Since you don't seem to know IP is Intellectual Property which includes data of all sorts such as music, patents, copyrights, etc.
IP is a system designed to produce artificial scarcity of data. The rationale is that there normally is no funding system in place to encourage the creation of new data, and that the creation of new data is a desirable goal. Thus, artificial scarcity was introduced, which allows our free market and other commodity-oriented economic models to work as a mechanism to allow data creation to be funded.
Data itself can be distributed. Data doesn't really have dollar values associated with it, inherently, because it is not property. Only when it is classified as IP does it do so, and IP specifically attempts to protect data against loss of value from distribution.
That is, SPF is not the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, but it makes some other spam-fighting techniques possible.
No, it really doesn't; at least not well.
People have been arguing "SPF isn't an anti-spam system", "SPF is an anti-joe-job system", etc.
SPF does not do any of the above.
SPF is a rudimentary, rather poor (easily breakable, inflexible, requires cooperation on a massive scale, lacks end-to-end capabilities, delegation of authority and user-level granularity) authentication system.
While SPF *alone* does not impose any side effects (it just adds a mail header or two) other than a bit of a bandwidth increase, systems based upon SPF generally make assumptions of SPF that do not hold (it can't be spoofed, or the source domain of an email is an effective identifier to an end user, and so forth). SPF is largely broken as a useful system. There are much better authentication systems out there, like PGP/GPG. The only reason SPF has been deployed is because admins are desperate for *anything* to reduce spam, and deploying SPF lets them feel like they're doing something, in the absence of good antispam tools.
MP isn't evil. He's actually had, from the little that I've paid attention to his policies, a strong tradition of helping out techies and little tech companies, and minimizing government interference -- the sort of thing that makes most Slashdotters happy. He was concerned enough about the fact that independent techies and hobbyists weren't being represented that he set up a weblog. He's one of my better-liked bureaucrats.
He got a *lot* of flack for condemning Janet Jackson for flashing her breast. That was unfortunate, because he got blamed for something that, well, really wasn't his fault. The existing laws prohibit JJ from doing what she did -- his irritation was over the fact that the laws that are part of the FCC's jurisdiction were being ignored, and conservatives were saying "Hey, this guy isn't enforcing our laws". MP didn't *make* the decency laws (that goes back to, oh, I don't know, the '50s, perhaps). The problem is, frankly, really stupid values from a lot of Americans that think that nudity is a horrible, awful thing. Don't blame MP for enforcing the laws that Americans asked for, and existed when he got into office. If he just ignored them, he'd be out of office in no time. Blame poor American values WRT nudity. That's what would have to change for decency laws on TV to go away, not Powell being replaced.
And a vote for Kerry won't change anything either.
Wrong.
First, Kerry's and Bush's ideals *do* differ. Both Republican and Democrat parties are fairly right-wing when it comes to global comparisons, but claiming that they are identical is ridiculous.
Second, voters are very unlikely to go from Republican to Libertarian. In general, Libertarians compete with votes mostly with Democrats, and will absolutely not beat the Democrats in the immediate future -- there are not enough Libertarians out there. The best way for Libertarians to get a vote is for Democrats to have a large, secure majority over the Republicans -- at that point, Democrat voters that are dissatisfied with Democrat policies will feel safe voting Libertarian, and Libertarians will begin siphoning off votes, and working their way up to becoming a major third party.
Third, there is a particularly disagreeable type of person noisily advocating Libertarian voting at this point -- Republicans who do not believe that they can get any centrist voters, and are trying to convince people sitting on the line between Libertarian and Democrat to vote Libertarian, as Libertarian is not a threat to them. The Republican party is already in hot water in two different states for funding and backing Nader to try to weaken the Democrat vote. I am not saying that you are such a person, but there is no way for us to know that this is the case.
