In the United States it is illegal to plan to (or attempt to) overthrow the government by force or with violence.
Passing around a petition saying "I support breaking up the United States" is not a crime. Running for congress and saying "I would vote to breakup the United States" is not a crime. Attacking with force Fort Sumter -- crime! It's not perfect, I'd probably like more anti-government actions to be completely protected, but it is what it is.
Bottom line is the the Chinese party line on basic freedoms (like freedom of speech) and the typical American or European view on such things are worlds apart different. Some people like to put these down to thousands of years of history with such theories as Wittfogel's hydrolic Empires -- "Orientals like rules because they are used to them from thousands of years of absolute rule from above." I don't buy that. American and European views on freedom of speech are very different too. Witness the Brits who are in trouble for burning Qur'ans, the illegality of certain types of clothing in France and Germany, religious freedom differences, great differences on offensive speech, etc.
One thing that North American and Europeans are almost united on though is that political dissenters should be allowed and protected. Doesn't mean dissenters always get an easy or free ride, but the Chinese model is very abhorrent to many.
Even if EXACTLY what you claim is true and even if it's not just propaganda created by the Chinese Government, you think a decade of imprisonment is fair punishment?
Absolutely agree that in the very early 90s Mac OS was superior to the DOS/win31 combo. Moving past them, don't forget that even Win95 had preemptive multitasking. Multitasking is--and was--a big deal. Remember hearing the disk grind and not being able to switch applications? Remember copying a file to the network or a disk and not being able to do anything but wait for it to finish?
I support many Thunderbird users and I've definitely seen the spellcheck bug. I've never seen the font change bug. Since you've seen it more than once, as a guess, maybe it's some customization implemented across the office (e.g., and addon?)
We don't generally have any addons installed, and the user in with the font change bug definitely doesn't have any. I assume it's some quirk in the HTML composer, and that probably most of the devs don't use HTML email (I know I despise it). Never have been able to replicate it with any real repeatability...
I don't think the spellcheck is very consequential -- just ignore it and move on -- and I support many Thunderbird users and they have not complained about it. I still wish it were fixed and Thunderbird could use some spit and polish, but overall our users love it. It's fast and efficient.
The user (now users) who complained about it to me were ones who have the spellcheck set to spellcheck every message before sending. Fortunately there are workarounds for some of the cases.
FOSS is a tool like any other: Good for some things, less good for other things. If you want a highly polished app, FOSS is often a poor choice; it doesn't seem to be in its DNA, at least for community-based projects. If you want professional support, that can also be a challenge with FOSS. If you want low purchase price, good functionality, security, confidentiality, access to highly technical resources (bug databases, developers, etc.), adherence to standards, etc., FOSS is pretty good.
I absolutely 100% agree with you here. One of the other people in this thread took great umbrage when I asserted the same thing, but I definitely feel as you do. I love many foss packages but in many cases do wish for some more polish. Having said that, it's not like all commercial software is perfect or polished!
It's a bug that's been present since 2002 I think, but in the case I submitted, the user had a html sig file that hadn't been modified in years, and only in a fairly recent update to Thunderbird did the spellchecker start tagging it. Not sure why...
A declarative statement like "your word, not mine" generally indicates that the writer believes the word to be deliberately misleading.
Ok, since that's your interpretation I can do nothing more than again apologize if you felt I was being unfair to you.
You say "checks the contents of the tag" does that mean something other than checking the tags?
Slashcode stripped out what I wrote. It checks the contents of <style> tags. So if a message, pasted content, your signature, a message you're replying to (etc) has a <style> tag in it, you get spelling matches. Are you looking at the same bugzilla report? I'm on a different computer from the one I have it bookmarked on now, but I think I linked to it from a previous message.
I agree it's not a "critical" error, but I do think it's a non-minor one, and a major annoyance for users!
huh? What does that matter? You were "right there with" something he had not even written yet?
No, no, you misunderstand--if you read his other message I think you might find some interesting stuff. (relating to bug reporting)...that was why I referenced it. Sorry if that was unclear.
No, you don't cheerfully grant - you declare and base your entire argument on that declaration. I don't agree - see the part where I called it a canard. Doing UI work well is hard, but that's true of all the other areas of programming too, they are all hard to do well - its the doing well part that is difficult. You just don't see all the sloppiness in the non-UI parts of the code because if it works fast enough with few enough errors you have no idea what cruft is under the hood. You may not realize it, but you are cherry picking your anecdotes.
Sorry, but I think you're still missing the point about UI design and polish. For the average user (heck, for the vast majority of all users, average or not!), "slopinness in the non-UI" parts of the code don't matter if it works. For instance in this example of the spellchecker bug. It's been around for 8 years and you say correct, it's rare, non-critical, and goes to the end of the queue. But if you're a clueless non-programmer user it's a BIG bug. If you don't know what these "rgb" or "background-color" or whatever else things are or where they are coming from, that's the kind of inexplicable impossible to solve error that will drive you away from FOSS! That's not something I think anybody wants...
