It's time to decide whether Linux wants to be a "hacker's system" where everything is compiled from source, or a "desktop system" where binary compatibility and simple installation is a must.
I don't think "someone" should decide to make Linux one or the other. The beauty of Linux is that it can do both, and more. What it needs, however, is dedicated people to see through the effort to make Linux implementations that work one way or the other.
Look at Gentoo, for instance, it has exploited the "I am a geek who likes to compile from source" niche wonderfully.
And at the other end of the spectrum, the HomeBase Desktop from OEone is IMHO a wonderful example of integrated, functional and easy to use Linux desktop. I wonder how many people have ever heard of HomeBase -- not many apparently if they still say "no Linux for the desktop".
So this brings me to ask "just what the hell do people want?" There ARE 5000 different Linux implementations out there. Some of them DO cover what you want. So what gives? I guess too much choice can hurt after all.
Isn't making an interface usable something interesting? Something challenging? Aren't challenges something geeks do well? Ignore Microsoft. Why not make the best interface that can be made? It'll take time but it'll arrive. I'd like to see lots of distributions with a strong core feature set to each of them, but with each carrying an ever varying application set. Think KDE on a large scale.
What I find interesting is that whenever someone says "usability" and "linux", people automatically assume "the graphical interface".
How about the rest? A well thought out OS, as far as usability is concerned, is thought so from the ground up.
Pardon me, but I'm going to point at Mac OS X. It's definitely not just the interface that's different, that's just the icing on the cake. The underlaying OS is vastly different from your average Linux distro, because the way it is organized. It has to do with everything: the bootscripts, the security, the application packaging, the filesystem organization, etc.
Think about it: those guys at Apple probably sat down and said "let's make it easy on the user", then they started doing things more or less from scratch. Only some of the people who contribute to Linux give a thought to the basic design principles that Linux is organized upon. No I don't mean the freaking graphical interface, I mean everything. The result is obvious.
The Linux heritage is UNIX, which has always been a black hole of usability. UNIX was always an OS designed by the extra-power users for other extra-power users. Naturally, Linux inherits all the flaws in it.
Frankly, I think it will take something like 10 or 20 years for Linux to become usable (you know what I mean by usable, don't start nitpicking please) and impose itself on the market. If it won't be too late by then. Why? Because companies like Apple and Microsoft can afford to redesign the entire operating system every few years. Think about how the Windows systems have evolved, or how Mac did. Eventually, one of these summers, you're going to look at the new Windows system and say "dude, that looks so good and usable, and it's thought out so well." People already say this about Mac, it's just the price tag for the hardware keeping them back.
Granted, the Linux community could do the same in 6 months to 1 year. The problem is that they don't even begin to acknowledge the need for a complete overhaul. The replies to this post will probably say "what's wrong with Linux as it is today?" Therein lies the problem.
There are already avangardist projects like GoboLinux or Zero Install (heck, even SELinux makes a good example, see how many adopt that soon) out there who try to challenge the basics of the Linux system design, but not many people take them seriously. It's a shame, because if anything, such projects have proved that you can do anything with Linux, as long as enough people start to see the need for the change.
Every year, the major distro's come up with bells and whistles, and better hardware detection, and package newer versions of the software, and better tools to tie together with ducttape the problems in the system. And we delude ourselves into thinking that Linux systems are evolving. Please. No, I don't mean the kernel or the applications, I mean the systems.
Sigh. You'd think there would be a breakthrough at some point, somewhere. That someone would understand the need for fundamental changes. That someone would design a new breed of Linux system. That it would implement that new system to a fairly usable point. That a company would appear to pick it up and bring it to the masses. That the community would embrace it.
But it doesn't happen. There are 5 hops I mentioned here, and something happens at some point. I can figure out some reasons and you can probably figure them out too. So we all clap for the 10th version of the same old distros, going on the 20th.
That's not how copyright works. Most often you don't even have to publish anything and the copyright still applies. AFAIK it applies to the love poem notebook you hide in the closet under the pijamas. Check this out for a nice rundown of copyright vs patents vs trademarks, plus more insight into patents.
eMacs are also cheap in the long run, the things are freakin' bulletproof, I've got two labs of them in the hands of hyperactive fourth-graders and they're totally unscathed after two years (excepting keyboards and mice). The Dell labs we have with GX150s have all had their front panels knocked out and CD-ROM trays damaged, most floppy drives will kill disks, and the rat's nest of cables is getting unmanageable.
