Windows needs an option that you can select at install time: "I'm not an idiot. I know what I'm doing. Give me all the rope I ask for." The results would be:
No Fischer Price interface. No dummy descriptions. Show all files. No, really, all of them. Yes, even the ones in WINNT and Program Files. Classic control panel. Classic task bar. Classic start menu. Nothing prefixed with "My ". Don't create any user accounts other than Administrator in the installation. Ctrl+Alt+Delete login. No stupid animation to help me search. No stupid yellow boxes pointing to the system tray and telling me things like "You should sign up for Passport" or "You should run windows update." Only ask me if I really meant to do something if I am permanently deleting files. No Wizards for anything.
Present choices * and settings in terms of user goals, not technology. Use everyday words when you can. This is especially effective if you are explaining a complex technical concept or action. Imagine you are looking over the user's shoulder and explaining how to accomplish the task.
Technology-based: * Enable Internet Connection Sharing host * Manual Duplex
Goal-based: * Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection. * Print on both sides of the paper.
This tendancy annoys me more and more with ever release of Windows, for many reasons: 1) Most everybody knows what "duplex" means. Why not let those who don't learn what it means instead of pretending the word doesn't exist, and encouraging people to forget. 2) When I am on the phone with a user, I can say "look for the options that says something like "Internet Connection Sharing". Most users will not find the goal-based option, as it does not include the word "sharing". 3) I know what I'm looking for. I know what it was called in NT4, 2000, and 2003 server. Now I have to read paragraphs and guess that "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection" is Internet Connection Sharing and not Web Proxy. 4) It encourages the user to not learn about the very complex piece of equipment he just bought. If you provide a good searchable manual instead of dumbing everything down, the program will be easier to use, and the user will learn more.
Imagine if your grill didn't say "Ignite" above the red button, but "Make the fire start", or if your toaster didn't say "Toast", but "Make your bread crispy", or if your car didn't say "ABS", but "Automatically remove and reapply pressure on the brake so your car doesn't skid. Don't pump your brakes".
This is slashdot, so I need to reference either Orwell or Rand: Or are they trying to reduce English to a smaller set of simple words that everybody can understand? Double-plus ungood.
Acrobat does more than generating PDFs from other files. For example, my job requires me to make PDF Forms. I have to run Windows in VMWare just to run Acrobat.
I might suggest that cameras be put in the politicians' offices that are property of the state. If a politician has his own office that he pays rent for somewhere else, his privacy would be respected.
As far as cameras in boardrooms, it is less stupid of an idea than cameras on street corners.
If I was doing 60 in the left lane then I'd be failing to keep right except to pass, which is a violation in most places. But I'm doing 60 in the rightmost lane, which still does slow down traffic as people wanting to go 65 or 70 need to get into the middle and left lanes to pass me.
They DO produce it. They made the product, and somebody else is selling, illegally, it for profit. That is why they are suing.
Don't complain that the RIAA/MPAA are taking legal action to protect their legal rights. If you don't think there should be laws against what YouTube is doing, complain about the laws and the lawmakers.
Don't complain that I'm impeding the advance of traffic flow because I'm doing 60 in a 65; complain that the speed limit is only 65.
note: Don't start ranting about how information should be free and copyrights are wrong and non free software is "ethically tainted". What should be has nothing to do with my comment. It is about what is, and what the appropriate response is.
X hasn't been replaced because it is entrenched and broken. Because it is entrenched, you'd have to provide X11 backwards compatibility. Because it is broken, that is hard to do. It works well enough, so it'll be around until a big player, IBM or Sun maybe, steps up and writes X12 or Y and sets it free.
X has other problems. Inconsistent user interface, inconsistent protocol support, everybody trying to out-eye-candy each other , a system not well designed for eye candy. . . well, its pretty much the same disaster as HTTP.
Seriously, though. If X were replaced with something with the same goal, but without the same "mechanism, not policy" policy, and a lot of the good design elements of News and NeXT, wouldn't that be ideal? Add some auto-launch features and SSL encryption, and you're all set. Hell, you could even have an abstraction layer to use and XML schema to control the toolkit.
You'll get your business leaders, activists, drones, revolutionaries, and sociopaths. They are side products. The desired output are willing taxpayers and party-line voters.
They could provide decent free lunches to kids, but the kids wouldn't eat them. You could provide a million different dishes based on rice, pasta, and vegetables. But the kids will only eat pizza, tacos, and chicken fingers, which are far more expensive.
I don't understand why the schools are feeding the kids anyways. Let the parents give the kids food. Those who can't afford it get WIC. Get rid of the cafeteria, the food service, the lunch ladies. Give the money you saved to CPA to deal with the children whose parents don't feed them.
