"one time, I set some guy's font color to red and his background to red. He couldn't see anything. Therefore, all interface customization is bad."
Even funnier, the guy was "one client of [his]" - I don't think I would get to keep many clients if I did stupid things like that. The only point he really demonstrated was that the GUI needed a 'restore default settings' option on the login screen.
That's a fair point, although part of the distinction for me is interactivity. HTML, for instance, allows the creation of forms that contain buttons that allow the user to make a choice. In this respect I would not see pdf or Word as programming languages, but I would see Powerpoint et al as a limited, very high level language. Of course Word does allow 'buttons' etc. on the page, but that is linked with Macros. I would argue that Macros _are_ a programming language, but a very limiited, high level one.
Not that I feel any of this too strongly:-). OTOH, there may be an advantage in allowing newbies to consider HTML as programming, because it may give them the encouragement needed to put the time into learning a 'real' language which they might not do otherwise.
HTML does have some control structures, for example the FRAMESET / NOFRAMES tags are essentially a control structure, whereby different sequences of commands are interpreted depending on a test condition. It's certainly not Turing complete, and I know that I'm reaching a little here, but I do think it's tenuous either way.
Why? Surely a web page is a sequence of instructions which the computer follows to perform a particular task. It's not clear _at all_ what is really programming and what isn't. It's back to the 'real programmers toggle hex into front panel switches' debate.
Well... maybe they will save money on the computer system and spend it on a printer instead. If you have a limited budget for whatever reason, compromises have to be made.
If a small charity has an IT budget of $500 for a year, then they would do well to acquire an old Pentium (perhaps for free) and buy a nice Epson or HP printer and a supply of cartridges. If they do lots of printing, that would probably eat up most of their budget, especially if they make OHP slides for presentations (inkjet acetates are very expensive). Not having to spend the majority of that budget on an overspecced machine is a Good Thing.
Your (implied) argument that if they have money for a printer they have money for a brand new computer system doesn't hold. Also, I personally have 3 colour inkjet printers lying around which will eventually get given to a good cause. And I'm sure they would like the latest drivers to go with them.
If the DVD-ROM manufacturer paid a license fee to sell the drive, aren't they getting their money from DeCSS users? It has no application to this case, but only in regards to DeCSS. If the Phillips, etc. get their money from the drive manufacturer, and they get their money from the disc producer, why is it so important that they also get their money from the software producer?
And I, like many people I'm sure, bought a drive with windows software and then ditched it to use in Linux. So they still get their software license.
One of the greatest features about Mozilla, in my opinion, is that links can be opened in a new 'tab' which saves the screen space and allows the page to load in the background while I carry on surfing.
Well, I think that depends on the supplier we used - but you're right, I should check it out.
I think you would still have to admit there is far more scope for tinkering with PCs and generally messing around with old/secondhand components at a reasonable price than on the Mac. Which is a good thing _and_ a bad thing of course.
He's tried reinstalling the OS, but that hasn't made any difference. Apart from that (and correct me if I'm wrong) there's not alot we can do because the Mac warranty is case-on. If we take it to bits, the warranty is void and we have no hope of getting it fixed for free. Even when the warranty is expired, if I tinker with it and trash the logic board, it will have to go to a Mac specialist for a new one - I can't buy a new one for £100 from a shop in town.
Don't get me wrong - I love Macs - but there is definitely an advantage in the wealth of knowledge and tinkering ability available for the x86 PC platform that isn't so easily available for the Mac.
Well, a few thousand dollars and say a free laptop each for the developers of that particular 'fragment' of code wouldn't have gone amiss, and that would have been a drop in the ocean compared to the money that MS have made from Windows - and the ongoing success of Windows must have be in no small way due to it being properly TCP/IP 'enabled'.
Of course MS were under no obligation to do so, but its pretty sad that they never even gave proper credit. Most end users wouldn't even understand what the credit meant, and those who did would think more favourably of MS in future: everyone wins.
I think your conclusion is probably right, but perhaps your analogy isn't (as in, I don't buy the car thing).
I would/love/ to own a Mac, but can't possibly afford them. I've been able to build a nice PC by buying and upgrading bits gradually over the past few years. I've finally ditched Windows now that Linux supports most of the hardware that I love, (getting my ATI TV Tuner working was the final hurdle) and I'm pretty happy with my machine. If I had had to go the Mac way, I would probably be stuck with a 6-8 year old machine cos that's all I could afford, probably with a string of over-priced USB, firewire or SCSI peripherals like CD burners, DVD etc. when IDE devices would have done a fine job.