Man, come on, seriously now. What's this now, a Mac being more sturdy than a PC? What will it be next: "my Mac can smash your PC to bits if it falls on it"? Kinda reminds me of "my brother can beat your brother and throw him over that fence with one hand"-talk back when we were five, doesn't it?
Mac apps are usually installed by dragging the application from the mounted DMG file (a compressed file system) into the Applications folder. Much easier than apt-get or Windows installers.
That's because those Mac apps are archives organized to be fully self-contained, so they are ready to go instantly.
What I mean by "self-contained" is something somewhat similar (in certain points) to Zero Install.
If you want another analogy, imagine compiling a Linux application for i386, with --prefix=/opt/appname (which means etc/, share/ everything gets under/opt/appname for that app), and shipping the/opt/appname tarball with some special files in it that will alow the unpacker on the target systems to do some nifty tricks with it.
So it's not such a different thing from a.deb or a.rpm package, it just puts a different twist on the user experience.
And on that note, let me point out that what this guy wants isn't exactly best described by "subliminal messages". I think he meant "self-suggestion messages". The difference is that you don't have to be tricked by it. You know it's there, you want it to work, you just let it slip out of your immediate attention, and that's where it makes its effect.
As for the technical means, you just have to record a message and simply mix it with audio tracks. For best results: the message should be spoken by the person intented for; it should be uttered in a low, monotonous voice; the exact same message should be repeated over and over, with the exact same length and contents; it helps if it's something fairly short; the music shouldn't drown it completely ie. it should be barely but still audible.
It also works if you just relax and listen to the message by itself, without music, but it's harder to slip out of focus and let the message make its effect. A good alternative case is simply to play it while you sleep, or when you do something that involves a lot of focus, such as working on something important.
Now this probably sounds like gibberish and I don't have anything to show for proof, except my word: I've read it in a book quite a while ago, can't recall the author or the title, and I've tried it myself for a while when I was having a real hard time and I think it helped. (It was personal and illness related so you'll excuse me if I don't tell you what it was about). Maybe it was just a placebo effect, maybe not. Anyway, you'll know for sure if you try, I guess.
The email client would have to somehow "record" every time you moved or copied something into a folder (or numerous folders), and then, when a message fit that criteria, it would have to replicate that action, move/copy, to the specified folder or folders. I don't think it's all that hard, but I don't think it's been done in major email clients.
Provided you find a bayesian filter which can use arbitrary destinations, Sylpheed Claws can easily take care of the automatic filtering using its folder processing rules.
But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't set GDK_USE_XFT. Enjoy some nice jaggy fonts:)
If you're gonna promote non-AA fonts, at least let's do it properly. Actually, yes, it can be a nice experience to only activate AA from a certain size upwards, say 10 or 12 pixels. And the way to do that is either through Gnome's own configuration, or by changing your FontConfig settings via ~/.fonts.conf. And using some quality TTF fonts will make everything look even better. Seriously, I don't use AA under 12px. Jagged edges don't have an effect unless the font is really big or the font is really ugly. In all other cases, small fonts are much easier to read without AA.
Since we're talking about fiction vs. real life, Robinson's Red Mars has pretty much covered all aspects of the Mars colonization, I think. Blue Mars and Green Mars (the next two books in the trilogy) speculate even further into the future and build on the speculations already in Red Mars, therefore they are not so vivid.
But Red Mars has succeeded to touch on a lot of the problems Mars could offer mankind, from "who owns Mars" to "should we terraform it or preserve it for research". It's chilling to see things on paper brought to life. However, the main thing that's different from the book is that the space industry is currently not quite at the level described there, so I hope we'll get to talk about it before we start doing it. Having a set of agreements and laws ready long before the real thing comes to life is preferrable IMO.
I just asked my non-geek roommate, "What's the last time you used a floppy disk?" And he thought for a minute and said, "I can't remember!" That's how yesterday the floppy disk is. Sure, it's needed to boot a computer that's so old it can't boot from CD, but that just means a rescue floppy has a place in a PC maint/repair kit, along with spare jumpers, and a Windows 95 install CD. It doesn't make it any less obsolete.
