Being Carmack works with OpenGL, ARB most likely stands for "Architechture Review Board." This is the group that defines the OpenGL standard, and there are often what are called ARB extensions in addition to the core language. I've always assumed that ARB2 meant Carmack was using ARB extensions that would eventually become the OpenGL 2.0 spec. I could be wrong though.:-)
First, let me thank you for sticking to explaining the reasoning behind your ideas and not resorting to "OMG GNOME R TEH SUX0R" style flames. Interface usability is a topic that fascinates me, and I'm always glad to have a rational discussion on it, especially with those who have differing viewpoints from my own.:-)
Windows didn't exist then, so it couldn't have been "contaminaton" from windows.
Mea culpa, no offense intended. As I said, it's merely been my experience that people learn to like what they're most familiar with, for better or worse.
This is all very nice in theory, but overlooks several facts:
1. the dialog is in another window, so people are not looking at the bottom right.
2. this would only apply to screens of text, and only screens of continuous text. Most web pages, for example, don't fit this model
3. when a dialog opens up, people who read left-to-right are going to visually acquire the new window, then start reading left-to-right. It's not a continuation of the previous window.
I believe you misread this section. What he's basically saying is that when a user is presented with a dialog, the way they're going to visually acquire it is as such:
1. Start at the top-left most corner of the window. 2. Begin scanning-left to right, reading the main body of the dialog box. 3. When reaching the bottom of the dialog, continue to read the options in a left to right manner. When their eyes have reached the end of the last option, their eyes will be focused on the bottom-right corner.
This means that if your confirming option is in the bottom-right corner, the user can immediately move to it, without having to refocus their vision on a different part of the screen.
He (the author) is making a seriously wrong assumption, that all the users are the same sex. Men and women have different methods of orienting themselves (do a google of "sex difference brain orientation spatial maze" and read the results).
No real argument on this one, I did think it was a rather poor argument for the concept he was talking about myself.
A second wrong assumption is that people have to "navigate" their desktop. Most people do a lot of things on autopilot - like drive the same route to and from work. No conscious navigation required.
You've just hit on *exactly* the reason why the right-left ordering is a good idea. By putting your confirming option in the bottom right, you ensure that it will always appear in the exact same location in *every* dialog box the user sees. With a left-right style, there's the opportunity for your confirming option to appear at different orientations inside your dialog, making for an inconsistent interface, which forces the user to consciously look for the default option. The confirming option always being in the same place facilitates the autopilot mode you're talking about.
The title bar is the hottest area? Total bull. How many people even look at the title bar any more? It's not the hottest area visually, and it never was. I remember back in the '90s writing apps, I decided to try putting status messages, etc., in the title bar - they were completely unseen.
As you've already noted, a dialog box is separate from the parent window, and by nature forces the user to give it their attention. I don't disagree that most of the time, people do filter out the title bar for normal applications, but in this case, it's all about context.
I've already selected what I want to do, and the stupid box is asking me if I'm sure. I want to pick the first choice I see, which, being someone who reads left-to-right, should be on the left. Making me read the "Cancel" button first is dumb.
A quick scan of Apple's HIG netted the guidlines related to how to place options in a dialog box, but not the why.
Perhaps more relevent, I found this post from the Gnome project's usability lead detailing why a right to left ordering should be easier to use. I'll note that I was wrong and it isn't exactly related to Fitts' Law, but it is a very similar concept.
Either way, it's clear that there's been a lot of thought and planning put into this - it wasn't an arbitrary decision. It *seems* unnatural at first simply because most people are accustomed to the Windows style dialogs. The problem is, by growing accustomed to them, they generally seem to believe that it's the best way of doing things, without ever really considering what the actual meritts of either system are.
While I haven't read the usability studies to find the exact reasoning behind this order, I'd imagine that it is at least somewhat related to Fitts' Law. Basically, Fitts' Law states that the four corners of the screen are the easiest places for a user to reach, and therefore your most important functions should be placed in the corners to allow ease of access.
