This is something I've heard *way* too many times.
Of course (to use your phrasing) computers need to be dumbed down. There's way too much complexity that the computer really should be handling, and not the user. And I don't just mean in linux, either. Windows (and to a lesser extent, Mac OS) is almost as bad - it just puts a thin veneer of user-friendliness over the whole mess.
In Linux, to access the files on an unmounted partition, you need to know a) the syntax of the mount command or the/etc/fstab file, b) where exactly the partition or drive is, c) whether the drive the partition is on is SCSI or IDE, d) how to figure out the device name based on where the partition is on the drive and what type of drive, and e) what filesystem the partition is formatted in.
Okay. If you run fdisk, it's easy to see that linux knows what partitions are on your system and what filesystem they're in! Who is served by telling the OS information it *already knows*?
Ease of use does not imply instability, or lack of security, or proprietary BS that makes life hard for everyone else (like, say, Outlook stationery or Word 2000). It just so happens that UNIX users and vendors haven't cared about ease of use, and Microsoft and Apple haven't really cared about stability or security.
A kind soul has posted the URL to the setup program on the ftp site, so this post is kinda beside the point, but.. the biggest thing I can't stand about those installers is that they don't tell you where they're saving the files.
I like downloading something once and only once. This is why I download the whole 35+ MB Windows NT service pack, and this is why I choose download only when downloading IE. Then I can save it in my Downloads folder, and if I reinstall the OS or if my system gets hosed, I don't have to re-download.
If you want to use a cute toy OS that crashes constantly and manages memory like Krusty the Clown manages money, then go buy a Mac. Along with the OS, you'll get a proprietary box that is bound to clash with the color scheme of your home or office.
If you want to use a bloated OS with the esthetic charm of a circa '75 Chevy station wagon* and the rock-solid stability of the Jell-O (tm) family of products, then by all means install Windows. A good reason to upgrade to Windows 2000 is the new blue screen of death - it's really, really pretty!
If you enjoy reading through page after page of badly written documentation and editing cryptic files in order to perform trivial tasks, then Linux, FreeBSD, or any other UNIX would be the OS for you. A longing to learn new keyboard shortcuts for every application is also helpful.
I use a Mac and a Windows NT box at work, and Windows 2000 and Linux at home. They all have their advantages, and they all have their disadvantages. There is no one perfect OS yet. The Holy Grail would be an OS with wide application support, rock-solid stability, a short learning curve, easy maintenance and troubleshooting, and extreme flexibility, but we're not there yet.
* Yes, as a matter of fact I did rip that off from Neal Stephenson.
Currently, most software seems to be aimed either at novice users or at expert users. A good example is Microsoft Publisher vs. Quark XPress. Publisher is almost impossible for an expert to use; Quark XPress is almost impossible for a novice to use.
Do you think there is any way, in the same interface, to accomodate the needs of both expert and novice users?
Adobe Photoshop gives the user three different interfaces for a similar task: the brightness/contrast dialog, the levels dialog, and the curves dialog. All three make global changes to the amount of detail in an image, with the curves dialog being the most powerful and the least intuitive, and the brightness/contrast being the least powerful and the most intuitive.
Microsoft Office 2000 hides menu items that it thinks you don't need, and hides toolbars until you tell the program to display them or until you start on a task that uses one of those toolbars.
Do you think either approach makes sense? Do you think that the needs of novice and expert users are so fundamentally different that it's best that the two groups use different pieces of software?
[ As an added bonus, I have TeX input files that I wrote in 1988 that still compile today. That's older than some/. readers! Word 97 can't even read Word 6.0 files. ]
Neal Stephenson talks about this very problem in his In the Beginning Was the Command Line essay on www.cryptonomicon.com. He and I made the same choice - I went through all of the fiction I wrote in Word, along with my journal and other stuff, and saved every last bit of it as ASCII text.
Unfortunately, file format rot will probably always be with us. I think that most developers think of file formats as intellectual property - if another program can read their files flawlessly, it's much easier for someone to switch to that other program, hence the user is locked in.
