Probably. Besides, why would the user ever pick that last option?
Because that's how many sites support themselves: they get paid a per-click fee by the advertisters. So think about an ad-hating but site-loving web user.. you want to avoid ads (especially popups, DHTML popovers, and flash), while still helping your favorite site pay its hosting bill. Which is exactly what that last option would provide.
If I had a Firefox plugin, for instance, that would download and "click" the ads for me, maybe randomly on 1 of N page hits, so that the site got some cash without me seeing the ads, I'd use it..
But, being well educated, they understand how I came upon my beliefs. I am starting to understand why they believe theirs.
Interesting.. I've met a few very intelligent, well-educated people who I've come to respect, in spite of their religious beliefs. But I can't say that I've ever been able to understand why they believe as they do, except to write it off as a personal failing or the result of never-critically-examined early brainwashing. What is it that you're starting to understand? (I ask that not argumentatively but with genuine curiosity.)
I saw the event at school in either 1st or 2nd grade was well -- but not live, exactly. The 5th graders saw it live and then the teachers showed each classroom one at a time, with a little preparation for what we would see and the option to not participate.
And we also had jokes in the next few days or weeks.. the one that stays with me is: How many astronauts can you fit in a VW Bug? Eleven: one in each seat and seven in the ashtray.
Kinda sick, I suppose, but a common human way of dealing with difficult-to-accept circumstances. Anyway, an entire little segment of the population was about our age when the Challenger disaster happened, and remember it in a similar way -- as the first real indication that the things adults do can go horribly wrong sometimes..
My home page is a nicely sorted webpage with all my frequently visited links in a password protected section of my web site.
My solution is similar, but I just put a PHP page on my home desktop that serves my FF bookmarks.html. It took about 2 minutes to create and now I can get to my bookmarks from anywhere.
The only downside is that I would have to spend a little more time if I also ever wanted to add new bookmarks from anywhere..
Ok, maybe I'm just being nitpicky here, but "the US" doesn't "want" anything. There's like 300 million of us, each of whom wants various things, and Bush certainly doesn't represent all of us. Nor does the US Trade Representative. Believe me, I dislike Bush, most of his foreign policy, the DMCA, or what-have-you just as much as you do, if not more.
Various *parts* of the US government, and some strong trade lobbies, are who want this.
Hopefully Canada's representatives can find some way to resist, but frankly and unfortuantely, I doubt it.
Just out of my own curiosity... are you also one of those guys who complains that iTunes organizes your music for you? I ask because those guys are impossible for me to understand. We rolled out a product that was basically the holy grail of music management, and they complained that it managed their music for them. They insisted that they would rather name and sort each of 20,000 tiny files themselves, with all the obsessive focus of an autistic kid counting paper clips. It was freaky.
I've read a few of your posts before, and while generally quite informative, they're also often pretty arrogant. I've finally decided to reply to one.
First off, let me say that I do think that iTunes is the best-of-breed music organizer. It gets many things right that other such tools don't. I don't, in general, dislike iTunes -- quite the contrary.
But it's *not good enough*. (As you yourself have said, all computers suck.. we're getting there but we're not there yet.)
Just as an example -- I have a lot of DJ mixes (the bulk of my collection), so I've always used the "original artist" ID3 field. It lets me cross-index an instance of, say, a Ferry Corsten remix of a track originally by Armin with a Paul van Dyk remix of the same track, and compare them. But iTunes doesn't support the original artist field. Not the end of the world, I suppose -- I wrote a Perl script to "abuse" the composer field by copying the values from all of my MP3s' original artist field into the composer field. It almost kinda works ok for now, although I'm of course screwed if I ever want to collect classical music too.
None of the other music organizers have "done it all" for me, either, so over the years I've ended up writing, bit by bit as needed, an extensive set of scripts to manage my music for me. If I let iTunes reorganize my library for me, that will all be broken. I would need to use iTunes exclusively, which as I've said doesn't really meet my needs.
I'm not mad at iTunes or anything. It does a decent job and exceeds any other solution I've tried. But it is irritating to see your arrogance on the matter.