In this example, by your standards Thunderbird works just fine -- email is sent correctly. It's just a bumpy road for the users!
I guess it ultimately comes down to this though. I point to the corpus of FOSS desktop applications and say by and by, the FOSS model has not produced many polished apps. You say well not all cathedral developed apps are good either. And of course we're both right. As an example I've been aggravated by Quark XPress bugs for about two weeks. Good software on one level, but unpolished for the last decade.
I do believe that in general FOSS programs are not as polished nor do they have as well developed user interface design. I do believe that in general programmers working on FOSS software tend to be less interested in user interface design and less interested in what I'm calling "polish." But I think at this point we just agree to disagree.
But the guy whom you were "right there with" did when he complained about stuff not "just working" out of the box. All those things are examples of stuff just not working in such a way as to be perceived as very "unpolished" to the user.
Oh I see. Let me put it this way -- when he complains about "Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts)," I agree. When he complains about "polish, compatibility, and accessibility," I agree. When he complains about "Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking," I agree. And that was the main thrust about which I've written since then.
The other comments about OS issues are more tangential, but ones with which I also happen to agree (though I haven't said a thing about them here).
If that's how you feel, why did you come out swinging about word choice in the first place?
Sorry, I'm really not sure what you're getting so upset about here? All I said is that you used a word different from what I said--and that this changed meanings. Don't know what you mean by "came out swinging" but I'm sorry if I offended you.
Furthermore when I looked at the bug it sure seemed rare to me - only happens when replying to and quoting certain types of messages with one specific formating method from one mail client and all it does is spell-check the htmls tags in addition to the real text. Rare and non-critical - it belongs at the back of the line.
Nope, that's not it. It's that spellchecker spellchecks the contents of the tag. More than just "one particular mail client," and common enough to be reported time and time again over 8 years. 8 years is a long queue!
The whole bit about "programmers like to invent new and faster algorithms" is a canard - there have been a ton of rote-work fixes in the UI and elsewhere in tbird and all of the major FOSS apps. You only see the empty half of the glass.
Sure you're right, and again, what you're saying is very obvious. Neither I nor anybody else here has claimed that NO work goes into the UIs of open source software, just that they almost uniformally lack polish and lag in usability.
I cheerfully grant that in a programmers view of priority, UI often comes last. That's part of the problem.
And to take the issue back to assersterne's post which you were "right there with
Take a look at his later posts about bug reports.
Anyone who has been around a while can go anecdote to anecdote about proprietary stuff that is "unpolished" too - drivers that fail in corner case scenarios, anti-virus software causing all kinds of applications to behave mysteriously. Hell my current winxp box has had screen/window redraw problems for years and its regularly updated with patches from MS and nvidia - the damn sound card driver blue-screens the system if I feed it 5 channel sound instead of 5.1 channels and its been that way for nearly four years now, despite being current on patches. That vendor doesn't even have a bug-tracking system I can look at.
In summary, my criticism of your point of view is that you have unrealistic expectations that are founded on cherry-picked anecdotes
Still missing the point. I've not once mentioned drivers, or blue screens or any such. I am talking about primarily desktop apps. Things like Thunderbird. Firefox. Openoffice. Even KDE/GNOME as entire entities I think fall into this too.
It's not an indictment of FOSS as a whole, I think many bazaar style open source projects cdo utterly fantastic work. What FOSS projects that are deskstop programs do you think have a great interface with great polish?
I think Firefox comes closest, nothing else in the Mozilla suite would I call polished or even particularly usable for non-techies.
I really am somewhat surprised...I've seen it admitted over the years even by hardcore FOSS believers that open source apps frequently lack good user interface design. I do think things are better now than a decade ago, but -- IMHO! -- usability remains a big problem for desktop apps.
Are you seriously giving me shit over a synonym for "probably doesn't hit too many people?"
I'm not quite sure why you're getting upset over this (and don't think it's worth it) but it's a valid distinction. If the spectrum is Common, Uncommon, and Rare, I would suspect this bug hits people in the "uncommon" range. Since it's been reported so many times over the years, it's more than rare. I couldn't have expected you to know that right off since I didn't post the link initially, so, my mistake.
Actually it is indicative of what happens when you have limited resources
No, I think you're wrong here bymissing the point of what I and several others in this thread are saying. It's beyond obvious to say it's a question of limited resources--with unlimited resources we could hire a programmer to fix every bug that ever arose. The problem is FOSS allocation of resources. Secondly, we are saying that open source software--and specfically desktop software--tends to be unpolished. This largely means UI. I really think defending FOSS UI is a difficult task, but if you want to take that one on, you're welcome to!
