Well, my question on "would it have been SOOOO hard" wasn't entirely rhetorical - WOULD it have been so difficult? What's the actual cost of making a plugin for a totally patent-free, BSD-licenesed audio codec?
Also, while the return is not immediate, including Vorbis would be considered an "investment" in the cost/benefit analysis. Perhaps they're cynical on Vorbis' future, but again, I'd really love to know just how horribly hard it would have been to create a Vorbis plugin and ship it with QT6. Yes, it costs money, but my *guess* is that it couldn't be THAT hard, and while it's not guaranteed they'll get much return it's probably a tiny cost. I may be wrong here, however. Anyone have any credible estimates?
Thirdly, you'll notice that Apple includes such fantastically popular codecs as:
ALaw 2:1
IMA 4:1
MACE 3:1
MACE 6:1
MS ADPCM (decode only)
QDesign Music 2
Qualcomm PureVoice
ULaw 2:1
You can't tell me that Joe Sixpack has heard of THESE either, yet they're included!
Again, in my frustration, I was overly-sarcastic - what really IS the cost to Apple here? Any developers or (clueful) managers have some realistic estimates?
Yeah, but unfortunately, it'll never ship by default unless APPLE makes it themselves. (Apple typically exhibits serious Not Invented Here syndrome, IMHO) And as it's been seen, users typically do not download add-ons, and do not change defaults. They use the software as they receive it, so until Ogg is shipped by default with QT, like it is with Winamp, it won't be available to most QT users, period.
The bottom line is though that standards put out by the W3C are USELESS.
And who would YOU propose invent the standards? The "market"? You know who THAT means... we DON'T want the web becoming the sad state that word processing has become: you buy Word, or you can't play nicely with 90% of the rest of American business.
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
WEll, this person has. I don't anymore, as I began to notice that I DIDN'T always buy what I liked - if I could find a song/album encoded well (ogg or >160kbps MP3) on a p2p system, what's my incentive to buy the album? Doing the right thing? That might work for a handful of people, but not the majority of the population. If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD? It certainly doesn't help the that/. and even some quasi-major media outlets are telling them that record companies are evil (true, IMO) and that the best way to "get back at them" is to break the law via p2p networks. (false, IMO)
Your example about free distribution is good, but it's only a paritial answer. Again, if ALL of an artist's music is p2p-available, why buy anything? Distribution of singles via p2p is a great idea, but whole albums? I'm not so sure.
Finally, and this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner. Record companies violate this through coersion, and p2p users violate it through outright violation of the law. It is no one else's place to tell an individual how they should have their music distributed, and this is the most fundamental question in the whole equation. Yeah, record companies suck ass, but that doesn't make stripping artists of their rights via unauthorized p2p distribution acceptable, either. They're both wrong. As I said in another reply, the future of music (I hope!) lies in the 'Net, with artist-owned distribution houses, and high quality, open standards like Vorbis.
My point, though, is that two wrongs don't make a right.
You're correct, though, in that the *true* model here needs to be a more direct-sale model. If we can fend off the copyright cartels long enough (another year or two, I think... perhaps I'm too optimistic in this estimate?), a good music business model will emerge, in the form of something like Emusic, only artist-owned, not Vivendi-Universal owned. (And using Ogg instead of MP3.:)
Ok, let me fill you in on the part you're missing.
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
Except that it's JOHN'S music being "shared" and John never said it was ok to just give away is music against his will, and doesn't see a fucking CENT from the exchange of that music.
Yes, p2p, and the entire digital realm for that matter, is great for avoiding the zero-sum problem of most markets. However, this doesn't mean it's alright to take other peoples work and do what you will with it. (with respects to Fair Use, of course.)
Finally, YES, a handful of artists use p2p to give out their music, but go browse a Kazaa users' shares sometime... tell me how many of those songs you REALLY think were put there by the artist/publisher for legal distribution.
I see where you're going with your objection. However, it's a bit apples to oranges to compare the GCC 2.96 thing to the usual "embrace and extend" tactics, because:
they have demonstrable reasons for doing what they did (ie: not just doing it for the sake of changing things, and thereby breaking them for everyone else)
their changes were (naturally) 100% open-source
when the opportunity finally arose to rejoin what the rest of the community was using (GCC 3), they did just that.
