You know, if you look outside of KDE apps they can be quite good. RhythmBox is a competent iTunes clone though gstreamer is still a bit immature - for now you may wish to use the Xine backend. If you're looking for something truly fresh then Muine has an innovative, unique (afaik) interface especially suitable for lots of albums. It doesn't do net radio though: it's purely for playing back music. Other downside is that it requires Mono. It works nicely however, in my limited experience.
The main issue is that Qt apps sometimes select fonts, uh, inappropriately. It appears to vary depending on.... well, I'm not sure what, I don't use many Qt apps. But one thing I rememeber from trying KDE 3.2 lately was that not everything used AA fonts: in particular I could not make Konqueror use them for the life of me.
Flip side is I never had any problems with this in Gnome... or FluxBox, or anything else really. It seems to be a KDE problem. In everything else the fonts were fine for me.
The explanation I heard was that there were a lot of bugs in the early 2.4 kernels that ReiserFS exposed and other filing systems didn't due to the way it worked internally. Whether it's finger pointing or not doesn't really matter - people are saying "I can't trust ReiserFS" but what makes you think you can trust the kernel team absolutely either?
Sure, so we've both worked tech support. You're preaching to the guys who are still there, saying "well you should always be nice and never let anybody annoy you, because that's what professionals do" and you're right in the absolute but realise that it's equally annoying to those who are still going through the day dealing with all the annoying user stereotypes.
For what it's worth we're both developers, so I don't think we have much of a podium on which to lecture people about how they should be sunny and pleasant all the time. It's been some time since I did tech support but I don't have rose tinted glasses.
Re:Um...because using a computer is more complex?
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Are You Annoying?
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No, really, it's not harder - the majority of people use things like email, the web, perhaps basic office skills (word processing etc) not the command prompt... considering how many people do these things with little to no formal training every day, I think it's wrong to suggest that it's much harder than driving a car. It often takes months to become proficient at driving, because doing it right is hard (at first).
The only difference is that it's a social taboo to be unable to drive - partly I suspect because you end up being dependent on people who can and people don't like taking other peoples time like that. But for IT it's not taboo and people feel no shame at all in sucking up hours of other peoples time because they couldn't be bothered downloading updates, or whatever it is this time. Hence mutual annoyance occurs.
It's very easy for people to preach if they haven't worked tech support lines in a big company. VERY easy. If you have done so for a good length of time and still have a sunny attitude then congratulations, but you are in the minority.
Now, *most* users in large networks do try their best, rarely (if ever) have issues, are polite etc and they tend to get good responses. Some (especially older ladies) basically don't even bother trying, they just expect people to handhold them all the time. Unfortunately for them using IT is sometimes a large component of their jobs: if they can't do it rather than having somebody else constantly do things for them, they probably shouldn't have the job at all.
I'm also somewhat sceptical about things like the "European Computer Driving License". My mother, a lovely lady who is absolutely non-IT literate, has taken this. She's managed to get scores in the high 90%s for modules like "File and directory management" but claims she still doesn't really understand directories and just saves files wherever the default is.
You very strongly don't want an abstraction. On the Mac, installing an application (I haven't use OSX, so my knowledge is based on the older versions) is as easy as dragging the folder onto the hard drive. To erase, you wipe it.
That's actually a great example of why you're wrong - in MacOS X sometimes you drag and drop software, sometimes it uses the Apple installer, and sometimes it uses custom installers. Even Apples own software does not use appfolders anymore - the underlying system was too simple to meet peoples actual needs, and so they ended up with many different hacks around it reducing consistency overall.
Worse, as more and more hacks were added to try and make the bundles/appfolders scheme functional enough, they managed to create security holes while they were at it. Witness the URL registration/LaunchServices mess.
There's a saying: "make something as simple as possible, but no simpler". Apple made appfolders simpler than was really possible and Mac users are now paying the price.
Yes, and some would agree - I'm looking for a solution that works for everybody regardless of what distro they use.
As for the Gimp on Win32, yep, it won't feel as native as say Photoshop which does (mostly) use native widgets, but GTK is good enough that with a native file picker most people don't seem to mind. The big issue that always come up is MDI.
Erm, the same is true of Photoshop. These are apps designed for people who want to do advanced graphics rather than mess around, of course it's going to have advanced terminology. That doesn't reflect on OSS vs proprietary usability, it simply reflects on the types of apps Gimp and Photoshop are.
