The PRC is also recruiting from its growing population of technically skilled people, including those from the private sector, to increase its network capabilities. It is recruiting skilled network operators from information technology firms and computer science programs into the ranks of numerous Information Warfare Militia units.
“network operators”.. “Information Warfare Militia”.. What? Try actually reading the linked PDF and see if you can take it seriously. All this stuff about increased “network attack incidences” and I can find absolutely nothing explicitly linking any incident with the Chinese government or anything even making explicit what a “network attack incident” is. (Also “network warfare” is a pretty small part of the report itself; the report isn’t about “network-warfare”, but US-China relations.)
Wow, that is the best proof for a trolling moderator I saw all year!
First he does not get that it’s funny, and then he jumps to his knee-jerk reaction of modding everything troll that criticizes his beloved master, Bush. ^^
There are really sad souls on this planet. And the worst ones are those with Stockholm syndrome.
Basically Gnome is gimped KDE. (Philosophy: You don’t need that feature. Period. Oh, and if it confuses anyone out there, it must go too!)
So Kubuntu would qualify as Ubuntu de-gimped.
Then again, as even KDE is basically a Windows clone (albeit a bit better than the original), it also started out too low, to ever reach a non-gimp level.:/
Yes, with everyone imitating each other, the state of software design all around is pretty sad. No real leaders around here...
Is there no prize for lifetime achievement in progress of humanity? Especially technological one?
That would be much more appropriate.
Linus is not exactly the peaceful guy. E.g. if you ever have asked him about his opinion on CVS. ^^ I respect him though. And only with standing behind even your strong opinions can you lead. Which he does, even if they are not nice. But peace is not exactly the right word here. ^^
Another good example is Bullfrog. After being “aquired”, every single one quit its job, and they founded a new company. Then when that company got bought by EA too, again 60% quit on the spot. That says something about how much EA is ‘loved’.
I know two ex-EA developers. They both are basically alcoholics now, because of it.
If you are there, you are basically a slave code monkey. Their whole process of game development is from its innermost core designed to kill off all creative life. Every design descision in governed by money. Not a single one by creative leadership. Things that could be “unusual” and thereby not likable by some potential clients, are a total taboo.
Something controversal or refreshing could never come out of there. Not for the life of it!
Then add the extreme number of hours per week. Hell the wives of the developers sued EA, because their husbands did not come home anymore, because the rule was: If you can go, you don’t need to ever come back.
Imagine trying to be creative in that environment!
EA, just as the **AAs, is the prime example of everything that is wrong with treating art like a business. As soon as you guide your design descisions on user surveys or financial descisions, it becomes impossible to become good art by its very definition. No matter if it’s games, music, movies, books, toys or theme parks. (The reason is basically the same thing that lets people make themselves servants instead of leaders, and lets guys fall into the “friend zone” with girls that they want to have a relationship with. If you put yourself in the reactive position, others automatically default to leading you. If you beg to be loved, you will not be loved for that very reason. Who wants a needy loser as a partner? Who wants someone who puts himself in the supplicant position to lead him? Someone who needs something from *you*, and tries to suck it out of you, is not going lead you or be loved by you. And EA, **AA and needy losers are exactly that: Trying to suck value of of their “customers”/“potential partners”. The proper way to do it, would be to offer something that lets them come by themselves, and then not giving it away for free, but expect a fair deal. (Because you are’n exploitable.) Of course most guys think they are worth less than shit, and she is a godess. And that mindset has to go, to ever get a “deal” out that feels good.)
Protip: I think GIMP is just as much a totally misdesigned piece of shit Winnome WinDE, OpenMSlikeOffice, VI, Emacs, and Clippy.
But as this has nothing to do with my argument, that bad interface design is no argument to kill freedom by dropping choices, you made no point. There is nothing to refute.
You haven’t read about the Russian cracks where they got out of the virtual machine, by attacking it itself, and then wrapped a very thin VM around the entire outside OS, right between it and the metal.