By comparison, show me where Microsoft plans to re-join the rest of the Web community and stick to XHTML 1.0 standards for their HTML "standards".:)
What RH did was a temporary fix, whereas MS's changes are meant as a permenant break, thus making them fundamentally different types of divergence, IMHO. I understand your argument of inconsistancy, but given this fundamental difference, I don't believe it's a fair comparison.
I must respectfully disagree with a few things here: They have encouraged proprietary software vendors to release their wares in a manner that is compatible with Red Hat and not other distributions, by falsely implying that they, Red Hat, set the standards and everyone else follows.
This is true to an extent. Red Hat did essentially "go their own way" in some respects, setting up their own standards for some things. The most notorious of these breaks is, of course, the use of GCC 2.96 instead of 2.95. This caused a lot of controversy, and deservedly so, but it's what they felt they had to do for their distro. They had customers who required the enhancements of 2.96, and so they met those needs. They took a lot of crap for it, too, but they stuck to their guns (and the customers they were serving).
RH also took some liberties with file system layout, etc. They obviously felt it was important enough to make the change, so they did.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that in both cases, RH did what they did not to lock out other vendors, or to hyjack the industry, but rather to apply what they felt was some needed sanity into certain aspects of Linux. However, the community has now "caught up" to Red Hat's changes, by releasing GCC 3.x, and the LSB 1.1 spec. RH's next distro (which will undoubtably be called 8.0) is going to be using GCC 3.x, and will be LSB compliant. So it seems to me that Red Hat has only been doing what they felt was necessary until the community made their decision on the direction of things, and then RH re-converged their distro with the community at large. it is quite possible, and vastly preferable, to package software in a distribution-agnostic form installable by evertyone. Blender did it, Loki did it, Id and several other proprietary vendors do it now.
Yeah, but they did it by making nasty custom installer scripts, typically with no uninstaller! Eek! This might be nice for Slack or Gentoo people, but how about an RPM for the RH, Mdk, Suse, Caldera, and (via alien) Debian users? What's more, they probably also statically linked the stuff to hell and back. I'd prefer to see 2 releases - LSB and non-LSB. A nice RPM for LSB compliant distros, and non-LSB for people who don't give a stuff.;-) The LSB people are rewarded with package management, and smaller executables, and a smaller memory footprint, but it doesn't keep out the people who aren't compliant.
While I'm on the subject, who isn't compliant now, or won't be by Fall? RH will be fully compliant with 8.0, MDK is/will be soon, all the United Linux distros are/will be (SuSE, Caldera, Connectiva, Turbo), and Debian is/will be as well. What about Gentoo, Slack, and the micro-distros? Anyone know if they plan to conform? FOr that matter, what about Lycoris and Lindows? ANyone have info either way on these?
Don't worry - most cable ISPs (I work for one) don't check for SSH servers, nor do they appear to care about it. SCP is crappy for distributing warez and pr0n, as it requires *shell accounts* on the box giving out the files, and thus there's no anonymous access, plus SCP is cpu-intensive, so the incentive to use SSH at home for anything but "legit" means is very very low.
As for VNC, you've got me there. Not because the ports are blocked, but because 128kbit upload is crap for VNC.;)
This is UTTERLY, hopelessly off-topic, but I felt the need to comment...
Your.sig is a quote from chumbawamba, with the speaker asking that someone "give the anarchist a cigarette". While it IS possible to grow your own tobacco and roll your own smokes, aren't the vast majority of cigs made by gigantic, nasty, corporations? Does anyone else see the irony in this?:)
I hate it when people say "calm down" just because someone else visibly cares about what s/he is talking about and has given the subject some thought
I generally hate it when people say stuff like "calm down" too, but there's a difference between passion and foaming at the mouth. Alluding to political beliefs (especially of the fascist/Nazi variety) because of one's views on the usability and maintainability of software is silly and counterproductive. I wasn't trying to dismiss him, but it got to the point where it wasn't going to go anywhere. I figured it was better to end it than to let it become a flamefest.
However...
