There is nothing wrong with "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines". That is the way it should be done.
And thus you demonstrate exactly the kind of unfounded assumption I was talking about. Have you considered the possiblity that a mouse might not necessarily be the best way to enter a computer program? I hope so, because you just ruled it out.
I think your analysis is wrong. Instead of studying how it is done today and improving that, we should be researching how it can be done better from the ground up.
Nothing of what I said contradicts that.
Regarding an editor which enforces contextual rules, that sounds like a set of training wheels. Such a "feature" would last about 1 week into my initial study and experimentation with a language.
It is a way to reduce typing redundancy and errors akin to tab-completion in most shells. It will not limit what the developer can do, merely alleviate errors and reduce the amount of typing they need to do.
I personally don't think that either a purely visual approach is necessarily better. Anyone looking into this should probably build it from the ground up by looking closely at how actual programmers write code, and treat it as a usability problem. Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct. This would mean autogeneration of text (auto-completion of variables and syntax), and restrictions to prevent the developer from entering impossible code.
I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).
If ever there was a demonstration of the flaws in the moderation system, the way this comment was moderated highlights them. I make a well-informed critique of Ximian (I have done due-dilligence work for a number of Venture Capitalists), but because I happen to be criticizing one of the Sacred Cows of Slashdot - I get an "overrated" and a "flamebait" moderation.
I hope whoever is responsible for that gets punished in meta-moderation (but I won't hold my breath).
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
on
Inside Ximian
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Just for sh1ts and giggles, let's pretend to be a smart VC taking a cold hard look at Ximian's business model.
If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free).
So is RedHat's Gnome, so is the default KDE installation, so is the default Gnome installation. This doesn't differentiate Ximian's offering from most of the other ways you can get your hands on Gnome, and since Ximian Gnome is Open Source, there is nothing to stop Redhat or others integrating your work into their product, removing whatever competitive advantage you have.
People buy Ximian Connector because they want to be able to connect to Exchange 2000 systems without having to use Outlook Web Access and without having to use a Windows box. Especially in large corporations where engineering is a Linux/UNIX installed base, it's important to be able to schedule with the management and use the shared address books and so forth; if you can't, you might as well not exist.
Fair enough - but it would be better if people used Open Source alternatives, Connector will be useful until a viable Open Source alternative to Exchange becomes popular. Is Connector really a long-term viable revenue generator? Doesn't it pit your Open Source friends against your business model?
People use the Red Carpet CorporateConnect service in order to have a stable, cross-platform way to ship their own software, plus operating system and desktop software from multiple vendors. They need to manage software installation sets and updates across multiple platforms, without vendor lock-in.
This is nothing apt-get can't do, but apt-get can do it automatically on a cron job.
Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.
Is there really a shortage of mirrors and bandwidth for Open Source software distribution? The bandwidth utilization on one popular (and very fast) mirror of a number of distros (mirrors.kernel.org) hardly ever seems to use more than half of its available bandwidth. Why not mirror Ximian at kernel.org and let people get faster downloads for free, or does your business model depend on people only having slow free access to Ximian?
Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.
You wish. I repeat my point - Red Carpet doesn't really do anything that apt-get with a simple GUI (or running as a cron job) can't do. Hardly the basis for a viable business.
Is that a reasonable enough answer?
They are good answers, but something tells me that you would get laughed out of any VC's office that really understood Open Source and Linux.
Re:As an ex-Ximian user...
on
Inside Ximian
·
· Score: 2
Umm... I guess you could upgrade each package individually... but why not just click the little "update now" button in the lower right-hand corner of the main screen which applies all pending updates, without having to select or enter anything?
What a wonderful piece of user-interface design. And what about adding new packages? Is there a way to do that in bulk? It is a pretty common operation.
The bottom line is that Red Carpet is redundant, apt-get does everything it does, and in a more flexible way. If you must have a gui, then build the gui around apt-get, and do some usability testing on it.
