Take 2 years of vacations and you are dead for CS for at least 2 more years to catch the industry living by Moore's law (18 months for hardware, something similar for software).
For years secretaries learned wordperfect 5.2 and all the weird shift function key combinations.
You cannot return users to those years.
For years there were thousands of custom apps written on mainframes which had no gui at all (go to any bank or hospital today to see them).
Been there, found only GUI applications. OS was one of windowz. What country are you living in?
All those people secrataries, nurses, bank tellers all learned to use the application they needed to get their job done.
Time changes. Secrtaries work most of their time with Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Nurses and doctors zoom your X-Ray. Tellers use charts and see your signature in DB. At least I watched it in Middle East, United States and in Canada.
I have been witness to too many migrations from mainframe apps to windows based apps and in every single case the users of the programs complained of lost productivity.
Now try them migrate back from GUI to TTY and do measure their complains again. See the difference?
if emacs could show you the text as it would be printed but I still say if you had to use menus and dialog boxes for all your emacs commands and lisp scripts life would suck for you.
I don't mind menu in Emacs if I still have my good old style of M-x:) BTW, many important commands are defined in some menu or buttons in Xemacs:)
But end-users just don't work today without menus. I don't like that fact but it's reality and if you don't understand it then you should never developer UI for end-users.
Emacs is easier to use then Word. Not easier to learn but easier to actually get your work done once you have learned it.
That is correct only for advanced users - for users who can learn virtually everything. Most of users cannot learn anything if it is not in the menu. Deal with it or leave UI business alone.
If a user cannot learn something then it's useless to say that it's easy to use for him. Learning is a part of usability, by definition. It's simple - no learning then no usability. But I agree with you that the opposite is not true sometimes: some UI is easy to learn but still difficult to use.
For years I use Emacs on a daily basis and extend my custom elisp on a monthly basis. But I still prefer LyX for LaTeX as it shows me preview (virtually in WYSIWYG) and limits me from my own errors (through styles). Preview and styles are very important funtions for document publishing. In 21st century 99% of document publishing users want it and they want the tool in WYSIWYG, not in programming-coding mode. If you don't understand it you cannot do the marketing of end-user oriented products.
How does it make it freer? Do you think that any corporation wants to fork the source code of MTA server and resell? They wanna use it, not fork it. Besides, you still can fork GPL code, just don't forget about source code availability if you resell it. But again, who wants to resell any MTA server without sources?
Obviously you have never even looked at the commercial directory services, because they suck even worse than openldap
Hmm... We all know that LDAP in MS Exchange works without any (significant) problems. It's easy to admin and it's easy to tune the client to save contacts there.
I've tried also Netscape LDAP and OpenLDAP to use in the small office application for keeping contacts.
The result was very successful for Netscape Dircetory Server (everything that I've expected worked perfectly fine: all different email clients picked it up and saved their contacts their without any problem). The web-based admin UI was very convinient. The documentation described exactly what was in reality.
As for OpenLDAP, no single email client (Mozilla, Evolution, Squirrel Web Mail) was successeful to save contacts there, often there was even no way to log-in there. There was the only way to admin it - from CLI. The documentation is inconsistent with what is in the package.
I don't know any daily-used application working with OpenLDAP. No single Linux distro (BSD?) can be installed and use LDAP for user authentication without any additional hacking. I think OpenLDAP is academic demo or some sort of joke. And it's certainly a shame for open source commmunity.
You had emacs, CVS and LaTeX and you wanted a *word processor*! Why? Because the better software wasn't "familiar enough".
LyX was pretty usable 5 years ago (and it's even better today!), so why did you force your users to suffer with editing "raw" LaTeX files in emacs, instead of nice GUI of LyX?
I thing it's a quite typical pattern in open source community - ignoring the usability, even in situations when there is an available opensource-based way to improve the user experience.
Regarding Latex and groff : a history professor can use Mozilla. Can he use Latex?
Yes, he can. Just don't ask him to write LaTeX files in Vi. Hi doesn't write MS-Word doc files in a hex editor, does he? Let him use LyX (or TeXmacs in a ~year from now) and you'll see that he doesn't want to return to MS-Word anymore. The keyword here is usability.
the fatser i move is the bigger my mass. But my speed is relative to the observer (and another way around). So, If I move with my friend together in the same direction from a bad guy with gamma=2 then I will not notice a difference of mass of my frind (so does s/he), but will notice that the bad guy behind is as twice as heavier.