Your company has created a partial solution to my needs. I fails to meet them fully. And now *you're* mocking *me* about it? After all, ultimately, its your program that sucks, not my desire to have my music organized.
I think this breaks down somewhat when you consider the importance of the developers.
Definitely, the developers are important. Which is how I prefer it. =) And it is important to recognize that, in many ways, any project (FOSS or otherwise) is in a real sense "orphaned" when the original developer(s) -- its parent(s) -- move on.
But, at least with FOSS, there's mostly no difference between someone getting bored and stopping work on a project, and someone getting hired up and transferring a project's copyrights to a company -- the open version is still out there, and if it's worth it to someone, will get "adopted" and continue to be maintained or even grow.
I say "mostly no difference" because sometimes the open version has to compete with the New And Improved closed version.. in your example of Linus & Linux, the really tough problem would not be losing Linus -- although that would suck, there are others who could, over time, step into his role, or at least something like it. No, the really hassly thing for the FOSS codebase would be that it would need to compete with the closed version that Linus had moved to. It would be a fragmentation/standards problem, kind of -- which version of the kernel (FOSS or "official") would your distro use? or your hosting company support, or nVidia develop for, etc.
In the case of Linux, though, it's actually not realistically possible to close the source, AFAIK; because Linus has never required copyright assignments from contributors, he cannot transfer them. Thousands of people would need to individually agree to transfer the copyright for their individual contributions.
No Active X support (many of our online applications use active X)
It's possible to run ActiveX under the mozilla browsers (and some others). See http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm for more. Note that this of course only works on Windows, but it seems you only support Windows anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem..
Not as user friendly as other browsers (ease of use and clarity issues)
Wow.. you're the first person I've ever heard say that. =) Better and more featureful UI was one of the big reasons I switched to mozilla (I'm still using the suite, not FF).
If you can condense your objections into specifics and describe better approaches, feel free to enter them into bugzilla.. sometimes things like that get acted on, although often not (just as with IE).
Lack of a real centralized support center (The forums are a rich resource..if you have time to run searches or wait for someone to answer your post, which in a real world environment, is not conducive)
Well, except for when I've had access to really posh support under some extremely-costly contracts, I've always found that forums tend to yield an answer faster than support personnel do, anyway..
But, I did a google for "firefox support contract"; the 3rd result was for http://www.findopensourcesupport.com/, and there are people there apparently willing to support Firefox. I was barely trying and found support contracts offered in a few minutes.. so it's out there.
Potential for abuse by students of all age ranges
(The tabbed browsing is an exceptional idea! however, most teachers are too sued to window browsing and wouldn't even notice the extra three or four tabs that are in the background hiding god knows what kind of sites from her view.)
Er.. yeah, I guess I have no answer for that. I mean, it's easy to hide an IE window also, and IE7 is coming with tabbed browsing. But if having tabs is really an abuse risk for you, then there's not much that can be done.. I tried a quick search for an extension to disable tabbed browsing, without luck (but I didn't really look very hard.)
Anyway, I hope the info on ActiveX and support was a little helpful to you.. maybe next year (or whenever you review IT policies) you will be able to support mozilla.. at least for teachers or others who can be trusted to use tabs responsibly.
Bottom line: if you're going to evaluate a product's pros and cons critically, as the subject of this discussion suggests, then you have to be realistic and admit that not interoperating with existing standards is a huge con.
Yeah, but then "supporting" all of the problems inherent with ActiveX is also a huge con, as well.
At any rate, since (while I'm obviously not), you seem to be a pro-ActiveX guy, I'd encourange you to check out http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm, where you can find a bridge between Netscape-style plugins and ActiveX, that allows Moz, Opera and others to host ActiveX controls (when running on Windows).
I'm sick of certain segments of US society trying to force *their* values on the rest of the world and thinking they can intimidate the rest of the world into obeying.