There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.
A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).
Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.
Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.
On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.
This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.
Skinning has done more to ruin usability of applications than anything else the last 10 years.
Well maybe so, but that hasn't stopped legions of my non-technical friends downloading and enjoying Trillian and WinAmp: somehow they figure it out despite the bizarre skins they have. These people aren't whiz-kids, they're just ordinary people.
While skinning may reduce immediate usability, it increases visual attractiveness and allows you to customize your surroundings. People always decorate their environments and personalize their posessions; see the popularity of changable mobile phone covers for a good example of this, so just because something reduces usability does not make it bad per se if it improves the product sufficiently in other areas. People will still use it.
The main problem with the "make it like Windows" approach is that it doesn't work. It was tried and usability studies showed that the approach was fatally flawed - people expected that because it looked like Windows it would act like Windows and of course it did not, how could it without duplicating Windows down to the last detail?
No, it was found (again through usability studies) that a better way was to make it look unique enough that people recognised it was new, but intuitive and obvious enough that people were able to use it easily anyway. This is the approach Gnome is taking - whether you think they've been succesful or not is a different argument for a different time;)
That would be right if the first poster actually had posted more than random trollage. Quite a lot of people have stated they find it faster than IE and have then given concrete examples of things they find that are faster. Just saying "I think IE is faster" is a weak argument, saying it in a trollish fashion is even worse
Wine already does this - while it's far from perfect it already implements debugger hiding to a certain extent and some more code is in there to allow even quite advanced techniques like the ones SafeDisc uses to work - though it's not activated yet.
And an interesting one found in the SafeDisc protection where(if I recall) they use a checksum of the GDT to decrypt a section of code. The debugger modifies this table and will cause the code to crash.
SafeDisc also loads a driver into the kernel which reads the debug register in the CPU. SafeDisc does a whole ton of clever things though, those guys really know their stuff, so I can well believe it hashes the GDT too.
The most common techniques are checking for SoftIce (a very, very popular kernel level debugger) using a variety of techniques, google for "MeltIce" to see one I patched Wine to work with a few weeks ago, checking the x86 debug register, playing with interrupts, examining a Windows internal structure called the PEB, and so on... lots of devious tricks you can use.
Yeah, I'm not especially sympathetic - getting apps which utilise copy protection to run under Windows emulation often requires detailed tracing and disassemblies of the programs in question. Debugger detection in particular isn't especially hard to counter especially if you have tools like DLL relayers. If they're being stymied by anti-debugger checks then... well, they need to hire some black hats.
Yahoo Store *used* to be in LISP. As far as I know, it was rewritten some time ago, partly because nobody knew the language and partly because the way it was done meant they had to have stupid warnings telling the user not to hit the browsers back button.
Well, does/etc/bashrc exist? It's not that it can open stuff in gedit, it's that it'll open any file at all with no confirmation, which is what the parent poster was saying was a bad thing
The reason FC2 is such a POS is because it spent most of its development cycle broken as snot due to SELinux - this time they're learned from their mistakes and are approaching SELinux integration far more slowly. Hopefully the fact that it's not spending all its time unusable due to too ambitious SELinux integration will mean they get a much more solid release out...
That's more to do with the way people build RPMS than anything specific to Linux - it's perfectly feasable to build RPMs for Fedora Core 1 and have them install into FC2 (or indeed, build packages that can be installed into distros going back several years). Doing so is something of a black art though currently so nobody does it.
However iirc the file:/// scheme still works, so you don't actually gain anything. You can still open arbitrary files, meaning that if you can find a buffer overflow in any OS X system applications you can escape the browser sandbox.
It's for that reason that Mozilla salts the profile directory.
What the original poster was probably meaning, if he had a point at all, was that non-Windows systems don't do this sort of "command-line-as-a-protocol" bullshit because it's quite obviously the wrong way to do things.
Sure about that? If you're in Firefox/Epiphany with Gnome installed (you don't have to using it) try opening this URL: ghelp:///etc/bashrc - Slashcode eats the slashes if I try and put that into an href but obviously that wouldn't occur elsewhere.
For those of you who don't use Linux (or use Konq/Opera), it will open your/etc/bashrc file in gedit.
Note that KDE is equally vulernable to URL handler attacks, see the telnet handler bug a while ago.
