Let's hope Activision lets Loki repeat its LokiHack contest from the Atl Linux Showcase. Letting hackers tweak the code for 48 hours isn't quite "open source," but it's more than most game companies are willing to do. Loki is good people and they're fulfilling a vital role.
Is the Open-Source Doc movement an attempt to make Linux more usable by the "common man" who is used to Windows, or is it simply a collection of FAQs and man pages which are useful to the hacker-type userbase Linux already has?
The Linux movement may have more and better developers than Microsoft, but Microsoft is WAY ahead in categories like usability-testing and documentation. Why did MS add a "Start Button" in Windows 95? Because the most often-asked question by newbies when they sit down at a computer is: "Where do I start?" MS tests its products with users and pays attention to their complaints.
When a user says: "I want Windows to do XXX," MS doesn't reply: "But doing that would slow the whole computer down, and it would be difficult to maintain, and could easily break, and above all, it wouldn't be ELEGANT!" When enough newbies say they'd love a friggin' dancing paperclip to tell them how to do a mail merge, MS does it.
I'm very happy to see an online documentation center. But what about an effort to design user interfaces which work well from a user's perspective? If hackers design programs, they're going to be usable only by hackers, and providing good documentation isn't going to fix the problem. We have window managers like Gnome and KDE which "look-and-feel" a lot like Windows, but under the surface they are really as much a hacker's project as gcc. I don't expect gcc to ever be usable by a newbie, but the windowing environment has to be well-tested and well-designed from a user's perspective if we're ever going to have a broader user-base.
Have any of the Distributors looked into providing links to the OSWG on their desktops, or from their help options? It would be very nice for a user to be able to link directly to the OSWG's archives when he/she presses the help button.
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Let's hope Activision lets Loki repeat its LokiHack contest from the Atl Linux Showcase. Letting hackers tweak the code for 48 hours isn't quite "open source," but it's more than most game companies are willing to do. Loki is good people and they're fulfilling a vital role.
Is the Open-Source Doc movement an attempt to make Linux more usable by the "common man" who is used to Windows, or is it simply a collection of FAQs and man pages which are useful to the hacker-type userbase Linux already has?
The Linux movement may have more and better developers than Microsoft, but Microsoft is WAY ahead in categories like usability-testing and documentation. Why did MS add a "Start Button" in Windows 95? Because the most often-asked question by newbies when they sit down at a computer is: "Where do I start?" MS tests its products with users and pays attention to their complaints.
When a user says: "I want Windows to do XXX," MS doesn't reply: "But doing that would slow the whole computer down, and it would be difficult to maintain, and could easily break, and above all, it wouldn't be ELEGANT!" When enough newbies say they'd love a friggin' dancing paperclip to tell them how to do a mail merge, MS does it.
I'm very happy to see an online documentation center. But what about an effort to design user interfaces which work well from a user's perspective? If hackers design programs, they're going to be usable only by hackers, and providing good documentation isn't going to fix the problem. We have window managers like Gnome and KDE which "look-and-feel" a lot like Windows, but under the surface they are really as much a hacker's project as gcc. I don't expect gcc to ever be usable by a newbie, but the windowing environment has to be well-tested and well-designed from a user's perspective if we're ever going to have a broader user-base.
Have any of the Distributors looked into providing links to the OSWG on their desktops, or from their help options? It would be very nice for a user to be able to link directly to the OSWG's archives when he/she presses the help button.