Yes, configurable behavior can be nice, but it's a *trade off*. People seem to fail to realize that preferences aren't free. I'd personally prefer software that's more stable and comes to completion quicker rather than having a zillion behavior preferences and being buggy as hell, or taking forever to get to release status, or BOTH! Any time you have two behaviors to choose from, and one isn't obviously better than the other, if they're both ok, why not just make one the default and forget about it? Making it a preference just bloats the code, (a frequent complaint here on/. ), makes it harder to fix, harder to maintain, etc. Is it really worth adding all these little tweaks in the name of "because I like tweaking it"? I would argue that it's not. Anyone else is free to differ, and the "market" (such as it is in the Free Software/OSS community) will hopefully show us the winner, eh?:)
As for Joe Sixpack, I would assert that he'd rather have things work out of the box and ideally be consistant between apps, and he could give a shit about configuring it. If you know anyone who works tech support for an "end user" computer product or service (Which I do - I work for an ISP doing support as part of my job), ask them just how much they think people care about changing the prefs on their computer. In my experience, people are TERRIFIED of it, much less interested in it. They want things to work correctly out of the box, and are only interested in changing their wallpaper and their WinAmp skins. (and even the latter is more rare than one might imagine. It's no small minority, but we are talking about Joe Sixpack here. His computer isn't a hobby, it's a way to write email to his kids at college and to get exotic pr0n from distant lands.)
No, it's not Joe Sixpack or his neighbor Harry Homeowner that likes to play with settings, it's Andy Hacker that wants to tweak everything. This isn't a BAD thing, either, believe me, I'm a tweaker too, but some things shouldn't require a user decision, they should Just Work. The question is determining which things need a preference, as opposed to "it should just work any way I please because I say so and I feel like it." It isn't that the latter isn't valid, rather, it's just a poor way to make quality software, and makes for a miserable user experience for anyone who isn't a l33t h4x0r like you or me. (and don't try to deny it, I saw those picutures of your laptop running Window Maker/*step.;) I probably try just about every new window manager that comes out, because I like playing around with stuff, but I've found that only a few are worth a damn; I'm so busy tweaking config files that I never get around to actually USING the software!
Ultimately, however, it's a personal decision. What people seem to have been forgetting is that I'm not advocating that we pass laws about software production - I'm merely suggesting a course of design: THINK before you add an option, and MORE PREFS != BETTER SOFTWARE. I never said everyone had to use Gnome and like it, and that it's my way or the highway. If you don't like Gnome, or any other piece of software, you can try to improve it, or you can just not use it! That's part of the point of Free software!
Finally, totally off topic: mad props for the DM quote at the bottom of your web page.:)
Because we're human. Should we let someone else determine which car is best, and what color it should be, and then all line up to drive it? Should we all live in identical houses on identical streets? Hell, if someone has determined one way to be better than the other, shouldn't the user be happy? No need to think for yourself or decide what you like best for yourself.
You're taking it a bit far, don't you think? However, I'll call your bluff a bit here and say that yeah, there are a lot things about cars and houses that could probably stand to be standardized upon. The more important point is that no one is FORCING anyone to buy a particular car, paint their houses a particular color, or to use GNOME. The idea is that there are more things that can be coded with a nice default than most people would think. It's about smarter software, not fascism. If something really needs a preference, it'll get one.
I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem.
I liked this idea too, except that it usually means that a lot of total *crap* gets crammed under "advanced". So we're back to square one: too many preferences. Yeah, advanced users are better equipped to deal with it, but I'm an advanced user, and I want MY desktop to Just Work just like the newbies' do!:-) That, and since a lot of junk gets stuffed into a particular user level, you get the same problems of bloat and difficulting in troubleshooting that Havoc mentions. It's a shame, because it's not too bad of an idea on its own, IMHO, it just has too many implementation problems...
People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.
True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default! If not, the cost of the preference needs to be weighed... It's a personal decision, naturally, but I would gladly trade in a tweak or two for a more stable, more usable desktop.
I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.
Damn right! Certain options, while sub-optimal, are destined to be judged too important to ditch. This is where the judgement of the coders and the release team comes in, and if they screw up, their users will let them know... the problem is when judgement slips, and coders give in to the pressure to include misfeatures that will alienate more users than it will ever keep/draw in.
Hell, at least in Free Software, we actually have some say in how things will work.