I just discovered PageMaker's tagged text function. It's basically PageMaker's own markup language - you can import and export ASCII text with its formatting codes embedded. And it is *nice* - I love being able to automatically format huge chunks of text using Perl scripts. So I keep telling myself I'm going to learn how to use TeX - I'm beginning to understand why people use something non-WYSIWIG.
Off-topic a bit, but - just to bash Word, Word can't even retain formatting moving from one computer to another. I'm the desktop publisher at a print shop, and Word files have to be proofed much more carefully than anything else (except for Publisher files). Text gets shifted from page to page, margins change - just selecting a different printer on the same computer causes text to reflow.
One day the mouse stopped working on the NT Server at work. So I went into the devices control panel, selected mouse class driver, and clicked on (er, typed the keyboard shortcut equivalent to clicking on) the Start button, and got the error message 'The service could not be started because the specified file could not be found.'
Er, which file, exactly, is that?
Almost as clear as my personal favorite, 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.'
Funny - this is pretty close to what I do now to maintain my system. The difference is that I've decided that a really long-ass $PATH and a really long/etc/ld.so.conf is not such a bad thing.
So, if you wander into my/usr/Applications directory, you'll find a directory named Netscape-4.7 and one named Netscape-4.5, and a symbolic link to Netscape-4.7 named (amazingly enough) Netscape.
/usr/Applications/Netscape is part of my $PATH; the two directories with version numbers in their name are not.
It makes it really ludicrously easy to back out of installing a new piece of software and go back to the earlier version - delete directory, delete symlink, make new symlink.
I've heard the criticism of coolbars (the flat buttons that raise when you move your mouse over them) several times, and the only time I've ever heard the criticism is from geeks.
I've never seen a novice user wonder whether that little icon is an icon or a decoration. And I think it's partly because it's become (relatively) standard on Windows apps to put the toolbar buttons under the menu bar, so little-pictures-under-menu-bar = stuff-to-click-on; and partly because at least some of the little buttons have words under or next to them to indicate what action will be performed (does an arrow pointing to the left with the word 'back' underneath really leave any ambiguity?).
Unlike the buttons on the Mac OS X titlebar, no information is hidden before mousing over. And actually, by appearing raised in a mouseover or popping into color (IE, Outlook Express), the user is given a visual cue that they are clicking on the button that they want to click on.
And a row of buttons which all appear raised adds unnecessary visual clutter - if you've ever seen Word 95's ludicrously huge toolbar compared with Word 97's ludicrously huge toolbar, you'll see what I mean.
I'm not sure I like the new UI terribly much myself, but there is a hell of a lot of impressive technology behind it. I'd have to actually use it to know for sure, but it looks like too much gaudy eye candy for my taste. I'm hoping there's a Platinum Appearance that one can switch to if one desires.
There's an article on ars technica that another poster provided a link to, which goes into all of the swank new technology behind the eye candy. It says that PDF is a superset of PostScript, which isn't exactly true. PDF is a subset of PostScript with some new onscreen features added like forms and hyperlinks. Eventually PostScript and PDF are going to be pretty close to merged - Adobe's PostScript Extreme engine is a PDF RIP (PDF to print, with no PostScript in between) and a PostScript to PDF converter.
There are a couple things about Display PDF that aren't mentioned in the article that are extremely cool. GDI and QuickDraw are the current systems for onscreen display on Windows and the Mac OS, respectively. On Windows or the Mac, if you copy anything other than text from one app to another, you are copying not the original file, but GDI or QuickDraw commands. And most non-desktop publishing apps use GDI or QuickDraw to print, which causes a couple of problems. GDI and QuickDraw are both RGB, which throws color off completely if you copy a CMYK TIFF from Photoshop into Quark or copy an EPS with spot colors from FreeHand into PageMaker. And GDI (and to a lesser extent, QuickDraw) is not at all friendly to PostScript printers.
PDF (as of version 1.2) understands CMYK and it understands spot color channels. PDF is friendly to non-PostScript and PostScript printers alike. Which means that non-desktop publishing apps will suddenly print much nicer to PostScript printers, and it means that copying and pasting from one desktop publishing app to another just may stop being the Extremely Bad Thing that it is now.
