the ability to open all filetypes that XP/Vista opens, and more, including.docx and all the video/audio formats and devices
an interaction interface that is consistent across all applications (yes, I know Windows and even OS X don't do this; but Linux has to be better than Windows/Macs to beat them)
changes to the interface so that it can be understood by non-experts
then Linux notebooks/netbooks will continue to be dead in the water for Joe and Jill User.
"Better" in this context does not mean "cooler for the geek", it means "more easily usable for the masses".
Microsoft doesn't like FOSS, but even more they hate someone coming up with a file format that is better than theirs. Plenty of FOSS implements Microsoft file formats, but to have a competing format become more widespread than their own is what terrifies Microsoft.
> It had been years since I had seen a book typeset using LaTeX.
The publishing industry (including my company) typesets books using LaTeX all the time. The reason you don't notice it (apart from the superior quality) is that it does its job of typesetting very well.
If this book has been typeset using LaTeX then I'm a Dutchman, or something has gone very wrong (and I'd like the author to contact me to let me know what).
Perhaps he was given faulty fonts, perhaps he was using a badly-written publisher's style, or perhaps he -- or his editor -- spent a long time making it look as bad as possible. Maybe OUP had it completely re-typeset in some other system without telling him. There are at least a dozen typographic faults in one paragraph alone, from unnecessary hyphenation to excessive word-spacing to bad math spacing, and LaTeX simply doesn't make those types of mistake unless you work very hard to introduce them manually.
As I don't have the book (and wouldn't understand it anyway:-) I'd be interested to know where the information came from that it was typeset with LaTeX; and if it really was done in LaTeX, I'd love to know WTF kind of style files, fonts, and preamble were used.
Remember newspapers? Articles printed on folded paper that you bought each morning? And people who said "it must be true; I read it in the paper"? (to cynical groans from the gallery).
Same applies everywhere. Google posts it: must be right. Word does it this way: must be right. Government says so: must be right. I saw it on/...
More to the point, people who play with stocks and shares need to know their facts and their history. This was an old story, presumably known and recognisable and remembered as such by anyone who knows their airline history. If you're going to invest in an industry, learn something about it before you start, otherwise you'll be taken for a sucker.
Except that the linked picture shows strawberries on the scales, but the screen shows a choice of all kinds of other fruit and veg, not different kinds of strawberry.
Are the proponents of cloud apps so stupid they don't realise that a network can go down just as easily as a local app? I wouldn't mind betting that Google's outage rate is considerably less than the amount of time the average Word user has to go without Word for some reason.
What you have to take into account is the failure rate of all network segments between you and Google (or wherever). With the best will in the world you're not going to get 100%, ever. It's just a matter of comparing the figures and making the call.
I find word imposable to use, it never does anything *i expect* it to do.
Aha...finally. A lot of the "usability problem" is about users' expectations. Users expect GIMP to be able to rotate an image by an arbitrary value in degrees: it can't (only 90/180/270). Authors and editors expect OO to be able to show applied styles for all text on display: it can't (only block by block as you click). Typesetters expect LaTeX to be able to scale fonts to arbitrary sizes: it can of course, but not by default (there are three competing packages which "fix" this in mutually exclusive ways).
No designer, programmer, or developer can be expected to be omniscient or to read the future, but they should be expected to be able to see what is done in other systems and provide equivalent facilities; otherwise their users will desert them.
if usability experts would devote some of their time and effort into making our own time and effort more worthwhile to the end users
But that is what usability experts do. The difficulty they face is persuading the designers, programmers, and developers that what they find out about the program's usability is actually the case.
A good example is OpenOffice: unlike Word, it has no way to show the style name attached to each block for all the text on display. Word's "style margin" does this excellently, but in OO you have to visit each block (para, item, heading, etc) in turn to see what style it uses. This makes OO productively unusable for professional editing for publication. When I explained this to OO, they didn't see why you can't just visit each block in turn: they were unable to grasp the productivity benefit of being able to see the styles for whole screenfuls of text at a time, and were unwilling to accept the concept.
So be it...but if designers, programmers, and developers want to become more worthwhile to end users, they need to become more willing to listen and understand, and to set aside the idea that their product is only used by people like themselves.
if you can decide for the user, don't confront him with the question, let the program figure it for the user
The problem comes when the programmers or designers do this, but make the wrong default because they are looking at the problem with programmers' or designers' eyes, not users'. It is excruciatingly difficult to persuade programmers and designers to get their software tested for usability by actual users, as well as to get them to accept the results.
For example, the French have no problem with an overbearing State that nitpickingly regulates every aspect of their life,
The difference being that the French government compensates for this by providing local services far in advance of anything other countries provide. "Our population is now X, and we need a new library." -- "Sure, no problem: it'll be one that we (Jean Gouvernement) decide on, but you'll get it."
Sure, the bureaucracy is horrendous, and you get lard-ass time-servers everywhere, but even in the US of A there are conscientious, hard-working people in public services trying to do a good job. As this topic has correctly identified, it's the incompetent management layer above them that does the harm.
Surely in the wunnerful US of A all these things are provided by private businesses? After all, we know that private enterprise is always infallible and much much better than public authorities...I mean look at N-Ron, uh, Bare Sterns, umm...
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, will they have fixed the notorious bug which allows the user accidentally to paste entire chapters into a footnote?
I've had two users come up to me recently saying they were editing their footnotes and suddenly the whole of the next n chapters "just disappeared".
More to the point, do OOo even care?
What worries me is that anyone would even consider doing business with a company called "Overstock.com" in the first place.
then Linux notebooks/netbooks will continue to be dead in the water for Joe and Jill User.
