No, but they can plaster ads in them before you buy them. Ever read a magazine?
I can imagine it now. A horde of basement-dwelling Slashdotters find their way out into the real world. Blinded by the sunlight, they stumble upon a newsstand, selling magazines and newspapers. Then they find out that the magazines contain ads - the very magazines that they paid for! Moral panic ensues. That is, until the confused newsstand owner collects another $15 from each of the Slashdotters. Then everyone is happy again.
Let's hope that when they find their way back to their basements, they don't switch on their mom's cable TV!
I don't understand why people keep bringing up performance. Yes, Gnome 3 has a lot of animations, but this is done by the GPU which would otherwise sit idle.
Gnome 3 feels much faster to me than Gnome 2. I think a big part of this is that Mutter is much faster than Compiz. Maybe this is why Gnome Shell feels faster than Unity (which uses Compiz)?
Maybe having everyone learn C or Java is a bit of a stretch. But one language that I think everyone (who works in an office setting) should learn is SQL, and maybe some analysis package like Matlab or R (but Excel is probably enough). It's amazing how much knowledge you can get about a business by analyzing even a small internal database.
Today, managers don't want to learn how to manipulate data, and programmers don't want to understand the business that they're in. Most managers and programmers are unable to quickly explore a database and search for useful information.
Not knowing how to manipulate data is like not knowing how to manipulate numbers. Sure, people can "get by" without an understanding of math or stats, but it is an incredibly useful skill and not many people have it.
That's very true. IMO there are two massive problems with having nontechnical managers and leaders:
They don't know what is easy, so they (and their subordinates) spend lots of time doing menial, easily automatable work.
Also, they don't know what is difficult, so they come up wtih ridiculous ideas that require breakthroughs in artificial intelligence or are theoretically proven to be impossible.
While the iPhone clearly was innovative, a lot of the ideas behind it become obvious once you assume that you're going to be using a capacitive (multitouch) touchscreen. Apple released the iPhone in the early days of capacitive touch, and so they deservedly took over the market.
Here's a video of Steve Jobs demonstrating multitouch. At 33:30, he demonstrates a pinch-to-zoom gesture, which he uses to zoom in on a photo. The audience love it.
Here's a video of Jeff Han demonstrating multitouch. At about 2:45, he demonstrates a pinch-to-zoom gesture, which he uses to zoom in on a photo. The audience love it.
Note that Jeff Han's video was filmed in February 2006, which is one year before Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement.
Once you decide that you're going to put a capacitive touchscreen on a phone, then swiping and pinching really do become obvious. If Apple had invented multitouch, then their patent claims might be fair, but there's clearly prior art on this.
Unlike Samsung, HTC didn't just blindly copy the iPhone. It's hard to claim they violated trade dress, and so it should be a lot harder for Apple to win this case.
There's definitely been a generational shift towards inner city living. Most 20-somethings that I know (myself included) desperately want to avoid living in some suburban wasteland. Not having to have a car (or sharing a single car between two people) more than makes up for the increase in rent.
This is in stark contrast to my parents' generation, who love living in the suburbs. The idea of "The American Dream" changing is not that far fetched.
Why is your bike's mileage so poor? We just drove a 4,000 (unloaded) minivan cross country and got 25MPG average, giving it 20x (!!!) better weight-to-mileage ratio.
Because his bike was designed to be a lot more fun than your minivan:P
I work in automotive engineering, and while Ford may not be suing Chevy, they have successfully sought injunctions on JAC (a car maker from China). This isn't just something that is specific to the tech industry; it's happening in automotive as well.
Looks are a big part of what sells a car, and for those who don't know, there are many Chinese car makers who are blatantly ripping off designs from established car companies. There are rip offs of BMWs, Toyotas, Fords and Rolls Royces (and many others). It's not just Ford vs JAC; injunctions on Chinese imports have been sought in other markets too.
The real argument (from Apple's point of view) is not about patent infringement but rather Samsung's blatant copying of the iPhone, and it's really hard to defend Samsung because it's obvious that their strategy has been to just "copy Apple".
