Well stated, and I agree completely. So move. There are plenty of better places in the world to live than America, where living standards are higher, politics are more sane, and the overall culture is more tolerant and less ignorant. So leave America now. I left four years ago, and I certainly don't regret it.
Yes. Our infrastructure is falling apart quite literally at the seams. Yes. The corporations have enough power to shutdown municiple WiFi ("It amounts to unfair government price controls, and government price controls are communist.") Yes. Education spending and educational standards are falling. Yes. The wage gap is getting larger. Yes. some care. No. Not enough are willing to do anything about it because they're distracted by gay marriage. Yes. America is moving full tilt to dismantle every socioeconomic safety net in the country, and effectively repeal the 20th century.
You are not willing to pay a penny for tv huh? So I guess you think you deserve you should get it for free. Well what do you do for a living. When I come to your office - i think you should perform those services for me for free.
Of course you fail to realize that television is free. Put up any antenna you too can receive free over the air television. All your major broadcast networks and a smattering of independents! All for the low low price of zero. Why? Because the stations are using your electromagnetic spectrum. It has always been that way.
Those creators of the websites want you (obviously) to view their information but pay for it by viewing their ads. If they didn't want you to view their ads - they would not have put it there. Why should the burdeon be put on them? WIth the exception of malicious websites (which i do not agree with) why should a webmaster have to make access to his site restrictive and unfriendly because *YOU* feel you deserve something for free?
Well the contract isn't with me, but rather betwen the advertiser and the media owner. The media isn't the product. The viewer is. Many people are tired of being sold.
There are alternate methods of extracting money from your audience. Tip jars and subscriptions have met with success in several cases.
Uh, they removed the Guide entry for Earth. Two words. "Mostly Harmless". This would somehow have been impossible to introduce into the script without "pausing the film, doing a voice over, and then resuming the film"?
This bit of info should have been in the movie, and the scene would have been exactly like how it is in the book. Arthur and Ford are talking and Arthur says, "Is there anything about Earth in here?" "A little. I helped write the entry." *Ford flips to the entry* "Mostly Harmless!?! That's it?" "Well it's more than what was there before." "What was it it before?" "Harmless."
It's the title of an Adams book, for petesake.
But not this book.
As the reviewer points out, the movie is titled "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". From the description, this title would be pretty inexplicable to viewers who haven't seen the movie.
Except they show the guide, and they hitchhike across the galaxy. The book wasn't the Guide. It may have had quotes from the Guide, but it was about the hitchhikers. The movie is no different in this respect. And anyway, many books and movies have titles that reference things in them without actually being the thing they reference. For example, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" isn't a self-help seminar.
The reviewer is not "the Comic Book Guy". For starters, he's written a biography of Douglas Adams, which gives him a bit of authority on the topic from my point of view.
And Comic Book Guys always are an authority. That's what adds to their arrogance. Anyway, The Comic Book Guy is the attitude that "I know everything there is to know about this, and this is the worst one ever!"
In particular, I'm not going to a movie which has, as a principal character, a NOKIA cellphone. Regardless of what else is in it.
You and I both know it's not a character, and for an example of a good movie with with blatent product pimping, I give you ET.
Except this guy gives specifics, and the specifics are terrible.
This guy also complains that the guide's entries are removed from the script. Well no shit. You can make an aside to "reprint" big swaths of text in a book, you can't do that in a movie. About the only thing you can do in a movie is pause the film, do a voice over, and then resume the film. While this might work once or twice, it won't work over the long term. The movie becomes slow, tedious, and boring.
Hell, even complains that Vogon are ships aren't described as "hanging in space in exactly the same way bricks don't". Of course that description isn't in there. You describe things when you have to imagine it, you don't describe things everyone can experience directly. I expected the guy to complain that the high performance ship they steal in Milways "wasn't black enough" because his eyes didn't slide off of it.
Does the movie suck? I don't know. Given the material and Hollywood's recent track record with films in general, there's a very good chance that it does. Do I believe this guy's review? Hell no. He's the Comic Book Guy.
If you've read the book, you already know the story, so how can the movie be spoiled? Of course I'm sure there are many people that went to see The Passion of the Christ and said, "Don't tell me how it ends!"
Where's Quark? Nothing epitimizes rising above greed and fear more than Quark. I know he's not human, but I relate to him because I too like to be surrounded by naked women chewing my food and spitting it in my my mouth.
