Table layout... vlines... too many links... an animated GIF (of a bubble-gum machine style police light)... 1997 design at it's best! The best part is that Drudge has kicked most major news outlets in the ass for over 10 years...
Apple is regifting. How delightfully hipsterish of them. WebKit is derived (meaning made from a copy of) KHTML, the browser component used by the Konqueror web browser.
So, do they quit or what? How do they settle the issue inside their minds?
It depends. Sadly, some become disillusioned with science and reject it. Some make up hokey theories like intelligent design to avoid dealing with the questions. Sadly, some become disillusioned with religion and scorn it -- in many cases becoming very bitter atheists. Fortunately, most seem to realize that there is truth in the science they are learning and truth in their religion and make adjustments to their religious beliefs. This often results in a less brittle, stronger and more flexible belief system. For example many come to the realization that their sacred text really is a powerfully inspired third-hand account, written with people with a bronze age or older grasp of the universe, under an archaic political and economic system. Understanding the text becomes more contemplative, and one where the reader is looking for meaning, then assessing how to apply that meaning to the modern world.
Sometimes, "adjusting their beliefs" is as simple as changing churches to a less fundamentalist one.
And what the hell arethey doing attending such a class in the first place?
Most often: they want to become doctors or nurses, and the biology classes are electives they must take to complete their undergraduate work. They have to take the course, they have to pass it, and the end up using the material through their career.
The issue in the US, especially surrounding creationism, is that fundamentalists believe that the Bible is to be taken literally (especially the creation story). As a result, teaching evolution is problematic because it conflicts directly with the creation story.
If you really want to see fireworks, sit in on the first week or two of an embryology course where people discover how (similarly) animals and people develop before leaving the womb or egg. The issue is that most fundamentalists are taught that human beings are not animals, so it comes as a shock when you compare the anatomy of a two-three week old human embryo with that of an immature lancelet.
Here's a little sales lesson for you: Giving people something that they like, want and need is the dream. It's what we all want to do in an ideal world that we don't live in. Reality is you go to market with the products you have, warts and all. We have a name for people who take their products and present them as they are perfect, without fault and capable of solving all problems: snake oil salesmen.
Regardless, I'm glad you have an opinion and are willing to share it. Your delivery is amateurish, and discounts your opinion.
And if you give it for free to the world, they can adapt to your style or die for all you care, because in the end you're writing the thing for your own need. I could be a dick and not share at all.
What too few people have realized is that Free Software (or open source, whatever term works for you) is a horrible development model for software you write exclusively for other people. That's why no one uses MySQL, Apache, Joomla, WordPress, Thunderbird, Firefox, any browser with Webkit (Safari, Android, Chrome) in it (which is a fork of the browser component from Konqueror), or OpenOffice, right? Please. People use Open Source stuff all the time. It's not different than commercial software, some of it sucks, and some of it is amazing.
Look around yourself and you'll notice how most Free Software is seriously lacking in UI design. If you want to fix user interfaces, then go help a project fix their craptacular GUI. Seriously. People actually would appreciate your contribution.
If it's good software and you call it Eye Dee Ten Tee, people will still use it & like it. I think you were trying to make a point. Oh, yes, that you remember names that you like.
* Kdenlive is as good a name as Vegas when it comes to making sense for video editing. I suppose Apache (and Cherokee) was a horrible, politically incorrect name for a web server. Unfortunately trademark law prevents using names like "Non-Linear Video Editor", "Photograph Manipulation Editor", "Text Editor", or "Word Processor" because they are common descriptive names.
* Some names have roots in foreign languages and make perfect sense there but sound horrible here (Choquok - an amazing twitter client - is a perfect example)
* Unix itself is a play on Multics, which predates Stallman's great crusade.
* Things aren't designed to confuse people. They are usually designed by one person, who may not be as good as UI design as a six person UX team at a large development shop. In some cases, I've discovered that the graphical interface is wonky, but the keyboard interfaces is amazingly smooth. Unfortunately, doing UI redesigns is a huge to-do for end users who have in many cases become very adept at the original UI of a software package.
