There's a great program called ThoughtTracker which seems designed for this sort of thing. I don't have a link (it's in Debian; one of the reasons I use Debian is so that I don't need to remember links) but ti should be easy to find.
Basically you have text nodes with arbitrary names which can be "linked" with any other nodes. You can thus follow a train of thought by at a later date going to a node, and then following its links for as long as the related thoughts go.
I'm a Gnome user, and I can't think of anything that I'd like to customize but can't.
This is just the problem: They've dumbed it down, and so dumbed you down.
I've not tried GNOME lately, not since they started this slide towards madness. But here are some points:
Rearrange the titlebar buttons. Now, I realize that this is a WM issue, so...
Switch your window manager. This used to be a simple option from control panel in GNOME. Now? It may exist, somewhere in the registry, maybe not. Who knows? People aren't going tolook in the registry.
I'd like to change the colors of one part of a theme but not the whole theme. Whoops, no luck there. How about a theme that doesn't clobber my emacs keybindings?
A web browser that I can get to behave the way *I* want, not the way the GNOME devs have decided everyone wants?
How about a damn file dialog? The KDE one is extremely fantastic in terms of customizability. GNOME people will ultimately decide on one-and-only for the file dialog, just like everything else, instead of providing choice.
I'vbe said it many times--most shows suffer from a lack of enough good characters. They muddle along with two or maybe three compelling characters, and somehow manage to fill up their time slot. Joss Whedon shows never have this problem, they have it in reverse: Too many good characters, and not enough screen time. You could spin off an entertaining and compelling show with almost any character which has appeared in more than one episode of Buffy or Angel. The good guys, the bad guys... who cares? They're all fantastic chatacters, with few exceptions, and could carry their own shows.
With Windows 2K (and driver discs) everything above "just works" out of the box.
With windows 2000, everything dose not "just work" out of the box. You said it yourself: Wndows plus driver discs eventually works.
Under Linux, the amount of time involved in 'fixing' the stuff that doesn't work right away will probably be about the same as in Windows... if you know enough about Linux to know where to start. Windows would take days to figure out, too, if you'd never figured it out before.
If you take time to learn the process of getting things working under Linux once, you'll find that it is no less efficient than under Windows. I can personally set up all of the things you mention from not-working to working in at most a few hours, and I'm not an expert. If only one or two are broken and I was using a modern distribution it would take me less time than inserting a discs and clicking next a lot and rebooting 2 to 5 times.
that would be megalib-version.deb and ubertool-version.deb
It's agaisnt debian policy for package names to be upper case, or to have packages without version info. To omit the arch is also bad, but you can kinda get away with it.
It's been said that the best path for learning programming is:
Basic -> Any Assembler -> C
But what's really meant is:
Simple, forgiving language to teach concepts and weed out those who cant shake it. Follow that up with the lowest most basic language you can find, to teach programming at its rawest (today C is going to be that language). Follow that with a modern, powerful language with tons of features anf libraries.
The idea is that you introduce concepts with langauge 1, whip the snot out of them with language 2, and then show them that programming doesn't have to be that bad with language 3. My observation is that language 1 should be easy but useless, or it will enciurage them to stay with that when language 2 gets frusterating. Therefore I do not recommend Python as language 1 (maybe for 3).
All normal people who make it to language 3 via this route will be so stunned by the time and effort it saves them that they wont even notice stupid little things about the language which newbies typically complain about. If you teach 'em language 3 first, they'll expect everything to be that easy.
Hook 'em, burn 'em, save 'em. Ask an evangelical preacher.
More usable, huh? More consistent, huh? Then why for the past seven years did they use the word "Directory" as opposed to "Folder?" If KDE was really more usable than GNOME, then why did they have such trouble matching the metaphor with terminology? I won't bother going into a long-winded rant about this, since I've already done it in my pre-faq.
There is no need to say "Folder" instead of "Directory" as long as you are consistent. As I will argue (again) below, the metaphor is useless.
More consistent: In KDE apps, most of the time, toolbars and menus are all the same. Editing toolbars and menus is all the same. Contents of standard menus (eg Help, Settings) is consistent. Interface layout is (from my experience) very consistent. I could go on.
I think consistency leads to usability. It is, perhaps, the primary component.
Usability is all about creating one consistent model that operates the same way in every single situation. I agree with the idea that a new way of doing things needs to be developed and that the desktop metaphor needs to be replaced, but if you do that, you better damn well toss out everything from that old desktop metaphor and completely throw out folders, the desktop, and all the other cruft while you're at it. As KDE and GNOME still use the desktop metaphor, it makes sense to toss out something that doesn't fit into that metaphor. The only thing worse than a really bad user interface is a really bad user interface with half-assed "improvements". If KDE and GNOME are going to have anything that resembles a desktop, then they damn well adhere completely and totally to the desktop metaphor.
