"When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free."
And how about that operator being honest and upfront about their selling emails to spammers? Chances are I wouldn't want their content in the first place.
When did it become anything else but fraud to lie about the costs to your customers?
What these fucktards are doing is no less than if I were to advertise "FREE pens!!!" But once you got one, I start showing up at your place, reading your mail (a RL equivalent of spyware), changing your channel on TV to what _I_ want you to see (adware and spam do a good equivalent of this), and interfering with your phone calls (an equivalent of spam again.) Oh yeah, and start shouting in front of your windows that you better pay for that pen already, you damn freeloading cheapskate. Even though it was advertised as FREE. (Some software advertised as FREE, e.g., RealOne, just loves to behave that way.)
Oh, and there's no way to opt out of that, for the rest of your life. Except if you move and don't give anyone your new address.
It wasn't in the contract, it wasn't in the fine print, and I conveniently forgot to tell you about it when you registered to get a cheap pen. But hey, you should be grateful. You got something for free. Right?
Would you put up with that kind of annoyance just for a stupid pen you probably didn't really need to start with? Chances are that if you knew up front about the real cost you're about to get, you wouldn't want it. And chances are that if I pulled that kind of fraud IRL, you'd sue the pants off me.
So why is dishonesty and fraud suddenly OK just because it happens online? Since when is having some piece of fucking useless and uninteresting HTML text justification enough for fraud? No, really. I want to know.
Oh, and another thing. You may think that making yet another obscure free site is God's gift to the Net. Don't flatter yourself. Most of those sites are free for a damn good reason: that noone would pay for their content even if it was the last site left on the Net.
Here's your free bit of economic clue for the day: the measure of how much something is worth, is how much people would pay for it. If noone wants to pay, maybe that's your clue that your precious content is worth exactly nothing.
And that goes double for blogs. Now far from me to keep people from doing the HTML equivalent of wanking in public and hoping to actually get some attention. But it always cracks me up to see _some_ of them get all infatuated about how their incoherent retarded whining is some valuable source of public information. Oh puh-lease.
And no, it doesn't give you the right to lie, cheat and sell addresses to spammers to keep your worthless content online.
If that's one thing I find hillarious on Slashdot is the knee jerk scare whenever someone mentions the government.
Well, guess what? Other countries have IDs, yet also have more rights than you 'merkins. Or at least don't have a government that bends over backwards to screw you, if it pleases some corporation.
The key is keeping your government in check, not trying to hide from it. They're supposed to work for _you_, so make them do so. If you actually need to hide from your own police and government, then it's a sad sad country you're living in.
That said, let's get to some of the funnier points.
"The battered wife (or husband for that matter) that doesn't want to be tracked down."
If you're a battered wife or husband, chances are you'll run to the police for help anyway. You'll also want your abusive spouse kept away from you, which doesn't happen without the police. It also doesn't happen if he/she can just refuse to say that he/she is the same guy/girl who's forbidden to stalk you.
If your best defense as a battered spouse is to never let the police know who or where you are, then good luck when your abusive spouse comes around to give you another set of black eyes and maybe a broken rib.
"The whistleblower that wants to be able to let the authorities know that his or her organization is doing something illegal, but doesn't want their life destroyed by doing so."
The whistleblower ran to the same authorities in the first place. Guess what? They know who he is. Chances are that if it's warranted, they gave him a different id, which he can then give to the cops.
Either way, if your "life not being destroyed" depends on noone, not even the cops, knowing who you are, then you're screwed the first time you get in a car accident. Or need medical care. Or meet an ex-coworker. Or whatever. At some point someone will know who you are.
And if you do run into someone determined to make you pay dearly for your whistleblowing, who will you run to? The cops.
"The ex-con that served his time and paid for his crime, and only wants a job."
Yes, and the cops are going to do... what? Run to your employer and black-mail him into firing you? Geesh.
If you really believe that kind of crap, I really want to know what you've been smoking. Something pretty damn good, I'd guess. Actually, scratch that. What I want to know is where can I buy some of that stuff.
"The journalist that has sources to protect."
The journalist gives his/her name in the paper or on TV every single damn day. I hardly think that giving their name to a cop would suddenly put them out of business. We're talking just giving your goddamn name, not handing over the full list of everyone you've ever talked to.
"Hell, I won't even give out my real name on Slashdot."
We're talking about the cops, not Slashdot, remember?
When someone mugs you or hits your car or breaks into your home or whatever, you'll run to the same cops and give them your name anyway. And your address. And expect them to help. You'd expect them to actually catch the bastard and put him behind bars, not just come say "well, we have a few suspects, but none of them wanted to tell us their name, so there's nothing we can do."
Whereas it would be pretty damn stupid to post your name and address on Slashdot in the same situation, and expect us all to come catch the thief. Now you might vent a little steam on Slashdot or some other board, but no more.
" You can blame the programmers, but I consider them fairly capable. I think they were doomed to a bad result by the bad platform that was forced upon them."
If the bad platform was pushed upon them, then indeed I don't blame the programmers. I blame whoever bought that +3 Cloak of Programming Miracles. The management, maybe?
You know what really makes me wonder? Why do they spend so much energy into justifying idiotic metrics, instead of in actually making people interested in the product?
E.g., yeah, Fake UI ads generate clicks. But do they actually make people buy your product? I don't think so.
The one time I was tricked into clicking on one of those, I closed the window so quickly, that I don't even remember what product or company was on that page. I wish I could even say that I hate them and won't buy their products ever again. But even that's not the case. It was just another annoyance to be closed quickly.
On the other hand let's look at things that do work, even if they weren't an actual ad. But noone seems to be interested in taking that route for advertising.
The last game I've bought (and my current obsession) is City Of Heroes. Great game, btw. Now I was pretty well known for hating MMORPGs with a passion, so what could make me buy one?
Well, that's easy. Online comics sites, such as Angst Technology or PVP Online ran comics strip about that game. Not ad strips, but normal funny strips. Just various humorous stuff involving the comic's main characters in that game. Mostly making fun of the game actually.
First of all, unlike your normal in-your-face annoyance ads, those comics are actually great fun to read. Whatever they mention there, even if they make fun of it, will be far more likely to remain in my memory than whatever actual ads they had on that page.
Second, it was a very targetted case, even if unintentionally. I'm reading their comic, so it's safe to say that I'm interested in comics. (Mind you, not a die-hard fan, but I like reading a few funny ones in the evening.) Those comics are also about games, so it's safe to say I'm a gamer if I find them funny.
So when they mentioned a game about comics, you could bet that it would get my interest. It was a double-hit as my interests go. It practically remained stamped all over my cortex that there's this game called City of Heroes out there.
Again, that was not actually an ad, but unintentionally worked better than actual ads do. So why can't some marketeer come with something like that? Something that's actually _interesting_, instead of going for sheer annoyance factor?
There are a _ton_ of problems spelled out in the article.
Incompetently set permissions. Incompetently managed network, including unpatched production servers, not just the client machines. (Yes, that would also explain needing the tons of policy admins. You haven't seen the kind of drooling incompetents that some companies hire.)
An incompetently programmed application, presumably written by the cheapest clueless monkey that could be found. (How _do_ you write an application, so that it needs the _OS_ to be unpatched and unprotected?)
A management who's more into chest thumping and scaring peons into submissions, than actually managing.
A total contempt for the paying customers too. (It would have taken just a couple of phonecalls to tell everyone _not_ to disconnect everyone's electricity, when it was the company's system that failed to accept payments. But did anyone even think of the customers? Nope. Fuck 'em. Who cares about 'em?)
Etc, etc, etc.
But what do _you_ understand from that? "Waah! Microsoft sucks! They shouldn't have used Windows!" Well, see, that's the problem with the IT world indeed.
And I'm talking about the ever increasing reliance on some magical "+3 cloak of IT protection (+5 against bugs)". The rush to rely 100% on the OS, framework or whatever, to protect you.
"If only it was _____ (random hyped IT product), it would have been 100% invulnerable!" Where the product may be Linux, WebSphere, EJB, ASP, XML, or whatever fashionable buzzwork or framework.
Heck, I don't doubt that, back in the caveman times, the same kind of people were busy whining about how just upgrading to Stone Axe v2.0 from Sharpened Stick v1.5 didn't automatically keep tigers at bay. Now if we had bought the hyped Wooden Club v2.6 instead, that one surely would have swung itself against the tigers! All by itself, and without requiring any skill!