Yeah.. a lot of us Americans are pretty sick of it, too.:-\
I've noticed that the GUI app that's always running is MUCH more intrusive. I've turned off the "new mail" sound but still the count of messages in the icon is a distraction. It annoys me, so I feel like I have to go check it. I want to turn it off, but there's no equivalent of "now you're back in the shell, you have new mail, eh" then.
Any ideas?
Just ignore it. =)
I'm not being facetious, really. I used to have some similar problems; whenever I got a new email I'd go see what it was immediately, which broke my focus on whatever code I was working on at the time. Eventually I learned not be be "enslaved" by the new-email notification, but it took an actual effort. I had to forcibly restrain myself from un-minimizing my email client for a while, until my brain got into the habit of noting the notification without feeling like it needed to pursue it immediately.
I'm 30, and my guess is that you are of similar age (and of a particular temperment to still be using the terminal so heavily).. we weren't as much naturally "trained" by the experience of many inputs competing for our attention as younger kids were -- they seem to manage multiple inputs with much less effort or loss of efficiency (although if this study can be trusted, still with some lossage). People older than I am seem to have even more problems with multitasking attention.
But so my point is this: while it may not be as natural for some of us, we can learn to filter inputs competing for our attention -- it just may take a little effort.
(You could also close out your email client except when you wish to deal with email, or if you're running like xbiff, stop, but IMHO it's more valuable in the long run to train yourself to direct your attention where *you* choose, not wherever the most noise or flash is..)
And who would determine what is porn and what is not?
You're right -- that is an extremely difficult question.
However, if paid the large sums that such a demanding and delicate task obviously demands, I would be willing to dedicate my life to answering it. For the good of mankind and whatnot, you understand..
The system gets built, but it suffers from Simplicity
Yeah, I just *hate* it when systems come out simple. I'd much rather some methodology was consistently applied to complicate them up.. that's generally far better in the long run.;-)
Just kidding.. your capitalization of "Simplicity" implies that it's part of some terminology I've not run across. I assume it means/implies "too simple-minded to fully encapsulate the problem set", or something along those lines. I've just never heard anyone criticize simplicity in system design before, and had to comment. =)
Yes, formal software methods are hard and time consuming compared to just building and testing. Formal bridge design is hard and time consuming compared to just building and testing.
For some reason we accept that software should be just thrown together rather than properly designed and proved.
I agree with you completely, but it doesn't help me any that we're right. Because my clients almost never agree to pay me for the "hard and time consuming" approach.
Heck, they seem to get antsy if I even say the words "hard and time consuming", or anything like them -- before they even see the reality of those words reflected in the estimate. After all, the next vendor over is promising "easy and quick", right?
Clients seem to *demand*, not just accept, that software should be built the ad-hoc way.
I don't know how we (the software development industry) collectively got ourselves into this mess -- on the one hand, nobody wants to pay for us to take the time to think like true engineers, and on the other hand, everyone wants engineering-grade stability. Probably we did it to ourselves somehow.. something to do with all of the hype that surrounds the industry, maybe.
In our defense, though, we do work in a very fast-changing industry.. other engineering fields (architecture, bridge-building, etc.) seem to move more slowly. So far, I've noticed I don't have much chance to "repeat myself" from project to project -- just about the time I've mastered some skill set, something new/big/exciting comes along to replace it, and I begin mastering that instead. It keeps my life interesting, and I certainly prefer things this way to grinding out the same stuff over and over, but it definitely increases the level of uncertainty involved in my life. Which, naturally, shows up in the slipped due dates and unexpected problems..
Oh, well. I think I'll keep the link to this article handy for next time I catch flack about a missed deadline -- after all, it can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it too, right?;-)
Here's my complaint, from an entirely different direction: two years from now, is every default installation of Mozilla and/or Firefox going to require me to change a laundry list of preferences in order to avoid features I don't want?
That's a little more valid than the other complaints you mention. On the other hand, if you get your way, am I going to need to tell my mom how to turn on some ever-growing set of default-disabled firefox options in order to get a decent browsing experience?
