oh yeah, I'm not saying there aren't good reasons to do things in different ways. But doing it _some_ way is more important.
Personally, I * think the tab key is there for a reason * want to see "if" or "for" or whatever lined up directly above my end brace * follow language conventions for variable names, but prefer Perl style: $var_name and ClassName
develop a coding style and stick to it ruthlessly.
It doesn't matter whether you do
if (blah) { ... } else { ... }
or
if (blah) { ... } else { ... }
or whether you indent with tabs or spaces, or use $perl_style_names or $studlyCapsNames...
just choose one and stick to it.
You'll find your code becomes much, much clearer.
This is particularly true when you are messing with PHP (ick;-]) which mixes HTML and code. You need to have the separation between the two as clear as possible.
oh, and learn python cuz it kicks the ass of perl and PHP:-)
1) new USB devices usually are autodetected by the "hotplug" subsystem. Worked out of the box for my digital camera. 2) the guys working on "Project Utopia" at freedesktop.org, specifically the Hardware Abstraction Layer, HAL, are developing the next bit of the chain, which is that when you plug something in, you automatically get a nice user-friendly desktop notification, and the ability to browse your CDrom/download your photos/etc
The over-complexity issue, I think Gnome has gone a long way to solving this. Maybe you should check it out - Suse and Mandrake are both excellent, but KDE oriented distributions. But the days when people could diss Linux desktop usability are coming slowly to an end.
I don't think gentoo is bad in itself. It's (relative, not absolute) popularity is a bad *sign* because it suggests that non-techie people are not coming to Linux. (Because they wouldn't use gentoo). Yes, I agree that advanced distros have a place. (Debian is my choice.)
Re emerge. Yes, the command is "easy" (still way too hard for e.g. my mum). But the concept behind it is not. Source-based installation is not for the masses; by definition, you want prepackaged binaries which install faster. (who wants to wait ten hours to use KDE?) Equally, wrapping this command line tool in some pretty interface would not solve the fundamental issue.
I think the push Gnome made for user friendliness is fabulous, and like the first article author I switched to Gnome a few months ago.
Sadly, it seems like a lot of geeks have deserted Linux for the Mac. This leaves only hard-core config crazies on Linux... hence not only the attacks on Gnome, but also the popularity of distros like Gentoo. Gentoo, to me, is a sign of failure. It has a source-based distribution - ie the whole software installation process is predicated on something that Granny cannot do. Gentoo's growth could be a sign that Linux is going to remain in the ghetto of tinkerers and enthusiasts.:-(
Dave
PS... but even I think spatial nautilus is stoopid.
I wish usability studies would really think about what usability is, over all and long-term, rather than just "can new users in a hurry get an email written?"
RTFA. They tested four users, including one long-term unix expert who just did everything via the terminal.
No, abiword won't open (some) Word documents: can't be used by secretaries who need to communicate with the rest of the world. Epiphany is OK. Fluxbox, windowmaker etc. don't have serious help systems - it would be like a return to Win3.1 for anyone who can't use the command line. What is a decent lightweight GUI email client? What replaces Word? Excel? Outlook? The answers to all these questions are "KDE or Gnome applications". Nobody else is close.
To be honest I don't see why Gnome and KDE couldn't own the market. They aren't _that_ far away, and have been improving. I think it is much easier for G/K to optimize than it will be for fluxbox et al to add the features.
Those of you who are posting stuff about Fluxbox, Windowmaker, Ratpoison, *insert your favourite WM here*, are missing the point, and need to RTFA.
There is a huge segment of the market with 64-128M PCs who don't want to be forced to upgrade their hardware just so as to run XP. If Linux could run responsively on that much memory, it could own that market. But instead, modern distros are too slow.
For this segment, Fluxbox, dillo etc. are not an option - they need the user friendliness of a proper desktop environment (help browsers, tooltips, proper word processors etc). KDE and Gnome could provide that - but they need to control the bloat.
To be fair, I hear KDE has improved a lot in this respect, and my mobile PII with 192M is reasonably nippy running Gnome and openoffice. So improvements will come.
But talking about the command line and fluxbox and all that is just irrelevant.
With 1.3 billion people in China, the US and Europe are going to need to stick together in the 21st century.
Despite our current differences, we share an allegiance to democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the traditions of the Enlightenment. These things are worth defending. (Just to be clear, I am sure that many Chinese would feel the same: but their government, not necessarily.)
You're being a bit naive, I think. With that level of information, a determined person could identify one individual, contact them and use their knowledge about their family for social engineering purposes - "Hi, I'm a friend of your father Manmohan, he needs you to meet him at such and such a place/send 10000Rs to this address/etc"
You may not be interested, but that doesn't mean potential criminals aren't.
