"Some small to midsized business owner who was trying to keep his company out of court"
By rewarding people who threaten legal action without proper claims? And thus encouraging such action? The last thing that's going to result is less legal costs, for anyone.
Try creating a square or circular selection (you can use the ctrl, shift keys to do various things like making a rectangle square while you're selecting), and then paint into your mask with an airbrush or paint tool.
Or press ctrl-k to kill (delete, whiten, or make transparent) your selected area, and then use the fill tool.
"If you left or died, would someone else be able to continue your work or would it be more efficient to just start over?"
You're pretty much confirming peoples' suspicions here -- if a craftsman or architect or composer or dressmaker or garden-designer died or left in the middle of a project, then there wouldn't be anyone who could carry on where they left off. You'd have to get someone else to look at what's done so far, and incorporate it into their own, new design.
Same with good software.
But if you're unlucky, you can get companies with people like Isonicotine working there, who want an assembly-line of programmers, where if one gets killed, nobody cares because they can continue as if nothing happened. Or if one person leaves, they don't care because they want their workers to be cheap and replaceable.
"In a demonstration, Otellini used a PC to beam an episode of "The Simpsons" to a plasma TV, while another Intel executive booted and rebooted a game with the same machine."
So they know how the television DRM debate will work out then...
"Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about commercial websites (like Salon)"
Yep, it's pretty awful watching people like Salon trying to operate a website -- kind'a like watching an amateur at anything failing.
For any other website, it's surprisingly simple. Write something interesting, put it on the web, and people come to your site and read it.
Then newspaper companies try the same, and completely fail.
They design a subscription system, spend years sorting out credit-card handling, account management, setting up the website to track people, setting up systems to stop images being linked to, setting up referer logs and browser-detects, setting up banner advert servers, loggers, and systems to charge advertisers. Setting up systems to convert simple text stories into flash or images or 10 frames, or anything to make it more difficult to copy.
And then after a hundred thousand dollars have disappeared into website design, start copying stories from the newspaper onto the website. And wonder why so few people are jumping the hurdles to get to any of their content.
Then having a meeting, wondering why nobody's subscribed, and spending thousands more dollars setting up a system where people can watch an advert and do something to prove they read it, and setting up a temporary ID and making it so people can use that ID to read content, and doing the logging and the tracking and the cookies to make sure that only one person can use each ID at a time.
And they wonder why the website isn't making a profit.
Eventually they get a few thousands of subscribers, and rack their brains trying to think how to make the site more profitable, even as they spend 60K per year on DBAs to handle all the user-ID and user-tracking databases, and the same again on support staff to handle lost passwords and account cancellations.
Yep, it's like watching a newbie bricklayer's wall falling down each time he builds it and wondering what's wrong. So bad to watch, you almost feel compelled to go over and offer them a clue. But they'd never take it. They know what they want, and it's big-budget.
"Ads can be (are not always) annoying, in any medium, but they make the content possible."
Because there wasn't anything on the internet before people came along thinking they could get fantastically rich by posting tripe and charging for it?
Oh look, a free independant website. And another. And another. Must be an optical illusion.
Creative have a java chat applet for technical support (or sales support), and it's acutally a lot easier than trying to get information on the web. "why is Nomad Zen NX so much cheaper than Nomad Zen" sort of questions, for example.
Although, the advantage of internet shopping is that, no matter how many people are browsing a particular category of amazon.co.uk, at least you're not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with any of them!
"Could I help you sir?" Dammit, I thought this was an internet site... go away, locust-like salespeople!
"24 time zones means it's day X for 48 hours somewhere on the planet."
Not on google.co.uk, it isn't. Localised website, localised timezone.
Looks like google spent a bit too long celebrating, and didn't get back into the office to change the logo until after a night and a day at O'Neill's...
"This seems like something more appropriate for the American Highway system"
The biggest scale model you could build in the USA would be about 2600km across, making it about 1:1E+6 scale. But to do that, you'd need a scale model of the sun that's 1300 metres in diameter.
Thinking about the technology that the USA has, you could probably make a glowing ball of fire that's 1.3km across, but I'd rather you didn't...
"they have one along the smithsonian museums, it's the length of the mall"
They have one in Sweden, it's the length of the country:
"The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest model of our planetary system, at a scale of 1:20 million. The Sun is represented by the Globe arena in Stockholm, the largest spherical building in the world. The planets are placed and sized according to scale with the inner planets being in Stockholm and Jupiter (diameter 7.3 m) at the International airport Arlanda. The outer planets follow in the same direction with Saturn in Uppsala and Pluto in Delsbo, 300 km from the Globe. At each planet station, exhibits provide information about astronomy and the natural sciences, and also about related mythology and culture."
