You weren't reading carefully enough. The author is pointing out one of the more ridiculous aspects of X.
In normal usage, a server is commonly defined as a remote system, program, or resource that serves information to a local interface known as a client.
But when you run an X program over a network, the client is the program that runs on the remote machine and the server (which is local) is what fields information from the remote machine to the user.
The designers of X were clearly the ones confused about the meanings of the two terms.
Maybe it's great when you're typesetting but in general it makes the screen like its out of focus.
Then either you or your software is doing it wrong. Good AA does not make the font look out of focus. Good AA takes the jaggies off large fonts and makes the small fonts much more readable. That's all, no more no less.
Intentional or not, Unix was not meant for Joe User. It never will be. And for a power user, I've found Unix to be merely adequate. The Unix Hater's Handbook claims that modern Unix is broken by design and cannot be fixed, only replaced by something better. (Do a Google search and read their rant on X and become enlightened.) I mostly agree with this perspective, but still find myself running Linux not because it's good, but because it happens to do the job slightly better than anything else.
There's no hope for Unix to ever become a desktop operating system. Apple's made it farther than anyone else so far with OS X, but only because they replaced all of the traditional Unix stuff with interfaces and subsystems of their own design. (Even though most of the traditional Unix stuff is still there, virtually none of it is used by default.)
I second this. This is how I got into Electronica to start with. (A Born Slippy mod remix is how I found Underworld) I've still got all of my old favorites on disk and ready to be played. Here's a short of some of my old-school mod favorites:
Wonderful Theme II Makina Abandon At the Top Bad Gun Barnyard Rave A Better World Remix Capital Punishment Celestial Fantasia Under Blue Sky...And Tears Apart Catch That Goblin! Johnnys Guardian Rave Two Faraway Love Feats of Valor Good Disco Beat Bytes Pinball We have to try... Get Ready 4 This Check the Sound Discovery Beyond Heaven Flight Over the Earth I Need a Drink Jump and Run Interphase More Than Meets the Mind Kiss Me You Fool Kingdom of the Sky Colors of Neptune Pawn Misery Pusher '99 South Park Mix I Can't Ever Face... Unreal2 Scirreal Mix Apollo 440 TAD Rmx Virus of Pain
(Sorry for the lack of artists, I ripped these straight from a playlist... These titles should be enough to find the files in the archives mentioned in the parent post, though.)
Though, if you're going to play mods, you might as well go all the way and make them sound good as well by using Modplug instead of Winamp. I *think* XMMS comes with a mod input plugin based on Modplug code, but if not, you can download it from the xmms site.
Flame it, troll it, overrate it or mark it redundant, but damn, what a waste of news space....Yet you find it necessary to read it anyway and even post a comment. Funny, that.
Speaking of killing hardware, my friend Jason and I make a nice hobby out of discussing various ways of destroying broken hardware and then making good on it.
Thus far he's been the one to do all of the killing, but we plan to one day gather all of our various broken and/or useless stuff for a bit of mass-murder.
I almost spewed my Pepsi all over the place when I saw they wanted $190 for the thing! I was lucky enough a few months back to stumble upon a used computer parts store that had a whole bin of older IBM PS/2 keyboards (clickey and post-clickety). I bought myself a post-clickety and kinda wish I'd have sprung for another one or two, though I don't see myself using one as my primary keyboard. I fancy most of the keyboards that Dell has made... this one at work for example (called a Dell QuietKey) is quite nice.
Oh yeah, and I refuse to buy any keyboard which has a crapload of them media and internet buttons built-in.
I'm nowhere near an expert on this kind of thing, but I believe there would be several intermediate steps before the bread turned into vapour.
The reason is that bread is made up of a bunch of different elements, and all have their own temperatures at which they turn into liquid and then gas. Thus, if you increased the temperature slowly enough, you could see some elements seperating from the bread mass before others.
Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array.
I'm not so sure about this. I have two 10k RPM drives in my desktop system, and when it was built it kicked the pants off anything IDE had to offer at the time.
People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.
My 10k drives don't make any more noise than most other drives I've ever heard in desktop systems. In fact, I don't even hear my Western Digital access the disc until I put my ear two inches from the case. That's a lot more than I can say for almost all of the ATA100 drives I've heard.
Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one.
This is my main complaint with IDE. My next system won't have SCSI because it's getting too expensive. Based on my understanding of the limitations of IDE, I'm going to get an ATA133 hardware RAID card for the drives that'll run my OS and then have a separate ATA133 card for a data drive ($HOME), CDRW drive, and DVD drive. Or use the interface on the motherboard if it's up to snuff.
Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)
Another reason why I'm going to miss SCSI. For most things, it's not too big a deal. But playing games... At a LAN party I used to go to, I'd love to watch people's framerates go to hell on their GeForce 2, Athlon Thunderbird 1.5GHz machine whenever anything at all accessed the disk. But my lowly 750Mhz machine would be trucking away, racking up frag after frag even while others downloaded movies and music from my shared folders.
DVDs are regioned. That is, discs sold in the U.S. can only be played on U.S. machines. Same is true for Europe, Japan, Austrailia and every other DVD-marketed region out there. In this case, there is absolutely no reason for French, German, et al audio dubs and subtitles on discs sold in the U.S. to even be in any other language than English. [1] In light of this, the author of the parent post has a legitimate gripe.
By the same token, if I were Japanese and living in Japan and own a Japanese DVD player, I would expect any movies that I bought to only have Japanese soundtracks and/or subtitles.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of DVD region coding in any way shape or form. However, the designers of DVD made the case that region coding would allow for "localization" (or regional customization) of all movies sold. Take note, however, that this is not the way region coding is being used. Instead, it's being used to prevent the selling of discs outside of the market that they were manufactured for.
1. Though one could make a case for Spanish soundtracks and subtitles being included.
Say, (and this isn't a troll/bait, just curious) does Linux have that kind of thing avaliable?
There is reportedly a third-party kernel patch, but I don't recall if it's even stable or active. I seem to remember it being targeted towards certain laptops too, so maybe this patch I'm thinking of is just to make particular laptop BIOSes not screw up on APM standby or whatever. (Like mine always did with Linux.)
Doesn't seem like a generic "hibernate" patch would be all that hard for a moderately skilled kernel hacker.
