You would have realized that I didn't say I liked MM, I was just shocked because he was compared with Bush, and I think it is unfair. Journalism, even bad journalism, is not comparable to warmongering, even if the first could be used for the latter.
Of course, I think that, because I'm on the outside of the US, and only suffer the consequences of your colonial^W foreign affairs management.
If you have an unreliable source, that you know is unreliable, and then quote them in you speech, you lied about the credibility of your facts. If SCO tells me that they wrote Linux, and I tell that to someone, I am a liar, because I am portraying gossip as fact.
BTW I despise both Bush and Moore. Both are propganda machines they prey on peoples willingness to believe distortions of the truth.
That's spin too, by expressing the same opinion on the two people, and showing a similarity, you are showing them as if they were equal. That would not be a fair comparison, because although his credibility might be questioned, Michael Moore is not responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, and Bush is. That is spin too, it is a fact that he sent an armed force to invade Irak and Afghanistan, and that they killed lots of people, many civilians, then my opinion is that it is wrong, and another one's would be that it was necessary. Of course, we as humans cannot be objective, because that's not the way we understand the facts.
That someone publishes something "with a spin" is not wrong, it is inevitable. The wisdom is in reading from many sources, so that spin can be cancelled, and you can get your own interpretation. But showing the facts with a spin is not the same as lying. Journalism is mostly related to opinion, just because it is a documentary it doesn't have to be objective, because it is made by someone who does have an opinion. In your advantage, MM tells you that he hates bush, so you know which way he is biasing his documentary, and it is easier to digest it. It would be much worst if he portrayed himself as an objective journalist, and then deceived you.
I thought everybody believed that direct self-realization (being a painter, a writer, an mathematic theorist) was a higher goal than self-realization through money (working and earning money so you can paint/write in your leisure time, or maybe working as an engineer where you can use math), but the latter was more feasible, because of practical issues, and thus is the most popular. It could be paraphrased like this: some people are more practical, some are more idealistic.
I don't think money has the same value in the US that it has in Russia. In the US, money is first in everyones life, because you need to be a money-making member of the society in order to eat. As it is the first priority, of course for many people it becomes the most important, and they live happy with it. Russia still has some remainings of socialist ideology, where if you can do something better than make some money to support yourself, you are supposed to do it, and the society is supposed to take care of you. Or in practice, you are just poor, but people admire you for your achievments instead of despising you just for your low annual income. Of course, it had many practical problems, but it has the potential to a kind of motivation unthinkable in the every-man-on-his-own scheme of things. To each his own, some people like money, some people like something higher. In the most capitalist countries, you can't do much without money, but that is just a characteristic of that kind of system, not an inherent problem of human society. Every system has pros and cons.
Re:Sigh, Andrew Morton seemed to be right...
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 1
I think that it would not be a good idea to change the way everyone manages files, just because of an upgrade. A kernel update seems more sensible, and doable. Of course, there's the problem of having the FS DB in the kernel instead of userland, but maybe that could be solved by taking care of a bigger problem that few people are trying to fix, and that is the monolothic kernel. Maybe some effort should be put in a modular kernel, that lets us plug-in this kind of enhancements, without having to mess with the core of the kernel, but staying behind its frontiers, but that could be too hairy an issue.
The idea that anything that is not mandatory should be prohibited is not very nice. Just because your company has policies about the kind of artwork the employees can show in their computers, the sysadmin has nothing to do with that. That would be a freedom of expression issue. One should be allowed to say (show) whatever one wants, and then, if any rule is broken, face the consequences. Preventing people from changing their desktops (on the basis of content, and not technical issues) is not the job of a sysadmin, I believe.
The exact point of my post is that the assumption that "Microsoft Word is the only \".DOC capable word processor\"...." is a flawed one.