Bunk. The so-called "desktop metaphor" is not in any way a consistent model. It sort've goes together and sort've makes sense in some situations. It provides no real value/because/ it does not work. People don't think in the desktop metaphor.
And BTW, saying "Because they know better" sounds like your calling end users idiots. If you're going to do that, just be honest about it (and while you're at it, don't bother lobbying governments to put replace their windows machines with linux). Come out and call the end users dummies who can't use computers; don't try to hide the unix geek interior that we all know exists anyways.
But that is not what I'm saying. I, a technical user, don't think of my computer as a "desktop" with "files" and "folders" and trash cans and such. I know enough about my computer that I think in a different way, a way closer to its actual behavior. The non-technical users are not "stupid" as you claim I am saying, but non-technical. They don't think about the computer the way I do, because they don't know enough to do so. This is not a comment on their intelligence, just on how much about computers they have learned. They also do not think of their computer as a desktop, at least not really. If you called the "desktop" the "floor" and "folders" "buckets" and "files" "books" (or something) then most people would not have a problem, and would find it just as easy to understand as the desktop metaphor. They are not THINKING of their computers as "dsktops". They are using our 'easy' terminology outside of any metaphorical context. We may say that a menu is a "drawer" and they may use that word, but it's NOT because they asre thinking "Desks have drawers, this is my desk top, so my file smay be in my drawers." It is because of totally arbitrary terminology imposed by the likes of you and I, who are trying to make things simple. There is nothing inherently "desktopy" about the mental model average users really use.
Because there is no/actual/ 'desktop' model in users heads, adhering to it does not inherently help. Discarding things which do not fit the model does not help.
I know exactly what you mean, though recently I've found other avenues for this frustration than Slashdot.
Heir to the Empire, by any chance? That's one of my favorite Star Wars books/series, which I read around the age of 13.
I'm 21 now, I can touch type faster than most people I know, and I keep being startled when friends ask me for editing tips on their writing. I can correct my own spelling and punctuation fast enough, mid-thought, to keep up with an active 6-way philosophical discussion on IRC without being hounded very often by the multitude of grammar nazi's (including an English teacher, a couple college newspaper editors, etc.) who hang out on the channel.
Sounds a lot like me... I never bothered to learn formal (read: touch) typing, but I can hunt and peck at 80wpm without difficulty. My family are all quite astute when it comes to English, and you can be sure that they call me on any mistakes. It doesn't happen terribly often.
(Anyone who hasn't stood in a room with four other English lovers and discussed etymology and the like is missing out on one of lifes more pleasurable activities.)
In regards to IM and Fan Fiction helping kids learn to write, I think they sort of do, but it's a little more personal, and a little less straight forward cause and effect than that. Whether you learn anything "proper" from those activities depends entirely on whether the people you're communicating with give a shit about propriety. Repetitive use of a skill will lead to improvement in that skill. Whether the skill is "proper English" or "l33t" or individually contrived phonetic attempts at spelling, all depends on circumstances which vary drastically within the realms of on-line writing and communication forums.
Quite so! The majority will probably take from this story "Writing and reading fan fiction improves spelling and grammar," when in fact the news is no news at all: If you give someone a need for a skill that is within their power to learn, they will simply learn it.
If you recall, this was what nautilus originally had. Before the new GNOME philosophy took over, there were three 'difficulty' settings for users of different skills.
It was supposed to be desktop-wide, eventually. Too bad...
I'm home schooled, and the way we did it I never was required to write papers by hand, or anything, and only once or twice on a computer. I know the letters, I read a lot, but my handwriting was horrible, my spelling was abysmal, and I didn't care. When did I ever use it? I told my parents that I couldn't spell and didn't care to learn to, it just wasn't something I needed.
A few years later we got AOL, a terrible place to be sure. I already know many of the things one must know... like AOL sucks, only morons use l33t speak, etc..
Being a Star Trek fan I went into the official Star Trek "The Bridge" chat room. I had an extreme fear of appearing foolish, and a worry about being understood. My grammar was as bad as my spelling, if not worse. I decided I just wouldn't say anything unless I was sure it was selled correctly. This lead to a/lot/ of occasions where I rephrased something so as to not use a word I could not spell for sure. But, being a big reader, and now having a motivation to learn how words were spelled, after a month or two my spelling was much improved. My grammar was stil not very good, but in a chat room you have little need for or chance to improve grammar.
