Are banks giving out loans for dot com startups still? Or is that a thing of the past, like dinosaur-powered rocket skates?

I don't know what you just said to me, but you opened up, so you special!

Why?

Because it doesn't matter. Check out Steve Krug's website. One of the masters of usability; it's plain and ugly. Amazon's original design was horrendous - and massively profitable.

Usability trumps pretty every single time, and pretty and usable is both hard to do and very, very expensive.

because we are human.... you can't just pretend our aesthetic reactions aren't part of our experiences.
do you think apple products are so popular just because they are "more usable"?






i agree with this, doesn't imply pretty doesnt matter.
totally disagree. keep in mind there are degrees of pretty, too. it's not a 100% either or thing.

not to mention, "pretty" usually also means unusable. i agree with Zurvan that to do both is hard and is partly why apple is good at what it does

semi-related, i dont know if i found this pic here or what, but i like it

you guys are making this way too complex, or are missing point. For example on Reddit I can find css on userstyles.org that makes it look better and changes the usability not at all. It's not "hard" to take a couple hours and think about your styles and make them a little more pleasing. My initial post was simply pointing out that these massive sites did not even appear to have done that.....

For future reference, no-one should have bother compressing video to a small size easily these days. Handbrake is absolutely fantastic and will pretty much convert anything your computer can play down to a tiny M4V that plays even on xbox

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

It never gets old.

Juk

so good.

But the thing with userstyles.org is it has tons of options and YOU can find the one YOU like best. Reddit, were they to change their style, would have to find the one that the MOST people would like most of the time, and that the other people wouldn't hate. That's why design is so hard, because so much of it is about finding a universally appealing aesthetic.

yeah i get that changing it at this point is a tough business decision, and probably one that doesn't make sense.

Hey guys, bit of a long-shot.

Just wondering if anyone in the UK has any Python books for beginners and would be willing to accept Stars as a payment?

Thanks

I'm currently trying to figure out a linux distro to start with, and this **** is soooo confusing.

I would like to try KDE. I also need to develop in Python and Lisp, along with whatever else I'll be picking up along the way.

I also want to make it run from a 16gb USB thumb drive.

I'm sure after another 10 weeks of pondering and studying, I'll figure out something. No wonder why "the year of the Linux" isn't here yet. Wow. **** choices. I don't want them.

don't run it from a thumbdrive. slowness.

I use Kubuntu, it's great.

Why aren't you just Ubuntu'ing?

Just use Ubuntu with KDE? Kubuntu?

I really don't want to use a thumb-drive, but I sort of have to ATM. I'm setting to buy a new computer in the near future, so I'm happy to just try some stuff out before going crazy and repartitioning the HD, etc.

I don't care too much about slowness. I bought the USB just to test it out. The next rig will be dual-booted for sure. My current computer is 1G RAM with XP, intel Atom netbook.

I found an i3, 4G RAM, 360GB brand new for $360. It's marked down considerably, but I think I can get that one.

Why don't I buy (blank)? The above paragraph has a keyword in it that should make the answer obvious.

yeah, Kubuntu is just normal ubuntu with all the KDE stuff instead of gnome/unity.

There's a way to install it to a file on your HDD, "wubi" installer I think not sure. saves the bother of repartitioning, trivial performance hit. Pretty sure it pops up when you run the CD from windows. or you could always use virtualbox. USB stick performance can be epic bad.

dude, did you read the man files?????



UR SUCH A LOSER LOL


disclaimer: that was a knock at linux enthusiasts

kubuntu is a fine option. slowness due to usb's inherent slowness should only be an issue at boot time; once you're running, most stuff will be cached in RAM (unless you try to run a million services. and i guess KDE + X server is kind of a pig. but 1GB ought to be enough).

Running a server off a USB? That would be pretty year 2150 of me.

Got, Kubuntu up and running. I can already see this will be a learning curve: go to menu and all I see is a red X that says "exit." I wasn't sure if that meant exit Kubuntu or exit the menu. I pressed it and it exits the menu.

After some searching around, I found the file manager. This is quite the 'where is everything?' experience if you are used to looking at 500 folders on the left side. Regardless, I have Emacs on the USB drive somewhere and I couldn't find the KDE equivalent to D: drive.

I'm not sure how to open the browser configuration. I have the page open and I am looking at it.

Booting from the USB isn't that slow really. If I had to compare the boot time to an unmodified fresh install of Windows, loading everything on the OS no one on earth needs, then a fresh install of Kubuntu is about the same.

I will say that the layout and look is very beautiful, though I am itching to modify the UI ASAP. There is a bunch of crap in my face I never use, so as soon as I find the trash can and uninstall section, I'm going to have something that closer resembles a command line, I think (tbh, I was thinking of downloading ADMIM so I could start at command line and have nothing much else on it).

So far, I like the search function, the look, and a few other things. I can't wait to dive in, but when I think about how long I took to really learn Windows, man....

Was Googling around for some OCR stuff for an idea I had and found out about AutoIT.

Question, why has the poker community seemingly standardized on AHK as opposed to AutoIT?

I tried to find out which is better and more popular and it seems to be AutoIT.

Most of the reason everything is developed in AHK is because everything is developed in AHK. When I joined the forums this was already the case, so you have to look further back than that.

As for comparing them
autoIT versus autohotkey on autohotkey.com
AutoHotKey vs AutoIt on autoitscript.com
AutoHotKey on autoitscript.com

I couldn't find a big thread on the AutoIt forums like AHK, so those are the two biggest threads I found on the topic.

I think it was Roland, _dave_ and SamIAm who started the trend: basically once they started writing lots of scripts and releasing their source it became very easy to knock other similar stuff up using their code snippets to help you (especially since most scripts were kept together on the [now dead] overcards.com Wiki)... From then on I think it just snowballed as more and more people got into writing scripts.

Juk

I've only used AHK once, but from my short experience with it I much prefer autoit and have always wondered about AHK's popularity here too....

As others have indicated first mover advantage. If the first few "poker developers" had used AutoIt then it would like dominate.

Most people (especially beginers) learn by doing. A generic tutorial on AHK or AutoIt doesn't really help them figure out how to do "x" in poker client.

Person 1 writes an AHK script. Person 2 knows nothing about scripting uses AHK script as a template to make 2nd AHK scipt. Third newb comes along sees two AHK scripts, takes parts form each and makes a third, etc.

5000 scripts later you have a crtical mass and it s unlikely that dynamic will change. Likely you could find other niches (like a particular video game) where AutoIt had the first mover status and the roles are reversed. The relative merits have much less to do with it than the first mover status. It is hard to be "almost as good as Ebay".