You are just assuming that it is the case. The whole point if the grand parent is specifying that MS.DOC compatibility is not so good. I have used every version of winword.exe, and they are not compatible with each other. It's usual to lose some formatting stuff between versions, or between platforms. If the level of compatibility achieved in the winword line is to be called acceptable, then oowriter 1.1.2 (and not the previous versions) is too, because it achieves a similar level of compatibility. It works, mostly, and sometimes doesn't (I have yet to find when it doesn't), but it's not worse than winword itself, so it's a good replacement as far as compatibility goes.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the compatibility achieved by different versions of winword is unacceptable, then you shouldn't use new versions of winword, and should stick to just the original platform you were using. Changing versions of winword, or even platforms, could be disasterous for compatibility, and be even comparable to using oowriter. So you would need to stick with winword 6.0, running on win95, which is not supported anymore, or risk taking the chance of losing compatibility by changing versions of winword, or changing to oo. I believe that, between the three options, the third is the safest.
Ok, I understand that there must be a lot of characteristics that OO doesn't share with MSWord, but I don't believe they belong to the word processor in the first place. Revision tracking is a feature I'd rather not have in the documents I publish, or at least, I'd like it to be something I'd have to opt-in. I don't really want everybody in my development group reading whichever previous versions I wrote.
Anyway, I got the point. MSWord has a lot of features that will never be implemented elsewhere. The fact is that to do that, the same design principles would have to be followed. Those are flawed. Word is many things that don't belong to word processing. I believe OOWriter implements in a compatible way those that do, and many that don't. Plus, it has compatibility with.DOC files, which is the only Word feature many people need.
I can be clearer. Word is the most popular word processor. It doesn't make it standard.
Take the web for example. Apache is not the standard. HTTP is. Whichever server that serves HTTP is going to be good ( we all know that is not exactyl true, anyway).
What I was pointing out is that the only problem that non-MS word processors generate when it comes to standardization is the.DOC compatibility..DOC - capable word processors are the real standard. Words interface is available in many other projects, including OO, and it changes so much between versions, that it cannot be called "standard". The only thing people are expected to find is MS.DOC compatibility. And OO has it. So, it's not a good idea to imply that you are going to have an standardization problem because you don't use MSWord, because that's just plain wrong. You will have it only if the program you use doesn't manage.DOC. If it does, you are still in the de facto standard when it comes to documents. (plus OOWriter copies Word interface, to some extent)
It is much better as far as.DOC compatibility goes. I am yet to find compatibility issues. Maybe a serious report of OO 1.1.2 compatibility would be nice.
Word couldn't be the standard, for example, in the place I work for, because it doesn't run on SuSE or Slackware, and we just have a win 2000 as a print server (location issues).
We use Open Office 1.1.2, which does a great job in handling different versions of.DOCs, a much better job that most versions of Word I have met.
OO 1.0 was not as good, but with this version, we have had no problem whatsoever when interchanging documents with other MS-only shops, including clients.
We thought about using terminal services, and installing MS Office in the print server, should any compatibility issue occur, but the MS Office 2000 CD sits unused, because noone has needed it yet. We killed our last Win machine about the time we installed Open Office 1.1. It is kind of hardware heavy, but that's not problem for us, many of us program Java, so we have memory to spare. The ones who just use OO, don't have trouble either. Heavier would be to have to dual boot Windows, or put money in licenses instead of fast hardware.
Q: How can this be rated funny? A: Everyone should know by now that Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet.
That's why, in my twisted mind, I thought it was funny, but it seems mods don't like twisted humor. If you take into account that "Funny" doesn't give you karma, you can understand that "Funny" posts are just trying to be humorous, and not looking for mod points, and there's no need to be offended by them. Maybe I just tried to make a joke and you didn't find it funny. Maybe you should have understood that it was a joke, because it was Especially, if he had actually said that he invented the internet (he said he took the initiative in creating it, a mistake, but not by far) , the joke would have died ages ago. I find it funny because it's a stupid comment to make. Alright. Maybe I'm saying this in the wrong room. Ok. I'll leave.
