In the consumer market this is not true. Most of us use and trust ATMs without any knowledge of how they communicate back to their banks. Most of us use credit cards without knowing the encryption level of the network. Most of us trust the air bags will work without actually knowing how they work. Does this mean people trust their banks and car manufacturers? I think there's an inherent trust by most people. These companies haven't done enough to make most customers not trust them, and the same goes for Phoenix and Microsoft. Microsoft will be generally trusted enough by the masses to follow along with this mostly because they won't see it. Anything they hear about will come across as Microsoft doing something behind the scenes to make their products better. Just like people don't care how their ATMs or air bags work, they won't care about how Microsoft's DRM works, just so long as they have an enjoyable experience.
Ok, try Office XP on Windows 2000. Choose File, Save As... in any of those apps. Now open notepad. Choose File, Save As... Now open Query Analyzer for SQL Server 2000. Choose File, Save As... None of them look the same. Their guidelines say to use the "standard" controls distributed with Windows. Yet create a VB app using the standard file dialog control and you'll see yet another dialog.
Microsoft's had UI design guidelines for about 20 years. They continually change as new ideas come to the interface (e.g. now tabbed documents are preferred over MDI). But Microsoft has never completely followed them. Their own apps go against their own guidelines. For example, they always said to never defy the user's color settings when making a menu, and then Office XP came out with a custom menu. They say your apps should have consistent file dialogs, yet every app they create has a different dialog, sometimes changing from version to version.
They ask everyone to follow certain guidelines while they ignore them. I gave up on their suggestions years ago and instead follow general best practices depending on the situation.
Hey, everyone look! It's RMS posting as this termos guy. Flame him, flame him!
The author of the article, I believe, is guilty of the usual mistake of confusing the Linux kernel with an entire operating system. But people usually think of more than than GNU plus Linux when they think of this OS. What name would include GNU, Linux, Apache, Mozilla, KDE, etc. without using one distro's name? It's a problem that most people solve by calling all the open source software making up the entire system Linux.
You're sort of correct. Gates must find ways to motivate people because he needs to find the best possible employees and keep them happy enough to stay. Torvalds doesn't need to do much motivation because his "staff" is there voluntarily because of passion. Most people working on Linux are there simply because they enjoy it, not because they need to work on this software to put food on their table.
Gates also has the problem of the corporate environment, where many developers feel trapped. So he must foster an environment where his people are as happy as possible. Linux is the opposite, where people are only there because it makes them happy.
I live in the NY metro area and last week got an offer from Cablevision to add VOIP to my broadband access. They just replace the cable modem with another that supports it. It's a direct offer from Cablevision's OptimumOnline department.
Check the hours for those unlimited nights and weekends. For me, in the NY metro area, nights start at 9pm. That means I'm burning minutes between the time I get home at 5:30 and 9pm. That's why I keep using my land line.
Why don't we see any other professional worker , let it be a builder, a doctor, a writer or whats not give his work for free ?
All, except the writer, are producing physical (tangible) products or services. They're selling a truely limited resource - physical items or time. It's natural to make an exchange for any limited resource. Words and computer code, however, are unlimited resources. The only limits are artificial. Many writers do give away their work for free, or almost free. It's nearly impossible to become a professional writer (i.e. make enough in writing to support oneself). I know people who have tried, and it's not easy. People end up writing for two reasons: to create a work that's their own idea or to create something someone needs written. Writers trying to create their own book and publish it have a very hard time selling it. The others are people like technical writers. Many fictional writers, who end up not supporting themselves on their fictional writing, are happy to give their work away for free. These things correlate directly with the software world. The things they're truely passionate about, yet receive no compensation for, they give away. Charging for services will come from things like custom needs, and will not always result in open source software. To differentiate, each company will want certain custom things. The need for services will not end any time soon.
Most software users are not very tech savvy (i.e. admin level knowledge). They're home users who want games and the internet or work users who need to get their job done. Those people need support, especially when their software is from closed vendors. A company's internal support needs external support from their vendors. My development team, for example, had a Microsoft employee come in to fix problems we had with SQL Server 2000. He wasn't able to fix their problem, so how were we?
Support's also needed for those who don't want to deal with communicating with developers. People just want their software to work. They don't want to fill out bugzilla reports and download patches.
I think the problem is they're only counting those bugs which they choose to fix. There are 31 known security bugs in IE, some over a year and half old. This week they fixed a security bug in the ListBox and ComboBox controls that goes back to NT. There's a big difference between "We fix all bugs in 24 hours" and "We fix all bugs we choose to fix in 24 hours". I'm developing in.NET lately and I run into one bug after another. They're all "known" bugs on Microsoft's web site, yet none are fixed. I find that in general Linux's bugs are fixed quicker. Too many Microsoft bugs linger around for years without ever being fixed.
