Re:Linux Desktop Thoughts...
on
Linux, Inc.
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· Score: 1
What's stopping someone from writing an entire environment like OS X from the ground up, around and on top of Linux, and creating an OS X like environment that is as complete and modern as either OS X or Windows?
So what's stopping you...?
If it was an easy task, it would have already been done. There are some people trying to do right this ( the Y environment comes to my mind right now ) - but even if they succeeded in this task, the lack of any developed software for that platform would be the main drawback to its adoption.
By its very needs, supervision is a centraliced process; when the system is under heavy use by many people, it becomes impossible (see Slashdot moderation as an example).
Wikis are a tool for decentralized, incremental building of information. As anybody can edit it without prior registration and training, the entry threshold is none - so the participation is expected to be high, and knowledge (ideally) develops in a organic way.
XSLT is an example of a data oriented language: you define what to do for every kind of data that can be found in a data flow; you specify how to transform the old data into the new one.
In an object oriented language, you build classes of objects that make series of calls to other objects following a given recipe.
Why? Why on earth do I have to type ctrl-l? You can set a preference with gconf editor to have it always open.
Every person I have ever seen have understood the file hierarchy after just a few seconds explanation: "put this years text into folder '2005'". And how on earth do you suppose they understand bookmarks?
Those are not hierarchies, they are flat one-level folders. The recursive concept of "a folder inside a folder inside a folder" is a difficult one to grasp for non techies (this have been scientifically proved, if you want to hunt for it yourself). The spatial filesystem is a way to alleviate this problem by showing the folders as "real" objects instead of giving a cumbersome, not intuitive tree.
So, you have to hunt them down in the registry instead of in the file system -- how is this better?
As a programmer, just put a command in your application that says "Edit advanced preferences" and which opens the Gnome Configuration editor in your apps folder. It's easy, consistent between applications, and you don't have to program a preferences dialog for each app.
But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
You have your names wrong. Spacial is not exclusive with hierarchical, they're ortogonal (i.e. a hierarchical filesystem interface can be spacial, or not). Indeed, in the case of searching for a file in which you remember its position but not its name, spacial only helps and completes the tree-like filesystem by placing each folder in the same place that you remember it.
Surely you should have said "navigational" vs "spacial", which are mutually exclusive.
Mod parent interesting. This is how Free Software is related to politics.
The US discovered massive corruption occurs when unions get too powerful. You could also say that's what happens when corporations get too powerful. Despite what libertarians would tell you, the right to private property is a positive right: it requires active intervention from the state to protect it.
Corporations are the ultimate expresion of private property, and they can also be so powerful to control government wich then no longer represents the citicens. The GPL actually prevents corporations to achieve this level of control by softening the capitalist concept of intellectual property and replacing it by a different cooperative process.
And then, interesting things be4gin to happen when you try to imagine a world where that postulate isnt true. The main difference I see between scientific and religious axioms is the willingness of its proposants to do mental games with the alternatives, and experiment with them to the last conlcusions.
Sidebars haven't been excluded from Firefox. You have the History bar and the Bookmarks bar, and you can also open any web page in the sidebar.
Sidebars are not for quick-launching a website; for that you have the bookmarks bar. They are used as goal-based navigating tools. Need to find a web you visited one week ago? Open the History bar, and find your way through it. Want to browse Google News daily? Open it as a sidebar, and click links for different news. That's why almost every web page in the Net has a sidebar on the left side.
The process you describe to include metadata is what browsers should do, but bookmarks should not get sorted into hierarchical folders. A much better retrieval interface is with tags (i.e. search by keyword), like those in Gmail and the Epiphany browser.
With tags, archived objects can be located in several places at once. That way Slashdot would be under the "News, Technology and Geek" tags, and Google under the "Search, Engine, Tools, Internet" tags.
Given that the article's author is not one of "the guys who think tabbed browsing isn't useful or desired by user", because he doesn't work in IE no more.
When this guy worked in IE there wasn't tabbed browsing in any major browser, and IE v4.0 was a very good tool for it's time, so I thinkg it's pretty obvious who's incorrect.
That comment is lame. about:cache is integrated int o firefox, but it doesn't allow to search for web pages content, which was grandparent's post request.
You mean like adhering to the W3C standards? You mean like not having your own proprietary code floating about?
That's already done. It's called Firefox. But you miss the subject; it's not about system's design, is about interface (i.e. a useable tool) design.
BTW, web standards didn't exist when this guy started working in Internet Explorer V1.0. That's right, the writer has been working that long in the IE development team. Given that IE is a somewhat useable piece of software, I would give him some credit.
That's already a solved problem. Check Furl, Spurl, del.icio.us (which have the further benefit of an emergent collaborative filtering system).
Better bookmark managment systems need to be implemented indeed, but the problem is far deeper. I wouldn't be satisfied with less that what Integrated Back, History and Bookmarks describes: most visited pages bookmarked automatically and shown in the history list, filtering by frequency of visits, thumbnails.
I would implement that system myself as a Firefox extension, but sadly I lack the developing skill with the Mozilla base code.
Fun aside, that's a real problem with current interface designs. Online bookmark sites manage this by adding a "private" checkbox to entries, but I would like to see a more fine-grained publishing classification (i.e. personal, for friends, for work, for the world).
Slashdot Mirror
What's stopping someone from writing an entire environment like OS X from the ground up, around and on top of Linux, and creating an OS X like environment that is as complete and modern as either OS X or Windows?
So what's stopping you...?
If it was an easy task, it would have already been done. There are some people trying to do right this ( the Y environment comes to my mind right now ) - but even if they succeeded in this task, the lack of any developed software for that platform would be the main drawback to its adoption.
By its very needs, supervision is a centraliced process; when the system is under heavy use by many people, it becomes impossible (see Slashdot moderation as an example).