If our part of galaxy is moving from very distant galaxy with accelerating speed (damn that dark energy!) than our masses (or galaxy and that galaxy) will be increasing over time. At some point we will ran away with gamma=2 and our masses will be x2. At that moment we will gravitate to each other with the force as twice as before. Then we will stop our acceleration and begin dropping the speed. our masses will be droped and dark forces will win again.
I never saw any theory of running away galaxies with pulsing acceleration. Can you find a spot?
Our CEO did not cut his salary, when started lay-offs. Instead, he's made him a pretty good bonus, took a safari tour in Africa, came back and resigned. The company has been sold out and closed few weeks after that. That's the spirit of startup CEO.
I'd rather cut my salary 12% and still keep that company alive. But history is not that we can turn back.
but Gecko is just a better engine. Its truly cross platform
I don't think Steve Jobs loves any cross-platform engines. Everything that works on x86 is a poison for Apple.
As for BSD fragments in OSX... BSD was dying anyway. Now BSD is dying on x86 even faster than before as BSD users would love to be addicted to candies of OSX and to switch from x86 to PPC for that.
> > This IS science. The only thing you can "prove" is that the universe exists NOW
> Oh, yeah? Prove it.
You're demanding an absurd standard of proof. "The universe exists" has already been proven for a long time to the satisfaction of the majority of the scientific community.
Did you watch the Matrix movie? I guess not.
In few words: There is no spoon. All you see (actually - all you think that you see) is just your imagination. There is no space, there is no time, there is no energy or matter. There is only a logic in what you think you are seeing, but I doubt that the logic by itself can be called as a Universe.
Even before Matrix, 2600 year ago, Prince Shakyamuni has proved everything.
It's hard to double the number of transistors in one space when they're on the atomic level. Do you think we could do that in 18 months?
By the time we'll work on a level of individual atoms, 18 months will be enough to switch the memory coding from one quantum state of electron to another, like with more coded levels per atom.
Also, by that time our today's nuclear science will make school students to smile. If there will be any schools. Or any students. Or if they will be capable to smile.
So, basically COMPAT on NetBSD works the same way as MOL, doesn't it?
Or, wait, what about devices? The biggest problem of MOL is that every device has to be reimplemented. As a result, today the MOL user can forget about virtually all USB and Firewire devices: printers, scanners, cameras. Is this the same problem with NetBSD's COMPAT?
I've saw once such "COMPAT" - Wine. Comparing to stable and fast MOL, Wine is crashy and slow. I don't expect good results from BSD if they will do it like Wine.
Dual booting isn't a comfortable environment either. You end up with neither environment doing what you want.
Regular users don't need anything specifically from Unix. Usually an average joe is Ok with just win2k.
Professional users don't perform two too different tasks simultaniously. For example, one won't do financial research and remote unix system administration at the same time. When it's still needed (working with many unix tools AND preparing documentation for it) the solution is not far away (X11 and OOo).
As for random Gnome or KDE program that's not usually the problem. Its far more often a simple X program or text mode. The modern stuff tends to get ported and you can pull it down from Fink.
Check Cygwin again. Random simple X11 programs compile successfully. And many popular complicated X11 programs are ported to support cygwin.
Anyway you have your answer.
Anyway I have my answer and that's great. Not only for me - the other./ers may find here points independent fro offical marketing. I wish more OSX users will answer such question instead of modding them down. This thread is not really a troll or FUD. It's a compensation of a lack of such information on the web.
Cygwin + Windows -- While cygwin is good too many things don't work in the simulated environment. A random unix program just won't compile
Any random Gnome or KDE program won't compile for MacOSX either.
On PC, dual-boot of (1) win2k+Cygwin+XFree86 and (2) Linux+Wine, gives you the maximum of various user functions you may have on one single desktop computer:
Good business applcations on Win2k and not-so-weak ones on Linux (OOo is not weak);
Rich development tools on both;
Excelent remote access on Linux (CLI and X11) and Cygwin;
some games on Linux and the best games collection on win2k;
some graphical tools on Linux and excelent ones on win2k (somehow Photoshop works faster and more stable on win2k rather than on OSX);
So, am I getting right that OSX is a good compromize of win2k biz app compliance (just less than with win2k), Unix env (just small subset like Cygwin), much cheaper than SGI price (but much more expensive than commodity PC) and hardware incompatibilty with the rest (95%) of desktops.