Well my point wasn't so much that the design is perfect, but rather that all the people who are screaming "change for change's sake!" are idiots. There are plenty of reasons behind the changes in Gnome Shell, and I doubt anything was changed just for "change's sake".
1. I'm not sure I agree that the benefits of the overview drop off over time. After using Gnome 3 for a few months, I can't stand having to go back to using Windows machines with taskbars. If you prefer the taskbar, you can go install the Bottom Panel extension. But if we agree that initially, Fitts's law does hold, shouldn't the overview be the initial default?
2. Tabs are nice, but they are an application-level mechanism for something that should be handled at the window manager level. Maybe you're right that the application-centric model can't replace tabs, but that in itself isn't a reason to go window-centric. Again, if you don't like it, you can install the Windows Alt Tab extension which makes it behave like Windows.
3. On my computer, the power button brings up a dialog box which lets me restart or shut down. If I don't respond in 60 seconds, it shuts down by default. If I want to suspend, I just close my laptop lid. This works perfectly for me and I suspect most if not all people. I agree that it is a bit strange that they chose to only put suspend there, and I don't see why the full selection of shutdown options (lock screen, switch user, log out, restart, suspend, hibernate, shut down) can't be there. My guess is that they were trying to avoid the mess of a shutdown menu that Vista had. But the argument is really a storm in a teacup - the menu is a secondary method of shutting down, and the primary one is via the hardware controls that every computer has.
4. I find the drag-the-window-to-the-side thing to be useful for viewing two windows side-by-side. It's great now that we have these ridiculously wide monitors. Why didn't they provide an option to turn this off? Well 1) most users shouldn't need to do this and 2) they did: dconf-editor lets you do this.
I'm not sure I agree with all of your points, but thanks for making an intelligent argument about them unlike most people here. It's a really refreshing change from "OMG CHANGE FOR CHANGES SAKE!!!!"
I remember a few years ago when my dad started using Ubuntu. He'd previously used Windows all his life but was sick of all the spyware on his computer.
At one point he called me and said "all my windows have disappeared!" Once I saw what he'd done, it was obvious - he'd changed workspaces and his all windows were on the previous workspace. But he had no mental model of how workspaces worked, and he wasn't even sure if his documents were still open. When I fixed it for him, he remarked something about Linux being really complicated.
When I installed Compiz and enabled the Desktop Cube animation, he mentioned that workspaces suddenly made sense. If he accidently switched to the workspace on the right, it was obvious how to "fix" it - you just need to rotate the cube back in the reverse direction.
Sure, it's eye candy to us, but animations can be used to help users understand what is going on in a desktop. Most Slashdotters are probably familiar enough with workspaces that they don't need to think about them, but keep in mind that it is a completely abstract concept. Animations can help communicate to new users how UI elements have been, and can be, manipulated.
Unfortunately it focuses on what they put in, and doesn't really explain much about why they removed or changed a lot of things that people are used to. Here's some of the reasoning behind the more controversial things:
Why the dock/taskbar was replaced with the overview: The overview is much better than a taskbar or dock, when you think about it in terms of Fitts's law. Targets should be big, and the Expose-style overview provides bigger targets (window thumbnails) than either a dock or a toolbar. Also the hot corner is one of the five fastest targets that a user can hit (the four corners of the screen and the pixel below the current mouse position). One thing that I've noticed is that users who complain about task switching don't understand how to take advantage of Fitts's law. All you need to do is learn to flick your mouse quickly into the top-left corner. Don't bother aiming, the edges of the screen will guide your mouse into the corner.
Why alt-tab seems broken: Windows uses a "window-centric" whereas Gnome Shell uses what is called an "application-centric" model. The way Gnome Shell works is quite simple: Alt-Tab changes between applications, and Alt-` (the key above the tab) switches between windows of the same application. It's exactly how Mac OS implements it, but lots of people hate it because it breaks the habits they learned when Windows 95 came out. If you think about it, tabbed applications (like Chrome, Firefox, and lots of Gnome apps like Terminal and Gedit) don't really need to have tabs. The tabs are just there because window-centric desktop environment doesn't provide an easy way to switch between windows of the same app. Just press Alt-` and switch between, say, different terminals, without worrying about mixing them up with web browser windows.
