What we receive 10 years from now will be a direct mirror of our actions now
That's such an important point that I think it's worth repeating. It's vital that justice is done AND that it's SEEN to be done. I doubt that any reading this know the exact details of what intelligence we did or didn't have on the various issues that were reasons or excuses for war, or exactly what Saddam has or hasn't done. What we think so far probably depends more on how much we trust our various leaders than on anything else. But that secret information and trust can NOT be the basis for what happens to Saddam.
If he's done anything to deserve what he gets, that MUST be made public, clearly and undeniably; if it can't be, for whatever reasons, then there was no justification for getting him.
Right now the US is in a position of power, and it would probably seem to get away with a show trial or convenient suicide. But history will judge what happens now, and (thankfully) history is usually fairer and less biased. As you say, what we receive 10 years from now will be a direct mirror of our actions now.
While those are all generally good points, you can't easily automate them, just as you can't machine-generate a good presentation in the first place. There are always exceptions; while well-intentioned I suspect that if actually implemented, rules like those would just lead to blander, lower-content presentations. "Well, the content checker liked it, so it must be good!"
A decent presentation needs to be checked by an intelligent human being. It helps if that's not the one who wrote it, though if the writer is intelligent, that gets you most of the way there...
The bottom line, though, is the content. That's the important thing. Bad presentation can obscure the content, but if you don't have any content then even the best presentation can't magic it up from nowhere. If you know what you're trying to say, and concentrate on communicating that to your audience, then most of the details will look after themselves.
But they can steal your users, your developers, your testers, your mindshare. To take an extreme example, what if M$ released a 'new, improved' version of your app? Wouldn't it take but a short time before most people used their version, complete with incompatible extensions and lock-ins? After that point, they could close the code, and it wouldn't matter that you still had your original code; it wouldn't do you much good.
In practice, of course, it's not likely to be as bad as that. Few companies have the clout to take over a project like that completely. But many companies and groups of people could do serious damage to a smallish project on those lines.
It's that loss of mindshare that licences like the GPL were designed to avoid. For some types of project, that sort of top-level mindshare isn't important, either because they have their own captive audience, or don't need anyone else. And some care more about getting the code out there and getting it used. But for others, mindshare may be important, and so, rightly or wrongly, licences like the GPL are there for them.
Absolutely. Open Source is generally better quality BEFORE anyone else ever sees it.
I'm co-author of an open source app which is at one extreme of this. It has an extremely limited audience: our potential users are in low double figures. So we weren't expecting thousands of eyes poring over our code, flurries of fixes pouring in, or lots of media attention! But the 10 or so who do use it find it extremely useful - I use it myself for an hour or two every day, so I have an extreme personal interest in it, and would be working on it even just for myself.
Why did we bother open-sourcing it? Well, at least two other users are developers (and were involved with a similar previous project), and we wanted the option of their input. (As it happens, we haven't needed any, and they haven't volunteered any, but there's always the option.) But also we'd learned from another similar previous project which never got off the ground because the sole developer wanted it to be perfect before releasing it, never finished it, and most of his work was lost. We wanted our work to last!
I always try to write neat, elegant, easy-to-maintain code anyway. But when I know the code will be released to the public, I make a special effort; it's only natural. Our project has benefited from being open sourced even though I'm not sure anyone else has ever looked at the code. And I'm pleased we did.
I haven't had any kernel panics for ages now. But 10.2.6 (or was it 8) did kill my net connection... I was not a happy bunny then!
But yes, despite the exceptions the basic point is sound: Apple generally issue patches far faster than M$, those patches tend to be smaller and work better, and the OS itself has far fewer problems.
AS has been discussed elsewhere, the argument that more people write viruses for Windows because more people use it doesn't stand up either - there are proportionally fewer Mac viruses than even the much smaller market share would suggest. (Much as most web server exploits are for IIS, despite it having less than half Apache's share.) OS X is simply more secure. Not perfect, but better.
