If nobody has access to your email address then they by defanition cannot spam you
Also by definition, nobody can email you. Not a great solution. And if you think you can keep it private by only giving it to select friend, you had better make sure none of them ever touches a Windows box, uses a CC instead of a BCC, ever uses a mail portal to check their messages, or does any number of things that can potentially put your email out in the wild. Anyone with a real solution to spam should be able to give back access of their address to everyone without concern.
From my read of their PR page about this, it sounds like something they entirely fabricated themselves to sell their software. There is nothing in the wild and no reports on respectable security sites, just Intego saying they "isolated" something and you should buy their FUD^H^H^Hproduct. As others have pointed out, a trojan is possible on any system if you can get the user to jump through elaborate enough hoops. So the next time you download an unknown MP3 (or whatever) file with an intact resource fork from an anonymous source and give it executable status so you can double-click it instead of just adding it to your iTunes library (or playing it in Finder with a single click in column view), be glad you also shelled out money to Intego so that you are protected from your own stupid and unnecessary actions! That it's come to this shows just how hard it is for anti-virus types to make money on the Mac.
No, of course not. And i'm not an enabler -- if you did the exact same thing these users did you'd also get these virus'.
That's kinda my point. Not everyone does that exact same thing, yet you charge them the exact same price as the people who do bad things. In that manner, you reward users who run insecure systems by providing them more services.
At any rate, offering a discount to non-windows users would be futile. We get quite a few calls from mac/lun1x users (since we always try to fix stuff even if we don't support it) and some of those linux calls can take years. Yes sir, i'll stay on the line while you recompile your kernel on a PII 266...:)
Again, if particular platforms are causing a support burden, you should absolutely charge a corresponding fee. If viruses are 15% of your total support time, don't ding the Mac and Linux users for it. If you wait for kernel compiles (which, really, points to a problem in support follow-up procedures), just ding the Linux users. In the end, costs for supporting all platforms is not the same, and if you don't reflect those factors in your pricing then it shouldn't surprise you that users don't get more clued in on the costs of running insecure systems.
If any of you put winxp on a machine (even with the firewall in xp enabled) that wasn't behind NAT/firewall it will get blaster/wachi/nachi in 10 minutes. There's litterally nothing you can do.
Nothing? Does your ISP offer discounts for non-Windows users? Do you charge more for those users who are taking up your support time? Don't blame them if you are an enabler of their bad behavior.
Ack! That all sounds absolutely *painful* to deal with. You're imposing the trappings of a 3D environment without showing any of the benefits. I pointed out that people like to "teleport" in 2D, and if most people had the ability to teleport in 3D, they'd eat it up even more because of the added dimension. In a virtual 3D world, there is no reason to take away the user's ability to teleport. Your setup seemingly forces people to suffer delays in both looking around and in moving around. Any information you present will likely be at least an order of magnitude slower than can be accomplished with a common 2D interface.
For example, say a friend on the system had a file they wanted me to look at. That's 3 quick operations away: click from my home directory to the parent, click from the parent to their home, and click the file. I may have to scroll down if things aren't immediately visible, but that is 1D movement, often with a hardware control to speed up the interaction. In your 3D system, I have to turn to the wall with the parent door and walk to it. Then I have to turn around and step back from the door I just came through so I can see all the other doors for user home directories. I locate the user in question and again have to walk to that door. Then, in their room, I have to locate the file somehow, again walk up to it, and perform some operation to select/open it. That'd be 2 seconds in 2D but more like 30 in 3D. Where is the advantage?
Now, users mostly work in a subset of directories. In a subdir of their home directory, there'd be a "links" directory which held links to their preferred locations and files, as well as a "cache" of recently-used ones. A shortcut to teleport there would help a lot, obviating the need for a lot of directory changes.
The funny thing is that here you are on to something, but you completely hand-wave it away because it has nothing to do with 3D directly. These this you are pointing to but neglecting are the real metaphors that will be used in the future for being better than the current file manager system. No, they don't need 3D either, but users will adopt them because they are a more useful way of dealing with files.
Part of the reason I like to look at game meataphors is they have to have a user interface that is fairly easy to pick up quickly and get at least somewhat productive in.
No, it isn't. You are confusing what is fun to use with what is productive to use. This goes back to human interface tests that show mouse operations were usually faster than command line operation, but the CLI seemed faster because you were mentally engaged in performing it. Likewise, a fun game is not a productive game. A "productive" game would instantly kill the enemy for you, a la aimbot. A productive game wouldn't have forward/backward buttons to move, it would just have a "there" button to teleport you to where you were looking.
Yes, frequently this isn't important, but given 3D it's easy to represent. And, as I said, we have hardware in our brains to extract information like this quickly.
No, our brains can extract import information quickly. You are instead presenting an environment full of a lot of unimportant information. That is going to slow the processing, possibly to the point of crippling it beyond a useful point. Just because you can represent things with load of eye candy doesn't mean you should.
Minimum number of polygons. Helps keep the speed up.
Again, wrong answer. If you're spending even a single cycle presenting useless information, you're spending too much. If everything is a triangle, it is just as useless as showing everything as a generic document icon. You have done nothing to show you're not completely wasting that extra dimension.
I prefer the command line for most things myself. But this would give newbies a
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance.
No, you couldn't. You make the same mistake that everyone who struggles with 3D makes. You go for the "oooo-ah" whiz-bang factor instead of the "oh yeah" eureka factor. You need to sit down and think about what people actually do with files before you bother to work out a better way.
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns.
