I'm sure Microsoft has done a lot of usability testing that proves the ribbon interface is x percent more efficient and intuitive. However, in my experience, that just isn't the case. For us geeks, it's sometimes fun to explore a new interface and maybe it really is faster once you get used to it.
However, I just got back from my brother's and his wife's place where they had accidentally installed the new office beta without recognizing it as such. Both of them absolutely hated the new UI because it was different and nothing worked the way they expected. And I agree with them. Something as basic is opening a file is completely unintuitive. You have to click on a weird shiny sphere to bring up something that resembles a file menu. WTF??
Some percent theoretical advantage is nothing compared to the hours or days of retraining that are necessary to switch to a radically different UI such as the ribbon interface. I don't have the patience for that kind of thing, and ordinary users that just want to get their work done even less so. Ironically, I just gave them Openoffice and it was similar enough to the old Word for them not to have any problems.
Use a chroot environment for x86. Then it'll work. Some distros also ship with the required libs to run x86 binaries out of the box, so you might not even need that.
No Sun Java (which is stupid -- they support PPC, UltraSparc, and Win64)
Does Java even run on 32 bit FreeBSD? Are you running the Linux version? Because Sun Java works fine on AMD64 Linux. I was running it on Debian a while back. Brings a nice speedup too. It was 300% faster running this simple puzzle solving program I made than the 32 bit JVM (and 32 bit OS) on the same machine.
If OpenSSH didn't exist, the ssh 1.3 source would probably have been picked up by GNU and we'd have free GnuSSH, without Theo's whining.
I'm sure you're right, it's not like we wouldn't have another SSH client, but would it be as good? The fact is that Theo and his team writes really good, really secure code. Someone who does security "for fun" is very rare and valuable. Most developers are quite naturally more interested in cool features than tedious code review.
That's not how it works. People do open source development because they enjoy it. Obviously these people liked working on stuff for OpenBSD and not for Linux. For whatever reason that's what they liked best. If they couldn't do that, it is far from guaranteed that they would write for Linux/*BSD instead. The prospect of writing for Linux might not entice them enough to bother starting at all.
Would all the KDE devs be Gnome/Fluxbox/XFCE/etc devs if KDE didn't exist? Not bloody likely. Programmer resources in open source can't just be shuffled around like that.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
What are you talking about? People use OpenSSH because it's by far the best out there. Nobody is locked into using it, the specs are open, anyone can code a replacement. It's just not easy to produce something of the same quality and security as OpenSSH. People are locked into Windows because of proprietary file formats and closed source applications; how is that in any way similar to OpenSSH?
But, like many celebrities, it's just never enough.
Sorry. CELEBRITIES? Hmm.. yeah sure, Theo is a celebrity. I'm sure he has paparazzi knocking on his door every day.
Sure Theo can be abrasive, but it's weird to see how gleefully people at the receiving end of his charity will attack him. It's always easy to be an armchair critic.
Yeah I think it mostly comes down to user perception. For all normal usages, all the terminal emulators are fast enough. I mean, what's the point of cat somehugefile? If you want to see the last few lines, use tail, if you want to look through it, use less or more, and if you want to search it, use grep. I can't really think of a scenario when you would want to just display a huge file on the terminal.
More important are things like startup speed. And now that I discovered yakuake ( http://yakuake.uv.ro/ ), I don't even care about that anymore.
Live.com, Microsoft's customizable search-oriented portal, has more than 3 million users and the second-highest Net Promoter score -- a metric showing how many users would recommend the site to others -- of all MSN.com properties
Are these 3 million users all high? Maybe I'm on some phenomenally poorly connected part of the internet, but I haven't even gotten live.com to complete a search successfully. Aside from that, most of the widgets on the main page don't load, and the one image search that worked only had 3 results. The page looks like crap on Opera (actually, it doesn't work at all as I just noticed), and behaves badly on just about every other browser (haven't tried IE). It loads slowly, and uses crappy non-standard interface elements to boot (that scrollbar! what the heck were they thinking?)
And these customers are going to: 1. Buy a Dell machine with Linux 2. Wipe the default linux distribution 3. Download and install a totally different distribution 4. Wonder why it doesn't work.
Bull. Customers that are not techies will stick with whatever is on their machines. They don't go around installing LFS and then complaining that their mouse doesn't move.
Am I completely out to lunch or could a 100% bug free e-voting system be written in half an hour and 100 lines of PHP?