Why there is no shutdown menu option: Your computer has a power button, and you can just press that. It should initiate an ACPI shutdown, and it is by far the most obvious way to turn off your computer. But people disagree because years of using Windows (or one of its clones) has conditioned them into thinking that it is totally intuitive to navigate through menus and select a shutdown option instead (if you really want to do this, you can install the "alternative status menu" extension).
Why they removed the maximize/minimize buttons: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-February/msg00192.html What's important here is that they didn't remove the ability to minimize or maximize, but rather just the window manager buttons. You can still do it using other methods. In particular, most people maximize by double-clicking the title-bar anyway.
You're right that the UI would make sense to people if it were explained better. I really like Gnome Shell but the biggest failing is that they didn't communicate their vision clearly, and didn't provide a smooth transition from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. They just said "here it is, and here's a crippled fallback if you really disagree with what we did".
I hope MATE with GTK3 ends up being the transitional environment that the Gnome people should have provided. And I also hope that more users give Gnome 3 a try with an open mind, because it's a really great desktop once you get used to it!
I often sort by price or average customer review, and yeah the results seem really random. However lately I've noticed two things.
When you sort by price, it seems to also take into account the price from other sellers. This means that products often appear out of order when there are multiple sellers. It might be the case that the sort is not broken. Rather, the way they preview the price is broken.
When you sort by "average" review, it doesn't actually search by the average review. It also seems to prioritize products that have lots of reviews. So for example, a 4.5 star product with 2 reviews appears below a 4 star product with 100 reviews.
My guess is that they know what they are doing in terms of sorting, but the way the results are displayed is a bit misleading.
Why is this irrelevant? SaaS encompases applications that require Internet access (e.g. email and databases), and applications that haven't traditionally required it (e.g. word processors and storage).
Words mean something; they are shorthand labels that encapsulate concepts, so we don't have to spell everything out all the time. For example:
Cloud Computing = Running your software and storing your data on a computer that you do not own and cannot control
So instead of boring my listener to death with "My business runs its software and stores its data on a computer we do not own and cannot control", I can simply say, "My business uses cloud computing."
Isn't that so much nicer?
I'm sure the first phrase is a lot nicer to you, since it neatly encapsulates your prejudices against the technology. But not everyone is like you, and some people value different things from what you value. How about:
"My business runs its software on a fleet of computers that can grow and shrink automatically, based on CPU load limits that I define" or "My business stores its data in a database that is redundant across three data centers, and we didn't have to build or rent buildings all around the world"
For a lot of IT people, "My business uses cloud computing" probably suffices. But obviously for you, shorthand labels won't do; everything really does need to be spelled out all the time.
You can choose to install sendmail on a server somewhere yourself, and connect to it using Thunderbird, or you can use Gmail.
You can choose to install MySQL on a server somewhere yourself, and connect to it using phpMyAdmin, or you can use Amazon's RDS.
If you had ever tried, you'd know that sendmail is an absolute bitch to configure properly. Most people don't bother, even those who are technically inclined. MySQL is less painful, but administrating a big database is still a lot of work.
Why you think email is a service "by definition", but other SaaS products are not?
Slashdot Mirror
Now we're knee deep into WTF territory. If you have a CS degree, why the hell are you working an IT job?
Exactly. For some strange reason, people seem to lump all "computer" jobs together, whether it's IT, Software Engineering or web design.
Do people need a degree to do IT work? No.
Do people need a degree to be a software engineer? Almost always, yes, unless they're exceptionally good.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with IT, or that it's any less of a job. But it is a different job and it requires different skills.
I'm not sure there is any demand for that, to be honest. The supply has already been fulfilled by things like EC2 and GCE.
No, but they can plaster ads in them before you buy them. Ever read a magazine?
I can imagine it now. A horde of basement-dwelling Slashdotters find their way out into the real world. Blinded by the sunlight, they stumble upon a newsstand, selling magazines and newspapers. Then they find out that the magazines contain ads - the very magazines that they paid for! Moral panic ensues. That is, until the confused newsstand owner collects another $15 from each of the Slashdotters. Then everyone is happy again.