I remember when I was first let loose on a Unix system, and discovered tools like 'lex' and 'yacc' for lexical analysis and parsing. I was amazed that advanced language processing was so well supported - it was a short while before I discovered that they weren't for natural language processing:)
Playing devil's advocate for a moment, would you rather have to choose between two well-featured and sophisticated GUI systems, or one that was old, clunky, and painful?
As others have said, the two competing systems don't each have half the resources that a single one would have had; not only do they share ideas &c, but the mere fact of competition keeps them both vital and improving faster.
So while the two of them 'fight it out', everyone benefits. And those of us who prefer an easy life use Mac OS X:)
Forking brings short-term problems, but is far better for everyone in the long-term. The fuss just seems to underline how business tends to think mostly in the short term, whereas open source hackers have a more responsible attitude!
NVidia isn't a small company; they have clout. If they wanted to release their drivers, I'm sure they could re-negotiate their licenses or find some other way to do so. I'm surprised to see so many people making excuses for them.
I'll use something like msndoesntspam@mydomain.com to see who exactly is sharing my addresses
I do something similar every time I give my address to a web site, and what's surprised me is that they don't lead to spam. The only spam I've ever had from filling a form is a site newsletter - relevant, clean, and identifiable - and that's only happened a couple of times. I've never had any 'real' spam via that route; it must all be from a handful of usenet posts from years back, and a couple of people who had my address on their web sites until I spotted them and asked them not to.
My post wasn't so much about her posting her own links as much as her hiding them
And quite right, too. IMO the issue isn't posting links to sites with ads, or even sites you personally benefit from in some way. The issue is posting such links and not identifying yourself.
People should be free to link to their own sites as long as they make that clear - then we can make an informed decision whether to visit; and also how biaed the post might be.
Oh, yes! A wonderful book - concise, well-arranged, technical but manageable, and packed with the highest density of usable and vital information in any book I've ever seen. I got it for Christmas. It was a good Christmas holiday!
But then, the book is no less than the machine deserved. Amazingly well-designed, with a breadth of imagination and planning that was orders of magnitude beyond other micros. Mine became the centre of a music system, with a synthesiser module, keyboard, an analogue joystick for a pitch bender, and a rudimentary sequencer I wrote; it also had a hardware speech synth (before Superior Software's 'Speech' software one made such things obsolete!), disk drive, full sideways ROM and RAM expansion, real-time clock, you name it...
Like you, I played around with the screen drivers; in fact, I created my very own screen mode! I took one of the 80-column screen modes, but used a 16x8 character grid to make a 40-column mode with highly-detailed, arty characters. (Had to juggle a bit to get the cursor-controlled copying, cursor width &c to work right, but it felt like a proper screen mode when I'd finished. Happy days.) I also rewrote the line input routine so you could move the cursor along the line, inserting and deleting. On any other system, something like that would be an ugly hack, which didn't always work and fouled up in unexpected ways. Yet the Beeb's OS was designed well enough that such things could be done safely and neatly.
An unfeasibly cool machine. Shame its real successor, the Archie (not counting the Master, which in all its variations was basically a Beeb expanded in various ways) took so long to arrive (and cost so much when it did) that most people had moved on to Ataris, Amigas, PCs and Macs in the meantime...
That's less of a problem. At least they have an international dialling code. A better analogy would be if they didn't have one at all, and every time anyone here in any other country dialled a number they'd get a US number unless they put in their own dialling code each time.
(I mean, it's not as if there are any Yanks I'd want to speak to...)
Yes, I think this is a Good Thing (tm). I experienced that
Yeah, and of course everyone is just like you, aren't they?
That's the single biggest problem with most of the fashions in the working environment: they assume that what's good for some people (read: those making the decisions) will automatically be good for everyone. I have news for you: people are different. Otherwise everyone would be equally good at their jobs... What's good for one person won't necessarily be good for another. Some people thrive on personal contact, others find it distracting. Some work best under great pressure, others find it stressful and counterproductive. Some can juggle umpteen tasks at once, others have to concentrate on one at once. Some have the self-discipline to work at home without getting distracted, others perform best in a work environment. Some enjoy new surroundings every day, others prefer somewhere familiar that they have a bit of control over.
