Before anyone asks, the primary reason to use Netscape over Mozilla is stability. Netscape releases are traditionally clobbered a lot harder than Mozilla which means they crash less. End users like that. It also has some extra frills like AIM/ICQ integration, a spellchecker and links to AOL content such as their Spinner/Radio and My Netscape etc..
If you prefer bleeding edge code with more bugs then use Mozilla. It doesn't have any of the above and has the popup blocker UI. Web developers will also appreciate stuff like the DOM inspector and JS Debugger modules.
Re:First they came for the Indians...
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Automats have been around for a hundred years. The fact they never caught on must demonstrate that shoppers prefer the human touch. That doesn't mean vending machines and their ilk don't have a place, but that any store that thinks it can do away with humans will soon find itself filing for bankruptcy.
I saw a program about Japan which featured a porn vending machine which was out on the street. Aside from the usual magazines and condoms, you could also buy a sex cup - a paper cup containing spongy jelly that you had intercourse with. Will the wonders of technology ever cease?
Unless the service allows users to download mp3s it may as well give up right now.
This shouldn't pose a problem - sell the songs for 1 euro a pop from fast servers and provide "community" features such as artist news, chat, song rating, special offers etc. and people will come. Many users would gratefully pay a reasonable price for guaranteed delivery and the other value added content on the site.
X11 is pretty tricky to set up OS X but I found an easy way to do it - install fink, follow the instructions on the fink website, when X11 starts, right click on it's icon in the dock and choose "Keep In Dock". From then on you just click the icon and launches as it's meant to.
I'm sure there are car mechanics who think the same way - if you're not prepared to dismantle the engine and put it back together to get it to go properly then you're too lazy.
The same with computers. Some people have real-life work to do and poking around inside the OS for hours to accomplish that takes a few seconds on XP or OS X is a supreme waste of time for them. They just want the bloody thing to work so they can get on with whatever they bought the machine to do in the first place.
Frankly I don't understand what your problem is with making Linux usable. If you want to RTFM, feel free to live your life in the console. But while Linux continues to inflict that piece of shit it calls a desktop on mere mortals they will simply turn to other operating systems be they made by Microsoft or Apple.
I don't wish to be flippant, but I see no evidence that Mandrake has paid *any* attention to usability. The desktop is an utter mess, being a vanilla KDE/GNOME, cobbled together tools and broken wizards (e.g. the new user wizard). Even their own tools have no consistency between them, using Ok,OK,Okay in dialogs and switching the order and size of the OK & Cancel buttons from one to the next.
Red Hat is better - the GNOME desktop is well laid out, bold and clean but it still suffers badly in comparison to OS X.
If you want to see how badly, just compare how hard it is to change your screen resolution, or share a folder, or change the system time, or burn a CD, or rip a CD into MP3 format, or get help on doing any of these things. All these things are pretty straightforward in OS X. You'd be hard pressed as a novice to figure them out in RH Linux.
OS X has faults (using Sherlock to find a file is a major pain in the ass) but it's clear from the changes in 10.2 that Apple are addressing them. The next question is why aren't Red Hat and the rest doing the same?
Linux only "just works" if you're prepared to wade through manuals and waste hours screwing around with config files. OS X isn't perfection incarnate but it beats to Linux in terms of usability by miles. A novice can use it and that's the point.
Now there is a 'nix based OS that shows it can be done, the Linux distros should follow suit. It is no wonder that Linux "isn't on the desktop" given the current attitude of RTFM that pervades.
... and when questioned about the blending technique, Palm spokeswoman Marlene Somsak replied, "each palm ships with a frosted glass display. The inability to see individual pixels or whole words for that matter dramatically increases the number of colors the user perceives".
Guinness isn't so good that choice should be banned. I prefer Murphys to Guinness but you'd be hard pushed to find it on sale 80 miles from Cork.
In Ireland every pub serves a nearly identical range of drinks, all with the same brands simply because Guinness has the industry in a stranglehold.