Already a mistake, because you turn moving between directories into to moving between rooms. A directory is a virtual room such that you can "teleport" between them with a simple click. How are you moving between your rooms? Are you wasting the users time by turning that click into a tedious run?
The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket)
You go to all the trouble to add a third dimension and this is all you use it for? 99% of the time users don't care about that information. Even if they did, they're pretty much going to have rooms full of triangles. That's a total waste, and precisely why I say people need to come up with new and useful metaphors for representing important information the same way they came up with WIMP for 2D.
the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.).
All these can be represented in 2D, but most don't matter to user 90% of the time, too. Look at a current file manager and you'll see that what users mainly care about for a file is the name to identify it and the type (including the icon representation of same) to identify the application(s) that can use it. Size is secondary these days unless a maintenance task is being done. Permissions are likewise best kept hidden; users mostly deal with files they have permission to deal with.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
Whee! More garbage I have no interest in over 90% of the time. Please, please think about how to actually make a useful 3D environment before you go off and code it. The metaphors you have in mind are essentially useless given the resources it takes to render them. But make no mistake that it is the metaphors, not the hardware, that need to be improved before a 3D desktop makes any sense.
The game designers created a beautiful and consistent interface just for the game sake and I always wanted to have a real file manager like this. There's a screenshot gallery here, with sample screenshot from the VR UI.
Most of those make it look more like Microsoft Bob than any useful sort of file manager. In general, 3D doesn't have a foundation for efficient file management. Current 2D technology involves direct manipulation, and users will not be drawn to a system that makes you run around to do things. It might be cute in the short term for a game, but for a real system it will fly about as well as Bob did.
In fact, the VR Dock looks almost like a real Dock from MacOS X, introduced many years later. I wonder if Jonathan Ive played this game...
Only if he was Dr. Sam Beckett. The Dock in Mac OS X is a direct evolution of the one from NeXT (screenshot), which pre-dates the game. Ive did not work at NeXT. Ive further does industrial design, not software design. He's got a good eye, but nothing points to any relationship between any of the elements listed.
First of all how much more open can "we" be then to have ESR publicly humiliate CUPS developers? Is there some other definition of open you are thinking about?
How about the people who are called out openly admitting they have issues they're not going to address because there is no "geek factor" in it? More to the point, it should not be humiliating for software to not do something easily unless it made claims that something is easy to do. That is why CUPS is not at fault for the printer issues, but the fault rather lies in the general Linux community making claims that Linux is ready for the desktop. It's not. Stop saying it is.
Secondly do you or anybody else in the world think that if we were somehow more "open" the vendors would write linux drivers? How does being more open put any pressure on vendors to write drivers?
ESR wasn't having a driver problem. That is moot, though, because the issue is that the action of the community has zero to do with vendor support. It's the profitability, and if there was a profit to be made in the Linux market then vendors would be all over it. Apple usually shows a profit for themselves and their suppliers, and so vendors usually show support for that platform. Until that happens in the Linux market at the same level, everyone needs to stop saying Linux will crush the Mac on the desktop this year or next year or within 5 years.
From my perspective the only way hardware manufacturers will write linux drivers is if linux market share grows. The only way it can grow is if there is more hardware support. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Yes; thank you for admitting there is a huge problem in the fanboy predictions of a pending huge Linux desktop market takeover. Getting that admission is like extracting teeth, though, and that is what I mean when advocates need to be more open. A frank evaluation of the platform strengths and weaknesses is what is needed for people to actually see a Linux desktop market in the future.
Personally I think the problem will take care itself pretty soon. Corporate adoption of linux will grow, non us countries will continue to migrate to linux, hardware manufacturers will take notice, more drivers will get written, home adoption will follow.
Yes, yes, followed shortly by world peace and everyone holding hands singing Kumbaya. Because that is the way the world works, right? People can surely sit on their asses and their problems will take care of themselves!
It's inevitable. People are just impatient that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Rome fell. Is that the sort of inevitable conclusion you want for Linux?
It's not even a disagreement--it's just people talking past one another.
Wow, a clueful AC. You must be new here!:-)
I don't think there can be any honest dispute over the fact that if you include servers, Linux has already surpassed Mac in marketshare, and if you exclude servers, Linux is catching up rapidly.
I agree with that. The problem with that "catching up rapidly", though, is that Linux has a long, long way to go on the desktop. People around here don't see it, but in the bigger picture Linux hardly exists as a desktop market for hardware and software products. Because of that, many Linux advocates are becoming Mac advocates when it comes to the desktop, too, so I'm left to wonder for how much longer you can really say Linux is gaining in market share. It's still kicking ass in servers, which is where I mainly use it, but I would not bank a company on it for desktop applications.
Now Linux users have more than one good word processor, web browser, and e-mail client to choose from. They wouldn't buy commercial equivalents because they simply do not need them.
Exactly right. I laughed and laughed when people were trying to defend the lack of shelf space for Linux software by saying that it was because the free stuff they could download was so good. That was my point on why Corel is stupid for making Linux a target before the Mac! They would be far smarter if they simply re-branded distributions of free software (e.g., Corel's GIMP) and put it in boxes next to the hardware at Walmart or wherever they thought they would get sales. Yeah we know we can get those things for free on the Internet, but if Bubba is just picking up a computer for his wife's birthday, he wants something that works he can put in the cart next to it, not an instruction booklet no how to download the source and compile it.
But the real market lies in the rest of the world - you know, not America, but the place where 95% of the population live. Linux is BIG there. Your attitude of dismissal and denial isn't going to help in 5 years time...
