Unfortunately coding to compliant browsers isn't enough since 80% of users still use IE. If it takes a day to make Firefox (and other gecko-based browsers), Opera, and Safari to all work then it'll probably take a second day to make IE work. IE's crappy CSS and Javascript support is just painful. It wouldn't be such a problem except that mgmt often wants every damn lil extra feature to work in IE or not to be included at all.:(
Why does every newbie out there think the purpose of Linux should be to topple Windows? Linux is a Swiss Army Knife and Windows is a spoon. Yes, more people use spoons than Swiss Army Knives but you have a lot more options when using a Swiss Army Knife. For people who only need a spoon then let them keep using a spoon. There is no reason to limit those of us who need a Swiss Army Knife.
IMO Microsoft's wealth is more an example of luck (and family connections) tied with shrewd (and supposedly illegal) abuse of a monopoly. They've rarely shown that they understand or even want to understand the consumer. When they had a monopoly they didn't need to understand but that monopoly position is getting harder to keep with OS X, Linux, and other choices available. DRM would be a smart business decision if their customer was content companies but their customer is the average joe and the average joe doesn't want the hassle or limitations of DRM. As long as that customer doesn't have choices than Microsoft doesn't need to worry but the choices for those customers is growing. They can choose to use non-Microsoft software and they can choose to find non-DRM (or broken DRM) content instead of going along with Microsoft's plan. How could that be a smart business decision?
Don't believe having wealth is a symbol of intelligence. Intelligent people don't need great wealth to make things happen. Personally I like to have enough wealth to be comfortable and to have the tools I need to create cool stuff but I don't want to be rich. I think people like the Amish have the right idea. Keep life simple and concentrate on personal relationships instead of running around like a maniac, making yourself unhappy, trying to make money.:)
I own thousands of legal DVDs but I didn't buy a single one until their DRM (CSS) had been broken. I'll do the same with any future content that is DRM protected. The average joe might not notice at first what is going on but when they do I think there will be a backlash against the content providers. Look at how well new DRM cds have gone over. So they're hurting their sales to early adopters like me and earning consumer dislike in the long run. They're only going to encourage downloading already cracked copies of their content and chase users away to other content providers that are less restrictive.
Microsoft is going to please content providers with this feature but they are putting themselves on the lossing side of a major consumer battle. Seems to be a bad business move to me.
The biggest problem is that the desktop concept is broken. It's not a workable concept for many apps (such as games) or when using a lot of open windows. Like a real desk things quickly become to cluttered and trying to fix that problem creates complexity. Complexity is bad for users. Simple as that. The GUI concept is good but I'm unconvinced that desktops are the way to go. We need to analyze what users are really trying to do and make those things easier for them. Linux does not want to be OS X or Windows. Unix was a giant leap forward because it looked at what people were trying to do and made those things easier. It's time to do that with the GUI.
Does Linux want to bring in users today by being another desktop that looks like Windows or Mac OS? Wouldn't it be better to keep innovating and try to leapfrog and grab the future? Most of Asa's points are just as valid for that future direction.
Migration of settings, documents, etc is important. Linux really needs to work on this. It should have been a priority for distros years ago.
Simplicity is important too (one reason desktops are bad). For my users I greatly simplify the desktop and menus which helps a lot but does nothing for apps. This is a computing problem in general. Feature bloat at the expense of keeping things usable. This doesn't mean that features and settings can't exist but they should not be forced on users. Features should be added as extensions and settings available under an advanced menu. Gnome and Firefox IMO do this wrong in hiding settings so that it takes special interfaces to find them. Progression from newbie to advanced should be smooth and everything well documented.
I've not experienced a problem finding the right libs for an app in years. Packages and things like Red Carpet, yum, apt-get, etc take care of such things way better than Windows does.
As far as comfort goes I agree that being different for the sake of being different is bad. OS X annoys me with this. On the other hand conforming for the sake of conforming is just as bad. Gnome and KDE annoy me with this. In each situation evaluate user needs and figure out the best solution. If you have a better way then do it - otherwise do what people are familiar with.
Corporations are people in so far as they have rights but usually they are not legally required to have many responsibilities. Seems pretty shadey to me. How often do you see corporations go to jail for bad behavior or sent off to kill the commies? If they have no social responsibility they deserve no benefits. Let them sink or swim as they best can.
Corporations are not people. IMO they have no rights (as they evidently have no social responsibility) and therefore should not count when considering damages. They exist to make money by any means so it's their job to defend themselves.
