MyEclipse is something that you have to pay for, this is seperate to the generic Eclipse. The fact that this is a link to a pay for product where a major feature being that it works on Vista (I would wonder how many of the Slashdot care if it works on Vista, let alone acquire it when they can put together Eclipse themselves). So he would be commenting on the actual product being linked to if your read the slashvertisement/article/press release. IMHO its an ad.
I rmeember trying this onea few years ago. Someone opened a worm infected email 10 minutes before the scheduled antivirus update at 9am. It only took that ten minutes to take down the entire head office of the organisation with thousands of desktops infected. Funnily enough in some places Linux boxes were used as routers on some gigabit networks. One of the techs told me afterwards that it was laggy connecting to the computers because the gigabit links were full of this worm attacking the entire network. My mates got home at 9pm that day after disinfecting the entire network. So yes, whilst in client-server if the server goes down you can't work, but its still easy to fix one server than thousands of desktops. Plus the one (or more) servers are typically in one location physically, which makes things that require physically rebooting the machine easier (keeping in mind that your network is now shot with computers trying to infect each other and the rest of the internet).
Indeed OSX is only licensed to run on Apple hardware but unlike Windows that hardware comes with a license to run the released version of MacOS at the time on it forever. When I buy a new Mac, I get a new license so its pointless to consider transferring my license. But lets consider Windows. Say I buy a computer without an operating system and put Windows Vista on it. That copy of Vista, which was seperate to the hardware, is now locked to the hardware that it is installed on. If I buy a new computer, again without and operating system, I cannot transfer my license from the original PC to the new one, I have to buy a new copy of the operating system. I can wipe the hard drive of the original computer clean so that no traces of Microsoft OS' are there but I can't install it on a new PC. The key difference here is that every Mac comes with a copy of MacOS installed/licensed to it. The MacOS license restricts you to using their operating system with their hardware. Without hacking the software/tampering with it, I do believe it is impossible to get it to run on non-Mac hardware. Apple are a hardware company, in all reality they give their software away. Compare Mac OS X to Vista Ultimate in terms of price. Windows came in and undercut the market place selling cheaper than all those out there, now that the competition has started to die off and they've got a strong monopoly they're raising the prices back to where they used to be.
I'll also jump in for trac. Subversion integration is nice, plus the wiki is awesome, you can link changesets directly from the wiki (Very cool when set up properly), roadmap useful for planning plus the fact it can generate a useful calendar and a timeline to see where you've been. i've used bugzilla in some projects to do things and while it is great for bug tracking, trac gives me far more and I'm happy for the switch.
No Debian's complaint has been that their stable branch is usually rock solid and has few releases. For large scale implementations this is actually a good thing (e.g. I know some people who used to use Red Hat, got scared off by Fedora going "we'll release every six months!" and move to Debian Stable's more long term release cycle) because you don't have to keep doing major system upgrades, you just apply the patches. For those who want to be on the latest and greatest, Debian Testing or Unstable is normally as up to date as Ubuntu (which is really Debian Unstable with a nice user interface applied on top and software that Debian wouldn't ship). Proof of this can be found in the number of complaints I saw against Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 (or the difficulties with applications when upgrading from Windows XP to SP1 and SP2, let alone Vista), upgrading can be challenging to say the least.
At least you have it announced, it still remains to be announced in Australia. I've seen two PS3's in Australia and both of them were running Linux at Linux.conf.au 2007 (from the Yellow Dog Linux guys, so I don't think they were local). So to answer your question? It isn't. I can understand localization issues in parts of Europe might cause delays but for Australia were technically its British English but due to the absolute raping that occured during our early TV development where the US TV producers firmly established their foothold in Australia (to the point that easily 50% or more commercial TV in Australia is American; the Australian Broadcasting Commission'sRadio National weekly 'The Science Show' covered this in one of its broadcasts on TV in Australia), American English would be accepted normally without a second thought. I'd almost suggest it'd be easier to ship the PS3 from Japan to Australia than it would to get it from Japan to the UK - especially via boat.