Besides the danger of fraud, a lot of people might not want everyone else in the world to know their exam results. Just because you don't care about privacy, doesn't mean others shouldn't.
I expected the discussion to be full of gung-ho militarism and "patriotism". Instead all the +4 and +5 comments are about the waste and wickedness of warfare. Way to go, Slashdot! Does this mean you guys are going to kick Bush out of the White House? As a limey, I need to know (hopefully we'll get rid of Blair soon).
The arch people have been making a lot of noise recently, and I've seen more projects using it. Does arch aim to provide the features that BK has currently? How close are they? Has anyone got any experiences to share?
This is an (un)official Slashdot repetition marker. Any further posts on the Lame Ass Metric System Analogy (LAMSA) are now Redundant, and their posters may be spanked with a metric ruler.
Posts utilizing the LAMSA _above_ this marker may also be moderated Redundant, but you may not beat the poster for more than forty five minutes at one sitting. Thank you. Have a nice day.
For all the talk of new technology and pace of change, the real pace of change is incredibly bad. Conventional wisdom equates change with the constant appearance of new technologies. Real change is seen in technology that increase productivity at the commodity level. The desktop is the commodity and applications are a response to peoples need to process information. The integration between the two is pathetic Other than at a superficial level - quote whatever new schemes you like - there is no linking between how the desktop manages and represents its information and the applications that people use other than through manual labor. It is in the interests of any company who controls a market to keep the pace of change slow, is Sun the one to break this cycle?
Wow, a Chomskybot for/. posting. Have you got source code for that?
In the interests of fairness, I have to point out that Konqueror used to do the exact same thing, leaving hidden thumbnail and display info directories all over the place. I think they have stopped now, though.
Personally, I think "tooltips" that cover about half of my available screenspace are a pain. (Yes, I know - it's configurable.) And in the last version I installed, the tooltip previews kept coming up different sizes, depending what thumbnail was available - very inconsistent and unpleasing. (Yes, I know I should submit a bug report.)
Slashdot Mirror
As an anti-spam technology, I don't see it. Quite often one gets legit email from perfect strangers.
Apart from that... I still don't really see it. You can only check for two levels of separation.
I like the general idea of decentralized social networking, though. The semantic web seems more hopeful than email.
oh yeah, I'm not saying there aren't good reasons to do things in different ways. But doing it _some_ way is more important.
Personally, I
* think the tab key is there for a reason
* want to see "if" or "for" or whatever lined up directly above my end brace
* follow language conventions for variable names, but prefer Perl style: $var_name and ClassName
develop a coding style and stick to it ruthlessly.
It doesn't matter whether you dooror whether you indent with tabs or spaces, or use $perl_style_names or $studlyCapsNames
just choose one and stick to it.
You'll find your code becomes much, much clearer.
This is particularly true when you are messing with PHP (ick
oh, and learn python cuz it kicks the ass of perl and PHP
dave
The link you posted quotes text from a book, which is the same as the OP's quote. But there isn't a source for the actual (?) academic research.
you're totally right, but progress is being made.
1) new USB devices usually are autodetected by the "hotplug" subsystem. Worked out of the box for my digital camera.
2) the guys working on "Project Utopia" at freedesktop.org, specifically the Hardware Abstraction Layer, HAL, are developing the next bit of the chain, which is that when you plug something in, you automatically get a nice user-friendly desktop notification, and the ability to browse your CDrom/download your photos/etc
The over-complexity issue, I think Gnome has gone a long way to solving this. Maybe you should check it out - Suse and Mandrake are both excellent, but KDE oriented distributions. But the days when people could diss Linux desktop usability are coming slowly to an end.
dave
I don't think gentoo is bad in itself. It's (relative, not absolute) popularity is a bad *sign* because it suggests that non-techie people are not coming to Linux. (Because they wouldn't use gentoo). Yes, I agree that advanced distros have a place. (Debian is my choice.)
Re emerge. Yes, the command is "easy" (still way too hard for e.g. my mum). But the concept behind it is not. Source-based installation is not for the masses; by definition, you want prepackaged binaries which install faster. (who wants to wait ten hours to use KDE?) Equally, wrapping this command line tool in some pretty interface would not solve the fundamental issue.
I think the push Gnome made for user friendliness is fabulous, and like the first article author I switched to Gnome a few months ago.
:-(
... but even I think spatial nautilus is stoopid.
Sadly, it seems like a lot of geeks have deserted Linux for the Mac. This leaves only hard-core config crazies on Linux... hence not only the attacks on Gnome, but also the popularity of distros like Gentoo. Gentoo, to me, is a sign of failure. It has a source-based distribution - ie the whole software installation process is predicated on something that Granny cannot do. Gentoo's growth could be a sign that Linux is going to remain in the ghetto of tinkerers and enthusiasts.