Programmers like to come up with new indexing algorithms/engines, or they like to come up with clever solutions that make xyz 5 times faster! There are certain programming tasks that more people like to work on. Not nearly so many people want to do boring, rote UI work, or the "details" that make some programs nice to work with, and some programs a bear. Look at the other Bug I referenced about renaming files, and look at the discussion. It's PAINFUL.
And please note, I'm not whining. I think FOSS is fantastic for many things, and some foss communities are fantastic about most things. FreeBSD I think does a good job up and down the line (including documentation). The server programs -- Apache, Samba, etc -- tend to be really fantastic. I just don't think the virtues of foss development seem to translate nearly so well into some other venues.
I can't tell you how many Mail.app bugs haven't been fixed. I can tell you that I get a lot more complaints from Thunderbird users than from Mail.app users.
Another bug which I don't even know how to submit to Bugzilla and so haven't. User is composing an HTML email. While typing, midsentence, and for no apparent reason, the font changes. I thought the user was doing something dumb like clicking elsewhere in the email, but no, the font / style just randomly changes mid-sentence.
It's these kind of bugs that are SO irritating to users.
"Rare" was your word, not mine. The fact that it's been submitted to Bugzilla numerous times over the past 5-6 years should tell you something. (Especially considering what a small portion of bugs users hit actually get reported)
The response their--and your attitude here as well--is perfectly indicative of some of the problems that users have with OSS software. "It's good enough!" or "fix it yourself."
That's exactly what the GP was talking about. Polished vs unpolished. A lot of FOSS software just ends up being unpolished. It may have absolutely tremendous features, but especially on the desktop side so many apps tend towards the unpolished. I can sympathize, but it does make it harder to want to use software like Thunderbird, when you can find plenty examples of known bugs lingering for YEARS.
As an example along similar lines, a user at my office reported a bug in Thunderbird to me. I tested and found it was definitely a Thunderbird bug. I made a test case file and submitted it to Bugzilla. A few days later my reported bug is deleted, to be merged with the same bug report from *2005*
Nobody who works on Thunderbird felt like working on the bug. It's not a sexy bug, probably doesn't hit too many people, and has work arounds...so it's stayed in the software for ~6 years.
And yeah I know, I should go in and fix it myself. Maybe one day I will. In the meanwhile I'll keep using Mail.app and I'll move more users over to new versions of Outlook that actually seem somewhat decent, and we'll go from there.
US rules have changed fairly recently as well. Married couples don't have to worry about 500k of profit (single 250k) if they've lived in a house 2 out of the last 5 years. Given average house costs, maintenance costs or money spent on improvements, etc, VERY few people get 500k in profit in a sale. Most houses nationwide don't even cost near 500, though obviously in many areas they do (or did)
a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS. well, almost. how can anyone buy in that kind of market and retain sanity?
Because who cares? The same argument can be made for computers, cars, video cards, etc. In today's world, there's ALWAYS something better coming just around the corner. Get the 2010 car, well guess who's a sucker, it's being completely redesigned with features xyz for 2011. Etc ad infinitum.
I'm not sure that's correct? I thought it was a Zero Day attack if on the day the attack occurred, the problem was not yet known.
Zero Day:
1) People start receiving emails with engineered PDFs that take advantage of the flaw. 2) Adobe discovers the flaw.
Not Zero Day:
1) Adobe discovers (and typically announces) a potential vulnerability 2) The next day, people start receiving emails with engineered PDFs that take advantage of the flaw.
The hydraulic empire theory is an old and fairly interesting one. I'm sure you know it was developed in a context largely of differentiating Europe from the others...Edward Said discusses it in Orientalism. The problem with Wittfogel's theory is that with better history, more recent archaeological discoveries, and frankly less ethno-centric or exceptionalist European ideologies, the idea has come under a lot of attack in recent years. I'm not a Chinese history expert by any means, but I think a lot of historians now would disagree with your assertion of Oriental despotism, etc.
My complaint--first, what EXACTLY do you mean by civilized?
Secondly when you talk about "We in the west" you're presumably talking about europe and north america and other directly European colonized parts of the world? Western is a somewhat nebulous term as at times it hasn't even referred to the entirety of Europe. Russian was certainly not Western, nor sometimes even the Spanish. Saying something like "westerns and orientals just think differently" is imho not a wise thing to say. It conflates far to many cultures and civilizations and only makes sense when you don't know many details.
Lastly, you mention 500 BC. The "West" that you mention today is Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman in origin. While at 500 BC the Romans and Christians had yet to enter the scene in a huge way, you cannot say the same for the other adjective pair. In 500 BC Rome was forming the basic Republic -- fundamentals of which are still used in our government today. In Greece (and this is centuries AFTER the Greek Dark Ages had passed--what does it tell you about Western civilization that the Greek dark ages started before 1000bc?) Pythagoras was alive and writing. Within a century names such as Plato, Aristotle and Socrates (influential enough on civilization that we still read them) will be appearing. And THAT is ultimately why I find your statement to be nonsense.
