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Microsoft Plays Linux Games at Work
When I called him back, he thanked me for my quick response and said that he was new to Linux and wasn't sure if he'd installed the game right. He then said, "This machine is going to used for... well, I'm a Microsoft employee and my group is doing a usability study on Linux."
As it turned out, he had unpacked the tarball (I had to explain what a tarball was) on the CD by double-clicking its package icon in gmc and then double-clicking the install icon that came up. He had absolutely no idea where the game had been installed, and didn't know how to search for it.
At this point I pointed out to him that CivCTP came with a graphical install script, conveniently labeled "install" and placed in the same directory as the tarball. And in fact, in that same directory was a text file labeled "README" that explained how to run the install program.
I had him pull up a terminal window and run `sh install` (since he had a 4.5 GB drive containing only a fresh install of RH6, he wasn't too concerned with finding his previous installation just yet), and as the graphical install smoothly copied the files into their proper place, we chatted amiably.
Me: "So what kind of system are you using for this?"
Him: "It's a... [pause to read label on the case] HP Vectra."
Me: "Umm, what processor does it use?"
Him: "It's a Pentium III, uh... 450 MHz?"
Me: "Yes, PIIIs do come in 450 MHz."
Eventually, the installation finished. I encouraged him to grab the patch from our website, and he thanked me and hung up.
Ordinarily, I am very respectful to newbies. I don't even laugh at them behind their backs--especially if they have been looking through man pages and reference books trying to figure things out. This time I almost peed my pants.
Then the big question dawned on me:
What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study?
Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
Note from RM: Yes, we verified the story. All parties are real.
They really just want to use gcc and stuff, so that they can support their servers at msn.com and hotmail.
hehe...
db48
Where do I apply for this job? This would be the coolest job even if Bill is signing my paychecks.
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
well, if you think about it...most of MS's products are geared towards people like this person (we may know them as clueless newbies, lusers, etc). so in a way it makes sense to have those same people trying it out. i can see giving them a fast system as an 'incentive' basically, and id be willing to bet they were told to try more than just games. it just so happened that they wanted to try out Civ first...i dont blame them...
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Microsoft's doing a usability study on Linux. Okay.
I'm going to whack anyone who's asking why they're using clueless newbies. Microsoft is doing it for two reasons; one, a clueless newbie is the typical Microsoft customer. Two, a clueless newbie will easily get frustrated and say that Linux sucks, giving Microsoft more FUD ammunition. Both of those points should be obvious.
Microsoft is loading for bear with this. They're going to put all these total idiots on overpowered machines. They're going to have them use Linux for a few weeks. Then Windows 2000 for a few weeks. Release the 'study' as 'fact' and genuine 'scientific research' in their battle against all unixes.
Even Linus says Linux isn't ready or meant for the desktop. *sigh* Oh well. More Microsoft FUD on the way.. excuse me while I put on my PR Flak Jacket.
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
your company here.
shelby != ford
If this is what's going on you can get ready
for a LOT more FUD coming down the pipe.
Especially now that the MS FTC trial is coming
to a close and the final arguments are in.
********************************************
Superstition is a word the ignorant use to describe their ignorance. -Sifu
I used work as a contractor on the microsoft campus in redmond. There are a lot of linux boxen there. The interesting thing is that almost all of them are on the desks of contractors. The deal is that those who are depending on MS stock for their retirement refuse to even think about linux, but a lot of the contractors out there are hedging their bets. There were (best guess) around 12 linux boxen in MS building 11 alone. Which is a lot considering the location.
--Shoeboy
This is kinda funny. Sounds like they really do want to make MS Linux. Which is amusing, because they've just spent about 35,000,000 FUD Points on Linus and His Commie Criminals, and now mebbe they want to make their own, to cash in on the hype.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Microsoft is checking out the competition. I don't see anything unusuall here.. standard business practice. .. I am pretty sure they will conclude that as a desktop Linux is way behind Windows and therefore there is nothing to worry about.
BTW
And you know what ? They would be right.
Linux is NOT ready for the market MS owns now and won't be for some time ( and don't forget,it is unlikely that MS will be waiting for them to catch up.)
I'm not sure games are the best choice to test for usablility sake. I mean, it's great that Micro$loth is trying it out, but does this mean that they are over looking their newest major competitor's such as Staroffice, etc..... Anyhoo. Hopefully this means that pretty soon the office developers are going to start gettings calls for tech support from M$ also!
I thunked Mikersoft was smrd.
Seriously, you would think that Microsoft would just bribe some experienced users of Linux to sit in with the new ones. I am not surprised however that Microsoft is scoping Linux. I wonder how long it will be before they rip it off.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
As charming and witty as those first couple of posts are, this is a BIG deal. (Okay, everyone else will say this, too.)
:) (While "tarball" is a great term for geeks to use, it certainly isn't an intuitive word. For that matter, neither are many of the other things unixfolk take for granted. "grep" comes to mind real quick.)
While all the gnome, redhat, etc people involved can pat themselves on the back, this does point out some things that are really small that *NEED* to be done... off the top of my head I can think of:
1. Autorun.
2. a dummy-fied RPM/DEB/any other kind of package installer/viewer/uninstaller that can be used cross-distribution and cross-version with similar functionality to the dreaded "add/remove programs" control panel
3. less jargon.
We're getting there. While things may be in a state now where linux+gnome/kde+icewm/enlightenemnt/* may be "mom friendly". It's certainly not friendly to someone who's going to be installing hundreds of programs cluelessly every day -- like your average computer using teenager.
-Chris
It would make some sense that the person who
:)
:) Quake3 plays pretty well now and well even when it crashes, the worst thing is that you have to go to some other computer, telnet in and kill some processes :)
:)"
was doing the usability study was someone who did not know much about Linux, of for that matter comptuers!( There is a 450 P3, I think i saw one on Killerapp.com)
Anyway, the point being that Microsoft may just be doing some kind of internal study to see what the impact of having Gnome and Kde become stable is on their market..... users who just want something that works!
When i use StarOffice, i hate the feeling of being inside of windows with teh start button and all that!
But with the current trend in companies supporting LInux as they are, it is not something taht I would find difficult to believe! NO one can say that M$ is not shrewd in business.... we may not agree with their tactics but they do know how to survive... and IF linux is a "contender" they will deal with it.
I would like to know if anyone here has ever been able to get someone who does not care about linux to just use it as a simple OS. Not caring about most things other than the fact that they have to remember a password ? I am talking about only a NON_CS_PERSON_HOME_USER
Either way, i would like to know if M$ ppl. were able to play Quake3 on their machines? and if so what did they think
It would be funny to know that ppl. testing would go up to their SUPS. and say
"we like this.... it *really* is stable.. and KDE and GNOME rock the house
well enough babble... better get back to algorithms (college work)
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Gee... hate to say it, but under Windows.. I drop the CD in the drive and I am done for the most part unless I want to customize my install...
In fact, who do you think MS would hire to study Linux?
Developers? No way! Once they got a hold of Linux they'd never go back to Windows.
Marketing types? Would you even try to sell Windows after using Linux?
Sales? See marketing.
FUD slingers? Nope. They couldn't even do their job anymore.
So who else do you hire other than someone expendable? Someone with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever? They'll probably poke his eyes out and sew his mouth shut after they're done with him.
Yes they are giving up. They are using the games to familiarize themselves with the machines. Next they will start to port Excel, Word, Access, and whatever else they sell... it is their only chance for survival! It has been so long since I looked at M$ products that I am just not up to speed on their product line. Isn't life Grand!
Do you thing that Justice will jail Bill?
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Anyway, bets are they have a BSD, Sun Solaris, SUN OS and other boxes in there. It's done as a precaution to know what your competitor is doing. A competitor went IPO and we laughed as their stock just sorta sat there at its opening price. It's not MS being sneaky, it's just them staying on top of their situation, regardless as to what they tell us it is.
-sporty
It's more fun than HUGBEES! HANDSPRING!
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
My opinion: M$' "usability study" has probably already looked into stuff like StarOffice (we'll just change the file formats again...then Star Division's "Filter Upgrade" will be another 70mb download"), KDE and Gnome. Linus said that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but, there are many people that use it every day (like me). I'm not a coder, I don't do any package maintenance, and I'm not really a *nix expert. But, Linux provides me a viable alternative to M$' overpriced software. I think M$ is probably looking across the full scope of Linux usability. The 'last frontier' is SVGA games. How many Linux users do you know who say "I have the WinX partition for games"? I sure as heck do.
It seems to me that the guy from Microsoft could have just as well been testing various support departments to see how much support you could get.
He may have been clueless or he may have just been acting that way.
Many people would just put the cd in the drive and *expect* an auto-install to start. If nothing happens, then they'll double click on some likely looking filenames in gmc/whatever.
Game installation now is a complete no-brainer compared to the bad old days when you had to run install programs from dos, make custom boot disks, maybe find a working video driver, yadda, yadda.
Win9[58] as a gaming environment is pretty good - most of the time you don't have to worry about stuff.
As for the 'newbie' not knowing what his pc is: chances are he was given a blank pc and a stack of CDs and told to install them and see how easy it is and if the platform is sensible for a *real* newbie, i.e. the 'foot pedal, cup-holder and monitor-stand' brigade.
dave
Really - any business looks at their competitors to see what they are doing and play around their products. That way they get a feel for what is good/bad and what may be improved upon. Just with Microsoft it means that they are looking for a way to shoe horn themselves into the linux distro business to take it over. Heck, I bet Red Hat has employees that are MS spies that call into Redmond every week....
Going on a previous thought that this is pure 'scientific research' MS is doing.. How many of these tests do they use that we never hear about except as crap from there PR department. Considering a lot of things, This was probably a random blurb to a MUCH bigger scheme of crap Microsoft has been doing for years.
So now Microsoft has their best people playing games on Linux.
You know what would be great? To document all the tech calls such as this, so when Micro$oft do release their 'findings', there is an abundance of support issues and follow ups, fully documented and ready for rebuttal in a professional, yet "up ya bum" kinda way.
It will be, as you said, for a *nix vs. W2k study and there would be nothing better than releasing the rebuttal before the conjured up findings. So...
All you Linux techies get your facts straight on each of these calls, document them and be prepared for another X vs. M$ fiasco.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Maybe there are several HP Vectra P3 450 models, or maybe X and the kernel have caught up now.
..another reason I hate Microsoft...
If somehow they had stuck with DOS (at the CLI) I would have been happy, I spent way too much time learning something totally useless. Had I been using Linux the whole time, well, this would be a nicer machine I'm typing on.
I'd give newbies servers with linux on it for a useability study. Heck, if a Newbie could figure it out, I'd call it pretty useable, eh? -Dave
Furthermore, until you know what group the Linux newbie was from, you'll have a hard time finding the meaning of this (non-)event. And even if you did know, all you could deduce is that some pointy haired manager somewhere got a pawn of his to write him a "report" about Linux.
In short, if you think this is news, you need your head examined. MS has lots of Linux users on campus, lots of independent groups with their own motivations and interests, lots of competitors and lots of clueless contractors.
Move along, now.
Do you think the biggest software maker in the world would ignore the competion? Theres an old argument that gets pitched to every tech CEO/Vice/ect. "How will you make this OS work so that my grandma can use it?". Well Linux has been around for 8-10 years and while its great as a server, its not an OS for Grandma. Yeah its really funny reading about how a 30-40 year old MS Rep cant install a simple game on Linux. It should be a clue to where Linux fails in the worst way possible. Ease of use has not been a trade mark for any *Nix OS, and after years of opensource it has yet to pass the "Grandma Test". MS is constantly making the OS easier to use, and a few security holes are found because of it. You cannot deny that its the easiest OS to use period! Eaiser than the Mac! Linux is great, but its more like a suped up Humvee. Great for off roading, but if you cant find the steering wheel your S.O.L. That is why you'll get users switching back to Windows. The Linux community is gonna have to do alot more than beef up the web server in order to pass the "Grandma Test", if it cant be done then alot of RedHat stocks are going to be sold off and people will continue to use whats easy. Think im wrong? Just look at AOL, Windows98, or even freakin StarBucks coffee!!!! Good service, bad products.
big bag bill always screw-tinizes the competition for strengths and weaknesses.
asimmilate what they do well, deride them for that they do poorly.
fortunately, linux is close enough to "being there" that we are getting close to a desktop rollout at work.
only twenty people, but AFAIC when one person switches away from winderz, everyone is better off.
Doh! Playing games is what they do at MS. First NOW you realize why all MS-products are such low quality :-) TN
Global Regular Expression Print.
I think the whole point is that this is not intuitive even knowing what it means.
It gives me the shits that I can't moderate and post. I've already posted, so I can't say "Shit yeah!" and give this guy a point. Dang! will someone else?
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
FUD? Rigging results? Please. Microsoft may make common practice of that, but that is NOT what's going on here.
./configure, make, make install)? Or are things as easy as clicking a single icon? Do you have to run applications within a terminal, calling them up by exact capitalization, or do you get a big friendly icon automatically? When something goes wrong, how easy is it to fix? How easy is it to get help? This is useable to people who don't already know all the proper commands, aka. born-and-bred Windows users who might want to stop using Windows for some reason. Microsoft wants to know "how easy is it to switch"? Do they have to worry?
...] or tr" when you type "help" is immediately useable?) Is the "/usr/bin" directory the first, most obvious place to look for a new game you just installed?
According to the fellow in question, they were performing a "useability" study. That means just that: useability. How easy is Linux for people who are not already accustomed to it to use?
So, why are they having people do studies on Linux? It's competition, and anyone who wants to compete will take a gander at the competition.
Why are they using "newbies"? Think about this. What good would it be to do a "useability" study on WordPerfect 3.1 using people who have already memorized all the fkey combos, or who know to look for fkey combos? NONE! Why? These people have already adjusted to the environment, and so any reports they have on how "useable" that environment are are SKEWED. People who don't know to read the manual, and don't know much about linux (or even computers, for that matter) are PERFECT for a true "usability" study. They allow a clearer look at how obvious and easy it is to do what you want to do. The question of useability attempts to answer the question: what do I have to learn in order to use this? Do you have to learn to install software in at least 5-6 steps (gunzip, untar, cd,
In this case, the answer is a resounding NO. Linux is complicated. Many if not most applications are distributed primarily in source-code format, which requires compiling, which requires installation of all the development libraries and toolkits, which requires keeping up with the most recent versions of these same libraries, which involves visiting ftp sites, which involves knowing about ftp-commands....and if not that, it requires discovery of rpm and it's man page, which requires discovery of man pages (not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when presented with a command prompt for most people), or it requires the discovery of gnorpm (not advertized as much as it is), which requires knowing why you need to be root for some things, but don't want to be for most things. Even just typing "help" provides you with a bewildering list of commands and a fairly cryptic set of symbols describing their use - BUT NOT WHAT THEY DO! (please, is anyone so deluded as to argue that any os that provides "trap [arg] [signal_spec
Suffice to say, to use Linux pretty much at all, you need to know A LOT about how it works, how computers work, how unixes work - some mixture thereof - to get ANYWHERE.
And why would they want to find out how "useable" Linux is from someone who already knows all about how to use and configure it? They don't. Because that information would be WRONG. At least, it would be in all areas that they care about.
Yes, it's funny. No, I don't know why. But it's newbies because that's the only kind of "useable" that counts for the mass market. "Useable" means "really fricking obvious" in the mass market. What's obvious to you and me is quite often nowhere near obvious to anyone else. Microsoft may be all about FUD, but that's not what it's doing here...at least, not yet.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/grep. html
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p, where re stands for a regular expression, to
Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to
it, via Unix grep(1)]
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
In defense of the Microsoft guy (let the flames begin), installing Linux software is pretty messy if you are used to Mac and Windows software. To install a Windows app, all you do is click setup.exe and agree to the EULA. Everything else is done for you. Nobody reads manuals because they consist of crap like "Now let's learn how to use the mouse."
Linux users, of course, don't have it so easily. You have to deal with downloading libraries, extracting stuff from tarballs, fooling with gcc, and so on. Reading documentation is a necessary part of the Linux culture, and Linux users have accepted the complications as part of the package.
Unfortunately, we live in a point-and-click, plug-and-play world, and most people have different expectations of what computers should be like. Most computer users are not programmers, and they don't want to learn how to do anything complicated. The doctors and lawyers and teachers and car mechanics and whoever else demand SIMPLICITY, so they can continue to go about their daily lives.
You can't even expect programmers to part with this "I don't wanna fool it" mentality. I got my first exposure to UNIX in a CS course, and I got my first Linux CD from a CS professor. However, it's possible to go through college, major in CS, and graduate without having touched UNIX at all. I've taken courses at three colleges, and only one of them used UNIX in CS courses.
I guess my point is that the guy calling tech support represents most of the computer using public and that Windows 95 and the Mac OS set the standard for ease of use. People are beginning to demand that from Linux, and if it can't deliver, it's the fault of the OS, and not the user.
Take care,
Steve
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a supporter of Microsoft and am writing this from my Linux workstation.
It is a very, very easy to install piece of OS. I had no trouble installing it on my dual PPro200 (OC) but do you know how long it took?
Three whole bloody hours.
I don't care what you say, even with all the dicking around it does not take that long to install any other OS, Linux included. The fact that W2k asks about one question and then goes "Please wait" is good, but jeez, I reckon they could warn you that you may as well go and watch "The Matrix" while you wait.
Easy installation is one thing, but trying to detect over a thousand devices over a two hour period is another.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Seems to me that this person at MS called the Loki tech support line, and who was on the other end? Someone who (as best as I can tell) courteously and helpfully told the person how to install the software, and had a friendly chat with them while the install was going. If someone calls MS for support, all they'll be talking to is an automated voice prompt, at least until they hand over their charge card number. And I'm pretty sure you can bet that there probably won't be a friendly tech support person on the other end of the line, should you choose to pay for support. Seems like MS should be studying the usability of their own stuff first....
although this may seem funny to giggling linuxers, it's not very nice to the newbie who's probably not even a microsoft engineer, but someone hired to test out linux as a newbie.
As an ex-Microsoftie, this quote hit me differently.
Then the big question dawned on me: What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study? Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
So, Microsoft's been touted for years for hiring smart cookies. Even with the degradation of its standards and practices, and the complacency of being the largest corporation with an enviable bottom line, it's not easy to walk in and get a Microsoft job.
I still expect that the guy who called up wasn't an idiot. Sure, hadn't yet looked at the machine that Bill bought him, sure, hadn't used Linux before very much. Isn't that the perfect useability test case ? And given that... how did Linux perform? The out-of-box experience seems to have failed.
I was on the team when Windows 95 was still called Windows 93, before it even grew the codename Chicago. At that time, the general manager of the desktop Windows Business Unit, Brad Silverberg, coined a mantra of the ideal in useability. He said that his [nontechnical] mother should be able to use Windows. Personally, I think we failed at reaching that ideal, but we made the right evolutionary step from Windows 3.1.
Now, how well can your mom use Linux?
[
On another note: regarding the kick-arse computer this clueless user had, it's pitiful, but another painful truth is that the newbies, for some reason, always get the best boxen. I'm a developer for Intel (yes, spawn of Satan), and I work on a Pentium Pro 200. Meanwhile, the marketing guy next to me who has to call tech support and pay someone to come out and install his shareware for him, has a PIII-550 with gobs of RAM and a monitor the size of my cubicle wall. Go figure. And you'd think Intel wouldn't have any problem supplying the cool chips to its employees...heh, yeah, right. I'm sure Microsoft is much the same way...
All I know is that no matter how stupid/interesting/mean/nice/etc. my customers are, I never talk about them in this amount of detail on a public forum.
It's exactly what I would do if I were them and it has nothing to do with FUD. Indeed: "a clueless newbie is the typical Microsoft customer". From MICROS~1's point of view that's just a fact. Their $$ spends just as well as that of a "guru" customer. What do you think they are going to do?
In this one example they seem to be looking at
games. A game that can't be installed easily by a 10 year old with 6 months experience pointing and clicking on things is not a market threat to them. That's all they care about. The fact that it's "obvious" to you or me or anyone else how to install it does not matter. That's not the target market.
Put it this way: Have you ever been asked to do QA on or write docs for code that you've written? For real end users I mean here, not man pages or READMEs or comments in the Makefile. I have and I've seen the results of these attempts many times. IT DOES NOT WORK. you are too close to it. You don't know to explain the parts that the end user will find confusing because it's not confusing to you. You don't know to test a part of the program in a way you didn't think of because... well you didn't think of it.
Same goes for usability. You bring in the intelligent but ignorant. If they can't make it work it doesn't work - because they are the customers. After your ignorant pawn has done this
for a while they lose their usefullness because they also know it too well and are too close to it. And LO! a tech support rep is created! Been there, done that. Eventually the smart ones understand it too well and become terrible tech support reps because they can't explain it to the end user in tiny words that they understand.
