This seems blown up slightly -- A library (IMHO) does not need a 2.8GHz 512MB system. What are people going to do? 3D animation? raytracing? Doom III?
I think a better estimate would be a 1.4 GHz AMD Athlon XP system with 256MB RAM and the bare min for hard disk and other. The monitor you chose also inflated the price a bit. You can get decent 15" monitors these days (either LCD panel, or Trinitron CRT for more savings) for under $300.
And the software costs for the PCs are horribly inflated as well -- first of all, screw Windows. Install a basic Linux environment on them; there go your unnecessary Norton licenses. Use Gnome (or KDE), Firefox, OpenOffice, and a terminal for the Library and you're all set. If you're going to do a price comparison, at least bring the PCs up to the same level as the UNIX sunrays.
Cost per unit: about $600-$800
Total cost: around $30,000
Hmm, significantly less. I don't know if it's just me, but it seems convenient that the sunrays beat out the PCs by only about two grand. Maybe for a call center environment you need the extra horsepower on your PCs (which is ironic, because you chose sunrays instead) but I doubt it. Aside from maintenance and support, the PCs are definately cheaper for the library.
I know you said that money is less important, but Sun Rays still might be out of your league. I have no idea what they go for.
Sun Rays are the epitomy of the thin client. I mean, they really are thin. Only like 2 inches thin. They run off a Solaris central server, and have no hard disk or much of a CPU. I use them all the time in my CS lab at UC Berkeley.
I'm commenting more on the general aspect of the thin client than these specifically, because I think something else might suit your needs better. So let me just say that in a lab of 30 sunrays, they always seemed slow. But then you (probably) don't have freshmen writing C programs with memory leaks and infinite loops that clog the pipes. If you had a moderate number running off a decent server, I'm sure they'd be fine for just about anything you do. Solaris is a pretty standard UNIX environment; you can offer Gnome and KDE and such, and all the applications you described, and they'll work fine as long as people don't expect 3D games.
But I'd consider alternatives. It all depends on how many systems you want to offer. If it were 5-10 systems, I'd just get cheap PCs and install RedHat or other linux, or an old version of Windows. Then keep a disk image handy so you can wipe them whenever you want. But if you need a lot of workstations, then a thin client might be more economical. Work it out and see.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd "> <html><head><title>Hello World</title></head> <body> <h1>'hello world'</h1> </body> </html>
Know any other programming languages that can do a completely understandable and arguably human readable 'hello world' like that? Yeah, I know there are probably a few. But that's not hard, man, I'm sorry. The doctype tag is the hardest part. Try searching for 'xhtml doctype' on google and copy-paste. Not hard.
If you know anything about software development, you'll no doubt be familiar with the idea of abstraction. You know, splitting a complex or redundant thing into parts to better understand it and make it simpler (loosely defined, anyway). XHTML does exactly the same thing. It abstracts the Content away from the Structure away from the Design. It takes away all the crap that existed in HTML4 pages from all those being mashed together, making XHTML far more readable and easier to code. If you can't see that, then you've never actually tried coding a bit of XHTML.
"Writing out XHTML by hand is going to be a pain, even for very simple content." -- I responded to something like this earlier, but I'll say it again -- people coding XHTML are throwing away the old WYSIWYG editors in favor of a better program -- a simple text editor. XHTML is so easy to code by hand that you don't even need a program to help you do it. Any old text editor will do. Just shows again, you've never actually had experience coding XHTML. The web is moving in this direction. If you're not going with it, then stop holding it back by saying unfounded things like this.
XHTML is so closely related to HTML4 that most old browsers ( IE 5, Netscape 4, even Lynx et al) render the content perfectly. The reason for this is the separation of the content from the design, so all of the content is marked up only based on what is contentually important -- like header tags, div tags, horizontal rules, paragraphs, em and strong tags, etc. Older browers understand most all of these tags and the content is perfectly structured and readable in any client, even Ye Olde Mosaic. Cool idea though -- if browsers like IE ever get too far behind, this could work.
Most of the web developers I know (and I know a lot) started out using tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive etc, which now output decent XHTML, but now they are starting to move toward XHTML and CSS in their designs (which are someofthebest on the net, might I add), and they're switching to using text editors exclusively for writing the code, plus your standard graphics programs for the images. I do the same.