By contrast British pubs (many of which also sell Guinness) have more choice and are usually cheaper to boot. Pubs like Wetherspoons often have 20 or more beers on tap including guest beers and regional beers.
There are a smattering of brew pubs, some of them quite excellent. The rest are almost exclusively selling Guinness and Guinness-licenced brands. You can forget getting variety or cheap beer in Ireland.
Cork does have some variety since it is the home turf of Beamish and Murphys, but nowhere in Ireland holds a candle to any town in the UK. The Guinness monopoly has had an extremely unhealthy effect on the quality of pubs in Ireland. It will be a good day indeed when the monopoly is broken.
I've never been served warm Guinness, Beamish or Murphys and I live here. The warmest it gets is cold with most pubs actually chilling it.
IMHO the nicest of the three is Murphys.
Guinness isn't particularly great and is made by an international drinks conglomerate who have a nearly total monopoly on the Irish market. It is for this reason that every pub serves the same shit brands for too much money. You won't even see Beamish or Murphys on sale unless you're close to Cork.
It's sad to say, but Ireland has absolutely the worst internet service you're likely to find anywhere in Europe. ADSL is practically non-existent, wireless is non-existent and most "power-users" are still stuck using ISDN or 56k modems still. Some third world countries offer a better service!
Anyone coming the beer hike better realise this. The only saving grace as far as visitors are concerned is there are several "free" ISPs, i.e. no subscription, you just pay for the phone call.
No, they *will* use Gecko in their client but its a matter of when rather than if. The technology is already there as witnessed by the AOL 8.0 betas which contain it and on OS X and in the shipping Compuserve client. It is also by all accounts very reliable too.
The problem they now face is how to ship it, how to get their partners to use it, how to get their content and top 100 sites to render properly with it. Hopefully by chipping away by using it in Compuserve (which is nearly the same codebase as the AOL client), AOL on OS X and set top boxes then most of these issues will iron themselves out over time.
I hope Mandrake are paying better attention to usability than they have in the past. The default GNOME / KDE desktops in 8.2 were simply atrocious which is one of the reasons I jumped ship back to Red Hat. A generic desktop slapped together with some godawful homegrown config tools makes for a lousy user experience. I wonder how the walmart crowd will cope!
Perhaps money is the issue, but since I got an email from them today saying they'll be profitable by the end of the year I hope they devote some serious attention to it.
Why not ship two versions of glibc and gcc? It seems like a fairly sensible way to maintain backwards compatibility while still allowing source-built apps the benefits of being built with a better compiler. It's been done before, I don't see what's different now.
If necessary you could even write "java", "javac", "javah" etc. scripts in/usr/bin which fixed up the lib paths before invoking the real tools.
But it is in the international section in the same system prefs. Not perfect I agree, but quite possibly easier than figuring out the same in Linux. I also think OS X (workstation version) has a pretty lame tool for configuring hosts. So there is room for improvement but in general use it is miles better.
It took me a while to figure how I'd even change my keyboard layout in my Red Hat 7.3 GNOME installation - I looked for a pref in the keyboard panel and then hunted around for a locale panel which I couldn't find. Eventually I discovered a utility "Panel | Add to panel | Applet | Utility | GKB Keyboard Switcher" that did it. It certainly wasn't easy or intuitive and using it horked my VNC X session too.
I suppose if you're a crop circle novice it would be hard to start off making elaborate ones, but as can be seen from visiting here that practice makes perfect.
Presumably your skilled crop circle maker accompanied by several friends would be able to make pretty much any design using a plan, gps equipment, wooden boards rope, posts etc.
It's quite funny and sad that there are people who believe that alien visitors do them when logic, common sense and websites(!) demonstrate it is actually humans.
I really don't understand why Linux is dominated by the head-up-the-ass attitude that users are lusers. A good, well designed desktop helps everyone. OS X is very easy to use whether you're a newbie or an expert. Apple took the time to create a simple UI, one which is intuitive, where the settings are in one place and where there aren't a zillion advanced settings cluttering up things.