He plans on implementing one of the key things which will makes systems bring up the user interface faster: launch only those services required by the system to boot, then launch the desktop (if applicable), then continue loading any "secondary" services. For example, the log rotation script found on some distros doesn't need to run before the interface is launched. I think this has been needed for a long time on the Linux desktop. It's worked that way on Windows for a long time.
SystemServices is not at all tied to Gnome. It will probably not require much more than the kernel and Python. His goal is partly to make a nice set of APIs callable from a desktop like Gnome to ease with management and error reporting. This project is not tightly integrated with Gnome just because someone from Gnome has started it.
Re:Application programming is a dying paradigm
on
Ford To Move To Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm seeing the same trend, but I believe to a large degree it's a mistake. The web was originally designed for sharing of documents, with minimal interactive capabilities added later. Most corporate desktop apps do much more than just display data and require much user interaction, but are being ported to the web. My development team's main application is for contact, account, and time management, plus reporting. It's data intensive and lets the user lay out lots of windows with a variety of info. The boss has us rewriting the entire app on the web because some other PHBs think it looks cool. Now the users will be forced to go through many more clicks and can't display as much data at the same time without opening many web browser instances. Being on the web it also can't easily be as "smart". For example, we can have alerts automatically pop up on schedule (kinda like Outlook) in a client app, but not in an HTML page.
It seems too many apps are going the way of the web when a client app would be best to handle a wide variety of user interaction.
You must have read the inverse of my statement. It seems when anyone says "Gnome has usability issues" that lots of people come out arguing "NO, it's perfect!" All those people who think Gnome has no usability issues need to realize there have are some.
Will this finally end the argument that Gnome doesn't have any usability issues. There are always tons of complaints when anyone says Gnome needs to improve usability. Yet here they are with a release focusing on interface guidelines. So please, please, end the arguments that Gnome shouldn't work on improving usability.
How about funding for other things first? Maybe money would be better spend on security and drug prevention than technology. The focus should first be on the other more important things and technology last. If a huge donation was made by Microsoft to hire security guards and teach awareness of drugs there wouldn't be any complaints.
It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...
Hackers highly value their problem solving abilities. The satisfaction of finding a solution far outways the simplicity of buy it. It's just a matter of what's more valuable to a person, having a solution or building it.
Hahaha... I'm a Visual Basic developer for a major financial institution. So DevX is trying to cater exactly to me. And I still don't fall for their bias. I don't listen to someone just because I'm the only one their speaking to. I ignore the Microsoft-centered view of the universe even though I use Microsoft products to pay my bills. You're confusing my choice to ignore short-sightedness with a choice to ignore Microsoft.
Exactly. The author (DevX's Executive Editor) is obviously only writing from a corporate Microsoft-only point of view. DevX used to be only for Windows developers and only recently added open source information. It's always catered to only corporate developers and corporate IT. I get the impression the editor has only used Microsoft software and learned about OSS recently, and has probably only looked at it from the side without actually getting his hands dirty. It's his perspective that's actually mistaken.
Re:is mandrake still viable
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm a Mandrake Club member to help support the cause. Even if Mandrake goes under I don't think it's a waste. Their apps (AFAIK all of them) are open source. Anyone can keep the core distro going. It's the commercial apps that might have to be dropped because they're kept in the distro by Mandrake's purchases of licenses. But all the good stuff is open. So paying their developers pays for things the community can support later.
Then consider the following about Gnome: - Theme, color, and window management choices are totally separate and confusing - Nautilus has none of the nice features of Konqueror such as proper handling of all MIME types, browser tree beyond just file system, drag-and-drop of CD tracks to rip to MP3 or OGG, and seamless integrated browsing of compressed files - Theme engines in KDE handle much fancier features, such as control of menu transparency (maybe it exists for Gnome somewhere, but I haven't found it) - Menu arrangements between applications seem more consistent and logical in KDE than Gnome, but that's purely my opinion
I use Gnome 2.2 almost exclusively because KDE's relatively heavy use of system resources bothers me. For look and feel KDE is arranged better, so the themes are able to be more consistant among menu features, windows, etc. By making the environment more comfortable it has better usability. You can get your job done in both, but KDE is arranged better and has more features.
I completely agree. I prefer KDE for the eye candy and the better usability, but Gnome for the performance. But it would be a huge improvement for Gnome to just improve usability. I think that should be first priority. After all, that's what desktops are all about.
