I guess the definition of "crude" is subjective, but I don't know where the "no one was willing" bit comes from.
Well, people might have been willing, but totally unqualified and incapable.
I guess both the Gnome and KDE folks are trying for a barely mediocre interface
If that was their goal, they are succeeding admirably indeed. Keep adding flashing lights and neon spinning 3d graphics, maybe a GUI will magically appear...
I had a guy show up at a presentation with a Sony laptop, and we had to make a change to his display settings and reboot for it to work right with the projector.
His Pentium 3 800 mhz laptop with 128 megs of RAM took literally 7 minutes to boot, because Sony was auto-loading over a dozen different programs at boot time.
Our VAIOs, while great machines, have software that I have no clue what it does. I can't just remove it because I know it's involved with all the sony doo-dads (like the video camera, the scroll wheel, etc) but there's no indication what software does what, or whether any of it is critical or just fluff.
My first task with my latest Dell desktop: boot it once, make sure it works, Ghost the drive (just in case), immediately wipe the disk and rebuild it sensibly.
It's the same case with area code + number dialing. The area code is analagous to the network.
In most places I've been the area code has no relationship to the person you're calling. Cities with 10 different area codes that have no basis in geography, you just basically keep guessing until you get the right area code (and call 5 wrong people before you get it right)...
If that was the case no one would remember IP addresses, and it seems like most people have no problem in that department.
Huh? If people could easily remm=ember IP addresses, we wouldn't need DNS.
While many network geeks may be able to remember IPs, they are hardly representative fo the population as a whole.
I know the IPs I know because they're all on the same network and start with the same 6 digits, so all i really have to "remember" is the last 6. If I had to truly memorize all 12 for every system I wouldn't have a chance...
How about the Banshee? What a deal! Inadequate 2d combined with the aging Voodoo2 chip but without SLI!! What were they thinking?
What are you talking about? The banshee was one of the best cards in existence when it came out -- the first decent 2d/3d combination card that you could buy for consumer prices ($150).
Yes, you could spend $300 on other cards, yes you could get better performance from a 3d-only SLI setup (that would cost you about $600+ to make), yes you could get better 2d performance from Matrox (again, for at least $50-100 more, without 3d).
You might be thinking of the first-gen 2d/3d card 3dfx had, which was total crap because it used separate chips for each function and really didn't work well at all, but it was still well ahead of its time in terms of features for the consumer...
Otoh, I find GIMP Win32 to be faster, and Paint Shop Pro to be the best of the three. I even like Corel Photopaint better. What am I missing that the Photoshop lovers see?
I would just guess that you're not using it 8 hours a day in a professional deadline environment. I don't mean that in any derogatory way -- I doubt you could tell the difference between a sable hair brush and an ox hair brush by painting with it, but paying ten times as much for the sable hair is not a waste for a professional painter, because he CAN tell the difference (and use it).
The guy in the next office from me is a database programmer and uses PSP because he can't figure out Photoshop and never does anything but RGB web graphics and powerpoint images with it. I, on the other hand, send out stuff to printers and make huge montages and do fairly involved image editing work on 300+ meg files, so I use Photoshop.
If you don't work with SWOP, if you aren't concerned with ink density or screen angles,if you aren't created complex selection masks, then you probably don't need (or even want) Photoshop.
As you "recall"? You must have access to news sources that I don't, since this hasn't even been whispered by Gore's supporters in all the news shows that I've been monitoring.
Okay, maybe I was being too "polite" -- Bush was calling people all damn day, the same way Gore was calling people, and any other high-ranking GOP or Democratic official was calling people. This is not something new, especially as a way to get people out in critical states, though I'm sure you'll come up with a way that Bill Clinton or a Democrat invented it so that the Republicans had to "lower themselves" to use the technique.
The Democrats hired a tele-marketing firm on the day of the election to create problems where there weren't any
There weren't any? As I recall (there's that phrase again!) people were calling their congressmen AND the board of election in palm Beach County as early as 9 am because they thought the ballot was confusing. Whether you think those people are idiots and should be ignored is no matter, the fact is that THEY started calling first thing in the morning to complain, and the democrats picked up that something was wrong and started calling others in the area to encourage that they complain (keeping in mind this is well before anyone had a clue what the final numbers of Florida would be).
It was due to this that an advisory was put out to try and clarify the ballots -- maybe it made a difference in the number of mistaken votes, or not, there's no real way to know. But I can hardly imagine how this is a nefarious scheme since I don't know of any other location where it took place, and NO ONE had a clue that Florida was going to be critical when this was happening.
in concert with the immediate decent of other Democratic heavyweights (Jesse Jackson, Wexler, etc.)