Also, while your concern does apply to the first installation of firefox/moz on any given machine, after that the user prefs are persistent, as they're stored in a user folder (at least under Windows), not with the app itself. So even if you uninstall and re-install months later, your prefs will be there waiting for you. My moz installation has prefs built up over time since 1.3, which is when I made it my default browser, or maybe even 1.1 on a couple of my machines.
The point is, most people (those not like us) don't ever really change defaults, so someone has to think hard about what those defaults should be. It's unavoidable, and turning everything off by default can be as bad as turning on things that shouldn't really be on by default. We just have to hope that our vendors (MoFo, in this case) make smart decisions. It's not elitist, really -- or doesn't have to be -- it's part of presenting the best possible experience to the widest possible range of users, with the least amount of tweaking necessary.
Maybe the Right Thing To Do would be one additional screen in the installation wizard that prompts the user if they want a "bare functionality" installation (for you), a "bells and whistles" installation (for my mom), or a "MoFo recommended" installation (embodying their best guesses)..
I think it would make more sense if network.prefetch-next would be set to false by default.
Finally, a complaint that deserves its "insightful" mod! =)
I'm a fan of the feature -- both in moz and of google's new use of it -- but I agree that it might have been a little wiser for moz disable it by default.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a "smart default" for features like this? For instance, maybe it could be enabled by default on broadband connections, but not dial-up. Or the browser could reverse-DNS its own IP and if a.com record is found (not likely for a home user), disable the feature, to avoid freaking out people who fear the prefetch downloading verboten content from a work machine.. dunno, just brainstorming. But I think that a lot of times defaults could be made more intelligent than they usually are, if software would consider its surroundings a little..
Not only could this get you in trouble by inadvertently downloading porn at work, but you could download even more incriminating things.
If your workplace is that draconian, they're probably already watching you carefully because the content filters have noticed verboten keywords in the page summaries google presents in the search listing, eh?;-)
Seriously, haven't you ever clicked on a search result, got to the site, and realized that it wasn't what you wanted (perhaps even.. *gasp*.. pr0n)? You just click "back" and try the next result. If link prefetching was going to get you into trouble, so could a simple mistake just along those lines.
What's more, the prefetch feature can be turned off, whereas you'll never be able to "turn off" your accidental mis-clicks. So if you really want to worry, it should be about google including child porn in the results, not about moz prefetching the occasional top result for you.
Actually, since google uses the prefetch feature only on searches where the vast majority of users immediately follow the top result's "authoritative" link, if the prefetch ever loads anything like kiddie porn, you might want to start worrying more about your fellow man than your IT department.;-)
I can just see some malicious little asshole putting hidden (via color) links in their webpages that download utterly offensive crap just to see if they can get someone fired.
I also expect that this will be abused by unscrupulous websites who want to run up their ad revenue by having people preload a page full of ads.
I just think this concept is a horrible idea.
There are already numerous ways similar effects can be achieved -- a hidden iframe, "web bug" images (or CSS or JavaScript or any other page element loaded with an href or src attribute), XMLHttpRequest(), etc. And none of the things you're afraid of have happened.
What's more, the prefetching feature has been in moz for a while now -- maybe a year or so? I remember reading about how to enable it on my own sites (although it turns out that I use it pretty rarely, because on my sites it's generally not very clear where the user would go next). But so the point is, the feature's been there for a long time and yet none of the things you're afraid of have happened.
What's more, you can just turn the feature off if you don't like it -- I'm not sure about firefox, but the suite has a GUI pref for it, so you don't even need to get into about:config to change it.
So.. I humbly suggest that you rethink your assessment.
Home PC users do not need to generate traffic on port 25 that's going anywhere other than their ISP's mailserver.
Of course we do. I send email out on two separate work-related SMTP servers from my home connection, every day.
While it would technically be possible for me to use my ISP's SMTP server for those accounts while connected from home, it would be a huge pain. I can't sent on my ISPs SMTP server except when connected from home, so I must use the office SMTP servers when connected from elsewhere than home.. if I had to only use my ISP's SMTP server from home, I'd have to change my email-account setup each time I booted up my laptop.
