The most impressive part of that laptop is the CD drive. I mean, look at it. It's large enough to use old vinyl LPs! Maybe we have another Apple breakthrough here. Picture yourself ripping vinyls to iTunes with that machine.
Very good post, but I think that you have missunderstood Raskin on one point.
I clearly remember Jef railing about the problems of habits -- he complained, for example, that the "Are you sure?" dialog is not just worthless, but dangerous because people develop the habit of clicking "yes" without pausing to consider the implications. So are habits good or bad, Mr. Raskin? One can't have it both ways, I'm afraid.
The point is: habits are neither good nor bad; they are human nature. If a system is not designed with human nature in mind, then habits might end up being a bad thing. If we design a system from the ground up with human habits in mind, then they might end up helping us use the system.
That said, I also do not see how Raskin's ideas could be used outside of a text editor domain. I have read the THI book (and even reviewed it on slashdot a few years back) and look through the project, but I still fail to see how to use THE for, say, video, or in a mobile phone.
Well, other points aside, your argument that cellphones are lagging in the US because of its size, is bordering on the ridiculous. The EU is as large as the US, yet the mobile phone penetration has been far higher ever since the mid 90's. Up here in Finland, there is only a population of 17 inhabitants per square kilometer. In the US the same figure is a little over 30 (use google to convert to metric). So, you seriously need to rethink your argument about why the US is lagging in mobile technology.
That seems to be true of early democracies, but there are many long established democracies that combine a president with a multi-party system. That is the case at least here in Finland and, as I mentioned a few comments down in this thread, also in France (if I'm not mistaken).
After a (rather quick, I have to admit) look at your website, I could not see any comments on other countries' election systems. More specifically, what do you think of two round elections for one-position elections such as a president? And, any comments on the d'Hondt method of elections for parliaments?
A short explanation of the two round method (google d'Hondt, or see the link for those who do not know it): 1. All voters vote directly on the person they like to see elected in a first round. The two most popular candidates go on to a second round. 2. The voters choose between the 2 candidates in the second round.
In this system you can vote by your concience in the first round, and get to choose the lesser of two evils in the second. It is simple to understand and gives smaller parties a chance. The systems is in use at least here in Finland and over in France, I think (ne pas?).
My question is: Is FlexWiki as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?"
Well, at least they are more resistant to slashdotting...
Keyboard, screen and connectivity
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
Here's my take:
1.I have never learned to write flawlessly with any of the handwriting recognition systems, at least not when it comes to any special symbols or letters (such as in my native Finnish or Swedish). Therefore I would like to have a full qwerty keyboard.
2. A second demand would be for a good enough screen to read and surf on. My analysis is that the horisontal resolution is more important up to around 800 pixels. Too small horisontal resolution will force you to scroll for each line on a forum such as/. This will drive you mad within minutes.
3. Jam as many radios as you can in there. Bluetooth for Salling Clicker (awesome!) and syncing, WiFi for home and work mailing and surfing and GPRS for train surfing (as I'm doing right now on my laptop + phone). An FM radio or GPS could also be nice.
Disclaimer: Above mentioned does not have anything to do with my work relationship and are purely my private ideas.
OK, let's do some forecasting. What every slashdotter wants to know is, of course, when Linux will be bigger than Windows. Based on the numbers in the articles and linear forecasting, here's what we get*:
So, basically we can come to the conclusion that Linux will surpass Windows as a server platform by the end of next year, both on platform sales and on database sales.
There, now I told you what you wanted to hear, so mod me up!
*No, this is not realiable. It is extremely unlikely that this quater's growth will continue for 2 years
It does sound exactly like my web server, which runs on ancient hardware and a small drive just for the hell of it.
I don't really see how this is useful. The point I'm making is that there is really no point in this other than to do it "for the hell of it". I'm typing this on a fairly old computer, barely from this century. Yet, even for this AMD K6-2 500 MHz with 384 MB of memory there seems to be almost no point in trying to be minimal.
A short anecdote: Last summer I wanted to watch a a very high-res DivX on the machine, and it was not even close to work without skipping on XP. Since my Linux partition was screwed at the moment I saw it as a good time to test a new distro: Gentoo. So, I installed it during a (whole) weekend and picked just the packages I needed: kernel, X and mplayer. And in the end I could watch my movie barely without skippning (as long as I didn't move the mouse or do anything while it played). Next weekend I wanted to see how fast the GUI was, so I compiled KDE. After working for two days at it, the system literally melted down. Two condensators and a FET had gotten too much heat and had to be replaced. Well, after some soldering the system was up again, but still without KDE. So, to I downloaded Mandrake and waited for half an hour to get it installed. Then I tried Mandrake with a lightweight WM and mplayer with the same DivX that had barely played in Gentoo, and it still barely worked. I could hardly tell the difference.