No, sorry. It never worked like that, and never will. A system is only as secure as the people using it.
And that's the problem written all over that story. That a big team of incompetents crafted an insecure network, with insecure computers on it. And would have been just as bad off with any other OS or framework, if they stick to those incompetents.
But no, let's hope for some magical cloak of protection instead. Maybe this time it will actually work. Right?
So have Zone Alarm (or in my case, the Sygate Personal Firewall) on a CD, and install it before you go to the Windows Update site. I've reinstalled Windows 2000 several times now, the last time when I last upgraded to a bigger hard drive. Never caught any virus while updating. Go figure.
And generally in the time it took to do two installs, plus write that flamebait question to Slashdot, he could have just spent 15 minutes downloading a firewall with his Linux computer and burning it on a CD. Or 15 seconds activating the firewall that comes with Windows XP.
But nah, just solving someone's problem instead of making a huge "Microsoft sucks" fuss, wouldn't be as fashionable for the self-respecting IT professional.
Again, I'm not saying that everyone in any line of work is a clueless monkey. There are a bunch competent programmers, competent managers, competent support people, competent web designers, etc. But also a bunch of very very bad ones. And a whole bunch somewhere between the two extremes.
Basically all the point I'm trying to make is that you can't say "oh, he's a programmer, he should have known about backups, and a whole lot of other stuff about computers." In practice, he might or he might not. Being a programmer could mean anything between PhD in CS and someone who doesn't even know what a backup is. Or what that funny "forward" button in Outlook does.
I have written a game walkthrough before, and I don't think I would have minded it that much to go fill a form.
I also don't see why should copyright law be usable to essentially bury my FAQ alive. As far as I'm concerned if anyone is still playing that game, and really needs a walkthrough, it might as well be mine. Glad to help.
Would I bother filling a form for every Slashdot or usenet post, though? Well, no, but then I couldn't care less if anyone comes and copies those. I've got no illusions that my occasional trolling is some font of pure wisdom.
If anyone wants to come print my kind of "10 bulleted reasons why your favourite OS sucks" posts in some newspaper or official guide, hey, they're probably crazy anyway. No use reasoning with crazy people;)
Well, yes, but we're talking speeds of kilometres per second out there. By comparison it makes any military sabot ammo seem slow.
Now a larger piece of debris, ok, would probably break through a rigid structure just as well. A glancing hit, on the other hand, might just graze a metal vehicle, but slice a balloon open.
To be clearer about it, my concern isn't as much about metal vs a syntetic membrane, but more along the lines of "what material and how thick will it be?"
I thought the whole reason to use these is, yes, to save weight. However, weight has nothing to do with whether it's rigid or flexible. A rigid piece of balsa wood can be lighter than a flexible piece of spring steel. All that matters is the density of the material, and how much of it do you have.
I.e., to make a bigger room out of inflatable material than the rigid ones we're currently sending up there, and still end up with less weight than those, you have to wonder how. Did they invent a flexible material that's extraordinarily lightweight and resistant and presumably cheap? Or, more likely, they're just planning to have a thin membrane?
Somehow it doesn't exactly make me believe that it'll be a thick armoured structure that can deflect a sharp edged rock.
My wild guess is that it's not that they don't know it happens. We all do. Copyright law may have been penned as a means to encourage distribution, but we all run 10 times more often into situations where it's effectively used to destroy a work of art, book recording or photo.
The problem is that too convince the Congress, they probably need some damn good examples. With a government that bends over to corporations and invades a country or two to please the oil tycoons, you need to make a _very_ convincing case if you want any hope of them actually taking some corporation's lollypop.
You can't just tell them "Uh, but I can't download Daggerfall, even though Bethesda no longer sells it, nor any of Microprose's games, although Microprose doesn't even exist any more." 90% of them would probably not even consider that to be art or culture. (Even though a movie or printed story with the exact same plot, would get considered as such.)
So you need to give them some really outrageous examples. Not just any obscure book or song, but fundamental pieces of the nation's very culture which are being effectively destroyed by copyright. _That_ might just get the point across.
And for that, well, they need all the help they can get.
[RANT] The funny thing is to think how wrong communist censorship was in those parts of the world. Instead of trying to outright ban or burn the work of dissidents, they could have just bought the distribution rights and used it to make sure noone is allowed to print or quote that book in the next 95 years. Works like a charm for US corporations, and noone throws a fit about human rights.
It's a funny world where banning a book to protect the ego of a dictator is rightfully reprehensible, but banning it to protect the greed of a corporation is perfectly acceptable and normal. Isnt't it just banning a book in both cases? [/RANT]
"All of this is very generous: It assumes that these people really believed or cared about your life. Most junkmailers don't."
Well, that was sarcasm on my part. I didn't actually think they really cared about my life.
"Of course if you only look at the failures, you'll find them in spades."
Well, and that's starting to be _the_ problem. All those failures are starting to pile up. I could do without them. I don't want to invite more of them.
I don't know about not paying... I would definitely pay to keep the blogging fucktards off the net, if it was even possible. Or at least off Google's searches.
Let's face it, searches for some subjects have become a completely useless exercise. Anything which happens to be the current fashionable topic for these fucktards to whine about, is being drowned in dozens of groups of 1000 blogs linking to each other. The actual information is _polluted_ by tons of _garbage_ spewed by fucktards who actually work hard to that end.
Their whiny shit showing on top on Google is like being elected mayor of Loserville. The apex and chief achievement of their pathetic lives.
Yes, you can use minus keywords or other such tricks in Google, but by the time you worked out the combination which actually gives you any actual information, you could have gone and bought a book on the subject.
It's sad. What was once a valuable medium for finding information, has been polluted by a retarded vanity contest among fucktards.
And, just to be fair, the same goes for the gazillions of retarded CS clan pages and such.
To complement what Just Some Guy already said, these are bloggers. If you gave them a week warning, they'd just spend the week posting whiny crap about how this sucks. And linking to each other so they would rank high on Google.
(Obviously, no actual information page should be allowed to show in the first 10 pages of a search for that topic on Google. Some airhead's whining and web equivalent of masturbating in public for attention is, of course, _the_ only authoritative source of information anyone should ever need on the net.)
I.e., yes, it would have served little purpose except to create more useless traffic.
Plus, I doubt that any of that data was worth backing up anyway. As I've said, the whole thing is more about verbal wanking in public for attention (and not getting it anyway) than about having any useful information on that site.
No offense taken. I'm a programmer, and half the people I see in this line of work are incompetent burger-flippers. Who only got hired because some "smart" beancounter thought he's cleverly saving money by hiring the cheapest monkeys. Except they have mental trouble even tying their shoelaces, forwarding emails or cutting and pasting.
(True story, and I swear to God I'm not making it up: every month I have to clean up my overflowing inbox at work, because some "programmer" mailed me a 24 bit full-screen screenshot to show me an error message displayed in telnet, or in whatever log viewer they were using. It takes work to teach them to copy and past that error message. What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".)
I would, however, disaggree with the assessment that even these are "just above" field service and helpdesk. You haven't seen the service and helpdesk, then. _Some_ of those make the "programmers" above look like brilliant geniuses.
The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.
If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.
I swear to God I'm not making it up.
So basically, yeah, I'm with you there. Just because someone's job says "programmer", doesn't automatically mean that they can actually program or administer a computer. Or what a backup is.
Don't get me wrong. I also do know a whole bunch of good competent programmers. But also about 3 times as many whose only merit was being shameless enough to lie to an incompetent HR droid.
Somewhat unrelated, so I've split it into another message: I'm also not interested in them making my life better without asking first. I have enough of that from my mother, god bless her.
And I also have tons of that from my bank, every bank whose ATM I've ever used, from every supermarket in a 100 mile radius, from every single lottery in the county, etc. If I had any more brochures from people trying to make my life better, my (physical) mailbox would literally explode. It already got deformed and I'll have to replace the lock, because some people can't take a hint when I'm away and it's full. They literally shoved more brochures and ad letters into it, by brute force, until it was a solid brick of compressed paper.
Speaking of mailboxes, my email inbox is also overflowing with messages from kind people trying to make my life better. Why, just look at how many are trying to improve my sex life and grow my *ahem* to the size of the Spanish Armada. Other kind people, god bless them, are working hard to give me a new credit card, offer me another college diploma without me even showing up for any exams, offer me great discounts on printer cartridges, refinance some mortgage I didn't know I had, give me 10% of Nigeria's ex-prime-minister's loot, point me at hundreds of horny teenagers just waiting for me, etc.