MICROS~1, and any other company that actually delivers products to "normal people", understands this early on or they go out of business. This is often a blind spot for OSS advocates but ICROS~1 has always understood it quite well. Technology, Quality, Stability - these may be their blind spot but this isn't.
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I think that one of the real important features of linux is that it is easy to use. Typing ntsysv is _so_ much easier than going start...setting...control panel...services. The problem is that many confuse "easy to use" with "easy to learn". In my experience, they are generally (but not always) inversely correlated -- the harder something is to learn, the easier it is to do something once you've learned it. Conversely, the easier something is to learn, the longer it takes to accomplish something once you've learned it.
:\ I can't wait for someone to jump out and give the "everybody can drive a car" example.
This is actually an idea that I've stolen from Jurassic Park, but I think that there is a real (and bad!) movement in the US to make everything brain-dead. We try to minimize the amount of knowledge that you need to start doing something, at expense of how well or fast it can be done.
Oh well, I'm probably the only one who thinks this.
[|] _L_o_r_E_ (~loki@tide72.microsoft.com) (InterNIC Commercial)
[|] name.. loki
[|] chan.. #seattle #seattle_chat @#poems
[|] serv.. LasVegas.NV.US.Undernet.org (Las Vegas Digital Internet)
`------- -------------- - -- ------- --------- ---->
Enjoy!
--
Personally, I think this is tasteless to put something like this on Slashdot. I mean, it is bad enough that we bash Microsoft as an entity, but now we have taken to bashing individual employees? Yea, sure, his name was changed, big deal. It just seems profoundly tasteless for a Loki employee to write an article on an incident which amounts to "look how dumb Microsoft employees are". The poor guy, I feel bad for him. Let's hope he doesn't read Slashdot and feel worse about it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
If there was one thing I could tell MS for their feasibility studies:
/sbin/lilo -U before you replace one linux distribution with another. It helps get rid of the LI... freeze in your MBR.
... or even at 4.0.
Use tcp_wrappers. The security benefits of tcp_wrappers have been proven by Wietse Venema; the rest comes only from my own meandering experience.
Run
If you're going to be paranoid and deny telnet and ftp in favor of SSH, don't send your mail passwords plaintext with POP3.
Maybe Linux will take over the desktop, maybe it won't. Maybe InstallShield for tarballs will be created; maybe it won't. Either way, your Mindcraft scores are half chance -- and so are everyone else's.
Be kind to your root partition. You'll miss it when it's gone.
If you don't know which direction your favorite window manager will go, don't worry. A lot of the greatest programmers I know had no idea what they were doing at version 2.2
Each day, activate a compiler flag that warns you.
Do not read Slate Magazine -- It will only make you feel ugly.
Accept certain truths as inevitable: USB support is dodgy, "stable" kernels will crash, and you too will lose your CHANGELOG -- at which point you will fantasize that when you were at version 2.2.x, USB suited your purposes, kernels never crashed, and people read their source code.
Read your source code. Source code is a form of nostalgia... it lets you pick it up, parse through the comments, and audit it to make better code in the future.
But trust me on the tcp_wrappers.
/* thanks to Baz Luhrmann */
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Microsoft wants to know its biggest enemy.
There are some neat ideas in both GNOME and KDE, but in general useability, it's behind Windows... even AmigaOS. MUI (Magic User Interface - a GUI-extension) for the Amiga has some neat ideas, btw. and it's built on a very useable system... but I digress.
The desktop itself is quite useable, but there are other problems. First, GNOME crawls if you have 32MB's of RAM or less. KDE does too, but to a lesser extent. Compare that to a typical Win95-setup - which was way faster on the same machine the last time I compared - and you'll see what I mean. OK, you can claim that people should have enough RAM (64MB or more) etc., but I'm making a point.
OK, you can run plain X and a windowmanager, but Windows-users that are trying out Linux won't like that. They certainly didn't before KDE came out.
Also, configuring some more low-level parts is difficult (or at times impossible) to do from the GUI. You have to know your way around on the command-line and in various configuration-files.
Believe me, I like Linux. But I see that it isn't ready for the desktop - yet.
I have Civ:CTP. I like it, I liked it's install. However, it wasn't perfect (from my ever-ongoing useablility test mindset :-)* ).
/opt, Mandrake installs it in, well, everywhere, etc).
./configure && make && make install is nice and quick, and works quite well on different distribs, but get a new user to install GNOME or KDE from sources and watch them cry.
The newbie doesn't understand mounting. That's step one. You can't even *read* the README on the CD until you do that. When you explain mounting, they usually say something like, "that's pretty stupid."
But that's not so much of a problem. The biggest problem, as I see it is the variable filesystem structure among distributions. There's tons of work being done on useability, etc, but it is pretty much in the context of one distribution at a time (SuSE installs KDE in
What is needed is an agreement on a filesystem structure, first and foremost. There was work being done on that, but where is it now??
How come I haven't heard a thing about it in *months*? I've heard so much news about new releases of XX distrib, XX desktop, etc. LSB? nothing.
I think that the importance of GUI install work should be downgraded to make room for this. When a developer can release a package and not have to supply different binaries for different distributions, we'll all be happier.
Ok, for small packages,
The worst thing is that this is an aspect of open-source that "low-ranking" people like me and many others cannot really make an impact in. This has to be done by Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Corel, among others.
I think that one of the real important features of linux is that it is easy to use. Typing ntsysv is _so_ much easier than going start...setting...control panel...services.
I really hope this is just dry humor.
This may be the fundamental problem. Hardcore Linux users are unable to discern the difference between easy and hard to use.
The problem is that many confuse "easy to use" with "easy to learn". In my experience, they are generally (but not always) inversely correlated -- the harder something is to learn, the easier it is to do something once you've learned it. Conversely, the easier something is to learn, the longer it takes to accomplish something once you've learned it.
That doesn't make any sense at all to me. But anyone who is able to use "inversely correlated" in a normal conversation may have a different perspective.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I worked as a dev on Visual Studio...
;)
This is a little bit off topic, but here goes...
For just everyday use (and not this usability study) - Microsoft doesn't really care what OS their employees use as long as they can perform their job functions. You can get quite a bit of functionality on their network with a Linux machine, especially with Samba.
The only thorn in its side that I heard of was that Linux didn't have an equivalent to the MS Proxy Client. I'm not sure if that has changed these days (someone chime in here?). So you couldn't really access the internet, except when web browsing.
But you could still use Netscape of course, and anything else provided it was not illegal software. Microsoft certainly endorses their own products, but if an employee feels more comfortable using Linux, and is still productive, then Microsoft doesn't care.
Just don't try calling their support desk for help
yes, I know what a subjunctive is. ;)
...
if there *were*
oops
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I am currently a pond scum contractor at Microsoft and you better believe it that MS keeps a very close eye on the linux market. There are two public email groups regarding linux. One is called like linux discussion and the other is linux competitive discussion. A recent thread on the linux competitive discussion was real concern about a new distro called someting like winlinux? Don't remember the exact name. As soon as I converted on of boxes to redhat6 I was asked to make copies for 2 contractors and a full timer. There seems to be alot of employees, (mostly contractors) that have a dislike for microsoft. There are also those who wave the BillG flag openly and proudly. I got into a pretty heated argument the other day with one about NT w/IIS vs *nix w/apache and the whole Mindcraft fiasco.
I find exremely funny humiliating the lesser mortals among us, and people like you.
Correct. The other answers aren't correct (especially not the one that mentioned "Gnu", given that grep existed long before the GNU project ever existed...).
Well, the other guy who said Global Regular Expression Print was right as well.
Yep, it thoroughly seems like a "support test".
What this DOES say though is MS is worried about
games being ported to Linux.
>>I think that one of the real important features of linux is that
>>it is easy to use. Typing ntsysv is _so_ much easier than
>>going start...setting...control panel...services.
>I really hope this is just dry humor.
Why? Or you never used a windows machine for more than a couple of hours straight and don't know what palm/finger pain is?
Mice are good for some special purposes - not constant use!
>If I update Netscape on both, my RedHat-box does it in notime with a simple command:"rpm -Uvh nets*.rpm"
this is pure humor!
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Recently, I managed to get LinuxPPC running on my PowerMac. Now you all are thinking, "Big flippin' deal." Well it is for me... prior to my LinuxPPC endeavour, I knew a bit of *nix command line, mainly simple file commands (chmod, cd, etc.) and grep. (BBEdit on the Mac lets you search/replace with grep patterns. It's godly.) Now I know a lot more.
I don't think we'll see Linux shipping on small-home, small-office machines for quite some time. Why? It's not a MomOS. Just think: Put Linux on your mom's computer. Scary? Yup... unless your Linus' mom.
Windows and the MacOS are still the only viable MomOSes. Linux has a long way to go before I turn my mother loose on it.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Perhaps Microsoft's "usability study" wasn't of Linux or Linux games per se, but actually checking to see the quality of Linux tech support operations.
They get some guys who pretend to be clueless, make some calls and some mail list posts and see what kind of response they get. They can then tally up all of the RTFM responses, the support engineers who "almost peed my pants" with laughter (and then promptly posted to a Linux advocacy board), and compare those with the quality responses.
Unlike some hypothetical desktop-battle, this information can be effectively used by Microsoft in FUD tactics. "Our informal studies show that if you aren't proficient in Unix, the Linux tech support companies will just ignore you or laugh at you." This can go along way in scaring managers that are (rightfully) worried about the skill gap of their staff when it comes to Linux.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I seriously doubt this was posted to bash anybody.
It seems to me (any many others) that this is a wakeup call regarding how easy Linux (or any UNIX, for that matter) really is to a new user.
I want to see Linux flourish as a desktop environment. In many ways it has surpassed Windows. However, the battle isn't over yet. There are many issues that still have to be solved. The problem is that us "advanced users" don't think about them enough.
Yeahh!
Windoze is so easy to use! Every user can screw it!
(And than call for me to repair)
--------------------------------
I'm-not-assenizator-bert
Or I tried to.
Easy to install? Not really. RC1 took two hour-long installs to actually get to the point where it would boot. When it did boot, the high-end video card in the machine (An Elsa GLoria) didn't work in anything other than 640x480 in 16 vibrant colors. There were no drivers for the card on Elsa's site, but I managed to convince the NT 4 drivers to work, after a fashion.
Easy to use? I guess, if you don't mind waiting. The default install came with all the needless crap turned on -- menus that fade into existance, all the ugly extras in Explorer that seemed to chew up CPU time rather than offer any useful features, even a cute little shadow under the mouse pointer that probably took up its fair share of processor cycles. Even after turning all the cruft off, the machine still ran like a three-legged horse. It felt _much_ slower than NT 4, which really is saying something. The video was unbearably slow, though using NT 4 drivers might have been the cause of that. Programs loaded slower. The machine took longer to boot and longer to shut down (which needed to be done often, even moreso than NT 4). Although it had a later version of DirectX than NT 4 SP3 did, none of the games I tried to use worked with it. (A few of them did in NT 4.) Internet Explorer kept forgetting that I'd told it to use a proxy server. Eventually I got sick of it and reinstalled NT 4.
The SP2 CDs just arrived yesterday. I'm very afraid.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I agree, a newbie is the best possible person to use for usability studies. That is actually one thing MS got right: pop in the cd, wait, press the install button, fill in a few fields, (usually) reboot and off you go. Anoying for the advanced user, but extremly easy for the newbie (this is after my recent experiences of installing both NT and 95). However, anything more complicated (eg downloaded drivers), their model just doesn't work as well, nor for installing the os.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
As others have noted, this is showing very poor taste on the part of Loki in sharing this kind of customer information in a public forum. Especially since the obvious intent is to ridicule this customer. I sure hope I never have a reason to call Loki tech support.
_I_ hope it's dry humor because it's exactly wrong.
For a first-time experience, for the 'usability tests' that we're talking about, if you're looking to change something in the way your computer behaves, Windows gives you some clues from the get-go that the command line simply doesn't: try the big friendly button with the bouncing arrow saying "Start Here."
Inside there, a clearly-marked "Settings" menu, and inside there, Control Panels, Printers, so forth. Clearly-labeled hierarchical menus that lead you to figuring out where you're going, even if you're not sure. Once you get "Control Panels" open, there's a mess of nicely labeled icons to poke at and try to figure things out. From context, you know that everything in there is going to change some setting on the computer, and can poke around inside that context for a while until you get what you want.
The original poster's 'easier' alternative, the command prompt, offers no such context. Finding out that 'ntsysv' can change around certain settings is nice to know, but offers no context in finding out how to change _other_ settings -- commands starting with 'nt'? command ending in 'sysv'? Nope. No rhyme or reason. Or clues. Or hints. Or help. You just scratch around until you stumble across what you're looking for, and slowly accumulate knowledge. Maybe you find 'man,' maybe you figure out how the GNU info viewer works, maybe you have Gnome or KDE installed and can use THEIR visual context.
But if you plunk down newbies to a Win32 desktop and to a command-line Unix environment and just say 'go' with no further instructions, I think you know where my money'd be.
Now, me, I'm a command-line junkie. I _love_ it. I live at the bash or tcsh prompt all day, even on Windows boxes I administer (Cygwin's getting pretty cool these days). But to say that command line is '_so_ much easier' is simply wrong, and so I, too, hope the original poster was being tongue-in-cheek.
--
Can you say "viable desktop environment?"
Personally, I don't really think this is a good thing to point out at the end of a tech support call that outlines several of Linux's and it's various desktop systems weaknesses. Also, this should have never been made public. It gives Linux (and Loki) a bad image.
Employee: I can't get Oracle for Linux installed.
Boss: Call tech support.
Employee: But what if I ask something dumb and my call shows up on Slashdot and I have to quit my job and become a hermit?
Boss: Hmm.. good point. Let's use Solaris.
>As it turned out, he had unpacked the tarball (I had to explain what a tarball was) on the CD by double-clicking its package icon in gmc and then double-clicking the install icon that came up. He had absolutely no idea where the game had been installed, and didn't know how to search for it. This is a common problem with installation of packages by newbies. Something should be done about it.
I don't care about this kind of stupid news. It has no value. Loki should be ashamed for giving out info like this. Next time some guy from Loki asks me a stupid question then I will also post it to slashdot. Does that make sense, nope! Guess they have no etiquette for customer support...
What makes you say that?
Hmmm, I'm in doubt !?
First of all, for those thinking this is the start of a usability FUD campaign, forget it. Microsoft hires outside firms to do studies like this when the intent is public consumption.
So why do a usability study. There is no need to do so with the OS itself. The only viable reason would be to evaluate a product. A Microsoft product. You can be certain that it is a program targeted toward corporate customers and not the desktop user.
That is...unless they have ported Office to thin linux-based Microsoft-branded terminal boxen. This would give MS the control they need while gaining the stability advantages, and all without violating the GPL. Just use supported components and when fanatics clamor for the source, you've added nothing of your own. You also are not releasing Office to the unwashed linux users, unless they have an MS box connected to an NT Server.
There is nothing to back this up, but what the heck. This is my bet. It be the closest thing to BillG kicking ScottM in the nuts.
MS has for years always studied competitors. It will then "Borrow" (otherwise known as steal) ideas/looks&feels/patents from competitor. Word Perfect / Macintosh / (the disk compressor company from '88) come to mind. This study is simply to find out what we are doing right and "Borrow them". Like wise they are probably trying to figure out weaknesses and expoit them like mindcraft. Remember that fact that patches were not allowed for tests. We will probably have to
endure another stupid benchmark from somebody
like mindcraft.
My x-wife use Linux regularly. And no, it wasn't done as a cruel joke. :+> She hates computers, but finds that she needs them for school. Getting degrees in anthropology and literature means a lot of writing! But, she doesn't have the money to buy a computer. So I dug through my spare parts, and put together a Pentium 90 with 16MB of RAM (now 32MB -- swapping was getting tedious). To make life easy, I installed SuSe with KDE. Personally, I prefer Debian and WindowMaker, but KDE made more sense for her. I also added a shortcut icon to WordPerfect and showed her how to mount/unmount floppies. Then I showed her how to login as a normal user, and made a login for shutdown. She's able to transport files to/from school as RTF files. The only thing Linux doesn't do for her is run SPSS. She needs a stats tool for the advanced anthropology classes. A couple years ago, I gave her mother an account on my machine for her to check e-mail, browse the web, and write papers. At the time, I setup fvwm and StarOffice in her own account. It worked very well for her -- everything was simple push button. These days mom wants an iMac because of the color choices. (sigh) I'm hoping Corel does a good job. It would save me a lot of effort in configuring computers like this! BTW, Windows is too complicated! The home computer UI needs to be like a PalmPilot. The Windows UI is just too inconsistant and missleading. Just allowing one window to completely cover another can cause a lot of confusion. This becomes very apparent when working with an otherwise intelligent adult who has never used a computer before. PS. Kids pick up on everything fast.
I think in general apps are harder to install w/ linux. This is unfortunately more due to library problems than anything else and needs to be fixed yesterday! The most obvious example is glibc2.0 glibc2.1 incompatibility! Take a look at your generic third party package say staroffice5.1 the install is nontrivial if you dont have the right libraries installed. On the other hand their are many things much nicer about linux, the most obvious being automatic package maintenance and upgrading over the net (like debian for instance). Install scripts for debian's packages and all kde software will automatically add themselves to a menu which is *imho* a good thing (this was the basic question asked by the microciv kid, where is my proggie?) At some point later he can run it from his xterm..
I think he's got a point about the sound card. I once had to reinstall NT after I installed Turtle Beach Montego sound card drivers (for my Montego sound card) in NT. The drivers didn't work, and NT would not let me uninstall them. After checking newsgroups, I found that reinstalling NT was the only solution (according to turtle beach tech support). I lost two days of work because of this. I am now using a a Creative Labs/Ensonic Audio PCI card which works ok. However, audio still crashes on NT about twice a week, requiring a reboot. I have Linux on the same PC, and I don't have any audio problems with Linux (I've had the machine up in Linux continuously for over two months with no problems).
The only reason that I have a Win32 machine at all is for games. I've got five computers in my office, and only one has a FAT32 partition on it. Got Solaris, got FreeBSD, got Linux, yep. And none of them machines can play games when my brother-in-law wants to play online (except Kingpin and Quake2/3, which run just fine in spite of my Voodoo3 graphics adapter and no damn official Linux support for it).
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Linux needs games (and the ease of use required to sell/market those games).
What's driven hardware and software innovation the most in the last five years? Games. Admit it. If none of this 3D crap would have come out, I would have been fine on my 386/25. Once I saw Doom, I had to have a 486. And so on. But none of that wanting involved Linux, even though I was a big Slackware user back then. Because Linux was for work, and Windows was for games. Hell, if Commodore hadn't tanked, I'd have probably become a developer for Amigas.
Linux needs games. Not the desktop... right now anyway. Servers for onlines gaems is where it's at for the next year or so. Don't wanna fuss with Mesa, but want Quake3? No sweat, a dedicated server is for you. But no: you can't run Q3 as a dedicated server easily. Much fussing is required, and it sucks.
But what if most online games came with special provisions for Linux machines as servers? What if game software companies made it especially easy to run an online Linux server of each game they distribute? You'd have 14 year old kids clamoring for new Linux machines. And 32-year-old kids like me as well.
Make the preferred server for an online game a Linux server, and the desktop will follow. That's what I'm saying. We'd have demand, and we'd have drivers and we'd have industry support. And we need it.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Linux MAY be more than Mom needs right now, but she certainly doesn't need $400 worth of Microsoft OS and programs just to email Junior, surf the web, and type up her resume.
I agree. Personally I don't see anything close to the Holy Grail of an "Information Appliance" yet. (Which is basically what we're talking about here.) Everything seems to be cheap PCs, or something that doesn't even come close to the versitility one needs. There doesn't seem to be a happy middle yet. You don't necessarily need majorly upgradeable hardware. (These things should be cheap enough for you not even really have to think about just going out and buying a new one.)
There needs to be the right kind of software too.
I agree it needs to be inexpensive, but by the same token it doesn't really need to be "full featured" either. Just all the common stuff. (Gimp is good example of this. It's powerful enough for you use without feeling tied and gaged (i.e. Paintbrush or xpaint) but it's not something the CIA would use to doctor photos either.) And of course the Interface needs to be clean. Personally I like the PalmOS UI. (Except for the dedicated writing area. I like WinCE's way better.)
Of course any IA is doomed to fail if you can't share files with the rest of the world, but again this is a software issue.
I'm disgusted with the hordes of slashdot readers that are ranting against Microsoft and overlooking the fact that Loki, hungry for publicity, has revealed the details of a private tech support call made by one of their users.
