Should it be illegal to break into someone else's computer? Yes. It's a violation of their privacy and means you could access information which you don't have a right to.
Why doesn't the same logic apply to breaking into someone's copy-protected CD? If you want unlimited rights to the digital content - i.e., you want to actually own the song or software - then you should buy those rights. If you don't have that ownership right then you aren't allowed to try and steal it - even if you own the physical medium.
Re:Open dialog still a monstrosity?
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think it even allowed regular expressions. This is a much more powerful system, and it didn't confuse newbies because they didn't know it existed.
I think the new file dialog is fabulous, and as I didn't know about the old features, I didn't benefit from them. Whereas I benefit from the new simplicity without having even to think about it.
"It's not a negative?" What's not a negative? Who said it was a negative? What are you smoking?//kracker?? WTF?? And who the hell is Sage Francis? Bah.
His argument is that the editing process fails to achieve a decent encyclopedia, and the article on Hamilton - which, he claims, has been edited repeatedly and now appears worse off than when it started - is an example of that. And his question is, how do you know when Wikipedia is authoritative? Just telling him to "edit it himself" is missing the point. I don't have the knowledge or time to write my own encyclopedia. At some point, the product has to become useful to the reader, as well as enjoyable for the contributors. Thus, your point that "Wikipedia thinking requires more depth" counts against Wikipedia, not for it.
Maybe there are valid counterarguments to this guy's point of view - I've used Wikipedia and been, subjectively, satisfied with it - but yours is not one.
Actually, listening to people you trust is quite a good way to decide who to vote for, given that *nobody* (not even poli sci PhD students like me) knows enough about all the issues to make a fully informed decision. Google "Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias" for a demonstration.
surely if your fish is constantly friggin' in the public eye it is being a bit self righteous just because you are cheating at what is, after all, a relatively harmless form of internet card-based entertainment?
I recall using MS Office (Word, Excel, et al.) on Windows boxes in the late 90s. There were no speed issues at all - it was easy to get my work done. Chip speeds and memories were slower than what I have now.
I can't blame the openoffice developers for not focusing on the low end when "most people" have much faster machines. But I can accept that MS Office got it right a lot earlier.
.... The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.)
BUT it allows me to use Linux on the desktop, and for that I am truly grateful.
Well, maybe you are right. But time is also money, and if you don't get the command line, quite a lot of Linux-y things can take time.
(Although, as an aside, two hardware problems I've had recently with Linux proved in the end to be just that - hardware problems. The open source software was working fine, it just wasn't telling me what was wrong with the hardware - and Windows didn't do any better.)
As the article says, it seems to be the SOHO guys who are getting most keenly into Linux. This is paradoxical, because Linux ought to be easiest to adopt in a big corporate environment - easy lockdown and centralization, natural multi-user capabilities, and there's always a tech guy on hand to deal with the lack of GUI wizards and troubleshooting tools. But maybe enough small businessmen are ideologically keen on Linux for it to make headway. If so, they'll be a valuable testbed.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. I think Wine (and Mono) are pretty important projects. Even in the small to medium business environment, people do occasionally want to install their own custom software - and it isn't always a security crime to do so - sometimes the security risks are outweighed by the benefits.
... Well, it is still an issue for KDE, because they haven't made the (quite far-reaching) changes to their priorities needed to get developers thinking about usability. Gnome have done this much better IMHO, and KDE has even suffered because lots of the software geeks who want "options everywhere" have moved to KDE... making the user base even less typical of the Joe Average user.
But in the long term, I am sure KDE will make strides - the Akademy seems to have focused on this area, and KDE are a great project which can develop at lightning speed.
In any case, the real issues for the "free desktop" as a whole are now elsewhere. This would be my first approximation:
* office suite. OpenOffice is good... it's almost as good as MSOffice. But it needs to be BETTER, in order to get people and institutions to switch. After all, 90% of ordinary people's computer time is spent working with office-type applications.
* hardware. I have this sweet Gnome desktop... but I have just spent a day trying to get my printer to work, with NO help from the GUI. Hotplug and HAL are a start but it's not just about recognizing hardware, it's about an easy way to troubleshoot it. Is my problem hardware related, or a kernel problem, or a driver, or is it CUPS or foomatic? I don't know!