"Better" in this context does not mean "cooler for the geek", it means "more easily usable for the masses".
> I don't see how any self-respecting scientist can sleep at night until this situation is rectified.
Maybe that was the problem with one of the projects...they used the wrong orifice :-)
IBM gave up the fight.
Microsoft doesn't like FOSS, but even more they hate someone coming up with a file format that is better than theirs. Plenty of FOSS implements Microsoft file formats, but to have a competing format become more widespread than their own is what terrifies Microsoft.
All your data are belong to us...
> It had been years since I had seen a book typeset using LaTeX.
The publishing industry (including my company) typesets books using LaTeX all the time. The reason you don't notice it (apart from the superior quality) is that it does its job of typesetting very well.
If this book has been typeset using LaTeX then I'm a Dutchman, or something has gone very wrong (and I'd like the author to contact me to let me know what).
Perhaps he was given faulty fonts, perhaps he was using a badly-written publisher's style, or perhaps he -- or his editor -- spent a long time making it look as bad as possible. Maybe OUP had it completely re-typeset in some other system without telling him. There are at least a dozen typographic faults in one paragraph alone, from unnecessary hyphenation to excessive word-spacing to bad math spacing, and LaTeX simply doesn't make those types of mistake unless you work very hard to introduce them manually.
As a test I screenshot a random paragraph that I viewed in Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, and then retyped it in LaTeX and typeset it (PDF).
As I don't have the book (and wouldn't understand it anyway :-) I'd be interested to know where the information came from that it was typeset with LaTeX; and if it really was done in LaTeX, I'd love to know WTF kind of style files, fonts, and preamble were used.
Only an idiot defaults a missing date to today. Sensible defaults are 0000-00-00 and 1970-01-01, or their equivalent, according to context.
You may yet eat your words on this one :-)
Same applies everywhere. Google posts it: must be right. Word does it this way: must be right. Government says so: must be right. I saw it on /...
More to the point, people who play with stocks and shares need to know their facts and their history. This was an old story, presumably known and recognisable and remembered as such by anyone who knows their airline history. If you're going to invest in an industry, learn something about it before you start, otherwise you'll be taken for a sucker.
But Vista runs perfectly happily (virtualised or dual-booted) on my new Mac :-)
It would be more compelling if the reviewer learned to use punctuation properly.
Except that the linked picture shows strawberries on the scales, but the screen shows a choice of all kinds of other fruit and veg, not different kinds of strawberry.
Your congresscritter won't listen, however, because he or she has already been bought off by the RIAA, Microsoft, Sony-Bertelsmann, etc etc etc.
Are the proponents of cloud apps so stupid they don't realise that a network can go down just as easily as a local app? I wouldn't mind betting that Google's outage rate is considerably less than the amount of time the average Word user has to go without Word for some reason.
What you have to take into account is the failure rate of all network segments between you and Google (or wherever). With the best will in the world you're not going to get 100%, ever. It's just a matter of comparing the figures and making the call.
Mod parent up to 5 informational for the correction
Yeah, they should all run DOS just fine...
I find word imposable to use, it never does anything *i expect* it to do.
Aha...finally. A lot of the "usability problem" is about users' expectations. Users expect GIMP to be able to rotate an image by an arbitrary value in degrees: it can't (only 90/180/270). Authors and editors expect OO to be able to show applied styles for all text on display: it can't (only block by block as you click). Typesetters expect LaTeX to be able to scale fonts to arbitrary sizes: it can of course, but not by default (there are three competing packages which "fix" this in mutually exclusive ways).
No designer, programmer, or developer can be expected to be omniscient or to read the future, but they should be expected to be able to see what is done in other systems and provide equivalent facilities; otherwise their users will desert them.
But that is what usability experts do. The difficulty they face is persuading the designers, programmers, and developers that what they find out about the program's usability is actually the case.
A good example is OpenOffice: unlike Word, it has no way to show the style name attached to each block for all the text on display. Word's "style margin" does this excellently, but in OO you have to visit each block (para, item, heading, etc) in turn to see what style it uses. This makes OO productively unusable for professional editing for publication. When I explained this to OO, they didn't see why you can't just visit each block in turn: they were unable to grasp the productivity benefit of being able to see the styles for whole screenfuls of text at a time, and were unwilling to accept the concept.
So be it...but if designers, programmers, and developers want to become more worthwhile to end users, they need to become more willing to listen and understand, and to set aside the idea that their product is only used by people like themselves.
The problem comes when the programmers or designers do this, but make the wrong default because they are looking at the problem with programmers' or designers' eyes, not users'. It is excruciatingly difficult to persuade programmers and designers to get their software tested for usability by actual users, as well as to get them to accept the results.
The difference being that the French government compensates for this by providing local services far in advance of anything other countries provide.
"Our population is now X, and we need a new library." -- "Sure, no problem: it'll be one that we (Jean Gouvernement) decide on, but you'll get it."
Sure, the bureaucracy is horrendous, and you get lard-ass time-servers everywhere, but even in the US of A there are conscientious, hard-working people in public services trying to do a good job. As this topic has correctly identified, it's the incompetent management layer above them that does the harm.
Surely in the wunnerful US of A all these things are provided by private businesses? After all, we know that private enterprise is always infallible and much much better than public authorities...I mean look at N-Ron, uh, Bare Sterns, umm...
We have the finest politicians money can buy, and they're selling well...
> the first commercial general purpose computer, the Ferranti Mark I.
I thought the first commercial general-purpose computer was the Leo.