Ok, I know that the Enlightment project is more about creating a graphic toolkit that a complete environment for end user. But having the technology doesn't mean that you could use it.
For what I've seen the window manager "experience" is far away from something pleasable, after the Wow factor is over. I've never been a fan of wallpaper drop-down menus, in WM nor in other "1st generation" window managers (those that have been on Linux for a long, long time without major usability revisions). Just how many times does he open a two level menu just to check/uncheck the gadgets "edit" mode?
Also I remember that the E desktop had to be configured through hand-editing the text files. Although they promise that "It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows", if this elements are as annoying to use as the dropdown menu then the environment will not have a good workflow.
It's great to have a wonderful platform to build upon. But until something that I can use is actually built, I'm not downloading this.
Domain dispute puts question mark over UK ecommerce By Kieren McCarthy (kieren at kmccarthy.eclipse.co.uk) Published Wednesday 16th February 2005 12:34 GMT
A dispute over ownership of "game.co.uk" could have significant and far-reaching effects on e-commerce in Britain.
The domain, which comes under the control of private company Nominet, was awarded to Game plc in January following a complaint that the owner, Garth Sumpter, was misusing it. Mr Sumpter, a consultant for the games industry, has owned the domain since October 1995 and immediately appealed the decision (http://www.nic.uk/DisputeResolution/Decisions/Drs 02166Game.html).
Nominet, as controller of the.uk registry, has created over 3.8 million.uk domains and yet only heard 2,104 domain disputes since its Dispute Resolution Service was launched in September 2001 - an extremely small number in comparison to other top-level domains such as.com or.org.
In many other domains around the world - where cases are decided by ICANN's UDRP rules - the situation is flipped and complainants traditionally have the upper-hand, with the existing owner forced to argue why they should retain the domain. If a big company can shut down an existing online business - and competitor - through financial might, and over a generic name such as "game", it could have dire knock-on effects for the hundreds of thousands of small online businesses running from.uk domains. Its finance director David Thomas told us that the company feels Mr Sumpter had infringed on its rights by starting to sell video games on his site, which was and has been mistaken for Game plc. and that Game plc's rights with regard to the name "game" online can be sufficiently gauged by referring to a Google search on that name. Domains ending with.pro,.aero and many others all have strict criteria before a domain is handed over. A domain's suffix is in fact just as important as the domain stem itself when it comes to deciding ownership. A wider Google search yields a very different set of results in which domains that include the word "game" and which also sells video games feature higher than Game plc. That Mr Sumpter had changed what the website contained and did (from acting as a front for his consultancy business to selling video games) in order to benefit from Game plc's name. That Mr Sumpter sought to elicit as much money as possible from Game plc for the domain. Also, both parties met several times and discussed the sale by Mr Sumpter of his domain to Game plc. As is usual in such domain dispute cases, Game plc sought to paint Mr Sumpter as someone out to profit from a respectable business by holding the company to ransom over a domain name. This is clearly an enormous sum but Mr Sumpter argues that this was a figure put on it by a salesman who had good reason to overplay the domain's true value. Game plc was not just buying his domain, it was buying his entire business based at Game.co.uk.
However, Game plc draws reference to a previous agreement that it accuses Mr Sumpter of backing out of, where he had agreed to sell the domain for a far lower figure. A letter from the head of the game industry's members body to Game plc about the use of its charts on Game.co.uk 3. A Dow Jones Newswire story regarding Game plc but which gave the company's domain name as Game.co.uk. Also since Mr Sumpter is running his own business, no doubt emails intended for Game plc but wrongly sent to him have inconvenienced him. The key to Mr Lothian's decision is given in one finishing sentence: "The Expert has reached the view that the Respondent has brought the consequences of a transfer of the Domain Name upon himself by effecting the change of use in full knowledge of the Complainant's rights."
The European Parliament is unequivocal: the software patents directive needs to go back to the drawing board. But the jury is still out on whether the Commission will listen
The European Parliament's request for the software patent directive to be started from scratch was ratified by senior members of the Parliament on Thursday, but campaigners from both sides are split on what will happen next. A Parliament spokesman said on Thursday that this request was approved without debate by the Conference of Presidents -- the President of the Parliament and the chairmen of political groups -- and can now be passed to the European Commission, which must decide whether to agree to the request. "It is not certain that the Commission will comply with the request of the Parliament, nor that it will use the opportunity to draft a good text," said Pilch. "The new Commission is not obliged to follow the Parliament's request and they might still try to keep all options open and ask the Council to adopt the agreement of last May without a new vote, so as to gain even more options for themselves." "There is a desire for the Council to adopt the directive to uphold the current working methods -- to show that every political agreement leads to a political decision," he said.
All Points Bulletin, a massively multiplayer action game from the creator of Grand Theft Auto, was today announced. APB will feature real-life cities from across the world, with Squads (the law) going up against Gangs for control of this territory. Thousands of players will form gangs or squads all around the world, and will play in hundreds of online cities.
Grand Theft Auto Creator, David Jones, Awards Worldwide Publishing Rights for His First Online Game, 'APB' to Webzen, Inc.; (Nasdaq:WZEN) was awarded the worldwide online game publishing rights to All Points Bulletin (APB), the first online game developed by David Jones, the creator of the multi-million unit selling video game, Grand Theft Auto, and his UK-based game development company, Real Time Worlds (RTW).
"As an avid gamer and creator of many single player games, it has been my dream to create an online game experience that provides the player with the ultimate freedom to do whatever he wants, in a thriving, living environment," said David Jones, founder and creative director of Real Time Worlds. "When looking for a publishing partner for APB, it was imperative to find a company that was a worldwide leader in online games and we found that in Webzen, Inc."
"APB is an online game that we think will fuel the worldwide growth of online gaming," said Nam Joo Kim, CEO of Webzen, Inc. The titles include the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), SUN, releasing in the third quarter of 2005, and a massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) called Huxley, that leverages the latest Unreal 3 game engine and is scheduled to release in 2006. is also developing game properties for the next generation game consoles to enhance its appeal to the mainstream gaming audience.
Actually you'd be better off using this other article called
Speed up Firefox the right way. The hack you linked to is not appropiate for everybody, and can even degrade performance.
LOS ANGELES: Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free.
Napster is currently offering a free trial of its new Napster To Go service, which will enable users for a monthly $US15 ($NZ21.21) fee to download as much music as they want and transfer it to a portable device.
Engadget.com said by installing the digital music programme Winamp and then adding a secondary programme to Winamp called Output Stacker, users could convert the digitally protected files from one format to another that can then be burned, unencumbered, onto CDs.
The original Napster was a free-for-all that let millions of users download and share songs for free - before the music industry forced it into bankruptcy with successful legal challenges.
Napster unveiled the portable subscription earlier this month, backed by a $US30 million ad campaign attacking rival Apple's iTunes service and its ubiquitous iPod digital music player.
Until recently, music subscription services have been somewhat restricted in their ability to transfer songs they provide to portable players, while Apple has sold millions of portable iPods by allowing users to buy songs from iTunes and store them on iPods.
Until the proponents can make it safe for Grandma to avoid being phished by minor pixel differences it's dead. And so, that is exactly what is proposed in the article that was linked in the previous comment.
I think one problem is that with audio, it's easy to just fade one song into another, but with video, there's not as clear an equivalent.
This could lead to new conventions for image language, as video-clips did to TV.
After all, fading audio was not at all natural the first time someone did it to merge different audio tracks. When music was all hand-made, there was no such thing as fading.
Octopuses, those boneless, brainy, denizens of the deep, use their arms for some tasks in much the same way humans do, according to a new study. But to bring captured prey to its mouth, the octopus turns the arm into a semi-rigid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length. "And indeed our studies show how the octopus simplifies the complex problems associated with controlling flexible arms that have an infinitely large number of degrees of freedom. This in turn inspires the development of new strategies for the control of flexible robotic arms."
Earlier research funded by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) suggests that, to keep the arms from constantly tangling themselves up, each arm has an independent peripheral nervous system and neural circuitry (see related-story link below). Once an octopus spots its prey, it has a remarkable ability to reach out with one of its arms and grab it with one of the suckers that form a double line up each of the octopus's arms.
Some scientists studying octopus arms conclude that they may represent the optimal design for robotic arms
It's nice to have an exhaustive list of changes, but i'd prefer having one list reporting the usability improvements, as those provided with GNOME new releases.
A simple list of new features doesn't give as much information as a report of the key changes that will affect the whole desktop "experience".
What you describe is low-level GUI management, the kind of what is solved by following some GUI guidelines (like GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, for instance). It's certainly the kind of details that a programmer should know, but it is not enough to build a decent interface.
The core of a really good application is goal oriented software design (also called user oriented design). Before thinking about widgets and gadgets and frame layout, you should start by defining what the application must do and how to do it - and the key to this is to build a prototype and observing real users using it.