There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is.
No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.
What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful.
Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. English is crack, too, as are ALL languages, really. The only languages that could ever qualify as crack free are human constructed languages, like Newspeak. Newspeak is flawed in that it doesn't offer a large enough vocabulary, but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages? However, in this case, Chinese, English, et al, are so entrenched that we'll never get rid of them, despite their very real flaws. That, and the fact that language (and depending on who you are, code) has aesthetic value as well as a function - poetry is a perfect example of a using a language's inexactness to spur the imagination, and create something of beauty. Maybe Enlightenment is the software equivilant of this?;-)
All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth.
I couldn't disagree more. Not all options are equally good. Good usability testing will help reveal what conventions are more intuitive or easier to work with than others. More on this below...
until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.
While no 2 people are alike, we all (generally) share similarities, too. Most people have two hands, two eyes, hate reading dialog boxes/manuals, and don't like spending half an hour learning how to make feature foo work, when it ought to be (dis)(en)abled by default, and the preference removed. Naturally, you can't please 100% of all people all of the time, but adding lots of preferences can start to alienate more users than would ever be turned off by the lack of a certain preference. I could go on, but I'm guessing it's obvious where I'm going with this, so this "until we're the same" is a fallacy, IMHO - we're already the same in many many ways.
This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case.
Again, I disagree. Most of the time, there probably IS a better way between the two. Moreover, even if there are two ways to do something, and they're supposedly equally good, why not pick the one that's easier/less bug prone to implement, and stick with it? If they're equally good, users should be equally happy with either behavior, but delighted that they didn't have to find yet another checkbox to hit to make app foo act consistantly with app bar.
Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart?
Absolutely not. And neither the Metacity README, nor HP's "Free software and good user interfaces" essay, nor my post, say anything of the sort. What IS being said is that preferences have a cost, and that there generally is a correct way to do a certain thing. Of course, this isn't always the case, and that's what preferences are for. The argument being made is that the majority of preferences shouldn't be preferences. Adding band-aid after band-aid on the software only leads to bloated, buggy, hard to maintain/troubleshoot code.
If you add a bunch of "band-aid"/useless/frivolous preferences to an app, and it means you keep 10 users, is it worth it if it means that you lose another 20 because your app behaves inconsistently , or is buggy as hell?
I am so not looking forward to the bile-spitting, spittle-launching, uber-flamewars that this decision is going to spark online and in Real Life(TM).... it'll be like the whole abortion debate, only it'll be over something ultimately rather inconsequential.
Oh well... let the flaming begin! I'll start it off with my own cynical take on it:
Expect the 700 club, with Pat Robertson and all his "Christian" conservative pals start exclaiming that the Gov't is "repressing" religion, and that we've lost our "moral compass" or some other stupid shit.
FLAME ON!
Re:My one big issue with the film (SPOILER?)
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 2
hehe, true.
Somehow I can't see ESPN2 airing "eXtreme Counseling!, sponsered by Mountain Dew!" any time soon, either. (I'm getting visions of people having to explain "how that makes them feel" while snowboarding down a black diamond hill.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my question on "would it have been SOOOO hard" wasn't entirely rhetorical - WOULD it have been so difficult? What's the actual cost of making a plugin for a totally patent-free, BSD-licenesed audio codec?
Also, while the return is not immediate, including Vorbis would be considered an "investment" in the cost/benefit analysis. Perhaps they're cynical on Vorbis' future, but again, I'd really love to know just how horribly hard it would have been to create a Vorbis plugin and ship it with QT6. Yes, it costs money, but my *guess* is that it couldn't be THAT hard, and while it's not guaranteed they'll get much return it's probably a tiny cost. I may be wrong here, however. Anyone have any credible estimates?
Thirdly, you'll notice that Apple includes such fantastically popular codecs as:
ALaw 2:1
IMA 4:1
MACE 3:1
MACE 6:1
MS ADPCM (decode only)
QDesign Music 2
Qualcomm PureVoice
ULaw 2:1
You can't tell me that Joe Sixpack has heard of THESE either, yet they're included!
Again, in my frustration, I was overly-sarcastic - what really IS the cost to Apple here? Any developers or (clueful) managers have some realistic estimates?