Ah, so the descent of republican heavyweights had nothing to do with it, I understand now. Everything done by democrats=bad/evil/extralegal, everything done by republicans=good/pure/constitutional. Thanks for clearing that one up for me.
Tell me again why no one in america seems willing to accept that maybe they don't have a monopoly on common sense or logic? Why is someone who disagrees with you automatically branded as breaking the law and trying to destroy the constitution?
I accept that republicans think everything is okay, lets just move on -- why do they assume anyone who disagrees is anti-american, that we have no capability for thought and are clearly puppets of some higher power? Why is it so unthinkable that the Florida Supreme Court actually did their job by ruling on the law? Is it impossible to conceive that an election whose totals are a thousand times smaller than the margin of error might actually HAVE AN ERROR? This seems like basic math to me, yet it seems to truly baffle anyone who voted for Bush.
I have no problem with Bush being elected (though people who HATE Bill Clinton seem to have a REAL problem with Gore being elected) but I have little faith that we've had an accurate assesment of WHO won yet.
(it should also be noted since you brought it up that the republican protestors are being funded by the GOP -- folks like Jesse Jackson were there on their own dime, and Gore was pretty blatantly being unsupportive of them. But hey, Bush has the moral high ground so anything goes).
After the Gore team took the initiative in circumventing Florida's election system ON ELECTION DAY when they hired that tele-marketing firm to call people and ask them to protest, Bush's team had no choice but to respond
Ah, the old "they MADE me do it" excuse.
Tell me, how is calling voters "circumventing" the election process? As I recall the GOP has no qualms about calling voters on election day -- I think its perfectly within everyones rights to do so.
We'd be happy to buy our own soda at CostCo and truck it in. Problems with that:
Where to put it? There is one refrigerator on the floor and we can't exactly just take it over with soda.
Who to do it? We're in the middle of Boston and most people take public transit. Lugging in a few cases of soda regularly is a bit of a pain.
If we try to get our own half-size fridge and hide it in a lab someplace, facilities will ultimately find and take it, I guarantee.
You buy a fridge and have it delivered by the place you buy it from. That is the drink fridge, and I don't know why "facilities" will take it, but tell them (and mean it) that its there officially and if they touch it they are fired.
WE have our drinks delivered by the local vending distributor so that we can get both coke and pepsi products, but if you use a LOT (we go through a dozen cases every other week) you can just call the pepsi or coke distributor and they will be happy to physically deliver 20 cases of coke products a week to your office (or tell you who will). It only costs us something like.15/can, so its really nothing in terms of expense (a few hundred dollars a month? We spend more than that on stupid report binders).
If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
You should work in academia -- it pays less, but has more perks (depending on where you are) than a typical company.
You generally start out with a lot more time off, and also get more holiday time at the university level. I'm currently making 75% of the salary I know I could get on the open market, but its nice to work in an environment that's as over-all casual (dress, attitude, schedules) as a university.
No 80-hour/week death marches, no bankruptcy (no stock options either), and I started with 4-5 weeks of vacation my first year (plus 2-3 weeks of sick leave, 1 week of "personal leave" and comp time). My friends might be making more money, but its nice to wake up and say "I'm gonna take off two weeks next month and go hiking" without worrying that its the only time you'll have all year, or that you'll come back to find your job is gone. I know I've still got another few weeks worth of time if I should want it...
You want to back up your implied knowledge on computer interface history here with some facts + references?
This is my implied knowledge: MS Windows is not a 100% clone of any Mac OS, anything from PARC, anything from Palm, or anything from IBM (or anyone else). MS has done original work on their UI, whether people like the results or not is of no consequence to that fact.
You're quick to say that MS is innovating, but you don't give any examples. Please, I invite you to show us the list of UI innovations that MS came up with themselves. For a company that spends $5bil a year on R&D, show us what it's produced
Off the top of my head i think of the sidewinder joystick -- a fantastic interface that is obvious in hindsight but was so novel when it came out. It makes perfect sense as a way to interact with the computer.
More software-oriented, I can think of the dynamic menus they're using in Office 2k. Again, you may hate them completely, but that's of no consequence to this discussion.
But of course these are all rough, blatant things -- an UI is not comprised of these "big" points, for the most part what makes an UI usable is the little things, like how a context-menu functions. The difference between Windows right-click menus and Mac OS option-click context menus is night and day -- the context menus on Windows actually contain useful functions, while the ones on the Mac OS seem placed there as an afterthought.