What I don't get about WoW is the fact that people complain that they can't level up any more and that the game is restrictive. In fact I had one friend tell me thats why they wanted TBC, so they can progress from Lvl60. I don't really see the fun in playing the game until you get to a point and can then progress no further, it reminds me of the single player worlds - once you're at the end all you can do is play with friends to help them get to the top. But in any case I'd be more interested in the fact that it appears that the 'patch' was given out for free (presumably to make everything nice and compatible) whilst the 'content update' was charged. I find this strange not only coming from EVE as my primary MMO but after seeing this on the WoW website:
Why isn't World of Warcraft free?
World of Warcraft will require a fee to play. This fee will be used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that we are planning for World of Warcraft.
I've asked people what the ongoing content creation has been so far and I've been told a reconfiguration of the Merit system (multiple times), Talents a few times and around about 10 new dungeons. I can see TBC as a major content update but I wonder why everyone is so happily accepting that is being charged for?
As an example of the contrary, EVE has no real upper skill limit (estimates on training _every_ skill in EVE amount to the years) and also has free content updates for a lower monthly fee. In fact Revelations, the last content update, did similar to TBC in a way: they added a whole new set of items, new skills (I'm told these are akin to talents), new abilities within the game (you can now salvage things and do invention as well (an extension of manufacturing)). If you're more interested in what free content updates there have been (and theres been 5 of them since the games release in May 2003) you can check out the EVE Website: http://www.eve-online.com/features/
I guess a space MMO isn't what people want, thats great, but when they go to WoW I wonder. You're paying more consistently to get what seems like lower service (no idling when you have large numbers of servers plus wait times to join) and you get charged for major content updates. Did I miss something?
I picked up on Firebug first time Slashdot mentioned it when linking to a Google blog over a year and a bit ago that was talking about AJAX. Plus, you never know whats out there until you spend a bit of time reading through things (and every few months I trawl through extensions.mozilla.org to find interesting extensions) - especially when you're looking at a difficult way to do the task initially.
I had no issues, I just used the vesa driver on my 6600 until I grabbed the proprietary binaries and installed them. You don't get 100% of features but its a start on things and gets you a graphical desktop.
Australian guy actually. Started off life in a small McDonald's franchise in Sydney I believe and worked his way up to CEO of the company and then died a month later from a heart attack. Not a bad progression from the bottom of the food chain to the top.
When your average non technical person walks into a store and asks for a computer. They get a computer with Windows preinstalled (in fact for those who recall its cheaper that way, remember Dell and 'FreeDOS' being more expensive). Lets say that this is Vista (we're close enough so it might as well be) which means they have IE7 installed by default. IE7 then defaults to Live.com search. The issue is that the user 1) probably doesn't distinguish from 'Windows' and a computer because they asked for a computer and this strange Windows thing tagged along and 2) they are then being pushed into Microsoft's search engine (hence the whole monopoly thing). If a Windows user is searching on Google they are doing so of their own choosing not because it was what was presented to them. If they do not like this then they can move away.
I do believe the majority of the fuss was not that they defaulted but that it was very hard to change this setting.
I know of a few Windows based companies that have it as their policy to do weekly reboots and then daily reboots during their peak season (festive season). I remember part of the regular maintainence cycle for the AS/400 was a weekly reboot. I think you could get away with it fortnightly, but after that it started to grind to a halt. Reboots do a lot of things like clear out things that are in swap that shouldn't be there, wipe out the odd bits of memory that Windows (and even Linux) lays around. No operating system is perfect and if you have the sort of loads that the WoW servers must have going through them (not to mention the amount of traffic through the network interface, remember there was a bug with NT where the TCP/IP stack had a small memory leak? Though I'm amazed with all of that cash they can't do what EVE does.