Memory waste? You mean like NoScript, which out of principle can’t work? (NoScript blocks JavaScript, except for those sites where you enabled it because you needed it. Which happen to be exactly the sites that XSS attackers target! And don’t try to argue that you just don’t go to those sites. Because following that logic, you would have to stop receiving any data packet from the net. Because someone could crack the TCP/IP stack, the HTTP module, the HTML and CSS parser, the image loader, etc, etc, etc.)
Or like having a graphical user interface running, when you could use plain text.
Face it: If it is worth it, it is worth it! If something is worth that few ms of wait and that some kB/MB or RAM, then it is worth it. I have 45 extensions. About half of them are development extensions. And some 5 or so are disabled. But every single one is worth it! You know how I know that? Because I have them installed! (I throw any file off my system that does not get used and is not in my archive.)
Thank you for thinking outside that tiny box of a coming-from-windows mindset, that so many “new” people wrapped themselves in in the last years.
The saying “Those who do not learn the history, are doomed to reimplement it. Badly.” fits perfectly here.
It’s the same set of people who work so hard, so make KDE and Gnome virtually indistinguishable from the incredibly primitive UI of Windows. (In case you don’t know: Everything that still has monolithic applications [instead of following the UNIX philosophy to combine things that do one thing right], menus and clickable icons (instead of actually efficient UI structures), etc, is “incredibly primitive”. Windows is the prime example of that.) It's so sad when you see Gnome and KDE “applications”, or things like OpenOffice, with tons of functions, in one huge single package. Instead of having sets of functions that a freely combinable for the needed purposes.
Think of a paintbrush “app”, that works on images, documents, and other files too, and is independent of the actual document code. THAT would be the UNIX philosophy applied to GUIs.
But nooo... there could be the possibility of some Windows user with his limited mindset loving us, because we”re different. So we must imitate Windows, and do everything right for him! Just pleaaase, you users, do love us!!
Now where have I heard this before.
Protip: No, this won’t give you love. Neither in software development, nor in dating or in school! You will only become the bottom bitch of those that you beg to. ^^
Yeah. And The ability to show pictures, to have a menu, to render graphics, to show fonts, and to understand css should also be plugins. Who needs all that bloat??
Also, mouse functionality and that newfangled HTML are rather pointless.:P
Then again, when it’s like throwing a salami in a corridor, technically, because of a lack of contact, using such a front door could not be called “sex” ^^
Please mod parent troll for not understanding the basics of how a browser works, and repeating the same outdated shit over and over. As I have yet to see Firefox behave like this on any system I have access to, I call bullshit on his statements.
To parent poster: Next time, bring me some reproducible proof. Then we can talk. Else you simply fail. Sorry.
There is a difference between not liking it, because of a a UI being horrible, and actually removing the choice. In my book, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but the second one is not only morally wrong, but also completely pointless, because it actually helps no-one.
Ooooh, look, some (1%) of our users complained about something being “too hard” (meaning they were the loud part of the lowest end of the natural bell curve). So instead of them having to wise up, or die out, like in real and fair nature, we adapt our software. Completely ignoring, that we will annoy the upper end of our bell curve of users just as much if not even more. And then the curve just will shift down, because intelligent people just leave and do their own thing, or solve the problem themselves otherwise, instead of complaining like spoiled children. Which in practice just means that nature will create new, better idiots, to fill the lower end of the curve and complain. This then of course causes a new caving in of the Ubuntu maintainers, because of their weak philosophy. And so the endless cycle of dumbing down to uselessness starts... straight ahead to Idiocracy.
Windows, MS Office (Clippy), AOL, OS X, Gnome, went that way. KDE 4 just got infected by that mindset too.
And look how they ended up. MS Bob is the pinnacle of this kind of development.
All, just to be loved? And just because they did not get, that as simplicity rises, efficiency first rises too, but from a point on, falls again. (This is the moment were Ubuntu went over that point.) The difference between efficiency and simplicity being, that simplifying can hurt your goals. Especially in cases as this one, where there is no point in just leaving GIMP as an option.