I understand that you want to vote based on pure ideals, however, the voting system is not a mechanism to make philosophical claims. It is a system to place the next set of officials in office. If your vote does nothing, you have simply thrown your vote away. That is not because people are operating badly; it is because the voting system in the United States is not structured in such a way that is conducive to many parties. The real fix would be to move to preferential voting (personally, I'd like to see the electoral college go away at the same point in time) or another voting system that doesn't discriminate as harshly against slightly smaller parties. The problem is that the people in office have little incentive to change the voting system to something that favors the little guy. Again, I think that the best fix for this, if you really believe in Libertarian principles, is to ensure that the Democrat majority is large enough, siphon off enough votes to win smaller elections and begin pressure, using these elected officials, for voting reform. That really needs to be pushed through for a third party to be in place. Once that happens, the Libertarian party has a decent ground to stand on. Yes, that's a lot of work, and it's a way off, but to do otherwise, to imagine that the Libertarian vote is going to beat Bush, is just wishful thinking.
IP is a wasting asset. The faster you get it out, the more it's worth, but the minute it's out, it will start losing value almost immediately due to the ease of duplication.
No, it's not. *Data* is a rapidlly depreciating asset. IP is designed to prevent this depreciation phenomenon from happening -- it allows laws to be made to prevent people from copying data.
The above being the biggie. It's a pain in the ass to reverse-engineer hardware, it makes Linux look bad when a piece of hardware can't be used in Linux (or can only be used with a flaky driver), it discourages people from switching with their computer loaded with WinHardware...
The software is not such a deal -- OSS volunteer projects take a while, but they have an approximate equivalent for an awful lot of software, and I can always write the software.
And Linux jobs are fun, but it's not like there's a huge lack of them.
Linux users need to decide what their operating system is all about. Is it about freedom and doing it your way, or is it all about sales and making money?
Not *only* do Linux users not need to decide that, but it's perfectly fine to have a variety of attitudes among kernel developers, and even among distribution providers.
So, aside from the possible fact that Macromedia has pull, why does Firefox ship without any Flash-blocking features, but with Flash included? It includes image display features, but has animated-GIF-blocking features, and if anything, animated Flash is more annoying than animated GIFs.
Consider the context -- someone was suggesting Flash as an alternative to PNG. I was pointing out that PNG is used for static raster graphics. While you *could* do static raster graphics using.swf, it'd be pretty inefficient.
I wasn't really saying that Flash could *only* be used for vector animations.
Personally, I dislike animated *and* web pages with code.:-)
RTFP. No, just skimming the Abstract isn't sufficient.
The patent describes a fairly specific method of encouraging and measuring a viewer's attention to detail. It's not nearly as insidious as the impression one might get from reading nothing but a one-sentence summary of the patent.
I suggest *you* RTFP. I was all set to fire off a "you need to read the *claims*, not the *abstract* to determine what a patent covers post, but then I read the claims. It really is a ridiculous patent.
You are correct that not reading the claims is a common problem; it is not an issue on this patent story.
Flash is primarily useful as a format for storing animated vector graphics.
PNG and GIF are both intended for storing raster images with areas of contant color or simple patterns.
PNG is almost unilaterally better than GIF. It can store an alpha channel, it can store gamma information, it supports more than 256 colors, it does a good job of detecting certain types of corruption, etc.
GIF tends to yield nasty dithered images from people who haven't considered PNG.
Japan is big in *consumer electronics*, small clever molded devices that do one thing. General purpose computing is, if anything, less big than in the US.
With wireless the government loses out on any direct profit from communication systems, because where the simplicity of wireless comes in it also brings a giant headache for them.
That's actually an interesting point -- wireless has to be regulated and the airwaves are a shared resource. I could see maybe taxing things based on signal strength *if* they're monodirectional. Unidirectional things (laser, Pringles can 802.11b, etc) don't pose the same issue.
I tried 'yes | head -10000 | cat -n' on xterm and gnome-terminal, both were about the same speed...as long as I was using the same (anti-aliased) fonts on both.
This is true. This may involve flushing somewhere.
If I try time find/usr/src/linux, I consistently get 11 seconds for gnome-terminal, a little over 1 second for xterm, and under a third fo a second for rxvt.
