Absolutely. They do really fundamental stuff actually. Including things like topological quantum computing. Not going to yield a product this decade or next, but at the cutting edge of the interface between physics and mathematics.
Do we have any info that you wont be able to disable web history after the change? Or delete it afterwards? That would seriously change my googling habits actually.
Their product is search. Mozilla is one way of getting to their product. Chrome is another. They benefit from there being a sufficient number of sufficiently fast and well engineered ways to get to their product. That's all.
Peculiar, it renders correctly for me, and I assume for most others (as its a high profile page that, if it broke across the board would be fixed quickly). Does it work with a clean install/profile?
It's 4 clicks or so to get the non chrome UI in the newer firefox releases and now that people have had time to adjust to the rapid release schedule add on compatibility is not really an issue anymore. I'm on the Beta chanel and haven't had an add on break in a long time.
I don't get it. Do you really miss the menu in Firefox? I like the new interface, with a little bit of tweaking (less then I did before!) it has everything I need right there and nothing else.
You know how many clicks it takes to activate the menu in Firefox BTW? Three: Firefox -> Options -> Menu
Firefox might not be perfect, but to say its lost its way is ridiculous. They have sped up the browser drammatically recently, they are working on threading it, which should help stability, etc... The new release schedule brings problems, for sure. But it also makes enormous amounts of sense from a logical point of view.
It's idiotic really. On the one hand supposedly Firefox UI is terribly because they are imitating Chrome to much, and in the next thread people say they are switc hing over to Chrome because its much faster (obviously not minding the Chrome UI at all). And the fact that it's slower is partly due to it's extendability (which is why I'm sticking with it), in other words due to the fact that it gives you enormous customizability.
Now Gnome 3 fucked up, but it's not beyond repair, and it's technically sound. Mint proves that (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851) "From a technological point of view, Gnome 3 is a fantastic desktop, and it’s getting better with every new release. It will take time for Linux Mint to develop a Gnome 3 desktop that is on-par with what we had with Gnome 2, but eventually we’ll be able to do much more with it than was possible with the traditional desktop."
Innovation means that you sometimes have to make high profile mistakes. KDE 4 was such a mistake but everybody seems to be very happy with the latest releases. Gnome 3 was such a mistake, but that doesn't mean that experimentation with UI paradigms isn't necessary. And now people like Mint and others are building on their technological foundation. The way we use computers has shifted dramatically since the paradigms Gnome 2 is based on were established.
tl;dr: Quit your whinning, sometimes big projects make mistakes, innovation is needed, the vast majority of the whinning is resenting change.
More over, any large cooperation is subject to the same type of politics. Relative to the size of the government these failed projects are not that huge.
Where's the evidence for anything you say? It's just ideology. It's the opposite of a pragmatic "what works" approach for the sake of an ideological vendetta that irrationaly glorifies one particular way of organising things.
It is clear that you have no clue about the German culture in the context of which these laws exist. It's not about erasing history. The history is taught openly and extensively in high school, and denying it is a crime. It's quite the opposite of trying to pretend it didn't exist. There is a giant Holocaust memorial not very far from the German parliament. I'll let Avi Primor, former Israeli Embassador to Germany speak of it:
"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."
On another note:
I think it's a false axiom that it is always better to confront irrationality and hatred with truth ("teach the controversy" anyone?). That said, free speech is of course a constitutionally guaranteed right in Germany. The only way it is limited is (like in the US) if it interferes with another constitutionally guaranteed right. In the case of Nazi symbolism that would be the principal and sole unnegotiable right in the German constitution: Human dignity.
derStandard.at: Recently there has been some very vocal criticism of GNOME 3.0, how do you deal with that as project?
McCann: I think it does affect us as a community more on a personal level than it does on a professional level. It's never nice to hear people that you have so much respect for offering their opinion very mean spirited. But that is their right, everyone has a voice on the internet and can express what they think. And we listen to it all and don't want to ignore it. However: We do have to remain focused on what we are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately on the internet - and in free software in particular - we have a lot of people whose voices aren't heard very loudly, and we have to take their needs into accounts as well as those who are vocal. And that's very challenging to do and very tricky to know what the less vocal people are looking for. So we have to remain sensitive to both sides.