I always wonder why people complain about stability when the distro they are using was originally copied from a repository better known as "Debian Unstable (Sid)" and quickly released from there. There is a reason Debian isn't on the bleeding edge: the bleeding edge is always broken. This is true of any moderate to large sized project. What do you think the swarms of Debian maintainers do with their packages? Just run the scripts and push it off to their nearest repository? No, they don't. They sit down and make bug fixes, security fixes and all sorts of other fixes on top of this released software. If you're not too worried about 'usability' and having the most up to date applications, grab Debian Etch when it is released as stable. If you want something more up with the times, you can always head to Debian Testing. If you like life on the edge, give Debian Unstable a go.
Just as GTK, QT, Motif all sit on top of and are different ways of developing for the X Windowing System. But both low level frameworks are relatively hard to get into compared to the layers that are built on them, which is why they were written. The difference is that GTK and QT appear to be portable enough to run on more than just the X windowing System, but also run under Win32 as well. GTK is even flexible enough that there is an engine that uses QT to draw its widgets.
alacarte easy GNOME menu editing tool Alacarte is an easy-to-use menu editor for GNOME that can add and edit new entries and menus. It works with the freedesktop.org menu specification and should work with any desktop environment that uses the spec.
Added in 2.16; Appears to replace SMEG (Simple Menu Editor for GNOME) which from a bit of Googling was around in 2.10
The question I have is do we have the same level of training for all people who use a computer compared with the old days of the mainframes? Compared to this, what is the number today? What is the number of _specialized_ training courses that are offered and supported? And how many people only use a computer as a small part of their job compared to a much larger portion. With the percentage of the population using computers increasing, the amount of training each individual user receives has been reduced. This can be attributed to the fact that the computers are not only smaller but a lot cheaper. If a user did something deadly to a mainframe system, the repairbill would be far more than completely replacing an entire desktop PC and reimaging it.
I work in local government and we used TCS on an AS/400 until a couple of years ago to manage our entire system. From payroll and rates to the library and animal management, TCS handled it all. TCS was even used to total and handle our election results and recently did the prepoll voting for a referrendum we held a few months back. Not bad for a machine that is nearing 20 years old. The reason we replaced it was two fold: 1) We couldn't get continued support for the platform and 2) because of this, the 15 year sunset clause forced us to move away from the system. In its place we deployed three systems, Civica Sypdus (library management), JD Edwards (assets, finance and HR mostly) and Pathway (animal management, rates/property, planning...basically what ever was left).
Now TCS doesn't look like the most user friendly environment. To begin with it was old school green screens. You keyed everything in and even though we had newer platforms you rarely used a mouse. Almost all of our users after getting over a short and steep learning curve, loved the system. After we deployed JD Edwards in particular, I know of one old woman (she had grandchildren) who had no issues with TCS and being textually driven but hated JDE's web interface. Having to remember "screen numbers", that said, she had a list of screens she went to regularly on her desk. Think book marks but you just key a number in - much faster. It is in a way worse than the CLI because "./quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin" means you can see something, translate that to "type 401 to pull up the screen to install Quake 3 and once its installed head to 508 for the application loader and you're in." She retired from her job quoting the new interface for her job as one of the biggest reasons for leaving the organisation. She had years of experience and was one of the longest serving members of her department (this is a department which appears to replace 90% of its staff every three years).
The problem I have is that people comment that GUI systems are user friendly. A well designed GUI system can be very userfriendly. Conversely a poorly designed GUI system can be far worse for the same reason that makes CLI systems hard: They present too many options. The CLI allows insane amount of flexibility (and for those Windows users who don't believe me, download and install the 'PowerShell' or Monad from Microsoft, Linux and Mac users learn how to user Terminal if you don't already) and for those who know what they're doing and have high typing speed, are far faster than their GUI counterparts as KLM modelling siggests. This is why many Linux users comment they spend lots of time in a shell, it is far faster to do tasks when you know what you're doing - and that is the key. If you do not know what you're doing (e.g. you haven't been trained in the use of the system) then a GUI will usually beat a CLI or other keyboard based system.
