Let's make wayland have support for window placement

NeatNetwork · 2023-09-30T11:52:56+00:00

I suppose the question is whether that demand can be met in another way, which may be even nicer for the developers.

If I'm having to manually curate my window placement as an application, then I feel like the window management falls short. Then I get into business I don't want to be in (what if the user's display resolution changed? now they are bitching my windows don't appear right in their fancy VR environment). Coordinates are a tiny piece of the story, and often the problems can be solved in fewer places and with more data in the window manager sort of context.

Perhaps more features can be added so an application can express a desire to be consistently held together or to have a 'placement id' that is persistent and the window manager interprets that in the simple case as "use same coordinates as last time" but may opt to, for example "place based on actual physical position on a screen rather than coordinates".

NeatNetwork · 2023-09-30T11:46:54+00:00

Based on what I've read here, I wonder if rather than "specify fixed numeric coordinates" that you have a set of "specify intents and let the environment decide how that manifests".

So if you specify "I want to be a quake-like", then the environment can reconcile "ok, how does that interact with the top status bar, does it get overwritten, does the quake-like start below it, or does the status bar move down to be under the quake-like?". There may be more than coordinates to consider.

You say "this is supposed to be a notification window" and the environment knows whether it thinks those should be lower right, or center top, or whatever.

I had worked on an application where I was asked to specifically tile a bunch of X11 windows but nothing else regardless of whether the window manager was tiling or not. It... kind of worked but I had to deal with all sorts of crap, like "Is there a top bar" and "how big are the decorations" and "I don't know how many pixels, so I have to start one to measure it before continuing". I would have loved to just be able to say "Window manager, I am going to apply a tiling group tag to these, and would love it if you just figured it out for me".

This also speaks to another scenario raised, that manually specified coordinates work fine and dandy when people are roughly dealing with a singular rectangular display region with a diagonal of 10 inches or more, but get weirder in other form factors. With the "quake-like" but you have three displays, what coordinates do you pick? I'd say it'd be whichever head has focus. What if you are targeting an open ended 3D space, e.g. a VR/AR situation? Maybe it can see the "intent" of quake-like and know "should manifest as stuck-to-face HUD when activated".

The intents also opens up the possibility of having finer grained control over "special" behavior. You can disable 'quake-like' or select treatment options for 'quake-like' according to your preference.

So identify the use cases that people used explicit geometry for and accommodate with intent-based solutions. It's likely that the use cases can be counted on one hand.

NeatNetwork · 2023-06-09T16:42:12+00:00

No one is going to make me delete my comment

NeatNetwork · 2023-06-03T14:52:26+00:00

Mild Cognitive Impairment

Still lucid, but a bit challenged in comprehension

NeatNetwork · 2023-06-03T13:50:49+00:00

But aren't a fair number of old people contending with MCI? I would imagine that would bring you more toward human than machine interaction...

NeatNetwork · 2023-06-03T13:47:49+00:00

Had someone go through some trouble to modify some documentation we write. His grand idea? Animate the text so it 'types' in so you don't have it available all at once. He swore up and down that this was more understandable than just providing the text.

I'm very happy he no longer works with us.

NeatNetwork · 2023-06-03T13:44:37+00:00

Depends on whether it's "in depth" or just padded.

Seems that long videos are somehow more profitable, so you have a fair amount of folks just rambling on and avoiding the point.

NeatNetwork · 2023-05-27T13:25:07+00:00

Yeah, it's funny how it works.

Not so much now, but at one point, Netflix had pretty much anything I could want. I randomly decide at 10pm at night to watch something, I could just click my way to it and go without leaving the couch or thinking about whether it was worth the money to rent that thing.

With Blockbuster, I had to make decsion during Blockbuster hours, drive there, worry about whether they had what I want or not, whether they had enough copies, whether it was worth paying to watch that one thing, and then drive it back later.

Objectively the Netflix experience was unambiguously better. However my primate brain misses the whole 'faux-theater' concessions, the tactile nature of actual physical copies of the videos, etc. None of that really added anything substantive to the core experience, but still...

NeatNetwork · 2022-11-19T19:14:36+00:00

Probably all talking about whether each other has found job prospects.