I guess its cooler to be the smart kid using different software than the ordinary people. No, for me it costs a lot less, I can get things done, and if I want to customize, I can and do. In some cases the software is incredibly good at what it does. In other cases, the commercial alternatives are really a lot better, but I don't want to spend $, so you live with it. It's really not about being cool. It's about freedom as in having no encumbered rights and having the economic means to exercise them.
Dude, no one's arguing with you. We're just saying your post was long, boring, redundant and is preaching to the choir on Slashdot.
You could have said:
You might want to update your hosts file to ensure that you don't waste your bandwidth on ____, _____ and _____ . ______.com has a some pre-built hosts files that may be helpful.
Also, since lots of us use Macs, Linux and Android devices, you may want to provide instructions on how to use your hosts file with non-Windows systems.
First, It's a silly notion that Canonical will become the next Apple. One is a consumer products company, the other is a professional services company that uses their Linux distribution to generate business. Linux is an OS kernel. I doubt it cares much about anything other than what instruction to load to execute next. It has no GUI, and without a shell of some sort, no UX to speak of.
Canonical distributes and operating system called Ubuntu that comes with a Linux kernel, an installer, bootloader, a variety of shells, various software packages and a GUI (which I think you are calling a "UX"). Canonical spends a lot of money on improving Ubuntu, especially the way users can find and install software as well as how their graphical desktop looks and works. That said, there's something that you don't understand about Linux and this entire FOSS universe:
In the Linux community, we really don't care about market share, Apple's success or many of the traditional trappings. Those are the ends. Linux, and free software in general is a means to that end.... It's about the tools we have to make things or to get things done. My wife uses them to surf the web and read emails. Canonical uses it to produce an operating system that in turn creates customers for their services. My company uses them to provide electronic payments to law firms. Someone else uses them to rent virtual private servers. Another builds smartphones that can do everything but the laundry. Another makes wifi routers.
As the tools get better, more third party companies and people will use Linux to create products. For example, many routers use the uhttpd server to deliver their web-based control panels. Linux existed long before uhttpd. The new uhttpd tool made it possible to make the control panel, and thus made the product cost less to develop, and made development happen faster. When a company like Canonical creates a new toolset like Unity, it simply enables people to do more new and cool stuff. That's the beauty of the whole free software thing. It's a feature, not an impediment.
You shouldn't be surprised that private companies make money by grafting their user interface on top of Linux. That is what it is for.
Back in 2004, I got a really cool Motion Computing tablet. It was 2x the computer an iPad was but was fatally flawed.
It was limited in utility because only the Journal software that came with it, MS One Note and a form CRUD application I forgot the name of really used the tablet features. Had MS truly pen/touch enabled Windows from top top bottom (i.e. larger buttons, smarter click regions, better pen integration to windows GUI controls etc...), their model for tablet computing would have won out years ago. I seem to remember reading a story about how there was some kind of fight between departments at MS where the pen computing group couldn't get the people that did office and Windows to add more tablet functionality...
The widespread availability of free email services really makes this unnecessary, but a free, verified by Uncle Sam email address would be very useful. Unfortunately, I fear that if the US Government offered email, it would just make life easier for process servers and law enforcement while doing little of real value for citizens.
I used to sell outsouced IT. When we ran into an inflexible IT department that would not support new stuff (which at the time were PDAs and old-school Blackberries), it was almost a guaranteed sale. Why? When people hate something, they are willing to commit ritual suicide to get rid of it. Companies with IT departments that constantly veto business plans, treat users with contempt and basically are hated by everyone will give up a great deal of control to get rid of pain.
The way you beat outsourcers is to destroy their value proposition which is: "same thing you got, cheaper" or "same thing you got, without the pain in the ass"
Here's how you beat it: understand business reality and deliver a net positive. That's the part where revenues are down, and the company has to shrink/adapt/change/deal with new challenges. When a board is seeing IT as an outsource play, it means one of two things: either they can get the same thing, or they are sick of IT standing in the way. In either case, it means IT IS TIME FOR A SURVIVAL DEPENDENT CHANGE IN HOW IT DOES BUSINESS.
BTW - when you start seeing lots of SAAS invading your company... you are being outsourced.