As a final note, JDE rated worse out of all of our corporate information systems. It rated worse than the fact that our proxy filtered their web traffic so that they couldn't waste their day on web mail, forums or cricket scores. TCS comparatively didn't have the same level of angst.
What if you're waiting for other players moves in Civilization? Or if you're dead because you got killed really early on because you didn't see that 'nade they threw because you happened around the wrong corner at the wrong time. I've been playing a bit of DOTA lately and the cooldowns near end game are massive, long enough to go and read an email or respond to IM. You can still see the game because you're _multitasking_ not _unitasking_. Windows isn't exactly the friendliest for that due to its simplistic window manager (on top, maximized, minimized, normal) and there are a few useful things it misses out on by default (X mouse is incredibly handy when you're working between windows for both hover focus and copy+paste operations).
So you buy a wall connector that has a standard usb female slot on the bottom to connect a bulk standard usb cable in if things are that bad for you and your laptop can't do it. I've got one that is useful to charging my mp3 or palm when i would rather that my mac laptop charge itself faster on the road. I've regularly charged my pda off my laptop back to full strength (I also have a spare laptop battery, plus the mac sleep mode is like a hybrid of sleep/hibernate but thats another discussion) since my mac's battery usually has enough charge and it works even when my mac is sleeping (e.g. pda and laptop connected via usb in the same bag). If I could get my phone to do the same then all I need is one adapter when I'm travelling around the world (and its various power adapters).
I don't think clearly labelling it and putting the source code out in accordance with the licence of the software plus returning contribution to the community in the case of Safari. They aren't doing it in the nicest possible way (massive patch instead of incrementals), but in a way isn't something better than nothing. And in all fairness they didn't steal it all from FreeBSD given that the underlying kernel is Mach, so getting it the BSD code to work on a differnt kernel takes a bit of effort - especially since they've managed to get the thing working on two different platforms without having too many issues with compatibility (e.g. I haven't seen one Apple user complain that Flash doesn't work for them. This is across 32-bit/64-bit PowerPC and Intel. Both Windows and Linux have issues with this on the 64bit platform, though Linux at least has wrappers to provide support).
So the menu item doesn't have an option. Its some random XYZ program, but for the purposes we'll use 'Finder' in Mac OS X 10.4.8 so those of us with Macs at home can play along too.
So we find our application (Finder) and we want to easily create a new burn folder because we do that a lot. Finder doesn't offer us an easy way to do it apart from File -> New Burn Folder (unlike a new folder, which is shift apple n, apple n is actually new window like say Internet Explorer, Safari, or a plethora of other things. By the way, whats the key board short cut for a new explorer window? Windows E. Sure that makes sense, and the short cut while you're in explorer? Still Windows E. Control N doesn't quite work the way it should (doesn't even create a new folder either, just sits there)).
So we head off to System Preferences, click Keyboard and Mouse and then Keyboard Shortcuts. This is a new one, so we'll click the the little plus sign thats there. We can add it to all applications, but we don't want that, we're only after Finder. So we select 'Finder' from the Appllication menu and the command we're chasing is "New Burn Folder", so we put that in there as well. Since Shift Apple B for me is already taken by Fugu's "Secure Copy", we'll make it Shift Control Apple B (hey I'm a glutton). I then hit Add. Then when we scroll down the list its there at the bottom. Funky.
So what we need to do now is restart the application. Because we're using Finder this isn't as obvious as restarting say Safari or Mail, but still rather easy within the GUI. Click on the Apple Menu, Force Quit. It gives us a list of applications and one of those is Finder. Now we can't force quit it because the option changes to 'relaunch'. Ensure you're not doing anything in Finder (like say a massive copy operation) and click the button. Finder will be active and if you click on 'File' you will notice your brand new shortcut there with the keyboard combo.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, spent three months in each country so you can then understand their accent.
They're called plugins.
