Informix can - in fact, you can write datablades for any binary data even if they're not already available. I believe that DB2 can as well. But yeah, they're both non-free.
The last time that I used Oracle directly, which was admittedly a few years ago, RMAN was not considered a good solution. It was only bundled with Oracle starting with the 8i series, and was possibly not quite ready for prime time then.
Even now, the 10g RMAN page is less than optimistic about previous versions:
RMAN becomes more powerful with a redesigned incremental backup scheme, offline recovery of incremental backups, previewing restore, recovering through resetlogs, file compression, and much more.
Most people would agree that RMAN is the de facto tool of choice for Oracle database backup. But as powerful as they were, early versions of RMAN left something to be desired. Like many DBAs, I had pet peeves about the absence of what I consider to be must-have features....
So why do many DBAs do incremental backups only rarely? One reason is that in Oracle9i and below, RMAN scans all the data blocks to identify candidates for backup. This process puts so much stress on the system that doing incrementals becomes impractical.
It also didn't use to be able to do things like backup to tape (ooh) without external tools from people like Legato. And heck, there's a whole series of books about how to use it effectively - if that isn't the sign of a poorly designed tool, well... Heck, the fact that a simple google search will show that a lot of people were (and still are) using filesystem backups indicates a severe (if historical) weakness in provided backup tools. Contrast this to most other enterprise vendors, where doing a backup is as simple as saying, "Backup to this [tape|disk] device, and make it a level [0|1|2] incremental backup."
Its funny - we had the same experience with Informix. My last company was responsible for about 150 critical production Informix instances, plus about 25 in-house development ones, and handled the load with 2.5 DBAs who spent most of their time tweaking for peak performance, or doing upgrades, et cetera. When we brought on an Oracle product that ratio dropped to more like 1 DBA for every 10 instances.
Then again, Oracle is the same company that sells a multiDollar enterprise product without a hot backup script... If you were a database consulting services company, which would you recommend?
If you're replacing an existing Windows machine with a new Mac, you have a Windows license already. So, no. Well, some people who don't know any better probably will, but an awful lot won't, and it'll all be perfectly legal.
It can walk but can't maintain verticality? Is it there to stabilize it? That's pretty lame if they don't even have to worry about keeping its center of balance... that's the hardest thing to figure out about fluid bipedal motion!
Probably just to stop the experiment needing a shitload of space without worrying about explicit turning. Of course, you could have just quoted the entire paragraph (two sentences) - bold face added:
RunBot currently walks around the edge of a circular room and is connected the centre of the room by a boom. But Wörgötter plans to develop a freestanding version next, and thinks it should be straightforward because the boom has only a small influence on its ability to walk.
Or you can do what I did (which got me from 240+ to 170). This assumes that you're maintaining your weight without issue:
Eat a bit less of everything. Some suggestions:
Skip "free" food like chips and breadsticks except while you're eating your entree
Eat your sides only until your main food is gone - no more mopping up sauce or beans after you're "done"
Switch to diet soda
Cut back any meal you eat alone to 400-500 calories (eg: 9 bagel bites), but at most one meal per day
Do more physical activity. Suggestions:
Get an audible.com subscription
(what I did): Walk around your living room listening to a DVD commentary track every evening before bed
Join a low-stress into sports league
Do whatever your slightly more in-shape buddies do, with them
Think about food before you eat it. Read nutrition labels. Mentally convert calories into miles-of-walking before eating. If you still want it, go ahead and eat it. If not, put it back.
Work out for 30 minutes a 2-3 times a week, in the gym. It really does make you feel better, even if it won't directly help you lose weight.
That's it. Take in (a few) less calories, and burn (a few) more. No deprivation, no hardship, no math. And it works. Make your net change a whopping 250 calories a day (less than 2 cans of soda) and you'll lose 25 pounds over the course of a year. Do more, and lose faster - just don't do too much so that you feel like its a pain. And yeah, it may take a year or more (depending on your activities and how much you have to lose), but think about it - if you're heavy, a year from now wouldn't you rather be lighter? You're going to be a year older either way, so its not like it really costs you much to lose the bulk...
Actually, 99% (guess, but probably fairly close) of all people who actually do a lot of aerobic exercise (running, biking, etc) stay tf away from "energy drinks." They're generally loaded with all sorts of crap. This holds even more true for people who have to monitor what they're taking in at least some of the time (and thus develop better habits the rest of the time) like marathoners, when it matters a lot what kind of hydration and nutrition you're getting.
