I've been a 100% telecommuter for 7 years now and here's the important things I've learned:
1) Set a clearly defined schedule that works well with your team. I work with many people still in an office and I work a 9am-6pm schedule with 1 hour lunch at the same time they do so I'm always available when they are. 2) Dedicated office space. You need to have a work head space in addition to a home head space. The lack of decompression time in a commute and such is very noticeable, especially during crunch times at work. 3) Optimize your communication setup to be available to your team. My work relies a lot on IM, plus I've got a VOIP phone line, and I use Growl/Prowl to forward my instant messages to my phone when I'm working on a secondary machine, or otherwise not sitting at my main work machine. 4) Be proactive on communication: You'd be amazed at how much useful information gets conveyed in water cooler and casual conversation in an office that is actually relevant to work. You need to be very proactive in maintaining strong communication with your coworkers to stay in the loop and keep others in the loop.
Would be interesting to know how many of those telecommuters are the stay at home mom types selling Avon or running an online Etsy store as opposed to a full time employee clocking in a typical work week.
If everyone in the survey is a full time worker that's supposed to be doing a 40 hour work week then title should be changed to 'A Fifth of Telecommuters and their Managers Need to be Fired'.
Well, since the Grand Ayatollah Sistani has his own website, I suspect that technology isn't viewed as being evil.
The website's design is a bit evil (crazy browser resizing, whacked scrolling applets, etc.), but hey, good for him for having a website, and bonus points for having several language translations, including English.
The fact is that no one's mom runs Linux unless someone set it up for them.
Yup, and how do the vast majority of windows and mac machines arrive? The OS install experience sucks regardless of the OS. I don't know any non geeks who can install any OS without help (I know they exist, I've just not met them).
It's just absurd to think that Linux could be overtaking MacOS at this stage of market share on the desktop.
Not at all, really. Consider the huge pool of windows users running intel hardware who have become disenchanted with the windows user experience enough to try an alternative. When exploring alternatives, what's more appealing: go to <insert big name electronics store> and buy a boxed Linux distro with support for under $100 and use your existing computer, or go to <insert big name electronics store> and spend somewhere around $1000 for a Mac?
This is a case of worse is better. Linux may not meet the polish or elegance expectations of the Mac crowd, but if it provides an experience positive enough to make the $100 switch worthwhile to the people exploring options it'll win the majority of converts.
It is possible for non geeks have a very pleasant experience using Linux as a daily desktop environment. They just get some friendly neighborhood unix geek (one who understands that the person who will be using the machine is likely to never use emacs or vi) to deck the whole thing out for them, just like OEMs ship windows and macs all decked out so that all the end user has to do is plug it in and turn it on.
The real trick for Linux is solving the chicken and egg issue of getting Linux machines to the consumer market already tweaked out. I think the work RedHat has been doing to make a consistent default desktop installation is a huge step in the right direction. Sure, it pissed people off in the KDE and GNOME camps, but establishing a default, consistent look, a consistent menu structure, and setting up all the mime types so that clicking links in mozilla, nautilus, and konqueror just works is nothing but a good thing for users who just want to use the computer and don't give a crap about understanding how it works. Not all distros need to do it, that's the whole point of having different distros, pick a target audience and tailor the linux install to that audience. It also makes for less work for OEMs, which would create added incentive for more vendors to take the risk of shipping machines with linux preinstalled.
I agree that this is pretty much a non issue. Frankly, I don't know why it's become newsworthy now, since this has happened occasionally for at least the past year. Tivo ran a promo for the version 2 unit they have now during the Superbowl, I've seen them do promo things for Lexus, one or two other things too. Hell, just this week there was some Best Buy promo for Sheryl Crow's new albumn. Maybe this is the first time it's been done in Europe, but in the U.S. this isn't new at all.
As you mentioned, with every one of these promos, the Tivo prompts to ask permission to record it, doesn't disrupt your own recording schedule, I believe it shows up on your To Do List, so it can be screened, and in all the cases that I've encountered these promos, they've been recorded off of informercial-esque, after hours content at like 4:00am.