Id should do some more Commander Keen games. Those were fun instead of dark and were excellent on gameplay. I'd like to see them do something new with the concept and blend it with their graphic pumping talents. It'd be a direction that they've done before and it'd be different than what the rest of the industry is doing. They could take the lead again.
Even with the animations turned off the dock bar is pretty crappy. I certainly see no way to switch the dock to a text view instead of icons/preview so if that option exists it's pretty damn well hidden. It isn't in the dock's option menu.
You'll notice that I don't like Windows UI either so I doubt I've been drinking any Microsoft Kool-Aid. Windows at least offers a text description in it's taskbar but it has a lot of other really bad UI elements.
Just to pick one feature of OS X. The stupid ass dock bar that looks cool but is absolutely useless for managing real workflow. How does waiting for genie effects make me work faster? How does requiring a unique space for every window's icon in my dock bar make it easier to manage more windows? A text description is usually more useful than an icon or preview because most windows look a lot alike and OS X forces you to roll over the icons to figure out which is the one you're looking for. That is an effect that most webmasters learned was retarded several years ago.. but OS X still does it.
Mainstream GUI's are designed for newbies that never work in more than half a dozen windows at a time. A compact, easy-to-read, dock bar without animation, transparency, etc, would be much more functional. Leave the cute effects for video games.
It's because GUI's are so bad at basics like window management that tabbed apps and browsing seems like such a great improvement. If done right windows would work at least as easily but in real life that doesn't happen so we need these stupid little simplification tricks to make computers usable.
Funny, I walk away from the Mac (and Windows, Gnome, and KDE) with a headache because of their stupid anti-productivity features. Even if you disable as many of the retarded features as possible the general design theory behind them still shows it's head everywhere and gets in your way. The UI layer should be able to look nice without giving up being functional. Unfortunately UI designers are so intererested in eye candy and dumbing down the interface that they largely forget to make usability and productivity important.
Why so complex? I just use a web interface. Upload a file and it gives you a unique key that is unlikely to be guessed. To access the file all you need is the key. Just pass the key to people and they have access to your file. Really simple to use and reasonable secure.
I'm beating out the features of a new version at Open Mouth by letting random netters distribute anything they want (evidently pr0n).. will probably distribute the software as opensource when I finish adding all the features I want. Already it can serve about 30GB of files a day without locking up the system and I've yet to find anyone that couldn't figure out how to use it.
My experience as someone that has been a workaholic is that lack of sleep can have some short-term benefits such as enhanced creativity but if prolonged it definately has a negative impact. Memory loss, loss of creativity, etc.. not good. Caffine only makes these effects worse. Working in a zombie state is good if your're briefly stuck on a problem but it will ruin you if done for extended periods.
Now my general policy is to never work overtime and not to bean count my time. As long as my work, which has to be of a reasonable amount, gets done then it's not my jobs right to ask me to work extra hours. If they tell me I have to then I'll tell them to go screw themselves.
Worse than just the high unemployment is the general decline in pay for IT workers even as they are asked to do more work. A lot of IT jobs, even for experienced and degree holding employees, in the Las Vegas area pay less than $12/hr. How pitiful is that? Cost of living here is among the highest in the US too. For $30000 a year employees can't afford to work any unpaid overtime as they probably need to get a second job.
I suggest that unles you really love IT work that you just find a different career path. The IT gold rush i over for now.
The language you use really doesn't matter as much as a good design. If you just throw something together then yes you might get some minor boost from one language over another. Being able to easily scale across a cluster of machines is more a design issue though and that's what counts for enterprise apps.
.pad is what we need.
on
.tel Coming Soon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been pushing for.pad as it could be for domains that are easy to type from a phone keypad. Thus it can use only letters available as the first press of a given key. A, D, G, J, M, P, T, and W. I wanted to make a non-profit called APT.PAD to sponsor the TLD. I imagine it being something like tinyurl for browsing from phones. Typing long or none-keypad friendly URLs is a pain on most phones.
The article didn't make it clear if the developers they talked to had the actual consoles to test on or just emulated dev kit enviroments. If it's just the dev kit enviroment and not an actual development console then their experiences really don't mean much of anything.
The only things this article said that were actually substantial were both obvious.. next gen consoles won't be everything marketing says they'll be and that developers don't like having to learn to write code for a new architecture.
Code ported from, or modeled from, current code bases obviously won't get the most out of parallel cores, SPEs, etc but that really doesn't say much about the real world limits of these systems. Just don't expect developers to slap a copy of Quake X on these consoles and have it run at 10 times the speed it did on the previous consoles.