The office assistant is an example of a great solution with an awful implementation. It is based on Bayesian operators, which are themselves a great idea, they filter my spam, for instance, and might be of great help in providing hints and tips for newbies. The problem was that marketing thought the clip didn't show up enough, so they made the horror that is Clippo. But I don't believe Miguel is wrong when saying that is is a great idea. I have been the office assistant of many people that hate me now I'm not willing to do it anymore. It would be nice that a little program did wht they think is my job.
RMS, when he started writing about the notion of what he calls "Copyleft", did so on the basis that Copyright is in fact, wrong, at least in what comes to software, and something needed to be done against its harmful effects. The idea is that a community without copyrights would be better, but given the fact that they exist, the GPL can be used against its more problematic consequences. Copyrights go against your freedom to share software, modify it, or help others by distributing your modifications. The GPL protects you by ensuring noone can deprive you of those freedoms. Its whole essence goes against Copyright. So, no doubt the same people who value the respect for the GPL, and will use every legal tool to protect freedom, will be against the RIAA, and every other Copyright enforcer.
The same could happen with hierarchical systems, I have lost some pictures easily, with the filesystem approach. the idea of a hierachy is not that great. Of course you can't find a file with wrong metadata, as you couldn't find a file with the worng name, in the wrong directory!!
The guy proposes zoomable interfaces as a way of "geographically" achieve a hierarchical structure, one we can easily navigate, because it is really a navigable metaphor, and accept all the geographical cues we are accustomed to use in our real life.
I have met people that after getting to know GIS, want to store every piece of data available in GIS-like databases, because of the easy navigability and spatial linking of information. I believe that zoomable interfaces are good in what respects to representing hierarchy, being much more flexible than tree representations, because they can show distance and size.
For the most part of my computer experience, at least, I believe the searchable interface is the most useful. I use incremental search in every text app I can (Eclipse, Firefox) and find it extremely fast and powerful, I hardly ever need to use nevigation keys, or the mouse.
If you believe that search would be slow, you are not giving enough thought to the matter. If google can search the world for me, for free, in a second, it must not be such a great task, at least in processor power. It all comes to an intelligent distribution of resources. using "find" to search for a file, can take forever, but "locate" does it instantly, if only it stored a text index of every file, and had a routine triggered by the filesystem, that indexed every new file, in the background, you could have an indexed FS. ReiserFS will move in that direction at some point. Plus, you only need to find the first incremental match, and then can continue searching, even the web, because google is so fast you could get your result at the same time you type your search, taking into account human delays.
The Humane Environment is not a text editor. It is an implementation of the humane interface, starting by a text editor, which is already implemented, at least most of it.
It is not a GUI environment, it is supposed to replace GUI as we know it. KDE is not just a GUI environment, it is a desktop environment. That has the limitations of the desktop metaphor. That is why just adding search capabilities is not such a nice idea. Building the full environment on the search metaphor would be much more sensible, instead of trying to adapt the desktop metaphor to the current reality. The desktop idea was successful for windows, specially because there wasn't anything easier available (the CLI could be considered better, but more difficult to learn) and Microsoft is very good at marketing stuff. That fact should not blind us from the reality that the desktop metaphor is not roven to be a good one, just because it is the most popular right now. Yahoo was the most popular once, and now we understand that big portal-style search sites were not a good idea. Maybe it's time to break with the past, afford the cost of changing, and trying something new. It will be hard, but I am convinced that we can get advantage from that change, having read "The Humane Interface", and seeing that many of the ideas exposed there are slowly starting to appear here, for example incremental searching. There was a better implementation of incremental search, for example in the Canon Cat (1987) involving a dedicated LEAP key, that made the search operation modeless, and so less prone to user errors.
METAMOD!! Bitchslap that moderator!!
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
(Have I just invented M^4 ??)
WTF?!? How is my comment a troll?? It's OT, of course, but it's not even false! I don't care about losing karma, but I do care about karma whoring, and want to denounce it, because it takes away the value of moderation. At least, I like karma whores that give something to the community, but "I'll get modded down" is just plain _lame_. One of the reasons I come to/. is that the lameness rate is slightly smaller than in most other places. Giving karma to lame posts only encourgaes lameness.