Yeah, but unfortunately, it'll never ship by default unless APPLE makes it themselves. (Apple typically exhibits serious Not Invented Here syndrome, IMHO) And as it's been seen, users typically do not download add-ons, and do not change defaults. They use the software as they receive it, so until Ogg is shipped by default with QT, like it is with Winamp, it won't be available to most QT users, period.
Still no Vorbis support listed in the codecs section!
Would it have been SOOOOO hard to build in a Vorbis decoder from xiph.org's BSD-licensed reference decorder? HUH? WOULD IT?
*sigh*... Oh, well. Perhaps some day they'll give in and build in Vorbis support.
Any Mac-aware types care to guess on if/when this'll happen?
No, DRM is not part of the SerialATA spec.
:-/
I'd expect it to be a feature on the next iteration of ATA, though.
Thank god I'm not in your shoes!
I can burn CDs, browse the web, watch a DVD (with menus and DeCSS and everything!), and play some games , too, all from my GNOME desktop on Linux!
"During childhood, playing outside with friends, not videogames, is the best option."
...then again, playing video games outside does sound intriguing... ;)
How dare he!
But seriously.. doesn't this deserve a big "Well, duh"?
The bottom line is though that standards put out by the W3C are USELESS.
And who would YOU propose invent the standards? The "market"? You know who THAT means... we DON'T want the web becoming the sad state that word processing has become: you buy Word, or you can't play nicely with 90% of the rest of American business.
I wonder if the people who write this stuff ever use P2P?
/. and even some quasi-major media outlets are telling them that record companies are evil (true, IMO) and that the best way to "get back at them" is to break the law via p2p networks. (false, IMO)
WEll, this person has. I don't anymore, as I began to notice that I DIDN'T always buy what I liked - if I could find a song/album encoded well (ogg or >160kbps MP3) on a p2p system, what's my incentive to buy the album? Doing the right thing? That might work for a handful of people, but not the majority of the population. If they can get songs of nearly equal sound quality to a CD, why buy the CD? It certainly doesn't help the that
Your example about free distribution is good, but it's only a paritial answer. Again, if ALL of an artist's music is p2p-available, why buy anything? Distribution of singles via p2p is a great idea, but whole albums? I'm not so sure.
Finally, and this is the most important part, it is the ARTIST that must allow or disallow their work to be distributed in a certain manner. Record companies violate this through coersion, and p2p users violate it through outright violation of the law. It is no one else's place to tell an individual how they should have their music distributed, and this is the most fundamental question in the whole equation. Yeah, record companies suck ass, but that doesn't make stripping artists of their rights via unauthorized p2p distribution acceptable, either. They're both wrong. As I said in another reply, the future of music (I hope!) lies in the 'Net, with artist-owned distribution houses, and high quality, open standards like Vorbis.
My point, though, is that two wrongs don't make a right.
:)
You're correct, though, in that the *true* model here needs to be a more direct-sale model. If we can fend off the copyright cartels long enough (another year or two, I think... perhaps I'm too optimistic in this estimate?), a good music business model will emerge, in the form of something like Emusic, only artist-owned, not Vivendi-Universal owned. (And using Ogg instead of MP3.
Ok, let me fill you in on the part you're missing.
John makes music for a living. His record company rips him off with a crappy contract, but it's better than starving or having to work at a regular job full time so he couldn't focus on his music.
But Bob down the street doesn't care to pay for John's music, even though he enjoys it, so he downloads it off a p2p network. Then he "shares" it with everyone else on p2p networks, so they can do likewise.
Except that it's JOHN'S music being "shared" and John never said it was ok to just give away is music against his will, and doesn't see a fucking CENT from the exchange of that music.
Yes, p2p, and the entire digital realm for that matter, is great for avoiding the zero-sum problem of most markets. However, this doesn't mean it's alright to take other peoples work and do what you will with it. (with respects to Fair Use, of course.)
Finally, YES, a handful of artists use p2p to give out their music, but go browse a Kazaa users' shares sometime... tell me how many of those songs you REALLY think were put there by the artist/publisher for legal distribution.
what would YOU call Kazaa, then?
:P
A for-profit "sharing" outfit?