The great thing about XHTML is that is separates the content from the design, which in turn makes your code beautiful and easy to write and maintain. I was looking at an XHTML page I had written the other day, and I thought, gee, I could just put this up as plain text and people would still understand it. It was free of all that contextual crap (tables, font tags, one-pixel spacer images) that heavily-designed HTML pages of two years ago were full of. So no, a text editor is not just for writing static text. I use mine for every aspect of the design process, though, admittedly ConTEXT is not notepad, it's pretty close. And I would contest that the sites I develop aren't crappy looking.
You may be able to design sites with a tailored WYSIWYG HTML editor, but you usally have little control over how everything fits together, and it results in messy code that is hard to understand. If that works for you, then fine, great. All I can say is that you better "know some of this stuff" and how to do it without your XHTML editor -- learn it in notepad -- and then, once you see what was output by your editor, and if you have any respect for the XHTML standard and the ideals that the W3C had in mind when they thought of it, I have a feeling you won't go back.
It's not so much about "necessary" -- it's helpful; a tool -- is your computer necessary to do your work? No, it may not be, but it sure as heck helps you get it done faster so you can focus on more important stuff. And it's not necessarily "goals" either... think of it as a time management system and it makes a little more sense. It's a method (tool) for looking at all the little "things" you have to do and saying, okay, how am I going to get all these done?
So no, I don't need this. I could do work just fine on my own. And even then, I'd have other methods to "get things done" all in my head or whatever. This way is just a useful tool. It's not about "forgetting" to do things, either. One simple list will take care of that. This method uses lists in interesting ways in order to streamline your workflow. It's like using a hammer to drive a nail, instead of a rock. The rock works, but the hammer works better.
"What more motivation than 'I want to do this' should a person need to actually go and do that thing?"
That actually works fine if you have the liberty of only needing to focus on one thing, or one thing that you deem important. It helps me (I can only speak for myself) to have a system when I have many things to do. So, when it's "I want to do this and this and this and this" etc, then it's a method for focusing on one thing while being able to take your mind off the rest, and I (and many others) find that helpful. That's all.
If you are work on something you truly believe in (and not because you need to suck your boss' or shareholders dick), everything will organize itself.
I'm sorry, but if you had an ideal workload that you love every bit of, and an ideal life back at home, and an ideal mind that never forgets, then no one would need systems like this now would they?
Listen, it's just a system. It's not meant for everyone, but it works for most people. And I just noticed your second paragraph, which is basically it. The truth is, most people have a thousand things on their mind at once, and for many people, the ability to focus on one of them while the rest sit waiting and managed in the system is very helpful. It's useful especially when you're doing something you love, because you don't want to think about anything else, and you don't have to.
A quote from David: "You don't make the lists of actions and projects just to get them all done and do nothing else in your life. You process the things you have attention on so you can really do what you feel like doing. And really do it with 100% of your focus and creative energy, with abandon."
Well I certainly understand where you're coming from here, but the fact is, I'm just a college student, I've never paid money to attend any of David's seminars (he's a family friend for god's sake, and you'll give me even more flac for that), and all I know is that this stuff just works. It's all just a system, that's all it is, and all you require to "Get things done" is a system, whatever it may be. But the lack of a system to manage my work has caused me so much trouble in the past that I adopted this one, which has been well documented, well practiced, and it works for me. Placing your goals into a rigid and stable system is not replacing them with a system. Look, most of this stuff is common sense. I've heard David say himself that if you already have your own way of getting things done that works for you, then you don't need his. All I'm saying is that this one works for me.
and let me tell you, he is one amazing person. I have been to his seminar (and one of his trainers' seminars) and it really makes you think about the way you do things. You start by extracting your brain into pages and pages of thoughts (called a brain dump), and then you practice moving each item into this process (the GTD process) whether you define it as a project, an action to complete a larger project, or just a "Someday Maybe" that is important only in the long term. There are a lot of details to the process, but you really need to read the book or go to one of his seminars to understand it fully, and even then you need a lot of practice and dedication beyond that. I highly reccomend both the seminar and the book.
