Oh, gee, thanks for that mature response. By the way, did you read the thread in the linked section of iPod Lounge? You know, the one that is full of iPod owners complaining of having the same problem? Give it a try reading the articles first.
This joker got modded interesting??? You seem to think that your one unit not having a problem disproves that there is a design issue that affects "many" iPods. Any person may have one that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue.
I actually know of a specific instance proving this in at least one city. There is a section of Missouri state highway 54 that goes North off of Interstate 70 that we used to have to drive through to get to my grandparents' house. The speed limit on most of that section was either 55 or 65 (It's been a few years so I forget which). At one point it briefly passed through the edge of the city limits of Auxvasse for about a mile or two, even though there was no intersection or turnoff that actually went into the town at that point. Because it was "in the city", however, they marked the speed limit 10mph lower, and it was a great source of revenue from the speed trap that always caught people who were just driving past.
The farmers who owned the land on each side of this speed trap were getting upset at the bad name their town was getting from this, so they put up billboards next to the highway on their land announcing to slow down for the Auxvasse speed trap. The city told them to take the billboards down, and their response was, "Why? We're trying to help people obey the law like you want them to, right?" They agreed to take down the signs when the city raised the speed limit there back up to match the rest of the highway.
Really, this is very dangerous. If people are expecting a decent amount of yellow time, where they would be able to get through, and instead it quickly flashes through yellow for less than a second, then people are going to be slamming on their brakes when they see the red...5-car pileup anyone?
I can't wait to see the personal injury lawsuits against the city governments who install these.
When I had first gotten my driver's license, my dad and some of his friends were talking about how they were worried about my driving fast. I told them the same as you commented, how the acceleration was the fun part. I said, "I like being able to accelerate as fast as I can and then have to slow down so I can accelerate again."
I have the same comment for you, as they gave me, "How many times a day do you gas up?"
Did you read the letter he sent to them? For one thing, using the phrase, "Fight For Rock isn't even a pimple on your ass" isn't exactly the best way to present yourself as a respectful person interested in calm negotiation. Also, I found this comment funny, "So I've decided to contact some legal experts and do some research so I can know exactly what my rights are." All right! I've always wanted to be a legal expert. There are several other glaring grammatical issues in there too. I find this one of the worst things he could have done. Why in the world would you fire off an angry, inflammatory letter to them and then seek legal advice?
Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then? Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time.
Keyboard position can be a huge factor here. You know those little stands under the far side of the kayboard that you can flip out to lean your keyboard toward you? Those things are from the devil. Having your keyboard tilted up toward you is one of the most uncomfortable, stressful things you can do to your wrists. If you have an adjustable keyboard tray, tilt the back of it downward, so it slopes away from you. That lets your wrists hang downward in a more normal position. Tilted farther is usually better, as long as you can keep your mouse from sliding off.
If you don't have one of those trays, it's not too bad to just have the keyboard flat instead of tilted up.
I've seen people here trash Windows for a lot of reasons, but come on! Every version of Linux I've tried takes many times as long as Windows to boot. Windows comes up much faster than Linux in every case I've seen. I understand why you want so much uptime on Linux because it's such a pain in the arse to wait for it to boot.
Usability is expensive? I can see time consuming, but does it have to be some kind of certified expensive usability consultant to do this kind of thing? I think that's the beauty of usability testing is that you can do it dirt cheap, because all it takes is a regular old person to try it and then tell them, "This part doesn't make sense. Here's what I'm thinking at this step and what I'm trying to find."
I don't see this as a problem for either big or small open source projects because they should fall into one of two scenarios for finding testers. SMALL: At least one of the people on the project will have a friend who is willing to try the program and let them know how well they are able to use it, and what things to improve. LARGE: They probably need more usability feedback for larger, more well known/complex programs at this point, so they should be able to put a request on their website for volunteer usability testers to give feedback.
One of the advantages of the open development model is that you can have large numbers of people working on things to provide the best possible collection of input. Why is this limited to just the programming side? I suppose that's because most OSS is written by programmers, for programmers, so many have never tried to check for volunteers to contribute to usability. I know that the vast majority of those interested in OSS are programmers, of course, but there are many more (myself included) who are not programmers, but want to use and contribute to open source software. (I know contributing can be monetary, but I want to improve the product, and I don't see programming resources as the lacking factor in most cases.)