The annoying thing is how mainstream press translates this into - "Linux allegedly violating Unix copyrights" sensationalistic reporting. I bet they are generating more hits that way. What you would hope for is that press gets its facts straight and cut down on "OMG -- you HAVE TO read this!!!" type articles.
As I pointed out yesterday in another SCO discussion:
The mainstream press is buying into SCO's claims just (AFAICT) based on the weight of how often they repeat them and the fact that they have an easy contact point, whereas there is no general "Linux" contact person.
Take a look at one of CNN.com's front page articles from yesterday. They sport lovely quotes like the following:
"The communal aspects of open source can lead to thorny legal questions, particularly when a company claims its proprietary code has seeped into a project. Because developers typically don't offer warranties, end users could be held liable for infringements."
Wow. It's like saying that all code under the GPL is held to a legal standard that's as harsh as... well, to give an equivalent example, if an author of a book included some infringing content, it's like holding every person that read the book liable. Eben Moglen's shot this down, it's been raked through the coals on Slashdot and Groklaw... but because SCO does a better job of managing the press than the "Linux community, as a whole", nasty disinformation about open source is rapidly spreading around the world and seeping into end users' heads.
All of the accelerators, or just the common ones? I remember seeing some interface that let people set what "print" was -- if an item is in a menu in a KDE app, can I necessarily rebind the accelerator associated with it?
Arguably, there are no really good desktop interfaces out there.
That's arguing semantics. The point of the study was "check out Linux, see how usable it is". The golden standard used as a comparison, whether it's a good thing or not, Windows and Windows-based software. If the software is as usable as Windows-based software *and* free, then usability is "good enough" for most people out there. There were certainly references to MS Office in the study notes.
The article doesn't suggest that it be made compulsory, or that fees should be paid for certification.
Obviously, it can't be made compulsory (who is going to "make me" certify each release of my project?). But once something like this happens, either there is essentially failure of the system and nobody cares about certifying their software, or there is pressure placed on projects to certify their software.
I can understand *why* these people suggest certification. They have an issue -- there are people working on projects that do not worry about the HIG, and these people want to provide an entirely consistent environment, and believe that usability people *must* be injected into the mix somewhere for HIG compliance to be ensured. I don't agree.
In the Mac world, a bunch of UI people developed a good set of guidelines to use. There was no "Macintosh Human Interface Certification" from Apple -- applications naturally tended toward being compliant, because a violation of the guidelines was a *bug*. The developers produced good software with good interfaces.
As for fees -- yes, I noticed that they avoided mentioning fees, and wondered if it might be deliberate. However, it's just not feasible to do otherwise. Who would fund constant usability testing for *every* release of *every* software package out there? It just doesn't happen.
Certification is something you do when you have something that is not going to change for a while, where the latency of having something tested is acceptable, where the developer has interest in obtaining certification and where any deviations from certain requirements are catastrophic. None of this is the case with the user interfaces. OSS software releases are *frequent*. The overhead imposed by certifying each release of software would be a pain. Most developers work on software to benefit themselves -- having them go through a certification process is just excessive when it comes to requiring annoyances to allow others to use your work. Finally, poor usability (well, to a point) is not catastrophic. I have used many pieces of software that deviate from interface norms, as have other people, and they continue to function. Firefox does not use the native widgets of a platform -- it has its own interface. Lotus Notes does the same thing. Combine that lack of consistency with a few Windows apps that have stupid interfaces, and a not uncommon Windows business environment (that people learned how to operate without much problem) does not *have* very consistent interfaces.
How about if it was on a whitelist basis, like the Mozilla thingies?
It's still building an authorization and installation system up from scratch. You have to handle error-handling, dependencies, different architectures, logging... I really think that this is more of a "I'm not used to the way this works" than a "it doesn't work well the way it is." Perhaps there's a need for an *easier to use* GUI front end for software installation -- perhaps synaptic isn't nice enough yet -- but I'm not convinced that there's a need to turn a web browser into a software installation system. I view software distribution systems like dselect and apt as an evolution away from the limited general-purpose approach of manually downloading and installing things from a website.