Frankly, as a form of advertising, it's one of the less obnoxious approaches I've seen in a while.
Ximian is trying to make a business of building a viable alternative to Windows desktops in the office place. The most important part of user interface design is understanding your target user base. In Ximian's case, the target market they want to reach is familiar with Outlook. You're not going to win those people over by making something so radically different that they need to completely alter the work patterns they are accustomed to with an application just so they can download their email.
Where a UI designer and usability testing become crucial in this situation is making sure that Evolution bridges the gap in work patterns of the average office worker and the average gnome hacker so that it usable by both groups and doesn't alienate users. This bridge benefits not only Evolution, but gnome as a whole, because it can serve as a working example to other gnome applications (and KDE, general unix, etc.)
Now that's not to say, 'Hey, everyone, let's be blanant clones of Windows.' The important lesson is to focus UI design on what works for a program's target user base. There's a lot of unix/linux apps out there where the UI design targets a very narrow user base (like the authors, and that's about it). Evolution can serve as an example to other gnome apps as a project that tries to cater to a wider audience.
This is from the list that comes with the ISP Tools package that ships to companies who resell domain names using NSI.
Bigger companies like NSI are pretty much always going to do this to appease stuffy old suits with money.
Smaller and newer registrars normally don't care, mainly because they're too busy working just to maintain a functional operation.
Bulkregister will take names with 'bad' words because they're just *now* getting their operation into a functional state. Heck, until just this month, there was no way for their resellers to do anything but register a domain with existing NIC handles without having to manually fill out forms. They're just too busy trying to build their infrastructure to give a rat's ass about screening domains for 'bad' words. I'd be willing to wager that once they start looking for major investment and some suit with a problem with swear words starts waving cash that a system for screening out 'inappropriate material' pops up real quick. That's business.
Heh, UPS strikes *every time* the Teamsters' contract is up almost. Heck, the other shipping companies actually make plans for when it's contract renewal time at UPS. The others aren't any better, after a stint at RPS when I started college, there's no way in hell I'd *ever* voluntarily ship a package through them, I saw just about every single thing we were told *not* to do in training done in the first few hours, and they're strictly business to business. The companies who ship to personal addresses care even less.
For me, taking stong opposition to the idea that these kids were motivated by violent games is not a knee-jerk reaction. This is nothing new. When I was in high school the "Great Evils" were Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal. Instead of goths there were punks. Nothing's changed.
What galls me is that these things are scapegoats, pure and simple. I was into all this stuff when I was a kid. The key is parents being involved with their children's lives. My parents were there for me. They listened to me, got involved with my life and my interests, and knew what I was doing. They gave me a lot of freedom and when there was something they didn't want me to do, they didn't give the "Because I said so!" explanation, they gave me reasons, explained their concerns.
The reason I really fume over this is because this scapegoat just doesn't fly anymore. The Pulling Report, written by Mike Stackpole, pretty comprehensively proved that the Dungeons & Dragons excuse just didn't work. Actual psychological studies found that role-playing game players were more in touch with reality than "regular people". What's frightening is that if you read this document and switch role-playing with DOOM, it'd apply to the current issue.
When I was a teenager, I had teachers, ministers, and even classmates tell me I'd go to Hell because I wore a Metallica T-Shirt, without even knowing anything about me. If we spent more time talking to our kids insteaded giving them crap about the games they play or the music they listen too, we might see when there's a problem before it literally blows up in someone's face.
"RH should be publicly held, so that ANYONE can share the proceeds of the growth of Linux, and not just companies that don't care about it, but only care about the profit."
The problem with that is then RedHat will get all the stockholder baggage that every other publicly traded company has to deal with. Investment in a privately held company does not necessarily grant voting rights to the investor. There's also nothing stopping non-corporate investments. RedHat needs capital to grow and if, for example, a LUG got together some money to invest in the company, I don't think RedHat would turn them down.