OTOH, if it would help cut down on spam, I'd be willing to fill out some online form on my ISP's server that would allow me to list a set of SMTP servers I want to connect to. Such a procedure would prevent owned machines from spamming or acting as relays to arbitrary servers, but would let people like me do what we need, with fairly minimal hassle..
Anybody else notice that desktop user-oriented opensource software always looks 5 years old, but consumes resources like it was only 2 years old?
A lot of times, that's because it's developed to be cross-platform. That's certainly a big factor in the "bloat" and slowness of OOo and Firefox (your examples).
If you pick up one of the gecko-based browsers with a native interface (rather than a XUL interface, whether the old XUL used by the suite or the "new" XUL used by FF), you should notice that they feel quite responsive and use less memory.
OOo, by running on multiple platforms, is also doing a lot of work and supporting layers that MS Office doesn't. OOo also has its own windowing library, for instance. OOo, while it does do everything I need and has replaced MS Office for me, is definitely sluggish, and doesn't support either my KDE skin or the XP look (or at least I don't know how to make it do so).
There are other issues though -- for example, the death-struggle of KDE vs. Gnome means that often GUIs get designed at a lowest common denominator. And the cross-platform thing drives that common denominator even lower. And most open-source projects don't have the the same resources for extensive usability studies that large commercial products do..
Anyway, I hear you, but I think there are reasonable causes for the effect you're describing.
I do hope OOo 2 is a little faster than 1.1, though.. although I'm not holding my breath or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's how many sites support themselves: they get paid a per-click fee by the advertisters. So think about an ad-hating but site-loving web user .. you want to avoid ads (especially popups, DHTML popovers, and flash), while still helping your favorite site pay its hosting bill. Which is exactly what that last option would provide.
If I had a Firefox plugin, for instance, that would download and "click" the ads for me, maybe randomly on 1 of N page hits, so that the site got some cash without me seeing the ads, I'd use it..
Interesting .. I've met a few very intelligent, well-educated people who I've come to respect, in spite of their religious beliefs. But I can't say that I've ever been able to understand why they believe as they do, except to write it off as a personal failing or the result of never-critically-examined early brainwashing. What is it that you're starting to understand? (I ask that not argumentatively but with genuine curiosity.)
I saw the event at school in either 1st or 2nd grade was well -- but not live, exactly. The 5th graders saw it live and then the teachers showed each classroom one at a time, with a little preparation for what we would see and the option to not participate.
And we also had jokes in the next few days or weeks .. the one that stays with me is: How many astronauts can you fit in a VW Bug? Eleven: one in each seat and seven in the ashtray.
Kinda sick, I suppose, but a common human way of dealing with difficult-to-accept circumstances. Anyway, an entire little segment of the population was about our age when the Challenger disaster happened, and remember it in a similar way -- as the first real indication that the things adults do can go horribly wrong sometimes..
My solution is similar, but I just put a PHP page on my home desktop that serves my FF bookmarks.html. It took about 2 minutes to create and now I can get to my bookmarks from anywhere.
The only downside is that I would have to spend a little more time if I also ever wanted to add new bookmarks from anywhere..
Link?
;-)
Since you're going to be picky, it's spelled "spelled", not "spelt".
Glass houses, etc.
Ok, maybe I'm just being nitpicky here, but "the US" doesn't "want" anything. There's like 300 million of us, each of whom wants various things, and Bush certainly doesn't represent all of us. Nor does the US Trade Representative. Believe me, I dislike Bush, most of his foreign policy, the DMCA, or what-have-you just as much as you do, if not more.
Various *parts* of the US government, and some strong trade lobbies, are who want this.
Hopefully Canada's representatives can find some way to resist, but frankly and unfortuantely, I doubt it.
Thanks for listening; please resume.
I've read a few of your posts before, and while generally quite informative, they're also often pretty arrogant. I've finally decided to reply to one.
First off, let me say that I do think that iTunes is the best-of-breed music organizer. It gets many things right that other such tools don't. I don't, in general, dislike iTunes -- quite the contrary.
But it's *not good enough*. (As you yourself have said, all computers suck .. we're getting there but we're not there yet.)