Using the right-click menu on a windows system is a relatively IMPORTANT part of running the system, while it isn't on a Mac. That's a BIG UI decision with many consequences. having the third button do cut-and-paste in X, for example, is an UI decision that is (AFAIK) original for Unix but is so completely useless that it hasn't been copied by anyone else. It would be obnoxious to suggest that it was "copied" simply becuase cut-and-paste existed, and third mouse buttons existed. It's still an original UI concept to tie them together in such a fashion.
MFC toolbars can't even handle more than 16 color bitmaps, I for one do not associate that sort of crap with a company that pushes any UI envelops.
If your UI relies on more than black and white to function, it's broken. Adding color is nice, but its a cosmetic issue, NOT one of UI functionality or capability. KDE and Gnome seem to focus on this part as well (making things "prettier") while ignoring the basic functionality of the UI (why can't I copy and paste between ANY applications on my system? That's a serious UI shortcoming). If a user selects "copy" in one location, goes elsewhere and cannot "paste" then the UI has failed that user, no matter if the menu has flaming text or spinning 3D grahics on it. Microsoft (and Apple and Palm) have done excellent jobs of making sure that THEIR UIs do not let down the users in such a fashion (or at least not on a regular basis). THAT is the true work of UI design.
As far as I can tell re gnome and kde, they seem to be trying to copy many of the things I've always regarded as the *worst* aspects of windows
I can't disagree with you there -- it's close enough in appearance that you expect it to function the same, but half of the functions aren't there, and that drives me nuts. I expect that any windows user would be similarly frustrated by a seemingly familiar interface that in fact behaves very differently.
I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
This may be the crux of our disagreement, then -- I don't believe "popup menus" make a UI and more than "paint on canvas" makes a painting (or "characters in text file" make source code).
This seems to be my main issue with KDE/Gnome, as well -- they think that making prettier menus, or floating shapes or customizable buttons is "improving the UI". This stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with UI, it's all cosmetics.
UI is putting buttons where you expect them to be, ensuring that the user is rarely surprised by output (by making sure they understand the ramifications of their input).
The web, for example, is a very "ugly" place, from an aesthetic standpoint -- but it has a FANTASTICALLY successful UI. All you do is click on any blue underlined text and you get taken to the link location! That's pretty much the whole thing, beyond that its cosmetics -- but its that simplicity, clarity, and predictability that have made it so successful.
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
Again, it has NOTHING to do with the buttons or the menus -- making a menu is a technical issue that's easy to solve. The HARD part is figuring out where to put the menu, how it reacts to the user, how it behaves when no attention is being paid, how it displays contents when it is activated, etc.
I'll give you an example: When you have your mouse over a menu, if you go a little bit off the side of the menu, should the menu close? Should it open the menu that is next to the current one (in other words, open the menu under the current location of the mouse and close the one that is where the mouse WAS), or should it keep the old menu open (and if so, how long, and how far should the mouse be allowed to stray?).
I personally find the very unforgiving menus in most X windowing systems to be very hard to use because they will close a menu without hesitation should you stray by even a pixel. It's a very mathematical (and computer-programmer logical) way of behaving, but its simply not a good UI, because it doesn't accept that people do not have perfectly steady hands, or that they need to move the cursor in order to read the menu option. You simply MUST be more forgiving than that to have a useful UI, but I just don't think it's ever occurred to a Unix programmer that users might not be able to drill down through a 7-layer deep cascading menu without being off by a pixel. My grandmother doesn't play enough Quake to be that precise with the mouse!:)
I have personally seen quite a few Windows users freak out when I show them how MacOS works.
I've personally seen quite a few mac-heads freak out when I show them that i can open huge files on windows without ever having to change the memory allocation to the application.
Different aspects of the UI are refined by different companies, and that's (IMHO) why I think people have such fervent preferences in OSes.
And, FWIW, I've spent the last 10 years of my life with a Mac and PC on my desk. In 1993 I preferred the mac, in 2000 I think Win9x/Win2k has far surpassed OS8/9 -- but I'm very eager to see how OSX pans out. (And I'm an artist even!)
Look, when will you guys figure out I'm NOT SAYING that MS invented everything on the GUI, only that they have done a million times more work on UIs than KDE or Gnome have.
And, it's worth noting that it used to be called "Microsoft OS/2", so it's debatable who's user lab the task bar even came out of...
All Microsoft UI R&D is done at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino California
really, is that why Apple now uses ALT-TAB to switch between apps?
UI is not GUI.
And there are no "virgins" in UI development -- they've all ripped off from each other liberally. I never claimed otherwise, only that KDE and Gnome have given back little in terms of advancements...
you are so ignorant, it's laughable. the ui ripoffs have been happening for fiteen frickin years.