I am a little disappointed that neither next gen console is supposed to have a dedicated phsyics processor. THAT along with their boost in CPU and GPU power would be radical.
Remember.. a weakness in a market is an opening for competition. Does anyone have the guts to slap a nice AMD-64 CPU in a box, gigabit ethernet, modern Gforce 6800 or better video card, and a phsyics processor, and 4GB of ram in a box and sell it as a console? Do it, and avoid going broke from the costs, and the console market could be yours.:)
Why? Free software is about freedom and not about money. The fact that free and opensource software is usually available for free is mostly just a happy side effect. Software developers need an income just like everyone else so there is no reason they shouldn't expect to get paid for their work even if it is licensed as opensource.
I think we need a formal non-profit organization to act as a union of sorts for opensource developers. Something similar to what SoC is (but much bigger) and what LinuxFund tried to be. The OSDU could coordinate things like SoC which would take much of the burden off of companies such as Google that might be involved. Also they could request sponsorships from multiple companies which would allow greater amounts of projects to be sponsored. The group could collect extra funds through various programs such as LinuxFund's branded credit card program and through similar programs such as branded license plates (who doesn't want Tux on their license plate?).
OSDU could maintain relationships with mentoring organizations such as those participating in SoC to keep a pulse of what those organizations need and to help shepard programmers to those projects as appropiate. OSDU could pay those programmers out of their funds as well as covering special needs of the programmers or mentors such as providing special hardware or funding needed artwork and documentation. Along with sponsoring programmers that mentors need OSDU could keep tabs on interesting and underfunded projects by monitoring Sourceforge, Freshmeat, and similar community websites. Such projects, when identified , could approach the project leaders to find out how they could best be sponsored.
OSDU would be a super-organization that could tie together many companies and mentoring organizations under a single umbrella to enable the community to better address the needs of these as well as the needs of the programmers actually doing the work.
Cool - I did not know I could do that. I'll look into it. Installers are stupid. Linux does perfectly well without them and a lot of OS X app I've tried work perfectly well without them. I don't understand the need to make things so complex.:)
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Over here in Henderson it hit 122F. To damn hot.
I agree. DST is retarded and has no real benefit.
Unfortunately coding to compliant browsers isn't enough since 80% of users still use IE. If it takes a day to make Firefox (and other gecko-based browsers), Opera, and Safari to all work then it'll probably take a second day to make IE work. IE's crappy CSS and Javascript support is just painful. It wouldn't be such a problem except that mgmt often wants every damn lil extra feature to work in IE or not to be included at all. :(
Why does every newbie out there think the purpose of Linux should be to topple Windows? Linux is a Swiss Army Knife and Windows is a spoon. Yes, more people use spoons than Swiss Army Knives but you have a lot more options when using a Swiss Army Knife. For people who only need a spoon then let them keep using a spoon. There is no reason to limit those of us who need a Swiss Army Knife.
IMO Microsoft's wealth is more an example of luck (and family connections) tied with shrewd (and supposedly illegal) abuse of a monopoly. They've rarely shown that they understand or even want to understand the consumer. When they had a monopoly they didn't need to understand but that monopoly position is getting harder to keep with OS X, Linux, and other choices available. DRM would be a smart business decision if their customer was content companies but their customer is the average joe and the average joe doesn't want the hassle or limitations of DRM. As long as that customer doesn't have choices than Microsoft doesn't need to worry but the choices for those customers is growing. They can choose to use non-Microsoft software and they can choose to find non-DRM (or broken DRM) content instead of going along with Microsoft's plan. How could that be a smart business decision?
:)
Don't believe having wealth is a symbol of intelligence. Intelligent people don't need great wealth to make things happen. Personally I like to have enough wealth to be comfortable and to have the tools I need to create cool stuff but I don't want to be rich. I think people like the Amish have the right idea. Keep life simple and concentrate on personal relationships instead of running around like a maniac, making yourself unhappy, trying to make money.
I own thousands of legal DVDs but I didn't buy a single one until their DRM (CSS) had been broken. I'll do the same with any future content that is DRM protected. The average joe might not notice at first what is going on but when they do I think there will be a backlash against the content providers. Look at how well new DRM cds have gone over. So they're hurting their sales to early adopters like me and earning consumer dislike in the long run. They're only going to encourage downloading already cracked copies of their content and chase users away to other content providers that are less restrictive.
Microsoft is going to please content providers with this feature but they are putting themselves on the lossing side of a major consumer battle. Seems to be a bad business move to me.
Who do you want gang raped by today?