Fast forward a year... I got invovled in a gaming community with a series of message boards. There was a certain amount of role playing that went on, and wars of words between different teams was common. I began posting, and arguing, and in effect writing like crazy. I probbaly wrote an average of at/least/ 1000 words per day for six months or more, just on those boards.
By the time I was halfway through those six months I was feared by all as a killer debater. Why? I marshalled my arguments well, turned phrases like nobodies business, and generally wrote up a storm.
Since that time I have grown considerably more lax with regards to all aspects of writing. (My speed, first honed in chat rooms so as to be able to keep up with the rapid scrolling, is the only thing which is better than it was then.) But now, though I worry less about putting in all the punctuation, and am no longer a strict capitalization nazi, I am much more engaged in general about English. Now I ama connoisseur of the English language, and am somewhat fascinated by language in general.
I attribute the majority of my skill and learning to being online and in a forum where I/want/ to write and write well.
I'm all for sensible defaults, which I'll admit KDE does not have in any great abundance.
I am not for making the options hard for normal users to access. I said I like having options hidden in plain sight, meaning right at your finger tips if you bother to try.
It's perfectly possible to have a ton of options and at the same time not "overwhelm" the 'normal' user. The answer is good configuration dialog layout, and access to options in an intuitive way. (For example: Desktop properties brings up a background config app, which means that the user isn't confused by kcontrol layout. It in no way helps to have this app be unable to do things a reasonable set of users might want.)
Repeat this mantra: More features does not mean harder to use. Easier to use does not mean fewer features.
When you target the lowest common denominator you are likely to miss, (darn 'em, they just keep gettin' lower!) and while you're aiming everyone else will have moved on to something else.
I could not agree more. Feature starvation do NOT mean usability, just as little as many features do. The more features you add, the more you will have to care about usability issues. And KDE 3.2 doesn't make it. Configured correctly KDE is quite easy to use. But that doesn't make KDE usable as you should not have to configure it to make it easy to use. It should be configured that way by default.
I agree completely. I am not exactly pleased with KDEs defaults, but I am so happy about being able to change them that I try not to complain,
One example: KDE is configured to use single click mode by default. I have done usability studies on this, and so far I haven't found a single user new to KDE that is confortable with this. They tend to activate/open/view things by mistake. One could easily think that this is only because they are used to using windows or MacOS, but not so. Even users that only have had access to web based interfaces, where single click is the standard, have problems. Why? In the web interface they base their doings on a cognitive model based on navigation. While in a desktop oriented system like KDE they act like if they are handling objects on that desktop. They pick up objects and do something with them. If you use single click users do not figure out how to pick the object up.
Indeed. I've never done any studies, but I've generally found the same thing. This is one area in which KDE are just copying WindowsME for no reason. Very annoying... but again, I can change it, so I try not to complain.
The article basically starts off with the _really_ important stuff:
"You can setup your desktop background as a slide show so that the background picture changes at predetermined intervals."
Yes! This was the one missing feature I was waiting for! Finally, I can switch to KDE!
Oh, sure. Great new feature. I remember thinking this was nifty... back in KDE 2.0.
I wish he'd listed more of the great actualy NEW features.
Re:Really? Infamous?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyway, I wish that the KDE people could get their act together on usability. As they clearly have a technical edge over Gnome this is really sad they they doesn't do better in this area.
II keep hearing this complaint, but I just don't see it. KDE has/always/ been more useable than GNOME,a nd still is. So they haven't published a fancy guideline manual with all kinds of rules everyone has to follow. Big deal! The apps work, and importantly "just work", intuitively and as expected. The interface is cleaner and more consistant than GNOME.
Reading the rest of your post, I think I see the problem: You and GNOME people seem to equate "Useable" with "Feature-starved". Just because GNOME's epiphany can't be configureed does NOT mean it's more useable! I don't know who first introduced this "No options is inherently superior" doctrine, but I don't like it, and it is just plain wrong.
I used to/like/ GNOME, and I preferred it to KDE up through GNOME 1.2. After that it seemed that they started removing features for no reason, or little reason. Topical example: Right click the Epiphany toolbar. Nothing! What I EXPECTED is to get some contextual options. Right click the Konq toolbar: Aha! A menu. Low and behold! It allows me to configure what's on the toolbar! That makes sense! AND SINCE NORMAL USERS WOULD NEVER HAVE CLICKED, IT IN NO WAY DEGRADES EASE OF USE TO HAVE THE OPTIONS THERE. Options hidden in plain quickly-accessed sight is GOOD.