First, thanks for your reply. I was probably a bit more abrasive than I meant to be and that kind of thing can sometimes get out of hand.
Anyway, a well designed interface is transparent.
I'll agree with that, even though as someone interested in computer science, I don't tend to think of them that way.
Your thought that there is no perfect interface for all users is incorrect. There IS. The fact that nobody has been able to conceptualize it doesn't make it not so.
And I still don't think so. In regards to computers, an interface is usually defined as the link between the hardware/software and the whole human. The "interface problem" that we're discussing right here is that the hardware/software combination, in your agrument, doesn't account for variations in the human element. Sure, you could have your universal interface if all humans were the same! But they're not. Pretty much drastically so, both phsycially and psychologically. The problems resulting from this range from repetitive stress disorder to grandma erroneously double-clicking on every hyperlink in sight. Granted, these are problems with today's interfaces, but these interfaces were designed by so-called experts. The point is that no matter what kind of interface you design, somebody either can't use it properly or won't like it. (And yes, someone that doesn't like a particular interface is probably not going to use it either unless they quite literally have to.)
Moreover, I haven't been made aware of any studies that show that high customizability make UIs any better to use in any OBJECTIVE (ie. measureable) sense. Before you say that intagible benefits like comfort or aesthetics are important, in the world of interface design, they're very difficult to factor in. Treated as a science, UI design can be very concrete, measuring the time that it takes to complete a task, for instance, or find what you're looking for.
I doubt that the benefit of being able to customize a UI can be measured objectively. And yes, you can measure how effective a particular interface is... let me break off from this for a moment.
I'm getting the feeling that when you talk about interfaces, you're referring to a smaller unit than I am. Say, an interface for one particular program. I was originally referring to an interface as the whole of a computing desktop. In designing a UI that complex, the user is not typically going to be performing a few pre-determined tasks, but a whole slew of different tasks that cannot be predicted at design time. I think this is part of what the GNOME developers faced... when they rewrote GNOME to make it simpler, they had in mind the type of tasks that they performed regularly. From the complaints I'm hearing about GNOME 2, they didn't stop to consider that other users out there would be practically breaking GNOME because the types of and number tasks they perform are so much different. Particularly it's the advanced GNOME users who have been using it for years who seem to be frustrated.
On the other hand, there HAVE been studies that have shown that despite a SUBJECTIVE dislike for the interface, an OBJECTIVE, measurable benefit can be found when the interface is meant to optimize productivity.
I can admit that an interface can be effective even if the user personally dislikes it for being boring or what have you. Some people are forced to use such an interface to do particular tasks. A task at work such as data entry, for example. But if the pendulum swings the other way--if the interface is aestheically atrocious--then productivity is lost. Easy enough to design around until you take into account that each person has their own view of what is aestheically atrocious and what is not just as much as they have their own idea of what is pleasing. For example, the person who wrote the webmail software that I have to use to view my email probably thought that the solid bright-blue bar on the left hand side of the screen looked alright with the rest of the page having a white background. But I can't stand it because it makes my eyes go screwy. I can't look at it for more than a couple minutes at a time... lost productivity.
Particularly in the computing industry where impressions alone drive sales. Your argument might apply to ATM machines, but not personal desktop environments.
For instance, I could give you a very uncomfortable mouse to use, but it may be extremely precise and high tech, which yields a measureable decrease in the amount of time it takes you to manipulate data on your screen. On the other hand, you could use the old, dirty mouse on your desk, which doesn't roll very well, or click as accurately, but feels nice in your hand. The subjective experience tells you that your old mouse is better, but the objective measurements show that you're not as productive as you could be.
That's a pretty good analogy, (rare on slashdot, I know) and I'd admit that any person who chose pure aesthetics over efficiency is indeed a moron. However, you can't change that the person is a moron. What you can do is change the aethetics of the new mouse to match what the user prefers. That will make him want to use the new mouse, which is technically a better interface. This is one of the primary problems with interface design. Like I said before, overall impressions drive sales and adoption. That's why nearly every open-source project with an interface has screenshots on its website. That's why OS X has candy-colored buttons. That's why we have color TV. It would be awfully nice if interfaces were judged on technical merit alone, but they are not. If they were, Linux (and other Unices) would probably have a heck of a lot more users than it does now.
The problem that we're running into here is that you think you know what's best for you, when that's clearly a false statement. You're not a user interface designer, and despite your gesticulating, you're not an expert on what makes a good interface, merely what is aesthetically pleasing to you.
I'm sorry, but I think I do have a pretty damn good idea of what's best for me. As does every other person in the world out there, including yourself. No, I'm not an interface designer, and I'm not an interface expert. But I have common sense. Common sense tells me that if I don't like an interface for whatever reason, then I am going to resist it as much as I can. THAT makes it an ineffective interface. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that people do not all come out of a factory with the same set of specifications, each one is different from the next in some way, shape, or form. Some even interact with their environment in totally different ways than 99.999% of the rest of the world. From what I've seen, current interface design caters to the common demoninator, i.e. "which types of people are most likely to do this sort of task?"
despite their obvious EXTERNAL appearance, cars are almost all exactly the same from an interface perspective. There's a gas pedal, a brake pedal and a steering wheel. Ignoring any transmission issues, when you know how to drive a car, you pretty much know how to drive all cars.
In using the car analogy, I was referring to the car as a whole. I'll assume that you knew what I was talking about when I mentioned Hitler. He proposed that in all of Germany, (and its subsequently acquired countries) that there would be just one kind of car that everyone drove. Having just one nationally-endorsed car for everyone would have make a lot of things easier: the cars being mass-produced would be much cheaper, streets built according to the width of a single type of car rather than estimating the average (and getting it wrong), social class differences would be somewhat blurred (cars are treated in this society as status symbols more than anything else), and perhaps most importantly repairs would be a breeze because every part on every car is exactly the same. You'd even stand a pretty good chance of knowing how to fix it yourself if you've had the exact same type of car for a few decades.
Now ask yourself how many people you know of would want to buy this car rather than an SUV, or Ford Mustang, or Chevy Truck or whatever they decided suited them best (regardless of whether it does or not). Same goes with desktop environments, my friend.
It's easy to see why you feel this way about interfaces, however. When all your options suck, any change that you make will feel like an improvement. Don't think that I'm not customizing MY interface. The interface design was poor in the first place, and THAT'S why we're still making changes.