I'm thinking that projects on SourceForge should have requests for usability testing volunteers. I've tried a few programs from there and have had varying experiences. They're not necessarily broken things that could be reported as bugs, but they are not convenient or not easy to figure out.
Usability is expensive? I can see time consuming, but does it have to be some kind of certified expensive usability consultant to do this kind of thing? I think that's the beauty of usability testing is that you can do it dirt cheap, because all it takes is a regular old person to try it and then tell them, "This part doesn't make sense. Here's what I'm thinking at this step and what I'm trying to find."
I don't see this as a problem for either big or small open source projects because they should fall into one of two scenarios for finding testers. SMALL: At least one of the people on the project will have a friend who is willing to try the program and let them know how well they are able to use it, and what things to improve. LARGE: They probably need more usability feedback for larger, more well known/complex programs at this point, so they should be able to put a request on their website for volunteer usability testers to give feedback.
One of the advantages of the open development model is that you can have large numbers of people working on things to provide the best possible collection of input. Why is this limited to just the programming side? I suppose that's because most OSS is written by programmers, for programmers, so many have never tried to check for volunteers to contribute to usability. I know that the vast majority of those interested in OSS are programmers, of course, but there are many more (myself included) who are not programmers, but want to use and contribute to open source software. (I know contributing can be monetary, but I want to improve the product, and I don't see programming resources as the lacking factor in most cases.)
I'm thinking that projects on SourceForge should have requests for usability testing volunteers. I've tried a few programs from there and have had varying experiences. They're not necessarily broken things that could be reported as bugs, but they are not convenient or not easy to figure out.
I just read Gruber's article, and I have a response to one of his most misled statements.
"It's not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don't have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It's an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability."
I don't understand why it is so hard for the programmer to call in a non-programmer to try to use their program and then watch and take notes of what they can't figure out, what they try that doesn't work, what questions they ask, etc. That should be one of the easiest steps to debug a UI. Common users should be a resource to help here. Programmers are great for being able to create the programs, but it takes a non-programmer who thinks a little differently to show how people will try to use it, approaching without the same assumptions. That's the same reason why external proofreading works. You as the author know how it's supposed to read, so you don't notice when the words don't convey it clearly.
I totally freakin' agree. I haven't even gotten far enough to get to the headache of trying to set up printers. I went through several distros that wouldn't detect or even support the hardware on my system. Once I did get something running, I found most of them didn't have a reasonable way to change the desktop size. SuSE finally has some of that covered, and I hope to see YaST spread to other distros now that it's open source.
An interesting thought comes to my mind when I hear that about MS saying security is their top priority. That just means "We're going to turn our full marketing BS/anti open source FUD onto the subject of security."
I RTTPS (read the three page summary). From the section entitled "Principal Short-Term Recommendations" --Adopt software development processes that can measurably reduce software specification, design and implementation defects.
Does anyone here know of a software development process that reduces defects???
Some of the best space dogfight battles I can think of are unfortunately not on film. They are the ones from the novel series Rogue Squadron. It is about Wedge Antilles re-forming the elite "Rogue Squadron" fighter group after ROTJ and some of the missions they go on. There are some great dogfights described in detail there, and it would be excellent to be made into a movie, but picturing it in your imagination isn't too bad.
That happened to my name, too. I was pretty upset that Slashdot just cuts it off and creates your account anyway without warning you that you've used to many characters. I would have liked a chance to choose something else instead.
"It's free to use, you simply pay for submission."
Uh, yeah, movie theaters are free to use, you just have to pay to watch the movies. (?)
Anyway, I checked that site, and they charge $39.95 to use their TurboTax Basic. What a rip! You can buy that retail for about $30, and lots of places have rebate deals, where it ends up being free, or you get a free CDRW drive or something with the rebate. Intuit sent us one of their TurboTax CDs in the mail this year, where you have to go to their website and pay to activate it. We went ahead and did that since we use TurboTax every year. It was about the next week that I started seeing the rebate deals and was kicking myself. I'll do it right next year. It's a great chance to get a good computer accessory for free once a year.