What I would like to see, is the speed of google, adapted for the user. The web metaphor justifies going to a text-box, and hitting Enter, but I'm not willing to do that just to look into a page. That's why incremental search is so successful. Maybe it would be nice to implement better metodologies, that have already been proposed. Just because the Google interface is good for the web, it doesn't mean it's good for the local machine. Maybe it would be nice to go to one of the sources of recent improvements (incremental searching) and implement what he suggests, in its full form.
A useful starting set of solutions to the problems outlined above includes
* A better text search methodology, effective both within a local document or system and with respect to extremely large data spaces such as the web
* A method of eliminating all modal aspects of the basic human-machine interface, a method that is readily learned by newcomers and which is habituating
* An improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks; a method which makes use of inborn and learned human navigational skills
* A set of detail improvements to some existing mechanisms that make them consistent with the goals and principles of the rest of the design.
Better text searching requires that the search be extremely fast (the next instance appears within human reaction time), interactive at the typed character (or spoken morpheme) level, and not based on dialog box interaction. You should be able to change the pattern (what you are seeking an instance of) at any time, including during a search. The results should be shown in context and not as a list of documents or sites. A search mechanism that is sufficiently fast and powerful also can serve as a cursor positioning mechanism in text. Such a cursor positioning tool can be significantly faster than graphical pointing devices and can unify local and internetworked information retrieval.
-------------
Well, maybe KDE is not the right project to do that, and I should shut up and help with the project Jef Raskin himself has started, and is slowly being developed, The Humane Environment .
Slashdot Mirror
You bet that I will have real-time photon-mapping rendered 3d backgrounds as soon as I have the spare GPU (yes, GPU) cycles to do it!
You would have realized that I didn't say I liked MM, I was just shocked because he was compared with Bush, and I think it is unfair.
Journalism, even bad journalism, is not comparable to warmongering, even if the first could be used for the latter.
Of course, I think that, because I'm on the outside of the US, and only suffer the consequences of your colonial^W foreign affairs management.
If you have an unreliable source, that you know is unreliable, and then quote them in you speech, you lied about the credibility of your facts.
If SCO tells me that they wrote Linux, and I tell that to someone, I am a liar, because I am portraying gossip as fact.
BTW I despise both Bush and Moore. Both are propganda machines they prey on peoples willingness to believe distortions of the truth.
That's spin too, by expressing the same opinion on the two people, and showing a similarity, you are showing them as if they were equal. That would not be a fair comparison, because although his credibility might be questioned, Michael Moore is not responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, and Bush is. That is spin too, it is a fact that he sent an armed force to invade Irak and Afghanistan, and that they killed lots of people, many civilians, then my opinion is that it is wrong, and another one's would be that it was necessary. Of course, we as humans cannot be objective, because that's not the way we understand the facts.
That someone publishes something "with a spin" is not wrong, it is inevitable. The wisdom is in reading from many sources, so that spin can be cancelled, and you can get your own interpretation. But showing the facts with a spin is not the same as lying. Journalism is mostly related to opinion, just because it is a documentary it doesn't have to be objective, because it is made by someone who does have an opinion. In your advantage, MM tells you that he hates bush, so you know which way he is biasing his documentary, and it is easier to digest it. It would be much worst if he portrayed himself as an objective journalist, and then deceived you.
I thought everybody believed that direct self-realization (being a painter, a writer, an mathematic theorist) was a higher goal than self-realization through money (working and earning money so you can paint/write in your leisure time, or maybe working as an engineer where you can use math), but the latter was more feasible, because of practical issues, and thus is the most popular.
It could be paraphrased like this: some people are more practical, some are more idealistic.
I don't think money has the same value in the US that it has in Russia.
In the US, money is first in everyones life, because you need to be a money-making member of the society in order to eat. As it is the first priority, of course for many people it becomes the most important, and they live happy with it.
