Placement? My Unity desktop has the icons down the LH side. My Mac OS X desktop has them along the bottom. Unless you're in some kind of parallel universe where these things are the same, those are called "different placements".
When it's working correctly, yes, a modern Linux GUI is, generally speaking, easier to use than Windows or Mac OS X.
But when it's not, it is at least usually fixable on a non-geological timescale, whereas Windows and OS X are not.
Linux is trying to be all things to everyone, and it's failing some of them. Personally, I quite like Unity (OK, so whip me:-) but I'm an end user with modest requirements: I use Linux because it provides the programs I need to use, and it does so in a usable manner — for me — which Windows and OS X don't.
I have an abiding respect for and debt of gratitude to the vast majority of developers who provide the software I use, and I sympathise with them if they feel they are being asked to emphasise eye-candy interfaces for end users when they'd rather leave it all in the config file. I also have a curious dislike of a very tiny fraction of developers who appear to be on another planet, and who include features that no-one will ever use, and omit key facilities because they themselves would never use them. Fortunately these dinosaurs are getting fewer.
Because of this, Linux will never be a mainstream end-user desktop OS like Windows. It's too clever and powerful, and that's why I prefer it. Most of it is usable: a few corners are not, and still need work.
Actually it's just measuring. Presupposing "well" and "badly" isn't part of it, if the tasks are designed to measure the software accurately.
But yes, you're right, the article is a crock, and doesn't measure anything resembling usability. User comments are very useful, but only in conjunction with some hard data.
Bug reporting systems aimed at developers should not be available to end users. They ask for (and expose) all kinds of irrelevant things that confuse the user.
Instead, use a form that automatically picks up as much information as it can about the application, platform, and environment, and then asks what happened to make the user want to report it. Allow a screenshot to be attached (warning that unreadable shots can't be used). Don't try to gather information that the end user cannot be expected to know. By all means provide a link to a developer-oriented bug reporting system, for users who do know what they are doing, but for the end user Keep It Simple.
...what else would they be useful for? I mean, is there something that a typical desktop/workstation does today that could be improved by adding some qubit-based magic behind the scenes...?
That is, will it run Emacs, LaTeX, and other important stuff?:-)
Pay teachers well and make sure their job description doesn't include "must have experience with taming wild animals" and you'll get better teachers and hence better education.
Not with pricks like this in charge of your school board you won't.
he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology.
This is why the USA has become a laughing-stock in education. He's not qualified to teach any subject at all except education itself. Except that in the USA, having a degree in education apparently qualifies you to teach any subject under the sun, regardless of whether or not you actually know anything about it.
OK, so maybe he has never actually been a teacher, and maybe never wanted to be one, but went straight into educational administration. In which case he's equally unqualified. The guy basically knows dick.
If you put completely unqualified people in charge of educating your kids, you'll end up with uneducated kids.
Oh, you already got them. Oops. Sorry. Game over. You lose. New game?
It's crazy. My old N800 PDA could run CUPS, so i could print the PDFs I created with LaTeX on it. WTF are they thinking, not having printing on it? And why has no-one ported CUPS?
The cost to the organization to recreate that information has already reached the millions and that does not include the lost business opportunities.
You think the company gives a rat's ass about this? It'll be hidden in the capital account as an investment, so it will never affect the bottom line. I suggest that if the company couldn't care about it, you shouldn't either, unless you have a personal intellectual stake in it (like it was something you personally invented, and are therefore due the kudos for). Most senior managers are far too stupid to grasp the effects of their actions, and are far too adept at hiding them — that's why they are in the position they are in.
If you and the company have parted amicably, and there are still people there who may be personal friends of long standing, and you all know and trust each other, then perhaps they would, even if it's unlikely. If, on the other hand, you got fired, or left out of frustration or dissatisfaction, and there's no-one left there now who remembers you, then they almost certainly would not. Either way, companies are not well known for being nice to their former employees. There are undoubtedly exceptions, but I suspect they stick out because they are rarities.
Do you think intellectual property is any different?
Yes, radically. The reduction of everything to a putative monetary value is one of the most obvious failings of modern management. As they tend to lack the higher faculties, such as rational analysis and critical thinking, they welcome any cliché as a godsend. The biggest difference between so-called "intellectual" property and a $10 bill is that the "IP" can be duplicated and reused ad infinitum (or nauseam, depending on your point of view), whereas the Treasury tends to take a dim view of people who duplicate paper money.
What they could have done is just outsourced the entire Teacher Dept email service to Google, using a closed server in the same way as Google offers Gmail to universities (my university moved all the student email that way a year ago). That would get you the integrated calendar and other collab options that FOSS email can't provide.
The problems I have seen with Exchange are not scalability (so long as you buy big enough hardware), but training the users not to do silly things, like never deleting anything and never emptying the trash, or constantly sorting and re-sorting folders with a gazillion messages in them, or trying to steal a licensed copy of some proprietary software to use at home by zipping up the install DVD and attaching the resulting (humungous) zip file to an email to an off-site address. The default interface (Outlook, and especially OWA, even the new one) may suck, but Exchange itself is fairly robust. AD, on the other hand...