Oh, and because Mac OS X is based on NeXTStep is based on BSD, for the first time I'll be able to do my desktop publishing on a real OS. No more stopping to allocate more RAM to FreeHand or less to Quark; no more crash and reboot.
In the same way that I tolerate the bright gaudy blue of the G3 on my desk at work, I'll probably learn to tolerate the jelly bean buttons and the jewel-bright scrollbars of Mac OS X.
Don't get me wrong - The GIMP is a truly kick-ass program, and it is a step towards me never having to boot into Windows NT again.
But, alas - it does not kick Photoshop's ass. For print folks, the lack of CMYK and color management is the biggest thing that keeps The GIMP from being a Photoshop killer. Color management via device profiles is patented in the US, so I understand that they're trying to get some European developers to build color management for The GIMP. Also relating to print is the lack of the ability to create spot color channels, and the lack of a Pantone color library (which I can't imagine Pantone allowing to be bundled into The GIMP without the developers paying lots of money).
For web developers, there are all the lovely things that ImageReady 2.0 (bundled with PS 5.5) can do - image slicing, automatic generation of code for JavaScript rollovers, the 2-up and above optimization views (so you can see what your JPEG will look like before you save as a JPEG, right next to the original graphic).
Oh, and I sure do wish The GIMP could open my Illustrator EPS graphics. I tend to create images in Illustrator, then bring them into Photoshop or ImageReady for futzing.
Re:Random RISC OS trivia by an ex-user
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The ROX Desktop
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The.app format is a truly lovely thing.
I find it astounding that the default for RPM is to put EVERYTHING in the/usr directory, which is just one of the reasons I don't use it anymore. I have a folder named/Apps which contains separate folders (i.e.,/Apps/Mozilla and/Apps/WindowMaker) for each application and another folder named/Libraries which contains things like GTK and Qt. Considering that Linux doesn't have any of those obnoxious global directories like System Folder:Extensions or WINDOWS\System, I don't understand why this kind of setup isn't the default.
I resolve not to spend *all* my free time playing with Linux, or with Photoshop, or with Illustrator, or playing Quake, or doing any of the other massive time-wasters installed on my computer.
I also resolve to finally teach myself to program in C.
I further resolve to ignore the fact that those two resolutions are contradictory.
Underneath the gloss, Windows is an extremely difficult OS to use.
On Linux, I have never (okay, never after I stopped using rpm) had an install of one piece of software break another piece of software. I have never had a shared library conflict (again, never after I stopped using rpm). I have never had to troubleshoot my init scripts. I have multiple versions of programs and shared libraries coexisting happily. I have *never* had to reinstall the OS. If I did reinstall Linux, getting my apps back would *not* require reinstalling them. If I want to perform an action that requires root access, I don't have to log all the way out of X and log back in - I just type 'su' or click on the KDE Root File Manager desktop icon, and type in my password. And I don't need a GUI to administer Linux - when I broke X by, um, accidentally deleting the/usr/X11R6 folder (don't ask), I was able to download the latest XFree86 and install it, all from the command line.
I could go on and on, but the point is this - Linux is well on its way to being just as easy to use on the surface as Windows is, and Windows - well, Windows is never going to be as easy to maintain as Linux is right now.
Try adding "@ppp" to the end of your username when you log on.
I installed linux at a friend's house and got ppp set up. When I dialed in to his ISP on minicom, type the user name and password, you get a whole lot of garbage characters under the login. So, I thought, success!, until pppd wouldn't start.
For some reason, I decided to boot into Windows NT on his machine, and dialed in to his ISP using hyperterminal - well, it brought up a full color bbs screen (presumably the color escape characters were the garbage I was seeing in minicom) with no option for starting ppp.
He had some manuals for his ISP which he'd printed out in something like 1990 which said to type username@slip at the login: prompt. We then tried using username@ppp, and it worked.
Apparently this is somewhat common, as he didn't need to open a terminal window or use a dial-up networking script in Windows NT.