And my opinion is that creating a desktop that's perfect for every single kind of user out there is impossible, hence having the option to make changes and tweak things is essential.
I don't know why you think that there is no need for a universal, optimal interface. Sure, it's a lofty (and likely, impossible) goal.
I know it's getting late and my mind isn't working at full-throttle any more, but that last sentence seems like a bit of contradiction to what you've been saying. There's nothing wrong with a universal interface for smaller components of the desktop. I wouldn't be the least bit worried if every media player on the planet, for example, changed their interfaces to be completely identical as long as it worked well. But the entirety of a computer user's interface (desktop plus programs) is a whole 'nother matter because there are virtually limitless tasks that one can perform on a desktop computer. More over, many people's desktops are quite dynamic. Interface designers (such as the GNOME team) simply cannot predict and plan for every single scenario that the user will encounter. Sure, adding options to the interface might result in some that end up as unnecessary bloat. But those can be discovered and gotten rid of over time through feedback. If those potentially useful options never get added in the first place, many users (myself included) might not even try the interface in the first place because it doesn't suit their needs and the developers wonder why their product is doing so shabby because they're getting no feedback other than the fact that their product isn't being used. See, you have to go a bit deeper than just the design of the interface alone in order to get anything remotely resembling an accurate guage of its success.
However, striving for an interface that is so mediocre that the user is FORCED to customize it just to be able to get work done is ludicrous.
I would never claim that a decent interface should be required to be customized right out of the box before it can be used. That is silly. What I advocate is the ability for users to be able to customize their desktop at any time as they see fit, so that the interface can remain flexible to their needs. If I recall your original post, you stated that the mere presence of lots of options was indicitive of a broken interface, with all other considerations being overlooked.
In any case, go out to your local computer book store, and pick up some books on interface design. If you're still in school, go take some classes in it. It's an interesting subject that actually has a scientific element to it. It's 1 part psych, 1 part art, and one part Computing Science.
Aha! Art! You admitted it! Aesthetics do play a part after all.:) Anyway, I shall make certain I do look into it further, as I will hopefully be taking some more CS classes this fall on my way to get a degree. Thank you for your interesting conversation.
Secondly. GNOME has taken a very far step towards KISS (Keep it simple stupid) unlike some comments on here seem to suggest.
Yes, so simple they took out most of the features that made GNOME my favourite desktop!
The reviewer tries to make himself out as a GUI-expert, something he doesn't seem to be at all.
When I read the review, I had the immediate impressed that she was just a regular user. IIRC, she claimed right up front to not be too impressed with *NIX desktops in general. Much as I like Linux and Unix, I'd say I side with her.
There are ACTUAL GUI-experts and usability exports working on GNOME.
Where are they, then? Last I heard, Sun did some usability studies on GNOME and that was about it. Whether the results actually did anything for the resulting interface of GNOME 2 is debatable.
Turning off Nautilus for speed should be rather unnecessary except for people really short on memory.
...or have a sub-gigahertz processor.
People desperate to get rid of Nautilus, could do it via gnome-session-properties, and actually, as of GNOME 2.0 I don't see the point apart from feeling 31337.
Wanting to get rid of software I consider unnecessary is considered "31337"? (By which I take to mean "lame".) Please explain that logic to me. In that case, I'd have to call you "31337" as well if you've ever removed panels that display by default or disabled that damned annoying fish applet.
Let's not forget that one of the things that GNOME claims to be is modular which means you can remove, swap out, or write any component you wish and the rest of the components will not bitch. THAT INCLUDES NAUTILUS.
It's really fucking sad what's happened to GNOME. It really truly is. The GNOME developers and even the Slashdot audience, which up until now I've considered halfway clueful about this sort of thing, have completely forgot what made GNOME good in the first place: the fact that you could tell it how you wanted it to behave and it wouldn't argue. Now, with GNOME 2.0, we have a desktop with a couple of "sensible defaults" and a shitload of users who believe customizing your own environment is a fucking crime.
Here's something people fail to realize: even if you dislike your interface in some way, with a well designed interface and some training, you can be faster with the interface that is subjectively offensive than the one that you feel is somehow 'comfortable'.
There are a number of things wrong with this sentence.
1) Who defines what a "well-defined" interface is? That is a loaded term if ever there was one. If you were to take some kind of accurate poll of what constitutes a well-defined interface, I'm sure you'd get a whole range of different answers to include:
a. how intuitive it is to use b. how efficient it is to use c. how useful the included applications are d. how it good looks e. how quickly the computing environment responds to user input f. the number of options available to control it
Everyone's going to have a different answer as to what they feel constitutes good interface design is in their opinion. Anyone who asserts that there is but one good interface is much too ego-centric; they're really only thinking about what works well for them. As if they expect the rest of the world should simply adjust to their preferences.
2) When you say "faster" what exactly does that imply? If by "faster" you mean "efficient", how can one possibly be considered efficient with a setup he or she is not even comfortable with? That doesn't make any sense.
Configurability is the hallmark (in general) of a poor UI design. It means that you didn't know how to do it properly in the first place, so you're passing the buck to the user.
That is patently false and moreover, ridiculous. Configurability is the hallmark of flexibility, nothing more. And it is most definitely not passing the buck to the user as long as you use sensible defaults. It's when you take away the ability to configure options and features that you immediately take away anything resembling usefullness. There's a reason I use Unix instead of Windows in my daily routine and that reason it has nothing to do with how standard the interface is. (By "interface" I refer to all user-visible aspects of the operating system, not just whatever happens to run in X.)
For an example, why don't we try Mozilla. Mozilla has some very sensible defaults and in most cases the user does not have to do modify a single one of them to start using it right away. But there are still something on the order of a hundred or more options that can be set "behind the scenes" by users who choose to modify them. Those options literally touch on every single aspect of the browser, from look and feel to performance and behavior. By your reckoning, the mere presence of these options (despite the fact that they are well hidden and have reasonable defaults) implies that Mozilla is a completely worthless browser. (Personal feelings aside.) That can't be the case, since two of my friends and my fiancee, all of whom are inexperienced computer users, think Mozilla is great. From what I've seen, they aren't the only ones.
