OK, I'm going to throw my opinion into the ring, even though I slept in today and there are already too many comments on this thread for anyone to give a shit.
Sometimes Suck is right on, and sometimes they kind of miss the point. In this case their core argument is pretty sound, but unfortunetly they sort of missed the idea that no one is forcing users to download an ugly skin. Furthermore, the reason there are so many skins out there in the first place is not based on "the whim of a developer"...developers usually don't make too many skins, rather they are generated by the users based on demand -- that's right, demand -- if no one wanted to have their entire desktop look like cheese, then we wouldn't see 5000 cheese themes.
The main problem is that UI design is mostly subjective, but UI "professionals" want to make an objective science of it. It would be nice if we could decide on absolute tenets like "All Widgets Must Look Alike!", dub them the 10 commandments of UI design, and then hunt down and shoot anyone who doesn't conform to them, but unfortunetly life doesn't work that way. The Open Source scene, which most clearly reflects the user's UI desires without interference from focus groups or marketing teams, is indicative that different people like different things. People still use vi for God's sake -- and don't ever, EVER try to convince them to stop using it because some self-labelled UI "expert" said they need a scrollbar to be productive. Likewise, it's true that Netscape won't look the same as your native OS widgets, but on the other hand, Netscape will always have the same L&F no matter which OS you're using, so people who dual-boot won't have to learn two interfaces.
Furthermore, it's true that OSS people generally consider standards to be a good thing, but theming everything is an effort to help create standard desktops, not the other way around. For example, most E themes nowadays have an accompanying GTK theme...if you use both at the same time, then your entire desktop looks coherant (except of course for that ugly copy of Netscape 4.x...blech), and more importantly you chose what you wanted it to look like.
Which brings me to the most important point, which is why themes exist in the first place. Put simply, regardless of whether or not really ugly plain grey widgets increase usability (I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove that they do), they're still extremely boring to look at. If Suck had their way, we wouldn't be back in 1983...but we might make a pit stop in 1984, with slogans like "User Unhappiness is Usabilty!". Obviously the users are getting bored with the same drab widgets all the time, so who are we to tell them that they can't have their way?
Well, that's about all I have to say...oh yeah, read OSHate.com! Have a nice day.
Funny...the bullets always go where I put the crosshairs. If you and your friends are emptying entire clips at each other without hitting anything, perhaps its time to come to terms with the fact that you suck. And no, none of the network code was changed, so the added lag is either on your end, a coincidence, or just your imagination. Then again most modem players like to whine about their ping as an excuse for sucking so bad...I don't blame them...I wouldn't want to play like that either.
...never even heard of drkoop, medscape, infonautics, intraware and peapod. Are these just made up or something? Anyway like I was saying, did anyone else see this coming? How can you stay in business when you don't make any money? Hello?
I don't know about you people, but I rarely if ever find something useful on a corporate web site. They are always impossible to navigate, and contain boring content which just screams "venture capital." What makes the web interesting is the hobbiests and the personal sites. Personal web sites are interesting (I have one!) and "real" sites like Slashdot (yes I know they got bought out, but the site hasn't changed that much since the time when it was "underground") are where the best surfing takes place...real people presenting content because its something they like, not to make money. That's what separates the web from any other form of mass-media -- anyone can do it. Whenever you start injecting corporations into the picture, you eventually end up with watered-down garbage similar to network TV.
I don't see why you think this person is "trolling". Everyone knows that without the programming skills of Gates and Ballmer, and to a lesser extent, Paul Allen, Microsoft would not be where they are today.
Have you read the comment text perhaps? If you had you might see why I came to this conclusion. Likewise the books I've read about Microsoft have led me to believe that their success is owed to their ruthless business strategy, and not their saavy programming skill. Their flagship product, DOS, upon which their entire fortune has since been built, was not written by them. Since then, their software has either been purchased, or implemented in a half-assed manner in order to get a leg up on the competition long enough to steal their features. I doubt I could match Bill Gates at crushing one's opponents in the business arena, but as a programmer he was at best mediocre (although it's impossible to grade him accurately due to his policy of not allowing people to see his work).
