Oh jesus effing Christ. I'm not a Linux hater but by god KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu seem to be having great fun in a spectacular race to the bottom.
Minimize - in GNOME 3 default shell is GNOME Shell, and in this shell there is nowhere to minimize to. You switch between windows using either Alt+Tab, or Expose, which can be reached just moving cursor to left top corner.
As a brother poster just put, what happens when you want a window hidden? I like this window existing, I don't want to see it - click, gone. Windows does this. Mac does this. Even bloody WindowMaker, blackbox and virtually every other WM in history do this. But GNOME want to differentiate themselves by removing a feature nobody wants removed. Good for them. They can suck somewhere else.
Maximize is more tricky, but more or less I always have wanted that confusing button gone. Nevermind that it toogles between maximize/restore functionality, double click on title of the window will do much better.
"Confusing"? Confused, by a maximise button? You click it, the window fills the screen. If it's filled the screen it shrinks it back. This is elementary. By all means complain about Apple's Zoom button (which is confusing to most users who don't understand what was going through Apple's head when they put it there, which is most of them) but a maximise button is probably the simplest thing there is. And by all means put Aero Snap functionality in - it's a feature of Win7 I simply cannot do without without going crazy now - but don't take a reasonable option away from me.
These changes are risky, but I would definitely not call them rushed or stupid or "just because authors want it that way". Keep in mind, that those are hired professionals which have brought us GNOME 2.x series.
They're risky because they're absolutely retarded. You would have to be absolutely insane to fuck around with something that is, to most people, an intrinsic part of using a computer. These changes are rushed, and whether their architects brought us GNOME 2 (which is hardly a case study in excellent UI idea, all things considered) is completely irrelevant. It's a silly idea.
Before criticizing understand that GNOME 3 and Unity (which also have got lot of "love" from Slashdot flamers) is created with future controls in mind - multitouch, gestures, etc.
Windows 7 does this right. I actually thought about this today - it looks like a desktop OS, it works like a desktop OS, but it would work equally well as a touchscreen OS, and neither gets disadvantaged by it. All of the controls and buttons are touch friendly without the user even realising it. To contrast however, GNOME's approach, from the looks of things (and Unity's) is "fuck you, we want it touchscreen friendly and desktop users can lump it". Bear in mind that touchscreens are still niche devices, especially on the desktop. It's stupid, stupid, stupid.
Oh christ this. I bought a cheap DeskJet and make a point of downloading the "light" (still clocking in at tens of megs!) drivers for it, because the ones it ships with are just chock full of utter crap that no sane person would ever need.
Not as bad for bloatedness as the Asus laptop I just got, but still pretty bad.
I use Android. I like Android. But it's not in any way as good a harbinger for Linux on the desktop for one very simple reason: no normal person knows or cares what's under Android's hood. To the consumer, it's a phone that happens to have something called "Android" on it, full stop.
We have something that focuses on user experience and simplification on Linux, it's called Ubuntu. I tried it a couple of weeks back for a couple days, to play around with it, and honestly it still needs a lot more polish and a lot more simplification. Rather than putting effort into UI enhancements that subtly help the user (see Aero Peek/Snap and the subtle effects on Mac OS X) we see pointless shit like wobbly windows, and the whole thing came off as very unrefined. There's good ideas there but the execution sucks.
And it was still the best desktop Linux experience I've had.
I wouldn't be so sure. The Electoral Reform Society in the UK conducts ballots for private organisations, for example leadership votes in political parties and unions. Twice now I've voted in one of their elections and they have a simple and elegant solution, based around snail mailing two login codes to anyone eligible to vote that can only be used once. The login codes both match, and one can't be used without the other, and it's only valid for the person casting the vote.
Again, it works remarkably well. Nobody has had cause to contest the accuracy of these ballots (as well they shouldn't, the ERS are a group campaigning for more verifiable and secure balloting).
I, personally, find the Android keyboard to be OK compared to the BlackBerry one. Not brilliant, not awful, just... OK. I definitely can't type as fast, and I'd say it restricts what I can do a little - I'd think nothing of banging out a few paragraph's worth of email or forum post on the BB Bold, but I find my Defy a bit clumsy for anything longer than a text message.
