Well I imagine random data would probably be 'good enough'.
The use of specific patterns, especially alternating 1's and 0's, is to take advantage of known effects such as degausing. There is also the matter of modern hard-drives and ecc data that a poster below kindly pointed out. My last dealings with such data-erasure techniques was a few (8-10?) years ago. My appologies for not pointing out that my info might be a tad dated.
For those not familiar with the United states constitution, I thouth what it says with regard to treaties might help this discussion.
Article VI, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution:
"Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
This gives treaties significant weight. On par with federal law. But not superior to the constitution itself.
I'll second this, even when I get a new hard I usually keep the old one to back stuff up to when I'm putting a new o.s. in. Or when I feel like trying out a new distro (or new version). Plus if a drive dies on me I have spare I can use.
Though is this case I think we're dealing with corporate upgrade cycle here. Usually the corporation sells off a bunch of drive in bulk to cut the cost of the upgrade or company hired to do the upgrade takes the old drives and re-sells them to garner a few extra $$.
Well that depends on what you mean by 'low level format'.
Re-formatting ata hard drives at a truly low level can mess the disk organisation in ways that seriously degrade performance.
If your referring to a 'full' format with does more than the 'quick' format that mearly marks the drive as empty, well it's easy, and of very little use in this case.
Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.
One way to improve your odds is to repeatedly write a series of 1's and 0's to a location to help average out these variables as well as use the hysteresis(sp?) effect to 'degause' the location, this is what 'shredder' programs do (the ones that aren't crap).
Some programs even go so far as to not simply write 11111111 then 00000000 over and over to the same byte, but to use other patterns so that the fields of niegboring bits add to the deguas effect in destroying the data.
At one time (and probably to this day) the US DOD specs used to require a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits followed by the writing of a specific bit pattern before a hard drive was considered to have been properly erased.
And yes each pass does put a little wear and tear on the drive, not enough to worry about unless your 'shredding' the drive quite a few times, but still worth noting.
The number of passes used and what if any special patterns are used determine the amount of effort it would take to recover the data, kind of like key length in cryptography. Adjust paranoi settings apropriately. (note: the anology is imperfect as hell, 1024 might be a mediocre key length, but thats enough shred passes to noticeably shorten drive lifespan.)
No mod points sorry. And lemme tell you untill my machine can do a realtime render with all the usefull options that is photographic quality on two montiors (different image each), it's no where near fast enough.
Well maybe thats excessive, but since we'll get there and then some eventually why not dream now:)
3dsmax 5 can bring an otherwise reasonable machine to a near halt on a fairly simple render as it is. I've got an amd 2200+ with 1/2 gig ram and a radeon 9600 based video card and I can choke it with less than 100k pollys, and this is just edit mode, not a real render.
Fyi, I got into 3d moddeling AFTER I upgraded last, and will upgrade again soon so please don't think I'm to big an idiot. I really didn't expect to have this much fun at it, just wanted to try a couple things out of curiousity. (Now if I could just get a good upgrade on my talent I'd be all happy:)
Sounds like you've got some of the bits and pieces needed to make some needed improvements. Other than putting them up on sourceforge and or tossing a few messages on the right mailing lists I'm not shure what else to suggest on getting them used.
Yeah, makeing the hard stuff easy rather than just making the easy stuff easier would be an improvement.
Gravity is still just windows at the moment. The regular expressions are merged into a conditional expression/booleen evaluation system, almost a scripting language, that has a rather decent interface for applying. It doese a fairly good job with multi-part posts and handling crossposted messages. plus it's got functions for handling decode jobs and of course the various encoding schemes for binaries. But to be honest it's main advantage for me is it's whole interface and layout suits the way I think.
A well organised and gradual shift from noob to power user in various features and settings, etc. should be a design goal in any software of non-trivial complexity/functionality. It's one area where much of Linux need improvement imho.
That and consistancy, at least out of the box. Just about everyone coding for linux seems to have a different idea about look and feel for thier apps and that tends creat confusion and cognitive disruption. At least with the high theme-ability of many linux desktop aps and even desktops it's possible to reduce this at the distro level. Though it won't help much with deciding what kinds of things go under which menus (do 'options' go under thier own menu, under file, under edit, under tools, etc. and what counts as options, as preference.) that all software seems to suffer regardless of os.
On problem is that alot of useability and interface guidlines come out of studies and research by experts in narrow fields hired by the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Not exactly a common forte amoung open source coders, or even coders in genera. Nor is running focus groups and other such testing a 'sexy' thing for most software developers.
Can't speak to what apple does. But I will agree that alot of what Microsoft does is eigther bad (automatic running of e-mail, default to root on boot up, etc.) and even thier half way decent ideas are often broken in implementation (the registry, add/remove programs, so on). I'm not just referencing thier programming when I refer to thier tactics though. Take the whole embrace and extend they use for lock in. Linux could simply do the same by creating much improved versions of apps found in the windows world for example.