MyEclipse is something that you have to pay for, this is seperate to the generic Eclipse. The fact that this is a link to a pay for product where a major feature being that it works on Vista (I would wonder how many of the Slashdot care if it works on Vista, let alone acquire it when they can put together Eclipse themselves). So he would be commenting on the actual product being linked to if your read the slashvertisement/article/press release. IMHO its an ad.
I rmeember trying this onea few years ago. Someone opened a worm infected email 10 minutes before the scheduled antivirus update at 9am. It only took that ten minutes to take down the entire head office of the organisation with thousands of desktops infected. Funnily enough in some places Linux boxes were used as routers on some gigabit networks. One of the techs told me afterwards that it was laggy connecting to the computers because the gigabit links were full of this worm attacking the entire network. My mates got home at 9pm that day after disinfecting the entire network. So yes, whilst in client-server if the server goes down you can't work, but its still easy to fix one server than thousands of desktops. Plus the one (or more) servers are typically in one location physically, which makes things that require physically rebooting the machine easier (keeping in mind that your network is now shot with computers trying to infect each other and the rest of the internet).
Indeed OSX is only licensed to run on Apple hardware but unlike Windows that hardware comes with a license to run the released version of MacOS at the time on it forever. When I buy a new Mac, I get a new license so its pointless to consider transferring my license. But lets consider Windows. Say I buy a computer without an operating system and put Windows Vista on it. That copy of Vista, which was seperate to the hardware, is now locked to the hardware that it is installed on. If I buy a new computer, again without and operating system, I cannot transfer my license from the original PC to the new one, I have to buy a new copy of the operating system. I can wipe the hard drive of the original computer clean so that no traces of Microsoft OS' are there but I can't install it on a new PC. The key difference here is that every Mac comes with a copy of MacOS installed/licensed to it. The MacOS license restricts you to using their operating system with their hardware. Without hacking the software/tampering with it, I do believe it is impossible to get it to run on non-Mac hardware. Apple are a hardware company, in all reality they give their software away. Compare Mac OS X to Vista Ultimate in terms of price. Windows came in and undercut the market place selling cheaper than all those out there, now that the competition has started to die off and they've got a strong monopoly they're raising the prices back to where they used to be.
I'll also jump in for trac. Subversion integration is nice, plus the wiki is awesome, you can link changesets directly from the wiki (Very cool when set up properly), roadmap useful for planning plus the fact it can generate a useful calendar and a timeline to see where you've been. i've used bugzilla in some projects to do things and while it is great for bug tracking, trac gives me far more and I'm happy for the switch.
Probably explains where the policy now stems from then, they would hate for it to happen again.
No Debian's complaint has been that their stable branch is usually rock solid and has few releases. For large scale implementations this is actually a good thing (e.g. I know some people who used to use Red Hat, got scared off by Fedora going "we'll release every six months!" and move to Debian Stable's more long term release cycle) because you don't have to keep doing major system upgrades, you just apply the patches. For those who want to be on the latest and greatest, Debian Testing or Unstable is normally as up to date as Ubuntu (which is really Debian Unstable with a nice user interface applied on top and software that Debian wouldn't ship). Proof of this can be found in the number of complaints I saw against Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 (or the difficulties with applications when upgrading from Windows XP to SP1 and SP2, let alone Vista), upgrading can be challenging to say the least.
At least you have it announced, it still remains to be announced in Australia. I've seen two PS3's in Australia and both of them were running Linux at Linux.conf.au 2007 (from the Yellow Dog Linux guys, so I don't think they were local). So to answer your question? It isn't. I can understand localization issues in parts of Europe might cause delays but for Australia were technically its British English but due to the absolute raping that occured during our early TV development where the US TV producers firmly established their foothold in Australia (to the point that easily 50% or more commercial TV in Australia is American; the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Radio National weekly 'The Science Show' covered this in one of its broadcasts on TV in Australia), American English would be accepted normally without a second thought. I'd almost suggest it'd be easier to ship the PS3 from Japan to Australia than it would to get it from Japan to the UK - especially via boat.