./ editors for posting this crap. It saddens me to see that Slashdot, who supposedly is a defender of citzens' privacy, has shown complete disregard for this person's private matters. Are you guys really this desperate for ad banner impressions that you have to stoop to these levels? If Microsoft or some other "evil" had posted this tech support call, I'm sure it would get an article on /. and at least 300 flaming comments. Instead, a linux company does the same thing and suddenly it's "Microsoft is hiring idiots and trying to spread FUD, blah blah blah".
I'm even more disgusted with the
Please join me in boycotting Loki. I'm not about to trust these clowns with a tech support call, much less my credit card number.
chris
I bought CTP, and I'm pretty sure that no one at Loki has any business telling people anything about me, beyond "we sold a copy from Fry's in Sunnyvale on July whateverth".
I hope someone asked permission, but it doesn't look that way.
Tech support departments need to be very careful what they divulge. Apparently, some aren't.
Just out of curiosity, what are the circumstances under which you wouldn't just hit the "Next" button on the install "wizard" at that point, and would, instead, specify a place to install it other than the default? I've always found that particular part of the installation process for Windows to be an irritant, but there're presumably users for whom it's a necessity (installing on a file server? Or something else?).
(The stuff that offers you various types of installations, including "Custom", is also sometimes a pain; I seem to remember not always getting a good idea from it of what the consequences of choosing different types of installations, or of choosing to or not to install some particular piece in a custom install, would be, other than "it'll take up this much disk space" - but I think I've seen the same thing installing, say, various UNIX-flavored OSes, so that's not unique to Windows.)
The debaters here have largely talked aboot software installation on Linux (as a proxy for UNIX-flavored systems in general, although others may do things differently) and Windows; how does, say, the MacOS software installation process differ?
From my own personal experience, if they're trying out Civ first, they won't get onto trying out anything else.
insignificant sig
Theres no way Im going to buy products from a company that treats its customers like this. Whomever the customer may be, this should not of left the company. Condescending p***k.
That's what the original poster meant by distinguishing "easy to use" from "easy to learn". It's very hard to find out that typing "ntsysv" does what you need, as you correctly pointed out. But once you know that fact, you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to type in the six letters and press ENTER. Whereas "click Start, select Settings, select Control Panel" is far easier to learn, but you have to move your hand to the mouse and wait for all the pretty menus and windows to finish deploying. Or at least, that's how I'm interpreting the argument.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Weel I've been using RH for about 16 months, and I have never used netsysv and didn't even know it existed really. I just ran netsysv --which shouldn't have been possible since I am not logged in as root but there u go-- and i do recognize it from the RH install. And I do recognize the comamnd name as something I have pulled up the man page on since i saw it on my system and was curious aboout it. But like I say, seeing netsysv in action was news to me. I have used linuxconf to configure services. There are many ways to get something done on a Linux system, starting services up from /etc/rc.d/init.d/ or from rc.local or even inittab for example, and this is symptomatic of the confusing environment newbies are in once they step out from the "planned communities" of Windows and MacOS. To take another example from service configuration, I have only recently become aware of command line utility chkconfig to do what 8 months ago I learned to do with linuxconf and before that did by manually ripping out and repasting link entries from rc.d/init.d runlevels. There are always more than one approach to doing something with the Linux system and while that has many upsides, it also has one major downside in that the raw newbie frequently --almost always-- sees several strands of mutually incompatible documentation and howto's together with friendly usenet advice while trying to solve what on other systems is an extremely simple matter because there is bascially one way to do it. Lookup the confusion in Usenet over how to use trutype fonts in sytems with xfs --people tied up in knots trying to make instructions for xfstt work because of the name similarity. (are you talking about Inet or identd and its spawn in.identd and why are these installed by a package called pidentd? Unix naming conventions are endlessly confusing to newbies and these conventions are so strongly part of UNIX culture and filesystem standards that either the newbie must bow his head and say I will learn this shit even if it kills me or someone comes up with a distro that is at least as functional as Windows while completely hiding the UNIXishness from their innocent eyes. Also the way in to documenation is obscure as The Poop on Unix system administration (not how to use KDE) just is not a popup window on the desktop --and can never be! Add to this the fact that many centrally important tools from a desktop users POV are projects being run very much in the sidestreets of the linux sceen. How many clewbies know what diald is and where to get it and how to install it? This example will make many people snicker but to a non-technical home user diald is extremely valuable software. Having it preinstalled or easily install itself would be even more valuable. How many would know that they can get all official updates to their RPM based system downloaded and installed as they hit the ftp servers every 24 hours without lifting a finger? They generally don't, as there is no one place to get this info. Yes I know a huge amount of documentation is right there in /usr/doc /usr/man and ready to be downloaded from linuxdoc.org or Sunsite in html, sgml, ascii-text, or .ps but it is just too much for a NORMAL person who just wants to do the basic stuff to wade through in search of answers to basic questions --not to mention that a good deal of it is out of date. And why isn't man the last word--why do we have to have man and info? thats retarded Info requires its own manual to use which says plenty about how userfriendly it is. Yup yup yup many things are very easy to do with Linux once you know the system, not just a part or a few parts in isolation but for the average person of average PC skills, Linux is a baptism in fire. you will come out "the other end" of your novitiate a changed person or you will run away screaming.
This is why Linux is not a real competitor to Win9x. Until I see a linux distribution that can be completely installed, configured and treaked without dropping to shell or text editor, I will not change my mind. Linux is fine for servers, programmers, unix geeks.. but a consumer OS it ain't
Eventually the smart ones understand it too well and become terrible tech support reps because they can't explain it to the end user in tiny words that they understand.
Alternately: the smart ones become senior support reps who are no longer any good at explaining simple problems to simple users but have seen many of the weirder problems before and can explain them efficiently to more sophisticated users.
While this story isn't anything more than yet another anti-luser screed from a tech with probably too much (and misplaced) self-esteem, and re: mIgrowsoft tells us only that, yes - oh the humanity - they're checking out Linux-as-OS-for-people-with-suntans to see if they should be worried about a (highly unlikely) migration away from Windows, the comments reveal Linux's weakest feature: developers are directing its development. That's why Corel (argh!) is pretty much alone in making a simplified distro (there's YDL for PPC, too, but I haven't seen a release date for their Gone Home version); Corel is just like the world - full of lusers who, when a /.er says quote [sigh/chuckle] All you have to do is
./configure
$ tar zxvf tarball.tar.gz
$ cd tarball
$
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
- what are you, retarded? unquote, will say "No, *that's* retarded. The mouse has been around for 15 years. Why can't I just poke the file with it?" And so Corel tries to make it happen, while RHAT makes its manual a hundred pages longer.
Now, before you get all worked up and start goin' root-this and null-that, you should know that I *want* to use a *nix, because I know what's good about all of 'em: they work right. That's why I don't use WinAnything, even though I "should," being a luser. I've got a relatively useless iMac staring at me right now that I want to run YDL on once the G4 arrives, because I figure a Linux OS will make better use of the little girl's limited memory while doing silly crap like slashdotting and visiting alt.fan.traci-lords. For me (non-sysadmin, non-dev), that's about all Linux offers right now. But to do work, I need two things (aside from Photoshop; don't get me started about GIMP (argh!)): solid uptime (which *nix has) and a GUI for every occasion. Mac OS 8.6, though it chews through memory like mad, almost has the second. There are Windows-style pop-up menus down in the left corner, GNOME-type open-app buttons in the right, a bunch of specialized 3rd-party menu-bar pulldowns and "virtual desktops," and, as a plus, the native scripting language is ridiculously simple (and works with almost every application). I use all of these, all the time. What I want is a command line. I know how much faster it is to grep than it is to use the Finder, and I'd like to be able to do more while keeping all my windows open (script-on-the-fly, for example). A real "EasyLinux" would be perfect. But there isn't one. Not even close. I don't wanna *make* nothin' but pretty pictures and invoices.
And unfortunately for The Movement (which I truly do love), Mac OSX Client, a prettied-up and expensive BSD, probably will be exactly what I (and most everyone I know, almost uniformly Mac- and Be-using graphics/publishing/music pros) need. We don't like that it's not really Free(TM) and isn't particularly anti-MS, but so what? Got work to do (if I ever shut up).
And if Linux can't even convince a super-luser like me, it's valid to ask what my mom (whose computer is so damn nice I pray for her death daily) and some doofus trying to play CivIII and listen to Korn mp3s are going to think of it. The word "retarded" springs to mind.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Ick, make a choice, WebTV or a real computer. Windows (the middle ground) has been, is and always will be a buggy POS OS!
./filename
tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz
cd
make
make install
Awww, now is that so hard? Pussy, you would have never survived DOS!
Why didn't you revert to a previous hardware profile? That's what they're there for. After reverting to your previous profile (which only requires a single tap on the down-arrow key to choose the previous profile during bootup), you wouldn't have to uninstall the drivers, because it would be like you never installed them in the first place. It's the same reason why you don't delete your old kernel immediately after building a new one. You make sure the new one behaves first, and if not, you just boot up the old one, and as far as Linux is concerned, that new one no longer exists.
If your sound card is crashing your OS, you need to get on Creative's ass to get you some drivers that work, or get a different sound card and make sure Creative knows that you are. FWIW, as far as Creative goes, I've never had any problems with my SB32 under NT4 or Win2K.
(That guy who posted about Netscape/Linux/NT/sound card should have been scored "Misinformative.")
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The only way they can grab new techies is by hiring them to play games! ;-)
Linux has become very simple to install and its amazing how non-techies are able to get Linux working and connected via ppp to the Internet.
I often get phonecalls at work with Linux questions and it's surprising how well non-techies has mastered Linux. Most questions I get is what books I recommend and what they should learn to enhance their Linux skills.
It's in the last couple of months that this new non-techie users has started to use Linux.
The short answer is that your mom will be able to use Linux if you help her with the installation.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
Also, my 7 year old daughter happily plays doom and xjewel without any problems.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
C:\Program Files\[Really long advertisement for Vendor]\[Really long advertisement for program]
That's a filing system that's optimized for finding programs by vendor. By looking at the Programs directory on a random computer, I can quickly answer questions like "Are there any applications by Globby Softworks Inc. on this computer?".
That's real useful.
If you're interested in keeping track of what's installed on a computer, either because it's your own, or because it's one of several that you manage, it is useful to design your filing system around being able to quickly determine which types of programs are installed, and why. For example, installing web and email apps under "C:\Program Files\Internet" will help you quickly answer questions like "Which email client is on this system?".
Also, the default install often means that newer versions overwrite older versions. If you're a web designer, you probably want to preserve your old versions of Netscape for testing purposes, so you have to pay attention during its install and choose sensible install locations. And you have to be able to remember those locations later, when you edit your four identical Netscape icons in the start menu.
I suppose the irony is that Windows installs default to giving the end user this degree of control over file locations, while most of it is wasted on Windows, considering how frequently you have to reinstall.
That, and the fact that this is one question that most *nix apps don't ask you (sometimes you really have to dig); which is odd, considering the longevity of a typical *nix system.
Most well behaved applications use "installshield" which keeps track of all files installed and (at least in theory) lets people remove redundant applications very easily - they don't even have to know where the files are to remove them, they can just use the "add/remove applications" dialog.
To make things simpler for the user, all installations should follow the same path and be reversible.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Has anyone tried calling Loki tech support and trying a similar thing. Its pretty damn hard to verify this stuff. I think its fake, and I think I could duplicate this shit in 5 minutes. I don't doubt that MS has linux boxes. I would be very surprised if there was a single OS Microsoft didn't have there. I would be willing to bet they have mom and pops OS written by a freshman at the local college, just to be on teh lookout for ideas. First of all, Loki releasing this information is wrong, and doesn't quite make sense. It sounds almost as if they're trying to get press. Any john doe can call up and say he's from microsoft. verifying it much harder than writing two emails, or calling the people involved.
Sure, it still is not going to be a *nix system but the more M$ can do to, at least, emulate an environment the more the management has an argument to stick to them and the harder it is going to become for the techies.
That at the end of the day the later ones get beaten up as it can only be their fault if things do not work; who cares. Do not be to happy about what is going on there.
When even Linus's own immediate family (mom, dad, sister) other than his wife stick with their Windows and Macs instead of using Linux, good luck convincing the world that it's ready for prime time.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Why is it that we immidiately assume that Grandma's dunno what they're doing. My granny doesn't dribble, and what's more she's actually a full time coder for Macromedia on their PDP-2-L (Port Director Promptly to Linux!!) project Stop bad-mouthing grannies! Besides dribbly grannies usually give out candy...
Who, but the readers of slashdot, would believe in such a story ? Get a grip!
Yes. My wife's 486/33 is running as an X terminal to my K6-2/350. She uses Netscape to check email and StarOffice to write papers.
John S. Jacob * jsjacob@iamnota.com * www.iamnota.com * pgp: ac6ace17
Look at it this way. 99% of the operations a user can perform will be performed only rarely. This means that unless they are at the far-end of the bell-curve marked "geek" a user will not have had the time or inclination to learn the super-optimal-figure-movement-minimising command-line way of doing it. This is where easy to learn becomes the same thing as easy to use - the operation is rare enough that for most users, performing the operation involves learning how to do it. In this situation, friendly icons win hands down.
For the kinds of operations that average users spend most of their time doing - moving files around, cutting and pasting bits of documents - Windows has plenty of shortcuts that even occasional or inexperienced users quickly become accustomed to, but at no stage is the user thrown in at the deep end and expected to pick them up straight away. Result: for an average user, Windows is easier to learn and easier to use.
"Designed by idiots for idiots" should be the mantra of anyone who seriously wants to take on the mass market.
Interesting, since someone's grandma can code theres all the reason to NOT care about this ease-of-use problem. Heres a hint-&-a-half, NOT EVERYONES GRANDMA CAN CODE!! Witty remarks and nothing else. Keep it up folks, keep on ignoring the problem, you DO know that the only way to beat MS is to create an easy to use interface. Something that has been lacking from *Nix for DECADES!! If the Windows interface scares the hell out of Grandma, she'll freak on the Linux interface. Figure it out folks, Linux NEEDS to work on its interface if its ever gonna survive, you cant expect the entire industry to "Deal with it". "So what, get used to it!", Marrion Barry.
Yup. And I agree.
Except that the context of this whole argument is 'usability tests.'
Meaning we're discussing 'easy to learn,' for the uneducated user. I'm completely on about the idea that command-line is easier to use, once it's mastered.
But _MY_ point is that once you know "Control Panel" you can find all the system settings you want by searching there.
But knowing 'ntsysv' doesn't get you any knowledge that isn't supplied by the ntsysv command itself. You have to find the next weird six-letter command, on your own, with no clues, to get any farther. In Windows, at least, you have a folder open, with all of the similar possibilities right there.
Or, to be clearer: command-line is easier, once you've taken all the time you need to know all the commands.
Until then, organized GUI's (and yes, Windows counts, like it or not) make it easier to narrow down to find what you're after, definitionally.
--
Kpackage is what I have recommended to my non commandline linux newbie friends. Its not bad, needs some improvement but is getting better. It tells you were every file will install for any given package and has an uninstaller. Not bad, better than the Windows uninstaller as it actually does remove most the stuff.
Sure the docs say you can install the docs onto a networked file server, what they don't say is that even when you observe their install procedure in their tech support doucments online it is up to fate to decide exactly which computers on your network will be able to use those docs.
These are the facts of the case and they are undisputed. I am sure someone can write in saying they have had no problems, but I'm a coder and a sysadmin on Unix and NT, if I have to spend a couple of hours to do something I consider trivial and still find it doesn't work then what kind of hope can anyone else have of installing something elsewhere.
The moral here is - if you are buying a computer for an MS OS then buy a hard drive that can handle as much as possible, even if you pay a premium, you may not be able to install everything you want to otherwise.
Wiggly -- But I want to be different, just like everybody else.
The only time I _ever_ need to change the default install dir is when I have multiple partitions in my system (NT doesn't support a boot partition larger than 4G!!) and i constantly have to specify "D:" to install!
In linux, if I have multiple drives or partitions, I mount them accordingly, and netscape goes where it should by default! It doesn't need to know or care what is happenning on the FS or hardware level.
Also, that "Last Known Good" hardware choice for NT has NEVER worked. I support 60 NT boxen, and 5 NT servers, and I have NEVER been able to get that to work. Even hardware profiles being created don't help, for some reason. And guess what Tech Support is gonna tell you to do?
And hopefully noone is an idiot enough to overwrite their old kernel without first booting to the new one...
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
You're scaring me a little here guys. This is going to be a cold shower for some of you.
This is NOT a competition against Microsoft. Don't use Linux as your private banner for campaign against Microsoft - or any other competitor. Those of you who do are working directly against Linux. I refer you to the crusades, the spanish inquisition. Both done in the name of Christianity. Both waged against an enemy that any convert could see was evil.
Microsoft is big enough that if the Linux following tries to make sure Microsoft can never out do Linux *by observing* Microsoft at the microscopic level, then Linux will turn into a Windows parasite.
I would suggest that Netscape's biggest undoing came not from Microsoft, but from Netscape. They got too obsessed with 'beating down Microsoft', and less and less focused on 'making a better Netscape'.
By Netscape 4.5, Microsoft didn't really have much to compete with.
I realise people are going to jump up here and tell me how the court case helped thus and something else did that.
But do we have a great web-browser? No.
Microsoft play a game, a competition. Linux has no need to enter the bullring. Remember what makes Linux what it is is people developing Linux for users, developing Linux for sys admins, developing Linux for deployment. Don't turn this into Linux development for comparison charts.
Oliver
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
There was an article "In the beginning their was a command line" by Neal Stephenson (sorry, don't have the URL on me!) that aptly described why people don't want to know any more then they need to. Why we watch the news to get 30 second snippets of a copy writers version of the truth, listen to the radio to get someone elses idea of what i should be listening to. Why people want us to know what a device driver or system call is and they can stay blissfully ignorant.
There was also an article that was linked from here a week or two back about 'linux lite' where a GUI to suit "the rest of the world" applied on a substrate of Linux (or *BSD :*) would be the product to compete with M$, not the OS we know (and love) at the moment.
And don't believe M$ needs to propagate any FUD. I am sure a much more significant negative image is created by word of mouth from people who jumped ship from M$ to Linux and had a bad experience because they really weren't prepared for it.
Just my US$0.10 (the oz dollar went up!)
Marty
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
It makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to produce a version of GNU/Linux.
Think of the advantages:
1. DOJ looses a big part of its anti-trust argument
2. MS Linux integrates with W2000 perfectly. This would encourage the
corporates to take Linux seriously and unsettle the commercial UNIX
vendors. OK Mr UNIX guy what would like like on the desktop? Linux!.
What would you like in the server room? UNIX.
How about we use the same vendor and get Linux on the desktop and
W2000 in the server room? Its cheaper, easier and supported.
3. MS Linux has the same frontend as W2000 (optional) so that users find
it easier to migrate. Less training costs.
4. If W2000 stinks on the desktop there will be an escape route for Micorsoft.
5. Home users don't have to pay for an expensive OS.
6. Microsoft can release their apps for MS Linux, giving a second bite of
the apple and making it very difficult for other vendors to get in.
7. Unsettles the growing Open Source community and scares the hell out
of the over priced UNIX vendors. Bye bye Sun.
8. Increases Micorsoft's number of developers overnight. You code for Linux
you code for Bill!
9. Gives Micorsoft a chance to deal with its reliability reputation.
10. Makes Bill richer through sales of his applications for Linux. Lets face it
the Wine project just cannot keep up and the commercial alternatives are too
expensive.
Wait. Sorry. Whoa. No.
/.ers would not be affected by such packages
One of the reasons I use Linux is that I'm relatively immune from the viri and other nasties which affect the Windows world. An important reason why I'm immune is that foreign software, if it is to do anything serious to the system, must be installed as root, and anything which I install as root I have the sourcecode to and have usually compiled myself. I usually haven't crawled through that code to check for hidden nastiness, but I could if I wanted to.
Recently I've had packages (mostly Java ones) which come with MS-Windows-like graphical point and click installers. To install these you've fundamentally two choices: to install them in the user space of some user, as that user, in which case you've immediately got problems with other users using the same software; or to install them as root, without being able to do 'make -n install' first to see what the hell they're up to.
This is what you're asking for if you ask for a point-and-click RPM installer. It would have (in the general case) to be su root, because otherwise it couldn't install into privileged parts of the filesystem; and before you know where you are you would have masses of hostile variants of well-known RPMs installing trojans and trap-doors and worms all over the shop.
Now, of course, we elite
but the newbies and journos and other less elite and refined Linux users would be, and they would not be impressed. And then the media would be full of stories about how insecure and risky Linux was and we'd lose all the ground we've gained over the past years.
