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Whose Desktop Would You Most Like To See?
An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever been curious about what someone else's computing environment looks like? Would you like to see what tools and products someone like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, George Bush, or Steve Jobs uses on a daily basis? What percentage of time is spent browsing the web, working in spreadsheets, programming, debugging, designing, or writing documents? How many monitors or devices do they have attached to their PC? What kind of security or anonymizers do they have in place?" For good or ill, open source developers' desktops at least are often visible in screenshots of their pet projects.
Personally, I'd love to see which distro Linus uses (or whether he still rolls his own).
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
we already know what George Bush's desktop looks like.
The shareholder is always right.
Linus uses Red Hat at work, and SuSE at Home.
I'd really love to see what tools they were using/are using still, when coding the vehicles. In fact, I really think Slashdot should try hard to get some info from the development team as to what OS they're running on those little vehicles, not to mention the basic hardware platform. It would be a real eye-opener, in fact, if it was discovered that they were using off-the-shelf components for the core computing systems, or if the specs turn out to be less complex than current-generation mini-itx class boards you can buy on the open market.
:)
They're supposedly a publicly-funded scientific project, so it would be revealing in itself if they refused to answer, claiming the need for secrecy. I dare you to file some FOIAs, Timothy
Get off my launchpad!
I would like to see what Neal Stephenson's desktop looks like, as well as his editor of choice.
Have you ever been curious about what someone else's computing environment looks like?
No. No I have not. I have been so not curious that the very question takes me aback.
Is this something like "Geeks Uncensored" or the "Weekly Geek News"? What's the favorite programing language of the Bat Boy anyway? Are we going to see Linus throwing his jacket over his monitor as the paparazzi descend upon him?
What a peculiar concept.
KFG
Its been reported (too lazy to provide a link) that W. doesn't use email. He doesn't trust it, course in his position I'd have reservations if he time for email.
As for his .emacs file, last time I looked, it wasn't empty, but contained a few lines to turn off the default disabling of novice-confusing commands like narrow-to-window, and I think he also enables debug-on-error. It no serious customization to speak of though. As someone else mentioned, he's presumably set up Emacs's defaults the way he already likes them.
In recent years because of injuries, he's often had to get other people to type for him while he tells them what to type ("control-F, meta-d, blah blah"). That wouldn't show up in a screen shot either, but somehow seems like it should be part of the picture. Typing for him is an interesting experience if you don't have to do it for too long. Volunteer for it sometime if the situation arises, I'm sure he'll appreciate it.
Actually when he was in Texas, he was pretty active email user. But his lawyers suggested he stopped using email after moving to WH.
I have always dreamed of seeing the setup of those who work on the low-level stuff in BSD and Linux, especially today.
There are so many tools and configurations that the ultimate programmers could use to help them.
i saw the console of one of the people who worked on BSD in the late 70s and 80s...
Surprisingly, he was running Redhat 8, (almost) default install.
The default install includes such great applications like OpenOffice and Mozilla.
However, he never used those applications.
Also, he had X with GNOME installed.
However, he never used X.
I also notice vi and emacs were installed. Everyone who uses seriously uses console likes either vi or emacs (but never both).
However, he never used vi or emacs.
Yes, he installed Redhat 9.0, but he didn't really use it to its full potential.
All he used was csh, telnet, and ed.
Yes, ed.
For those who do not know ed, it is a text-only edittor that can only change the contents of one line at a time. It was mainly used back in the 60s and 70s when most computers did not have monitors, and every line had to be printed out.
However, despite his lack of creativity in the tool-selection, he is the best programmer I know, and knows the bsd kernal inside and out, as well as many of the popular device drivers.
His code is beautiful too, conforming to K&R.
I think this is a fundamental difference between even the most passionate Microsoft Windows user... In GNU/Linux and Unix in general, the desktop is a person thing. We change it to fit our needs, our key bindings, our window dressing, our themeable widgets.
So what does it matter what someone else's desktop looks like- particularly a non-technical person? They'll likely be using something more "out of the box" than I will. I'm sometimes curious about technical user's desktops to find out tricks about how they've made thier system more productive (such as dedicating each key on the numeric keypad to a screen in X, or using virtual dekstops to represnt connections to a given remote host via SSH, or a desktop where all the windows are automatically tiled so there's no wasted space.