As how we react to those latest criticisms: It's very difficult cause not all of those necessarily agree with one another. In some sense people who are against something think they have something in common, but when you look at it in more detail - which of course we try to do - very few actually agree on much of anything other than that's not what they are used to.
derStandard.at: But would you say there was some valid criticism voiced or is all this just "people hating change" for you?
McCann: It's certainly valid in the sense that people are not making it up and it may indeed not be what they like. And that's fine, there are a lot of different products out there that may fit their way of working better. But if you look at it from a historical perspective, this isn't the first time we have encountered such reactions. Even many of the same people who are now claiming that GNOME2 was such a great thing for them were some of the most vocal opponents of the things we did in GNOME2. People forget that we are the same group of folks that built GNOME2 and it's not that we don't know what was good about it. But we also know what didn't work.
Some of the feedback is certainly valid and we are going to use that to make informed decisions in the GNOME3 cycle - remember we've only had one release so far. In couple of the talks we pointed out that it took us eight, nine years to get to where GNOME2 ended up and we've had like four months of GNOME3. So there are plenty of things we still have to do. There are a lot of holes in our story. People will look at some things and say "Why is this there? Does this really make sense?". And in many cases that's because we didn't get to really finish that off. And that will start to fill in, the story will become a little bit more complete as we go through this cycle. I'm not saying that all this people will be completely convinced and that's unfortunate but I think over time people will realize what we are doing has been at least thought through.
Is your argument really: "Don't be naive, even if it would make huge business sense this is a personal decision by the CEO who would act out of petty feelings rather than rationally to earn the company more bucks."???
That's just inane.
Now the only question left is how many extensions will be required to restore the toolbar so I can keep my NoScript and Firebug icons fucking available since I frequently need to use them. You took away my status bar, please don't take away my toolbar too.
Firefox -> Option -> Menu Bar
Firefox -> Option -> Add On Bar
I get that people who grew up with one interface paradigm dislike the new interfaces, but all the handwringing over "And surely soon all those art majors will leave us people desiring functionality and clarity out in the woods!" is ridiculous. It takes litterally 6 mouse clicks to achieve a traditional layout, and it's in the very first place you'd look for it. There is zero indication that this will go away.
On top of that if you actually read the thought processes that go into these designs it's ridiculous to claim that it's all just art for arts sake. You might disagree with the design decisions, but declaring anything that moves from your entrenched paradigm to be merely "prettying things up" is just ridiculous get-off-my-lawning. It's the design equivalent of the "works for me" approach to debugging.
You know how we all loved google when it came out because its homepage was not flooded with useless information like altavista and all the others? Just the most relevant bit of info presented in the most straightforward way, and then some subtle hints where all the extra magic functionality is if you need it while keeping it out of your way when you don't. Sounds a lot like what the new browser interfaces are attempting, right?
> Too many scientists think that once you have written the equations, your work is done.
I became a scientist rather than a programmer because I don't care for the extra work. Once the equations are written down _MY_ work is done, and the programmers begins. I'm not so vain to think that I could do their work as well as they can and I am paid for doing what's in my range of expertise.
I sucked as a coder, because to me code was always just a way to express an algorithm, an idea, I never cared about what's happening at the metal level. I hate C. If I had dabeled in coding 10 years later than I did I probably would have liked Haskell.
Using your numbers only, let me explain it to the shareholders:
"Revenue side:
2/3 * 16 > 10
Cost side:
2/3 1
We made a move that both increases revenue and reduces cost. We're doing our job and making you more money."
Whatever the appropriate means are Amazon has not provided them.
Plus did you read that review? In the context of what the developer told us it looks like there was a bug from which the user drew understandable (hence I also disagree with the developers assessment of the user as paranoid) but completely wrong conclusions.
A) The customer is not always right.
b) The guy complained that he had no way to communicate with the customer in order to work with the customer on explaining/addressing the issues the customer had. So his complain was that he wanted to do exactly what you are telling him he must learn to do (patronize much?) but couldn't due to the app stores suckiness.
It doesn't have lock in, but it has a dominant market position in one area and is using it to push in a different market.
The point to note is that MS is still dominant in OS software, and is pushing IE out with it (though now we at least get the browser ballot to balance things somewhat). So in this case all it is iss doing is restoring some balance.