What I don't get about WoW is the fact that people complain that they can't level up any more and that the game is restrictive. In fact I had one friend tell me thats why they wanted TBC, so they can progress from Lvl60. I don't really see the fun in playing the game until you get to a point and can then progress no further, it reminds me of the single player worlds - once you're at the end all you can do is play with friends to help them get to the top. But in any case I'd be more interested in the fact that it appears that the 'patch' was given out for free (presumably to make everything nice and compatible) whilst the 'content update' was charged. I find this strange not only coming from EVE as my primary MMO but after seeing this on the WoW website:
Why isn't World of Warcraft free?
World of Warcraft will require a fee to play. This fee will be used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that we are planning for World of Warcraft.
For those interested, I sourced it from the General FAQ: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/general.ht ml
I've asked people what the ongoing content creation has been so far and I've been told a reconfiguration of the Merit system (multiple times), Talents a few times and around about 10 new dungeons. I can see TBC as a major content update but I wonder why everyone is so happily accepting that is being charged for?
As an example of the contrary, EVE has no real upper skill limit (estimates on training _every_ skill in EVE amount to the years) and also has free content updates for a lower monthly fee. In fact Revelations, the last content update, did similar to TBC in a way: they added a whole new set of items, new skills (I'm told these are akin to talents), new abilities within the game (you can now salvage things and do invention as well (an extension of manufacturing)). If you're more interested in what free content updates there have been (and theres been 5 of them since the games release in May 2003) you can check out the EVE Website: http://www.eve-online.com/features/
I guess a space MMO isn't what people want, thats great, but when they go to WoW I wonder. You're paying more consistently to get what seems like lower service (no idling when you have large numbers of servers plus wait times to join) and you get charged for major content updates. Did I miss something?
Australia did it ages ago. There are a few vehicles around the place still in miles (I think my dad has an old Cortina thats still in miles) but almost everything is in metric. In fact according to the National Measurement Institute 1988 was the "Withdrawal of remaining imperial units from general legal use". That page also has a timeline.
I picked up on Firebug first time Slashdot mentioned it when linking to a Google blog over a year and a bit ago that was talking about AJAX. Plus, you never know whats out there until you spend a bit of time reading through things (and every few months I trawl through extensions.mozilla.org to find interesting extensions) - especially when you're looking at a difficult way to do the task initially.
I had no issues, I just used the vesa driver on my 6600 until I grabbed the proprietary binaries and installed them. You don't get 100% of features but its a start on things and gets you a graphical desktop.
Australian guy actually. Started off life in a small McDonald's franchise in Sydney I believe and worked his way up to CEO of the company and then died a month later from a heart attack. Not a bad progression from the bottom of the food chain to the top.
When your average non technical person walks into a store and asks for a computer. They get a computer with Windows preinstalled (in fact for those who recall its cheaper that way, remember Dell and 'FreeDOS' being more expensive). Lets say that this is Vista (we're close enough so it might as well be) which means they have IE7 installed by default. IE7 then defaults to Live.com search. The issue is that the user 1) probably doesn't distinguish from 'Windows' and a computer because they asked for a computer and this strange Windows thing tagged along and 2) they are then being pushed into Microsoft's search engine (hence the whole monopoly thing). If a Windows user is searching on Google they are doing so of their own choosing not because it was what was presented to them. If they do not like this then they can move away.
I do believe the majority of the fuss was not that they defaulted but that it was very hard to change this setting.
I know of a few Windows based companies that have it as their policy to do weekly reboots and then daily reboots during their peak season (festive season). I remember part of the regular maintainence cycle for the AS/400 was a weekly reboot. I think you could get away with it fortnightly, but after that it started to grind to a halt. Reboots do a lot of things like clear out things that are in swap that shouldn't be there, wipe out the odd bits of memory that Windows (and even Linux) lays around. No operating system is perfect and if you have the sort of loads that the WoW servers must have going through them (not to mention the amount of traffic through the network interface, remember there was a bug with NT where the TCP/IP stack had a small memory leak? Though I'm amazed with all of that cash they can't do what EVE does.
