That makes sense actually. Come use GNOME on Linux. Our desktop is just a soul-destroying and annoying as anything Microsoft has ever made!
The buisiness guys should love it. You know, the ones who have personal assistants to do anything so gauce and painful as actually use a computer for more than 10 minutes a day...
Well, er...give it up man. Go into flower arranging because you're never going to be happy using a computer. Enjoy the delicate scents, the gorgeous colors, the soft touch of flower petals. Using a computer is just never going to be that good. Most of time when I'm ear-deep in a morass of debugging flower arranging sounds really good, so heck I might join you.
It's not at all obvious that those mouse & keyboard shortcuts exist, and if using the "intuitive, easy to learn, amazingly, suprerfluous, so much so we're locking it as the default" nautilus requires them, then it becomes just as non-obvious and non-discoverable as they are.
Besides, after using double-middle-clicks (a week after I began using GNOME and found a post that mentioned them), I ended up with a throbbing middle finger.
Aha! I did use it! I had never used GNOME before and specifically emerged it to try out the Spatial Nautilus I had heard so much about.
In brief: I hated it. Used it for a week and was leaping at the chance to go back to my normal enviroment (WindowMaker).
A few relevent points: 1) I saw the browse filesystem and browse this folder links in the GNOME Menu and the Nautilus menus, but they didn't mean "browse in non-spatial classic mode" for me until days after I had been using it when I realized that in the many GNOME discussions I had been reading that "browse" was the codeword for "classic style file manager". If you haven't made that connection - which I a long-term linux & windows user & developer didn't make for weeks - it means nothing special to you. It is non-obvious. Nowhere does it say browse == classic/oldstyle explicitly.
2) The article in question states that you cannot change the default behaviour without changing the registry setting. This is correct, because using the "browse this folder" and --browse commands are non-default requests. The default is what you get when you do not request anything else. Now those are non-obvious methods of getting a non-default Nautilus invocations but they DO NOT change the default.
3) I found myself with a non-working Diablo 2 icon on my GNOME desktop. It didn't work. It took me all morning (literally 4 to 5 hours) to discover where that file lived on my filesystem, because GNOME, in its infinite wisdom, would not let me directly edit the raw information represented by that icon. A context-menu choice of "Edit blahblah.desktop" would have been much appreciated. Heck, even just pointing me at the appropriate folder on my drive would have been plenty.
There is a huge difference between choosing reasonable defaults that help the new user from destroying their computer-using selves, and placing every barrier you can think of in their path to becoming computer literate.
The assertion that file browsers kill viewing files as "manipulatable objects" is Stupid. File browsers in no way kill drag and drop. Maybe there is a small conceptual hit, but its not a big one, and if it the "cost" of losing that conception is learning that files are abstract data that can be handled in a number of ways, well, your user is one step closer to grokking the computer using experience and thus no longer being a terrible burden because they are being kept in a state of ignorance.
Invoke a file browser. Drill down in tree to where you need to get files from.
Fire off a second file browser from the branch point in drilling down, as you would in the spatial file manager scenario above.
Continue navigating in the spawned browser via the tree (faster especially when the tree navigation allows you to skip loading a bunch of file attributes between here and there that you don't need to see) and select in the tree your destination.
You now have two file browsers open, one to your source directory, one to your destination directory. Select files from source, drag/drop/cut/paste/whatever to destination.
Done. You've only opened two windows, you've skipped viewing a ton of extraneous files that would be shown in the spatial navigator (which can be a HUGE delay if the machine is slow or under load, or large directories, or snapshots, or one of the many other situations), and as a bonus, you haven't had to chase fifty windows across the screen - not a big deal on a small screen, but on my 1600x1200 screen a REAL pain.
Asimov wasn't a hack - he was a skilled scientist, philosopher, editor, and author. He wrote about everything, from humor to mythology to chemistry to physics to robots. Some of its fiction, some of it isn't.
His bibliography is huge, as he wrote some five hundred novels, with assorted short fiction, essays, nonfiction, magazine articles, and so on.
He won every major award his peers could give him over his career, and influenced generations of authors.
I tried using the virtual desktop stuff on my deceased twice-over XP install. Can you say uber-unstable? Nothing like having a piece of the taskbar consistantly crash and leaving its little corpse there until you rebooted.
When I was a kid my parents hardly ever swore in front of me...but man when they did! You *knew* things had just hit the fan and were about to descend on someones head...
The only reason to censor cursing on TV is to make sure the words maintain their power, because they are diluted by overuse. That's a good thing, it means I can keep offending the fundamentalist tightwads with a few choice syllables.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes sense actually. Come use GNOME on Linux. Our desktop is just a soul-destroying and annoying as anything Microsoft has ever made!
The buisiness guys should love it. You know, the ones who have personal assistants to do anything so gauce and painful as actually use a computer for more than 10 minutes a day...
Tired of ugly and clunky?
Come to Windowmaker!
Windowmaker too ugly and clunky for you?
Come to Ion!
Ion too ugly and clunky for you?
Use screen!
Screen too ugly and clunky for you?
Naked BASH prompt it is on a console login.
Naked BASH too ugly and clunky for you?
Well, er...give it up man. Go into flower arranging because you're never going to be happy using a computer. Enjoy the delicate scents, the gorgeous colors, the soft touch of flower petals. Using a computer is just never going to be that good. Most of time when I'm ear-deep in a morass of debugging flower arranging sounds really good, so heck I might join you.