No, he's just confused as to why the mouse-movements he's used to get the control panel every day for the last 3 years suddenly don't work.
It's a minor change, I admit. But listen to the people who evaluate KDE on desktops. To them, having the start menu in a different place, or having the control panel laid out differently to windows is important enough that they wave their hands and wail that it will cost millions of pounds to retrain people to use DrakConf instead of the control panel. Yet these differences occur even within different versions of Windows.
"It's right there."
It's 2/3 of the way across the screen, about 400 pixels across and 300 pixels up. In every other version, it was on the bottom left of the screen.
(don't complain about the low screen resolution, it's a default installation as supplied by Dell)
"Again, classic mode, if you really need it."
Again, that doesn't help the first time. You have to spend the half-hour reconfiguring things to get a system that "hasn't changed since Windows95"
"Maybe he should try a google search to find that stuff out?"
You're suggesting a google search to find out how to configure Windows? This is supposed to be easy to use.
And how do you get to google anyway, if you don't have an IP address and default gateway and DNS server setup yet?
"That's what you end up doing with Linux anyway."
We're discussing Windows here, not Linux.
But if your defence of Windows usability is "it's no worse than Linux", then that speaks for itself really.
"Let me guess, the MCSE contractor said to do it? Did he bill you hours for it? You just got taken to task. Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting to reset all of those XP machines to classic mode? Problem solved.
Wow, technical troubleshooting by someone with no idea of the question.
The reformat XP to 2000 was suggested by a software engineer, who had already wasted most of the day just setting up WindowsXP so that it was usable. It was a permanent member of staff, doing the installations during time on his own project budget. WindowsXP machines were already set to classic mode, that was not the problem.
The problem was that WindowsXP either stopped responding, or crashed the machine, about 5-6 times in a 2 hour period. The people concerned had to get a complex system involving 20 networked PCs up and running within a few days, and wasting one of those days with a difficult-to-use operating system that was crashing even as it tried to display the control panel (this was brand-new unmodified Dell computer) was costing them too much. The decision was made to install MS-Windows 2000, which as you say, doesn't crash. [unless you run java]
There was also a suggestion that the automatic updates was causing our CPU-intensive application to crash, but we never got around to investigating this because the computer stopped responding when we tried to use the "System" control panel, and after that, we had to get rid of WindowsXP, just to get some work done.
"Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting"
Maybe we should have learnt how to do scripting on Windows. Last time I tried, Windows scripting couldn't even reliably copy files between two machines, so it doesn't inspire me with confidence. What config file do you have to edit to make Windows appear in classic mode then? Can you save the configuration and use it on another machine?
"Fuck. Wow. I have no response. Is he a moron? Is he blind? It's right there."
And they say linux advocates were impolite about people who couldn't use their software...
Windows2000: Start, Settings, Control panel.
WindowsXP: Start... err.. what the fuck is that, there's a purple animation taking up half my screen!
To "just turn it off" involves: Right-click on the start menu, "properties", start menu properties, "classic", customise, scroll to bottom of list, small icons, ok. Now finally we have a menu which "hasn't changed since Windows95"
And it's like that for every single setting you care to mention. Want to turn off the idiotic "I'm sorry dave, I can't allow you to see the c:\winnt folder" option? Tools, "Folder options", display options, scroll down looking for boxes and ticking them.
Want to stop it making a fucking annoying jingle every time the PC starts? (and do this on 10 PCs in half a day) - start, settings, control panel, sounds and multimedia, "no sounds" scheme, click "OK", notice that "OK" was actually a question about saving the default sound settings, cancel the dialog box, reselect the "no sounds" scheme, click "no" this time, and "OK" in the dialog box. Repeat for machine 2...
This is pre-installed copies of Windows on new Dell machines which have had all their relevant software and drivers already installed. It takes about a half-hour just to make it usable.
I'm not sure how this is easier or more consistant than just copying a backup of your linux applications' configuration files onto the disk. (and before you ask, file managers, volume controls, and scheduled sounds are applications, as much as Windows people would like to think of them as the O/S kernel)
"If you ever want Linux to become a real destop choice to Joe User, it must get more 'newbieized'."
One of the great things about open-source apps is that while the learning curve might be steep, you only need learn it once. If you know how to do x on linux, you know it. But on Windows, it'll probably be in a different dialog box each time you get a new version.