I've actually seen tools a little like what you mention in your search-grep-act example, Mostly in news readers though. The whole concept is somthing I'd like to see as well. If a proprietary newsreader can implement stuff like this on message filters, it should be possible to do somthing like this on the linux desktop.
The reason why powerfull concepts like this are not on the desktop have to do with why alot of people work on open source. It's an ego game to some degree, and shiny pretty widget that do somthing trully new clever are more ego points.
The rest are mostly making some specific tool to fit thier own needs, once it's 'good enough' for them it doesn't get as much attention from them, the person who understands the code best.
Of course these are just two factors I see, I'm shure there are others.
A user in general should have to know as little as possible. The lower bar to entry the better. Now this doesn't mean a knowledgeable user should be locked into an idiot box without access under the hood.
In fact we largely have eigther the idiot box, or the opposite end of the spectrum. And this problem I see as endemic to most software these days, not just winodws or linux. It's bad, there should be as smooth a graduation from idiot noob to HighWizard Guru as possible. The minute I want to do more than choose between eye candy setting I shouldn't have to edit obscure setting in a file or hack the registry. The "advanced" options shouldn't be just whether or not the menu's are animated fast or slow.
The news reader I'm thinking of up there is Microplanet Gravity. The original company died, but a developer got to keep a full copy of the code and has rights to most of it. I beleive he was looking into Open sourceing everything he had full rights to once he could replace code he was only alowed to use, not open and modify (probably proprietary libraries). But the main thing is he's still developing it and it has halfway decent regular expression parsing for it's rules and I'm thinking a more generalized implementation of what he did would make a good start on your idea (a good idea I think).
Interesting. One of the reasons I'm using firefox is I got sick of IE randomly deciding to run amok and shoot processor use to 100%. It only did this when read/. though. Haven't been running it long though, but sofar no problems, and no pop-ups or crappy flash ads eigther.
Pretty sad when a 0.8 versioned browser runs better and works better than one built into the o.s. itself that's on version 6.0.
Of course I suppose you could argue that ms is versions are only 1/10 as significant as Firefoxes. But I don't see as that helps ms look any better.
I never meant to imply that useability should be reduced. Other than your good suggestion (being able to turn it off) Another way to 'fix' the highlight issue would be for it to say be moved to highlighting with the middle button to copy and maybe setting paste to be a double middle click or somthing else a bit more consistant and less prone to confusion. The option to change it to suit the user should always be available IMHO.
As far the dialog thing goes, I believe I arleady explained that. A dialog per-se is not always needed, but the fact that somthing other than Just what you see is going on should be communicated to the user, somthing as simple as a little icon somewhere visible, but non intrusive. Perhaps followed by "use middle button to paste a copy of highlighted text in compatable applications" in a status bar or some such. just tossing out ideas here.
Your whole last paragraph is very close to my thinking, the only thing in it I MIGHT quible with is that it comes close to implying just because Microsoft or Apple did it's therfore wrong, but based in part on "We should concentrate more on enabling faster, better, more flexible access to the information users need.." I seriously doubt you've made that mistake. Personaly I think one should evaluate a tactic on it's own merits, not on who else has used it.
As far as dumbing down, far from it. What I'm looking for is a simple streamlined intuitive interface that Joe sixpack can sit down and use, yet a power user can go in and set to exactly his preferences through an equally elegant intuive system. It can be done, it's just not as easy or attractive to many coders as the apps themselves usually are.
I'd like to point out that Joe six-pack has the power to make the big companies sit up a pay attention. If Joe say Linux is how things are going to be, The companies WILL develope for linux, and some of that will be Open source if for no other reason than better Linux makes thier software more attractive to Joe and his wallet. If however Joe goes blithly along with next bug-ridden virus prone drm loaded redmond offering our lives don't get any easier. Joe outnumbers us millions to one.
And to this:
"The power of the command-line needs to find the ease of use of the desktop. "
All I can say amen brother your preaching to choir here.
Anyway I've put a rough draft of some of my thinking from which much of my point of view on this comes from in my journal if you care to check it out. I suspect in broad terms I dissagree you less than it might otherwise seem, just a few details.
Except Joe Sixpack isn't an experienced unix user.
I wasn't refering to a confirm dialog, just make it obvious what's going on. Useability through Obscurity is a non-sequiter. An extra step 100% of the time that takes.1 second beats a mess that takes more than 2 seconds to clean up 5% of the time.
I can understand how such a 'feature' wound up in an OS based on the posix standard. It's been around a long time (for Good reason). But computers are no longer the domain of educated specialist, and quirks that devolped for limited resources that an experienced user can adapt to will completly turn Joe off. Now if you just want *nix for the geeks, and see no value in a version for the masses that's fine. I however do see a value in it and am interested in improving it.