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In the consumer market this is not true. Most of us use and trust ATMs without any knowledge of how they communicate back to their banks. Most of us use credit cards without knowing the encryption level of the network. Most of us trust the air bags will work without actually knowing how they work. Does this mean people trust their banks and car manufacturers? I think there's an inherent trust by most people. These companies haven't done enough to make most customers not trust them, and the same goes for Phoenix and Microsoft. Microsoft will be generally trusted enough by the masses to follow along with this mostly because they won't see it. Anything they hear about will come across as Microsoft doing something behind the scenes to make their products better. Just like people don't care how their ATMs or air bags work, they won't care about how Microsoft's DRM works, just so long as they have an enjoyable experience.
Mmmmmmm... cracker...
They view themselves as tasty of course!
Ok, try Office XP on Windows 2000. Choose File, Save As... in any of those apps. Now open notepad. Choose File, Save As... Now open Query Analyzer for SQL Server 2000. Choose File, Save As... None of them look the same. Their guidelines say to use the "standard" controls distributed with Windows. Yet create a VB app using the standard file dialog control and you'll see yet another dialog.
Microsoft's had UI design guidelines for about 20 years. They continually change as new ideas come to the interface (e.g. now tabbed documents are preferred over MDI). But Microsoft has never completely followed them. Their own apps go against their own guidelines. For example, they always said to never defy the user's color settings when making a menu, and then Office XP came out with a custom menu. They say your apps should have consistent file dialogs, yet every app they create has a different dialog, sometimes changing from version to version.
They ask everyone to follow certain guidelines while they ignore them. I gave up on their suggestions years ago and instead follow general best practices depending on the situation.
Hey, everyone look! It's RMS posting as this termos guy. Flame him, flame him!
The author of the article, I believe, is guilty of the usual mistake of confusing the Linux kernel with an entire operating system. But people usually think of more than than GNU plus Linux when they think of this OS. What name would include GNU, Linux, Apache, Mozilla, KDE, etc. without using one distro's name? It's a problem that most people solve by calling all the open source software making up the entire system Linux.
You're sort of correct. Gates must find ways to motivate people because he needs to find the best possible employees and keep them happy enough to stay. Torvalds doesn't need to do much motivation because his "staff" is there voluntarily because of passion. Most people working on Linux are there simply because they enjoy it, not because they need to work on this software to put food on their table.
Gates also has the problem of the corporate environment, where many developers feel trapped. So he must foster an environment where his people are as happy as possible. Linux is the opposite, where people are only there because it makes them happy.
Actually, it means Outlook Express would be the best understood e-mail client on the planet. It still requires someone who cares enough to fix it.
I live in the NY metro area and last week got an offer from Cablevision to add VOIP to my broadband access. They just replace the cable modem with another that supports it. It's a direct offer from Cablevision's OptimumOnline department.
Check the hours for those unlimited nights and weekends. For me, in the NY metro area, nights start at 9pm. That means I'm burning minutes between the time I get home at 5:30 and 9pm. That's why I keep using my land line.
Why don't we see any other professional worker , let it be a builder, a doctor, a writer or whats not give his work for free ?
All, except the writer, are producing physical (tangible) products or services. They're selling a truely limited resource - physical items or time. It's natural to make an exchange for any limited resource. Words and computer code, however, are unlimited resources. The only limits are artificial. Many writers do give away their work for free, or almost free. It's nearly impossible to become a professional writer (i.e. make enough in writing to support oneself). I know people who have tried, and it's not easy. People end up writing for two reasons: to create a work that's their own idea or to create something someone needs written. Writers trying to create their own book and publish it have a very hard time selling it. The others are people like technical writers. Many fictional writers, who end up not supporting themselves on their fictional writing, are happy to give their work away for free. These things correlate directly with the software world. The things they're truely passionate about, yet receive no compensation for, they give away. Charging for services will come from things like custom needs, and will not always result in open source software. To differentiate, each company will want certain custom things. The need for services will not end any time soon.
Most software users are not very tech savvy (i.e. admin level knowledge). They're home users who want games and the internet or work users who need to get their job done. Those people need support, especially when their software is from closed vendors. A company's internal support needs external support from their vendors. My development team, for example, had a Microsoft employee come in to fix problems we had with SQL Server 2000. He wasn't able to fix their problem, so how were we?
Support's also needed for those who don't want to deal with communicating with developers. People just want their software to work. They don't want to fill out bugzilla reports and download patches.
I think the problem is they're only counting those bugs which they choose to fix. There are 31 known security bugs in IE, some over a year and half old. This week they fixed a security bug in the ListBox and ComboBox controls that goes back to NT. There's a big difference between "We fix all bugs in 24 hours" and "We fix all bugs we choose to fix in 24 hours". I'm developing in .NET lately and I run into one bug after another. They're all "known" bugs on Microsoft's web site, yet none are fixed. I find that in general Linux's bugs are fixed quicker. Too many Microsoft bugs linger around for years without ever being fixed.