Let's hope that when they find their way back to their basements, they don't switch on their mom's cable TV!
I know you're joking, but it's easily enough for most people considering they can also use Wifi when at home.
If you really believe what you're saying, you could install FVWM95. But few people use it, probably because Windows 98 sucked.
I don't understand why people keep bringing up performance. Yes, Gnome 3 has a lot of animations, but this is done by the GPU which would otherwise sit idle.
Gnome 3 feels much faster to me than Gnome 2. I think a big part of this is that Mutter is much faster than Compiz. Maybe this is why Gnome Shell feels faster than Unity (which uses Compiz)?
I'm not sure I understand. In a desktop environment that supports overlapping windows, how does a global menubar save space?
Maybe having everyone learn C or Java is a bit of a stretch. But one language that I think everyone (who works in an office setting) should learn is SQL, and maybe some analysis package like Matlab or R (but Excel is probably enough). It's amazing how much knowledge you can get about a business by analyzing even a small internal database.
Today, managers don't want to learn how to manipulate data, and programmers don't want to understand the business that they're in. Most managers and programmers are unable to quickly explore a database and search for useful information.
Not knowing how to manipulate data is like not knowing how to manipulate numbers. Sure, people can "get by" without an understanding of math or stats, but it is an incredibly useful skill and not many people have it.
That's very true. IMO there are two massive problems with having nontechnical managers and leaders:
They don't know what is easy, so they (and their subordinates) spend lots of time doing menial, easily automatable work.
Also, they don't know what is difficult, so they come up wtih ridiculous ideas that require breakthroughs in artificial intelligence or are theoretically proven to be impossible.
Ridiculous isn't it? A bunch of people land a fucking robot on Mars, and everyone's attention is on one of the guys' haircut.
While the iPhone clearly was innovative, a lot of the ideas behind it become obvious once you assume that you're going to be using a capacitive (multitouch) touchscreen. Apple released the iPhone in the early days of capacitive touch, and so they deservedly took over the market.
Here's a video of Steve Jobs demonstrating multitouch. At 33:30, he demonstrates a pinch-to-zoom gesture, which he uses to zoom in on a photo. The audience love it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uW-E496FXg
Here's a video of Jeff Han demonstrating multitouch. At about 2:45, he demonstrates a pinch-to-zoom gesture, which he uses to zoom in on a photo. The audience love it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html
Note that Jeff Han's video was filmed in February 2006, which is one year before Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement.
Once you decide that you're going to put a capacitive touchscreen on a phone, then swiping and pinching really do become obvious. If Apple had invented multitouch, then their patent claims might be fair, but there's clearly prior art on this.
Unlike Samsung, HTC didn't just blindly copy the iPhone. It's hard to claim they violated trade dress, and so it should be a lot harder for Apple to win this case.
There's definitely been a generational shift towards inner city living. Most 20-somethings that I know (myself included) desperately want to avoid living in some suburban wasteland. Not having to have a car (or sharing a single car between two people) more than makes up for the increase in rent.
This is in stark contrast to my parents' generation, who love living in the suburbs. The idea of "The American Dream" changing is not that far fetched.
Why is your bike's mileage so poor? We just drove a 4,000 (unloaded) minivan cross country and got 25MPG average, giving it 20x (!!!) better weight-to-mileage ratio.
Because his bike was designed to be a lot more fun than your minivan :P
I work in automotive engineering, and while Ford may not be suing Chevy, they have successfully sought injunctions on JAC (a car maker from China). This isn't just something that is specific to the tech industry; it's happening in automotive as well.
Looks are a big part of what sells a car, and for those who don't know, there are many Chinese car makers who are blatantly ripping off designs from established car companies. There are rip offs of BMWs, Toyotas, Fords and Rolls Royces (and many others). It's not just Ford vs JAC; injunctions on Chinese imports have been sought in other markets too.
