I haven't read the FA yet, but this isn't the first time this concern has been raised. The OGP, from the beginning, have been struggling with the issue of some other hardware vendor legally taking OGP graphics chip designs and making their own version, thereby crusing the OGP out of existence.
Most fructose (and dextrose) in the US is dervied from corn. And corn (along with soy, dairy (casein), wheat (gluten), peanuts, shellfish, and several others) is among the top food allergens found in the US diet. Pure fructose would not be any worse than sucrose. For instance, most people, even those who have problems with sugar cane, don't have a problem with maple syrup. The problem is the plant proteins that come along with it. These allergens cause inflamation of the digestive system, tie up the immune system, and generally slow metabolisms and make us more vulnerable to illness.
In American food, top ingredients include soybean oil and corn syrup. They're cheap and plentiful. So we use them to make everything. But they make us fat and sick.
Another thing recently discovered: Many hypothyroid conditions are actually caused by an epidemic iodine defficiency in the American diet. This is in part due to the FDA proscribing an RDA that is like 1/50 of what many people need.
Know why we don't know these things? Because MDs don't know dick about nutrition. They push drugs from the pharm companies and look for physical causes for illnesses. It's amazing to me, but looking for specific dietary causes seems to be the last thing an MD will consider. This is why my primary car physician is a nutritionist!
Monolaurin is an extract from coconut milk that is used to kill herpes virus strains including Epstein-Barr.
The thing that bugs me about all of this is that most MDs don't seem to know about these things. MDs want to put you on toxic antivirals from pharm companies, when you can take something just as effective and nontoxic to humans like monolaurin.
If you're interested, see the Medicinal properties of the wikipedia article. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_milk"
See, what Apple has is user-friendliness appeal. They are excellent at indistrial design and aren't afraid to push the envelope with their ideas. Apple products just look freaking cool, and MacOS is a really superb OS.
But Apple is out to make money, and you can see it from the premium they charge. Even though you can get cheaper products from Dell and HP, you also get less, because they all have profit margins they have to make in order to stay in business. No body is going to give hardware or services away for free. So as nice as the people are in the Apple store, their job is to sell you something so that you give them money and go home with a new gadget. Never forget that.
As much as I would hate to drop MacOS, the next time I buy a new computer, I'm going to seriously consider the alternatives to a Mac. Why? Because I want to make sure that I get the best deal, and only I am able to do that. They certainly aren't going to. Apple won't tell me that I'm better off buying a Dell. The reason I keep mentioning Dell is that they have this warranty plan where if the computer gets hit by a brick (i.e. damage not their fault), they'll replace it. Apple should have that. Another thing that drives me nuts is dead pixels on LCD screens. I'm going to favor whoever has a better policy on that. I'd pay extra just for the right to exchange for a single dead pixel.
You need to figure out what's important to you and make sure that what you make an informed choice. And be aware that the 'best' choice cannot be a perfect one.
Maybe this belongs in a different category, but it seems to me that per capita, it's much harder now to find an engineer who could write a line of assembly for any processor.
Of course, it doesn't seem overly healthy to me to put any kind of artificial radiation source near your body. But frankly, I think our health is being heart a great deal more by pollution, GMO foods, and the excess of allergens in our diet from things like soy, corn, dairy, and wheat.
A large part of Microsoft's inability to modernize many aspects of Windows has been their need to retain backward compatibility with all sorts of crappy old software that did all sort of bad things that would break when the OS was recompiled. While it sucks for people with 32-bit machines, this is an opportunity for Microsoft to stop diverting resources to making old junk work and dedicate those resources to making actual improvements to the OS.
They have to do it this way. Apple doesn't have this problem because they made a clean break in 2000 with OSX. With OSX, they could start over with new APIs and a whole new way of doing things that shed a lot of the crud from the past. As long as Microsoft supports 32-bit and 16-bit Windows code, they're going to be held back. Ditching 32-bit processors is a forcing function that they can use to draw a line in the sand for all of the users. They'll surely still run Win32 code, but users won't have an expectation that all old stuff will work problem-free.
Microsoft is rightly bitched at for a lot of things that they do wrong. But what's ironic is that whenever they've broken backward compatibility, they get bitched at for that moreso than any other vendor. Of course, with old Linux code, that's mostly a recompile, but Apple was really drastic in their moves from OS9 to OSX and from PPC to x86. Some people complained, but most people just accepted it.