There's also the actual OS itself where the BB wins - I can't tell you how much I miss having a unified messaging list with texts, all my email accounts, Twitter mentions etc in one (although this is most likely a quirk of Motorola's thoroughly crap customisation of the Android system...)
Soon, people will say, "Why buy a Blackberry when I'm just running Android apps?"
I've said it twice in this thread so far: because for actual communication - SMS, email, phone, IM and the like - the BlackBerry absolutely spanks the iPhone and Android hands down.
Horrible hardware? My ex's BB Curve got dropped into water about 5 times and survived. My old Bold suffered so many drops and pummelings I'm surprised it's still alive. Both had excellent keyboards which I now miss immensely having an Android phone.
It's underspecced, granted, but for communication, social networking and the like Blackberry is incredibly good at what it does.
Yeah, with an actual on-topic comment from me now, speaking as a former BlackBerry user who moved onto Android, some Android apps could be just what BB needs. Most of the stuff on App World was simply useless to me, whereas the Android Market has had lots of very useful stuff in the short time I've had the phone. A real pity, since what the BB does it does very well (communication, email, phone etc - Android doesn't hold a candle to the BlackBerry).
Same as my Motorola Defy when it got screwed up by my poor, amateur attempts to reflash it. Plug into USB, put the phone into its bootloader and click a button on the PC and it's all well again. It's very hard to truly "brick" anything.
Bricking is rendering a device totally inoperable, such that its use is equivalent to that of a brick. Bricking can't be recovered from without intervention from the manufacturer.
What you've described would be very easily rectified (excepting personal data and settings) using an OS install disc, something which could be done by anyone with a modicum of sense.
One of the things I appreciate most about it is the proper OSS sound support, with mixing that actually works out of the box without having to deal with shit like PulseAudio or the clusterfuck that is Alsa.
I gave up on E2 because, basically, it was too much of an encyclopedia to be a place for personal expression, and vice versa. I contributed a fair bit to it (enough that I recognised the Slashdot handle...) and gave up when it became obvious that it was trying to be literally everything. Then there's shit like "Butterfinger McFlurry" being kept around, but writing by a newbie considered "sub-par" by someone you've never met gets deleted with a nasty message. I seem to remember it was when they were trying to force through the "new e2" bullshit that it became stupid.
You'd be incredibly surprised at the number of people who still use Windows 2000, or even Windows 9x, which don't have support for IPv6 (although to be fair, if you're running Win2k at this point you probably have enough smarts to sort it out).
At the same time, many ISPs are unequipped to deal with it too. For instance, my ISP (Virgin Media in the UK) have no plans as of yet to roll it out. There's going to be lots of incompatibilities all around.
The person above who said about the DTV transitioning (which the UK is currently going through) is on the money. Some people just won't take notice, and if they do won't care.
But the reality is that the main stream media is by now utterly incapable of performing such a feat. Paying someone competent to sift through these files, pick out juicy pieces that will makes news, while still catching eyeballs and not pissing off friends in the military-industrial-political complex? And all while trying to keep up with their twitter and web 2.0 feeds?
Wikileaks releases ahead of time to, among other papers (including the New York Times) The Guardian, who can and do pay competent people to sift through the files. It's currently the number 1 thing on their website. Linky.
The Sun and the Daily Mail probably won't say a thing, mind.
I do not intend this to be a troll or flamebait, but I firmly believe that iTunes is the worst piece of software ever written. It manages to make a dual core behemoth slow to a crawl. It takes christ knows how long to open, when Windows Media Player is damn near instant. It shits all over any UI guideline fed to it and runs like crap. It is a work of Satan and it should be destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a similar system here in the UK. It's really not that big a deal.
Oh jesus effing Christ. I'm not a Linux hater but by god KDE, Gnome and Ubuntu seem to be having great fun in a spectacular race to the bottom.
Minimize - in GNOME 3 default shell is GNOME Shell, and in this shell there is nowhere to minimize to. You switch between windows using either Alt+Tab, or Expose, which can be reached just moving cursor to left top corner.