Personally, I think the fact that RedHat is not publicly traded is a Good Thing. Do you think that the shareholders with the biggest stake are all going to be people who are primarily concerned with Free Software's best interest? No, the major shareholders with the most influence are going to be major stock market players who are more concerned about profit margins. On top of that, you run the risk of another company buying out RedHat in a stock deal, and who's to say that company will have the any concern about Free Software ideals?
RedHat's success does profit the Free Software community because it's continued success legitimizes it. It proves that you can profit from Free Software, and once the rest of the industry gets the idea, more and more of the people who contribute code in their spare time to the community might get paid for doing it.
This article has a lot of good, valid points, but I feel that a lot of ease of use issues are completely overblown by journalists because they're missing the most important point: perspective.
It seems that whenever someone writes about ease of use in Linux the "evil command line" issue keeps popping up. This is a perspective issue, not an ease of use issue. Both Windows and Linux have GUI and command line interfaces. It's just that Linux's CLI is good and Windows' isn't. I know a lot of people who've come from Windows to Linux, who after getting used to it actually prefer using a command line for many jobs.
CLI-o-phobia is a mindset of someone familiar with only GUI tools, but the door swings both ways. My first serious exposure to a GUI environment was Windows 95, before that I had only ever used DOS or other types of CLI interfaces. When I first started using Windows, I would've told anyone who said it was easier than using DOS that they were on crack because I was not used to a GUI environment. Don't get me wrong, GUI's are great, but they're not "magic pixie dust" that automagically makes a program easier to use.
I agree with this article in that a lot needs done to address ease of use in Linux, but the continual references in such articles to the "arcane commands and intimidating CLI" are just as damaging as lack of documentation. Recalling my experience with learning to use Windows, I do not think Linux is harder, it's different, and whether someone is going from DOS to Windows, or Windows to Linux, or Linux to Mac, there's going to be stumbling blocks along the way.
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I've been a 100% telecommuter for 7 years now and here's the important things I've learned:
1) Set a clearly defined schedule that works well with your team. I work with many people still in an office and I work a 9am-6pm schedule with 1 hour lunch at the same time they do so I'm always available when they are.
2) Dedicated office space. You need to have a work head space in addition to a home head space. The lack of decompression time in a commute and such is very noticeable, especially during crunch times at work.
3) Optimize your communication setup to be available to your team. My work relies a lot on IM, plus I've got a VOIP phone line, and I use Growl/Prowl to forward my instant messages to my phone when I'm working on a secondary machine, or otherwise not sitting at my main work machine.
4) Be proactive on communication: You'd be amazed at how much useful information gets conveyed in water cooler and casual conversation in an office that is actually relevant to work. You need to be very proactive in maintaining strong communication with your coworkers to stay in the loop and keep others in the loop.
Would be interesting to know how many of those telecommuters are the stay at home mom types selling Avon or running an online Etsy store as opposed to a full time employee clocking in a typical work week.
If everyone in the survey is a full time worker that's supposed to be doing a 40 hour work week then title should be changed to 'A Fifth of Telecommuters and their Managers Need to be Fired'.
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Yeah playing in WoW is pretty seamless, once you can log in.
Well, since the Grand Ayatollah Sistani has his own website, I suspect that technology isn't viewed as being evil. The website's design is a bit evil (crazy browser resizing, whacked scrolling applets, etc.), but hey, good for him for having a website, and bonus points for having several language translations, including English.
Yup, and how do the vast majority of windows and mac machines arrive? The OS install experience sucks regardless of the OS. I don't know any non geeks who can install any OS without help (I know they exist, I've just not met them).
Not at all, really. Consider the huge pool of windows users running intel hardware who have become disenchanted with the windows user experience enough to try an alternative. When exploring alternatives, what's more appealing: go to <insert big name electronics store> and buy a boxed Linux distro with support for under $100 and use your existing computer, or go to <insert big name electronics store> and spend somewhere around $1000 for a Mac?
This is a case of worse is better. Linux may not meet the polish or elegance expectations of the Mac crowd, but if it provides an experience positive enough to make the $100 switch worthwhile to the people exploring options it'll win the majority of converts.