I think Scott Adams had the right idea. One of his books laid down his management principles, one of which was along the lines that people are generally capable and willing to produce good work; the function of management should be to give people what they need for their job, and then keep out of their way and let them do it!
Sorry to mention this again, but it clearly bears repeating: AAC alone is not DRM. AAC is a compression format, like MP3, and has no protection of any kind.
iTunes can rip and convert to unrestricted AAC files (.M4A), which are playable anywhere. There are many available on P2P networks; I prefer them because they have higher quality than MP3 for a given bitrate.
iTunes can also play.M4P files, which are AAC in a protected wrapper. It's these which have DRM, and which you buy from the iTunes Music Store. This is the protection we're talking about cracking. (The P2P networks also have the occasional file in this format, which is a bit pointless.)
AAC is a good format, with better quality than MP3 and no worse licensing issues, and it's a shame that its been linked so strongly with DRM in people's minds. (Widespread Ogg Vorbis support would be even better, of course...)
all of the content being sold through the iTMS is... already available in unprotected formats
...SO FAR.
If the iTunes Music Store gets popular enough to threaten existing CD distribution, then what's the betting it gets extra 'exclusive' tracks and other DRM-only material?
Some of us stuck with Atari past that. Most of the utilities you mention weren't needed when alternate OSs, notably MagiC, came along. (A surprisingly advanced system - full pre-emptive multitasking even on apps written for the original single-tasking OS, full memory protection (on supporting hardware) ditto, and with a few subtleties that I've never seen elsewhere. For example, far better GUI-terminal integration than anything else I've seen.)
But it's true that Atari dropped the ball. Commodore brought out the Amiga a short while later, and the STE wasn't quite up to the job. But worse was the hiatus after that. The Falcon, while a nice machine, was really too little too late. It was great for us folks who had a big investment in the platform, and no doubt musos everywhere loved it (the first version of Cubase to feature digital audio was Cubase Audio Falcon), but by then everyone was using PCs and the battle was lost. A few third-party manufacturers advanced the system further with machines like (IIRC) the Hades and Medusa, but there wasn't enough compatibility or consensus to keep things together. A shame, because the Falcon and MagiC made a great combination. People are surprised to hear that even three years ago I was running most of the GNU toolset, doing decent web browsing, email, and all the usual stuff on it.
Oh, yes. That's why I included that reference! In fact, it's worse than that - the Tea Act seems a deliberate act to set up a state-backed monopoly. Depressingly relevant today, really.
Interestingly, the law that the Boston 'patriots' disagreed with was one which drastically lowered the tax on tea to a point where it undercut the tea smugglers. Americans had happily paid (well, paid) high taxes on tea for the previous 7 years, but it was the reduction in tax which sparked the protest. (References here, here, etc..) Rumour has it that said protest was due in large part to disgruntled smugglers...
Of course, as a British person, I'm not defending what happened back then. But I find the truth interestingly different from the simplified version that I've often heard.
It's certainly what other systems tend to do - I'm thinking particularly of Mac OS X here, but other less-known systems work well in a similar fashion. However, I don't see that as a viable solution for the open source world; as I said, there's just too much incentive for developers to keep control, to do their own thing.
But there needs to be some central point of contact. I was wondering if that point could be part of the system, rather than a group of people. I don't know exactly what form it might take, but consider this: suppose instead of using a GUI toolkit directly, an application used some sort of meta-toolkit. Instead of saying "I want a window here with this widget here and that widget there, and these menu items with these shortcuts...", it might say "This is what I'm called, I manipulate these data structures, these are my preference settings, this is how I quit...". Then the meta-toolkit would decide exactly how to present that to the user. The developer wouldn't have to worry about the UI decisions, and every app would have a consistent look and feel automatically.
