I don't care if a name is recognizable. I use google when I don't remember exactly where something is at. But the point is, people who create sites do care if their name is recognizable. They have to. Nobody wants to create a popular site, and then have somebody else squat the exact same URL (except with a different TLD) and populate it with a bunch of porn links or ads.
Put another way, what value are we getting out of more TLDs? More sites can share the same name? Is that really something we want?
why does there have to be a need? will too many make the net too heavy or something? The thing that gets me about all these new TLDs is that.com is still by far the most recognized, and so people continue to use it whether it's appropriate or not... But at the same time they scoop up the equivalent name in other TLDs as well to avoid confusion. For instance, a site I go to has a front page on.com - a store site on.biz, and a forum on.net...
Having more TLDs gives people a bigger namespace to play in, but the problem is people don't generally want a bigger name space for domain names. They want their domain name to be unique, for recognition and to avoid confusion...
huh, I always thought that line was "Luck Ass Falls in Attack Position". Yours makes more sense (although I still dont know what an S foil is) It's actually just a euphemism for "ass", so your interpretation works, too...
Heat rejection. Also, looking really cool. Not necessarily in that order. Besides, what the hell are you going to do when your squad leader says "Lock S-Foils in Attack Position" if you haven't got any S-Foils?
Can be found in this video. So we get like one brief glimpse of the top of the poster, the "Sitar Hero" text, and that's it? I had to skim through the video 'cause I couldn't stand listening to that woman impersonating Olive Oyl impersonating Laura Petrie impersonating Marge Simpson, so I don't know if I missed anything...
I wonder if HMX has their Sitar Hero posters up in their offices? Maybe I can get in to help play-test a game sometime and find out.:D
"Rate of Evolution Metrics Observed" -> (then a miracle of logic occurs) -> "proof, suckitcreationists"
What?
Oh, same process as...
"Evolution happens" -> (then a miracle of logic occurs) -> "evolution exhaustively explains origins and incidentally there is no God"
Nevermind. Well, not really... I mean, yes, creationism can refer to the simple belief that there was some creator who, by intent, developed the universe we know, through unspecified processes. (Not much of a belief, really. Just sort of amounts to "that which we cannot understand we attribute to a personification of all things beyond our own powers") but "creationism" also refers to those who use creationist ideas on a scientific level. For instance:
Suggesting creationism should be taught in science classes. (It shouldn't - it's philosophy, it's got no bearing on science.)
Formulating pseudo-scientific arguments to cast doubt on or otherwise minimize valid, scientifically-developed ideas such as evolution. (For instance "Entropy would make evolution impossible" - ignoring the fact that the Earth is not a closed system... Or otherwise saying evolution is "just" a theory, and therefore on par with creationism - which is also "just a theory", except one inherently impossible to prove or disprove, and therefore not supported by any compelling evidence - in terms of relevance and practical importance...)
So if you want to be technical the anti-science Creationists shouldn't be called simply "Creationists" - they should be known by something more distinctive - like "Fucking dick-head creationists" or "Pseudo-science/Anti-science Creationists"... It's not really fair that most of us just shorten that to "Creationists" - but deal with it. It's just like how people think "hacker" means "malevolent vandal-hacker". Those assholes are giving your non-science-related philosophical belief a bad name.
The whole basis of good UI design is that there is not one way to do things.
So the whole basis of good UI design is that there are zero ways to do things?
Not to nitpick grammar but I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
Forcing the use of keys instead of drop-down menus is bad design. Period. That's just your opinion, though, right? I have a different one. I don't agree with the assertion that current UI practice should be considered law. I think there's still a lot of exploration to be done in terms of UI design, and I do not feel that every UI should be aimed at all users...
But again in LW, anything you can do using keyboard shortcuts you can also accomplish using drop-down menus. [sarcasm]And check this out! They even list the actual keyboard shortcuts in the list of options in those very menus! Imagine that, pointers to the shortcuts within the very UI instead of buried somewhere in cryptic man pages! Brilliant![/sarcasm] [sarcasm]Oh, great use of the sarcasm tag there. You really burned me on that one.[/sarcasm]
Oh, but wait... Blender also has menus listing the commands available in the current mode, and they also list the keyboard shortcuts next to the command name. Imagine that, you knocked Blender for not implementing something that is implemented in Blender.