I am just so sick of Linux users thinking they can sit on their asses and flip a calendar until some magical day when the world loves them all. Put your money where your mouth is is you're so hot for the product! Show yourself as something other than an AC and we can both work out an arrangement to put $1000 each into escrow and if in 5 years Corel has a profitable office suite for Linux you get a sweet new PC to run it on, and if not then I get whatever Apple is cranking out at that time. This is business I'm talking about, not some idle mental masturbation. As a business, I will bet against Corel every time. Don't mistakenly think that liking Linux means you have to support every half-assed company that claims they're supporting it.
If your target customer base could download just about any program you needed for free, as a software development company, why would you think that selling software that does the same thing would be a good money-making idea?
I'm not the one thinking of putting out a pricey office suite for a free OS. Ask Corel that one. You support my point.
Hardware? There is no such thing as Windows Hardware, so any PC hardware on those shelves is "Linux hardware."
You must not actually try to use Linux as a desktop system, then. Do you imagine you can just pick up any new gizmo off the shelf and it'll plug-and-play with Linux just fine? There are these little things called drivers that are a hit-and-miss proposition for Linux. Most hardware has Windows support straight from the manufacturer, but most manufacturers don't support Linux at all. Even Linux gurus lament about simple printer problems. Unless we're all open about these real issues so that they can be fixed, the platform won't actually be ready for the desktop any time soon.
I never see Mac hardware OR software in stores. That could just be because I am not looking for it, but there is certainly MUCH MUCH less of it, at least.
From a market share perspective, yes, you should expect to see 1/20th the Mac stuff you see of Windows stuff. The important thing, though, is that often time boxes with the Windows sticker have the Mac sticker as well; manufacturers support the Mac. Where is that elusive Linux sticker? If you really think you can claim there is a desktop market on par with the Mac, you need that kind of evidence. It's just not there. Sad but true.
Yes. Let's talk available shelf space for the boxes Corel expects to ship. Square footage for Linux office/productivity apps at every major store I visit is zero. Nor can I go into any of them and pick up a Linux desktop system, or find any hardware that is labeled as Linux compatible. Those are the "numbers" that matter to a business, not some guesswork statistics generated by Linux fans. You people are doing more harm than good, because every desktop tool that gets ported to Linux only to inevitably fail because there isn't a real desktop market means one less tool you'll have in the future when there is a solid desktop experience available. Stop being the platform that cries wolf!
The big difference is that the Mac-market gets smaller while the Linux market gets bigger.
Does it? The shelf space reserved for Linux hardware and software at Computer City doesn't seem to be growing any. Are you saying you know a lot of people who are going to drop $500 on Corel's office suite? Are you going to spend it?
China is looking at Linux, not Mac. In Thailand most computers are already preloaded with Linux, not MacOS. Munich is switching to Linux, not MacOS.
Good thing Linux provides great tools for localizing X11 apps for those custom foreign distributions. Oh, wait . . .
Also, just linking an app against winelib is much more cost-effective than having to buy new hardware and port it to some Mac-API.
Is that what you're looking for in a commercial port? A half-assed link to Wine and cross your fingers? You'd trust your business report or thesis to that? Cost-effective is not the big hurdle Corel faces. They need to address quality issues that killed them years ago. That's going to be expensive on whatever platform they target, and their best chance of getting money back is to target a commercial desktop. That's the Mac, not Linux.
Linux on the other hand, is seemingly poised for a significant boost in market share. So it could very well overcome mac in just a couple of years.
Want to put money on that? If you actually look at the market instead of being some doe-eyed statistics fanboy, you'd see Linux doesn't really exist as a desktop platform. I can't go into Best Buy and get a Linux computer and printer for my Mom to simply use. Yeah, I've set up Linux boxes for friends that get most things done without the hassles they had with Windows, but that is not the market that Corel needs for this move to make sense. Until you point to the people that are going to give them multiple hundreds of dollars, it's all just hot air.
PLus, there is a Mac version of MS office. On linux, they don't have to compete with that 1000 pound gorilla.
No, they just have to compete with the free OOo! As I said, Mac users are comfortable paying for things, and many have no love for MS and still remember WordPerfect fondly. Everyone seems to forget that the Mac is a commercial desktop platform where Linux is not. Add in the larger size as well and, despite competition from other commercial office suites, from a business perspective it makes far more sense to target a Mac before Linux.
Linux is on much more than just a mere "tens of thousands" of desktops. Based on it's growth, it is also expected to pass the Mac OS in user base this year.
That's all wishful thinking. I'd believe you if I could walk into a CompUSA and see Linux represented in any way near the way Macs are represented. Linux does not exist as a desktop. I don't care how many buddies you get together to sing the praises of Gnome and KDE; Corel as a business needs money to survive. Unless you can say right now you're willing to drop $500 on a Linux office suite, you do not matter to them. Now try getting all those buddies together and see how many will drop the cash. Not enough to make it worthwhile from a business perspective I bet.
Yea, Corel could do alot of good at porting Wordperfect to Mac OS X, but it would be halfway there by porting it to run on Linux anyway.
That is a common misconception. A fair (let's be honest, Corel has no history of ever putting out a good Linux app) X11 app makes for a real crappy Mac application experience. It is a huge mistake to target a commercial desktop app at Linux. They should, as I have argued, target the Mac so they have something of reasonable commercial quality to compete, and then use that code base to move to Linux. Even now, they admit they're only "testing" the Linux platform. Odds are they'll put out another crap effort and disappear just like they did the last time they "embraced" the Linux market. Save your money.
Yes. The only people unsure about that are the ones who are so deep into the open source community that they haven't come up for air in far too long. From a commercial market perspective, which is where Corel's concerns should lie, Linux hardly exists.