I just don't get what the holdup is. I'll help out whoever wants to build one and write up the functional specs: 1. Present list of choices 2. User picks one 3. Present confirmation 4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.
You're absolutely right about the startup time being slow for Openoffice compared to MS Office, but the display corruption and the speed when openoffice is loaded is not normal. Yes, it's probably a bug in openoffice, but don't think that every install is like that. After it's loaded, Openoffice is quite snappy for me and there are no display artifacts. I've read that it depends quite heavily on the display drivers, as in bad drivers producing display artifacts. It's not an excuse though. Openoffice needs to clean up its act in many ways. (speed, 64 bit support, interface)
As the first reply already says, could you elaborate? Where's the link to the wishlist entry? Fonts seem to work ok here. Control center - Appearance - fonts. There are two other places you can adjust fonts, one is for the konqueror web browser, and one is the advanced editor kpart. Other than that all the apps seem to respect the overall font settings.
Smart for businesses with proprietary software images or special Linux needs
That's one hell of an advertisement. Basically they're saying "buy these things so you can wipe them out and reinstall your site licensed copy of Windows". It doesn't portray much confidence in the product.
Do you honestly think that your have to rate your music ever 4 minutes?
Well of course. Either you rate it at every song, or you rate your music in batches at a time. I don't think either is a good use of time.
Can't you see the versatility of this?
I can, I just don't think it's a good tradeoff. Too much time spent tagging for the time it saves me. Obviously you like things organized, and to you it is a good tradeoff, but for me, it's a waste of time.
It's just like all the image database programs. Sure, everytime I upload images from my digicam I could tag each one with the location, as well as people or places depicted in them. This would make searching for things a snap.. I could say "find pictures of my friend bob in switzerland" and the program would do it. But how often do I need to actually do that? For me, barely ever. So when I actually do need to find that picture of bob in switzerland, it might take me 5 minutes, but that's ok, since I barely ever have to do it. For me, it's exactly the same with music.
Magical solution: So don't fuck around with playlists and ratings.
Exactly. There goes the big so called advantage of iPod/iTunes.
You don't need to do tagging to use iTunes, although it's silly to claim you don't have time to rate music when you're already spending time listening to the music. It takes like three clicks on an iPod to rate something.
It's not silly to claim that at all. I don't feel like doing it, because when I'm listening to music, I'm usually either doing something else at the same time and don't want to be interrrupted, or enjoying the music, and don't want to be interrupted. So if I'm jogging listening to music, I should dig around in my pocket for my mp3 player every 4 minutes to rate a song? It's completely retarded. Who am I rating for anyway? I'm not a review service, and my brain does a far better job of keeping track of what I like automatically.
Yes, a lot of time that I'd rather not waste (or rather, would like to waste on relaxing things instead).
Actually, you love some and hate others.
Yes, I know the ones I love, and I delete the ones I hate. Why would I keep songs that I hate?
My tastes change over time, and more importantly, they change based on my mood. Sometimes I really like to listen to some classical music (while programming for example) so I would rate it highly. At other times I enjoy the occasional stint of death metal. A playlist with both of these highly rated genres is completely useless.
Thing is, I have used it, and it just isn't that special. The scroll wheel is ok, but I don't think its inherently superior to other interfaces. As for the "smart" playlists, I have thousands of songs.. When I'm listening to music, I want to sit back and enjoy it, not fuck around with my mp3 player every 4 minutes to rate the song I just heard. I also don't want to spend hours rating them one by one. It's a futile waste of time. I know in my head which songs are good, and I do a way better job of adjusting the ratings there in real time than the ipod ever will. The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching.
ioslaves in KDE. I don't know if it's an original idea (blah blah some company did it back in 1842) but it's damn useful. You can work on remote files in any KDE app as if they were local files. FTP/SSH/SFTP/Webdav, what have you.. No other OS does anything close. There are some lame attempts, but they are not nearly as seamless as in KDE.
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I'm sure Microsoft has done a lot of usability testing that proves the ribbon interface is x percent more efficient and intuitive. However, in my experience, that just isn't the case. For us geeks, it's sometimes fun to explore a new interface and maybe it really is faster once you get used to it.
However, I just got back from my brother's and his wife's place where they had accidentally installed the new office beta without recognizing it as such. Both of them absolutely hated the new UI because it was different and nothing worked the way they expected. And I agree with them. Something as basic is opening a file is completely unintuitive. You have to click on a weird shiny sphere to bring up something that resembles a file menu. WTF??