We shouldn't confuse the conceptual "vocabulary" in 3D animation (the domain) with the process constraints from the interfaces of the programs. Huh?
I think you're saying that a complex problem doesn't require a complex UI? I don't agree.
The toolset is large enough that presenting all those tools on-screen at once results in information overload. You simply can't "keep it simple" and still give the user everything. Though I'd concede that if you make that a priority you can do a better job of it than Blender did.
I agree that learning 3D animation is hard, but having a painfully autistic UI doesn't make it easier. I never said Blender's UI made it easier to learn 3-D modeling, I said that once you take the time to learn it, it's more efficient to use. I compared the one-time cost of learning the interface against the cost of slowing down an operation you'll probably use thousands of times in the interest of making it easy-to-learn.
Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you want to accomplish, knowing that it is certainly possible, knowing that it should be ridiculously easy, and yet can't figure out the voodoo mouse-twitch keyboard hack to make it happen. And then all the documentation you can find assumes you already know that part and glosses over that step. Hm. Well I seem to have been able to muddle through somehow so I can't really relate to what you're saying here. Maybe I just learned from a better tutorial than you did. Got an example for me?
I've owned the PSP for a while and never had a problem sliding it into my jeans pocket. Besides, I'm willing to let it be longer so that I can have the widescreen, which is great for movies and games alike. Oh, no question, it's got a great screen. All 130555 +- 5 pixels worth. Having a large device is the price you pay, I guess. It's neat that the new version of the PSP is almost every bit as large as the old one.
And the square button is a bit funky on the old PSP but I heard they changed it around for the Slim. My crack about the square button was just a joke. I remember people complaining about it when the PSP came out, but I don't honestly know if that was just belly-aching or what.
Try looking at the side-by-sides with the PSP, Slim, DS, and DS Lite before you try and make a joke. Slightly smaller than the PSP, but definitely thinner than the DS Lite. When you say side by side you ain't kidding... All you can see in those shots are the side of the machine.:)
I don't care if it's thinner - it's too frikkin' big. Making something that big a fraction of an inch thinner doesn't amount to much when it comes to storing the thing. We're talking about the smallest dimension of the machine, and they made it a little smaller. Talk to me when the thing isn't so frikkin' wide...
But mostly I'm just pushing your buttons (except the square button - I hear that one's cheaply-built) - so don't take any of it too seriously or you'll get a headache. If it makes you feel any better, I'm happy to acknowledge that the PSP is a damn nice machine, and its game library is getting better all the time. I just think it's funny that the "smaller" PSP is... pretty much the same size as the old PSP.
(Slashdot ID: 1) I'll just cut this off now then. Oh my GOD! You must feel so STUPID posting here... I mean your user number is so low - mine is WAY HIGHER than yours is!:D
Pah! Whippersnappers! Well, that's kind of what I was driving at, with respect to myself anyway... "It doesn't seem that long" because I haven't been around here as long as some other people.:D
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution.
Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.
True, that - when switching between the two I often find myself wishing Gimp worked a bit more like Blender... And certainly there are a lot of people out there who wish Gimp worked more like Photoshop...
But this whole idea of "one paradigm to rule them all" doesn't work for me. I think it's premature. People are still figuring out better ways to do things in UIs and - here's the clincher for me - what's best is domain-specific. If you're writing, say, an e-mail application - there's a certain set of tasks that program has to do, and probably there's an expectation that lots of people with all kinds of different backgrounds will use the app. In that case, sure, familiar UI concepts are a strong asset. But even then, even in something as simple as e-mail, the emphasis on making the app "easy-to-learn" emphasizes things like hiding or removing lesser-used features, to simplify the interface.
But a 3-D modeler is a different beast. You don't expect everyone to learn 3-D modeling, not everybody needs or wants to - which is quite understandable due to various difficulties involved. (For instance, dealing with 3-D space but 2-D display and input, using a giant library of different modeling tools and techniques to create the desired effect, and even dealing with things like individual vertex placement, since the computer can't quite handle that on its own in "specialized" cases, like low-poly modeling or animation...) The task of 3-D mesh modeling is inherently complicated - at present, anyway. People, in general, aren't sculptors or model-makers. In any medium (clay, plastic, polygons, whatever) the process of learning to model isn't simply "how do I make this", but "how do I make this with these tools and materials?" So users of a 3-D modeling app have a considerably higher initial investment: this suggests a higher level of sophistication as well.