Or, I tried Konqueror first because it had an icon on the taskbar. Konqueror errored and took a dump at mail.yahoo.com, the first page I went to. I then used Mozilla, which doesn't suck like that. Really, how does a non-functioning product like that make it into one of the two most popular X desktops?
I concur in that the Slashdot editor who posts something like that is making Slashdot look like a place run by fools(no comment). It's kind of a given that the write-up by the story submitter will be biased and have problems, but the headlines should be different. When scanning the headlines, I want to see the facts of what the linked article is about. You have just jumped off a cliff when your headlines start making stuff up.
Actual article: "Martha Stewart aquitted" Slashdot headline: "Martha Stewart Sent to Pound-me-in-the-ass prison"
Also, if Bush was as Christian as everyone of the right thought he was he would do something about the treatment of Christians in China, yet he doesn't.
Did you even think about that for a second? There are Christians being persecuted and martyred all over the world--China is not unique. Besides, doesn't the US already get accused of being too much of an international busybody? I don't really want to invite more of that criticism. And last but not least, anyonymity is good for the Christians there. Let's not call attention to them.
What the??? I'm less mad at you for spouting an ill-informed inflamatory opinion--this is an open forum, after all--as I am at the moderator who marked your slander as Insightful.
Oh, jeez, quit being a prick. I use Snopes frequently to debunk myths, but they definitely screwed this one up. Exact quote from Gore, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." They say it's false only because he used the word "create" instead of "invent".
They don't want to bring up a terminal, run a config utility or edit config files and then have to restart X windows and reload their desktop environment.
And they don't have to under Linux either.
What the hell?? I finally found that SuSE has a utility to change the X screen size from within KDE, but Mandrake, Debian, and Knoppix sure didn't. Fiction is not a good counter argument.
For your next section, I suppose neither one of us can prove anyting either way. Sometimes Windows drivers work well, and sometimes they don't. I haven't had many problems with Windows drivers for stuff, so it doesn't seem to be much of an issue from my perspective. I don't know if you had those problems you mentioned personally or if they came from stories you heard. The only driver issue I've come across was our Apollo P-1200 printer, which worked fine under Win98 (with an Apollo-provided driver), but the WinXP driver(provided by Microsoft) doesn't work at all. That is pretty lame from Apollo to not test the driver that Microsoft was proposing to include. What I do know is that almost every peripheral you can buy comes with a Windows driver. Only some percentage of them are supported under Linux--if your distro doesn't have a driver in it, you have to search to see if support exists.
Have a look at some modern Linux distributions: they have GUI-based configuration tools that are second to none, for every level of system management.
I've looked at several, thanks. That is what I meant when I said that once you've overcome the initial difficulty of getting it installed and getting it to work with your hardware, then the software config utilities make it not too hard from that point--the 6-foot step analogy I mentioned.
And if you think that "custom firewalls" and "NAT addressing" are particularly obscure features, you really don't know what's going on in the real world.
If you think most Windows users even know what those are, you are not living in the real world.
[...]"NAT addressing" at home that she installed herself (in her case, it came as part of an Apple AirPort)
Hmm, Apple..."Would you like to set up NAT addressing?(recommended)" [OK] "Would you like to use default settings for this?(recommended)" [OK]
Basically, you just keep mindlessly repeating the same Microsoft marketing drivel that we keep hearing again and again. But repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true.
My opinions I think differ from the Microsoft marketing line, which is that Windows is the best choice of every PC and server. I'm repeating real life--mine and everyone else I know, which doesn't lie. If everyone you know uses Linux, then that shapes your view of what you think the rest of the world is like.
while Windows nominally supports more hardware, Linux supports the stuff people actually use and it supports it better than Windows; the stuff that's Windows-only is usually junk anyway.
stuff people actually use??? What, people buy it and throw it away instead of using it? The last part is just mud slinging; if it works for years with no problems, what qualifies it as junk?