* Help systems. Gnome and KDE have great manuals for individual programs. They don't have task-based HOWTO guides, or troubleshooting guides, saying "how do I connect to my friend's workstation" or "I can't get online, what's wrong?"
* Stack integration. We have a great kernel. And we have (at least) two great desktops. And in the middle we have... well, an assortment of GNU and BSD tools, distro-specific stuff, little programs that someone wrote, each with their own config file.... Again, the Novell stuff and the freedesktop stuff isn't a bad start, but we really want *one single way* to manage startup services, for example, so that GUI tools can be written which will work with every distribution (without writing 10 distro-specific backends). The advantage to this is that when there is "one true way", it is much easier to build stuff that can assume the "one true way" is being used. (Note: this is perfectly compatible with diversity, experimentation, Gobolinux etc. etc. - just remember, experimentation can be aimed at *improving the next generation of the standard*.)
* In general: "finish". This is related to the stack integration point but it is more abstract. Let me give you an example. I use Debian. I need to change the time, due to an obscure 2.6 bug relating to APM which makes my clock run at 4x speed. I read "man hwclock". It tells me about how to use hwclock to set the time, and that I can automatically adjust to make up for a slow clock. So I do that. Then, by chance, I read "/usr/share/doc/util-linux/README.Debian.hwclock.g z"... and it tells me all about how hwclock is dangerous and must not be used! You see? The same distro is giving me inconsistent information in two different sources!
Another example: network interfaces. I can access these in so many different ways. "ifconfig". "ifup" and "ifdown". The scripts in "/etc/init.d". And each of these different levels is built upon the others... and I often don't know which one to go in at... and if I use one level, I may break the assumptions of the other level. Similarly, how do I configure samba?
So IMHO "finish" is the big one. It's about turning a big heap of user-contributed software, into a single consistent centralized system. That's where distros come in, but at the moment, those distros aren't really doing their job. They are just whacking out 6-monthly releases with the latest cool stuff all chucked in there. Debian is better - kudos for a slow, careful release cycle and a high standard for package maintenance - but still, as a desktop, it ain't there. We should be aiming for a distro release to be usable for *years*, not months - my Mum still uses Windows 98, why is this seen as "old-fashioned" if it
You have to remember that _selling_ open source (I mean, getting people to use it) requires that they perceive immediate benefits. (In fact, they sometimes say, to get people to change your product needs to be TEN TIMES better than their existing choice.)
Now if you use something for half an hour and you find it difficult, you are not going to assume "hey, I bet once I get used to this it will be fantastic". You will assume, quite rationally, that it is going to carry on being difficult to use.
That is why initial impressions do count.
Of course this depends on the context. Big departments can take long term decisions to switch users over, and evaluate user experience after six months. But for SOHO or home use, you have to have *immediate* usability.
but not at all easy to learn. It's not that the programming is hard (although it is, it is a functional language which takes a while to get your head round) - but the documentation is aimed at fairly high level stats boffins.
I have a Nokia 7250i. A very nice phone, which lets you take colour photographs, with an infrared port. I can upload my contacts to my PC via the infrared port - works out of the box, modulo a bit of man page reading, under Debian. Can I upload my photos? Can I fuck. Can I send my photos to my computer via email, at 20p a throw? Why yes, I can.
I wish someone who knew about these things could write an OBEX thingy to upload them. I know it is possible in theory - there is a closed source windows app that does it.
We smoked pretty heavily in those days (cigarettes) and felt a need to justify it.... 87% of Nobel prize winners are smokers. Furthermore, children who smoke are more likely to get GCSE grades A to C; non-smoking prisoners reoffend more often. In fact smoking cures AIDS. And cancer.
All these came from the sound research of the IRS (Institute for Random Statistics). We got pretty far down the list with some people.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me bite.
Should it be illegal to break into someone else's computer? Yes. It's a violation of their privacy and means you could access information which you don't have a right to.
Why doesn't the same logic apply to breaking into someone's copy-protected CD? If you want unlimited rights to the digital content - i.e., you want to actually own the song or software - then you should buy those rights. If you don't have that ownership right then you aren't allowed to try and steal it - even if you own the physical medium.