There is a downside to the pre-packaged mac, too. One of my friends is a graphic designer, and he has a G4. We're sure there is something wrong with it - it runs like a dog (a big, fat, lazy dog) and has recently started taking ages to print even simple jobs. The supplier claims there is nothing wrong with it. If it were a PC I would play with the BIOS, try some different RAM, stick my harddrive in it and see if my apps ran more slowly etc. At the moment we are trying to come up with some benchmark stats that might prove that it is running more slowly than a G4 would be expected too. If we don't manage that then he's stuck with £2000 worth of crap.
I find so many Linux and KDE apps to be so much more configurable and useful than Windows programs, personally. But just like the article's author, getting them up and running is the biggest pain in the ass ever in most cases!
But... firstly this article is talking about business computing, where that is the IT department's job, so doesn't really come into the question of how useable and practical Linux is on the business desktop.
Personally, I use debian and have never had any real problems configuring anything - I select the apps from dselect, it downloads them, installs them and asks me a few questions to configure them. The only app I've had any real trouble with is XMMS but that's because of the whole DeCSS caper and it's not a business app in any case.
Secondly - and this is speaking as an admin of 30 or so windows 98 machines in a small organisation - windows apps are _not_ easy to install and configure. For instance, installing staroffice or similar under Linux takes 10-15 mins start to finish. To install Office 2000 on the same machine dual-booted into Windows takes 20 mins per CD, 40 in total, including multiple reboots. _Then_ there's at least 5 patches required to deal with all the MS security holes, at 10-20 mins per patch again with several reboots each. _Plus_ it takes incredible effort to find the real patches on the MS website instead of just an 'installer' which insists on re-downloading the patch files onto each and every machine (and one of them also has a bug that crashes the install process until you delete a certain file - I know... I've done it 30 times!)
Futher problems abound if you install Office over a network connection and then want to change the installation using a CD (e.g. a laptop off site), because it 'remembers' the install path and won't budge..... suffice to say I've had very bad experiences of desktop Windows.
And dosemu, wine, and VMWare are not nearly stable enough.
I don't know about these, but I'm using win4lin here and it's rock solid. It mainly gets used for Dreamweaver and the occasional site that requires IE (urrgh). There's no reason at all why custom windows apps can't be run this way, and there's even a sister product to win4lin that runs on a high-end linux box, and is essentially a terminal server.
That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.
Maybe finding your way to places that haven't been to before?
What about having the PDA tell you to do things when you get to a particular/place/ rather than a particular time, e.g. 'next time I'm in the supermarket, remind me to get some washing powder'?
There may be all sorts of possible wireless e-commerce ideas, for instance calling a cab and not knowing where on earth you were - you could go to a web page and they could find you.
If you're really weak-willed, you could set the PDA up to make a guess at whether you're really doing what you said you wanted to do, or if you've actually gone for a beer instead.
DVDs don't need PAL to NTSC convertors. The whole point is that they don't conform to any type of picture standard other than aspect ratio. It's the job of the DVD player to render the picture in PAL, NTSC, SECAM, SVGA or whatever standard you care to mention. The aspect ratio obviously depends on the physical screen, but can be corrected by adding black bars at the top or sides of the picture or by stretching if the view prefers.
This is why there is so much dicussion about the region coding - because there is no reason why any DVD cannot be played anywhere in the world, the 'region coding' has been added because the film industry has got very used to controlling when and where a product can be distributed by choosing what picture standard to release it in. By delaying PAL releases they have been able to release films later in UK cinemas without the cinema release clashing with tape sales and therefore decreases losses if the film is a flop.
I would guess that the BBC have decided to delay marketing this new DVD in the US, and so are pragmatically taking advantage of the region coding to see how it does over here first.
The only time a PAL/NTSC convertor might be useful is if a foreign DVD player were imported in order to play DVDs from another region, which at 100 dollars/pounds, it's quite a viable thing to do. Of course, here in the UK many off-the-shelf players will play any region.....
Good Point. Last year I sat in a UI lecture at university. The lecturer drew a comparison between a VCR and a car, and his quote (roughly) was 'a modern VCR has maybe 10-15 controls and yet the vast majority of people cannot manage to programme it to record a televison program at a specific time and date. A car has possibly upwards of 50 different controls and yet most people manage to drive without any problems at all.' He appeared oblivious to the fact that most people (in the UK at least) have upwards of 15 hours of tuition from a professional driving expert, and extensive theory and practical tests before being allowed to drive on their own. Even then the majority of people would not attempt even routine maintainance on their vehicle.