I think you've fallen in to the trap of thinking that neural nets are something special and magical and somehow model real neurons. They're none of those things. All an artifical neuron is a sigmoid function that takes in weighted sums and spits out a real value. That's it.
As I said earlier, you can't just create neurons and wire them up randomly. Each additional connection creates another degree of freedom to the system. Too few neurons and you can't approximate the function you're looking for. Too many and the network may never reach stability. You need to have about the right number with about the right number of levels or NNs don't work.
You can't automatically determine whether or not you need a new layer or not, since the network has no idea what it is attempting to model. To any system looking at the network, a network that is flailing around uselessly appears identically to a network that isn't yet stable, but soon will be. Furthermore, just because a network has reached stability, that in and to itself isn't an indication that the network has actually learned the correct function.
Then there's the whole issue of whether or not you use batch or iterative back propagation. I one time created a neural network that implemented an XOR gate. Pretty simple huh? I create the training sets and use iterative back propagation (update the weights after every training set), the system stablized, but the network wasn't outputing XOR. I reinitialized the network with identical starting conditions, only the second time I used batch back propagation (updating the weights using the average error of all the training sets). The system stablized again, only this time the network implemented XOR. I asked about this, since everything I read said batch and iterative propagation was mathematically identical. The answer? "Yeah. Sometimes neural nets do that. No one really knows why."
Even if you believe the hype of neural nets' hayday that everything can be done with a neural net if you just wire it correctly, it doesn't necessarilty make it the best way. Sure you can spend the time to train a network or you could take the time to decompose the problem properly and create a system that achieves equally good results using more traditional techniques in less time. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying neural nets are teh suck, I'm just saying they're not the end-all-be-all. They're great for pattern recognition, but not necessarily good for other problems. That's all.
I dabble in AI now and again so I haven't read up on everything that's out there, but in my limited travels what I haven't yet seen is a neural network implementation which can learn and grow itself. The recently posted/. article about Numenta seems to be heading in the right direction. Most neural networks are incredibly rudimentary, offering a few levels of propogation. In a real brain, there's a hell of a lot more going on.
I don't know what you mean "grow", since all implentations use a static number of neurons that are connected to each other via a series of preexisting links. In a very real sense there's no real difference between a neuron that's connected another neuron via link of weight 0 and one that isn't connected at all. Fully connect the neurons, and walla. And you a completely abstract network. Of course, now you have cycles, so the propagation algorithms get complicated real fast. Also you can't just throw neurons into a network and expect it to work. Every neuron and every link between neurons adds another degree of freedom to the network, and so stability can become harder to reach.
NNs are kind of neat, but they're far from the end-all-be-all. A single neuron can only divide the search space via a hyperplane. Determining how many neurons in how many hidden layers is a bit of dark art. And to dash the last bit mistique about NNs, backpropagation is nothing more than hill-climbing.
And not a single one of those apps do you use ctrl-L inside a dialog entitled "open", or any dialog for that matter.
Firefox does so. If you turn off the navigation toolbar, and press ctrl-l, you get this.
You conviently didn't do what I said. You're not in a dialog. You in the application window. File|Open | [focus on the open dialog] | Ctrl-L does nothing.
I don't know what the bet was, but I like the odds. I found it because ctrl-l is the keybinding that takes you to the url bar in Firefox, Nautilus, Konqueror, and a whole bunch of others.
And not a single one of those apps do you use ctrl-L inside a dialog entitled "open", or any dialog for that matter. Furthermore, why would press that keycombo when there isn't a url bar in the application at all?
Well take it up with the GTK+ developers. It doesn't make any more sense to complain to Gnome devs about that than it does to complain about it to the Gaim developers.
When it comes to the widgets, GNOME and GTK+ are the same people. When it comes to useability, they're the same people. They're intimatly related projects, and even a cursorary glance through bugzilla and the mailing lists would tell you that.
'And before you even start calling me some troll'
You're not just some troll.. You're a troll with a bad attitude
Meow! Someone doesn't like having their sacred cow gored.
It seems
a decision based largely on practical considerations -- and with a disregard for the consequences for both the rest of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities and the future of OpenOffice.org itself.
And that's the problem with the FOSS zealots. They always see the perfect as the enemy of the good. Too often when given a choice between something that works and something that doesn't, they choose the one that doesn't.
The flip side of that one is, anyone who knows how to type in a filename, can handle pressing ctrl-l to do that, or right clicking and selecting "Open Location". Autocomplete works nicely, and you can navigate to a new directory, or select a file or network resource.
