The hatred of Mircosoft does not stem from a hatred of proprietary software, nor is MS a symbol of propriatery software. If anything, it's the other way around - free software / open source spokespeople have used the (existing) volumes of MS hatred as a springboard for attacking all of propriatery software.
Before The Cathedral and the Bazzar, was there really a big fuss about Open Source or propriatery software? Some, in the GNU camp. But for the most part, that mindset wasn't there. Hell, no one cared that xv was the defacto image viewer on X, and that's certainly propriatery (shareware). But MS hatred certainly abounded.
MS hatred exists because of the classic American values of Hate And Fear Those That Are Successful And Have Money And Power(TM). (This is the same reason why there are RedHat bashers.) The alleged hatred of propriatery software in the Linux community is mostly based on the feelings for Mircosoft (i.e. attempts to liken propriatery software houses to MS).
I say alleged, because Linux users don't hate really hate propriatery software itself - only when they feel that the company behind it is acting like Microsoft does that feeling come around. Witness all the games - Linux users love those, and they are certainly propriatery.
This, of course, assumes that the NSA hasn't found any 'holes' in the algorithms (or the implementations of these algorithms) that would cut that to a reasonable time.
Remember, the NSA is the worlds largest employer of mathematicians. They aren't there as tech support, either.
Sun's not doing this because they want an office suite for Linux or Solairs. They're doing it so they have a place to start developing a thin-client Office suite for the Network Computer concept that they're still hung up on (read : way to sell more Sun servers). Star Office as we know it (large, MS-Like office suite) is going to eventually atrophy, simply because Sun doesn't really care about it (regardless of the 'Openess' of this, it's still basically Sun trying to enlist developers with thier silly Community License).
Re:"Office.. i think i can hear someone....."
on
911 Calls Linux
·
· Score: 1
And when was the last time you had a kernel panic in Linux (when you weren't doing anything 'creative' like installing a half dead hard drive or the like)?
Yes, all the patches were free. But that didn't change the fact that it took a year to be finished.
(To be fair, it was pretty functional out of the box - but alot of silly mistakes (leaving a backdoor rcon password in, getting thier master servers pinged every 30 ms, as opposed to every 30 s, etc) could have been avoided with a few iterations of the test, and some multiplayer capabilities in it (q2test was one player only, 3 levels)).
CTP was by Activision, Myth II is from Bungie, etc, etc.
That's like saying Zoid wrote Quake for Linux - he didn't write it he, he ported it to the various Unices it runs on (not to diminish Zoid's work, of course, as he is certainly a very fine programmer who handles teamplay & CTF code and all in all is very cool and who I know is reading this right now:-).
(Which reminds me -- Zoid -- for Team Play in Q3, can we get something to address the problem of TeamKillers? It's a really, really annoying problem in q3test right now).
Now all this beta testing is needed thats sure But one release IMHO should have been enough not 3 or more just because the game isn't ready
Yeah, one beta release was just great for Quake 2. Got all those bugs right out of there. That's why it had to be patched from 3.05 to 3.20 over the course of the next year. Because it was enough beta testing.
When a company officially finishes a game just under a year after they release it, and then tries to do more beta testing for thier next game, that's called 'learning from ones mistakes'. Quake 2 was a mess out of the box. Hopefully, all this playing and drooling over Q3Test will make it actually in good shape out of the box.
Actually, what I meant was SGML-like tags to delimit the sections of text that contain command line switches - as that's the most useful thing about man pages. So the author (or an interested 3rd party) could flag the sections of the manual that are sufficently useful to be included in the man page.
Hear, Hear! (or is it Here, Here!? I could never figure that out. I'd like to go with Ear, Ear!, but I think that would confuse some people.)