Russia still has some remainings of socialist ideology, where if you can do something better than make some money to support yourself, you are supposed to do it, and the society is supposed to take care of you. Or in practice, you are just poor, but people admire you for your achievments instead of despising you just for your low annual income.
Of course, it had many practical problems, but it has the potential to a kind of motivation unthinkable in the every-man-on-his-own scheme of things. To each his own, some people like money, some people like something higher.
In the most capitalist countries, you can't do much without money, but that is just a characteristic of that kind of system, not an inherent problem of human society. Every system has pros and cons.
I think that it would not be a good idea to change the way everyone manages files, just because of an upgrade. A kernel update seems more sensible, and doable.
Of course, there's the problem of having the FS DB in the kernel instead of userland, but maybe that could be solved by taking care of a bigger problem that few people are trying to fix, and that is the monolothic kernel. Maybe some effort should be put in a modular kernel, that lets us plug-in this kind of enhancements, without having to mess with the core of the kernel, but staying behind its frontiers, but that could be too hairy an issue.
Your views are kind of totalitarian.
The idea that anything that is not mandatory should be prohibited is not very nice.
Just because your company has policies about the kind of artwork the employees can show in their computers, the sysadmin has nothing to do with that.
That would be a freedom of expression issue. One should be allowed to say (show) whatever one wants, and then, if any rule is broken, face the consequences. Preventing people from changing their desktops (on the basis of content, and not technical issues) is not the job of a sysadmin, I believe.
That wasn't funny, Uma.
The exact point of my post is that the assumption that "Microsoft Word is the only \".DOC capable word processor\"...." is a flawed one.
.DOC compatibility is not so good.
You are just assuming that it is the case. The whole point if the grand parent is specifying that MS
I have used every version of winword.exe, and they are not compatible with each other. It's usual to lose some formatting stuff between versions, or between platforms. If the level of compatibility achieved in the winword line is to be called acceptable, then oowriter 1.1.2 (and not the previous versions) is too, because it achieves a similar level of compatibility. It works, mostly, and sometimes doesn't (I have yet to find when it doesn't), but it's not worse than winword itself, so it's a good replacement as far as compatibility goes.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the compatibility achieved by different versions of winword is unacceptable, then you shouldn't use new versions of winword, and should stick to just the original platform you were using. Changing versions of winword, or even platforms, could be disasterous for compatibility, and be even comparable to using oowriter. So you would need to stick with winword 6.0, running on win95, which is not supported anymore, or risk taking the chance of losing compatibility by changing versions of winword, or changing to oo.
I believe that, between the three options, the third is the safest.
;)
.DOC files, which is the only Word feature many people need.
Ok, I understand that there must be a lot of characteristics that OO doesn't share with MSWord, but I don't believe they belong to the word processor in the first place.
Revision tracking is a feature I'd rather not have in the documents I publish, or at least, I'd like it to be something I'd have to opt-in. I don't really want everybody in my development group reading whichever previous versions I wrote.
Anyway, I got the point. MSWord has a lot of features that will never be implemented elsewhere.
The fact is that to do that, the same design principles would have to be followed. Those are flawed.
Word is many things that don't belong to word processing. I believe OOWriter implements in a compatible way those that do, and many that don't. Plus, it has compatibility with
I can be clearer.
.DOC compatibility. .DOC - capable word processors are the real standard. Words interface is available in many other projects, including OO, and it changes so much between versions, that it cannot be called "standard". .DOC compatibility. And OO has it. So, it's not a good idea to imply that you are going to have an standardization problem because you don't use MSWord, because that's just plain wrong. You will have it only if the program you use doesn't manage .DOC. If it does, you are still in the de facto standard when it comes to documents.
Word is the most popular word processor. It doesn't make it standard.
Take the web for example. Apache is not the standard. HTTP is. Whichever server that serves HTTP is going to be good ( we all know that is not exactyl true, anyway).