IBM isn't the first or last to come up with the idea behind the CELL processor. With the advent of programmable shaders, the GPU industry was headed that way like a freight train. When people started using these highly pipelined, highly parallel SIMD stream processors that we know as GPUs to do supercomputing, people with a clue took notice and decided that it would be sensible to strip out the video components and generalize the compute engine. However, this kind of compute engine only works well for stream processing, requiring some kind of general-purpose CPU to supervise. And this is exactly what the CELL processor is: A PowerPC supervising the operation of an array of stream processors.
So, while the CELL is inspired by GPU design, I think it would be more appropriate to say that CELL is a supercomputing architecture that, being what it is, is also highly suitable for graphics applications. As such, I think what the slashdot article says is silly. What IBM is doing is putting a supercomputing architecture into a mainframe. This isn't weird. It's sensible and a wise move, technically and competitively.
I've studied statistics. I can follow this guy's math. It makes sense, and he's right. But the fact is, I'm rusty enough to not find it to be "obvious". (Hell, I find about 90% of the field of statistics to be non-obvious.) Perhaps 25% being very close to 29% should make it obviously wrong, but it was this erroneous, superficial line of reasoning that made the Mythbusters mess up in the first place. Maybe the blogger found it to be obvious. Or perhaps he was so experienced with statistics that he did some of the math in his head. But, more likely, he didn't know for sure that the mythbusters were wrong until he sat down and did the math.
How are we in some way special that "observing" something makes it exist or converge to a single state or whatever? Are we not merely objects of matter that inhabit the universe just like everything else in it? Moreover, the universe existed before we were there to observe it. It seems to me that "observation" is a red herring. I prefer Penrose's hypothesis that it is gravity that causes superpositions to converge, which is why tiny objects can be in states of superposition, while macroscopic ones do not.
A lot of people are really taking this idea of open hardware designs very seriously, especially in graphics, where we have a really hard time getting docs out of GPU vendors to write Free Software drivers. One of the commenters on this article said something about how he and his colleagues who know how to do this stuff have no interest in doing it outside of work. This isn't true for everyone. The founder and leader of the Open Graphics Project is an experienced graphics chip designer.
AMD has never been entirely "on top", but as long as they were beating Intel, they were hot, and enthusiasts wanted AMD. Now that Intel's Core 2 is beating the Opteron in nearly every test, the speed freeks have jumped ship. The fact is, Intel is on top no matter what. So for AMD to have any kind of fighting chance at a share of the market, they HAVE to be better and faster than Intel. The underdog must beat the top dog or die.
So, if AMD's planned direction doesn't involve a CPU that beats the Core 2, I don't know how they're going to reverse their negative growth.
My home page isn't a credible source of academic information. It's not lies... it's just random crap about me. On that basis, they should block my home page too.
My wife does a lot of public speaking and has training in it, so I have some idea what I'm talking about, but I probably won't present it quite right. Anyhow, it is considered very bad to write presentations where the slides contain anything you're going to say. Even titles are something you should avoid speaking. Rather, slides should be there exclusively to present context and visual aids that are hard or impossible to present through the speech. For instance, if I'm talking about the Ruby programming language, I'll speak things that describe concepts and show code snippets and diagrams on the slides that illustrate them in a different way.
PowerPoint presentations aren't fundamentally bad. Rather, many PowerPoint presentations are bad.
One of my areas of interest for my Ph.D. research is multi-agent systems. The concept Amazon is describing is so old that there's a term for it. "Human in the loop." This is where a human agent is considered to be a part of a heterogeneous multi-agent system.
Apple users want to gripe all of the time about flaws in Apple hardware and software. If you read the online discussions before buying a Mac, you might get scared. But the fact is that Mac users are an elite club of really obsessive people. That's not a slight against them. They have incredibly high standards. As a Windows and Linux user, however, my experiences with the Mac were a huge breath of fresh air. It's nice to finally use a computer that's clearly been well-engineered. From simple things like how the keyboards are made to the way MacOS X manages application-related files, you can tell that Apple wants to do things well and isn't afraid to do it.