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This is something I've heard *way* too many times.
/etc/fstab file, b) where exactly the partition or drive is, c) whether the drive the partition is on is SCSI or IDE, d) how to figure out the device name based on where the partition is on the drive and what type of drive, and e) what filesystem the partition is formatted in.
Of course (to use your phrasing) computers need to be dumbed down. There's way too much complexity that the computer really should be handling, and not the user. And I don't just mean in linux, either. Windows (and to a lesser extent, Mac OS) is almost as bad - it just puts a thin veneer of user-friendliness over the whole mess.
In Linux, to access the files on an unmounted partition, you need to know a) the syntax of the mount command or the
Okay. If you run fdisk, it's easy to see that linux knows what partitions are on your system and what filesystem they're in! Who is served by telling the OS information it *already knows*?
Ease of use does not imply instability, or lack of security, or proprietary BS that makes life hard for everyone else (like, say, Outlook stationery or Word 2000). It just so happens that UNIX users and vendors haven't cared about ease of use, and Microsoft and Apple haven't really cared about stability or security.
A kind soul has posted the URL to the setup program on the ftp site, so this post is kinda beside the point, but .. the biggest thing I can't stand about those installers is that they don't tell you where they're saving the files.
I like downloading something once and only once. This is why I download the whole 35+ MB Windows NT service pack, and this is why I choose download only when downloading IE. Then I can save it in my Downloads folder, and if I reinstall the OS or if my system gets hosed, I don't have to re-download.
Actually, every single OS out there sucks rocks.
If you want to use a cute toy OS that crashes constantly and manages memory like Krusty the Clown manages money, then go buy a Mac. Along with the OS, you'll get a proprietary box that is bound to clash with the color scheme of your home or office.
If you want to use a bloated OS with the esthetic charm of a circa '75 Chevy station wagon* and the rock-solid stability of the Jell-O (tm) family of products, then by all means install Windows. A good reason to upgrade to Windows 2000 is the new blue screen of death - it's really, really pretty!
If you enjoy reading through page after page of badly written documentation and editing cryptic files in order to perform trivial tasks, then Linux, FreeBSD, or any other UNIX would be the OS for you. A longing to learn new keyboard shortcuts for every application is also helpful.
I use a Mac and a Windows NT box at work, and Windows 2000 and Linux at home. They all have their advantages, and they all have their disadvantages. There is no one perfect OS yet. The Holy Grail would be an OS with wide application support, rock-solid stability, a short learning curve, easy maintenance and troubleshooting, and extreme flexibility, but we're not there yet.
* Yes, as a matter of fact I did rip that off from Neal Stephenson.
Currently, most software seems to be aimed either at novice users or at expert users. A good example is Microsoft Publisher vs. Quark XPress. Publisher is almost impossible for an expert to use; Quark XPress is almost impossible for a novice to use.
Do you think there is any way, in the same interface, to accomodate the needs of both expert and novice users?
Adobe Photoshop gives the user three different interfaces for a similar task: the brightness/contrast dialog, the levels dialog, and the curves dialog. All three make global changes to the amount of detail in an image, with the curves dialog being the most powerful and the least intuitive, and the brightness/contrast being the least powerful and the most intuitive.
Microsoft Office 2000 hides menu items that it thinks you don't need, and hides toolbars until you tell the program to display them or until you start on a task that uses one of those toolbars.
Do you think either approach makes sense? Do you think that the needs of novice and expert users are so fundamentally different that it's best that the two groups use different pieces of software?
[ As an added bonus, I have TeX input files that I wrote in 1988 that still compile today. That's older than some /. readers! Word 97 can't even read Word 6.0 files. ]
Neal Stephenson talks about this very problem in his In the Beginning Was the Command Line essay on www.cryptonomicon.com. He and I made the same choice - I went through all of the fiction I wrote in Word, along with my journal and other stuff, and saved every last bit of it as ASCII text.
Unfortunately, file format rot will probably always be with us. I think that most developers think of file formats as intellectual property - if another program can read their files flawlessly, it's much easier for someone to switch to that other program, hence the user is locked in.