One thing I have to say about GTD is the end result -- you end up with a process to control your life. I can't remember the quote David had -- but basically, his idea was that if you had all the "things" controlled, then you were free. Its honestly a sort of nirvana -- when you reach the point where you have everything you do into this system, and it becomes part of your life, then you don't have to think about the system anymore. So, whatever you had before -- oh, I have to do this and this and this today, but right now I'm doing this with this other thing on my mind but I really want to do this... becomes I am doing this. It's an amazing feeling. But there's more to it than that, so go to David's site and get into it.
"I think that aestethics play a hughe role in usability"
Just wanted to say that I absolutely agree with you on this one. A good desiner's eye would make any site more usable. Fonts, colors, font spacing, paragraph spacing, paragraph width, etc etc all affect how usable the page is -- a nice looking page just makes the whole experience more pleasing. Heck, it's why people put art in their homes. It's why we have "interior decorators" and "landscape artists" -- yes, our home would be more functional if instead we spent all that money on useful things like changing around the lightswitches or buying new appliances, but in the end, the beauty of the home plays as large (if not larger) a role as the usability in the overall experience. I for one would absolutely hate to live in a house without plants, without good-looking furniture, without some art on the walls (even just my own photography) -- it would be bland and boring, regardless of how usable it is. The best homes I've seen balance utility and design incredibly -- thebestwebdesigners do the same thing to the same effect. Jacob Nielsen has only half the picture.
"There is never a good reason to use a fixed width."
Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.
Most designs rely on fixed widths because the page can be controlled; otherwise the widths are unknown and all sorts of things start looking like crap -- images, for instance. Lets say you have a 400 pixel wide image, and your fluid page is *usually* big enough (on my monitor) so that whatever design element it sits in is large enough to contain it. Now let's say someone looks at it in 640x480 -- the image probably overflows the design.
When you just have text data, and it looks like crap (Nielsen's site being the prime example), then yes, fluid designs are preferable. But when you start trying to make a site look good, be more usable, be more accessible, and work well while providing useful content in a very eye-pleasing form, then you need some measure of control of the look, and fixed designs can provide some of that. Now of course there are fixed pages which are absoulutely horrible -- just like any design, using fixed width requires thought, and some designers don't have that capability, and I'm sorry if you come accross one; but fixed widths can be useful in making a web site look better, which in my opinion improves the user experience as much as any of Nielsen's tips.
Late follow-up-- You are indeed correct, sorry about that -- I'm getting about the same memory usage on my system. But I think what really counts is the percieved efficiency, where Firefox/Thunderbird's start-up times and overall speed are percievably better (especially start-up -- Mozilla 1.7 takes approx 12 seconds to load on my comp, which I think is unacceptable for an app that I use so often (and no, I'm not going to preload it); Firefox is about 2s, which is acceptable).
Re:Firefox + Thunderbird = Mozilla?
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
I don't have any Slashdot Cool Points, so I'll take some of yours and try to help you out.;-)
In a nutshell, Mozilla started off as the open-sourced version of Netscape 6, which turned into the Mozilla suite, and included the browser, and an e-mail client and some other things and even more things. Mozilla was big, slow, and clunky by many people's views, but it had a great rendering engine called "Gecko," and some other cool stuff. So some people decided to take the rendering engine and other cool stuff, and make a browser that was smaller, lighter, faster, and was really good at one task -- web browsing. They called it Pheonix, then Firebird, then Firefox (legal issues...). At the same time (well, a little later, after people saw how cool it was) some people decided to make an e-mail client on the same idea -- they called it Thunderbird (No legal issues).
So, Firefox and Thunderbird are very similar on the inside, but with obvious differences. Mozilla is pretty different, as it's a direct derivative (albeit with a full rewrite) of the Netscape application. The Mozilla suite is also significantly slower (but hopefully better with this release) than Firefox and Thunderbird, and has a bigger memory footprint.
Read this for a more thourough explanation of Firefox's goals, and also check out the Wikipedia article.
Re:Someone please explain this to me.
on
Mozilla 1.7 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Woah woah woah...
You're right about the first part, but on the second part-- Mozilla is a separate application suite that contains both a Browser and a Mail Client, but they are not Firefox/Thunderbird, they are completely different (mostly). So the updates to Firefox/Thunderbird have little to do with this.