It is possible for non geeks have a very pleasant experience using Linux as a daily desktop environment. They just get some friendly neighborhood unix geek (one who understands that the person who will be using the machine is likely to never use emacs or vi) to deck the whole thing out for them, just like OEMs ship windows and macs all decked out so that all the end user has to do is plug it in and turn it on.
The real trick for Linux is solving the chicken and egg issue of getting Linux machines to the consumer market already tweaked out. I think the work RedHat has been doing to make a consistent default desktop installation is a huge step in the right direction. Sure, it pissed people off in the KDE and GNOME camps, but establishing a default, consistent look, a consistent menu structure, and setting up all the mime types so that clicking links in mozilla, nautilus, and konqueror just works is nothing but a good thing for users who just want to use the computer and don't give a crap about understanding how it works. Not all distros need to do it, that's the whole point of having different distros, pick a target audience and tailor the linux install to that audience. It also makes for less work for OEMs, which would create added incentive for more vendors to take the risk of shipping machines with linux preinstalled.
I agree that this is pretty much a non issue. Frankly, I don't know why it's become newsworthy now, since this has happened occasionally for at least the past year. Tivo ran a promo for the version 2 unit they have now during the Superbowl, I've seen them do promo things for Lexus, one or two other things too. Hell, just this week there was some Best Buy promo for Sheryl Crow's new albumn. Maybe this is the first time it's been done in Europe, but in the U.S. this isn't new at all.
As you mentioned, with every one of these promos, the Tivo prompts to ask permission to record it, doesn't disrupt your own recording schedule, I believe it shows up on your To Do List, so it can be screened, and in all the cases that I've encountered these promos, they've been recorded off of informercial-esque, after hours content at like 4:00am.
Frankly, as a form of advertising, it's one of the less obnoxious approaches I've seen in a while.
It's called the principal of least astonishment.
Ximian is trying to make a business of building a viable alternative to Windows desktops in the office place. The most important part of user interface design is understanding your target user base. In Ximian's case, the target market they want to reach is familiar with Outlook. You're not going to win those people over by making something so radically different that they need to completely alter the work patterns they are accustomed to with an application just so they can download their email.
Where a UI designer and usability testing become crucial in this situation is making sure that Evolution bridges the gap in work patterns of the average office worker and the average gnome hacker so that it usable by both groups and doesn't alienate users. This bridge benefits not only Evolution, but gnome as a whole, because it can serve as a working example to other gnome applications (and KDE, general unix, etc.)
Now that's not to say, 'Hey, everyone, let's be blanant clones of Windows.' The important lesson is to focus UI design on what works for a program's target user base. There's a lot of unix/linux apps out there where the UI design targets a very narrow user base (like the authors, and that's about it). Evolution can serve as an example to other gnome apps as a project that tries to cater to a wider audience.
For reference, this is the list of words which NSI will refuse to register:
Olympic
Olympiad
Redcross
Red-cross
Nasa
Genevacross
Geneva-cross
Citius-altius-fortius
Citiusaltius-fortius
Citius-altiusfortius
Peacecorps
Peace-corps
Fuck
Piss
Cunt
Cocksucker
Cock-sucker
Motherfucker
Mother-fucker
Tits
Nigger
Kike
This is from the list that comes with the ISP Tools package that ships to companies who resell domain names using NSI.
Bigger companies like NSI are pretty much always going to do this to appease stuffy old suits with money.
Smaller and newer registrars normally don't care, mainly because they're too busy working just to maintain a functional operation.
Bulkregister will take names with 'bad' words because they're just *now* getting their operation into a functional state. Heck, until just this month, there was no way for their resellers to do anything but register a domain with existing NIC handles without having to manually fill out forms. They're just too busy trying to build their infrastructure to give a rat's ass about screening domains for 'bad' words. I'd be willing to wager that once they start looking for major investment and some suit with a problem with swear words starts waving cash that a system for screening out 'inappropriate material' pops up real quick. That's business.
