"Since I am the only guy with Linux experience I would have to support the Linux installations. Now the problem is what works perfectly fine for me may be a horrible experience for some of my coworkers, and even if they would only be using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice I don't know if I could seriously recommend using Linux as a desktop OS in a business. Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it. The test machine should be as easy and painless to use as possible and not look too different compared to Windows. Which distro and what configuration should I choose for this demo box?"
What you are describing is an impromptu usability test. And that's a good thing to do, especially if you are planning to recommend a particular desktop environment.
But what you need to start with is applications. Running Linux on the desktop is great (I do it at work and at home) but if you have users who need to run Photoshop, or a Windows IDE, or some particular finance application, it's going to be awfully hard to do that on Linux. But let's say your organization has all your applications in the Cloud or on an internally-hosted web application server, and these web applications run fine in Chrome or Firefox. That's a different story. But my guess is that you'll have at least a few programs that require running on the desktop.
My recommendation would be to find interested groups who'd like to try Linux on the desktop, and start there. Make it a pilot project. Take it slow, and meet with someone from that group daily to make sure you're addressing any pain points that come up. Things you'll want to watch out for are shared storage (like on a file server) and printing.
I've been part of Slashdot for a little longer than that. I for one can't wait for Slashdot Beta to go live this month! I'll save so much time in my day by not going to Slashdot anymore.
Beta is unusable. Once Beta goes live, I quit. I'm moving on.
I like to find leadership lessons from unusual places too. I occasionally write about them on my blog. This year, that included IT leadership lessons from Zombies, and leadership lessons from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic! Coaching Buttons blog:-)
Sad thing is, much of the behavior one sees out of federal contracts is due to taxpayer groups demanding anti-corruption measures. A great deal of the bureaucracy comes directly from people complaining about waste and demanding a complex audible process.
*auditable
I'm going to assume that was an autocorrect error on your post.
Man, I hope they don't close Best Buy. That's where I try out stuff before I go buy it on Amazon.
Sure, Best Buy has been close on price for a few items, but I really don't like getting my bag searched on the way out. I'll try out the stuff that's there, but I won't spend my money there.
1. I have a 3G phone, but my service area only offers 2G. After loading your new site on slooooooooooooooooooow 2G, I'm not feeling very motivated to find a menu item to turn off images. I'll likely go to Google News - Technology section instead.
2. Your beta site clearly is detecting that I'm using a mobile phone, because it gives me a different top-banner than my desktop browser. But that icon that you pointed us to does not exist on mobile.
It's 2013. Supporting mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops should be a no-brainer. But the beta site looks pretty bad on mobile. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.
This layout does not auto-adjust to the width of the browser. It is responsive for smaller screens, but for large ones, it wastes space.
The beta site may scale down well for desktop browsers, but not for phones. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.
It's 2013, we must support mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops.
Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first...
That's an interesting UI decision. I would argue it fails the Obviousness criteria.
Here's an example: I use a laptop, with a 22" desktop flat-panel monitor as my second display. For me, it works well to run Chrome, GIMP, and other "large real estate" programs on the desktop monitor. (I run "small real estate" programs on the laptop display, such as Nautilus and Terminal.) GNOME presents the "Activities" action (hot-corner) on my laptop display.
So if my program is running on the 2nd display, there's no connection between the "menu" you describe and the program.
The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it
No, but I can only comment on the state of things today.
[...] for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in the process of being revised to meet new design guidelines. This process is not complete yet; until it is, you'll see inconsistencies between apps which have been fully converted, apps which have not yet been fully converted, and apps which haven't been converted at all.
(emphasis mine)
And I look forward to trying GNOME again when things are more consistent between all the applications. Until then, I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME.
Moving to Fedora 19 Xfce
on
Fedora 19 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.
Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example and instructions). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
The OP is an absurdly long and wordy essay/rant, and I didn't read all of it. Don't expect me to. (At 3,730 words after the "Read on," that's just into 5 pages if I load it into LibreOffice at 10pt Times New Roman.) But I can give Bennett one example where the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination is a good idea:
Q: "Where were you when you witnessed the murder?"
In this case, let's say the witness happened to be hotwiring a Mercedes-Benz on a dark and empty street - and saw one person rush out from an alley, shoot the victim right in the head, and run off. The whole thing happened less than 10 feet from where he was sitting inside the car. A perfectly valid witness, he definitely saw the murder (and murderer) even though no one saw him. After witnessing the murder, he called 911 from a nearby pay phone, then drove off in the now-stolen MB.