Actually, I thought that FF/TB development *was* picking up quite a bit recently... we've gone from 0.7 to 0.9 in less than a year, I mean, that's something isn't it?
Honestly though, some developers have different focuses. Some people will never stop working on the big Mozilla for various reasons, and because of the nature of open source it's really pretty hard to get an open source project to die as long as it has people that want to improve it. But I have read (in an interview somewhere) that the main focus of the mozilla organization is moving toward the smaller modular programs if that's what you're thinking.
I have, actually, but that feature wasn't obvious enough for me to be able to find it or use it with ease. That was my whole point actually.. the list was sort of just a rant, and I'm very happy to see that many of the things I complained about were actually buried deep in the menus.
But the point is, I found the spatial features to be more counter-intuitive than useful. Didn't mean to say more than that, just sort of came out.
"Good interface design becomes obvious upon using it."
As soon as I read this, I thought "yes!!" because that is exactly right. I don't think both MS and Apple ditched the spatial view for no reason, and I for one am intensely annoyed by it every time I try to use it. I end up saying, screw it, I'll use a terminal. And that's not how it should be-- It should be obvious and useful without any need for explanation, or what they're really giving us -- excuses. How am I supposed to believe "it's better, just trust us and use it for two weeks" when I have been using it for two weeks and , though I have become somewhat "used to it" in that time, it still feels like it's lowering my productivity. Here are my main pet peeves, most of which have been addressed already in reviews and such but I feel like saying them anyway:
When I want to open a folder, I don't want to open every folder before it in the tree -- too many extra clicks.
Similarly, I don't want to have to close all those folders which are open for no reason, again too many clicks.
How do I quickly go back to the parent folder? Oh, it's in the menu. Three clicks.
What if I want to go three folders up? Three menu clicks!
And then there are the problems with the "Filing Cabinet" analogy -- if my filing cabinet at home had well over a thousand folders in it, and happened to also have folders inside folders (and honestly, what kind of a real filing cabinet has nested folders?) then I would take a real long hard look at my life. Computer files transcend real filing cabinets.
Windows get in the way of other windows. Too many windows. Have to move windows around (and find windows that get behind other windows... silly windows) just to copy/move/open/reach a file.
Most of the great little shortcuts I'm used to (yes, from windows) have been removed. Example: I'm in a directory of, say, 10,000 files. I want to get to the one called "testnumber5384.c". I start typing the filename, expecting the file manager to know what I want and automatically jump to the files fitting my typing. Nothing happens. I sort by name, then proceed to scroll through 5,383 other files (an imperfect science at best) before I finally find the file I'm looking for.
And of course, where the heck are the hidden files in the file chooser??? Forget opening any config files in gedit (not that you would).
I always say it's all in the details, and that has never been more true than with spatial nautilus. It was a bad idea at first, but then they get all the little details wrong too and it just becomes a mess, and it does make the user into a garbage (wo)man, spending more time dealing with the interface than actually doing what they want to be doing. Ideally, the interface should be transparent to the process, it should be obvious, just as the parent said.
I find the opposite is true... in fact, a class on machine structures is required at Berkeley, and our professor is very enthusiastic about teaching assembly. In fact, he probably got most of the points in this article out over the semester. So, "No one really needs to know this stuff, and you'll never use it, but it is required by this program so we've got to struggle through the next several weeks studying this material." was not what I experienced at all. We were thouroughly taught how a processor runs our code, how the processor itself works, how to optimize machine code, etc etc. Great class.
Patagonia, hands down, makes the best laptop backpack I have ever used. I've had the thing for 3 years and it looks brand new, and it has a slot for your laptop, which supports it and is a good fit for almost any computer, aside from those new gigantic laptops (never saw the point in those...). Anyway, Patagonia. It's worth the extra cash; the stuff lasts a lifetime, and they've got excellent customer service -- if it breaks, send it back and they fix it -- I've done this with a jacket, I'm sure it applies to anything.
Galen Rowell was a man who took much of Ansel Adams' work as inspiration in his photographs, and he saw the move to digital prints, but not to digital photography.