I think the new file dialog is fabulous, and as I didn't know about the old features, I didn't benefit from them. Whereas I benefit from the new simplicity without having even to think about it.
"Inside every British person, there is a little monarchist. Inside every German, there is a little anarchist."
WTF? This gets +5?
//kracker?? WTF?? And who the hell is Sage Francis? Bah.
Looks like it was written by a robot.
"It's not a negative?" What's not a negative? Who said it was a negative? What are you smoking?
With this revolutionary desktop, all Linux users will be able to get deep, deep down (so rest upon my chest).
Er, no.
His argument is that the editing process fails to achieve a decent encyclopedia, and the article on Hamilton - which, he claims, has been edited repeatedly and now appears worse off than when it started - is an example of that. And his question is, how do you know when Wikipedia is authoritative? Just telling him to "edit it himself" is missing the point. I don't have the knowledge or time to write my own encyclopedia. At some point, the product has to become useful to the reader, as well as enjoyable for the contributors. Thus, your point that "Wikipedia thinking requires more depth" counts against Wikipedia, not for it.
Maybe there are valid counterarguments to this guy's point of view - I've used Wikipedia and been, subjectively, satisfied with it - but yours is not one.
Actually, listening to people you trust is quite a good way to decide who to vote for, given that *nobody* (not even poli sci PhD students like me) knows enough about all the issues to make a fully informed decision. Google "Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias" for a demonstration.
Cease and desist at once!!!! Yours, Nintendo.
I think the key phrase is "or the legal incidents thereof".
surely if your fish is constantly friggin' in the public eye it is being a bit self righteous just because you are cheating at what is, after all, a relatively harmless form of internet card-based entertainment?
Er, I was complaining that openoffice was slow? I fulfil all the listed requirements by quite a long way - what's your point?
I recall using MS Office (Word, Excel, et al.) on Windows boxes in the late 90s. There were no speed issues at all - it was easy to get my work done. Chip speeds and memories were slower than what I have now.
I can't blame the openoffice developers for not focusing on the low end when "most people" have much faster machines. But I can accept that MS Office got it right a lot earlier.
.... The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.)
BUT it allows me to use Linux on the desktop, and for that I am truly grateful.
Well, maybe you are right. But time is also money, and if you don't get the command line, quite a lot of Linux-y things can take time.
(Although, as an aside, two hardware problems I've had recently with Linux proved in the end to be just that - hardware problems. The open source software was working fine, it just wasn't telling me what was wrong with the hardware - and Windows didn't do any better.)
As the article says, it seems to be the SOHO guys who are getting most keenly into Linux. This is paradoxical, because Linux ought to be easiest to adopt in a big corporate environment - easy lockdown and centralization, natural multi-user capabilities, and there's always a tech guy on hand to deal with the lack of GUI wizards and troubleshooting tools. But maybe enough small businessmen are ideologically keen on Linux for it to make headway. If so, they'll be a valuable testbed.
It was marked redundant because someone made the exact same point a couple of posts up.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. I think Wine (and Mono) are pretty important projects. Even in the small to medium business environment, people do occasionally want to install their own custom software - and it isn't always a security crime to do so - sometimes the security risks are outweighed by the benefits.
... Well, it is still an issue for KDE, because they haven't made the (quite far-reaching) changes to their priorities needed to get developers thinking about usability. Gnome have done this much better IMHO, and KDE has even suffered because lots of the software geeks who want "options everywhere" have moved to KDE... making the user base even less typical of the Joe Average user.
But in the long term, I am sure KDE will make strides - the Akademy seems to have focused on this area, and KDE are a great project which can develop at lightning speed.
In any case, the real issues for the "free desktop" as a whole are now elsewhere. This would be my first approximation:
* office suite. OpenOffice is good... it's almost as good as MSOffice. But it needs to be BETTER, in order to get people and institutions to switch. After all, 90% of ordinary people's computer time is spent working with office-type applications.
* hardware. I have this sweet Gnome desktop... but I have just spent a day trying to get my printer to work, with NO help from the GUI. Hotplug and HAL are a start but it's not just about recognizing hardware, it's about an easy way to troubleshoot it. Is my problem hardware related, or a kernel problem, or a driver, or is it CUPS or foomatic? I don't know!