The advantages of a rigidly stardardized interface are often completely ignored, but they're what allow most people to sit down at any computer and start typing.
The words "rigidly standardized interface" honestly send a chill down my spine. That's a socialist statement if I ever heard one. If you're proposing that all interfaces be the same, I'll be the very first in line to oppose that. I do not want my interface to be the same as anyone elses, simply because I'm not everyone else and my preferences for a comfortable and efficient interface are completely different from every other person's on the planet.
You might as well take it one step further and propose that all schoolchildren in the world have the same exact cirriculum, despite the obvious differences in culture. Or that everybody should be required to drive the same car. Wait a moment, that has already been proposed... think a fellow named Hitler thought of that one.
However, I'm not about to suggest that most interfaces shouldn't carry among them common elements. But it's important to note that those common elements are already in place. Application windowing is almost universal across all computing platforms. Everybody expects a scrollbar to scroll content, a checkbox to check, and radio button to select a particular option. I can think of a hundred different examples that include cars, video games, and microwaves, but I think you get the picture.
There is simply no need for a universal interface the way you describe it. The current ones are far from perfect, but they are the best technology has to offer. You simply cannot create one interface that will allow everyone be efficient with it. Nor will absolutely every person even be able to use it. (The physically disabled, for example.) Most importantly, not everyone would even happy with it.
As long as there are computers, (and it's looking like there always will be, in some form) then there will always be different ways to inferface with them. I, for one, am thankful for that. There is no larger killer of innovation, spirit, and individuality than a large group of people conditioned to believe that there's just one way in the whole world to perform a task.
Then either these inexperienced users can find a different, non-confusing desktop or the experenced users can find a different desktop if either group decides their current one doesn't fit the bill.
Most of us are complaining about the fact that GNOME went from a desktop for "experienced developers" to an "easy-to-use" desktop, dropping support for some of our favourite features along the way.
Many, perhaps most, users use their PC only occasionally
Many, perhaps most, users should not be using a Unix-based OS in this case. They should be using an operating system that was designed from the ground up to cater to their needs: Windows or MacOS. Because by the time that you finally manage to modify Linux (for example) to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible for inexperienced users, it would then cease to be Linux as we know it.
On all of the computers I've tried it on, hibernation took only marginally less time than a cold boot to start up and about 5x the time to shut down.
Probably has something to do with writing 200MB (or more, depending on how much memory you have and what's running) of data to disk on every shutdown. Also, I'm fearful that reading and writing hundreds of MBs of data to my disk on every shutdown and boot would cause extra wear and tear on my disks, which I can't afford to replace right now. (Data-wise and money-wise.)
I would imagine hibernation is useful in the rare scenario where you're in the middle of something important and *have* to shut down and don't want to lose your place. But beyond that, I'd rather boot the old-fashioned way.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system. While some people like being able to tweak their desktops to hell and back, for many users it is just plain confusing to have as ridiculously many options everywhere as Gnome1 had. Note that for those serious about tweaking, gconf is there for your time-wasting pleasure.:)
Sensible defaults are fine. But I take exception to the fact that a lot of the (arguably more useful) options have been completely eradicated from GNOME. The developers reportedly did this in an effort to make the environment more intuitive.
There's a quote from one of the GNOME developers floating around... something to the effect of: "Better to have one good default way of doing something instead of six equally broken ones." This just reeks of ego-centricism on the part of the GNOME crew. Obviously they think that their desktop preferences are somehow The Right Way and everyone elses's are "broken".
For example Havoc Pennington, author of Metacity, the new GNOME wm (please correct me if those facts are wrong), professed that he thinks the sloppy-focus model of window management is stupid. Did he offer a reason why? No, but it is clearly implicit: "It isn't my way of doing it, so it's wrong." I have to take offense to that because I think the click-to-focus model is utterly retarded. It severly grates on my nerves whenever I have to make that extra, pointless, unneeded click to focus a program in Windows. I got away from Windows partly because I hated the lack of flexibility in the UI, and now GNOME is trying to force the same old crap back on me again.
I used GNOME not because it looked good, not because it had sensible defaults, and not even because it was free software. I used GNOME because it offered a plethora of options to let me do what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it without a whole lot of bitching.
I'm in the process of building GNOME 2 as we speak, and I will give it a try. But if my experience falls in line with most everyone elses, then it looks like I'll have to see what KDE 3 has to offer...
Erm, but then you have incriminating network logs which are not quite as easy to erase as a few MP3s and (at my workplace at least), will probably be noticed quicker by the admins...
Way I understood it, the fair use laws stated[1] that you could give copies to friends and you could make as many backups as you liked... so long as you were making no profit from either action.
1) I say "stated" because copying and/or reverse engineering anything now for any purpose is technically illegal.
But why did "they" choose the one, boring clock? ASClock was far superior.
Agreed. I have ASClock on all of my desktops. It was about the coolest-looking part of gnome 1.4 and would fit right in with gnome 2. If I knew my way around gnome applets, I'd bring it back and also give it an option to shrink to digital-only mode for smaller-sized panels.
Guess I'll have to find out if the applet will still compile and work fine in Gnome 2.
Even though though this question was targeted towards devlopers (and I'm not a developer per se), my pet bug would have to be how Windows 2000 and Windows XP make my motherboard's power LED turn off in Linux.
Now I'll be the first to admit that yeah, Mitnik screwed up. He made several mistakes and more importantly, broke the law. However, he more than paid for it by the inhumane (at best) treatment that the law system gave him[1], even when he admitted his guilt. The courts used him as an example of how they treat hackers who get caught.
It's yet another perfect example of what's wrong with the legal system in this country.
Mitnik's "officially" done his time, but thanks to the power of the government, media, and press, he'll continue be prosecuted by the public for the rest of his life.
1) Details of his unfair and unconstitutional treatment can be found all over the internet from independent resources. The government still won't admit that they did anything wrong and you can bet the press wouldn't challenge that.
Slashdot Mirror
You weren't reading carefully enough. The author is pointing out one of the more ridiculous aspects of X.
In normal usage, a server is commonly defined as a remote system, program, or resource that serves information to a local interface known as a client.
But when you run an X program over a network, the client is the program that runs on the remote machine and the server (which is local) is what fields information from the remote machine to the user.
The designers of X were clearly the ones confused about the meanings of the two terms.