No shit, genius -- so tell me did you actually read what I said or just feel self-important enough to contribute this "insight".
I never claimed MS was creating UIs from whole cloth, only that MS has done a hell of a lot more advancement and refinement of UIs than KDE or Gnome has. Apple and Palm and MS have all borrowed from each other, but just as importantly they've all ACTUALLY CREATED NEW THINGS, too! That's called progress -- are we using EXACTLY THE SAME UI that PARC developed all those years ago? No -- because people are actually allowed to develop new concepts to build on old ones. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to be a contributor to progress.
All KDE and Gnome have done is copy the wheel, while the actual developers (at Apple, MS, and Palm) are criticized for spending money without producing a better product?
mmmm...just a sec...X was developed at MIT at the same time as all three!
mmmmm...just a sec, X isn't a UI! you are so ignorant it's laughable.
Call me when you've read more than the nickle version of computer interface history and we might have an intelligent discussion.
"There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon."
Or a Start Menu. Boggles my mind. Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work. Nasty fonts, horrible prints, inconsistent dialogs and menus, not to mention installation and maintainance of the system.
I meant only one UI in that comparison that has R&D money behind it. I specifically call out apple later on as a company doing original work -- I wasn't trying to "rate" the UIs in any way.
Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome approach is to just copy MS. So of course they don't have to spend money to get the same results.
"All three" aren't learning from each other -- both are learning from Windows. There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon.
When Win95 came out, all people did was complain about how stupid the start button is, now we read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome both have start buttons, so they're just as good as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all that money."
So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly there are only two companies that can claim any moral high ground for actually advancing the UI outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They are the only companies I see actually doing NEW things as opposed to "me-too"...
I meant as opposed to folks on slashdot who "do a little work in Gimp now and then" or "I used to work on the school paper, and we used all macs".
i dunno about you but my years of working in the advertising and design industries brings me to the conclusion that Mac rules well beyond all others
Oh, certainly in numbers, Macs still are far ahead in the industry. My personal feel is that it has more to do with inertia than anything -- the same reason a lot of folks here say "oh, to do graphic design you need to use a mac". It's just "common knowledge" that you use macs for prepress, because of the historical development there.
As for OS/2, unfortunately it was only a year or so that it showed so much promise. We converted a LOT of systems to Warp when it came out, so that we could run photoshop on it, and it was fantastic -- I remember the Adobe Forum on Compuserve went nuts when PS3 came out because it wouldn't run on OS/2, and we kept begging IBM to get a win32 system going. The history that COULD have been, I suppose!...
There are no REAL professional graphic designers or publisher that use Windows either.
They use macs because of ColorSync and because Photoshop actually runs much much better on macs.
Son, REAL professional graphic designers don't need colorsync, so it doesn't matter what OS they're on. If you don't know what a CMYK value is gonna look like without help from colorsync, you're not going to know WITH it, either.
Postscript is platform-independent, I've been using Windows for publishing ever since 3.1 (there was a time when any serious photoshop people were using OS/2 Warp to run Photoshop 2.5 because it was the most stable and memory efficient configuration on ANY system). I've meet plenty of Mac folks who don't believe it, but I've never met an imagesetter yet that disagreed with me...
My god, you mean WHO hasn't single-handedly solved every health problem on earth yet? For shame! They're obviously corrupt because they spend any time on tobacco while people are starving (of course, they also do stuff about the starving people, but it's not solved yet so they're obviously not doing enough!)...
Slashdot Mirror
Care to enlighten the rest of us?
Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...
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I guess the definition of "crude" is subjective, but I don't know where the "no one was willing" bit comes from.
Well, people might have been willing, but totally unqualified and incapable.
I guess both the Gnome and KDE folks are trying for a barely mediocre interface
If that was their goal, they are succeeding admirably indeed. Keep adding flashing lights and neon spinning 3d graphics, maybe a GUI will magically appear...
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No kidding -- I'd say the worst, by FAR, is Sony.
I had a guy show up at a presentation with a Sony laptop, and we had to make a change to his display settings and reboot for it to work right with the projector.
His Pentium 3 800 mhz laptop with 128 megs of RAM took literally 7 minutes to boot, because Sony was auto-loading over a dozen different programs at boot time.
Our VAIOs, while great machines, have software that I have no clue what it does. I can't just remove it because I know it's involved with all the sony doo-dads (like the video camera, the scroll wheel, etc) but there's no indication what software does what, or whether any of it is critical or just fluff.
