Slashdot Mirror
Usability and Open Source Software
Martin Soto writes "This article by two user interaction researchers, discusses many of the usability problems in current open source projects. The nice part is that, unlike many /. readers, it doesn't stop there, but goes into suggesting novel (at least for the OSS community) approaches to cope with those problems in an open source compatible way. Worth a read to those that, like me, still think that OSS should find its way to every desktop computer."
PA denies Sharon charge that Al-Qaida present in PA areas
By Ha'aretz Service and Agencies
A Palestinian official denied Thursday a statement by Prime Minister Ariel Ariel Sharon that there is an Al-Qaida presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Sharon said earlier in the day Thursday that Israel has for some time been aware of Al-Qaida militants entering Palestinian-controlled areas in the territories.
Rashid Abu Shbak, chief of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza denied the charge and said Israel was looking for an excuse to invade Gaza, where it often launches raids to hunt militants. In Lebanon, a Hezbollah official declined to comment.
Abu Shbak dismissed Sharon's charges and said Israel knew there were no Al-Qaida operatives or cells in the Strip.
"This is the sort of justification the Israeli leadership is trying to market for the Americans to launch a strike against the Gaza Strip," Abu Shbak said.
Sharon, however, said that Israel has intelligence suggesting an Al-Qaida were indeed present in PA-ruled areas.
"For some time we have received reports of Al-Qaida members entering [Palestinian areas]," the prime minister told a meeting of news editors at Beit Sokolov in Tel Aviv.
"The reports at the moment are of the presence of a few [Al-Qaida members] in the Gaza Strip," he said. "We know that they are there. We know that they are in Lebanon, working closely with Hezbollah. We know that they are in the region."
Sharon said that while Israel was a target for a terror attack by the militant orgnization, he believed that the country was taking the necessary steps to defend itself.
"There is no doubt that Israel is a target for an attack, but we are... taking all the [necessary] steps," Sharon said, adding that he felt today the country has more forces at its disposal to thwart an attack than in the past.
Is there a competiting website called . / now?
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
First post!
Pain(n): when you're telnetting into a box doing somethin cool, and some luser calls for help with a 'critical error' ad
fp
I love to cum in her butthole; it's like asian heaven in purple heaven.
"As You are, I was; as I am, so you will be"
Heinrich Himmler
Bocksburg Party Rally
7 November 1937
The weird thing is that I actually got to where I could read the whole thing backwards. Hmm, maybe I should try reading some hebrew sometime.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
I'm impressed with how far open source has come. From the days when you could spend a week trying to figure out what your monitor's horizontal refresh rate was just to get X running under Slackware, to the wizard-style installs of RedHat, the installation process (as mentioned in the article) has come a long way.
I just recently came back to try to set up a dedicated Linux server on an old PC. I was going to put some custom servlets on there, so I wanted Apache and Tomcat installed.
Apache came with the RedHat installation I did, but not Tomcat. No problem. I download an RPM of Tomcat and install it fairly easily (although I have to RTFM to figure out how to install the RPM).
After that, it took me three days to get Apache to talk to Tomcat. After installing, uninstalling, and finally compiling an entirely new build of Apache, I got the webapp connector to work, only to find it was broken. Some more futzing around and trying to read the broken-English documentation of the mod_jk2 connector and I finally got it working. I'm a developer with fifteen years' experience, I'm not a newbie here. I can fly circles around all but the most experienced vi user, but this was a baffling array of too many choices, not enough guidance, and no friendly setup.
Other usability problems I encountered included:
1. The graphical tool for configuring Apache provided by RedHat doesn't like you touching the config file with any other editor, but it doesn't provide all the functionality either. So, the minute you have to touch the config file with an editor, your user-friendly tool breaks.
2. I had three choices for everything. Did I want to use Tomcat as my main server? Integrate with Apache? What directories did I want to integrate? Which of three different connectors that do exactly the same thing did I want to use? (Hint: whichever one that just works). As a first-time user, I didn't want a choice, I wanted a decision.
In contrast, the first time I ever set up a servlet engine on a Windows NT box (and this was in the bad-old-days) the procedure was:
Double click installer, click next about five times, select "IIS" and hit "Finish." Took me less than an hour--the first time. Sure, it probably wasn't tuned to perfection, but it worked.
With the success of the Linux installers being so easy, it appears that usability is making inroads...but it's not there yet.
If you want to waste your whole life living in the past, then join the Palestinians.
Today, Palestinians ARE terrorists!
I heard it was located IN SOVIET RUSSIA!
10 YOU SUCK
20 GOTO 10
..government is drafted into doing what PEOPLE want!