Now granted, this is a mostly a site for web developers. However, I still find these results interesting.
You shouldn't. You know they're skewed away from the desktop, so you have to reject them. A slightly more neutral source would be Google, and their last Zeitgeist shows Mac at 4% and Linux at 1%. I have no idea how they round those numbers, and browsers faking Windows is going to take different chunks out of both sides, but it's clear that Apple at least 4 times the Linux market, and I wager most of those Linux installs are for roles where lacking a word processing isn't a huge problem.
The problem is that those Linux stats are completely bogus. The Apple ones have to be reasonably accurate because it's a public company and has to file reports on its financial health. Linux number are just fabricated guesswork. A sanity check is simple enough, too: How big is the Linux section at CompUSA? If Linux were anywhere near Macs as far as desktop market went, there would be at least as much hardware and software on the shelves marketed towards it. That is not the case. Don't kid yourself; some of us geeks use it as a primary desktop, but that's about it. Everywhere else, and especially in corporate environments, it is used to run specialized, in-house software. The sooner advocates admit there is zero desktop appeal, the sooner they can fix that little Linux problem.
What I always found odd was the fact that WP hasn't been ported to the Apple Mac OS X environment.
It's not just odd, it's downright brain-dead from a business perspective. I say it every time I see a game get a Linux port and not a Mac port, too. The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it. It's easy to see that anyone who can be satisfied with a Linux desktop is also probably satisfied with available free office suites, whereas Mac users don't have the same choices in native versions and are further used to paying for such software. So, what, their master plan is to throw millions at something with a market that is maybe in the tens of thousands? This is just a stupid move, and someone at Corel should almost certainly be fired over it.
Maybe they could pay hot chicks to be waiting in a club, and the only way you can get experience . . . is to talk her into giving you a . . . Just think, for a . . . fee you could get interaction with a hot chi...
I don't mean to put a total damper on your pre-IPO frenzy, yet I cannot help but mention that prior art exists in the form of nothing less than the world's oldest profession. And a pimp's got a better business plan, too, because the chicks don't even have to be all that hot, and the "interaction" is way better than just silly game chit-chat.
However, imagine what you could do for yourself for that $100/hr. while you were doing nothing for the client.
What, like lose any semblance of a moral or ethical foundation in life? The client simply would not have been happy with me doing valuable stuff for myself while getting paid by them. I had a friend who stayed there after I left who got paid while windsurfing (client fully knew they were doing it), though. It's not like $100/hour jobs were tough to come by, either, especially when I know what I'm doing.
To be honest, your post just makes me cry.
To be honest, I understand why you'd have to post that as an AC.
The Chicago incident is sexual harassment whether the OP is male or female.
Yeah, but I expect most people would think it more . . . understandable for the harassment to be about sexual gratification rather than sexual intimidation. Unless the boss guy was gay, of course. Either way, the best thing to do is not move away, but to start making sudden movements and wearing spiked gear. You know, a solultion were you can say something like, "Oh, were those your nads I tasered? I felt something on my shoulder and thought it was a small rodent."
As for the Walgreens, hey, sounds like decent money for the work.
For the short term I, too, tend not to care what they ask me to do in the course of a job. But if I'm really interested in working in my field, there is only so much sit-and-do-nothing I can take regardless of the pay. I quit jobs in the middle of the dot-com boom because they wanted me to sit on my ass for $100/hour and I wanted to solve real problems.
In this case, I'd be referring to the 'she' in your example; if she feels nothing in return, has nothing to give in return, she's not going to love the fellow in question.
Again, you're talking about returns. That is a selfish love, if it is even love at all.
If you're watching a television show, and the TV show consists of an actor/actress of the appropriate gender looking right at you and saying 'I love you,' you're not going to be able to love her back, as you can't give of yourself to her. You can hate her, lust after her, be happy for her, cry for her, all sorts of things, but loving her would be very difficult.
I'm not sure what you mean by "give of yourself to her"; if you're just talking about sex then you've gotten off the real topic. When it comes to fictional characters being acted out, yeah, a sane person would not be able to suspend disbelief to the point where they have any real emotional ties to the character. That said, as another poster pointed out, it is easy to say that a character could be loved if they were real.
The main component of love is that *you* are giving, not that the person you want to love needs to give; this is the problem.
Where is the problem? If the presumption is that you can love someone based only on behavior provided through a video/audio feed, how does placing that within the context of a game create a problem? I really don't see what you're taking issue with.
That and the fact that love is one of the few emotions that requires interactivity. You can invoke amusement, anger, lust, contentment, joy, all sorts of emotions, in a passive viewer. Love, however, requires as much giving as receiving.
What? That's grade school "I like her, but only if she likes me!" bullshit. You're describing a very selfish kind of Love; one conditional on getting something in return. I grant you that even that is difficult to make happen in a game, but maybe we'd have a better shot at putting in elements of that base love were we to aim for a higher love. I have to stop now, before I get all weepy.:-)
Here's a review of BuyMusic.com. Some of the reasons for it's unpopularity are pretty obvious from the review.
I think you misspelled "my". It's a nice list of reviews, don't get me wrong, but I think most people would prefer full disclosure when you karma whore like that!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
If nobody has access to your email address then they by defanition cannot spam you
Also by definition, nobody can email you. Not a great solution. And if you think you can keep it private by only giving it to select friend, you had better make sure none of them ever touches a Windows box, uses a CC instead of a BCC, ever uses a mail portal to check their messages, or does any number of things that can potentially put your email out in the wild. Anyone with a real solution to spam should be able to give back access of their address to everyone without concern.