They do? Unless you use an extension you don't seem able to do that with Firefox, I know I've never needed to use such things in years of using Mozilla. I think people are just covering up for the fact that, well, it might not be just but Moz/Firefox does not have much market share at all.
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You know, if you look outside of KDE apps they can be quite good. RhythmBox is a competent iTunes clone though gstreamer is still a bit immature - for now you may wish to use the Xine backend. If you're looking for something truly fresh then Muine has an innovative, unique (afaik) interface especially suitable for lots of albums. It doesn't do net radio though: it's purely for playing back music. Other downside is that it requires Mono. It works nicely however, in my limited experience.
You can purchase songs and play them on Linux. However, iPod integration doesn't presently work.
Flip side is I never had any problems with this in Gnome ... or FluxBox, or anything else really. It seems to be a KDE problem. In everything else the fonts were fine for me.
The explanation I heard was that there were a lot of bugs in the early 2.4 kernels that ReiserFS exposed and other filing systems didn't due to the way it worked internally. Whether it's finger pointing or not doesn't really matter - people are saying "I can't trust ReiserFS" but what makes you think you can trust the kernel team absolutely either?
For what it's worth we're both developers, so I don't think we have much of a podium on which to lecture people about how they should be sunny and pleasant all the time. It's been some time since I did tech support but I don't have rose tinted glasses.
The only difference is that it's a social taboo to be unable to drive - partly I suspect because you end up being dependent on people who can and people don't like taking other peoples time like that. But for IT it's not taboo and people feel no shame at all in sucking up hours of other peoples time because they couldn't be bothered downloading updates, or whatever it is this time. Hence mutual annoyance occurs.
Now, *most* users in large networks do try their best, rarely (if ever) have issues, are polite etc and they tend to get good responses. Some (especially older ladies) basically don't even bother trying, they just expect people to handhold them all the time. Unfortunately for them using IT is sometimes a large component of their jobs: if they can't do it rather than having somebody else constantly do things for them, they probably shouldn't have the job at all.
I'm also somewhat sceptical about things like the "European Computer Driving License". My mother, a lovely lady who is absolutely non-IT literate, has taken this. She's managed to get scores in the high 90%s for modules like "File and directory management" but claims she still doesn't really understand directories and just saves files wherever the default is.
That's actually a great example of why you're wrong - in MacOS X sometimes you drag and drop software, sometimes it uses the Apple installer, and sometimes it uses custom installers. Even Apples own software does not use appfolders anymore - the underlying system was too simple to meet peoples actual needs, and so they ended up with many different hacks around it reducing consistency overall.
Worse, as more and more hacks were added to try and make the bundles/appfolders scheme functional enough, they managed to create security holes while they were at it. Witness the URL registration/LaunchServices mess. There's a saying: "make something as simple as possible, but no simpler". Apple made appfolders simpler than was really possible and Mac users are now paying the price.
As for the Gimp on Win32, yep, it won't feel as native as say Photoshop which does (mostly) use native widgets, but GTK is good enough that with a native file picker most people don't seem to mind. The big issue that always come up is MDI.
Erm, the same is true of Photoshop. These are apps designed for people who want to do advanced graphics rather than mess around, of course it's going to have advanced terminology. That doesn't reflect on OSS vs proprietary usability, it simply reflects on the types of apps Gimp and Photoshop are.
There are already a lot of replies to this post saying "no definitely not, OSS developers are all elitest ignoramuses" because it's easy to sound insightful when criticising, but really what they're saying doesn't stack up. It might have been right 3 years ago but the improvements made since then have been staggering.
A lot of software has been rewritten or redesigned with usability being core. Example: grip was deemed a lost cause as far as UI went, so Sound Juicer was written instead. XMMS was deemed fundamentally flawed so Muine and RhythmBox were written. Gnome has adopted a pervasive HIG and while it may have a few rough edges still it's arguably more consistent than both Windows (hands up if you read the Windows HIG - thought not) and even Apples (brushed metal or aqua - what mood is Steven in today?).
Today, if you want, you can get software that's had well thought through usability. That doesn't mean everybody uses it, but it's certainly available to those who want it.
Now, there are some big remaining usability issues in free software but these tend to be structural/architectural. For instance Linux software installation is frequently very difficult and it's not easy to solve without a great deal of engineering.