Ah, but can you give me one example of another computer storage media that is as widely supported in the computer world, even today? Sure, different operating systems may format the disk differently so one particular floppy-disk may not be directly usable on any machine, but the floppy in general is still everywhere.
I for one can't think of any other media that has surpassed the floppy in terms of ease of use, wide support and read-write ability. The ones that come the closest, like write-on-the-fly CD-RW, USB flash sticks or ZIP disks, are severely outnumbered and handicapped by the competition among various vendors trying to impose their own proprietary products.
Think about it: the closest second in popularity is actually the write-once CD. But can you go to a mate's computer with a CD in hand and leave 10 seconds later with a file on it, like you can with a floppy? Without having to fire up special CD-writing software? Without having to throw the disk sometime later? Without having seconds thoughts about shelling out the dough for a quality CD-RW? Without having to format or re-erase it previously?
Let's face it, the floppy-disk was and is an yet unsurpassed success, at least for me, and I seriously question the once-in-a-while attempts of PC vendors like Dell who try to ban it.
I've seen the "floppy is so obsolete" oppinion arise again and again. Yet no one seems to really be able to offer something as good in return, otherwise it would have disapeared by now, would it have not? It's not like the plotting of evil leprechauns is the thing keeping floppies around, they're still around for a sound reason.
You could have an editor where you type arbitrary characters and which then warns if they veer off the DTD, as you suggest. But this would get annoying since if you are typing 'hello' then the document is not well-formed from typing the first character until you have typed the last. So you'd get lots of warning lights all the time.
It's how most "programmer editors" work. It actually makes for a fast and easy to use syntax checker: if you see that all the text has turned green it's very easy to go up and find the point where you forgot to close a string, for instance.
You may be kidding here, but I was amazed to see how many people, web developers, people with a clue so to speak, still openly prefer to use Internet Explorer. I honest to God fail to see why. I understand that a clueless user would use whatever is put in front if him. But a knowledgeable developer?
I've seen co-workers and aquintances do it. One of them spent half a day finding spyware and trojans with Ad-Aware and similar tools. He found over a hundred items, most of which were IE related. He used Mozilla for a day or two, quietly agreeing to all its fine points I was underlining. Then on the third he was back to using Explorer. He just stared at me blankly when I asked why.
Another guy I talked with on a forum said he "feels" that IE responds the quickest on his system, so he's willing to overlook the popups, the inability to block ads, the lack of tabs, the flaky security, for this. "I'll just wait until MS implements popup blockers and tabs", he said.
A third guy was quick to point out that IE is perfectly usable "as long as you also use a firewall, a good antivirus and some kind of proxy such as Promixtron". Great. So I have to use 3 additional pieces of software on the same system just to make up for one crappy browser. Go logic!
I'm telling you, it's more than just using the browser you find preinstalled. I'm guessing some kind of brainwashing is involved after all.
One thing I haven't seen much of is an XML editor which does real-time validation of the document against a DTD or XML Schema. The ones I've seen do only XML syntax (ie. well-forming) validation in real time, and syntax highlighting as a benefic side-effect. But you have to start the validation against DTD/Schema by hand (ie. push a button) and the feedback is in many cases raw output from the validator presented in a separate pane or window. What I'd like is the highlighting to give me useful feedback the split second I stray off of the DTD/Schema, as I type, with the additional more verbose messages in a separate pane.
Another issue I have with XML editors is their take on suggesting completion alternatives for the element or attribute currently under the cursor. Of course, most give you everything the DTD or Schema for the document has to offer. However, I'd like some kind of "most likely to be used" mode I can switch on/off and which will reduce the available completion set to the things that are most likely to be used for that particular document and position.
I'd imagine they will go with Symantec, and integrate similar to the way the took on Diskeeper for defragmentation. Which is nice for Symantec and easy for Microsoft, but it *completely* shafts every other antivirus vendor.
MS doesn't even need to do that. It's been already mentioned once or twice in earlier posts: MS bought an East-European antivirus maker called RAV a few months back. IIRC, RAV was regarded as pretty good antivirus solution. MS bought them out, payed the owners, hired a handful of developers and discontinued the product after a few months of updates. I understand it was an especially bad blow for Linux users, because RAV was widely used and efficient on Linux servers as well as on Windows.
So if you ask me, this is the obvious and logical next step: putting the AV solution they bought where they usually put stuff like this, bundle it with Windows. And from what I gather from the way they went about it, they don't intend to to depend on Symantec or other AV vendor for this.