Just as an example -- I have a lot of DJ mixes (the bulk of my collection), so I've always used the "original artist" ID3 field. It lets me cross-index an instance of, say, a Ferry Corsten remix of a track originally by Armin with a Paul van Dyk remix of the same track, and compare them. But iTunes doesn't support the original artist field. Not the end of the world, I suppose -- I wrote a Perl script to "abuse" the composer field by copying the values from all of my MP3s' original artist field into the composer field. It almost kinda works ok for now, although I'm of course screwed if I ever want to collect classical music too.
None of the other music organizers have "done it all" for me, either, so over the years I've ended up writing, bit by bit as needed, an extensive set of scripts to manage my music for me. If I let iTunes reorganize my library for me, that will all be broken. I would need to use iTunes exclusively, which as I've said doesn't really meet my needs.
I'm not mad at iTunes or anything. It does a decent job and exceeds any other solution I've tried. But it is irritating to see your arrogance on the matter.
Your company has created a partial solution to my needs. I fails to meet them fully. And now *you're* mocking *me* about it? After all, ultimately, its your program that sucks, not my desire to have my music organized.
So, please -- try to lay off the attitude.
Very, very high? ;-)
Er .. isn't that part supposed to come at the end? Maybe that's the translation for "sated"..
Definitely, the developers are important. Which is how I prefer it. =) And it is important to recognize that, in many ways, any project (FOSS or otherwise) is in a real sense "orphaned" when the original developer(s) -- its parent(s) -- move on.
But, at least with FOSS, there's mostly no difference between someone getting bored and stopping work on a project, and someone getting hired up and transferring a project's copyrights to a company -- the open version is still out there, and if it's worth it to someone, will get "adopted" and continue to be maintained or even grow.
I say "mostly no difference" because sometimes the open version has to compete with the New And Improved closed version .. in your example of Linus & Linux, the really tough problem would not be losing Linus -- although that would suck, there are others who could, over time, step into his role, or at least something like it. No, the really hassly thing for the FOSS codebase would be that it would need to compete with the closed version that Linus had moved to. It would be a fragmentation/standards problem, kind of -- which version of the kernel (FOSS or "official") would your distro use? or your hosting company support, or nVidia develop for, etc.
In the case of Linux, though, it's actually not realistically possible to close the source, AFAIK; because Linus has never required copyright assignments from contributors, he cannot transfer them. Thousands of people would need to individually agree to transfer the copyright for their individual contributions.
Well, except for when I've had access to really posh support under some extremely-costly contracts, I've always found that forums tend to yield an answer faster than support personnel do, anyway..
But, I did a google for "firefox support contract"; the 3rd result was for http://www.findopensourcesupport.com/, and there are people there apparently willing to support Firefox. I was barely trying and found support contracts offered in a few minutes .. so it's out there.
Er .. yeah, I guess I have no answer for that. I mean, it's easy to hide an IE window also, and IE7 is coming with tabbed browsing. But if having tabs is really an abuse risk for you, then there's not much that can be done .. I tried a quick search for an extension to disable tabbed browsing, without luck (but I didn't really look very hard.)
Anyway, I hope the info on ActiveX and support was a little helpful to you .. maybe next year (or whenever you review IT policies) you will be able to support mozilla .. at least for teachers or others who can be trusted to use tabs responsibly.
Yeah, but then "supporting" all of the problems inherent with ActiveX is also a huge con, as well.
At any rate, since (while I'm obviously not), you seem to be a pro-ActiveX guy, I'd encourange you to check out http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm, where you can find a bridge between Netscape-style plugins and ActiveX, that allows Moz, Opera and others to host ActiveX controls (when running on Windows).
Yeah .. a lot of us Americans are pretty sick of it, too. :-\
Just ignore it. =)
I'm not being facetious, really. I used to have some similar problems; whenever I got a new email I'd go see what it was immediately, which broke my focus on whatever code I was working on at the time. Eventually I learned not be be "enslaved" by the new-email notification, but it took an actual effort. I had to forcibly restrain myself from un-minimizing my email client for a while, until my brain got into the habit of noting the notification without feeling like it needed to pursue it immediately.