My first task with my latest Dell desktop: boot it once, make sure it works, Ghost the drive (just in case), immediately wipe the disk and rebuild it sensibly.
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It's the same case with area code + number dialing. The area code is analagous to the network.
In most places I've been the area code has no relationship to the person you're calling. Cities with 10 different area codes that have no basis in geography, you just basically keep guessing until you get the right area code (and call 5 wrong people before you get it right)...
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If that was the case no one would remember IP addresses, and it seems like most people have no problem in that department.
Huh? If people could easily remm=ember IP addresses, we wouldn't need DNS.
While many network geeks may be able to remember IPs, they are hardly representative fo the population as a whole.
I know the IPs I know because they're all on the same network and start with the same 6 digits, so all i really have to "remember" is the last 6. If I had to truly memorize all 12 for every system I wouldn't have a chance...
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How about the Banshee? What a deal! Inadequate 2d combined with the aging Voodoo2 chip but without SLI!! What were they thinking?
What are you talking about? The banshee was one of the best cards in existence when it came out -- the first decent 2d/3d combination card that you could buy for consumer prices ($150).
Yes, you could spend $300 on other cards, yes you could get better performance from a 3d-only SLI setup (that would cost you about $600+ to make), yes you could get better 2d performance from Matrox (again, for at least $50-100 more, without 3d).
You might be thinking of the first-gen 2d/3d card 3dfx had, which was total crap because it used separate chips for each function and really didn't work well at all, but it was still well ahead of its time in terms of features for the consumer...
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What it does show is that the Florida Supreme Court has acted outside of the law
No, it only means that the Florida Supreme Court wasn't explicit enough in the BASIS for their decision (whether statuatory or constitutional).
This is basically a non-ruling, it says "try over, and delete all the stuff about the constitution so there are no federal laws involved at all".
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Otoh, I find GIMP Win32 to be faster, and Paint Shop Pro to be the best of the three. I even like Corel Photopaint better. What am I missing that the Photoshop lovers see?
I would just guess that you're not using it 8 hours a day in a professional deadline environment. I don't mean that in any derogatory way -- I doubt you could tell the difference between a sable hair brush and an ox hair brush by painting with it, but paying ten times as much for the sable hair is not a waste for a professional painter, because he CAN tell the difference (and use it).
The guy in the next office from me is a database programmer and uses PSP because he can't figure out Photoshop and never does anything but RGB web graphics and powerpoint images with it. I, on the other hand, send out stuff to printers and make huge montages and do fairly involved image editing work on 300+ meg files, so I use Photoshop.
If you don't work with SWOP, if you aren't concerned with ink density or screen angles,if you aren't created complex selection masks, then you probably don't need (or even want) Photoshop.
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So this is my take, Gimp is better then the current photoshop because: 1) it supports all the features of Photoshop
Really, so I can do my CMYK separations in it now? great!
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As you "recall"? You must have access to news sources that I don't, since this hasn't even been whispered by Gore's supporters in all the news shows that I've been monitoring.
Okay, maybe I was being too "polite" -- Bush was calling people all damn day, the same way Gore was calling people, and any other high-ranking GOP or Democratic official was calling people. This is not something new, especially as a way to get people out in critical states, though I'm sure you'll come up with a way that Bill Clinton or a Democrat invented it so that the Republicans had to "lower themselves" to use the technique.
The Democrats hired a tele-marketing firm on the day of the election to create problems where there weren't any
There weren't any? As I recall (there's that phrase again!) people were calling their congressmen AND the board of election in palm Beach County as early as 9 am because they thought the ballot was confusing. Whether you think those people are idiots and should be ignored is no matter, the fact is that THEY started calling first thing in the morning to complain, and the democrats picked up that something was wrong and started calling others in the area to encourage that they complain (keeping in mind this is well before anyone had a clue what the final numbers of Florida would be).
It was due to this that an advisory was put out to try and clarify the ballots -- maybe it made a difference in the number of mistaken votes, or not, there's no real way to know. But I can hardly imagine how this is a nefarious scheme since I don't know of any other location where it took place, and NO ONE had a clue that Florida was going to be critical when this was happening.
in concert with the immediate decent of other Democratic heavyweights (Jesse Jackson, Wexler, etc.)
Ah, so the descent of republican heavyweights had nothing to do with it, I understand now. Everything done by democrats=bad/evil/extralegal, everything done by republicans=good/pure/constitutional. Thanks for clearing that one up for me.
Tell me again why no one in america seems willing to accept that maybe they don't have a monopoly on common sense or logic? Why is someone who disagrees with you automatically branded as breaking the law and trying to destroy the constitution?