As a bonus, you may end up with improved performance
While this is true for the most part (and in fact I made a case for it elsewhere on this thread), the one side-effect is that your DBMS can't examine the value of the parameters when determining the query path, possibly resulting in sub-optimal optimization. However, it does result in incredibly repeatable query paths, which is a trade-off I'll take almost any day.
It still amazes me when you can crash even high-dollar enterprise apps by putting an apostrophe into a free-form text field. [shudder]
2. use regular expressions, strip out the naugty chars from your inputs where you can, like newlines, even semicolons (no one i know has a semi colon in their name, date of birth or email address), and HTML encode your data BEFORE you try to save it to your db, gets rid of the double quotes AND saves time encoding it for every page write.
Well, yes and no. HTML encoding your data is really messy if you have to pass it off to other systems and you keep wondering if you've already decoded it, or not, or if you need to re-encode it - ick. Keep it native as long as possible and HTML encode it on the way out.
But really, none of that should be necessary. Your app should never, ever, be creating a big long string of SQL. Its about the least efficient way to communicate with your database. Write all of your queries using bind variables (effectively placeholders for values, often a ? in the string). Prepare them once (some modern databases will correctly cache and pool them for you even if you skip this step) and execute them with the variables containing your data.
Making all of your queries this way means that there's no, nada, zero chance of the content of one of those variables ever "infecting" your database, because the database knows at a fundamental level which information is instruction (your SQL command) and which information is data (contained in your variables). Doing anything else is asking for trouble, no matter how well you think you may have checked the data.
So. Its faster, easier, and more secure. Its supported by every major database language layer that I know of. And its more "standards-compliant" to boot. Life is good, no?
The real lesson there is that if your office uses Outlook to schedule meetings, then you need to use it too. If its not a good time for you, or if you have something else going on, block it off. It only takes a couple of seconds, and everyone in the office can see what your available time is without trying to call 20 different people to find out. Really, its pretty trivial if everyone just keeps their calendars updated (not even with detail - just with the fact that there's something from 2-4 that you'll be busy for).
The alternative is that nasty-ass game of email tag when people keep replying with, "Oh, no, that doesn't work for me, how about 3pm Friday?"
I keep hearing this comment. I can only assume that you don't have HDTV yourself? HD content looks significantly better than SD on a 36" TV, and the improvements get dramatically more noticable as you go up from there. Besides, prices on 50"+ TVs are dropping like crazy these days. Also, you're ignoring all of those folk who have large format TVs without the various proposed digital interfaces already, who aren't in the immediate market to upgrade them (and if they did, you're ignoring the people who repurchased those large yet older HDTVs).
If you're a Java developer you are - statistically - probably developing with Eclipse against something like JBoss or Tomcat. In which case, it really doesn't matter what OS you use.
Standards compliance, native SVG, and secure extensibility don't do it for you, eh?
Hmm. Nope, not really. I develop webapps using pure CSS driven layouts, and haven't run into very much at all that needs hacks for IE7. Sure, there's some, very little -- especially compared to IE6. Native SVG? Eh, I securely extended the browser through a plugin that renders SVGs just fine. Secure extensibility? Well, beyond a couple of plugins (flash, svg, pdf, etc) I really haven't found anything else I was missing. After all, isn't one of the points people make about browsers that they're supposed to be simple?
And yes, I have Firefox, Opera, et cetera installed and I use them frequently for testing. Don't assume that a product is more functional just because its "neat" or "cool." IE7 browses the web safely and quickly -- and that's all I use it for.
That's funny - in my opinion, you found a bug in a limited-release beta product with a lot of rework in its rendering engine. I hope you reported it somewhere other than slashdot...
IE7 does the same thing, with the same key combination. Just FYI.
It may not be FireFox, but IE7 is actually a very nice, usable browser. Between it and AdMuncher, I really don't have a reason to use FireFox. Of course, the same is true the other way around as well. But the compelling argument just isn't there anymore.
(Yes, yes, I know DVD players sold well, etc bla bla. But they would have sold more quickly, and in greater quantities, if they weren't encumbered. As it is now, the only reason many of us ever bought into that hardware is because it started being sold unencumbered).
Nah, mate, I'm going to have to call you on this one. Most people don't know that DVDs are encumbered. Heck, I'm a pretty geeky guy myself - ran an ISP back in '95, like to get down and play with my soldering iron, whatever. You know what?