I always wonder why people complain about stability when the distro they are using was originally copied from a repository better known as "Debian Unstable (Sid)" and quickly released from there. There is a reason Debian isn't on the bleeding edge: the bleeding edge is always broken. This is true of any moderate to large sized project. What do you think the swarms of Debian maintainers do with their packages? Just run the scripts and push it off to their nearest repository? No, they don't. They sit down and make bug fixes, security fixes and all sorts of other fixes on top of this released software. If you're not too worried about 'usability' and having the most up to date applications, grab Debian Etch when it is released as stable. If you want something more up with the times, you can always head to Debian Testing. If you like life on the edge, give Debian Unstable a go.
Just as GTK, QT, Motif all sit on top of and are different ways of developing for the X Windowing System. But both low level frameworks are relatively hard to get into compared to the layers that are built on them, which is why they were written. The difference is that GTK and QT appear to be portable enough to run on more than just the X windowing System, but also run under Win32 as well. GTK is even flexible enough that there is an engine that uses QT to draw its widgets.
alacarte
easy GNOME menu editing tool
Alacarte is an easy-to-use menu editor for GNOME that can add
and edit new entries and menus. It works with the freedesktop.org
menu specification and should work with any desktop environment
that uses the spec.
Added in 2.16; Appears to replace SMEG (Simple Menu Editor for GNOME) which from a bit of Googling was around in 2.10
The question I have is do we have the same level of training for all people who use a computer compared with the old days of the mainframes? Compared to this, what is the number today? What is the number of _specialized_ training courses that are offered and supported? And how many people only use a computer as a small part of their job compared to a much larger portion. With the percentage of the population using computers increasing, the amount of training each individual user receives has been reduced. This can be attributed to the fact that the computers are not only smaller but a lot cheaper. If a user did something deadly to a mainframe system, the repairbill would be far more than completely replacing an entire desktop PC and reimaging it.
I work in local government and we used TCS on an AS/400 until a couple of years ago to manage our entire system. From payroll and rates to the library and animal management, TCS handled it all. TCS was even used to total and handle our election results and recently did the prepoll voting for a referrendum we held a few months back. Not bad for a machine that is nearing 20 years old. The reason we replaced it was two fold: 1) We couldn't get continued support for the platform and 2) because of this, the 15 year sunset clause forced us to move away from the system. In its place we deployed three systems, Civica Sypdus (library management), JD Edwards (assets, finance and HR mostly) and Pathway (animal management, rates/property, planning...basically what ever was left).
Now TCS doesn't look like the most user friendly environment. To begin with it was old school green screens. You keyed everything in and even though we had newer platforms you rarely used a mouse. Almost all of our users after getting over a short and steep learning curve, loved the system. After we deployed JD Edwards in particular, I know of one old woman (she had grandchildren) who had no issues with TCS and being textually driven but hated JDE's web interface. Having to remember "screen numbers", that said, she had a list of screens she went to regularly on her desk. Think book marks but you just key a number in - much faster. It is in a way worse than the CLI because "./quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin" means you can see something, translate that to "type 401 to pull up the screen to install Quake 3 and once its installed head to 508 for the application loader and you're in." She retired from her job quoting the new interface for her job as one of the biggest reasons for leaving the organisation. She had years of experience and was one of the longest serving members of her department (this is a department which appears to replace 90% of its staff every three years).
The problem I have is that people comment that GUI systems are user friendly. A well designed GUI system can be very userfriendly. Conversely a poorly designed GUI system can be far worse for the same reason that makes CLI systems hard: They present too many options. The CLI allows insane amount of flexibility (and for those Windows users who don't believe me, download and install the 'PowerShell' or Monad from Microsoft, Linux and Mac users learn how to user Terminal if you don't already) and for those who know what they're doing and have high typing speed, are far faster than their GUI counterparts as KLM modelling siggests. This is why many Linux users comment they spend lots of time in a shell, it is far faster to do tasks when you know what you're doing - and that is the key. If you do not know what you're doing (e.g. you haven't been trained in the use of the system) then a GUI will usually beat a CLI or other keyboard based system.
