Is it just me or does everyone interpret sites with tiny font sizes as credible? (The article in point, too.)
Perhaps it's just a pet peeve, but I would much rather have a sizable (not hard-coded) font size rather than a miniscule one where I can't resize it. To me, usability reflects a level of expertise and understandingand is more likely to garner my optimistic impressions ("credibility") of the site's owner.
My eye doctor (M.D.) shares a building with another one who does Lasiks. When I told him I thought it wasn't worth the risks, he said that was why he still wore contacts, too.
OTOH, my aunt had radial K probably 20 years ago when it was still very rare. She was the first in the US to have it with local anethesia and still says today it was the best thing she ever did. Of course, her eyesight was extremely poor (legally blind) and it took her to near 20/20. But I guess there's always anecdots both ways.
if you're upset that Apple's don't have multiple mouse buttons and are too dense to push the Option, Control and Command keys in their stead (hang on a minute, that means you've got - effectively - FOUR mouse click types!) then you're just being deliberately perverse. The modifier key system is GOOD, and gives NOTHING away to the multiple mouse button approach IMHO.
Serious CAD software requires multiple mouse buttons. In AutoCAD 2000 and later, the right mouse hand can control selection, zoom, pan, context menus, and command enter if you are fortunate enough to have three buttons and a scroll wheel. Meanwhile, the left hand is very busy hopping all over the keyboard entering the hundreds of possible commands. With some experience, the CAD user can almost draw without looking down at the keyboard. Except...
We used to use Logitech mice at our firm, but the mouse software was buggy with AutoCAD, requiring the user to hold down the Ctrl key with the left hand while using the right hand mouse scroll button just to zoom around the drawing. This defeated the whole purpose of having zoom on the scroll button: single hand zoom and pan control! My left hand effectively became multi-modal again which requires considerable more thinking (read: slower) effort during production.
A single button mouse might make sense for dinky little point and click word processing but all serious CAD and graphics software (and probably other serious industry-based software) provide much more power at the mouse hand. Apple continues to hold on to this paradigm because it likes both the design implications and the tradition. But it is one of the major reasons Micros~1 ate it for lunch ten years ago: lack of options.
I appreciate Red Hat's concern that the community understand and approve what they are doing in this effort. However I think the community has been far too cynical in its reaction.
Being a for-profit company I have long been surprised that Red Hat hasn't done this type of thing more often. There's no requirement that everyone be in agreement with one group's efforts--this is Open Source! Our montra is that if you don't like something, you are always free to do it your own way.
These are the type of freedoms that take away your reasons to complain. Were we in any proprietary system, we would be at the mercy of the implementor. But as it stands here, our only limitation is time and money. These are precisely the same resources Red Hat is trying to steward just to stay in business. (Let alone, turn a profit!) So it appears we are all on the same footing.
I wish individuals would stop complaining about someone else deciding to exercise their freedom. Life is hard, you can't always get what you want. Be happy that your rights aren't taken away. Sure we might not all like Red Hat's decisions in integrating GNOME and KDE. I'd be certain that not all on Red Hat's own desktop team are 100% happy about some of the individual decisions either.
Just be thankful that Red Hat has even bothered to inform us of what they are doing. Obviously they are interesting in maintaining community support, but everyone should take note that this is our privilege, not our right. Certainly, Red Hat has a lot to gain by working with the community as opposed to against it or in some dark shroud of secrecy. But there is no requirement that they do this.
In all, this is a great start on something both sides have long pondered. Frankly, both GNOME and KDE have been slow to make this type of move, although discussed much for a long while. Thank you Red Hat for once again taking the lead on a tough task, and thanks Owen for so kindly explaining how Red Hat is has decided to implement its business strategy.
Linux is terribly lacking good CAD software, let alone Free CAD software. Please see my CAD Pages for the full scoop. (BTW, if anybody is interested in starting a serious Free Software CAD project, please contact me!)