I recently was in need of a notebook computer, so I did some investigation as to what my options were. I put notebooks from various manufacturers side by side and compared based on processor speed, FSB speed, memory (size, speed), graphics (GPU power, shared memory, etc.), display resolution, and numerous other factors. While things appear to have changed slightly in the recent past, at the time, the MacBook Pro was less expensive than any PC notebook with comparable capabilities. How's that for risk management? I was nervous about getting a Mac... what if I didn't like it? No problem. The hardware is great, and I can install Linux or Windows on it if I feel like it. Turns out that I really like MacOS too and run Windows and Linux using Parallels.
As a Free Software enthusiast, I am bothered by the fact that so much Apple software isn't Free. But I'm an activist in many ways. I'm an activist for Free Software. I'm also an activist for GOOD software. And my computer is my computer, and I'll run whatever apps make my life easiest. As such, I'm going to use commercial software when it's clearly superior in design and quality to the Free Software. (Notice how I'm implicitly dismissing Microsoft as anything worth talking about.) Then I tell people which apps are the best and why. This way, the Free Software enthusiasts can take notice and improve their designs
I think I won't be much interested in using Linux as a desktop OS until some Ubuntu comes with Beryl by default. And I'll NEVER like the fact that Linux applications have their files spread out across different sections of the file system (/bin,/usr,/etc) and how config file are plain-text in a way that makes it impossible to do upgrades cleanly. That's annoying as hell. Linux architects need to get their heads out of their asses, group all files for a given app into one place, and use mini XML registries for config options. This is just simply good engineering!
When you own the mindshare, you win. Ok, so it's possible for Google to tank if the management makes bad decisions. But the fact is that although their hiring process is surely not perfect, they'll statistically have a higher than average qualify of engineer. What pisses off Microsoft is that Google has sucked away all of the best talent. And Google also has a better environment for engineers to be creative in. Microsoft may be "evil", but they have some great individual engineers, and they need more if they're going to even just keep up. Microsoft's systems are so disorganized and tangled they NEED the brightest people just to survive.
Google is killing Microsoft by attrition. Brilliant!
You hear the complaint both ways, of course. Commercial software gets professional testing, which means that engineers are paid to test un-fun corner cases, apply heuristic analysis, and other stuff like that. FOSS software gets more intense testing, because there are more people testing, although it's somewhat less organized.
Well, here's an example of how it can go wrong, no matter who you are. Of course, we're never surprised when Microsoft has a bug. It's really funny to me, actually. Huge company--can never get their shit together.
No, it's not a sleep issue. With the mouse clicks, I always do some kind of movement before clicking, so it's definitely awake. Also, I used the built-in keyboard, so that's not going to sleep when I lose keypresses.
I turned off that "ignore trackpad while typing" feature a long time ago. Didn't help. Besides, I have a bluetooth mouse and observe the same exact behavior. This is not a hardware problem.
I recently got a MacBook Pro, and while I really enjoy using it, and It's generally better than Windows, KDE, or GNOME, one thing I have noticed is that there is a tendency for it to lose keypresses and mouse clicks. This commonly occurs when switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. For instance, if I use the mouse to click somewhere in this text I'm writing, there's a 50% chance that if I hit the Delete key, the keypress will be completely ignored. I have similar experiences with mouse clicks on window decorations or links in Safari being ignored. It's not a hardware problem, because use of the mouse alone is smooth, and continuous typing on the keyboard does not lose any keypresses. Moreover, people who have experienced this MacOS-knows-best loss of input events do not experience the same things when using the same hardware running Windows under bootcamp. There aren't very many frustrating things about MacOS (once you get used to it), but this problem is incredibly frustrating.
Readable code is a good thing. But Torvalds is fixated on it in a way that suggests he cares more about that than usability. He should not even mention it. If he wants to criticize GNOME, he should focus on what matters: usability.
I think that people who have no background in cognitive engineering, HCI, or design engineering should just shut the hell up, because they're making life miserable for those of us who would really like to have user-friendly systems.
At the very least, read one of the seminal books in the field first: The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN 0-465-06710-7
If Torvalds hasn't read this book, he should shut up.
If there's anyone working on GNOME (or KDE) who hasn't read this book, they should immediately resign and work on some other project. Only people who have some talent or training in thinking about usability should get involved in these things.
One of the biggest problems is that so many of these people are mildly aspergic and therefore have limited ability to empathize with how other people (who don't know as much as they do about the system they're designing) will be able to use it.
Oh, BTW, I'm working on my Ph.D., and one of my minors is HCI.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read the FA yet, but this isn't the first time this concern has been raised. The OGP, from the beginning, have been struggling with the issue of some other hardware vendor legally taking OGP graphics chip designs and making their own version, thereby crusing the OGP out of existence.