Maybe it's great when you're typesetting but in general it makes the screen like its out of focus.
Then either you or your software is doing it wrong. Good AA does not make the font look out of focus. Good AA takes the jaggies off large fonts and makes the small fonts much more readable. That's all, no more no less.
You've hit the nail right on the head.
Intentional or not, Unix was not meant for Joe User. It never will be. And for a power user, I've found Unix to be merely adequate. The Unix Hater's Handbook claims that modern Unix is broken by design and cannot be fixed, only replaced by something better. (Do a Google search and read their rant on X and become enlightened.) I mostly agree with this perspective, but still find myself running Linux not because it's good, but because it happens to do the job slightly better than anything else.
There's no hope for Unix to ever become a desktop operating system. Apple's made it farther than anyone else so far with OS X, but only because they replaced all of the traditional Unix stuff with interfaces and subsystems of their own design. (Even though most of the traditional Unix stuff is still there, virtually none of it is used by default.)
I second this. This is how I got into Electronica to start with. (A Born Slippy mod remix is how I found Underworld) I've still got all of my old favorites on disk and ready to be played. Here's a short of some of my old-school mod favorites:
Wonderful Theme II
Makina
Abandon
At the Top
Bad Gun
Barnyard Rave
A Better World Remix
Capital Punishment
Celestial Fantasia
Under Blue Sky
Catch That Goblin!
Johnnys Guardian
Rave Two
Faraway Love
Feats of Valor
Good Disco Beat
Bytes
Pinball
We have to try...
Get Ready 4 This
Check the Sound
Discovery
Beyond Heaven
Flight Over the Earth
I Need a Drink
Jump and Run
Interphase
More Than Meets the Mind
Kiss Me You Fool
Kingdom of the Sky
Colors of Neptune
Pawn
Misery
Pusher '99 South Park Mix
I Can't Ever Face...
Unreal2 Scirreal Mix
Apollo 440 TAD Rmx
Virus of Pain
(Sorry for the lack of artists, I ripped these straight from a playlist... These titles should be enough to find the files in the archives mentioned in the parent post, though.)
Though, if you're going to play mods, you might as well go all the way and make them sound good as well by using Modplug instead of Winamp. I *think* XMMS comes with a mod input plugin based on Modplug code, but if not, you can download it from the xmms site.
Cheers and happy listening.
Flame it, troll it, overrate it or mark it redundant, but damn, what a waste of news space.
Speaking of killing hardware, my friend Jason and I make a nice hobby out of discussing various ways of destroying broken hardware and then making good on it.
Thus far he's been the one to do all of the killing, but we plan to one day gather all of our various broken and/or useless stuff for a bit of mass-murder.
What a colossal waste of time.
Meanwhile, you're posting to slashdot....
A bit pricey?!
I almost spewed my Pepsi all over the place when I saw they wanted $190 for the thing! I was lucky enough a few months back to stumble upon a used computer parts store that had a whole bin of older IBM PS/2 keyboards (clickey and post-clickety). I bought myself a post-clickety and kinda wish I'd have sprung for another one or two, though I don't see myself using one as my primary keyboard. I fancy most of the keyboards that Dell has made... this one at work for example (called a Dell QuietKey) is quite nice.
Oh yeah, and I refuse to buy any keyboard which has a crapload of them media and internet buttons built-in.
I'm nowhere near an expert on this kind of thing, but I believe there would be several intermediate steps before the bread turned into vapour.
The reason is that bread is made up of a bunch of different elements, and all have their own temperatures at which they turn into liquid and then gas. Thus, if you increased the temperature slowly enough, you could see some elements seperating from the bread mass before others.
Also, you don't really see the benefits of high speed drives until you throw them in a RAID array.
I'm not so sure about this. I have two 10k RPM drives in my desktop system, and when it was built it kicked the pants off anything IDE had to offer at the time.
People are getting tired of their computers sounding like jet engines.
My 10k drives don't make any more noise than most other drives I've ever heard in desktop systems. In fact, I don't even hear my Western Digital access the disc until I put my ear two inches from the case. That's a lot more than I can say for almost all of the ATA100 drives I've heard.
Another of ATA's big problems is that yes, it has the bandwidth to handle a fast drive, but not more than one.
This is my main complaint with IDE. My next system won't have SCSI because it's getting too expensive. Based on my understanding of the limitations of IDE, I'm going to get an ATA133 hardware RAID card for the drives that'll run my OS and then have a separate ATA133 card for a data drive ($HOME), CDRW drive, and DVD drive. Or use the interface on the motherboard if it's up to snuff.
Also, the more traffic ATA eats up, the more CPU it eats (ever noticed how burning CDs on an ATA burner will bog your machine down?)
Another reason why I'm going to miss SCSI. For most things, it's not too big a deal. But playing games... At a LAN party I used to go to, I'd love to watch people's framerates go to hell on their GeForce 2, Athlon Thunderbird 1.5GHz machine whenever anything at all accessed the disk. But my lowly 750Mhz machine would be trucking away, racking up frag after frag even while others downloaded movies and music from my shared folders.
e.g. lets see them actually use gcc3.1 before redhat
You troll. Because gcc > 2.95 is simply broken.
DVDs are regioned. That is, discs sold in the U.S. can only be played on U.S. machines. Same is true for Europe, Japan, Austrailia and every other DVD-marketed region out there. In this case, there is absolutely no reason for French, German, et al audio dubs and subtitles on discs sold in the U.S. to even be in any other language than English. [1] In light of this, the author of the parent post has a legitimate gripe.
By the same token, if I were Japanese and living in Japan and own a Japanese DVD player, I would expect any movies that I bought to only have Japanese soundtracks and/or subtitles.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of DVD region coding in any way shape or form. However, the designers of DVD made the case that region coding would allow for "localization" (or regional customization) of all movies sold. Take note, however, that this is not the way region coding is being used. Instead, it's being used to prevent the selling of discs outside of the market that they were manufactured for.
1. Though one could make a case for Spanish soundtracks and subtitles being included.
Say, (and this isn't a troll/bait, just curious) does Linux have that kind of thing avaliable?
There is reportedly a third-party kernel patch, but I don't recall if it's even stable or active. I seem to remember it being targeted towards certain laptops too, so maybe this patch I'm thinking of is just to make particular laptop BIOSes not screw up on APM standby or whatever. (Like mine always did with Linux.)