Maybe the situation with Macosx is getting better? It doesn't seems so - prices are not dropped, Unix compatibility is not improved, and commercial software vendors are all the same as 10 year ago (n new ones). Just iApps now are for fee.
XFree86 evolved together with Linux. Today it's fast and stable. Choose FVWM2 or other simple environment to see. KDE and GNOME are still young, but litterally tomorrow (GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1) they promise to become adult. So, the problem is almost solved. OpenGL is probabaly the rest to solve.
The Adoption Of A Single, Standardized Interface Design.
Typically you choose you desktop at the installation time (each commercial leading distro have one by default for you ) and you have it consistent untill you change your opinion. So, the choice is not a bad thing, once you have a choice to do not choose:)
Make Graphical Setup "Wizards" For Everything.
Working on it. Compare most of commercial leading distros with what they had two years ago. Today we've got Webmin and several ncurses-based, gnome-based and kde-based configuration wizards/dialogs. Not bad.
Binary Distributions For Everything.
I didn't recompile kernel after installation RH and YDL in their last releases. All modules has been pre-installed and ready for being configured to start. Seems the problem is solved at least in leading commercial distros.
Workstation Configurations With Dangerous Deamons (ftpd, httpd, etc...) Turned Off By Default.
Check latest RH. Solved.
Linux Evangelists Stop Insulting MS And Its Users.
Solved. Linux evangelists now mod-up good criticism about Linux and good feedbacks about Windowz, when it's construcive, logical, proved.
Now./ has another problem:
MacOSX Evangelists Should Stop Insulting Linux And Its Users.
Seriously, try just to ask "why OSX?" and you will be immediately mod-down without even any attempt to answer for your question. In best case you'll get several similar to each other comments like "OSX is cool!" without any explanation of it.
The author just said his prediction which (s)he's done short and logically.
Mod-downs of brain-washed mac zealots becomes really annoying on./ and I afraid./ may begin to loose professional readers and become as a sold-off Mac-singing marketing channel.
Dude, have you used MacOS X Jaguar? It rocks!...The iApps are pretty darn cool and worth paying for if you want upgrades.
It sounds like you work for Apple's marketing department.
Jaguar is a nice toy Cristmas tree: it looks like a candy, but it's pretty useless for anything real.
As for any Geeks switching to Jaguar, all their comments are some similar to each other that it looks like few Apple marketing geeks have generated many./ accounts and bitching here about their products. Otherwise, all they are just brain-washed zombies - no one from them can explain logically why macosx?. All they do is just repeating several stamped key phrases about how it's cool, rocks and so on.
And each time when I ask why they mod me down. By the way, I don't see any such modding behaviour on Linux vs windowz related topics. Vice versa, people mod up all reasonable and constructive fud about linux or arguments for windowz. That make Linux community very different from mac community. We question everything. Mac-zombies blindly believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Maternity is a biology factor, not a social one.
You cannot return users to those years.
For years there were thousands of custom apps written on mainframes which had no gui at all (go to any bank or hospital today to see them).
Been there, found only GUI applications. OS was one of windowz. What country are you living in?
All those people secrataries, nurses, bank tellers all learned to use the application they needed to get their job done.
Time changes. Secrtaries work most of their time with Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Nurses and doctors zoom your X-Ray. Tellers use charts and see your signature in DB. At least I watched it in Middle East, United States and in Canada.
I have been witness to too many migrations from mainframe apps to windows based apps and in every single case the users of the programs complained of lost productivity.
Now try them migrate back from GUI to TTY and do measure their complains again. See the difference?
I don't mind menu in Emacs if I still have my good old style of M-x :) BTW, many important commands are defined in some menu or buttons in Xemacs :)
But end-users just don't work today without menus. I don't like that fact but it's reality and if you don't understand it then you should never developer UI for end-users.
Emacs is easier to use then Word. Not easier to learn but easier to actually get your work done once you have learned it.
That is correct only for advanced users - for users who can learn virtually everything. Most of users cannot learn anything if it is not in the menu. Deal with it or leave UI business alone.
If a user cannot learn something then it's useless to say that it's easy to use for him. Learning is a part of usability, by definition. It's simple - no learning then no usability. But I agree with you that the opposite is not true sometimes: some UI is easy to learn but still difficult to use.
For years I use Emacs on a daily basis and extend my custom elisp on a monthly basis. But I still prefer LyX for LaTeX as it shows me preview (virtually in WYSIWYG) and limits me from my own errors (through styles). Preview and styles are very important funtions for document publishing. In 21st century 99% of document publishing users want it and they want the tool in WYSIWYG, not in programming-coding mode. If you don't understand it you cannot do the marketing of end-user oriented products.