I'd imagine this translates over to individual windows, albeit to a lesser extent. In most cases, a user is more likely to want to select a confirming action than a negative action, so it'd make sense placing to confirming option in the easiest to reach position in the window.
I'll admit that, personally, I had the same negative initial reaction that you did, but after spending some time allowing myself to get used to it, I've actually come to prefer right-left ordering over Microsoft left-right ordering, for exactly the reason above. It's much faster to just throw the mouse in the general direction of the corner than it is to precisely position it in an arbitrary location.
The funny thing is, getting X working on Slackware isn't that hard. The most it's taken on any of the machines I've installed it on is a quick xf86config, or now with 10.0, an xorgconfig. It defaults to a basic Gnome desktop, which I happen to rather like myself. And as I've pointed out in another post, adding in Dropline Gnome makes it a top notch desktop platform.
Yes, Slackware makes an excellent server system, but that doesn't mean that it's difficult to make it an equally excellent desktop system. Just because the underlying system is intentionally kept simplistic (read: easily manageable) does not mean that it takes any obscene amount of tweaking to turn it into a rather nice to use desktop environment.
Dropline's a meta-distribution that sits on top of Slackware that's very desktop oriented. It even has a helpful little applet that checks to see if there've been updates and a simple menu based program for upgrading the system. This means you get all the latest packages with a pretty nice amount of ease.
When it comes down to it, Slack is actually one of the simplest distributions out there. Everything is very logical, and nothing is made more complex than it needs to be. Thrown in with the nice admin tools Dropline provides for those that aren't really comfortable hand editing config files, and I feel like it makes for an excellent desktop distribution.
If I didn't have a need for a portable myself, I'd probably be doing the same thing. As it stands though, I'm in school and my old Dell Copermine Celeron 700 just isn't cutting it anymore - too big and bulky, the battery's all but shot, and the i810 graphics chipset is a nightmare to make work right with Linux.
I figure a new iBook is a solid investment for school, until Apple manages to squeeze a G5 into a PowerBook anyway.:-)
Right now, high cost of entry is the barrier. In Linux's case it's in time, in Apple's case, it's monetary. This is coming from someone who runs a single Windows box for gaming, 3 Linux boxes, and will be buying an Apple portable in a couple of weeks when the cash is available.
When it comes to Linux, it's just plain easier to run the copy of Windows that came on their $499 Dell than it is to spend time installing and learning a completely different operating system. It's what everyone else uses, so they might as well. Intertia is the cause more than anything.
The same goes for Apple here. While the hardware may be of higher quality and the overall experience for your average user may be higher, the fact remains that your minimum investment into a Macintosh is a $799 eMac, which is more expensive than that $499 Dell. And besides, nobody in the "real world" uses Macs and they're not compatible with anything, right? That's the mindset of the average user, whether it's based on fact or prejudice is another story entirely.
So what it comes down to is that, while I agree with you that all three platforms are perfectly adequate for the needs of most desktop users, Windows maintains its market share through pure inertia. It's what people know, it's what every one else uses, and it's basically just the path of least resistance all around. This, in turn, makes moving to an alternative more difficult, which means fewer people are likely to switch.
You mean the Iraq that was receiving direct US aid at the time, despite their usage of chemical weapons?
Either way, it's irrelevant to the comment you're singling out. Relative to other governments in the Middle East, Iraq's government was exactly as I described it. We're talking about a country that was essentially alone in the region in giving women rights near equal to their male counterparts. That provided secular education. Or any number of other things. By no means did I mean they were perfect, but there's far worse out there. Including some of the regimes we're currently busy propping up - Musharaaf in Pakistan , anyone?
I fail to see how replacing one of the only progressive, secular governments in the Middle East with the seeds of a government hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists is 'fixing things.' Saddam is a horrible man, no doubt, but Iraq was one of the most stable countries in an extremely unstable region.
When we're out supporting leaders who commit attrocities as bad and worse worse than Saddam's under false pretenses, in turn further destabilizing an already volatile region of the world, I just don't see how we're making things markedly better.
