Who cares about usability these days, when there is so much bells-and-whistles to add? Come on, neither your boss, your marketing dept nor the bosses of your customers care about good UI. The poor schmucks who will have to use your masterpiece don't get anything to say.
Can't we finally cut the problem at its roots? And the roots are a criminally insecure poor-excuse-for-an-OS.
If your car notoriously breaks causing harm to other users of the road, you won't get your car's paper prolonged. If a company keeps producing cars that damage other users of the roads, that company has to replace/fix all the cars sold. Now, tell me why exactly Microsoft can get away with selling software that's harmful for the community at large?
It looks like the world's climate has changed a lot. When I was a kid, the winter started around Dec 20th and lasted until late March where I live. Nowadays, in the last few years, if we had any snow it was in November, with nothing during the time when the winter was supposed to be, with perhaps another strike of snow around April. Such "two springs" years became nearly a rule lately -- with a screwed up effect on the vegetation.
Ah, I'm just 26, so that "when I was a kid" is not that far ago. Such a rapid, severe change of climate is something not to be trifled with.
But hey... we have several processes that cause rapid global warming running simultaneously with processes that cause global cooling. Things just have to act weird:p
It's all because of those dirty rotten tree-hugging bastards.
Nuclear power is many orders of magnitude cleaner than anything that burns fossil fuels. In fact, a nuclear plant would generate way less radioactive elements if it dumped all the waste right into the atmosphere compared to a coal plant -- and this is just the radioactive waste. Any conventional power plant will also generate an astounding amount of carbon dioxite, various forms of sulphur, etc, etc.
The main reason is, the few nuclear plants that went boom did it with a bang, while conventional fuel causes deaths silently -- usually you don't even know that you were ill because of pollution generated by those. Just alike, people are afraid of planes and not of automobiles even though the latter cause a lot more accidents -- plane crashes cause more fear than cars.
I seriously hope the robotic spectators will not cut seats in trains or spray profanities about the police all around.
These two activities seem to be the purpose in life of like 80% spectators, at least where I live. But hey, in 2050 I guess I won't care about that anyway.
It's not really about the package in question. The important thing here is, if the US Army learns that GPLing their code can be beneficial for them, we can get a very powerful ally.
Besides, that piece of software was developed for your (and even a bit of my) money anyway...
Capitalism? Tell me why in the hell would you chastise capitalism for this, when communist countries have much worse records where it comes to environmental issues?
Well, capitalism doesn't fare better just because it's capitalism -- but, all democratic countries at the moment are capitalist (no, people's democracy is as far from democracy as it can be), and that gives them a chance of having the voices of people heard. In communism, the Party rules unchecked, and people have nothing to say. And, caring about the environment is not among the goals of any communist party I know of.
Note that capitalism is not about monopolies. In fact, capitalism relies on free market, and you can't have free market if one of the players controls a majority of it.
The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.
On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too! Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about. So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.
1) is a valid point. The thing is, Macs are next to non-existant around here, and software developers like me simply have no choice.
2) One word. "alias".
3) Bash is Turing-complete, and if it's not enough, you can always extend it. I've once made a playlist by mpg123 `perl -e 'xxxxxxxx'` where xxxxxxx was around three screen lines long:p On the other hand, show me an explorer.exe/KDE/whatever way to say "change all the filenames in this dir to lowercase". Or even "rename all these files from *.foo to *.bar".
The GUI may be easier for a granny-type user, but face it, we still don't have anything better than the good old command line.
The pros and cons of a GUI are: + easier for a beginner + faster to use if you're not used to the program in question - not scriptable - memorized commands work faster than well-known menus - you can't do anything that was not thought of by the coder
In other words, GUIs work only until the moment you begin to need to repeatedly do the same or similar tasks.
The last time I used BASIC was 20 years ago, when I was six -- and I'll be damned if I ever come back. We got so many programming languages -- good ones and bad ones, that is simply doesn't make any sense altogether to use a Cobol-lookalike. Repent, folks!
Well, blow me down. Here in Poland, our monopolistic telco takes around 10% of the average income for a 512/128kbps line, and have outages of more than a month. You need to pay the bill for the time the line was down, of course -- unless you're willing to face a 5-10 years long legal battle for your money. Lost profits? Who cares.
Thus, if India is a 3rd-world country, the US are 4th-world, Zambia 100th and Poland approximately 89th.
Ugh, how can you compare something that causes people to completely fuck up their lives (drugs) to something that is a supposed to be a compromise between greed and the flow of works?