There really is a significant engineering trade off to be made here. Microsoft (and Apple before them) know this perfectly well and have made a conscious choice to go for ease-of-(unskilled)-use over security and stability. And Microsoft are now moving from that extreme ease-of-use position towards a still easy to use but more secure position by using installers that look at digital signatures and so on before installing a package.
Remember, we (the Linux community) are not competing with a bunch of incompetent morons here. We're competing with an extremely slick and professional marketing organisation, who hire very capable software engineers. We've got where we are because we occupy an ecological niche that Microsoft hasn't yet occupied: something with better security, but a bit harder to learn. I don't believe we can compete with Microsoft in their core market, because they are already established there and they are very good at what they do.
If we erode the things which make our product distinct from theirs we risk losing our market share, with (in my opinion) little prospect of taking theirs.
What we need to do is not change our product (at least, not radically) but to educate the marketplace to see its benefits. Our message must be 'Yes, linux may be a bit harder to learn, but the improved stability and reliability are worth it'. Instead of going out to capture their market, we need to bring (some of) their market to us.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
We had a talk from an MS employee here this week, and he said the standard development box at MS is a dual PIII 500 with 256 MB of RAM. A single PIII 450 doesn't seem so overspecced in relation to that...
--
Just out of curiosity, what are the circumstances under which you wouldn't just hit the "Next" button on the install "wizard" at that point, and would, instead, specify a place to install it other than the default?
/ or /etc, so I don't install my Windows software in C:\. Therefore I have ended up using this reasonably frequently.
/usr/local can become a veritable maze :(
:)
;) Under FreeBSD, /stand/sysinstall allows pretty much the same functionality. (I can't remember what the equivalent is in RH, I tend to use rpm from the command line to install packages.)
/dev/null or local equivalent.)
I like to keep all my Windows software in C:\Program Files\Vendor\Package , so they're easy to find when Uninstall decides it can't delete everything because the package uninstaller flakes out. (I tend to uninstall stuff quite a lot.) Some vendors like to make their software's default installation directory a subdirectory of C:\, which clutters up my root folder (Acrobat 3 used to do this, as well as the software on my Rage 128 display driver CD IIRC). I don't install StarOffice, CivCTP, et al. in
It is possible to do this with Linux/*BSD apps, though more often than not (in my experience) it involves installing from source (and taking config files to bits). When it's a lot quicker to install from an RPM or tarball, I have a tendency to think that perhaps it's not all that essential - as a result
The stuff that offers you various types of installations, including "Custom", is also sometimes a pain
True, but you don't have to use it. Select "Typical install" and go make yourself a coffee, if the Custom option is so daunting.
As far as Windows is concerned, it's not the End Of All Things(tm) if you mess up the custom install, anyway. Settings-> Control Panel-> Add/Remove Programs-> Windows Setup got used very heavily after I realised I'd forgotten to check several boxes during my first custom install of Win98. It happens; neither blood nor tears were shed.
(Moderate to oblivion at will; flames to
--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
It's not FUD. Linux is not usable by most of the world's population, and it was never intended to be. Linux remains a technical, enthusiasts' OS; to use it to do almost anything at all requires a vast store of knowledge and familiarity with the functioning of the OS and programs. Think of all the concepts we understand and take for granted:
This lends itself to more of a learning cliff than curve. Most of the world's population doesn't even want to know what a filesystem is. They just want to be able to press a button to send email to Jimmy. If they're going to use Linux as a desktop OS, they need to be abstracted from all the internals of the machine.
Linux, even pre-installed with KDE/Gnome, is nowhere close to this. I would never recommend Linux to a non-technical-enthusiant in a million years. If you had to give OS support to your clueless grandmother/uncle/neighbor, which you rather they use--Linux or 98?
The important question is: do we really want these people using linux, in any form? It's not as easy a question as it might sound. On one hand, pretty much all Linux users dislike Micro$oft. We're all happy to see a proprietary, closed, inferior OS get trashed by Linux. The rapid expansion and public hype has also benefited the Linux community immensely. A couple years ago you never would have seen useful things like QT, XFS, and Darwin open-sourced, major games on Linux, or graphics companies releasing Linux drivers... Such benefits will continue to flow as more people and hence desktop applications support linux.
But there are also dangers if this increasing popularization of Linux were to occur, more than just the irritation of having users that don't understand what a tarball is. The reason most people I know use Linux is because it's so complex. What first attracted me to Linux was its complexity, its power, and the ability to manipulate, control, and monitor the OS on a low level.
The problem is that while ease-of-use/idiotproofing and power can coexist, it's a difficult and unstable situation. As it stands now, most programs cater to advanced users -- text
If an idiotproof easy-to-use desktop environment is layered on top of Linux, it's likely that many companies releasing software for it would not include the power, behavior, and configurability we now expect; also, programs might begin to depend on various functionalities of the user-friendly shell to do irritating things without telling us.
Programs that might otherwise be ported to Linux as it is now, with full functionality, could work only in user-friendly mode. Hard-core Linux users could face the unpleasant choice of either 1) contuining as they do now, compiling software, not using insecure features, and being unable to use most software out there, or 2) having to deal with many of the annoyances of Windows, except on Linux.
So think through the issue carefully before espousing Linux as the OS of the masses... do we really want Linux to be an OS usable by those who have no idea how it works? Or do we want to keep it an OS for technophiles, one that chooses power, flexibility, and security over ease-of-use and simplicity? I know why I use Linux; the choice is clear to me. There are enough tech-loving people around to make linux a viable, well-supported choice without opening it the masses.
Ali Soleimani
Caltech math/physics undergrand
alis@caltech.edu
It's not FUD. Linux is not usable by most of the world's population, and it was never intended to be. Linux remains a technical, enthusiasts' OS; to use it to do almost anything at all requires a vast store of knowledge and familiarity with the functioning of the OS and programs. Think of all the concepts we understand and take for granted:
This lends itself to more of a learning cliff than curve. Most of the world's population doesn't even want to know what a filesystem is. They just want to be able to press a button to send email to Jimmy. If they're going to use Linux as a desktop OS, they need to be abstracted from all the internals of the machine.
Linux, even pre-installed with KDE/Gnome, is nowhere close to this. I would never recommend Linux to a non-technical-enthusiant in a million years. If you had to give OS support to your clueless grandmother/uncle/neighbor, which you rather they use--Linux or 98?
The important question is: do we really want these people using linux, in any form? It's not as easy a question as it might sound. On one hand, pretty much all Linux users dislike Micro$oft. We're all happy to see a proprietary, closed, inferior OS get trashed by Linux. The rapid expansion and public hype has also benefited the Linux community immensely. A couple years ago you never would have seen useful things like QT, XFS, and Darwin open-sourced, major games on Linux, or graphics companies releasing Linux drivers... Such benefits will continue to flow as more people and hence desktop applications support linux.
But there are also dangers if this increasing popularization of Linux were to occur, more than just the irritation of having users that don't understand what a tarball is. The reason most people I know use Linux is because it's so complex. What first attracted me to Linux was its complexity, its power, and the ability to manipulate, control, and monitor the OS on a low level.
The problem is that while ease-of-use/idiotproofing and power can coexist, it's a difficult and unstable situation. As it stands now, most programs cater to advanced users -- text
Programs that might otherwise be ported to Linux as it is now, with full functionality, could work only in user-friendly mode. Hard-core Linux users could face the unpleasant choice of either 1) contuining as they do now, compiling software, not using insecure features, and being unable to use most software out there, or 2) having to deal with many of the annoyances of Windows, except on Linux.
So think through the issue carefully before espousing Linux as the OS of the masses... do we really want Linux to be an OS usable by those who have no idea how it works? Or do we want to keep it an OS for technophiles, one that chooses power, flexibility, and security over ease-of-use and simplicity? I know why I use Linux; the choice is clear to me. There are enough tech-loving people around to make linux a viable, well-supported choice without opening it the masses.
Ali Soleimani
Caltech math/physics undergrand
alis@caltech.edu
Noone has to download libs, extract tarballs and mess with gcc. That's the reason why rpm's, deb's and you-name-it's exist.
Hi blacknat@lokigames.com, I read about your conversation with the MS guy. And, I recognized my own problems from last night!!! I installed RedHat 6.0 last Friday and yesterday I eventually had the time to install Povray 3.1. Six hours of frustration, reading manuals, HowTos, KDE-help, Gnome-help, etc. Nowhere to find anything on the sh install -command you referred to... I read the attached ReadMe-file. But, from a complete newbie perspective IT DOES NOT contain the information you need (as I saw it at least). I have worked with MS products for more than a decade, and feel pretty used to crappy manuals and pograms. But, documentation in Linux-world is not for newbies. It is written by someone who takes too much basic knowledge for granted. I'm not stupid, but "the steep learning curve" bugs me. I'm determined to make Linux run. And, I'm determined write BETTER newbie manuals, once I master the basics. Cheers!
I'm not convinced this was posted to bash anyone. If he feels embarrassed or upset that's his own problem, but that's probably just about a lack of confidence. What I always found useful when starting up with Linux was that I did have the confidence in myself not to get aggravated or upset and not to think myself stupid when someone said 'oh you want to type xshdfd -dfjh | dhsf > hdsjs, isn't that obvious?'....
i don't mean to resort to name-calling, but this seems like a rather elitist position to take. what you're saying is basically that linux should be difficult to use so people who aren't up to par won't be able to use it. i like to consider myself rather intelligent, but if i could figure out how to even install linux on my computer and properly boot it, i would consider myself near genius. it's easy to say that it's not that difficult once you know how to use it, but try looking at it from another perspective. it took me about 3 months to figure out what a tarball was. i was even a computer science major at the time! who are you making an operating system for, if not the general public? if you want a bunch of ISPs to use linux, then you can quit working on it right now. as long as you refuse to admit that linux is too difficult, you absolve yourself from any responsibilty of making it easier. making it more intuitive does not require "dumbing it down." there is no reason you can't make an easy to use operating system with powerful capability for more experienced users. a learning curve is okay, but the objective is always to make it as smooth as possible, not to make it unclimbable for anyone left at the bottom.
Thanks for pointing about the license agreement and rebooting after Netscape installation. My mistake as it's quite a time since I installed it last time. Points for you.
But why do you have to get personal because of my NT-problem? There's no reason to get personal mr/mrs/ms Anonymous.
I did try to revert to the original hardware profile and got the same BSOD. I took the sound card out and no help. If you have some way to fix that (without an emergency disk, of course), I'm all ears.
It is possible to do this with Linux/*BSD apps, though more often than not (in my experience) it involves installing from source (and taking config files to bits). When it's a lot quicker to install from an RPM or tarball, I have a tendency to think that perhaps it's not all that essential - as a result /usr/local can become a veritable maze :(
/software/apache-1.3.4) and then symlink to the latest version (eg. /software/apache)
I do this quite a lot.. for software such as apache and mysql (which change reasonably often, and are worth upgrading regularly)
It's pretty useful to install different versions in different directories (such as
This does need to be done from source, but it's pretty useful. A custom install is ideal for this.
Start/Settings/Control Panel/System/Devices/CDROM/Turn off AutoRun.
I'm with MS in this one. My theory is they are hiring clueless newbies and/or established Windows users to test out Linux, to see how the average person would respond to it. And this phone converstation is not suprising at all. I speak from experiance, I've used Windows since about Win 3.1 and never really had to do anything with DOS. I'm a teenager, so I like to install lot's of crap, so that's important too. Reading /. day after day about how great and almightly Linux is, I decided to try it out. I thankfully read a lot about it, so when it came to install I knew to reboot my machine to boot into CD (I mention this only because of a kid in my class who was suprised when a Linux install program didn't start when he popped in his Red Hat CD in Windows), and wasn't totally confused of what /dev/hda2 meant. But will the average Windows user know that? Maybe, maybe not. Ok, so I finally get it running, and I agree again with the MS guy, it IS harder to install, at least if you're used to Windows. If people switch, I guarentee the tech support lines will be swamped with calls complaining about having to use a command prompt, people wondering where the .exe extension is, and just how to do the simple redundent tasks that everyone uses everyday. I still have problems installing some programs a month after I've installed it, and sometimes it does inexplicably screw up on me and just stop working. Sure it's my fault, but what's to say that some other clueless newbie won't do the same thing? And I doubt they'll be as patient as me, they'll just erase it and go to Windows only again. Linux has it's place in the computer world, I see how come you like it. But I think that Windows is the better choice for newbies, and I think a lot of new Linux users who used to use Windows will get fustrated at Linux. And if you really must know, I do prefer Windows over Linux, and part of that reason is I already know how to do everything that's neccasary for me in Windows, and a lot of things just seem simpler in Windows.
Disclamier: I do not hate Linux. I think it's a good OS depending on what you want to do. I just feel like MS is a better choice for a newbie and for me
One test of Usability of s/w is can I install and use -lets say- an editor easily *without* having to read the manuals or installation procedure. If I have to do that, then it's too hard and unusable. Only for the more powerful features should I have to read the manual. Thus, it should be idiot proof. Moreover, documentation written for the military has a spec whereby it must be written at a seventh grade education level. The reason is is that at one time the person using this big complicated electronic device was usually a high-school dropout, however, the spec has changed. So if you do Usability studies on how simple it is to use, you must also do Readability studies so that documentation is simple to understand and use. We get alot of comments on Computer-based Training (CBT) stuff that would surprise you although it should be almost common sense.
How 'bout a graphical user interface (newbies go wild on them) which allows you to type commands? Hey, and if they don't wanna loose their mouse control, make them *click* on the characters on a, onscreen interface. Trust me, that's probably one of the few ways to get a middle of the road...
From the point of view of "Microsoft spying on Linux" it is not exactly breathtaking news that Microsoft might be playing around and doing tests on competitor products. I would bet my left hand that it's not the first or the last time they do this, and it's not even worth noting as a practice in this industry.
I can hardly consider this article "news".. I would more easily classify it as "gossip", given that I also have my doubts as to whether it is an admirable practice to publicize the contents of private support service calls.
Perhaps this article has given foot to an interesting discussion over UI issues.. but nevertheless this could have been achieved without introducing tabloid-style gossip headlines such as "Microsoft plays Linux games at work" What's next? "Microsoft runs out of sanitary paper?" or "Bill's X-lover reveals true nature of company name?"
Nick Moraitakis
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
Saves space too.
Maybe memory serves me wrong but I think I once read (here on slashdot??) that the Linux-community was going to try and get Linux on the desktop-market. Some of the observations made then were that:
1) HELP is not cool (kewl/c00l);-) ("If you can't find it out by reading the manual or the README, thou art not worthy")
2) HELP-files are really hard to write. Big companies have people working for them doing nothing but making manuals, and these professionals are the people that make those incredibly clear, easy to read, VCR-manuals!!!
Truth is (IMHO) that if you guys want to give Linux a place on the desktop, you will have to cope with (l)users.....
What Linux probably needs is a "TESTGROUP" of some kind. Maybe just a bunch of (ex-)WIN users that are genuinely interested in Linux, but just can't get it working.
Truth is, I am such a person. I'd love to try and get Linux on my machine, but it's just too damn hard... Well, maybe I'm just a lazy bastard....
Bauke
_
Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
_ Light travels faster than sound. That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.... -
I almost agree with you....EXCEPT that I remember the first time I used a Windows machine I couldn't find a text-editor to use without consulting a friend (same as a manual). The first time I used a MacOS box, couldn't find a text editor without searching through the menus. It's not any harder to find an editor in Linux (at least if you're using GNOME or KDE) to find a text editor for a first time user than it is in other OSes.
Werd.
If the intent was to serve that purpose, naming the company that operated the usabilty study would not be necessary. In fact, we could rather have an article on Linux usabilty with a few anonymous accounts of similar incidents to demostrate its flaws.
I believe that while the usabilty debate sprouted over this issue, given the ease at which this debate comes out in about any discussion about Linux, it was peripheral in the context and the phrasing of the news article posted on the frontpage. The story concentrated on the fact that Microsoft performs usabilty studies that involve installation on games, with an emphasis on the questionable technical qualities of the test users.
Nick Moraitakis
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
sorry, mlefranc, but the original post was only reinforced by your response. i consider myself fluent in the dos/win3x9x systems and try to keep up w/hardware.
/. crowd, i want to learn linux. from the looks of things so far, i'd have to apply an old hackerism- "if it was hard to write it oughta be hard to read!"
for reasons that would seem obvious to a
for better or worse, it seems there is nothing user friendly about linux if you don't want to Get Involved. most people couldn't spare a square for their OS.
if you want the desktop, you gotta make it a little more inviting. catch more flies w/honey and all.
The cars to computers analogy is a lousy one and I wish people would stop using it. Everyone uses their cars for pretty much the same thing. Not everyone uses their computers for the same thing. Frankly, a Linux without shell scripting, compilers, configuration files, etc. would be useless to me. That's why I don't use Windows; I can't do a damn thing on it!
If you must have an analogy, I suggest computers to vehicles. Maybe you need a car, and I need a dump truck, and someone else would need a jet.
If you must have an OS for the masses, then why don't you write one? Linux was written to be a powerful, Unix-like OS. That's why Linus started on it in the first place. I don't see why it has to meet the needs of every single person. If you want a free home-user OS, there's plenty of GPL'd code you could use to start building one.
Whereas "click Start, select Settings, select Control Panel" is far easier to learn, but you have to move your hand to the mouse
Hmm... I just changed the country settings in Win'95 without touching the mouse. I'm not saying I love it but you can do a lot with those (semi-consistent, which is better than the typical X mixed setup) keyboard shortcuts.
Whoever "Nick" is, I hope they have a pinkslip on their desk when they walk in today.
Compromising customer-vendor relations, even when that customer is MS, is totally unethical.
M$ has nothing to really fear from linux for now (atleast not of the newbie leaving).
:P)
Face it, linux is hard from easy. Until a person can get prebuild binaries for everything that requires no intelligence to setup(meaning, statically linked, etc.), it will be too daunting. You think your average computer user knows enough about C/C++ to fix even a stupid compiler bug, or even what a compiler does and how it works?
Even I get sick of having to recompile things time to time, and when I get bins they don't work because they're compiled against some lib I've never heard of. Guess what I'm getting down to, is if linux wants to be nicer in binary distros, do everyone a favor and offer a statically linked version, yes it's bigger, but it works out of the box (err, ball
This is really amazing if it is true. Of course /. says it is so wow. I just wonder what distrib!
This is embarassing. What do you mean "almost"?!! I was talking about such an event in theory with a colleague just before reading this. Not only did we both fall off our chairs (literally), I actually did pee myself! It's a good thing our washrooms are equipped with electric hand driers.
p.s.: In all my postings to Slashdot (10 currently listed on my user information page), this is my first ever as "Anonymous Coward." I'm sure you'll understand. ;-)
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Just a little something I noticed... I'm going to have to agree that this person was just testing tech support and whatnot. The reason I'm stating this is because unless I'm mistaken (and please correct me if I am), aren't there installation directions included in the Civ:CTP box?
I mean, when all else fails, read the bloody manual...
Just my $.02...
(Posted anonymously because I lost my passwd. Go figure.)
I work in a shop where we use Linux almost exclusively on the server (in addition to one NT and three Sun boxen)...but Win32 exclusively on the desktop.
Anyways, my point is that after five years with the company, I've finally made the jump to Linux for my workstation. And quite happy that I did.
Three years ago, I told the netadmins that tried to get me to run Linux on my desktop that once the GUI made sense and a decent office package was available, I would make the plunge. And I've done it now - I should have qualified my statements tho', because the Linux install process does need a lot of work...
- the whole process of setting up the drive partitions and choosing your mount points is interminably complex. Mainly because it uses entirely different terminology than it's Win32 counterparts. Not a terrible thing, but it made me feel stupid not knowing what to do - something that doesn't happen often with me as I've been a user now for 15 years.
- Sound card support bites. The documentation sucks large, the driver installation (likely technically brilliant) is totally confusing (modprobe, lsmod, insmod, OSS/Free etc.,etc.,etc.)My sound card still doesn't work (SB16) even though it took me less than ten minutes to get KPilotd installed and configured - something else that was *supposed* to be difficult.
Anyways, difficult is one thing, but Linux does have a way to go on the useability front, mainly from a documentation point of view. If a smart guy like me can't get sound support up and running, I'd be wary of giving it to my mother. OTOH, Linux is the perfect environment for a new user because it makes it really tough for anyone but root to blow things up
I think in this case Linux actually passed extremely well. This guy has done a complete install of Linux, obviously got the desktop working to the extent of browsing the filesystem and CD in the GUI.
It's CIV:CTP that's failed if anything. I bet if their install had been called setup instead there would have been no problem.