This "Too many small icons" arguement doesn't hold water. Maybe there are for YOU, so right click and change them! For GNOME, they've decided being able to suit your environmnt to your needs is BAD, so they give me what is acceptable to the LOWEST common user skillset. That's fine! But since they've also decided that users shouldn't be given options, I CAN'T CHANGE IT!
I really prefer C to C++ for a lot of reasons. Some things about KDE annoy me. But GNOME/really/ pisses me off.
Functionality != hard to use! Get it right, people!
If the toolbars are crowded, the context menus are even worse. E.g. in the right menu button menu of the konquerer file manager you have both a "Move to trash" and a "Delete" item. Wouldn't it have bin better to just have a "Move to trash" item, and then configure the trash to perform the correct action this would have bin more in line with the desktop metaphor. On the your normal desktop you put things you don't want in the waste basket, and then you decide when to empty it.
No. On SOME people's desktops "trash, then delete" is the norm. Most people, however, when they want to delete something, they want it GONE, not hanging around and taking up disk space. Thus the very-clear, understandable, and/seperate/ "MOVE to trash" and "DELETE" options.
And, incidentally, being "in line with the desktop metaphor" is NOT a valid reason to configure a GUI one way or another. The desktop metaphor is merely a minor convenience, I practically guarantee that it is not how most people actually think of their computers. The technical people think differently because they know better, the nontechnical people don't think about it enough for it to make much difference whate metaphor s being used. If the goal is being easier to use, then the GUI should make things easier, not conform to a model which might, maybe, we HOPE, be easy to understand and relate to for some office workers.
The menu still have a dominating red cancel button. That button is probably the first thing the user sees when he drops a file over a folder, and the menu pops up. To me its somewhat unclear why this menu needs a cancel button in the first place, all other menus seam to be able to do without it. And second why does it have to be that eye catching. After all in most of the cases "Cancel" is not what the user is most likely to do.
The reason that the Cancel is in big and red is not that it is the most LIKELY thing the us
It's not like he's suggesting telnet+knocking instead of SSH. It's SHH + knocking. I don't see how that could possibly be construed as a bad thing.
No, there is not actually any more security once someone connects to the port. But... a random sniffer is unlikely to even SEE the open port, and so will be more likely to move on without attempting a compromise. Any situation which fools a few attackers some of the time into thinking that there's no meat here definitely enhances the "security" of the thing being protected.
Maybe it's illusionary, but as a small-time guy running a personal ssh server, I know that the only one who would ever have know the sequence of knocks would be me. It's not like there's only once sequence of knocks for all servers, I can pick how many and which ports, like a password.
So first I find my machine and give it the "it's me" password, so it shows its port. And then I give it my login and password, and I'm in. No one is likely to be attacking my machine, but if they do this one extra level of indirection will make it much less likely that they'll get anywhere. This is more secure! No, it's not REAL security, but it does lend itself to fewer attacks, and attack prevention is close enough to security in my book.
The one-time-pad idea sound even better, but is really overkill for me.
You make a good point, or at least I see a good point in what you're saying, or what I think you're saying.
I don't view Linux as the ultimate OS, although I sort've hope it could be. What I view as the job of Linux is to break Microsoft. Linux is not the best possible desktop, not the best possible server, and not the best possible Unix. It's just got enough of each of those elements that it can clobber Windows to death and really open up the market.
Once the monopoly is gone and the environment is more open, a really good OS that's really good at being a desktop can come along and supplant the Linux desktop. A really good Unix (maybe one of the BSDs, or the HURD, or something new) can come along and be the new best Unix.
Linux is not the end, it is jut the beginning. Without Linux chances are MS will never be defeated and none of these other OSs will be able to be created, much less become popular. Linux is "good enough" to take on MS in all areas at once. A better OS can topple Linux easily and quickly, once Linux is the dominant.
Remember, there is no chance of a Linux monopoly. Linux demands open standards. Look at Syllable... how many GPL Linux apps have been ported already? How many would be trivial? If Linux crushes all competition, and then we decide something else is better, all essential functionality can be ported to any new OS in a year or two. There is no lock in! It just wont happen.
I hail Linux and its coming dominance. I will be even more delighted when Linux fades away into history... a valiant, indispensible fighter, eventually no longer needed.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a great program called ThoughtTracker which seems designed for this sort of thing. I don't have a link (it's in Debian; one of the reasons I use Debian is so that I don't need to remember links) but ti should be easy to find.
Basically you have text nodes with arbitrary names which can be "linked" with any other nodes. You can thus follow a train of thought by at a later date going to a node, and then following its links for as long as the related thoughts go.
Yes, but you didn't post the uptimes.
I'm a Gnome user, and I can't think of anything that I'd like to customize but can't.