I just discovered PageMaker's tagged text function. It's basically PageMaker's own markup language - you can import and export ASCII text with its formatting codes embedded. And it is *nice* - I love being able to automatically format huge chunks of text using Perl scripts. So I keep telling myself I'm going to learn how to use TeX - I'm beginning to understand why people use something non-WYSIWIG.
Off-topic a bit, but - just to bash Word, Word can't even retain formatting moving from one computer to another. I'm the desktop publisher at a print shop, and Word files have to be proofed much more carefully than anything else (except for Publisher files). Text gets shifted from page to page, margins change - just selecting a different printer on the same computer causes text to reflow.
One day the mouse stopped working on the NT Server at work. So I went into the devices control panel, selected mouse class driver, and clicked on (er, typed the keyboard shortcut equivalent to clicking on) the Start button, and got the error message 'The service could not be started because the specified file could not be found.'
Er, which file, exactly, is that?
Almost as clear as my personal favorite, 'A device attached to the system is not functioning.'
Funny - this is pretty close to what I do now to maintain my system. The difference is that I've decided that a really long-ass $PATH and a really long /etc/ld.so.conf is not such a bad thing.
/usr/Applications directory, you'll find a directory named Netscape-4.7 and one named Netscape-4.5, and a symbolic link to Netscape-4.7 named (amazingly enough) Netscape.
So, if you wander into my
/usr/Applications/Netscape is part of my $PATH; the two directories with version numbers in their name are not.
It makes it really ludicrously easy to back out of installing a new piece of software and go back to the earlier version - delete directory, delete symlink, make new symlink.
I've heard the criticism of coolbars (the flat buttons that raise when you move your mouse over them) several times, and the only time I've ever heard the criticism is from geeks.
I've never seen a novice user wonder whether that little icon is an icon or a decoration. And I think it's partly because it's become (relatively) standard on Windows apps to put the toolbar buttons under the menu bar, so little-pictures-under-menu-bar = stuff-to-click-on; and partly because at least some of the little buttons have words under or next to them to indicate what action will be performed (does an arrow pointing to the left with the word 'back' underneath really leave any ambiguity?).
Unlike the buttons on the Mac OS X titlebar, no information is hidden before mousing over. And actually, by appearing raised in a mouseover or popping into color (IE, Outlook Express), the user is given a visual cue that they are clicking on the button that they want to click on.
And a row of buttons which all appear raised adds unnecessary visual clutter - if you've ever seen Word 95's ludicrously huge toolbar compared with Word 97's ludicrously huge toolbar, you'll see what I mean.
I'm not sure I like the new UI terribly much myself, but there is a hell of a lot of impressive technology behind it. I'd have to actually use it to know for sure, but it looks like too much gaudy eye candy for my taste. I'm hoping there's a Platinum Appearance that one can switch to if one desires.
There's an article on ars technica that another poster provided a link to, which goes into all of the swank new technology behind the eye candy. It says that PDF is a superset of PostScript, which isn't exactly true. PDF is a subset of PostScript with some new onscreen features added like forms and hyperlinks. Eventually PostScript and PDF are going to be pretty close to merged - Adobe's PostScript Extreme engine is a PDF RIP (PDF to print, with no PostScript in between) and a PostScript to PDF converter.
There are a couple things about Display PDF that aren't mentioned in the article that are extremely cool. GDI and QuickDraw are the current systems for onscreen display on Windows and the Mac OS, respectively. On Windows or the Mac, if you copy anything other than text from one app to another, you are copying not the original file, but GDI or QuickDraw commands. And most non-desktop publishing apps use GDI or QuickDraw to print, which causes a couple of problems. GDI and QuickDraw are both RGB, which throws color off completely if you copy a CMYK TIFF from Photoshop into Quark or copy an EPS with spot colors from FreeHand into PageMaker. And GDI (and to a lesser extent, QuickDraw) is not at all friendly to PostScript printers.