So while it's sometimes nice to know that to set your IP address, you go to control-panel, "classic view", networking, LAN card 1, properties, protocols, TCP/IP, properties, it was in a different place on WindowsNT, and it was in a different place on Windows98, and it'll probably be in a different place in Windows Longhorn. And they'll rearrange the control panel again. And they'll rearrange the start menu again.
Today I watched an experienced contractor, a Windows programmer and MCSE, look blankly at the WindowsXP start menu for almost half a minute, wondering what he needed to do to get the control panel (despite using it all the time in Windows2000). If you know how to set an option in Linux, you could probably do it without even knowing or noticing what flavour of *nix you were running, let alone the version or the distro.
Yes, we just reformatted a load of WindowsXP machines to put Windows2000 on them. It's just that unbearable...
"Which is why we should move to something like XML based configuration files."
Because you'll get more typing practise using "<someitem>value</someitem>" rather than "name=value"?
Do XML users have some special keyboard with "<" and ">" where the spacebar should be, or something? I can't understand why they keep going on about files being human-editable.
"I suggest you take that complaint up with Autodesk; MS can hardly be held responsible for how other companies store their apps' configuration settings, and the documentation they may or may not provide."
I think the idea was that config files provide inline documentation, and the MS-Windows Registry doesn't. Even if you wanted to add documentation to parts of the registry (which people don't, because they don't think anyone will edit it manually), then there's no easy way to do it. It's not like adding a few lines of comments in a text file explaining what the next thing does and what the options are.
Picking a random example (this was the first file I looked at on my system, I didn't go looking for an especially clear one), these are the first few lines of a default openoffice.conf on a Mandrake machine:
### Define font scaling (default: not set). # If set to "AUTO", font scaling is set based on the current display # resolution of first screen. Otherwise, this shall be a valid number. FONT_SCALING="AUTO"
Slashdot Mirror
"Flying through windows is a very cool feature, but then what?"
Screenshots?
"now what am I supposed to do with 10 gallons of tar and a sack of feathers?"
Are we allowed to discuss explosives anymore with americans?
"Some small to midsized business owner who was trying to keep his company out of court"
By rewarding people who threaten legal action without proper claims? And thus encouraging such action? The last thing that's going to result is less legal costs, for anyone.
"and the release of the Java Desktop"
Written in what languages? Oh yeah, C and C++ mainly.
"You're advocating boycotting the POS browser that at least 95% of people use"
boycotting? You can do better than that. How about just crashing their browser, and possibly their computer too from your website.
They'll soon learn..
"For instance, I frequently draw shapes (you know, circles, squares, rectangles, etc)"
Try creating a square or circular selection (you can use the ctrl, shift keys to do various things like making a rectangle square while you're selecting), and then paint into your mask with an airbrush or paint tool.
Or press ctrl-k to kill (delete, whiten, or make transparent) your selected area, and then use the fill tool.
"I consider it to be more inefficient to have companyname.info, companyname.com, companyname.net, companyname.org, companyname.mail, etc"
How about companyname.shop.fr and companyname.restaurant.uk?
If you're going to use trademarks, may as well use them properly -- unique in their own region, and line of business...
"If you left or died, would someone else be able to continue your work or would it be more efficient to just start over?"
You're pretty much confirming peoples' suspicions here -- if a craftsman or architect or composer or dressmaker or garden-designer died or left in the middle of a project, then there wouldn't be anyone who could carry on where they left off. You'd have to get someone else to look at what's done so far, and incorporate it into their own, new design.
Same with good software.
But if you're unlucky, you can get companies with people like Isonicotine working there, who want an assembly-line of programmers, where if one gets killed, nobody cares because they can continue as if nothing happened. Or if one person leaves, they don't care because they want their workers to be cheap and replaceable.
Not a very nice way to work...
"Speaking of names, does anyone know what the "H" stands for in William H. Gates?"
Hologram.
You realize that IE spoofs Mozilla headers so that they don't get rejected by Netscape-powered websites?
"In a demonstration, Otellini used a PC to beam an episode of "The Simpsons" to a plasma TV, while another Intel executive booted and rebooted a game with the same machine."
So they know how the television DRM debate will work out then...
"Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about commercial websites (like Salon)"
Yep, it's pretty awful watching people like Salon trying to operate a website -- kind'a like watching an amateur at anything failing.
For any other website, it's surprisingly simple. Write something interesting, put it on the web, and people come to your site and read it.