Yeah--places like England or Northern Germany were backwards compared to Greece or China in the BCs (though probably not as backwards as you imagine), the extent of East Asian empires at the same time was perhaps not as extensive as you imagine. Certainly not beginning to cover the landmass that China covers today.
I know there is a a very common fascination with China/Asians amongst many nerds, but statements like yours just don't stand up. An archaeologist friend of mine once commented that it's very hard for non-Chinese to do fieldwork in China, and when you do, you have to be careful for misinformation. It seems to be a strong goal of the Chinese government to push discoveries farther back in time and for discoveries (even if later lost) to have been discovered in China first. I don't know why, possibly because the Chinese have destroyed so much of their history at times over the past century. Take it with a grain of salt.
Slashdot - Only recently made the login process 'usable' on the iPad. The opacity change in the background and the login section was VERY difficult to use. I'd go as far as saying broken and dodgy.
Hmmm, I've only had an iPad for I guess ~2 months, but I haven't ever had any problems on Slashdot?
Facebook - try and use the jQuery like search interface to look for friends, its broken.
Don't use facebook often, have only used the App on my idevices. I'll take your word for it.
YouTube - ever tried to search for "latest uploaded videos" or sort the search queries? very limiting, on several occasions I've simply given up on using YT on the iPad. Walked over to my PC to find the clip i was looking for. 2 mins on the PC, 20 mins of sh*ting and f*cking on my iPad till i gave up.
CAn't say I've ever run into any of those problems. Can you just go to the website?
Newspapers - Australian based newspaper reading is nothing short of a complicated and sits on a broken half done interface (a lot of it is WIP). It works well on the iPhone, iPad not so much.
Sorry, not exactly sure what you mean? Are you talking about apps the aussie newspapers have released? Not sure how that's Apple's problem... if it's a non-functional website that's another issue. Sites that boot you to a mobile page ghetto and won't let you navgiate to the main page are a MAJOR pet peeve of mine. I tend to hate most mobile pages.
Finding text within Web Pages - Please direct me to the "find" or "find next" feature on the iPad?
An egregious lack (and to be remedied in the next update). Fortunately there have been easy to use javascript bookmarklets around for years for just this purpose.
No Extension Management - Simple things like Google toolbar is not possible. Web Developer tools? view source? without even the option of these things it makes it useless for any professional web person.
Agreed, currently the iPad is NOT suitable for a development platform. But nobody ever claimed it was...
Unable to Download Media - I wont regurgitate the no flash argument but if it aint QuickTime it rarely works, in fact mp3, avi all those formats are BUGGY at best. And dont worry about having the capacity to save anything. I'm just curious on how Jobs expects to use the whopping 64 gig he gave us *sarcasm*
This is another weakness, though to be fair you can download media to the iPad just fine via iTunes or eg mail. Just today I as an example, I was mailed an ePub file and it opened in Stanza.
Not a great interface, but fairly functional.
Maybe it comes down the to type of user, for me who practically lives on the internet as apart of his job my iPad gathers a lot of dust. Believe me when I say i wish it wouldn't.
I can totally agree with you here. I primarily use the iPad for "fun" at home, as an ebook reader, and when traveling for business. At conferences it's been absolutely fantastic. For development purposes--absolutely not.
Again same as above, I don't believe a lot of people are in this boat. I believe a small percentage is but you'll find 8 x out of 10 people just want a phone to be phone. The camera is only an extra and there to take snaps of your drunk mates to use as bribery material later - it doesn't need to be airbrushed and polished and stuck on a magazine cover, it just needs to be recognizable.
I think we'll just have to disagree on this point then. As an anecdote, I would say most of the people I know who got an iPhone4 have mentioned the improved camera+flash as the biggest or a very big selling point.
Okay so your in agreeing that reading books on the iPhone sucks. Now consider if your to sit on the PC for an 1hr or so reading a technical reference like docs.php.net on the iP
Slashdot Mirror
In the United States it is illegal to plan to (or attempt to) overthrow the government by force or with violence.
Passing around a petition saying "I support breaking up the United States" is not a crime. Running for congress and saying "I would vote to breakup the United States" is not a crime. Attacking with force Fort Sumter -- crime! It's not perfect, I'd probably like more anti-government actions to be completely protected, but it is what it is.
Bottom line is the the Chinese party line on basic freedoms (like freedom of speech) and the typical American or European view on such things are worlds apart different. Some people like to put these down to thousands of years of history with such theories as Wittfogel's hydrolic Empires -- "Orientals like rules because they are used to them from thousands of years of absolute rule from above." I don't buy that. American and European views on freedom of speech are very different too. Witness the Brits who are in trouble for burning Qur'ans, the illegality of certain types of clothing in France and Germany, religious freedom differences, great differences on offensive speech, etc.