I have to say, as an American, that politically in this country we miss the point of this argument because of our trade protection concerns.
But to me it's just the same as our automobile strategies of the 1960s-70s. We imposed penalties to foreign makers simply because they were foreign. When the oil crisis happened, America was hit hard simply because the environment of limited competition that we had fostered prevented gasolene conserving cars from being imported.
I believe the Open Source v. Microsoft arguments being made by our politicians center around the same myopias. We desparately need to understand that Open Source is *not* about ruining American companies (ie, Microsoft) or even giving up control of our software. It's about freedom, choice and competition... the very things the country was founded upon.
Every now and then, somebody breaks through with an idea that really changes how we think about things. Fastap is certainly one.
The best part about this design is that none of us will need to relearn anything. It's easily, almost automatically integratable into our daily lives without having to change our behavior. Certainly this doesn't mean we'll all have one soon. We should, but if we don't, I'll be forever disappointed knowing it existed.
BTW, wouldn't this concept also work on a PDA virtual keyboard? Seems like somebody could program one for my Palm without too much trouble. Any takers?
Why not Open Office?
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I don't know if it's just me, or if I've been hanging out on SlashDot too long... this article makes me feel sick.
Can it really be that we're the only ones who see Microsoft's business "initiatives" for what they really are--predatory monopolisitc struggles to rule the world? Or have we all become stained by reading SlashDot and they really mean well?
IMO, Mexico is the perfect place for Open Source software. It's a real shame that portions of the Mexican government can't see their opportunity to leapfrog existing software technologies and jump into the first world.
Probably too late in the thread to get noticed, but here goes...
What if Microsoft is now strategizing that a forced fully modular design could be done, with the condition that Microsoft eliminate third party flexibilities, effectively slipping themselves into the hardware market at the same time? They could easily argue that Apple has better control over their software because they control the hardware side of the equation.
"Sure we can make it modular... if we sell more applications and the hardware, too!"
I don't care if Mozilla can cook breakfast for me, if it doesn't do what I need, it's not useful. Here's some explanation as to why I think these three are serious issues:
Home Button: My home page is my personal collection of links, dictionary form and Google search form. I start every new browse there. You may argue that this is only personal taste, but Intranets everywhere use this setup. (And oh, BTW, every other browser feels this is an important UI issue.)
View Source in External Editor: I also write a lot of HTML, and prefer to use the browser to navigate the code. A quick view source is the best way to polish a page, IMO. (This is enough for me to stick with IE while I'm using Windows.)
Broken Address Book Lists: I don't even use the address book, but I finally convinced my boss to try Mozilla as an upgrade to Netscape 4. (Which had trashed his address book.) Figuring an upgrade may possibly restore his data (it did), he went along with my suggestion. But he still thinks I'm a crackpot for suggesting a browser that won't maintain his address book lists. (He wishes he would have just re-installed NS 4.)
UI issues are serious issues. Coders may pooh, pooh them, but one of the great successes of Apple is that last 1%. Can't we just fix these?
So does this mean the Patent Office now implicitly agrees that they think patents are silly, too?
(BTW, does anybody else see the potential here for using this as a general call for taxpayer revolt? How much did we pay for this? Do our congresspeople approve on wasting such funds? Do they want re-elected?)
No surpise, really, considering that Best Buy and the RIAA are both on the retail side of things. What I find interesting is that both sectors care little for the artist or the listener... boiling down their influence on music to making it shiny and flashy.
Sooner or later, musicians and audiophiles will have enough technology to bypass all this ridulousness. Let's just hope it doesn't end up being illegal for me to buy listening rights to a song directly from whoever wrote and recorded it!
I spent half the article waiting for the writer to provide some facts, but by the end, there still weren't any.
She says:
Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux.
Does this mean RedHat is moving all their employees to the marketing department? Does it mean everybody is told to make 9 cold calls a day? All we're given is the typical investor information, share price, projections, etc., but little information about how the business plan is working or changing.