With all those kind people already competing to make my life better, I hope you'll understand that I'm reluctant to get even more of them into the act;)
Or in layman's terms, if anyone can possibly use stuff like my house number in a _statistic_, and not to burry me in even more junk mail, they better explain _how_. They better have a damn good explanation. So far I haven't seen any.
But _if_ someone actually can explain how such trivia as my phone number helps them make a better product, heck, I'm willing to change my point of view.
But until then I'm not that concerned with such phantasy "what if they're really trying to make your life better?" scenarios. At that rate, I might as well also start considering equally surrealistic stuff like "what if I'm really Superman and won't die if I jump off a building?" Doesn't mean I'll actually jump to find out.
Well, no idea if you'll attract some ire in general, but not from me. I know I'm arrogant, egotistical, presumptuous, and a few other words to that end. Never claimed otherwise. (Would be pointless to claim that to anyone who's read my posts or journal anyway:)
That said, my biggest problem isn't with newspapers, which I just avoid if they're obnoxious about the registration.
My biggest problem is with software. Too often after I've already paid for a bugg piece of crap, I find out that I need to fill out a very obnoxious form to be able to download a fscking patch. And here I was thinking that my money paid for the patches too. But no, you have to first give them every single personal detail.
And if you thought that newspaper registration forms were obnoxious, wait until you see some software ones. They ask not just the name, address, home _and_ work phone number, but also the company's income last year (as if I even knew that), number of workers at this place, etc. Heck, they stop just short of asking what size condoms do I use. (Or maybe I just haven't bought that software yet.)
And those _will_ get bogus data and a disposable email address. Again, I've already paid money for their crap, I don't have to also put up with their cretinous data collection. Nowhere on the box was it written that I have to give them _all_ my personal data to be allowed to use that POS software, or I wouldn't have bought it.
If that's being egotistical, so be it. I'll keep calling it "consumer rights" instead.
Comparing it to sowftware piracy and whatnot, might be a nice hyperbole, but... somehow it still fails to convince me. Let's calm down and think about it.
Software piracy hurts someone. It means lost revenue. If I had pirated, say, KOTOR instead of buying it, Lucas Arts, Bioware and the retailer would have been cheating of some 40+ Euros. Worse yet, piracy hurts other software users. Budget decisions and genre decisions are based on how much money did the last game bring in.
Now let's look at newspaper registrations. _What_ legitimate revenue stream do they lose? (Again, keyword being: legitimate. Selling that data to spammers is not a revenue stream I'd want to support.)
Now I understand registration for _polls_, as you mention about G&M. Fair enough. I can live without taking part in polls. But what most of us bitch about doesn't involve polls.
Now I also understand demographic statistics. E.g., "how many males between 20 and 30 years old read our news."
But even those don't need the level of detail that some of these obnoxious registrations require. E.g., how about asking directly the age group, instead of the exact birth date? There is no way in heck to believe that exact day and month of my birth can be used in any useful statistic.
The same goes for a lot of other intrusive details these idiots _require_. E.g., house number or telephone number. _What_ kind of statistics can one make out of that? "How many people living in odd numbered houses read our newspaper?" That's bull. That's not a statistic, it's useless trivia.
So here's my take on it: the bigger the registration form and the more unnecessary personal data they ask for, the more I'm convinced that they're clueless retards without any plan. People who didn't actually think _why_ and _what_ _for_ do they need that data. They just collect it because, dude, it's way cool to have so much data about all these people. It almost feels like power.
And the less convinced I'll be that bogus data is actually hurting them in any way. It's not like they had a (legitimate) plan for that data in the first place. Whether it's _my_ data that collects virtual dust in some marketroid's pointless database, or that of a fictive 12 year old Bolivian brain surgeon called Yura Sukker, they get exactly as much use out of that data: none whatsoever.
On the other hand, _if_ they actually do the smart thing and only ask for whatever general non-specific data they actually need (age group, country, etc), I'll probably actually give honest answers. Who knows? They might actually have some plan and clue, in that case. Might as well encourage that kind of people, because they're obviously a dying breed.
If by "easy to browse" you mean instantly getting to the directory I need, well, no. A small forest of directory trees remains just that. However, if I have to go all the way to that depth anyway, it might at least not spawn a new window at each level.
Never said that MS wasn't unethical, nor that deliberately trying to break Java wasn't very real. Yes, I have followed the shameful progress of MS's joke of a trial, like any other geek did.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that of all ways imaginable, in which one can possibly break a language, they chose the path that also gives better speed. It wasn't just the way which gives more colourful buttons to idiot users, as seems to be the impression that some people have about GUI design. (And God knows it wouldn't even have been hard to come out with a better GUI library than AWT and Swing combined.)
Basically I could go and write a tome about what I like about MS, what I dislike about MS, and how in spite of acting irresponsibly and illegally they still did have a better product back when it mattered. (Think Dick Dastardly from the Wacky Races cartoons. Ever notice how, to be able to spend so much time building cartoonish traps for the other competitors, he must have been _massively_ in front and would have otherwise won without a problem? Same here. Before MS could leverage their monopoly position, they had to earn that position. Yes, Linux may be faster and more stable and whatnot nowadays, but back then Linux didn't even exist, and the non-MS PC OSes just royally sucked.) But let's leave that for now.
The main idea I was actually trying to get across, in way too many words, is that making a better GUI doesn't necessarily mean making everything much slower.
OK, let's not use MS as an example. It was a silly example, anyway. Let's talk about Id Software, Epic Megagames, Valve or Bioware. A modern graphics card can paint quite literally billions of textured and lit polygons per second. It can also render whole screens worth of text in milliseconds.
Computers are no longer Commodore 64s, ZX Spectrums or IBM PC XTs. Strapping a well made GUI onto a program won't make it crawl, like it did back then. (It might make it swap if the GUI is really badly written, though.)
Plus, I'm guessing that making Linux more user-friendly for newbies doesn't necessarily involve more graphics. Most programs already have some kind of GUI wrapper, or version, or config program by now. Making it usable is IMHO more of an issue of rearranging and tweaking those GUIs into something usable, than of slowing down the computer with even more graphics.
Again, that's all I'm saying: you _can_ rearrange a GUI into something logical and intuitive, without wasting billions of CPU cycles on animated graphics. That's all.
It's worth pointing out though, that being user-friendly didn't stop Windows from actually being faster than X in a lot of tasks. E.g., repainting a Window works orders of magnitude faster under Windows, while in XFree86 you end up needing such silly tricks as processing only each n'th repaint when the user is resizing a window. Doubly so when the Linux equivalent reinvents the bloated wheel, e.g., by insisting to do its very own font rendering and themed widgets.
E.g., MS Visual C still optimizes a LOT better than GCC.
I know it will sound like blasphemy to a lot of the/. crowd, but MS really isn't a company of idiots who are just drooling over the prospect of coloured buttons. It's what you get when you cross (in more than one way;) a whole lot of hackers, with a whole lot of hard working usability experts.
Most of Microsofts's faults, such as never thinking twice about ignoring the standards if it can optimize better without them, or inventing its own formats, are the exact same things we admire in the archetipal idea of a hacker. (The one illustrated in the Jargon file, for example.)
And indeed it has committed more sins in the name of speed, than for all other reasons combined. (Anti-competitive behaviour included.) E.g., that's the reason why MSVC++ was always slightly deviating from the ANSI standard: they could optimize code better that way. E.g., that's the reason it let drivers run in kernel mode, and made Windows inherently unstable. E.g., deliberately pissing off Sun aside, all the changes they did to their implementation of Java were precisely aimed at making it very very fast. Etc.
So either way, what I'm trying to say is: "user-friendly" doesn't _have_ to mean "slower than a snail". Windows has managed to stay pretty fast (fast enough to play real time 3D games, for example) even while cattering to the newbies. I'm sure Linux will, too.
Now stability, that's another thing. No idea there, and indeed MS doesn't exactly come to mind as a good example there;)
Plus, as was already said, it's not like anyone will stop you from running another desktop environment, if the newbie-inspired one gets too user-friendly for your taste. E.g., most distros ship with KDE, which is aimed at precisely that: looking like Windows to newbies, yet I happily run XFce 4 instead. A couple of co-workers run Ratpoison, and that's as far from Windows (or user friendly) as you can get in a graphics mode.