I have a commercial DVD player - Toshiba SD9100 or something. Not a grey-market anything, I picked it up off the shelf. Every DVD I've ever tried to play in it plays fine. I have DVD players in my laptop and desktop. Every DVD I've ever tried to play in them plays fine. The fact that the technology is, to an extent, encumbered, means diddly squat to me.
Now, HD-DVDs not outputting onto Component video? That would annoy me, or rather it would if I wasn't already planning to replace my old big-box RP HDTV with a wall-mounted unit (for decor reasons, not technical ones). But I can pretty much guarantee you that Joe Average Consumer, the guy buying 99.99% of DVDs and DVD Players, neither knows nor cares about your issues.
And Hi-Def? Don't get me started. Why would I even CONSIDER it, since I know that somewhere, somehow in the process, those pieces of hardware are infected with restrictions?
Because it looks fantastic, even at 65"? Just a thought. That is, after all, why most people (geeks or non-geeks alike) consider it.
Do you ever make backups? If so, isn't it true that there's a period of time, possibly a month or more, when an email could have been deleted from your "Inbox" but still remain on a backup tape before it gets recycled?
Go and read the PDF. Now assume that its been sent to you, as-is. Nothing whatsoever on that indicates in any way, shape, or form that it was a work of Satire, that those words did not come from John Howard. Its not as if it was posted on The Onion, or another similar site, that clearly indicates it is not official.
Now look down at the bottom. There's a copyright link which, like a lot of other links on the site, actually leads to the official website's copyright page. By doing that, and by not having anything anywhere on the page that identifies the authors in any other way, they may well have actually assigned copyright (I'm not familiar with the intracies of Australian copyright law). In that case, as the copyright owners (if not the authods), they were completly within their rights to insist that the piece be removed.
There's satire, and then there's impersonation. To me, for something to be protected even if satirical there would have to be some way, other than a personal evaluation of the content of the attributed text, for them to be able to tell that they're not looking at a "true" website. It can be evocative of the original, but should not be too easily mistaken for it. In the same way that, in the 'States, Saturday Night Live can use the presidential trappings for a "Press Conference" but if they were to broadcast a) without a laugh track, and b) using a body double instead of a "regular" actor, and c) react accordingly - they'd get in trouble too.
I failed to comment on Ekiga as far as naming went, because I thought they'd finally got it right with different project and application names. The article even said, Evolution's address book is now integrated with Ekiga, a.k.a. GNOME Meeting.. But, alas, from another article I found this delightful snippet:
Ekiga, formerly known as GNOME Meeting, is GNOME's voice and video-over-IP client.
That's going the wrong way, guys. Long live usability indeed.
I just wanted to respond to a couple of things that the article mentioned in passing. Some are minor, some are things that I think may be suffering from a "Can't see the forest for the trees," problem.
Some of the interface changes in the new version, such as the addition of icons to dialog windows, are the equivalent of the gingerbread on the gables of Victorian houses -- decorations that do nothing for functionality.
Well, that may be somewhat true. Of course, there have been studies showing that people work more efficiently, with less strain, in an "attractive," work environment. This holds true in everything from adding plants to offices to adding "gingerbread," to a GUI. And in this case, it sounds as if they do provide functionality as well since I'd be very surprised if these icons weren't context-specific in some form or fashion. But even if they provided no direct benefit, they probably do something for functionality.
Two of the new tools, Pessulus and Sabayon, help administrators limit what users of everyday accounts can do on the system
Whoa. We're talking about usability, and we're not going to comment on "Pessulus" and "Sabayon"? Don't get me wrong, those are great project names. Really great. But as new tools (and therefore not projects like Apache that everyone is familiar with), those names stink.
From a security perspective, Sabayon and Pessulus are complementary tools, differing mainly in approach. They are joined by the Power Manager, used to control how a computer is suspended or hibernates when inactive.
Now, "Power Manager" is far from sexy, but without ever using it I could have guessed what it did. And I'd say that most people could have done as well. When software behaves as you expect it to, without changing your mental map from "solving a problem" to "using the software," that's usability.
A desktop tool for changing window managers would also be welcome.
Allowing the users to focus on their work or, failing that, their desktop environment, without ever having to stop and think about their choice of window manager, would be a welcome usability enhancement. The fact that, as evidenced by earlier comparisons of SawFish and Metacity, not only can the users not ignore their WM but are indeed actively encouraged to become involved, seems unfortunate.
"Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value." -- Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), British theologian.
Especially ironic, if you compare its track record to that of most theological studies...
Slashdot Mirror
Informix can - in fact, you can write datablades for any binary data even if they're not already available. I believe that DB2 can as well. But yeah, they're both non-free.
The last time that I used Oracle directly, which was admittedly a few years ago, RMAN was not considered a good solution. It was only bundled with Oracle starting with the 8i series, and was possibly not quite ready for prime time then.
...
Even now, the 10g RMAN page is less than optimistic about previous versions:
RMAN becomes more powerful with a redesigned incremental backup scheme, offline recovery of incremental backups, previewing restore, recovering through resetlogs, file compression, and much more.
Most people would agree that RMAN is the de facto tool of choice for Oracle database backup. But as powerful as they were, early versions of RMAN left something to be desired. Like many DBAs, I had pet peeves about the absence of what I consider to be must-have features.
So why do many DBAs do incremental backups only rarely? One reason is that in Oracle9i and below, RMAN scans all the data blocks to identify candidates for backup. This process puts so much stress on the system that doing incrementals becomes impractical.
It also didn't use to be able to do things like backup to tape (ooh) without external tools from people like Legato. And heck, there's a whole series of books about how to use it effectively - if that isn't the sign of a poorly designed tool, well... Heck, the fact that a simple google search will show that a lot of people were (and still are) using filesystem backups indicates a severe (if historical) weakness in provided backup tools. Contrast this to most other enterprise vendors, where doing a backup is as simple as saying, "Backup to this [tape|disk] device, and make it a level [0|1|2] incremental backup."
Note: "Replacing." As long as you don't attempt to use or resell your old hardware with the OS installed, there's no problem.
Its funny - we had the same experience with Informix. My last company was responsible for about 150 critical production Informix instances, plus about 25 in-house development ones, and handled the load with 2.5 DBAs who spent most of their time tweaking for peak performance, or doing upgrades, et cetera. When we brought on an Oracle product that ratio dropped to more like 1 DBA for every 10 instances.
Then again, Oracle is the same company that sells a multiDollar enterprise product without a hot backup script... If you were a database consulting services company, which would you recommend?
If you're replacing an existing Windows machine with a new Mac, you have a Windows license already. So, no. Well, some people who don't know any better probably will, but an awful lot won't, and it'll all be perfectly legal.
It can walk but can't maintain verticality? Is it there to stabilize it? That's pretty lame if they don't even have to worry about keeping its center of balance ... that's the hardest thing to figure out about fluid bipedal motion!
Probably just to stop the experiment needing a shitload of space without worrying about explicit turning. Of course, you could have just quoted the entire paragraph (two sentences) - bold face added:
RunBot currently walks around the edge of a circular room and is connected the centre of the room by a boom. But Wörgötter plans to develop a freestanding version next, and thinks it should be straightforward because the boom has only a small influence on its ability to walk.
Doesn't seem quite so problematic now, does it?
That's it. Take in (a few) less calories, and burn (a few) more. No deprivation, no hardship, no math. And it works. Make your net change a whopping 250 calories a day (less than 2 cans of soda) and you'll lose 25 pounds over the course of a year. Do more, and lose faster - just don't do too much so that you feel like its a pain. And yeah, it may take a year or more (depending on your activities and how much you have to lose), but think about it - if you're heavy, a year from now wouldn't you rather be lighter? You're going to be a year older either way, so its not like it really costs you much to lose the bulk...
Actually, 99% (guess, but probably fairly close) of all people who actually do a lot of aerobic exercise (running, biking, etc) stay tf away from "energy drinks." They're generally loaded with all sorts of crap. This holds even more true for people who have to monitor what they're taking in at least some of the time (and thus develop better habits the rest of the time) like marathoners, when it matters a lot what kind of hydration and nutrition you're getting.
As a bonus, you may end up with improved performance
While this is true for the most part (and in fact I made a case for it elsewhere on this thread), the one side-effect is that your DBMS can't examine the value of the parameters when determining the query path, possibly resulting in sub-optimal optimization. However, it does result in incredibly repeatable query paths, which is a trade-off I'll take almost any day.