So, my question then is: this old machine is probably not even worth 100 anymore, yet it still has 50 GB of harddisk space, which is way more than I could ever fill with any programs. The performance difference between a "monolithic" system and a custom built one also seem negligible. Also, given that both space and performance keep getting cheaper all the time: Where is the value in being lightweight?
Counting the value of my time against the savings in hardware costs by lightweight systems, I just don't see the point! Please reply and tell me why I'm an idiot, Honestly!
I think that if you would like to solve the problems you're complaining about, the best path is for you to code. I don't yet believe that a public license that "enforces usability" is going to be much help.
The problem with large projects is that they require different skill sets that are usually not present in one single person. Someone might be a good coder, someone else understands a specific (business) problem and a third person is skilled in streamlining the UI. There is a real challenge in getting people whose expertise is something other than programming to participate in community projects of this kind.
Case in point: At the moment I'm forced to use Windows by (among others) an accounting program. I do not know of any Linux based programs that I could use for accounting in Finland, where I live. In order to make one, one would need skills in the local accounting standards (economical), in the Finnish legal system governing taxes etc. (legal) as well as UI design (psychological and esthetical) and programming (technical). It is extremely unlikely that any one person would master all these skills, and have time to spare to code free software.
Your second point about licenses not helping in this problem is most probably correct, though.
And before I accept your point about the GUI not working as an add-on, I'd like to hear what systems you like.
Here I would like to offer another example. I was once working as a trainee for a company making CAD software used in piping. There was a function to make a pipe transparent on one section. Technically it worked by making a 3D box that was clipped out from the model before rendering, thus making the pipe and everything else transparent where the box was. The original UI was just a front end to this OpenGL code and the user was required to give the box anchor, width, height and 3D rotation. It turned out that no user understood about this box and couldn't use it (to use it you would have to think about it like the developer sees it: OpenGL calls, rather than how a user sees it: "I want to see through this pipe). A solution was to allow the user to just click the pipe that was to be cut (at the position to start cutting) and another click to show how far to cut it. This redesign, of course, required a redesign of the code - which goes to prove that UI design should be done at an early stage if you want a good product.
Some of the UI gurus advocate the extreme version of this with the workflow: design the UI first, write the manual second, and implement it last. This of course depends on what you are building. I assume you have looked into the UI literature if you are into making things more usable. If you haven't come across them yet, Nielsen and Norman provide some interesting text on the subjects discussed above. A lot of Normans texts are available here.
But who am I kidding? I'll buy it anyway, and I'll buy the regular cut, and I'll buy both editions of ROTK, and if (when) they come out with some uber-box-set with all three movies, a copy of the books, a lifesize inflatable Balrog, and new commentary by Christopher Tolkien (heh, yeah right!) I'll buy that too.
At least they're telling us up front about the different editions, so buyers can make the right choices.
Like the one you're making?
Origami, is that related to Polygamy?
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Origamy, is that like, when you only have a few wives, instead of really a lot like in polygamy? I can see how this relates to math very clearly.
"Abdullah has five camels. How many wives can he afford?"
"If Abu Chacr has five rooms on each floor of a two floor building, how many wives can he fit in before they start to figft? Every wife needs her own room and does not want another wife in an adjacent room."
You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples.
This is where your assumptions go wrong. Raskin is not talking about what people love/hate or what their favorite colors are. He's talking about building an *efficient* UI. In this regard the differences between different people are *much* smaller than the similarities.
For instance many people like to set their text to some wierd combinations of yellow on red using an obscure font. This is because they love these colors and they thuoght the font looked nice. If, however, you measure their reading speed you will not find a single person whose reading speed has been increased by this change. There is a certain font, a certain line spacing and a certain color combination (white on black) that is almost optimal for all users. *If* you can build a system based entirely on these sientifically measured variables all customisation is a waste of time (both developers' and users') and a needless source of bugs and inconsistencies.
So, we have our Great American Hero fighting the bad Bosnian Army? Which one is it really? As far as I know there were roughly three parties involved: Serbs, Croats and Muslims (Croats with another religion really). The Serbs were mostly depicted as the bad guys by western media, with the Muslims as the major victims. So how about this movie?
Did they get something right or will they just depend on the Good American Audience to be as ignorant about the background as Katz seems to be?
Aluminium is what most of the world uses as a name for the metal. Only americans use their own speling (surprise, right?). You can check out the
history of the metal here
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
The costs in doing so would, as far as I can tell, not be too large and this could give them more bargaining power against software companies (MS).
Desktop Machines
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It would really be nice to see someone (IBM) try to build a Linux desktop system. With high quality hardware and Linux with GNOME or KDE we would end up with a machine resembling an Apple G4 + OS X.
Could there be any money in such a move?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! I'll finally be able to quit vi without rebooting! When can i have it?
Can't they publish this information in some better known units of measurement. Like Libraries of Congress?
