I can testify from experience that gnome users usually don't know what they're missing.
Ah, but I first became a Linux user with SuSE (pre-Novell, so it was still KDE all the way). At first I liked KDE because it seemed more familiar to me, coming from a Windows background. It was about a year later when I decided to try Gnome. I had dismissed it before because most distros I had tried so far hadn't made it look very good. After a while, though, it felt a lot more natural to me. So it's not like I don't know the other side at all -- what I meant was that I don't know all the stuff Gnome has dropped since I wasn't a user back then.
Also, in konqueror, you can split the view. This is a simple feature, but it improves usability loads, as you no longer need a ftp client.
I usually just use two Nautilus windows for (s)ftp.
Nautilus, in contrast, is slow at drawing, wastes screen space, and doesn't have tabs. It does have those weird buttons at the top, which are a nice idea, but they should go all the way up to the root.
The tabs thing is another "mode of thinking" difference, I bet. I'm sure I could get used to tabs, but separate windows work just fine for me (with the advantage of dragging between them). As for the buttons -- do you perhaps mean the location buttons? They do go all the way to the root, although for some reason you have to click an extra button to see it. I'm more of a keyboard person, so I always toggle the location bar back to text input mode.
I'm not asking for configurability, I'm asking for flexibility. Either the gnome team has to unstiffen their necks and improve the interface a little, or KDE has to cut some of the fat. Supposedly, KDE 4 will improve usability and become more gnome-like, maybe this is the solution.
If that's the case, I'll give KDE 4 a try when it gets released. I definitely like the one clear advantage of KDE -- Qt apps seem a lot more "snappy" compared to Gtk+. It's not enough to wean me off from Gnome, though.:)
[...] GNOME integrating a clone of Microsoft's fucking.NET platform (initiated, of course, by everyone's favourite GNOME founder and would-be Microsoft employee).
Eh, Mono is a virtual machine and a class library, and so far I haven't seen a single Gnome app written in Windows Forms -- they all use Gtk#. Windows Forms is provided for two reasons: it's a migration path from Windows to other Operating Systems and a Free alternative to the.NET Framework on Windows. So how exactly is this relevant, since we're talking about the Gnome user interface?
I'd wager that nobody ever said "KDE is teh windoze because they use Qt!".
Personally I tend to think Gnome's "users are idiots" attitude is not so much due to thinking that users are idiots; I think it's more due to the fact that a few large corporations pay for most of Gnome's development, and they want their users to be treated as idiots.
See, here's the thing. I have never felt that Gnome treats me like an idiot ever since I started using it (somewhere around 2.10 I think).
Then again, maybe that's because I am an idiot and I just can't tell...:P
Seriously though, there's a couple of points here: first, interfaces that do their best to stay out of your way are good for some people.
Second, if you design to please everyone, you end up with design-by-committee software that everyone hates. If the Gnome developers have got a vision of what the desktop should be, more power to them.
Someone has to have control of the computer, and as is true with Microsoft, the last thing they want is for that control to rest with the person using it.
Maybe the reason I feel in control with Gnome is that its design fits my mode of thinking (interestingly enough, I was never comfortable with OS X). It's a bit hard for me to be objective here.
Despite what so many seem to believe, an easy to use UI is not mutually exclusive to a flexible and capable UI; that so many developers assume it to be true is much more a function of their own lack of vision and ability than a reflection on the reality of the situation.
This seems a reasonable line of thought to me, so I'm willing to concede that I just don't know what I'm missing. I gather that the stuff that has been removed has been long gone by now, so maybe I simply don't know what the heck I'm talking about. In any case, every release of Gnome I've seen so far has only improved the experience for me. More and more stuff just works out of the box and more often than not, things are where I expect them to be. As long as that is the case, I don't mind if power-user tweak-everything features are added, just don't clutter my interface with them.
How about this: there exists a class of programmers that will not -- for a second! -- stop to think that someone might already have solved in a reusable way the particular problem they are facing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the more extreme examples will not even check whether the standard libraries provide a solution.
And the few of those that both have read it and have the authority to act on it fail to get the message.
Re:It needs more professionalism
on
Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Couldn't agree more. And the reason is I know I'm one of those untrained people. I'm also probably the only one among my peers that thinks we have no business calling ourselves software engineers.
Judging by a bunch of people I've met and worked with, schools fail to teach basic problem-solving skills, professionalism, or indeed, even the fundamental tools of software engineering. Instead they focus on teaching a specific language or tool, and the students never rise above that. Hence we get a lot of Blub programmers.
For quite some time I've been thinking that we do stuff ass backwards: we go to school, take a stab at learning something useful and then go to work where very little of the teachings are applicable. I wonder how things would be if students first got to work in real-life conditions and then got to decide what their learning focus should be.
You closed them in the wrong order, so I guess the rest of the conversation is no longer valid.:)
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If I build a new and presumably better (in my own opinion) programming language starting off with Lisp, and my implementation turns out to be less powerful and slower than an average CL implementation, is that progress?
It is if it helps introduce the concepts behind Lisp to a lot of people who never would have dared to venture into Lisp otherwise. Ruby was the first language with functional constructs I tried (very much due to the excitement around Rails). Now I'm reading up on Lambda Calculus and learning Haskell, and I'm not at all sure it would have happened, were it not for Ruby.
I was actually being generous, as much as I hope Cedega can at least be cheaper. I strongly suspect it will cost MUCH more than it would for a copy of Windows, and there's no way they can keep up with Vista
I'm probably being optimistic, but I'm kind of hoping that by paying for Cedega I'm helping to send a message: "linux users pay for games too". It's quite likely (that's to say, nearly 100% certain) that it won't make much of a difference when game developers choose the platform(s) they will ship for, but still. One can always hope.
There's Cedega. Remains to be seen whether Cedega is actually significantly more expenisve than a decent copy of Vista.
I may be in the minority, but I happily pay for a monthly Cedega subscription, even if I only play once every month or so. I don't really care if it's more expensive than a Windows licence in the long run, since it saves me the trouble of dual-booting and lets me play straight from my OS of choice.
I don't run any Firefox extensions, but can someone explain why Firefox gets lauded for "lots of extensions" while IE gets dinged for lots of ActiveX controls?
... perhaps it's because the majority of Firefox extensions are actually beneficial to the user? That, and the fact that Firefox has a huge repository of nice and useful stuff whereas I can't recall ever having knowingly installed a single ActiveX control (unless you count plugins for Flash and Java).
There's a way to reset the browser defaults
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
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· Score: 1
You can reset the browser positioning defaults to 0 with a single rule:
The asterisk selector matches all elements, and thus the snippet above would read as "set all margins, paddings and suchlike to 0 for every element unless I explicitly say otherwise". It's a very useful trick to have up your sleeve:)
Caveat: Haven't bothered to find out which browser versions support the selector.
The point of "rewriting UNIX" in Linux was not about rewriting, but about free software. The UNIX vendors of the time would certainly not give their products away for free, so taking their existing code was not an option.
I just bought the game about a month ago from a retail store (mistake -- the price was nearly double of what it should have been, but I was impatient).
When I finally got to installing the game, Steam told me the key was registered. I was pissed at first, but then took digicam pics of the serial and the receipt and sent them to Valve via their support site, along with a message where I described the situation. They took nearly a week to respond, but when they did, their response was to grant me my key back.
Valve need to do something about this, but they do have a process in place that serves as a workaround.
MSN Messenger is the ad-ridden MSN client Windows Messenger is the version without all the blinkety blink, but it's still a MSN client Windows Messenger Service is the thing that displays pop-up messages from other conmputers.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but I first became a Linux user with SuSE (pre-Novell, so it was still KDE all the way). At first I liked KDE because it seemed more familiar to me, coming from a Windows background. It was about a year later when I decided to try Gnome. I had dismissed it before because most distros I had tried so far hadn't made it look very good. After a while, though, it felt a lot more natural to me. So it's not like I don't know the other side at all -- what I meant was that I don't know all the stuff Gnome has dropped since I wasn't a user back then.
I usually just use two Nautilus windows for (s)ftp.
The tabs thing is another "mode of thinking" difference, I bet. I'm sure I could get used to tabs, but separate windows work just fine for me (with the advantage of dragging between them). As for the buttons -- do you perhaps mean the location buttons? They do go all the way to the root, although for some reason you have to click an extra button to see it. I'm more of a keyboard person, so I always toggle the location bar back to text input mode.
If that's the case, I'll give KDE 4 a try when it gets released. I definitely like the one clear advantage of KDE -- Qt apps seem a lot more "snappy" compared to Gtk+. It's not enough to wean me off from Gnome, though. :)
Eh, Mono is a virtual machine and a class library, and so far I haven't seen a single Gnome app written in Windows Forms -- they all use Gtk#. Windows Forms is provided for two reasons: it's a migration path from Windows to other Operating Systems and a Free alternative to the .NET Framework on Windows. So how exactly is this relevant, since we're talking about the Gnome user interface?
I'd wager that nobody ever said "KDE is teh windoze because they use Qt!".