You will, however, notice that even with the "/workspace/some_project" part sym-linked away, I still have to navigate something that looks like:/src/de/some_company/some_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content And, no, I can't cut it off at the pass and symling to some deeper point along that hierarchy, because other points in that project directory that I might want to reach include:/src/de/some_company/some_framework/some_project/e jb/src/de/some_company/some_framework/some_project/d ata/jms/resources/deploy/ejb/META-INF/resources/deploy/test_war/META-INF/resources/templates/workflow/content/resources/gui/forms/stylesheets/build/conf
That's just a small sample of the directories I might have to reach in only one project. The full list is a lot longer.
So if you suggest that I should symlink all those locations on my desktop, times some two dozen modules and sub-projects... you're overestimating the resolution of my desktop. I just don't have the space for that.
And why? Just because someone from the Gnome team doesn't like my directory structure?
Let me ennumerate in how many ways you got the fundamentally wrong idea for a metaphor:
"The classic spatial example is driving."
1. If it's an example of anything, it's an example of why _not_ to copy RL limitations into a program.
Driving by landmarks is one thing we've been trying to _avoid_. That's what GPS navigation systems are for, for example. All things being equal, I'd rather _not_ have to remember the position of every building in relationsip to others, thank you very much.
(Heck, if you really want metaphors, driving to get somewhere is something we'd all rather avoid. Videoconferencing, instant-messaging, telephones, the postal service, etc, were invented precisely because I'd rather sit here and talk to mom, than do the spatial driving thing.)
So you're taking an example of something we're trying to _avoid_ IRL, and use it as a cool feature on a computer? Gimme a break.
"Spatial works, and only works, because it's *spatial*. Which means that you can visualize locations and objects based on their relationships to other objects."
Let's say anyone actually is retarded enough to find their way around a file system by "uh, click the third link on the left, then the fourth down", as opposed to the more logical "it ought to be in the pictures folder, then look for the town name".
2. Well, blimey, you can already do that with a browser interface. _If_ the contents of those folders never change, then the position of those files and directories, relative to the browser window, won't change either.
3. You seem to assume that the positions of those windows will never change, so once you've saved their position, the user can eventually learn in which corner he has which directory. Which is bogus.
The first time they need to find some window underneath the others, or whenever they want to see a directory in the left side while chatting to their friends on AIM on the right side, what is the first thing a user does? Or when the folder they're copying from and the one they're copying to are on top of each other? Well, blimey, they start dragging windows around. All that careful saving windows positions just went back to meaning nothing whatsoever.
4. For that matter, however, those windows springing to life at whatever previous position got saved, most likely will just interfere with whatever the user was doing. Can you say "inconvenience"?
In a plain browser interface, if I moved the file manager window left, and I have AIM on the right, they stay there. No matter how I navigate around the filesystem, the file manager window is still on the left. Or if the next time I want it on the right, it will stay on the right, no matter how I navigate.
Now let's throw new windows and saved positions in the mix. Ooops, although I had dragged the window to where I want it now, the first click will spawn a new window to whatever other position was saved before. E.g., right over my AIM window, or right over the man page I was reading.
I'm supposed to do, what? Individually drag every single directory window to the new position? How's that an improvement over having one single window which I only needed to drag once?
And no, closing the parent window still doesn't do anything about this inconvenience.
Bingo. That was my first reaction to that article too, and still find it far more weird than the spatial-vs-browser issue. The literal-minded sticking to some bad RL metaphor (directories are drawers, web sites are books), and actually trying to copy the _limitations_ of the real thing to fit the metaphor.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: all good and successful UI elements are abstract. There is no literal real-word equivalent to a mouse or a hyperlink, but users have no problems using them as such.
Getting carried away on a RL metaphor, and trying to copy its limitations, can be a dangerous thing. E.g., books are mostly like sequential files. You can't point your finger to some character's name and instantly jump to the page where he/she/it first appeared or was described. Also searching through a RL book is a right pain.
(E.g., a couple of months ago, being my usual trollish self, I got in a flame war on/. about the proper way to design a web page. So I pick up a couple of books on good usable design and start looking for quotes to post. I knew the information was there, I even had a good idea of the wording they used, but actually finding those phrases took literally hours. Dead trees don't have a search engine.)
Designing a web site strictly based on the metaphor of a book, and "bug-for-bug compatible" with a RL book is a recipe for disaster. Most people would curse and leave your strictly sequential site by page 3 or 4.
Furthermore even the way you write for the web is different from how you'd write on paper. The same paragraph length or font size which would be great in a novel or newspaper, would just give people a headache if they had to read it on a computer screen. Use of funky colours and backgrounds, like in ad brochures, doubly so.
Etc.
Basically RL models and equivalents should be taken with a grain of salt. A lot of their properties are not some great features to be copied, but a limitation of the real world device.
E.g., speaking of spatial-vs-browser, if Ikea could make furniture where you can search all wardrobes in the house without opening more than one drawer, they would. The spatiality is not some cool feature to be copied, but an unfortunate limitation of how we build the furniture. Again, if any furniture maker knew how to get rid of it, they would do so in a jiffy.
So why try to copy it into programs? We can do much better, since we're not limited by physical wood planks and metal screws. So why stick to a bad metaphor at all cost?
Well, now that you mention it, MS hiding everything in the registry doesn't really make me any happier. But still, whenever they did come up with some change in behaviour, MS gave you a big menu option to change it back, if you preferred the old way. Instead of bitching about how y'all are retarded Mac/OS2/whatever users who refuse to change.
E.g., when Windows 2000 switched to non-spatial by default (after Win 95 had already proved that spatial is a pain in the butt), they do give you the option of changing it back to the way it was before.
E.g., when for whatever idiotic reason they decided to hide file extensions (and we all know about the flurry of viruses that flourished just because Joe Average could be tricked into thinking that an executable is really a.jpg and opening it), they still do offer the big easily accessible option to get your old extensions back.
E.g., when they switched to the (IMHO stupid) use of "web folders" where half the space is taken by a pointless extra frame (presumably to justify why they have to tie IE into the kernel), they give you a big option to disable that.
E.g., my old copy of Win95 still had the old Win 3.1 Program Manager around, if I remember right. You did have to manually add it to Autostart and presumably also move your Start menu icons to it. But if you really wanted to, you could have your old Win 3.1 interface back.
E.g., I'm told that Win XP lets you get your old Win2000 interface back. I wouldn't know, since I never got Win XP.
E.g., when at some point Microsoft switched the cut, copy and paste to CTRL+X, CTRL+C and CTRL+V, the old SHIFT+DEL, CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS combinations remained usable by us dinosaurs who were already used to the old keys.
Basically all I'm saying is: making the computer usable by grandma is a good and noble goal, but I doubt that squeezing grandma into a strait-jacket is the way to go about it. And if grandma is already used to doing things in a speciffic way, I still think it's smarter to give her the option to keep using her existing skills.
Well, regardless of who wrote that, it's an example of the rampant "if you don't do thing _my_ particular way, you're a n00b/retard/luser/fossil/whatever. I couldn't care less about what _you_ need. Just learn to use whatever I felt like coding" mentality.
If for the authors of that article shallow directories are ok, more power to them. But here's a real life example (with the corporation and project name changed to protect the innocent;) of a directory I need to get to. It's from a java project:
~/workspace/some_project/src/de/some_company/som e_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content What am I supposed to do? Dump the files of all projects together in my home directory, so I can save the "/workspace/some_project" part?
Yeah, that'll make it so much easier to check in only the some_project files in CVS, when they're mixed with other projects and with every single config file and directory from other apps. E.g., I'm sure everyone will understand if the config file for the game Pingus suddenly appears among the sources I checked in. (Hey, it was something to do between projects, ok?:) For that matter, I'm sure they'll understand that my whole browser cache and history needs to be in CVS in every project too.
Or maybe unilaterally also dump the "src" (and other directories in each project too), regardless of what the rest of the team decided?
Or maybe I should tell them that they should stop using packages too, for that matter. Yeah, those projects will be so much easier to use with all the files dumped together in a big mess. EJBs, facade classes, xml content handlers, whole hierarchies of data objects, wrappers, singletons, factories, properties files, deployment descriptors, etc. Yeah, when you need to find the sax event cache classes, and only those, it's soo much easier if they're not in their own package. Not.
Slashdot Mirror
"When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free."