Now, this is only a very rough idea; as above, it would be far too restrictive and simplistic, and most apps wouldn't fit into such a specific model. But my intuition tells me that the future must lie with something like that; software has got far too complex for app developers to have to make the sort of low-level UI decisions they do. I'm convinced that this area of research could be defining the way we write applications in years to come.
The problem AISI (from a distance:) isn't so much that individual apps, widget sets, &c are ugly, but that they're inconsistent - they're all ugly in different ways.
What's really needed IMO is consistency. Dialog boxes, for example should have the same style across applications &c. - and that doesn't just mean the font size, or even the font; it means having a similar layout (where appropriate), with buttons in a similar order, the same default focus, similar keyboard controls, similar positioning. And the same principle applies right across the GUI, from having the menus arranged in a similar fashion with common menu options in similar places, to similar behaviour of toolbars and palettes, and so on and so on.
The trouble with this is control. This sort of consistency would mean developers willingly going with someone else's design principles and UI guidelines, and too many developers seem too keen on doing their own thing to let this happen, whether from a desire to make their app stand out, thinking (rightly or wrongly) that the usual principles don't apply to their app, incompetence, or just sheer stubbornness.
Not everyone has graphical skills or UI design skills, so IMO we need a way of working where developers who want to can do so without needing those sorts of skills, but without inflicting that lack on their users. I think this is one of the fundamental problems that the free software community needs to address. GUI toolkits are a step in this direction, but clearly don't go far enough.
Maybe we should consider some fundamental reorganisation. With everything split by application, each has its own way of doing things; what if there was some other way of doing things? What if application developers yielded ultimate control of their GUI to a separate project of some kind? I've no idea how this might be done technically, and even less idea how developers could be brought on board, but IMO it's the only way to achieve the sort of consistency, predictability, and least astonishment that more centrally-controlled systems have.
the worse of it was that I couldn't see why they were doing it to me.
I know - that only adds to the frustration. But beyond a certain point, I don't think it really matters. Whatever reason there might be isn't going to stop it, isn't going to suddenly make everything all right.
As I said, a while later I've come to the conclusion that in many cases kids just don't empathise; they don't see you as a human being with feelings just as valid as their own. So they don't see any reason not to take their own frustrations/hangups/personal problems out on you. It's really not meant personally. Of course, that doesn't help much - even if you understand all that, it's hard not to let it affect you; and it's doubly hard when you're young and don't have the maturity, experience, and confidence to cope.
Self-confidence takes a long time to build back up. If you have some close friends who you can talk to, that can help. (Or if not, set about making some!) I also found it helped to think myself back there, to mentally go back and face it again, with the experience you've gained since. It's traumatic, but it helped me come to terms with some of it. And then try to move on - after all, the world's much bigger than any of our schools, and the vast majority of people in it are far more civilised!
It may be an option, but is it a solution? What if it's more than just a couple of people? What if the abuse is never enough to justify anything like that (but never little enough to ignore)? What if you fight back but it doesn't stop them?
I agree that this is a far-from-perfect world, and that violence - as a last resort - may solve some problems. But there are many that it won't solve.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be
2014-Orc by Orcrist
(i.e. Thorin's sword)?
That's such an important point that I think it's worth repeating. It's vital that justice is done AND that it's SEEN to be done. I doubt that any reading this know the exact details of what intelligence we did or didn't have on the various issues that were reasons or excuses for war, or exactly what Saddam has or hasn't done. What we think so far probably depends more on how much we trust our various leaders than on anything else. But that secret information and trust can NOT be the basis for what happens to Saddam.
If he's done anything to deserve what he gets, that MUST be made public, clearly and undeniably; if it can't be, for whatever reasons, then there was no justification for getting him.
Right now the US is in a position of power, and it would probably seem to get away with a show trial or convenient suicide. But history will judge what happens now, and (thankfully) history is usually fairer and less biased. As you say, what we receive 10 years from now will be a direct mirror of our actions now.