Some percent theoretical advantage is nothing compared to the hours or days of retraining that are necessary to switch to a radically different UI such as the ribbon interface. I don't have the patience for that kind of thing, and ordinary users that just want to get their work done even less so. Ironically, I just gave them Openoffice and it was similar enough to the old Word for them not to have any problems.
Use a chroot environment for x86. Then it'll work. Some distros also ship with the required libs to run x86 binaries out of the box, so you might not even need that.
Finally!! For the first time my broadcom wireless networking card works with the open source driver! Follow this guide and it's easy: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185174
No more ndiswrapper, and now I can use the absolutely amazing knetworkmanager!
No Sun Java (which is stupid -- they support PPC, UltraSparc, and Win64)
Does Java even run on 32 bit FreeBSD? Are you running the Linux version? Because Sun Java works fine on AMD64 Linux. I was running it on Debian a while back. Brings a nice speedup too. It was 300% faster running this simple puzzle solving program I made than the 32 bit JVM (and 32 bit OS) on the same machine.
If OpenSSH didn't exist, the ssh 1.3 source would probably have been picked up by GNU and we'd have free GnuSSH, without Theo's whining.
I'm sure you're right, it's not like we wouldn't have another SSH client, but would it be as good? The fact is that Theo and his team writes really good, really secure code. Someone who does security "for fun" is very rare and valuable. Most developers are quite naturally more interested in cool features than tedious code review.
That's not how it works. People do open source development because they enjoy it. Obviously these people liked working on stuff for OpenBSD and not for Linux. For whatever reason that's what they liked best. If they couldn't do that, it is far from guaranteed that they would write for Linux/*BSD instead. The prospect of writing for Linux might not entice them enough to bother starting at all.
Would all the KDE devs be Gnome/Fluxbox/XFCE/etc devs if KDE didn't exist? Not bloody likely. Programmer resources in open source can't just be shuffled around like that.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
What are you talking about? People use OpenSSH because it's by far the best out there. Nobody is locked into using it, the specs are open, anyone can code a replacement. It's just not easy to produce something of the same quality and security as OpenSSH. People are locked into Windows because of proprietary file formats and closed source applications; how is that in any way similar to OpenSSH?
But, like many celebrities, it's just never enough.
Sorry. CELEBRITIES? Hmm.. yeah sure, Theo is a celebrity. I'm sure he has paparazzi knocking on his door every day.
Sure Theo can be abrasive, but it's weird to see how gleefully people at the receiving end of his charity will attack him. It's always easy to be an armchair critic.
wildstoo -> WHOOOSH!
Since when does a chair go SPLAT?
Building a GPU is trivially easy relative to building a CPU
Easier? In some respects. Trivially easy? Not quite.
In contrast general purpose code has (on average) one branch every 7 cycles.
One branch every 5-7 instructions, not cycles.
Other than that, good comment, I didn't know about the (lack of) branch support in GPUs.
Yeah I think it mostly comes down to user perception. For all normal usages, all the terminal emulators are fast enough. I mean, what's the point of cat somehugefile? If you want to see the last few lines, use tail, if you want to look through it, use less or more, and if you want to search it, use grep. I can't really think of a scenario when you would want to just display a huge file on the terminal.
More important are things like startup speed. And now that I discovered yakuake ( http://yakuake.uv.ro/ ), I don't even care about that anymore.
Have a look at this: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1864 to see why this kind of performance test is largely useless.
Live.com, Microsoft's customizable search-oriented portal, has more than 3 million users and the second-highest Net Promoter score -- a metric showing how many users would recommend the site to others -- of all MSN.com properties
Are these 3 million users all high? Maybe I'm on some phenomenally poorly connected part of the internet, but I haven't even gotten live.com to complete a search successfully. Aside from that, most of the widgets on the main page don't load, and the one image search that worked only had 3 results.
The page looks like crap on Opera (actually, it doesn't work at all as I just noticed), and behaves badly on just about every other browser (haven't tried IE). It loads slowly, and uses crappy non-standard interface elements to boot (that scrollbar! what the heck were they thinking?)
I mean belly crawling gutter shit stupid
And these customers are going to:
1. Buy a Dell machine with Linux
2. Wipe the default linux distribution
3. Download and install a totally different distribution
4. Wonder why it doesn't work.
Bull. Customers that are not techies will stick with whatever is on their machines. They don't go around installing LFS and then complaining that their mouse doesn't move.