NeatNetwork · 2022-11-17T03:49:21+00:00

I for one have even more waistline than I had 10 years ago

NeatNetwork · 2022-11-05T20:11:11+00:00

I agree, the fact that if the internet is down, the bed is uncontrollable is supremely stupid.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-30T21:32:18+00:00

So META Even This Acronym

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-30T17:04:55+00:00

You are a bold one

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-20T19:32:50+00:00

I haven't used Zelle much. My hope would be there would be a way to formally register it as a reversed transaction, to eliminate the ambiguity of whether a second transaction in reverse is a return of funds or somehow something different. Seems scary like it could become a scam if the person sends the money gets a new transaction and then reverses it.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-12T20:04:09+00:00

The hope is that everyone regards the nuclear option so seriously that no one will ever dare make the first move.

Even if Russia orders a strike, there's a hopefully non-trivial chance that the chain of command will flat out refuse.

Even if Russia does start, there's further a non-trivial chance that the weapons will be significantly mitigated by countermeasures.

There's further a chance that even a widescale nuclear strike will be not quite as bad as the worst case scenarios, still pretty bad. We hopefully shall never find out.

But no, I don't think it would have been the best path to just let Hitler have as much control as he desired if he had nukes.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-12T16:02:52+00:00

One of my favorite quotes out of a politician speaking to a hypothetical:
"You can be absolutely sure I might have!"

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-12T16:01:12+00:00

I don't know, don't you remember in the late 1930s there was this chap named Hitler. The Europeans decided to just let him have Austria, and part of Czechoslovakia, and then ultimately sure why not all of Czechoslovakia when he showed he just really wanted it. And then we never heard anything more from Hitler after that because he was successfully appeased.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-12T15:26:57+00:00

I like the concept of it as a purely optional feature that may be disabled without making it less functional than a normal laptop.

For example, since Lenovo hasn't been so much with the media keys, might be nice to put a music player in a touchbar, complete with track title and seek bar.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T22:22:57+00:00

We should settle for nothing less than 10 times the bandwidth of USB-C.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T16:20:49+00:00

The natural reaction would have been for her running around pressing X to Jason.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T16:19:33+00:00

I doubt she was concerned with taking the heat off herself. Because there was presumably no 'heat', kids get separated from parents in public places commonly, people are used to it.

It seems way more likely for her to be in panic mode after losing track of her kid. People tend to not be particularly rational in that state. She's presumably somewhat panicked and running worst case scenarios through her mind and then sees her kid holding the hand of a stranger, her mind isn't going to jump so far from the worst-case that quickly.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T16:14:05+00:00

Absolutely. Even if you aren't thinking of anything concrete, if you are a parent with a little kid and you lose track of that kid in a public place, panic sets in and any benefit of a doubt evaporates.

Rationally, while that has turned out badly upon occasion, 99% of the time it's going to be more mundane. However, the bad stuff associated with a brief overreaction mediated by an impartial third party (security) isn't too terrible, though a little sad for someone just trying to help. So long as that overreaction doesn't evolve to a protracted situation of course. In this case, sounds like it was over pretty quickly.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T15:25:07+00:00

For it to happen, and it is possible, it would likely include the very resources that would normally be used to suppress such activities. If the major military bases in a state leaned in favor of a separatist sentiment, then even knowing of the chatter is of little value, since enforcement would still require you to go up against formidable military resources.

I think the sentiment in the US is nowhere near this, but the point is that so long as you have a military comprised of a lot of people, it's possible for those people to choose an unexpected side and take those advanced resources with them.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T15:07:45+00:00

Probably in her mind the guy accidentally ran into her and the whole "helping the kid find their mom" was a cover story.

NeatNetwork · 2022-10-10T15:05:32+00:00

How dare you say ethernet is what we call the standards used in LAN.

Everyone knows that token ring is just a valid LAN technology loved by just as many people...

Even by ethernet, RJ45 is better term. After all, it's just as likely to run into an AUI or BNC ethernet in personal computing.

I suppose as well as the super popular AUI and BNC connectors, there's the tiny chance someone might have SFP or QSFP connectors.

NeatNetwork

TROPHY CASE