A decent presentation needs to be checked by an intelligent human being. It helps if that's not the one who wrote it, though if the writer is intelligent, that gets you most of the way there...
The bottom line, though, is the content. That's the important thing. Bad presentation can obscure the content, but if you don't have any content then even the best presentation can't magic it up from nowhere. If you know what you're trying to say, and concentrate on communicating that to your audience, then most of the details will look after themselves.
But they can steal your users, your developers, your testers, your mindshare. To take an extreme example, what if M$ released a 'new, improved' version of your app? Wouldn't it take but a short time before most people used their version, complete with incompatible extensions and lock-ins? After that point, they could close the code, and it wouldn't matter that you still had your original code; it wouldn't do you much good.
In practice, of course, it's not likely to be as bad as that. Few companies have the clout to take over a project like that completely. But many companies and groups of people could do serious damage to a smallish project on those lines.
It's that loss of mindshare that licences like the GPL were designed to avoid. For some types of project, that sort of top-level mindshare isn't important, either because they have their own captive audience, or don't need anyone else. And some care more about getting the code out there and getting it used. But for others, mindshare may be important, and so, rightly or wrongly, licences like the GPL are there for them.
I'm co-author of an open source app which is at one extreme of this. It has an extremely limited audience: our potential users are in low double figures. So we weren't expecting thousands of eyes poring over our code, flurries of fixes pouring in, or lots of media attention! But the 10 or so who do use it find it extremely useful - I use it myself for an hour or two every day, so I have an extreme personal interest in it, and would be working on it even just for myself.
Why did we bother open-sourcing it? Well, at least two other users are developers (and were involved with a similar previous project), and we wanted the option of their input. (As it happens, we haven't needed any, and they haven't volunteered any, but there's always the option.) But also we'd learned from another similar previous project which never got off the ground because the sole developer wanted it to be perfect before releasing it, never finished it, and most of his work was lost. We wanted our work to last!
I always try to write neat, elegant, easy-to-maintain code anyway. But when I know the code will be released to the public, I make a special effort; it's only natural. Our project has benefited from being open sourced even though I'm not sure anyone else has ever looked at the code. And I'm pleased we did.
But yes, despite the exceptions the basic point is sound: Apple generally issue patches far faster than M$, those patches tend to be smaller and work better, and the OS itself has far fewer problems.
AS has been discussed elsewhere, the argument that more people write viruses for Windows because more people use it doesn't stand up either - there are proportionally fewer Mac viruses than even the much smaller market share would suggest. (Much as most web server exploits are for IIS, despite it having less than half Apache's share.) OS X is simply more secure. Not perfect, but better.
I remember when I was first let loose on a Unix system, and discovered tools like 'lex' and 'yacc' for lexical analysis and parsing. I was amazed that advanced language processing was so well supported - it was a short while before I discovered that they weren't for natural language processing :)
As others have said, the two competing systems don't each have half the resources that a single one would have had; not only do they share ideas &c, but the mere fact of competition keeps them both vital and improving faster.
So while the two of them 'fight it out', everyone benefits. And those of us who prefer an easy life use Mac OS X :)
Forking brings short-term problems, but is far better for everyone in the long-term. The fuss just seems to underline how business tends to think mostly in the short term, whereas open source hackers have a more responsible attitude!
NVidia isn't a small company; they have clout. If they wanted to release their drivers, I'm sure they could re-negotiate their licenses or find some other way to do so. I'm surprised to see so many people making excuses for them.
I do something similar every time I give my address to a web site, and what's surprised me is that they don't lead to spam. The only spam I've ever had from filling a form is a site newsletter - relevant, clean, and identifiable - and that's only happened a couple of times. I've never had any 'real' spam via that route; it must all be from a handful of usenet posts from years back, and a couple of people who had my address on their web sites until I spotted them and asked them not to.