You sound a lot like the old MIS guys who would scream security or legal compliance when departments started buying Novell servers and stringing ethernet so they could do things the MIS department thought was useless... like sharing printers, using software like 1-2-3 and WordPerfect instead of inflexible CICS applications on the trusty ol' mainframe.
Screaming regulatory compliance is usually the last thing IT managers say before, "Who knows a good resume writer?"
HIPAA is a big deal. So is failure to provide support for iPhones and iPads. IT's job is not to resist change. It's to embrace new technologies and find a way to use them to improve the business. It's about finding a HIPAA compliant way to support iDevices. If all you have is screaming about HIPPAA and how your "Lusers" (who happen to be important people in the grand scheme of things - they provide the care that gets the insurance payments that pay IT's paycheck) don't understand that your users are important, then you are an abject failure as an IT manager and really... need to move on.
IT is going through a lot of change right now. Users are more knowledgeable than in the past. Users are the early adopters and are driving lots of new ways of doing things. IT managers have to become resilient and learn to bounce with change or you will face being replaced with SAAS solutions that are inflexible, not a secure, and would not be in the company's best interested EXCEPT for the fact they don't come with you, your attitude and your ostentatious resistance to change.
Actually, how you do your job determines if you are a dickwad, professional, professional dickwad or not. More to the point: smartphones have been around long enough that a hospital IT department being unable to support them would be an indicator that the IT department is not very professional.
There's probably some wisdom to providing services relevant to this decade.
SAAS applications like Google Calendar are simply what happens when IT fails to provide relevant services.
To compete you are gonna need Billions with a B, where is it gonna come from? Not Red hat, because the community is screwing them raw, what with over 34% of the servers out there running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Novell? Practically tits up. Mandriva? Life support. Apple? Moving away from any GPL code as fast as they can. So who is left? Can't just join hands and wish upon a star you know. Devs need to eat, have a roof, etc. Can't all be MIT bums.
SaaS much? IBM Global Services any? Android Phone Manufacturers some (see Motorola before Droid and after)? Oblivious to reality? Definitely.
The GPL is hard on people that want to write software and milk it for 15-20 years with incremental, insignificant patches and rely on holding customers hostage with proprietary and undocumented data formats. Open Source is a bitch for incompetent IT people that don't know how computers really work because at some level, the name of the game is being able to program -- and to be able to program... well, you actually have to understand the computer and not see it as a glorified component stereo.
It's really high time that you look at what's going on. Open source is everywhere - and people ARE making money from it. From gadgets to servers, from startups to global corporations, open source is there. And someone (apparently not you) is making money from it. You sound like someone who is bitter because a PHP content manager put your Windows CMS out of business.
I realize that PJ wants to move on. It is her life and she is free to do so. At the same time, I believe that Groklaw has a very solid place in technology media, and effort should be made to create an organization that can continue PJ's work. Incidentally, PJ's work has been helping technology people understand the law, and helping lawyers and judges understand technology and industry history.
Prior to NCLB, we just didn't know how bad the situation was. We all kind of new, but it wasn't quantified. NCLB is not the solution, but it did help bring the problem more into focus. It's not failing teachers, it's failing schools and failing school systems.
Things were getting worse faster prior to No Child Left Behind. I'm not sure it stopped the decay but at least we now have to act like something is wrong when a bunch of kids perform under grade level on a standardized test. That's a quantum leap from giving everyone raises and building a new football stadium at academically failing schools.
And I'd very much like to see an engineer working under a system that's comparable to what teachers have to work with.
Manager: Mr. Smith, the bridge you designed just fell in the bay with 420 commuters on it. 355 are dead. Everyone is suing. Engineer under Teacher System: Piss off. I have tenure. I'm going to the movies now.
Bill, the complaint wasn't that Unix wasn't easy to use, it was that it was too expensive. Unix was viewed as a better DOS (even by MS at the time who was trying to sell Xenix as an upgrade from DOS)... but unlike today's Linux, it was $500 for a single user license of *ix.
Slashdot Mirror
Table layout... vlines... too many links... an animated GIF (of a bubble-gum machine style police light)... 1997 design at it's best! The best part is that Drudge has kicked most major news outlets in the ass for over 10 years...