With a software installation tool, it's easier for an admin to manage systems on a network (for example, if he knows that current gaim2 copies break with the existing network co
Right now gnome's main usability problem is it's speed.
One significant improvement that would help many GNOME users would be to add jump scroll support to gnome-terminal.
In xterm (or the even peppier rxvt), there is a limited number of refreshes that can happen a second. Internally, much text can go by between each screen refresh. This avoids huge numbers of unnecessary screen displays being done. You can easily cat tens of thousands of lines of text to rxvt almost instantly -- gnome-terminal takes a while to churn through all of them.
Currently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made availCurrently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made available, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.able, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.
Horrible idea. None of the good desktop interfaces out there have *ever* required certification. We know that it is not necessary to produce an easy-to-use desktop. Further, this will discriminate against those people that do not have money to pay certification fees, slow development of applications (as individual versions would have to each be certified), and slow evolution of the HIG itself. I am opposed, and think that any attempt to formalize a certification process as part of GNOME would simply lead to bad feelings, loss of good will for GNOME, and project fragmentation.
Unfortunately, those who were not were just as quickly lost and confused. To maintain the abstraction, we recommend that it be removed from the view of the new user and kept in the application menu.
There were a number of suggestions like these -- hiding advanced functionality. While this is a reasonable approach -- the terminal is still in the applications menu, and easily available and easily found by non-novice users -- it is also extremely important not to work too hard to hide functionality. One of the largest problems with GNOME 2.x (IMHO, of course) is that significant and valuable functionality has been hidden or deprecated in the name of more basic "easy to use" features. This includes two of my favorite pet peeves:
* Viewport support (someone apparently decided that it was "confusing" to allow the user to have a window partly on one viewport and partly on another, so it was replaced with a number of virtual desktops). As a result of this technical decision, sawfish (which is not the newbie-recomended GNOME WM in any event) underwent significant negative technical change.
* User-rebindable accelerators. In GNOME 1, unlike every other GUI that I know of, accelerator keys attached to menu items can be simply and easily rebound by highlighting a menu item and tapping the desired key combination. This is a phenomenally powerful feature that demonstrated that the OSS world really *does* enjoy new ideas and significantly improved the GNOME user experience. It meant, for the first time, that the user was not bound by the decisions of the application developer. KDE has a similar-but-not-identical feature that allows *some* menu item accelerators to be globally rebound (frankly, I'd like to see the synthesis of these two featurs). Anyway, some usability person decided that this could be confusing to a new user (fine, I'll buy that) and the solution presented was to entirely disable this feature and requires manually adding a line to a text file on a per-user basis, instead of simply providing a toggle button in an "Advanced..." dialog or something similar. As a result, few users know about or take advantage of this functionality.
A remedy is needed for this situation. The answer could be an installation application that can speak to all of the popular distributions. It could be built in such a modular way as to allow new backends and functionality.
This is a good idea, and should have been done a while ago. It's a bit disheartening to think that this will likely have a very limited subset of functionality and be used by most users, though.
A solution to this problem that allows for applications to be downloaded from webpages an
A past lawsuit over a video game manufacturer (I believe it was Sega, but might have been Atari, can't find a link with a google search) established that formats are not protected by including copyrighted content as part of the format, which is the only way that copyright might potentially have been able to protect a format.
Thus, this guy must be saying that everyone has stolen copyrighted ELF implementation code.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you don't seem to know IP is Intellectual Property which includes data of all sorts such as music, patents, copyrights, etc.
IP is a system designed to produce artificial scarcity of data. The rationale is that there normally is no funding system in place to encourage the creation of new data, and that the creation of new data is a desirable goal. Thus, artificial scarcity was introduced, which allows
our free market and other commodity-oriented economic models to work as a mechanism to allow data creation to be funded.