From my read of their PR page about this, it sounds like something they entirely fabricated themselves to sell their software. There is nothing in the wild and no reports on respectable security sites, just Intego saying they "isolated" something and you should buy their FUD^H^H^Hproduct. As others have pointed out, a trojan is possible on any system if you can get the user to jump through elaborate enough hoops. So the next time you download an unknown MP3 (or whatever) file with an intact resource fork from an anonymous source and give it executable status so you can double-click it instead of just adding it to your iTunes library (or playing it in Finder with a single click in column view), be glad you also shelled out money to Intego so that you are protected from your own stupid and unnecessary actions! That it's come to this shows just how hard it is for anti-virus types to make money on the Mac.
No, of course not. And i'm not an enabler -- if you did the exact same thing these users did you'd also get these virus'.
That's kinda my point. Not everyone does that exact same thing, yet you charge them the exact same price as the people who do bad things. In that manner, you reward users who run insecure systems by providing them more services.
At any rate, offering a discount to non-windows users would be futile. We get quite a few calls from mac/lun1x users (since we always try to fix stuff even if we don't support it) and some of those linux calls can take years. Yes sir, i'll stay on the line while you recompile your kernel on a PII 266... :)
Again, if particular platforms are causing a support burden, you should absolutely charge a corresponding fee. If viruses are 15% of your total support time, don't ding the Mac and Linux users for it. If you wait for kernel compiles (which, really, points to a problem in support follow-up procedures), just ding the Linux users. In the end, costs for supporting all platforms is not the same, and if you don't reflect those factors in your pricing then it shouldn't surprise you that users don't get more clued in on the costs of running insecure systems.
If any of you put winxp on a machine (even with the firewall in xp enabled) that wasn't behind NAT/firewall it will get blaster/wachi/nachi in 10 minutes. There's litterally nothing you can do.
Nothing? Does your ISP offer discounts for non-Windows users? Do you charge more for those users who are taking up your support time? Don't blame them if you are an enabler of their bad behavior.
Okay, I'd figured the north wall would . . .
Ack! That all sounds absolutely *painful* to deal with. You're imposing the trappings of a 3D environment without showing any of the benefits. I pointed out that people like to "teleport" in 2D, and if most people had the ability to teleport in 3D, they'd eat it up even more because of the added dimension. In a virtual 3D world, there is no reason to take away the user's ability to teleport. Your setup seemingly forces people to suffer delays in both looking around and in moving around. Any information you present will likely be at least an order of magnitude slower than can be accomplished with a common 2D interface.
For example, say a friend on the system had a file they wanted me to look at. That's 3 quick operations away: click from my home directory to the parent, click from the parent to their home, and click the file. I may have to scroll down if things aren't immediately visible, but that is 1D movement, often with a hardware control to speed up the interaction. In your 3D system, I have to turn to the wall with the parent door and walk to it. Then I have to turn around and step back from the door I just came through so I can see all the other doors for user home directories. I locate the user in question and again have to walk to that door. Then, in their room, I have to locate the file somehow, again walk up to it, and perform some operation to select/open it. That'd be 2 seconds in 2D but more like 30 in 3D. Where is the advantage?
Now, users mostly work in a subset of directories. In a subdir of their home directory, there'd be a "links" directory which held links to their preferred locations and files, as well as a "cache" of recently-used ones. A shortcut to teleport there would help a lot, obviating the need for a lot of directory changes.
The funny thing is that here you are on to something, but you completely hand-wave it away because it has nothing to do with 3D directly. These this you are pointing to but neglecting are the real metaphors that will be used in the future for being better than the current file manager system. No, they don't need 3D either, but users will adopt them because they are a more useful way of dealing with files.
Part of the reason I like to look at game meataphors is they have to have a user interface that is fairly easy to pick up quickly and get at least somewhat productive in.
No, it isn't. You are confusing what is fun to use with what is productive to use. This goes back to human interface tests that show mouse operations were usually faster than command line operation, but the CLI seemed faster because you were mentally engaged in performing it. Likewise, a fun game is not a productive game. A "productive" game would instantly kill the enemy for you, a la aimbot. A productive game wouldn't have forward/backward buttons to move, it would just have a "there" button to teleport you to where you were looking.
Yes, frequently this isn't important, but given 3D it's easy to represent. And, as I said, we have hardware in our brains to extract information like this quickly.
No, our brains can extract import information quickly. You are instead presenting an environment full of a lot of unimportant information. That is going to slow the processing, possibly to the point of crippling it beyond a useful point. Just because you can represent things with load of eye candy doesn't mean you should.
Minimum number of polygons. Helps keep the speed up.
Again, wrong answer. If you're spending even a single cycle presenting useless information, you're spending too much. If everything is a triangle, it is just as useless as showing everything as a generic document icon. You have done nothing to show you're not completely wasting that extra dimension.
I prefer the command line for most things myself. But this would give newbies a
You could tell a lot about a file in a single glance.
No, you couldn't. You make the same mistake that everyone who struggles with 3D makes. You go for the "oooo-ah" whiz-bang factor instead of the "oh yeah" eureka factor. You need to sit down and think about what people actually do with files before you bother to work out a better way.
My own preference would be a simple rooms metaphor, but files are represented as columns.
Already a mistake, because you turn moving between directories into to moving between rooms. A directory is a virtual room such that you can "teleport" between them with a simple click. How are you moving between your rooms? Are you wasting the users time by turning that click into a tedious run?
