You're missing the point about an important aspect of oswd: Education. Think of the templates as an extension of basic HTML tutorials. A lot of people use oswd to get practical experience with HTML and CSS, "I wonder how he achieved this effect? Let's have a look"... This is also evident in the associated forums where the designers hang out to help beginners.
You may object that you can do this with every website already. Granted, but it's hell of a lot more difficult. some sites have really obfuscated code, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes because a CMS engine doesn't care. At oswd, everything is conveniently bundled (ok, ideally) in one or two neatly formatted and commented files.
Finally, think of situations like this: You're the poor webmaster for your workgroup or department. You're really a scientist/student, but you've familarized yourself with HTML enough to be picked by the PHB to do it. Now you can either put out a crappy site, or you can at least use a decent oswd design and customize it to your needs. Never will you have the option to hire an expensive freelance webdesigner!
Hendrik is a cool guy. I remember meeting him a couple of years ago because I'm acquainted with his girlfriend. When I asked him about his surely interesting job at Bell Labs, he told me that it really wasn't anything special:
"I basically just go through lots of samples of different materials, connect each one to electrodes, and see if it conducts. Nothing too exciting." I guess now I know what understatement means.
Did you read the original paper? The link itself is not very informative (*what* mathematical model?), I would therefore be pleased if I had access to the original paper.
-- TIA, Daniel
One problem is of course that multi-discipline cooperation means hard work. Suppose Psychologist A suggests that the interface has to be changed in some way. This involves work on the side of the programmer.
The question is: Why should the programmer do that extra work despite the fact that he himself operates very nicely with the existing interface? He does not get paid for this, he does not benefit personally from this, it was not his idea, the work is not intellectually challenging. Why should he care?
So the factor of motivation comes into play. Concerning commercial software, there is money and perhaps the PHB to obey. But where is the motivation coming from in OSS projects? And does it suffice to do boring work for the sake of success among users who normally don't interest you?
In commercial environments, it is often the task of Psychologists to evaluate man-machine interfaces and user interaction with software. The topic of software usability is indeed not only a part of CS education but of Psychology education, as well, because many important psychological factors are involved, e.g. perception, motivation, learning etc.
As CS students / graduates seem to contribute much to OSS, why not try to cooperate with Psychology students in order to establish GUI / CLI evaluation projects. The students could work on real world problems, the user-friendliness of the software might benefit.
As mentioned above, this seems to work in departments of CS and Physics, so it might be worth trying.
With version 4.20 Pine actually supports filtering (but there's procmail anyway) and user-defined colors just well. Still no split-screen and threading, so Mutt's still #1.
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You're missing the point about an important aspect of oswd: Education. Think of the templates as an extension of basic HTML tutorials. A lot of people use oswd to get practical experience with HTML and CSS, "I wonder how he achieved this effect? Let's have a look"... This is also evident in the associated forums where the designers hang out to help beginners.
You may object that you can do this with every website already. Granted, but it's hell of a lot more difficult. some sites have really obfuscated code, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes because a CMS engine doesn't care. At oswd, everything is conveniently bundled (ok, ideally) in one or two neatly formatted and commented files.
Finally, think of situations like this: You're the poor webmaster for your workgroup or department. You're really a scientist/student, but you've familarized yourself with HTML enough to be picked by the PHB to do it. Now you can either put out a crappy site, or you can at least use a decent oswd design and customize it to your needs. Never will you have the option to hire an expensive freelance webdesigner!
Hendrik is a cool guy. I remember meeting him a couple of years ago because I'm acquainted with his girlfriend. When I asked him about his surely interesting job at Bell Labs, he told me that it really wasn't anything special:
"I basically just go through lots of samples of different materials, connect each one to electrodes, and see if it conducts. Nothing too exciting." I guess now I know what understatement means.
Works for me: External ZIP100 USB. Don't know about corruption problems since I haven't tested it extensively.
Did you read the original paper? The link itself is not very informative (*what* mathematical model?), I would therefore be pleased if I had access to the original paper. -- TIA, Daniel
One problem is of course that multi-discipline cooperation means hard work. Suppose Psychologist A suggests that the interface has to be changed in some way. This involves work on the side of the programmer.
The question is: Why should the programmer do that extra work despite the fact that he himself operates very nicely with the existing interface? He does not get paid for this, he does not benefit personally from this, it was not his idea, the work is not intellectually challenging. Why should he care?
So the factor of motivation comes into play. Concerning commercial software, there is money and perhaps the PHB to obey. But where is the motivation coming from in OSS projects? And does it suffice to do boring work for the sake of success among users who normally don't interest you?
I think this is a problem that has to be solved.
In commercial environments, it is often the task of Psychologists to evaluate man-machine interfaces and user interaction with software. The topic of software usability is indeed not only a part of CS education but of Psychology education, as well, because many important psychological factors are involved, e.g. perception, motivation, learning etc.
As CS students / graduates seem to contribute much to OSS, why not try to cooperate with Psychology students in order to establish GUI / CLI evaluation projects. The students could work on real world problems, the user-friendliness of the software might benefit.
As mentioned above, this seems to work in departments of CS and Physics, so it might be worth trying.
> can you even set up filters in PINE?
With version 4.20 Pine actually supports filtering (but there's procmail anyway) and user-defined colors just well. Still no split-screen and threading, so Mutt's still #1.