I have a great quote that criticizes that mindset nicely:
Jake Green: “There is something about yourself that you don’t know. Something that you will deny even exists, until it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s the only reason you get up in the morning. The only reason you suffer the shitty job, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. Fear or revere me, but please, think I’m special. We share an addiction. We’re approval junkies. We’re all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The hip-hip-hoo-fuckin’ rah. Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on you crazy diamond, because we’re just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.” — Revolver (2005, Guy Richie)
Fight Club is partially built on the same rejection of that mindset, by the way.
Possible uses: line car gas/hydrogen tanks with it. But aside from that and protecting masonry walls from disintegrating in an explosion, I can't see any practical use.
Dude, you just listed two very practical uses for it! ^^
I thing wrapping it around anything that might explode sounds like a good idea.
Yeah right. Announced for years. Now finally enabled, but since nobody knows how to use it or can actually access it, it’s completely useless. Just like before.
Way to go showing that you have not a bit of actual experience on the subject.
Get a ATi card to run with a compositing window manager, xinerama and accelerated H.264 video on Linux running. (Something that I research hard to get working every time a new driver comes out.) Then we’re talking.
If you then add fast Flash (fullscreen HD and stutter-free), I’ll buy you a beer. Deal?
That is one of the dumbest things that get parroted around her ever!
Because you make the faulty simplification from efficient == good to this. And those simplifications that you can’t really make because they actually make things worse, are exactly why simple != good.
You see it is not completely wrong. It’s just simplified too much. And what you get out, is shit like Windows, Clippy, AOL, and other things that are so “simple”, that they stop being usable by people who still can think themselves. Which causes people to dumb down, and expect to e.g. replace the “” quote characters in Word by " if they actually wanted to use that one, etc. It makes the interface tedious, and worse to use again. Which causes the bell curve to go down. Which then gets understood by people again, as it being “too hard to use”. Meanwhile the intelligent end of the curve gets completely ignored and more and more annoyed. Which can even, in the case of people not being able to keep up with the “simplification” (Or rather limiting of freedoms!!), cause the program/device to be generally called the same things that Clippy gets called nowadays.
The huge failure that both the interface designers of VI and of Clippy make, is that efficiency and easy usage would be mutually exclusive opposites. When really, they are very closely related. It's just that while easiness goes up, efficiency just follows it up to a point. And then it goes down again. To make things worse, that tip of efficiency is different for every person and every experience level.
Which means, the program has to grow with the user! (I can’t repeat this often enough!) Neither Notepad nor VI do that. Notepad starts very low. And stays right there. That’s even the design goal for the typical commercial software. And VI starts out close to the top professional full-time user level. They are both very nice programs for that level. But the failure of both is that they don’t adapt to the user.
If you want to write a good user interface, write one that grows with the user! A text editor that starts out as Notepad, and can grow out to become VI. But always adapts to the needs and experience level of the user. Which will first grow to the amount the user uses it. And then either stay there, or even drop off again, when it’s less needed. Imagine you not using a program for half a year. You won’t remember that one shortcut again. With a adapting UI, you will always be at your maximum efficiency level (for your level of experience).
I just don’t understand, why software developers and UI designers can’t get this simple fact.
Uuum, what stops you from just writing a small midi-to-mouse or -to-joystick mapper. I bet something like that already exists. And if not, it’s really easy to do in Linux.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The PRC is also recruiting from its growing population of technically skilled people, including those from the private sector, to increase its network capabilities. It is recruiting skilled network operators from information technology firms and computer science programs into the ranks of numerous Information Warfare Militia units.
“network operators”.. “Information Warfare Militia”.. What?
Try actually reading the linked PDF and see if you can take it seriously. All this stuff about increased “network attack incidences” and I can find absolutely nothing explicitly linking any incident with the Chinese government or anything even making explicit what a “network attack incident” is. (Also “network warfare” is a pretty small part of the report itself; the report isn’t about “network-warfare”, but US-China relations.)
What’s wrong with that?