That's it, interface design must be an iterative process in which real user problems are observed in real use, and then fixing it with a new design for the real task that the user is trying to accomplish.
What is Longhorn's major selling point? What does it stand to offer the average user?
State of the art search technologies. Longhorn is the mother of the technology also used for Gnome's Beagle and Dashboard, and it will ship with an excellent interface for their search tools (probably much better than Apple's Spotlight).
Microsoft "Stuff I've Seen" interface will probably deprecate the current hierarchical filesystem for most end users, and integrated desktop + internet search will fight Google the same way than IExplorer fought Netscape.
Those interfaces will be cloned quickly by other operating systems, though. But I don't think they can be ported back to Windows XP from Longhorn.
What exactly does Longhorn offer other than a 3D accelerated interface and a big information bar on the side?
State of the art search technologies. Longhorn is the mother of the technology also used for Gnome's Beagle and Dashboard, and it will ship with an excellent interface for their search tools (probably much better than Apple's Spotlight).
Microsoft "Stuff I've Seen" interface will probably deprecate the current hierarchical filesystem for most end users, and integrated desktop + internet search will fight Google the same way than IExplorer fought Netscape.
Anti-gun or anti-drug are not lost causes: a society or country with strong weapon restrictions will be quite different to one in which everybody is allowed to carry any kind of weapon, given that they can find them.
The same thing can be said of genetic engineering, or any other powerful technology. Although their use can not be totally banned, it can be pipelined to better/different uses than with pure free access (which usually doesn't remain free to all for very long).
And/. is not the best site for meditated arguments, but it's very good for getting thought-provoking ideas and feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I know that the Enlightment project is more about creating a graphic toolkit that a complete environment for end user. But having the technology doesn't mean that you could use it.
For what I've seen the window manager "experience" is far away from something pleasable, after the Wow factor is over. I've never been a fan of wallpaper drop-down menus, in WM nor in other "1st generation" window managers (those that have been on Linux for a long, long time without major usability revisions). Just how many times does he open a two level menu just to check/uncheck the gadgets "edit" mode?
Also I remember that the E desktop had to be configured through hand-editing the text files. Although they promise that "It will provide nicely integrated GUI elements for managing your desktop elements, both files and windows", if this elements are as annoying to use as the dropdown menu then the environment will not have a good workflow.
It's great to have a wonderful platform to build upon. But until something that I can use is actually built, I'm not downloading this.
Or maybe just a beowulf cluster of del.icio.us users...
Nielsen has published ten high-level heuristics for making a good interface. You can use it as a checklist.
It's a loooong article! ,-)
s 02166Game.html).
.uk registry, has created over 3.8 million .uk domains and yet only heard 2,104 domain disputes since its Dispute Resolution Service was launched in September 2001 - an extremely small number in comparison to other top-level domains such as .com or .org.
.uk domains. Its finance director David Thomas told us that the company feels Mr Sumpter had infringed on its rights by starting to sell video games on his site, which was and has been mistaken for Game plc. and that Game plc's rights with regard to the name "game" online can be sufficiently gauged by referring to a Google search on that name. Domains ending with .pro, .aero and many others all have strict criteria before a domain is handed over. A domain's suffix is in fact just as important as the domain stem itself when it comes to deciding ownership. A wider Google search yields a very different set of results in which domains that include the word "game" and which also sells video games feature higher than Game plc. That Mr Sumpter had changed what the website contained and did (from acting as a front for his consultancy business to selling video games) in order to benefit from Game plc's name. That Mr Sumpter sought to elicit as much money as possible from Game plc for the domain. Also, both parties met several times and discussed the sale by Mr Sumpter of his domain to Game plc. As is usual in such domain dispute cases, Game plc sought to paint Mr Sumpter as someone out to profit from a respectable business by holding the company to ransom over a domain name. This is clearly an enormous sum but Mr Sumpter argues that this was a figure put on it by a salesman who had good reason to overplay the domain's true value. Game plc was not just buying his domain, it was buying his entire business based at Game.co.uk.
Domain dispute puts question mark over UK ecommerce
By Kieren McCarthy (kieren at kmccarthy.eclipse.co.uk)
Published Wednesday 16th February 2005 12:34 GMT
A dispute over ownership of "game.co.uk" could have significant and far-reaching effects on e-commerce in Britain.