Here's a little bit about open source where I work. I work at a company that has almost 20,000 employees worldwide. We do use a bit of open source, but it's generally not in the PC area. It's mainly on our UNIX networks to take the place of buying more Sun workstations. The main reason for that is that Sun boxes are freakin' expensive! We can set someone up with a really nice RedHat PC for about $1,500 instead of the Sun Blade 1000 box for $15,000. With hundreds of UNIX systems on the same network, we also use an open-source clustering application to harness that power for really big computing jobs in our design department. The program is called Condor (BSD license, I think), and they have it set up to detect idle time on a machine and then run in the background until there is activity at that console again. We also use Mozilla on our UNIX systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, gee, thanks for that mature response. By the way, did you read the thread in the linked section of iPod Lounge? You know, the one that is full of iPod owners complaining of having the same problem? Give it a try reading the articles first.
This joker got modded interesting??? You seem to think that your one unit not having a problem disproves that there is a design issue that affects "many" iPods. Any person may have one that works well, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue.
I actually know of a specific instance proving this in at least one city. There is a section of Missouri state highway 54 that goes North off of Interstate 70 that we used to have to drive through to get to my grandparents' house. The speed limit on most of that section was either 55 or 65 (It's been a few years so I forget which). At one point it briefly passed through the edge of the city limits of Auxvasse for about a mile or two, even though there was no intersection or turnoff that actually went into the town at that point. Because it was "in the city", however, they marked the speed limit 10mph lower, and it was a great source of revenue from the speed trap that always caught people who were just driving past.
The farmers who owned the land on each side of this speed trap were getting upset at the bad name their town was getting from this, so they put up billboards next to the highway on their land announcing to slow down for the Auxvasse speed trap. The city told them to take the billboards down, and their response was, "Why? We're trying to help people obey the law like you want them to, right?" They agreed to take down the signs when the city raised the speed limit there back up to match the rest of the highway.
Really, this is very dangerous. If people are expecting a decent amount of yellow time, where they would be able to get through, and instead it quickly flashes through yellow for less than a second, then people are going to be slamming on their brakes when they see the red...5-car pileup anyone?
I can't wait to see the personal injury lawsuits against the city governments who install these.
When I had first gotten my driver's license, my dad and some of his friends were talking about how they were worried about my driving fast. I told them the same as you commented, how the acceleration was the fun part. I said, "I like being able to accelerate as fast as I can and then have to slow down so I can accelerate again."
I have the same comment for you, as they gave me, "How many times a day do you gas up?"
Did you read the letter he sent to them? For one thing, using the phrase, "Fight For Rock isn't even a pimple on your ass" isn't exactly the best way to present yourself as a respectful person interested in calm negotiation.
Also, I found this comment funny, "So I've decided to contact some legal experts and do some research so I can know exactly what my rights are." All right! I've always wanted to be a legal expert.
There are several other glaring grammatical issues in there too. I find this one of the worst things he could have done. Why in the world would you fire off an angry, inflammatory letter to them and then seek legal advice?
Heh, remember Tommy Boy?
Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time.
Keyboard position can be a huge factor here. You know those little stands under the far side of the kayboard that you can flip out to lean your keyboard toward you? Those things are from the devil. Having your keyboard tilted up toward you is one of the most uncomfortable, stressful things you can do to your wrists. If you have an adjustable keyboard tray, tilt the back of it downward, so it slopes away from you. That lets your wrists hang downward in a more normal position. Tilted farther is usually better, as long as you can keep your mouse from sliding off.
If you don't have one of those trays, it's not too bad to just have the keyboard flat instead of tilted up.
I've seen people here trash Windows for a lot of reasons, but come on! Every version of Linux I've tried takes many times as long as Windows to boot. Windows comes up much faster than Linux in every case I've seen. I understand why you want so much uptime on Linux because it's such a pain in the arse to wait for it to boot.
Usability is expensive? I can see time consuming, but does it have to be some kind of certified expensive usability consultant to do this kind of thing? I think that's the beauty of usability testing is that you can do it dirt cheap, because all it takes is a regular old person to try it and then tell them, "This part doesn't make sense. Here's what I'm thinking at this step and what I'm trying to find."