And it's not even the minor nit about how that version of c&p works per se. It's the lack of a consistant, dependable, mechanism that Just Works, the same way, everywhere. It's what joe sixpack is used to.
And just because Windows has one break in it's c&p does that somehow invalidate improving what *nix has?
Still it has shown signs of improving, I'll probably be buying a boxed distro with the 2.6 series kernel and newer versions of Gnome and Kde sometime soon and checking out how far things have actually come since I last did so about 6-10 months ago. Don't have the bandwidth out here to d/l a whole distro, even the small ones
My goal here is NOT to disparage *nix, but rather to point out an area I believe needs improvement to make the modern *nix ready for the common desktop, it's very close right now and the main things holding it back seem to be variations on elite-isms and sacred cows.
But really this is a fairly minor thing compared to some of the few BIG problems still remaining.
Problem is, according to Microsoft itself, no-one in redmond has(or can have) the level of knowledge of windows code that the apache team has on thier code.
Just look at some of the things they've said in court, some of thier practice so could say those things. They deliberately loose track of source just so they can say things like "I'm sorry your honor, we no longer seem to have the code specified in the supeona(I know I've mangled that word, sorry), and couldn't remove it anyway because it's part of how windows works" or some such.
Yes they do. especialy older files from places other than america and europe.
Personally I wish avi would die. It has been the single biggest pain in the neck.
It's almost completly streaming unfriendly, you have no clue what codec it uses, it's occasionally boobytraped, little to no robustness. and whats really sad is often the codec used to create the encapselated file is none of the above would be best as it's own format. Divx is a prime example being streamable, resistant to missing bits, dosen't need the decoder to 'phone home' for permission to watch.
Just my pet peeve I suppose, but I hate avi almost as much a wmv.
Actually I suspect it's both kinds of free propelling acceptance. Think about it.
Without both I'd likely have never tried linux.
Plus bussiness have to meet a bottom line. The lack of up front cost for the software is attractive for that reason, and fact that they can tailor it more exactly to thier specific needs can improve efficiency and again impact thier bottom line.
Joe sixpack is much less likely to replace windows with something doesn't run moose sniper 9 and let him do that online billing thing if he has to pay out any significant $$ for it.
And of course your local computer geek gets all sorts of toys he can actually play with without having eula's threaten to do evil things if takes it apart and requiring his imortal soul and first born simply to run.
It's a good and altruist a motive to sing the virtues of open source I agree. But not paying $200+ a pop to mearly be able to actually run that nice shiny computer is a pretty nice thing as well.
Ever have a vital piece of info destroyed because you accidently hit the delete button.
Ever accidently overwrite a file because you saved with the wrong name and didn't realize it.
This is why I see a problem with silent actions like how the highlight/middle click works.
Not necessarily as disaterous, but it still takes a non obvious assumed action with no feedback.
It good UI design to have clarity of action and response. People make mistakes and click the wrong thing from time to time and the dumping of the clipboard into a document because just a little to much pressure was aplied to the mousewheel while scrolling is plain asking to frustrate the user and bad ui design.
I'll grant that mousewheels that act as a middle button probably didn't exist when this was started, but that still dosen't excuse it still doing that on a single click.
From your last paragraph it seems as though the situation might be improving some. But you can understand my frustration when a recent set of apps (mandrake 9.1 install) couldn't even share TEXT through simple cut/copy and paste. I don't mean obscure apps, I mean a browser, a file manager and a text editor and other apps that SHOULD communicate simple text easily.
One last partial tangent to this. Choice is good when optional, not when forced for everything. To make an analogy try going to a few stores, start with general stores that don't specialize and notice how limited thier selections per item are. Then goto a few specialty stores that cater to people with specific intrests and likely specific knowledge. notice how broad thier selection is and consider how daunting that could be to an outsider.
Because a) the behaviour is inconsistant (try cut and paste between several different apps, now try under windows) and everything has it's own cut and paste system almost. It's fine to have other systems available, but you need a consistant method that just works everywhere, or as nearly so as possible.
and b) what you just described is broken for many people. try cut and replace that way.
highlight to copy, then highlight what you want to replace, oh wait that won't work. I used a windows app that had to do it that way because the author hadn't figured out how to work a around a limitation in the programming system he was using. His docs Apologised for the broken behaviour.
And you don't have to use the ctrl key combos to c&p unless your mouse/trackball is dead. just a few mouse button clicks is all.
The highlight to copy thing makes assumptions about the users intentions, in a situation where there are other equally likely reasons to highlight, some of which require the clipboard to NOT be emptied. This is broken by definition.
Not shure about LSB compatability, but they do maintain the appearance of FHS or simular through links and such so that apps see the directory structure they expect while users get a directory structure that is more intuitive.
It's possible LSB dependant apps could run just fine on this system.