You just have to understand, a digital camera simply cannot produce anything of good quality larger than 8x10, even with 10 megapixels. Even with 50 there is a limit. The main digital innovation in the print photography world is the digital printing process; using lasers to acheieve perfect color and detail in prints of amazing size -- There are prints on the wall of Galen's gallery in Bishop that took my breath away when I saw them for the first time. I had simply never seen a photograph so large and so clear in my life. But was it taken digitally? No, of course not.
I don't think digital cameras will truly be taken seriously in pro photography until we can think of something better than a CCD or CMOS sensor to record the image. Maybe with the advent of nanotech we might be able to find a way to record true film digitally. Now that would be the best of both worlds.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know...
Just when we thought it was safe to put colored pixels on the internet again...
This seems blown up slightly -- A library (IMHO) does not need a 2.8GHz 512MB system. What are people going to do? 3D animation? raytracing? Doom III?
I think a better estimate would be a 1.4 GHz AMD Athlon XP system with 256MB RAM and the bare min for hard disk and other. The monitor you chose also inflated the price a bit. You can get decent 15" monitors these days (either LCD panel, or Trinitron CRT for more savings) for under $300.
And the software costs for the PCs are horribly inflated as well -- first of all, screw Windows. Install a basic Linux environment on them; there go your unnecessary Norton licenses. Use Gnome (or KDE), Firefox, OpenOffice, and a terminal for the Library and you're all set. If you're going to do a price comparison, at least bring the PCs up to the same level as the UNIX sunrays.
Cost per unit: about $600-$800
Hmm, significantly less. I don't know if it's just me, but it seems convenient that the sunrays beat out the PCs by only about two grand. Maybe for a call center environment you need the extra horsepower on your PCs (which is ironic, because you chose sunrays instead) but I doubt it. Aside from maintenance and support, the PCs are definately cheaper for the library.Total cost: around $30,000
I know you said that money is less important, but Sun Rays still might be out of your league. I have no idea what they go for.
Sun Rays are the epitomy of the thin client. I mean, they really are thin. Only like 2 inches thin. They run off a Solaris central server, and have no hard disk or much of a CPU. I use them all the time in my CS lab at UC Berkeley.
I'm commenting more on the general aspect of the thin client than these specifically, because I think something else might suit your needs better. So let me just say that in a lab of 30 sunrays, they always seemed slow. But then you (probably) don't have freshmen writing C programs with memory leaks and infinite loops that clog the pipes. If you had a moderate number running off a decent server, I'm sure they'd be fine for just about anything you do. Solaris is a pretty standard UNIX environment; you can offer Gnome and KDE and such, and all the applications you described, and they'll work fine as long as people don't expect 3D games.
But I'd consider alternatives. It all depends on how many systems you want to offer. If it were 5-10 systems, I'd just get cheap PCs and install RedHat or other linux, or an old version of Windows. Then keep a disk image handy so you can wipe them whenever you want. But if you need a lot of workstations, then a thin client might be more economical. Work it out and see.
Know any other programming languages that can do a completely understandable and arguably human readable 'hello world' like that? Yeah, I know there are probably a few. But that's not hard, man, I'm sorry. The doctype tag is the hardest part. Try searching for 'xhtml doctype' on google and copy-paste. Not hard.
If you know anything about software development, you'll no doubt be familiar with the idea of abstraction. You know, splitting a complex or redundant thing into parts to better understand it and make it simpler (loosely defined, anyway). XHTML does exactly the same thing. It abstracts the Content away from the Structure away from the Design. It takes away all the crap that existed in HTML4 pages from all those being mashed together, making XHTML far more readable and easier to code. If you can't see that, then you've never actually tried coding a bit of XHTML.
"Writing out XHTML by hand is going to be a pain, even for very simple content." -- I responded to something like this earlier, but I'll say it again -- people coding XHTML are throwing away the old WYSIWYG editors in favor of a better program -- a simple text editor. XHTML is so easy to code by hand that you don't even need a program to help you do it. Any old text editor will do. Just shows again, you've never actually had experience coding XHTML. The web is moving in this direction. If you're not going with it, then stop holding it back by saying unfounded things like this.