Heh, UPS strikes *every time* the Teamsters' contract is up almost. Heck, the other shipping companies actually make plans for when it's contract renewal time at UPS. The others aren't any better, after a stint at RPS when I started college, there's no way in hell I'd *ever* voluntarily ship a package through them, I saw just about every single thing we were told *not* to do in training done in the first few hours, and they're strictly business to business. The companies who ship to personal addresses care even less.
For me, taking stong opposition to the idea that these kids were motivated by violent games is not a knee-jerk reaction. This is nothing new. When I was in high school the "Great Evils" were Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal. Instead of goths there were punks. Nothing's changed.
What galls me is that these things are scapegoats, pure and simple. I was into all this stuff when I was a kid. The key is parents being involved with their children's lives. My parents were there for me. They listened to me, got involved with my life and my interests, and knew what I was doing. They gave me a lot of freedom and when there was something they didn't want me to do, they didn't give the "Because I said so!" explanation, they gave me reasons, explained their concerns.
The reason I really fume over this is because this scapegoat just doesn't fly anymore. The Pulling Report, written by Mike Stackpole, pretty comprehensively proved that the Dungeons & Dragons excuse just didn't work. Actual psychological studies found that role-playing game players were more in touch with reality than "regular people". What's frightening is that if you read this document and switch role-playing with DOOM, it'd apply to the current issue.
When I was a teenager, I had teachers, ministers, and even classmates tell me I'd go to Hell because I wore a Metallica T-Shirt, without even knowing anything about me. If we spent more time talking to our kids insteaded giving them crap about the games they play or the music they listen too, we might see when there's a problem before it literally blows up in someone's face.
"RH should be publicly held, so that ANYONE can share the proceeds of the growth of Linux, and not just companies that don't care about it, but only care about the profit."
The problem with that is then RedHat will get all the stockholder baggage that every other publicly traded company has to deal with. Investment in a privately held company does not necessarily grant voting rights to the investor. There's also nothing stopping non-corporate investments. RedHat needs capital to grow and if, for example, a LUG got together some money to invest in the company, I don't think RedHat would turn them down.
Personally, I think the fact that RedHat is not publicly traded is a Good Thing. Do you think that the shareholders with the biggest stake are all going to be people who are primarily concerned with Free Software's best interest? No, the major shareholders with the most influence are going to be major stock market players who are more concerned about profit margins. On top of that, you run the risk of another company buying out RedHat in a stock deal, and who's to say that company will have the any concern about Free Software ideals?
RedHat's success does profit the Free Software community because it's continued success legitimizes it. It proves that you can profit from Free Software, and once the rest of the industry gets the idea, more and more of the people who contribute code in their spare time to the community might get paid for doing it.
This article has a lot of good, valid points, but I feel that a lot of ease of use issues are completely overblown by journalists because they're missing the most important point: perspective.
It seems that whenever someone writes about ease of use in Linux the "evil command line" issue keeps popping up. This is a perspective issue, not an ease of use issue. Both Windows and Linux have GUI and command line interfaces. It's just that Linux's CLI is good and Windows' isn't. I know a lot of people who've come from Windows to Linux, who after getting used to it actually prefer using a command line for many jobs.
CLI-o-phobia is a mindset of someone familiar with only GUI tools, but the door swings both ways. My first serious exposure to a GUI environment was Windows 95, before that I had only ever used DOS or other types of CLI interfaces. When I first started using Windows, I would've told anyone who said it was easier than using DOS that they were on crack because I was not used to a GUI environment. Don't get me wrong, GUI's are great, but they're not "magic pixie dust" that automagically makes a program easier to use.
I agree with this article in that a lot needs done to address ease of use in Linux, but the continual references in such articles to the "arcane commands and intimidating CLI" are just as damaging as lack of documentation. Recalling my experience with learning to use Windows, I do not think Linux is harder, it's different, and whether someone is going from DOS to Windows, or Windows to Linux, or Linux to Mac, there's going to be stumbling blocks along the way.