Data itself can be distributed. Data doesn't really have dollar values associated with it, inherently, because it is not property. Only when it is classified as IP does it do so, and IP specifically attempts to protect data against loss of value from distribution.
That is, SPF is not the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, but it makes some other spam-fighting techniques possible.
No, it really doesn't; at least not well.
People have been arguing "SPF isn't an anti-spam system", "SPF is an anti-joe-job system", etc.
SPF does not do any of the above.
SPF is a rudimentary, rather poor (easily breakable, inflexible, requires cooperation on a massive scale, lacks end-to-end capabilities, delegation of authority and user-level granularity) authentication system.
While SPF *alone* does not impose any side effects (it just adds a mail header or two) other than a bit of a bandwidth increase, systems based upon SPF generally make assumptions of SPF that do not hold (it can't be spoofed, or the source domain of an email is an effective identifier to an end user, and so forth). SPF is largely broken as a useful system. There are much better authentication systems out there, like PGP/GPG. The only reason SPF has been deployed is because admins are desperate for *anything* to reduce spam, and deploying SPF lets them feel like they're doing something, in the absence of good antispam tools.
MP isn't evil. He's actually had, from the little that I've paid attention to his policies, a strong tradition of helping out techies and little tech companies, and minimizing government interference -- the sort of thing that makes most Slashdotters happy. He was concerned enough about the fact that independent techies and hobbyists weren't being represented that he set up a weblog. He's one of my better-liked bureaucrats.
He got a *lot* of flack for condemning Janet Jackson for flashing her breast. That was unfortunate, because he got blamed for something that, well, really wasn't his fault. The existing laws prohibit JJ from doing what she did -- his irritation was over the fact that the laws that are part of the FCC's jurisdiction were being ignored, and conservatives were saying "Hey, this guy isn't enforcing our laws". MP didn't *make* the decency laws (that goes back to, oh, I don't know, the '50s, perhaps). The problem is, frankly, really stupid values from a lot of Americans that think that nudity is a horrible, awful thing. Don't blame MP for enforcing the laws that Americans asked for, and existed when he got into office. If he just ignored them, he'd be out of office in no time. Blame poor American values WRT nudity. That's what would have to change for decency laws on TV to go away, not Powell being replaced.
Yeah, I hope that we hit 1984 and Brave New World status. Because it'll make everything much, much better. Really.
And a vote for Kerry won't change anything either.
Wrong.
First, Kerry's and Bush's ideals *do* differ. Both Republican and Democrat parties are fairly right-wing when it comes to global comparisons, but claiming that they are identical is ridiculous.
Second, voters are very unlikely to go from Republican to Libertarian. In general, Libertarians compete with votes mostly with Democrats, and will absolutely not beat the Democrats in the immediate future -- there are not enough Libertarians out there. The best way for Libertarians to get a vote is for Democrats to have a large, secure majority over the Republicans -- at that point, Democrat voters that are dissatisfied with Democrat policies will feel safe voting Libertarian, and Libertarians will begin siphoning off votes, and working their way up to becoming a major third party.
Third, there is a particularly disagreeable type of person noisily advocating Libertarian voting at this point -- Republicans who do not believe that they can get any centrist voters, and are trying to convince people sitting on the line between Libertarian and Democrat to vote Libertarian, as Libertarian is not a threat to them. The Republican party is already in hot water in two different states for funding and backing Nader to try to weaken the Democrat vote. I am not saying that you are such a person, but there is no way for us to know that this is the case.
I understand that you want to vote based on pure ideals, however, the voting system is not a mechanism to make philosophical claims. It is a system to place the next set of officials in office. If your vote does nothing, you have simply thrown your vote away. That is not because people are operating badly; it is because the voting system in the United States is not structured in such a way that is conducive to many parties. The real fix would be to move to preferential voting (personally, I'd like to see the electoral college go away at the same point in time) or another voting system that doesn't discriminate as harshly against slightly smaller parties. The problem is that the people in office have little incentive to change the voting system to something that favors the little guy. Again, I think that the best fix for this, if you really believe in Libertarian principles, is to ensure that the Democrat majority is large enough, siphon off enough votes to win smaller elections and begin pressure, using these elected officials, for voting reform. That really needs to be pushed through for a third party to be in place. Once that happens, the Libertarian party has a decent ground to stand on. Yes, that's a lot of work, and it's a way off, but to do otherwise, to imagine that the Libertarian vote is going to beat Bush, is just wishful thinking.