I hope so, this kind of soulution is needed, the cryptic (to MOST people) unix style directory structure really need to go, or at least be hidden for Joe Sixpack to be able to use it. The only reason for not doing so would to to avoid breaking compatability, another thing that needs to stop happening so often if we want Joe Sixpack to dump windows for linux.
If this system is really path agnostic, and doese what is seems to say wrt to paths I'm a much happier person today. Definately a BIG improvement if true.
I would tend to agree that breaking the paths would be bad, fourtunately they don't exactly do that.
What they do is provide a more intuitive (on the surface of it, it seems so to me, need more details to be shure) path system while maintaining compatability to the old system.
"In GoboLinux, each program resides in its own directory, such as/Programs/Xorg/6.7.0 and/Programs/KDE/3.2.2. Each file category (executables, libraries, headers) can also be accessed through unified symlink views, such as/System/Links/Libraries and/System/Links/Headers. These views match the legacy directories (/bin,/usr/include,/usr/local/share) and so on, achieving total Unix compatibility while keeping program directories completely self-contained."
They claim thier systems is path agnostic. this is a good thing imho. One of my (minor) pet peves is that the standard *nix path system is largely cryptic to joe user, and a pain in the butt even for the cluefull unless you have enough *nix experience to make it automatic.
Now if they fix cut and paste and find a way to make havening both a *nix and a windows version as close as possible to a simple recompile with a few options/flags changed the year of linux as a major desktop contender will finally arive istead of forever being next year.
hmm, seems a bit insecure at that last step, unless your closet is tempest shielded AND your running on battery power. otherwise they could get the data from powerline fluctuations.
I've found even though I KNOW how to fix many problems, I don't know the exact steps unless I'm following them.
I often can't tell someone the exact sequence over the phone unless I can see it in front of me.
It's very frustrating sometimes when someone new comes along and has trouble believing I know what I'm doing when I can't easily walk them through a fix. Fourtuneately thats rare, I usually goto them and just fix it on the spot.
I've fixed a few problems in seconds a few of my more tech savy friends have beat thier brains out over for a couple days before I was available to help, does wonders for rep with them, and my ego of course.:) they think I'm some kinda eccentric genius (or rainman) because I'll rarely try to help them over the phone, and when I do it's often a painfull waste of time, yet I show up at thier home and a few minutes later everything is running just fine.
7 characters would probably be ideal from a memory standpoint as most peoples short term memory is approx 7 items and thus one of the easiest lengths to memorize.
I strongly suspect this is why phone numbers in the usa are the length they are, 7 digits for the most part and then 3 digits for area code, but the structure makes 'area codes' a seperate item cognitively. that is you don't think of someones number as 5554324321 but as 4324321 in the 555 area code, which you usualy associate with an area whereas the 4324321 is the person.
Food isn't the only product where lable and price are the only differences. I'm shure most slashdotters are aware how many tech items, such as cd-roms and dvd players are just rebadged.
I can also verify from personal experience that most charcoal is the same, when I briefly worked at factory packaging charcoal all we did was switch bags when we had enough of brand-x for that days order.
Most 'house' brands of anything are of course re-badged as well.
A clever tip I learned a while back about comsumer electronics. If it's got a fcc id number you can look it up on thier (fcc's) website to see who really makes it. They only isue one number per device no matter how many people change the plastic and re-sell it.
Mycroft
Re:How much does the AC adapter weigh?
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Your sig. is that an actual report from netcraft, or are you making a joke. In eigther case it's funny, and somehow fundementaly WRONG, in so many ways............
addendum: Just because someone is an evil @#$$ doen't make it axiomatic that everything they say is wrong or the product of inferior intellect. Nor because someone is Good and saintly do they posses great wisdom or insight.
I gather from your post you probably realize this, but others may proffit from the reminder.
The most unfortunate part? It's mostly true. Most people people are lemmings.
Two paraphrases (because I'm to tired from fighting flu to search for exact quotes, sorry)
"And it profits evil that good men do nothing" Burk IIRC, the only possible answer to Goering, and then only when backed by somthing like our constitution, which also unfortunately the 'two' parties have been undermining because no-one follows Burkes admonition there.
"A person is smart, but people are blind, stupid, panicky and you know it." -K men in black.
I have alot of belief in the goodness of my fellow man, but people scare the shit outa me.--me:)
I wasn't attacking with the godwins law ref, and I'm honestly sorry if you got that impression. I've been fairly sick with the flu last two days and fevers and exaustion play games with my sense of humour. I was humourously trying to point out that some hyperboly can damage credibility (for all I'm often guilty of excess hyperboly myself).
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Well I imagine random data would probably be 'good enough'.
The use of specific patterns, especially alternating 1's and 0's, is to take advantage of known effects such as degausing. There is also the matter of modern hard-drives and ecc data that a poster below kindly pointed out. My last dealings with such data-erasure techniques was a few (8-10?) years ago. My appologies for not pointing out that my info might be a tad dated.