The domain, which comes under the control of private company Nominet, was awarded to Game plc in January following a complaint that the owner, Garth Sumpter, was misusing it. Mr Sumpter, a consultant for the games industry, has owned the domain since October 1995 and immediately appealed the decision (http://www.nic.uk/DisputeResolution/Decisions/Dr
Nominet, as controller of the
In many other domains around the world - where cases are decided by ICANN's UDRP rules - the situation is flipped and complainants traditionally have the upper-hand, with the existing owner forced to argue why they should retain the domain. If a big company can shut down an existing online business - and competitor - through financial might, and over a generic name such as "game", it could have dire knock-on effects for the hundreds of thousands of small online businesses running from
However, Game plc draws reference to a previous agreement that it accuses Mr Sumpter of backing out of, where he had agreed to sell the domain for a far lower figure. A letter from the head of the game industry's members body to Game plc about the use of its charts on Game.co.uk
3. A Dow Jones Newswire story regarding Game plc but which gave the company's domain name as Game.co.uk. Also since Mr Sumpter is running his own business, no doubt emails intended for Game plc but wrongly sent to him have inconvenienced him. The key to Mr Lothian's decision is given in one finishing sentence: "The Expert has reached the view that the Respondent has brought the consequences of a transfer of the Domain Name upon himself by effecting the change of use in full knowledge of the Complainant's rights."
...brought to you by the Open Text Summarizer:
The European Parliament is unequivocal: the software patents directive needs to go back to the drawing board. But the jury is still out on whether the Commission will listen
The European Parliament's request for the software patent directive to be started from scratch was ratified by senior members of the Parliament on Thursday, but campaigners from both sides are split on what will happen next. A Parliament spokesman said on Thursday that this request was approved without debate by the Conference of Presidents -- the President of the Parliament and the chairmen of political groups -- and can now be passed to the European Commission, which must decide whether to agree to the request. "It is not certain that the Commission will comply with the request of the Parliament, nor that it will use the opportunity to draft a good text," said Pilch. "The new Commission is not obliged to follow the Parliament's request and they might still try to keep all options open and ask the Council to adopt the agreement of last May without a new vote, so as to gain even more options for themselves." "There is a desire for the Council to adopt the directive to uphold the current working methods -- to show that every political agreement leads to a political decision," he said.
Here are the OTS summaries of both articles:
All Points Bulletin, a massively multiplayer action game from the creator of Grand Theft Auto, was today announced. APB will feature real-life cities from across the world, with Squads (the law) going up against Gangs for control of this territory. Thousands of players will form gangs or squads all around the world, and will play in hundreds of online cities.
Grand Theft Auto Creator, David Jones, Awards Worldwide Publishing Rights for His First Online Game, 'APB' to Webzen, Inc.; (Nasdaq:WZEN) was awarded the worldwide online game publishing rights to All Points Bulletin (APB), the first online game developed by David Jones, the creator of the multi-million unit selling video game, Grand Theft Auto, and his UK-based game development company, Real Time Worlds (RTW).
"As an avid gamer and creator of many single player games, it has been my dream to create an online game experience that provides the player with the ultimate freedom to do whatever he wants, in a thriving, living environment," said David Jones, founder and creative director of Real Time Worlds. "When looking for a publishing partner for APB, it was imperative to find a company that was a worldwide leader in online games and we found that in Webzen, Inc."
"APB is an online game that we think will fuel the worldwide growth of online gaming," said Nam Joo Kim, CEO of Webzen, Inc. The titles include the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), SUN, releasing in the third quarter of 2005, and a massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) called Huxley, that leverages the latest Unreal 3 game engine and is scheduled to release in 2006. is also developing game properties for the next generation game consoles to enhance its appeal to the mainstream gaming audience.
Actually you'd be better off using this other article called Speed up Firefox the right way. The hack you linked to is not appropiate for everybody, and can even degrade performance.
Here you have the OTS summary:
LOS ANGELES: Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free.
Napster is currently offering a free trial of its new Napster To Go service, which will enable users for a monthly $US15 ($NZ21.21) fee to download as much music as they want and transfer it to a portable device.
Engadget.com said by installing the digital music programme Winamp and then adding a secondary programme to Winamp called Output Stacker, users could convert the digitally protected files from one format to another that can then be burned, unencumbered, onto CDs.
The original Napster was a free-for-all that let millions of users download and share songs for free - before the music industry forced it into bankruptcy with successful legal challenges.
Napster unveiled the portable subscription earlier this month, backed by a $US30 million ad campaign attacking rival Apple's iTunes service and its ubiquitous iPod digital music player.
Until recently, music subscription services have been somewhat restricted in their ability to transfer songs they provide to portable players, while Apple has sold millions of portable iPods by allowing users to buy songs from iTunes and store them on iPods.
Until the proponents can make it safe for Grandma to avoid being phished by minor pixel differences it's dead.
And so, that is exactly what is proposed in the article that was linked in the previous comment.
This is not a solution, it's a workaround. A solution would be something that allowed to use IDN sites without risk of phishing.
This will block any URL that uses characters outside the normal ASCII range.
So why was IDN created at all?
There are websites that use IDN characters... IN JAPAN!
FTFL (follof the f* link). There ARE legitimate uses for mixed character sets. You don't need them because your native language is english, I presume?
...a Firefox extension!
I, for one, welcome our new Multimedia Hyperlinked World Video Web Overlords.
I suggest to call them WiVi.
I think one problem is that with audio, it's easy to just fade one song into another, but with video, there's not as clear an equivalent.
This could lead to new conventions for image language, as video-clips did to TV.
After all, fading audio was not at all natural the first time someone did it to merge different audio tracks. When music was all hand-made, there was no such thing as fading.
Octopuses, those boneless, brainy, denizens of the deep, use their arms for some tasks in much the same way humans do, according to a new study. But to bring captured prey to its mouth, the octopus turns the arm into a semi-rigid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length. "And indeed our studies show how the octopus simplifies the complex problems associated with controlling flexible arms that have an infinitely large number of degrees of freedom. This in turn inspires the development of new strategies for the control of flexible robotic arms."
Earlier research funded by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) suggests that, to keep the arms from constantly tangling themselves up, each arm has an independent peripheral nervous system and neural circuitry (see related-story link below). Once an octopus spots its prey, it has a remarkable ability to reach out with one of its arms and grab it with one of the suckers that form a double line up each of the octopus's arms.
Some scientists studying octopus arms conclude that they may represent the optimal design for robotic arms
Not often. I did it this time b/c there were two nearly identical questions in the comments of two different stories.
Ok, have you read what is "Stuff I've Seen" before calling BS?
I never talked about Windows XP, so stop flaming.
It's nice to have an exhaustive list of changes, but i'd prefer having one list reporting the usability improvements, as those provided with GNOME new releases.
A simple list of new features doesn't give as much information as a report of the key changes that will affect the whole desktop "experience".
What you describe is low-level GUI management, the kind of what is solved by following some GUI guidelines (like GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, for instance). It's certainly the kind of details that a programmer should know, but it is not enough to build a decent interface.
The core of a really good application is goal oriented software design (also called user oriented design). Before thinking about widgets and gadgets and frame layout, you should start by defining what the application must do and how to do it - and the key to this is to build a prototype and observing real users using it.
That's it, interface design must be an iterative process in which real user problems are observed in real use, and then fixing it with a new design for the real task that the user is trying to accomplish.
What is Longhorn's major selling point? What does it stand to offer the average user?
State of the art search technologies. Longhorn is the mother of the technology also used for Gnome's Beagle and Dashboard, and it will ship with an excellent interface for their search tools (probably much better than Apple's Spotlight).
Microsoft "Stuff I've Seen" interface will probably deprecate the current hierarchical filesystem for most end users, and integrated desktop + internet search will fight Google the same way than IExplorer fought Netscape.
Those interfaces will be cloned quickly by other operating systems, though. But I don't think they can be ported back to Windows XP from Longhorn.
What exactly does Longhorn offer other than a 3D accelerated interface and a big information bar on the side?
State of the art search technologies. Longhorn is the mother of the technology also used for Gnome's Beagle and Dashboard, and it will ship with an excellent interface for their search tools (probably much better than Apple's Spotlight).
Microsoft "Stuff I've Seen" interface will probably deprecate the current hierarchical filesystem for most end users, and integrated desktop + internet search will fight Google the same way than IExplorer fought Netscape.
This is called "user centered design". It's the key to usable interfaces. Software should be designed for humans, not the other way around.
Anti-gun or anti-drug are not lost causes: a society or country with strong weapon restrictions will be quite different to one in which everybody is allowed to carry any kind of weapon, given that they can find them.
/. is not the best site for meditated arguments, but it's very good for getting thought-provoking ideas and feedback.
The same thing can be said of genetic engineering, or any other powerful technology. Although their use can not be totally banned, it can be pipelined to better/different uses than with pure free access (which usually doesn't remain free to all for very long).
And
Apparently it was important enough for you to read it and even post a comment!