What I was pointing out is that the only problem that non-MS word processors generate when it comes to standardization is the
The only thing people are expected to find is MS
(plus OOWriter copies Word interface, to some extent)
It is much better as far as .DOC compatibility goes. I am yet to find compatibility issues.
Maybe a serious report of OO 1.1.2 compatibility would be nice.
Word couldn't be the standard, for example, in the place I work for, because it doesn't run on SuSE or Slackware, and we just have a win 2000 as a print server (location issues).
.DOCs, a much better job that most versions of Word I have met.
We use Open Office 1.1.2, which does a great job in handling different versions of
OO 1.0 was not as good, but with this version, we have had no problem whatsoever when interchanging documents with other MS-only shops, including clients.
We thought about using terminal services, and installing MS Office in the print server, should any compatibility issue occur, but the MS Office 2000 CD sits unused, because noone has needed it yet. We killed our last Win machine about the time we installed Open Office 1.1.
It is kind of hardware heavy, but that's not problem for us, many of us program Java, so we have memory to spare.
The ones who just use OO, don't have trouble either.
Heavier would be to have to dual boot Windows, or put money in licenses instead of fast hardware.
Q: How can this be rated funny?
A: Everyone should know by now that Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet.
That's why, in my twisted mind, I thought it was funny, but it seems mods don't like twisted humor.
If you take into account that "Funny" doesn't give you karma, you can understand that "Funny" posts are just trying to be humorous, and not looking for mod points, and there's no need to be offended by them. Maybe I just tried to make a joke and you didn't find it funny. Maybe you should have understood that it was a joke, because it was
Especially, if he had actually said that he invented the internet (he said he took the initiative in creating it, a mistake, but not by far) , the joke would have died ages ago. I find it funny because it's a stupid comment to make. Alright.
Maybe I'm saying this in the wrong room.
Ok.
I'll leave.
We all know Al Gore created the open-MMPORG.
The office assistant is an example of a great solution with an awful implementation. It is based on Bayesian operators, which are themselves a great idea, they filter my spam, for instance, and might be of great help in providing hints and tips for newbies. The problem was that marketing thought the clip didn't show up enough, so they made the horror that is Clippo.
But I don't believe Miguel is wrong when saying that is is a great idea. I have been the office assistant of many people that hate me now I'm not willing to do it anymore. It would be nice that a little program did wht they think is my job.
RMS, when he started writing about the notion of what he calls "Copyleft", did so on the basis that Copyright is in fact, wrong, at least in what comes to software, and something needed to be done against its harmful effects.
The idea is that a community without copyrights would be better, but given the fact that they exist, the GPL can be used against its more problematic consequences.
Copyrights go against your freedom to share software, modify it, or help others by distributing your modifications. The GPL protects you by ensuring noone can deprive you of those freedoms. Its whole essence goes against Copyright.
So, no doubt the same people who value the respect for the GPL, and will use every legal tool to protect freedom, will be against the RIAA, and every other Copyright enforcer.
A middle "S" would certainly improve sales.
The same could happen with hierarchical systems, I have lost some pictures easily, with the filesystem approach. the idea of a hierachy is not that great. Of course you can't find a file with wrong metadata, as you couldn't find a file with the worng name, in the wrong directory!!
The guy proposes zoomable interfaces as a way of "geographically" achieve a hierarchical structure, one we can easily navigate, because it is really a navigable metaphor, and accept all the geographical cues we are accustomed to use in our real life.
I have met people that after getting to know GIS, want to store every piece of data available in GIS-like databases, because of the easy navigability and spatial linking of information. I believe that zoomable interfaces are good in what respects to representing hierarchy, being much more flexible than tree representations, because they can show distance and size.
For the most part of my computer experience, at least, I believe the searchable interface is the most useful. I use incremental search in every text app I can (Eclipse, Firefox) and find it extremely fast and powerful, I hardly ever need to use nevigation keys, or the mouse.