But that's a completely unwarranted assumption. For me the latest redesign opened up some screen space and changed defaults to something more closely aligned to how I was using the browser anyway. The key novelty was to make it possible to use the browser without the menu by adding the title bar button, an idea copied from Chrome.
If you were among the people who used the menu it takes a grand total of three clicks to reenable it. Another three clicks disables tabs on top. Other than that the changes weren't exactly all that drastic.
BS. A Designer who trys to make things pretty is an atrocious designer. And we have had decades of software engineers designing software, that software was amazingly usable.... for other software engineers. Usability is the core tennant of design theory (read The Design of Everyday Things). Good design enables you to use and think about your tools in new ways. The iPhone wasn't technically capable of much (if anything) that you couldn't do before. But it changed how people thought about and interacted with their devices, how they used their devices capabilities. That is good design.
The problem is of course that at the other end of the spectrum software is a tool to do a wide variety of things and is going to be used by experts who can be bothered to invest considerable time or effort (or have spend in the past consiberable time and effort) to adapt themselves to the tool. That is of course more difficult but also more powerful. But this is where your efficiency argument falls. You neglect the initial investment into learning the tools. FPC clearly falls into the category of software as a tool.
Your lament is mostly about that: Bloody designers make it easy to do easy things with the computer so that all those infidels can use them to put their pictures on their facebook without even knowing what a file extension is, while inconveniencing me when I use a computer properly! They hate usability and efficiency! Oh for the good old days when nobody who hadn't memorized at least a couple of hundred command line commands could use a computer! It was so much more efficient then. You just type what you want the computer to do! None of that silly clicking on things!
I also don't get the hating on Firefox and Mozilla. Overall their design has been a huge usability improvement over the years. Even if I didn't agree with every step the overall direction has been good. Perhaps the single most important innovation that changed my way of browsing and interacting with the web was the AwesomeBar. That was much maligned by lots and lots of people at the time for much of the reasons you speak of. In particular people who adapt themselves to their tools want those to behave deterministically of course. But for every ordinary person I have ever seen using the browser it works incredibly well.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. They do really fundamental stuff actually. Including things like topological quantum computing. Not going to yield a product this decade or next, but at the cutting edge of the interface between physics and mathematics.
(http://stationq.ucsb.edu/research.html)
Do we have any info that you wont be able to disable web history after the change? Or delete it afterwards? That would seriously change my googling habits actually.
Their product is search. Mozilla is one way of getting to their product. Chrome is another. They benefit from there being a sufficient number of sufficiently fast and well engineered ways to get to their product. That's all.
Peculiar, it renders correctly for me, and I assume for most others (as its a high profile page that, if it broke across the board would be fixed quickly). Does it work with a clean install/profile?
It's 4 clicks or so to get the non chrome UI in the newer firefox releases and now that people have had time to adjust to the rapid release schedule add on compatibility is not really an issue anymore. I'm on the Beta chanel and haven't had an add on break in a long time.
I don't get it. Do you really miss the menu in Firefox? I like the new interface, with a little bit of tweaking (less then I did before!) it has everything I need right there and nothing else.
You know how many clicks it takes to activate the menu in Firefox BTW? Three: Firefox -> Options -> Menu
Firefox might not be perfect, but to say its lost its way is ridiculous. They have sped up the browser drammatically recently, they are working on threading it, which should help stability, etc... The new release schedule brings problems, for sure. But it also makes enormous amounts of sense from a logical point of view.
It's idiotic really. On the one hand supposedly Firefox UI is terribly because they are imitating Chrome to much, and in the next thread people say they are switc hing over to Chrome because its much faster (obviously not minding the Chrome UI at all). And the fact that it's slower is partly due to it's extendability (which is why I'm sticking with it), in other words due to the fact that it gives you enormous customizability.
Now Gnome 3 fucked up, but it's not beyond repair, and it's technically sound. Mint proves that (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851) "From a technological point of view, Gnome 3 is a fantastic desktop, and it’s getting better with every new release. It will take time for Linux Mint to develop a Gnome 3 desktop that is on-par with what we had with Gnome 2, but eventually we’ll be able to do much more with it than was possible with the traditional desktop."