I don't see this as a problem for either big or small open source projects because they should fall into one of two scenarios for finding testers. SMALL: At least one of the people on the project will have a friend who is willing to try the program and let them know how well they are able to use it, and what things to improve.
LARGE: They probably need more usability feedback for larger, more well known/complex programs at this point, so they should be able to put a request on their website for volunteer usability testers to give feedback.
One of the advantages of the open development model is that you can have large numbers of people working on things to provide the best possible collection of input. Why is this limited to just the programming side? I suppose that's because most OSS is written by programmers, for programmers, so many have never tried to check for volunteers to contribute to usability. I know that the vast majority of those interested in OSS are programmers, of course, but there are many more (myself included) who are not programmers, but want to use and contribute to open source software. (I know contributing can be monetary, but I want to improve the product, and I don't see programming resources as the lacking factor in most cases.)
I'm thinking that projects on SourceForge should have requests for usability testing volunteers. I've tried a few programs from there and have had varying experiences. They're not necessarily broken things that could be reported as bugs, but they are not convenient or not easy to figure out.
Help me with that term: SDCL?
Usability is expensive? I can see time consuming, but does it have to be some kind of certified expensive usability consultant to do this kind of thing? I think that's the beauty of usability testing is that you can do it dirt cheap, because all it takes is a regular old person to try it and then tell them, "This part doesn't make sense. Here's what I'm thinking at this step and what I'm trying to find."
I don't see this as a problem for either big or small open source projects because they should fall into one of two scenarios for finding testers. SMALL: At least one of the people on the project will have a friend who is willing to try the program and let them know how well they are able to use it, and what things to improve.
LARGE: They probably need more usability feedback for larger, more well known/complex programs at this point, so they should be able to put a request on their website for volunteer usability testers to give feedback.
One of the advantages of the open development model is that you can have large numbers of people working on things to provide the best possible collection of input. Why is this limited to just the programming side? I suppose that's because most OSS is written by programmers, for programmers, so many have never tried to check for volunteers to contribute to usability. I know that the vast majority of those interested in OSS are programmers, of course, but there are many more (myself included) who are not programmers, but want to use and contribute to open source software. (I know contributing can be monetary, but I want to improve the product, and I don't see programming resources as the lacking factor in most cases.)
I'm thinking that projects on SourceForge should have requests for usability testing volunteers. I've tried a few programs from there and have had varying experiences. They're not necessarily broken things that could be reported as bugs, but they are not convenient or not easy to figure out.
I just read Gruber's article, and I have a response to one of his most misled statements.
"It's not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don't have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It's an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability."
I don't understand why it is so hard for the programmer to call in a non-programmer to try to use their program and then watch and take notes of what they can't figure out, what they try that doesn't work, what questions they ask, etc. That should be one of the easiest steps to debug a UI. Common users should be a resource to help here. Programmers are great for being able to create the programs, but it takes a non-programmer who thinks a little differently to show how people will try to use it, approaching without the same assumptions. That's the same reason why external proofreading works. You as the author know how it's supposed to read, so you don't notice when the words don't convey it clearly.
I totally freakin' agree. I haven't even gotten far enough to get to the headache of trying to set up printers. I went through several distros that wouldn't detect or even support the hardware on my system. Once I did get something running, I found most of them didn't have a reasonable way to change the desktop size. SuSE finally has some of that covered, and I hope to see YaST spread to other distros now that it's open source.
An interesting thought comes to my mind when I hear that about MS saying security is their top priority. That just means "We're going to turn our full marketing BS/anti open source FUD onto the subject of security."
I RTTPS (read the three page summary).
From the section entitled "Principal Short-Term Recommendations"
--Adopt software development processes that can measurably reduce software specification, design and implementation defects.
Does anyone here know of a software development process that reduces defects???
Some of the best space dogfight battles I can think of are unfortunately not on film. They are the ones from the novel series Rogue Squadron. It is about Wedge Antilles re-forming the elite "Rogue Squadron" fighter group after ROTJ and some of the missions they go on. There are some great dogfights described in detail there, and it would be excellent to be made into a movie, but picturing it in your imagination isn't too bad.
That happened to my name, too. I was pretty upset that Slashdot just cuts it off and creates your account anyway without warning you that you've used to many characters. I would have liked a chance to choose something else instead.