Without the 5th Amendment, the witness would be compelled to admit to committing an unrelated crime, so would self-incriminate himself.
In 1982, our dad bought a Franklin ACE 1000 computer (an Apple II clone) for us when we were in elementary school. My brother and I experimented with AppleSoft BASIC programming on that, and our parents also bought a book about BASIC. We mostly skipped the tutorials in the book, and jumped right to the reference section, figuring out things on our own by looking them up in the reference then trying them out on our own.
It didn't take very long to "get" programming. I think after a year of writing programs in AppleSoft BASIC, I was writing pretty advanced stuff. The SIN and COS functions were pretty hard to grasp until I had the math classes (years later) to understand them, but otherwise I "got" it right away. I remember writing several small programs, such as a number-guessing game ("too high" or "too low" until you got it right).
I figured it would be interesting to write computer programs that mimicked the computer displays from television and movies. So whenever I watched a movie or TV program that featured computers (and it was the 1980s, almost everything featured a computer) I tried to mock up a similar display on our computer at home. It didn't take long to realize that a special effects person was doing the same behind the scenes, rather than the movie or show using an actual program, but that didn't take the fun out of it.
In 1983, the movie War Games came out, and I decided I wanted to write the nuclear war simulator featured in the movie. It took me all summer, but I eventually wrote something that would draw maps of both the US and Russia, then let you select a few targets and launch missiles. The opposing side would return with a few missiles of their own. It even drew the missile tracks like in the movie. At the end, the program would tally the damage to determine the winner. (I think the "nuclear war is bad" message was lost on me at the time.) It was all in AppleSoft BASIC.
I used different versions of BASIC until college, when I learned my first compiled language. As a physics student, we needed to write our own data acquisition and analysis programs, so we learned FORTRAN77. It was pretty easy to pick up in class, since it wasn't worlds apart from BASIC. In the summer between my junior and senior year, I interned at a research lab. For half the summer, I took data. By the second half, they realized I was pretty good at FORTRAN, so they asked me to update a FORTRAN-IV program that analyzed ellipsometry data (precise optical measurements using a laser). I didn't expect this during my internship. I enjoyed it a lot, but learned to hate FORTRAN's computed GOTO.
After FORTRAN, my brother (a computer science student) introduced me to C, and I took to that right away. It was more powerful than FORTRAN, but still easy to write code. My brother taught me the basics of C, then I picked up the rest on my own through books, including Kernighan and Ritchie's book. And C really put me on the path to computing as a career.
In my experience, "Familiar" doesn't have to mean "Same." Using your example, iOS shares a lot of familiarity with MacOSX. The two environments aren't the same, but they aren't worlds apart either.
I think those two points are somewhat linked. You can lose a little bit of obviousness if it looks like something that already exists (Familiarity)... or you can lose a bit of familiarity if the system is dead simple to use (Obviousness). Gmail is one example that successfully balanced the tradeoff between Familiarity and Obviousness.
In one of my usability tests, I observed typical Windows/Mac users with average knowledge quickly figure out how to use most of GNOME 3.4 (Fedora 17) because GNOME 3.4 seemed familiar enough to Windows/Mac, programs acted consistently within GNOME 3.4, they could find actions in menus, and (most) application functions were obvious and had obvious effects.
I know it's bad form to reply to my own comment, but I figured it was better to make a separate comment about Xfce.
I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. After I installed Fedora 19alpha GNOME, I installed Fedora 19alpha Xfce, and it is much better!
From my open source software usability test last year, the four themes of successful usability were:
Familiarity
Consistency
Menus
Obviousness
While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation of Xfce is that it meets all four of these themes. The menus are there, everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the menus) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to the Aura window manager used in Google's Chromebook. It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
And of course, Xfce uses fewer system resources, so it runs very fast.
I installed Fedora 19alpha on my laptop the other day, and I have to say that Fedora's GNOME desktop has really lost me. I don't expect things to change in Fedora 19beta. In my opinion, the last usable version of GNOME was version 3.4 in Fedora 17. And that's barely usable, but things get better if you use some of the plugins.