The biggest problem is that the desktop concept is broken. It's not a workable concept for many apps (such as games) or when using a lot of open windows. Like a real desk things quickly become to cluttered and trying to fix that problem creates complexity. Complexity is bad for users. Simple as that. The GUI concept is good but I'm unconvinced that desktops are the way to go. We need to analyze what users are really trying to do and make those things easier for them. Linux does not want to be OS X or Windows. Unix was a giant leap forward because it looked at what people were trying to do and made those things easier. It's time to do that with the GUI.
Does Linux want to bring in users today by being another desktop that looks like Windows or Mac OS? Wouldn't it be better to keep innovating and try to leapfrog and grab the future? Most of Asa's points are just as valid for that future direction.
Migration of settings, documents, etc is important. Linux really needs to work on this. It should have been a priority for distros years ago.
Simplicity is important too (one reason desktops are bad). For my users I greatly simplify the desktop and menus which helps a lot but does nothing for apps. This is a computing problem in general. Feature bloat at the expense of keeping things usable. This doesn't mean that features and settings can't exist but they should not be forced on users. Features should be added as extensions and settings available under an advanced menu. Gnome and Firefox IMO do this wrong in hiding settings so that it takes special interfaces to find them. Progression from newbie to advanced should be smooth and everything well documented.
I've not experienced a problem finding the right libs for an app in years. Packages and things like Red Carpet, yum, apt-get, etc take care of such things way better than Windows does.
As far as comfort goes I agree that being different for the sake of being different is bad. OS X annoys me with this. On the other hand conforming for the sake of conforming is just as bad. Gnome and KDE annoy me with this. In each situation evaluate user needs and figure out the best solution. If you have a better way then do it - otherwise do what people are familiar with.
Pretty simple really.
I still vote for .pad which is easy to key in on a phone. No Apt.Pad sponsor still though. :(
Corporations are people in so far as they have rights but usually they are not legally required to have many responsibilities. Seems pretty shadey to me. How often do you see corporations go to jail for bad behavior or sent off to kill the commies? If they have no social responsibility they deserve no benefits. Let them sink or swim as they best can.
Corporations are not people. IMO they have no rights (as they evidently have no social responsibility) and therefore should not count when considering damages. They exist to make money by any means so it's their job to defend themselves.
Id should do some more Commander Keen games. Those were fun instead of dark and were excellent on gameplay. I'd like to see them do something new with the concept and blend it with their graphic pumping talents. It'd be a direction that they've done before and it'd be different than what the rest of the industry is doing. They could take the lead again.
Even with the animations turned off the dock bar is pretty crappy. I certainly see no way to switch the dock to a text view instead of icons/preview so if that option exists it's pretty damn well hidden. It isn't in the dock's option menu.
You'll notice that I don't like Windows UI either so I doubt I've been drinking any Microsoft Kool-Aid. Windows at least offers a text description in it's taskbar but it has a lot of other really bad UI elements.
Just to pick one feature of OS X. The stupid ass dock bar that looks cool but is absolutely useless for managing real workflow. How does waiting for genie effects make me work faster? How does requiring a unique space for every window's icon in my dock bar make it easier to manage more windows? A text description is usually more useful than an icon or preview because most windows look a lot alike and OS X forces you to roll over the icons to figure out which is the one you're looking for. That is an effect that most webmasters learned was retarded several years ago.. but OS X still does it.
Mainstream GUI's are designed for newbies that never work in more than half a dozen windows at a time. A compact, easy-to-read, dock bar without animation, transparency, etc, would be much more functional. Leave the cute effects for video games.
It's because GUI's are so bad at basics like window management that tabbed apps and browsing seems like such a great improvement. If done right windows would work at least as easily but in real life that doesn't happen so we need these stupid little simplification tricks to make computers usable.
Funny, I walk away from the Mac (and Windows, Gnome, and KDE) with a headache because of their stupid anti-productivity features. Even if you disable as many of the retarded features as possible the general design theory behind them still shows it's head everywhere and gets in your way. The UI layer should be able to look nice without giving up being functional. Unfortunately UI designers are so intererested in eye candy and dumbing down the interface that they largely forget to make usability and productivity important.
Why so complex? I just use a web interface. Upload a file and it gives you a unique key that is unlikely to be guessed. To access the file all you need is the key. Just pass the key to people and they have access to your file. Really simple to use and reasonable secure.
I'm beating out the features of a new version at Open Mouth by letting random netters distribute anything they want (evidently pr0n).. will probably distribute the software as opensource when I finish adding all the features I want. Already it can serve about 30GB of files a day without locking up the system and I've yet to find anyone that couldn't figure out how to use it.