That may be, but it still doesn't make what they did ok. They were still trying to impose their views on another group of people by means of intimidation, which fits the classic definition of terrorism quite well.
As for your 2nd quip, the same could be said for Greenpeace themselves, but I'm not getting into that at the moment.
So you're saying if you were aboard a research vessel in the antarctic and there were people ramming your ship, in an attempt to intimidate you into leaving, there's no element of terror there? I honestly do believe that the term "terrorist" has been thrown around far too much since 9/11, but the actions described here, if accurate, definitely fall into what I would term terrorism.
I'm a tech myself, and you come across as nothing short of clueless. Brand new CD-ROM drives cost a whole $15 these days, a floppy drive costs about $10. To me, that makes the cost of replacing a CD-ROM negligible in comparison.
I work doing computer maintenance, and trust me, 28 is lowballing it. These days, most of the machines we get in are having trouble with viruses and spyware, and it's not unusual to see a machine with 30 or 40 spyware programs running. If you were including tracking cookies, it very easily gets into the hundreds. Remember, we're not talking about your average slashdot reader; we're talking about your average clueless user. There's a world of difference.
Re:Someone please explain this to me.
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
For starters, you seem to be confused about which project is which, that's understandable. Let's break it down.
Mozilla - The big, all encompassing suite, including a browser, e-mail client, chat, web editor, etc. Firebird - Standalone browser based on the same code as Mozilla's browswer, but with speed and small memory footprint in mind. Thunderbird - Standalone e-mail client based on Mozilla code.
As for why - any number of reasons. Tabbed browsing and pop up blocking are commonly cited. It's almost as quick as IE to start and often loads actual pages faster. It also isn't the huge vector for viruses and spyware that IE tends to be thanks to ActiveX. To me, that alone is worth it.
So there really isn't any one big single feature that makes it better, but there are lots of smaller ones that I feel make it a much better browser overall.
Actually, this is turning out to be a very *bad* thing, as I've never seen a milestone release from the Mozilla Foundation this buggy before. The theme manager, for example, is rather severely borked at the moment - the only way myself and several others have been able to install new themes is to drag and drop them into the manager, rather than the simple click to install function that should work. The download manager is a bit quirky. There are bugs like the user agent string that just scream that this release was rushed.
Personally, I don't think this is even really RC quality, and unless there's a 0.9.1 interim release, the browser in its current state is pretty much unusable for me as far as getting people off of IE. I love Firefox for this as it's a great product that shows how great open source can be for the average user. I'm not going to stick a program that I know is buggy and doesn't behave consistently in front of them, because if you turn them off from a piece of software, they're NEVER consider it again. Fortunately, I can still get.8 installers in the meantime.
Which I'm totally cool with. What I do have a problem with, however, is the horrible way in which the situation was handled. I think that, at this point, Avrid has made it clear that if, when he was originally approached on the subject 6 months ago, that the license issue was make or break, he would have relicensed the artwork. Instead, the devs asked if he might be interested in changing the artwork, without really explaining the reasoning or the weight of the decision, and then went off and split off new artwork without informing anyone else.
The problem I have is the poor communication, the secrecy with which the decision was made and kept, and the fact that the devs don't seem interested in hearing anything contradictory to their point of view. Goodger dismissing the legitimate complaints coming from the community due to a few trolls is absolutely apalling to me, and *does* reek of egotism as far as I'm concerned.
While it was bad form for Avrid to post the private e-mail on the subject, in my opinion, it was a topic that never should have been private in the first place. The community really should have been informed all along, and the fact that all this was going on for so long does not say good things about the ability of the core devs communication skills. Yes, sometimes arbitrary decisions have to be made, but absolutely refusing to listen to the people using your product is a sure way to drive them away from it.
Because rather than communicate clearly with the theme author or the community, the core devs made a decision and kept it secret from everyone until release was imminent, to the detriment of the project IMO. The crappy part is that, at this point, the chances of this poor decision being reversed are slim to none as it'd mean the core devs losing face.