And how about that operator being honest and upfront about their selling emails to spammers? Chances are I wouldn't want their content in the first place.
When did it become anything else but fraud to lie about the costs to your customers?
What these fucktards are doing is no less than if I were to advertise "FREE pens!!!" But once you got one, I start showing up at your place, reading your mail (a RL equivalent of spyware), changing your channel on TV to what _I_ want you to see (adware and spam do a good equivalent of this), and interfering with your phone calls (an equivalent of spam again.) Oh yeah, and start shouting in front of your windows that you better pay for that pen already, you damn freeloading cheapskate. Even though it was advertised as FREE. (Some software advertised as FREE, e.g., RealOne, just loves to behave that way.)
Oh, and there's no way to opt out of that, for the rest of your life. Except if you move and don't give anyone your new address.
It wasn't in the contract, it wasn't in the fine print, and I conveniently forgot to tell you about it when you registered to get a cheap pen. But hey, you should be grateful. You got something for free. Right?
Would you put up with that kind of annoyance just for a stupid pen you probably didn't really need to start with? Chances are that if you knew up front about the real cost you're about to get, you wouldn't want it. And chances are that if I pulled that kind of fraud IRL, you'd sue the pants off me.
So why is dishonesty and fraud suddenly OK just because it happens online? Since when is having some piece of fucking useless and uninteresting HTML text justification enough for fraud? No, really. I want to know.
Oh, and another thing. You may think that making yet another obscure free site is God's gift to the Net. Don't flatter yourself. Most of those sites are free for a damn good reason: that noone would pay for their content even if it was the last site left on the Net.
Here's your free bit of economic clue for the day: the measure of how much something is worth, is how much people would pay for it. If noone wants to pay, maybe that's your clue that your precious content is worth exactly nothing.
And that goes double for blogs. Now far from me to keep people from doing the HTML equivalent of wanking in public and hoping to actually get some attention. But it always cracks me up to see _some_ of them get all infatuated about how their incoherent retarded whining is some valuable source of public information. Oh puh-lease.
And no, it doesn't give you the right to lie, cheat and sell addresses to spammers to keep your worthless content online.
If that's one thing I find hillarious on Slashdot is the knee jerk scare whenever someone mentions the government.
Well, guess what? Other countries have IDs, yet also have more rights than you 'merkins. Or at least don't have a government that bends over backwards to screw you, if it pleases some corporation.
The key is keeping your government in check, not trying to hide from it. They're supposed to work for _you_, so make them do so. If you actually need to hide from your own police and government, then it's a sad sad country you're living in.
That said, let's get to some of the funnier points.
"The battered wife (or husband for that matter) that doesn't want to be tracked down."
If you're a battered wife or husband, chances are you'll run to the police for help anyway. You'll also want your abusive spouse kept away from you, which doesn't happen without the police. It also doesn't happen if he/she can just refuse to say that he/she is the same guy/girl who's forbidden to stalk you.
If your best defense as a battered spouse is to never let the police know who or where you are, then good luck when your abusive spouse comes around to give you another set of black eyes and maybe a broken rib.
"The whistleblower that wants to be able to let the authorities know that his or her organization is doing something illegal, but doesn't want their life destroyed by doing so."
The whistleblower ran to the same authorities in the first place. Guess what? They know who he is. Chances are that if it's warranted, they gave him a different id, which he can then give to the cops.
Either way, if your "life not being destroyed" depends on noone, not even the cops, knowing who you are, then you're screwed the first time you get in a car accident. Or need medical care. Or meet an ex-coworker. Or whatever. At some point someone will know who you are.
And if you do run into someone determined to make you pay dearly for your whistleblowing, who will you run to? The cops.
"The ex-con that served his time and paid for his crime, and only wants a job."
Yes, and the cops are going to do... what? Run to your employer and black-mail him into firing you? Geesh.
If you really believe that kind of crap, I really want to know what you've been smoking. Something pretty damn good, I'd guess. Actually, scratch that. What I want to know is where can I buy some of that stuff.
"The journalist that has sources to protect."
The journalist gives his/her name in the paper or on TV every single damn day. I hardly think that giving their name to a cop would suddenly put them out of business. We're talking just giving your goddamn name, not handing over the full list of everyone you've ever talked to.
"Hell, I won't even give out my real name on Slashdot."
We're talking about the cops, not Slashdot, remember?
When someone mugs you or hits your car or breaks into your home or whatever, you'll run to the same cops and give them your name anyway. And your address. And expect them to help. You'd expect them to actually catch the bastard and put him behind bars, not just come say "well, we have a few suspects, but none of them wanted to tell us their name, so there's nothing we can do."
Whereas it would be pretty damn stupid to post your name and address on Slashdot in the same situation, and expect us all to come catch the thief. Now you might vent a little steam on Slashdot or some other board, but no more.
" You can blame the programmers, but I consider them fairly capable. I think they were doomed to a bad result by the bad platform that was forced upon them."
If the bad platform was pushed upon them, then indeed I don't blame the programmers. I blame whoever bought that +3 Cloak of Programming Miracles. The management, maybe?
You know what really makes me wonder? Why do they spend so much energy into justifying idiotic metrics, instead of in actually making people interested in the product?
E.g., yeah, Fake UI ads generate clicks. But do they actually make people buy your product? I don't think so.
The one time I was tricked into clicking on one of those, I closed the window so quickly, that I don't even remember what product or company was on that page. I wish I could even say that I hate them and won't buy their products ever again. But even that's not the case. It was just another annoyance to be closed quickly.
On the other hand let's look at things that do work, even if they weren't an actual ad. But noone seems to be interested in taking that route for advertising.
The last game I've bought (and my current obsession) is City Of Heroes. Great game, btw. Now I was pretty well known for hating MMORPGs with a passion, so what could make me buy one?
Well, that's easy. Online comics sites, such as Angst Technology or PVP Online ran comics strip about that game. Not ad strips, but normal funny strips. Just various humorous stuff involving the comic's main characters in that game. Mostly making fun of the game actually.
First of all, unlike your normal in-your-face annoyance ads, those comics are actually great fun to read. Whatever they mention there, even if they make fun of it, will be far more likely to remain in my memory than whatever actual ads they had on that page.
Second, it was a very targetted case, even if unintentionally. I'm reading their comic, so it's safe to say that I'm interested in comics. (Mind you, not a die-hard fan, but I like reading a few funny ones in the evening.) Those comics are also about games, so it's safe to say I'm a gamer if I find them funny.
So when they mentioned a game about comics, you could bet that it would get my interest. It was a double-hit as my interests go. It practically remained stamped all over my cortex that there's this game called City of Heroes out there.
Again, that was not actually an ad, but unintentionally worked better than actual ads do. So why can't some marketeer come with something like that? Something that's actually _interesting_, instead of going for sheer annoyance factor?
What did _you_ learn from this?
There are a _ton_ of problems spelled out in the article.
Incompetently set permissions. Incompetently managed network, including unpatched production servers, not just the client machines. (Yes, that would also explain needing the tons of policy admins. You haven't seen the kind of drooling incompetents that some companies hire.)
An incompetently programmed application, presumably written by the cheapest clueless monkey that could be found. (How _do_ you write an application, so that it needs the _OS_ to be unpatched and unprotected?)
A management who's more into chest thumping and scaring peons into submissions, than actually managing.
A total contempt for the paying customers too. (It would have taken just a couple of phonecalls to tell everyone _not_ to disconnect everyone's electricity, when it was the company's system that failed to accept payments. But did anyone even think of the customers? Nope. Fuck 'em. Who cares about 'em?)
Etc, etc, etc.
But what do _you_ understand from that? "Waah! Microsoft sucks! They shouldn't have used Windows!" Well, see, that's the problem with the IT world indeed.
And I'm talking about the ever increasing reliance on some magical "+3 cloak of IT protection (+5 against bugs)". The rush to rely 100% on the OS, framework or whatever, to protect you.
"If only it was _____ (random hyped IT product), it would have been 100% invulnerable!" Where the product may be Linux, WebSphere, EJB, ASP, XML, or whatever fashionable buzzwork or framework.
Heck, I don't doubt that, back in the caveman times, the same kind of people were busy whining about how just upgrading to Stone Axe v2.0 from Sharpened Stick v1.5 didn't automatically keep tigers at bay. Now if we had bought the hyped Wooden Club v2.6 instead, that one surely would have swung itself against the tigers! All by itself, and without requiring any skill!