The shape of the column base indicates file type (triangle for regular file, square/rectangle for char/block device, hexagonal for pipe/socket)
You go to all the trouble to add a third dimension and this is all you use it for? 99% of the time users don't care about that information. Even if they did, they're pretty much going to have rooms full of triangles. That's a total waste, and precisely why I say people need to come up with new and useful metaphors for representing important information the same way they came up with WIMP for 2D.
the height indicates file size (log2), the color indicates permissions, and the texture indicates detailed file type (text, image, binary, etc.).
All these can be represented in 2D, but most don't matter to user 90% of the time, too. Look at a current file manager and you'll see that what users mainly care about for a file is the name to identify it and the type (including the icon representation of same) to identify the application(s) that can use it. Size is secondary these days unless a maintenance task is being done. Permissions are likewise best kept hidden; users mostly deal with files they have permission to deal with.
The color of the room indicates permissions on the directory, the texture indicates filesystem type (ext2, vfat, smb, ftp, etc.).
Whee! More garbage I have no interest in over 90% of the time. Please, please think about how to actually make a useful 3D environment before you go off and code it. The metaphors you have in mind are essentially useless given the resources it takes to render them. But make no mistake that it is the metaphors, not the hardware, that need to be improved before a 3D desktop makes any sense.
The game designers created a beautiful and consistent interface just for the game sake and I always wanted to have a real file manager like this. There's a screenshot gallery here, with sample screenshot from the VR UI.
Most of those make it look more like Microsoft Bob than any useful sort of file manager. In general, 3D doesn't have a foundation for efficient file management. Current 2D technology involves direct manipulation, and users will not be drawn to a system that makes you run around to do things. It might be cute in the short term for a game, but for a real system it will fly about as well as Bob did.
In fact, the VR Dock looks almost like a real Dock from MacOS X, introduced many years later. I wonder if Jonathan Ive played this game...
Only if he was Dr. Sam Beckett. The Dock in Mac OS X is a direct evolution of the one from NeXT (screenshot), which pre-dates the game. Ive did not work at NeXT. Ive further does industrial design, not software design. He's got a good eye, but nothing points to any relationship between any of the elements listed.
First of all how much more open can "we" be then to have ESR publicly humiliate CUPS developers? Is there some other definition of open you are thinking about?
How about the people who are called out openly admitting they have issues they're not going to address because there is no "geek factor" in it? More to the point, it should not be humiliating for software to not do something easily unless it made claims that something is easy to do. That is why CUPS is not at fault for the printer issues, but the fault rather lies in the general Linux community making claims that Linux is ready for the desktop. It's not. Stop saying it is.
Secondly do you or anybody else in the world think that if we were somehow more "open" the vendors would write linux drivers? How does being more open put any pressure on vendors to write drivers?
ESR wasn't having a driver problem. That is moot, though, because the issue is that the action of the community has zero to do with vendor support. It's the profitability, and if there was a profit to be made in the Linux market then vendors would be all over it. Apple usually shows a profit for themselves and their suppliers, and so vendors usually show support for that platform. Until that happens in the Linux market at the same level, everyone needs to stop saying Linux will crush the Mac on the desktop this year or next year or within 5 years.
From my perspective the only way hardware manufacturers will write linux drivers is if linux market share grows. The only way it can grow is if there is more hardware support. It's a chicken and egg problem.
Yes; thank you for admitting there is a huge problem in the fanboy predictions of a pending huge Linux desktop market takeover. Getting that admission is like extracting teeth, though, and that is what I mean when advocates need to be more open. A frank evaluation of the platform strengths and weaknesses is what is needed for people to actually see a Linux desktop market in the future.
Personally I think the problem will take care itself pretty soon. Corporate adoption of linux will grow, non us countries will continue to migrate to linux, hardware manufacturers will take notice, more drivers will get written, home adoption will follow.
Yes, yes, followed shortly by world peace and everyone holding hands singing Kumbaya. Because that is the way the world works, right? People can surely sit on their asses and their problems will take care of themselves!
It's inevitable. People are just impatient that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Rome fell. Is that the sort of inevitable conclusion you want for Linux?
It's not even a disagreement--it's just people talking past one another.
Wow, a clueful AC. You must be new here! :-)
I don't think there can be any honest dispute over the fact that if you include servers, Linux has already surpassed Mac in marketshare, and if you exclude servers, Linux is catching up rapidly.
I agree with that. The problem with that "catching up rapidly", though, is that Linux has a long, long way to go on the desktop. People around here don't see it, but in the bigger picture Linux hardly exists as a desktop market for hardware and software products. Because of that, many Linux advocates are becoming Mac advocates when it comes to the desktop, too, so I'm left to wonder for how much longer you can really say Linux is gaining in market share. It's still kicking ass in servers, which is where I mainly use it, but I would not bank a company on it for desktop applications.
Now Linux users have more than one good word processor, web browser, and e-mail client to choose from. They wouldn't buy commercial equivalents because they simply do not need them.
Exactly right. I laughed and laughed when people were trying to defend the lack of shelf space for Linux software by saying that it was because the free stuff they could download was so good. That was my point on why Corel is stupid for making Linux a target before the Mac! They would be far smarter if they simply re-branded distributions of free software (e.g., Corel's GIMP) and put it in boxes next to the hardware at Walmart or wherever they thought they would get sales. Yeah we know we can get those things for free on the Internet, but if Bubba is just picking up a computer for his wife's birthday, he wants something that works he can put in the cart next to it, not an instruction booklet no how to download the source and compile it.
But the real market lies in the rest of the world - you know, not America, but the place where 95% of the population live. Linux is BIG there. Your attitude of dismissal and denial isn't going to help in 5 years time...