As a final note, JDE rated worse out of all of our corporate information systems. It rated worse than the fact that our proxy filtered their web traffic so that they couldn't waste their day on web mail, forums or cricket scores. TCS comparatively didn't have the same level of angst.
What if you're waiting for other players moves in Civilization? Or if you're dead because you got killed really early on because you didn't see that 'nade they threw because you happened around the wrong corner at the wrong time. I've been playing a bit of DOTA lately and the cooldowns near end game are massive, long enough to go and read an email or respond to IM. You can still see the game because you're _multitasking_ not _unitasking_. Windows isn't exactly the friendliest for that due to its simplistic window manager (on top, maximized, minimized, normal) and there are a few useful things it misses out on by default (X mouse is incredibly handy when you're working between windows for both hover focus and copy+paste operations).
So you buy a wall connector that has a standard usb female slot on the bottom to connect a bulk standard usb cable in if things are that bad for you and your laptop can't do it. I've got one that is useful to charging my mp3 or palm when i would rather that my mac laptop charge itself faster on the road. I've regularly charged my pda off my laptop back to full strength (I also have a spare laptop battery, plus the mac sleep mode is like a hybrid of sleep/hibernate but thats another discussion) since my mac's battery usually has enough charge and it works even when my mac is sleeping (e.g. pda and laptop connected via usb in the same bag). If I could get my phone to do the same then all I need is one adapter when I'm travelling around the world (and its various power adapters).
I don't think clearly labelling it and putting the source code out in accordance with the licence of the software plus returning contribution to the community in the case of Safari. They aren't doing it in the nicest possible way (massive patch instead of incrementals), but in a way isn't something better than nothing. And in all fairness they didn't steal it all from FreeBSD given that the underlying kernel is Mach, so getting it the BSD code to work on a differnt kernel takes a bit of effort - especially since they've managed to get the thing working on two different platforms without having too many issues with compatibility (e.g. I haven't seen one Apple user complain that Flash doesn't work for them. This is across 32-bit/64-bit PowerPC and Intel. Both Windows and Linux have issues with this on the 64bit platform, though Linux at least has wrappers to provide support).
So the menu item doesn't have an option. Its some random XYZ program, but for the purposes we'll use 'Finder' in Mac OS X 10.4.8 so those of us with Macs at home can play along too.
So we find our application (Finder) and we want to easily create a new burn folder because we do that a lot. Finder doesn't offer us an easy way to do it apart from File -> New Burn Folder (unlike a new folder, which is shift apple n, apple n is actually new window like say Internet Explorer, Safari, or a plethora of other things. By the way, whats the key board short cut for a new explorer window? Windows E. Sure that makes sense, and the short cut while you're in explorer? Still Windows E. Control N doesn't quite work the way it should (doesn't even create a new folder either, just sits there)).
So we head off to System Preferences, click Keyboard and Mouse and then Keyboard Shortcuts. This is a new one, so we'll click the the little plus sign thats there. We can add it to all applications, but we don't want that, we're only after Finder. So we select 'Finder' from the Appllication menu and the command we're chasing is "New Burn Folder", so we put that in there as well. Since Shift Apple B for me is already taken by Fugu's "Secure Copy", we'll make it Shift Control Apple B (hey I'm a glutton). I then hit Add. Then when we scroll down the list its there at the bottom. Funky.
So what we need to do now is restart the application. Because we're using Finder this isn't as obvious as restarting say Safari or Mail, but still rather easy within the GUI. Click on the Apple Menu, Force Quit. It gives us a list of applications and one of those is Finder. Now we can't force quit it because the option changes to 'relaunch'. Ensure you're not doing anything in Finder (like say a massive copy operation) and click the button. Finder will be active and if you click on 'File' you will notice your brand new shortcut there with the keyboard combo.
any questions?