IP is a wasting asset. The faster you get it out, the more it's worth, but the minute it's out, it will start losing value almost immediately due to the ease of duplication.
No, it's not. *Data* is a rapidlly depreciating asset. IP is designed to prevent this depreciation phenomenon from happening -- it allows laws to be made to prevent people from copying data.
what you're doing is called "stealing".
If you're an RIAA lobbyist. To the rest of us, it's called "copyright infringement".
1. More support from hardware manufacturers
The above being the biggie. It's a pain in the ass to reverse-engineer hardware, it makes Linux look bad when a piece of hardware can't be used in Linux (or can only be used with a flaky driver), it discourages people from switching with their computer loaded with WinHardware...
The software is not such a deal -- OSS volunteer projects take a while, but they have an approximate equivalent for an awful lot of software, and I can always write the software.
And Linux jobs are fun, but it's not like there's a huge lack of them.
Because as we all know, XML is currently the most important technology in existence. :-)
Linux users need to decide what their operating system is all about. Is it about freedom and doing it your way, or is it all about sales and making money?
Not *only* do Linux users not need to decide that, but it's perfectly fine to have a variety of attitudes among kernel developers, and even among distribution providers.
So, aside from the possible fact that Macromedia has pull, why does Firefox ship without any Flash-blocking features, but with Flash included? It includes image display features, but has animated-GIF-blocking features, and if anything, animated Flash is more annoying than animated GIFs.
Interesting; I'll still stick with my point.
.swf, it'd be pretty inefficient.
:-)
Consider the context -- someone was suggesting Flash as an alternative to PNG. I was pointing out that PNG is used for static raster graphics. While you *could* do static raster graphics using
I wasn't really saying that Flash could *only* be used for vector animations.
Personally, I dislike animated *and* web pages with code.
RTFP. No, just skimming the Abstract isn't sufficient.
The patent describes a fairly specific method of encouraging and measuring a viewer's attention to detail. It's not nearly as insidious as the impression one might get from reading nothing but a one-sentence summary of the patent.
I suggest *you* RTFP. I was all set to fire off a "you need to read the *claims*, not the *abstract* to determine what a patent covers post, but then I read the claims. It really is a ridiculous patent.
You are correct that not reading the claims is a common problem; it is not an issue on this patent story.
Flash is more advanced than PNG.
Flash serves a different purpose than PNG does.
Flash is primarily useful as a format for storing animated vector graphics.
PNG and GIF are both intended for storing raster images with areas of contant color or simple patterns.
PNG is almost unilaterally better than GIF. It can store an alpha channel, it can store gamma information, it supports more than 256 colors, it does a good job of detecting certain types of corruption, etc.
GIF tends to yield nasty dithered images from people who haven't considered PNG.
Ack. That should be if they're unidirectional, and spew waves in all direction. Monodirectional would continue to be untaxed.
Japan is big in *consumer electronics*, small clever molded devices that do one thing. General purpose computing is, if anything, less big than in the US.
With wireless the government loses out on any direct profit from communication systems, because where the simplicity of wireless comes in it also brings a giant headache for them.
That's actually an interesting point -- wireless has to be regulated and the airwaves are a shared resource. I could see maybe taxing things based on signal strength *if* they're monodirectional. Unidirectional things (laser, Pringles can 802.11b, etc) don't pose the same issue.
I tried 'yes | head -10000 | cat -n' on xterm and gnome-terminal, both were about the same speed...as long as I was using the same (anti-aliased) fonts on both.
/usr/src/linux, I consistently get 11 seconds for gnome-terminal, a little over 1 second for xterm, and under a third fo a second for rxvt.