I am just so sick of Linux users thinking they can sit on their asses and flip a calendar until some magical day when the world loves them all. Put your money where your mouth is is you're so hot for the product! Show yourself as something other than an AC and we can both work out an arrangement to put $1000 each into escrow and if in 5 years Corel has a profitable office suite for Linux you get a sweet new PC to run it on, and if not then I get whatever Apple is cranking out at that time. This is business I'm talking about, not some idle mental masturbation. As a business, I will bet against Corel every time. Don't mistakenly think that liking Linux means you have to support every half-assed company that claims they're supporting it.
If your target customer base could download just about any program you needed for free, as a software development company, why would you think that selling software that does the same thing would be a good money-making idea?
I'm not the one thinking of putting out a pricey office suite for a free OS. Ask Corel that one. You support my point.
Hardware? There is no such thing as Windows Hardware, so any PC hardware on those shelves is "Linux hardware."
You must not actually try to use Linux as a desktop system, then. Do you imagine you can just pick up any new gizmo off the shelf and it'll plug-and-play with Linux just fine? There are these little things called drivers that are a hit-and-miss proposition for Linux. Most hardware has Windows support straight from the manufacturer, but most manufacturers don't support Linux at all. Even Linux gurus lament about simple printer problems. Unless we're all open about these real issues so that they can be fixed, the platform won't actually be ready for the desktop any time soon.
I never see Mac hardware OR software in stores. That could just be because I am not looking for it, but there is certainly MUCH MUCH less of it, at least.
From a market share perspective, yes, you should expect to see 1/20th the Mac stuff you see of Windows stuff. The important thing, though, is that often time boxes with the Windows sticker have the Mac sticker as well; manufacturers support the Mac. Where is that elusive Linux sticker? If you really think you can claim there is a desktop market on par with the Mac, you need that kind of evidence. It's just not there. Sad but true.
You have other numbers?
Yes. Let's talk available shelf space for the boxes Corel expects to ship. Square footage for Linux office/productivity apps at every major store I visit is zero. Nor can I go into any of them and pick up a Linux desktop system, or find any hardware that is labeled as Linux compatible. Those are the "numbers" that matter to a business, not some guesswork statistics generated by Linux fans. You people are doing more harm than good, because every desktop tool that gets ported to Linux only to inevitably fail because there isn't a real desktop market means one less tool you'll have in the future when there is a solid desktop experience available. Stop being the platform that cries wolf!
The big difference is that the Mac-market gets smaller while the Linux market gets bigger.
Does it? The shelf space reserved for Linux hardware and software at Computer City doesn't seem to be growing any. Are you saying you know a lot of people who are going to drop $500 on Corel's office suite? Are you going to spend it?
China is looking at Linux, not Mac. In Thailand most computers are already preloaded with Linux, not MacOS. Munich is switching to Linux, not MacOS.
Good thing Linux provides great tools for localizing X11 apps for those custom foreign distributions. Oh, wait . . .
Also, just linking an app against winelib is much more cost-effective than having to buy new hardware and port it to some Mac-API.
Is that what you're looking for in a commercial port? A half-assed link to Wine and cross your fingers? You'd trust your business report or thesis to that? Cost-effective is not the big hurdle Corel faces. They need to address quality issues that killed them years ago. That's going to be expensive on whatever platform they target, and their best chance of getting money back is to target a commercial desktop. That's the Mac, not Linux.
Linux on the other hand, is seemingly poised for a significant boost in market share. So it could very well overcome mac in just a couple of years.
Want to put money on that? If you actually look at the market instead of being some doe-eyed statistics fanboy, you'd see Linux doesn't really exist as a desktop platform. I can't go into Best Buy and get a Linux computer and printer for my Mom to simply use. Yeah, I've set up Linux boxes for friends that get most things done without the hassles they had with Windows, but that is not the market that Corel needs for this move to make sense. Until you point to the people that are going to give them multiple hundreds of dollars, it's all just hot air.
PLus, there is a Mac version of MS office. On linux, they don't have to compete with that 1000 pound gorilla.
No, they just have to compete with the free OOo! As I said, Mac users are comfortable paying for things, and many have no love for MS and still remember WordPerfect fondly. Everyone seems to forget that the Mac is a commercial desktop platform where Linux is not. Add in the larger size as well and, despite competition from other commercial office suites, from a business perspective it makes far more sense to target a Mac before Linux.
Linux is on much more than just a mere "tens of thousands" of desktops. Based on it's growth, it is also expected to pass the Mac OS in user base this year.
That's all wishful thinking. I'd believe you if I could walk into a CompUSA and see Linux represented in any way near the way Macs are represented. Linux does not exist as a desktop. I don't care how many buddies you get together to sing the praises of Gnome and KDE; Corel as a business needs money to survive. Unless you can say right now you're willing to drop $500 on a Linux office suite, you do not matter to them. Now try getting all those buddies together and see how many will drop the cash. Not enough to make it worthwhile from a business perspective I bet.
Yea, Corel could do alot of good at porting Wordperfect to Mac OS X, but it would be halfway there by porting it to run on Linux anyway.
That is a common misconception. A fair (let's be honest, Corel has no history of ever putting out a good Linux app) X11 app makes for a real crappy Mac application experience. It is a huge mistake to target a commercial desktop app at Linux. They should, as I have argued, target the Mac so they have something of reasonable commercial quality to compete, and then use that code base to move to Linux. Even now, they admit they're only "testing" the Linux platform. Odds are they'll put out another crap effort and disappear just like they did the last time they "embraced" the Linux market. Save your money.