One thing that North American and Europeans are almost united on though is that political dissenters should be allowed and protected. Doesn't mean dissenters always get an easy or free ride, but the Chinese model is very abhorrent to many.
Link for further info?
Even if EXACTLY what you claim is true and even if it's not just propaganda created by the Chinese Government, you think a decade of imprisonment is fair punishment?
Tablets are going to be popular and then they'll be gone like Betamax.
Why do you believe that?
I don't think I would agree with your assertion.
Absolutely agree that in the very early 90s Mac OS was superior to the DOS/win31 combo. Moving past them, don't forget that even Win95 had preemptive multitasking. Multitasking is--and was--a big deal. Remember hearing the disk grind and not being able to switch applications? Remember copying a file to the network or a disk and not being able to do anything but wait for it to finish?
Er, not sure why my last message was posted anonymous but the "STRONGLY disagree" post below was me.
I'm firmly in Apple's lap today, and have been using Macs at work and elsewhere for many years, but I couldn't stand the original Mac OS.
On a technological level, I also think it was far behind the competition in terms of memory protection, cooperative multitasking, etc.
I support many Thunderbird users and I've definitely seen the spellcheck bug. I've never seen the font change bug. Since you've seen it more than once, as a guess, maybe it's some customization implemented across the office (e.g., and addon?)
We don't generally have any addons installed, and the user in with the font change bug definitely doesn't have any. I assume it's some quirk in the HTML composer, and that probably most of the devs don't use HTML email (I know I despise it). Never have been able to replicate it with any real repeatability...
I don't think the spellcheck is very consequential -- just ignore it and move on -- and I support many Thunderbird users and they have not complained about it. I still wish it were fixed and Thunderbird could use some spit and polish, but overall our users love it. It's fast and efficient.
The user (now users) who complained about it to me were ones who have the spellcheck set to spellcheck every message before sending. Fortunately there are workarounds for some of the cases.
FOSS is a tool like any other: Good for some things, less good for other things. If you want a highly polished app, FOSS is often a poor choice; it doesn't seem to be in its DNA, at least for community-based projects. If you want professional support, that can also be a challenge with FOSS. If you want low purchase price, good functionality, security, confidentiality, access to highly technical resources (bug databases, developers, etc.), adherence to standards, etc., FOSS is pretty good.
I absolutely 100% agree with you here. One of the other people in this thread took great umbrage when I asserted the same thing, but I definitely feel as you do. I love many foss packages but in many cases do wish for some more polish. Having said that, it's not like all commercial software is perfect or polished!
Was there a <style> tag?
It's a bug that's been present since 2002 I think, but in the case I submitted, the user had a html sig file that hadn't been modified in years, and only in a fairly recent update to Thunderbird did the spellchecker start tagging it. Not sure why...
I could replicate on multiple comps.
A declarative statement like "your word, not mine" generally indicates that the writer believes the word to be deliberately misleading.
Ok, since that's your interpretation I can do nothing more than again apologize if you felt I was being unfair to you.
You say "checks the contents of the tag" does that mean something other than checking the tags?
Slashcode stripped out what I wrote. It checks the contents of <style> tags. So if a message, pasted content, your signature, a message you're replying to (etc) has a <style> tag in it, you get spelling matches. Are you looking at the same bugzilla report? I'm on a different computer from the one I have it bookmarked on now, but I think I linked to it from a previous message.
I agree it's not a "critical" error, but I do think it's a non-minor one, and a major annoyance for users!
huh? What does that matter? You were "right there with" something he had not even written yet?
No, no, you misunderstand--if you read his other message I think you might find some interesting stuff. (relating to bug reporting)...that was why I referenced it. Sorry if that was unclear.
No, you don't cheerfully grant - you declare and base your entire argument on that declaration. I don't agree - see the part where I called it a canard. Doing UI work well is hard, but that's true of all the other areas of programming too, they are all hard to do well - its the doing well part that is difficult. You just don't see all the sloppiness in the non-UI parts of the code because if it works fast enough with few enough errors you have no idea what cruft is under the hood. You may not realize it, but you are cherry picking your anecdotes.
Sorry, but I think you're still missing the point about UI design and polish. For the average user (heck, for the vast majority of all users, average or not!), "slopinness in the non-UI" parts of the code don't matter if it works. For instance in this example of the spellchecker bug. It's been around for 8 years and you say correct, it's rare, non-critical, and goes to the end of the queue. But if you're a clueless non-programmer user it's a BIG bug. If you don't know what these "rgb" or "background-color" or whatever else things are or where they are coming from, that's the kind of inexplicable impossible to solve error that will drive you away from FOSS! That's not something I think anybody wants...
In this example, by your standards Thunderbird works just fine -- email is sent correctly. It's just a bumpy road for the users!