There's one obvious problem with this "solution". There's no indication that this functionality exists! (I'll give you 10 to 1 that the way you found out about ctrl-L was via the web search or a mailing list.) Furthermore, this "Go to location" subdialog goes only to the directory, not the actual file indicated. For instance, you want to open "/usr/local/share/doc/foo.html". You bring up the filechooser. You strike the magic keys. You type in "/usr/local/share/doc/foo.html". You click "open". The file isn't opened, but rather the subdialog is closed and the filechooser changes directory to "/usr/local/share/doc". You now have to scroll through the listing and click "foo.html", and then open (again!). That's a problem.
This is simply looking at the filechooser as a usability issue with normal users. The situation gets worse when you consider accessability software like on-screen keyboards and speech-to-text converters. And before you even start calling me some troll, I suggest you read the corresponding bug.
Or their morale probably. I wish Sun would do another HIG. The developers need more unbaised feedback. All they are likely to hear on Slashdot is the vocal minority.
The GNOME heirachy needs to be walloped with a clue stick when it comes to useability. Before the Sun usability GNOME suffered from the Tyrany of Choice. Too many almost identical apps all with similar names. The clock applets were my favorite, "clock", "another clock", "clock with mail check", "jbc clock", etc. Sun came back and said, "You have too many choices." Havoc et al. took away from this, "Choice is bad" and systematically removed almost every preference in GNOME. They didn't have to go from one extreme to the other. Now you're stuck using undocumented gconf keys to change things, even though gconf-editor plainly says "don't use this to change preferences". Nice.
The other problem with GNOME is the whole culture of "Let's rewrite everything!" The file chooser has changed almost 6 times since GNOME started. Entire architectures are tossed overboard without much second thought. Damn. It's like it's being developed by a bunch of ADD teenagers trying to show how 1337 they are.
But yes, GNOME needs another usability study.
I use Gnome, with e16, and I like it very much but I'm not likely to say anything about it until I have something to bitch about.
I'll give you something. The filechooser. "Nah. No one will ever want to type in a filename when they can simply click 15 times!" (Yes, I know MacOSX 10.2+ introduced this. I'll simply recount the wisdom of Obi-Wan, "Who's the more foolish? The fool or the one who follows him?"
Non-native speakers tend to countries that were former colonies of Britain, or close to former colonies of Britain. They invariably learn British spelling.
That's just bullshit. English is the most widely spoken language on the planet. A sizeable portion of non-native english speakers come from countries that were never parts of the British Empire. American English is what is taught in almost all of those countries. Asian countries come to mind immediately. (Hong Kong and Singapore are exceptions)
Whatever the (de)merits of replacing your metal case with a wooden one, this is not the way to do it.
It appears to be made with very cheap plywood that looks like it's one the verge of splitting. There's gaping wholes in the sides of the case. The metal frame of the lcd shows. There's exposed screws everywhere. The stain is uneven, either as a result of the poor quality of the plywood, or his lack of skill. All the edges of the plywood are exposed, making the case look even more amaturish.
It's really embrassing that he would post pictures of this with captions like "really beautiful", "very nice", and "details are important". Details are important. I just wish he actually paid attention to them.
From where? Magic? Unless you actually have the driver on your windows CD you need to get it from somewhere - a download or an install CD - recently released hardware is unlikely to have drivers there. It's exactly the same with linux, if the driver isn't with the kernel you have you need to go get it - exactly like the situation where the hardware drivers don't come on your windows CD.
It doesn't matter how it gets it. It should get it. A simply search order of "check disk, check update site, fail" is all that's needed. If it fails, then you try a compatable driver if one exists (i.e. vesa for video drivers) You then throw up a dialog informing the user that it tried and failed. This isn't anything more than sticking hardware detection and automatic fetching of packages together.
Also to repeat things in a different way X is an application in user space, and the kernel doesn't care much about video hardware so you need to actually set up X seperately.
I fully understand the difference between kernelspace and userspace. But from a user perspective, it doesn't matter that some drivers live in the kernel or at least/lib/modules and that some live in/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers. They all need to be installed, and the all need to work.
Who cares how it works on the backend? The user should just see one simple interface. If the user wants to dig around with 90 different config files, let him. But he shouldn't have to.
Take how applications are installed on a mac. The user drags an icon to the disk. That's it. he's done. When he double clicks it, the application starts.