No, sorry. It never worked like that, and never will. A system is only as secure as the people using it.
And that's the problem written all over that story. That a big team of incompetents crafted an insecure network, with insecure computers on it. And would have been just as bad off with any other OS or framework, if they stick to those incompetents.
But no, let's hope for some magical cloak of protection instead. Maybe this time it will actually work. Right?
So have Zone Alarm (or in my case, the Sygate Personal Firewall) on a CD, and install it before you go to the Windows Update site. I've reinstalled Windows 2000 several times now, the last time when I last upgraded to a bigger hard drive. Never caught any virus while updating. Go figure.
And generally in the time it took to do two installs, plus write that flamebait question to Slashdot, he could have just spent 15 minutes downloading a firewall with his Linux computer and burning it on a CD. Or 15 seconds activating the firewall that comes with Windows XP.
But nah, just solving someone's problem instead of making a huge "Microsoft sucks" fuss, wouldn't be as fashionable for the self-respecting IT professional.
Again, I'm not saying that everyone in any line of work is a clueless monkey. There are a bunch competent programmers, competent managers, competent support people, competent web designers, etc. But also a bunch of very very bad ones. And a whole bunch somewhere between the two extremes.
Basically all the point I'm trying to make is that you can't say "oh, he's a programmer, he should have known about backups, and a whole lot of other stuff about computers." In practice, he might or he might not. Being a programmer could mean anything between PhD in CS and someone who doesn't even know what a backup is. Or what that funny "forward" button in Outlook does.
I have written a game walkthrough before, and I don't think I would have minded it that much to go fill a form.
;)
I also don't see why should copyright law be usable to essentially bury my FAQ alive. As far as I'm concerned if anyone is still playing that game, and really needs a walkthrough, it might as well be mine. Glad to help.
Would I bother filling a form for every Slashdot or usenet post, though? Well, no, but then I couldn't care less if anyone comes and copies those. I've got no illusions that my occasional trolling is some font of pure wisdom.
If anyone wants to come print my kind of "10 bulleted reasons why your favourite OS sucks" posts in some newspaper or official guide, hey, they're probably crazy anyway. No use reasoning with crazy people
Well, yes, but we're talking speeds of kilometres per second out there. By comparison it makes any military sabot ammo seem slow.
Now a larger piece of debris, ok, would probably break through a rigid structure just as well. A glancing hit, on the other hand, might just graze a metal vehicle, but slice a balloon open.
To be clearer about it, my concern isn't as much about metal vs a syntetic membrane, but more along the lines of "what material and how thick will it be?"
I thought the whole reason to use these is, yes, to save weight. However, weight has nothing to do with whether it's rigid or flexible. A rigid piece of balsa wood can be lighter than a flexible piece of spring steel. All that matters is the density of the material, and how much of it do you have.
I.e., to make a bigger room out of inflatable material than the rigid ones we're currently sending up there, and still end up with less weight than those, you have to wonder how. Did they invent a flexible material that's extraordinarily lightweight and resistant and presumably cheap? Or, more likely, they're just planning to have a thin membrane?
Somehow it doesn't exactly make me believe that it'll be a thick armoured structure that can deflect a sharp edged rock.
My wild guess is that it's not that they don't know it happens. We all do. Copyright law may have been penned as a means to encourage distribution, but we all run 10 times more often into situations where it's effectively used to destroy a work of art, book recording or photo.
The problem is that too convince the Congress, they probably need some damn good examples. With a government that bends over to corporations and invades a country or two to please the oil tycoons, you need to make a _very_ convincing case if you want any hope of them actually taking some corporation's lollypop.
You can't just tell them "Uh, but I can't download Daggerfall, even though Bethesda no longer sells it, nor any of Microprose's games, although Microprose doesn't even exist any more." 90% of them would probably not even consider that to be art or culture. (Even though a movie or printed story with the exact same plot, would get considered as such.)
So you need to give them some really outrageous examples. Not just any obscure book or song, but fundamental pieces of the nation's very culture which are being effectively destroyed by copyright. _That_ might just get the point across.
And for that, well, they need all the help they can get.
[RANT]
The funny thing is to think how wrong communist censorship was in those parts of the world. Instead of trying to outright ban or burn the work of dissidents, they could have just bought the distribution rights and used it to make sure noone is allowed to print or quote that book in the next 95 years. Works like a charm for US corporations, and noone throws a fit about human rights.
It's a funny world where banning a book to protect the ego of a dictator is rightfully reprehensible, but banning it to protect the greed of a corporation is perfectly acceptable and normal. Isnt't it just banning a book in both cases?
[/RANT]
"All of this is very generous: It assumes that these people really believed or cared about your life. Most junkmailers don't."
Well, that was sarcasm on my part. I didn't actually think they really cared about my life.
"Of course if you only look at the failures, you'll find them in spades."
Well, and that's starting to be _the_ problem. All those failures are starting to pile up. I could do without them. I don't want to invite more of them.
I don't know about not paying... I would definitely pay to keep the blogging fucktards off the net, if it was even possible. Or at least off Google's searches.
Let's face it, searches for some subjects have become a completely useless exercise. Anything which happens to be the current fashionable topic for these fucktards to whine about, is being drowned in dozens of groups of 1000 blogs linking to each other. The actual information is _polluted_ by tons of _garbage_ spewed by fucktards who actually work hard to that end.
Their whiny shit showing on top on Google is like being elected mayor of Loserville. The apex and chief achievement of their pathetic lives.
Yes, you can use minus keywords or other such tricks in Google, but by the time you worked out the combination which actually gives you any actual information, you could have gone and bought a book on the subject.
It's sad. What was once a valuable medium for finding information, has been polluted by a retarded vanity contest among fucktards.
And, just to be fair, the same goes for the gazillions of retarded CS clan pages and such.
To complement what Just Some Guy already said, these are bloggers. If you gave them a week warning, they'd just spend the week posting whiny crap about how this sucks. And linking to each other so they would rank high on Google.
(Obviously, no actual information page should be allowed to show in the first 10 pages of a search for that topic on Google. Some airhead's whining and web equivalent of masturbating in public for attention is, of course, _the_ only authoritative source of information anyone should ever need on the net.)
I.e., yes, it would have served little purpose except to create more useless traffic.
Plus, I doubt that any of that data was worth backing up anyway. As I've said, the whole thing is more about verbal wanking in public for attention (and not getting it anyway) than about having any useful information on that site.
No offense taken. I'm a programmer, and half the people I see in this line of work are incompetent burger-flippers. Who only got hired because some "smart" beancounter thought he's cleverly saving money by hiring the cheapest monkeys. Except they have mental trouble even tying their shoelaces, forwarding emails or cutting and pasting.
(True story, and I swear to God I'm not making it up: every month I have to clean up my overflowing inbox at work, because some "programmer" mailed me a 24 bit full-screen screenshot to show me an error message displayed in telnet, or in whatever log viewer they were using. It takes work to teach them to copy and past that error message. What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".)
I would, however, disaggree with the assessment that even these are "just above" field service and helpdesk. You haven't seen the service and helpdesk, then. _Some_ of those make the "programmers" above look like brilliant geniuses.
The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.
If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.
I swear to God I'm not making it up.
So basically, yeah, I'm with you there. Just because someone's job says "programmer", doesn't automatically mean that they can actually program or administer a computer. Or what a backup is.
Don't get me wrong. I also do know a whole bunch of good competent programmers. But also about 3 times as many whose only merit was being shameless enough to lie to an incompetent HR droid.
Somewhat unrelated, so I've split it into another message: I'm also not interested in them making my life better without asking first. I have enough of that from my mother, god bless her.
;)
And I also have tons of that from my bank, every bank whose ATM I've ever used, from every supermarket in a 100 mile radius, from every single lottery in the county, etc. If I had any more brochures from people trying to make my life better, my (physical) mailbox would literally explode. It already got deformed and I'll have to replace the lock, because some people can't take a hint when I'm away and it's full. They literally shoved more brochures and ad letters into it, by brute force, until it was a solid brick of compressed paper.
Speaking of mailboxes, my email inbox is also overflowing with messages from kind people trying to make my life better. Why, just look at how many are trying to improve my sex life and grow my *ahem* to the size of the Spanish Armada. Other kind people, god bless them, are working hard to give me a new credit card, offer me another college diploma without me even showing up for any exams, offer me great discounts on printer cartridges, refinance some mortgage I didn't know I had, give me 10% of Nigeria's ex-prime-minister's loot, point me at hundreds of horny teenagers just waiting for me, etc.