Somehow I don't think that the kind of "sharing" that goes on 90% of the time on p2p networks is the kind of "sharing" your mom taught you was good.
How about "for-profit copyright-violation outfit"?
- they have demonstrable reasons for doing what they did (ie: not just doing it for the sake of changing things, and thereby breaking them for everyone else)
- their changes were (naturally) 100% open-source
- when the opportunity finally arose to rejoin what the rest of the community was using (GCC 3), they did just that.
By comparison, show me where Microsoft plans to re-join the rest of the Web community and stick to XHTML 1.0 standards for their HTML "standards".What RH did was a temporary fix, whereas MS's changes are meant as a permenant break, thus making them fundamentally different types of divergence, IMHO. I understand your argument of inconsistancy, but given this fundamental difference, I don't believe it's a fair comparison.
I must respectfully disagree with a few things here:
;-) The LSB people are rewarded with package management, and smaller executables, and a smaller memory footprint, but it doesn't keep out the people who aren't compliant.
They have encouraged proprietary software vendors to release their wares in a manner that is compatible with Red Hat and not other distributions, by falsely implying that they, Red Hat, set the standards and everyone else follows.
This is true to an extent. Red Hat did essentially "go their own way" in some respects, setting up their own standards for some things. The most notorious of these breaks is, of course, the use of GCC 2.96 instead of 2.95. This caused a lot of controversy, and deservedly so, but it's what they felt they had to do for their distro. They had customers who required the enhancements of 2.96, and so they met those needs. They took a lot of crap for it, too, but they stuck to their guns (and the customers they were serving).
RH also took some liberties with file system layout, etc. They obviously felt it was important enough to make the change, so they did.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that in both cases, RH did what they did not to lock out other vendors, or to hyjack the industry, but rather to apply what they felt was some needed sanity into certain aspects of Linux. However, the community has now "caught up" to Red Hat's changes, by releasing GCC 3.x, and the LSB 1.1 spec. RH's next distro (which will undoubtably be called 8.0) is going to be using GCC 3.x, and will be LSB compliant. So it seems to me that Red Hat has only been doing what they felt was necessary until the community made their decision on the direction of things, and then RH re-converged their distro with the community at large.
it is quite possible, and vastly preferable, to package software in a distribution-agnostic form installable by evertyone. Blender did it, Loki did it, Id and several other proprietary vendors do it now.
Yeah, but they did it by making nasty custom installer scripts, typically with no uninstaller! Eek! This might be nice for Slack or Gentoo people, but how about an RPM for the RH, Mdk, Suse, Caldera, and (via alien) Debian users? What's more, they probably also statically linked the stuff to hell and back. I'd prefer to see 2 releases - LSB and non-LSB. A nice RPM for LSB compliant distros, and non-LSB for people who don't give a stuff.
While I'm on the subject, who isn't compliant now, or won't be by Fall? RH will be fully compliant with 8.0, MDK is/will be soon, all the United Linux distros are/will be (SuSE, Caldera, Connectiva, Turbo), and Debian is/will be as well. What about Gentoo, Slack, and the micro-distros? Anyone know if they plan to conform? FOr that matter, what about Lycoris and Lindows? ANyone have info either way on these?
VPN? ewww. i hope you meant VNC. (i hate "vpn" software... what's wrong with SSH tunelling?)
ANyhow... most cable providers I know don't have a 384k up, which IS plenty, but 128, which is more common as I understand it, is far more frequent.
Don't worry - most cable ISPs (I work for one) don't check for SSH servers, nor do they appear to care about it. SCP is crappy for distributing warez and pr0n, as it requires *shell accounts* on the box giving out the files, and thus there's no anonymous access, plus SCP is cpu-intensive, so the incentive to use SSH at home for anything but "legit" means is very very low.
;)
As for VNC, you've got me there. Not because the ports are blocked, but because 128kbit upload is crap for VNC.
We use the revision control built into Word and other things so please don't offer Abiword, StarOffice, OpenOffice or KWord as alternatives
:)
Ok, I suggest Crossover Office then.
It's good stuff, runs Word flawlessly. (yes, flawlessly.)
This is UTTERLY, hopelessly off-topic, but I felt the need to comment...