The real argument (from Apple's point of view) is not about patent infringement but rather Samsung's blatant copying of the iPhone, and it's really hard to defend Samsung because it's obvious that their strategy has been to just "copy Apple".
Saloon also means sedan (car) in Britain and Australia.
Just Britain. No one says "saloon" in Australia; Australians say "sedan".
Well my point wasn't so much that the design is perfect, but rather that all the people who are screaming "change for change's sake!" are idiots. There are plenty of reasons behind the changes in Gnome Shell, and I doubt anything was changed just for "change's sake".
1. I'm not sure I agree that the benefits of the overview drop off over time. After using Gnome 3 for a few months, I can't stand having to go back to using Windows machines with taskbars. If you prefer the taskbar, you can go install the Bottom Panel extension. But if we agree that initially, Fitts's law does hold, shouldn't the overview be the initial default?
2. Tabs are nice, but they are an application-level mechanism for something that should be handled at the window manager level. Maybe you're right that the application-centric model can't replace tabs, but that in itself isn't a reason to go window-centric. Again, if you don't like it, you can install the Windows Alt Tab extension which makes it behave like Windows.
3. On my computer, the power button brings up a dialog box which lets me restart or shut down. If I don't respond in 60 seconds, it shuts down by default. If I want to suspend, I just close my laptop lid. This works perfectly for me and I suspect most if not all people.
I agree that it is a bit strange that they chose to only put suspend there, and I don't see why the full selection of shutdown options (lock screen, switch user, log out, restart, suspend, hibernate, shut down) can't be there. My guess is that they were trying to avoid the mess of a shutdown menu that Vista had. But the argument is really a storm in a teacup - the menu is a secondary method of shutting down, and the primary one is via the hardware controls that every computer has.
4. I find the drag-the-window-to-the-side thing to be useful for viewing two windows side-by-side. It's great now that we have these ridiculously wide monitors. Why didn't they provide an option to turn this off? Well 1) most users shouldn't need to do this and 2) they did: dconf-editor lets you do this.
I'm not sure I agree with all of your points, but thanks for making an intelligent argument about them unlike most people here. It's a really refreshing change from "OMG CHANGE FOR CHANGES SAKE!!!!"
I remember a few years ago when my dad started using Ubuntu. He'd previously used Windows all his life but was sick of all the spyware on his computer.
At one point he called me and said "all my windows have disappeared!" Once I saw what he'd done, it was obvious - he'd changed workspaces and his all windows were on the previous workspace. But he had no mental model of how workspaces worked, and he wasn't even sure if his documents were still open. When I fixed it for him, he remarked something about Linux being really complicated.
When I installed Compiz and enabled the Desktop Cube animation, he mentioned that workspaces suddenly made sense. If he accidently switched to the workspace on the right, it was obvious how to "fix" it - you just need to rotate the cube back in the reverse direction.
Sure, it's eye candy to us, but animations can be used to help users understand what is going on in a desktop. Most Slashdotters are probably familiar enough with workspaces that they don't need to think about them, but keep in mind that it is a completely abstract concept. Animations can help communicate to new users how UI elements have been, and can be, manipulated.
They have a page on their wiki, which explains each UI element and why it is there.
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/
Unfortunately it focuses on what they put in, and doesn't really explain much about why they removed or changed a lot of things that people are used to. Here's some of the reasoning behind the more controversial things:
Why the dock/taskbar was replaced with the overview:
The overview is much better than a taskbar or dock, when you think about it in terms of Fitts's law. Targets should be big, and the Expose-style overview provides bigger targets (window thumbnails) than either a dock or a toolbar. Also the hot corner is one of the five fastest targets that a user can hit (the four corners of the screen and the pixel below the current mouse position).
One thing that I've noticed is that users who complain about task switching don't understand how to take advantage of Fitts's law. All you need to do is learn to flick your mouse quickly into the top-left corner. Don't bother aiming, the edges of the screen will guide your mouse into the corner.
Why alt-tab seems broken:
Windows uses a "window-centric" whereas Gnome Shell uses what is called an "application-centric" model.