Then newspaper companies try the same, and completely fail.
They design a subscription system, spend years sorting out credit-card handling, account management, setting up the website to track people, setting up systems to stop images being linked to, setting up referer logs and browser-detects, setting up banner advert servers, loggers, and systems to charge advertisers. Setting up systems to convert simple text stories into flash or images or 10 frames, or anything to make it more difficult to copy.
And then after a hundred thousand dollars have disappeared into website design, start copying stories from the newspaper onto the website. And wonder why so few people are jumping the hurdles to get to any of their content.
Then having a meeting, wondering why nobody's subscribed, and spending thousands more dollars setting up a system where people can watch an advert and do something to prove they read it, and setting up a temporary ID and making it so people can use that ID to read content, and doing the logging and the tracking and the cookies to make sure that only one person can use each ID at a time.
And they wonder why the website isn't making a profit.
Eventually they get a few thousands of subscribers, and rack their brains trying to think how to make the site more profitable, even as they spend 60K per year on DBAs to handle all the user-ID and user-tracking databases, and the same again on support staff to handle lost passwords and account cancellations.
Yep, it's like watching a newbie bricklayer's wall falling down each time he builds it and wondering what's wrong. So bad to watch, you almost feel compelled to go over and offer them a clue. But they'd never take it. They know what they want, and it's big-budget.
"Ads can be (are not always) annoying, in any medium, but they make the content possible."
Because there wasn't anything on the internet before people came along thinking they could get fantastically rich by posting tripe and charging for it?
Oh look, a free independant website. And another. And another. Must be an optical illusion.
Creative have a java chat applet for technical support (or sales support), and it's acutally a lot easier than trying to get information on the web. "why is Nomad Zen NX so much cheaper than Nomad Zen" sort of questions, for example.
Although, the advantage of internet shopping is that, no matter how many people are browsing a particular category of amazon.co.uk, at least you're not standing shoulder-to-shoulder with any of them!
"Could I help you sir?" Dammit, I thought this was an internet site... go away, locust-like salespeople!
"24 time zones means it's day X for 48 hours somewhere on the planet."
Not on google.co.uk, it isn't. Localised website, localised timezone.
Looks like google spent a bit too long celebrating, and didn't get back into the office to change the logo until after a night and a day at O'Neill's...
"This seems like something more appropriate for the American Highway system"
The biggest scale model you could build in the USA would be about 2600km across, making it about 1:1E+6 scale. But to do that, you'd need a scale model of the sun that's 1300 metres in diameter.
Thinking about the technology that the USA has, you could probably make a glowing ball of fire that's 1.3km across, but I'd rather you didn't...
"So what new feature is Google planning this time, then?"
A 48-hour St. Patrick's day, by the look of things...
"you could actually stand at one planet and use high powered binoculars to see the next closet planet"
You can stand on Earth and see Venus and Mars without particularly needing the binoculars... (and that's the full-scale version)
They have one in Sweden, it's the length of the country:
Link to the Swede site
List of solar system models
"Guess what - if the recipient wants you you to pay that means he didn't want your email"
Or that he would prefer to keep your money, having read the email anyway.
"Is he a moron? Is he blind?"
No, he's just confused as to why the mouse-movements he's used to get the control panel every day for the last 3 years suddenly don't work.
It's a minor change, I admit. But listen to the people who evaluate KDE on desktops. To them, having the start menu in a different place, or having the control panel laid out differently to windows is important enough that they wave their hands and wail that it will cost millions of pounds to retrain people to use DrakConf instead of the control panel. Yet these differences occur even within different versions of Windows.
"It's right there."
It's 2/3 of the way across the screen, about 400 pixels across and 300 pixels up. In every other version, it was on the bottom left of the screen.
(don't complain about the low screen resolution, it's a default installation as supplied by Dell)
"Again, classic mode, if you really need it."
Again, that doesn't help the first time. You have to spend the half-hour reconfiguring things to get a system that "hasn't changed since Windows95"
"Maybe he should try a google search to find that stuff out?"
You're suggesting a google search to find out how to configure Windows? This is supposed to be easy to use.
And how do you get to google anyway, if you don't have an IP address and default gateway and DNS server setup yet?
"That's what you end up doing with Linux anyway."
We're discussing Windows here, not Linux.
But if your defence of Windows usability is "it's no worse than Linux", then that speaks for itself really.
"Let me guess, the MCSE contractor said to do it? Did he bill you hours for it? You just got taken to task. Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting to reset all of those XP machines to classic mode? Problem solved.