Innovation means that you sometimes have to make high profile mistakes. KDE 4 was such a mistake but everybody seems to be very happy with the latest releases. Gnome 3 was such a mistake, but that doesn't mean that experimentation with UI paradigms isn't necessary. And now people like Mint and others are building on their technological foundation. The way we use computers has shifted dramatically since the paradigms Gnome 2 is based on were established.
tl;dr: Quit your whinning, sometimes big projects make mistakes, innovation is needed, the vast majority of the whinning is resenting change.
More over, any large cooperation is subject to the same type of politics. Relative to the size of the government these failed projects are not that huge.
Where's the evidence for anything you say? It's just ideology. It's the opposite of a pragmatic "what works" approach for the sake of an ideological vendetta that irrationaly glorifies one particular way of organising things.
It is clear that you have no clue about the German culture in the context of which these laws exist. It's not about erasing history. The history is taught openly and extensively in high school, and denying it is a crime. It's quite the opposite of trying to pretend it didn't exist. There is a giant Holocaust memorial not very far from the German parliament. I'll let Avi Primor, former Israeli Embassador to Germany speak of it: "Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility." On another note: I think it's a false axiom that it is always better to confront irrationality and hatred with truth ("teach the controversy" anyone?). That said, free speech is of course a constitutionally guaranteed right in Germany. The only way it is limited is (like in the US) if it interferes with another constitutionally guaranteed right. In the case of Nazi symbolism that would be the principal and sole unnegotiable right in the German constitution: Human dignity.
I guess you also get up in the middle of movies and demand your money back because you couldn't actually influence any of the action on screen, right?
I think 50$ for 10 hours is a fair price actually. Comparable to what you get at the movies.
I know I'm new here and reading the article is not recommended but he actually says:
Highlights: It's [the criticism] certainly valid...
derStandard.at: Recently there has been some very vocal criticism of GNOME 3.0, how do you deal with that as project? McCann: I think it does affect us as a community more on a personal level than it does on a professional level. It's never nice to hear people that you have so much respect for offering their opinion very mean spirited. But that is their right, everyone has a voice on the internet and can express what they think. And we listen to it all and don't want to ignore it. However: We do have to remain focused on what we are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately on the internet - and in free software in particular - we have a lot of people whose voices aren't heard very loudly, and we have to take their needs into accounts as well as those who are vocal. And that's very challenging to do and very tricky to know what the less vocal people are looking for. So we have to remain sensitive to both sides.
As how we react to those latest criticisms: It's very difficult cause not all of those necessarily agree with one another. In some sense people who are against something think they have something in common, but when you look at it in more detail - which of course we try to do - very few actually agree on much of anything other than that's not what they are used to.
derStandard.at: But would you say there was some valid criticism voiced or is all this just "people hating change" for you?
McCann: It's certainly valid in the sense that people are not making it up and it may indeed not be what they like. And that's fine, there are a lot of different products out there that may fit their way of working better. But if you look at it from a historical perspective, this isn't the first time we have encountered such reactions. Even many of the same people who are now claiming that GNOME2 was such a great thing for them were some of the most vocal opponents of the things we did in GNOME2. People forget that we are the same group of folks that built GNOME2 and it's not that we don't know what was good about it. But we also know what didn't work.
Some of the feedback is certainly valid and we are going to use that to make informed decisions in the GNOME3 cycle - remember we've only had one release so far. In couple of the talks we pointed out that it took us eight, nine years to get to where GNOME2 ended up and we've had like four months of GNOME3. So there are plenty of things we still have to do. There are a lot of holes in our story. People will look at some things and say "Why is this there? Does this really make sense?". And in many cases that's because we didn't get to really finish that off. And that will start to fill in, the story will become a little bit more complete as we go through this cycle. I'm not saying that all this people will be completely convinced and that's unfortunate but I think over time people will realize what we are doing has been at least thought through.
Is your argument really: "Don't be naive, even if it would make huge business sense this is a personal decision by the CEO who would act out of petty feelings rather than rationally to earn the company more bucks."??? That's just inane.
* Ace of Spades (video game)
* Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
* Amok (video game)
* Blade Runner (1997 video game)
* Blood (video game)
* Comanche series
* Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
* Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
* Delta Force (video game)
* Delta Force 2
* Delta Force: Urban Warfare
* Hexplore
* Master of Orion III
* Minecraft
* Outcast (video game)
* Perimeter (video game)
* Shadow Warrior
* Shattered Steel
* Vangers
So it can be done, it has been done, and it might well be useful in some games, though not neccessarily the FPS genre.