Wikis are a tool for decentralized, incremental building of information. As anybody can edit it without prior registration and training, the entry threshold is none - so the participation is expected to be high, and knowledge (ideally) develops in a organic way.
XSLT is an example of a data oriented language: you define what to do for every kind of data that can be found in a data flow; you specify how to transform the old data into the new one.
In an object oriented language, you build classes of objects that make series of calls to other objects following a given recipe.
Why? Why on earth do I have to type ctrl-l?
You can set a preference with gconf editor to have it always open.
Every person I have ever seen have understood the file hierarchy after just a few seconds explanation: "put this years text into folder '2005'". And how on earth do you suppose they understand bookmarks?
Those are not hierarchies, they are flat one-level folders. The recursive concept of "a folder inside a folder inside a folder" is a difficult one to grasp for non techies (this have been scientifically proved, if you want to hunt for it yourself). The spatial filesystem is a way to alleviate this problem by showing the folders as "real" objects instead of giving a cumbersome, not intuitive tree.
So, you have to hunt them down in the registry instead of in the file system -- how is this better?
As a programmer, just put a command in your application that says "Edit advanced preferences" and which opens the Gnome Configuration editor in your apps folder. It's easy, consistent between applications, and you don't have to program a preferences dialog for each app.
But if I can't really remember the name, that's when things like bookmarks and hierarchical structures become usefull. Indeed most of the time, looking at the site favicon in my bookmarks dropdown is what triggers my memory most... that and the categorizing. So I guess, imho, spacial is not a complete replacement for hierarchical, but hierarchical can be a complete replacement for spacial.
You have your names wrong. Spacial is not exclusive with hierarchical, they're ortogonal (i.e. a hierarchical filesystem interface can be spacial, or not). Indeed, in the case of searching for a file in which you remember its position but not its name, spacial only helps and completes the tree-like filesystem by placing each folder in the same place that you remember it.
Surely you should have said "navigational" vs "spacial", which are mutually exclusive.
Mod parent interesting. This is how Free Software is related to politics.
The US discovered massive corruption occurs when unions get too powerful.
You could also say that's what happens when corporations get too powerful. Despite what libertarians would tell you, the right to private property is a positive right: it requires active intervention from the state to protect it.
Corporations are the ultimate expresion of private property, and they can also be so powerful to control government wich then no longer represents the citicens. The GPL actually prevents corporations to achieve this level of control by softening the capitalist concept of intellectual property and replacing it by a different cooperative process.
You have yet not seen Penzilla (and its fork Pendesktop), the integrated desktop suite based on Mozilla?
Yeah, that gives a whole new meaning to grandparents post.
And then, interesting things be4gin to happen when you try to imagine a world where that postulate isnt true. The main difference I see between scientific and religious axioms is the willingness of its proposants to do mental games with the alternatives, and experiment with them to the last conlcusions.
Sidebars haven't been excluded from Firefox. You have the History bar and the Bookmarks bar, and you can also open any web page in the sidebar.
Sidebars are not for quick-launching a website; for that you have the bookmarks bar. They are used as goal-based navigating tools. Need to find a web you visited one week ago? Open the History bar, and find your way through it. Want to browse Google News daily? Open it as a sidebar, and click links for different news. That's why almost every web page in the Net has a sidebar on the left side.
Ok, i meant that W3C standards didn't exist when first browsers went into the market. Of course HTML was a web standard by then.
The process you describe to include metadata is what browsers should do, but bookmarks should not get sorted into hierarchical folders. A much better retrieval interface is with tags (i.e. search by keyword), like those in Gmail and the Epiphany browser.
With tags, archived objects can be located in several places at once. That way Slashdot would be under the "News, Technology and Geek" tags, and Google under the "Search, Engine, Tools, Internet" tags.
Given that the article's author is not one of "the guys who think tabbed browsing isn't useful or desired by user", because he doesn't work in IE no more.
When this guy worked in IE there wasn't tabbed browsing in any major browser, and IE v4.0 was a very good tool for it's time, so I thinkg it's pretty obvious who's incorrect.
I don't need any of that and no one else does either.
So, you know precisely what the rest of the world does or doesn't need?
You, sir, are a troll. And IHBT.
That comment is lame. about:cache is integrated int o firefox, but it doesn't allow to search for web pages content, which was grandparent's post request.
You mean like adhering to the W3C standards? You mean like not having your own proprietary code floating about?
That's already done. It's called Firefox. But you miss the subject; it's not about system's design, is about interface (i.e. a useable tool) design.
BTW, web standards didn't exist when this guy started working in Internet Explorer V1.0. That's right, the writer has been working that long in the IE development team. Given that IE is a somewhat useable piece of software, I would give him some credit.
That's already a solved problem. Check Furl, Spurl, del.icio.us (which have the further benefit of an emergent collaborative filtering system).
Better bookmark managment systems need to be implemented indeed, but the problem is far deeper. I wouldn't be satisfied with less that what Integrated Back, History and Bookmarks describes: most visited pages bookmarked automatically and shown in the history list, filtering by frequency of visits, thumbnails.
I would implement that system myself as a Firefox extension, but sadly I lack the developing skill with the Mozilla base code.
Fun aside, that's a real problem with current interface designs. Online bookmark sites manage this by adding a "private" checkbox to entries, but I would like to see a more fine-grained publishing classification (i.e. personal, for friends, for work, for the world).
You can try your vision with this Demo of Zoomworld. This system is part of The Humane Environment project.
Do you wish that you had mod points right now youd get modded up?
Um, Tell me your definition of AI.
Can you elaborate on that?
Old people, Japan and 18-inch jokes all in the same story! I won't survive it!
Was the study published 1st April?