Wow, technical troubleshooting by someone with no idea of the question.
The reformat XP to 2000 was suggested by a software engineer, who had already wasted most of the day just setting up WindowsXP so that it was usable. It was a permanent member of staff, doing the installations during time on his own project budget. WindowsXP machines were already set to classic mode, that was not the problem.
The problem was that WindowsXP either stopped responding, or crashed the machine, about 5-6 times in a 2 hour period. The people concerned had to get a complex system involving 20 networked PCs up and running within a few days, and wasting one of those days with a difficult-to-use operating system that was crashing even as it tried to display the control panel (this was brand-new unmodified Dell computer) was costing them too much. The decision was made to install MS-Windows 2000, which as you say, doesn't crash. [unless you run java]
There was also a suggestion that the automatic updates was causing our CPU-intensive application to crash, but we never got around to investigating this because the computer stopped responding when we tried to use the "System" control panel, and after that, we had to get rid of WindowsXP, just to get some work done.
"Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting"
Maybe we should have learnt how to do scripting on Windows. Last time I tried, Windows scripting couldn't even reliably copy files between two machines, so it doesn't inspire me with confidence. What config file do you have to edit to make Windows appear in classic mode then? Can you save the configuration and use it on another machine?
"Fuck. Wow. I have no response. Is he a moron? Is he blind? It's right there."
And they say linux advocates were impolite about people who couldn't use their software...
Windows2000: Start, Settings, Control panel.
WindowsXP: Start... err.. what the fuck is that, there's a purple animation taking up half my screen!
To "just turn it off" involves: Right-click on the start menu, "properties", start menu properties, "classic", customise, scroll to bottom of list, small icons, ok. Now finally we have a menu which "hasn't changed since Windows95"
And it's like that for every single setting you care to mention. Want to turn off the idiotic "I'm sorry dave, I can't allow you to see the c:\winnt folder" option? Tools, "Folder options", display options, scroll down looking for boxes and ticking them.
Want to stop it making a fucking annoying jingle every time the PC starts? (and do this on 10 PCs in half a day) - start, settings, control panel, sounds and multimedia, "no sounds" scheme, click "OK", notice that "OK" was actually a question about saving the default sound settings, cancel the dialog box, reselect the "no sounds" scheme, click "no" this time, and "OK" in the dialog box. Repeat for machine 2...
This is pre-installed copies of Windows on new Dell machines which have had all their relevant software and drivers already installed. It takes about a half-hour just to make it usable.
I'm not sure how this is easier or more consistant than just copying a backup of your linux applications' configuration files onto the disk. (and before you ask, file managers, volume controls, and scheduled sounds are applications, as much as Windows people would like to think of them as the O/S kernel)
"If you ever want Linux to become a real destop choice to Joe User, it must get more 'newbieized'."
One of the great things about open-source apps is that while the learning curve might be steep, you only need learn it once. If you know how to do x on linux, you know it. But on Windows, it'll probably be in a different dialog box each time you get a new version.
So while it's sometimes nice to know that to set your IP address, you go to control-panel, "classic view", networking, LAN card 1, properties, protocols, TCP/IP, properties, it was in a different place on WindowsNT, and it was in a different place on Windows98, and it'll probably be in a different place in Windows Longhorn. And they'll rearrange the control panel again. And they'll rearrange the start menu again.
Today I watched an experienced contractor, a Windows programmer and MCSE, look blankly at the WindowsXP start menu for almost half a minute, wondering what he needed to do to get the control panel (despite using it all the time in Windows2000). If you know how to set an option in Linux, you could probably do it without even knowing or noticing what flavour of *nix you were running, let alone the version or the distro.
Yes, we just reformatted a load of WindowsXP machines to put Windows2000 on them. It's just that unbearable...
"Which is why we should move to something like XML based configuration files."
Because you'll get more typing practise using "<someitem>value</someitem>" rather than "name=value"?
Do XML users have some special keyboard with "<" and ">" where the spacebar should be, or something? I can't understand why they keep going on about files being human-editable.
I think the idea was that config files provide inline documentation, and the MS-Windows Registry doesn't. Even if you wanted to add documentation to parts of the registry (which people don't, because they don't think anyone will edit it manually), then there's no easy way to do it. It's not like adding a few lines of comments in a text file explaining what the next thing does and what the options are.
Picking a random example (this was the first file I looked at on my system, I didn't go looking for an especially clear one), these are the first few lines of a default openoffice.conf on a Mandrake machine: