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  1. Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue? on GNOME 2.16 Released · · Score: 1

    And where would the hinting be for that? Anyone besides gnome users are going to know that how? Typical Gnome cop-out. Hide features behind a shortcut key, but provide zero UI to tell people they exist.

  2. Re:Well, doesn't Gnome have some nerve? on GNOME 2.16 Released · · Score: 1

    So you would say then, for the sake of usability, that people accustomed to using the Tab key for completion should suddenly retrain themselves? Tell me again how this makes Gnome any more usable? If the question is accessability, then by golly make it a pref that's enabled by default. Don't expect people to be happy with this, or button re-ordering, "spatial" browsing(implemented totally half-assed, just to add insult to injury), or any of the myriad of other changes Gnome UI has jammed down the throats of the unwilling. Expect us to use something else, and publicly deride Gnome for what they've become.

    Amazing how many replies a -1:Troll post can generate, neh? I suspect I've got the Gnome fanbois in a big lather. Well, let 'em mod me down. They need something to do in between emerging this update and putting new taillight inserts on their yugos.

  3. Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue? on GNOME 2.16 Released · · Score: 1

    How about the idiotic part where you go to save a file with the picker, create a new folder, and then the moment you give this new folder a name, the 50-char filename of the .deb you were trying to save gets wiped? Not to mention the acres of wasted space in that picker. What a turd that thing is. At least they put back the location bar, sort of, in this release.

  4. Re:So? It still sucks. on GNOME 2.16 Released · · Score: 1

    Like Windows, for example. It's just another case of "Shit wins not because it smells nice, but because everyone sees it." So much for the meritocracy of geekhood...

  5. Well, doesn't Gnome have some nerve? on GNOME 2.16 Released · · Score: -1, Troll
    First of all, calling anything they do a "usability improvement" is a bald-faced lie. I'm awaiting with bemusement the moment when all of Gnome is reduced to one single button (that you have to double-click, naturally) with a picture of a brain-dead monkey on it, that launches an xterm.

    More to the point of why I accuse them of having nerve, behold:
    The file chooser dialog has also been improved: the location entry (previously opened by using Ctrl+L) has been integrated...
    So, in other words, Gnome put back what they idiotically took out in the first place - for the sake of "usability" naturally - and then have the balls to call this fix an "improvement."

    Suffice to say, I'm solidly in agreement with Torvalds on this issue. Gnome is dumbed down to the point where I begin to wonder whether most of the UI team suffers from some condition or another which causes them to abhor visual complexity, preferring instead to cover their screens in acres of brown, unused, empty space. I would say "wasted space" but I think I've wasted more than enough space making this post. Cheers.
  6. Re:Witness the misery caused by AOL dropping dialu on The Internet Not for Old People · · Score: 1
    Oh man. You're right, you know. Having said that, the drum sets would, in my household at least, become "Special wsanders drum sets," playable only when you came to visit. Had a similar issue when someone gifted my child with a hobby horse that would neigh angrily and play a couple of bars from the William Tell Overture when you pinched its ear. It now keeps its stable at the home of my ex.
    </muahaha>
  7. Well, that tears it on Heroic IT Dept Less Likely to Steal... Lunches? · · Score: 1

    I'm stealing your lunch. Even if it has your name on it. After all, traditions are meant to be broken, aren't they? Go thinking I won't steal your lunch just because I work in IT, what gives you the right? Huh?

  8. Re:I work in the industry... on Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Haha, I used to use a similar trick with the local cable company. They provide both internet and cable TV service, but because their TV service is a sanctioned monopoly, they're required by law to have a certain average hold time for 800 calls. Not so the Internet service, where one could grow old waiting on hold. But yeah, they both used the same queue, so guess which option I chose when I had a problem with my Internet service? And the CSRs never noticed that I'd pulled a fast one (although to be honest, I was actually catching THEM in the act of pulling a fast one, and working around it).

    That said, there's no justification for forcing anyone to give the account number twice. If the system can be used to route callers based upon account number, it can sure as hell pass that account number along tho the damn CSR.

  9. Re:I work in the industry... on Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Most companies simply transfer the calls, and if you get lucky, your account number might travel with the call.
    This is the problem with so many of such systems, as well as many if not most of the push-button systems. When I go through the hassle of telling a robot my 16-digit account number and then having it verify it - "You said four, four, three, two, zero..." - and then having the bot decide I really need a human to deal with the issue after all, it's damn rude and lazy of the company to make me as the customer go through it all again. One would think the companies would prefer to have the information forwarded to the CSR anyhow, as verifying account information over the phone takes time, and the more time the CSR spends doing something that a bot just did, the more people the company has to hire to fulfill a redundant role.

