I can't understand why having all of those codes on the screen is so important in word processing
I agree, and after watching many people use WordPerfect (hey, I'm a UI guy), I have to conclude that it's because WP would let you create a mess that you could only unravel by manually cleaning up it's metadata. Certainly each office usually had it's share of WP addicts who knew all the keystrokes and could effortlessly produce beautiful documents all the livelong day, but in several years of writing software to run private practice doctor's offices and law offices (WP was rampant in both of them), which put me in a position to see this usage (we also sold the hardware and networks, and therefore installed software like WP) I'd have to say that most people used it as an elaborate and expensive plain-text editor.
"And in the end of the year 1982, King Hesaphasaramubani, Plenipotent High Soverign Monarch of the Kingdom of Germany, did decree that the satellite would measure 5,000 cubits on a side, and would enjoy construction utilizing the finest woods from the oldest forests in the kingdom. Laborers slaved for six and twenty days, felling and milling the tallest trees, while craftsmen produced a fine "satellite" cabinet, with loving care. And so it came to be that this chugging steam-powered contraption was lofted into orbit by means of an enormous sling, jointly twirled overhead by the five strongest men, one each from the most powerful nations of Europe in that distant day."
Many people will appreciate it when you share and share alike. And that by itself is worth much more than choosing life, a career, or a fscking big television.
While I agree with you in principle, I think it's "Funny" if it's just being a story being related to the readership, but would be a "Your Rights Online" if it was posted by someone actually affected by the event.
Wasn't there a race car driver who once said he'd rather drive on the track than drive in a major city?
Yeah, me.:)
(Incidentally, in the course of a single weekend racing at a private track in west Texas, an acquiantance of mine managed to hit a roadrunner on one day, which only tore up the bra he put on the car to protect it from track debris, and then a javelina, a type of small wild pig, which did quite a bit more damage to the fascia of his Viper. Not all race tracks are created equally...)
You appear to have missed the ass-kicking aspect of the game "king of the hill". There are certain potential "kings" who wouldn't think twice about denying access to space to everyone else if they truly thought they could get away with it.
I hate to say it, but the moment you bring up the old command line superiority ploy -- particularly in a discussion involving newbies and computer-phobes -- you've lost any credibility you may have built with me. I'm fine with a command line (although as time goes on, I'm running out of reasons to use it very often), but suggesting that it's the most user friendly interface is, again, just stupid. We keep coming back to that, don't we? To borrow your own response -- the command line is the definition of powerful. There isn't anything friendly about it.
And to bring us swerving back to the point, while I think there are some problems with the article, this piece does a pretty good job of illustrating what I'm talking about.
Google for the trick they played on a technician at Pixar - offering him the CEO job at Apple
It sounds less like a funny prank and more like a couple of nutjob ego-freaks acting like dickheads. Which pretty much fits with everything else I've ever read about them -- and my one encounter with Ellison, in which he was trying to use the "Do You Know Who I Am?" effect to cut into a two-hour line at the last minute for a breakout session at the first JavaOne conference.
Being available for comment is about the only thing he's good for.
And about 90% of the time, the comment is grounds for confinement under the Baker Act.
For some reason it's not showing up when I search the archives though.
A lot of "archived" articles have gone missing. I realized this last year when I searched for a comment which I happened to print when it was current. (It was totally off-topic -- the article was about dark matter or something like that -- but some guy wrote a fantastic step-by-step guide to making perfect seared fillet mignon.) After that I checked a few times, and here and there stories apparently just "disappear" -- even ones that have huge amounts of activity.
No big deal, probably just the usual meadering-discussion thing... You're obviously like me and will actually "converse" here, which means you probably end up doing that in several threads, and I know how the original point can get fuzzy after a few days.:)
No, I think sports games contributed to the downfall of arcades because I don't think they're particularly creative. They are a symptom of the overall decline in creativity. (And I appreciate the explanation at the end, I wasn't really following you until that point.)
Um, yeah... That would be the reason I said "I think" when I suggested the rise of sports-themed contributed to the death of the American arcade game. Had I instead claimed, "It is an incontrovertible fact," then you'd have a point.
In addition to what that other guy posted (accounts having daily limits), sending mail through those types of systems is generally just too slow to be of interest to dedicated spammers.