I've seen plenty of software that's difficult to install under Win, and most that's impossible to uninstall. Quite often with NT some stuff can't be installed without administrator perms because obviously all DLL's have to go in the system directory.
What's worse, ignorance or apathy? Who knows, and who cares.
I interned for the evil empire last summer and I've got a semi-funny story. Everyone has two machines (slow one for e-mail, fast one for work) there so I installed Linux as my e-mail machine (because Outlook was too slow on my bottom-of-the-pecking-order e-mail machine). All kinds of geeks came out of the woodwork and wanted to play with Enlightenment and my other stuff. A couple guys got accounts to run scripts on it. One clueless manager guy said, "Are you *allowed* to use Linux?", I told him yes, definitely (i had no idea). His next question was, "Do you think I should?" I again told him yes. After I left, I heard he tried to do so, and managed to munge his system. The tech support guys who had to fix it reported it, and got him in trouble for 'undermining the corporate confidence and solidarity'. They came out with an anti-Linux internal use policy as a result, at least for that department.
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
Yes, I am really 11 years old, and I use Linux. No you cannot meet me, my parents already arranged a marriage for me when I get older. Go to linuxchicks.com or something.
I do not understand why we always have to fight about it. Linus SAID, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." When did he say this? How often will this be quoted? He said this in the past, Does the past not change? Look around you! What has changed since that quote? SuSE, RHAT and other distribution installations have gotten much easier. More drivers have been written, more people are supporting linux. More companies are backing up Linux.
Slashdot is a great idea, but it is very sad that we don't always make the best out of it. When a news like this comes on slashdot, we should always ask, How do we use this opportunity for good. Do we? But No! We rather fight, about who is right and who is wrong. Nobody is right, and nobody is wrong.
This article does point out something that Linux needs, and that is to simplify installation of programs. We need a self extracting archive. With various unix systems having different binary, I guess perl will not be a bad language to use to do this. In a real world, most people do not like to read, even geeks. Aye, the only thing they probably read is slashdot. But anyway, Linux is 50% ready for desktop. I use Linux for my desktop workstation, SuSE with KDE. Very wonderful. wonderful for me, because I can read and will read when there is a need. The problem this article presents to us is simple. Linux NEEDS a self extracting/installation kind of program. Lets just focus on this problem. Nothing more or less. The amount of time spent on reading and fighting over this will be wisely spent solving this problem. So what are you going to do, whatcha gonna do? Please don't reply to my post. Go code. Yes, it is hard to believe but I am really 11 years old, and a girl. I turn 12 next week. I love Linux.
The pengiun is soooo cute! ^_^
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
does it make sense to anyone why a microsoft employee doing this kind of study would actually divulge all that info when all he needed was to ask how to install and run the game? me: i can't seem to get ctp to work correctly... loki: well what seems to be the problem? me: well, this machine is being used to prepare financial reports, read slashdot, a little web page writing, and... i mean, is it just me or does this whole story not tie together? and it's not like readme's don't come with every piece of win32 software you have ever seen... unless this guy was the janitor, he seems a little too clueless about all this... you realize that even ms has employees who know how to use linux..
As somewhat of a newbie, I may not understand all of the implications here. However, isn't it possible for MS to legally sell a file manager or window manager running on top of Linux? They could package a distribution with something that looks very similar to fvwm95, coded outside of a GPL. They sell the window/file manager as closed source, slap a slick install on the front end of whatever distro they use, include the GNU/Linux as complementary, market the absense of virii and *nix compatibility to the business folks, start a MS-Window/File manager vs other distro FuD campaign, slap a $99 price on it for their usual (lack of) support and voila, they are players in the Linux market with a closed source product. Since I don't know a whole lot about the GPL and such, though, I could be way off.
Somebody (if I ever get the time I'll look into it myself) needs to modify autofs so that a mountpoint can be specified, and will show up in the automount directory, but won't be mounted until you actually try to enter that directory and retrieve the file list. That way, under [Gnome|KDE|Enlightenment|*], there will be an icon for drooling user boy to click on. This would go a long way to making Linux easier to use.
Now, re: Loki's install. The biggest problem with the install script that I had was that it was not tagged as executable on the CD. That means that:
Now, I agree that autostart on programs is a BAD IDEA. I turn it off on my W9bluescreen systems, but it does make it easier for luserboy to run his stuff. I have a friend who has a five year old. She can play her games on the computer, since they all autostart. She finds the CD, puts it in the drive, and there is her game. There is no way my friend will leave that system in Linux and have to deal with a cranky kid! But, autostart should be an option (perhaps a daemon that is launched (or not) on a per user basis when you log in AT THE CONSOLE.
Lastly, the LSB needs to push some sort of standardized installer, be it RPM, DEB, or supercilfragoulishexpealidous. But it needs to be standardized, it needs to be able to set up any and all desktop managers (i.e. the various GUIs need to settle on a standard, common way to set file associations, icons, etc.), and it needs to work both as a GUI and CLI app.
Make no mistake: if we do not make Linux desktop ready, Bill will bide his time, gather his strength, and when he is ready, destroy us. In his world view, "There can be only one."
www.eFax.com are spammers
I too, would love to use Linux, but no matter what I do, I can't get the RH 6 install I have to get x windows up and running..... I gave up after 3 days.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I beg to differ. The same old argument comes up: Is Windows really easier to use than linux, or any other *nix? I don't think so. It's a matter of what the user already knows, which is usually what is installed on the peecee they buy from CompUSA. Despite the fact that you can order linux machines from any of a number of large manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, others), you still can't buy a PC pre-loaded with linux in a retail outlet.
The usability issue is a valid one, though. To appeal to the masses, Microsoft is more "on-target" than linux, but still way off mark. The average person can't use Windows, either. I'm not talking about the "average computer user" -- the people that are "average computer users" these days are far more sophisticated than the "average person" in general. There is no doubt that usability studies need to be performed by the various commercial interests (Red Hat, Caldera, LinuxCare, etcetera) if they wish to appeal to more than the technically "superior" crowd. Sure, lots of you "elite" will bitch and moan that there are too many newbies using linux these days, AOLers reigning the linux newsgroups and IRC channels, but the fact remains that for Microsoft's domination to be usurped, there has to be a standards-bearer. For the moment, linux is it.
When all you had to do to win was make a better browser, they could gear up for that. Remember that the word is that they spent more on developing IE than they spent on Windows 95.
The fight against Linux is far more complicated.
Microsoft has realized that an important beach head onto the desktop for Linux will be games. If the average user sees that hot games run and run well on Linux, and you don't have to be a geek to play them, then this user is going to start thinking that he can use Linux for just about anything. Microsoft is doing useability studies on Linux games to determine how to win this battle.
But, unlike with Netscape, where they only had to win the browser battle, now they have to win against Linux Servers, Linux Office Suites and now, Linux games.
I liken the battle of Microsoft vs. Netscape to the early Cold War when the US and USSR were just competing by building Nuclear Weapons. The USSR could compete. The battle of Microsoft vs. Linux is like the late Cold War. When the USSR had to compete on a whole lot of technology fronts in the late '80s, they folded.
It's running RedHat Linux 6.0, updated with KDE 1.1.2, and heavily tweaked by me to make it easier to use. Sure, it took me two days to configure the machine so that I was happy with it - but after I was done the result was really very good. With constantly improving distributions and apps, I expect that next time it won't take me two days to get even better results...
Linux just works. Making it work the way you want it to is getting easier every day - and that includes making it user friendly.
The problem with most usability tests, is people are testing users who already have Windows or Mac experience, and therefore expect certain things from their computers. If Windows users hate using Macs and vice versa, is it fair to expect either to like Linux? A valid test would involve a well configured machine and a complete newbie. I'm getting the distinct impression that Linux can do a pretty good job in that scenario.
Host your own websites, anywhere!
If Microsoft needs to do hands on tests to figure that linux is unfriendly to newbies who can't rtfm and are trying to manage their own machines, they really are as stupid as many people here seem to think.
The problem for MS is that a large portion of their constumers are not in this situation at all. I probably could not get many of my non-geek relations to move to Linux today, because they manage their own machines to some extent and don't have the enough interest to learn something new and complex.
My parents (and my surfin grandma), however, never do any management or installation on their own windows machinse anyways, so if it wasn't for the MS-Office thing I could move them straight over any day now (if they were still living in the same country as me that is). All they have to do is learn to click on an icon in KDE instead of Windows 98.
As Linux gets more and more simple and the average knowledge of computer users increases, the middle group is shrinking.
-
> He said that his [nontechnical] mother should be able to use Windows.
That's the drill: put a Turing Machine on your mother's desk, but hamstring it first, so it won't do anything that would make her need to ask a question or two.
That's fine for an appliance, but let's not call the result a computer.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I like the fact that linux is in the first category. I like the fact that Windows * is in the second category. It means there is something that my Mom and Dad can use.
Having spent a full ten minutes on the phone explaining to them how to cut'n'paste between a word doc and an email, I surely don't want them going anywhere near fdisk or su.
The alternative would be for me (or someone like me) to do their administration for them. At the moment, they don't install any software. The pc is essentially a zero maintenance appliance, used for word docs and email. The os came pre-installed, and has not been touched. Essentially, they could be using an x-terminal and StarOffice, provided I wanted to install and maintain them.
The key problem here is that the Microsoft desktop is built on the idea that anyone can use one of their machines out of the box. The older view was that computer use was a skill, leant itself to the first view above. I think that linux/unix belongs firmly to this tradition, and should recognise this fact.
Linux on the desktop? Complete newbies installing CivCTP in Redmond? Insane! They should be installed on a server, and connected to by an x-terminal.
We do not want to be MumOS. Try this: to install the average (non-suid) package I run the following commands normally:
$ tar xzfv package.tar $ cd package $ ./configure --PREFIX=/usr/src/package $ make $ su $ make install
Take your favourite man reader, and, as an experienced user, try to locate all the switches to all the commands used. How long did it take you? Now imagine trying to do this without knowing where to look, or the confidence to recognise that you have found the correct info.
Now (ta-da) imagine your Mom doing it. My favourite quote is from an article my poker champion Doyle Brunson. He asked someone how spoke about a mistake being obvious, what he thought on the subject 10 seconds before it became obvious. A bit of a Zen-master question, that!
Why should people not use windows? I think my set of reasons include in no particular order:
Zero security Secret interfaces leading to buggy apps Changing tools
On this basis, your Mom gains in the following
way if she converts to *n?x:
She gets more security (does she need security?) She gets fewer crashes. (Good) She gets stable interfaces to user-space tools. (Does your Mom actually _know_ the packages she uses? Mine doesn't)
If linux were to "win" this market, slashdot would be alive with flame-wars between mothers and their children. This is a bad thing. If only cause Moms don't argue in any rational way :)
When the "negative publicity" comes out of Redmond saying linux isn't ready for the desktop, they'll make up some kind of artificial scenario in which what they say is correct. Let's let it pass. Let microsoft be the MumOS.
After all, it is possible to be a geek and use windows. Its just more fun to do it on *n?x. The ultimate recruiting force will be on our side:
"What? You're 12 and you still use your Mum's windows? Bwahaha :)"
Maybe Micorsoft was looking at whether it should buy out LokiSoft before something dangerous happens?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It is not that *nix is hard, it is that it is different. Most people don't think Windows is hard because that is what they have ``grown up'' on; it is what they are used to; it is what they know.
Trust me, as someone who doesn't use Windows, it is not exactly intuitive. My father recently got his first computer and has Windows 98 on there with Office 2000, etc., because that is what his company uses. He calls me all the time asking how to do this or that, and to try and figure it out is often not easy.
If you grew up using *nix (as my children will), then that would be easy for you. When forced to use a windows machine, you would ask ``why does it crash?'', ``what should I do when it freezes?'', ``why is everything in one directory?'', ``why would they put everything about the system into one file?'', ``how come I have to reboot to get it to work right?'' It would be Windows that would seem odd, difficult, and nonintuitive.
You see, it is all perception. Everything you experience is tainted by what you know. Since you know Windows, you use it as a yardstick to judge other operating systems. But *nix is so different from traditional PC OS's, that this is really a disservice to *nix. You must approach fresh, forgetting what you know. Then you can begin to appreciate *nix for what it has to offer.
dd
"if you hang the blame on the wall
there'd be a frame around us all" - Jay Farrar
This has been hinted at in a few postings here, but I want to emphasize that there's a BIG difference between how easy things are to learn vs how easy they are to use once you know them well.
Windows is much easier to learn than Linux. Sit pretty much anyone down who knows how to mouse, and (for example, an experienced Mac user) and they'll probably be able to get a lot of things done. The reason is that the GUI provides a lot of context for you- look at an empty screen, and there's a big start button that will lead you to almost everything that's useful on the computer with nice hierarchical labeling.
This does NOT mean that Windows is perfect in this regard- knowing to move a little box with a wire sticking out of it to make an arrow on the screen point at something is a new concept for a LOT of people. But it's possible for a reasonably computer literate person to use without reading any documentation.
It is not possible to find most of the useful things on your average Linux box by pointing and clicking. Yes, it *can* be set up this way for "normal" end-user tasks if someone knows what they are doing comes along and puts all of the right things in (for example) the KDE menuing system. But putting anything new onto the machine (or doing serious reconfiguration work) requires a lot more knowledge than you're likely to get by pointing and clicking. Even finding the right docs can be a real challenge.
But this is all about the first time you use a system. What about the 100th time? If you're a patient user and have taken the time to learn what to do, the problem changes entirely from "how do I find things" to "how do I get to what I need efficiently". IF you know Linux, it's very efficient to get around in. The command namespace is flat- there is no hierarchical set of menus to click through to get to what you need, so every command is at your fingertips if it's in your brain. Most things can be automated with scripting if you know what you're doing, and if typing three keystrokes to get your favorite text editor open (vi) is too much, you can alias it down to two.
My point is that "usability" is not a simple scale with things that are "usable" and things that aren't. A lot of you who love Linux today (including me) would hate some of the changes that would be required to make it more friendly for newbies, because it would sacrifice one kind of usability for another. And no, you can't always have it both ways... some of the properties of Linux that make it so powerful (customization) also fundamentally decrease the newbie-friendliness.
many confuse "easy to use" with "easy to learn".
Contrary to what some would argue, many tasks in M$ products are not always a piece of cake either. While they talk about the ideal of plug and play, fact is we run into many features like, fer instance, someone here d/l and ran an Internet phone program, it clobbered their pc-card ethernet config and they had to call me, the Linux dude, to come bail them out (Gawd, I love M$ for the job security due to their lousy products!). M$ is particularly frustrating, to me, due to the fact that they DO try to hide all the techy details from appliance users, and all the anti-piracy tricks they have to build in to keep the same honest. Sometimes I have to spend hours, days trying to trick a semi-automatic M$ system into doing what the customers wants while I bawl about how it could have been accomplished in minutes if I had full open access. Bottom line on automatic software: when it works automatically, it's great!
When it fails (like during a botched installation) , it's HELL!!
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You are correct.
I've been running win2k betas as part of my job for about 6 months now. I'm currently at rc1, and will move to rc2 this weekend. RC1 installed in 40 minutes on my p2-366 laptop, and all hardware was detected correctly. In an average day the laptop is used 10 hours, and has only crashed in rc1 2 times since installation. USB works flawlessly, and the entire machine runs as fast or FASTER than NT 4 on this hardware. (it also dual boots win2k w/NTFS and mandrake 6.1)
Why? Or you never used a windows machine for more than a couple of hours straight and don't know what palm/finger pain is?
Mice are good for some special purposes - not constant use!
You could say the same thing for typing in a CLI all friggin' day trying* to get X to work. heh.
To answer your question, do what I do: use Windows shortcut keys extensively. Use it as much as you use the mouse.
Once a nick name came along with a reverse DNS lookup saying something like "tide77.microsoft.com". Naturally the user was banned from the channel with a message such as "Be gone ye evil devil". I found it funny, so I messaged this user to ask him what he wanted. He needed help with Samba. As it showed out, not only did he need help with Samba, but he wanted to put it as a PDC for a production system. This production system was a workgroup of Windows 2000 machines. I helped him out, to demonstrate not my anger towards Microsoft, but how the Open Source community helps out. I think that we are all responsible for getting the knowledge out there, and what better way than to teach the Redmond people? =)
In fact I have seen more of these events. This user that I have been talking about didn't know how to read logs or anything. He told me some cheesy message he got from his Windows 2000 client that tried to connect to the Samba machine. Even though I know nothing of Windows 2000, it was still easy to solve. I know what this guy at Loki thought. I thought the same... What in the world does Billy's boys do during the days? I think they do much more Linux than we can imagine. The interesting thing to get out to the public is, exactly how many percent of the machines at Microsoft are running Linux. I think that is equally interesting to how much Linux has gained in marketshare.
Sincerely, Alexander
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I'm sure that this has been talked about before be since I've never seen it I'll ask.
Since Linux is a very good server OS and Microsoft needs a good server OS what would prevent Bill from releasing Microsoft-brand Linux?
They have the most wide spread applications, some decent games, and lots of money to throw around.
I've seen MS "embrace and extinguish" before. So why not with this? MS E-Z Linux for the small business or for departmental servers. Windows 9x for the end user. And Win2K as the robust and stable enterprise platform.
So am I missing something here?
I'm not a Windows Admin, I just play one in I.T.
Whats the big deal -- he didn't use the guy's real name... Only he and the guy who called in know who it was... (I would expect that this guy isn't the only person doing a 'usability study' for Microsoft)
Looks like the guy already found a usability problem. You can't just point and click to install something and you have to read a README or lookup a howto or call tech support. Newbies and/or common desk top users just want to point/click and use, not fumble with READMEs and other things. Once we get these issues addressed and come up with a generic installation method across all distro's (a graphical tool and can be used by any Ex-windoz user and/or newbie) then "Linux" will rule the Desktop. Until then most people will just get frustrated and give up.
That's it... I've had enough of the /. PC Brigade. The story was funny. Maybe not hilarious, but definitely amusing. Let humor be your guide...
But no, you would rather bitch "If you can't say something nice...". I'm tired of it. Did you say the same thing when you read the one about the cup holder? How about the power outage? Did you send a message to the person who gave it to you whining that it's unfair to pick on the technically incompetent?
This is not victim humor, by my definition. He hasn't been injured in any real way, even if he does read this post. Yes, the story revolves around this guy's decision not to open the file called README. It's a classic newbie mistake but one that amuses. The author wanted us to see the punchline: Microsoft is paying this guy to play games and he can't even do that right. That's funny! But the humor stems from something very mundane and forgivable.
My opinion has always been that anyone who can't appreciate humor in the little things are really missing out. You PC assholes are not only missing out, but you try and drag the rest of us with you, down into that little hell.
I agree, you people live your lives searching for obscure mocks against Microsoft and you have to laugh and tell everybody. "ohhh look Microsoft uses a unix box to run a section of their website" who cares? I use NT on a daily basis but have several Linux-Mandrake workstations. I find I can do my work faster and better with NT as of now. My point is whoever wrote this article is more assimilated by the "I hate Bill Gates" mentality than the US is assimilated to use MS products. I suggest all you people out there spend less time scouring the net for stuff like pictures of Bill Gates with a pie in his face and more time learning your less intuitive OS.
?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??! it would be easier to double click. its like a .shar file, remember those? dont flame me please. im just a 8 year old little girl with glasses and braces. *achoo*
--
?
We don't have to worry about them finding it too usable and attacking us then ;-)
This, as I see it, is where the major conflict is in the above debate. Coaxial says that a "learning cliff" is necessary to keep the "don't know, don't care" type out of Linux. He implies that this would be a good thing, but I hold a different view. How can getting more users into Linux possibly be bad? They might not know what
The other side of this issue is from the techies, who would rather be placed on the rack than suffer under a wimpy OS. Take the mac (whack?), for example. It is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Linux. It has almost no learning curve, but it also has no depth. You can't lift up the hood and look at the engine (why do cars always have to get involved? I can't drive yet!
So here we have Linux, which is almost unuseable for newbies, and Mac (whack! whack!) OS, which is almost unuseable for techies. But perhaps the true Good Thing (tm) lies in the middle.
I have a dream. A dream where all users can unite under one OS, where newbies and techies can stand proudly together under the banner of the One True Good Thing (not tm yet). An Operating System where one can just log in and go without knowing about anything inside of it. Where any complete moron can click the icon for "netscape" and be happy for the next 20 years. Yet it is also an Operating System that claims infinite depth; one can explore for years and still find new files to fool around with. It is the Operating System that will last for eternity.
So how will this happen?
First of all, Linux is already moving in the right direction. Linux is the perfect OS for people at the techie end of the spectrum, and my "dream" OS must start with a technical base.