As an ex-Ximian user...
on
Inside Ximian
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...I found it best to stick with my distro's default version of Gnome, and use apt-get to keep my system up-to-date. I found that Ximian's "Red Carpet" software had a nasty habit of screwing up the RPM dependencies on my system, and while visually appealing, I didn't really like its interface (for example, the way you need to click on every single package you want upgraded even if there are 50, 60, or 100 of them).
I also got the impression that the purpose of Red Carpet was more to-do with providing Ximian with some kind of business model, than actually providing useful functionality to the end-user - otherwise why not just build it around apt-get and give us all some flexibility?
In the end, I didn't really see any solid advantage to going with Ximian Gnome (although I do like Evolution), and it had the disadvantage of making my rpm dependency tree more complicated than it needs to be.
Not 15 years ago, Ireland was often regarded as the third-world of Europe, yet they are willing to do what it takes to comply with the Kyoto Protocol (flawed that it might be, it is the best we have).
Why can't the US, the world's largest economy, do the same?
...what about Gentoo? Why is the distribution that happens to be favored by non-corporate advanced users any more deserving of recognition than distributions which serve other sets of users?
This is not that I don't like Debian (although I don't have the patience to use it as a desktop OS), but it is dangerous to nominate one project where many other equivolent projects exist, and where there is an ongoing debate as to which is best.
I have been running "null" for about a week now - it is the latest beta for Redhat 8.0, and it is extremely impressive.
Everything is antialiased, there is a nice consistent theme, configuration is much easier, and you no-longer need to understand the difference between things like your Window Manager theme, and your GTK theme.
Installation was a breeze, and everything was auto-detected - the only problem I had was with lpr and my printer - I have reported the bug to redhat.
Open Office is integrated pretty seamlessly into the distro too.
I think Redhat has already got Linux pretty close to being an effective, solid, easy-to-use desktop OS. It will be cool to see what they come up with when this is their actual intention.
...unless you really believe that copying some bits is really the equivolent of boarding a ship, raping and killing those on-board, stealing what is left, then burning the ship and the bodies of those you have murdered.
If you want to refer to violation of copyright law, then please call it what it is.
Nevertheless, selling proprietary SW on proprietary HW is a lot more ethical than monopolizing a supposedly "open" standard.
Again, you are trying to defend Apple by criticizing Microsoft - no matter how bad Microsoft is, it doesn't make Apple any better.
Why not argue against Linux (the subject of my original comment), rather than arguing against a strawman in the form of Microsoft?
Wrong. They were cheap because that's the way IBM designed them. If you knew any computer history, you would know IBM was very late to the microcomputer market, and when it finally showed up with it's IBM P.C., it had to make sure it could reach market quickly with the cheapest and most plentiful parts and architectures -- not the best. It's been one kludge after another since then.
Actually, they are cheap because third-parties reverse engineered those machines and were then able to provide competitive products (which ran the same operating system) which drove down prices. Rather than forcing people to reverse-engineer Apple's hardware (and then still being stuck with a proprietary OS), why not devote energy towards Linux?
So while hammerheads like you are kicking up dust about Apple owning their HW platform, Microsoft can quietly check-off some more "open" standards in their bid to own everything!
Heh. Hammerheads like you are supporting a closed platform, even if Apple does take large amounts of market-share away from Microsoft, we will then be stuck with an even worse situation where not only are we stuck with a closed OS, but we are stuck with closed hardware too, leaving us in an even worse situation.
Wouldn't it be better to support an open OS like Linux, on open hardware, so that if Microsoft does fall, its place isn't taken by Apple, which could be every bit as monopolistic?
It's that apple as a developer is more trustworthy than Microsoft.
Why? The whole point of OS-X is to force people to purchase Apple's pretty but over-priced hardware.
At least Microsoft allows people to decide what hardware they will use Windows with, in many ways, this is what started the PC revolution, however Apple would have return to the bad-old-days when user-communities were fragmented into Atari users, Amiga users, Apple users, etc etc, by operating systems which were tied to a specific manufacturer's hardware.