Oooohhh... I seee... Well, there’s a “app“ for that! :D
And that is the problem. :)
Wow, that is the best proof for a trolling moderator I saw all year!
First he does not get that it’s funny, and then he jumps to his knee-jerk reaction of modding everything troll that criticizes his beloved master, Bush. ^^
There are really sad souls on this planet. And the worst ones are those with Stockholm syndrome.
Basically Gnome is gimped KDE. (Philosophy: You don’t need that feature. Period. Oh, and if it confuses anyone out there, it must go too!)
So Kubuntu would qualify as Ubuntu de-gimped.
Then again, as even KDE is basically a Windows clone (albeit a bit better than the original), it also started out too low, to ever reach a non-gimp level. :/
Yes, with everyone imitating each other, the state of software design all around is pretty sad. No real leaders around here...
Hey, I’m not Bush either! And so is my dog!
Can I have two? :D
Is there no prize for lifetime achievement in progress of humanity? Especially technological one?
That would be much more appropriate.
Linus is not exactly the peaceful guy. E.g. if you ever have asked him about his opinion on CVS. ^^
I respect him though. And only with standing behind even your strong opinions can you lead. Which he does, even if they are not nice.
But peace is not exactly the right word here. ^^
I think even Linus would agree to that.
Another good example is Bullfrog. After being “aquired”, every single one quit its job, and they founded a new company. Then when that company got bought by EA too, again 60% quit on the spot.
That says something about how much EA is ‘loved’.
I know two ex-EA developers. They both are basically alcoholics now, because of it.
If you are there, you are basically a slave code monkey. Their whole process of game development is from its innermost core designed to kill off all creative life. Every design descision in governed by money. Not a single one by creative leadership. Things that could be “unusual” and thereby not likable by some potential clients, are a total taboo.
Something controversal or refreshing could never come out of there. Not for the life of it!
Then add the extreme number of hours per week. Hell the wives of the developers sued EA, because their husbands did not come home anymore, because the rule was: If you can go, you don’t need to ever come back.
Imagine trying to be creative in that environment!
EA, just as the **AAs, is the prime example of everything that is wrong with treating art like a business.
As soon as you guide your design descisions on user surveys or financial descisions, it becomes impossible to become good art by its very definition. No matter if it’s games, music, movies, books, toys or theme parks.
(The reason is basically the same thing that lets people make themselves servants instead of leaders, and lets guys fall into the “friend zone” with girls that they want to have a relationship with. If you put yourself in the reactive position, others automatically default to leading you. If you beg to be loved, you will not be loved for that very reason. Who wants a needy loser as a partner? Who wants someone who puts himself in the supplicant position to lead him? Someone who needs something from *you*, and tries to suck it out of you, is not going lead you or be loved by you. And EA, **AA and needy losers are exactly that: Trying to suck value of of their “customers”/“potential partners”.
The proper way to do it, would be to offer something that lets them come by themselves, and then not giving it away for free, but expect a fair deal. (Because you are’n exploitable.) Of course most guys think they are worth less than shit, and she is a godess. And that mindset has to go, to ever get a “deal” out that feels good.)
Protip: I think GIMP is just as much a totally misdesigned piece of shit Winnome WinDE, OpenMSlikeOffice, VI, Emacs, and Clippy.
But as this has nothing to do with my argument, that bad interface design is no argument to kill freedom by dropping choices, you made no point. There is nothing to refute.
As it that would help if you’re paranoid.
You haven’t read about the Russian cracks where they got out of the virtual machine, by attacking it itself, and then wrapped a very thin VM around the entire outside OS, right between it and the metal.
In (Ex-)Soviet Russia, program virtualizes YOU!
Memory waste? You mean like NoScript, which out of principle can’t work?
(NoScript blocks JavaScript, except for those sites where you enabled it because you needed it. Which happen to be exactly the sites that XSS attackers target! And don’t try to argue that you just don’t go to those sites. Because following that logic, you would have to stop receiving any data packet from the net. Because someone could crack the TCP/IP stack, the HTTP module, the HTML and CSS parser, the image loader, etc, etc, etc.)