Fedora 19 will include GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've noted elsewhere that GNOME 3 has poor usability. (My graduate thesis is on the usability of open source software.) The developers at GNOME have continued their downward usability trend, so Fedora 19 isn't getting any better. GNOME 3 fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: "Consistency" and "Menus". Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do. The Gedit text editor (which is also part of GNOME) still has menus, but the file manager does not. When you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
I've only discussed the file manager here, but I'm sad to say that this is just one example of poor usability throughout GNOME 3.8 in Fedora 19alpha. While some areas of the Fedora 19alpha desktop seem familiar, the environment contains many areas where I was left confused. Programs act differently; there's very little consistency. And the updated desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
The worst offender is the Fedora 19alpha installer itself. Maybe they fix this in Fedora 19beta, but I doubt it. Fedora used to have a very simple, easy-to-use installer. You answered a few simple questions using point-and-click or drop-down menus, then the installer did everything else for you. For example, let's say your computer was set up to "dual boot" both Fedora Linux and Microsoft Windows. Previous versions of the Fedora installer would give you the option to install over your previous Linux installation, or set up the install disk configuration yourself. The latter phrase may be more meaningful to someone with more technical knowledge, but the former is easily recognized by users of all skill levels to mean the same thing.
In the Fedora 19alpha installer, everything has changed. (Actually, I believe this changed in the Fedora 18 installer.) The installer now presents a yellow warning label that the disk doesn't have enough room. When I clicked into the disk setup tool, I was given the option to "reclaim" space, but I really didn't understand what that meant. There was no button or other option to "install over my previous Linux installation," despite the fact that this laptop only had Linux on it (an older Fedora 17 install). If I were a user with "typical" knowledge and "average" skill, I would likely be afraid to use this installer, lest it do the wrong thing.
The installer's progress bar is equally confusing. Usually, when a program displays a progress bar and a message to indicate the percent complete (such as, "Installing 50%") you might expect the progress bar to indicate the same "percent complete" as the text message. Not so during the Fedora 19alpha installation. The installer (Anaconda) displayed a message that it was installing system software, and it was "50%" complete, yet the progress bar displayed something like two-thirds complete. I quickly decided not to trust the progress bar. And it's a bad sign when your users decide not to trust your software.
We've thought about buying an iPad for guests to use, but decided it wasn't right to knowingly let others use a computing platform that may have been compromised.
If you're willing to buy a $499 iPad just for guests to use, then you'd probably be willing to buy a $249 Chromebook instead. It's a great second laptop, and perfect for guests to use. There's even a "Guest" account they can use, and it clears the data when they are done using it. And it's secure - which you want if your guests have "high risk computing habits."
I really like my X1 Carbon (it runs Linux just fine!) - and from the photos, the new T431 looks to be of a similar design. Basically the same keyboard, similar form factor, same hinge. The T431 trackpad is different of course, but the lack of buttons isn't a problem. I also have a Samsung Chromebook (the ARM one) and the Chromebook has a trackpad with no buttons. And I don't miss them. Neither does my wife. You can click the trackpad to select something, and use another finger to complete the selection. Think of starting the click with your thumb, and using your forefinger to make the selection. It makes a lot of sense.
So to answer the question: No, I don't think Lenovo is going downhill. If anything, I'd say starting with the X1 Carbon, Lenovo moved from making "sturdy and functional" laptops to "sturdy and functional and sexy" laptops. Even my Mac-fan friends really like my X1 Carbon.
I think ReadWriteWeb is just trolling a negative review in an attempt to garner page-views and comments from readers. The author admits he hasn't even tried the new laptop ("Fair warning: I haven't laid hands on the new ThinkPad") so this is a pretty meaningless article. Ignore.
The launch video I saw was a bit different from the one described in TFS. I think it was delivering the right message, just for the wrong reasons. It's not about being a rock star, it's about learning how computers work. I think it's a great idea to encourage more people to learn how to write programs. It doesn't have to be C or Scheme or Java, just something that helps them understand how computers work. Computers shouldn't be scary technology; anyone can learn to write a simple computer program. And I think once you learn how to write that simple program, you start to understand how computers do the things that they do. Computers become less mysterious.
I am an IT Director / CIO for a small liberal arts university, and I've discussed this issue on my blog about IT leadership in higher ed. What many of us in technology sometimes forget is that technology is fairly new to the workforce, and that includes faculty. Remember, the PC was only introduced to office desktops in the 1980s (unseen mainframes in server rooms don't count). If people enter the workforce in their 20s and retire in their 60s, that's a 40-year work generation. So computers have only been part of the workplace for less than a work generation. There are still a lot of people out there who remember doing their work without technology.