How does it make it freer? Do you think that any corporation wants to fork the source code of MTA server and resell? They wanna use it, not fork it. Besides, you still can fork GPL code, just don't forget about source code availability if you resell it. But again, who wants to resell any MTA server without sources?
Then use Courier MTA or MTA+IMAP server, which is same maildir compatible as qmail, fast and beside: it's GPL - what can be more free than GPL?
Hmm... We all know that LDAP in MS Exchange works without any (significant) problems. It's easy to admin and it's easy to tune the client to save contacts there.
I've tried also Netscape LDAP and OpenLDAP to use in the small office application for keeping contacts.
The result was very successful for Netscape Dircetory Server (everything that I've expected worked perfectly fine: all different email clients picked it up and saved their contacts their without any problem). The web-based admin UI was very convinient. The documentation described exactly what was in reality.
As for OpenLDAP, no single email client (Mozilla, Evolution, Squirrel Web Mail) was successeful to save contacts there, often there was even no way to log-in there. There was the only way to admin it - from CLI. The documentation is inconsistent with what is in the package.
I don't know any daily-used application working with OpenLDAP. No single Linux distro (BSD?) can be installed and use LDAP for user authentication without any additional hacking. I think OpenLDAP is academic demo or some sort of joke. And it's certainly a shame for open source commmunity.
LyX was pretty usable 5 years ago (and it's even better today!), so why did you force your users to suffer with editing "raw" LaTeX files in emacs, instead of nice GUI of LyX?
I thing it's a quite typical pattern in open source community - ignoring the usability, even in situations when there is an available opensource-based way to improve the user experience.
Yes, he can. Just don't ask him to write LaTeX files in Vi. Hi doesn't write MS-Word doc files in a hex editor, does he? Let him use LyX (or TeXmacs in a ~year from now) and you'll see that he doesn't want to return to MS-Word anymore. The keyword here is usability.
If our part of galaxy is moving from very distant galaxy with accelerating speed (damn that dark energy!) than our masses (or galaxy and that galaxy) will be increasing over time. At some point we will ran away with gamma=2 and our masses will be x2. At that moment we will gravitate to each other with the force as twice as before. Then we will stop our acceleration and begin dropping the speed. our masses will be droped and dark forces will win again.
I never saw any theory of running away galaxies with pulsing acceleration. Can you find a spot?
I'd rather cut my salary 12% and still keep that company alive. But history is not that we can turn back.
I don't think Steve Jobs loves any cross-platform engines. Everything that works on x86 is a poison for Apple.
As for BSD fragments in OSX... BSD was dying anyway. Now BSD is dying on x86 even faster than before as BSD users would love to be addicted to candies of OSX and to switch from x86 to PPC for that.
> Oh, yeah? Prove it.
You're demanding an absurd standard of proof. "The universe exists" has already been proven for a long time to the satisfaction of the majority of the scientific community.
Did you watch the Matrix movie? I guess not.
In few words: There is no spoon. All you see (actually - all you think that you see) is just your imagination. There is no space, there is no time, there is no energy or matter. There is only a logic in what you think you are seeing, but I doubt that the logic by itself can be called as a Universe.
Even before Matrix, 2600 year ago, Prince Shakyamuni has proved everything.
By the time we'll work on a level of individual atoms, 18 months will be enough to switch the memory coding from one quantum state of electron to another, like with more coded levels per atom.
Also, by that time our today's nuclear science will make school students to smile. If there will be any schools. Or any students. Or if they will be capable to smile.
Or, wait, what about devices? The biggest problem of MOL is that every device has to be reimplemented. As a result, today the MOL user can forget about virtually all USB and Firewire devices: printers, scanners, cameras. Is this the same problem with NetBSD's COMPAT?
I've saw once such "COMPAT" - Wine. Comparing to stable and fast MOL, Wine is crashy and slow. I don't expect good results from BSD if they will do it like Wine.
I don't see any content - only advertisement headers.
Regular users don't need anything specifically from Unix. Usually an average joe is Ok with just win2k.
Professional users don't perform two too different tasks simultaniously. For example, one won't do financial research and remote unix system administration at the same time. When it's still needed (working with many unix tools AND preparing documentation for it) the solution is not far away (X11 and OOo).