I'm all for change and improvement, but this is a step back for Firefox as far as acceptance by the average user goes. The old theme was excellent in that it was close enough to IE to be familiar, yet different enough to be unique in its own right. In the end, it doesn't matter how good your software is, if the average user is turned off by the default interface, they're not going to use it.
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You do realize that OS X uses Samba, right? They just have a sane config tool sitting on top of it.
Being Carmack works with OpenGL, ARB most likely stands for "Architechture Review Board." This is the group that defines the OpenGL standard, and there are often what are called ARB extensions in addition to the core language. I've always assumed that ARB2 meant Carmack was using ARB extensions that would eventually become the OpenGL 2.0 spec. I could be wrong though. :-)
Mea culpa, no offense intended. As I said, it's merely been my experience that people learn to like what they're most familiar with, for better or worse.
I believe you misread this section. What he's basically saying is that when a user is presented with a dialog, the way they're going to visually acquire it is as such:
1. Start at the top-left most corner of the window.
2. Begin scanning-left to right, reading the main body of the dialog box.
3. When reaching the bottom of the dialog, continue to read the options in a left to right manner. When their eyes have reached the end of the last option, their eyes will be focused on the bottom-right corner.
This means that if your confirming option is in the bottom-right corner, the user can immediately move to it, without having to refocus their vision on a different part of the screen.
No real argument on this one, I did think it was a rather poor argument for the concept he was talking about myself.
You've just hit on *exactly* the reason why the right-left ordering is a good idea. By putting your confirming option in the bottom right, you ensure that it will always appear in the exact same location in *every* dialog box the user sees. With a left-right style, there's the opportunity for your confirming option to appear at different orientations inside your dialog, making for an inconsistent interface, which forces the user to consciously look for the default option. The confirming option always being in the same place facilitates the autopilot mode you're talking about.
As you've already noted, a dialog box is separate from the parent window, and by nature forces the user to give it their attention. I don't disagree that most of the time, people do filter out the title bar for normal applications, but in this case, it's all about context.
Personally, I feel that the argument here i
A quick scan of Apple's HIG netted the guidlines related to how to place options in a dialog box, but not the why.
Perhaps more relevent, I found this post from the Gnome project's usability lead detailing why a right to left ordering should be easier to use. I'll note that I was wrong and it isn't exactly related to Fitts' Law, but it is a very similar concept.
Either way, it's clear that there's been a lot of thought and planning put into this - it wasn't an arbitrary decision. It *seems* unnatural at first simply because most people are accustomed to the Windows style dialogs. The problem is, by growing accustomed to them, they generally seem to believe that it's the best way of doing things, without ever really considering what the actual meritts of either system are.
While I haven't read the usability studies to find the exact reasoning behind this order, I'd imagine that it is at least somewhat related to Fitts' Law. Basically, Fitts' Law states that the four corners of the screen are the easiest places for a user to reach, and therefore your most important functions should be placed in the corners to allow ease of access.
I'd imagine this translates over to individual windows, albeit to a lesser extent. In most cases, a user is more likely to want to select a confirming action than a negative action, so it'd make sense placing to confirming option in the easiest to reach position in the window.
I'll admit that, personally, I had the same negative initial reaction that you did, but after spending some time allowing myself to get used to it, I've actually come to prefer right-left ordering over Microsoft left-right ordering, for exactly the reason above. It's much faster to just throw the mouse in the general direction of the corner than it is to precisely position it in an arbitrary location.
I don't know about Doom 3, but Quake was coded in Objective C, which, as the name suggests, is most definitely object-oriented.
Honestly, I think it has as much to do with Carmack simply being an excellent programmer and choosing the right tools for the right job.
The funny thing is, getting X working on Slackware isn't that hard. The most it's taken on any of the machines I've installed it on is a quick xf86config, or now with 10.0, an xorgconfig. It defaults to a basic Gnome desktop, which I happen to rather like myself. And as I've pointed out in another post, adding in Dropline Gnome makes it a top notch desktop platform.