For some reason there is an idea that everyone should be able to use PCs without any training, because they should be 'intuitive'. And people then expect to be able to install their own upgrades such as scanners, printers etc. I personally think that as computers are becoming more complex and necessary to every day life, it should become routine to have a computer 'mechanic' provide upgrades, hardware and possibly software, to make sure that the system continues running perfectly.
Much noise is made about Linux being difficult to install and run on various hardware, but this should not be an issue - I think Gnome+Nautilus is one of the most reliable and intuive systems around.
How does this relate to the topic in hand -- well, abstracting and hiding more and more of the system is fine, so long as a 'mechanic' can open the hood and access all the inner workings. (Hint: the MS 'registry' does not count).
the most vivid tropes in his book were taken from the movie Blade Runner
Blade Runner was actually a screenplay based on the Philip K. Dick novel, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.
Neuromancer was published in 1984,
Do Androids Dream was originally published in 1968 and the film in 1982 so there is a good chance that they could have influenced Neuromancer. Sadly I haven't read the book, but I read Do Androids Dream...? a long time ago and have seen Bladerunner over and over.
How about having ads of a similar size to the existing ones, but at regular intervals down the page, maybe every 20 comments or so? That would be less obtrusive than one huge one.
X dies frequently on my system. It really depends on the version of XFree86 you use + your vid card. The error messages aren't terribly helpful to a newbie either.
But this is a business installation - they should have made sure that X was stable before commissioning the systems.
For certain users, no amount of training helps. I'm still teaching people how to click and drag, and I've repeated the instructions to some of them 20 times. There is a difference in innate usability, however, between desktops like KDE and Mac OS. Mac OS X is perhaps the most intuitive GUI I've ever seen, with Windows XP following in second. I like KDE, but it's confusing to most new users.
I consider myself an extremely experienced user, being familiar with many GUIs including CDE, KDE, Gnome, Win 3.x, Win 9x/NT/2000 and even Gem! I tried to do some work on a Mac notebook the other day and it's the first time I've ever sat down at a computer and had to ask for help. I don't think there exists a GUI that is totally intuitive, but I would say that for an average user a well-configured Gnome is much easier than Win9x/2000, considering the vast array of differing desktop components, e.g. desktop icons, start button, taskbar 'shortcuts', tasktray shortcuts etc. etc.
The average user upgrades their GUI (Windows) every 2-3 years. Things are going to change rapidally. The only problem, as it's been said many times before, is that Linux doesn't have the "advantage" of having a single, standardized desktop. At least if you know one version of Windows, you pretty much have a good idea how the next one is going to act.
Firstly, linux not having a standardized desktop makes no difference at all to corporate IT installations. The IT/IS department simply needs to choose a desktop and suite of apps that suits their working practices, create a rock solid install image and distribute at will. The only people that cound be confused by that are those with Linux desktops at home, and they are the very people who should be able to get over it. Secondly, the Windows desktop has been far from consistent even over the past three years. Even within the Win 9x family it is possible to vastly change the look and feel of the GUI by changing some of the 'Active Desktop' features. Users get extremely confused about single- and double-clicking, and a GUI that allows you to change the way desktop icons behave is an extremely bad move. Yes - you can make this kind of change under Linux, but you can also very easily lock it all down.
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Even funnier, the guy was "one client of [his]" - I don't think I would get to keep many clients if I did stupid things like that. The only point he really demonstrated was that the GUI needed a 'restore default settings' option on the login screen.
Not that I feel any of this too strongly :-). OTOH, there may be an advantage in allowing newbies to consider HTML as programming, because it may give them the encouragement needed to put the time into learning a 'real' language which they might not do otherwise.
HTML does have some control structures, for example the FRAMESET / NOFRAMES tags are essentially a control structure, whereby different sequences of commands are interpreted depending on a test condition. It's certainly not Turing complete, and I know that I'm reaching a little here, but I do think it's tenuous either way.
Why? Surely a web page is a sequence of instructions which the computer follows to perform a particular task. It's not clear _at all_ what is really programming and what isn't. It's back to the 'real programmers toggle hex into front panel switches' debate.
Perhaps they borrowed it, the rascals.
You don't use an excellent web browser because it look funny?!