At what point did people lose the ability to take care of themselves and the desire to directly take care of others?
I don't know where people ge their ideas about thinkpads. Must be the commercials. We have been using Thinkpads in our office for years. Blown backlights, flimsy keyboards, quickly degrading batteries, and persistent annoying electronic noises the norm. And IBM/Lenovo's customer support is terrible. Nobody knows the answer to anything, and if it might be possibly software related (there are funny black lines on my monitor once Windows boots, please send me a damn installer CD that will work on this laptop*), they tell you to call Microsoft and hang up on you.
* I have a T43. It comes with a recovery partition. You can order a DVD that will restore the factory setting. If you want multiple partitions, you are out of luck. They tell you to go buy a new copy of Windows. The retail Windows XP Professional CD does not work. I don't know if its the display or the SATA-PATA bridge, but after it start inspecting your hardware, you get a black screen and thats it. MS blames IBM. IBM blames MS.
What?! User interface is non-standard and sucks. The CSS support is different but not right, so correct CSS is broken AND IE6 hacked CSS is broken. What way is it better in? Tabs. Thats one way, not pretty much every way.
This is a different issue than Newspeak. A better example than 1984 is the Bush Administration's sell of the war in Iraq. The administration repeatedly spoke about Al Qaeda and Iraq in the same breath, knowing that most people would not look into it further and assume that the two were related. It is deliberate deceit.
"Every camera and music player I've ever used has automatically mounted as an external drive. Have I been abnormally lucky?"
Yes, you have been abnormally lucky. Most do, but there are a few that don't. I have a friend who had to toss a Canon digital camera because drivers were only available for Windows 9x. No 2k or XP support even. There are a lot of manufacturers that do stupid things.
Really? I'd think most people would be content to cease to exist. The idea of having a soul is lot scarier: there may be long term - even eternal - consequences to your actions.
There are a lot of us crazy Christian conservatives who are against: 1) abortion 2) IVF 3) death penalty 4) war 5) George W. Bush 6) the Republican Party, which has gone off the deep end
There just don't seem to be enough of us to rival the rest of the voting population.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows needs an option that you can select at install time: "I'm not an idiot. I know what I'm doing. Give me all the rope I ask for." The results would be:
No Fischer Price interface.
No dummy descriptions.
Show all files.
No, really, all of them.
Yes, even the ones in WINNT and Program Files.
Classic control panel.
Classic task bar.
Classic start menu.
Nothing prefixed with "My ".
Don't create any user accounts other than Administrator in the installation.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete login.
No stupid animation to help me search.
No stupid yellow boxes pointing to the system tray and telling me things like "You should sign up for Passport" or "You should run windows update."
Only ask me if I really meant to do something if I am permanently deleting files.
No Wizards for anything.
This tendancy annoys me more and more with ever release of Windows, for many reasons:
1) Most everybody knows what "duplex" means. Why not let those who don't learn what it means instead of pretending the word doesn't exist, and encouraging people to forget.
2) When I am on the phone with a user, I can say "look for the options that says something like "Internet Connection Sharing". Most users will not find the goal-based option, as it does not include the word "sharing".
3) I know what I'm looking for. I know what it was called in NT4, 2000, and 2003 server. Now I have to read paragraphs and guess that "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection" is Internet Connection Sharing and not Web Proxy.
4) It encourages the user to not learn about the very complex piece of equipment he just bought. If you provide a good searchable manual instead of dumbing everything down, the program will be easier to use, and the user will learn more.
Imagine if your grill didn't say "Ignite" above the red button, but "Make the fire start", or if your toaster didn't say "Toast", but "Make your bread crispy", or if your car didn't say "ABS", but "Automatically remove and reapply pressure on the brake so your car doesn't skid. Don't pump your brakes".
This is slashdot, so I need to reference either Orwell or Rand:
Or are they trying to reduce English to a smaller set of simple words that everybody can understand? Double-plus ungood.
"they'd only be trying to suppress something that has come about naturally."
Vandalism, burglery, rape, murder, and genocide have all come about naturally. Naturally does not mean good.
It won't sell for under 1.5b. It won't sell at all. Welcome dot-com bust 2 point oh.
Which leads to another problem. People will pay Joe to hack together a lousy program. Nobody will pay for Sally to fix it. The end users suffer.
Acrobat does more than generating PDFs from other files. For example, my job requires me to make PDF Forms. I have to run Windows in VMWare just to run Acrobat.
I might suggest that cameras be put in the politicians' offices that are property of the state. If a politician has his own office that he pays rent for somewhere else, his privacy would be respected.
As far as cameras in boardrooms, it is less stupid of an idea than cameras on street corners.
No Acrobat for Linux. Just reader.