Mycroft
For those not familiar with the United states constitution, I thouth what it says with regard to treaties might help this discussion.
Article VI, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution:
"Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
This gives treaties significant weight. On par with federal law. But not superior to the constitution itself.
Mycroft
I'll second this, even when I get a new hard I usually keep the old one to back stuff up to when I'm putting a new o.s. in. Or when I feel like trying out a new distro (or new version). Plus if a drive dies on me I have spare I can use.
Though is this case I think we're dealing with corporate upgrade cycle here. Usually the corporation sells off a bunch of drive in bulk to cut the cost of the upgrade or company hired to do the upgrade takes the old drives and re-sells them to garner a few extra $$.
Mycroft
Well that depends on what you mean by 'low level format'.
Re-formatting ata hard drives at a truly low level can mess the disk organisation in ways that seriously degrade performance.
If your referring to a 'full' format with does more than the 'quick' format that mearly marks the drive as empty, well it's easy, and of very little use in this case.
Simply writing zeros to every location on the hard drive that stores data doesn't completely erase the data. That is the magnetic field of the bits are not set at exactly '0'. Slight variations in the magnetic material, write head field strength, and positioning all contribute to increase the odds of data being recoverable.
One way to improve your odds is to repeatedly write a series of 1's and 0's to a location to help average out these variables as well as use the hysteresis(sp?) effect to 'degause' the location, this is what 'shredder' programs do (the ones that aren't crap).
Some programs even go so far as to not simply write 11111111 then 00000000 over and over to the same byte, but to use other patterns so that the fields of niegboring bits add to the deguas effect in destroying the data.
At one time (and probably to this day) the US DOD specs used to require a certain number of passes of 0 and 1 bits followed by the writing of a specific bit pattern before a hard drive was considered to have been properly erased.
And yes each pass does put a little wear and tear on the drive, not enough to worry about unless your 'shredding' the drive quite a few times, but still worth noting.
The number of passes used and what if any special patterns are used determine the amount of effort it would take to recover the data, kind of like key length in cryptography. Adjust paranoi settings apropriately. (note: the anology is imperfect as hell, 1024 might be a mediocre key length, but thats enough shred passes to noticeably shorten drive lifespan.)
Mycroft
No mod points sorry. :)
And lemme tell you untill my machine can do a realtime render with all the usefull options that is photographic quality on two montiors (different image each), it's no where near fast enough.
Well maybe thats excessive, but since we'll get there and then some eventually why not dream now
3dsmax 5 can bring an otherwise reasonable machine to a near halt on a fairly simple render as it is. I've got an amd 2200+ with 1/2 gig ram and a radeon 9600 based video card and I can choke it with less than 100k pollys, and this is just edit mode, not a real render.
Fyi, I got into 3d moddeling AFTER I upgraded last, and will upgrade again soon so please don't think I'm to big an idiot. I really didn't expect to have this much fun at it, just wanted to try a couple things out of curiousity. (Now if I could just get a good upgrade on my talent I'd be all happy:)
Mycroft
Sounds like you've got some of the bits and pieces needed to make some needed improvements. Other than putting them up on sourceforge and or tossing a few messages on the right mailing lists I'm not shure what else to suggest on getting them used.
Yeah, makeing the hard stuff easy rather than just making the easy stuff easier would be an improvement.
Gravity is still just windows at the moment. The regular expressions are merged into a conditional expression/booleen evaluation system, almost a scripting language, that has a rather decent interface for applying. It doese a fairly good job with multi-part posts and handling crossposted messages. plus it's got functions for handling decode jobs and of course the various encoding schemes for binaries. But to be honest it's main advantage for me is it's whole interface and layout suits the way I think.
A well organised and gradual shift from noob to power user in various features and settings, etc. should be a design goal in any software of non-trivial complexity/functionality. It's one area where much of Linux need improvement imho.
That and consistancy, at least out of the box. Just about everyone coding for linux seems to have a different idea about look and feel for thier apps and that tends creat confusion and cognitive disruption. At least with the high theme-ability of many linux desktop aps and even desktops it's possible to reduce this at the distro level. Though it won't help much with deciding what kinds of things go under which menus (do 'options' go under thier own menu, under file, under edit, under tools, etc. and what counts as options, as preference.) that all software seems to suffer regardless of os.
On problem is that alot of useability and interface guidlines come out of studies and research by experts in narrow fields hired by the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Not exactly a common forte amoung open source coders, or even coders in genera. Nor is running focus groups and other such testing a 'sexy' thing for most software developers.
Mycroft
Can't speak to what apple does. But I will agree that alot of what Microsoft does is eigther bad (automatic running of e-mail, default to root on boot up, etc.) and even thier half way decent ideas are often broken in implementation (the registry, add/remove programs, so on). I'm not just referencing thier programming when I refer to thier tactics though. Take the whole embrace and extend they use for lock in. Linux could simply do the same by creating much improved versions of apps found in the windows world for example.