See, here's the thing. I have never felt that Gnome treats me like an idiot ever since I started using it (somewhere around 2.10 I think).
Then again, maybe that's because I am an idiot and I just can't tell... :P
Seriously though, there's a couple of points here: first, interfaces that do their best to stay out of your way are good for some people. Second, if you design to please everyone, you end up with design-by-committee software that everyone hates. If the Gnome developers have got a vision of what the desktop should be, more power to them.
Maybe the reason I feel in control with Gnome is that its design fits my mode of thinking (interestingly enough, I was never comfortable with OS X). It's a bit hard for me to be objective here.
This seems a reasonable line of thought to me, so I'm willing to concede that I just don't know what I'm missing. I gather that the stuff that has been removed has been long gone by now, so maybe I simply don't know what the heck I'm talking about. In any case, every release of Gnome I've seen so far has only improved the experience for me. More and more stuff just works out of the box and more often than not, things are where I expect them to be. As long as that is the case, I don't mind if power-user tweak-everything features are added, just don't clutter my interface with them.
What, in the end Anonymous Coward gets to turn the light on?
How about this: there exists a class of programmers that will not -- for a second! -- stop to think that someone might already have solved in a reusable way the particular problem they are facing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the more extreme examples will not even check whether the standard libraries provide a solution.
And the few of those that both have read it and have the authority to act on it fail to get the message.
Couldn't agree more. And the reason is I know I'm one of those untrained people. I'm also probably the only one among my peers that thinks we have no business calling ourselves software engineers.
Judging by a bunch of people I've met and worked with, schools fail to teach basic problem-solving skills, professionalism, or indeed, even the fundamental tools of software engineering. Instead they focus on teaching a specific language or tool, and the students never rise above that. Hence we get a lot of Blub programmers.
For quite some time I've been thinking that we do stuff ass backwards: we go to school, take a stab at learning something useful and then go to work where very little of the teachings are applicable. I wonder how things would be if students first got to work in real-life conditions and then got to decide what their learning focus should be.
I think the company you mean is Initech.
We'll just tag them all "irrelevant". :)
You closed them in the wrong order, so I guess the rest of the conversation is no longer valid. :)
It is if it helps introduce the concepts behind Lisp to a lot of people who never would have dared to venture into Lisp otherwise. Ruby was the first language with functional constructs I tried (very much due to the excitement around Rails). Now I'm reading up on Lambda Calculus and learning Haskell, and I'm not at all sure it would have happened, were it not for Ruby.
I believe you are referring to "Bedlam DL3".
I've got two cats at home and I do .NET programming at work!
I'd try to be modest too if people blamed me for XML :P
... is Ctrl+Shift+T
That's wine doing it's thing. On Windows, the IE engine is available, and the Mozilla ActiveX is not used.
... perhaps it's because the majority of Firefox extensions are actually beneficial to the user? That, and the fact that Firefox has a huge repository of nice and useful stuff whereas I can't recall ever having knowingly installed a single ActiveX control (unless you count plugins for Flash and Java).
You can reset the browser positioning defaults to 0 with a single rule:
The asterisk selector matches all elements, and thus the snippet above would read as "set all margins, paddings and suchlike to 0 for every element unless I explicitly say otherwise". It's a very useful trick to have up your sleeve :)
Caveat: Haven't bothered to find out which browser versions support the selector.
The point of "rewriting UNIX" in Linux was not about rewriting, but about free software. The UNIX vendors of the time would certainly not give their products away for free, so taking their existing code was not an option.
I just bought the game about a month ago from a retail store (mistake -- the price was nearly double of what it should have been, but I was impatient).
When I finally got to installing the game, Steam told me the key was registered. I was pissed at first, but then took digicam pics of the serial and the receipt and sent them to Valve via their support site, along with a message where I described the situation. They took nearly a week to respond, but when they did, their response was to grant me my key back.
Valve need to do something about this, but they do have a process in place that serves as a workaround.
...like a web browser, or a media player?
Wrong. If you watch the video of Anders Hejlsberg demonstrating LINQ, you'll notice that it's a language feature, not a MSSQL-only layer, and he actually demonstrates using LINQ not only with MSSQL but XML documents and arrays (IIRC) too.
:)
Miguel De Icaza's comment on the video was "Anders Hejlsberg is a man of excellent taste"
The video is a bit on the long side, but it's well worth it if you're interested in the topic
Actually, there are three messengers.
MSN Messenger is the ad-ridden MSN client
Windows Messenger is the version without all the blinkety blink, but it's still a MSN client
Windows Messenger Service is the thing that displays pop-up messages from other conmputers.