If you feel like taking on the challenge you have the potential to make yourself look very good.
Ask yourself: what happens if you take the promotion? If you do turn it around, all the best for you. If you don't, will the superiors understand it's not necessarily your fault or will they just want a scapegoat? If you do accept, consider very carefully the team you're gonna work with and if you really think you (one man) can turn things around. From where I stand it's a win double - lose it all kind of situation.
You could stay behind but that is generally regarded very badly IMO. Can't take the responsability, ungrateful, undecisive, not interested in promoting... take your pick.
I have seen quite a few machines where windows wouldn't boot due to accidental file renaming, and quite a few from deliberate renaming through ignorance.
When the problem is pointed out, the response has pretty much the same: "Why does it let me do it, then?" or "Why is it so easy to do if it's wrong?"
Wait a minute, this is not an interface issue anymore. If an operating system lets arbitrary users rename essential files than that would be a security issue already.
And even if they were logged in as administrator, renaming files in bulk out of malice, ignorance or playful nature (kids) doesn't have anything to do with the interface either.
I always thought there's more to this, and this expression doesn't say it right. It should be "content, structure and aspect". Content is the actual (linear) content; structure is the way it gets displayed in 2 dimensions; and aspect is the final touch (fonts, colors). Usually people bundle the last two together, but as a fellow poster said above in real life you have to separate them eventually doing something server-side or using XSLT.
There are many already available solutions from established distro's out there. Use one of them, like the previous posters suggested. Making a custom boot CD to be used for rescue/backup is not exactly easy for a Linux newbie, since it requires a fair understanding of the operating system's inner workings. Sure, there are tutorials and examples out there, that's how I've learned too, but my guess is that in a corporate environment you can't afford to lose time in this manner.
That combined with the philosophy of "everything is done from the context menu", the fact that said menu is broken down into hierarchies several levels deep (however logical) with few shortcuts (Adobe spent an insane amount of money on this part of their UI design and it shows) and the messy array of tool and property boxes that inevitably clutter the screen (on that point, Photoshop isn't much better), makes the Gimp slower to work with than I'd like, regardless of how impressively powerful the underlying framework is. I'm looking forward to see what has improved so far, though, and I have good hopes for the future.
That's not really true. The GTK toolkit that Gimp uses allows you to redefine the keyboard shortcut for any menu entry, anywhere. In Photoshop you're restricted to whatever Adobe has set up for you.
I honestly don't know what kind of hardware you run, but on my P4 2.4Ghz, KDE is lightening fast. If the whole KDE system takes up 3GB of disk space on my dual 320GB system, who cares?
Well, gee, and I bet that at 2.4 GHz Mozilla and other bloat monsters also exhibit blazing speed. However, even if the latest trend right now is having CPU's in the 2.5 GHz range, a lot of people out there still work with 600MHz, 800MHz, 1.2GHz, and so on.
Hell, this issue is not even related to a particular CPU speed generation; traditional bloatware have always been slow. The developers seem to have always relied on the next CPU performance wave to save face and so people like you are able to say "but look, with my latest CPU it works great!" Sure it does, now; just wait a couple of major releases, wanna guess how it's gonna work then? It's never cool to stop adding features and focus on performance; so it's unavoidable, the bloat keeps swelling and the performance improvements never come.
I don't have anything against KDE, Mozilla and other fine software otherwise. I understand that the so called "bloat" comes from necessary complexity. But let's not hide our heads in the sand here.
Making $12k/yr in a suburban environment in Mexico (just pulling a ficticious example out of my hat here), might very well land you a better standard of living than making $50k-to-$100k somewhere in California.
...but don't drink the water.
I don't mean this as a funny statement, but rather to illustrate what previous posters meant by "lower living standards". Better start taking such mundane details seriously if you really mean going to another country. The pay/expenses ratio may be better in that other country, but you'd have to get used to towns filled with stray dogs or very poor roads or lousy health services or extreme beaurocracy and the list can go on. The question being, are you the kind of person who will put up with that or not?
I'm not at all knowledgeable about stuff like this. I was wondering about the liquid oxygen they use as fuel and common misconceptions about it. Logic tells me that's a very cold substance, what kind of hazard dangers are we talking about? I ask because I've seen stuff I suspect to be pretty wild, like in one of those "asteroid's gonna hit Earth" movies where the liquid oxygen escaped from the tanks inside the space station and caught fire...??? To me that seems like a wild idea but as I said, I'm far from an expert.