Info was ahead of it's time (I guess) in terms of being a hypertext documentation system, but really now - the only decent info reader is Emacs, which is really kind of silly. The stand alone info reader is beyond hope, and has perhaps the most counterintuitive interface I've ever seen (only the 'info-mode' commands are available in it IIRC (it's been a while since I've used it, because it sucks)) (I need to look up a flag for grep and the --help-me-please-i-beg-you switches aren't doing the job - I know, I have to start up Emacs, go to info mode, pray the node is linked properly, and then I finally go down 5 nodes to find what I'm looking for Yay! And this, of course, assumes that info pages are put in the right place, and the info directory files are updated appropriately, etc). I seriously think that the GNU project should move towards SGML or something more robust for thier official documentation, but also still produce man pages. Man pages are the most useful, consise form of online documentation I have ever, ever encountered. Info isn't:-)
Actually, one of the SGML packages should grow a facility to generate Man pages from certain sections of the document containing command line switches, etc. I.e. a block of text marked or something would suffice. That way, those long winded authors could write thier 450 node info pages in SGML, and still have a useful, up-to-date man page for those of us who actually work on a schedule....
Okay, so it's not the best analogy in the world:-P I was just trying to keep the car thing going (I drive a standard, so... Next slashdot poll idea, I guess.) Anyway, the idea is the same - you still have to know *something* about driving, about how the spedometer works, about what the '1' and '2' are on the Automatic transmission, as opposed to 'D' (I still haven't figured that out...), etc. If you don't know how to drive, automatic transmission isn't going to help that much.
As someone noted earlier, the idea that "they will just be able to use the software" is saying "they will just be able to drive the car (without learning anything about it)". The problem is one of perception, and average logical literacy.
Perception, in the sense that MS & Co. have been trying like hard to hammer home the fact that thier software is *easy* to use, and doesn't require any thought, and that Apple with thier iMac has been trying to make the 'un-thinking' PC a reality. Imagine someone trying to market a car that you don't have to learn how to drive, it's so easy to use! Absurd. But we see that as the holy grail of software design nowadays - that the user shouldn't have to think at all in order to do anything.
Logical literacy, in the sense that computers are very, very logical machines, and human minds aren't. In order to effectively use a computer, your expectations of what is and isn't possible have to conform (roughly) to the rules of logic (i.e. you can't do word processing without a word processor, no matter how much you think you can). This really should be addressed by increased standards for Math and Science testing, but with the way things are going in our society (cutting school budgets, the whole evolution mess in Kansas), I don't see that happening. I am not saying users are stupid - generally, users are very good at what they do in life. It's just that thier minds (very literally) don't work the same as a programmer's mind. Something that very few programmers (and technical people in general) realize.
Logical reasoning is not something fundamental to human thought or behaviour. It has to be learned, just like everything else.
However, the danger in trying to make things easier is doing it wrong. I'm sure we're all familiar with the results of this process *coughcoughWordcoughcough*.
To some techies and/.'ers, 'easy to the average user' means 'something that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole because it's too graphical, but I guess it's fine for the people who've never seen something like this before', when said application has years (decade's in Unix's case) of evolution behind it, which the programmer can't get out of his mind. The problem is the perception of the problem.
The typical UI-solving exersize is 'make it look pretty and have simple, easy to navigate options'. This is generally the approach taken by Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc. The problem with this, is that for anything more complex than a trivial application, the logic of the program can become pretty, well, non-trivial, and communicating the logical structure to the user can be a bit of a chore. So, the programmer just assumes that the user is going to know to look in 'Options' for changing his user information, but in 'Preferences' to change his start page, or 'Page Setup' to change how the thing is going to print, etc, etc. And that's a simple case. Do Tools->Options in Word to see a horrible case (to turn off auto spell check, you have to go to Tools->Options->Spelling & Grammar, but to turn off AutoCorrection, you have to go to Tools->AutoCorrect->AutoReplaceAsYouType, even though those are two extremely related functions). The average complexity of the typical application, which may be cool for someone who got 90's in Math in high school, becomes an insurmountable obstacle for the person who has trouble with logical reasoning.