Frankly, the few real facts that are provided show a mixed bag, hardly worthy of the article's pessimistic title. Yet another Linux story trying to make news rather than report it.
Right. That's where the software would have to keep everything legal. As long as you were listening to a song from a CD that no one else was listening to (including other tracks) at that point in time, you'd be legal, because at that moment you owned the CD.
The software would have to maintain ownership status for each CD (represented in liquid form on hdd) AND would disallow simultaneous listening to any CD. (Here's where redundancy in the repository would be a big help. But the most popular music would probably be the best represented in shareholder deposits anyway, right?)
Let's say we set up an economy within our office. We buy and sell CDs on demand. At the beginning of the month, you bring in whatever CDs you want to sell. You deposit them into the office trust, where they're "converted" to a more economically liquid form, onto a digital hard drive.
Now all we need is some simple software that "trades" CDs. Whenever you want to listen to one of the many volumes in the repository, you buy it on demand. You real-time trade one of the CDs you deposited in exchange for the ownership of the one you want to listen to.
The only hitch is when multiple people want to buy a CD that no one wants to sell, or when no one wants to buy any of the CDs you brought in so that you don't have any purchasing/exchange power to buy any of the others.
Obviously, in a small office, there's not a large enough "economy" to make this work, but for a 1,000 person corporation, it's unlikely that you'd ever have to wait more than a few minutes. Especially if everybody brought in enough CDs. The redundancy along would keep things rolling. Now what if it were multi-corporation?
IANAL, but this seems like a perfectly legal brokerage-type method to share music without breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have linked: HTML Email: Whenever Possible, Turn It Off!.
Is it just me or does everyone interpret sites with tiny font sizes as credible? (The article in point, too.)
Perhaps it's just a pet peeve, but I would much rather have a sizable (not hard-coded) font size rather than a miniscule one where I can't resize it. To me, usability reflects a level of expertise and understandingand is more likely to garner my optimistic impressions ("credibility") of the site's owner.
My $0.02.
My eye doctor (M.D.) shares a building with another one who does Lasiks. When I told him I thought it wasn't worth the risks, he said that was why he still wore contacts, too.
OTOH, my aunt had radial K probably 20 years ago when it was still very rare. She was the first in the US to have it with local anethesia and still says today it was the best thing she ever did. Of course, her eyesight was extremely poor (legally blind) and it took her to near 20/20. But I guess there's always anecdots both ways.
Anybody got links to statistics?
Serious CAD software requires multiple mouse buttons. In AutoCAD 2000 and later, the right mouse hand can control selection, zoom, pan, context menus, and command enter if you are fortunate enough to have three buttons and a scroll wheel. Meanwhile, the left hand is very busy hopping all over the keyboard entering the hundreds of possible commands. With some experience, the CAD user can almost draw without looking down at the keyboard. Except...
We used to use Logitech mice at our firm, but the mouse software was buggy with AutoCAD, requiring the user to hold down the Ctrl key with the left hand while using the right hand mouse scroll button just to zoom around the drawing. This defeated the whole purpose of having zoom on the scroll button: single hand zoom and pan control! My left hand effectively became multi-modal again which requires considerable more thinking (read: slower) effort during production.
A single button mouse might make sense for dinky little point and click word processing but all serious CAD and graphics software (and probably other serious industry-based software) provide much more power at the mouse hand. Apple continues to hold on to this paradigm because it likes both the design implications and the tradition. But it is one of the major reasons Micros~1 ate it for lunch ten years ago: lack of options.
I appreciate Red Hat's concern that the community understand and approve what they are doing in this effort. However I think the community has been far too cynical in its reaction.
Being a for-profit company I have long been surprised that Red Hat hasn't done this type of thing more often. There's no requirement that everyone be in agreement with one group's efforts--this is Open Source! Our montra is that if you don't like something, you are always free to do it your own way.