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In your journal entry you said:
It's time to decide whether Linux wants to be a "hacker's system" where everything is compiled from source, or a "desktop system" where binary compatibility and simple installation is a must.
I don't think "someone" should decide to make Linux one or the other. The beauty of Linux is that it can do both, and more. What it needs, however, is dedicated people to see through the effort to make Linux implementations that work one way or the other.
Look at Gentoo, for instance, it has exploited the "I am a geek who likes to compile from source" niche wonderfully.
And at the other end of the spectrum, the HomeBase Desktop from OEone is IMHO a wonderful example of integrated, functional and easy to use Linux desktop. I wonder how many people have ever heard of HomeBase -- not many apparently if they still say "no Linux for the desktop".
So this brings me to ask "just what the hell do people want?" There ARE 5000 different Linux implementations out there. Some of them DO cover what you want. So what gives? I guess too much choice can hurt after all.
Isn't making an interface usable something interesting? Something challenging? Aren't challenges something geeks do well? Ignore Microsoft. Why not make the best interface that can be made? It'll take time but it'll arrive. I'd like to see lots of distributions with a strong core feature set to each of them, but with each carrying an ever varying application set. Think KDE on a large scale.
What I find interesting is that whenever someone says "usability" and "linux", people automatically assume "the graphical interface".
How about the rest? A well thought out OS, as far as usability is concerned, is thought so from the ground up.
Pardon me, but I'm going to point at Mac OS X. It's definitely not just the interface that's different, that's just the icing on the cake. The underlaying OS is vastly different from your average Linux distro, because the way it is organized. It has to do with everything: the bootscripts, the security, the application packaging, the filesystem organization, etc.
Think about it: those guys at Apple probably sat down and said "let's make it easy on the user", then they started doing things more or less from scratch. Only some of the people who contribute to Linux give a thought to the basic design principles that Linux is organized upon. No I don't mean the freaking graphical interface, I mean everything. The result is obvious.
The Linux heritage is UNIX, which has always been a black hole of usability. UNIX was always an OS designed by the extra-power users for other extra-power users. Naturally, Linux inherits all the flaws in it.
Frankly, I think it will take something like 10 or 20 years for Linux to become usable (you know what I mean by usable, don't start nitpicking please) and impose itself on the market. If it won't be too late by then. Why? Because companies like Apple and Microsoft can afford to redesign the entire operating system every few years. Think about how the Windows systems have evolved, or how Mac did. Eventually, one of these summers, you're going to look at the new Windows system and say "dude, that looks so good and usable, and it's thought out so well." People already say this about Mac, it's just the price tag for the hardware keeping them back.
Granted, the Linux community could do the same in 6 months to 1 year. The problem is that they don't even begin to acknowledge the need for a complete overhaul. The replies to this post will probably say "what's wrong with Linux as it is today?" Therein lies the problem.
There are already avangardist projects like GoboLinux or Zero Install (heck, even SELinux makes a good example, see how many adopt that soon) out there who try to challenge the basics of the Linux system design, but not many people take them seriously. It's a shame, because if anything, such projects have proved that you can do anything with Linux, as long as enough people start to see the need for the change.
Every year, the major distro's come up with bells and whistles, and better hardware detection, and package newer versions of the software, and better tools to tie together with ducttape the problems in the system. And we delude ourselves into thinking that Linux systems are evolving. Please. No, I don't mean the kernel or the applications, I mean the systems.
Sigh. You'd think there would be a breakthrough at some point, somewhere. That someone would understand the need for fundamental changes. That someone would design a new breed of Linux system. That it would implement that new system to a fairly usable point. That a company would appear to pick it up and bring it to the masses. That the community would embrace it.
But it doesn't happen. There are 5 hops I mentioned here, and something happens at some point. I can figure out some reasons and you can probably figure them out too. So we all clap for the 10th version of the same old distros, going on the 20th.
...no?