Yes, Slackware makes an excellent server system, but that doesn't mean that it's difficult to make it an equally excellent desktop system. Just because the underlying system is intentionally kept simplistic (read: easily manageable) does not mean that it takes any obscene amount of tweaking to turn it into a rather nice to use desktop environment.
Two words: Dropline Gnome.
Dropline's a meta-distribution that sits on top of Slackware that's very desktop oriented. It even has a helpful little applet that checks to see if there've been updates and a simple menu based program for upgrading the system. This means you get all the latest packages with a pretty nice amount of ease.
When it comes down to it, Slack is actually one of the simplest distributions out there. Everything is very logical, and nothing is made more complex than it needs to be. Thrown in with the nice admin tools Dropline provides for those that aren't really comfortable hand editing config files, and I feel like it makes for an excellent desktop distribution.
Germany? You mean the country that has *twice* tried to take over the entire world in the past 100 years? Yeah, no balls on them at all. :-P
If I didn't have a need for a portable myself, I'd probably be doing the same thing. As it stands though, I'm in school and my old Dell Copermine Celeron 700 just isn't cutting it anymore - too big and bulky, the battery's all but shot, and the i810 graphics chipset is a nightmare to make work right with Linux.
:-)
I figure a new iBook is a solid investment for school, until Apple manages to squeeze a G5 into a PowerBook anyway.
Right now, high cost of entry is the barrier. In Linux's case it's in time, in Apple's case, it's monetary. This is coming from someone who runs a single Windows box for gaming, 3 Linux boxes, and will be buying an Apple portable in a couple of weeks when the cash is available.
When it comes to Linux, it's just plain easier to run the copy of Windows that came on their $499 Dell than it is to spend time installing and learning a completely different operating system. It's what everyone else uses, so they might as well. Intertia is the cause more than anything.
The same goes for Apple here. While the hardware may be of higher quality and the overall experience for your average user may be higher, the fact remains that your minimum investment into a Macintosh is a $799 eMac, which is more expensive than that $499 Dell. And besides, nobody in the "real world" uses Macs and they're not compatible with anything, right? That's the mindset of the average user, whether it's based on fact or prejudice is another story entirely.
So what it comes down to is that, while I agree with you that all three platforms are perfectly adequate for the needs of most desktop users, Windows maintains its market share through pure inertia. It's what people know, it's what every one else uses, and it's basically just the path of least resistance all around. This, in turn, makes moving to an alternative more difficult, which means fewer people are likely to switch.
You mean the Iraq that was receiving direct US aid at the time, despite their usage of chemical weapons?
Either way, it's irrelevant to the comment you're singling out. Relative to other governments in the Middle East, Iraq's government was exactly as I described it. We're talking about a country that was essentially alone in the region in giving women rights near equal to their male counterparts. That provided secular education. Or any number of other things. By no means did I mean they were perfect, but there's far worse out there. Including some of the regimes we're currently busy propping up - Musharaaf in Pakistan , anyone?
I fail to see how replacing one of the only progressive, secular governments in the Middle East with the seeds of a government hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists is 'fixing things.' Saddam is a horrible man, no doubt, but Iraq was one of the most stable countries in an extremely unstable region.
When we're out supporting leaders who commit attrocities as bad and worse worse than Saddam's under false pretenses, in turn further destabilizing an already volatile region of the world, I just don't see how we're making things markedly better.
That may be, but it still doesn't make what they did ok. They were still trying to impose their views on another group of people by means of intimidation, which fits the classic definition of terrorism quite well.
As for your 2nd quip, the same could be said for Greenpeace themselves, but I'm not getting into that at the moment.
So you're saying if you were aboard a research vessel in the antarctic and there were people ramming your ship, in an attempt to intimidate you into leaving, there's no element of terror there? I honestly do believe that the term "terrorist" has been thrown around far too much since 9/11, but the actions described here, if accurate, definitely fall into what I would term terrorism.