.sig is a quote from chumbawamba, with the speaker asking that someone "give the anarchist a cigarette". While it IS possible to grow your own tobacco and roll your own smokes, aren't the vast majority of cigs made by gigantic, nasty, corporations? Does anyone else see the irony in this? :)
Your
As far as I know, this is an option - try Metacity Setup - I swear the option to do just that is included in that program.
My apologies if it doesn't actually show up in the README. *sheepish grin*
I hate it when people say "calm down" just because someone else visibly cares about what s/he is talking about and has given the subject some thought
/. ), makes it harder to fix, harder to maintain, etc. Is it really worth adding all these little tweaks in the name of "because I like tweaking it"? I would argue that it's not. Anyone else is free to differ, and the "market" (such as it is in the Free Software/OSS community) will hopefully show us the winner, eh? :)
;) I probably try just about every new window manager that comes out, because I like playing around with stuff, but I've found that only a few are worth a damn; I'm so busy tweaking config files that I never get around to actually USING the software!
:)
I generally hate it when people say stuff like "calm down" too, but there's a difference between passion and foaming at the mouth. Alluding to political beliefs (especially of the fascist/Nazi variety) because of one's views on the usability and maintainability of software is silly and counterproductive. I wasn't trying to dismiss him, but it got to the point where it wasn't going to go anywhere. I figured it was better to end it than to let it become a flamefest.
However...
Yes, configurable behavior can be nice, but it's a *trade off*. People seem to fail to realize that preferences aren't free. I'd personally prefer software that's more stable and comes to completion quicker rather than having a zillion behavior preferences and being buggy as hell, or taking forever to get to release status, or BOTH! Any time you have two behaviors to choose from, and one isn't obviously better than the other, if they're both ok, why not just make one the default and forget about it? Making it a preference just bloats the code, (a frequent complaint here on
As for Joe Sixpack, I would assert that he'd rather have things work out of the box and ideally be consistant between apps, and he could give a shit about configuring it. If you know anyone who works tech support for an "end user" computer product or service (Which I do - I work for an ISP doing support as part of my job), ask them just how much they think people care about changing the prefs on their computer. In my experience, people are TERRIFIED of it, much less interested in it. They want things to work correctly out of the box, and are only interested in changing their wallpaper and their WinAmp skins. (and even the latter is more rare than one might imagine. It's no small minority, but we are talking about Joe Sixpack here. His computer isn't a hobby, it's a way to write email to his kids at college and to get exotic pr0n from distant lands.)
No, it's not Joe Sixpack or his neighbor Harry Homeowner that likes to play with settings, it's Andy Hacker that wants to tweak everything. This isn't a BAD thing, either, believe me, I'm a tweaker too, but some things shouldn't require a user decision, they should Just Work. The question is determining which things need a preference, as opposed to "it should just work any way I please because I say so and I feel like it." It isn't that the latter isn't valid, rather, it's just a poor way to make quality software, and makes for a miserable user experience for anyone who isn't a l33t h4x0r like you or me. (and don't try to deny it, I saw those picutures of your laptop running Window Maker/*step.
Ultimately, however, it's a personal decision. What people seem to have been forgetting is that I'm not advocating that we pass laws about software production - I'm merely suggesting a course of design: THINK before you add an option, and MORE PREFS != BETTER SOFTWARE. I never said everyone had to use Gnome and like it, and that it's my way or the highway. If you don't like Gnome, or any other piece of software, you can try to improve it, or you can just not use it! That's part of the point of Free software!
Finally, totally off topic: mad props for the DM quote at the bottom of your web page.
Because we're human. Should we let someone else determine which car is best, and what color it should be, and then all line up to drive it? Should we all live in identical houses on identical streets? Hell, if someone has determined one way to be better than the other, shouldn't the user be happy? No need to think for yourself or decide what you like best for yourself.
You're taking it a bit far, don't you think? However, I'll call your bluff a bit here and say that yeah, there are a lot things about cars and houses that could probably stand to be standardized upon. The more important point is that no one is FORCING anyone to buy a particular car, paint their houses a particular color, or to use GNOME. The idea is that there are more things that can be coded with a nice default than most people would think. It's about smarter software, not fascism. If something really needs a preference, it'll get one.