I think you are referring to this standard:
http://www.w3.org/TR/wbxml/
Hope that page helps you.
The most impressive part of that laptop is the CD drive. I mean, look at it. It's large enough to use old vinyl LPs! Maybe we have another Apple breakthrough here. Picture yourself ripping vinyls to iTunes with that machine.
Very good post, but I think that you have missunderstood Raskin on one point.
I clearly remember Jef railing about the problems of habits -- he complained, for example, that the "Are you sure?" dialog is not just worthless, but dangerous because people develop the habit of clicking "yes" without pausing to consider the implications. So are habits good or bad, Mr. Raskin? One can't have it both ways, I'm afraid.
The point is: habits are neither good nor bad; they are human nature. If a system is not designed with human nature in mind, then habits might end up being a bad thing. If we design a system from the ground up with human habits in mind, then they might end up helping us use the system.
That said, I also do not see how Raskin's ideas could be used outside of a text editor domain. I have read the THI book (and even reviewed it on slashdot a few years back) and look through the project, but I still fail to see how to use THE for, say, video, or in a mobile phone.
Well, other points aside, your argument that cellphones are lagging in the US because of its size, is bordering on the ridiculous. The EU is as large as the US, yet the mobile phone penetration has been far higher ever since the mid 90's. Up here in Finland, there is only a population of 17 inhabitants per square kilometer. In the US the same figure is a little over 30 (use google to convert to metric). So, you seriously need to rethink your argument about why the US is lagging in mobile technology.
That seems to be true of early democracies, but there are many long established democracies that combine a president with a multi-party system. That is the case at least here in Finland and, as I mentioned a few comments down in this thread, also in France (if I'm not mistaken).
After a (rather quick, I have to admit) look at your website, I could not see any comments on other countries' election systems. More specifically, what do you think of two round elections for one-position elections such as a president? And, any comments on the d'Hondt method of elections for parliaments?
A short explanation of the two round method (google d'Hondt, or see the link for those who do not know it):
1. All voters vote directly on the person they like to see elected in a first round. The two most popular candidates go on to a second round.
2. The voters choose between the 2 candidates in the second round.
In this system you can vote by your concience in the first round, and get to choose the lesser of two evils in the second. It is simple to understand and gives smaller parties a chance. The systems is in use at least here in Finland and over in France, I think (ne pas?).
My question is: Is FlexWiki as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?"
Well, at least they are more resistant to slashdotting...
Here's my take:
/. This will drive you mad within minutes.
1.I have never learned to write flawlessly with any of the handwriting recognition systems, at least not when it comes to any special symbols or letters (such as in my native Finnish or Swedish). Therefore I would like to have a full qwerty keyboard.
2. A second demand would be for a good enough screen to read and surf on. My analysis is that the horisontal resolution is more important up to around 800 pixels. Too small horisontal resolution will force you to scroll for each line on a forum such as
3. Jam as many radios as you can in there. Bluetooth for Salling Clicker (awesome!) and syncing, WiFi for home and work mailing and surfing and GPRS for train surfing (as I'm doing right now on my laptop + phone). An FM radio or GPS could also be nice.
Disclaimer: Above mentioned does not have anything to do with my work relationship and are purely my private ideas.
There, now I told you what you wanted to hear, so mod me up!
*No, this is not realiable. It is extremely unlikely that this quater's growth will continue for 2 years
Can anyone then tell me why I can't play a DivX encoded movie in QuickTime? Since QT has an MPEG4 decoder this should work, but it doesn't.
It does sound exactly like my web server, which runs on ancient hardware and a small drive just for the hell of it.
I don't really see how this is useful. The point I'm making is that there is really no point in this other than to do it "for the hell of it". I'm typing this on a fairly old computer, barely from this century. Yet, even for this AMD K6-2 500 MHz with 384 MB of memory there seems to be almost no point in trying to be minimal.
A short anecdote: Last summer I wanted to watch a a very high-res DivX on the machine, and it was not even close to work without skipping on XP. Since my Linux partition was screwed at the moment I saw it as a good time to test a new distro: Gentoo. So, I installed it during a (whole) weekend and picked just the packages I needed: kernel, X and mplayer. And in the end I could watch my movie barely without skippning (as long as I didn't move the mouse or do anything while it played). Next weekend I wanted to see how fast the GUI was, so I compiled KDE. After working for two days at it, the system literally melted down. Two condensators and a FET had gotten too much heat and had to be replaced. Well, after some soldering the system was up again, but still without KDE. So, to I downloaded Mandrake and waited for half an hour to get it installed. Then I tried Mandrake with a lightweight WM and mplayer with the same DivX that had barely played in Gentoo, and it still barely worked. I could hardly tell the difference.