And that's really where the difficulty lies - the root of the problem is that many, many people aren't very logically literate - yet we constantly heap very complex logical tasks upon them daily, and get exasparated because they don't know that you go to 'Page Setup' to set up your margins, and not 'Internet Options'.
To solve this, really, we need to think through not just OS or UI design in general, but application design as a whole. Not just to create a consistent-across-the-board interface methodology, but also a simple, logical, and potentially universal way to interact with the computer. Until you address that problem - that programmers think in a highly logical manner, and most people don't - the glut of clueless users is just going to get larger.
I'm seeing alot of Notes bashing (or, at least gentle hammering) going on, so I thought i'd chip in:-)
The main problem I have with Notes is the people who use it. At our shop, we store a great deal in Notes - documentation, forms, internal memos, etc. (i.e. all the forms to fill out to request stuff are all in a Notes database). This in itself is nice. The problem is that each and every one of these things is an attached MS Word document. Yup, if you want to put a document on Notes here, the accepted procedure is to write it in Word, attach it, and then save it in a Notes database... (this, of course becomes a nightmare when you want to update it ( Open, Detach, Open in Word, Save, Delete attachment, Re attach new document), but no one seems to care, which mystifies me). The weird thing is that most of the doumentation in the databases could just as easily be written in Notes' internal word processor (most could be written in Emacs with no loss of meaning whatsoever).
Notes may be a pig (yes), may be annoying (yes), may be useless (not), but it's problems can pale in comparison the the problems the users can have.
Slashdot Mirror
So, can we get a widescreen LCD display on a coffee table to go with that?
Speaking of concept computers, this still beats anything Intel has come up (of course, Intel Inside could bring new meaning to that concept....)
BTW, didn't Intel come up with an Aztec-like pyramid-looking computer some time ago? I was digging around for it yesteday and couldn't find it.
Here, here!
The work that those guys do is very, very appreciated.
Thank you. And I mean that, dammit.
I disagree.
The hatred of Mircosoft does not stem from a hatred of proprietary software, nor is MS a symbol of propriatery software. If anything, it's the other way around - free software / open source spokespeople have used the (existing) volumes of MS hatred as a springboard for attacking all of propriatery software.
Before The Cathedral and the Bazzar, was there really a big fuss about Open Source or propriatery software? Some, in the GNU camp. But for the most part, that mindset wasn't there. Hell, no one cared that xv was the defacto image viewer on X, and that's certainly propriatery (shareware). But MS hatred certainly abounded.
MS hatred exists because of the classic American values of Hate And Fear Those That Are Successful And Have Money And Power(TM). (This is the same reason why there are RedHat bashers.) The alleged hatred of propriatery software in the Linux community is mostly based on the feelings for Mircosoft (i.e. attempts to liken propriatery software houses to MS).
I say alleged, because Linux users don't hate really hate propriatery software itself - only when they feel that the company behind it is acting like Microsoft does that feeling come around. Witness all the games - Linux users love those, and they are certainly propriatery.
"They hate proprietary software."
/. have you been reading ?
:-P)
What
(Taunt me again and I railgun your butt to the wall
"Linux users don't hate Microsoft."
/. have you been reading?
What
"We Came, We Saw, We kicked some ass!"
Sorry, slipped into Bill Murray mode for a minute....
This, of course, assumes that the NSA hasn't found any 'holes' in the algorithms (or the implementations of these algorithms) that would cut that to a reasonable time.
Remember, the NSA is the worlds largest employer of mathematicians. They aren't there as tech support, either.
Sun's not doing this because they want an office suite for Linux or Solairs. They're doing it so they have a place to start developing a thin-client Office suite for the Network Computer concept that they're still hung up on (read : way to sell more Sun servers). Star Office as we know it (large, MS-Like office suite) is going to eventually atrophy, simply because Sun doesn't really care about it (regardless of the 'Openess' of this, it's still basically Sun trying to enlist developers with thier silly Community License).
No.
And when was the last time you had a kernel panic in Linux (when you weren't doing anything 'creative' like installing a half dead hard drive or the like)?