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Something about being created in his own image? Srsly, the small-minded little piece of work who brought this up in the first place was objecting that the book was unsuitable for kids. So that means the Bible is unsuitable for kids? Way to go, fundies — not only assholes, but ignorant assholes.
Unlike the uselss.biz and.co TLDs that no one care about,.xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
This entire argument is bogus. In what way does it damage their names or reps? You really think anyone of any significance would actually believe that sears.xxx or ibm.xxx means that Sears or IBM have just started up porno services?
Perhaps, but most Motorola phones suck little black toads. Unreliable, restrictive, and unimaginative are the three words which first come to mind. Not unimaginative in visual design — the RAZR was certainly groundbreaking that way — but in function. They may have a lot of patents, but as I have posted before, Google are on a hiding to nothing if they think they're going to benefit from them.
[...] the display on the DROID RAZR [...] still isn’t perfect
That's going to kill it: it's one of the first things people look at. If it looks grainy compared with other phones, it's a loser.
can’t even delete an icon off the home screen using one hand
If it's only usable by people with large hands, that's a bit restrictive. It also demonstrates that there was insufficient user testing done.
[...] the device instantly reacting to every touch event, swipe and drag
I find this hard to believe except on a brand new machine with no apps. All Android devices suffer from an exceptionally poor design philosophy, that what is going on under the hood is more important than the user's input. So once you have loaded up your apps and configured your connectivity (polling frequencies, downloads, etc), the responsivity of the interface takes a nosedive, with the system believing that its internal housekeeping must run at a higher priority than the interface. Wrong: a usable system (of any kind, not just smartphones) must absolutely respond instantaneously to user input before resuming whatever internal processes are active. No matter how fast the processor, if the OS is going to prioritise its background tasks higher than the interface, it's a loser. System designers don't understand this: they believe the user must always wait.
Is it a device worthy of being the new Motorola RAZR?
Possibly, but to me it looks like it was designed exclusively for the US, with its restrictive, antiquated cellphone companies, and its core of unfortunate and unenlightened users who have only just migrated off phones with pull-out aerials. In a country where vendors can get away with almost any old rubbish, including hopelessly outdated OS versions, ridiculous charging models (pay to receive, FFS?), and patchy coverage, it might just succeed.
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Placement? My Unity desktop has the icons down the LH side. My Mac OS X desktop has them along the bottom. Unless you're in some kind of parallel universe where these things are the same, those are called "different placements".
But when it's not, it is at least usually fixable on a non-geological timescale, whereas Windows and OS X are not.
Linux is trying to be all things to everyone, and it's failing some of them. Personally, I quite like Unity (OK, so whip me :-) but I'm an end user with modest requirements: I use Linux because it provides the programs I need to use, and it does so in a usable manner — for me — which Windows and OS X don't.
I have an abiding respect for and debt of gratitude to the vast majority of developers who provide the software I use, and I sympathise with them if they feel they are being asked to emphasise eye-candy interfaces for end users when they'd rather leave it all in the config file. I also have a curious dislike of a very tiny fraction of developers who appear to be on another planet, and who include features that no-one will ever use, and omit key facilities because they themselves would never use them. Fortunately these dinosaurs are getting fewer.
Because of this, Linux will never be a mainstream end-user desktop OS like Windows. It's too clever and powerful, and that's why I prefer it. Most of it is usable: a few corners are not, and still need work.
It's measuring how well people did on tasks
Actually it's just measuring. Presupposing "well" and "badly" isn't part of it, if the tasks are designed to measure the software accurately.
But yes, you're right, the article is a crock, and doesn't measure anything resembling usability. User comments are very useful, but only in conjunction with some hard data.
Why is the NTSB targeting gadgets instead of bad drivers?
Because the unions will have their ass if they try to make out it was the drivers' fault.
Instead, use a form that automatically picks up as much information as it can about the application, platform, and environment, and then asks what happened to make the user want to report it. Allow a screenshot to be attached (warning that unreadable shots can't be used). Don't try to gather information that the end user cannot be expected to know. By all means provide a link to a developer-oriented bug reporting system, for users who do know what they are doing, but for the end user Keep It Simple.
...what else would they be useful for? I mean, is there something that a typical desktop/workstation does today that could be improved by adding some qubit-based magic behind the scenes...?
That is, will it run Emacs, LaTeX, and other important stuff? :-)
Sadly, they were told, repeatedly, but they have cloth ears.
I wish there was a similar OS 9 mode for OS X.
It's called Unity :-)
Pay teachers well and make sure their job description doesn't include "must have experience with taming wild animals" and you'll get better teachers and hence better education.
Not with pricks like this in charge of your school board you won't.
he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology.
This is why the USA has become a laughing-stock in education. He's not qualified to teach any subject at all except education itself. Except that in the USA, having a degree in education apparently qualifies you to teach any subject under the sun, regardless of whether or not you actually know anything about it.
OK, so maybe he has never actually been a teacher, and maybe never wanted to be one, but went straight into educational administration. In which case he's equally unqualified. The guy basically knows dick.