So, here's the thing about making the interface fast-to-use vs. easy-to-learn... How many times do you have to use a given function? How does that weigh against the one time you have to learn how to invoke it? Let's suppose, for instance, that I had a polygon model with "smoothing" turned on. (That is, smoothing via shading algorithms, like Phong or Gourad shading) - And I wanted to specify edges that would appear "sharp" - discontinuities in the "smooth" surface. Now, it may be simpler for me to find this functionality if it's laid out nicely in a button bar somewhere - and I honestly have no idea if Blender has such a button, since I use keystrokes for most functions like this... If this is a task I have to do lots and lots of times, it's worth my t
I've always thought Blender to be a solid but completely useless application because for whatever reason, the developers created the most heinous god aweful UI known to man. It's a freakin eyebleeding headache that leaves one happily shelling out the hundreds or thousands of Dollars for a modelor with a usable GUI. Huh?
To each their own, I guess. I always thought the Blender interface was pretty cool. What don't you like about it?
Now their Boolean tools, on the other hand... Those are abysmal.
It's a shame. Because Blender could be a contender, but since the developers live in their own little world with the attitidude that their app is made for a "certain group of people and not everyone", the application is basically a sick joke. I don't agree with the general principle that every piece of software should be written for everyone. The cynic in me would call it "pandering to the lowest common denominator" - but of course that's not a totally fair statement either... There's value in making an application conceptually self-consistent, but making it conceptually consistent with everything else out there, making it immediately and intuitively accessible (criteria that are defined more by what people are used to rather than what is best) makes specialization difficult...
"Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007."
The students aren't required to use Office 2007 at home, it's merely recommended.
All this means is that, if people buy Office 2007 and they have problems with it, they can talk to Microsoft. If they didn't buy Office 2007, as the school recommends, it's their problem.
If the school recommended, say, Openoffice, then they would be expected to stand behind that recommendation - and to provide an explanation, if it ultimately turned out that OpenOffice is a complete lemon. As recommendations go, it's not an especially safe one. But people still have the option of using it if they like, regardless of what the school recommends.
It brings a smile to my face when somebody cites Palm as a model for the ideal OS.:) See? There it is. It's one of the systems I think of, too, when trying to figure out how a computer ought to work. Of course, there are some limitations, at least with Palm's design.
First off, "generic" file types aren't supported very well. Everything is assumed to have exactly one application which works with that file type. Generally this isn't much of a problem (memos in Memo Pad, To Do items in To Do list, DeLorme maps in XMap HH, etc.) but what about really generic things, like images? Do I want to view a JPEG or edit it? In the Palm design, files like that would be under the care of some one application capable of doing all relevant operations on them - but on my desktop I don't have an application like that. I have no one app that's as handy for viewing as xv and as powerful for editing as the GIMP or Photoshop, so the typical GUI model of a "default file-extension/application binding" doesn't work too well for me - and hence Palm's model doesn't work either. The application can't really manage the data because there -is- no one application that does it all.
My answer to that problem (and the POV presented in #1) is that the shell should provide better support for these things, and applications should have closer ties to the shell, whatever shell that may be (GUI, command line, whatever.) Ah, hell, I don't have all the answers, I guess I can't get a good enough picture of my ideal system to describe it right now... anyway, this sort of thing interests me a lot more than the proliferation of Windows-style desktop software on Linux - I want a system that addresses the shortcomings in Windows -and- Linux...
There was a time when the same argument would have prevented people from encoding long file names or Unix permissions to a CD-ROM. Now both are available through widely accepted means. The solution is a CD-ROM filesystem that supports the extended attributes.
I do think it's important to make systems that ease transition from the older designs (else, who's gonna use them?) but ultimately the design goal should not be compromised by those concerns. I want to store and retrieve my files in more intelligent, managable ways. If that means systems as I know them are going to change, so be it.
I don't consider myself dumb or unable to remember simple filenames. The problem here is that too much information is being stuffed into the filenames, to classify the file and to uniquify its name.