This is just the problem: They've dumbed it down, and so dumbed you down.
I've not tried GNOME lately, not since they started this slide towards madness. But here are some points:
Rearrange the titlebar buttons. Now, I realize that this is a WM issue, so...
Switch your window manager. This used to be a simple option from control panel in GNOME. Now? It may exist, somewhere in the registry, maybe not. Who knows? People aren't going tolook in the registry.
I'd like to change the colors of one part of a theme but not the whole theme. Whoops, no luck there. How about a theme that doesn't clobber my emacs keybindings?
A web browser that I can get to behave the way *I* want, not the way the GNOME devs have decided everyone wants?
How about a damn file dialog? The KDE one is extremely fantastic in terms of customizability. GNOME people will ultimately decide on one-and-only for the file dialog, just like everything else, instead of providing choice.
There's more, but it would take me ages.
I'vbe said it many times--most shows suffer from a lack of enough good characters. They muddle along with two or maybe three compelling characters, and somehow manage to fill up their time slot. Joss Whedon shows never have this problem, they have it in reverse: Too many good characters, and not enough screen time. You could spin off an entertaining and compelling show with almost any character which has appeared in more than one episode of Buffy or Angel. The good guys, the bad guys... who cares? They're all fantastic chatacters, with few exceptions, and could carry their own shows.
try:
du -hcs
and be amazed.
With Windows 2K (and driver discs) everything above "just works" out of the box.
With windows 2000, everything dose not "just work" out of the box. You said it yourself: Wndows plus driver discs eventually works.
Under Linux, the amount of time involved in 'fixing' the stuff that doesn't work right away will probably be about the same as in Windows... if you know enough about Linux to know where to start. Windows would take days to figure out, too, if you'd never figured it out before.
If you take time to learn the process of getting things working under Linux once, you'll find that it is no less efficient than under Windows. I can personally set up all of the things you mention from not-working to working in at most a few hours, and I'm not an expert. If only one or two are broken and I was using a modern distribution it would take me less time than inserting a discs and clicking next a lot and rebooting 2 to 5 times.
I think:
Linux: Strong enough for a desktop, load balanced for a server.
Would be more appropriate in any number of ways.
Lossy text compression:
rmv ll f th vwls!
that would be megalib-version.deb and ubertool-version.deb
It's agaisnt debian policy for package names to be upper case, or to have packages without version info. To omit the arch is also bad, but you can kinda get away with it.
Red hat has conventions?
Wow, what alternate universe have I fallen in to?
Where are these stupid HR people you refer to? If some JS weenie can get a job due to their stupidity, surely I can.
It's been said that the best path for learning programming is:
Basic -> Any Assembler -> C
But what's really meant is:
Simple, forgiving language to teach concepts and weed out those who cant shake it. Follow that up with the lowest most basic language you can find, to teach programming at its rawest (today C is going to be that language). Follow that with a modern, powerful language with tons of features anf libraries.
The idea is that you introduce concepts with langauge 1, whip the snot out of them with language 2, and then show them that programming doesn't have to be that bad with language 3. My observation is that language 1 should be easy but useless, or it will enciurage them to stay with that when language 2 gets frusterating. Therefore I do not recommend Python as language 1 (maybe for 3).
All normal people who make it to language 3 via this route will be so stunned by the time and effort it saves them that they wont even notice stupid little things about the language which newbies typically complain about. If you teach 'em language 3 first, they'll expect everything to be that easy.
Hook 'em, burn 'em, save 'em. Ask an evangelical preacher.
More usable, huh? More consistent, huh? Then why for the past seven years did they use the word "Directory" as opposed to "Folder?" If KDE was really more usable than GNOME, then why did they have such trouble matching the metaphor with terminology? I won't bother going into a long-winded rant about this, since I've already done it in my pre-faq.
/because/ it does not work. People don't think in the desktop metaphor.
/actual/ 'desktop' model in users heads, adhering to it does not inherently help. Discarding things which do not fit the model does not help.
There is no need to say "Folder" instead of "Directory" as long as you are consistent. As I will argue (again) below, the metaphor is useless.
More consistent: In KDE apps, most of the time, toolbars and menus are all the same. Editing toolbars and menus is all the same. Contents of standard menus (eg Help, Settings) is consistent. Interface layout is (from my experience) very consistent. I could go on.
I think consistency leads to usability. It is, perhaps, the primary component.