XHTML is so closely related to HTML4 that most old browsers ( IE 5, Netscape 4, even Lynx et al) render the content perfectly. The reason for this is the separation of the content from the design, so all of the content is marked up only based on what is contentually important -- like header tags, div tags, horizontal rules, paragraphs, em and strong tags, etc. Older browers understand most all of these tags and the content is perfectly structured and readable in any client, even Ye Olde Mosaic. Cool idea though -- if browsers like IE ever get too far behind, this could work.
Clearly you aren't a web developer.
Most of the web developers I know (and I know a lot) started out using tools like Dreamweaver and GoLive etc, which now output decent XHTML, but now they are starting to move toward XHTML and CSS in their designs (which are some of the best on the net, might I add), and they're switching to using text editors exclusively for writing the code, plus your standard graphics programs for the images. I do the same.
The great thing about XHTML is that is separates the content from the design, which in turn makes your code beautiful and easy to write and maintain. I was looking at an XHTML page I had written the other day, and I thought, gee, I could just put this up as plain text and people would still understand it. It was free of all that contextual crap (tables, font tags, one-pixel spacer images) that heavily-designed HTML pages of two years ago were full of. So no, a text editor is not just for writing static text. I use mine for every aspect of the design process, though, admittedly ConTEXT is not notepad, it's pretty close. And I would contest that the sites I develop aren't crappy looking.
You may be able to design sites with a tailored WYSIWYG HTML editor, but you usally have little control over how everything fits together, and it results in messy code that is hard to understand. If that works for you, then fine, great. All I can say is that you better "know some of this stuff" and how to do it without your XHTML editor -- learn it in notepad -- and then, once you see what was output by your editor, and if you have any respect for the XHTML standard and the ideals that the W3C had in mind when they thought of it, I have a feeling you won't go back.
It's not so much about "necessary" -- it's helpful; a tool -- is your computer necessary to do your work? No, it may not be, but it sure as heck helps you get it done faster so you can focus on more important stuff. And it's not necessarily "goals" either... think of it as a time management system and it makes a little more sense. It's a method (tool) for looking at all the little "things" you have to do and saying, okay, how am I going to get all these done?
So no, I don't need this. I could do work just fine on my own. And even then, I'd have other methods to "get things done" all in my head or whatever. This way is just a useful tool. It's not about "forgetting" to do things, either. One simple list will take care of that. This method uses lists in interesting ways in order to streamline your workflow. It's like using a hammer to drive a nail, instead of a rock. The rock works, but the hammer works better.
"What more motivation than 'I want to do this' should a person need to actually go and do that thing?"
That actually works fine if you have the liberty of only needing to focus on one thing, or one thing that you deem important. It helps me (I can only speak for myself) to have a system when I have many things to do. So, when it's "I want to do this and this and this and this" etc, then it's a method for focusing on one thing while being able to take your mind off the rest, and I (and many others) find that helpful. That's all.
If you are work on something you truly believe in (and not because you need to suck your boss' or shareholders dick), everything will organize itself.
I'm sorry, but if you had an ideal workload that you love every bit of, and an ideal life back at home, and an ideal mind that never forgets, then no one would need systems like this now would they?
Listen, it's just a system. It's not meant for everyone, but it works for most people. And I just noticed your second paragraph, which is basically it. The truth is, most people have a thousand things on their mind at once, and for many people, the ability to focus on one of them while the rest sit waiting and managed in the system is very helpful. It's useful especially when you're doing something you love, because you don't want to think about anything else, and you don't have to.
A quote from David: "You don't make the lists of actions and projects just to get them all done and do nothing else in your life. You process the things you have attention on so you can really do what you feel like doing. And really do it with 100% of your focus and creative energy, with abandon."
Well I certainly understand where you're coming from here, but the fact is, I'm just a college student, I've never paid money to attend any of David's seminars (he's a family friend for god's sake, and you'll give me even more flac for that), and all I know is that this stuff just works. It's all just a system, that's all it is, and all you require to "Get things done" is a system, whatever it may be. But the lack of a system to manage my work has caused me so much trouble in the past that I adopted this one, which has been well documented, well practiced, and it works for me. Placing your goals into a rigid and stable system is not replacing them with a system. Look, most of this stuff is common sense. I've heard David say himself that if you already have your own way of getting things done that works for you, then you don't need his. All I'm saying is that this one works for me.
and let me tell you, he is one amazing person. I have been to his seminar (and one of his trainers' seminars) and it really makes you think about the way you do things. You start by extracting your brain into pages and pages of thoughts (called a brain dump), and then you practice moving each item into this process (the GTD process) whether you define it as a project, an action to complete a larger project, or just a "Someday Maybe" that is important only in the long term. There are a lot of details to the process, but you really need to read the book or go to one of his seminars to understand it fully, and even then you need a lot of practice and dedication beyond that. I highly reccomend both the seminar and the book.