But Linux still, in many ways, has a learning cliff, as the tsi said. This must be smoothed out at the bottom end while still remaining infinitely high at the other end. As the tsi said, one of the things needed is autorun. The other one is for applications to automatically place icons on the desktop. This way, computer neophytes must merely place the CD in the computer, follow the instructions to install, and from then on just click the icon on the desktop. All this can be done without removing the complexity of the OS from those who really want it. This means *no* cute MS Bob(tm, all you people named "bob" better change your name now) clones.
One of coaxial's claims was that a knowledgeable community is necessary for Linux. However, if Linux moves into the mainstream, all those kernel hackers will still be there, right? None of us want whining newbies flooding the newsgroups with "what's a faq? why is my cd not working! i am 37337 too!" But this viewpoint forgets several things:
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Case in point. I was talking to my friend's grandmother last week, and I was totally surprised to hear her constantly badmouthing windows. She was an avid DOS user for the past 10 years, and did lots of stuff with Lotus123. When she finally recently 'upgraded' to windows98, she hated it, and felt SO much more comfortable at the command line! She even realized how to dig into the old Lotus files and export her data to put it into the current version of Lotus, despite her calling Lotus's technical support which said it couldn't be done. I was amazed at her intelligence and motivation, and realized this crap about naive grandmas is really just a unfair stereotype. Of course, I was explaining lots of stuff about linux, maybe one day she'll make the jump.
If you treat people like they have a brain, they will actually use that brain. Dumb them down with a try-do-everything-for-you-GUI and they'll remain as a lobotomized drone.
On my Gateway PII-400 machine (with all sorts of bs on the board) with 13G of fixed disk (o/c, only 4G in the fragging boot partition...thanks NTFS), Win2k came up in about 35-45 minutes. Only had to answer questions relating to my network and TCP/IP setup, which virtually no OS can detect completely (I have a static IP, no DHCP or BOOTP anywhere). Works rather well (DUCK! flame...), except that my Voodoo3 2000 was a bear to get working. (NOTE to Gateway users: When installing a new video card, uninstall the NVida or whatever FIRST, BEFORE rebooting, then install your new card)
Users dont READ ReadMes. They just point and click. If Linux cant get past the scripts/readmes/howtos, then it will never get into the home user market place. The guy in question was most likey your 'average' user that microSoft hired to see if they can use Linux and be a threat to their market. If he hadn't have had to call, then they might have been more worried, but the fact that nothing was intuitive right off the bat, or auto-running cd's makes it a lot harder and worse off for Linux. We need install wizards, not source code and tarballs and install scripts, or readmes. People just dont get those, and thats what the majority of people are.
The critical mass has come. And, it will disappear quicker than soon if usability doesn't come near now. Linus promised 30% of the desktops someday in the future... Hrrrmpf. Not until KDE and Gnome stop ranting and continue make quality, but unified, and usable for Alice Carlton in Pleasantville.
The critical mass has come. And, it will disappear quicker than soon if usability doesn't come any near now. Linus "promised" 30% of the desktops someday in the future... Hrrrmpf. Not until the teams of KDE and Gnome stop ranting and continue make quality, but unified, and usable for Alice Carlton in Pleasantville.
We've been having constant "wakeup calls" for at least the five years I've been using Linux. Personally, I wish the calls would stop a while so I could get some sleep.
That's "write", not "right".
You'd be amazed at how many MCSE's I work with that have never even used any flavor of UNIX. Its sick, and they think they know something too.
/me laughs
-Cozmo
Maybe I don't get it, but what's funny about this? All it proves is what we already know -- Linux is not ready for newbie users, and it's too hard to install software (no -- reading a README should not be required.)
I think this shows a need in the linux OS. 95/8/NT have an option to "autorun" and install CD's has anyone looked in to this for linux? Make it an option that is easy to turn off so it does not annoy power users but leave it on for the new people.
WTF? Why did the story spontaneously empty? (And who is "RM" from andover?)
I know a number linux users at M$. Granted, all of them are in research and are CS grad students. But they all have linux on their desks and use it as their primary OS. They have communicated to me that this is not all that uncommon.
-- Moondog
Maybe this will keep them comfortable with the idea that it's too hard to use? The longer, the better.
Viable desktop environment... not in this case, OBVIOUSLY, since this guy could not even install a game. I was able to install games on M$ products when I was in elementary school. Gimme a break.
That's not a usability study. I've got a 70+ year-old man using Linux. That's a usability study. By the way, this man knows how to dig through man pages and everything to find the answers to his questions. He even finds things that I don't know about and I've been using UNIX for 10+ years . . .
Of course they should have to learn "tarball" and "grep" and other terms. When someone "learns" (and I use the term loosely!) how to use Windows, they have to familiarize themselves with a set of terminology... "system crash", "fatal exception", "page fault" and of course "blue screen of death".
:-)
.
As much as I found this interesting, this simply isn't right. When I call a company, I really don't expect employees OF that company to go announce it all on slashdot.
I don't care if they changed the name or not.. It was tacky, and makes Loki look bad..
"Hey guys!! I work at a sex hotline, and I just got a call from ".
For all the complaining about privacy, apperently it doesn't apply to Microsoft and their employees..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Well, actually it wasn't dry humor at all, I was (and am!) serious.
The problem is that you are confusing easy to use with easy to learn. For an experienced user, which is the faster and more effective interface? The command line. It may not be as easy to learn, but once learned it is a much more powerful, useful, and extensible interface.
Yes, graphical menus can provide context. But the user has to way to grow beyond that -- Their effectiveness will grow only marginally vs. the newbie.
I do tech support for microsoft and run a 24/7 quake2 lithium server, runs on p75 with 64 megs ram redhat 6.0.. tried to run it on NT but it took 90 percent of the cpu. Compared with the 10-20 percent it takes on linux it is a big plus.
Imagine reading /. one year ago...
Who'd a thought that Microsoft would ever pay someone to play games on Linux?
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
Those boys have a lot of trouble with reading anything.
Any one know where I can get one for my P II-300. I hate it when peaple take the floppy out of the drive on my computer without un-mounting it, then they complain to me that the data got corrupted. I know enough not to do this, but Joe Blow down the hall that uses my computer in my dorm dosent. It would make things so much simpler for me, and not be that much trouble to do. It is nice that zip drives and CD-Rom drives lock the door when they are mounted. Thanks.....
The car analogy works in other ways, too.
When I did tech support for an ISP, it amazed me how often people moaned "Oh, this is SO hard" over the phone. I would tell them "click here... click there... click 'ok'" and get "Ohhh... this is sooo hard. How do you learn all this?" But I'm a "computer person" and they're not - why should I be amazed?
When's the last time you heard a reporter on TV moan or joke about the complexities of cars? "Yes Corky... I know what you mean. Last night I went for a little drive and there was a light blinking on the dash. By the time I figured out I needed something called 'gas', I THEN had to figure out what 'octane' to buy! Those cars are sure difficult" (group chuckle).
I'm sure this kind of car conversation wouldn't be as out of place if it were 70 or 80 years earlier. But these days, its ludicrous. Furthermore, no respecting "intelligent" public figure would repeat such absurdity. Cars are old hat. EVERYONE knows how to operate them. If they break, most people shrug and hire someone to fix them. When we're "car newbies", we take Driver's Ed. classes to get the basics. Then we build on the basic knowledge with experience. Its all very simple.
Welcome to the "computer generation". Pundits used to love talking about how computers will be in everyone's life during the 80s. We're there now. And how does popular culture refer to computers? "Ohhh... they're so HARD!"
Hobbiests are going to enjoy the ins and outs of their chosen interest. They'll tweak and tinker. And they'll smirk at those who don't have their understanding. Even if that hobby involves what others see as simple tools. But that works well for the hobbiest - they can make their interest their profession. Provide the casual user with a simplified interface so they can use their tool. Then take over from them if their tool breaks. It works for cars; it'll work for computers.
What we don't need is the continued absurdity that, in this day and age, computers are "too hard" fostered on us by popular culture.
I do not see such a problem with clicky-do-it-all installers. They only need to have code signing as an unbreakable requirement. Then there would be accountability.
We cannot just copy from the other world. We need to improvise every step of the way.
...I might as well speak my mind. What is the point here of making fun of someone just because they work for MS? Is this the kind of evaluation you want for Linux tech support: "Tech support personell publicly humiliated user for no reason." Believe it or not there are some nice people working at MS (I know a couple), and by and large they are extremely intelligent. We all know how intimidating UNIX can be to someone who has never used it before (and Red Hat 6.0 is not going to win any awards for usability anytime soon), so just lay off and give the guy a break.
I really don't even think that one of their employees would be ./
stupid enough to identify themselves as a MS employee, and also go so far as to state they were doing Linux usability studies.
This was probably just some kiddie who thought it would be cool to make MS/employees look stupid, and get a story posted on
HAAHAA, that was worth a couple chuckles
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
You know... That is some pretty interesting info. Although I'm not sure what kind of person could have been telling you this. Microsoft doesn't hire dumb people. Even though MS and Linux are different, if you write a damn operating system, I'm sure you can figure Linux out. If they were testing Games, it might have even been a Coop or Intern. I don't know any full fledged engineers that only play video games for their jobs.
Last time I installed a game ("Legacy of Time"), a bunch of stuff stopped working on my machine, no doubt due to some DLL incompatibility introduced by the install procedure. Fortunately, I always have a complete copy of windows\system and of the Registry squirreled away. So I just copied them back, and voila, everything started working again.
The game is still on the shelf. Want it? I *never* install anything on this pig without a complete copy of everything journalled aside. That's the *real* Micros~1 install procedure, as far as I'm concerned.
I guess maybe it's OK to close your eyes and pray that the next install won't gronk your machine if all you do is play games on it. Me, I gotta keep this Win95 pig running, so I can eat next week, because I have to maintain code for my clients.
Which means I don't install nothin' on it, baby. Nothin'.
I'm not surprised to hear that MS is using people who aren't familiar with the hardware their using, to test the viability of an OS they've only heard about.- -
I'm contracted to the Ontario Ministry of Health, and we sat around for almost 8 months after the contract started, waiting for a "committee" to decide the viability of a desktop "application template" to be decided upon. The people involved didn't understand the new machines, or what software was relevant to their own branches, etc. etc. Each time we deployed a new "standard" onto the new PCs of one branch, we'd end up back there with a new Ghost image within a couple of weeks.. then sit around and wait for the next "standard" to arrive.
MS is probably taking the same approach...
You form a committee to assess the viability of a product, and that committee pulls names out of a hat to work on it. It's not about who's qualified to test the system... it's about who will give them the answer they want... and someone who doesn't read README files is just the person to say Linux is not a viable OS for those wading into the desktop world.
In the environment I see here at work every day, Linux or FreeBSD would be a godsend. Thin clients and a nice server locked away, with permissions to only access the necessary apps and files on the server. Instead of this peer-to-peer, and open policy NT domain rubbish. Lock it down, I say! Lock it down! and give your helpdesks a new catchphrase for when a client calls.... "RTFM!".
Cruciform.
-------------------------------------------------
sigh. still have to post anonymous. tells me my nick doesn't exist... but when I try to newuser it say's I'm duplicate. Waah! Babble babble.
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Civ3 on Linux Rocks. I would work 60 hours a week at that job.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
In order to win in the Real World, you have to cater to the masses -- NOT MAKE THE MASSES
CATER TO YOU. Granted, many companies have made the public bend over backwards in the past
(utilities come to mind real fast), but if it isn't easy to use, do what users need, or doesn't work, then they
will move on to something else.
That's a bunch of crap. There's plenty of room in the world for products for intelligent people as well as "the Masses". If you wanna make linux for dummies fine. Branch off and make your own distro. But dont go trying to ruin the other versions with your "improvements". The masses dont need linux, they dont need MSWinblows for that matter either. The fact that most of the public only needs a game console and a webtv device is no reason to try and turn everything into an appliance.
Glad you asked. "Romans" in Latin: Romani (Vocative Plural :-] ) .
Ok, so it's just a quote from the "Brian" sketch, but I couldn't help the (somewhat loose) opportunity to plug a free software program.
"Words" for Linux is a free Latin dictionary program. It was written in Ada for DOS PCs a long time ago, ported to Linux last year using Gnat. Check http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordslux.htm for details. (It's fair to plug a FREE program that I'm not associated with, right...?)
Sample output:
=>romanum
roman.um N 2 1 ACC S M P
roman.um N 2 1 GEN P M P uncommon
romanus, romani
Roman; the Romans (pl.)
"If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off."
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Geeks have to exist in the real world. What this means is that we have to do things that people "out there" want. For several years now, this has been writing software that runs under Windows, a nearly unendurable misery for the typical geek.
Some geeks don't really care, probably because they have jobs running Linux server farms, or they're still students outside of the Real World. There's nothing wrong with this, but I think it causes them to miss what the 'other side" is saying.
The truth of the matter is that Linux isn't doomed by any of this evolution; until the Next Big Thing comes along, people will always be tinkering with Linux software, and there will always be the slackware holdouts who want nothing more than to roll their own systems. tar zxvf foo.tar.gz isn't going away, it will always be there for those who want it. If you want a hand in preserving this culture, introduce it to the newbies - show them how much faster you can do stuff on the bash command line than pointing and clicking. Young people are normally eager to learn; teach them the hackish ways, and they will learn.
That aside, there are millions of people who don't aspire to be hackers. Your ideas will doom them to the tortures of eternal Windows use. Worse, your ideas doom many of your fellow geeks to the torturous world of writing software for Windows. If you want to help liberate them from that hellish world, you should support efforts to make Linux easy to use and Linux software easier to install.
D
----
Lots of people responding who don't want to see Linux cater to the masses seem to have forgotten something: If you don't want it, don't install it and don't use it!
There are plenty of distributions for experts, and since making a version of Linux that's luser-friendly will most likely mean an X overlay that hides the command shell, why worry that the core Linux will become dumbed-down? Things like WinLinux 2000 aren't there to replace e.g., Debian, so relax!
Better yet, go join one of those luser-friendly companies (or form your own) and make a friendly Linux, and make a lot of money off it! Except for the part about lots of money perhaps, that's what has been going on...
I was a contractor at M$ for 6 months, in the computer lab there were several machines that had Linux installed on it. For the most part, it was enthusiast that were using it. VMWare has also become popular since many of them are running 450-600 dual or quad xeon procs with at least a gig or ram.
Are there any linux usability projects out there now that people can contribute to? (I find this subject fascinating.)
If not, are there any people out there interested in starting one? It certainly could be put to good use, and it might be fun to tackle some of these little issues, and make them available to the masses.
Of course, it's also difficult to run down a family of four with a computer.
+&x
I've seen some very wrong and some almost right answers posted here. Folks that grew up with a real Unix editor - 'ed' or even 'ex'/'vi' - know that it comes from the editor command 'g/re/p', for globabally search for regular expression and print (where 're' stands for arbitrary regular expression).
Now, if you want obscure name origins, there's 'awk'. (Named for the initials of the three authors).
-- Alastair
Looks like Microsoft is testing dangerous unknowns (i.e. penguin lust) on animals first before endangering valuable human lives. I'm amazed they were could train a chimp both to speak AND to dial a telephone... They should call the project Banana 9000.
I'd bet there are thousands of Linux users at Microsoft. I doubt there is any general anti-Linux attitude there. Mind you, I've never been, so I could be wrong, but this is coming from a guy who works at a company who has standardized on NT and has a large and growing Linux fan base in its employees.
OK, the _story_ has been verified. But does anybody know whether `Nick' really is a _Microsoft_ employee or not? (He could have lied, you know...) Awaiting eagerly a clarification :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Makes you wonder what's going on in there. Doesn't matter much though. I'll still be using my free software.
First of all this tech support call should have never been released in the press. Second in defense of the microsoft employee that all this snickering is going on at... A while back SGI recieved several NT workstation in their lab, the folks decided to port some applications to NT, lo and behold they ran into a problem. They needed to make a soft link from one partition to another. After spending an hour on the matter, going even to the point of installing a bash shell...they gave up. Now imagine half a dozen Unix programmers and system administrators huffing and puffing over an NT box, (Having never even seen Windows in their life) unable to do anything. They ended up copying the whole directory structure, some 10 gigabytes. When the next day I showed them that all of this could've been accomplished by hitting the right mouse button and choosing "create a shortcut" they were totally baffled.
What's the moral of the story? Don't harp on someone new to the operating system. The pendulum swings both ways. So the guy didn't read the fine manual, big deal. Cut him some slack. Notice that in Windows the application installs in one step. A double click, not a mount cd, change cd, gunzip, followed by a tar followed by a make install. Heck just look at that and tell me which you would preffer. Some things in Unix are just a pain in the ass and people know it but refuse to admit so.
Depending on how far you want Linux to go. Bill may not see Linux as much of a threat as he's been told it is if he sees that the average user can't readily use it out of the box. Linux users are generally above average users who have some amount of determination.
Thank you... I'm amazed when people get this elitist viewpoint, then wonder why Microsoft stomps all over them. You want Microsoft to go away? First you have to understand what Microsoft does right. They know what average people want. They know that many people don't care to recompile their kernel when they add a piece of hardware. Unfortunately, they also know that, given ease of use, people will tolerate buggy software.
True, the specific name of the person was changed, but, amusing as this is, it's still inappropriate. The job of a support staff member is to help users, not judge them.
See SAGE and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the ACM for more on this subject.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Installing win98 is pretty painless. Guess that's why the above statement should be moderated down to -1. Could be even easier if your machine boots from the cdrom. But we can't let this be known right? MS is _always_ complicated!!
---- The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. -Thomas Jefferson
This story is just plain cruel.
If that was your grandmother being hired to install a Loki game, would you be heckling her as a stupid old woman?
These are usability tests, from WINDOWS users. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was planted by Microsoft to demonstrate just how unfriendly and elitist the Linux community can be.
Need Linux support? Sure, it's available by phone! However, if you exhibit any weakness, a transcript of your session will be exploited for cheap public ridicule on Slashdot.
Way to go.
--
#19845
OK, ya'll got upset when Amazon was posting private information about the most popular books being bought at different companies (which IMHO is kinda cool, but thats not the point) and how that was bad...Slashdot goes ahead and posts whats being used at M$ (again, I don't think this is bad either).
Why isn't there some sort of policy statment that says 'Tech support will not be used to ridicule or even comment on the specifics of others or the companies.' I know for one, I don't tell the specifics or even generalities of those I have to support as it just ain't right. Then again, we're talkin' bout M$ here so I guess all rules get thrown out the windows, eh?
clif
I had Win2k installed on a 166mmx odp with a piece of shit bigfoot hd, an 8X packard bell cd-rom, and 64mb sdram. It only took about 40 minutes and i had to configure the network card. I think maybe your machine has a problem. If it will install on my POS, I think it will install on anything.
Sounds much like something Microsoft would do... I have heard rumors thought that many of the more intellegent Microsoft employees run Linux or FreeBSD and others as well as Windows... Dunno how true it is, but I'm sure it's not far off. I know I would if I developed software for Microsoft. I mean, if you really truly know what you're doing [and I'm sure at least someone inside Micorosoft does] then why would you not?
I started using linux when I was 12. If a person at M$ can't even install a program in linux it makes me wonder how much he/she knows
Exactly the point, especially in a corporate environment.
When my company (major telco, 120,000 people, 50,000 LAN users) completely replaced our NOS in the early '90s, they made a good faith effort to educate everyone on what was changing and how to do X under the new system. But that effort was doomed from the start. Even in an office of ten people, someone won't get it. When you're talking 50K, many won't (and didn't) bother to attend the training. I was on the corporate helpdesk at the time, and the most prevalent comment I heard was, "I was too busy to attend the training. Can you help me? I've been trying to make this work for two days." The training sessions were about an hour long, so you can see how dumb that statement is, but that's the common mentality.
Easy to use is subjective to the perception of the person trying to do the using. For that executive or executive secretary that was too busy to attend the training and now couldn't figure out how to make their Macintosh(!) work on the new network, the new network was not easy to use and should never have been picked as the replacement.
How can the eyes be the Windows of the soul when they never blue screen?
While it would be nice if Linux were easy enough anyone could run it, it isn't disasterous if it is not.
The most important strength (among several) of Linux (and open source software generally) is flexibility. Those who want (or need) the level of flexibility offered by OSS will need the technical ability to take advantage of the flexibility offered; those who need Linux most are those who are able to use it. Furthermore, it is these users who are most able to improve the software.
Although convienient, it is not essential that Linux be usable to someone with no computer experience.
I'm not claiming it wouldn't be a very good thing if it were that simple to use. However, it is not
essential, and not worth it if it makes it less useful to those that don't need quite that level of simplicity.