This was fixed a long time ago.
?
I really wish I had the energy to parse this, but it's late in the day.
What are you saying?
Yes, all the patches were free. But that didn't change the fact that it took a year to be finished.
(To be fair, it was pretty functional out of the box - but alot of silly mistakes (leaving a backdoor rcon password in, getting thier master servers pinged every 30 ms, as opposed to every 30 s, etc) could have been avoided with a few iterations of the test, and some multiplayer capabilities in it (q2test was one player only, 3 levels)).
Loki doesn't make games. They port them.
:-).
CTP was by Activision, Myth II is from Bungie, etc, etc.
That's like saying Zoid wrote Quake for Linux - he didn't write it he, he ported it to the various Unices it runs on (not to diminish Zoid's work, of course, as he is certainly a very fine programmer who handles teamplay & CTF code and all in all is very cool and who I know is reading this right now
(Which reminds me -- Zoid -- for Team Play in Q3, can we get something to address the problem of TeamKillers? It's a really, really annoying problem in q3test right now).
Yeah, one beta release was just great for Quake 2. Got all those bugs right out of there. That's why it had to be patched from 3.05 to 3.20 over the course of the next year. Because it was enough beta testing.
When a company officially finishes a game just under a year after they release it, and then tries to do more beta testing for thier next game, that's called 'learning from ones mistakes'. Quake 2 was a mess out of the box. Hopefully, all this playing and drooling over Q3Test will make it actually in good shape out of the box.
Ahh, I see. I was using preview.
Weird.
Actually, what I meant was SGML-like tags to delimit the sections of text that contain command line switches - as that's the most useful thing about man pages. So the author (or an interested 3rd party) could flag the sections of the manual that are sufficently useful to be included in the man page.
Okay, how, pray tell, do I get faux HTML tags in here? Anyone? ampgtsemiclon / ampltsemicolon doesn't work....
Should have read :
block of text marked or something would suffice.
And to think I even previewed it....
Hear, Hear! (or is it Here, Here!? I could never figure that out. I'd like to go with Ear, Ear!, but I think that would confuse some people.)
:-)
Info was ahead of it's time (I guess) in terms of being a hypertext documentation system, but really now - the only decent info reader is Emacs, which is really kind of silly. The stand alone info reader is beyond hope, and has perhaps the most counterintuitive interface I've ever seen (only the 'info-mode' commands are available in it IIRC (it's been a while since I've used it, because it sucks)) (I need to look up a flag for grep and the --help-me-please-i-beg-you switches aren't doing the job - I know, I have to start up Emacs, go to info mode, pray the node is linked properly, and then I finally go down 5 nodes to find what I'm looking for Yay! And this, of course, assumes that info pages are put in the right place, and the info directory files are updated appropriately, etc). I seriously think that the GNU project should move towards SGML or something more robust for thier official documentation, but also still produce man pages. Man pages are the most useful, consise form of online documentation I have ever, ever encountered. Info isn't
Actually, one of the SGML packages should grow a facility to generate Man pages from certain sections of the document containing command line switches, etc. I.e. a block of text marked or something would suffice. That way, those long winded authors could write thier 450 node info pages in SGML, and still have a useful, up-to-date man page for those of us who actually work on a schedule....
Okay, so it's not the best analogy in the world :-P I was just trying to keep the car thing going (I drive a standard, so... Next slashdot poll idea, I guess.)
Anyway, the idea is the same - you still have to know *something* about driving, about how the spedometer works, about what the '1' and '2' are on the Automatic transmission, as opposed to 'D' (I still haven't figured that out...), etc. If you don't know how to drive, automatic transmission isn't going to help that much.
As someone noted earlier, the idea that "they will just be able to use the software" is saying "they will just be able to drive the car (without learning anything about it)". The problem is one of perception, and average logical literacy.