Are you sure about that?
Yes. The only people unsure about that are the ones who are so deep into the open source community that they haven't come up for air in far too long. From a commercial market perspective, which is where Corel's concerns should lie, Linux hardly exists.
Now granted, this is a mostly a site for web developers. However, I still find these results interesting.
You shouldn't. You know they're skewed away from the desktop, so you have to reject them. A slightly more neutral source would be Google, and their last Zeitgeist shows Mac at 4% and Linux at 1%. I have no idea how they round those numbers, and browsers faking Windows is going to take different chunks out of both sides, but it's clear that Apple at least 4 times the Linux market, and I wager most of those Linux installs are for roles where lacking a word processing isn't a huge problem.
The problem is that those Linux stats are completely bogus. The Apple ones have to be reasonably accurate because it's a public company and has to file reports on its financial health. Linux number are just fabricated guesswork. A sanity check is simple enough, too: How big is the Linux section at CompUSA? If Linux were anywhere near Macs as far as desktop market went, there would be at least as much hardware and software on the shelves marketed towards it. That is not the case. Don't kid yourself; some of us geeks use it as a primary desktop, but that's about it. Everywhere else, and especially in corporate environments, it is used to run specialized, in-house software. The sooner advocates admit there is zero desktop appeal, the sooner they can fix that little Linux problem.
What I always found odd was the fact that WP hasn't been ported to the Apple Mac OS X environment.
It's not just odd, it's downright brain-dead from a business perspective. I say it every time I see a game get a Linux port and not a Mac port, too. The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it. It's easy to see that anyone who can be satisfied with a Linux desktop is also probably satisfied with available free office suites, whereas Mac users don't have the same choices in native versions and are further used to paying for such software. So, what, their master plan is to throw millions at something with a market that is maybe in the tens of thousands? This is just a stupid move, and someone at Corel should almost certainly be fired over it.
Maybe they could pay hot chicks to be waiting in a club, and the only way you can get experience . . . is to talk her into giving you a . . . Just think, for a . . . fee you could get interaction with a hot chi...
I don't mean to put a total damper on your pre-IPO frenzy, yet I cannot help but mention that prior art exists in the form of nothing less than the world's oldest profession. And a pimp's got a better business plan, too, because the chicks don't even have to be all that hot, and the "interaction" is way better than just silly game chit-chat.
However, imagine what you could do for yourself for that $100/hr. while you were doing nothing for the client.
What, like lose any semblance of a moral or ethical foundation in life? The client simply would not have been happy with me doing valuable stuff for myself while getting paid by them. I had a friend who stayed there after I left who got paid while windsurfing (client fully knew they were doing it), though. It's not like $100/hour jobs were tough to come by, either, especially when I know what I'm doing.
To be honest, your post just makes me cry.
To be honest, I understand why you'd have to post that as an AC.
The Chicago incident is sexual harassment whether the OP is male or female.
Yeah, but I expect most people would think it more . . . understandable for the harassment to be about sexual gratification rather than sexual intimidation. Unless the boss guy was gay, of course. Either way, the best thing to do is not move away, but to start making sudden movements and wearing spiked gear. You know, a solultion were you can say something like, "Oh, were those your nads I tasered? I felt something on my shoulder and thought it was a small rodent."
As for the Walgreens, hey, sounds like decent money for the work.
For the short term I, too, tend not to care what they ask me to do in the course of a job. But if I'm really interested in working in my field, there is only so much sit-and-do-nothing I can take regardless of the pay. I quit jobs in the middle of the dot-com boom because they wanted me to sit on my ass for $100/hour and I wanted to solve real problems.
I don't think you understand.
Nah, you're the one confused.
In this case, I'd be referring to the 'she' in your example; if she feels nothing in return, has nothing to give in return, she's not going to love the fellow in question.
Again, you're talking about returns. That is a selfish love, if it is even love at all.
If you're watching a television show, and the TV show consists of an actor/actress of the appropriate gender looking right at you and saying 'I love you,' you're not going to be able to love her back, as you can't give of yourself to her. You can hate her, lust after her, be happy for her, cry for her, all sorts of things, but loving her would be very difficult.
I'm not sure what you mean by "give of yourself to her"; if you're just talking about sex then you've gotten off the real topic. When it comes to fictional characters being acted out, yeah, a sane person would not be able to suspend disbelief to the point where they have any real emotional ties to the character. That said, as another poster pointed out, it is easy to say that a character could be loved if they were real.
The main component of love is that *you* are giving, not that the person you want to love needs to give; this is the problem.
Where is the problem? If the presumption is that you can love someone based only on behavior provided through a video/audio feed, how does placing that within the context of a game create a problem? I really don't see what you're taking issue with.
That and the fact that love is one of the few emotions that requires interactivity. You can invoke amusement, anger, lust, contentment, joy, all sorts of emotions, in a passive viewer. Love, however, requires as much giving as receiving.
What? That's grade school "I like her, but only if she likes me!" bullshit. You're describing a very selfish kind of Love; one conditional on getting something in return. I grant you that even that is difficult to make happen in a game, but maybe we'd have a better shot at putting in elements of that base love were we to aim for a higher love. I have to stop now, before I get all weepy. :-)
. . . DMCA . . . DMCA . . . DMCA . . . DMCA . . .
The only thing worse than the two-party system is all the one-issue voters.
Here's a review of BuyMusic.com. Some of the reasons for it's unpopularity are pretty obvious from the review.
I think you misspelled "my". It's a nice list of reviews, don't get me wrong, but I think most people would prefer full disclosure when you karma whore like that! :-)