It's not at all obvious that those mouse & keyboard shortcuts exist, and if using the "intuitive, easy to learn, amazingly, suprerfluous, so much so we're locking it as the default" nautilus requires them, then it becomes just as non-obvious and non-discoverable as they are.
Besides, after using double-middle-clicks (a week after I began using GNOME and found a post that mentioned them), I ended up with a throbbing middle finger.
Viva la RSI. Long live GNOME!
So do I!
Viva la Windowmaker!
Aha! I did use it! I had never used GNOME before and specifically emerged it to try out the Spatial Nautilus I had heard so much about.
In brief: I hated it. Used it for a week and was leaping at the chance to go back to my normal enviroment (WindowMaker).
A few relevent points:
1) I saw the browse filesystem and browse this folder links in the GNOME Menu and the Nautilus menus, but they didn't mean "browse in non-spatial classic mode" for me until days after I had been using it when I realized that in the many GNOME discussions I had been reading that "browse" was the codeword for "classic style file manager". If you haven't made that connection - which I a long-term linux & windows user & developer didn't make for weeks - it means nothing special to you. It is non-obvious. Nowhere does it say browse == classic/oldstyle explicitly.
2) The article in question states that you cannot change the default behaviour without changing the registry setting. This is correct, because using the "browse this folder" and --browse commands are non-default requests. The default is what you get when you do not request anything else. Now those are non-obvious methods of getting a non-default Nautilus invocations but they DO NOT change the default.
3) I found myself with a non-working Diablo 2 icon on my GNOME desktop. It didn't work. It took me all morning (literally 4 to 5 hours) to discover where that file lived on my filesystem, because GNOME, in its infinite wisdom, would not let me directly edit the raw information represented by that icon. A context-menu choice of "Edit blahblah.desktop" would have been much appreciated. Heck, even just pointing me at the appropriate folder on my drive would have been plenty.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah ahahaha.
There is a huge difference between choosing reasonable defaults that help the new user from destroying their computer-using selves, and placing every barrier you can think of in their path to becoming computer literate.
GNOME 2.6 falls on the far side of that line.
The assertion that file browsers kill viewing files as "manipulatable objects" is Stupid. File browsers in no way kill drag and drop. Maybe there is a small conceptual hit, but its not a big one, and if it the "cost" of losing that conception is learning that files are abstract data that can be handled in a number of ways, well, your user is one step closer to grokking the computer using experience and thus no longer being a terrible burden because they are being kept in a state of ignorance.
Invoke a file browser. Drill down in tree to where you need to get files from.
Fire off a second file browser from the branch point in drilling down, as you would in the spatial file manager scenario above.
Continue navigating in the spawned browser via the tree (faster especially when the tree navigation allows you to skip loading a bunch of file attributes between here and there that you don't need to see) and select in the tree your destination.
You now have two file browsers open, one to your source directory, one to your destination directory. Select files from source, drag/drop/cut/paste/whatever to destination.
Done. You've only opened two windows, you've skipped viewing a ton of extraneous files that would be shown in the spatial navigator (which can be a HUGE delay if the machine is slow or under load, or large directories, or snapshots, or one of the many other situations), and as a bonus, you haven't had to chase fifty windows across the screen - not a big deal on a small screen, but on my 1600x1200 screen a REAL pain.
I tried GNOME and spatial Nautilus for a week.
I loathed Spatial Nautilus. Horrible.
Crufty hacker on call 24/7?
Oooooh...so who is going to port the kernel to elisp?
+1 Sig Funny
Asimov wasn't a hack - he was a skilled scientist, philosopher, editor, and author. He wrote about everything, from humor to mythology to chemistry to physics to robots. Some of its fiction, some of it isn't.
His bibliography is huge, as he wrote some five hundred novels, with assorted short fiction, essays, nonfiction, magazine articles, and so on.
He won every major award his peers could give him over his career, and influenced generations of authors.
I tried using the virtual desktop stuff on my deceased twice-over XP install. Can you say uber-unstable? Nothing like having a piece of the taskbar consistantly crash and leaving its little corpse there until you rebooted.
Oh the horrors trying to explain this to family.
Hey, dude, I read it.
Brings to mind some famous words:
"Every OS Sucks"
When I was a kid my parents hardly ever swore in front of me...but man when they did! You *knew* things had just hit the fan and were about to descend on someones head...
The only reason to censor cursing on TV is to make sure the words maintain their power, because they are diluted by overuse. That's a good thing, it means I can keep offending the fundamentalist tightwads with a few choice syllables.
They do it to themselves.
DARPA?
Of course you can toast a freshly-installed XP box just by connecting to the internet to download the security updates...
Actually, I'm Windows XP at the moment and cutting and pasting between Thunder^H^H^H^HFirefox and Trillian hasn't been working for about an hour.
It worked two hours ago.
Damn if I know why.
I'll be back in linux in an hour or so where I can at least expect copy&paste to be flaky.
I'll be Pegleg Pete, you can be the one-eyed Parrot!
X has no standard
:)
thats because X *IS* a standard.
I've been wanting to play with NeWS for a while actually...when do we start?
You'd have to prove to me that either of these Windows was designed with security of any form on the list at anything higher than #6...
Yum! Good old Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler!
Nothing says tasty puke-streaming delights like CMOT Dibbler!
Go look at the Rox Filer and AppDirs to see how this can be implemented - source building "itself" upon need.