...why are people migrating away from Linux towards a closed platform in the form of OSX, and what can be done to stop it?
Does the fact that OSX isn't produced by Microsoft, or that it looks pretty, mean that we can overlook the fact that it is closed source? Does Apple have some innate quality that makes them more trustworthy than Microsoft?
It makes me sad when I see users of Open Source software switch to closed source, whether it is Windows or OSX, and it makes me concerned when few here seem to question this.
How can you say they are ridiculously priced when the article points out that, when adjusted for inflation, the price of CD's has remained about constant over 30 years?
Hate to be captain obvious, but we haven't had CDs for 30 years.
...since Napster highlighed the fact that the only people whose interests the record industry serves are their own. We have heard from Courtney Love, Alanis Morisette, and other artists that the record industry doesn't serve them (and recall that those artists are at the top end of the spectrum).
We can deduce from the rediculously inflated price of CDs, the assumption that we are all thieves, and the total lack of diversity in the music that they premote that they don't serve the consumer.
It is therefore clear that the only people whose interests the record industry serves are their own, and they do nothing for us (short of lobby congress to restrict our digital freedoms) - so why should we buy from them?
You do us a disservice when you assume that anyone in the tech community which disagrees with the abuse and corruption of government by corporate interests must, of course, be a Libertarian.
Firstly, even you use of the term "piracy" with respect to copying some bytes betrays our disagreement as I think it is rediculous to equate sharing mp3s with illegally boarding a ship, murdering the crew, raping and murdering the passengers, stealing their cargo, and sinking the ship when you are done.
The normal way for a large company to deal with these is "defensive patents". Bill Gates emails Steve Jobs and says "hey, you are infringing on 20 of my patents", Jobs replies and says "yeah, well you are infringing on at least 20 of my patents, go away" - deal done. Now IBM has more software patents than anyone else, and they have a vested interest in keeping Linux around and healthy, so perhaps they could use their patent portfolio defensively to protect against attacks on Linux or its developers.
The copyright cartel are right about one thing, this is about property, it is about my right to know that property which I own won't spy on me, or prevent me from doing things that I have a legal and moral right to do, such as exercise fair use over copyrighted work.
Computers, and electronic devices in general, are increasingly an important way in which we interact with the world around us. They are increasingly our eyes, ears, and voice in this digital age, and they should work for us, their owners, not an amoral corporation determined to milk our culture for profit.
This is not to say that I disagree with people, or groups of people, working for profit, but I do disagree with the government tipping the balance in their favor at the expense of those who they are supposed to represent.
You wouldn't tolerate a Cop sitting in your home guarding, not you, not even the rest of society, but some faceless corporation who doesn't care about anything but their own profit - so why tolerate a Cop in your computer or CD player?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a perfect job for even the simplest search-and-replace functionality.
I personally don't think that either a purely visual approach is necessarily better. Anyone looking into this should probably build it from the ground up by looking closely at how actual programmers write code, and treat it as a usability problem. Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct. This would mean autogeneration of text (auto-completion of variables and syntax), and restrictions to prevent the developer from entering impossible code.
I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).
I hope whoever is responsible for that gets punished in meta-moderation (but I won't hold my breath).
The bottom line is that Red Carpet is redundant, apt-get does everything it does, and in a more flexible way. If you must have a gui, then build the gui around apt-get, and do some usability testing on it.
I also got the impression that the purpose of Red Carpet was more to-do with providing Ximian with some kind of business model, than actually providing useful functionality to the end-user - otherwise why not just build it around apt-get and give us all some flexibility?
In the end, I didn't really see any solid advantage to going with Ximian Gnome (although I do like Evolution), and it had the disadvantage of making my rpm dependency tree more complicated than it needs to be.
Why can't the US, the world's largest economy, do the same?