Am I completely out to lunch or could a 100% bug free e-voting system be written in half an hour and 100 lines of PHP?
I just don't get what the holdup is. I'll help out whoever wants to build one and write up the functional specs:
1. Present list of choices
2. User picks one
3. Present confirmation
4. Print paper copy for confirmation #2 and recount purposes.
You're absolutely right about the startup time being slow for Openoffice compared to MS Office, but the display corruption and the speed when openoffice is loaded is not normal. Yes, it's probably a bug in openoffice, but don't think that every install is like that. After it's loaded, Openoffice is quite snappy for me and there are no display artifacts. I've read that it depends quite heavily on the display drivers, as in bad drivers producing display artifacts. It's not an excuse though. Openoffice needs to clean up its act in many ways. (speed, 64 bit support, interface)
As the first reply already says, could you elaborate? Where's the link to the wishlist entry? Fonts seem to work ok here. Control center - Appearance - fonts. There are two other places you can adjust fonts, one is for the konqueror web browser, and one is the advanced editor kpart. Other than that all the apps seem to respect the overall font settings.
90% is about some minor functionality that this-or-that package doesn't have, 9% is about graphics design.
You forgot the inevitable and entirely useless "this is why open source/linux will never make it" replies.
From the Dell Precision page:
Smart for businesses with proprietary software images or special Linux needs
That's one hell of an advertisement. Basically they're saying "buy these things so you can wipe them out and reinstall your site licensed copy of Windows".
It doesn't portray much confidence in the product.
Do you honestly think that your have to rate your music ever 4 minutes?
Well of course. Either you rate it at every song, or you rate your music in batches at a time. I don't think either is a good use of time.
Can't you see the versatility of this?
I can, I just don't think it's a good tradeoff. Too much time spent tagging for the time it saves me. Obviously you like things organized, and to you it is a good tradeoff, but for me, it's a waste of time.
It's just like all the image database programs. Sure, everytime I upload images from my digicam I could tag each one with the location, as well as people or places depicted in them. This would make searching for things a snap.. I could say "find pictures of my friend bob in switzerland" and the program would do it. But how often do I need to actually do that? For me, barely ever. So when I actually do need to find that picture of bob in switzerland, it might take me 5 minutes, but that's ok, since I barely ever have to do it. For me, it's exactly the same with music.
Magical solution: So don't fuck around with playlists and ratings.
Exactly. There goes the big so called advantage of iPod/iTunes.
You don't need to do tagging to use iTunes, although it's silly to claim you don't have time to rate music when you're already spending time listening to the music. It takes like three clicks on an iPod to rate something.
It's not silly to claim that at all. I don't feel like doing it, because when I'm listening to music, I'm usually either doing something else at the same time and don't want to be interrrupted, or enjoying the music, and don't want to be interrupted. So if I'm jogging listening to music, I should dig around in my pocket for my mp3 player every 4 minutes to rate a song? It's completely retarded.
Who am I rating for anyway? I'm not a review service, and my brain does a far better job of keeping track of what I like automatically.
Yes, it takes time to rate them all
Yes, a lot of time that I'd rather not waste (or rather, would like to waste on relaxing things instead).
Actually, you love some and hate others.
Yes, I know the ones I love, and I delete the ones I hate. Why would I keep songs that I hate?
My tastes change over time, and more importantly, they change based on my mood. Sometimes I really like to listen to some classical music (while programming for example) so I would rate it highly. At other times I enjoy the occasional stint of death metal. A playlist with both of these highly rated genres is completely useless.
Thing is, I have used it, and it just isn't that special. The scroll wheel is ok, but I don't think its inherently superior to other interfaces.
As for the "smart" playlists, I have thousands of songs.. When I'm listening to music, I want to sit back and enjoy it, not fuck around with my mp3 player every 4 minutes to rate the song I just heard. I also don't want to spend hours rating them one by one. It's a futile waste of time. I know in my head which songs are good, and I do a way better job of adjusting the ratings there in real time than the ipod ever will.
The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching.
Xorg composite still crashes for me frequently.
As opposed to Vista, which is running stable and polished on your desktop?
ioslaves in KDE. I don't know if it's an original idea (blah blah some company did it back in 1842) but it's damn useful. You can work on remote files in any KDE app as if they were local files. FTP/SSH/SFTP/Webdav, what have you.. No other OS does anything close. There are some lame attempts, but they are not nearly as seamless as in KDE.