"It's free to use, you simply pay for submission."
Uh, yeah, movie theaters are free to use, you just have to pay to watch the movies. (?)
Anyway, I checked that site, and they charge $39.95 to use their TurboTax Basic. What a rip! You can buy that retail for about $30, and lots of places have rebate deals, where it ends up being free, or you get a free CDRW drive or something with the rebate. Intuit sent us one of their TurboTax CDs in the mail this year, where you have to go to their website and pay to activate it. We went ahead and did that since we use TurboTax every year. It was about the next week that I started seeing the rebate deals and was kicking myself. I'll do it right next year. It's a great chance to get a good computer accessory for free once a year.
Or, I tried Konqueror first because it had an icon on the taskbar. Konqueror errored and took a dump at mail.yahoo.com, the first page I went to. I then used Mozilla, which doesn't suck like that. Really, how does a non-functioning product like that make it into one of the two most popular X desktops?
I concur in that the Slashdot editor who posts something like that is making Slashdot look like a place run by fools(no comment). It's kind of a given that the write-up by the story submitter will be biased and have problems, but the headlines should be different. When scanning the headlines, I want to see the facts of what the linked article is about. You have just jumped off a cliff when your headlines start making stuff up.
Actual article: "Martha Stewart aquitted"
Slashdot headline: "Martha Stewart Sent to Pound-me-in-the-ass prison"
What the??? I'm less mad at you for spouting an ill-informed inflamatory opinion--this is an open forum, after all--as I am at the moderator who marked your slander as Insightful.
Oh, jeez, quit being a prick. I use Snopes frequently to debunk myths, but they definitely screwed this one up. Exact quote from Gore, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." They say it's false only because he used the word "create" instead of "invent".
What the hell?? I finally found that SuSE has a utility to change the X screen size from within KDE, but Mandrake, Debian, and Knoppix sure didn't. Fiction is not a good counter argument.
For your next section, I suppose neither one of us can prove anyting either way. Sometimes Windows drivers work well, and sometimes they don't. I haven't had many problems with Windows drivers for stuff, so it doesn't seem to be much of an issue from my perspective. I don't know if you had those problems you mentioned personally or if they came from stories you heard. The only driver issue I've come across was our Apollo P-1200 printer, which worked fine under Win98 (with an Apollo-provided driver), but the WinXP driver(provided by Microsoft) doesn't work at all. That is pretty lame from Apollo to not test the driver that Microsoft was proposing to include. What I do know is that almost every peripheral you can buy comes with a Windows driver. Only some percentage of them are supported under Linux--if your distro doesn't have a driver in it, you have to search to see if support exists.
I've looked at several, thanks. That is what I meant when I said that once you've overcome the initial difficulty of getting it installed and getting it to work with your hardware, then the software config utilities make it not too hard from that point--the 6-foot step analogy I mentioned.
If you think most Windows users even know what those are, you are not living in the real world.
Hmm, Apple..."Would you like to set up NAT addressing?(recommended)" [OK] "Would you like to use default settings for this?(recommended)" [OK]
My opinions I think differ from the Microsoft marketing line, which is that Windows is the best choice of every PC and server. I'm repeating real life--mine and everyone else I know, which doesn't lie. If everyone you know uses Linux, then that shapes your view of what you think the rest of the world is like.
stuff people actually use??? What, people buy it and throw it away instead of using it? The last part is just mud slinging; if it works for years with no problems, what qualifies it as junk?
Here's a little bit about open source where I work. I work at a company that has almost 20,000 employees worldwide. We do use a bit of open source, but it's generally not in the PC area. It's mainly on our UNIX networks to take the place of buying more Sun workstations. The main reason for that is that Sun boxes are freakin' expensive! We can set someone up with a really nice RedHat PC for about $1,500 instead of the Sun Blade 1000 box for $15,000. With hundreds of UNIX systems on the same network, we also use an open-source clustering application to harness that power for really big computing jobs in our design department. The program is called Condor (BSD license, I think), and they have it set up to detect idle time on a machine and then run in the background until there is activity at that console again. We also use Mozilla on our UNIX systems.