PDF (as of version 1.2) understands CMYK and it understands spot color channels. PDF is friendly to non-PostScript and PostScript printers alike. Which means that non-desktop publishing apps will suddenly print much nicer to PostScript printers, and it means that copying and pasting from one desktop publishing app to another just may stop being the Extremely Bad Thing that it is now.
Oh, and because Mac OS X is based on NeXTStep is based on BSD, for the first time I'll be able to do my desktop publishing on a real OS. No more stopping to allocate more RAM to FreeHand or less to Quark; no more crash and reboot.
In the same way that I tolerate the bright gaudy blue of the G3 on my desk at work, I'll probably learn to tolerate the jelly bean buttons and the jewel-bright scrollbars of Mac OS X.
Don't get me wrong - The GIMP is a truly kick-ass program, and it is a step towards me never having to boot into Windows NT again.
But, alas - it does not kick Photoshop's ass. For print folks, the lack of CMYK and color management is the biggest thing that keeps The GIMP from being a Photoshop killer. Color management via device profiles is patented in the US, so I understand that they're trying to get some European developers to build color management for The GIMP. Also relating to print is the lack of the ability to create spot color channels, and the lack of a Pantone color library (which I can't imagine Pantone allowing to be bundled into The GIMP without the developers paying lots of money).
For web developers, there are all the lovely things that ImageReady 2.0 (bundled with PS 5.5) can do - image slicing, automatic generation of code for JavaScript rollovers, the 2-up and above optimization views (so you can see what your JPEG will look like before you save as a JPEG, right next to the original graphic).
Oh, and I sure do wish The GIMP could open my Illustrator EPS graphics. I tend to create images in Illustrator, then bring them into Photoshop or ImageReady for futzing.
The .app format is a truly lovely thing.
/usr directory, which is just one of the reasons I don't use it anymore. I have a folder named /Apps which contains separate folders (i.e., /Apps/Mozilla and /Apps/WindowMaker) for each application and another folder named /Libraries which contains things like GTK and Qt. Considering that Linux doesn't have any of those obnoxious global directories like System Folder:Extensions or WINDOWS\System, I don't understand why this kind of setup isn't the default.
I find it astounding that the default for RPM is to put EVERYTHING in the
I resolve not to spend *all* my free time playing with Linux, or with Photoshop, or with Illustrator, or playing Quake, or doing any of the other massive time-wasters installed on my computer.
I also resolve to finally teach myself to program in C.
I further resolve to ignore the fact that those two resolutions are contradictory.
Underneath the gloss, Windows is an extremely difficult OS to use.
/usr/X11R6 folder (don't ask), I was able to download the latest XFree86 and install it, all from the command line.
On Linux, I have never (okay, never after I stopped using rpm) had an install of one piece of software break another piece of software. I have never had a shared library conflict (again, never after I stopped using rpm). I have never had to troubleshoot my init scripts. I have multiple versions of programs and shared libraries coexisting happily. I have *never* had to reinstall the OS. If I did reinstall Linux, getting my apps back would *not* require reinstalling them. If I want to perform an action that requires root access, I don't have to log all the way out of X and log back in - I just type 'su' or click on the KDE Root File Manager desktop icon, and type in my password. And I don't need a GUI to administer Linux - when I broke X by, um, accidentally deleting the
I could go on and on, but the point is this - Linux is well on its way to being just as easy to use on the surface as Windows is, and Windows - well, Windows is never going to be as easy to maintain as Linux is right now.
Try adding "@ppp" to the end of your username when you log on.
I installed linux at a friend's house and got ppp set up. When I dialed in to his ISP on minicom, type the user name and password, you get a whole lot of garbage characters under the login. So, I thought, success!, until pppd wouldn't start.
For some reason, I decided to boot into Windows NT on his machine, and dialed in to his ISP using hyperterminal - well, it brought up a full color bbs screen (presumably the color escape characters were the garbage I was seeing in minicom) with no option for starting ppp.
He had some manuals for his ISP which he'd printed out in something like 1990 which said to type username@slip at the login: prompt. We then tried using username@ppp, and it worked.
Apparently this is somewhat common, as he didn't need to open a terminal window or use a dial-up networking script in Windows NT.