Now that's not what's really going on. When the icon is dragged off of the install disk, a self extracting archive is copied. When the user runs it, the app is unzipped, and the main executable is run. When he drags the icon to another disk, the application is zipped up and copied. When he drags the icon to the trash, the application is uninstalled.
The user doesn't see the 50 files that actually make up the application, because he doesn't need to. From his perspective the icon is all there is to the app. It really isn't, but it might as well be.
I bring up the mac, only to illustrate that you can present a simple interface to a user that hides what is actually going on. The majority of the time this is preferable.
This attitude that the display manager/window manager/web browser etc is part of the OS is a relatively recent MS marketing invention - the kernel is a different thing to the applications that display your 3D video.
To a developer, userspace versus kernelspace is important. To a user, it's distinction without a difference.
Getting back to configuring X, It's absurd that I have to edit XF86Config and tell the xserver things like BusID and VideoRAM. Screw that. It should figure that out on its own. It can, because I had to run a userspace app to get things like the bus id. If I can run the app, then xfree86 should run the app for me.
I see the earlier posts as "I want it to do whatever I want no matter what it is without knowing anything about it or getting someone else with knowledge to set it up for me". Computers have got a very long way to go before that - if it's even possible.
That's why we need to start cracking on that now. Some of that technolgy exists today. If you put it together properly.
You still need to change the oil in a car, but that isn't a problem - you need skills or knowledge to operate stuff.
Can we please dispense with the car analogies? They're incredibly strained and unoriginal. And now that Mobil has released oil that is rated for 15k miles, you may not even have to change it for as long as you own your car.
As for the sig - insight does not come from ignorance, you have to learn something on a suject before you get insights.
It's directed at more of the general abuse of "informative" as a mod. Too many times I've seen something like "You are dumb" be modded up as "informative". There's incredibly little if any information in a post like that. Insight, maybe, but not information.
It doesn't - it's video hardware. XFree86 is not part of the kernel. With MS windows you need to install the correct driver too
Well, actually the correct driver is selected and installed automatically. You rarely, if ever, are presented a two pane window with manufacturers on the left, and chipsets on the right.
You can use the kernel to query the bus to return the proper card id string. Which user space apps can do. You then use that information to select the proper driver automatically. It's not all that hard. Maintaining the database may be hard, but it's doable, as seen by the billion websites that list XF86Config files for various hardware configurations.
expecting it all to "just work" is no good, you at least have to pay some moorlock to set things up for you or crack open a book/pc case/web page whatever.
There's a better way, yet too many appologists see the trials and tribulations of linux as as some sort of badge of honor, or at least a right of passage. The way things are, aren't how they are supposed to be. There are better ways out there today, but many in the commmunity are blinded by what they see as an initiation ritual. You see it all the time with comments like "Well if you don't like it, go back to windows!" or the semi-witty, "Linux is user friendly. It's just picky about its friends."
Take for instance how isapnp worked. You had to query the bus to determine the card id. Then you had to go hundreds of textfiles to find the matching configuration file for that card id. Then you had to copy that file to another master configuration file. You then repeated that for every isapnp card you had.
That's stupid. A perl script can do that job. A perl should do that job. Instead of just working, my time is wasted, doing something that could just as easiliy been done by the machine.
The world doesn't work that way - if something isn't know to run on paticular hardware it isn't going to run, and if you are going to set up a system you have to at least make the effort of finding out if you have compatible hardware.
There's something wrong when you have to spend a week researching what chipset your card uses, only to find out that it comes in two different chipsets, one that's supported and one that's not. So you in the end you have to pick a card off the shelf, install it before determining if it's compatable or not. That's a problem. Simply saying, "that's the way is" doesn't make it right. The world won't change unless the community doens't stop lying to itself and realize the problem staring it in the face.
You don't have hardware problems under windows like you do under linux because drivers are readily available for windows. Windows also has good hardware detection and autoconfiguration.
I don't think you really find the mindset as a problem, the alternative is the mindset of instant gratification with no effort
No the alternative is allowing the user to actually spend his time working on his own tasks as quickly as possible rather than babysitting the machine. Using the computer isn't some hobby. It's a tool to be used, and the best tools are invisible. Unfortunately, we're a long way from there.
I suspect if you didn't want to spend the money or take the time in anything you wouldn't be in grad school.
The reason why I'm in grad school is because computers suck. I want them to suck less.
Slashdot Mirror
Well stated, and I agree completely. So move. There are plenty of better places in the world to live than America, where living standards are higher, politics are more sane, and the overall culture is more tolerant and less ignorant. So leave America now. I left four years ago, and I certainly don't regret it.