With all those kind people already competing to make my life better, I hope you'll understand that I'm reluctant to get even more of them into the act
Or in layman's terms, if anyone can possibly use stuff like my house number in a _statistic_, and not to burry me in even more junk mail, they better explain _how_. They better have a damn good explanation. So far I haven't seen any.
But _if_ someone actually can explain how such trivia as my phone number helps them make a better product, heck, I'm willing to change my point of view.
But until then I'm not that concerned with such phantasy "what if they're really trying to make your life better?" scenarios. At that rate, I might as well also start considering equally surrealistic stuff like "what if I'm really Superman and won't die if I jump off a building?" Doesn't mean I'll actually jump to find out.
Well, no idea if you'll attract some ire in general, but not from me. I know I'm arrogant, egotistical, presumptuous, and a few other words to that end. Never claimed otherwise. (Would be pointless to claim that to anyone who's read my posts or journal anyway:)
That said, my biggest problem isn't with newspapers, which I just avoid if they're obnoxious about the registration.
My biggest problem is with software. Too often after I've already paid for a bugg piece of crap, I find out that I need to fill out a very obnoxious form to be able to download a fscking patch. And here I was thinking that my money paid for the patches too. But no, you have to first give them every single personal detail.
And if you thought that newspaper registration forms were obnoxious, wait until you see some software ones. They ask not just the name, address, home _and_ work phone number, but also the company's income last year (as if I even knew that), number of workers at this place, etc. Heck, they stop just short of asking what size condoms do I use. (Or maybe I just haven't bought that software yet.)
And those _will_ get bogus data and a disposable email address. Again, I've already paid money for their crap, I don't have to also put up with their cretinous data collection. Nowhere on the box was it written that I have to give them _all_ my personal data to be allowed to use that POS software, or I wouldn't have bought it.
If that's being egotistical, so be it. I'll keep calling it "consumer rights" instead.
Comparing it to sowftware piracy and whatnot, might be a nice hyperbole, but... somehow it still fails to convince me. Let's calm down and think about it.
Software piracy hurts someone. It means lost revenue. If I had pirated, say, KOTOR instead of buying it, Lucas Arts, Bioware and the retailer would have been cheating of some 40+ Euros. Worse yet, piracy hurts other software users. Budget decisions and genre decisions are based on how much money did the last game bring in.
Now let's look at newspaper registrations. _What_ legitimate revenue stream do they lose? (Again, keyword being: legitimate. Selling that data to spammers is not a revenue stream I'd want to support.)
Now I understand registration for _polls_, as you mention about G&M. Fair enough. I can live without taking part in polls. But what most of us bitch about doesn't involve polls.
Now I also understand demographic statistics. E.g., "how many males between 20 and 30 years old read our news."
But even those don't need the level of detail that some of these obnoxious registrations require. E.g., how about asking directly the age group, instead of the exact birth date? There is no way in heck to believe that exact day and month of my birth can be used in any useful statistic.
The same goes for a lot of other intrusive details these idiots _require_. E.g., house number or telephone number. _What_ kind of statistics can one make out of that? "How many people living in odd numbered houses read our newspaper?" That's bull. That's not a statistic, it's useless trivia.
So here's my take on it: the bigger the registration form and the more unnecessary personal data they ask for, the more I'm convinced that they're clueless retards without any plan. People who didn't actually think _why_ and _what_ _for_ do they need that data. They just collect it because, dude, it's way cool to have so much data about all these people. It almost feels like power.
And the less convinced I'll be that bogus data is actually hurting them in any way. It's not like they had a (legitimate) plan for that data in the first place. Whether it's _my_ data that collects virtual dust in some marketroid's pointless database, or that of a fictive 12 year old Bolivian brain surgeon called Yura Sukker, they get exactly as much use out of that data: none whatsoever.
On the other hand, _if_ they actually do the smart thing and only ask for whatever general non-specific data they actually need (age group, country, etc), I'll probably actually give honest answers. Who knows? They might actually have some plan and clue, in that case. Might as well encourage that kind of people, because they're obviously a dying breed.
If by "easy to browse" you mean instantly getting to the directory I need, well, no. A small forest of directory trees remains just that. However, if I have to go all the way to that depth anyway, it might at least not spawn a new window at each level.
Never said that MS wasn't unethical, nor that deliberately trying to break Java wasn't very real. Yes, I have followed the shameful progress of MS's joke of a trial, like any other geek did.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that of all ways imaginable, in which one can possibly break a language, they chose the path that also gives better speed. It wasn't just the way which gives more colourful buttons to idiot users, as seems to be the impression that some people have about GUI design. (And God knows it wouldn't even have been hard to come out with a better GUI library than AWT and Swing combined.)
Basically I could go and write a tome about what I like about MS, what I dislike about MS, and how in spite of acting irresponsibly and illegally they still did have a better product back when it mattered. (Think Dick Dastardly from the Wacky Races cartoons. Ever notice how, to be able to spend so much time building cartoonish traps for the other competitors, he must have been _massively_ in front and would have otherwise won without a problem? Same here. Before MS could leverage their monopoly position, they had to earn that position. Yes, Linux may be faster and more stable and whatnot nowadays, but back then Linux didn't even exist, and the non-MS PC OSes just royally sucked.) But let's leave that for now.
The main idea I was actually trying to get across, in way too many words, is that making a better GUI doesn't necessarily mean making everything much slower.
OK, let's not use MS as an example. It was a silly example, anyway. Let's talk about Id Software, Epic Megagames, Valve or Bioware. A modern graphics card can paint quite literally billions of textured and lit polygons per second. It can also render whole screens worth of text in milliseconds.
Computers are no longer Commodore 64s, ZX Spectrums or IBM PC XTs. Strapping a well made GUI onto a program won't make it crawl, like it did back then. (It might make it swap if the GUI is really badly written, though.)
Plus, I'm guessing that making Linux more user-friendly for newbies doesn't necessarily involve more graphics. Most programs already have some kind of GUI wrapper, or version, or config program by now. Making it usable is IMHO more of an issue of rearranging and tweaking those GUIs into something usable, than of slowing down the computer with even more graphics.
Again, that's all I'm saying: you _can_ rearrange a GUI into something logical and intuitive, without wasting billions of CPU cycles on animated graphics. That's all.
It's worth pointing out though, that being user-friendly didn't stop Windows from actually being faster than X in a lot of tasks. E.g., repainting a Window works orders of magnitude faster under Windows, while in XFree86 you end up needing such silly tricks as processing only each n'th repaint when the user is resizing a window. Doubly so when the Linux equivalent reinvents the bloated wheel, e.g., by insisting to do its very own font rendering and themed widgets.
/. crowd, but MS really isn't a company of idiots who are just drooling over the prospect of coloured buttons. It's what you get when you cross (in more than one way;) a whole lot of hackers, with a whole lot of hard working usability experts.
;)
E.g., MS Visual C still optimizes a LOT better than GCC.
I know it will sound like blasphemy to a lot of the
Most of Microsofts's faults, such as never thinking twice about ignoring the standards if it can optimize better without them, or inventing its own formats, are the exact same things we admire in the archetipal idea of a hacker. (The one illustrated in the Jargon file, for example.)
And indeed it has committed more sins in the name of speed, than for all other reasons combined. (Anti-competitive behaviour included.) E.g., that's the reason why MSVC++ was always slightly deviating from the ANSI standard: they could optimize code better that way. E.g., that's the reason it let drivers run in kernel mode, and made Windows inherently unstable. E.g., deliberately pissing off Sun aside, all the changes they did to their implementation of Java were precisely aimed at making it very very fast. Etc.
So either way, what I'm trying to say is: "user-friendly" doesn't _have_ to mean "slower than a snail". Windows has managed to stay pretty fast (fast enough to play real time 3D games, for example) even while cattering to the newbies. I'm sure Linux will, too.
Now stability, that's another thing. No idea there, and indeed MS doesn't exactly come to mind as a good example there
Plus, as was already said, it's not like anyone will stop you from running another desktop environment, if the newbie-inspired one gets too user-friendly for your taste. E.g., most distros ship with KDE, which is aimed at precisely that: looking like Windows to newbies, yet I happily run XFce 4 instead. A couple of co-workers run Ratpoison, and that's as far from Windows (or user friendly) as you can get in a graphics mode.