As a brother poster just put, what happens when you want a window hidden? I like this window existing, I don't want to see it - click, gone. Windows does this. Mac does this. Even bloody WindowMaker, blackbox and virtually every other WM in history do this. But GNOME want to differentiate themselves by removing a feature nobody wants removed. Good for them. They can suck somewhere else.
Maximize is more tricky, but more or less I always have wanted that confusing button gone. Nevermind that it toogles between maximize/restore functionality, double click on title of the window will do much better.
"Confusing"? Confused, by a maximise button? You click it, the window fills the screen. If it's filled the screen it shrinks it back. This is elementary. By all means complain about Apple's Zoom button (which is confusing to most users who don't understand what was going through Apple's head when they put it there, which is most of them) but a maximise button is probably the simplest thing there is. And by all means put Aero Snap functionality in - it's a feature of Win7 I simply cannot do without without going crazy now - but don't take a reasonable option away from me.
These changes are risky, but I would definitely not call them rushed or stupid or "just because authors want it that way". Keep in mind, that those are hired professionals which have brought us GNOME 2.x series.
They're risky because they're absolutely retarded. You would have to be absolutely insane to fuck around with something that is, to most people, an intrinsic part of using a computer. These changes are rushed, and whether their architects brought us GNOME 2 (which is hardly a case study in excellent UI idea, all things considered) is completely irrelevant. It's a silly idea.
Before criticizing understand that GNOME 3 and Unity (which also have got lot of "love" from Slashdot flamers) is created with future controls in mind - multitouch, gestures, etc.
Windows 7 does this right. I actually thought about this today - it looks like a desktop OS, it works like a desktop OS, but it would work equally well as a touchscreen OS, and neither gets disadvantaged by it. All of the controls and buttons are touch friendly without the user even realising it. To contrast however, GNOME's approach, from the looks of things (and Unity's) is "fuck you, we want it touchscreen friendly and desktop users can lump it". Bear in mind that touchscreens are still niche devices, especially on the desktop. It's stupid, stupid, stupid.
Oh christ this. I bought a cheap DeskJet and make a point of downloading the "light" (still clocking in at tens of megs!) drivers for it, because the ones it ships with are just chock full of utter crap that no sane person would ever need.
Not as bad for bloatedness as the Asus laptop I just got, but still pretty bad.
I use Android. I like Android. But it's not in any way as good a harbinger for Linux on the desktop for one very simple reason: no normal person knows or cares what's under Android's hood. To the consumer, it's a phone that happens to have something called "Android" on it, full stop.
We have something that focuses on user experience and simplification on Linux, it's called Ubuntu. I tried it a couple of weeks back for a couple days, to play around with it, and honestly it still needs a lot more polish and a lot more simplification. Rather than putting effort into UI enhancements that subtly help the user (see Aero Peek/Snap and the subtle effects on Mac OS X) we see pointless shit like wobbly windows, and the whole thing came off as very unrefined. There's good ideas there but the execution sucks.
And it was still the best desktop Linux experience I've had.
My jesus, we have blogspam on Slashdot.
Welp, this site just jumped the shark.
FreeBSD can run a computer, whereas trains merely run them over.
I wouldn't be so sure. The Electoral Reform Society in the UK conducts ballots for private organisations, for example leadership votes in political parties and unions. Twice now I've voted in one of their elections and they have a simple and elegant solution, based around snail mailing two login codes to anyone eligible to vote that can only be used once. The login codes both match, and one can't be used without the other, and it's only valid for the person casting the vote.
Again, it works remarkably well. Nobody has had cause to contest the accuracy of these ballots (as well they shouldn't, the ERS are a group campaigning for more verifiable and secure balloting).
I'm a very satisfied customer of Virgin's 50MB service. I get spot on 50MB all of the time. Service has been flawless.
I, personally, find the Android keyboard to be OK compared to the BlackBerry one. Not brilliant, not awful, just... OK. I definitely can't type as fast, and I'd say it restricts what I can do a little - I'd think nothing of banging out a few paragraph's worth of email or forum post on the BB Bold, but I find my Defy a bit clumsy for anything longer than a text message.