That's not how copyright works. Most often you don't even have to publish anything and the copyright still applies. AFAIK it applies to the love poem notebook you hide in the closet under the pijamas. Check this out for a nice rundown of copyright vs patents vs trademarks, plus more insight into patents.
eMacs are also cheap in the long run, the things are freakin' bulletproof, I've got two labs of them in the hands of hyperactive fourth-graders and they're totally unscathed after two years (excepting keyboards and mice). The Dell labs we have with GX150s have all had their front panels knocked out and CD-ROM trays damaged, most floppy drives will kill disks, and the rat's nest of cables is getting unmanageable.
Man, come on, seriously now. What's this now, a Mac being more sturdy than a PC? What will it be next: "my Mac can smash your PC to bits if it falls on it"? Kinda reminds me of "my brother can beat your brother and throw him over that fence with one hand"-talk back when we were five, doesn't it?
Mac apps are usually installed by dragging the application from the mounted DMG file (a compressed file system) into the Applications folder. Much easier than apt-get or Windows installers.
That's because those Mac apps are archives organized to be fully self-contained, so they are ready to go instantly.
What I mean by "self-contained" is something somewhat similar (in certain points) to Zero Install.
If you want another analogy, imagine compiling a Linux application for i386, with --prefix=/opt/appname (which means etc/, share/ everything gets under /opt/appname for that app), and shipping the /opt/appname tarball with some special files in it that will alow the unpacker on the target systems to do some nifty tricks with it .
So it's not such a different thing from a .deb or a .rpm package, it just puts a different twist on the user experience.
And on that note, let me point out that what this guy wants isn't exactly best described by "subliminal messages". I think he meant "self-suggestion messages". The difference is that you don't have to be tricked by it. You know it's there, you want it to work, you just let it slip out of your immediate attention, and that's where it makes its effect.
As for the technical means, you just have to record a message and simply mix it with audio tracks. For best results: the message should be spoken by the person intented for; it should be uttered in a low, monotonous voice; the exact same message should be repeated over and over, with the exact same length and contents; it helps if it's something fairly short; the music shouldn't drown it completely ie. it should be barely but still audible.
It also works if you just relax and listen to the message by itself, without music, but it's harder to slip out of focus and let the message make its effect. A good alternative case is simply to play it while you sleep, or when you do something that involves a lot of focus, such as working on something important.
Now this probably sounds like gibberish and I don't have anything to show for proof, except my word: I've read it in a book quite a while ago, can't recall the author or the title, and I've tried it myself for a while when I was having a real hard time and I think it helped. (It was personal and illness related so you'll excuse me if I don't tell you what it was about). Maybe it was just a placebo effect, maybe not. Anyway, you'll know for sure if you try, I guess.
The email client would have to somehow "record" every time you moved or copied something into a folder (or numerous folders), and then, when a message fit that criteria, it would have to replicate that action, move/copy, to the specified folder or folders. I don't think it's all that hard, but I don't think it's been done in major email clients.
Provided you find a bayesian filter which can use arbitrary destinations, Sylpheed Claws can easily take care of the automatic filtering using its folder processing rules.
But that's not even considering that you can still use non-AA fonts with GTK2. Use the fonts that come with X, and don't set GDK_USE_XFT. Enjoy some nice jaggy fonts :)
If you're gonna promote non-AA fonts, at least let's do it properly. Actually, yes, it can be a nice experience to only activate AA from a certain size upwards, say 10 or 12 pixels. And the way to do that is either through Gnome's own configuration, or by changing your FontConfig settings via ~/.fonts.conf. And using some quality TTF fonts will make everything look even better. Seriously, I don't use AA under 12px. Jagged edges don't have an effect unless the font is really big or the font is really ugly. In all other cases, small fonts are much easier to read without AA.
Since we're talking about fiction vs. real life, Robinson's Red Mars has pretty much covered all aspects of the Mars colonization, I think. Blue Mars and Green Mars (the next two books in the trilogy) speculate even further into the future and build on the speculations already in Red Mars, therefore they are not so vivid.
But Red Mars has succeeded to touch on a lot of the problems Mars could offer mankind, from "who owns Mars" to "should we terraform it or preserve it for research". It's chilling to see things on paper brought to life. However, the main thing that's different from the book is that the space industry is currently not quite at the level described there, so I hope we'll get to talk about it before we start doing it. Having a set of agreements and laws ready long before the real thing comes to life is preferrable IMO.
Ah, but can you give me one example of another computer storage media that is as widely supported in the computer world, even today? Sure, different operating systems may format the disk differently so one particular floppy-disk may not be directly usable on any machine, but the floppy in general is still everywhere.