* Help systems. Gnome and KDE have great manuals for individual programs. They don't have task-based HOWTO guides, or troubleshooting guides, saying "how do I connect to my friend's workstation" or "I can't get online, what's wrong?"
* Stack integration. We have a great kernel. And we have (at least) two great desktops. And in the middle we have... well, an assortment of GNU and BSD tools, distro-specific stuff, little programs that someone wrote, each with their own config file.... Again, the Novell stuff and the freedesktop stuff isn't a bad start, but we really want *one single way* to manage startup services, for example, so that GUI tools can be written which will work with every distribution (without writing 10 distro-specific backends). The advantage to this is that when there is "one true way", it is much easier to build stuff that can assume the "one true way" is being used. (Note: this is perfectly compatible with diversity, experimentation, Gobolinux etc. etc. - just remember, experimentation can be aimed at *improving the next generation of the standard*.)
* In general: "finish". This is related to the stack integration point but it is more abstract. Let me give you an example. I use Debian. I need to change the time, due to an obscure 2.6 bug relating to APM which makes my clock run at 4x speed. I read "man hwclock". It tells me about how to use hwclock to set the time, and that I can automatically adjust to make up for a slow clock. So I do that. Then, by chance, I read "/usr/share/doc/util-linux/README.Debian.hwclock.g z"...
and it tells me all about how hwclock is dangerous and must not be used! You see? The same distro is giving me inconsistent information in two different sources!
Another example: network interfaces. I can access these in so many different ways. "ifconfig". "ifup" and "ifdown". The scripts in "/etc/init.d". And each of these different levels is built upon the others... and I often don't know which one to go in at... and if I use one level, I may break the assumptions of the other level. Similarly, how do I configure samba?
So IMHO "finish" is the big one. It's about turning a big heap of user-contributed software, into a single consistent centralized system. That's where distros come in, but at the moment, those distros aren't really doing their job. They are just whacking out 6-monthly releases with the latest cool stuff all chucked in there. Debian is better - kudos for a slow, careful release cycle and a high standard for package maintenance - but still, as a desktop, it ain't there. We should be aiming for a distro release to be usable for *years*, not months - my Mum still uses Windows 98, why is this seen as "old-fashioned" if it
I sort of agree, but.
You have to remember that _selling_ open source (I mean, getting people to use it) requires that they perceive immediate benefits. (In fact, they sometimes say, to get people to change your product needs to be TEN TIMES better than their existing choice.)
Now if you use something for half an hour and you find it difficult, you are not going to assume "hey, I bet once I get used to this it will be fantastic". You will assume, quite rationally, that it is going to carry on being difficult to use.
That is why initial impressions do count.
Of course this depends on the context. Big departments can take long term decisions to switch users over, and evaluate user experience after six months. But for SOHO or home use, you have to have *immediate* usability.
but not at all easy to learn. It's not that the programming is hard (although it is, it is a functional language which takes a while to get your head round) - but the documentation is aimed at fairly high level stats boffins.
But... ANYTHING is better than SPSS.
dave
Ah, I love it when your .sig totally undermines your comment....
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
-- Dr Johnson
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Joi Ito...
(My blog; my blogging application.)
I have a Nokia 7250i. A very nice phone, which lets you take colour photographs, with an infrared port. I can upload my contacts to my PC via the infrared port - works out of the box, modulo a bit of man page reading, under Debian. Can I upload my photos? Can I fuck. Can I send my photos to my computer via email, at 20p a throw? Why yes, I can.
I wish someone who knew about these things could write an OBEX thingy to upload them. I know it is possible in theory - there is a closed source windows app that does it.
Dave
At university I and a friend invented the IRS.
We smoked pretty heavily in those days (cigarettes) and felt a need to justify it.... 87% of Nobel prize winners are smokers. Furthermore, children who smoke are more likely to get GCSE grades A to C; non-smoking prisoners reoffend more often. In fact smoking cures AIDS. And cancer.
All these came from the sound research of the IRS (Institute for Random Statistics). We got pretty far down the list with some people.
I find GNOME, on the other hand, to be uncomfortably light and clean...
This tells you everything you need to know about (1) Gnome and (2) KDE users.