Most fructose (and dextrose) in the US is dervied from corn. And corn (along with soy, dairy (casein), wheat (gluten), peanuts, shellfish, and several others) is among the top food allergens found in the US diet. Pure fructose would not be any worse than sucrose. For instance, most people, even those who have problems with sugar cane, don't have a problem with maple syrup. The problem is the plant proteins that come along with it. These allergens cause inflamation of the digestive system, tie up the immune system, and generally slow metabolisms and make us more vulnerable to illness.
In American food, top ingredients include soybean oil and corn syrup. They're cheap and plentiful. So we use them to make everything. But they make us fat and sick.
Another thing recently discovered: Many hypothyroid conditions are actually caused by an epidemic iodine defficiency in the American diet. This is in part due to the FDA proscribing an RDA that is like 1/50 of what many people need.
Know why we don't know these things? Because MDs don't know dick about nutrition. They push drugs from the pharm companies and look for physical causes for illnesses. It's amazing to me, but looking for specific dietary causes seems to be the last thing an MD will consider. This is why my primary car physician is a nutritionist!
aluminum -> aluminium
Monolaurin is an extract from coconut milk that is used to kill herpes virus strains including Epstein-Barr.
The thing that bugs me about all of this is that most MDs don't seem to know about these things. MDs want to put you on toxic antivirals from pharm companies, when you can take something just as effective and nontoxic to humans like monolaurin.
If you're interested, see the Medicinal properties of the wikipedia article. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_milk"
... just like with every other manufacturer.
See, what Apple has is user-friendliness appeal. They are excellent at indistrial design and aren't afraid to push the envelope with their ideas. Apple products just look freaking cool, and MacOS is a really superb OS.
But Apple is out to make money, and you can see it from the premium they charge. Even though you can get cheaper products from Dell and HP, you also get less, because they all have profit margins they have to make in order to stay in business. No body is going to give hardware or services away for free. So as nice as the people are in the Apple store, their job is to sell you something so that you give them money and go home with a new gadget. Never forget that.
As much as I would hate to drop MacOS, the next time I buy a new computer, I'm going to seriously consider the alternatives to a Mac. Why? Because I want to make sure that I get the best deal, and only I am able to do that. They certainly aren't going to. Apple won't tell me that I'm better off buying a Dell. The reason I keep mentioning Dell is that they have this warranty plan where if the computer gets hit by a brick (i.e. damage not their fault), they'll replace it. Apple should have that. Another thing that drives me nuts is dead pixels on LCD screens. I'm going to favor whoever has a better policy on that. I'd pay extra just for the right to exchange for a single dead pixel.
You need to figure out what's important to you and make sure that what you make an informed choice. And be aware that the 'best' choice cannot be a perfect one.
Maybe this belongs in a different category, but it seems to me that per capita, it's much harder now to find an engineer who could write a line of assembly for any processor.
Of course, it doesn't seem overly healthy to me to put any kind of artificial radiation source near your body. But frankly, I think our health is being heart a great deal more by pollution, GMO foods, and the excess of allergens in our diet from things like soy, corn, dairy, and wheat.
A large part of Microsoft's inability to modernize many aspects of Windows has been their need to retain backward compatibility with all sorts of crappy old software that did all sort of bad things that would break when the OS was recompiled. While it sucks for people with 32-bit machines, this is an opportunity for Microsoft to stop diverting resources to making old junk work and dedicate those resources to making actual improvements to the OS.
They have to do it this way. Apple doesn't have this problem because they made a clean break in 2000 with OSX. With OSX, they could start over with new APIs and a whole new way of doing things that shed a lot of the crud from the past. As long as Microsoft supports 32-bit and 16-bit Windows code, they're going to be held back. Ditching 32-bit processors is a forcing function that they can use to draw a line in the sand for all of the users. They'll surely still run Win32 code, but users won't have an expectation that all old stuff will work problem-free.
Microsoft is rightly bitched at for a lot of things that they do wrong. But what's ironic is that whenever they've broken backward compatibility, they get bitched at for that moreso than any other vendor. Of course, with old Linux code, that's mostly a recompile, but Apple was really drastic in their moves from OS9 to OSX and from PPC to x86. Some people complained, but most people just accepted it.