Now the only question left is how many extensions will be required to restore the toolbar so I can keep my NoScript and Firebug icons fucking available since I frequently need to use them. You took away my status bar, please don't take away my toolbar too.
Firefox -> Option -> Menu Bar Firefox -> Option -> Add On Bar
I get that people who grew up with one interface paradigm dislike the new interfaces, but all the handwringing over "And surely soon all those art majors will leave us people desiring functionality and clarity out in the woods!" is ridiculous. It takes litterally 6 mouse clicks to achieve a traditional layout, and it's in the very first place you'd look for it. There is zero indication that this will go away.
On top of that if you actually read the thought processes that go into these designs it's ridiculous to claim that it's all just art for arts sake. You might disagree with the design decisions, but declaring anything that moves from your entrenched paradigm to be merely "prettying things up" is just ridiculous get-off-my-lawning. It's the design equivalent of the "works for me" approach to debugging.
You know how we all loved google when it came out because its homepage was not flooded with useless information like altavista and all the others? Just the most relevant bit of info presented in the most straightforward way, and then some subtle hints where all the extra magic functionality is if you need it while keeping it out of your way when you don't. Sounds a lot like what the new browser interfaces are attempting, right?
> Too many scientists think that once you have written the equations, your work is done. I became a scientist rather than a programmer because I don't care for the extra work. Once the equations are written down _MY_ work is done, and the programmers begins. I'm not so vain to think that I could do their work as well as they can and I am paid for doing what's in my range of expertise. I sucked as a coder, because to me code was always just a way to express an algorithm, an idea, I never cared about what's happening at the metal level. I hate C. If I had dabeled in coding 10 years later than I did I probably would have liked Haskell.
Using your numbers only, let me explain it to the shareholders: "Revenue side: 2/3 * 16 > 10 Cost side: 2/3 1 We made a move that both increases revenue and reduces cost. We're doing our job and making you more money."
Plus did you read that review? In the context of what the developer told us it looks like there was a bug from which the user drew understandable (hence I also disagree with the developers assessment of the user as paranoid) but completely wrong conclusions.
A) The customer is not always right. b) The guy complained that he had no way to communicate with the customer in order to work with the customer on explaining/addressing the issues the customer had. So his complain was that he wanted to do exactly what you are telling him he must learn to do (patronize much?) but couldn't due to the app stores suckiness.
It doesn't have lock in, but it has a dominant market position in one area and is using it to push in a different market. The point to note is that MS is still dominant in OS software, and is pushing IE out with it (though now we at least get the browser ballot to balance things somewhat). So in this case all it is iss doing is restoring some balance.
But that's a completely unwarranted assumption. For me the latest redesign opened up some screen space and changed defaults to something more closely aligned to how I was using the browser anyway. The key novelty was to make it possible to use the browser without the menu by adding the title bar button, an idea copied from Chrome. If you were among the people who used the menu it takes a grand total of three clicks to reenable it. Another three clicks disables tabs on top. Other than that the changes weren't exactly all that drastic.
The problem is of course that at the other end of the spectrum software is a tool to do a wide variety of things and is going to be used by experts who can be bothered to invest considerable time or effort (or have spend in the past consiberable time and effort) to adapt themselves to the tool. That is of course more difficult but also more powerful. But this is where your efficiency argument falls. You neglect the initial investment into learning the tools. FPC clearly falls into the category of software as a tool.
Your lament is mostly about that: Bloody designers make it easy to do easy things with the computer so that all those infidels can use them to put their pictures on their facebook without even knowing what a file extension is, while inconveniencing me when I use a computer properly! They hate usability and efficiency! Oh for the good old days when nobody who hadn't memorized at least a couple of hundred command line commands could use a computer! It was so much more efficient then. You just type what you want the computer to do! None of that silly clicking on things!
I also don't get the hating on Firefox and Mozilla. Overall their design has been a huge usability improvement over the years. Even if I didn't agree with every step the overall direction has been good. Perhaps the single most important innovation that changed my way of browsing and interacting with the web was the AwesomeBar. That was much maligned by lots and lots of people at the time for much of the reasons you speak of. In particular people who adapt themselves to their tools want those to behave deterministically of course. But for every ordinary person I have ever seen using the browser it works incredibly well.