There are a few pro-Microsoft posts on this thread, but I replied only to this one because of the glaring innaccuracies contained therein (only one of which is mentioned in my original post). I call people trolls when I find it ridiculous to believe that, given they are mentally compentant human beings, that they are taking what they are saying seriously. Whether or not the original poster was not a troll or not a mentally competant human being, I will leave as an exercise for the reader. I am from Europe, and we are always hearing about how the Americans like to reward success, hard work, achievment, and winning etc etc. Judging by the comments on Slashdot, this is not true. Don't be blinkered by jealousy.
Do all Europeans make gross generalizations about people in foriegn nations:-)? I myself cannot speak for ALL Americans, or even any American besides me. Personally I don't think that money is that important -- I value personal satisfaction and morality. I'm sure that in your biased eyes I am longing to be just like the Bowman's (whoever they are), with a Porche Carrera and a job at a soulless Silicon Valley manufacturer of bullshit, but that's not how I measure success.
Please have a pleasant day and a rewarding tomorrow,
The absolute worst flaw in the Martix, which for some reason no one seems to ever notice, is that humans are not a very good source of power. Although technically its possible to strap a human into some device to suck out the electricity, if you only feed them the bodies of the dead humans, then you won't be gaining anything in energy...its basic thermodynamics. The basic flaw in the premise is that humans ultimately gain energy from the same place as everything else -- the sun. If the machines wanted power that badly, they could have just launched a satellite to collect solar power above the atmosphere or tapped into a geothermal energy source.
If you change the plot a bit then it works fine -- for example, the AI's need cheap, powerful computer hardware to run themselves on. The solution? Wire all our brains together to form a massive neural network which they can move freely in. In this case, they are hijacking our brains to run themselves on, while keeping the concious potion busy with the Matrix, which is running over the same network, but on a completely different "layer" so the AI's (except for the agents of course) do not appear there.
Re:"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!
on
Men Playing as Women
·
· Score: 1
too bad the text was way overboard and crushed the joke.
This could possibly be true, except that I know people who talk like this and mean it. Seriously. Its both amusing and sickening to watch.
-W.W.
"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!
on
Men Playing as Women
·
· Score: 5
I mean come on man, sure I play as a girl sometimes, but that gender exploration thing sounds totally gay. I mean, sometimes I pretend to be a girl on IRC, but its only so the total gaywad guys will hit on me which proves they're gay. I mean, sure sometimes I feel more comfortable as a girl in video games? So what??? Are you calling me gay??? I'll kick your ass!
Except for one stunningly gorgeous girl in my Operating Systems class, I know of very few women in CS or any other tech major. Of course there are a few lurking about here and there, but by and large they're kind of...strange. Most of the girls here tend to hang out either at the gym or the art building, as far as I can tell. Personally I'll never understand why girls seem disinterested when I start talking about Quake, PHP, C++, 3D modeling, etc. This is all complex and fascinating stuff. What else could possibly be as comparitively interesting?
I am told by those in the know that most so-called "audiophiles" are wasting their time with high-tech gadgets like this. 99% of sound quality is the acoustic environment of the room you're listening in, not the "horizontal tracking angle error compensation" or whatever.
Another problem my straight (female) friends often complain about is that when they go to a straight club, guys are constantly feeling them up or being generally rude to them. A girl once professed to me that on one occasion she had had at least one hand placed on her ass for literally the entire night. I'm bi, but when I'm looking to meet women I go to gay clubs, because everywhere you look there are eligible women hanging around, just looking to dance and have a good time, not wanting to be pressured or hit on. And of course there's very little competition:). Meanwhile the "straight" clubs are just tons of guys hanging around togther drinking because all the girls have deserted them. Now thats irony for you...
oh never mind, it was just a keynote broadcast. I guess I can just turn Michael back off because he's proven himself to be a moron once again. A note to CmdrTaco: get this guy off slashdot as soon as possible, he's an embarrassment.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, Mach and BSD predate Linux by a looooong time...
-W.W.
OK, I'm going to throw my opinion into the ring, even though I slept in today and there are already too many comments on this thread for anyone to give a shit.
Sometimes Suck is right on, and sometimes they kind of miss the point. In this case their core argument is pretty sound, but unfortunetly they sort of missed the idea that no one is forcing users to download an ugly skin. Furthermore, the reason there are so many skins out there in the first place is not based on "the whim of a developer"...developers usually don't make too many skins, rather they are generated by the users based on demand -- that's right, demand -- if no one wanted to have their entire desktop look like cheese, then we wouldn't see 5000 cheese themes.