Usability is all about creating one consistent model that operates the same way in every single situation. I agree with the idea that a new way of doing things needs to be developed and that the desktop metaphor needs to be replaced, but if you do that, you better damn well toss out everything from that old desktop metaphor and completely throw out folders, the desktop, and all the other cruft while you're at it. As KDE and GNOME still use the desktop metaphor, it makes sense to toss out something that doesn't fit into that metaphor. The only thing worse than a really bad user interface is a really bad user interface with half-assed "improvements". If KDE and GNOME are going to have anything that resembles a desktop, then they damn well adhere completely and totally to the desktop metaphor.
Bunk. The so-called "desktop metaphor" is not in any way a consistent model. It sort've goes together and sort've makes sense in some situations. It provides no real value
And BTW, saying "Because they know better" sounds like your calling end users idiots. If you're going to do that, just be honest about it (and while you're at it, don't bother lobbying governments to put replace their windows machines with linux). Come out and call the end users dummies who can't use computers; don't try to hide the unix geek interior that we all know exists anyways.
But that is not what I'm saying. I, a technical user, don't think of my computer as a "desktop" with "files" and "folders" and trash cans and such. I know enough about my computer that I think in a different way, a way closer to its actual behavior. The non-technical users are not "stupid" as you claim I am saying, but non-technical. They don't think about the computer the way I do, because they don't know enough to do so. This is not a comment on their intelligence, just on how much about computers they have learned. They also do not think of their computer as a desktop, at least not really. If you called the "desktop" the "floor" and "folders" "buckets" and "files" "books" (or something) then most people would not have a problem, and would find it just as easy to understand as the desktop metaphor. They are not THINKING of their computers as "dsktops". They are using our 'easy' terminology outside of any metaphorical context. We may say that a menu is a "drawer" and they may use that word, but it's NOT because they asre thinking "Desks have drawers, this is my desk top, so my file smay be in my drawers." It is because of totally arbitrary terminology imposed by the likes of you and I, who are trying to make things simple. There is nothing inherently "desktopy" about the mental model average users really use.
Because there is no
I know exactly what you mean, though recently I've found other avenues for this frustration than Slashdot.
Your link seems broken.
to a Timothy Zahn novel
Heir to the Empire, by any chance? That's one of my favorite Star Wars books/series, which I read around the age of 13.
I'm 21 now, I can touch type faster than most people I know, and I keep being startled when friends ask me for editing tips on their writing. I can correct my own spelling and punctuation fast enough, mid-thought, to keep up with an active 6-way philosophical discussion on IRC without being hounded very often by the multitude of grammar nazi's (including an English teacher, a couple college newspaper editors, etc.) who hang out on the channel.
Sounds a lot like me... I never bothered to learn formal (read: touch) typing, but I can hunt and peck at 80wpm without difficulty. My family are all quite astute when it comes to English, and you can be sure that they call me on any mistakes. It doesn't happen terribly often.
(Anyone who hasn't stood in a room with four other English lovers and discussed etymology and the like is missing out on one of lifes more pleasurable activities.)
In regards to IM and Fan Fiction helping kids learn to write, I think they sort of do, but it's a little more personal, and a little less straight forward cause and effect than that. Whether you learn anything "proper" from those activities depends entirely on whether the people you're communicating with give a shit about propriety. Repetitive use of a skill will lead to improvement in that skill. Whether the skill is "proper English" or "l33t" or individually contrived phonetic attempts at spelling, all depends on circumstances which vary drastically within the realms of on-line writing and communication forums.
Quite so! The majority will probably take from this story "Writing and reading fan fiction improves spelling and grammar," when in fact the news is no news at all: If you give someone a need for a skill that is within their power to learn, they will simply learn it.
None of thse three are the kind I object to losing. I have been annoyed many times by options which are in the categories you reference.
/basic/ features, for no good reason.
GNOME people are removing/hiding a lot of
If you recall, this was what nautilus originally had. Before the new GNOME philosophy took over, there were three 'difficulty' settings for users of different skills.
It was supposed to be desktop-wide, eventually. Too bad...
King didn't remotely attempt the same thing as Baen.
King held the continuing story hostage to a certain payed/not payed ratio of downloaders.
Baen gives away books which no longer make them significant amounts of money, causing other (related) books to sell well.
The two are not at all related.
I was a terrible speller up until I got online.
/lot/ of occasions where I rephrased something so as to not use a word I could not spell for sure. But, being a big reader, and now having a motivation to learn how words were spelled, after a month or two my spelling was much improved. My grammar was stil not very good, but in a chat room you have little need for or chance to improve grammar.
/least/ 1000 words per day for six months or more, just on those boards.
/want/ to write and write well.
I'm home schooled, and the way we did it I never was required to write papers by hand, or anything, and only once or twice on a computer. I know the letters, I read a lot, but my handwriting was horrible, my spelling was abysmal, and I didn't care. When did I ever use it? I told my parents that I couldn't spell and didn't care to learn to, it just wasn't something I needed.