My experience as someone that has been a workaholic is that lack of sleep can have some short-term benefits such as enhanced creativity but if prolonged it definately has a negative impact. Memory loss, loss of creativity, etc.. not good. Caffine only makes these effects worse. Working in a zombie state is good if your're briefly stuck on a problem but it will ruin you if done for extended periods.
Now my general policy is to never work overtime and not to bean count my time. As long as my work, which has to be of a reasonable amount, gets done then it's not my jobs right to ask me to work extra hours. If they tell me I have to then I'll tell them to go screw themselves.
Worse than just the high unemployment is the general decline in pay for IT workers even as they are asked to do more work. A lot of IT jobs, even for experienced and degree holding employees, in the Las Vegas area pay less than $12/hr. How pitiful is that? Cost of living here is among the highest in the US too. For $30000 a year employees can't afford to work any unpaid overtime as they probably need to get a second job.
I suggest that unles you really love IT work that you just find a different career path. The IT gold rush i over for now.
Just wait for the house of cards to fall. It won't be a pretty picture.
The language you use really doesn't matter as much as a good design. If you just throw something together then yes you might get some minor boost from one language over another. Being able to easily scale across a cluster of machines is more a design issue though and that's what counts for enterprise apps.
I've been pushing for .pad as it could be for domains that are easy to type from a phone keypad. Thus it can use only letters available as the first press of a given key. A, D, G, J, M, P, T, and W. I wanted to make a non-profit called APT.PAD to sponsor the TLD. I imagine it being something like tinyurl for browsing from phones. Typing long or none-keypad friendly URLs is a pain on most phones.
The mobo I'm drooling over handlers 4 AMD-64 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. To bad the mobo alone is $2500.
A dedicated processor is designed for the right kind of math in the way a GPU is designed for handling graphics.
The article didn't make it clear if the developers they talked to had the actual consoles to test on or just emulated dev kit enviroments. If it's just the dev kit enviroment and not an actual development console then their experiences really don't mean much of anything.
:)
The only things this article said that were actually substantial were both obvious.. next gen consoles won't be everything marketing says they'll be and that developers don't like having to learn to write code for a new architecture.
Code ported from, or modeled from, current code bases obviously won't get the most out of parallel cores, SPEs, etc but that really doesn't say much about the real world limits of these systems. Just don't expect developers to slap a copy of Quake X on these consoles and have it run at 10 times the speed it did on the previous consoles.
I am a little disappointed that neither next gen console is supposed to have a dedicated phsyics processor. THAT along with their boost in CPU and GPU power would be radical.
Remember.. a weakness in a market is an opening for competition. Does anyone have the guts to slap a nice AMD-64 CPU in a box, gigabit ethernet, modern Gforce 6800 or better video card, and a phsyics processor, and 4GB of ram in a box and sell it as a console? Do it, and avoid going broke from the costs, and the console market could be yours.
Why? Free software is about freedom and not about money. The fact that free and opensource software is usually available for free is mostly just a happy side effect. Software developers need an income just like everyone else so there is no reason they shouldn't expect to get paid for their work even if it is licensed as opensource.
:)
I think we need a formal non-profit organization to act as a union of sorts for opensource developers. Something similar to what SoC is (but much bigger) and what LinuxFund tried to be. The OSDU could coordinate things like SoC which would take much of the burden off of companies such as Google that might be involved. Also they could request sponsorships from multiple companies which would allow greater amounts of projects to be sponsored. The group could collect extra funds through various programs such as LinuxFund's branded credit card program and through similar programs such as branded license plates (who doesn't want Tux on their license plate?).
OSDU could maintain relationships with mentoring organizations such as those participating in SoC to keep a pulse of what those organizations need and to help shepard programmers to those projects as appropiate. OSDU could pay those programmers out of their funds as well as covering special needs of the programmers or mentors such as providing special hardware or funding needed artwork and documentation. Along with sponsoring programmers that mentors need OSDU could keep tabs on interesting and underfunded projects by monitoring Sourceforge, Freshmeat, and similar community websites. Such projects, when identified , could approach the project leaders to find out how they could best be sponsored.
OSDU would be a super-organization that could tie together many companies and mentoring organizations under a single umbrella to enable the community to better address the needs of these as well as the needs of the programmers actually doing the work.
Now.. how do I bootstrap this.
Cool - I did not know I could do that. I'll look into it. Installers are stupid. Linux does perfectly well without them and a lot of OS X app I've tried work perfectly well without them. I don't understand the need to make things so complex. :)