If you put completely unqualified people in charge of educating your kids, you'll end up with uneducated kids.
Oh, you already got them. Oops. Sorry. Game over. You lose. New game?
It's crazy. My old N800 PDA could run CUPS, so i could print the PDFs I created with LaTeX on it. WTF are they thinking, not having printing on it? And why has no-one ported CUPS?
Hmm. I wonder can you get fudge sticks to work in a glue gun? Maybe Cadbury's Finger of Fudge bars would do. Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart...
The cost to the organization to recreate that information has already reached the millions and that does not include the lost business opportunities.
You think the company gives a rat's ass about this? It'll be hidden in the capital account as an investment, so it will never affect the bottom line. I suggest that if the company couldn't care about it, you shouldn't either, unless you have a personal intellectual stake in it (like it was something you personally invented, and are therefore due the kudos for). Most senior managers are far too stupid to grasp the effects of their actions, and are far too adept at hiding them — that's why they are in the position they are in.
Would the company do the same for you?
If you and the company have parted amicably, and there are still people there who may be personal friends of long standing, and you all know and trust each other, then perhaps they would, even if it's unlikely. If, on the other hand, you got fired, or left out of frustration or dissatisfaction, and there's no-one left there now who remembers you, then they almost certainly would not. Either way, companies are not well known for being nice to their former employees. There are undoubtedly exceptions, but I suspect they stick out because they are rarities.
Do you think intellectual property is any different?
Yes, radically. The reduction of everything to a putative monetary value is one of the most obvious failings of modern management. As they tend to lack the higher faculties, such as rational analysis and critical thinking, they welcome any cliché as a godsend. The biggest difference between so-called "intellectual" property and a $10 bill is that the "IP" can be duplicated and reused ad infinitum (or nauseam, depending on your point of view), whereas the Treasury tends to take a dim view of people who duplicate paper money.
Gosh, what a good idea...
I'm hoping mine will do the same for me :-)
The problems I have seen with Exchange are not scalability (so long as you buy big enough hardware), but training the users not to do silly things, like never deleting anything and never emptying the trash, or constantly sorting and re-sorting folders with a gazillion messages in them, or trying to steal a licensed copy of some proprietary software to use at home by zipping up the install DVD and attaching the resulting (humungous) zip file to an email to an off-site address. The default interface (Outlook, and especially OWA, even the new one) may suck, but Exchange itself is fairly robust. AD, on the other hand...
Oh, and assuming it does actually make and receive phone calls and texts :-)
Yes, if it doesn't have CarrierIQ
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Something about being created in his own image? Srsly, the small-minded little piece of work who brought this up in the first place was objecting that the book was unsuitable for kids. So that means the Bible is unsuitable for kids? Way to go, fundies — not only assholes, but ignorant assholes.
Unlike the uselss .biz and .co TLDs that no one care about, .xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
This entire argument is bogus. In what way does it damage their names or reps? You really think anyone of any significance would actually believe that sears.xxx or ibm.xxx means that Sears or IBM have just started up porno services?
WTF are Newegg anyway?
Please, Hollywood, don't spoil Doctor Who.
I think the Op might be confusing them with someone who gives a shit.
The RAZR was a hot phone
Perhaps, but most Motorola phones suck little black toads. Unreliable, restrictive, and unimaginative are the three words which first come to mind. Not unimaginative in visual design — the RAZR was certainly groundbreaking that way — but in function. They may have a lot of patents, but as I have posted before, Google are on a hiding to nothing if they think they're going to benefit from them.
[...] the display on the DROID RAZR [...] still isn’t perfect
That's going to kill it: it's one of the first things people look at. If it looks grainy compared with other phones, it's a loser.
can’t even delete an icon off the home screen using one hand
If it's only usable by people with large hands, that's a bit restrictive. It also demonstrates that there was insufficient user testing done.
[...] the device instantly reacting to every touch event, swipe and drag
I find this hard to believe except on a brand new machine with no apps. All Android devices suffer from an exceptionally poor design philosophy, that what is going on under the hood is more important than the user's input. So once you have loaded up your apps and configured your connectivity (polling frequencies, downloads, etc), the responsivity of the interface takes a nosedive, with the system believing that its internal housekeeping must run at a higher priority than the interface. Wrong: a usable system (of any kind, not just smartphones) must absolutely respond instantaneously to user input before resuming whatever internal processes are active. No matter how fast the processor, if the OS is going to prioritise its background tasks higher than the interface, it's a loser. System designers don't understand this: they believe the user must always wait.
Is it a device worthy of being the new Motorola RAZR?
Possibly, but to me it looks like it was designed exclusively for the US, with its restrictive, antiquated cellphone companies, and its core of unfortunate and unenlightened users who have only just migrated off phones with pull-out aerials. In a country where vendors can get away with almost any old rubbish, including hopelessly outdated OS versions, ridiculous charging models (pay to receive, FFS?), and patchy coverage, it might just succeed.
I reviewed Georgina Ferry's book "A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World's First Office Computer" for /. in May 2003.