A couple years ago I wrote a bunch of software for very large e-mail runs -- not spamming related, but the lists were in the high hundreds of thousands -- and to successfully blast out hundreds of thousands of e-mails in any reasonable amount of time requires quite a bit of planning, software built for that purpose (our evals showed even the well-known and venerable lsoft offerings perform abysmally for these purposes), not to mention having a fairly hefty chunk of bandwidth at your disposal.
That's probably the dumbest way to find an answer up there. If he truly ran around on campus all day, that explains why he didn't get anywhere. The MS campus is physically huge, there are thousands of people there, and that doesn't include their satellite offices in Bellview and other surrounding areas. Running from building to building (which would eat up a significant portion of your day, in itself) is about the least effective way I can imagine to try to find anybody there.
We occasionally need heavy-duty tech support (for example, a couple years ago we identified an obscure but severe bug in COM), and I can usually hook up with the right person with only two or three e-mails and a few hours of waiting. All unofficial, and all back-channel, but not terribly difficult. And most of those addresses I've culled from public articles over the years. Only a few were given to me in person as a "here's my address, keep it to yourself" kind of thing. I've found that even if you contact the wrong person up there, if the request is serious, well-written (e.g. not "d00d, cn U help me? thx"), and appears to be reasonably outside the capabilities of their usual support services, they'll go out of their way to try to put you in touch with the right person. Not only have I always reached somebody who was quite knowledgable, but very often I reach the person who wrote (or currently maintains) the code in question.
And frankly, I'd be surprised if a staff MSJ writer didn't have those kinds of contacts.
Actually, even according to the stories told by the people who worked on the original Mac (at folklore.org -- lots of good reading even if you don't like Macs), Microsoft Windows was announced quite a long time before the Mac was released. Even in that early release, it clearly contained a lot of elements being planned for the Mac. The story is pretty funny, actually. Steve Jobs, in all of his High and Mighty Jobness, demanded that Bill Gates appear in his royal court. Gates showed up as requested, and Jobs accused him point-blank of stealing the Mac GUI. Bill's reply is a classic; I probably don't have the quote exactly right, but it's close to this: "The way I see it, we both have a neighbor named Xerox PARC. I broke into their house to steal their TV, only to find that you broke in and stole it before me."
At least Bill had the nads to admit where it came from.
By the way, folklore.org will give you a deep new appreciation for what a head-case Jobs really is... he's almost an Ellison-grade nutjob...
The decision to go with a one-button mouse on the Mac didn't have anything to do with studies. The original Mac was slated for a two-button mouse until the later stages of deveopment, when they realized they hadn't used the second button in the GUI at all.
Several ex-PARC people were involved with the original Mac at a very early stage, and the PARC Star system used a two-button mouse (and movable, overlapping windows, and pop-up menus). About the only serious GUI innovation the Mac made over the Star was that background windows could be updated. The Mac GUI invented clip regions.
You appear to equate "make everything possible" with "user-friendly". While "make everything possible" is a noble mantra and an unquestionably worthwhile pursuit, and I will not suggest that Windows doesn't have many failings in this respect -- I submit that this is not even *close* to the accepted definition of user-friendly. And we are most likely to learn from discussion only when we can all agree on basic terminology.
While I will never suggest that Windows is any panacea of user friendliness, Linux is so far removed from this that suggesting anything else is laughable. Ok, perhaps explaining apt-get wouldn't be terribly mind-boggling, but it's still far from a user-friendly experience.
Forget what YOU know and step back and imagine Man on the Street who has just heard that an important patch is available for his operating system. Do you suppose he'll consider the system more friendly to him, a mere user, if all he must do is click the little "Windows Update" icon, or would he consider it more friendly to open a shell and type "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.3-1-686"? It's almost a rhetorical question.
What is a "geek"? Someone who wants to learn?
Absolutely NOT. Or rather, there is more to it than that. Now it's MY turn to ask how long YOU'VE been here.:) Obviously a geek, at least in this context, is somebody who spends a great deal of time working with computers because they *enjoy* working with computers. Contrast this with somebody who spends a lot of time on computers strictly because they're an AOL chat-junkie, for example. I would not characterize such a person as a geek. For my entire working adult life, I have built systems for people who do not like computers. They don't want to use them, they don't care how they work, and quite often they HATE them. These are the people who's lives are made easier by making the computer easier to use -- and whether you agree or not, that really is the basis for the definition of the term "user-friendly".