/.'ers, 'easy to the average user' means 'something that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole because it's too graphical, but I guess it's fine for the people who've never seen something like this before', when said application has years (decade's in Unix's case) of evolution behind it, which the programmer can't get out of his mind. The problem is the perception of the problem.
Perception, in the sense that MS & Co. have been trying like hard to hammer home the fact that thier software is *easy* to use, and doesn't require any thought, and that Apple with thier iMac has been trying to make the 'un-thinking' PC a reality. Imagine someone trying to market a car that you don't have to learn how to drive, it's so easy to use! Absurd. But we see that as the holy grail of software design nowadays - that the user shouldn't have to think at all in order to do anything.
Logical literacy, in the sense that computers are very, very logical machines, and human minds aren't. In order to effectively use a computer, your expectations of what is and isn't possible have to conform (roughly) to the rules of logic (i.e. you can't do word processing without a word processor, no matter how much you think you can). This really should be addressed by increased standards for Math and Science testing, but with the way things are going in our society (cutting school budgets, the whole evolution mess in Kansas), I don't see that happening. I am not saying users are stupid - generally, users are very good at what they do in life. It's just that thier minds (very literally) don't work the same as a programmer's mind. Something that very few programmers (and technical people in general) realize.
Logical reasoning is not something fundamental to human thought or behaviour. It has to be learned, just like everything else.
However, the danger in trying to make things easier is doing it wrong. I'm sure we're all familiar with the results of this process *coughcoughWordcoughcough*.
To some techies and
The typical UI-solving exersize is 'make it look pretty and have simple, easy to navigate options'. This is generally the approach taken by Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc. The problem with this, is that for anything more complex than a trivial application, the logic of the program can become pretty, well, non-trivial, and communicating the logical structure to the user can be a bit of a chore. So, the programmer just assumes that the user is going to know to look in 'Options' for changing his user information, but in 'Preferences' to change his start page, or 'Page Setup' to change how the thing is going to print, etc, etc. And that's a simple case. Do Tools->Options in Word to see a horrible case (to turn off auto spell check, you have to go to Tools->Options->Spelling & Grammar, but to turn off AutoCorrection, you have to go to Tools->AutoCorrect->AutoReplaceAsYouType, even though those are two extremely related functions). The average complexity of the typical application, which may be cool for someone who got 90's in Math in high school, becomes an insurmountable obstacle for the person who has trouble with logical reasoning.
And that's really where the difficulty lies - the root of the problem is that many, many people aren't very logically literate - yet we constantly heap very complex logical tasks upon them daily, and get exasparated because they don't know that you go to 'Page Setup' to set up your margins, and not 'Internet Options'.
To solve this, really, we need to think through not just OS or UI design in general, but application design as a whole. Not just to create a consistent-across-the-board interface methodology, but also a simple, logical, and potentially universal way to interact with the computer. Until you address that problem - that programmers think in a highly logical manner, and most people don't - the glut of clueless users is just going to get larger.
Look and Feel lawsuits never worked for Apple, did they?
Isn't Microsoft going to be annoyed that NASA used Sun's magnetic field, and not thiers?
After all, the total magnetic disturbance from all those unsold copies of BoB (on floppy) would be phenomenal....
First? Nah.
The main problem I have with Notes is the people who use it. At our shop, we store a great deal in Notes - documentation, forms, internal memos, etc. (i.e. all the forms to fill out to request stuff are all in a Notes database). This in itself is nice. The problem is that each and every one of these things is an attached MS Word document. Yup, if you want to put a document on Notes here, the accepted procedure is to write it in Word, attach it, and then save it in a Notes database... (this, of course becomes a nightmare when you want to update it ( Open, Detach, Open in Word, Save, Delete attachment, Re attach new document), but no one seems to care, which mystifies me). The weird thing is that most of the doumentation in the databases could just as easily be written in Notes' internal word processor (most could be written in Emacs with no loss of meaning whatsoever).
Notes may be a pig (yes), may be annoying (yes), may be useless (not), but it's problems can pale in comparison the the problems the users can have.