And faculty are less likely than, say, accountants to embrace change. Accountants realized that they could use the computer to add up the numbers and create a spreadsheet to track the income & expenses. People in sales used the computer to write letters and other communication. But for faculty, their job is teaching and for that they have relied on a chalkboard (or whiteboard) for pretty much their entire careers, going back to undergrad. Powerpoint was a stretch for some faculty, but Powerpoint isn't much more than a "captured" version of their whiteboard talk, so many faculty took to Powerpoint as a means of delivering lectures.
One of the faculty at my university often uses the phrase "Technology should be like a rock; it should be that simple to use." And there's a lot to that. Faculty want technology that is easy to use. They don't want to tinker with technology, they don't want to try the latest thing. Faculty only want technology when it supports what they need to do for instruction.
And that's where we in IT see things differently, of course. For us, technology isn't just our job, it's often our passion. We got involved with technology as a career path (programming, desktop support, server admin, databases, etc) because we were pretty much doing that already (building web pages, building our own computers, installing our own OS, etc) and what better job than to get paid doing what you love? So campus technology folks are going to gravitate to the latest technology: the Raspberry Pi, smartboards, video capture, and the like. And we get confused when the faculty don't want to use it, as TFA mentions.
Faculty will adopt technology when they need it to do the job of teaching. The article includes some quotes along those lines.
"I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it." What makes it easier for faculty to focus on teaching? Learning how to put a PDF on the web (or a course management tool like Moodle) when they've never done that before, or printing out a syllabus and asking the students not to lose it.
"What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper."
One quote that highlighted when faculty were interested in using classroom technology: "They're undergraduates - you need to attract their attention before you can teach them anything." Because that helps the faculty in the job of teaching students, which is the most important thing. In this case, using some technology in the classroom may help get the attention of students, which the professor says you need to do "before you can teach them anything."
I'd also remind anyone working in campus technology to remember three important questions when trying to effect change on campus:
We don't have cable TV where we live, but do have really fast Internet service. We watch shows on HuluPlus, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, etc using a Roku box. It's well below $100 and I highly recommend it.
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices. It doesn't make sense these days. What's better is to build a responsive web design that scales down appropriately to the device. Then we don't have to visit a separate website with different branding to get to the same content on a mobile device.
In a responsive web design, you might still choose to detect a mobile browser, and then set the comment browsing level to "5" or maybe "4". That's arguably the only thing you'd need to do that requires knowing the type of the client device.
I'd like to know how you got the idea to do the "Will it blend?" videos in the first place? As mentioned in the summary, it's one of, if not the greatest viral marketing campaigns of all time. Did someone at BlendTec just suggest out of the blue "You should do videos on YouTube", or were you looking for a new advertising idea and a clever marketer had this idea?
The summary gives the impression this is a patent, but the/. article title says trademark. Actually, according to the linked USPTO file, it's a service mark.
I had once considered applying for a registered trademark for the FreeDOS Project, just to protect the name. To be clear, a registered trademark is R not TM. But the Apple file is a service mark, or SM. To simplify, a SM is basically the same as a TM, but the understanding is a SM will be for a short term use, for various definitions of "short term" (usually a SM is applied to an advertising slogan, like Walmart's "Save money. Live better.")
First of all, to apply for either mark in the US, you need to pay a fee to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But even if you file, there is the issue of diligence. If there's a violation (someone uses that trademark or service mark without permission) the mark holder fails to prosecute or take action, the mark can be found in a court to be unprotected and open for use. There are other ways to lose a mark as well.
However, it is not necessary to register a mark with the USPTO in order to claim it as a trademark or service mark. The USPTO says any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO.
Owning a mark registration on the Principal Register does give you several things:
constructive notice to the public of the registrant's claim of ownership of the mark;
a legal presumption of the registrant's ownership of the mark and the registrant's exclusive right to use the mark nationwide on or in connection with the goods and/or services listed in the registration;
the ability to bring an action concerning the mark in federal court;
the use of the U.S registration as a basis to obtain registration in foreign countries; and
the ability to file the U.S. registration with the U.S. Customs Service to prevent importation of infringing foreign goods.
So really what Apple is doing here is registering the layout and design of their store as a service mark (an identity) so that if someone else comes along and uses the same layout and design, Apple can make a stronger case to sue them. The legal theory is that you could have looked up the service mark to see if someone else was using it so it's harder to defend yourself if you are found to be infringing. Not impossible to defend, just harder.