Or like having a graphical user interface running, when you could use plain text.
Face it: If it is worth it, it is worth it! If something is worth that few ms of wait and that some kB/MB or RAM, then it is worth it.
I have 45 extensions. About half of them are development extensions. And some 5 or so are disabled. But every single one is worth it!
You know how I know that? Because I have them installed! (I throw any file off my system that does not get used and is not in my archive.)
This is by far the best comment in here.
Thank you for thinking outside that tiny box of a coming-from-windows mindset, that so many “new” people wrapped themselves in in the last years.
The saying “Those who do not learn the history, are doomed to reimplement it. Badly.” fits perfectly here.
It’s the same set of people who work so hard, so make KDE and Gnome virtually indistinguishable from the incredibly primitive UI of Windows. (In case you don’t know: Everything that still has monolithic applications [instead of following the UNIX philosophy to combine things that do one thing right], menus and clickable icons (instead of actually efficient UI structures), etc, is “incredibly primitive”. Windows is the prime example of that.)
It's so sad when you see Gnome and KDE “applications”, or things like OpenOffice, with tons of functions, in one huge single package. Instead of having sets of functions that a freely combinable for the needed purposes.
Think of a paintbrush “app”, that works on images, documents, and other files too, and is independent of the actual document code. THAT would be the UNIX philosophy applied to GUIs.
But nooo... there could be the possibility of some Windows user with his limited mindset loving us, because we”re different. So we must imitate Windows, and do everything right for him! Just pleaaase, you users, do love us!!
Now where have I heard this before.
Protip: No, this won’t give you love. Neither in software development, nor in dating or in school! You will only become the bottom bitch of those that you beg to. ^^
You fail to see the humor that flew right over your head, and so we will make a sound like laughter because you clearly deserve it. :P
Uuum, I have the newest CS suite running under Wine right now. Works quite well. So what?
Yeah. And The ability to show pictures, to have a menu, to render graphics, to show fonts, and to understand css should also be plugins.
Who needs all that bloat??
Also, mouse functionality and that newfangled HTML are rather pointless. :P
Then again, when it’s like throwing a salami in a corridor, technically, because of a lack of contact, using such a front door could not be called “sex” ^^
If Windows has a back door that the NSA can use, how would they prevent foreign intelligence agencies from using it?
You have heard of that concept called “password”, have you? ^^
Please mod parent troll for not understanding the basics of how a browser works, and repeating the same outdated shit over and over. As I have yet to see Firefox behave like this on any system I have access to, I call bullshit on his statements.
To parent poster: Next time, bring me some reproducible proof. Then we can talk. Else you simply fail. Sorry.
There is a difference between not liking it, because of a a UI being horrible, and actually removing the choice.
In my book, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but the second one is not only morally wrong, but also completely pointless, because it actually helps no-one.
...and their “too hard” pseudo-arguments.
Ooooh, look, some (1%) of our users complained about something being “too hard” (meaning they were the loud part of the lowest end of the natural bell curve). So instead of them having to wise up, or die out, like in real and fair nature, we adapt our software. Completely ignoring, that we will annoy the upper end of our bell curve of users just as much if not even more. And then the curve just will shift down, because intelligent people just leave and do their own thing, or solve the problem themselves otherwise, instead of complaining like spoiled children.
Which in practice just means that nature will create new, better idiots, to fill the lower end of the curve and complain.
This then of course causes a new caving in of the Ubuntu maintainers, because of their weak philosophy.
And so the endless cycle of dumbing down to uselessness starts... straight ahead to Idiocracy.
Windows, MS Office (Clippy), AOL, OS X, Gnome, went that way. KDE 4 just got infected by that mindset too.
And look how they ended up. MS Bob is the pinnacle of this kind of development.
All, just to be loved? And just because they did not get, that as simplicity rises, efficiency first rises too, but from a point on, falls again. (This is the moment were Ubuntu went over that point.)