These are the type of freedoms that take away your reasons to complain. Were we in any proprietary system, we would be at the mercy of the implementor. But as it stands here, our only limitation is time and money. These are precisely the same resources Red Hat is trying to steward just to stay in business. (Let alone, turn a profit!) So it appears we are all on the same footing.
I wish individuals would stop complaining about someone else deciding to exercise their freedom. Life is hard, you can't always get what you want. Be happy that your rights aren't taken away. Sure we might not all like Red Hat's decisions in integrating GNOME and KDE. I'd be certain that not all on Red Hat's own desktop team are 100% happy about some of the individual decisions either.
Just be thankful that Red Hat has even bothered to inform us of what they are doing. Obviously they are interesting in maintaining community support, but everyone should take note that this is our privilege, not our right. Certainly, Red Hat has a lot to gain by working with the community as opposed to against it or in some dark shroud of secrecy. But there is no requirement that they do this.
In all, this is a great start on something both sides have long pondered. Frankly, both GNOME and KDE have been slow to make this type of move, although discussed much for a long while. Thank you Red Hat for once again taking the lead on a tough task, and thanks Owen for so kindly explaining how Red Hat is has decided to implement its business strategy.
CAD!
Linux is terribly lacking good CAD software, let alone Free CAD software. Please see my CAD Pages for the full scoop. (BTW, if anybody is interested in starting a serious Free Software CAD project, please contact me!)
For a more "usable" Vim: Cream (for Vim)
(Sorry, gotta plug my own little project with a topic like this!)
Wow, I suggested this not too long ago on SlashDot:
"High speed CD brokerage house"
Nice to see someone implementing it.
Uhh... hasn't he heard of Vim?
I have to say, as an American, that politically in this country we miss the point of this argument because of our trade protection concerns.
But to me it's just the same as our automobile strategies of the 1960s-70s. We imposed penalties to foreign makers simply because they were foreign. When the oil crisis happened, America was hit hard simply because the environment of limited competition that we had fostered prevented gasolene conserving cars from being imported.
I believe the Open Source v. Microsoft arguments being made by our politicians center around the same myopias. We desparately need to understand that Open Source is *not* about ruining American companies (ie, Microsoft) or even giving up control of our software. It's about freedom, choice and competition... the very things the country was founded upon.
Steve Hall
They sure are taking this time phasing thing to a new level. Maybe Lucas could use this to finish Star Wars parts 7-9.
Every now and then, somebody breaks through with an idea that really changes how we think about things. Fastap is certainly one.
The best part about this design is that none of us will need to relearn anything. It's easily, almost automatically integratable into our daily lives without having to change our behavior. Certainly this doesn't mean we'll all have one soon. We should, but if we don't, I'll be forever disappointed knowing it existed.
BTW, wouldn't this concept also work on a PDA virtual keyboard? Seems like somebody could program one for my Palm without too much trouble. Any takers?
Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?
I don't know if it's just me, or if I've been hanging out on SlashDot too long... this article makes me feel sick.
Can it really be that we're the only ones who see Microsoft's business "initiatives" for what they really are--predatory monopolisitc struggles to rule the world? Or have we all become stained by reading SlashDot and they really mean well?
IMO, Mexico is the perfect place for Open Source software. It's a real shame that portions of the Mexican government can't see their opportunity to leapfrog existing software technologies and jump into the first world.
Probably too late in the thread to get noticed, but here goes...
What if Microsoft is now strategizing that a forced fully modular design could be done, with the condition that Microsoft eliminate third party flexibilities, effectively slipping themselves into the hardware market at the same time? They could easily argue that Apple has better control over their software because they control the hardware side of the equation.
"Sure we can make it modular... if we sell more applications and the hardware, too!"
Win 95B (patched), IE 5.5 -- Worked using a modified path C:/Windows/winmine.exe
(Yes, that's Windows 95. I prefer it.)