IBM isn't the first or last to come up with the idea behind the CELL processor. With the advent of programmable shaders, the GPU industry was headed that way like a freight train. When people started using these highly pipelined, highly parallel SIMD stream processors that we know as GPUs to do supercomputing, people with a clue took notice and decided that it would be sensible to strip out the video components and generalize the compute engine. However, this kind of compute engine only works well for stream processing, requiring some kind of general-purpose CPU to supervise. And this is exactly what the CELL processor is: A PowerPC supervising the operation of an array of stream processors.
So, while the CELL is inspired by GPU design, I think it would be more appropriate to say that CELL is a supercomputing architecture that, being what it is, is also highly suitable for graphics applications. As such, I think what the slashdot article says is silly. What IBM is doing is putting a supercomputing architecture into a mainframe. This isn't weird. It's sensible and a wise move, technically and competitively.
I've studied statistics. I can follow this guy's math. It makes sense, and he's right. But the fact is, I'm rusty enough to not find it to be "obvious". (Hell, I find about 90% of the field of statistics to be non-obvious.) Perhaps 25% being very close to 29% should make it obviously wrong, but it was this erroneous, superficial line of reasoning that made the Mythbusters mess up in the first place. Maybe the blogger found it to be obvious. Or perhaps he was so experienced with statistics that he did some of the math in his head. But, more likely, he didn't know for sure that the mythbusters were wrong until he sat down and did the math.
There's nothing "obvious" about this.
How are we in some way special that "observing" something makes it exist or converge to a single state or whatever? Are we not merely objects of matter that inhabit the universe just like everything else in it? Moreover, the universe existed before we were there to observe it. It seems to me that "observation" is a red herring. I prefer Penrose's hypothesis that it is gravity that causes superpositions to converge, which is why tiny objects can be in states of superposition, while macroscopic ones do not.
Check out:
http://www.openhardwarefoundation.org/
http://www.opengraphics.org/
A lot of people are really taking this idea of open hardware designs very seriously, especially in graphics, where we have a really hard time getting docs out of GPU vendors to write Free Software drivers. One of the commenters on this article said something about how he and his colleagues who know how to do this stuff have no interest in doing it outside of work. This isn't true for everyone. The founder and leader of the Open Graphics Project is an experienced graphics chip designer.
AMD has never been entirely "on top", but as long as they were beating Intel, they were hot, and enthusiasts wanted AMD. Now that Intel's Core 2 is beating the Opteron in nearly every test, the speed freeks have jumped ship. The fact is, Intel is on top no matter what. So for AMD to have any kind of fighting chance at a share of the market, they HAVE to be better and faster than Intel. The underdog must beat the top dog or die.
So, if AMD's planned direction doesn't involve a CPU that beats the Core 2, I don't know how they're going to reverse their negative growth.
I thought Evolution already did this.
My home page isn't a credible source of academic information. It's not lies... it's just random crap about me. On that basis, they should block my home page too.
My wife does a lot of public speaking and has training in it, so I have some idea what I'm talking about, but I probably won't present it quite right. Anyhow, it is considered very bad to write presentations where the slides contain anything you're going to say. Even titles are something you should avoid speaking. Rather, slides should be there exclusively to present context and visual aids that are hard or impossible to present through the speech. For instance, if I'm talking about the Ruby programming language, I'll speak things that describe concepts and show code snippets and diagrams on the slides that illustrate them in a different way.
PowerPoint presentations aren't fundamentally bad. Rather, many PowerPoint presentations are bad.
One of my areas of interest for my Ph.D. research is multi-agent systems. The concept Amazon is describing is so old that there's a term for it. "Human in the loop." This is where a human agent is considered to be a part of a heterogeneous multi-agent system.
Apple users want to gripe all of the time about flaws in Apple hardware and software. If you read the online discussions before buying a Mac, you might get scared. But the fact is that Mac users are an elite club of really obsessive people. That's not a slight against them. They have incredibly high standards. As a Windows and Linux user, however, my experiences with the Mac were a huge breath of fresh air. It's nice to finally use a computer that's clearly been well-engineered. From simple things like how the keyboards are made to the way MacOS X manages application-related files, you can tell that Apple wants to do things well and isn't afraid to do it.
/usr, /etc) and how config file are plain-text in a way that makes it impossible to do upgrades cleanly. That's annoying as hell. Linux architects need to get their heads out of their asses, group all files for a given app into one place, and use mini XML registries for config options. This is just simply good engineering!