I for one can't think of any other media that has surpassed the floppy in terms of ease of use, wide support and read-write ability. The ones that come the closest, like write-on-the-fly CD-RW, USB flash sticks or ZIP disks, are severely outnumbered and handicapped by the competition among various vendors trying to impose their own proprietary products.
Think about it: the closest second in popularity is actually the write-once CD. But can you go to a mate's computer with a CD in hand and leave 10 seconds later with a file on it, like you can with a floppy? Without having to fire up special CD-writing software? Without having to throw the disk sometime later? Without having seconds thoughts about shelling out the dough for a quality CD-RW? Without having to format or re-erase it previously?
Let's face it, the floppy-disk was and is an yet unsurpassed success, at least for me, and I seriously question the once-in-a-while attempts of PC vendors like Dell who try to ban it.
I've seen the "floppy is so obsolete" oppinion arise again and again. Yet no one seems to really be able to offer something as good in return, otherwise it would have disapeared by now, would it have not? It's not like the plotting of evil leprechauns is the thing keeping floppies around, they're still around for a sound reason.
Make yourself indispensable. Never comment your code.
You could have an editor where you type arbitrary characters and which then warns if they veer off the DTD, as you suggest. But this would get annoying since if you are typing 'hello' then the document is not well-formed from typing the first character until you have typed the last. So you'd get lots of warning lights all the time.
It's how most "programmer editors" work. It actually makes for a fast and easy to use syntax checker: if you see that all the text has turned green it's very easy to go up and find the point where you forgot to close a string, for instance.You may be kidding here, but I was amazed to see how many people, web developers, people with a clue so to speak, still openly prefer to use Internet Explorer. I honest to God fail to see why. I understand that a clueless user would use whatever is put in front if him. But a knowledgeable developer?
I've seen co-workers and aquintances do it. One of them spent half a day finding spyware and trojans with Ad-Aware and similar tools. He found over a hundred items, most of which were IE related. He used Mozilla for a day or two, quietly agreeing to all its fine points I was underlining. Then on the third he was back to using Explorer. He just stared at me blankly when I asked why.
Another guy I talked with on a forum said he "feels" that IE responds the quickest on his system, so he's willing to overlook the popups, the inability to block ads, the lack of tabs, the flaky security, for this. "I'll just wait until MS implements popup blockers and tabs", he said.
A third guy was quick to point out that IE is perfectly usable "as long as you also use a firewall, a good antivirus and some kind of proxy such as Promixtron". Great. So I have to use 3 additional pieces of software on the same system just to make up for one crappy browser. Go logic!
I'm telling you, it's more than just using the browser you find preinstalled. I'm guessing some kind of brainwashing is involved after all.
One thing I haven't seen much of is an XML editor which does real-time validation of the document against a DTD or XML Schema. The ones I've seen do only XML syntax (ie. well-forming) validation in real time, and syntax highlighting as a benefic side-effect. But you have to start the validation against DTD/Schema by hand (ie. push a button) and the feedback is in many cases raw output from the validator presented in a separate pane or window. What I'd like is the highlighting to give me useful feedback the split second I stray off of the DTD/Schema, as I type, with the additional more verbose messages in a separate pane.
Another issue I have with XML editors is their take on suggesting completion alternatives for the element or attribute currently under the cursor. Of course, most give you everything the DTD or Schema for the document has to offer. However, I'd like some kind of "most likely to be used" mode I can switch on/off and which will reduce the available completion set to the things that are most likely to be used for that particular document and position.
I'd imagine they will go with Symantec, and integrate similar to the way the took on Diskeeper for defragmentation. Which is nice for Symantec and easy for Microsoft, but it *completely* shafts every other antivirus vendor.
MS doesn't even need to do that. It's been already mentioned once or twice in earlier posts: MS bought an East-European antivirus maker called RAV a few months back. IIRC, RAV was regarded as pretty good antivirus solution. MS bought them out, payed the owners, hired a handful of developers and discontinued the product after a few months of updates. I understand it was an especially bad blow for Linux users, because RAV was widely used and efficient on Linux servers as well as on Windows.
So if you ask me, this is the obvious and logical next step: putting the AV solution they bought where they usually put stuff like this, bundle it with Windows. And from what I gather from the way they went about it, they don't intend to to depend on Symantec or other AV vendor for this.
