFR method is accessible and degrades gracefully. While the book does not discuss the specific implementation details of this method, just bringing it to my attention taught me something new.
Imagery is the subject of the final chapter, and the book ends on a disappointing note. Very little of this section is about the graphic design principles behind imagery. Rather, precious pages are dedicated to discussing various license agreements and tips on finding stock photos. This is useful information, but it should have been relegated to a sidebar at the most. The chapter focuses almost entirely on images as content and not as design elements. If you want to know how to make images in a blog post look pretty, there are some ideas here (drop-shadows, borders). But there is no information about how to work images into a page header or navigation menu. How do I determine if an image matches my color scheme? How can images spice up a design without going overboard? These were just some of the questions I had going into this chapter that were left unanswered. The Texture chapter hinted at these ideas with examples, but I wanted to see a deeper explanation of the underlying principles.
The book is a little short at 180 pages, but that's not as bad as it may seem. Those of us accustomed to reading 800-page tomes on programming tend to forget how much content can be packed into a book when the author doesn't have to waste 300 pages listing code, 200 pages on the API, and 150 pages on an index.
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a good book to kick start your graphic-design journey. The biggest benefit that I got from this book is the knowledge to learn from great designs as opposed to just admiring them in a state of awe. The book could have been a little longer, and some of the topics could have been discussed in more detail. This book won't teach you everything, but it's a good place to start and it will leave you excited about learning more.
Trent Lucier is a software engineer. He is the creator of ChessUp, a tool for creating chess diagrams online."
Fellow programmers, beware! Graphic designers have been invading our territory. A flood of books have been released aimed at artists who want to learn web development skills. Oh, it starts innocently enough, usually with CSS and XHTML. But soon they are learning JavaScript, PHP, and even SQL! What have we techies fought back with? What material is there for us to boost our artistic right-brain power? Sadly, our motley collection of Gimp tutorials alone will not win this battle. We need something stronger. We need to understand the principles of graphic design. But the shelves have been empty of books that make this topic accessible to tech-minded people. Well, empty until now, that is.
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird is aimed at developers who want to learn how to make websites look more attractive. The 5 chapters each cover one of the pillars of graphic design theory: Layout, Color, Texture, Typography, and Imagery. Full-color and packed with lots of great examples, the book contains screenshots from dozens of modern websites to illustrate graphic design principles. A cumulative case-study ends each chapter, where the author shows you how the theories he just explained can be applied to a real site he is developing for a client.
Except for some CSS sprinkled here and there, the book contains no code. Don't look for tips on creating 3-column layouts or other stylesheet wizardry, because you won't find it here. The author assumes that you know how to take an image mock-up and convert it into an HTML/CSS document. This is a strong point of the book, since the focus can remain on graphic design techniques and not unnecessary code listings Additionally, there isn't much discussion of tool usage. A few examples use Photoshop, but the book focuses mostly on theory and case studies, not step-by-step program tutorials.
The book starts with Layout and Composition. If you have ever wondered why some websites just look better organized than others, this chapter will explain why. Beaird discusses the concepts of grid theory, and how using the golden ratio to divide page elements can improve the visual appeal. Plenty of examples are given that illustrate the principles of balance, unity, and emphasis.
The Color chapter contains my favorite example, where Beaird uses different versions of the same drawing to describe monochromatic, analogous, and complementary colors. As with the previous chapter on layout, this part of the book does an excellent job of teaching you how to learn from attractive websites, instead of mindlessly imitating them. Color is a hard topic to understand, but there are some good tips here that teach readers how to create an appealing palette for a website.
Relying solely on solid colors and grid layouts can make a website look flat. The Texture chapter discusses ways to use style and make your designs much more eye catching. This chapter is probably the most "Web 2.0" chapter in the book. Gel buttons, gradients, and backgrounds are all discussed.
To the dismay of typophiles everywhere, font support on the web is very poor. There are very few "web safe" fonts that designers can safely assume are on all computers. The Typography section shows readers how to make the most out of this situation by understanding letter spacing, justification, and font usage. Beaird also discusses the sIFR technique (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which uses Flash and Javascript to display fonts that may not be on the user's computer. The sIFR method is accessible and degrades gracefully. While the book does not discuss the specific implementation details of this method, just bringing it to my attention taught me something new.
Imagery is the subject of the final chapter, and the book ends on a disappointing note. Very little of this section is about the graphic design principles behind imagery. Rather, precious pages are dedicated to discussing various license agreements and tips on finding stock photos. This is useful information, but it should have been relegated to a sidebar at the most. The chapter focuses almost entirely on images as content and not as design elements. If you want to know how to make images in a blog post look pretty, there are some ideas here (drop-shadows, borders). But there is no information about how to work images into a page header or navigation menu. How do I determine if an image matches my color scheme? How can images spice up a design without going overboard? These were just some of the questions I had going into this chapter that were left unanswered. The Texture chapter hinted at these ideas with examples, but I wanted to see a deeper explanation of the underlying principles.
The book is a little short at 180 pages, but that's not as bad as it may seem. Those of us accustomed to reading 800-page tomes on programming tend to forget how much content can be packed into a book when the author doesn't have to waste 300 pages listing code, 200 pages on the API, and 150 pages on an index.
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a good book to kick start your graphic-design journey. The biggest benefit that I got from this book is the knowledge to learn from great designs as opposed to just admiring them in a state of awe. The book could have been a little longer, and some of the topics could have been discussed in more detail. This book won't teach you everything, but it's a good place to start and it will leave you excited about learning more.
Trent Lucier is a software engineer. He is the creator of ChessUp, a tool for creating chess diagrams online."
Submission + - Best Money Management Software?
An anonymous reader writes: I want to start managine my personal finances on my computer. What's the best software program to use? I hear good things about Quicken and Microsoft Money, but are any of those open source financial programs any good? (JCash, GNUcash, Grisbi, etc.)
Submission + - Fantasy novel serialized on web
Jon Lundy writes: Lawrence Watt Evans has been serializing novels using a donation strategy. His traditional publishers found weren't interested in the series, but his fans were. His second novel is almost done at http://www.ethshar.com/thevondishambassador0.html.
This seems to be an interesting alternative to the current publishing mechanisms, where the readers and writer can use the internet directly to get a book published, that the traditional publishing house wasn't interested in.
This seems to be an interesting alternative to the current publishing mechanisms, where the readers and writer can use the internet directly to get a book published, that the traditional publishing house wasn't interested in.