I've actually seen tools a little like what you mention in your search-grep-act example, Mostly in news readers though. The whole concept is somthing I'd like to see as well. If a proprietary newsreader can implement stuff like this on message filters, it should be possible to do somthing like this on the linux desktop.
The reason why powerfull concepts like this are not on the desktop have to do with why alot of people work on open source. It's an ego game to some degree, and shiny pretty widget that do somthing trully new clever are more ego points.
The rest are mostly making some specific tool to fit thier own needs, once it's 'good enough' for them it doesn't get as much attention from them, the person who understands the code best.
Of course these are just two factors I see, I'm shure there are others.
A user in general should have to know as little as possible. The lower bar to entry the better. Now this doesn't mean a knowledgeable user should be locked into an idiot box without access under the hood.
In fact we largely have eigther the idiot box, or the opposite end of the spectrum. And this problem I see as endemic to most software these days, not just winodws or linux. It's bad, there should be as smooth a graduation from idiot noob to HighWizard Guru as possible. The minute I want to do more than choose between eye candy setting I shouldn't have to edit obscure setting in a file or hack the registry. The "advanced" options shouldn't be just whether or not the menu's are animated fast or slow.
The news reader I'm thinking of up there is Microplanet Gravity. The original company died, but a developer got to keep a full copy of the code and has rights to most of it. I beleive he was looking into Open sourceing everything he had full rights to once he could replace code he was only alowed to use, not open and modify (probably proprietary libraries). But the main thing is he's still developing it and it has halfway decent regular expression parsing for it's rules and I'm thinking a more generalized implementation of what he did would make a good start on your idea (a good idea I think).
Mycroft
Interesting. One of the reasons I'm using firefox is I got sick of IE randomly deciding to run amok and shoot processor use to 100%. It only did this when read /. though. Haven't been running it long though, but sofar no problems, and no pop-ups or crappy flash ads eigther.
Pretty sad when a 0.8 versioned browser runs better and works better than one built into the o.s. itself that's on version 6.0.
Of course I suppose you could argue that ms is versions are only 1/10 as significant as Firefoxes. But I don't see as that helps ms look any better.
Mycroft
I never meant to imply that useability should be reduced. Other than your good suggestion (being able to turn it off) Another way to 'fix' the highlight issue would be for it to say be moved to highlighting with the middle button to copy and maybe setting paste to be a double middle click or somthing else a bit more consistant and less prone to confusion. The option to change it to suit the user should always be available IMHO.
As far the dialog thing goes, I believe I arleady explained that. A dialog per-se is not always needed, but the fact that somthing other than Just what you see is going on should be communicated to the user, somthing as simple as a little icon somewhere visible, but non intrusive. Perhaps followed by "use middle button to paste a copy of highlighted text in compatable applications" in a status bar or some such. just tossing out ideas here.
Your whole last paragraph is very close to my thinking, the only thing in it I MIGHT quible with is that it comes close to implying just because Microsoft or Apple did it's therfore wrong, but based in part on "We should concentrate more on enabling faster, better, more flexible access to the information users need.." I seriously doubt you've made that mistake. Personaly I think one should evaluate a tactic on it's own merits, not on who else has used it.
As far as dumbing down, far from it. What I'm looking for is a simple streamlined intuitive interface that Joe sixpack can sit down and use, yet a power user can go in and set to exactly his preferences through an equally elegant intuive system. It can be done, it's just not as easy or attractive to many coders as the apps themselves usually are.
I'd like to point out that Joe six-pack has the power to make the big companies sit up a pay attention. If Joe say Linux is how things are going to be, The companies WILL develope for linux, and some of that will be Open source if for no other reason than better Linux makes thier software more attractive to Joe and his wallet. If however Joe goes blithly along with next bug-ridden virus prone drm loaded redmond offering our lives don't get any easier. Joe outnumbers us millions to one.
And to this:
"The power of the command-line needs to find the ease of use of the desktop. "
All I can say amen brother your preaching to choir here.
Anyway I've put a rough draft of some of my thinking from which much of my point of view on this comes from in my journal if you care to check it out. I suspect in broad terms I dissagree you less than it might otherwise seem, just a few details.
Mycroft
Except Joe Sixpack isn't an experienced unix user. .1 second beats a mess that takes more than 2 seconds to clean up 5% of the time.
I wasn't refering to a confirm dialog, just make it obvious what's going on. Useability through Obscurity is a non-sequiter. An extra step 100% of the time that takes
I can understand how such a 'feature' wound up in an OS based on the posix standard. It's been around a long time (for Good reason). But computers are no longer the domain of educated specialist, and quirks that devolped for limited resources that an experienced user can adapt to will completly turn Joe off. Now if you just want *nix for the geeks, and see no value in a version for the masses that's fine. I however do see a value in it and am interested in improving it.