One thing I have to say about GTD is the end result -- you end up with a process to control your life. I can't remember the quote David had -- but basically, his idea was that if you had all the "things" controlled, then you were free. Its honestly a sort of nirvana -- when you reach the point where you have everything you do into this system, and it becomes part of your life, then you don't have to think about the system anymore. So, whatever you had before -- oh, I have to do this and this and this today, but right now I'm doing this with this other thing on my mind but I really want to do this... becomes I am doing this. It's an amazing feeling. But there's more to it than that, so go to David's site and get into it.
Especially in this case, when he's basically saying that it's impossible to make a good user experience on top of any operating system...
Just wanted to say that I absolutely agree with you on this one. A good desiner's eye would make any site more usable. Fonts, colors, font spacing, paragraph spacing, paragraph width, etc etc all affect how usable the page is -- a nice looking page just makes the whole experience more pleasing. Heck, it's why people put art in their homes. It's why we have "interior decorators" and "landscape artists" -- yes, our home would be more functional if instead we spent all that money on useful things like changing around the lightswitches or buying new appliances, but in the end, the beauty of the home plays as large (if not larger) a role as the usability in the overall experience. I for one would absolutely hate to live in a house without plants, without good-looking furniture, without some art on the walls (even just my own photography) -- it would be bland and boring, regardless of how usable it is. The best homes I've seen balance utility and design incredibly -- the best web designers do the same thing to the same effect. Jacob Nielsen has only half the picture.
Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.
Most designs rely on fixed widths because the page can be controlled; otherwise the widths are unknown and all sorts of things start looking like crap -- images, for instance. Lets say you have a 400 pixel wide image, and your fluid page is *usually* big enough (on my monitor) so that whatever design element it sits in is large enough to contain it. Now let's say someone looks at it in 640x480 -- the image probably overflows the design.
When you just have text data, and it looks like crap (Nielsen's site being the prime example), then yes, fluid designs are preferable. But when you start trying to make a site look good, be more usable, be more accessible, and work well while providing useful content in a very eye-pleasing form, then you need some measure of control of the look, and fixed designs can provide some of that. Now of course there are fixed pages which are absoulutely horrible -- just like any design, using fixed width requires thought, and some designers don't have that capability, and I'm sorry if you come accross one; but fixed widths can be useful in making a web site look better, which in my opinion improves the user experience as much as any of Nielsen's tips.
Late follow-up-- You are indeed correct, sorry about that -- I'm getting about the same memory usage on my system. But I think what really counts is the percieved efficiency, where Firefox/Thunderbird's start-up times and overall speed are percievably better (especially start-up -- Mozilla 1.7 takes approx 12 seconds to load on my comp, which I think is unacceptable for an app that I use so often (and no, I'm not going to preload it); Firefox is about 2s, which is acceptable).
I don't have any Slashdot Cool Points, so I'll take some of yours and try to help you out. ;-)
In a nutshell, Mozilla started off as the open-sourced version of Netscape 6, which turned into the Mozilla suite, and included the browser, and an e-mail client and some other things and even more things. Mozilla was big, slow, and clunky by many people's views, but it had a great rendering engine called "Gecko," and some other cool stuff. So some people decided to take the rendering engine and other cool stuff, and make a browser that was smaller, lighter, faster, and was really good at one task -- web browsing. They called it Pheonix, then Firebird, then Firefox (legal issues...). At the same time (well, a little later, after people saw how cool it was) some people decided to make an e-mail client on the same idea -- they called it Thunderbird (No legal issues).
So, Firefox and Thunderbird are very similar on the inside, but with obvious differences. Mozilla is pretty different, as it's a direct derivative (albeit with a full rewrite) of the Netscape application. The Mozilla suite is also significantly slower (but hopefully better with this release) than Firefox and Thunderbird, and has a bigger memory footprint.