A few years later we got AOL, a terrible place to be sure. I already know many of the things one must know... like AOL sucks, only morons use l33t speak, etc..
Being a Star Trek fan I went into the official Star Trek "The Bridge" chat room. I had an extreme fear of appearing foolish, and a worry about being understood. My grammar was as bad as my spelling, if not worse. I decided I just wouldn't say anything unless I was sure it was selled correctly. This lead to a
Fast forward a year... I got invovled in a gaming community with a series of message boards. There was a certain amount of role playing that went on, and wars of words between different teams was common. I began posting, and arguing, and in effect writing like crazy. I probbaly wrote an average of at
By the time I was halfway through those six months I was feared by all as a killer debater. Why? I marshalled my arguments well, turned phrases like nobodies business, and generally wrote up a storm.
Since that time I have grown considerably more lax with regards to all aspects of writing. (My speed, first honed in chat rooms so as to be able to keep up with the rapid scrolling, is the only thing which is better than it was then.) But now, though I worry less about putting in all the punctuation, and am no longer a strict capitalization nazi, I am much more engaged in general about English. Now I ama connoisseur of the English language, and am somewhat fascinated by language in general.
I attribute the majority of my skill and learning to being online and in a forum where I
I'm all for sensible defaults, which I'll admit KDE does not have in any great abundance.
I am not for making the options hard for normal users to access. I said I like having options hidden in plain sight, meaning right at your finger tips if you bother to try.
It's perfectly possible to have a ton of options and at the same time not "overwhelm" the 'normal' user. The answer is good configuration dialog layout, and access to options in an intuitive way. (For example: Desktop properties brings up a background config app, which means that the user isn't confused by kcontrol layout. It in no way helps to have this app be unable to do things a reasonable set of users might want.)
Repeat this mantra: More features does not mean harder to use. Easier to use does not mean fewer features.
When you target the lowest common denominator you are likely to miss, (darn 'em, they just keep gettin' lower!) and while you're aiming everyone else will have moved on to something else.
I could not agree more. Feature starvation do NOT mean usability, just as little as many features do. The more features you add, the more you will have to care about usability issues. And KDE 3.2 doesn't make it. Configured correctly KDE is quite easy to use. But that doesn't make KDE usable as you should not have to configure it to make it easy to use. It should be configured that way by default.
I agree completely. I am not exactly pleased with KDEs defaults, but I am so happy about being able to change them that I try not to complain,
One example: KDE is configured to use single click mode by default. I have done usability studies on this, and so far I haven't found a single user new to KDE that is confortable with this. They tend to activate/open/view things by mistake. One could easily think that this is only because they are used to using windows or MacOS, but not so. Even users that only have had access to web based interfaces, where single click is the standard, have problems. Why? In the web interface they base their doings on a cognitive model based on navigation. While in a desktop oriented system like KDE they act like if they are handling objects on that desktop. They pick up objects and do something with them. If you use single click users do not figure out how to pick the object up.
Indeed. I've never done any studies, but I've generally found the same thing. This is one area in which KDE are just copying WindowsME for no reason. Very annoying... but again, I can change it, so I try not to complain.
The article basically starts off with the _really_ important stuff:
"You can setup your desktop background as a slide show so that the background picture changes at predetermined intervals."
Yes! This was the one missing feature I was waiting for! Finally, I can switch to KDE!
Oh, sure. Great new feature. I remember thinking this was nifty... back in KDE 2.0.
I wish he'd listed more of the great actualy NEW features.
Anyway, I wish that the KDE people could get their act together on usability. As they
/always/ been more useable than GNOME,a nd still is. So they haven't published a fancy guideline manual with all kinds of rules everyone has to follow. Big deal! The apps work, and importantly "just work", intuitively and as expected. The interface is cleaner and more consistant than GNOME.
/like/ GNOME, and I preferred it to KDE up through GNOME 1.2. After that it seemed that they started removing features for no reason, or little reason. Topical example: Right click the Epiphany toolbar. Nothing! What I EXPECTED is to get some contextual options. Right click the Konq toolbar: Aha! A menu. Low and behold! It allows me to configure what's on the toolbar! That makes sense! AND SINCE NORMAL USERS WOULD NEVER HAVE CLICKED, IT IN NO WAY DEGRADES EASE OF USE TO HAVE THE OPTIONS THERE. Options hidden in plain quickly-accessed sight is GOOD.
/really/ pisses me off.
/seperate/ "MOVE to trash" and "DELETE" options.
clearly have a technical edge over Gnome this is
really sad they they doesn't do better in this area.