  10. Great idea! on Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus? · · Score: 1

    If nothing else, it will provide some emotional release while the system tries to figure out what to do with you. Even better if some QA tech listens to the recording later to try to improve the system.

  11. God dammit, learn how to use apostrophes on Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus? · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Seriously (and yes, this is offtopic, so what), learn how to use the fucking apostrophe. Jesus fucking christ, you could be intelligent, articulate, and have interesting things to say, but the moment you use an apostrophe where it doesn't go, you look like a fucking moron. Here's some help for the likes of you:
    http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/
    If you're not able to parse a goddamn thing unless it's illustrated (your blog suggests that you can in fact manage the written word, but this bit is funny just the same), here's one from the funny pages:
    http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
    Signed,
    Protector of the Apostrophe. Enemy of the department of redundancy department. Grammar Fascist. (Err, wait, nothing corporatist about grammar that I can think of, unless the question is one of buzzwords. Nevermind then.)

    Cheers

  12. No good with kids in the house on Why Do Companies Stick with Voice Menus? · · Score: 5, Funny
    I've got a 4-year-old who is going through that stage where the use of the phone causes instant pandemonium - she sees me on the phone, and suddenly the same child who has been ignoring me for the past half hour will do anything and everything to grab my attention. This is common at this age, apparently. A large part of the problem is that many IVR systems are programmed to hang up if they get too many invalid responses. At least with a "press 3 for billing" solution, you can let it babble for a minute while you can handle things not related to talking to a robot. I'm sure other parents can relate to the following typical conversation:
    IVR Bot: "To talk to billing, say 'billing.' To get help with your connection, say 'connection.' If you'd like help with something else, say 'something else.'"
    Me: "Firstname-middlename-lastname, put down that hammer, NOW!"
    IVR Bot: "I'm sorry. I didn't understand what you needed. Can you please say that again?"
    Me: "I said now."
    IVR Bot: "I didn't quite make that out. One more time please?"
    Me: "ONE... TWO..."
    IVR Bot: "Thanks for calling. Goodbye!"
  13. Good grief, newbs! on NASA Names New Spaceship 'Orion' · · Score: 1

    Orion was the name of the passenger ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yeah, all that other stuff, too, but how much you want to bet they named it after the original fictional spacecraft?

  14. Re:No shards in EVE? on World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry? · · Score: 1

    "or every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight."

    Aww, nobody would let you gate-gank them? You poor bastard. Really, who defines whether a player is a PVPer? You? Just because someone is running through 0.4 doesn't mean they're a PVPer. More likely, they're going shopping or running a mission. The only people I hear bitching about players running away are the assholes who like to camp 70km from a gate and try to one-shot players with a tenth of their skill. Pah, go kick your cat instead.

  15. Re:Works for me on World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the lag issue is significant. The way I see it working in EVE would be manageable though - my understanding of their cluster architecture is that you've got your authentication servers, your database (what items do you have, which ones are fitted, etc.), and servers for different solar systems. So to my outside view at least, it would seem possible to fit a server to each station that people can FPS in, and the problem is thus solved in terms of resources. Plus, you could do a lot of neat stuff - even simply wandering around visiting offices and such. Instead of clicking on a station agent, you actually go to his or her office, etc.

    With regard to the spawn camping, that one could be rather easily avoided by applying game design. Make the players spawn out of their ships in different places would be the most obvious solution. Additionally, high-security systems are heavily policed, and any attacking of players could result in deployment of npc cops, security turrets, etc.

    I think the thing I like about EVE is the thing I dislike about WoW (aside from the obvious differences in premise). EVE is hard to learn, especially if you're an impatient dork and skip the tutorial. Once you learn it, it plays very easily, but I can't tell you how many times I laughed at people in the rookie chat channel speaking AOLer and saying effectively "This game is too hard! I just wanna kill stuff and the tutorial is boring!" It sort of selects against immature players, and makes the experience for the players who remain much more satisfying.

  16. Works for me on World Of Warcraft Crushing PC Game Industry? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Personally, I can't stand WoW - I just don't much go in for that "I put on my robe and wizard hat" crap, but something else did turn out to hook me in rather completely - in my case, it's EVE Online. Since I've started playing that, I haven't spent any time with CS:S, BF2, or any of the other titles I generally spent time on (not even GTA).

    I'm not saying the game I like is better than the game in the article, but what I do observe is that a well-crafted MMOG can pull a player in for hours and weeks at a time. I know I don't bother considering buying games right now, because I know that I probably won't play them - hell, I'm not playing the ones I already have. So you have probably four big MMOGs dominating the landscape, which is great for Blizzard, CCP, etc., but the rest of the industry sees a decline.