If you feel like taking on the challenge you have the potential to make yourself look very good.
Ask yourself: what happens if you take the promotion? If you do turn it around, all the best for you. If you don't, will the superiors understand it's not necessarily your fault or will they just want a scapegoat? If you do accept, consider very carefully the team you're gonna work with and if you really think you (one man) can turn things around. From where I stand it's a win double - lose it all kind of situation.
You could stay behind but that is generally regarded very badly IMO. Can't take the responsability, ungrateful, undecisive, not interested in promoting... take your pick.
Wait a minute, this is not an interface issue anymore. If an operating system lets arbitrary users rename essential files than that would be a security issue already.
And even if they were logged in as administrator, renaming files in bulk out of malice, ignorance or playful nature (kids) doesn't have anything to do with the interface either.
I always thought there's more to this, and this expression doesn't say it right. It should be "content, structure and aspect". Content is the actual (linear) content; structure is the way it gets displayed in 2 dimensions; and aspect is the final touch (fonts, colors). Usually people bundle the last two together, but as a fellow poster said above in real life you have to separate them eventually doing something server-side or using XSLT.
The concept of lifestreams seems interesting and is an approage really different from the "classic" desktop.
There are many already available solutions from established distro's out there. Use one of them, like the previous posters suggested. Making a custom boot CD to be used for rescue/backup is not exactly easy for a Linux newbie, since it requires a fair understanding of the operating system's inner workings. Sure, there are tutorials and examples out there, that's how I've learned too, but my guess is that in a corporate environment you can't afford to lose time in this manner.
That combined with the philosophy of "everything is done from the context menu", the fact that said menu is broken down into hierarchies several levels deep (however logical) with few shortcuts (Adobe spent an insane amount of money on this part of their UI design and it shows) and the messy array of tool and property boxes that inevitably clutter the screen (on that point, Photoshop isn't much better), makes the Gimp slower to work with than I'd like, regardless of how impressively powerful the underlying framework is. I'm looking forward to see what has improved so far, though, and I have good hopes for the future.
That's not really true. The GTK toolkit that Gimp uses allows you to redefine the keyboard shortcut for any menu entry, anywhere. In Photoshop you're restricted to whatever Adobe has set up for you.
I honestly don't know what kind of hardware you run, but on my P4 2.4Ghz, KDE is lightening fast. If the whole KDE system takes up 3GB of disk space on my dual 320GB system, who cares?
Well, gee, and I bet that at 2.4 GHz Mozilla and other bloat monsters also exhibit blazing speed. However, even if the latest trend right now is having CPU's in the 2.5 GHz range, a lot of people out there still work with 600MHz, 800MHz, 1.2GHz, and so on.
Hell, this issue is not even related to a particular CPU speed generation; traditional bloatware have always been slow. The developers seem to have always relied on the next CPU performance wave to save face and so people like you are able to say "but look, with my latest CPU it works great!" Sure it does, now; just wait a couple of major releases, wanna guess how it's gonna work then? It's never cool to stop adding features and focus on performance; so it's unavoidable, the bloat keeps swelling and the performance improvements never come.
I don't have anything against KDE, Mozilla and other fine software otherwise. I understand that the so called "bloat" comes from necessary complexity. But let's not hide our heads in the sand here.
Making $12k/yr in a suburban environment in Mexico (just pulling a ficticious example out of my hat here), might very well land you a better standard of living than making $50k-to-$100k somewhere in California.
...but don't drink the water.
I don't mean this as a funny statement, but rather to illustrate what previous posters meant by "lower living standards". Better start taking such mundane details seriously if you really mean going to another country. The pay/expenses ratio may be better in that other country, but you'd have to get used to towns filled with stray dogs or very poor roads or lousy health services or extreme beaurocracy and the list can go on. The question being, are you the kind of person who will put up with that or not?
I'm not at all knowledgeable about stuff like this. I was wondering about the liquid oxygen they use as fuel and common misconceptions about it. Logic tells me that's a very cold substance, what kind of hazard dangers are we talking about? I ask because I've seen stuff I suspect to be pretty wild, like in one of those "asteroid's gonna hit Earth" movies where the liquid oxygen escaped from the tanks inside the space station and caught fire...??? To me that seems like a wild idea but as I said, I'm far from an expert.