I guess it ultimately comes down to this though. I point to the corpus of FOSS desktop applications and say by and by, the FOSS model has not produced many polished apps. You say well not all cathedral developed apps are good either. And of course we're both right. As an example I've been aggravated by Quark XPress bugs for about two weeks. Good software on one level, but unpolished for the last decade.
I do believe that in general FOSS programs are not as polished nor do they have as well developed user interface design. I do believe that in general programmers working on FOSS software tend to be less interested in user interface design and less interested in what I'm calling "polish." But I think at this point we just agree to disagree.
But the guy whom you were "right there with" did when he complained about stuff not "just working" out of the box. All those things are examples of stuff just not working in such a way as to be perceived as very "unpolished" to the user.
Oh I see. Let me put it this way -- when he complains about "Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts)," I agree. When he complains about "polish, compatibility, and accessibility," I agree. When he complains about "Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking," I agree. And that was the main thrust about which I've written since then.
The other comments about OS issues are more tangential, but ones with which I also happen to agree (though I haven't said a thing about them here).
If that's how you feel, why did you come out swinging about word choice in the first place?
Sorry, I'm really not sure what you're getting so upset about here? All I said is that you used a word different from what I said--and that this changed meanings. Don't know what you mean by "came out swinging" but I'm sorry if I offended you.
Furthermore when I looked at the bug it sure seemed rare to me - only happens when replying to and quoting certain types of messages with one specific formating method from one mail client and all it does is spell-check the htmls tags in addition to the real text. Rare and non-critical - it belongs at the back of the line.
Nope, that's not it. It's that spellchecker spellchecks the contents of the tag. More than just "one particular mail client," and common enough to be reported time and time again over 8 years. 8 years is a long queue!
The whole bit about "programmers like to invent new and faster algorithms" is a canard - there have been a ton of rote-work fixes in the UI and elsewhere in tbird and all of the major FOSS apps. You only see the empty half of the glass.
Sure you're right, and again, what you're saying is very obvious. Neither I nor anybody else here has claimed that NO work goes into the UIs of open source software, just that they almost uniformally lack polish and lag in usability.
I cheerfully grant that in a programmers view of priority, UI often comes last. That's part of the problem.
And to take the issue back to assersterne's post which you were "right there with
Take a look at his later posts about bug reports.
Anyone who has been around a while can go anecdote to anecdote about proprietary stuff that is "unpolished" too - drivers that fail in corner case scenarios, anti-virus software causing all kinds of applications to behave mysteriously. Hell my current winxp box has had screen/window redraw problems for years and its regularly updated with patches from MS and nvidia - the damn sound card driver blue-screens the system if I feed it 5 channel sound instead of 5.1 channels and its been that way for nearly four years now, despite being current on patches. That vendor doesn't even have a bug-tracking system I can look at.
In summary, my criticism of your point of view is that you have unrealistic expectations that are founded on cherry-picked anecdotes
Still missing the point. I've not once mentioned drivers, or blue screens or any such. I am talking about primarily desktop apps. Things like Thunderbird. Firefox. Openoffice. Even KDE/GNOME as entire entities I think fall into this too.
It's not an indictment of FOSS as a whole, I think many bazaar style open source projects cdo utterly fantastic work. What FOSS projects that are deskstop programs do you think have a great interface with great polish?
I think Firefox comes closest, nothing else in the Mozilla suite would I call polished or even particularly usable for non-techies.
I really am somewhat surprised...I've seen it admitted over the years even by hardcore FOSS believers that open source apps frequently lack good user interface design. I do think things are better now than a decade ago, but -- IMHO! -- usability remains a big problem for desktop apps.
Are you seriously giving me shit over a synonym for "probably doesn't hit too many people?"
I'm not quite sure why you're getting upset over this (and don't think it's worth it) but it's a valid distinction. If the spectrum is Common, Uncommon, and Rare, I would suspect this bug hits people in the "uncommon" range. Since it's been reported so many times over the years, it's more than rare. I couldn't have expected you to know that right off since I didn't post the link initially, so, my mistake.
Actually it is indicative of what happens when you have limited resources
No, I think you're wrong here bymissing the point of what I and several others in this thread are saying. It's beyond obvious to say it's a question of limited resources--with unlimited resources we could hire a programmer to fix every bug that ever arose. The problem is FOSS allocation of resources. Secondly, we are saying that open source software--and specfically desktop software--tends to be unpolished. This largely means UI. I really think defending FOSS UI is a difficult task, but if you want to take that one on, you're welcome to!
Programmers like to come up with new indexing algorithms/engines, or they like to come up with clever solutions that make xyz 5 times faster! There are certain programming tasks that more people like to work on. Not nearly so many people want to do boring, rote UI work, or the "details" that make some programs nice to work with, and some programs a bear. Look at the other Bug I referenced about renaming files, and look at the discussion. It's PAINFUL.