It still amazes me when you can crash even high-dollar enterprise apps by putting an apostrophe into a free-form text field. [shudder]
2. use regular expressions, strip out the naugty chars from your inputs where you can, like newlines, even semicolons (no one i know has a semi colon in their name, date of birth or email address), and HTML encode your data BEFORE you try to save it to your db, gets rid of the double quotes AND saves time encoding it for every page write.
Well, yes and no. HTML encoding your data is really messy if you have to pass it off to other systems and you keep wondering if you've already decoded it, or not, or if you need to re-encode it - ick. Keep it native as long as possible and HTML encode it on the way out.
But really, none of that should be necessary. Your app should never, ever, be creating a big long string of SQL. Its about the least efficient way to communicate with your database. Write all of your queries using bind variables (effectively placeholders for values, often a ? in the string). Prepare them once (some modern databases will correctly cache and pool them for you even if you skip this step) and execute them with the variables containing your data.
Making all of your queries this way means that there's no, nada, zero chance of the content of one of those variables ever "infecting" your database, because the database knows at a fundamental level which information is instruction (your SQL command) and which information is data (contained in your variables). Doing anything else is asking for trouble, no matter how well you think you may have checked the data.
So. Its faster, easier, and more secure. Its supported by every major database language layer that I know of. And its more "standards-compliant" to boot. Life is good, no?
The real lesson there is that if your office uses Outlook to schedule meetings, then you need to use it too. If its not a good time for you, or if you have something else going on, block it off. It only takes a couple of seconds, and everyone in the office can see what your available time is without trying to call 20 different people to find out. Really, its pretty trivial if everyone just keeps their calendars updated (not even with detail - just with the fact that there's something from 2-4 that you'll be busy for).
The alternative is that nasty-ass game of email tag when people keep replying with, "Oh, no, that doesn't work for me, how about 3pm Friday?"
I keep hearing this comment. I can only assume that you don't have HDTV yourself? HD content looks significantly better than SD on a 36" TV, and the improvements get dramatically more noticable as you go up from there. Besides, prices on 50"+ TVs are dropping like crazy these days. Also, you're ignoring all of those folk who have large format TVs without the various proposed digital interfaces already, who aren't in the immediate market to upgrade them (and if they did, you're ignoring the people who repurchased those large yet older HDTVs).
Hence the use of the words, "probably," and "statistically."
If you're a Java developer you are - statistically - probably developing with Eclipse against something like JBoss or Tomcat. In which case, it really doesn't matter what OS you use.
Standards compliance, native SVG, and secure extensibility don't do it for you, eh?
Hmm. Nope, not really. I develop webapps using pure CSS driven layouts, and haven't run into very much at all that needs hacks for IE7. Sure, there's some, very little -- especially compared to IE6. Native SVG? Eh, I securely extended the browser through a plugin that renders SVGs just fine. Secure extensibility? Well, beyond a couple of plugins (flash, svg, pdf, etc) I really haven't found anything else I was missing. After all, isn't one of the points people make about browsers that they're supposed to be simple?
And yes, I have Firefox, Opera, et cetera installed and I use them frequently for testing. Don't assume that a product is more functional just because its "neat" or "cool." IE7 browses the web safely and quickly -- and that's all I use it for.
In my opinion, IE7 is still garbage
That's funny - in my opinion, you found a bug in a limited-release beta product with a lot of rework in its rendering engine. I hope you reported it somewhere other than slashdot...
IE7 does the same thing, with the same key combination. Just FYI.
It may not be FireFox, but IE7 is actually a very nice, usable browser. Between it and AdMuncher, I really don't have a reason to use FireFox. Of course, the same is true the other way around as well. But the compelling argument just isn't there anymore.
Of course, if those tapes were subpoenad (sp?), they'd come back with another one for the decryption key...
(Yes, yes, I know DVD players sold well, etc bla bla. But they would have sold more quickly, and in greater quantities, if they weren't encumbered. As it is now, the only reason many of us ever bought into that hardware is because it started being sold unencumbered).
Nah, mate, I'm going to have to call you on this one. Most people don't know that DVDs are encumbered. Heck, I'm a pretty geeky guy myself - ran an ISP back in '95, like to get down and play with my soldering iron, whatever. You know what?
I have a commercial DVD player - Toshiba SD9100 or something. Not a grey-market anything, I picked it up off the shelf. Every DVD I've ever tried to play in it plays fine. I have DVD players in my laptop and desktop. Every DVD I've ever tried to play in them plays fine. The fact that the technology is, to an extent, encumbered, means diddly squat to me.