So, my question then is: this old machine is probably not even worth 100 anymore, yet it still has 50 GB of harddisk space, which is way more than I could ever fill with any programs. The performance difference between a "monolithic" system and a custom built one also seem negligible. Also, given that both space and performance keep getting cheaper all the time: Where is the value in being lightweight?
Counting the value of my time against the savings in hardware costs by lightweight systems, I just don't see the point! Please reply and tell me why I'm an idiot, Honestly!
The problem with large projects is that they require different skill sets that are usually not present in one single person. Someone might be a good coder, someone else understands a specific (business) problem and a third person is skilled in streamlining the UI. There is a real challenge in getting people whose expertise is something other than programming to participate in community projects of this kind.
Case in point: At the moment I'm forced to use Windows by (among others) an accounting program. I do not know of any Linux based programs that I could use for accounting in Finland, where I live. In order to make one, one would need skills in the local accounting standards (economical), in the Finnish legal system governing taxes etc. (legal) as well as UI design (psychological and esthetical) and programming (technical). It is extremely unlikely that any one person would master all these skills, and have time to spare to code free software.
Your second point about licenses not helping in this problem is most probably correct, though.
And before I accept your point about the GUI not working as an add-on, I'd like to hear what systems you like.
Here I would like to offer another example. I was once working as a trainee for a company making CAD software used in piping. There was a function to make a pipe transparent on one section. Technically it worked by making a 3D box that was clipped out from the model before rendering, thus making the pipe and everything else transparent where the box was. The original UI was just a front end to this OpenGL code and the user was required to give the box anchor, width, height and 3D rotation. It turned out that no user understood about this box and couldn't use it (to use it you would have to think about it like the developer sees it: OpenGL calls, rather than how a user sees it: "I want to see through this pipe). A solution was to allow the user to just click the pipe that was to be cut (at the position to start cutting) and another click to show how far to cut it. This redesign, of course, required a redesign of the code - which goes to prove that UI design should be done at an early stage if you want a good product.
Some of the UI gurus advocate the extreme version of this with the workflow: design the UI first, write the manual second, and implement it last. This of course depends on what you are building. I assume you have looked into the UI literature if you are into making things more usable. If you haven't come across them yet, Nielsen and Norman provide some interesting text on the subjects discussed above. A lot of Normans texts are available here.
... see NYT and c|net
But who am I kidding? I'll buy it anyway, and I'll buy the regular cut, and I'll buy both editions of ROTK, and if (when) they come out with some uber-box-set with all three movies, a copy of the books, a lifesize inflatable Balrog, and new commentary by Christopher Tolkien (heh, yeah right!) I'll buy that too.
At least they're telling us up front about the different editions, so buyers can make the right choices.
Like the one you're making?
Origamy, is that like, when you only have a few wives, instead of really a lot like in polygamy? I can see how this relates to math very clearly.
"Abdullah has five camels. How many wives can he afford?"
"If Abu Chacr has five rooms on each floor of a two floor building, how many wives can he fit in before they start to figft? Every wife needs her own room and does not want another wife in an adjacent room."
The Nokia 7650 [nokia.com] was scheduled for UK release in May but it's been put back to August.
No, it has not been put back to August. You can buy them right now, at least they are available in stores here in Finland.
Maybe Slashdot could get the hint!
You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples.
This is where your assumptions go wrong. Raskin is not talking about what people love/hate or what their favorite colors are. He's talking about building an *efficient* UI. In this regard the differences between different people are *much* smaller than the similarities.
For instance many people like to set their text to some wierd combinations of yellow on red using an obscure font. This is because they love these colors and they thuoght the font looked nice. If, however, you measure their reading speed you will not find a single person whose reading speed has been increased by this change. There is a certain font, a certain line spacing and a certain color combination (white on black) that is almost optimal for all users. *If* you can build a system based entirely on these sientifically measured variables all customisation is a waste of time (both developers' and users') and a needless source of bugs and inconsistencies.
That is what Reaskin is talking about.
So, we have our Great American Hero fighting the bad Bosnian Army? Which one is it really? As far as I know there were roughly three parties involved: Serbs, Croats and Muslims (Croats with another religion really). The Serbs were mostly depicted as the bad guys by western media, with the Muslims as the major victims. So how about this movie?
Did they get something right or will they just depend on the Good American Audience to be as ignorant about the background as Katz seems to be?
Will it compile KDE by now? Could anybody enlighten me on this?
About the name of the metal:
Aluminium is what most of the world uses as a name for the metal. Only americans use their own speling (surprise, right?). You can check out the
history of the metal here
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
The costs in doing so would, as far as I can tell, not be too large and this could give them more bargaining power against software companies (MS).
It would really be nice to see someone (IBM) try to build a Linux desktop system. With high quality hardware and Linux with GNOME or KDE we would end up with a machine resembling an Apple G4 + OS X.
Could there be any money in such a move?