Some of us would rather fight than surrender.
I'm an American. I'll fill you in.
Yes. Our infrastructure is falling apart quite literally at the seams. Yes. The corporations have enough power to shutdown municiple WiFi ("It amounts to unfair government price controls, and government price controls are communist.") Yes. Education spending and educational standards are falling. Yes. The wage gap is getting larger. Yes. some care. No. Not enough are willing to do anything about it because they're distracted by gay marriage. Yes. America is moving full tilt to dismantle every socioeconomic safety net in the country, and effectively repeal the 20th century.
America's best days are behind it.
You are not willing to pay a penny for tv huh? So I guess you think you deserve you should get it for free. Well what do you do for a living. When I come to your office - i think you should perform those services for me for free.
Of course you fail to realize that television is free. Put up any antenna you too can receive free over the air television. All your major broadcast networks and a smattering of independents! All for the low low price of zero. Why? Because the stations are using your electromagnetic spectrum. It has always been that way.
Those creators of the websites want you (obviously) to view their information but pay for it by viewing their ads. If they didn't want you to view their ads - they would not have put it there. Why should the burdeon be put on them? WIth the exception of malicious websites (which i do not agree with) why should a webmaster have to make access to his site restrictive and unfriendly because *YOU* feel you deserve something for free?
Well the contract isn't with me, but rather betwen the advertiser and the media owner. The media isn't the product. The viewer is. Many people are tired of being sold.
There are alternate methods of extracting money from your audience. Tip jars and subscriptions have met with success in several cases.
Of course the ipod shuffle doen't have a screen so you have to listen to your entire music collection in the one way Steve has blessed, shuffle.
I like apple. I'm typing this on my powerbook. I think the ipod is stylish. However, I think the shuffle is crap.
And how about the fact that his girlfriend was really a guy!
You know those Mon Calamari dancers? They're going to be topless.
Hello topless Mon Calamaris dancers! :)
Uh, they removed the Guide entry for Earth. Two words. "Mostly Harmless". This would somehow have been impossible to introduce into the script without "pausing the film, doing a voice over, and then resuming the film"?
This bit of info should have been in the movie, and the scene would have been exactly like how it is in the book. Arthur and Ford are talking and Arthur says, "Is there anything about Earth in here?"
"A little. I helped write the entry." *Ford flips to the entry*
"Mostly Harmless!?! That's it?"
"Well it's more than what was there before."
"What was it it before?"
"Harmless."
It's the title of an Adams book, for petesake.
But not this book.
As the reviewer points out, the movie is titled "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". From the description, this title would be pretty inexplicable to viewers who haven't seen the movie.
Except they show the guide, and they hitchhike across the galaxy. The book wasn't the Guide. It may have had quotes from the Guide, but it was about the hitchhikers. The movie is no different in this respect. And anyway, many books and movies have titles that reference things in them without actually being the thing they reference. For example, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" isn't a self-help seminar.
The reviewer is not "the Comic Book Guy". For starters, he's written a biography of Douglas Adams, which gives him a bit of authority on the topic from my point of view.
And Comic Book Guys always are an authority. That's what adds to their arrogance. Anyway, The Comic Book Guy is the attitude that "I know everything there is to know about this, and this is the worst one ever!"
In particular, I'm not going to a movie which has, as a principal character, a NOKIA cellphone. Regardless of what else is in it.
You and I both know it's not a character, and for an example of a good movie with with blatent product pimping, I give you ET.
Except this guy gives specifics, and the specifics are terrible.
This guy also complains that the guide's entries are removed from the script. Well no shit. You can make an aside to "reprint" big swaths of text in a book, you can't do that in a movie. About the only thing you can do in a movie is pause the film, do a voice over, and then resume the film. While this might work once or twice, it won't work over the long term. The movie becomes slow, tedious, and boring.
Hell, even complains that Vogon are ships aren't described as "hanging in space in exactly the same way bricks don't". Of course that description isn't in there. You describe things when you have to imagine it, you don't describe things everyone can experience directly. I expected the guy to complain that the high performance ship they steal in Milways "wasn't black enough" because his eyes didn't slide off of it.
Does the movie suck? I don't know. Given the material and Hollywood's recent track record with films in general, there's a very good chance that it does. Do I believe this guy's review? Hell no. He's the Comic Book Guy.
Worst review ever.