I'm 30, and my guess is that you are of similar age (and of a particular temperment to still be using the terminal so heavily) .. we weren't as much naturally "trained" by the experience of many inputs competing for our attention as younger kids were -- they seem to manage multiple inputs with much less effort or loss of efficiency (although if this study can be trusted, still with some lossage). People older than I am seem to have even more problems with multitasking attention.
But so my point is this: while it may not be as natural for some of us, we can learn to filter inputs competing for our attention -- it just may take a little effort.
(You could also close out your email client except when you wish to deal with email, or if you're running like xbiff, stop, but IMHO it's more valuable in the long run to train yourself to direct your attention where *you* choose, not wherever the most noise or flash is ..)
You're right -- that is an extremely difficult question.
However, if paid the large sums that such a demanding and delicate task obviously demands, I would be willing to dedicate my life to answering it. For the good of mankind and whatnot, you understand..
;-)
Yeah, I just *hate* it when systems come out simple. I'd much rather some methodology was consistently applied to complicate them up .. that's generally far better in the long run. ;-)
Just kidding .. your capitalization of "Simplicity" implies that it's part of some terminology I've not run across. I assume it means/implies "too simple-minded to fully encapsulate the problem set", or something along those lines. I've just never heard anyone criticize simplicity in system design before, and had to comment. =)
I agree with you completely, but it doesn't help me any that we're right. Because my clients almost never agree to pay me for the "hard and time consuming" approach.
Heck, they seem to get antsy if I even say the words "hard and time consuming", or anything like them -- before they even see the reality of those words reflected in the estimate. After all, the next vendor over is promising "easy and quick", right?
Clients seem to *demand*, not just accept, that software should be built the ad-hoc way.
I don't know how we (the software development industry) collectively got ourselves into this mess -- on the one hand, nobody wants to pay for us to take the time to think like true engineers, and on the other hand, everyone wants engineering-grade stability. Probably we did it to ourselves somehow .. something to do with all of the hype that surrounds the industry, maybe.
In our defense, though, we do work in a very fast-changing industry .. other engineering fields (architecture, bridge-building, etc.) seem to move more slowly. So far, I've noticed I don't have much chance to "repeat myself" from project to project -- just about the time I've mastered some skill set, something new/big/exciting comes along to replace it, and I begin mastering that instead. It keeps my life interesting, and I certainly prefer things this way to grinding out the same stuff over and over, but it definitely increases the level of uncertainty involved in my life. Which, naturally, shows up in the slipped due dates and unexpected problems..
Oh, well. I think I'll keep the link to this article handy for next time I catch flack about a missed deadline -- after all, it can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it too, right? ;-)
That's a little more valid than the other complaints you mention. On the other hand, if you get your way, am I going to need to tell my mom how to turn on some ever-growing set of default-disabled firefox options in order to get a decent browsing experience?
Also, while your concern does apply to the first installation of firefox/moz on any given machine, after that the user prefs are persistent, as they're stored in a user folder (at least under Windows), not with the app itself. So even if you uninstall and re-install months later, your prefs will be there waiting for you. My moz installation has prefs built up over time since 1.3, which is when I made it my default browser, or maybe even 1.1 on a couple of my machines.
The point is, most people (those not like us) don't ever really change defaults, so someone has to think hard about what those defaults should be. It's unavoidable, and turning everything off by default can be as bad as turning on things that shouldn't really be on by default. We just have to hope that our vendors (MoFo, in this case) make smart decisions. It's not elitist, really -- or doesn't have to be -- it's part of presenting the best possible experience to the widest possible range of users, with the least amount of tweaking necessary.
Maybe the Right Thing To Do would be one additional screen in the installation wizard that prompts the user if they want a "bare functionality" installation (for you), a "bells and whistles" installation (for my mom), or a "MoFo recommended" installation (embodying their best guesses)..