II keep hearing this complaint, but I just don't see it. KDE has
Reading the rest of your post, I think I see the problem: You and GNOME people seem to equate "Useable" with "Feature-starved". Just because GNOME's epiphany can't be configureed does NOT mean it's more useable! I don't know who first introduced this "No options is inherently superior" doctrine, but I don't like it, and it is just plain wrong.
I used to
This "Too many small icons" arguement doesn't hold water. Maybe there are for YOU, so right click and change them! For GNOME, they've decided being able to suit your environmnt to your needs is BAD, so they give me what is acceptable to the LOWEST common user skillset. That's fine! But since they've also decided that users shouldn't be given options, I CAN'T CHANGE IT!
I really prefer C to C++ for a lot of reasons. Some things about KDE annoy me. But GNOME
Functionality != hard to use! Get it right, people!
If the toolbars are crowded, the context menus are even worse. E.g. in the right menu button menu of the konquerer file manager you have both a "Move to trash" and a "Delete" item. Wouldn't it have bin better to just have a "Move to trash" item, and then configure the trash to perform the correct action this would have bin more in line with the desktop metaphor. On the your normal desktop you put things you don't want in the waste basket, and then you decide when to empty it.
No. On SOME people's desktops "trash, then delete" is the norm. Most people, however, when they want to delete something, they want it GONE, not hanging around and taking up disk space. Thus the very-clear, understandable, and
And, incidentally, being "in line with the desktop metaphor" is NOT a valid reason to configure a GUI one way or another. The desktop metaphor is merely a minor convenience, I practically guarantee that it is not how most people actually think of their computers. The technical people think differently because they know better, the nontechnical people don't think about it enough for it to make much difference whate metaphor s being used. If the goal is being easier to use, then the GUI should make things easier, not conform to a model which might, maybe, we HOPE, be easy to understand and relate to for some office workers.
The menu still have a dominating red cancel button. That button is probably the first thing the user sees when he drops a file over a folder, and the menu pops up. To me its somewhat unclear why this menu needs a cancel button in the first place, all other menus seam to be able to do without it. And second why does it have to be that eye catching. After all in most of the cases "Cancel" is not what the user is most likely to do.
The reason that the Cancel is in big and red is not that it is the most LIKELY thing the us
It's not like he's suggesting telnet+knocking instead of SSH. It's SHH + knocking. I don't see how that could possibly be construed as a bad thing.
No, there is not actually any more security once someone connects to the port. But... a random sniffer is unlikely to even SEE the open port, and so will be more likely to move on without attempting a compromise. Any situation which fools a few attackers some of the time into thinking that there's no meat here definitely enhances the "security" of the thing being protected.
Maybe it's illusionary, but as a small-time guy running a personal ssh server, I know that the only one who would ever have know the sequence of knocks would be me. It's not like there's only once sequence of knocks for all servers, I can pick how many and which ports, like a password.
So first I find my machine and give it the "it's me" password, so it shows its port. And then I give it my login and password, and I'm in. No one is likely to be attacking my machine, but if they do this one extra level of indirection will make it much less likely that they'll get anywhere. This is more secure! No, it's not REAL security, but it does lend itself to fewer attacks, and attack prevention is close enough to security in my book.
The one-time-pad idea sound even better, but is really overkill for me.
that would be apt-get install kdelibs4
You make a good point, or at least I see a good point in what you're saying, or what I think you're saying.
I don't view Linux as the ultimate OS, although I sort've hope it could be. What I view as the job of Linux is to break Microsoft. Linux is not the best possible desktop, not the best possible server, and not the best possible Unix. It's just got enough of each of those elements that it can clobber Windows to death and really open up the market.
Once the monopoly is gone and the environment is more open, a really good OS that's really good at being a desktop can come along and supplant the Linux desktop. A really good Unix (maybe one of the BSDs, or the HURD, or something new) can come along and be the new best Unix.
Linux is not the end, it is jut the beginning. Without Linux chances are MS will never be defeated and none of these other OSs will be able to be created, much less become popular. Linux is "good enough" to take on MS in all areas at once. A better OS can topple Linux easily and quickly, once Linux is the dominant.
Remember, there is no chance of a Linux monopoly. Linux demands open standards. Look at Syllable... how many GPL Linux apps have been ported already? How many would be trivial? If Linux crushes all competition, and then we decide something else is better, all essential functionality can be ported to any new OS in a year or two. There is no lock in! It just wont happen.
I hail Linux and its coming dominance. I will be even more delighted when Linux fades away into history... a valiant, indispensible fighter, eventually no longer needed.