That doesn't mean that the nitty gritty details can't also be user-friendly, but in Linux even the most basic tasks are often difficult. I will concede that a system can be configured to be very basic and "safe" and user-friendly within the framework of what it permits a simple user to do, but that isn't how any distro ships out of the box -- not even distros like Mandrake.
You and I and probably the majority of slashdot readers are not typical users. We aren't the users that people talk about when they say "user-friendly". So, unfortunately, I still have to conclude that it's stupid to suggest that Linux is more user-friendly than Windows. It is more friendly to a user who is knows what they're doing and is looking for control and configurability, but that isn't the definition of user-friendly.
(My first modem was a Radio Shack 150 baud single-duplex "dumb" modem. Not only do I still have it, but it still actually works...)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and after watching many people use WordPerfect (hey, I'm a UI guy), I have to conclude that it's because WP would let you create a mess that you could only unravel by manually cleaning up it's metadata. Certainly each office usually had it's share of WP addicts who knew all the keystrokes and could effortlessly produce beautiful documents all the livelong day, but in several years of writing software to run private practice doctor's offices and law offices (WP was rampant in both of them), which put me in a position to see this usage (we also sold the hardware and networks, and therefore installed software like WP) I'd have to say that most people used it as an elaborate and expensive plain-text editor.
"And in the end of the year 1982, King Hesaphasaramubani, Plenipotent High Soverign Monarch of the Kingdom of Germany, did decree that the satellite would measure 5,000 cubits on a side, and would enjoy construction utilizing the finest woods from the oldest forests in the kingdom. Laborers slaved for six and twenty days, felling and milling the tallest trees, while craftsmen produced a fine "satellite" cabinet, with loving care. And so it came to be that this chugging steam-powered contraption was lofted into orbit by means of an enormous sling, jointly twirled overhead by the five strongest men, one each from the most powerful nations of Europe in that distant day."
Ha! Troll! I knew it...
So which is it -- "nothing" or "horrific"?
While I agree with you in principle, I think it's "Funny" if it's just being a story being related to the readership, but would be a "Your Rights Online" if it was posted by someone actually affected by the event.
Yeah, me. :)
(Incidentally, in the course of a single weekend racing at a private track in west Texas, an acquiantance of mine managed to hit a roadrunner on one day, which only tore up the bra he put on the car to protect it from track debris, and then a javelina, a type of small wild pig, which did quite a bit more damage to the fascia of his Viper. Not all race tracks are created equally...)
http://www.mobileperipherals.com/
You appear to have missed the ass-kicking aspect of the game "king of the hill". There are certain potential "kings" who wouldn't think twice about denying access to space to everyone else if they truly thought they could get away with it.
What part of "marry your sister" do you not understand? -- God, Genesis 20:12
Read the end of the article. When they talked to the "pest" it didn't sound like he did anything unusually annoying.
And to bring us swerving back to the point, while I think there are some problems with the article, this piece does a pretty good job of illustrating what I'm talking about.
It sounds less like a funny prank and more like a couple of nutjob ego-freaks acting like dickheads. Which pretty much fits with everything else I've ever read about them -- and my one encounter with Ellison, in which he was trying to use the "Do You Know Who I Am?" effect to cut into a two-hour line at the last minute for a breakout session at the first JavaOne conference.
Article here.
Being available for comment is about the only thing he's good for.
And about 90% of the time, the comment is grounds for confinement under the Baker Act.
A lot of "archived" articles have gone missing. I realized this last year when I searched for a comment which I happened to print when it was current. (It was totally off-topic -- the article was about dark matter or something like that -- but some guy wrote a fantastic step-by-step guide to making perfect seared fillet mignon.) After that I checked a few times, and here and there stories apparently just "disappear" -- even ones that have huge amounts of activity.