This is not that I don't like Debian (although I don't have the patience to use it as a desktop OS), but it is dangerous to nominate one project where many other equivolent projects exist, and where there is an ongoing debate as to which is best.
Everything is antialiased, there is a nice consistent theme, configuration is much easier, and you no-longer need to understand the difference between things like your Window Manager theme, and your GTK theme.
Installation was a breeze, and everything was auto-detected - the only problem I had was with lpr and my printer - I have reported the bug to redhat.
Open Office is integrated pretty seamlessly into the distro too.
I think Redhat has already got Linux pretty close to being an effective, solid, easy-to-use desktop OS. It will be cool to see what they come up with when this is their actual intention.
If you want to refer to violation of copyright law, then please call it what it is.
Why not argue against Linux (the subject of my original comment), rather than arguing against a strawman in the form of Microsoft? Actually, they are cheap because third-parties reverse engineered those machines and were then able to provide competitive products (which ran the same operating system) which drove down prices. Rather than forcing people to reverse-engineer Apple's hardware (and then still being stuck with a proprietary OS), why not devote energy towards Linux? Heh. Hammerheads like you are supporting a closed platform, even if Apple does take large amounts of market-share away from Microsoft, we will then be stuck with an even worse situation where not only are we stuck with a closed OS, but we are stuck with closed hardware too, leaving us in an even worse situation.
Wouldn't it be better to support an open OS like Linux, on open hardware, so that if Microsoft does fall, its place isn't taken by Apple, which could be every bit as monopolistic?
The importance of "content" (remember when we used to call it "art") to the Internet has always been overstated. Take a look at this article.
At least Microsoft allows people to decide what hardware they will use Windows with, in many ways, this is what started the PC revolution, however Apple would have return to the bad-old-days when user-communities were fragmented into Atari users, Amiga users, Apple users, etc etc, by operating systems which were tied to a specific manufacturer's hardware.
Does the fact that OSX isn't produced by Microsoft, or that it looks pretty, mean that we can overlook the fact that it is closed source? Does Apple have some innate quality that makes them more trustworthy than Microsoft?
It makes me sad when I see users of Open Source software switch to closed source, whether it is Windows or OSX, and it makes me concerned when few here seem to question this.
We can deduce from the rediculously inflated price of CDs, the assumption that we are all thieves, and the total lack of diversity in the music that they premote that they don't serve the consumer.
It is therefore clear that the only people whose interests the record industry serves are their own, and they do nothing for us (short of lobby congress to restrict our digital freedoms) - so why should we buy from them?
You do us a disservice when you assume that anyone in the tech community which disagrees with the abuse and corruption of government by corporate interests must, of course, be a Libertarian.
Firstly, even you use of the term "piracy" with respect to copying some bytes betrays our disagreement as I think it is rediculous to equate sharing mp3s with illegally boarding a ship, murdering the crew, raping and murdering the passengers, stealing their cargo, and sinking the ship when you are done.
The normal way for a large company to deal with these is "defensive patents". Bill Gates emails Steve Jobs and says "hey, you are infringing on 20 of my patents", Jobs replies and says "yeah, well you are infringing on at least 20 of my patents, go away" - deal done. Now IBM has more software patents than anyone else, and they have a vested interest in keeping Linux around and healthy, so perhaps they could use their patent portfolio defensively to protect against attacks on Linux or its developers.
Computers, and electronic devices in general, are increasingly an important way in which we interact with the world around us. They are increasingly our eyes, ears, and voice in this digital age, and they should work for us, their owners, not an amoral corporation determined to milk our culture for profit.
This is not to say that I disagree with people, or groups of people, working for profit, but I do disagree with the government tipping the balance in their favor at the expense of those who they are supposed to represent.
You wouldn't tolerate a Cop sitting in your home guarding, not you, not even the rest of society, but some faceless corporation who doesn't care about anything but their own profit - so why tolerate a Cop in your computer or CD player?