You will, however, notice that even with the "/workspace/some_project" part sym-linked away, I still have to navigate something that looks like: /src/de/some_company/some_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content
/src/de/some_company/some_framework/some_project/e jb /src/de/some_company/some_framework/some_project/d ata/jms /resources/deploy/ejb/META-INF /resources/deploy/test_war/META-INF /resources/templates/workflow/content /resources/gui/forms/stylesheets /build/conf
And, no, I can't cut it off at the pass and symling to some deeper point along that hierarchy, because other points in that project directory that I might want to reach include:
That's just a small sample of the directories I might have to reach in only one project. The full list is a lot longer.
So if you suggest that I should symlink all those locations on my desktop, times some two dozen modules and sub-projects... you're overestimating the resolution of my desktop. I just don't have the space for that.
And why? Just because someone from the Gnome team doesn't like my directory structure?
Let me ennumerate in how many ways you got the fundamentally wrong idea for a metaphor:
"The classic spatial example is driving."
1. If it's an example of anything, it's an example of why _not_ to copy RL limitations into a program.
Driving by landmarks is one thing we've been trying to _avoid_. That's what GPS navigation systems are for, for example. All things being equal, I'd rather _not_ have to remember the position of every building in relationsip to others, thank you very much.
(Heck, if you really want metaphors, driving to get somewhere is something we'd all rather avoid. Videoconferencing, instant-messaging, telephones, the postal service, etc, were invented precisely because I'd rather sit here and talk to mom, than do the spatial driving thing.)
So you're taking an example of something we're trying to _avoid_ IRL, and use it as a cool feature on a computer? Gimme a break.
"Spatial works, and only works, because it's *spatial*. Which means that you can visualize locations and objects based on their relationships to other objects."
Let's say anyone actually is retarded enough to find their way around a file system by "uh, click the third link on the left, then the fourth down", as opposed to the more logical "it ought to be in the pictures folder, then look for the town name".
2. Well, blimey, you can already do that with a browser interface. _If_ the contents of those folders never change, then the position of those files and directories, relative to the browser window, won't change either.
3. You seem to assume that the positions of those windows will never change, so once you've saved their position, the user can eventually learn in which corner he has which directory. Which is bogus.
The first time they need to find some window underneath the others, or whenever they want to see a directory in the left side while chatting to their friends on AIM on the right side, what is the first thing a user does? Or when the folder they're copying from and the one they're copying to are on top of each other? Well, blimey, they start dragging windows around. All that careful saving windows positions just went back to meaning nothing whatsoever.
4. For that matter, however, those windows springing to life at whatever previous position got saved, most likely will just interfere with whatever the user was doing. Can you say "inconvenience"?
In a plain browser interface, if I moved the file manager window left, and I have AIM on the right, they stay there. No matter how I navigate around the filesystem, the file manager window is still on the left. Or if the next time I want it on the right, it will stay on the right, no matter how I navigate.
Now let's throw new windows and saved positions in the mix. Ooops, although I had dragged the window to where I want it now, the first click will spawn a new window to whatever other position was saved before. E.g., right over my AIM window, or right over the man page I was reading.
I'm supposed to do, what? Individually drag every single directory window to the new position? How's that an improvement over having one single window which I only needed to drag once?
And no, closing the parent window still doesn't do anything about this inconvenience.
Bingo. That was my first reaction to that article too, and still find it far more weird than the spatial-vs-browser issue. The literal-minded sticking to some bad RL metaphor (directories are drawers, web sites are books), and actually trying to copy the _limitations_ of the real thing to fit the metaphor.
/. about the proper way to design a web page. So I pick up a couple of books on good usable design and start looking for quotes to post. I knew the information was there, I even had a good idea of the wording they used, but actually finding those phrases took literally hours. Dead trees don't have a search engine.)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: all good and successful UI elements are abstract. There is no literal real-word equivalent to a mouse or a hyperlink, but users have no problems using them as such.
Getting carried away on a RL metaphor, and trying to copy its limitations, can be a dangerous thing. E.g., books are mostly like sequential files. You can't point your finger to some character's name and instantly jump to the page where he/she/it first appeared or was described. Also searching through a RL book is a right pain.
(E.g., a couple of months ago, being my usual trollish self, I got in a flame war on
Designing a web site strictly based on the metaphor of a book, and "bug-for-bug compatible" with a RL book is a recipe for disaster. Most people would curse and leave your strictly sequential site by page 3 or 4.
Furthermore even the way you write for the web is different from how you'd write on paper. The same paragraph length or font size which would be great in a novel or newspaper, would just give people a headache if they had to read it on a computer screen. Use of funky colours and backgrounds, like in ad brochures, doubly so.
Etc.
Basically RL models and equivalents should be taken with a grain of salt. A lot of their properties are not some great features to be copied, but a limitation of the real world device.
E.g., speaking of spatial-vs-browser, if Ikea could make furniture where you can search all wardrobes in the house without opening more than one drawer, they would. The spatiality is not some cool feature to be copied, but an unfortunate limitation of how we build the furniture. Again, if any furniture maker knew how to get rid of it, they would do so in a jiffy.
So why try to copy it into programs? We can do much better, since we're not limited by physical wood planks and metal screws. So why stick to a bad metaphor at all cost?
Well, now that you mention it, MS hiding everything in the registry doesn't really make me any happier. But still, whenever they did come up with some change in behaviour, MS gave you a big menu option to change it back, if you preferred the old way. Instead of bitching about how y'all are retarded Mac/OS2/whatever users who refuse to change.
.jpg and opening it), they still do offer the big easily accessible option to get your old extensions back.
E.g., when Windows 2000 switched to non-spatial by default (after Win 95 had already proved that spatial is a pain in the butt), they do give you the option of changing it back to the way it was before.
E.g., when for whatever idiotic reason they decided to hide file extensions (and we all know about the flurry of viruses that flourished just because Joe Average could be tricked into thinking that an executable is really a
E.g., when they switched to the (IMHO stupid) use of "web folders" where half the space is taken by a pointless extra frame (presumably to justify why they have to tie IE into the kernel), they give you a big option to disable that.
E.g., my old copy of Win95 still had the old Win 3.1 Program Manager around, if I remember right. You did have to manually add it to Autostart and presumably also move your Start menu icons to it. But if you really wanted to, you could have your old Win 3.1 interface back.
E.g., I'm told that Win XP lets you get your old Win2000 interface back. I wouldn't know, since I never got Win XP.
E.g., when at some point Microsoft switched the cut, copy and paste to CTRL+X, CTRL+C and CTRL+V, the old SHIFT+DEL, CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS combinations remained usable by us dinosaurs who were already used to the old keys.
Basically all I'm saying is: making the computer usable by grandma is a good and noble goal, but I doubt that squeezing grandma into a strait-jacket is the way to go about it. And if grandma is already used to doing things in a speciffic way, I still think it's smarter to give her the option to keep using her existing skills.
Well, regardless of who wrote that, it's an example of the rampant "if you don't do thing _my_ particular way, you're a n00b/retard/luser/fossil/whatever. I couldn't care less about what _you_ need. Just learn to use whatever I felt like coding" mentality.
m e_ framework/some_project/util/xml/handlers/content
If for the authors of that article shallow directories are ok, more power to them. But here's a real life example (with the corporation and project name changed to protect the innocent;) of a directory I need to get to. It's from a java project:
~/workspace/some_project/src/de/some_company/so
What am I supposed to do? Dump the files of all projects together in my home directory, so I can save the "/workspace/some_project" part?
Yeah, that'll make it so much easier to check in only the some_project files in CVS, when they're mixed with other projects and with every single config file and directory from other apps. E.g., I'm sure everyone will understand if the config file for the game Pingus suddenly appears among the sources I checked in. (Hey, it was something to do between projects, ok?:) For that matter, I'm sure they'll understand that my whole browser cache and history needs to be in CVS in every project too.
Or maybe unilaterally also dump the "src" (and other directories in each project too), regardless of what the rest of the team decided?
Or maybe I should tell them that they should stop using packages too, for that matter. Yeah, those projects will be so much easier to use with all the files dumped together in a big mess. EJBs, facade classes, xml content handlers, whole hierarchies of data objects, wrappers, singletons, factories, properties files, deployment descriptors, etc. Yeah, when you need to find the sax event cache classes, and only those, it's soo much easier if they're not in their own package. Not.