Read this for a more thourough explanation of Firefox's goals, and also check out the Wikipedia article.
Woah woah woah...
You're right about the first part, but on the second part-- Mozilla is a separate application suite that contains both a Browser and a Mail Client, but they are not Firefox/Thunderbird, they are completely different (mostly). So the updates to Firefox/Thunderbird have little to do with this.
Details, details...
Actually, I thought that FF/TB development *was* picking up quite a bit recently... we've gone from 0.7 to 0.9 in less than a year, I mean, that's something isn't it?
Honestly though, some developers have different focuses. Some people will never stop working on the big Mozilla for various reasons, and because of the nature of open source it's really pretty hard to get an open source project to die as long as it has people that want to improve it. But I have read (in an interview somewhere) that the main focus of the mozilla organization is moving toward the smaller modular programs if that's what you're thinking.
I have, actually, but that feature wasn't obvious enough for me to be able to find it or use it with ease. That was my whole point actually.. the list was sort of just a rant, and I'm very happy to see that many of the things I complained about were actually buried deep in the menus.
But the point is, I found the spatial features to be more counter-intuitive than useful. Didn't mean to say more than that, just sort of came out.
"Good interface design becomes obvious upon using it."
As soon as I read this, I thought "yes!!" because that is exactly right. I don't think both MS and Apple ditched the spatial view for no reason, and I for one am intensely annoyed by it every time I try to use it. I end up saying, screw it, I'll use a terminal. And that's not how it should be-- It should be obvious and useful without any need for explanation, or what they're really giving us -- excuses. How am I supposed to believe "it's better, just trust us and use it for two weeks" when I have been using it for two weeks and , though I have become somewhat "used to it" in that time, it still feels like it's lowering my productivity. Here are my main pet peeves, most of which have been addressed already in reviews and such but I feel like saying them anyway:
I always say it's all in the details, and that has never been more true than with spatial nautilus. It was a bad idea at first, but then they get all the little details wrong too and it just becomes a mess, and it does make the user into a garbage (wo)man, spending more time dealing with the interface than actually doing what they want to be doing. Ideally, the interface should be transparent to the process, it should be obvious, just as the parent said.
I find the opposite is true... in fact, a class on machine structures is required at Berkeley, and our professor is very enthusiastic about teaching assembly. In fact, he probably got most of the points in this article out over the semester. So, "No one really needs to know this stuff, and you'll never use it, but it is required by this program so we've got to struggle through the next several weeks studying this material." was not what I experienced at all. We were thouroughly taught how a processor runs our code, how the processor itself works, how to optimize machine code, etc etc. Great class.
From the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems:
"The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections."
This 2.5 TB RAMdisk is a big thing? You'd need 68 of them (more if you actually expect the internet to grow, but I don't know...).
That's also without the "deep web" -- database-driven sites (they estimate the size to be 400 to 450 times larger if they were included).
Patagonia, hands down, makes the best laptop backpack I have ever used. I've had the thing for 3 years and it looks brand new, and it has a slot for your laptop, which supports it and is a good fit for almost any computer, aside from those new gigantic laptops (never saw the point in those...). Anyway, Patagonia. It's worth the extra cash; the stuff lasts a lifetime, and they've got excellent customer service -- if it breaks, send it back and they fix it -- I've done this with a jacket, I'm sure it applies to anything.
Galen Rowell was a man who took much of Ansel Adams' work as inspiration in his photographs, and he saw the move to digital prints, but not to digital photography.
You just have to understand, a digital camera simply cannot produce anything of good quality larger than 8x10, even with 10 megapixels. Even with 50 there is a limit. The main digital innovation in the print photography world is the digital printing process; using lasers to acheieve perfect color and detail in prints of amazing size -- There are prints on the wall of Galen's gallery in Bishop that took my breath away when I saw them for the first time. I had simply never seen a photograph so large and so clear in my life. But was it taken digitally? No, of course not.
I don't think digital cameras will truly be taken seriously in pro photography until we can think of something better than a CCD or CMOS sensor to record the image. Maybe with the advent of nanotech we might be able to find a way to record true film digitally. Now that would be the best of both worlds.