And it's not even the minor nit about how that version of c&p works per se. It's the lack of a consistant, dependable, mechanism that Just Works, the same way, everywhere. It's what joe sixpack is used to.
And just because Windows has one break in it's c&p does that somehow invalidate improving what *nix has?
Still it has shown signs of improving, I'll probably be buying a boxed distro with the 2.6 series kernel and newer versions of Gnome and Kde sometime soon and checking out how far things have actually come since I last did so about 6-10 months ago. Don't have the bandwidth out here to d/l a whole distro, even the small ones
My goal here is NOT to disparage *nix, but rather to point out an area I believe needs improvement to make the modern *nix ready for the common desktop, it's very close right now and the main things holding it back seem to be variations on elite-isms and sacred cows.
But really this is a fairly minor thing compared to some of the few BIG problems still remaining.
Mycroft
Problem is, according to Microsoft itself, no-one in redmond has(or can have) the level of knowledge of windows code that the apache team has on thier code.
Just look at some of the things they've said in court, some of thier practice so could say those things. They deliberately loose track of source just so they can say things like "I'm sorry your honor, we no longer seem to have the code specified in the supeona(I know I've mangled that word, sorry), and couldn't remove it anyway because it's part of how windows works" or some such.
Mycroft
AFAIK, there are still bbs's in the St. Louis area running MTABBS on trs-80 III's. They were some of the best in the mid 80's.
Microft
Yes they do. especialy older files from places other than america and europe.
Personally I wish avi would die. It has been the single biggest pain in the neck.
It's almost completly streaming unfriendly, you have no clue what codec it uses, it's occasionally boobytraped, little to no robustness. and whats really sad is often the codec used to create the encapselated file is none of the above would be best as it's own format. Divx is a prime example being streamable, resistant to missing bits, dosen't need the decoder to 'phone home' for permission to watch.
Just my pet peeve I suppose, but I hate avi almost as much a wmv.
Mycroft
Actually I suspect it's both kinds of free propelling acceptance. Think about it.
Without both I'd likely have never tried linux.
Plus bussiness have to meet a bottom line. The lack of up front cost for the software is attractive for that reason, and fact that they can tailor it more exactly to thier specific needs can improve efficiency and again impact thier bottom line.
Joe sixpack is much less likely to replace windows with something doesn't run moose sniper 9 and let him do that online billing thing if he has to pay out any significant $$ for it.
And of course your local computer geek gets all sorts of toys he can actually play with without having eula's threaten to do evil things if takes it apart and requiring his imortal soul and first born simply to run.
It's a good and altruist a motive to sing the virtues of open source I agree. But not paying $200+ a pop to mearly be able to actually run that nice shiny computer is a pretty nice thing as well.
Mycroft
Ever have a vital piece of info destroyed because you accidently hit the delete button.
Ever accidently overwrite a file because you saved with the wrong name and didn't realize it.
This is why I see a problem with silent actions like how the highlight/middle click works.
Not necessarily as disaterous, but it still takes a non obvious assumed action with no feedback.
It good UI design to have clarity of action and response. People make mistakes and click the wrong thing from time to time and the dumping of the clipboard into a document because just a little to much pressure was aplied to the mousewheel while scrolling is plain asking to frustrate the user and bad ui design.
I'll grant that mousewheels that act as a middle button probably didn't exist when this was started, but that still dosen't excuse it still doing that on a single click.
From your last paragraph it seems as though the situation might be improving some. But you can understand my frustration when a recent set of apps (mandrake 9.1 install) couldn't even share TEXT through simple cut/copy and paste. I don't mean obscure apps, I mean a browser, a file manager and a text editor and other apps that SHOULD communicate simple text easily.
One last partial tangent to this. Choice is good when optional, not when forced for everything. To make an analogy try going to a few stores, start with general stores that don't specialize and notice how limited thier selections per item are. Then goto a few specialty stores that cater to people with specific intrests and likely specific knowledge. notice how broad thier selection is and consider how daunting that could be to an outsider.
Mycroft
Because a) the behaviour is inconsistant (try cut and paste between several different apps, now try under windows) and everything has it's own cut and paste system almost. It's fine to have other systems available, but you need a consistant method that just works everywhere, or as nearly so as possible.
and b) what you just described is broken for many people. try cut and replace that way.
highlight to copy, then highlight what you want to replace, oh wait that won't work. I used a windows app that had to do it that way because the author hadn't figured out how to work a around a limitation in the programming system he was using. His docs Apologised for the broken behaviour.
And you don't have to use the ctrl key combos to c&p unless your mouse/trackball is dead. just a few mouse button clicks is all.
The highlight to copy thing makes assumptions about the users intentions, in a situation where there are other equally likely reasons to highlight, some of which require the clipboard to NOT be emptied. This is broken by definition.