On Windows the GIMP user interface isn't anywhere near as good as on Linux, despite the GIMP 2 itself making great strides over the 1.2 release in absolute terms, the different (arguably worse) Windows WM model and UI paradigms aren't accounted for and there aren't enough Win32 Gimp developers to give Gimp/Win32 an excellently integrated UI. Or at least, not rapidly.
This is more a side-effect of the Gimp being most popular on Linux and the core developers all using Linux though, rather than any fundamental insight into the nature of open source. I've seen some pretty crap ports to Windows UI from commercial companies as well - for instance, the laughable QuickTime 4 which not only made zero effort to integrate with the host operating systems UI but also committed quite a few usability sins like the thumbwheel.
Well maybe so, but that hasn't stopped legions of my non-technical friends downloading and enjoying Trillian and WinAmp: somehow they figure it out despite the bizarre skins they have. These people aren't whiz-kids, they're just ordinary people.
While skinning may reduce immediate usability, it increases visual attractiveness and allows you to customize your surroundings. People always decorate their environments and personalize their posessions; see the popularity of changable mobile phone covers for a good example of this, so just because something reduces usability does not make it bad per se if it improves the product sufficiently in other areas. People will still use it.
No, it was found (again through usability studies) that a better way was to make it look unique enough that people recognised it was new, but intuitive and obvious enough that people were able to use it easily anyway. This is the approach Gnome is taking - whether you think they've been succesful or not is a different argument for a different time ;)
That would be right if the first poster actually had posted more than random trollage. Quite a lot of people have stated they find it faster than IE and have then given concrete examples of things they find that are faster. Just saying "I think IE is faster" is a weak argument, saying it in a trollish fashion is even worse
Wine already does this - while it's far from perfect it already implements debugger hiding to a certain extent and some more code is in there to allow even quite advanced techniques like the ones SafeDisc uses to work - though it's not activated yet.
SafeDisc also loads a driver into the kernel which reads the debug register in the CPU. SafeDisc does a whole ton of clever things though, those guys really know their stuff, so I can well believe it hashes the GDT too.
The most common techniques are checking for SoftIce (a very, very popular kernel level debugger) using a variety of techniques, google for "MeltIce" to see one I patched Wine to work with a few weeks ago, checking the x86 debug register, playing with interrupts, examining a Windows internal structure called the PEB, and so on... lots of devious tricks you can use.
Yeah, I'm not especially sympathetic - getting apps which utilise copy protection to run under Windows emulation often requires detailed tracing and disassemblies of the programs in question. Debugger detection in particular isn't especially hard to counter especially if you have tools like DLL relayers. If they're being stymied by anti-debugger checks then ... well, they need to hire some black hats.
Yahoo Store *used* to be in LISP. As far as I know, it was rewritten some time ago, partly because nobody knew the language and partly because the way it was done meant they had to have stupid warnings telling the user not to hit the browsers back button.
Well, does /etc/bashrc exist? It's not that it can open stuff in gedit, it's that it'll open any file at all with no confirmation, which is what the parent poster was saying was a bad thing
The reason FC2 is such a POS is because it spent most of its development cycle broken as snot due to SELinux - this time they're learned from their mistakes and are approaching SELinux integration far more slowly. Hopefully the fact that it's not spending all its time unusable due to too ambitious SELinux integration will mean they get a much more solid release out ...
That's more to do with the way people build RPMS than anything specific to Linux - it's perfectly feasable to build RPMs for Fedora Core 1 and have them install into FC2 (or indeed, build packages that can be installed into distros going back several years). Doing so is something of a black art though currently so nobody does it.
It's for that reason that Mozilla salts the profile directory.
Sure about that? If you're in Firefox/Epiphany with Gnome installed (you don't have to using it) try opening this URL: ghelp:///etc/bashrc - Slashcode eats the slashes if I try and put that into an href but obviously that wouldn't occur elsewhere.
For those of you who don't use Linux (or use Konq/Opera), it will open your /etc/bashrc file in gedit.
Note that KDE is equally vulernable to URL handler attacks, see the telnet handler bug a while ago.
They do? Unless you use an extension you don't seem able to do that with Firefox, I know I've never needed to use such things in years of using Mozilla. I think people are just covering up for the fact that, well, it might not be just but Moz/Firefox does not have much market share at all.
CAPTCHAs on edit? For instance: like this