The way Gnome Shell works is quite simple: Alt-Tab changes between applications, and Alt-` (the key above the tab) switches between windows of the same application. It's exactly how Mac OS implements it, but lots of people hate it because it breaks the habits they learned when Windows 95 came out.
If you think about it, tabbed applications (like Chrome, Firefox, and lots of Gnome apps like Terminal and Gedit) don't really need to have tabs. The tabs are just there because window-centric desktop environment doesn't provide an easy way to switch between windows of the same app. Just press Alt-` and switch between, say, different terminals, without worrying about mixing them up with web browser windows.
Why there is no shutdown menu option:
Your computer has a power button, and you can just press that. It should initiate an ACPI shutdown, and it is by far the most obvious way to turn off your computer. But people disagree because years of using Windows (or one of its clones) has conditioned them into thinking that it is totally intuitive to navigate through menus and select a shutdown option instead (if you really want to do this, you can install the "alternative status menu" extension).
Why they removed the maximize/minimize buttons:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-February/msg00192.html
What's important here is that they didn't remove the ability to minimize or maximize, but rather just the window manager buttons. You can still do it using other methods. In particular, most people maximize by double-clicking the title-bar anyway.
You're right that the UI would make sense to people if it were explained better. I really like Gnome Shell but the biggest failing is that they didn't communicate their vision clearly, and didn't provide a smooth transition from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. They just said "here it is, and here's a crippled fallback if you really disagree with what we did".
I hope MATE with GTK3 ends up being the transitional environment that the Gnome people should have provided. And I also hope that more users give Gnome 3 a try with an open mind, because it's a really great desktop once you get used to it!
I often sort by price or average customer review, and yeah the results seem really random. However lately I've noticed two things.
When you sort by price, it seems to also take into account the price from other sellers. This means that products often appear out of order when there are multiple sellers. It might be the case that the sort is not broken. Rather, the way they preview the price is broken.
When you sort by "average" review, it doesn't actually search by the average review. It also seems to prioritize products that have lots of reviews. So for example, a 4.5 star product with 2 reviews appears below a 4 star product with 100 reviews.
My guess is that they know what they are doing in terms of sorting, but the way the results are displayed is a bit misleading.
So what's your point? Bad magazines make untrue statements? Why should that stop the rest of us from discussing and using the cloud to our advantage?
Why is this irrelevant? SaaS encompases applications that require Internet access (e.g. email and databases), and applications that haven't traditionally required it (e.g. word processors and storage).
Words mean something; they are shorthand labels that encapsulate concepts, so we don't have to spell everything out all the time.
For example:
Cloud Computing = Running your software and storing your data on a computer that you do not own and cannot control
So instead of boring my listener to death with "My business runs its software and stores its data on a computer we do not own and cannot control", I can simply say, "My business uses cloud computing."
Isn't that so much nicer?
I'm sure the first phrase is a lot nicer to you, since it neatly encapsulates your prejudices against the technology. But not everyone is like you, and some people value different things from what you value. How about:
"My business runs its software on a fleet of computers that can grow and shrink automatically, based on CPU load limits that I define"
or
"My business stores its data in a database that is redundant across three data centers, and we didn't have to build or rent buildings all around the world"
For a lot of IT people, "My business uses cloud computing" probably suffices. But obviously for you, shorthand labels won't do; everything really does need to be spelled out all the time.
Now, apparently if we go with cloud computing, the desktops and LANs will magically maintain themselves for no discernible reason, apparently.
I don't think any cloud provider has ever promised anything like that. Can you give an example of one?
You can choose to install sendmail on a server somewhere yourself, and connect to it using Thunderbird, or you can use Gmail.
You can choose to install MySQL on a server somewhere yourself, and connect to it using phpMyAdmin, or you can use Amazon's RDS.
If you had ever tried, you'd know that sendmail is an absolute bitch to configure properly. Most people don't bother, even those who are technically inclined. MySQL is less painful, but administrating a big database is still a lot of work.
Why you think email is a service "by definition", but other SaaS products are not?
Obligatory link:
http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Natural-Water-Based-Lubricant-Gallon/dp/B005MR3IVO