Companies do this kind of thing all the time. It just doesn't usually hit the news. Coke has a registered mark on the shape their bottle, for example.
This isn't an Apple patent, it's not an abuse of the patent system. It's just a service mark.
Slashdot Mirror
"Since I am the only guy with Linux experience I would have to support the Linux installations. Now the problem is what works perfectly fine for me may be a horrible experience for some of my coworkers, and even if they would only be using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice I don't know if I could seriously recommend using Linux as a desktop OS in a business. Instead I want to set up one test machine for users to try it and ask THEM if they like it. The test machine should be as easy and painless to use as possible and not look too different compared to Windows. Which distro and what configuration should I choose for this demo box?"
What you are describing is an impromptu usability test. And that's a good thing to do, especially if you are planning to recommend a particular desktop environment.
But what you need to start with is applications. Running Linux on the desktop is great (I do it at work and at home) but if you have users who need to run Photoshop, or a Windows IDE, or some particular finance application, it's going to be awfully hard to do that on Linux. But let's say your organization has all your applications in the Cloud or on an internally-hosted web application server, and these web applications run fine in Chrome or Firefox. That's a different story. But my guess is that you'll have at least a few programs that require running on the desktop.
My recommendation would be to find interested groups who'd like to try Linux on the desktop, and start there. Make it a pilot project. Take it slow, and meet with someone from that group daily to make sure you're addressing any pain points that come up. Things you'll want to watch out for are shared storage (like on a file server) and printing.
I've been part of Slashdot for a little longer than that. I for one can't wait for Slashdot Beta to go live this month! I'll save so much time in my day by not going to Slashdot anymore.
Beta is unusable. Once Beta goes live, I quit. I'm moving on.
I like to find leadership lessons from unusual places too. I occasionally write about them on my blog. This year, that included IT leadership lessons from Zombies, and leadership lessons from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic! Coaching Buttons blog :-)
Sad thing is, much of the behavior one sees out of federal contracts is due to taxpayer groups demanding anti-corruption measures. A great deal of the bureaucracy comes directly from people complaining about waste and demanding a complex audible process.
*auditable
I'm going to assume that was an autocorrect error on your post.
Man, I hope they don't close Best Buy. That's where I try out stuff before I go buy it on Amazon.
Sure, Best Buy has been close on price for a few items, but I really don't like getting my bag searched on the way out. I'll try out the stuff that's there, but I won't spend my money there.
2 things:
1. I have a 3G phone, but my service area only offers 2G. After loading your new site on slooooooooooooooooooow 2G, I'm not feeling very motivated to find a menu item to turn off images. I'll likely go to Google News - Technology section instead.
2. Your beta site clearly is detecting that I'm using a mobile phone, because it gives me a different top-banner than my desktop browser. But that icon that you pointed us to does not exist on mobile.
It's 2013. Supporting mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops should be a no-brainer. But the beta site looks pretty bad on mobile. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.
jh
This layout does not auto-adjust to the width of the browser. It is responsive for smaller screens, but for large ones, it wastes space.
The beta site may scale down well for desktop browsers, but not for phones. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.
It's 2013, we must support mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops.
That's an interesting UI decision. I would argue it fails the Obviousness criteria.
Here's an example: I use a laptop, with a 22" desktop flat-panel monitor as my second display. For me, it works well to run Chrome, GIMP, and other "large real estate" programs on the desktop monitor. (I run "small real estate" programs on the laptop display, such as Nautilus and Terminal.) GNOME presents the "Activities" action (hot-corner) on my laptop display.
So if my program is running on the 2nd display, there's no connection between the "menu" you describe and the program.
No, but I can only comment on the state of things today.
(emphasis mine)
And I look forward to trying GNOME again when things are more consistent between all the applications. Until then, I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME.
I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.
Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example and instructions). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
The OP is an absurdly long and wordy essay/rant, and I didn't read all of it. Don't expect me to. (At 3,730 words after the "Read on," that's just into 5 pages if I load it into LibreOffice at 10pt Times New Roman.) But I can give Bennett one example where the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination is a good idea:
Q: "Where were you when you witnessed the murder?"