This is true. This may involve flushing somewhere.
If I try time find
The annoying thing is how mainstream press translates this into - "Linux allegedly violating Unix copyrights" sensationalistic reporting. I bet they are generating more hits that way. What you would hope for is that press gets its facts straight and cut down on "OMG -- you HAVE TO read this!!!" type articles.
... well, to give an equivalent example, if an author of a book included some infringing content, it's like holding every person that read the book liable. Eben Moglen's shot this down, it's been raked through the coals on Slashdot and Groklaw ... but because SCO does a better job of managing the press than the "Linux community, as a whole", nasty disinformation about open source is rapidly spreading around the world and seeping into end users' heads.
As I pointed out yesterday in another SCO discussion:
The mainstream press is buying into SCO's claims just (AFAICT) based on the weight of how often they repeat them and the fact that they have an easy contact point, whereas there is no general "Linux" contact person.
Take a look at one of CNN.com's front page articles from yesterday. They sport lovely quotes like the following:
"The communal aspects of open source can lead to thorny legal questions, particularly when a company claims its proprietary code has seeped into a project. Because developers typically don't offer warranties, end users could be held liable for infringements."
Wow. It's like saying that all code under the GPL is held to a legal standard that's as harsh as
Sad. And probably not fixable.
Sun donated Open Office, one of the larger free Open Source applications out there. I think that few companies can claim this much.
All of the accelerators, or just the common ones? I remember seeing some interface that let people set what "print" was -- if an item is in a menu in a KDE app, can I necessarily rebind the accelerator associated with it?
If so, that's pretty cool.
Arguably, there are no really good desktop interfaces out there.
... I really think that this is more of a "I'm not used to the way this works" than a "it doesn't work well the way it is." Perhaps there's a need for an *easier to use* GUI front end for software installation -- perhaps synaptic isn't nice enough yet -- but I'm not convinced that there's a need to turn a web browser into a software installation system. I view software distribution systems like dselect and apt as an evolution away from the limited general-purpose approach of manually downloading and installing things from a website.
That's arguing semantics. The point of the study was "check out Linux, see how usable it is". The golden standard used as a comparison, whether it's a good thing or not, Windows and Windows-based software. If the software is as usable as Windows-based software *and* free, then usability is "good enough" for most people out there. There were certainly references to MS Office in the study notes.
The article doesn't suggest that it be made compulsory, or that fees should be paid for certification.
Obviously, it can't be made compulsory (who is going to "make me" certify each release of my project?). But once something like this happens, either there is essentially failure of the system and nobody cares about certifying their software, or there is pressure placed on projects to certify their software.
I can understand *why* these people suggest certification. They have an issue -- there are people working on projects that do not worry about the HIG, and these people want to provide an entirely consistent environment, and believe that usability people *must* be injected into the mix somewhere for HIG compliance to be ensured. I don't agree.
In the Mac world, a bunch of UI people developed a good set of guidelines to use. There was no "Macintosh Human Interface Certification" from Apple -- applications naturally tended toward being compliant, because a violation of the guidelines was a *bug*. The developers produced good software with good interfaces.
As for fees -- yes, I noticed that they avoided mentioning fees, and wondered if it might be deliberate. However, it's just not feasible to do otherwise. Who would fund constant usability testing for *every* release of *every* software package out there? It just doesn't happen.
Certification is something you do when you have something that is not going to change for a while, where the latency of having something tested is acceptable, where the developer has interest in obtaining certification and where any deviations from certain requirements are catastrophic. None of this is the case with the user interfaces. OSS software releases are *frequent*. The overhead imposed by certifying each release of software would be a pain. Most developers work on software to benefit themselves -- having them go through a certification process is just excessive when it comes to requiring annoyances to allow others to use your work. Finally, poor usability (well, to a point) is not catastrophic. I have used many pieces of software that deviate from interface norms, as have other people, and they continue to function. Firefox does not use the native widgets of a platform -- it has its own interface. Lotus Notes does the same thing. Combine that lack of consistency with a few Windows apps that have stupid interfaces, and a not uncommon Windows business environment (that people learned how to operate without much problem) does not *have* very consistent interfaces.