I don't care if Mozilla can cook breakfast for me, if it doesn't do what I need, it's not useful. Here's some explanation as to why I think these three are serious issues:
Home Button: My home page is my personal collection of links, dictionary form and Google search form. I start every new browse there. You may argue that this is only personal taste, but Intranets everywhere use this setup. (And oh, BTW, every other browser feels this is an important UI issue.)
View Source in External Editor: I also write a lot of HTML, and prefer to use the browser to navigate the code. A quick view source is the best way to polish a page, IMO. (This is enough for me to stick with IE while I'm using Windows.)
Broken Address Book Lists: I don't even use the address book, but I finally convinced my boss to try Mozilla as an upgrade to Netscape 4. (Which had trashed his address book.) Figuring an upgrade may possibly restore his data (it did), he went along with my suggestion. But he still thinks I'm a crackpot for suggesting a browser that won't maintain his address book lists. (He wishes he would have just re-installed NS 4.)
UI issues are serious issues. Coders may pooh, pooh them, but one of the great successes of Apple is that last 1%. Can't we just fix these?
<sigh>
Don't get me wrong, Mozilla is great and I love/use it, but there are still some very serious issues:
Hope those CompuServe users can hang in there until 1.2 or so.
(I'd link, but they don't take referrals from SlashDot... here's the Mozilla Bugzilla Home Page.)
So does this mean the Patent Office now implicitly agrees that they think patents are silly, too?
(BTW, does anybody else see the potential here for using this as a general call for taxpayer revolt? How much did we pay for this? Do our congresspeople approve on wasting such funds? Do they want re-elected?)
Easy to use Vim? Don't you mean Cream?
</shameless plug>Definitely start with:
Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition
Best learning (and reference) resource I've ever seen for Linux.
No surpise, really, considering that Best Buy and the RIAA are both on the retail side of things. What I find interesting is that both sectors care little for the artist or the listener... boiling down their influence on music to making it shiny and flashy.
Sooner or later, musicians and audiophiles will have enough technology to bypass all this ridulousness. Let's just hope it doesn't end up being illegal for me to buy listening rights to a song directly from whoever wrote and recorded it!
I spent half the article waiting for the writer to provide some facts, but by the end, there still weren't any.
She says:
Does this mean RedHat is moving all their employees to the marketing department? Does it mean everybody is told to make 9 cold calls a day? All we're given is the typical investor information, share price, projections, etc., but little information about how the business plan is working or changing.
Frankly, the few real facts that are provided show a mixed bag, hardly worthy of the article's pessimistic title. Yet another Linux story trying to make news rather than report it.
Right. That's where the software would have to keep everything legal. As long as you were listening to a song from a CD that no one else was listening to (including other tracks) at that point in time, you'd be legal, because at that moment you owned the CD.
The software would have to maintain ownership status for each CD (represented in liquid form on hdd) AND would disallow simultaneous listening to any CD. (Here's where redundancy in the repository would be a big help. But the most popular music would probably be the best represented in shareholder deposits anyway, right?)
Just thought of a way around this.
Let's say we set up an economy within our office. We buy and sell CDs on demand. At the beginning of the month, you bring in whatever CDs you want to sell. You deposit them into the office trust, where they're "converted" to a more economically liquid form, onto a digital hard drive.
Now all we need is some simple software that "trades" CDs. Whenever you want to listen to one of the many volumes in the repository, you buy it on demand. You real-time trade one of the CDs you deposited in exchange for the ownership of the one you want to listen to.
The only hitch is when multiple people want to buy a CD that no one wants to sell, or when no one wants to buy any of the CDs you brought in so that you don't have any purchasing/exchange power to buy any of the others.
Obviously, in a small office, there's not a large enough "economy" to make this work, but for a 1,000 person corporation, it's unlikely that you'd ever have to wait more than a few minutes. Especially if everybody brought in enough CDs. The redundancy along would keep things rolling. Now what if it were multi-corporation?
IANAL, but this seems like a perfectly legal brokerage-type method to share music without breaking the law.