I accept that republicans think everything is okay, lets just move on -- why do they assume anyone who disagrees is anti-american, that we have no capability for thought and are clearly puppets of some higher power? Why is it so unthinkable that the Florida Supreme Court actually did their job by ruling on the law? Is it impossible to conceive that an election whose totals are a thousand times smaller than the margin of error might actually HAVE AN ERROR? This seems like basic math to me, yet it seems to truly baffle anyone who voted for Bush.
I have no problem with Bush being elected (though people who HATE Bill Clinton seem to have a REAL problem with Gore being elected) but I have little faith that we've had an accurate assesment of WHO won yet.
(it should also be noted since you brought it up that the republican protestors are being funded by the GOP -- folks like Jesse Jackson were there on their own dime, and Gore was pretty blatantly being unsupportive of them. But hey, Bush has the moral high ground so anything goes).
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After the Gore team took the initiative in circumventing Florida's election system ON ELECTION DAY when they hired that tele-marketing firm to call people and ask them to protest, Bush's team had no choice but to respond
Ah, the old "they MADE me do it" excuse.
Tell me, how is calling voters "circumventing" the election process? As I recall the GOP has no qualms about calling voters on election day -- I think its perfectly within everyones rights to do so.
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We'd be happy to buy our own soda at CostCo and truck it in. Problems with that:
.15/can, so its really nothing in terms of expense (a few hundred dollars a month? We spend more than that on stupid report binders).
Where to put it? There is one refrigerator on the floor and we can't exactly just take it over with soda.
Who to do it? We're in the middle of Boston and most people take public transit. Lugging in a few cases of soda regularly is a bit of a pain.
If we try to get our own half-size fridge and hide it in a lab someplace, facilities will ultimately find and take it, I guarantee.
You buy a fridge and have it delivered by the place you buy it from. That is the drink fridge, and I don't know why "facilities" will take it, but tell them (and mean it) that its there officially and if they touch it they are fired.
WE have our drinks delivered by the local vending distributor so that we can get both coke and pepsi products, but if you use a LOT (we go through a dozen cases every other week) you can just call the pepsi or coke distributor and they will be happy to physically deliver 20 cases of coke products a week to your office (or tell you who will). It only costs us something like
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If I ever found a company that offered 4 weeks of vacation to start I would be willing to make substantial allowances for that. I can't be the only one. Try offering more vacation!
You should work in academia -- it pays less, but has more perks (depending on where you are) than a typical company.
You generally start out with a lot more time off, and also get more holiday time at the university level. I'm currently making 75% of the salary I know I could get on the open market, but its nice to work in an environment that's as over-all casual (dress, attitude, schedules) as a university.
No 80-hour/week death marches, no bankruptcy (no stock options either), and I started with 4-5 weeks of vacation my first year (plus 2-3 weeks of sick leave, 1 week of "personal leave" and comp time). My friends might be making more money, but its nice to wake up and say "I'm gonna take off two weeks next month and go hiking" without worrying that its the only time you'll have all year, or that you'll come back to find your job is gone. I know I've still got another few weeks worth of time if I should want it...
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You want to back up your implied knowledge on computer interface history here with some facts + references?
This is my implied knowledge: MS Windows is not a 100% clone of any Mac OS, anything from PARC, anything from Palm, or anything from IBM (or anyone else). MS has done original work on their UI, whether people like the results or not is of no consequence to that fact.
You're quick to say that MS is innovating, but you don't give any examples. Please, I invite you to show us the list of UI innovations that MS came up with themselves. For a company that spends $5bil a year on R&D, show us what it's produced
Off the top of my head i think of the sidewinder joystick -- a fantastic interface that is obvious in hindsight but was so novel when it came out. It makes perfect sense as a way to interact with the computer.
More software-oriented, I can think of the dynamic menus they're using in Office 2k. Again, you may hate them completely, but that's of no consequence to this discussion.
But of course these are all rough, blatant things -- an UI is not comprised of these "big" points, for the most part what makes an UI usable is the little things, like how a context-menu functions. The difference between Windows right-click menus and Mac OS option-click context menus is night and day -- the context menus on Windows actually contain useful functions, while the ones on the Mac OS seem placed there as an afterthought.
Using the right-click menu on a windows system is a relatively IMPORTANT part of running the system, while it isn't on a Mac. That's a BIG UI decision with many consequences. having the third button do cut-and-paste in X, for example, is an UI decision that is (AFAIK) original for Unix but is so completely useless that it hasn't been copied by anyone else. It would be obnoxious to suggest that it was "copied" simply becuase cut-and-paste existed, and third mouse buttons existed. It's still an original UI concept to tie them together in such a fashion.