    So what's the problem? If you want to compete with the market leaders, produce something more compelling, exciting, shiny, and innovative than what's out there. Don't whine that better games are eating your lunch. From what I see, the big MMOGs are winning because they are that good. Now, if someone were to put out a spaceship-based MMOG where you could dock into a station, exit your ship, and engage in FPS combat to take over the station, land on the planets to do missions, PVE, PVP, world-building, etc., I'd be in line at midnight to give it a try. I bet if someone did a robe-and-wizard-hat MMOG where there were no shards or instances (a-la EVE's ginormous server cluster with anywhere between 15,000-25,000 players on at any given time), then you'd see guys in tunics camping outside Fry's.

    In the games industry, if you can't beat 'em, go work for EA, where you can at least be sure of steady income for producing shit rerun knockoffs. Or you could do better, and actually beat 'em.

  17. Re:Unstoppable Opportunity on Slashback: Oklahoma Spyware, FSF DRM, Lenovo Linux · · Score: 1

    If it's unstoppable, unbreakable, whatever, then their naming solution should be obvious (all the more so if they actually did it): United States Spaceship Oracle. Imagine the co-branding opportunities!

  18. Re:Sophos AV on Alternative Enterprise Anti-Virus Solutions? · · Score: 1

    Wow, I've found it to be the opposite: Lightweight and affordable. Haven't seen it thrashing Windows hosts as you describe (even when the machines have gotten themselves into virus or other trouble), our Macs are happy running it - firewall or no, the Linux boxes are happy running it, and the console doesn't freak out over FQDN (although why your network isn't configured correctly isn't the fault of an antivirus company)

    I supsect you were running an old version, son.

  19. Sophos AV on Alternative Enterprise Anti-Virus Solutions? · · Score: 4, Informative

    We just switched to it after battling the behemoths, and it's been a real boon to me. Management console works well, the product has been catching a ton of stuff that Symantec didn't, price was good, and it does a nice job of push installation (even here - we've got Samba domain controllers - it didn't care). I've had good experiences with their phone jockeys also. Downside - simple file sharing has to be turned off on winxp clients, but if you're on AD that's easy enough to fix.

  20. Hahaha, GNOME on FreeBSD Vows to Compete with Desktop Linux · · Score: 1

    Betting on the wrong horse there. Gnome is such an utter piece of shit (ask Torvalds - d'oh!) that all BSD will do is ensure that nobody ends up using it on the desktop. Same thing as redshat and the other gnome distros. Unless someone here really believes that a return to the System 7 Finder with all that window clutter is a good idea? Or that Gnome's file browse dialog is anything other than a useless piece of shit with the most important information hidden from the users (like "where am I right now?")... but really, gnome should just quit before they prove the impossible by sucking worse than they already do.

  21. Mod Parent UP on SUSE 10.1 Released · · Score: 1

    I love the distro, despite its many warts. Am using SuSE 10 right now, etc. OTOH, that comment needs +n: Funny asap. Moderators, take note.

  22. Re:Sad state of backbone administration on What Happened to Blue Security · · Score: 1

    Fair point. I was getting more at the sense of general criminality that I see coming from there than spam volume, but wasn't that clear. People in the US do commit internet crimes, and then they (sometimes) get busted. I don't see the same level of enforcement happening in Russia, and as a function of population, the amount of crime coming from there is disproportionate.

  23. Re:Sad state of backbone administration on What Happened to Blue Security · · Score: 1

    So why the fuck haven't the Russian authorities gotten their shit together? I mean, they've been spammer central for years now, well known, and the issue isn't on the table politically or diplomatically. It's as though world leaders sort of complicitly agreed that Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states could be a free-fire zone for internet fraud, child porn, and the like.

    Enough is enough. Snailmail your congressluser or similar from wherever you're at. And if you're Russian, double!

  24. Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too on Linux Growth Doesn't Offset NetWare Decline · · Score: 1

    Oddly, you seem to have failed to read the link I provided, so here it is in plaintext: http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Licensing
    Either which way, downloading and using for free is a long way away from five digits of USD. Sorry, your cluebat remains pristine.

    Cheers.

  25. Correction on Linux Growth Doesn't Offset NetWare Decline · · Score: 1

    Erm, perhaps it's not all GPL, but it is all under some version of a free license. Details here. Free (as in beer, etc) download of FDS (Binary RPMs for you redhatty folks!) right here. *puts away cluebat*