Bill Sux

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Hi Joerg and Ban You should try some of the Spanish techy websites for utter lack of content. Most only have a front page, and phone number. Many have links that all point to the guy digging up the road with a very nice yellow background. This applies to biggish organisations as well.

It's about the only thing I miss after leaving the UK, just good simple easy to get around websites in Spanish, that work.

Its just the way of life here, somewhat relaxed. But when they really want to they can do it, say

martin

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DAMMIT.... forgot to eat again.....

martin

That's probably because the files are not really there - windows puts stuff in other directories, and has the registry point them to other places. Plug the drive in another computer and you will find some weird things with some folders. The font folder, recycle bin, temp internet files, etc become merged, i.e. you can access the two drives from the same folder

You may be right about the intellect, but this is an add-on office software which is not bundeled with XPpro and works with other Win versions as well.

I give you an example for an IMHO acceptable home page. I would make a second column to not scroll down too much, but there are pretty no-frills still with much better fonts. The rollover is quite well made, saves you clicks and waiting times.

What's really disturbing is that XP *Professional* defaults to such cartoonish behaviour.

Is this a reflection on the state of the average US intellect ?

Graham

Read the rest of the site too.

- YD.

AGREED!

In my last Registry snafu a number of my old programs didn't need reinstallation because they run entirely based on an INI file.

File associations could be done the same way.

...Jim Thompson

When you copy a file to a new directory, it would be *nice* if its SFN was the same there.

Stick the SFN in the registry, copy/move the file somewhere else and everything breaks, just as it does in WinBlows.

Agreed, but its there. Their "dynamic" LFN-> SFN translation makes things much worse. If it were a static translation things would be better.

You insult duct tape.

They did neither. As I said earlier, OS/2 has(had) it all over Win, except customers were suckered into Bill's trap.

At Zetex, if you click on Datasheet, it pops up a small window that has a link to the datasheet. Why?

And National, when you click Datasheet, jumps you down the same page to where there's the actual link to the datasheet.

John

The SFN was supposed to be human readable (used for DOS compatibility). DOS programs can't figure out LFNs. 99.44% of them would overflow their stack if you entered a LFN.

Nah, just Redmond.

Washington (both of 'em).

My main system at home is SuSE 9.1 (64bit), but use Win2K at work. I also have an old (K6-III) system at home that I use for my digital camera and Linux unfriendly printers. My work laptop is Win2k because, well, it is.

Don't forget the intentional incompatibilities.

That's how OS/2 worked, but Billy had a better idea. One could simply drag an application from one disk to another and it would still work. One could drag it across a network and it would work too. ;-)

Coulda-woulda-shoulda. It was all done before M$ broke it.

Why does the mapping have to be kept?

When a file is deleted, the space for it in the directory is marked as no longer in use. The a file created later may reuse that slot. The numbers would not change a lot.

Every long file would have a SFN that could be used to make a DOS program work. This seems to me to be the enough.

You could also ask why Windoze uses the registry method at all. They managed to make a binary file format that is slower to process than an ASCII one.

Microsoft had the chance at Win95 to create a really good OS and missed it. They had a second chance on the NT effort and missed again. Now they've taken some of the code from the NT line and some from the Win95 line and a bunch of digital duct tape and made XP.

Doing large software projects is all about subdividing the problem. The obvious first way to divide the PC problem is to make a good 32 bit multitasking OS and a good UI program to run on it. Microsoft didn't do this.

In Netscape 4.8 the links render as a different color with underlines (good), but the main text is black on dark grey (bad).

In IE 6 the links are NOT underlined, you can't tell they are links until the mouse goes over them and then their backgrounds change (VERY bad) but at least the text is white on grey (so-so).

NO. Luserish site. Bad design. Useability has been SERIOUSLY impaired, and for what? No discernable advantage.

This may be good design for people selling overpriced blue jeans to clueless yuppies, but the impairment of useability will seriously turn off any real engineer.

Links are NOT underlined even in Netscape 4.8, nor with IE.

PEOPLE WHO SACRIFICE FUNCTIONALITY AND VIOLATE USEABILITY CONVENTIONS IN THE NAME OF "AESTHETICS" SHOW, THEREBY, THAT THEY REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND EITHER. (MHOO, YMMV) Links are supposed to be underlined to show what is a link and what is not. Making users search for links impairs useability. When functionality gets degraded, then the site is less useful. (Duh!) Any compensatory benefit would have to be pretty large to compensate. I don't think there are any compensatory benefits for the sacrifices in either of those sites.

I think, Ban, on this you and I can only agree to disagree. You WILL never convince me that such a loss of functionality is justified by any form of "making pretty". And, apparently, you don't mind it.

But consider: How about we rearrange all the locations of keys on your keyboard? I think the Dvorak layout is much prettier than QWERTY. Or we could just start with "A" in the upper left corner and go by whatever Alphabetical order is commonest in Italy, spiraling in form the outside, since spirals a prettier than rows and columns.

Where would you draw the line at smashing function in order to achieve pretty?

In article , Keith Williams wrote: [...]

Its only *nice* to have the names stay the same.

Even that could be handled. The SFN could be based on the time of file creation in nanoseconds or something. In base 36, an 8 digit number is over 10^12. You could use 3 characters from the LFN and 8 digits.

No, no, no, Never ever put a SFN in the registry. Get rid of the registry. Kill the person who thought of the registry. Play it safe nuke the city he was born in just in case.

Maybe we should take out the planet he can from too, just to be safe!

The machine I'm using is SuSE-8.2. My work machine is SuSE-9.1. DOS programs work better under DOSEMU than under XP. I have DOS stuff I still need to use. All well written Windows programs[1] work well under wine. LTSpice runs faster under wine than XP.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Ken Smith wrote (in ) about 'Bill Sux', on Fri, 19 Aug 2005:

According to some people here, we are doing just that. I hope they are wrong.

Hello Ban,

This one is fine.

This one isn't all that nice. When you click MOSFET Discretes two things happen that shouldn't:

1. It opens up a new window. Why on earth is that needed?

1. It starts the dreaded trade name game: COOL MOS, Trench Gate... What's that good for? All people usually want is a selection list with Vmax and Vgs versus guaranteed Rdson. One list, not several sorted by some trademark name or market segment (automotive, consumer...).

Regards, Joerg

Hello John,

It seems that most people designing web sites do not have an engineering background. But at least those two companies keep the fluff in check.

It gets worse when you look at how a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, keep track of financials and other massive data amounts. They often use spreadsheets instead of databases. I never understood why.

Regards, Joerg

I read in sci.electronics.design that Joerg wrote (in ) about 'Larkins website sucks[was Re: Bill Sux]', on Fri, 19 Aug 2005:

For me, it's because Excel help and manuals are written in something approaching English. Access help and manuals use English words, but the actual language is something incomprehensible to me. The text might as well be in Japanese.