MFC toolbars can't even handle more than 16 color bitmaps, I for one do not associate that sort of crap with a company that pushes any UI envelops.
If your UI relies on more than black and white to function, it's broken. Adding color is nice, but its a cosmetic issue, NOT one of UI functionality or capability. KDE and Gnome seem to focus on this part as well (making things "prettier") while ignoring the basic functionality of the UI (why can't I copy and paste between ANY applications on my system? That's a serious UI shortcoming). If a user selects "copy" in one location, goes elsewhere and cannot "paste" then the UI has failed that user, no matter if the menu has flaming text or spinning 3D grahics on it. Microsoft (and Apple and Palm) have done excellent jobs of making sure that THEIR UIs do not let down the users in such a fashion (or at least not on a regular basis). THAT is the true work of UI design.
As far as I can tell re gnome and kde, they seem to be trying to copy many of the things I've always regarded as the *worst* aspects of windows
I can't disagree with you there -- it's close enough in appearance that you expect it to function the same, but half of the functions aren't there, and that drives me nuts. I expect that any windows user would be similarly frustrated by a seemingly familiar interface that in fact behaves very differently.
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I was using HPUX w/ a variety of popup menus in 1988, and it had been around for awhile then. Before win 1.0 I believe. You are talking about systems here, and you are just plain wrong -- windowing GUI systems are all basically the same when you walk up to them.
:)
This may be the crux of our disagreement, then -- I don't believe "popup menus" make a UI and more than "paint on canvas" makes a painting (or "characters in text file" make source code).
This seems to be my main issue with KDE/Gnome, as well -- they think that making prettier menus, or floating shapes or customizable buttons is "improving the UI". This stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with UI, it's all cosmetics.
UI is putting buttons where you expect them to be, ensuring that the user is rarely surprised by output (by making sure they understand the ramifications of their input).
The web, for example, is a very "ugly" place, from an aesthetic standpoint -- but it has a FANTASTICALLY successful UI. All you do is click on any blue underlined text and you get taken to the link location! That's pretty much the whole thing, beyond that its cosmetics -- but its that simplicity, clarity, and predictability that have made it so successful.
Sure, we read it, but how hard is it to make popup, cascading menus in early X w/ twm? Or to pull down menus from the early Macs' menu bar? I've always throught the start button was dumb. If KDE and Gnome had no foot or K, I guess I'd use an icon to launch a menu system or use popups. I don't really care.
Again, it has NOTHING to do with the buttons or the menus -- making a menu is a technical issue that's easy to solve. The HARD part is figuring out where to put the menu, how it reacts to the user, how it behaves when no attention is being paid, how it displays contents when it is activated, etc.
I'll give you an example: When you have your mouse over a menu, if you go a little bit off the side of the menu, should the menu close? Should it open the menu that is next to the current one (in other words, open the menu under the current location of the mouse and close the one that is where the mouse WAS), or should it keep the old menu open (and if so, how long, and how far should the mouse be allowed to stray?).
I personally find the very unforgiving menus in most X windowing systems to be very hard to use because they will close a menu without hesitation should you stray by even a pixel. It's a very mathematical (and computer-programmer logical) way of behaving, but its simply not a good UI, because it doesn't accept that people do not have perfectly steady hands, or that they need to move the cursor in order to read the menu option. You simply MUST be more forgiving than that to have a useful UI, but I just don't think it's ever occurred to a Unix programmer that users might not be able to drill down through a 7-layer deep cascading menu without being off by a pixel. My grandmother doesn't play enough Quake to be that precise with the mouse!
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Not quite. Microsoft took IBM's OS/2 1.2 and re-released it as "Microsoft OS/2".
I thought it was completely co-developed up until the BIG split between MS & IBM, is my history wrong?
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I have personally seen quite a few Windows users freak out when I show them how MacOS works.
I've personally seen quite a few mac-heads freak out when I show them that i can open huge files on windows without ever having to change the memory allocation to the application.
Different aspects of the UI are refined by different companies, and that's (IMHO) why I think people have such fervent preferences in OSes.
And, FWIW, I've spent the last 10 years of my life with a Mac and PC on my desk. In 1993 I preferred the mac, in 2000 I think Win9x/Win2k has far surpassed OS8/9 -- but I'm very eager to see how OSX pans out. (And I'm an artist even!)
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Look, when will you guys figure out I'm NOT SAYING that MS invented everything on the GUI, only that they have done a million times more work on UIs than KDE or Gnome have.