In this case, let's say the witness happened to be hotwiring a Mercedes-Benz on a dark and empty street - and saw one person rush out from an alley, shoot the victim right in the head, and run off. The whole thing happened less than 10 feet from where he was sitting inside the car. A perfectly valid witness, he definitely saw the murder (and murderer) even though no one saw him. After witnessing the murder, he called 911 from a nearby pay phone, then drove off in the now-stolen MB.
Without the 5th Amendment, the witness would be compelled to admit to committing an unrelated crime, so would self-incriminate himself.
In 1982, our dad bought a Franklin ACE 1000 computer (an Apple II clone) for us when we were in elementary school. My brother and I experimented with AppleSoft BASIC programming on that, and our parents also bought a book about BASIC. We mostly skipped the tutorials in the book, and jumped right to the reference section, figuring out things on our own by looking them up in the reference then trying them out on our own.
It didn't take very long to "get" programming. I think after a year of writing programs in AppleSoft BASIC, I was writing pretty advanced stuff. The SIN and COS functions were pretty hard to grasp until I had the math classes (years later) to understand them, but otherwise I "got" it right away. I remember writing several small programs, such as a number-guessing game ("too high" or "too low" until you got it right).
I figured it would be interesting to write computer programs that mimicked the computer displays from television and movies. So whenever I watched a movie or TV program that featured computers (and it was the 1980s, almost everything featured a computer) I tried to mock up a similar display on our computer at home. It didn't take long to realize that a special effects person was doing the same behind the scenes, rather than the movie or show using an actual program, but that didn't take the fun out of it.
In 1983, the movie War Games came out, and I decided I wanted to write the nuclear war simulator featured in the movie. It took me all summer, but I eventually wrote something that would draw maps of both the US and Russia, then let you select a few targets and launch missiles. The opposing side would return with a few missiles of their own. It even drew the missile tracks like in the movie. At the end, the program would tally the damage to determine the winner. (I think the "nuclear war is bad" message was lost on me at the time.) It was all in AppleSoft BASIC.
I used different versions of BASIC until college, when I learned my first compiled language. As a physics student, we needed to write our own data acquisition and analysis programs, so we learned FORTRAN77. It was pretty easy to pick up in class, since it wasn't worlds apart from BASIC. In the summer between my junior and senior year, I interned at a research lab. For half the summer, I took data. By the second half, they realized I was pretty good at FORTRAN, so they asked me to update a FORTRAN-IV program that analyzed ellipsometry data (precise optical measurements using a laser). I didn't expect this during my internship. I enjoyed it a lot, but learned to hate FORTRAN's computed GOTO.
After FORTRAN, my brother (a computer science student) introduced me to C, and I took to that right away. It was more powerful than FORTRAN, but still easy to write code. My brother taught me the basics of C, then I picked up the rest on my own through books, including Kernighan and Ritchie's book. And C really put me on the path to computing as a career.
In my experience, "Familiar" doesn't have to mean "Same." Using your example, iOS shares a lot of familiarity with MacOSX. The two environments aren't the same, but they aren't worlds apart either.
I think those two points are somewhat linked. You can lose a little bit of obviousness if it looks like something that already exists (Familiarity) ... or you can lose a bit of familiarity if the system is dead simple to use (Obviousness). Gmail is one example that successfully balanced the tradeoff between Familiarity and Obviousness.
In one of my usability tests, I observed typical Windows/Mac users with average knowledge quickly figure out how to use most of GNOME 3.4 (Fedora 17) because GNOME 3.4 seemed familiar enough to Windows/Mac, programs acted consistently within GNOME 3.4, they could find actions in menus, and (most) application functions were obvious and had obvious effects.
I know it's bad form to reply to my own comment, but I figured it was better to make a separate comment about Xfce.
I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. After I installed Fedora 19alpha GNOME, I installed Fedora 19alpha Xfce, and it is much better!
From my open source software usability test last year, the four themes of successful usability were:
While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation of Xfce is that it meets all four of these themes. The menus are there, everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the menus) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to the Aura window manager used in Google's Chromebook. It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
And of course, Xfce uses fewer system resources, so it runs very fast.
I installed Fedora 19alpha on my laptop the other day, and I have to say that Fedora's GNOME desktop has really lost me. I don't expect things to change in Fedora 19beta. In my opinion, the last usable version of GNOME was version 3.4 in Fedora 17. And that's barely usable, but things get better if you use some of the plugins.