As for random Gnome or KDE program that's not usually the problem. Its far more often a simple X program or text mode. The modern stuff tends to get ported and you can pull it down from Fink.
Check Cygwin again. Random simple X11 programs compile successfully. And many popular complicated X11 programs are ported to support cygwin.
Anyway you have your answer.
Anyway I have my answer and that's great. Not only for me - the other ./ers may find here points independent fro offical marketing. I wish more OSX users will answer such question instead of modding them down. This thread is not really a troll or FUD. It's a compensation of a lack of such information on the web.
Any random Gnome or KDE program won't compile for MacOSX either.
On PC, dual-boot of (1) win2k+Cygwin+XFree86 and (2) Linux+Wine, gives you the maximum of various user functions you may have on one single desktop computer:
- Good business applcations on Win2k and not-so-weak ones on Linux (OOo is not weak);
- Rich development tools on both;
- Excelent remote access on Linux (CLI and X11) and Cygwin;
- some games on Linux and the best games collection on win2k;
- some graphical tools on Linux and excelent ones on win2k (somehow Photoshop works faster and more stable on win2k rather than on OSX);
So, am I getting right that OSX is a good compromize of win2k biz app compliance (just less than with win2k), Unix env (just small subset like Cygwin), much cheaper than SGI price (but much more expensive than commodity PC) and hardware incompatibilty with the rest (95%) of desktops.Maybe the situation with Macosx is getting better? It doesn't seems so - prices are not dropped, Unix compatibility is not improved, and commercial software vendors are all the same as 10 year ago (n new ones). Just iApps now are for fee.
No wonder I keep asking: "why OSX?"
It's true, Xerox GUI was invented way before MS and Mac. Read it here
XFree86 evolved together with Linux. Today it's fast and stable. Choose FVWM2 or other simple environment to see. KDE and GNOME are still young, but litterally tomorrow (GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1) they promise to become adult. So, the problem is almost solved. OpenGL is probabaly the rest to solve.
The Adoption Of A Single, Standardized Interface Design.
Typically you choose you desktop at the installation time (each commercial leading distro have one by default for you ) and you have it consistent untill you change your opinion. So, the choice is not a bad thing, once you have a choice to do not choose :)
Make Graphical Setup "Wizards" For Everything.
Working on it. Compare most of commercial leading distros with what they had two years ago. Today we've got Webmin and several ncurses-based, gnome-based and kde-based configuration wizards/dialogs. Not bad.
Binary Distributions For Everything.
I didn't recompile kernel after installation RH and YDL in their last releases. All modules has been pre-installed and ready for being configured to start. Seems the problem is solved at least in leading commercial distros.
Workstation Configurations With Dangerous Deamons (ftpd, httpd, etc...) Turned Off By Default.
Check latest RH. Solved.
Linux Evangelists Stop Insulting MS And Its Users.
Solved. Linux evangelists now mod-up good criticism about Linux and good feedbacks about Windowz, when it's construcive, logical, proved.
Now ./ has another problem:
MacOSX Evangelists Should Stop Insulting Linux And Its Users.
Seriously, try just to ask "why OSX?" and you will be immediately mod-down without even any attempt to answer for your question. In best case you'll get several similar to each other comments like "OSX is cool!" without any explanation of it.
I've tried OSX. It looks as Aqua is what Apple likes, not what I like. That's why I stay with Gnome on my Gentoo/PPC.
The author just said his prediction which (s)he's done short and logically.
Mod-downs of brain-washed mac zealots becomes really annoying on ./ and I afraid ./ may begin to loose professional readers and become as a sold-off Mac-singing marketing channel.
Macosx? I thought that Win2K with Cygwin is much more appropriate answer for proprietary OS levers.
Although, Gimp, Gnumeric and OOo may change that answer.
It sounds like you work for Apple's marketing department.
Jaguar is a nice toy Cristmas tree: it looks like a candy, but it's pretty useless for anything real.
As for any Geeks switching to Jaguar, all their comments are some similar to each other that it looks like few Apple marketing geeks have generated many ./ accounts and bitching here about their products. Otherwise, all they are just brain-washed zombies - no one from them can explain logically why macosx?. All they do is just repeating several stamped key phrases about how it's cool, rocks and so on.
And each time when I ask why they mod me down. By the way, I don't see any such modding behaviour on Linux vs windowz related topics. Vice versa, people mod up all reasonable and constructive fud about linux or arguments for windowz. That make Linux community very different from mac community. We question everything. Mac-zombies blindly believe.