And please note, I'm not whining. I think FOSS is fantastic for many things, and some foss communities are fantastic about most things. FreeBSD I think does a good job up and down the line (including documentation). The server programs -- Apache, Samba, etc -- tend to be really fantastic. I just don't think the virtues of foss development seem to translate nearly so well into some other venues.
I already replied with the one I submitted, but here's another one that I first saw referenced on Slashdot.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165
It's just _PAINFUL_ to read through this bug! It's almost 10 years old now!
And on the topic of crazy bug reports...here's another (non-Mozilla):
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980
Here's another example (somebody on Slashdot posted this awhile back and I bookmarked it for hilarity)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165
Test case + bug #, or it didn't happen.
Sure. And apologies for getting the year wrong--it's actually been since 2003.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222747
I can't tell you how many Mail.app bugs haven't been fixed. I can tell you that I get a lot more complaints from Thunderbird users than from Mail.app users.
Another bug which I don't even know how to submit to Bugzilla and so haven't. User is composing an HTML email. While typing, midsentence, and for no apparent reason, the font changes. I thought the user was doing something dumb like clicking elsewhere in the email, but no, the font / style just randomly changes mid-sentence.
It's these kind of bugs that are SO irritating to users.
"Rare" was your word, not mine. The fact that it's been submitted to Bugzilla numerous times over the past 5-6 years should tell you something. (Especially considering what a small portion of bugs users hit actually get reported)
The response their--and your attitude here as well--is perfectly indicative of some of the problems that users have with OSS software. "It's good enough!" or "fix it yourself."
That's exactly what the GP was talking about. Polished vs unpolished. A lot of FOSS software just ends up being unpolished. It may have absolutely tremendous features, but especially on the desktop side so many apps tend towards the unpolished. I can sympathize, but it does make it harder to want to use software like Thunderbird, when you can find plenty examples of known bugs lingering for YEARS.
Hear, hear. I'm right there with you.
As an example along similar lines, a user at my office reported a bug in Thunderbird to me. I tested and found it was definitely a Thunderbird bug. I made a test case file and submitted it to Bugzilla. A few days later my reported bug is deleted, to be merged with the same bug report from *2005*
Nobody who works on Thunderbird felt like working on the bug. It's not a sexy bug, probably doesn't hit too many people, and has work arounds...so it's stayed in the software for ~6 years.
And yeah I know, I should go in and fix it myself. Maybe one day I will. In the meanwhile I'll keep using Mail.app and I'll move more users over to new versions of Outlook that actually seem somewhat decent, and we'll go from there.
Is there any quality email app for Windows??
US rules have changed fairly recently as well. Married couples don't have to worry about 500k of profit (single 250k) if they've lived in a house 2 out of the last 5 years. Given average house costs, maintenance costs or money spent on improvements, etc, VERY few people get 500k in profit in a sale. Most houses nationwide don't even cost near 500, though obviously in many areas they do (or did)
Canada is also in the midst of a housing bubble that is in the process of popping right now.
I would say one of the other biggest differences is that in Canada you can't deduct mortgage interest. Something I wish we would change in the US...
Where's the "free" part?
a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS. well, almost. how can anyone buy in that kind of market and retain sanity?
Because who cares? The same argument can be made for computers, cars, video cards, etc. In today's world, there's ALWAYS something better coming just around the corner. Get the 2010 car, well guess who's a sucker, it's being completely redesigned with features xyz for 2011. Etc ad infinitum.
I'm not sure that's correct? I thought it was a Zero Day attack if on the day the attack occurred, the problem was not yet known.
Zero Day:
1) People start receiving emails with engineered PDFs that take advantage of the flaw.
2) Adobe discovers the flaw.
Not Zero Day:
1) Adobe discovers (and typically announces) a potential vulnerability
2) The next day, people start receiving emails with engineered PDFs that take advantage of the flaw.
Yeah, I could check my logs, but no sites I run have RSS...so...
? Are people really hanging up on reading RSS feeds? I don't think so
Have RSS feeds ever really been popular?
I have no idea how one would track usage, but I've always assumed that they are primarily used by niche users group. Power users. Geeks. Etc.
The hydraulic empire theory is an old and fairly interesting one. I'm sure you know it was developed in a context largely of differentiating Europe from the others...Edward Said discusses it in Orientalism. The problem with Wittfogel's theory is that with better history, more recent archaeological discoveries, and frankly less ethno-centric or exceptionalist European ideologies, the idea has come under a lot of attack in recent years. I'm not a Chinese history expert by any means, but I think a lot of historians now would disagree with your assertion of Oriental despotism, etc.
My complaint--first, what EXACTLY do you mean by civilized?