Now, HD-DVDs not outputting onto Component video? That would annoy me, or rather it would if I wasn't already planning to replace my old big-box RP HDTV with a wall-mounted unit (for decor reasons, not technical ones). But I can pretty much guarantee you that Joe Average Consumer, the guy buying 99.99% of DVDs and DVD Players, neither knows nor cares about your issues.
And Hi-Def? Don't get me started. Why would I even CONSIDER it, since I know that somewhere, somehow in the process, those pieces of hardware are infected with restrictions?
Because it looks fantastic, even at 65"? Just a thought. That is, after all, why most people (geeks or non-geeks alike) consider it.
Do you ever make backups? If so, isn't it true that there's a period of time, possibly a month or more, when an email could have been deleted from your "Inbox" but still remain on a backup tape before it gets recycled?
Go and read the PDF. Now assume that its been sent to you, as-is. Nothing whatsoever on that indicates in any way, shape, or form that it was a work of Satire, that those words did not come from John Howard. Its not as if it was posted on The Onion, or another similar site, that clearly indicates it is not official.
Now look down at the bottom. There's a copyright link which, like a lot of other links on the site, actually leads to the official website's copyright page. By doing that, and by not having anything anywhere on the page that identifies the authors in any other way, they may well have actually assigned copyright (I'm not familiar with the intracies of Australian copyright law). In that case, as the copyright owners (if not the authods), they were completly within their rights to insist that the piece be removed.
There's satire, and then there's impersonation. To me, for something to be protected even if satirical there would have to be some way, other than a personal evaluation of the content of the attributed text, for them to be able to tell that they're not looking at a "true" website. It can be evocative of the original, but should not be too easily mistaken for it. In the same way that, in the 'States, Saturday Night Live can use the presidential trappings for a "Press Conference" but if they were to broadcast a) without a laugh track, and b) using a body double instead of a "regular" actor, and c) react accordingly - they'd get in trouble too.
I failed to comment on Ekiga as far as naming went, because I thought they'd finally got it right with different project and application names. The article even said, Evolution's address book is now integrated with Ekiga, a.k.a. GNOME Meeting.. But, alas, from another article I found this delightful snippet:
Ekiga, formerly known as GNOME Meeting, is GNOME's voice and video-over-IP client.
That's going the wrong way, guys. Long live usability indeed.
I just wanted to respond to a couple of things that the article mentioned in passing. Some are minor, some are things that I think may be suffering from a "Can't see the forest for the trees," problem.
Some of the interface changes in the new version, such as the addition of icons to dialog windows, are the equivalent of the gingerbread on the gables of Victorian houses -- decorations that do nothing for functionality.
Well, that may be somewhat true. Of course, there have been studies showing that people work more efficiently, with less strain, in an "attractive," work environment. This holds true in everything from adding plants to offices to adding "gingerbread," to a GUI. And in this case, it sounds as if they do provide functionality as well since I'd be very surprised if these icons weren't context-specific in some form or fashion. But even if they provided no direct benefit, they probably do something for functionality.
Two of the new tools, Pessulus and Sabayon, help administrators limit what users of everyday accounts can do on the system
Whoa. We're talking about usability, and we're not going to comment on "Pessulus" and "Sabayon"? Don't get me wrong, those are great project names. Really great. But as new tools (and therefore not projects like Apache that everyone is familiar with), those names stink.
From a security perspective, Sabayon and Pessulus are complementary tools, differing mainly in approach. They are joined by the Power Manager, used to control how a computer is suspended or hibernates when inactive.
Now, "Power Manager" is far from sexy, but without ever using it I could have guessed what it did. And I'd say that most people could have done as well. When software behaves as you expect it to, without changing your mental map from "solving a problem" to "using the software," that's usability.
A desktop tool for changing window managers would also be welcome.
Allowing the users to focus on their work or, failing that, their desktop environment, without ever having to stop and think about their choice of window manager, would be a welcome usability enhancement. The fact that, as evidenced by earlier comparisons of SawFish and Metacity, not only can the users not ignore their WM but are indeed actively encouraged to become involved, seems unfortunate.
I'm sorry but ... did you see some of those screenshots? That's just wrong. As wrong as Kryten with a vacuum cleaner manual.
"Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value."
-- Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), British theologian.
Especially ironic, if you compare its track record to that of most theological studies...