As a power user on OS X I don't feel constricted by this. I still run X and various Unix tools thanks to fink and I find the UI to be straightforward and easy to use. In other words, the simplicity helps me get on with stuff rather than wasting hours reading through FAQs or HOWTOs just trying to figure how to share a folder or whatnot.
The same cannot be said for a Linux desktop. I'm constantly wasting my time trying to find some stupid option in the zillion control panels KDE/GNOME puts up for me, or swearing at the stupid help system that doesn't integrate distro help with KDE/GNOME help with manpage help etc., or scratching my head trying to figure out to get my scanner to be recognized, or grinding my teeth because the distro fills its multiple menus of apps with cryptic apps with names starting with g or k.
It doesn't have to be that way. Unless Linux becomes usable for everyone, not just experts it will never get on the deskop. Besides, the more users there are, the more jobs there are for admins and developers to meet demand. I would have thought it's in everyone's interest to see it succeed.
Wade through this horrible flash site and you'll eventually see pictures of this thing. It is not a PDA killer unless you like carrying around something the size, weight and appearance of a 3.5 inch hard disk. And running XP? Ugh - I suppose you have to be running Outlook to get anywhere near the functionality that a PDA requires.
This thing is definitely and obviously useless as a PDA.
It would be a cute toy however and might be useful replacement for a laptop if you're going to plug it into external monitor, mouse & keyboard. Assuming it had a decent battery life, it might make an awesome personal media player too.
I truly don't understand why people *want* AA on apps. Maybe it's great when you're typesetting but in general it makes the screen like its out of focus.
Mozilla 1.1 also does AA on Mac OS X and to be honest I reckon it looks better without it.
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If you prefer bleeding edge code with more bugs then use Mozilla. It doesn't have any of the above and has the popup blocker UI. Web developers will also appreciate stuff like the DOM inspector and JS Debugger modules.
Automats have been around for a hundred years. The fact they never caught on must demonstrate that shoppers prefer the human touch. That doesn't mean vending machines and their ilk don't have a place, but that any store that thinks it can do away with humans will soon find itself filing for bankruptcy.
I saw a program about Japan which featured a porn vending machine which was out on the street. Aside from the usual magazines and condoms, you could also buy a sex cup - a paper cup containing spongy jelly that you had intercourse with. Will the wonders of technology ever cease?
I don't see why not - it's worked well enough until now.
This shouldn't pose a problem - sell the songs for 1 euro a pop from fast servers and provide "community" features such as artist news, chat, song rating, special offers etc. and people will come. Many users would gratefully pay a reasonable price for guaranteed delivery and the other value added content on the site.
A more fitting punishment, adopt sharia law and treat spamming as theft of service. Cut the bastard's hands off.
X11 is pretty tricky to set up OS X but I found an easy way to do it - install fink, follow the instructions on the fink website, when X11 starts, right click on it's icon in the dock and choose "Keep In Dock". From then on you just click the icon and launches as it's meant to.
The same with computers. Some people have real-life work to do and poking around inside the OS for hours to accomplish that takes a few seconds on XP or OS X is a supreme waste of time for them. They just want the bloody thing to work so they can get on with whatever they bought the machine to do in the first place.
Frankly I don't understand what your problem is with making Linux usable. If you want to RTFM, feel free to live your life in the console. But while Linux continues to inflict that piece of shit it calls a desktop on mere mortals they will simply turn to other operating systems be they made by Microsoft or Apple.
Red Hat is better - the GNOME desktop is well laid out, bold and clean but it still suffers badly in comparison to OS X.
If you want to see how badly, just compare how hard it is to change your screen resolution, or share a folder, or change the system time, or burn a CD, or rip a CD into MP3 format, or get help on doing any of these things. All these things are pretty straightforward in OS X. You'd be hard pressed as a novice to figure them out in RH Linux.
OS X has faults (using Sherlock to find a file is a major pain in the ass) but it's clear from the changes in 10.2 that Apple are addressing them. The next question is why aren't Red Hat and the rest doing the same?