Apple is regifting. How delightfully hipsterish of them. WebKit is derived (meaning made from a copy of) KHTML, the browser component used by the Konqueror web browser.
So, do they quit or what? How do they settle the issue inside their minds?
It depends. Sadly, some become disillusioned with science and reject it. Some make up hokey theories like intelligent design to avoid dealing with the questions. Sadly, some become disillusioned with religion and scorn it -- in many cases becoming very bitter atheists. Fortunately, most seem to realize that there is truth in the science they are learning and truth in their religion and make adjustments to their religious beliefs. This often results in a less brittle, stronger and more flexible belief system. For example many come to the realization that their sacred text really is a powerfully inspired third-hand account, written with people with a bronze age or older grasp of the universe, under an archaic political and economic system. Understanding the text becomes more contemplative, and one where the reader is looking for meaning, then assessing how to apply that meaning to the modern world.
Sometimes, "adjusting their beliefs" is as simple as changing churches to a less fundamentalist one.
And what the hell arethey doing attending such a class in the first place?
Most often: they want to become doctors or nurses, and the biology classes are electives they must take to complete their undergraduate work. They have to take the course, they have to pass it, and the end up using the material through their career.
The issue in the US, especially surrounding creationism, is that fundamentalists believe that the Bible is to be taken literally (especially the creation story). As a result, teaching evolution is problematic because it conflicts directly with the creation story.
If you really want to see fireworks, sit in on the first week or two of an embryology course where people discover how (similarly) animals and people develop before leaving the womb or egg. The issue is that most fundamentalists are taught that human beings are not animals, so it comes as a shock when you compare the anatomy of a two-three week old human embryo with that of an immature lancelet.
You are the least insightful anonymous coward ever.
Here's a little sales lesson for you: Giving people something that they like, want and need is the dream. It's what we all want to do in an ideal world that we don't live in. Reality is you go to market with the products you have, warts and all. We have a name for people who take their products and present them as they are perfect, without fault and capable of solving all problems: snake oil salesmen.
Regardless, I'm glad you have an opinion and are willing to share it. Your delivery is amateurish, and discounts your opinion.
And if you give it for free to the world, they can adapt to your style or die for all you care, because in the end you're writing the thing for your own need.
I could be a dick and not share at all.
What too few people have realized is that Free Software (or open source, whatever term works for you) is a horrible development model for software you write exclusively for other people.
That's why no one uses MySQL, Apache, Joomla, WordPress, Thunderbird, Firefox, any browser with Webkit (Safari, Android, Chrome) in it (which is a fork of the browser component from Konqueror), or OpenOffice, right? Please. People use Open Source stuff all the time. It's not different than commercial software, some of it sucks, and some of it is amazing.
Look around yourself and you'll notice how most Free Software is seriously lacking in UI design.
If you want to fix user interfaces, then go help a project fix their craptacular GUI. Seriously. People actually would appreciate your contribution.
If it's good software and you call it Eye Dee Ten Tee, people will still use it & like it. I think you were trying to make a point. Oh, yes, that you remember names that you like.
Your complaints are somewhat silly:
* Kdenlive is as good a name as Vegas when it comes to making sense for video editing. I suppose Apache (and Cherokee) was a horrible, politically incorrect name for a web server. Unfortunately trademark law prevents using names like "Non-Linear Video Editor", "Photograph Manipulation Editor", "Text Editor", or "Word Processor" because they are common descriptive names.
* Some names have roots in foreign languages and make perfect sense there but sound horrible here (Choquok - an amazing twitter client - is a perfect example)
* Unix itself is a play on Multics, which predates Stallman's great crusade.
* Things aren't designed to confuse people. They are usually designed by one person, who may not be as good as UI design as a six person UX team at a large development shop. In some cases, I've discovered that the graphical interface is wonky, but the keyboard interfaces is amazingly smooth. Unfortunately, doing UI redesigns is a huge to-do for end users who have in many cases become very adept at the original UI of a software package.
I guess its cooler to be the smart kid using different software than the ordinary people.