How about if it was on a whitelist basis, like the Mozilla thingies?
It's still building an authorization and installation system up from scratch. You have to handle error-handling, dependencies, different architectures, logging
With a software installation tool, it's easier for an admin to manage systems on a network (for example, if he knows that current gaim2 copies break with the existing network co
Right now gnome's main usability problem is it's speed.
One significant improvement that would help many GNOME users would be to add jump scroll support to gnome-terminal.
In xterm (or the even peppier rxvt), there is a limited number of refreshes that can happen a second. Internally, much text can go by between each screen refresh. This avoids huge numbers of unnecessary screen displays being done. You can easily cat tens of thousands of lines of text to rxvt almost instantly -- gnome-terminal takes a while to churn through all of them.
Currently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made availCurrently, the HIG (see above) is made available to developers for voluntary adherence. If more resources were made available, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.able, the GNOME project could start a certification program to document compliance with the standard. This would allow users to seek out certified applications and know that these applications would integrate well with their existing desktops.
Horrible idea. None of the good desktop interfaces out there have *ever* required certification. We know that it is not necessary to produce an easy-to-use desktop. Further, this will discriminate against those people that do not have money to pay certification fees, slow development of applications (as individual versions would have to each be certified), and slow evolution of the HIG itself. I am opposed, and think that any attempt to formalize a certification process as part of GNOME would simply lead to bad feelings, loss of good will for GNOME, and project fragmentation.
Unfortunately, those who were not were just as quickly lost and confused. To maintain the abstraction, we recommend that it be removed from the view of the new user and kept in the application menu.
There were a number of suggestions like these -- hiding advanced functionality. While this is a reasonable approach -- the terminal is still in the applications menu, and easily available and easily found by non-novice users -- it is also extremely important not to work too hard to hide functionality. One of the largest problems with GNOME 2.x (IMHO, of course) is that significant and valuable functionality has been hidden or deprecated in the name of more basic "easy to use" features. This includes two of my favorite pet peeves:
* Viewport support (someone apparently decided that it was "confusing" to allow the user to have a window partly on one viewport and partly on another, so it was replaced with a number of virtual desktops). As a result of this technical decision, sawfish (which is not the newbie-recomended GNOME WM in any event) underwent significant negative technical change.
* User-rebindable accelerators. In GNOME 1, unlike every other GUI that I know of, accelerator keys attached to menu items can be simply and easily rebound by highlighting a menu item and tapping the desired key combination. This is a phenomenally powerful feature that demonstrated that the OSS world really *does* enjoy new ideas and significantly improved the GNOME user experience. It meant, for the first time, that the user was not bound by the decisions of the application developer. KDE has a similar-but-not-identical feature that allows *some* menu item accelerators to be globally rebound (frankly, I'd like to see the synthesis of these two featurs). Anyway, some usability person decided that this could be confusing to a new user (fine, I'll buy that) and the solution presented was to entirely disable this feature and requires manually adding a line to a text file on a per-user basis, instead of simply providing a toggle button in an "Advanced..." dialog or something similar. As a result, few users know about or take advantage of this functionality.
A remedy is needed for this situation. The answer could be an installation application that can speak to all of the popular distributions. It could be built in such a modular way as to allow new backends and functionality.
This is a good idea, and should have been done a while ago. It's a bit disheartening to think that this will likely have a very limited subset of functionality and be used by most users, though.
A solution to this problem that allows for applications to be downloaded from webpages an
A past lawsuit over a video game manufacturer (I believe it was Sega, but might have been Atari, can't find a link with a google search) established that formats are not protected by including copyrighted content as part of the format, which is the only way that copyright might potentially have been able to protect a format.
Thus, this guy must be saying that everyone has stolen copyrighted ELF implementation code.
This promises to be interesting.