For instance, let's suppose I had a collection of games for my emulator. The simplest file-naming scheme would be just the name of the game, like "Pac Man" or "Super Mario Brothers". So what happens when I want to distinguish between an English or Japanese version of the game, or a copy with or without some dumb pirating group's demo tacked on? First off, the file name grows: "Pac Man" turns into "0713 - Pac Man[E][Dumbass group]" and I have to type that in every time I want to use the file. I can't start with "Pac" and auto-complete because the sequence number is listed first, and I can remember those dumb sequence numbers about as well as I remember what iNode the file's stored in. Sure, I can make symlinks or use some other program to select the correct file - but from a UI perspective, the tools for doing that are neither convenient nor efficient, in part because the extra data being stuffed into the filename isn't organized very well, in part because this organization isn't standardized at all, and in part because of stupid geek machismo that says we shouldn't bat an eye when we come up against a file management problem like this.
I don't think the KDE file manager linked to the story is an especially good design, but at least he's trying. As a power user I'd really like my system to support more powerful and sensible means for me to organize the files I've got - and I want that means to be supported at the command shell and in the applications I use.
"However, for the most part, this effort has been piecemeal and on the fringe. So far, there has not been a mainstream computing platform which has seriously attacked the cruft that graphical interfaces have been dragging around since the early 1980s."
I disagree. To me, this is one of the strengths of PalmOS: Palm was willing to rethink some of the established ideas of what a handheld should be and how a computer should work, and the result was a very practical and efficient system. I wouldn't say Palm got everything right, but they definitely cut the cruft.
You have to consider that, under real normal use the device spends most of its time in processor-sleep mode. Sure, if you thrash the CPU for a while, it'll run the batteries down.
Slashdot Mirror
Put another way, what value are we getting out of more TLDs? More sites can share the same name? Is that really something we want?
Having more TLDs gives people a bigger namespace to play in, but the problem is people don't generally want a bigger name space for domain names. They want their domain name to be unique, for recognition and to avoid confusion...
I wonder if HMX has their Sitar Hero posters up in their offices? Maybe I can get in to help play-test a game sometime and find out.
What?
Oh, same process as...
"Evolution happens" -> (then a miracle of logic occurs) -> "evolution exhaustively explains origins and incidentally there is no God"
Nevermind. Well, not really... I mean, yes, creationism can refer to the simple belief that there was some creator who, by intent, developed the universe we know, through unspecified processes. (Not much of a belief, really. Just sort of amounts to "that which we cannot understand we attribute to a personification of all things beyond our own powers") but "creationism" also refers to those who use creationist ideas on a scientific level. For instance:
So if you want to be technical the anti-science Creationists shouldn't be called simply "Creationists" - they should be known by something more distinctive - like "Fucking dick-head creationists" or "Pseudo-science/Anti-science Creationists"... It's not really fair that most of us just shorten that to "Creationists" - but deal with it. It's just like how people think "hacker" means "malevolent vandal-hacker". Those assholes are giving your non-science-related philosophical belief a bad name.
The whole basis of good UI design is that there is not one way to do things.
So the whole basis of good UI design is that there are zero ways to do things?Not to nitpick grammar but I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make here. Forcing the use of keys instead of drop-down menus is bad design. Period. That's just your opinion, though, right? I have a different one. I don't agree with the assertion that current UI practice should be considered law. I think there's still a lot of exploration to be done in terms of UI design, and I do not feel that every UI should be aimed at all users... But again in LW, anything you can do using keyboard shortcuts you can also accomplish using drop-down menus. [sarcasm]And check this out! They even list the actual keyboard shortcuts in the list of options in those very menus! Imagine that, pointers to the shortcuts within the very UI instead of buried somewhere in cryptic man pages! Brilliant![/sarcasm] [sarcasm]Oh, great use of the sarcasm tag there. You really burned me on that one.[/sarcasm]
Oh, but wait... Blender also has menus listing the commands available in the current mode, and they also list the keyboard shortcuts next to the command name. Imagine that, you knocked Blender for not implementing something that is implemented in Blender. We shouldn't confuse the conceptual "vocabulary" in 3D animation (the domain) with the process constraints from the interfaces of the programs. Huh?
I think you're saying that a complex problem doesn't require a complex UI? I don't agree.