Now there is a 'nix based OS that shows it can be done, the Linux distros should follow suit. It is no wonder that Linux "isn't on the desktop" given the current attitude of RTFM that pervades.
2 ** 16 of course, not that the human eye would actually be able to perceive the differences between some of them.
... and when questioned about the blending technique, Palm spokeswoman Marlene Somsak replied, "each palm ships with a frosted glass display. The inability to see individual pixels or whole words for that matter dramatically increases the number of colors the user perceives".
In Ireland every pub serves a nearly identical range of drinks, all with the same brands simply because Guinness has the industry in a stranglehold.
By contrast British pubs (many of which also sell Guinness) have more choice and are usually cheaper to boot. Pubs like Wetherspoons often have 20 or more beers on tap including guest beers and regional beers.
Cork does have some variety since it is the home turf of Beamish and Murphys, but nowhere in Ireland holds a candle to any town in the UK. The Guinness monopoly has had an extremely unhealthy effect on the quality of pubs in Ireland. It will be a good day indeed when the monopoly is broken.
IMHO the nicest of the three is Murphys.
Guinness isn't particularly great and is made by an international drinks conglomerate who have a nearly total monopoly on the Irish market. It is for this reason that every pub serves the same shit brands for too much money. You won't even see Beamish or Murphys on sale unless you're close to Cork.
Anyone coming the beer hike better realise this. The only saving grace as far as visitors are concerned is there are several "free" ISPs, i.e. no subscription, you just pay for the phone call.
The problem they now face is how to ship it, how to get their partners to use it, how to get their content and top 100 sites to render properly with it. Hopefully by chipping away by using it in Compuserve (which is nearly the same codebase as the AOL client), AOL on OS X and set top boxes then most of these issues will iron themselves out over time.
Presumably Java requires a glibc compiled with the old compiler. In which case, I don't see why Mandrake couldn't ship one just to keep it happy.
Perhaps money is the issue, but since I got an email from them today saying they'll be profitable by the end of the year I hope they devote some serious attention to it.
If necessary you could even write "java", "javac", "javah" etc. scripts in /usr/bin which fixed up the lib paths before invoking the real tools.
It took me a while to figure how I'd even change my keyboard layout in my Red Hat 7.3 GNOME installation - I looked for a pref in the keyboard panel and then hunted around for a locale panel which I couldn't find. Eventually I discovered a utility "Panel | Add to panel | Applet | Utility | GKB Keyboard Switcher" that did it. It certainly wasn't easy or intuitive and using it horked my VNC X session too.
Linux distributors really have some fixing to do.
Presumably your skilled crop circle maker accompanied by several friends would be able to make pretty much any design using a plan, gps equipment, wooden boards rope, posts etc.
It's quite funny and sad that there are people who believe that alien visitors do them when logic, common sense and websites(!) demonstrate it is actually humans.
As a power user on OS X I don't feel constricted by this. I still run X and various Unix tools thanks to fink and I find the UI to be straightforward and easy to use. In other words, the simplicity helps me get on with stuff rather than wasting hours reading through FAQs or HOWTOs just trying to figure how to share a folder or whatnot.
The same cannot be said for a Linux desktop. I'm constantly wasting my time trying to find some stupid option in the zillion control panels KDE/GNOME puts up for me, or swearing at the stupid help system that doesn't integrate distro help with KDE/GNOME help with manpage help etc., or scratching my head trying to figure out to get my scanner to be recognized, or grinding my teeth because the distro fills its multiple menus of apps with cryptic apps with names starting with g or k.
It doesn't have to be that way. Unless Linux becomes usable for everyone, not just experts it will never get on the deskop. Besides, the more users there are, the more jobs there are for admins and developers to meet demand. I would have thought it's in everyone's interest to see it succeed.
This thing is definitely and obviously useless as a PDA.
It would be a cute toy however and might be useful replacement for a laptop if you're going to plug it into external monitor, mouse & keyboard. Assuming it had a decent battery life, it might make an awesome personal media player too.
Mozilla 1.1 also does AA on Mac OS X and to be honest I reckon it looks better without it.