Dave
PS
RTFA. They tested four users, including one long-term unix expert who just did everything via the terminal.
Damn lameness filter! You asked for it.
Woohoo, a fellow PWEI fan! (-1 offtopic)
No, abiword won't open (some) Word documents: can't be used by secretaries who need to communicate with the rest of the world. Epiphany is OK. Fluxbox, windowmaker etc. don't have serious help systems - it would be like a return to Win3.1 for anyone who can't use the command line. What is a decent lightweight GUI email client? What replaces Word? Excel? Outlook? The answers to all these questions are "KDE or Gnome applications". Nobody else is close.
To be honest I don't see why Gnome and KDE couldn't own the market. They aren't _that_ far away, and have been improving. I think it is much easier for G/K to optimize than it will be for fluxbox et al to add the features.
Those of you who are posting stuff about Fluxbox, Windowmaker, Ratpoison, *insert your favourite WM here*, are missing the point, and need to RTFA.
There is a huge segment of the market with 64-128M PCs who don't want to be forced to upgrade their hardware just so as to run XP. If Linux could run responsively on that much memory, it could own that market. But instead, modern distros are too slow.
For this segment, Fluxbox, dillo etc. are not an option - they need the user friendliness of a proper desktop environment (help browsers, tooltips, proper word processors etc). KDE and Gnome could provide that - but they need to control the bloat.
To be fair, I hear KDE has improved a lot in this respect, and my mobile PII with 192M is reasonably nippy running Gnome and openoffice. So improvements will come.
But talking about the command line and fluxbox and all that is just irrelevant.
I think this is a schnidey attempt to drum up some "grassroots" public interest. Nothing against poker itself, though.
With 1.3 billion people in China, the US and Europe are going to need to stick together in the 21st century.
Despite our current differences, we share an allegiance to democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the traditions of the Enlightenment. These things are worth defending. (Just to be clear, I am sure that many Chinese would feel the same: but their government, not necessarily.)
Obviously never heard of Godwin's law, then.
You're being a bit naive, I think. With that level of information, a determined person could identify one individual, contact them and use their knowledge about their family for social engineering purposes - "Hi, I'm a friend of your father Manmohan, he needs you to meet him at such and such a place/send 10000Rs to this address/etc"
You may not be interested, but that doesn't mean potential criminals aren't.
Besides the danger of fraud, a lot of people might not want everyone else in the world to know their exam results. Just because you don't care about privacy, doesn't mean others shouldn't.
I expected the discussion to be full of gung-ho militarism and "patriotism". Instead all the +4 and +5 comments are about the waste and wickedness of warfare. Way to go, Slashdot! Does this mean you guys are going to kick Bush out of the White House? As a limey, I need to know (hopefully we'll get rid of Blair soon).
The arch people have been making a lot of noise recently, and I've seen more projects using it. Does arch aim to provide the features that BK has currently? How close are they? Has anyone got any experiences to share?
This is an (un)official Slashdot repetition marker. Any further posts on the Lame Ass Metric System Analogy (LAMSA) are now Redundant, and their posters may be spanked with a metric ruler.
Posts utilizing the LAMSA _above_ this marker may also be moderated Redundant, but you may not beat the poster for more than forty five minutes at one sitting. Thank you. Have a nice day.
For all the talk of new technology and pace of change, the real pace of change is incredibly bad. Conventional wisdom equates change with the constant appearance of new technologies. Real change is seen in technology that increase productivity at the commodity level. The desktop is the commodity and applications are a response to peoples need to process information. The integration between the two is pathetic Other than at a superficial level - quote whatever new schemes you like - there is no linking between how the desktop manages and represents its information and the applications that people use other than through manual labor. It is in the interests of any company who controls a market to keep the pace of change slow, is Sun the one to break this cycle?
/. posting. Have you got source code for that?
Wow, a Chomskybot for
dave
Serious question: are there any open source scripting languages that _can_ handle threads?
In the interests of fairness, I have to point out that Konqueror used to do the exact same thing, leaving hidden thumbnail and display info directories all over the place. I think they have stopped now, though.
Personally, I think "tooltips" that cover about half of my available screenspace are a pain. (Yes, I know - it's configurable.) And in the last version I installed, the tooltip previews kept coming up different sizes, depending what thumbnail was available - very inconsistent and unpleasing. (Yes, I know I should submit a bug report.)
It seems relatively simple to me
Did you mean "simple to think about" or "simple to implement"? If the latter, go ahead - the code is yours to fork.