The main problem is that UI design is mostly subjective, but UI "professionals" want to make an objective science of it. It would be nice if we could decide on absolute tenets like "All Widgets Must Look Alike!", dub them the 10 commandments of UI design, and then hunt down and shoot anyone who doesn't conform to them, but unfortunetly life doesn't work that way. The Open Source scene, which most clearly reflects the user's UI desires without interference from focus groups or marketing teams, is indicative that different people like different things. People still use vi for God's sake -- and don't ever, EVER try to convince them to stop using it because some self-labelled UI "expert" said they need a scrollbar to be productive. Likewise, it's true that Netscape won't look the same as your native OS widgets, but on the other hand, Netscape will always have the same L&F no matter which OS you're using, so people who dual-boot won't have to learn two interfaces.
Furthermore, it's true that OSS people generally consider standards to be a good thing, but theming everything is an effort to help create standard desktops, not the other way around. For example, most E themes nowadays have an accompanying GTK theme...if you use both at the same time, then your entire desktop looks coherant (except of course for that ugly copy of Netscape 4.x...blech), and more importantly you chose what you wanted it to look like.
Which brings me to the most important point, which is why themes exist in the first place. Put simply, regardless of whether or not really ugly plain grey widgets increase usability (I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove that they do), they're still extremely boring to look at. If Suck had their way, we wouldn't be back in 1983...but we might make a pit stop in 1984, with slogans like "User Unhappiness is Usabilty!". Obviously the users are getting bored with the same drab widgets all the time, so who are we to tell them that they can't have their way?
Well, that's about all I have to say...oh yeah, read OSHate.com! Have a nice day.
-W.W.
Two reasonable assumptions:
1) Hating people because they're different from you is wrong
2) Saying "dipshit" doesn't help your argument.
-W.W.
> I'm so sick of these oppressed queer stories on slashdot. We DON'T CARE!!
"We"? Please don't project your idiocy onto more enlightened people.
-W.W.
Yes, works fine for me.
Funny...the bullets always go where I put the crosshairs. If you and your friends are emptying entire clips at each other without hitting anything, perhaps its time to come to terms with the fact that you suck. And no, none of the network code was changed, so the added lag is either on your end, a coincidence, or just your imagination. Then again most modem players like to whine about their ping as an excuse for sucking so bad...I don't blame them...I wouldn't want to play like that either.
-W.W.
...never even heard of drkoop, medscape, infonautics, intraware and peapod. Are these just made up or something? Anyway like I was saying, did anyone else see this coming? How can you stay in business when you don't make any money? Hello?
I don't know about you people, but I rarely if ever find something useful on a corporate web site. They are always impossible to navigate, and contain boring content which just screams "venture capital." What makes the web interesting is the hobbiests and the personal sites. Personal web sites are interesting (I have one!) and "real" sites like Slashdot (yes I know they got bought out, but the site hasn't changed that much since the time when it was "underground") are where the best surfing takes place...real people presenting content because its something they like, not to make money. That's what separates the web from any other form of mass-media -- anyone can do it. Whenever you start injecting corporations into the picture, you eventually end up with watered-down garbage similar to network TV.
My 2 cents.
-W.W.
I agree...look at his user info...49 comments on this article? We need some sort of posting limit.
-W.W.
Shouldn't be that difficult considering the dev machines already run Linux.
-W.W.
My bad...didn't read the intro carefully...I was probably thinking of Calhoun or Trinity or something like that.
-W.W.
AFAIK, it's a private school
-W.W.
Have you read the comment text perhaps? If you had you might see why I came to this conclusion. Likewise the books I've read about Microsoft have led me to believe that their success is owed to their ruthless business strategy, and not their saavy programming skill. Their flagship product, DOS, upon which their entire fortune has since been built, was not written by them. Since then, their software has either been purchased, or implemented in a half-assed manner in order to get a leg up on the competition long enough to steal their features. I doubt I could match Bill Gates at crushing one's opponents in the business arena, but as a programmer he was at best mediocre (although it's impossible to grade him accurately due to his policy of not allowing people to see his work).