No, for me it costs a lot less, I can get things done, and if I want to customize, I can and do. In some cases the software is incredibly good at what it does. In other cases, the commercial alternatives are really a lot better, but I don't want to spend $, so you live with it. It's really not about being cool. It's about freedom as in having no encumbered rights and having the economic means to exercise them.
Dude, no one's arguing with you. We're just saying your post was long, boring, redundant and is preaching to the choir on Slashdot.
You could have said:
You might want to update your hosts file to ensure that you don't waste your bandwidth on ____, _____ and _____ . ______.com has a some pre-built hosts files that may be helpful.
Also, since lots of us use Macs, Linux and Android devices, you may want to provide instructions on how to use your hosts file with non-Windows systems.
The point is when you try to see the linux community through the market share lens, you are putting rubber flippers on a duck. It's pointless.
First, It's a silly notion that Canonical will become the next Apple. One is a consumer products company, the other is a professional services company that uses their Linux distribution to generate business. Linux is an OS kernel. I doubt it cares much about anything other than what instruction to load to execute next. It has no GUI, and without a shell of some sort, no UX to speak of.
Canonical distributes and operating system called Ubuntu that comes with a Linux kernel, an installer, bootloader, a variety of shells, various software packages and a GUI (which I think you are calling a "UX"). Canonical spends a lot of money on improving Ubuntu, especially the way users can find and install software as well as how their graphical desktop looks and works. That said, there's something that you don't understand about Linux and this entire FOSS universe:
In the Linux community, we really don't care about market share, Apple's success or many of the traditional trappings. Those are the ends. Linux, and free software in general is a means to that end.... It's about the tools we have to make things or to get things done. My wife uses them to surf the web and read emails. Canonical uses it to produce an operating system that in turn creates customers for their services. My company uses them to provide electronic payments to law firms. Someone else uses them to rent virtual private servers. Another builds smartphones that can do everything but the laundry. Another makes wifi routers.
As the tools get better, more third party companies and people will use Linux to create products. For example, many routers use the uhttpd server to deliver their web-based control panels. Linux existed long before uhttpd. The new uhttpd tool made it possible to make the control panel, and thus made the product cost less to develop, and made development happen faster. When a company like Canonical creates a new toolset like Unity, it simply enables people to do more new and cool stuff. That's the beauty of the whole free software thing. It's a feature, not an impediment.
You shouldn't be surprised that private companies make money by grafting their user interface on top of Linux. That is what it is for.
Back in 2004, I got a really cool Motion Computing tablet. It was 2x the computer an iPad was but was fatally flawed.
It was limited in utility because only the Journal software that came with it, MS One Note and a form CRUD application I forgot the name of really used the tablet features. Had MS truly pen/touch enabled Windows from top top bottom (i.e. larger buttons, smarter click regions, better pen integration to windows GUI controls etc...), their model for tablet computing would have won out years ago. I seem to remember reading a story about how there was some kind of fight between departments at MS where the pen computing group couldn't get the people that did office and Windows to add more tablet functionality...
The widespread availability of free email services really makes this unnecessary, but a free, verified by Uncle Sam email address would be very useful. Unfortunately, I fear that if the US Government offered email, it would just make life easier for process servers and law enforcement while doing little of real value for citizens.
You've failed.
I used to sell outsouced IT. When we ran into an inflexible IT department that would not support new stuff (which at the time were PDAs and old-school Blackberries), it was almost a guaranteed sale. Why? When people hate something, they are willing to commit ritual suicide to get rid of it. Companies with IT departments that constantly veto business plans, treat users with contempt and basically are hated by everyone will give up a great deal of control to get rid of pain.
The way you beat outsourcers is to destroy their value proposition which is: "same thing you got, cheaper" or "same thing you got, without the pain in the ass"
Here's how you beat it: understand business reality and deliver a net positive. That's the part where revenues are down, and the company has to shrink/adapt/change/deal with new challenges. When a board is seeing IT as an outsource play, it means one of two things: either they can get the same thing, or they are sick of IT standing in the way. In either case, it means IT IS TIME FOR A SURVIVAL DEPENDENT CHANGE IN HOW IT DOES BUSINESS.
BTW - when you start seeing lots of SAAS invading your company... you are being outsourced.