Doesn't seem like a generic "hibernate" patch would be all that hard for a moderately skilled kernel hacker.
First, thanks for your reply. I was probably a bit more abrasive than I meant to be and that kind of thing can sometimes get out of hand.
Anyway, a well designed interface is transparent.
I'll agree with that, even though as someone interested in computer science, I don't tend to think of them that way.
Your thought that there is no perfect interface for all users is incorrect. There IS. The fact that nobody has been able to conceptualize it doesn't make it not so.
And I still don't think so. In regards to computers, an interface is usually defined as the link between the hardware/software and the whole human. The "interface problem" that we're discussing right here is that the hardware/software combination, in your agrument, doesn't account for variations in the human element. Sure, you could have your universal interface if all humans were the same! But they're not. Pretty much drastically so, both phsycially and psychologically. The problems resulting from this range from repetitive stress disorder to grandma erroneously double-clicking on every hyperlink in sight. Granted, these are problems with today's interfaces, but these interfaces were designed by so-called experts. The point is that no matter what kind of interface you design, somebody either can't use it properly or won't like it. (And yes, someone that doesn't like a particular interface is probably not going to use it either unless they quite literally have to.)
Moreover, I haven't been made aware of any studies that show that high customizability make UIs any better to use in any OBJECTIVE (ie. measureable) sense. Before you say that intagible benefits like comfort or aesthetics are important, in the world of interface design, they're very difficult to factor in. Treated as a science, UI design can be very concrete, measuring the time that it takes to complete a task, for instance, or find what you're looking for.
I doubt that the benefit of being able to customize a UI can be measured objectively. And yes, you can measure how effective a particular interface is... let me break off from this for a moment.
I'm getting the feeling that when you talk about interfaces, you're referring to a smaller unit than I am. Say, an interface for one particular program. I was originally referring to an interface as the whole of a computing desktop. In designing a UI that complex, the user is not typically going to be performing a few pre-determined tasks, but a whole slew of different tasks that cannot be predicted at design time. I think this is part of what the GNOME developers faced... when they rewrote GNOME to make it simpler, they had in mind the type of tasks that they performed regularly. From the complaints I'm hearing about GNOME 2, they didn't stop to consider that other users out there would be practically breaking GNOME because the types of and number tasks they perform are so much different. Particularly it's the advanced GNOME users who have been using it for years who seem to be frustrated.
On the other hand, there HAVE been studies that have shown that despite a SUBJECTIVE dislike for the interface, an OBJECTIVE, measurable benefit can be found when the interface is meant to optimize productivity.
I can admit that an interface can be effective even if the user personally dislikes it for being boring or what have you. Some people are forced to use such an interface to do particular tasks. A task at work such as data entry, for example. But if the pendulum swings the other way--if the interface is aestheically atrocious--then productivity is lost. Easy enough to design around until you take into account that each person has their own view of what is aestheically atrocious and what is not just as much as they have their own idea of what is pleasing. For example, the person who wrote the webmail software that I have to use to view my email probably thought that the solid bright-blue bar on the left hand side of the screen looked alright with the rest of the page having a white background. But I can't stand it because it makes my eyes go screwy. I can't look at it for more than a couple minutes at a time... lost productivity.
Particularly in the computing industry where impressions alone drive sales. Your argument might apply to ATM machines, but not personal desktop environments.
For instance, I could give you a very uncomfortable mouse to use, but it may be extremely precise and high tech, which yields a measureable decrease in the amount of time it takes you to manipulate data on your screen. On the other hand, you could use the old, dirty mouse on your desk, which doesn't roll very well, or click as accurately, but feels nice in your hand. The subjective experience tells you that your old mouse is better, but the objective measurements show that you're not as productive as you could be.
That's a pretty good analogy, (rare on slashdot, I know) and I'd admit that any person who chose pure aesthetics over efficiency is indeed a moron. However, you can't change that the person is a moron. What you can do is change the aethetics of the new mouse to match what the user prefers. That will make him want to use the new mouse, which is technically a better interface. This is one of the primary problems with interface design. Like I said before, overall impressions drive sales and adoption. That's why nearly every open-source project with an interface has screenshots on its website. That's why OS X has candy-colored buttons. That's why we have color TV. It would be awfully nice if interfaces were judged on technical merit alone, but they are not. If they were, Linux (and other Unices) would probably have a heck of a lot more users than it does now.
The problem that we're running into here is that you think you know what's best for you, when that's clearly a false statement. You're not a user interface designer, and despite your gesticulating, you're not an expert on what makes a good interface, merely what is aesthetically pleasing to you.
I'm sorry, but I think I do have a pretty damn good idea of what's best for me. As does every other person in the world out there, including yourself. No, I'm not an interface designer, and I'm not an interface expert. But I have common sense. Common sense tells me that if I don't like an interface for whatever reason, then I am going to resist it as much as I can. THAT makes it an ineffective interface. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that people do not all come out of a factory with the same set of specifications, each one is different from the next in some way, shape, or form. Some even interact with their environment in totally different ways than 99.999% of the rest of the world. From what I've seen, current interface design caters to the common demoninator, i.e. "which types of people are most likely to do this sort of task?"
despite their obvious EXTERNAL appearance, cars are almost all exactly the same from an interface perspective. There's a gas pedal, a brake pedal and a steering wheel. Ignoring any transmission issues, when you know how to drive a car, you pretty much know how to drive all cars.
In using the car analogy, I was referring to the car as a whole. I'll assume that you knew what I was talking about when I mentioned Hitler. He proposed that in all of Germany, (and its subsequently acquired countries) that there would be just one kind of car that everyone drove. Having just one nationally-endorsed car for everyone would have make a lot of things easier: the cars being mass-produced would be much cheaper, streets built according to the width of a single type of car rather than estimating the average (and getting it wrong), social class differences would be somewhat blurred (cars are treated in this society as status symbols more than anything else), and perhaps most importantly repairs would be a breeze because every part on every car is exactly the same. You'd even stand a pretty good chance of knowing how to fix it yourself if you've had the exact same type of car for a few decades.
Now ask yourself how many people you know of would want to buy this car rather than an SUV, or Ford Mustang, or Chevy Truck or whatever they decided suited them best (regardless of whether it does or not). Same goes with desktop environments, my friend.