Secondly when you talk about "We in the west" you're presumably talking about europe and north america and other directly European colonized parts of the world? Western is a somewhat nebulous term as at times it hasn't even referred to the entirety of Europe. Russian was certainly not Western, nor sometimes even the Spanish. Saying something like "westerns and orientals just think differently" is imho not a wise thing to say. It conflates far to many cultures and civilizations and only makes sense when you don't know many details.
Lastly, you mention 500 BC. The "West" that you mention today is Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman in origin. While at 500 BC the Romans and Christians had yet to enter the scene in a huge way, you cannot say the same for the other adjective pair. In 500 BC Rome was forming the basic Republic -- fundamentals of which are still used in our government today. In Greece (and this is centuries AFTER the Greek Dark Ages had passed--what does it tell you about Western civilization that the Greek dark ages started before 1000bc?) Pythagoras was alive and writing. Within a century names such as Plato, Aristotle and Socrates (influential enough on civilization that we still read them) will be appearing. And THAT is ultimately why I find your statement to be nonsense.
Yeah--places like England or Northern Germany were backwards compared to Greece or China in the BCs (though probably not as backwards as you imagine), the extent of East Asian empires at the same time was perhaps not as extensive as you imagine. Certainly not beginning to cover the landmass that China covers today.
I know there is a a very common fascination with China/Asians amongst many nerds, but statements like yours just don't stand up. An archaeologist friend of mine once commented that it's very hard for non-Chinese to do fieldwork in China, and when you do, you have to be careful for misinformation. It seems to be a strong goal of the Chinese government to push discoveries farther back in time and for discoveries (even if later lost) to have been discovered in China first. I don't know why, possibly because the Chinese have destroyed so much of their history at times over the past century. Take it with a grain of salt.
Slashdot - Only recently made the login process 'usable' on the iPad. The opacity change in the background and the login section was VERY difficult to use. I'd go as far as saying broken and dodgy.
Hmmm, I've only had an iPad for I guess ~2 months, but I haven't ever had any problems on Slashdot?
Facebook - try and use the jQuery like search interface to look for friends, its broken.
Don't use facebook often, have only used the App on my idevices. I'll take your word for it.
YouTube - ever tried to search for "latest uploaded videos" or sort the search queries? very limiting, on several occasions I've simply given up on using YT on the iPad. Walked over to my PC to find the clip i was looking for. 2 mins on the PC, 20 mins of sh*ting and f*cking on my iPad till i gave up.
CAn't say I've ever run into any of those problems. Can you just go to the website?
Newspapers - Australian based newspaper reading is nothing short of a complicated and sits on a broken half done interface (a lot of it is WIP). It works well on the iPhone, iPad not so much.
Sorry, not exactly sure what you mean? Are you talking about apps the aussie newspapers have released? Not sure how that's Apple's problem... if it's a non-functional website that's another issue. Sites that boot you to a mobile page ghetto and won't let you navgiate to the main page are a MAJOR pet peeve of mine. I tend to hate most mobile pages.
Finding text within Web Pages - Please direct me to the "find" or "find next" feature on the iPad?
An egregious lack (and to be remedied in the next update). Fortunately there have been easy to use javascript bookmarklets around for years for just this purpose.
No Extension Management - Simple things like Google toolbar is not possible. Web Developer tools? view source? without even the option of these things it makes it useless for any professional web person.
Agreed, currently the iPad is NOT suitable for a development platform. But nobody ever claimed it was...
Unable to Download Media - I wont regurgitate the no flash argument but if it aint QuickTime it rarely works, in fact mp3, avi all those formats are BUGGY at best. And dont worry about having the capacity to save anything. I'm just curious on how Jobs expects to use the whopping 64 gig he gave us *sarcasm*
This is another weakness, though to be fair you can download media to the iPad just fine via iTunes or eg mail. Just today I as an example, I was mailed an ePub file and it opened in Stanza.
Not a great interface, but fairly functional.
Maybe it comes down the to type of user, for me who practically lives on the internet as apart of his job my iPad gathers a lot of dust. Believe me when I say i wish it wouldn't.
I can totally agree with you here. I primarily use the iPad for "fun" at home, as an ebook reader, and when traveling for business. At conferences it's been absolutely fantastic. For development purposes--absolutely not.
Again same as above, I don't believe a lot of people are in this boat. I believe a small percentage is but you'll find 8 x out of 10 people just want a phone to be phone. The camera is only an extra and there to take snaps of your drunk mates to use as bribery material later - it doesn't need to be airbrushed and polished and stuck on a magazine cover, it just needs to be recognizable.
I think we'll just have to disagree on this point then. As an anecdote, I would say most of the people I know who got an iPhone4 have mentioned the improved camera+flash as the biggest or a very big selling point.
Okay so your in agreeing that reading books on the iPhone sucks. Now consider if your to sit on the PC for an 1hr or so reading a technical reference like docs.php.net on the iP