The difference between efficiency and simplicity being, that simplifying can hurt your goals. Especially in cases as this one, where there is no point in just leaving GIMP as an option.
I have a great quote that criticizes that mindset nicely:
Jake Green: “There is something about yourself that you don’t know. Something that you will deny even exists, until it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s the only reason you get up in the morning. The only reason you suffer the shitty job, the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. Fear or revere me, but please, think I’m special. We share an addiction. We’re approval junkies. We’re all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The hip-hip-hoo-fuckin’ rah. Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on you crazy diamond, because we’re just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others.”
— Revolver (2005, Guy Richie)
Fight Club is partially built on the same rejection of that mindset, by the way.
Possible uses: line car gas/hydrogen tanks with it. But aside from that and protecting masonry walls from disintegrating in an explosion, I can't see any practical use.
Dude, you just listed two very practical uses for it! ^^
I thing wrapping it around anything that might explode sounds like a good idea.
Yeah right. Announced for years. Now finally enabled, but since nobody knows how to use it or can actually access it, it’s completely useless. Just like before.
Way to go showing that you have not a bit of actual experience on the subject.
Get a ATi card to run with a compositing window manager, xinerama and accelerated H.264 video on Linux running. (Something that I research hard to get working every time a new driver comes out.) Then we’re talking.
If you then add fast Flash (fullscreen HD and stutter-free), I’ll buy you a beer.
Deal?
No? ;)
Then get out!
Which is exactly the speed of this card, compared tho the HD 5970 rocket. ^^
Simple == good
That is one of the dumbest things that get parroted around her ever!
Because you make the faulty simplification from efficient == good to this. And those simplifications that you can’t really make because they actually make things worse, are exactly why simple != good.
You see it is not completely wrong. It’s just simplified too much.
And what you get out, is shit like Windows, Clippy, AOL, and other things that are so “simple”, that they stop being usable by people who still can think themselves. Which causes people to dumb down, and expect to e.g. replace the “” quote characters in Word by " if they actually wanted to use that one, etc. It makes the interface tedious, and worse to use again.
Which causes the bell curve to go down. Which then gets understood by people again, as it being “too hard to use”.
Meanwhile the intelligent end of the curve gets completely ignored and more and more annoyed.
Which can even, in the case of people not being able to keep up with the “simplification” (Or rather limiting of freedoms!!), cause the program/device to be generally called the same things that Clippy gets called nowadays.
The huge failure that both the interface designers of VI and of Clippy make, is that efficiency and easy usage would be mutually exclusive opposites. When really, they are very closely related. It's just that while easiness goes up, efficiency just follows it up to a point. And then it goes down again.
To make things worse, that tip of efficiency is different for every person and every experience level.
Which means, the program has to grow with the user! (I can’t repeat this often enough!)
Neither Notepad nor VI do that.
Notepad starts very low. And stays right there. That’s even the design goal for the typical commercial software.
And VI starts out close to the top professional full-time user level.
They are both very nice programs for that level. But the failure of both is that they don’t adapt to the user.
If you want to write a good user interface, write one that grows with the user! A text editor that starts out as Notepad, and can grow out to become VI. But always adapts to the needs and experience level of the user. Which will first grow to the amount the user uses it. And then either stay there, or even drop off again, when it’s less needed. Imagine you not using a program for half a year. You won’t remember that one shortcut again. With a adapting UI, you will always be at your maximum efficiency level (for your level of experience).
I just don’t understand, why software developers and UI designers can’t get this simple fact.
I thought it was about Androids. Maybe military ones. Or at least ones with auto-focusing cameras as eyes.
And them behaving bizarrely human-like.
Now that would be a real story!
Who cares about some crappy niche phone?
I want my “drone wars”! Now!
That would also solve the problem of people caring about unimportant shit like this. ^^
Uuum, what stops you from just writing a small midi-to-mouse or -to-joystick mapper. I bet something like that already exists. And if not, it’s really easy to do in Linux. :)