The toolset is large enough that presenting all those tools on-screen at once results in information overload. You simply can't "keep it simple" and still give the user everything. Though I'd concede that if you make that a priority you can do a better job of it than Blender did. I agree that learning 3D animation is hard, but having a painfully autistic UI doesn't make it easier. I never said Blender's UI made it easier to learn 3-D modeling, I said that once you take the time to learn it, it's more efficient to use. I compared the one-time cost of learning the interface against the cost of slowing down an operation you'll probably use thousands of times in the interest of making it easy-to-learn. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you want to accomplish, knowing that it is certainly possible, knowing that it should be ridiculously easy, and yet can't figure out the voodoo mouse-twitch keyboard hack to make it happen. And then all the documentation you can find assumes you already know that part and glosses over that step. Hm. Well I seem to have been able to muddle through somehow so I can't really relate to what you're saying here. Maybe I just learned from a better tutorial than you did. Got an example for me?
I don't care if it's thinner - it's too frikkin' big. Making something that big a fraction of an inch thinner doesn't amount to much when it comes to storing the thing. We're talking about the smallest dimension of the machine, and they made it a little smaller. Talk to me when the thing isn't so frikkin' wide...
But mostly I'm just pushing your buttons (except the square button - I hear that one's cheaply-built) - so don't take any of it too seriously or you'll get a headache. If it makes you feel any better, I'm happy to acknowledge that the PSP is a damn nice machine, and its game library is getting better all the time. I just think it's funny that the "smaller" PSP is... pretty much the same size as the old PSP.
It's not really "slim" - it should be "PSP slightly less chunky". :)
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution.
Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.
True, that - when switching between the two I often find myself wishing Gimp worked a bit more like Blender... And certainly there are a lot of people out there who wish Gimp worked more like Photoshop...
But this whole idea of "one paradigm to rule them all" doesn't work for me. I think it's premature. People are still figuring out better ways to do things in UIs and - here's the clincher for me - what's best is domain-specific. If you're writing, say, an e-mail application - there's a certain set of tasks that program has to do, and probably there's an expectation that lots of people with all kinds of different backgrounds will use the app. In that case, sure, familiar UI concepts are a strong asset. But even then, even in something as simple as e-mail, the emphasis on making the app "easy-to-learn" emphasizes things like hiding or removing lesser-used features, to simplify the interface.
But a 3-D modeler is a different beast. You don't expect everyone to learn 3-D modeling, not everybody needs or wants to - which is quite understandable due to various difficulties involved. (For instance, dealing with 3-D space but 2-D display and input, using a giant library of different modeling tools and techniques to create the desired effect, and even dealing with things like individual vertex placement, since the computer can't quite handle that on its own in "specialized" cases, like low-poly modeling or animation...) The task of 3-D mesh modeling is inherently complicated - at present, anyway. People, in general, aren't sculptors or model-makers. In any medium (clay, plastic, polygons, whatever) the process of learning to model isn't simply "how do I make this", but "how do I make this with these tools and materials?" So users of a 3-D modeling app have a considerably higher initial investment: this suggests a higher level of sophistication as well.
So, here's the thing about making the interface fast-to-use vs. easy-to-learn... How many times do you have to use a given function? How does that weigh against the one time you have to learn how to invoke it? Let's suppose, for instance, that I had a polygon model with "smoothing" turned on. (That is, smoothing via shading algorithms, like Phong or Gourad shading) - And I wanted to specify edges that would appear "sharp" - discontinuities in the "smooth" surface. Now, it may be simpler for me to find this functionality if it's laid out nicely in a button bar somewhere - and I honestly have no idea if Blender has such a button, since I use keystrokes for most functions like this... If this is a task I have to do lots and lots of times, it's worth my t
To each their own, I guess. I always thought the Blender interface was pretty cool. What don't you like about it?
Now their Boolean tools, on the other hand... Those are abysmal. It's a shame. Because Blender could be a contender, but since the developers live in their own little world with the attitidude that their app is made for a "certain group of people and not everyone", the application is basically a sick joke. I don't agree with the general principle that every piece of software should be written for everyone. The cynic in me would call it "pandering to the lowest common denominator" - but of course that's not a totally fair statement either... There's value in making an application conceptually self-consistent, but making it conceptually consistent with everything else out there, making it immediately and intuitively accessible (criteria that are defined more by what people are used to rather than what is best) makes specialization difficult...
10. While having sex. I dunno, man... this one time I chrooted this girl without changing my working directory - it was wild.
"Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007."
The students aren't required to use Office 2007 at home, it's merely recommended.
All this means is that, if people buy Office 2007 and they have problems with it, they can talk to Microsoft. If they didn't buy Office 2007, as the school recommends, it's their problem.
If the school recommended, say, Openoffice, then they would be expected to stand behind that recommendation - and to provide an explanation, if it ultimately turned out that OpenOffice is a complete lemon. As recommendations go, it's not an especially safe one. But people still have the option of using it if they like, regardless of what the school recommends.
It brings a smile to my face when somebody cites Palm as a model for the ideal OS. :) See? There it is. It's one of the systems I think of, too, when trying to figure out how a computer ought to work. Of course, there are some limitations, at least with Palm's design.
First off, "generic" file types aren't supported very well. Everything is assumed to have exactly one application which works with that file type. Generally this isn't much of a problem (memos in Memo Pad, To Do items in To Do list, DeLorme maps in XMap HH, etc.) but what about really generic things, like images? Do I want to view a JPEG or edit it? In the Palm design, files like that would be under the care of some one application capable of doing all relevant operations on them - but on my desktop I don't have an application like that. I have no one app that's as handy for viewing as xv and as powerful for editing as the GIMP or Photoshop, so the typical GUI model of a "default file-extension/application binding" doesn't work too well for me - and hence Palm's model doesn't work either. The application can't really manage the data because there -is- no one application that does it all.
My answer to that problem (and the POV presented in #1) is that the shell should provide better support for these things, and applications should have closer ties to the shell, whatever shell that may be (GUI, command line, whatever.) Ah, hell, I don't have all the answers, I guess I can't get a good enough picture of my ideal system to describe it right now... anyway, this sort of thing interests me a lot more than the proliferation of Windows-style desktop software on Linux - I want a system that addresses the shortcomings in Windows -and- Linux...
There was a time when the same argument would have prevented people from encoding long file names or Unix permissions to a CD-ROM. Now both are available through widely accepted means. The solution is a CD-ROM filesystem that supports the extended attributes.
I do think it's important to make systems that ease transition from the older designs (else, who's gonna use them?) but ultimately the design goal should not be compromised by those concerns. I want to store and retrieve my files in more intelligent, managable ways. If that means systems as I know them are going to change, so be it.
I don't consider myself dumb or unable to remember simple filenames. The problem here is that too much information is being stuffed into the filenames, to classify the file and to uniquify its name.
For instance, let's suppose I had a collection of games for my emulator. The simplest file-naming scheme would be just the name of the game, like "Pac Man" or "Super Mario Brothers". So what happens when I want to distinguish between an English or Japanese version of the game, or a copy with or without some dumb pirating group's demo tacked on? First off, the file name grows: "Pac Man" turns into "0713 - Pac Man[E][Dumbass group]" and I have to type that in every time I want to use the file. I can't start with "Pac" and auto-complete because the sequence number is listed first, and I can remember those dumb sequence numbers about as well as I remember what iNode the file's stored in. Sure, I can make symlinks or use some other program to select the correct file - but from a UI perspective, the tools for doing that are neither convenient nor efficient, in part because the extra data being stuffed into the filename isn't organized very well, in part because this organization isn't standardized at all, and in part because of stupid geek machismo that says we shouldn't bat an eye when we come up against a file management problem like this.
I don't think the KDE file manager linked to the story is an especially good design, but at least he's trying. As a power user I'd really like my system to support more powerful and sensible means for me to organize the files I've got - and I want that means to be supported at the command shell and in the applications I use.
"However, for the most part, this effort has been piecemeal and on the fringe. So far, there has not been a mainstream computing platform which has seriously attacked the cruft that graphical interfaces have been dragging around since the early 1980s."
I disagree. To me, this is one of the strengths of PalmOS: Palm was willing to rethink some of the established ideas of what a handheld should be and how a computer should work, and the result was a very practical and efficient system. I wouldn't say Palm got everything right, but they definitely cut the cruft.
I've tried the Zaurus. I'm sorry, but the software on that thing is crap. The UI is way too clunky, it's like they were trying to clone PocketPC.
You have to consider that, under real normal use the device spends most of its time in processor-sleep mode. Sure, if you thrash the CPU for a while, it'll run the batteries down.