Mycroft
Not shure about LSB compatability, but they do maintain the appearance of FHS or simular through links and such so that apps see the directory structure they expect while users get a directory structure that is more intuitive.
It's possible LSB dependant apps could run just fine on this system.
I hope so, this kind of soulution is needed, the cryptic (to MOST people) unix style directory structure really need to go, or at least be hidden for Joe Sixpack to be able to use it. The only reason for not doing so would to to avoid breaking compatability, another thing that needs to stop happening so often if we want Joe Sixpack to dump windows for linux.
If this system is really path agnostic, and doese what is seems to say wrt to paths I'm a much happier person today. Definately a BIG improvement if true.
Mycroft
I would tend to agree that breaking the paths would be bad, fourtunately they don't exactly do that.
/Programs/Xorg/6.7.0 and /Programs/KDE/3.2.2. Each file category (executables, libraries, headers) can also be accessed through unified symlink views, such as /System/Links/Libraries and /System/Links/Headers. These views match the legacy directories (/bin, /usr/include, /usr/local/share) and so on, achieving total Unix compatibility while keeping program directories completely self-contained."
What they do is provide a more intuitive (on the surface of it, it seems so to me, need more details to be shure) path system while maintaining compatability to the old system.
"In GoboLinux, each program resides in its own directory, such as
They claim thier systems is path agnostic.
this is a good thing imho. One of my (minor) pet peves is that the standard *nix path system is largely cryptic to joe user, and a pain in the butt even for the cluefull unless you have enough *nix experience to make it automatic.
Now if they fix cut and paste and find a way to make havening both a *nix and a windows version as close as possible to a simple recompile with a few options/flags changed the year of linux as a major desktop contender will finally arive istead of forever being next year.
Mycroft
hmm, seems a bit insecure at that last step, unless your closet is tempest shielded AND your running on battery power. otherwise they could get the data from powerline fluctuations.
Mycroft
I've found even though I KNOW how to fix many problems, I don't know the exact steps unless I'm following them. :) they think I'm some kinda eccentric genius (or rainman) because I'll rarely try to help them over the phone, and when I do it's often a painfull waste of time, yet I show up at thier home and a few minutes later everything is running just fine.
I often can't tell someone the exact sequence over the phone unless I can see it in front of me.
It's very frustrating sometimes when someone new comes along and has trouble believing I know what I'm doing when I can't easily walk them through a fix. Fourtuneately thats rare, I usually goto them and just fix it on the spot.
I've fixed a few problems in seconds a few of my more tech savy friends have beat thier brains out over for a couple days before I was available to help, does wonders for rep with them, and my ego of course.
Mycroft
7 characters would probably be ideal from a memory standpoint as most peoples short term memory is approx 7 items and thus one of the easiest lengths to memorize.
I strongly suspect this is why phone numbers in the usa are the length they are, 7 digits for the most part and then 3 digits for area code, but the structure makes 'area codes' a seperate item cognitively. that is you don't think of someones number as 5554324321 but as 4324321 in the 555 area code, which you usualy associate with an area whereas the 4324321 is the person.
Mycroft
Food isn't the only product where lable and price are the only differences. I'm shure most slashdotters are aware how many tech items, such as cd-roms and dvd players are just rebadged.
I can also verify from personal experience that most charcoal is the same, when I briefly worked at factory packaging charcoal all we did was switch bags when we had enough of brand-x for that days order.
Most 'house' brands of anything are of course re-badged as well.
A clever tip I learned a while back about comsumer electronics. If it's got a fcc id number you can look it up on thier (fcc's) website to see who really makes it. They only isue one number per device no matter how many people change the plastic and re-sell it.
Mycroft
Your sig. is that an actual report from netcraft, or are you making a joke. In eigther case it's funny, and somehow fundementaly WRONG, in so many ways............
Mycroft
addendum: Just because someone is an evil @#$$ doen't make it axiomatic that everything they say is wrong or the product of inferior intellect. Nor because someone is Good and saintly do they posses great wisdom or insight.
I gather from your post you probably realize this, but others may proffit from the reminder.
Mycroft
The most unfortunate part? It's mostly true. Most people people are lemmings.
Two paraphrases (because I'm to tired from fighting flu to search for exact quotes, sorry)
"And it profits evil that good men do nothing" Burk IIRC, the only possible answer to Goering, and then only when backed by somthing like our constitution, which also unfortunately the 'two' parties have been undermining because no-one follows Burkes admonition there.
"A person is smart, but people are blind, stupid, panicky and you know it." -K men in black.
I have alot of belief in the goodness of my fellow man, but people scare the shit outa me.--me:)
I wasn't attacking with the godwins law ref, and I'm honestly sorry if you got that impression. I've been fairly sick with the flu last two days and fevers and exaustion play games with my sense of humour. I was humourously trying to point out that some hyperboly can damage credibility (for all I'm often guilty of excess hyperboly myself).
Mycroft