You sound a lot like the old MIS guys who would scream security or legal compliance when departments started buying Novell servers and stringing ethernet so they could do things the MIS department thought was useless... like sharing printers, using software like 1-2-3 and WordPerfect instead of inflexible CICS applications on the trusty ol' mainframe.
Screaming regulatory compliance is usually the last thing IT managers say before, "Who knows a good resume writer?"
HIPAA is a big deal. So is failure to provide support for iPhones and iPads. IT's job is not to resist change. It's to embrace new technologies and find a way to use them to improve the business. It's about finding a HIPAA compliant way to support iDevices. If all you have is screaming about HIPPAA and how your "Lusers" (who happen to be important people in the grand scheme of things - they provide the care that gets the insurance payments that pay IT's paycheck) don't understand that your users are important, then you are an abject failure as an IT manager and really... need to move on.
IT is going through a lot of change right now. Users are more knowledgeable than in the past. Users are the early adopters and are driving lots of new ways of doing things. IT managers have to become resilient and learn to bounce with change or you will face being replaced with SAAS solutions that are inflexible, not a secure, and would not be in the company's best interested EXCEPT for the fact they don't come with you, your attitude and your ostentatious resistance to change.
Actually, how you do your job determines if you are a dickwad, professional, professional dickwad or not. More to the point: smartphones have been around long enough that a hospital IT department being unable to support them would be an indicator that the IT department is not very professional.
There's probably some wisdom to providing services relevant to this decade.
SAAS applications like Google Calendar are simply what happens when IT fails to provide relevant services.
To compete you are gonna need Billions with a B, where is it gonna come from? Not Red hat, because the community is screwing them raw, what with over 34% of the servers out there running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Novell? Practically tits up. Mandriva? Life support. Apple? Moving away from any GPL code as fast as they can. So who is left? Can't just join hands and wish upon a star you know. Devs need to eat, have a roof, etc. Can't all be MIT bums.
SaaS much? IBM Global Services any? Android Phone Manufacturers some (see Motorola before Droid and after)? Oblivious to reality? Definitely.
The GPL is hard on people that want to write software and milk it for 15-20 years with incremental, insignificant patches and rely on holding customers hostage with proprietary and undocumented data formats. Open Source is a bitch for incompetent IT people that don't know how computers really work because at some level, the name of the game is being able to program -- and to be able to program... well, you actually have to understand the computer and not see it as a glorified component stereo.
It's really high time that you look at what's going on. Open source is everywhere - and people ARE making money from it. From gadgets to servers, from startups to global corporations, open source is there. And someone (apparently not you) is making money from it. You sound like someone who is bitter because a PHP content manager put your Windows CMS out of business.
I realize that PJ wants to move on. It is her life and she is free to do so. At the same time, I believe that Groklaw has a very solid place in technology media, and effort should be made to create an organization that can continue PJ's work. Incidentally, PJ's work has been helping technology people understand the law, and helping lawyers and judges understand technology and industry history.
Prior to NCLB, we just didn't know how bad the situation was. We all kind of new, but it wasn't quantified. NCLB is not the solution, but it did help bring the problem more into focus. It's not failing teachers, it's failing schools and failing school systems.
Things were getting worse faster prior to No Child Left Behind. I'm not sure it stopped the decay but at least we now have to act like something is wrong when a bunch of kids perform under grade level on a standardized test. That's a quantum leap from giving everyone raises and building a new football stadium at academically failing schools.
And I'd very much like to see an engineer working under a system that's comparable to what teachers have to work with.
Manager: Mr. Smith, the bridge you designed just fell in the bay with 420 commuters on it. 355 are dead. Everyone is suing.
Engineer under Teacher System: Piss off. I have tenure. I'm going to the movies now.
Asshole parents have asshole kids. Asshole kids get expelled... so do their parents. Problem solved.
Get back to playing Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja already. You are on the clock.
Bill, the complaint wasn't that Unix wasn't easy to use, it was that it was too expensive. Unix was viewed as a better DOS (even by MS at the time who was trying to sell Xenix as an upgrade from DOS)... but unlike today's Linux, it was $500 for a single user license of *ix.