If a small charity has an IT budget of $500 for a year, then they would do well to acquire an old Pentium (perhaps for free) and buy a nice Epson or HP printer and a supply of cartridges. If they do lots of printing, that would probably eat up most of their budget, especially if they make OHP slides for presentations (inkjet acetates are very expensive). Not having to spend the majority of that budget on an overspecced machine is a Good Thing.
Your (implied) argument that if they have money for a printer they have money for a brand new computer system doesn't hold. Also, I personally have 3 colour inkjet printers lying around which will eventually get given to a good cause. And I'm sure they would like the latest drivers to go with them.
And I, like many people I'm sure, bought a drive with windows software and then ditched it to use in Linux. So they still get their software license.
Love it.
Then www.whois.net is your friend!
So no problems there then.
I think you would still have to admit there is far more scope for tinkering with PCs and generally messing around with old/secondhand components at a reasonable price than on the Mac. Which is a good thing _and_ a bad thing of course.
He's tried reinstalling the OS, but that hasn't made any difference. Apart from that (and correct me if I'm wrong) there's not alot we can do because the Mac warranty is case-on. If we take it to bits, the warranty is void and we have no hope of getting it fixed for free. Even when the warranty is expired, if I tinker with it and trash the logic board, it will have to go to a Mac specialist for a new one - I can't buy a new one for £100 from a shop in town.
Don't get me wrong - I love Macs - but there is definitely an advantage in the wealth of knowledge and tinkering ability available for the x86 PC platform that isn't so easily available for the Mac.
Well, a few thousand dollars and say a free laptop each for the developers of that particular 'fragment' of code wouldn't have gone amiss, and that would have been a drop in the ocean compared to the money that MS have made from Windows - and the ongoing success of Windows must have be in no small way due to it being properly TCP/IP 'enabled'.
Of course MS were under no obligation to do so, but its pretty sad that they never even gave proper credit. Most end users wouldn't even understand what the credit meant, and those who did would think more favourably of MS in future: everyone wins.
I would /love/ to own a Mac, but can't possibly afford them. I've been able to build a nice PC by buying and upgrading bits gradually over the past few years. I've finally ditched Windows now that Linux supports most of the hardware that I love, (getting my ATI TV Tuner working was the final hurdle) and I'm pretty happy with my machine. If I had had to go the Mac way, I would probably be stuck with a 6-8 year old machine cos that's all I could afford, probably with a string of over-priced USB, firewire or SCSI peripherals like CD burners, DVD etc. when IDE devices would have done a fine job.
There is a downside to the pre-packaged mac, too. One of my friends is a graphic designer, and he has a G4. We're sure there is something wrong with it - it runs like a dog (a big, fat, lazy dog) and has recently started taking ages to print even simple jobs. The supplier claims there is nothing wrong with it. If it were a PC I would play with the BIOS, try some different RAM, stick my harddrive in it and see if my apps ran more slowly etc. At the moment we are trying to come up with some benchmark stats that might prove that it is running more slowly than a G4 would be expected too. If we don't manage that then he's stuck with £2000 worth of crap.
That's like saying my microwave is software.... surely....?
Maybe the original poster was Australian????
But... firstly this article is talking about business computing, where that is the IT department's job, so doesn't really come into the question of how useable and practical Linux is on the business desktop.
Personally, I use debian and have never had any real problems configuring anything - I select the apps from dselect, it downloads them, installs them and asks me a few questions to configure them. The only app I've had any real trouble with is XMMS but that's because of the whole DeCSS caper and it's not a business app in any case.
Secondly - and this is speaking as an admin of 30 or so windows 98 machines in a small organisation - windows apps are _not_ easy to install and configure. For instance, installing staroffice or similar under Linux takes 10-15 mins start to finish. To install Office 2000 on the same machine dual-booted into Windows takes 20 mins per CD, 40 in total, including multiple reboots. _Then_ there's at least 5 patches required to deal with all the MS security holes, at 10-20 mins per patch again with several reboots each. _Plus_ it takes incredible effort to find the real patches on the MS website instead of just an 'installer' which insists on re-downloading the patch files onto each and every machine (and one of them also has a bug that crashes the install process until you delete a certain file - I know... I've done it 30 times!)
Futher problems abound if you install Office over a network connection and then want to change the installation using a CD (e.g. a laptop off site), because it 'remembers' the install path and won't budge..... suffice to say I've had very bad experiences of desktop Windows.
I don't know about these, but I'm using win4lin here and it's rock solid. It mainly gets used for Dreamweaver and the occasional site that requires IE (urrgh). There's no reason at all why custom windows apps can't be run this way, and there's even a sister product to win4lin that runs on a high-end linux box, and is essentially a terminal server.