The Pentium 4 E is the Prescott.
I'm a tech myself, and you come across as nothing short of clueless. Brand new CD-ROM drives cost a whole $15 these days, a floppy drive costs about $10. To me, that makes the cost of replacing a CD-ROM negligible in comparison.
I work doing computer maintenance, and trust me, 28 is lowballing it. These days, most of the machines we get in are having trouble with viruses and spyware, and it's not unusual to see a machine with 30 or 40 spyware programs running. If you were including tracking cookies, it very easily gets into the hundreds. Remember, we're not talking about your average slashdot reader; we're talking about your average clueless user. There's a world of difference.
For starters, you seem to be confused about which project is which, that's understandable. Let's break it down.
Mozilla - The big, all encompassing suite, including a browser, e-mail client, chat, web editor, etc.
Firebird - Standalone browser based on the same code as Mozilla's browswer, but with speed and small memory footprint in mind.
Thunderbird - Standalone e-mail client based on Mozilla code.
As for why - any number of reasons. Tabbed browsing and pop up blocking are commonly cited. It's almost as quick as IE to start and often loads actual pages faster. It also isn't the huge vector for viruses and spyware that IE tends to be thanks to ActiveX. To me, that alone is worth it.
So there really isn't any one big single feature that makes it better, but there are lots of smaller ones that I feel make it a much better browser overall.
Funny thing, I've always killed processes in Slackware in the exact manner you just described as being System V.
It drops in a working PAM infrastructure, as well as up to date Gnome and other packages.
Actually, this is turning out to be a very *bad* thing, as I've never seen a milestone release from the Mozilla Foundation this buggy before. The theme manager, for example, is rather severely borked at the moment - the only way myself and several others have been able to install new themes is to drag and drop them into the manager, rather than the simple click to install function that should work. The download manager is a bit quirky. There are bugs like the user agent string that just scream that this release was rushed.
.8 installers in the meantime.
Personally, I don't think this is even really RC quality, and unless there's a 0.9.1 interim release, the browser in its current state is pretty much unusable for me as far as getting people off of IE. I love Firefox for this as it's a great product that shows how great open source can be for the average user. I'm not going to stick a program that I know is buggy and doesn't behave consistently in front of them, because if you turn them off from a piece of software, they're NEVER consider it again. Fortunately, I can still get
You mean Big Macs run Linux now?
Which I'm totally cool with. What I do have a problem with, however, is the horrible way in which the situation was handled. I think that, at this point, Avrid has made it clear that if, when he was originally approached on the subject 6 months ago, that the license issue was make or break, he would have relicensed the artwork. Instead, the devs asked if he might be interested in changing the artwork, without really explaining the reasoning or the weight of the decision, and then went off and split off new artwork without informing anyone else.
The problem I have is the poor communication, the secrecy with which the decision was made and kept, and the fact that the devs don't seem interested in hearing anything contradictory to their point of view. Goodger dismissing the legitimate complaints coming from the community due to a few trolls is absolutely apalling to me, and *does* reek of egotism as far as I'm concerned.
While it was bad form for Avrid to post the private e-mail on the subject, in my opinion, it was a topic that never should have been private in the first place. The community really should have been informed all along, and the fact that all this was going on for so long does not say good things about the ability of the core devs communication skills. Yes, sometimes arbitrary decisions have to be made, but absolutely refusing to listen to the people using your product is a sure way to drive them away from it.
Because rather than communicate clearly with the theme author or the community, the core devs made a decision and kept it secret from everyone until release was imminent, to the detriment of the project IMO. The crappy part is that, at this point, the chances of this poor decision being reversed are slim to none as it'd mean the core devs losing face.
I'm all for change and improvement, but this is a step back for Firefox as far as acceptance by the average user goes. The old theme was excellent in that it was close enough to IE to be familiar, yet different enough to be unique in its own right. In the end, it doesn't matter how good your software is, if the average user is turned off by the default interface, they're not going to use it.