There are a few pro-Microsoft posts on this thread, but I replied only to this one because of the glaring innaccuracies contained therein (only one of which is mentioned in my original post). I call people trolls when I find it ridiculous to believe that, given they are mentally compentant human beings, that they are taking what they are saying seriously. Whether or not the original poster was not a troll or not a mentally competant human being, I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
I am from Europe, and we are always hearing about how the Americans like to reward success, hard work, achievment, and winning etc etc. Judging by the comments on Slashdot, this is not true. Don't be blinkered by jealousy.
Do all Europeans make gross generalizations about people in foriegn nations :-)? I myself cannot speak for ALL Americans, or even any American besides me. Personally I don't think that money is that important -- I value personal satisfaction and morality. I'm sure that in your biased eyes I am longing to be just like the Bowman's (whoever they are), with a Porche Carrera and a job at a soulless Silicon Valley manufacturer of bullshit, but that's not how I measure success.
Please have a pleasant day and a rewarding tomorrow,
-W.W.
You gave yourself away right here, Mr. Troll sir.
I give your trolling a "C-".
Sorry old chap, try not to be so obvious next time.
-W.W.
This is the best Slashdot comment I've read in a long, long time.
-W.W.
Usually I do 'make oldconfig'
-W.W.
The absolute worst flaw in the Martix, which for some reason no one seems to ever notice, is that humans are not a very good source of power. Although technically its possible to strap a human into some device to suck out the electricity, if you only feed them the bodies of the dead humans, then you won't be gaining anything in energy...its basic thermodynamics. The basic flaw in the premise is that humans ultimately gain energy from the same place as everything else -- the sun. If the machines wanted power that badly, they could have just launched a satellite to collect solar power above the atmosphere or tapped into a geothermal energy source.
If you change the plot a bit then it works fine -- for example, the AI's need cheap, powerful computer hardware to run themselves on. The solution? Wire all our brains together to form a massive neural network which they can move freely in. In this case, they are hijacking our brains to run themselves on, while keeping the concious potion busy with the Matrix, which is running over the same network, but on a completely different "layer" so the AI's (except for the agents of course) do not appear there.
-W.W.
Can someone mirror the photos somewhere other than an ftp site with a stringent user limit?
-W.W.
Try sawmill
-W.W.
too bad the text was way overboard and crushed the joke.
This could possibly be true, except that I know people who talk like this and mean it. Seriously. Its both amusing and sickening to watch.
-W.W.
I mean come on man, sure I play as a girl sometimes, but that gender exploration thing sounds totally gay. I mean, sometimes I pretend to be a girl on IRC, but its only so the total gaywad guys will hit on me which proves they're gay. I mean, sure sometimes I feel more comfortable as a girl in video games? So what??? Are you calling me gay??? I'll kick your ass!
Stupid fags.
cutiechick@hotmail.com
Stop reading then, ya dumb fuck.
Except for one stunningly gorgeous girl in my Operating Systems class, I know of very few women in CS or any other tech major. Of course there are a few lurking about here and there, but by and large they're kind of...strange. Most of the girls here tend to hang out either at the gym or the art building, as far as I can tell. Personally I'll never understand why girls seem disinterested when I start talking about Quake, PHP, C++, 3D modeling, etc. This is all complex and fascinating stuff. What else could possibly be as comparitively interesting?
-W.W.
I am told by those in the know that most so-called "audiophiles" are wasting their time with high-tech gadgets like this. 99% of sound quality is the acoustic environment of the room you're listening in, not the "horizontal tracking angle error compensation" or whatever.
Just my 2 cents.
-W.W.
Another problem my straight (female) friends often complain about is that when they go to a straight club, guys are constantly feeling them up or being generally rude to them. A girl once professed to me that on one occasion she had had at least one hand placed on her ass for literally the entire night. I'm bi, but when I'm looking to meet women I go to gay clubs, because everywhere you look there are eligible women hanging around, just looking to dance and have a good time, not wanting to be pressured or hit on. And of course there's very little competition :). Meanwhile the "straight" clubs are just tons of guys hanging around togther drinking because all the girls have deserted them. Now thats irony for you...
-W.W.
oh never mind, it was just a keynote broadcast. I guess I can just turn Michael back off because he's proven himself to be a moron once again. A note to CmdrTaco: get this guy off slashdot as soon as possible, he's an embarrassment.
-W.W.