I recently was in need of a notebook computer, so I did some investigation as to what my options were. I put notebooks from various manufacturers side by side and compared based on processor speed, FSB speed, memory (size, speed), graphics (GPU power, shared memory, etc.), display resolution, and numerous other factors. While things appear to have changed slightly in the recent past, at the time, the MacBook Pro was less expensive than any PC notebook with comparable capabilities. How's that for risk management? I was nervous about getting a Mac... what if I didn't like it? No problem. The hardware is great, and I can install Linux or Windows on it if I feel like it. Turns out that I really like MacOS too and run Windows and Linux using Parallels.
As a Free Software enthusiast, I am bothered by the fact that so much Apple software isn't Free. But I'm an activist in many ways. I'm an activist for Free Software. I'm also an activist for GOOD software. And my computer is my computer, and I'll run whatever apps make my life easiest. As such, I'm going to use commercial software when it's clearly superior in design and quality to the Free Software. (Notice how I'm implicitly dismissing Microsoft as anything worth talking about.) Then I tell people which apps are the best and why. This way, the Free Software enthusiasts can take notice and improve their designs
I think I won't be much interested in using Linux as a desktop OS until some Ubuntu comes with Beryl by default. And I'll NEVER like the fact that Linux applications have their files spread out across different sections of the file system (/bin,
When you own the mindshare, you win. Ok, so it's possible for Google to tank if the management makes bad decisions. But the fact is that although their hiring process is surely not perfect, they'll statistically have a higher than average qualify of engineer. What pisses off Microsoft is that Google has sucked away all of the best talent. And Google also has a better environment for engineers to be creative in. Microsoft may be "evil", but they have some great individual engineers, and they need more if they're going to even just keep up. Microsoft's systems are so disorganized and tangled they NEED the brightest people just to survive.
Google is killing Microsoft by attrition. Brilliant!
You hear the complaint both ways, of course. Commercial software gets professional testing, which means that engineers are paid to test un-fun corner cases, apply heuristic analysis, and other stuff like that. FOSS software gets more intense testing, because there are more people testing, although it's somewhat less organized.
Well, here's an example of how it can go wrong, no matter who you are. Of course, we're never surprised when Microsoft has a bug. It's really funny to me, actually. Huge company--can never get their shit together.
No, it's not a sleep issue. With the mouse clicks, I always do some kind of movement before clicking, so it's definitely awake. Also, I used the built-in keyboard, so that's not going to sleep when I lose keypresses.
I turned off that "ignore trackpad while typing" feature a long time ago. Didn't help. Besides, I have a bluetooth mouse and observe the same exact behavior. This is not a hardware problem.
I recently got a MacBook Pro, and while I really enjoy using it, and It's generally better than Windows, KDE, or GNOME, one thing I have noticed is that there is a tendency for it to lose keypresses and mouse clicks. This commonly occurs when switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. For instance, if I use the mouse to click somewhere in this text I'm writing, there's a 50% chance that if I hit the Delete key, the keypress will be completely ignored. I have similar experiences with mouse clicks on window decorations or links in Safari being ignored. It's not a hardware problem, because use of the mouse alone is smooth, and continuous typing on the keyboard does not lose any keypresses. Moreover, people who have experienced this MacOS-knows-best loss of input events do not experience the same things when using the same hardware running Windows under bootcamp. There aren't very many frustrating things about MacOS (once you get used to it), but this problem is incredibly frustrating.
Readable code is a good thing. But Torvalds is fixated on it in a way that suggests he cares more about that than usability. He should not even mention it. If he wants to criticize GNOME, he should focus on what matters: usability.
I think that people who have no background in cognitive engineering, HCI, or design engineering should just shut the hell up, because they're making life miserable for those of us who would really like to have user-friendly systems.
At the very least, read one of the seminal books in the field first:
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN 0-465-06710-7
If Torvalds hasn't read this book, he should shut up.
If there's anyone working on GNOME (or KDE) who hasn't read this book, they should immediately resign and work on some other project. Only people who have some talent or training in thinking about usability should get involved in these things.
One of the biggest problems is that so many of these people are mildly aspergic and therefore have limited ability to empathize with how other people (who don't know as much as they do about the system they're designing) will be able to use it.
Oh, BTW, I'm working on my Ph.D., and one of my minors is HCI.