Two things:
;)
One, calm down. We're discussing software, not the future of Law.
Two,
your arguments would fairly easily support, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor!
I invoke Godwin's law, you lose.
I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem.
:-) That, and since a lot of junk gets stuffed into a particular user level, you get the same problems of bloat and difficulting in troubleshooting that Havoc mentions. It's a shame, because it's not too bad of an idea on its own, IMHO, it just has too many implementation problems...
I liked this idea too, except that it usually means that a lot of total *crap* gets crammed under "advanced". So we're back to square one: too many preferences. Yeah, advanced users are better equipped to deal with it, but I'm an advanced user, and I want MY desktop to Just Work just like the newbies' do!
People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.
True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default! If not, the cost of the preference needs to be weighed... It's a personal decision, naturally, but I would gladly trade in a tweak or two for a more stable, more usable desktop.
I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.
Damn right! Certain options, while sub-optimal, are destined to be judged too important to ditch. This is where the judgement of the coders and the release team comes in, and if they screw up, their users will let them know... the problem is when judgement slips, and coders give in to the pressure to include misfeatures that will alienate more users than it will ever keep/draw in.
Hell, at least in Free Software, we actually have some say in how things will work.
There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is.
;-)
No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.
What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful.
Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. English is crack, too, as are ALL languages, really. The only languages that could ever qualify as crack free are human constructed languages, like Newspeak. Newspeak is flawed in that it doesn't offer a large enough vocabulary, but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages? However, in this case, Chinese, English, et al, are so entrenched that we'll never get rid of them, despite their very real flaws. That, and the fact that language (and depending on who you are, code) has aesthetic value as well as a function - poetry is a perfect example of a using a language's inexactness to spur the imagination, and create something of beauty. Maybe Enlightenment is the software equivilant of this?
All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth.
I couldn't disagree more. Not all options are equally good. Good usability testing will help reveal what conventions are more intuitive or easier to work with than others. More on this below...
until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.
While no 2 people are alike, we all (generally) share similarities, too. Most people have two hands, two eyes, hate reading dialog boxes/manuals, and don't like spending half an hour learning how to make feature foo work, when it ought to be (dis)(en)abled by default, and the preference removed. Naturally, you can't please 100% of all people all of the time, but adding lots of preferences can start to alienate more users than would ever be turned off by the lack of a certain preference. I could go on, but I'm guessing it's obvious where I'm going with this, so this "until we're the same" is a fallacy, IMHO - we're already the same in many many ways.
This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case.
Again, I disagree. Most of the time, there probably IS a better way between the two. Moreover, even if there are two ways to do something, and they're supposedly equally good, why not pick the one that's easier/less bug prone to implement, and stick with it? If they're equally good, users should be equally happy with either behavior, but delighted that they didn't have to find yet another checkbox to hit to make app foo act consistantly with app bar.
Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart?
Absolutely not. And neither the Metacity README, nor HP's "Free software and good user interfaces" essay, nor my post, say anything of the sort. What IS being said is that preferences have a cost, and that there generally is a correct way to do a certain thing. Of course, this isn't always the case, and that's what preferences are for. The argument being made is that the majority of preferences shouldn't be preferences. Adding band-aid after band-aid on the software only leads to bloated, buggy, hard to maintain/troubleshoot code.
If you add a bunch of "band-aid"/useless/frivolous preferences to an app, and it means you keep 10 users, is it worth it if it means that you lose another 20 because your app behaves inconsistently , or is buggy as hell?
I am so not looking forward to the bile-spitting, spittle-launching, uber-flamewars that this decision is going to spark online and in Real Life(TM).... it'll be like the whole abortion debate, only it'll be over something ultimately rather inconsequential.
Oh well... let the flaming begin! I'll start it off with my own cynical take on it:
Expect the 700 club, with Pat Robertson and all his "Christian" conservative pals start exclaiming that the Gov't is "repressing" religion, and that we've lost our "moral compass" or some other stupid shit.
FLAME ON!
hehe, true.
Somehow I can't see ESPN2 airing "eXtreme Counseling!, sponsered by Mountain Dew!" any time soon, either. (I'm getting visions of people having to explain "how that makes them feel" while snowboarding down a black diamond hill.)