Finally, a complaint that deserves its "insightful" mod! =)
I'm a fan of the feature -- both in moz and of google's new use of it -- but I agree that it might have been a little wiser for moz disable it by default.
I wonder if it would be possible to make a "smart default" for features like this? For instance, maybe it could be enabled by default on broadband connections, but not dial-up. Or the browser could reverse-DNS its own IP and if a .com record is found (not likely for a home user), disable the feature, to avoid freaking out people who fear the prefetch downloading verboten content from a work machine .. dunno, just brainstorming. But I think that a lot of times defaults could be made more intelligent than they usually are, if software would consider its surroundings a little..
If your workplace is that draconian, they're probably already watching you carefully because the content filters have noticed verboten keywords in the page summaries google presents in the search listing, eh? ;-)
Seriously, haven't you ever clicked on a search result, got to the site, and realized that it wasn't what you wanted (perhaps even .. *gasp* .. pr0n)? You just click "back" and try the next result. If link prefetching was going to get you into trouble, so could a simple mistake just along those lines.
What's more, the prefetch feature can be turned off, whereas you'll never be able to "turn off" your accidental mis-clicks. So if you really want to worry, it should be about google including child porn in the results, not about moz prefetching the occasional top result for you.
Actually, since google uses the prefetch feature only on searches where the vast majority of users immediately follow the top result's "authoritative" link, if the prefetch ever loads anything like kiddie porn, you might want to start worrying more about your fellow man than your IT department. ;-)
There are already numerous ways similar effects can be achieved -- a hidden iframe, "web bug" images (or CSS or JavaScript or any other page element loaded with an href or src attribute), XMLHttpRequest(), etc. And none of the things you're afraid of have happened.
What's more, the prefetching feature has been in moz for a while now -- maybe a year or so? I remember reading about how to enable it on my own sites (although it turns out that I use it pretty rarely, because on my sites it's generally not very clear where the user would go next). But so the point is, the feature's been there for a long time and yet none of the things you're afraid of have happened.
What's more, you can just turn the feature off if you don't like it -- I'm not sure about firefox, but the suite has a GUI pref for it, so you don't even need to get into about:config to change it.
So .. I humbly suggest that you rethink your assessment.
Thanks for listening,
A prefetch fan =)
Hey, that actually looks kinda cool .. every other aero screenshot I've seen looks hideously ugly.
Of course we do. I send email out on two separate work-related SMTP servers from my home connection, every day.
While it would technically be possible for me to use my ISP's SMTP server for those accounts while connected from home, it would be a huge pain. I can't sent on my ISPs SMTP server except when connected from home, so I must use the office SMTP servers when connected from elsewhere than home .. if I had to only use my ISP's SMTP server from home, I'd have to change my email-account setup each time I booted up my laptop.
OTOH, if it would help cut down on spam, I'd be willing to fill out some online form on my ISP's server that would allow me to list a set of SMTP servers I want to connect to. Such a procedure would prevent owned machines from spamming or acting as relays to arbitrary servers, but would let people like me do what we need, with fairly minimal hassle..
A lot of times, that's because it's developed to be cross-platform. That's certainly a big factor in the "bloat" and slowness of OOo and Firefox (your examples).
If you pick up one of the gecko-based browsers with a native interface (rather than a XUL interface, whether the old XUL used by the suite or the "new" XUL used by FF), you should notice that they feel quite responsive and use less memory.
OOo, by running on multiple platforms, is also doing a lot of work and supporting layers that MS Office doesn't. OOo also has its own windowing library, for instance. OOo, while it does do everything I need and has replaced MS Office for me, is definitely sluggish, and doesn't support either my KDE skin or the XP look (or at least I don't know how to make it do so).
There are other issues though -- for example, the death-struggle of KDE vs. Gnome means that often GUIs get designed at a lowest common denominator. And the cross-platform thing drives that common denominator even lower. And most open-source projects don't have the the same resources for extensive usability studies that large commercial products do..
Anyway, I hear you, but I think there are reasonable causes for the effect you're describing.
I do hope OOo 2 is a little faster than 1.1, though .. although I'm not holding my breath or anything.