That kind of solution would allow linux desktops to be phased in whilst the custom software was recoded. There would be short-term expenses, but as part of a long term strategy of replacing MS software, probably quite practical.
What about having the PDA tell you to do things when you get to a particular /place/ rather than a particular time, e.g. 'next time I'm in the supermarket, remind me to get some washing powder'?
There may be all sorts of possible wireless e-commerce ideas, for instance calling a cab and not knowing where on earth you were - you could go to a web page and they could find you.
If you're really weak-willed, you could set the PDA up to make a guess at whether you're really doing what you said you wanted to do, or if you've actually gone for a beer instead.
Just some ideas....
This is why there is so much dicussion about the region coding - because there is no reason why any DVD cannot be played anywhere in the world, the 'region coding' has been added because the film industry has got very used to controlling when and where a product can be distributed by choosing what picture standard to release it in. By delaying PAL releases they have been able to release films later in UK cinemas without the cinema release clashing with tape sales and therefore decreases losses if the film is a flop.
I would guess that the BBC have decided to delay marketing this new DVD in the US, and so are pragmatically taking advantage of the region coding to see how it does over here first.
The only time a PAL/NTSC convertor might be useful is if a foreign DVD player were imported in order to play DVDs from another region, which at 100 dollars/pounds, it's quite a viable thing to do. Of course, here in the UK many off-the-shelf players will play any region.....
For some reason there is an idea that everyone should be able to use PCs without any training, because they should be 'intuitive'. And people then expect to be able to install their own upgrades such as scanners, printers etc. I personally think that as computers are becoming more complex and necessary to every day life, it should become routine to have a computer 'mechanic' provide upgrades, hardware and possibly software, to make sure that the system continues running perfectly.
Much noise is made about Linux being difficult to install and run on various hardware, but this should not be an issue - I think Gnome+Nautilus is one of the most reliable and intuive systems around.
How does this relate to the topic in hand -- well, abstracting and hiding more and more of the system is fine, so long as a 'mechanic' can open the hood and access all the inner workings. (Hint: the MS 'registry' does not count).
Blade Runner was actually a screenplay based on the Philip K. Dick novel, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.
Neuromancer was published in 1984, Do Androids Dream was originally published in 1968 and the film in 1982 so there is a good chance that they could have influenced Neuromancer. Sadly I haven't read the book, but I read Do Androids Dream...? a long time ago and have seen Bladerunner over and over.
How about having ads of a similar size to the existing ones, but at regular intervals down the page, maybe every 20 comments or so? That would be less obtrusive than one huge one.
But this is a business installation - they should have made sure that X was stable before commissioning the systems.
For certain users, no amount of training helps. I'm still teaching people how to click and drag, and I've repeated the instructions to some of them 20 times. There is a difference in innate usability, however, between desktops like KDE and Mac OS. Mac OS X is perhaps the most intuitive GUI I've ever seen, with Windows XP following in second. I like KDE, but it's confusing to most new users.
I consider myself an extremely experienced user, being familiar with many GUIs including CDE, KDE, Gnome, Win 3.x, Win 9x/NT/2000 and even Gem! I tried to do some work on a Mac notebook the other day and it's the first time I've ever sat down at a computer and had to ask for help. I don't think there exists a GUI that is totally intuitive, but I would say that for an average user a well-configured Gnome is much easier than Win9x/2000, considering the vast array of differing desktop components, e.g. desktop icons, start button, taskbar 'shortcuts', tasktray shortcuts etc. etc.
The average user upgrades their GUI (Windows) every 2-3 years. Things are going to change rapidally. The only problem, as it's been said many times before, is that Linux doesn't have the "advantage" of having a single, standardized desktop. At least if you know one version of Windows, you pretty much have a good idea how the next one is going to act.
Firstly, linux not having a standardized desktop makes no difference at all to corporate IT installations. The IT/IS department simply needs to choose a desktop and suite of apps that suits their working practices, create a rock solid install image and distribute at will. The only people that cound be confused by that are those with Linux desktops at home, and they are the very people who should be able to get over it. Secondly, the Windows desktop has been far from consistent even over the past three years. Even within the Win 9x family it is possible to vastly change the look and feel of the GUI by changing some of the 'Active Desktop' features. Users get extremely confused about single- and double-clicking, and a GUI that allows you to change the way desktop icons behave is an extremely bad move. Yes - you can make this kind of change under Linux, but you can also very easily lock it all down.