Fedora 19 will include GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've noted elsewhere that GNOME 3 has poor usability. (My graduate thesis is on the usability of open source software.) The developers at GNOME have continued their downward usability trend, so Fedora 19 isn't getting any better. GNOME 3 fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: "Consistency" and "Menus". Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do. The Gedit text editor (which is also part of GNOME) still has menus, but the file manager does not. When you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
I've only discussed the file manager here, but I'm sad to say that this is just one example of poor usability throughout GNOME 3.8 in Fedora 19alpha. While some areas of the Fedora 19alpha desktop seem familiar, the environment contains many areas where I was left confused. Programs act differently; there's very little consistency. And the updated desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
The worst offender is the Fedora 19alpha installer itself. Maybe they fix this in Fedora 19beta, but I doubt it. Fedora used to have a very simple, easy-to-use installer. You answered a few simple questions using point-and-click or drop-down menus, then the installer did everything else for you. For example, let's say your computer was set up to "dual boot" both Fedora Linux and Microsoft Windows. Previous versions of the Fedora installer would give you the option to install over your previous Linux installation, or set up the install disk configuration yourself. The latter phrase may be more meaningful to someone with more technical knowledge, but the former is easily recognized by users of all skill levels to mean the same thing.
In the Fedora 19alpha installer, everything has changed. (Actually, I believe this changed in the Fedora 18 installer.) The installer now presents a yellow warning label that the disk doesn't have enough room. When I clicked into the disk setup tool, I was given the option to "reclaim" space, but I really didn't understand what that meant. There was no button or other option to "install over my previous Linux installation," despite the fact that this laptop only had Linux on it (an older Fedora 17 install). If I were a user with "typical" knowledge and "average" skill, I would likely be afraid to use this installer, lest it do the wrong thing.
The installer's progress bar is equally confusing. Usually, when a program displays a progress bar and a message to indicate the percent complete (such as, "Installing 50%") you might expect the progress bar to indicate the same "percent complete" as the text message. Not so during the Fedora 19alpha installation. The installer (Anaconda) displayed a message that it was installing system software, and it was "50%" complete, yet the progress bar displayed something like two-thirds complete. I quickly decided not to trust the progress bar. And it's a bad sign when your users decide not to trust your software.
If you're willing to buy a $499 iPad just for guests to use, then you'd probably be willing to buy a $249 Chromebook instead. It's a great second laptop, and perfect for guests to use. There's even a "Guest" account they can use, and it clears the data when they are done using it. And it's secure - which you want if your guests have "high risk computing habits."
Hi. Can you add that note to the article summary? That should head off a lot of comments.
I really like my X1 Carbon (it runs Linux just fine!) - and from the photos, the new T431 looks to be of a similar design. Basically the same keyboard, similar form factor, same hinge. The T431 trackpad is different of course, but the lack of buttons isn't a problem. I also have a Samsung Chromebook (the ARM one) and the Chromebook has a trackpad with no buttons. And I don't miss them. Neither does my wife. You can click the trackpad to select something, and use another finger to complete the selection. Think of starting the click with your thumb, and using your forefinger to make the selection. It makes a lot of sense.
So to answer the question: No, I don't think Lenovo is going downhill. If anything, I'd say starting with the X1 Carbon, Lenovo moved from making "sturdy and functional" laptops to "sturdy and functional and sexy" laptops. Even my Mac-fan friends really like my X1 Carbon.
I think ReadWriteWeb is just trolling a negative review in an attempt to garner page-views and comments from readers. The author admits he hasn't even tried the new laptop ("Fair warning: I haven't laid hands on the new ThinkPad") so this is a pretty meaningless article. Ignore.
The launch video I saw was a bit different from the one described in TFS. I think it was delivering the right message, just for the wrong reasons. It's not about being a rock star, it's about learning how computers work. I think it's a great idea to encourage more people to learn how to write programs. It doesn't have to be C or Scheme or Java, just something that helps them understand how computers work. Computers shouldn't be scary technology; anyone can learn to write a simple computer program. And I think once you learn how to write that simple program, you start to understand how computers do the things that they do. Computers become less mysterious.
I am an IT Director / CIO for a small liberal arts university, and I've discussed this issue on my blog about IT leadership in higher ed. What many of us in technology sometimes forget is that technology is fairly new to the workforce, and that includes faculty. Remember, the PC was only introduced to office desktops in the 1980s (unseen mainframes in server rooms don't count). If people enter the workforce in their 20s and retire in their 60s, that's a 40-year work generation. So computers have only been part of the workplace for less than a work generation. There are still a lot of people out there who remember doing their work without technology.