And, it's worth noting that it used to be called "Microsoft OS/2", so it's debatable who's user lab the task bar even came out of...
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All Microsoft UI R&D is done at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino California
really, is that why Apple now uses ALT-TAB to switch between apps?
UI is not GUI.
And there are no "virgins" in UI development -- they've all ripped off from each other liberally. I never claimed otherwise, only that KDE and Gnome have given back little in terms of advancements...
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you are so ignorant, it's laughable. the ui ripoffs have been happening for fiteen frickin years.
No shit, genius -- so tell me did you actually read what I said or just feel self-important enough to contribute this "insight".
I never claimed MS was creating UIs from whole cloth, only that MS has done a hell of a lot more advancement and refinement of UIs than KDE or Gnome has. Apple and Palm and MS have all borrowed from each other, but just as importantly they've all ACTUALLY CREATED NEW THINGS, too! That's called progress -- are we using EXACTLY THE SAME UI that PARC developed all those years ago? No -- because people are actually allowed to develop new concepts to build on old ones. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to be a contributor to progress.
All KDE and Gnome have done is copy the wheel, while the actual developers (at Apple, MS, and Palm) are criticized for spending money without producing a better product?
mmmm...just a sec...X was developed at MIT at the same time as all three!
mmmmm...just a sec, X isn't a UI! you are so ignorant it's laughable.
Call me when you've read more than the nickle version of computer interface history and we might have an intelligent discussion.
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"There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon."
Or a Start Menu. Boggles my mind. Window's UI is hardly useable for daily work. Nasty fonts, horrible prints, inconsistent dialogs and menus, not to mention installation and maintainance of the system.
I meant only one UI in that comparison that has R&D money behind it. I specifically call out apple later on as a company doing original work -- I wasn't trying to "rate" the UIs in any way.
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Gnome and KDE, on the other hand, have managed to put together very useable interfaces without millions of dollars behind them. All three interfaces need work to become as user friendly as possible, and all three can learn from each other.
Can we buy a clue here? For all the sniping people do on how "unoriginal" MS/Windows is, as near as I can tell the entire KDE and Gnome approach is to just copy MS. So of course they don't have to spend money to get the same results.
"All three" aren't learning from each other -- both are learning from Windows. There's only one UI that has any real R&D and UI testing dollars behind it, and it dowesn't have a footprint or K as an icon.
When Win95 came out, all people did was complain about how stupid the start button is, now we read comparisons that say "well, KDE and Gnome both have start buttons, so they're just as good as Windows, I don't know where MS is wasting all that money."
So we can bitch and moan about how imperfect and stupid MS interfaces are, but quite frankly there are only two companies that can claim any moral high ground for actually advancing the UI outside of ripping off MS: Apple and Palm. They are the only companies I see actually doing NEW things as opposed to "me-too"...
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as opposed to a quiche eater?
I meant as opposed to folks on slashdot who "do a little work in Gimp now and then" or "I used to work on the school paper, and we used all macs".
i dunno about you but my years of working in the advertising and design industries brings me to the conclusion that Mac rules well beyond all others
Oh, certainly in numbers, Macs still are far ahead in the industry. My personal feel is that it has more to do with inertia than anything -- the same reason a lot of folks here say "oh, to do graphic design you need to use a mac". It's just "common knowledge" that you use macs for prepress, because of the historical development there.
As for OS/2, unfortunately it was only a year or so that it showed so much promise. We converted a LOT of systems to Warp when it came out, so that we could run photoshop on it, and it was fantastic -- I remember the Adobe Forum on Compuserve went nuts when PS3 came out because it wouldn't run on OS/2, and we kept begging IBM to get a win32 system going. The history that COULD have been, I suppose!...
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There are no REAL professional graphic designers or publisher that use Windows either.
They use macs because of ColorSync and because Photoshop actually runs much much better on macs.
Son, REAL professional graphic designers don't need colorsync, so it doesn't matter what OS they're on. If you don't know what a CMYK value is gonna look like without help from colorsync, you're not going to know WITH it, either.
Postscript is platform-independent, I've been using Windows for publishing ever since 3.1 (there was a time when any serious photoshop people were using OS/2 Warp to run Photoshop 2.5 because it was the most stable and memory efficient configuration on ANY system). I've meet plenty of Mac folks who don't believe it, but I've never met an imagesetter yet that disagreed with me...
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My god, you mean WHO hasn't single-handedly solved every health problem on earth yet? For shame! They're obviously corrupt because they spend any time on tobacco while people are starving (of course, they also do stuff about the starving people, but it's not solved yet so they're obviously not doing enough!)...
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