He plans on implementing one of the key things which will makes systems bring up the user interface faster: launch only those services required by the system to boot, then launch the desktop (if applicable), then continue loading any "secondary" services. For example, the log rotation script found on some distros doesn't need to run before the interface is launched. I think this has been needed for a long time on the Linux desktop. It's worked that way on Windows for a long time.
SystemServices is not at all tied to Gnome. It will probably not require much more than the kernel and Python. His goal is partly to make a nice set of APIs callable from a desktop like Gnome to ease with management and error reporting. This project is not tightly integrated with Gnome just because someone from Gnome has started it.
I'm seeing the same trend, but I believe to a large degree it's a mistake. The web was originally designed for sharing of documents, with minimal interactive capabilities added later. Most corporate desktop apps do much more than just display data and require much user interaction, but are being ported to the web. My development team's main application is for contact, account, and time management, plus reporting. It's data intensive and lets the user lay out lots of windows with a variety of info. The boss has us rewriting the entire app on the web because some other PHBs think it looks cool. Now the users will be forced to go through many more clicks and can't display as much data at the same time without opening many web browser instances. Being on the web it also can't easily be as "smart". For example, we can have alerts automatically pop up on schedule (kinda like Outlook) in a client app, but not in an HTML page.
It seems too many apps are going the way of the web when a client app would be best to handle a wide variety of user interaction.
You must have read the inverse of my statement. It seems when anyone says "Gnome has usability issues" that lots of people come out arguing "NO, it's perfect!" All those people who think Gnome has no usability issues need to realize there have are some.
Will this finally end the argument that Gnome doesn't have any usability issues. There are always tons of complaints when anyone says Gnome needs to improve usability. Yet here they are with a release focusing on interface guidelines. So please, please, end the arguments that Gnome shouldn't work on improving usability.
How about funding for other things first? Maybe money would be better spend on security and drug prevention than technology. The focus should first be on the other more important things and technology last. If a huge donation was made by Microsoft to hire security guards and teach awareness of drugs there wouldn't be any complaints.
It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...
Hackers highly value their problem solving abilities. The satisfaction of finding a solution far outways the simplicity of buy it. It's just a matter of what's more valuable to a person, having a solution or building it.
Hahaha... I'm a Visual Basic developer for a major financial institution. So DevX is trying to cater exactly to me. And I still don't fall for their bias. I don't listen to someone just because I'm the only one their speaking to. I ignore the Microsoft-centered view of the universe even though I use Microsoft products to pay my bills. You're confusing my choice to ignore short-sightedness with a choice to ignore Microsoft.
Exactly. The author (DevX's Executive Editor) is obviously only writing from a corporate Microsoft-only point of view. DevX used to be only for Windows developers and only recently added open source information. It's always catered to only corporate developers and corporate IT. I get the impression the editor has only used Microsoft software and learned about OSS recently, and has probably only looked at it from the side without actually getting his hands dirty. It's his perspective that's actually mistaken.
I'm a Mandrake Club member to help support the cause. Even if Mandrake goes under I don't think it's a waste. Their apps (AFAIK all of them) are open source. Anyone can keep the core distro going. It's the commercial apps that might have to be dropped because they're kept in the distro by Mandrake's purchases of licenses. But all the good stuff is open. So paying their developers pays for things the community can support later.
This isn't an alternative to artificial intelligence as the poster claims. It's a form of computer learning and adapting to information. That's AI.
Usability != Usable
First, take a deep breath and relax.
Then consider the following about Gnome:
- Theme, color, and window management choices are totally separate and confusing
- Nautilus has none of the nice features of Konqueror such as proper handling of all MIME types, browser tree beyond just file system, drag-and-drop of CD tracks to rip to MP3 or OGG, and seamless integrated browsing of compressed files
- Theme engines in KDE handle much fancier features, such as control of menu transparency (maybe it exists for Gnome somewhere, but I haven't found it)
- Menu arrangements between applications seem more consistent and logical in KDE than Gnome, but that's purely my opinion
I use Gnome 2.2 almost exclusively because KDE's relatively heavy use of system resources bothers me. For look and feel KDE is arranged better, so the themes are able to be more consistant among menu features, windows, etc. By making the environment more comfortable it has better usability. You can get your job done in both, but KDE is arranged better and has more features.
I completely agree. I prefer KDE for the eye candy and the better usability, but Gnome for the performance. But it would be a huge improvement for Gnome to just improve usability. I think that should be first priority. After all, that's what desktops are all about.