If you've read the book, you already know the story, so how can the movie be spoiled? Of course I'm sure there are many people that went to see The Passion of the Christ and said, "Don't tell me how it ends!"
Where's Quark? Nothing epitimizes rising above greed and fear more than Quark. I know he's not human, but I relate to him because I too like to be surrounded by naked women chewing my food and spitting it in my my mouth.
I think you've fallen in to the trap of thinking that neural nets are something special and magical and somehow model real neurons. They're none of those things. All an artifical neuron is a sigmoid function that takes in weighted sums and spits out a real value. That's it.
As I said earlier, you can't just create neurons and wire them up randomly. Each additional connection creates another degree of freedom to the system. Too few neurons and you can't approximate the function you're looking for. Too many and the network may never reach stability. You need to have about the right number with about the right number of levels or NNs don't work.
You can't automatically determine whether or not you need a new layer or not, since the network has no idea what it is attempting to model. To any system looking at the network, a network that is flailing around uselessly appears identically to a network that isn't yet stable, but soon will be. Furthermore, just because a network has reached stability, that in and to itself isn't an indication that the network has actually learned the correct function.
Then there's the whole issue of whether or not you use batch or iterative back propagation. I one time created a neural network that implemented an XOR gate. Pretty simple huh? I create the training sets and use iterative back propagation (update the weights after every training set), the system stablized, but the network wasn't outputing XOR. I reinitialized the network with identical starting conditions, only the second time I used batch back propagation (updating the weights using the average error of all the training sets). The system stablized again, only this time the network implemented XOR. I asked about this, since everything I read said batch and iterative propagation was mathematically identical. The answer? "Yeah. Sometimes neural nets do that. No one really knows why."
Even if you believe the hype of neural nets' hayday that everything can be done with a neural net if you just wire it correctly, it doesn't necessarilty make it the best way. Sure you can spend the time to train a network or you could take the time to decompose the problem properly and create a system that achieves equally good results using more traditional techniques in less time. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying neural nets are teh suck, I'm just saying they're not the end-all-be-all. They're great for pattern recognition, but not necessarily good for other problems. That's all.
I dabble in AI now and again so I haven't read up on everything that's out there, but in my limited travels what I haven't yet seen is a neural network implementation which can learn and grow itself. The recently posted /. article about Numenta seems to be heading in the right direction. Most neural networks are incredibly rudimentary, offering a few levels of propogation. In a real brain, there's a hell of a lot more going on.
I don't know what you mean "grow", since all implentations use a static number of neurons that are connected to each other via a series of preexisting links. In a very real sense there's no real difference between a neuron that's connected another neuron via link of weight 0 and one that isn't connected at all. Fully connect the neurons, and walla. And you a completely abstract network. Of course, now you have cycles, so the propagation algorithms get complicated real fast. Also you can't just throw neurons into a network and expect it to work. Every neuron and every link between neurons adds another degree of freedom to the network, and so stability can become harder to reach.
NNs are kind of neat, but they're far from the end-all-be-all. A single neuron can only divide the search space via a hyperplane. Determining how many neurons in how many hidden layers is a bit of dark art. And to dash the last bit mistique about NNs, backpropagation is nothing more than hill-climbing.
Firefox does so. If you turn off the navigation toolbar, and press ctrl-l, you get this.
You conviently didn't do what I said. You're not in a dialog. You in the application window. File|Open | [focus on the open dialog] | Ctrl-L does nothing.
And not a single one of those apps do you use ctrl-L inside a dialog entitled "open", or any dialog for that matter. Furthermore, why would press that keycombo when there isn't a url bar in the application at all?
Well take it up with the GTK+ developers. It doesn't make any more sense to complain to Gnome devs about that than it does to complain about it to the Gaim developers.
When it comes to the widgets, GNOME and GTK+ are the same people. When it comes to useability, they're the same people. They're intimatly related projects, and even a cursorary glance through bugzilla and the mailing lists would tell you that.
You're not just some troll.. You're a troll with a bad attitude
Meow! Someone doesn't like having their sacred cow gored.
And that's the problem with the FOSS zealots. They always see the perfect as the enemy of the good. Too often when given a choice between something that works and something that doesn't, they choose the one that doesn't.
The flip side of that one is, anyone who knows how to type in a filename, can handle pressing ctrl-l to do that, or right clicking and selecting "Open Location". Autocomplete works nicely, and you can navigate to a new directory, or select a file or network resource.