No big deal, probably just the usual meadering-discussion thing... You're obviously like me and will actually "converse" here, which means you probably end up doing that in several threads, and I know how the original point can get fuzzy after a few days. :)
No, I think sports games contributed to the downfall of arcades because I don't think they're particularly creative. They are a symptom of the overall decline in creativity. (And I appreciate the explanation at the end, I wasn't really following you until that point.)
Um, yeah... That would be the reason I said "I think" when I suggested the rise of sports-themed contributed to the death of the American arcade game. Had I instead claimed, "It is an incontrovertible fact," then you'd have a point.
A couple years ago I wrote a bunch of software for very large e-mail runs -- not spamming related, but the lists were in the high hundreds of thousands -- and to successfully blast out hundreds of thousands of e-mails in any reasonable amount of time requires quite a bit of planning, software built for that purpose (our evals showed even the well-known and venerable lsoft offerings perform abysmally for these purposes), not to mention having a fairly hefty chunk of bandwidth at your disposal.
I wish I had mod points; I think you may have pegged the reason...
We occasionally need heavy-duty tech support (for example, a couple years ago we identified an obscure but severe bug in COM), and I can usually hook up with the right person with only two or three e-mails and a few hours of waiting. All unofficial, and all back-channel, but not terribly difficult. And most of those addresses I've culled from public articles over the years. Only a few were given to me in person as a "here's my address, keep it to yourself" kind of thing. I've found that even if you contact the wrong person up there, if the request is serious, well-written (e.g. not "d00d, cn U help me? thx"), and appears to be reasonably outside the capabilities of their usual support services, they'll go out of their way to try to put you in touch with the right person. Not only have I always reached somebody who was quite knowledgable, but very often I reach the person who wrote (or currently maintains) the code in question.
And frankly, I'd be surprised if a staff MSJ writer didn't have those kinds of contacts.
Very common. Heck, I know people who's companies own their house. One guy I race with -- his company owns the Viper he races in.
At least Bill had the nads to admit where it came from.
By the way, folklore.org will give you a deep new appreciation for what a head-case Jobs really is... he's almost an Ellison-grade nutjob...
Several ex-PARC people were involved with the original Mac at a very early stage, and the PARC Star system used a two-button mouse (and movable, overlapping windows, and pop-up menus). About the only serious GUI innovation the Mac made over the Star was that background windows could be updated. The Mac GUI invented clip regions.
While I will never suggest that Windows is any panacea of user friendliness, Linux is so far removed from this that suggesting anything else is laughable. Ok, perhaps explaining apt-get wouldn't be terribly mind-boggling, but it's still far from a user-friendly experience.
Forget what YOU know and step back and imagine Man on the Street who has just heard that an important patch is available for his operating system. Do you suppose he'll consider the system more friendly to him, a mere user, if all he must do is click the little "Windows Update" icon, or would he consider it more friendly to open a shell and type "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.3-1-686"? It's almost a rhetorical question.
What is a "geek"? Someone who wants to learn?
Absolutely NOT. Or rather, there is more to it than that. Now it's MY turn to ask how long YOU'VE been here. :) Obviously a geek, at least in this context, is somebody who spends a great deal of time working with computers because they *enjoy* working with computers. Contrast this with somebody who spends a lot of time on computers strictly because they're an AOL chat-junkie, for example. I would not characterize such a person as a geek. For my entire working adult life, I have built systems for people who do not like computers. They don't want to use them, they don't care how they work, and quite often they HATE them. These are the people who's lives are made easier by making the computer easier to use -- and whether you agree or not, that really is the basis for the definition of the term "user-friendly".
That doesn't mean that the nitty gritty details can't also be user-friendly, but in Linux even the most basic tasks are often difficult. I will concede that a system can be configured to be very basic and "safe" and user-friendly within the framework of what it permits a simple user to do, but that isn't how any distro ships out of the box -- not even distros like Mandrake.
You and I and probably the majority of slashdot readers are not typical users. We aren't the users that people talk about when they say "user-friendly". So, unfortunately, I still have to conclude that it's stupid to suggest that Linux is more user-friendly than Windows. It is more friendly to a user who is knows what they're doing and is looking for control and configurability, but that isn't the definition of user-friendly.
(My first modem was a Radio Shack 150 baud single-duplex "dumb" modem. Not only do I still have it, but it still actually works...)
Cool. I apologize for getting a little bent out of shape.