-Hil
Actually Sid wrote Civ and Civ2 at Microprose, not Activision. Civ:Call to power was neither written by the same designer, nor published by the same producer as Civ.
Ok, now I've been informative... gimmie the kibble, moderators!
I'm a gnu world man.
- find out what files you installed?
- find out what other software and libraries your program requires to run?
- find out what other software and libraries require your program to run?
- uninstall, accounting for the dependency information above?
- reinstall, accounting for the dependencies?
- upgrade, accounting for the dependencies?
I'm sorry, but under Windows, software installations are crap. They break the moment you have dependencies and uninstall something. They break if you perform an incompatible upgrade in a dependency chain. And Windows gives you no way to tell what program(s) use a particular file or what files a particular program uses, so you can't handle those dependencies at all. Stories of "DLL hell", where one installation clobbers the DLLs that another program needs, abound.Windows software installation seems easy, but is actually painful to administer. If you actually like to install/uninstall/administer Windows software, fine. It's your loss.
Give me rpm/dpkg any day.
You install stuff. It goes in one folder. You make a link to the executable wherever you want. DONE.
(Except for the FEW rare cases that need some lib to be put somewhere... and even in those cases, BeOS has a very elegant deal going on... because the OS tree structure is ALWAYS the same, people put a link in the zip/tar file that says "drag libs here" and you do and they go right into the proper lib folder.)
when you want to uninstall, you can just delete away. no registry. no complex tree structures to mess with (ie, linux)
it's easy. it makes me happy. if only Be would run on my new machine... :-(
please don't go BeBashing, I like it. it's not that i don't like linux - that's not true. I just think Be has it "TheRightWay (tm)"
another $0.73 from me.
Beep Codes: S-L-L-S-S = speaker error
From a motherboard manual, error beep codes: S-L-L-L-SS: Speaker Error
You Linux guys kill me. Use the man pages? Open the reference? Please. That's not how people in the real world use computers. They simply stick the CD in and wait to see what happens. Bill Gates laughs all the way to the bank with these people's money. The caller didn't know how to find out where the app was installed? IF IT'S NOT ON HIS DESKTOP, IT DOESN'T EXIST. Get it? Y'all just a bunch of OS debutantes.
I run Linux on an AMD K6 233 My mother uses an Amiga 500 running Workbench 1.3. No hard drive. For her, this was an upgrade from a PC (_NOT_ one of thoses new XT's. Just a PC) running DOS from 5.25" floppies. She loves it. She plays games, simple personal productivity and types up the book we are working on. She uses TeX with vi. Every so often she will mail me a floppy which I suck into my linux box and process her TeX file. I print it out, mark it up with an editor's pencil and mail it back. (Yes, she has a color inkjet printer. But processing TeX from floppies may not be a good idea. So I process the source and mail the pretty pictures.) I am currently working on her upgrade to an Amiga 1200 with hard drive and Internet ready. I know she will love email. Did I mention that my mother is 68 years young? "A computer without Microsoft is like a chocolate cake without the mustard."
Considering all the spin on everything nowadays its nice to know whos giving the "factual information".
Hypothetically, anything hypothetical is possible.
I completely agree. I've had the same experience too many times. Therefore, when spreading the word about Linux nowadays, I think everyone should really, really think twice about the users situation before convincing them to "try Linux". I do that, since I've convinced too many to try Linux and they came back very disappointed and had lost most of their enthusiasm over that "Linux thingie" because Linux didn't work for them.
Questions you should ask yourself are:
So until X detects and supports all the newest video cards, and installs them correctly, and detects nearly all the monitor types out there in the big wide world without having to ask the user for horizontal refresh rates, I think there has to be work done to make the installation easier. The average home user wants a GUI and therefore a Linux installation will never be easier than a successful XFree86 installation.
Until this is the case, I will still have to ask those people [who come to me and say that they're interested in trying Linux out, after all they heard about it in the press] for their hardware, just so that they won't get disappointed.
Automatical hardware detection is a crucial point in ease of installation. Of course, when Linux installs easily, it doesn't automatically make Linux easy to use, but my whole point is that to make Linux easy to use, it must also be easy to install.
Kind a like the Windows98 installation. Yes, it still asks you some stupid questions, and it takes forever to install, but it detects most new hardware properly.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
How do you pronounce Loki? "low-key", "low-kai", "lock-key"?
/usr/doc and didn't find a definition.
What IS a tarball? I just did "man tarball", "man tar" and searched for "ball", and grep'd all of
Moderators: Please read the whole thing before you "flame bait" me. Thanks.
Some guy in Redmond is playing a game on Linux, and this is news?
Why does the Free/Open Source community care about this story? So there's some clueless guy trying to do an install at Microsoft. Maybe he works in the cafeteria, who knows? The world is filled with clueless people doing "usability studies" with Linux. Why do we fall all over ourselves everytime the words "Microsoft" and "Linux" are linked together?
Microsoft is not the competition. Whatever Microsoft does with Linux, it doesn't change the facts about Linux. But every time we point out these type of stories, we reinforce the myth that somehow we need to be concerned about what's going on at Microsoft. We don't. Linux and free/open source stand on their own. We don't need to be compared to some software hause in Redmond. Once you start trying to compete on Microsoft's terms, you lose.
Well, maybe the MS employee was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing, in testing the useability, of the whole package, including tech support. (in useability studies, you generally try to document at what point in the installation or use process a tech support call would be required - that's a spot you generally try to fix).
On the other hand, though I'm very much enjoying this story on Slashdot, and it's given us very valuable information (ie. MS is probably planning on slamming Linux publicly for useability lapses), as a tech support person myself, I think it's rather unprofessional to "kiss-and-tell" on a client. I know I've done it in the past, and it's done ALL THE TIME internally - I feel kind of creepy about this, Microsoft's internal problems broadcast out on Slashdot for all the world to read. If tech support were lawyers, this would be strictly forbidden as "attorney-client privilege".
my zwei pfennnig.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I've seen several installation procedures mentioned in response to this article, but no one has mentioned the obvious, which is drag-and-drop. Why is it that Linux installs aren't simple drags and drops from the CD to the desktop ?
Microsoft is good. Microsoft is the best because Bill Gates is the richest man on the planet. BIG DEAL. If you are so in love with Microsoft go and have chairman Bill's love child you sicking little weasel. BTW- Microsoft is not good because they practice a monopoly which keeps the technology down instead of sharing and letting things prosper. I said come and get me, here it is duder@operamail.com (operamail is like hotmail, but not microsoft owned and opera is a kick-ass browser).
I will refuse with my last dying breath to EVER call a "directory" a "folder." :)
I have to agree that Linux for the masses is probably not a good thing. Some things are great, but just not suited to everyone.
I am a pilot. I think airplanes and helicopters are wonderful, but I don't think everyone on earth should have a helicopter. The average person is not willing or in some cases capable of aquiring the mental and physical skills and knowledge to operate one responsibly. The same goes for advanced operating systems - especially ones connected to networks.
Making a 'click-and-drool' Linux is a road to disaster. It would be like making a helicopter for the general population that "comes with a simple 10 step instruction sheet." You would end-up with a user-friendly and simple to use COFFIN!
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
Which of course stands for:
Must
Consult
Someone
Experienced.
:o>
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
Have any of you guys considered that maybe he never really was from microsoft and just said that thinking he may get better support? First things first. Microsoft would spend most of their testing time on office applications as that's where linux could potentially hit them hardest. If all of a sudden linux and star office became as viable as win95 and office (already is for me) and are free on top of it, microsoft could have some problems. Game development is a secondary issue. if linux has games, it helps linux, but it really doesn't detract anything from MS. (the people that want the games on linux likely already want to take the plung) I suppose it's possible that MS just wanted to *install* the application and the guy never had much intention to really play it, but to just see how the install process went. Perhaps the phone call was a setup to see how fast loki's tech support is. Or, perhaps the guy just thought it'd make him sound more important.
They probably aren't trying to draw silly conclusions like, "Linux is unfriendly to newbies." They are probably trying to discover details about where Linux's usability is strong and where it is weak.
As I'm not a Microsoft employee, I can't really comment on *why* they're doing this study, but in the words of Jack Ryan, "It is wise to study the ways of one's adversary." They're probably doing this to see "where" Linux is in the usability department.
I would imagine information like this would be pretty important to a company like Microsoft. If I were them, I would be attempting to assess the current and potential market for a competing operating system as accurately as I possibly could. This would include comparitive usability and stability studies and predictions about where these will be in the next few years.
It's not stupid at all. It's good business sense.
NT supports system partitions up to 7.8gb in size. Not 4gb.
You all keep illustrating the guys point in an attempt to refute him. He said that it is easier to learn how to change the settings in windows, but it is easier to do so with a command line once you already know.
Ex:
Which takes more time? Click My Computer, Click C:
click Program Files, click Internet Explorer
or cd \my computer\program files\internet explorer
It's almost always faster to type than to click, but it's easier to learn where to click than what to type.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Everyone, at some point or another, is ignorant. Most of us are ignorant of most things our entire lives. No one could claim to demand that no ignorant person should use Linux. Coaxial (the poster whom you described as 'elitist') expresses his demand that when someone is using Linux, they have taken personal steps to correct their ignorance of computers, and are open to learning, new ideas, and effort.
That is not elitist. That is a desire to work with people who are trying, as opposed to those who don't care. There's another shade to the previous sentence, which I will add because my instincts think you are rather young. That shade is that my, and presumably most peoples', friendships aren't based upon what a person, eg, knows, or does, right now, but rather, if they're trying. Trying involves giving back, usually time and effort, the most valuable things people have.
So both Coaxial and I want to work with people who give back, rather than those who just take.
Many people don't realize we *can* create a user desktop that's JUST as user-friendly as anything Microsoft has produced. We have the tools, the back-ends, everything we need. It's just a matter of sitting down and writing things like this kpackage utility to *do* it.
People frequently recite library version incompatibilities and things of that nature as one of the major hurdles to overcome, as there is no easy way to resolve these types of problems to the satisfaction of installed software. What they don't realize is that if you keep your system "sane" by only installing pre-packaged versions of software (like RPM's), library version dependencies are already being handled. It's just a matter of converting existing (perhaps older) source tarballs and newer software releases into RPM's (or whatever package format you prefer) so there's no *excuse* to have to do stuff by hand.
I like the idea of being shown *exactly* what an RPM installation is about to do. The whole Windows install/uninstall process always makes me nervous because I never know quite what it is that it's doing behind that "Please wait" dialog.
A true user-friendly desktop is a lot closer than people seem to think. For those that haven't performed a fresh Linux install in the past year, I'd recommend getting the latest RedHat and installing it on a play system. Experiment with KDE and Gnome. You might be surprised at the progress they've made.
This will be doable in Linux very soon.
I've been gaming on dos since I had to hand tweak EMM386 and pick expanded or extended memory. Nowadays it has gotten soo simple. I play 10 or so new demos a week and if it takes more than 3 clicks from Net to action I pass on it (that includes recognizing my card, picking resolution, etc.). Linux needs a lot of work in this area. One good thing I have noticed on a lot of gaming boards is more kids asking questions on how to install/use Linux. This is the next gen. of geeks and PC gamers are almost by defintion hardcore (who else spends so much on arcade machines). My point? Games are fun, Linux is fun, let's get 'em together for a party.
+&x
<rant>
I was trying to install it on my new Adaptec, AIC-7890 system. Yes, I did have the driver disk. But before you install NT you need to do a pre-install in DOS. . .and of course they don't supply you with a DOS boot disk. Fortunately, I had one. But that didn't have the drivers. Again, to my fortune, I had one of the windows98 boot disks with a bunch of drivers. (One of the nicest things I have seen MS put out, even if they only put together pre-existing tools). Okay, cool, just go ahead and format the drive and do the preinstall, right? Nope. 98 would only do a FAT32 format, and NT doesn't understand FAT32. I pulled out half my hair. Eventually, I borrowed someone's old 500 meg IDE hd to install the preinstall to and then used the setup. I don't think that many people would consider that 'painless'.
</rant>
First of all, instead of berating people for not knowing how to do "tar xvf xyzzy.tar" and "make install", how about sticking these commands in a shell script? That's not so hard.
Secondly, if your installation routine provides the user with two options, "Install the usual way" and "Customize the installation", both novices and experts will be satisfied.
Thirdly, user environments might support "beginner", "intermediate", and "expert" modes, each mode having its own set of menu items customized for the appropriate level of expertise.
--- Brian
So long as we're being picky, the "speed" and "effectiveness" of either approach is virtually the same. I can either reach for my mouse, click, slide, slide, click, or I reach for my keyboard, ALT-TAB my way to the open command prompt (if it's already open, otherwise, I need to open it) and type the relevant command.
In this particular instance, there's no appreciable gain either way.
From an idle state, what if you wanted to find a folder you placed in c:\ earlier that day, but you weren't quite sure of the same. What's faster? "ALT-TAB, cd \, dir" or double-click, double-click, peruse?
In many cases there is no net gain by using the command line, and in most ALL cases, there is definitely a heirarchical logic to using the graphical interface. In these cases, I'll use whatever interface I'm using at the time. If I have a directory folder open, and I need to move stuff around, I'll use that. If I'm working on a Unix-ish command-prompt and need to move a file or two around, I'll use that. It's inefficient to switch, since the gain is so marginal.
Now, that's not to say there *aren't* certain tasks where a command-line prompt will be tons faster. At the same time, though, one should concede that there are also tasks where a GUI representation of the system makes a lot more sense and can work just as well.
IMO, this is turning into yet another "GUI vs CLI" holy war, so I'm bailing out now. If you folks are die-hard CLI activists, fine, use it. Likewise with the GUI folks who just Don't Want To Learn It. I personally am of the Use-What's-Best-For-The-Task camp, the Use-What's-Efficient camp.
What makes the various Unix systems and desktop environments so great is that we're able to make that choice for ourselves. We have powerful CLI *and* GUI environments and we have people working to make each one better, instead of placing all of our efforts into just one, like Windows has.
sort of. when I've done this we had
tiered tech support and you are right.
They move up the food chain and become
the senior techs that can solve the problems
that the guys that are better with (l)users
can't solve. They train the new techs. They
learn to code (if they didn't already) and by
the time they can't take it anymore you often
have a developer.
This seems to be going on a tech suport tanget,
not terribly on topic but in my experience very
few people can take doing tech support at the
entry level for more than 18 months without
going stark staring mad. (yeah, that's my excuse...)
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Everyone has been focusing on usability of Linux vs win*. Maybe I am being too optimistic, but it could be that is not what they are testing at all.
Microsoft not only sells their OS but they also sell software, including games, and hardware (mice, joysticks, gamepads, etc.) They could be comparing usability of Intellimouse, SideWinder under Linux compared to Thrustmaster products. Or they could be examining Loki install routines for reference on future MS Games on Linux. After all Age of Empires II will be in direct competition with Civ:CTP. It could make sense for Microsoft to start offering their games on Linux to gain marketshare as well as give Linux users reasons to like Microsoft. If a good number of Linux users suddenly found themselves playing Microsoft games with Microsoft controllers on their Linux box there would probably be fewer "Microsoft is evil" rants.
There's a story on The Register here that talks about Microsoft's interest (or at least, The Register's take on it) in Linux. Specifically, looks like Microsoft went and bought a company that was developing a Linux distro. and apps that would run on NT. Why? I don't know. But Microsoft bought 'em, so we may never know.
What is Autorun? Are you referring to the "Virus Support Feature" in Windoze that causes it to, when media is inserted, automatically load and execute code?
---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
- How to turn on the computer
- Which way a floppy disk goes in
- What the floppy disk is for anyway
- What the CDROM is for
- What the mouse is for and how to use it.
If you were to do what mschmitt said, they'd give you a blank stare and complain they didn't know how to use a computer and you were being too hard on them. And you aren't allowed to tell them b/c the condition was that they don't read any documentation or get any outside help.But you might say "Well, installing linux wouldn't be any easier!" and you are right. But that wasn't mschmitt's point. mschmitt's point was that whether you start with Windows or Linux, there is a learning curve either way. And sadly, that curve is too much for many as it is (I should know, my mom is one of them--and we are trying to get her to use Windows, the "easier" OS).
ufdraco
(Note: this is not flamebait, so chill!) For a scripthead and kernel hacker who considers emacs + {t|n}roff (or whatever) "real word processing", yes Linux is a usable desktop. For your "average" user or anyone who can appreciate some form of integration and polish of their desktop _environment_, Linux is not quite there yet. Even though it's on its way of becoming really usable by mere mortals and people with _work_ to do, there is still too much "obfuscation" (ouch) and obscure ways to do things. For example, I've lost count on how many RH6 machines sitting there unused I've seen in store trying to sell Linux, with the personnel having _no clue_ on how to do things on them, like making their GNOME panel reappear, set up a printer or have Communicator launch RealPlayer automagically like in Win9x... (This was just an example, not an attack on RH.) Even though things look promising, there is still a lot of work to be done. Especially needed is that last bit of polishing, that last bit effort that distinguishes (sp?) a professional-looking product from a hopelessly (sp?) amateurish-looking piece of software. Nice icons and spiffy widgets alone don't cut it. What is needed is a coherent, integrated Linux-compatible desktop _environment_. Contrary to what hard-core kernel hackers might think, parts that work _toghether_ are not a crime (from cut-n-paste and drag-n-drop to having one program that launches another automatically). This is where Corel might be usefull: since they come from the land of "real" users (non-geeks), are aware of their need and expectations, they seem to be working on the right things (from what I've seen in there first beta) with the right frame of mind. If they really add all the missing bits (IMO, beta 1 is very incomplete, feature-wise), if they really add a "fit-n-finish" that could please a PHB to Linux withoht castrating it/"dumming it" down, then yes, Linux will have become a truly usable desktop. Even more so if they bring all their applications to the party. (Actually, I'd wish Lotus, Novell and others like FileMaker inc. would do the same.) Because just a desktop and assorted utilities alone are not sufficient. You need applications, too. Even thought we're not quite there yet (sorry), the future looks promising. I'm sure we'll eventually get a desktop _really_ usable by everyone, geeks and non-geeks...
Uh, the folder is still there (or another one). Under User Groupware/Social Discussions/Hobbies/Linux User Discussion. I'm looking at it right now. There's no big bad management stiffling free expression here.
And for what it's worth, despite all the anti-Microsoft flaming on Slashdot, I think Microsoft it a great place to work. And as a former Unix guy (10 years of mostly BSD and derivatives), I find NT to be fine, thank you (once I put GNU Emacs and friends on it :-). I don't currently run a BSD box here, but I could if I wanted to.
Almost every one I know hates MS, to different degrees, and most people I know aren't into Linux at all. This just goes to show what a bad reputation they have, no one wants to buy MS software, they only do it if they feel they need to, kinda like going to Wal-Mart. While coming out with Linux software probably would matter to this people, it could still have some effect on their opinions.
will star office create a word 2000 compatable doc? ya ya more topic drift
Rick B.
Now I understand the problem with Linux. It's the open-source community. Yes, we all work hard at what we do, and yes, Linux has grown into a beautiful thing. But we look like a bunch of crackpots, posting stories like this. We look like a paranoid group of folks who can't tolerate criticism or people who aren't where we are on the learning curve. Red Hat's trying to make money. Corel is trying to make money. Microsoft even is trying to make money. That's natural and normal. Nothing's wrong yet. Instead of boycotting Red Hat and comparing them to Satan, we should embrace them and put our resources where their money is. The path to success is not through infighting and complaining. It's through supporting those who support us. Red Hat has done lots for the Linux community -- but there's a constant "fear" that they're going to do something "bad" and "big brother-like". Let go. Let's support Red Hat's efforts, and wish them the best. I use Red Hat on my desktop. Do you know why? Because it's nice. I prefer its installer above all the rest. I prefer RPM above the rest. I also like the fact that if a vendor is going to support ONE distribution, it's going to be Red Hat's. It's also the most marketable in the corporate environment. It's much easier for me to convince my boss to let us install Red Hat on a server than Debian. Corel's trying a Grand Experiment. They're trying to take a stable, robust operating system, make a nice front end to it, and sell it to users who need, basically, an email terminal and Netscape. Maybe a few games, too. What's wrong? I don't see a problem here. Instead of over-reacting to their license agreement, we need to just back off and let them explain themselves. I've seen it numerous times on Slashdot already. A huge over-reaction to what amounts, really, to nothing. Ease up. This is only a computer operating system, not a life-and-death situation. I use Linux exclusively at work. It's fantastic. At home, I dual-boot Linux and Windows 98. Since I can't play Half-Life in Linux, I need Windows. My laptop is a Mac PowerBook. It's got a great UI, and runs fast. There's something for everyone -- this shouldn't be a holy war. We just need to keep working to make Linux the best thing for __US__. This whole idea of world domination shouldn't be. If we try to be all things to all people, we're going to fail. Let's step back, take a good look at what we've created, and continue to mold it to our liking. We don't need to be on everyone's desktop to be successful!