There's one obvious problem with this "solution". There's no indication that this functionality exists! (I'll give you 10 to 1 that the way you found out about ctrl-L was via the web search or a mailing list.) Furthermore, this "Go to location" subdialog goes only to the directory, not the actual file indicated. For instance, you want to open "/usr/local/share/doc/foo.html". You bring up the filechooser. You strike the magic keys. You type in "/usr/local/share/doc/foo.html". You click "open". The file isn't opened, but rather the subdialog is closed and the filechooser changes directory to "/usr/local/share/doc". You now have to scroll through the listing and click "foo.html", and then open (again!). That's a problem.
This is simply looking at the filechooser as a usability issue with normal users. The situation gets worse when you consider accessability software like on-screen keyboards and speech-to-text converters. And before you even start calling me some troll, I suggest you read the corresponding bug.
Or their morale probably. I wish Sun would do another HIG. The developers need more unbaised feedback. All they are likely to hear on Slashdot is the vocal minority.
The GNOME heirachy needs to be walloped with a clue stick when it comes to useability. Before the Sun usability GNOME suffered from the Tyrany of Choice. Too many almost identical apps all with similar names. The clock applets were my favorite, "clock", "another clock", "clock with mail check", "jbc clock", etc. Sun came back and said, "You have too many choices." Havoc et al. took away from this, "Choice is bad" and systematically removed almost every preference in GNOME. They didn't have to go from one extreme to the other. Now you're stuck using undocumented gconf keys to change things, even though gconf-editor plainly says "don't use this to change preferences". Nice.
The other problem with GNOME is the whole culture of "Let's rewrite everything!" The file chooser has changed almost 6 times since GNOME started. Entire architectures are tossed overboard without much second thought. Damn. It's like it's being developed by a bunch of ADD teenagers trying to show how 1337 they are.
But yes, GNOME needs another usability study.
I use Gnome, with e16, and I like it very much but I'm not likely to say anything about it until I have something to bitch about.
I'll give you something. The filechooser. "Nah. No one will ever want to type in a filename when they can simply click 15 times!" (Yes, I know MacOSX 10.2+ introduced this. I'll simply recount the wisdom of Obi-Wan, "Who's the more foolish? The fool or the one who follows him?"
Non-native speakers tend to countries that were former colonies of Britain, or close to former colonies of Britain. They invariably learn British spelling.
That's just bullshit. English is the most widely spoken language on the planet. A sizeable portion of non-native english speakers come from countries that were never parts of the British Empire. American English is what is taught in almost all of those countries. Asian countries come to mind immediately. (Hong Kong and Singapore are exceptions)
Whatever the (de)merits of replacing your metal case with a wooden one, this is not the way to do it.
It appears to be made with very cheap plywood that looks like it's one the verge of splitting. There's gaping wholes in the sides of the case. The metal frame of the lcd shows. There's exposed screws everywhere. The stain is uneven, either as a result of the poor quality of the plywood, or his lack of skill. All the edges of the plywood are exposed, making the case look even more amaturish.
It's really embrassing that he would post pictures of this with captions like "really beautiful", "very nice", and "details are important". Details are important. I just wish he actually paid attention to them.
on an unrelated note: kudo points for a creative spelling of favorite
Get a fucking education.
NPR. Of course this is predicated that you've got a good NPR station that plays something besides 17th century chamber music.
Many off-site archival backups of Playstation games come in this format.
You mean warez?
From where? Magic? Unless you actually have the driver on your windows CD you need to get it from somewhere - a download or an install CD - recently released hardware is unlikely to have drivers there. It's exactly the same with linux, if the driver isn't with the kernel you have you need to go get it - exactly like the situation where the hardware drivers don't come on your windows CD.
/lib/modules and that some live in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers. They all need to be installed, and the all need to work.
It doesn't matter how it gets it. It should get it. A simply search order of "check disk, check update site, fail" is all that's needed. If it fails, then you try a compatable driver if one exists (i.e. vesa for video drivers) You then throw up a dialog informing the user that it tried and failed. This isn't anything more than sticking hardware detection and automatic fetching of packages together.
Also to repeat things in a different way X is an application in user space, and the kernel doesn't care much about video hardware so you need to actually set up X seperately.
I fully understand the difference between kernelspace and userspace. But from a user perspective, it doesn't matter that some drivers live in the kernel or at least
Who cares how it works on the backend? The user should just see one simple interface. If the user wants to dig around with 90 different config files, let him. But he shouldn't have to.