The should put the cameras in boardrooms and politicians' offices. They'd catch many more crooks that way.
If I was doing 60 in the left lane then I'd be failing to keep right except to pass, which is a violation in most places. But I'm doing 60 in the rightmost lane, which still does slow down traffic as people wanting to go 65 or 70 need to get into the middle and left lanes to pass me.
"They don't produce it."
They DO produce it. They made the product, and somebody else is selling, illegally, it for profit. That is why they are suing.
Don't complain that the RIAA/MPAA are taking legal action to protect their legal rights. If you don't think there should be laws against what YouTube is doing, complain about the laws and the lawmakers.
Don't complain that I'm impeding the advance of traffic flow because I'm doing 60 in a 65; complain that the speed limit is only 65.
note: Don't start ranting about how information should be free and copyrights are wrong and non free software is "ethically tainted". What should be has nothing to do with my comment. It is about what is, and what the appropriate response is.
mechanism, not policy.
X hasn't been replaced because it is entrenched and broken. Because it is entrenched, you'd have to provide X11 backwards compatibility. Because it is broken, that is hard to do. It works well enough, so it'll be around until a big player, IBM or Sun maybe, steps up and writes X12 or Y and sets it free.
xorg on cygwin.
X has other problems. Inconsistent user interface, inconsistent protocol support, everybody trying to out-eye-candy each other , a system not well designed for eye candy. . . well, its pretty much the same disaster as HTTP.
You mean X Windows?
Don't shoot!
Seriously, though. If X were replaced with something with the same goal, but without the same "mechanism, not policy" policy, and a lot of the good design elements of News and NeXT, wouldn't that be ideal? Add some auto-launch features and SSL encryption, and you're all set. Hell, you could even have an abstraction layer to use and XML schema to control the toolkit.
You'll get your business leaders, activists, drones, revolutionaries, and sociopaths. They are side products. The desired output are willing taxpayers and party-line voters.
They could provide decent free lunches to kids, but the kids wouldn't eat them. You could provide a million different dishes based on rice, pasta, and vegetables. But the kids will only eat pizza, tacos, and chicken fingers, which are far more expensive.
I don't understand why the schools are feeding the kids anyways. Let the parents give the kids food. Those who can't afford it get WIC. Get rid of the cafeteria, the food service, the lunch ladies. Give the money you saved to CPA to deal with the children whose parents don't feed them.
At what point did people lose the ability to take care of themselves and the desire to directly take care of others?
I don't know where people ge their ideas about thinkpads. Must be the commercials. We have been using Thinkpads in our office for years. Blown backlights, flimsy keyboards, quickly degrading batteries, and persistent annoying electronic noises the norm. And IBM/Lenovo's customer support is terrible. Nobody knows the answer to anything, and if it might be possibly software related (there are funny black lines on my monitor once Windows boots, please send me a damn installer CD that will work on this laptop*), they tell you to call Microsoft and hang up on you.
* I have a T43. It comes with a recovery partition. You can order a DVD that will restore the factory setting. If you want multiple partitions, you are out of luck. They tell you to go buy a new copy of Windows. The retail Windows XP Professional CD does not work. I don't know if its the display or the SATA-PATA bridge, but after it start inspecting your hardware, you get a black screen and thats it. MS blames IBM. IBM blames MS.
"It is better than IE 6 in pretty much every way"
What?! User interface is non-standard and sucks. The CSS support is different but not right, so correct CSS is broken AND IE6 hacked CSS is broken. What way is it better in? Tabs. Thats one way, not pretty much every way.
This is a different issue than Newspeak. A better example than 1984 is the Bush Administration's sell of the war in Iraq. The administration repeatedly spoke about Al Qaeda and Iraq in the same breath, knowing that most people would not look into it further and assume that the two were related. It is deliberate deceit.
If I fiddle the with volume keys on my T43 (which otherwise is a piece of crap) before it clears the POST, they do change the volume.
"Every camera and music player I've ever used has automatically mounted as an external drive. Have I been abnormally lucky?"
Yes, you have been abnormally lucky. Most do, but there are a few that don't. I have a friend who had to toss a Canon digital camera because drivers were only available for Windows 9x. No 2k or XP support even. There are a lot of manufacturers that do stupid things.
Really? I'd think most people would be content to cease to exist. The idea of having a soul is lot scarier: there may be long term - even eternal - consequences to your actions.
There are a lot of us crazy Christian conservatives who are against:
1) abortion
2) IVF
3) death penalty
4) war
5) George W. Bush
6) the Republican Party, which has gone off the deep end
There just don't seem to be enough of us to rival the rest of the voting population.
Like "xerox", "kleenex", and "thermos"?
But you don't HAVE to give people what they want. You can sell, or not sell, whatever you want. Thats freedom.