And quite right, too. IMO the issue isn't posting links to sites with ads, or even sites you personally benefit from in some way. The issue is posting such links and not identifying yourself.
People should be free to link to their own sites as long as they make that clear - then we can make an informed decision whether to visit; and also how biaed the post might be.
But then, the book is no less than the machine deserved. Amazingly well-designed, with a breadth of imagination and planning that was orders of magnitude beyond other micros. Mine became the centre of a music system, with a synthesiser module, keyboard, an analogue joystick for a pitch bender, and a rudimentary sequencer I wrote; it also had a hardware speech synth (before Superior Software's 'Speech' software one made such things obsolete!), disk drive, full sideways ROM and RAM expansion, real-time clock, you name it...
Like you, I played around with the screen drivers; in fact, I created my very own screen mode! I took one of the 80-column screen modes, but used a 16x8 character grid to make a 40-column mode with highly-detailed, arty characters. (Had to juggle a bit to get the cursor-controlled copying, cursor width &c to work right, but it felt like a proper screen mode when I'd finished. Happy days.) I also rewrote the line input routine so you could move the cursor along the line, inserting and deleting. On any other system, something like that would be an ugly hack, which didn't always work and fouled up in unexpected ways. Yet the Beeb's OS was designed well enough that such things could be done safely and neatly.
An unfeasibly cool machine. Shame its real successor, the Archie (not counting the Master, which in all its variations was basically a Beeb expanded in various ways) took so long to arrive (and cost so much when it did) that most people had moved on to Ataris, Amigas, PCs and Macs in the meantime...
(I mean, it's not as if there are any Yanks I'd want to speak to...)
Yeah, and of course everyone is just like you, aren't they?
That's the single biggest problem with most of the fashions in the working environment: they assume that what's good for some people (read: those making the decisions) will automatically be good for everyone. I have news for you: people are different. Otherwise everyone would be equally good at their jobs... What's good for one person won't necessarily be good for another. Some people thrive on personal contact, others find it distracting. Some work best under great pressure, others find it stressful and counterproductive. Some can juggle umpteen tasks at once, others have to concentrate on one at once. Some have the self-discipline to work at home without getting distracted, others perform best in a work environment. Some enjoy new surroundings every day, others prefer somewhere familiar that they have a bit of control over.
I think Scott Adams had the right idea. One of his books laid down his management principles, one of which was along the lines that people are generally capable and willing to produce good work; the function of management should be to give people what they need for their job, and then keep out of their way and let them do it!
iTunes can rip and convert to unrestricted AAC files (.M4A), which are playable anywhere. There are many available on P2P networks; I prefer them because they have higher quality than MP3 for a given bitrate.
iTunes can also play .M4P files, which are AAC in a protected wrapper. It's these which have DRM, and which you buy from the iTunes Music Store. This is the protection we're talking about cracking. (The P2P networks also have the occasional file in this format, which is a bit pointless.)
AAC is a good format, with better quality than MP3 and no worse licensing issues, and it's a shame that its been linked so strongly with DRM in people's minds. (Widespread Ogg Vorbis support would be even better, of course...)
If the iTunes Music Store gets popular enough to threaten existing CD distribution, then what's the betting it gets extra 'exclusive' tracks and other DRM-only material?
But it's true that Atari dropped the ball. Commodore brought out the Amiga a short while later, and the STE wasn't quite up to the job. But worse was the hiatus after that. The Falcon, while a nice machine, was really too little too late. It was great for us folks who had a big investment in the platform, and no doubt musos everywhere loved it (the first version of Cubase to feature digital audio was Cubase Audio Falcon), but by then everyone was using PCs and the battle was lost. A few third-party manufacturers advanced the system further with machines like (IIRC) the Hades and Medusa, but there wasn't enough compatibility or consensus to keep things together. A shame, because the Falcon and MagiC made a great combination. People are surprised to hear that even three years ago I was running most of the GNU toolset, doing decent web browsing, email, and all the usual stuff on it.