Take how applications are installed on a mac. The user drags an icon to the disk. That's it. he's done. When he double clicks it, the application starts.
Now that's not what's really going on. When the icon is dragged off of the install disk, a self extracting archive is copied. When the user runs it, the app is unzipped, and the main executable is run. When he drags the icon to another disk, the application is zipped up and copied. When he drags the icon to the trash, the application is uninstalled.
The user doesn't see the 50 files that actually make up the application, because he doesn't need to. From his perspective the icon is all there is to the app. It really isn't, but it might as well be.
I bring up the mac, only to illustrate that you can present a simple interface to a user that hides what is actually going on. The majority of the time this is preferable.
This attitude that the display manager/window manager/web browser etc is part of the OS is a relatively recent MS marketing invention - the kernel is a different thing to the applications that display your 3D video.
To a developer, userspace versus kernelspace is important. To a user, it's distinction without a difference.
Getting back to configuring X, It's absurd that I have to edit XF86Config and tell the xserver things like BusID and VideoRAM. Screw that. It should figure that out on its own. It can, because I had to run a userspace app to get things like the bus id. If I can run the app, then xfree86 should run the app for me.
I see the earlier posts as "I want it to do whatever I want no matter what it is without knowing anything about it or getting someone else with knowledge to set it up for me". Computers have got a very long way to go before that - if it's even possible.
That's why we need to start cracking on that now. Some of that technolgy exists today. If you put it together properly.
You still need to change the oil in a car, but that isn't a problem - you need skills or knowledge to operate stuff.
Can we please dispense with the car analogies? They're incredibly strained and unoriginal. And now that Mobil has released oil that is rated for 15k miles, you may not even have to change it for as long as you own your car.
As for the sig - insight does not come from ignorance, you have to learn something on a suject before you get insights.
It's directed at more of the general abuse of "informative" as a mod. Too many times I've seen something like "You are dumb" be modded up as "informative". There's incredibly little if any information in a post like that. Insight, maybe, but not information.
It doesn't - it's video hardware. XFree86 is not part of the kernel. With MS windows you need to install the correct driver too
Well, actually the correct driver is selected and installed automatically. You rarely, if ever, are presented a two pane window with manufacturers on the left, and chipsets on the right.
You can use the kernel to query the bus to return the proper card id string. Which user space apps can do. You then use that information to select the proper driver automatically. It's not all that hard. Maintaining the database may be hard, but it's doable, as seen by the billion websites that list XF86Config files for various hardware configurations.
expecting it all to "just work" is no good, you at least have to pay some moorlock to set things up for you or crack open a book/pc case/web page whatever.
There's a better way, yet too many appologists see the trials and tribulations of linux as as some sort of badge of honor, or at least a right of passage. The way things are, aren't how they are supposed to be. There are better ways out there today, but many in the commmunity are blinded by what they see as an initiation ritual. You see it all the time with comments like "Well if you don't like it, go back to windows!" or the semi-witty, "Linux is user friendly. It's just picky about its friends."
Take for instance how isapnp worked. You had to query the bus to determine the card id. Then you had to go hundreds of textfiles to find the matching configuration file for that card id. Then you had to copy that file to another master configuration file. You then repeated that for every isapnp card you had.
That's stupid. A perl script can do that job. A perl should do that job. Instead of just working, my time is wasted, doing something that could just as easiliy been done by the machine.
The world doesn't work that way - if something isn't know to run on paticular hardware it isn't going to run, and if you are going to set up a system you have to at least make the effort of finding out if you have compatible hardware.
There's something wrong when you have to spend a week researching what chipset your card uses, only to find out that it comes in two different chipsets, one that's supported and one that's not. So you in the end you have to pick a card off the shelf, install it before determining if it's compatable or not. That's a problem. Simply saying, "that's the way is" doesn't make it right. The world won't change unless the community doens't stop lying to itself and realize the problem staring it in the face.
You don't have hardware problems under windows like you do under linux because drivers are readily available for windows. Windows also has good hardware detection and autoconfiguration.
I don't think you really find the mindset as a problem, the alternative is the mindset of instant gratification with no effort
No the alternative is allowing the user to actually spend his time working on his own tasks as quickly as possible rather than babysitting the machine. Using the computer isn't some hobby. It's a tool to be used, and the best tools are invisible. Unfortunately, we're a long way from there.
I suspect if you didn't want to spend the money or take the time in anything you wouldn't be in grad school.
The reason why I'm in grad school is because computers suck. I want them to suck less.