It's easy to see why you feel this way about interfaces, however. When all your options suck, any change that you make will feel like an improvement. Don't think that I'm not customizing MY interface. The interface design was poor in the first place, and THAT'S why we're still making changes.
And my opinion is that creating a desktop that's perfect for every single kind of user out there is impossible, hence having the option to make changes and tweak things is essential.
I don't know why you think that there is no need for a universal, optimal interface. Sure, it's a lofty (and likely, impossible) goal.
I know it's getting late and my mind isn't working at full-throttle any more, but that last sentence seems like a bit of contradiction to what you've been saying. There's nothing wrong with a universal interface for smaller components of the desktop. I wouldn't be the least bit worried if every media player on the planet, for example, changed their interfaces to be completely identical as long as it worked well. But the entirety of a computer user's interface (desktop plus programs) is a whole 'nother matter because there are virtually limitless tasks that one can perform on a desktop computer. More over, many people's desktops are quite dynamic. Interface designers (such as the GNOME team) simply cannot predict and plan for every single scenario that the user will encounter. Sure, adding options to the interface might result in some that end up as unnecessary bloat. But those can be discovered and gotten rid of over time through feedback. If those potentially useful options never get added in the first place, many users (myself included) might not even try the interface in the first place because it doesn't suit their needs and the developers wonder why their product is doing so shabby because they're getting no feedback other than the fact that their product isn't being used. See, you have to go a bit deeper than just the design of the interface alone in order to get anything remotely resembling an accurate guage of its success.
However, striving for an interface that is so mediocre that the user is FORCED to customize it just to be able to get work done is ludicrous.
I would never claim that a decent interface should be required to be customized right out of the box before it can be used. That is silly. What I advocate is the ability for users to be able to customize their desktop at any time as they see fit, so that the interface can remain flexible to their needs. If I recall your original post, you stated that the mere presence of lots of options was indicitive of a broken interface, with all other considerations being overlooked.
In any case, go out to your local computer book store, and pick up some books on interface design. If you're still in school, go take some classes in it. It's an interesting subject that actually has a scientific element to it. It's 1 part psych, 1 part art, and one part Computing Science.
Aha! Art! You admitted it! Aesthetics do play a part after all.
Secondly. GNOME has taken a very far step towards KISS (Keep it simple stupid) unlike some comments on here seem to suggest.
Yes, so simple they took out most of the features that made GNOME my favourite desktop!
The reviewer tries to make himself out as a GUI-expert, something he doesn't seem to be at all.
When I read the review, I had the immediate impressed that she was just a regular user. IIRC, she claimed right up front to not be too impressed with *NIX desktops in general. Much as I like Linux and Unix, I'd say I side with her.
There are ACTUAL GUI-experts and usability exports working on GNOME.
Where are they, then? Last I heard, Sun did some usability studies on GNOME and that was about it. Whether the results actually did anything for the resulting interface of GNOME 2 is debatable.
Turning off Nautilus for speed should be rather unnecessary except for people really short on memory.
...or have a sub-gigahertz processor.
People desperate to get rid of Nautilus, could do it via gnome-session-properties, and actually, as of GNOME 2.0 I don't see the point apart from feeling 31337.
Wanting to get rid of software I consider unnecessary is considered "31337"? (By which I take to mean "lame".) Please explain that logic to me. In that case, I'd have to call you "31337" as well if you've ever removed panels that display by default or disabled that damned annoying fish applet.
Let's not forget that one of the things that GNOME claims to be is modular which means you can remove, swap out, or write any component you wish and the rest of the components will not bitch. THAT INCLUDES NAUTILUS.
It's really fucking sad what's happened to GNOME. It really truly is. The GNOME developers and even the Slashdot audience, which up until now I've considered halfway clueful about this sort of thing, have completely forgot what made GNOME good in the first place: the fact that you could tell it how you wanted it to behave and it wouldn't argue. Now, with GNOME 2.0, we have a desktop with a couple of "sensible defaults" and a shitload of users who believe customizing your own environment is a fucking crime.
Here's something people fail to realize: even if you dislike your interface in some way, with a well designed interface and some training, you can be faster with the interface that is subjectively offensive than the one that you feel is somehow 'comfortable'.
There are a number of things wrong with this sentence.
1) Who defines what a "well-defined" interface is? That is a loaded term if ever there was one. If you were to take some kind of accurate poll of what constitutes a well-defined interface, I'm sure you'd get a whole range of different answers to include:
a. how intuitive it is to use
b. how efficient it is to use
c. how useful the included applications are
d. how it good looks
e. how quickly the computing environment responds to user input
f. the number of options available to control it
Everyone's going to have a different answer as to what they feel constitutes good interface design is in their opinion. Anyone who asserts that there is but one good interface is much too ego-centric; they're really only thinking about what works well for them. As if they expect the rest of the world should simply adjust to their preferences.
2) When you say "faster" what exactly does that imply? If by "faster" you mean "efficient", how can one possibly be considered efficient with a setup he or she is not even comfortable with? That doesn't make any sense.
Configurability is the hallmark (in general) of a poor UI design. It means that you didn't know how to do it properly in the first place, so you're passing the buck to the user.
That is patently false and moreover, ridiculous. Configurability is the hallmark of flexibility, nothing more. And it is most definitely not passing the buck to the user as long as you use sensible defaults. It's when you take away the ability to configure options and features that you immediately take away anything resembling usefullness. There's a reason I use Unix instead of Windows in my daily routine and that reason it has nothing to do with how standard the interface is. (By "interface" I refer to all user-visible aspects of the operating system, not just whatever happens to run in X.)
For an example, why don't we try Mozilla. Mozilla has some very sensible defaults and in most cases the user does not have to do modify a single one of them to start using it right away. But there are still something on the order of a hundred or more options that can be set "behind the scenes" by users who choose to modify them. Those options literally touch on every single aspect of the browser, from look and feel to performance and behavior. By your reckoning, the mere presence of these options (despite the fact that they are well hidden and have reasonable defaults) implies that Mozilla is a completely worthless browser. (Personal feelings aside.) That can't be the case, since two of my friends and my fiancee, all of whom are inexperienced computer users, think Mozilla is great. From what I've seen, they aren't the only ones.