Those are interesting, finding out what Tony Danza uses isn't.
No offense Tony.
- Serge
Not just for the sake of completeness. It would certainly be interesting to compare software and hardware, and I don't mean in the competitive sense. I'm more interested in seeing whether each group has independently evolved the same tool suites to do the same tasks, or whether each group has realms of innovation.
You can bet it would be a great kickstart for the next generation of entrepreneurs to have a rudimentary insight into the types of problems (and early-generation solutions) they will have to work with in their own potential projects. Ironically, of course, that may be one reason for attempting to keep this information secret, keeping an ivory-tower mystique (and securing their jobs and their governments' scientific edge) rather than opening the next "space race" to all comers.
Get off my launchpad!
Alan Cooper's book, About Face, describes an ideal desktop: not a metaphor for something else, but an easily learned, symbolic interface.
The closest thing to it currently is GNOME.
see subject.
Of course, since John posts here, I'm hoping that he'd be kind enough to take a screenshot of the current desktop he has, and post it here.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
As a Mac user, I'd be extremely interested to see what third-party system utilities, if any, he has installed on his machine, especially given the apparent hostility Apple has to user-interface modifications.
...posting a little late for this discussion:
DEK's desktop
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
"In his book "Stupid White Men," Michael Moore claims that Bush has cabinet members read their reports to him."
Thats really interesting because I have heard the same about A.Hitler. That he was extremely lazy, getting out of bed very late in the day and that he could never be bothered reading anything; his aides read everything to him.
Apparently he got a lot of mail from ordinary Germans asking advice and such, a sort of "Ask Adolf" if you will.
There was so much mail that a special Gestapo unit was set up to process it.
The story goes that this is how A.Hitler got a lot of his ideas from; one (or more?) aide had the thought that euthanasia for old folks was a great idea.
But how to draw it to Herr Fuhrers attention? So this aide went through the mail till he found things like "Dear Adolph, my dear old grandmama is so old and sick and feeble and we are so poor and hard working. Would you mind if we, uh, 'let' her die with dignity?"
Finding such letters, he'd present them to the boss and try to make the case for euthanasia. It worked; Hitler thought it was such a good idea that it was implemented nationally.
This is not apologist; I'm not saying Hitler was an ok kinda guy.
I'm just pointing out a means by which national leaders who unfortunately happen to be a bit lazy or disenclined to read for themselves can get themselves and those around them In The Poo.
Always be careful who you let do your thinking for you.
Now of course, all of this Hitler stuff has long since passed away into the classical mythology of our civilisation, so who knows how much *truth* there is in that anecdote? Or, for that matter, the 'Bush is dyslexic' anecdote that I've also heard?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I'm very curious to see Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's, him being an interaction design guru 'n' all. For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing any of the alleged experts' from the Nielson Norman Group.
Bush, like all modern presidents, has the Secret Service doing the same job of sorting through mail from the public. That's necessary. And I don't think it's odd at all if he has people read stuff to him while he's trying to do something else. If he's really that busy, more power to him.
But if the cabinet member who wrote the report is sitting there in front of you, and you make him read it aloud, that's a different story alltogether. That is a meeting. You don't have anywhere else to be, or anything else to do until it's over. Oral dictation is much slower than reading, so you're only wasting everybody's time.
Because it's not about time, it's either about lacking certain skills, or the presence of someone who lacks sufficient discipline to stay on task and absorb the material independently.
> Always be careful who you let do your thinking for you.
That's not fair at all. I trust an author to check his facts, so when I cite things put forth in a book as facts, I expect to be taken seriously. I'm no publishing expert, but I understand some publishers employ "fact checkers" to make sure they don't get sued.
Moore does accuse Bush of being illiterate in that book, but I didn't buy it at the time. It really is kind of far fetched when you only have those two bits of information to go on. I'd even go so far as to say that Moore came off as an ass. But nothing has come out to refute his accusation. Far from it.
If Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I call that a highly suspicious pattern. I can't imagine going without instantaneous, securable, asynchronous global communication, and my life is (hopefully) less demanding. But I'm still waiting on that link.
I don't think he feels "too cool to use a window system", but rather just doesn't feel like he needs one for what he does. He's the author of an old Lisp machine window system and has written plenty of X code, so it's not like the idea of a window system is unknown or scary to him.
Part of his setup's weirdness is because he travels a lot and has limited net access on the road. He does very little online. Instead, if he visits you at your company or university, he'll typically plug his laptop into your ethernet and spend a few minutes downloading his unread email (however many hundred messages that is) into it. Then he unplugs and reads the email offline while going on his way, spooling his replies onto disk. Then at his next stop, he plugs in again, uploads his replies to the old email and downloads new mail that's arrived since the last stop. He usually doesn't use web browsers. If you mail him a URL he should see, he prefers if you send him a text dump of the contents along with it. If he only gets the URL and thinks it's likely to be interesting, he emails it to a special daemon he's set up back home, that retrieves the URL's text contents and dumps it into his next batch of email. Images? What images?
All in all it actually seems like a pretty practical system, less conducive to wasting time web surfing than what most of us are used to, but he doesn't care about that.
http://unix.se/gallery/folk Dennis Ritchie, Jordan K. Hubbard, Jon "maddog" Hall, Rasmus Lerdorf etc.
I can confirm this. During a conversation, he wanted to look up an email. He pulled out his laptop from his bag, woke it up. It was already running Emacs in terminal mode. No X. In a few clicks had found what he was looking for. He put it back to sleep and back in its bag. All of this took just a few seconds.
Actually I heard someone say they saw Jobs' office at Pixar and he had a Dell PC on his desk, but then I heard somebody else say that was true but it was running OpenStep, and he has since switched to Mac OS X.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Indeed and with serious consequences (for the Nazi Germany that is), too.
The German commanders in Normandy missed their chance of mounting a serious counterattack partly because Hitler a) had assumed direct command of most divisions in the area and b) he was still in bed six hours after the start of the invasion. Field Marshal Rundstedt wished to move the crack 12th SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr divisions towards Caen, but the divisions were in OKW reserve and could not be committed without Hitler's orders. An armored counterattack from Caen area (when the skies were still overcast) could have driven a wedge between the US and British armies and, most importantly, the all important Carentan-Bayeux-Caen road could have been held.
The owls are not what they seem
doesn't use a computer unless he absolutely has to
Which means his experience on tech issues is limited to what people tell him. Though this isn't so bad, the president shouldn't even be involved with tech issues. Although, I suppose this is true for a lot of politicians, even the ones who should be more informed.
doesn't watch television unless it's sports
doesn't even read the news himself
has his advisors act as a "news filter" for him
Lack of independantly gathered information means his advisers can treat him like a puppet. Who here honestly believes G.W. is getting accurate and unbiased information from the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld? Especially with subjects he doesn't know anything about himself (like economy) it's VERY easy to get a hopelessly biased viewpoint.
doesn't like to use the telephone
He doesn't like to travel abroad either. His lack of social networking skills is ok if he were still some bigshot in the oil business (some might claim he still is), but for a president this is unacceptable. A president needs to be in constant dialogue with the other world leaders. It's been made painfully obvious not only is shielded by his advisers from finding out more about how the world works, but just plain isn't interested in reality.
Once David Pogue whined in his MacWorld column about Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad running Win95 right after Apple bought NeXT --- he was half right, it was a ThinkPad (He also had a Toshiba Tecra), but it ran (of course) OPENSTEP.
Time was someone published the headers of a private e-mail from Steve Jobs' e-mail account at Pixar to show that it was from a machine running OPENSTEP.
Interestingly, one of the things which kept him on OPENSTEP was Concurrence.app (a presentation program) --- which goes a long way to explaining the existence of Keynote, no?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Speaking of plain old dumb... Have you look at Mrs. W. Bush lately?
Seriously, look at a picture, or watch a video of her. Look into her eyes, and you'll see that there is literally nothing behind them. It's almost like you can see right to the back of her skull. I've never seen a person who looked this braindead before.
It gets really creepy if you look at her for too long.