There's also the actual OS itself where the BB wins - I can't tell you how much I miss having a unified messaging list with texts, all my email accounts, Twitter mentions etc in one (although this is most likely a quirk of Motorola's thoroughly crap customisation of the Android system...)
To each their own, I suppose.
If so I'd be overjoyed the hardware could handle a pummelling, given how much that damn game frustrates me.
Soon, people will say, "Why buy a Blackberry when I'm just running Android apps?"
I've said it twice in this thread so far: because for actual communication - SMS, email, phone, IM and the like - the BlackBerry absolutely spanks the iPhone and Android hands down.
Horrible hardware? My ex's BB Curve got dropped into water about 5 times and survived. My old Bold suffered so many drops and pummelings I'm surprised it's still alive. Both had excellent keyboards which I now miss immensely having an Android phone.
It's underspecced, granted, but for communication, social networking and the like Blackberry is incredibly good at what it does.
Yeah, with an actual on-topic comment from me now, speaking as a former BlackBerry user who moved onto Android, some Android apps could be just what BB needs. Most of the stuff on App World was simply useless to me, whereas the Android Market has had lots of very useful stuff in the short time I've had the phone. A real pity, since what the BB does it does very well (communication, email, phone etc - Android doesn't hold a candle to the BlackBerry).
You joke, but their jobsite url is actually http://rim.jobs.
Same as my Motorola Defy when it got screwed up by my poor, amateur attempts to reflash it. Plug into USB, put the phone into its bootloader and click a button on the PC and it's all well again. It's very hard to truly "brick" anything.
That isn't bricking.
Bricking is rendering a device totally inoperable, such that its use is equivalent to that of a brick. Bricking can't be recovered from without intervention from the manufacturer.
What you've described would be very easily rectified (excepting personal data and settings) using an OS install disc, something which could be done by anyone with a modicum of sense.
One of the things I appreciate most about it is the proper OSS sound support, with mixing that actually works out of the box without having to deal with shit like PulseAudio or the clusterfuck that is Alsa.
I gave up on E2 because, basically, it was too much of an encyclopedia to be a place for personal expression, and vice versa. I contributed a fair bit to it (enough that I recognised the Slashdot handle...) and gave up when it became obvious that it was trying to be literally everything. Then there's shit like "Butterfinger McFlurry" being kept around, but writing by a newbie considered "sub-par" by someone you've never met gets deleted with a nasty message. I seem to remember it was when they were trying to force through the "new e2" bullshit that it became stupid.
You'd be incredibly surprised at the number of people who still use Windows 2000, or even Windows 9x, which don't have support for IPv6 (although to be fair, if you're running Win2k at this point you probably have enough smarts to sort it out).
At the same time, many ISPs are unequipped to deal with it too. For instance, my ISP (Virgin Media in the UK) have no plans as of yet to roll it out. There's going to be lots of incompatibilities all around.
The person above who said about the DTV transitioning (which the UK is currently going through) is on the money. Some people just won't take notice, and if they do won't care.
Not to mention, as far as I'm aware Virgin Media (BT's main/only competitor with regards to infrastructure used for broadband) already do this.
Mod: +1 Acutely distressing
One can be successful without being good or honest. By most standards, Mr Moore is very, very successful.
But the reality is that the main stream media is by now utterly incapable of performing such a feat. Paying someone competent to sift through these files, pick out juicy pieces that will makes news, while still catching eyeballs and not pissing off friends in the military-industrial-political complex? And all while trying to keep up with their twitter and web 2.0 feeds?
Wikileaks releases ahead of time to, among other papers (including the New York Times) The Guardian, who can and do pay competent people to sift through the files. It's currently the number 1 thing on their website. Linky.
The Sun and the Daily Mail probably won't say a thing, mind.
considering the ~10 sec it takes for a man to make his contribution
Hey, speak for yourself.
I do not intend this to be a troll or flamebait, but I firmly believe that iTunes is the worst piece of software ever written. It manages to make a dual core behemoth slow to a crawl. It takes christ knows how long to open, when Windows Media Player is damn near instant. It shits all over any UI guideline fed to it and runs like crap. It is a work of Satan and it should be destroyed.
Rant over... ;)