If you believe that search would be slow, you are not giving enough thought to the matter. If google can search the world for me, for free, in a second, it must not be such a great task, at least in processor power. It all comes to an intelligent distribution of resources. using "find" to search for a file, can take forever, but "locate" does it instantly, if only it stored a text index of every file, and had a routine triggered by the filesystem, that indexed every new file, in the background, you could have an indexed FS.
ReiserFS will move in that direction at some point.
Plus, you only need to find the first incremental match, and then can continue searching, even the web, because google is so fast you could get your result at the same time you type your search, taking into account human delays.
The Humane Environment is not a text editor. It is an implementation of the humane interface, starting by a text editor, which is already implemented, at least most of it.
It is not a GUI environment, it is supposed to replace GUI as we know it.
KDE is not just a GUI environment, it is a desktop environment. That has the limitations of the desktop metaphor. That is why just adding search capabilities is not such a nice idea.
Building the full environment on the search metaphor would be much more sensible, instead of trying to adapt the desktop metaphor to the current reality.
The desktop idea was successful for windows, specially because there wasn't anything easier available (the CLI could be considered better, but more difficult to learn) and Microsoft is very good at marketing stuff. That fact should not blind us from the reality that the desktop metaphor is not roven to be a good one, just because it is the most popular right now. Yahoo was the most popular once, and now we understand that big portal-style search sites were not a good idea.
Maybe it's time to break with the past, afford the cost of changing, and trying something new. It will be hard, but I am convinced that we can get advantage from that change, having read "The Humane Interface", and seeing that many of the ideas exposed there are slowly starting to appear here, for example incremental searching.
There was a better implementation of incremental search, for example in the Canon Cat (1987) involving a dedicated LEAP key, that made the search operation modeless, and so less prone to user errors.
(Have I just invented M^4 ??)
/. is that the lameness rate is slightly smaller than in most other places.
WTF?!? How is my comment a troll??
It's OT, of course, but it's not even false! I don't care about losing karma, but I do care about karma whoring, and want to denounce it, because it takes away the value of moderation. At least, I like karma whores that give something to the community, but "I'll get modded down" is just plain _lame_.
One of the reasons I come to
Giving karma to lame posts only encourgaes lameness.
"The Humane Interface" is kind of recent (about 2000?), but those ideas have been published by Raskin a long time ago.
Reverse psychology karma whoring?
_That_ is lame.
What I would like to see, is the speed of google, adapted for the user. The web metaphor justifies going to a text-box, and hitting Enter, but I'm not willing to do that just to look into a page. That's why incremental search is so successful. Maybe it would be nice to implement better metodologies, that have already been proposed. Just because the Google interface is good for the web, it doesn't mean it's good for the local machine. Maybe it would be nice to go to one of the sources of recent improvements (incremental searching) and implement what he suggests, in its full form.
from Jef Raskin's
The Humane Interface
Part II: WHAT INTERFACES SHOULD HAVE
A useful starting set of solutions to the problems outlined above includes
* A better text search methodology, effective both within a local document or system and with respect to extremely large data spaces such as the web
* A method of eliminating all modal aspects of the basic human-machine interface, a method that is readily learned by newcomers and which is habituating
* An improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks; a method which makes use of inborn and learned human navigational skills
* A set of detail improvements to some existing mechanisms that make them consistent with the goals and principles of the rest of the design.
Better text searching requires that the search be extremely fast (the next instance appears within human reaction time), interactive at the typed character (or spoken morpheme) level, and not based on dialog box interaction. You should be able to change the pattern (what you are seeking an instance of) at any time, including during a search. The results should be shown in context and not as a list of documents or sites. A search mechanism that is sufficiently fast and powerful also can serve as a cursor positioning mechanism in text. Such a cursor positioning tool can be significantly faster than graphical pointing devices and can unify local and internetworked information retrieval.
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Well, maybe KDE is not the right project to do that, and I should shut up and help with the project Jef Raskin himself has started, and is slowly being developed, The Humane Environment .