Hrm.. Ctrl+Escape, S, Enter. 4 total keys pressed, that's even less than n-t-s-y-s-v! Windows as an OS is quite easy to use with only a keyboard. The problem comes about when applications don't properly use things like accelerators, hot keys, tab order, F6 to switch panes, etc. I've got IE and Navigator on my solaris machine.. and I can't stand using navigator because it's impossible to use with just a keyboard. IE is much better in this category IMO.
This was perfectly acceptable. I have on occasion told about many things that I've done related to work. I never give names, dates or places.
I love telling the story about how I helped expose the activivies of a cheating wife. She thought that deleting the AOL shortcut from her Win3.1 box would delete all of the AOL related files. Oooooops!
Or I could talk about how stingy and unreasonable a certain professional Hockey player was when we dealt with him.
As long as name, date, and place (when applicable) are not given, there is nothing unprofessional, unethical or in poor taste about telling the tale. Not all of us work for the FBI, NSA or military you know...
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Especially if you are using bash and can do filename expansion, eg.:
/My[TAB]Pro[TAB]Int[TAB]
cd
if the M$ guy who gets paid to watch /. (and we know they have one...) sees this, please email me and I will send you a resume hella-fast!
To solve this problem, why don't distributions have a novice/expert setting when installing. You satisfy the gurus/newbies, everyone is happy.
I think Jim Davis of Apple computer put it well:
"The [goal] of multimedia user interfaces is moving more toward the paradigm of the Mac, which is to recognize and point, and away from remember and type."
--LP
I can see your point, but it is my opinion that linux is a darn good operating system. That isn't to say that it is the only operating system I would want to use. In an ideal world, it would be possible to get all of the benefits of linux in a completely logical gui. I consider the MacOS gui to be pretty logical... much more so than the windows gui.
Linux is a great OS, but let's face it, anyone of average intelligence can become an expert windows user in a month or two, while it takes more intelligence and more time to become a linux expert. Of course, a lot more knowledge is involved in gaining expertise with linux. However there is a core issue, and that is the issue of OS/human interaction. The challenge in OS design (gui design?) in the next few decades will be to maximize the total usability and intuitiveness of the system. One way to do this is to establish consistant controls and interfaces throughout an OS (and ideally allow them to be customizable to a user's preferences). Microsoft has done a good job at standardization, but a poor job incorporating customizability.
Standardization and gui-ization of an OS allows normal humans (aka mom, etc.) to sit in front of a computer and think logically about it without having to memorize a lot of intimidating concepts. To a seasoned geek, the elegance of the shell is something worthy of admiration. To the average person, it is as inviting as an unknown language.
I use linux because I love learning about its inner workings. I like being able to enter into linux the way Donald Duck explores Mathemagicland (in an inspirational Disney short).
Humans think in terms of visual objects. "picture this", "visualize the consequences", "look at it this way", "we see eye to eye"... it makes sense that humans ought to interact with machines in a visual fashion.
cat comments.txt |grep good_idea*
I have to say i was rather disapointed with this article. I completely agree with all the comments about this -- I imagine the author of this article could most likely get fired because of this. Don't you have an NDA where you work?
:)
I am a contractor at Microsoft, and I do unix and perl most of the day. I am very much a unix fan, but working here has really made me aware of the horrible double standard all slashdotters and other people in the community seem to have.
I guess I just want to blow off some steam, but just recently I thought "Hmm, I should get a Linux tshirt." and I went to linuxmall. All the TShirts there look like they were made by 10 year olds, and I'd be embarassed to wear most of them in public. Yet apparently they sell, and people by them. Not because of the quality of the product, but JUST because it's Linux related.
I love good humor about microsoft, but especially with working here, everyone who sees my ip seems to think they're the first person who ever realized that I'm coming from micros-~1. I've found that ANY humor that involves microsoft is immediately funny to most linux fans, even if the joke itself is extremely lame.
(No, I'm referred to by my name, not an employee id number
Also, I don't really think it is god for the Linux community to constantly compare itself to microsoft. OH LOOK, SOMEONE AT MICROSOFT RUNS LINUX! HAHAH THE MICROSOFT PERSON DOESNT UNDERSTAND IT VERY WELL! OH MY GOD IVE NEVER SEEN ANTHING FUNNIER IN MY LIFE.
feh.
I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but at least I've been able to let off some steam.
Thanks for the info.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
What you all seem to fail to realise is that M$ isn't "stupid" (depends on your definition - but just humour me for a second). Well, OK, I hate them as much as the most extream Linux advocate could ever possibly hate them, but the fact that they've lasted so long so far means that they (by whatever underhand, etc. tactics) are fairly successful. You'd have to be plain silly to think that this is the "first" study of this kind conducted my M$. I'll bet they have whole teams of people who work on parts of the Linux kernel. If I wanted to develop a commercially successful OS/Applications and there were open sourced applications of a similar nature - I'd be very interested in "borrowing" ideas too. Don't forget that they just bought a major UN*X company so we might be seeing signs of a shift in the M$ position? I just hope they ditch Winblows and concentrate on what they're good at - writing talking paperclips which are completely useless and hated by all, to be embeded into _reliable_ wordprocessors like vi :) Wanna mail me? wincrap2000@hotmail.com
http://www.jonmasters.org/
I agree. This is more of a article about MS's usability studies. It has brought on a lot of talk about how hard Linux is for the newbie and until then 100% Windows user. It sorta echos my experiance with Linux, and I can attest that this caller is no different than what any other newbie would ask.
This post is perhaps the most level-headed I've seen on Slashdot. Microsoft may be the enemy, but they know who there market is. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason that they are conducting this usability survey may be for a couple of different reasons: Have you seen the travesty of an article on Linux in PC Magazine this month? Virtually all of their "facts" were wrong. The picture they paint for Linux is that, since (in their mind) it's ill suited for the desktop. I would contend that is strictly for lack of quality desktop applications, not for lack of a quality operating environment (the likes of KDE are production quality). At any rate, the only type of bad press is no press at all, and there's been an awful lot of press regarding Linux lately... positive and negative. Back to my couple of reasons. This may all be a way for Microsoft to tell their target audience that Linux is difficult to use (and for a newbie that's certainly true), and to steer them away from it. On the other hand, another alternative may be that Microsoft themselves are interested in packaging their very own distribution of Linux. May seem crazy, but it really isn't. Hey, they've already got a port of Internet Explorer that runs on Solaris, and that's just a hop-skip-and-jump from a Linux port. Perhaps they're looking to expand their market a bit, or just railroad Linux by making a non-standard linux. ;) I think that in any case, a Microsoft produced Linux is a real possibility.
their tech support HUNG UP ON ME TWICE!! Needless to say I decided not to use AOL
Depends how you have your taskbar menus set. If you name items correctly you can get at each menu item with a keystroke. Your example would be (start button), S, C, (hunt around in the control panel for services starting by hitting S). I do agree that microsoft needs to make the control panel items a menu rather than an explorer window.
I don't know... games are a very important part of the computer use (and I run StarCraft here from Linux, so all is calm in my home) but I personally think that for corporations, PRINTING is where Linux needs a LOT of improvement. My mom's system that she got is fine (she doesn't use any games) and I recently weaned my family off of AOL ("Hey, we can chat online without using AOL's actual program? We can get online and still browse the web without Windows©? Great!) BUT they all still need Windows© for printing.
Major corporations are also likely to have a similar problem, if not the same one. Linux printing is simply not at the same level as printing from Windows© is right now. Also, I have heard the rumors that XFree86 fonts are a dream compared to what I'm used to right now. Hopefully.... because right now, fonts are a mess too. So there are really three frontiers- we need better fonts (being worked on), better printing (anyone?) and lots of games (also being worked on... Loki entertainment?)
Just my rant.
I'm new to Linux. I can see why the dude from MS would be so befuddled. Unless you spend a lot of time trying to learn Linux or are a computer demi-god who can pick up on this stuff like a loose hooker on main street, it's hard for a newbie. I wonder if perhaps the support person's prejudice against MS software and personal are what made this so funny to him. I personally have no clue what a tar ball is, and I have trouble with many installations of Linux apps (though I here Loki games are notoriously easy to install). But lets face it, the "read the man pages etc etc etc." comment only makes you sound like a jerk. It's cases like this that prove MS is hella more friendly for newbies. As Linus himself said, Linux is a long way off for main stream use as a consumer OS. But that's another story, right =) NEwho... just my thoughts...
I agree with the "plug and run" thing. I were on the phone some weeks ago and helped my sister ( who isn't interested at all in coputer-stuff ) to instal a game. She expected the game to work after she had put in the CD in CD-drive. The concept of fooling around in some arcane "explorer" loocking for a .exe file was as alien to her as to change an engine-part in her car ( she isn't interested in cars either ). It has to be easy and intutive if the masses ever will use it.
Everybody knows that we are the evil boys, making noise with deadly toys.
I read all the replies on this subject, and the word I see the most often when abording Linux is "Newbies". Well, I have to say something, some people will always belong to the class of newbies, even if they work on a computer for weeks, years, or even centuries... What linux lacks is good support for people who are not really involved in computers. Linux is not adapted for people who use computer only as a more easy way to do their job... Ok, my english is very bad, so let's put an example to show my point : My mother has been working for 15 years on a computer as a secretary. So she cannot be cannot be considered as a "newbie". The fact is that she DO NOT want to go configure her video card or her keyboard settings... She wants to use a computer to type letters, etc. That's why microsoft and its Windows product has the monopoly, don't look no further ! Ok, don't go thinking that I say that Windows is a superior product, far than that. Linux has a very strong potential, but it's just not adapted enough for people like my mother, or my neighbor, or my cousin, or any people who aren't interested that much in computers, but are interested in computers as tools to produce more rapidly. Those people, as I said sooner, don't want to know How you install a product, or how does it work, and I know it's a sad thing because people works with things they don't even know how they work, but hey, this is how our actual society works... We just have to let it go as it is... (unless you're a rebel...) That's why Windows and all other Microsoft products are so popular, because they have much easier access than other products, we can't deny this fact. So, you can continue to say : "Microsoft Windows 9X is all ****", but, hey, if it's as popular as it is, it's because they knew how to make their product more abordable to people who are different from you and me, newbies or mommies... or choose what you want!! ( I hope my opinion will be published, even if my english is pitiful... sorry everyone, i hope my point of view is understandable..)! =)
This employee shouldn't have written this as a representative of lokisoft. It's irresponsible of the linux community to giggle at this and say that Microsoft is dumb. This is boring.
Guys, get a clue. Microsoft is here to stay, no matter what linux tries to do. The only way linux can get a wider userbase is if they make events like this less common. Dudes, make linux easy!
My mom is clueless about linux. She can't use linux to save her life. Give her eudora and windows 98 and she's set.
-Anonymous Coward
Oh yeah, "usability survey"... right. :-) Methinks the Micro$oft employees are getting sick of their company's own OS, heh heh.
Well if you dont like using linux/unix then dont use it. No one is making you. Linux != MacOS. There is no reson why we should change or "dumb" down Linux. Who the hell cares if 90% of the PC's run Linux? I want an OS that doesnt "SUCK", not one that everyone else uses. I couldnt care less! If you want a point and click OS use MacOS, not Linux. But for some dumb reson alot of linux people feel we need to make Linux a one size fits all OS. We are giving up speed and relibilaty for eye candy. Some linux users cant install a program if it doesnt come in an RPM, guess reading the INSTALL/README and typing 'make' is to hard. Atleast there is Free/Open/NetBSD, it looks like they havent lost their way (yet). :)
"People are beginning to demand that from Linux, and if it can't deliver, it's the fault of the OS, and not the user..."
This is NOT the fault of the OS. If people demand that their TV's cook food then would sony come out with a TV that gets 200 channels and goes upto 450 degrees F? NO. They should be demanding a stove. People who are demanding linux to be more like Windows should just use Windows
I have to return some videotapes...
Dang right. How many people do you know of that have minimize buttons on files in the file cabinet? What the heck is an icon? Why the heck do I have to put quotes around a file name with spaces in it? Those are questions I hear a lot when I'm helping people with Windows. Does that sound like it's intuitive? No, I don't think so. Now Linux may not be perfect, but it cuts through all that @#*$ and gets straight to the point.
I would like to hear more of this event... this seems like one of those stories that helpdesk employees might tell... kinda like using the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder...
The great thing about Linux is there is not now nor will there ever be a Linux Inc. If Windows 2000 turns out to be open source and totally rocks we'll all be using it in a few months. The same goes for the HURD, FreeBSD, Solaris, or whatever other operating system you care to think of. If it's free (as in there ain't no liscense fee) and it's good (as in it don't crash and corrupt your harddrive), then I for one am going to use it. Linux fits that bill right now so therefore I'm going to use Linux. It's natural selection, survival of the fittest, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. Loyalty to any one operating system is a mistake. Tomorrow it will be obsolete and you will lag behind, or you will shell out some cash. Microsoft just ain't natural. They have built up around them a legion of under-educated loyal users, and a group of educated disgruntled users. The clueless will get a clue and the cluefull will just get out.
And it rocks already. Just watch...
As for X, I agree. What is really needed is not simplicity; but rather direct, powerful, and straight-forward solutions. The best solution for every problem...
My mom is an idiot.. and she can run linux, the secret is not allowing your family to admin the system, but to use it. You might find this funny, because she has no power to install applications or such; however, she accomplishes the few and minimal tasks she wants done. Of these: websurfing (ns4), wordprocessing (wordperfect 8), and a familiar interface (gnome /w enlightenment "clean-big" theme) -- Eric Windisch "I always found it funny that my WinTV works better under linux" Now if only i can locate my /. password.
I started on computers with Reader Rabbit sorts of software, then got to typing stuff for school, then found the Net, then found programming. Because I've used Windows for however long (I'm fifteen) I'm fairly good at making it do more or less what I want. I recently discovered linux and have been playing with it, and Win9* gives you a lot of unlearning to do when you first start Linux. The trick is to not have years of Win experience, it just makes a lot of things harder in the beginning.
But if we can get Linux to be an OS that can just be a family workstation without losing the power and flexibility it will be a Good Thing (tm). Anything that promotes open souce is good. My family (four kids ages 7, 10, 12, 15) uses the computer for Reader Rabbit-esque educational stuff, word-processing, web and internet stuff, games, some programming. If we can develop a UI that can let my little brother play his Magic Schoolbus game, let me play around and learn more about the system and OS, and let my semi-computer-literate mom run Quicken, a lot more people will be interested in trying Linux.
Another way to have people "grow up" on Linux is to have it available in the schools. I know I didn't question when they sat us down in front of old Digital terminals and said "This is a computer." Admittedly, I was seven and still thought that teachers were to be worshipped. Sorry, this is kind of wandering off subject. My point is that if we can teach kids how to use a simple Linux UI to do what the "average consumer" needs, it will very soon be Windows that feels unintuitive. The kids that are more interested can get into command line and all that, the ones who aren't can work with point-and-click.
The issue that comes up here, of course, is intercompatibility. It can often be life-saving (from the viewpoint of a highschooler whose life often depends on her grades) to beale to use computers both places on the same file. I would love to see the day when files are intercompatible between all OS's, but I'm afraid it'll be a while. But if kids know to save something as RTF (not as hard to teach as you might think) the problem's pretty much solved.
Yeah, I know, the day's of getting Linux into the schools may be a ways in the future. But even having a few machines that can dual-bootin a jr high or high school is a good start and would give the kids who spend study hall/lunch/etc in the computer lab a chance to try something they've probably heard about, don't know all that much about, and will give them something to do other than hacking into the school sysadmin. -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ Cats have the right idea. Sleep in the sun whenever possible, and only do stuff below your dignity when they're going to feed you for it!
We at Loki Entertainment Software apologize for the submission of this story. We value and respect all our customers, be they Microsoft employees and/or longtime Linux aficionados.
We appreciate the posters who alerted us to the inappropriateness of the story, and welcome any additional comments directly to sigyn@lokigames.com.
Sincerely,
Kayt Sorhaindo
Loki Entertainment Software
I don't particularly care about the OS's / companies involved (I support NT, I use FreeBSD for virtually anything involving networking)
what makes me irritated here is the oh so common techie arrogance being displayed here.
I work in customer service, it is my job to be rung up by people who know less than I do and help them, not to mock them.
Most of the people I work for wish to spend their time using the sotware, not working out how to install it or make it run.
This guy should not be in a customer service department.
Aactually, "if there *was*" is correct.
Rearrange the sentence from
"If there was one thing..."
to
"If one thing was there..."
See?
The subject and verb of that phrase agree in number (thing is singular).
And now, I shall leave and spread my anal grammatical knowledge to others in need.
Fare thee well, and REMEMBER this: "i" before "e" except after "c", but if you want the sound "ay", "e" before "i" is the way!!!
--with love,
the grammar whore.
I do deny that it's the easiest OS to use! Ever seen (I'll even settle for 'heard of') NeXTSTEP? If I had to pick one OS and say that is was the best ever, it would be NeXTSTEP. Of course, I haven't used BeOS yet, but it seems to be much cooler than Windows also.
While I use computers to do work, my main reason for using computers is that I love the structure, logic, and creativity that goes into the design of hardware and software. It's like a playground for the mind. Sadly, most people have no appreciation for this sort of thing. We have to face this and do something with it.
I have yet to see a DOS or Windows package that *doesn't* have a README...and I've been using DOS since v2. And I have built and installed many a UNIX source-based package *without* looking at README or INSTALL. It's a formula, almost everything installs the same way. We just need to come up with a graphical formula. We can't get rid of source packages.
I use linux at home for everything but games and I use Windows NT at work for mainly email using Outlook 98... For being a usable OS and email program, it sure took me a very long time to find where the options were to compact mail folders and to add a sig, not to mention entering email addys.
Perhaps MS products are easy for non-computer literate people, but for me (I consider myself well versed), I prefer a more straight forward way... Win: Eudora, Linux: Pine or Netscape (i haven't found any others that are really functional).
Enough, I am a college freshman and my computer
ONLY runs Mandrake, actually with the MacOS 8
KDE theme, a friend who is a freshman at rutgers
runs dual/boot win98 and mandrake (he likes
gnome over KDE) and yet another friend runs only
mandrake on his IndyBox, and he is a straight-up
fucking Newbie. he just called me to brag that
he read the CD-Burning howto and the IDE-SCSI
howto and was now able to burn CD's. HE's never,
ever used Unix before or done progamming, and his
old computeer was DOS/win3.1
Nobody at college, looking at my desktop in KDE,
has any IDEA that this isn't windows or a mac.
Seriously, just use Mandrake, it's the shit.
Marc
The one thing that has prevented Linux from entering the market as a common house-hold system are the two things that really drives the industry, games, and money. nobody gives a toss if linux has the best security, the best networking, the best, well, everything really. If little jonny slackjaw can't drop his CD in the tray and within seconds be whisked away to the magical world of Quake (or whatever) he isn't going to bother with linux. Voodoo. One of the hottest bits of hardware available(where i live anyway) it the Voodoo3 3500 Why? i hear you ask, is it because it has video capture? no, is it because it can make word 2000 scroll text perfectly(?)? no is it because it can make Quake3:Arena go down like single malt scotch? YES!!!. 3DFx have made a hell of a lot of money from gamers. even microshaft have contributed to the world of gaming with DirectX. One of the joys of windoze 95/8 is that it IS easy to set-up and use, to install (supported) hardware all you have to do is plug it in and windoze will do the rest. Connecting to the internet is also a no-brainer, hell, most isp's provide software that does it all for you. the debate between linux and windows is fairly similar to the debate between the PC and the console. everyone has their own opinions and they are entitled to them. my conclusion is not that windows is better tha linux or that linux is better than windows - simply that each os has it's advantages and people are drawn to those. microshaft can never kill linux because people will (hopefully/probably) always be using linux because it suits their needs likewise people will always be using windows. i, personally use both.
There was an article "In the beginning their sic was a command line" by Neal Stephenson (sorry, don't have the URL on me!)
:)
No point recommending it if the URL is lacking
It's http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html for the record and it is worth the read.
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
What if they use kde. It will certainly be more friendly a GUI for those newbies. WHat if they use a distro like Caldera newest one, and they find it easier than NT and quicker? What if they discover that after an application crashes under Linux there system doesn't? What if this little 'plan' of Microsofts backfires, and the clueless newbies discover they really like Linux better then W2K? Yes these are a lot of what if's but 'anything can happen'.
Only 'flamers' flame!