Oh, yes. That's why I included that reference! In fact, it's worse than that - the Tea Act seems a deliberate act to set up a state-backed monopoly. Depressingly relevant today, really.
Of course, as a British person, I'm not defending what happened back then. But I find the truth interestingly different from the simplified version that I've often heard.
Erm, Australia is a jail. I mean, you don't think anyone could actually want to live there, do you?
It's certainly what other systems tend to do - I'm thinking particularly of Mac OS X here, but other less-known systems work well in a similar fashion. However, I don't see that as a viable solution for the open source world; as I said, there's just too much incentive for developers to keep control, to do their own thing.
But there needs to be some central point of contact. I was wondering if that point could be part of the system, rather than a group of people. I don't know exactly what form it might take, but consider this: suppose instead of using a GUI toolkit directly, an application used some sort of meta-toolkit. Instead of saying "I want a window here with this widget here and that widget there, and these menu items with these shortcuts...", it might say "This is what I'm called, I manipulate these data structures, these are my preference settings, this is how I quit...". Then the meta-toolkit would decide exactly how to present that to the user. The developer wouldn't have to worry about the UI decisions, and every app would have a consistent look and feel automatically.
Now, this is only a very rough idea; as above, it would be far too restrictive and simplistic, and most apps wouldn't fit into such a specific model. But my intuition tells me that the future must lie with something like that; software has got far too complex for app developers to have to make the sort of low-level UI decisions they do. I'm convinced that this area of research could be defining the way we write applications in years to come.
What's really needed IMO is consistency. Dialog boxes, for example should have the same style across applications &c. - and that doesn't just mean the font size, or even the font; it means having a similar layout (where appropriate), with buttons in a similar order, the same default focus, similar keyboard controls, similar positioning. And the same principle applies right across the GUI, from having the menus arranged in a similar fashion with common menu options in similar places, to similar behaviour of toolbars and palettes, and so on and so on.
The trouble with this is control. This sort of consistency would mean developers willingly going with someone else's design principles and UI guidelines, and too many developers seem too keen on doing their own thing to let this happen, whether from a desire to make their app stand out, thinking (rightly or wrongly) that the usual principles don't apply to their app, incompetence, or just sheer stubbornness.
Not everyone has graphical skills or UI design skills, so IMO we need a way of working where developers who want to can do so without needing those sorts of skills, but without inflicting that lack on their users. I think this is one of the fundamental problems that the free software community needs to address. GUI toolkits are a step in this direction, but clearly don't go far enough.
Maybe we should consider some fundamental reorganisation. With everything split by application, each has its own way of doing things; what if there was some other way of doing things? What if application developers yielded ultimate control of their GUI to a separate project of some kind? I've no idea how this might be done technically, and even less idea how developers could be brought on board, but IMO it's the only way to achieve the sort of consistency, predictability, and least astonishment that more centrally-controlled systems have.
I know - that only adds to the frustration. But beyond a certain point, I don't think it really matters. Whatever reason there might be isn't going to stop it, isn't going to suddenly make everything all right.
As I said, a while later I've come to the conclusion that in many cases kids just don't empathise; they don't see you as a human being with feelings just as valid as their own. So they don't see any reason not to take their own frustrations/hangups/personal problems out on you. It's really not meant personally. Of course, that doesn't help much - even if you understand all that, it's hard not to let it affect you; and it's doubly hard when you're young and don't have the maturity, experience, and confidence to cope.
Self-confidence takes a long time to build back up. If you have some close friends who you can talk to, that can help. (Or if not, set about making some!) I also found it helped to think myself back there, to mentally go back and face it again, with the experience you've gained since. It's traumatic, but it helped me come to terms with some of it. And then try to move on - after all, the world's much bigger than any of our schools, and the vast majority of people in it are far more civilised!
I hope you get sorted out.
I agree that this is a far-from-perfect world, and that violence - as a last resort - may solve some problems. But there are many that it won't solve.