The advantages of a rigidly stardardized interface are often completely ignored, but they're what allow most people to sit down at any computer and start typing.
The words "rigidly standardized interface" honestly send a chill down my spine. That's a socialist statement if I ever heard one. If you're proposing that all interfaces be the same, I'll be the very first in line to oppose that. I do not want my interface to be the same as anyone elses, simply because I'm not everyone else and my preferences for a comfortable and efficient interface are completely different from every other person's on the planet.
You might as well take it one step further and propose that all schoolchildren in the world have the same exact cirriculum, despite the obvious differences in culture. Or that everybody should be required to drive the same car. Wait a moment, that has already been proposed... think a fellow named Hitler thought of that one.
However, I'm not about to suggest that most interfaces shouldn't carry among them common elements. But it's important to note that those common elements are already in place. Application windowing is almost universal across all computing platforms. Everybody expects a scrollbar to scroll content, a checkbox to check, and radio button to select a particular option.
I can think of a hundred different examples that include cars, video games, and microwaves, but I think you get the picture.
There is simply no need for a universal interface the way you describe it. The current ones are far from perfect, but they are the best technology has to offer. You simply cannot create one interface that will allow everyone be efficient with it. Nor will absolutely every person even be able to use it. (The physically disabled, for example.) Most importantly, not everyone would even happy with it.
As long as there are computers, (and it's looking like there always will be, in some form) then there will always be different ways to inferface with them. I, for one, am thankful for that. There is no larger killer of innovation, spirit, and individuality than a large group of people conditioned to believe that there's just one way in the whole world to perform a task.
Then either these inexperienced users can find a different, non-confusing desktop or the experenced users can find a different desktop if either group decides their current one doesn't fit the bill.
Most of us are complaining about the fact that GNOME went from a desktop for "experienced developers" to an "easy-to-use" desktop, dropping support for some of our favourite features along the way.
Many, perhaps most, users use their PC only occasionally
Many, perhaps most, users should not be using a Unix-based OS in this case. They should be using an operating system that was designed from the ground up to cater to their needs: Windows or MacOS. Because by the time that you finally manage to modify Linux (for example) to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible for inexperienced users, it would then cease to be Linux as we know it.
b) It seems like a waste of elecricity to leave it on when I'm not using it
P.S.: Your computer's not wasting electriticy if it's researching a cure for cancer.
On all of the computers I've tried it on, hibernation took only marginally less time than a cold boot to start up and about 5x the time to shut down.
Probably has something to do with writing 200MB (or more, depending on how much memory you have and what's running) of data to disk on every shutdown. Also, I'm fearful that reading and writing hundreds of MBs of data to my disk on every shutdown and boot would cause extra wear and tear on my disks, which I can't afford to replace right now. (Data-wise and money-wise.)
I would imagine hibernation is useful in the rare scenario where you're in the middle of something important and *have* to shut down and don't want to lose your place. But beyond that, I'd rather boot the old-fashioned way.
Lack of options: Well, yes and no. There has been a serious attempt at providing sensible defaults for a lot of stuff, and hide away rare and/or strange options into the gconf system. While some people like being able to tweak their desktops to hell and back, for many users it is just plain confusing to have as ridiculously many options everywhere as Gnome1 had. Note that for those serious about tweaking, gconf is there for your time-wasting pleasure.
Sensible defaults are fine. But I take exception to the fact that a lot of the (arguably more useful) options have been completely eradicated from GNOME. The developers reportedly did this in an effort to make the environment more intuitive.
There's a quote from one of the GNOME developers floating around... something to the effect of: "Better to have one good default way of doing something instead of six equally broken ones." This just reeks of ego-centricism on the part of the GNOME crew. Obviously they think that their desktop preferences are somehow The Right Way and everyone elses's are "broken".
For example Havoc Pennington, author of Metacity, the new GNOME wm (please correct me if those facts are wrong), professed that he thinks the sloppy-focus model of window management is stupid. Did he offer a reason why? No, but it is clearly implicit: "It isn't my way of doing it, so it's wrong." I have to take offense to that because I think the click-to-focus model is utterly retarded. It severly grates on my nerves whenever I have to make that extra, pointless, unneeded click to focus a program in Windows. I got away from Windows partly because I hated the lack of flexibility in the UI, and now GNOME is trying to force the same old crap back on me again.
I used GNOME not because it looked good, not because it had sensible defaults, and not even because it was free software. I used GNOME because it offered a plethora of options to let me do what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it without a whole lot of bitching.
I'm in the process of building GNOME 2 as we speak, and I will give it a try. But if my experience falls in line with most everyone elses, then it looks like I'll have to see what KDE 3 has to offer...
Erm, but then you have incriminating network logs which are not quite as easy to erase as a few MP3s and (at my workplace at least), will probably be noticed quicker by the admins...
Way I understood it, the fair use laws stated[1] that you could give copies to friends and you could make as many backups as you liked... so long as you were making no profit from either action.
1) I say "stated" because copying and/or reverse engineering anything now for any purpose is technically illegal.
But why did "they" choose the one, boring clock? ASClock was far superior.
Agreed. I have ASClock on all of my desktops. It was about the coolest-looking part of gnome 1.4 and would fit right in with gnome 2. If I knew my way around gnome applets, I'd bring it back and also give it an option to shrink to digital-only mode for smaller-sized panels.
Guess I'll have to find out if the applet will still compile and work fine in Gnome 2.
Even though though this question was targeted towards devlopers (and I'm not a developer per se), my pet bug would have to be how Windows 2000 and Windows XP make my motherboard's power LED turn off in Linux.
Conspiracy, I say!
Now I'll be the first to admit that yeah, Mitnik screwed up. He made several mistakes and more importantly, broke the law. However, he more than paid for it by the inhumane (at best) treatment that the law system gave him[1], even when he admitted his guilt. The courts used him as an example of how they treat hackers who get caught.
It's yet another perfect example of what's wrong with the legal system in this country.
Mitnik's "officially" done his time, but thanks to the power of the government, media, and press, he'll continue be prosecuted by the public for the rest of his life.
1) Details of his unfair and unconstitutional treatment can be found all over the internet from independent resources. The government still won't admit that they did anything wrong and you can bet the press wouldn't challenge that.