And faculty are less likely than, say, accountants to embrace change. Accountants realized that they could use the computer to add up the numbers and create a spreadsheet to track the income & expenses. People in sales used the computer to write letters and other communication. But for faculty, their job is teaching and for that they have relied on a chalkboard (or whiteboard) for pretty much their entire careers, going back to undergrad. Powerpoint was a stretch for some faculty, but Powerpoint isn't much more than a "captured" version of their whiteboard talk, so many faculty took to Powerpoint as a means of delivering lectures.
One of the faculty at my university often uses the phrase "Technology should be like a rock; it should be that simple to use." And there's a lot to that. Faculty want technology that is easy to use. They don't want to tinker with technology, they don't want to try the latest thing. Faculty only want technology when it supports what they need to do for instruction.
And that's where we in IT see things differently, of course. For us, technology isn't just our job, it's often our passion. We got involved with technology as a career path (programming, desktop support, server admin, databases, etc) because we were pretty much doing that already (building web pages, building our own computers, installing our own OS, etc) and what better job than to get paid doing what you love? So campus technology folks are going to gravitate to the latest technology: the Raspberry Pi, smartboards, video capture, and the like. And we get confused when the faculty don't want to use it, as TFA mentions.
Faculty will adopt technology when they need it to do the job of teaching. The article includes some quotes along those lines.
"I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it." What makes it easier for faculty to focus on teaching? Learning how to put a PDF on the web (or a course management tool like Moodle) when they've never done that before, or printing out a syllabus and asking the students not to lose it.
"What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper."
One quote that highlighted when faculty were interested in using classroom technology: "They're undergraduates - you need to attract their attention before you can teach them anything." Because that helps the faculty in the job of teaching students, which is the most important thing. In this case, using some technology in the classroom may help get the attention of students, which the professor says you need to do "before you can teach them anything."
I'd also remind anyone working in campus technology to remember three important questions when trying to effect change on campus:
We don't have cable TV where we live, but do have really fast Internet service. We watch shows on HuluPlus, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, etc using a Roku box. It's well below $100 and I highly recommend it.
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices. It doesn't make sense these days. What's better is to build a responsive web design that scales down appropriately to the device. Then we don't have to visit a separate website with different branding to get to the same content on a mobile device.
In a responsive web design, you might still choose to detect a mobile browser, and then set the comment browsing level to "5" or maybe "4". That's arguably the only thing you'd need to do that requires knowing the type of the client device.
I'd like to know how you got the idea to do the "Will it blend?" videos in the first place? As mentioned in the summary, it's one of, if not the greatest viral marketing campaigns of all time. Did someone at BlendTec just suggest out of the blue "You should do videos on YouTube", or were you looking for a new advertising idea and a clever marketer had this idea?
Love the videos, by they way.
The summary gives the impression this is a patent, but the /. article title says trademark. Actually, according to the linked USPTO file, it's a service mark.
I had once considered applying for a registered trademark for the FreeDOS Project, just to protect the name. To be clear, a registered trademark is R not TM. But the Apple file is a service mark, or SM. To simplify, a SM is basically the same as a TM, but the understanding is a SM will be for a short term use, for various definitions of "short term" (usually a SM is applied to an advertising slogan, like Walmart's "Save money. Live better.")
First of all, to apply for either mark in the US, you need to pay a fee to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). But even if you file, there is the issue of diligence. If there's a violation (someone uses that trademark or service mark without permission) the mark holder fails to prosecute or take action, the mark can be found in a court to be unprotected and open for use. There are other ways to lose a mark as well.
However, it is not necessary to register a mark with the USPTO in order to claim it as a trademark or service mark. The USPTO says any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO.
Owning a mark registration on the Principal Register does give you several things:
So really what Apple is doing here is registering the layout and design of their store as a service mark (an identity) so that if someone else comes along and uses the same layout and design, Apple can make a stronger case to sue them. The legal theory is that you could have looked up the service mark to see if someone else was using it so it's harder to defend yourself if you are found to be infringing. Not impossible to defend, just harder.
Companies do this kind of thing all the time. It just doesn't usually hit the news. Coke has a registered mark on the shape their bottle, for example.
This isn't an Apple patent, it's not an abuse of the patent system. It's just a service mark.