Drugs: give people (criminals) money for fucking up people's lives. Financial benefit for bad acts. Copyright: gives people (artists) money for creating new works. Financial benefit for good acts.
Thus, in principle, copyright potentially can be a good thing. It is supposed to give fair compensation to the artists -- the thing that that compensation is not given but instead seized by **AA/record labels/bean counters/etc/etc is a different story. Of course, an unhindered flow of works is something much more beneficial to the society, and it used to lie at the base of our culture for millenia.
Drugs are something inheretly bad. Piracy is just working around a misused system.
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So, we'll get even more cookie-cutter, mass produced crap that no one can listen to for even a few seconds?
Great!
Who cares about usability these days, when there is so much bells-and-whistles to add? Come on, neither your boss, your marketing dept nor the bosses of your customers care about good UI. The poor schmucks who will have to use your masterpiece don't get anything to say.
Sad but true.
I don't play any shitty sport-themed games.
I do play NetHack a lot.
'nuff said.
Can't we finally cut the problem at its roots? And the roots are a criminally insecure poor-excuse-for-an-OS.
If your car notoriously breaks causing harm to other users of the road, you won't get your car's paper prolonged. If a company keeps producing cars that damage other users of the roads, that company has to replace/fix all the cars sold. Now, tell me why exactly Microsoft can get away with selling software that's harmful for the community at large?
It looks like the world's climate has changed a lot. When I was a kid, the winter started around Dec 20th and lasted until late March where I live. Nowadays, in the last few years, if we had any snow it was in November, with nothing during the time when the winter was supposed to be, with perhaps another strike of snow around April. Such "two springs" years became nearly a rule lately -- with a screwed up effect on the vegetation.
:p
Ah, I'm just 26, so that "when I was a kid" is not that far ago. Such a rapid, severe change of climate is something not to be trifled with.
But hey... we have several processes that cause rapid global warming running simultaneously with processes that cause global cooling. Things just have to act weird
It's all because of those dirty rotten tree-hugging bastards.
Nuclear power is many orders of magnitude cleaner than anything that burns fossil fuels. In fact, a nuclear plant would generate way less radioactive elements if it dumped all the waste right into the atmosphere compared to a coal plant -- and this is just the radioactive waste. Any conventional power plant will also generate an astounding amount of carbon dioxite, various forms of sulphur, etc, etc.
The main reason is, the few nuclear plants that went boom did it with a bang, while conventional fuel causes deaths silently -- usually you don't even know that you were ill because of pollution generated by those. Just alike, people are afraid of planes and not of automobiles even though the latter cause a lot more accidents -- plane crashes cause more fear than cars.
This is pretty much guaranteed to be a widely-perused field of robotics in the future.
I seriously hope the robotic spectators will not cut seats in trains or spray profanities about the police all around.
These two activities seem to be the purpose in life of like 80% spectators, at least where I live. But hey, in 2050 I guess I won't care about that anyway.
I'm sorry, but the "3 rules of robotics" are just some do-gooder blabbing that no one cares about the slightest.
In fact, military purposes are one of key fields for robots.
Are you sure it's "spyware removal"? All what MS has done before were "spyware catchers"...
It's trivial to find a male virgin.
...
But if you meant a female one,
Not really, a bigger disaster = more opportunities to get rich.
During the WW2, many people didn't even hesitate before selling Jews for a load of bread...
It's not really about the package in question. The important thing here is, if the US Army learns that GPLing their code can be beneficial for them, we can get a very powerful ally.
Besides, that piece of software was developed for your (and even a bit of my) money anyway...
But, is the Democrat Party any different?
Capitalism? Tell me why in the hell would you chastise capitalism for this, when communist countries have much worse records where it comes to environmental issues?
Well, capitalism doesn't fare better just because it's capitalism -- but, all democratic countries at the moment are capitalist (no, people's democracy is as far from democracy as it can be), and that gives them a chance of having the voices of people heard.
In communism, the Party rules unchecked, and people have nothing to say. And, caring about the environment is not among the goals of any communist party I know of.
That's because you don't have capitalism yet. Putin is leading you in the very opposite direction, so you won't have it soon, too... :(
Note that capitalism is not about monopolies. In fact, capitalism relies on free market, and you can't have free market if one of the players controls a majority of it.
The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.
On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too!
Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about.
So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.
1) is a valid point. The thing is, Macs are next to non-existant around here, and software developers like me simply have no choice.
:p
2) One word. "alias".
3) Bash is Turing-complete, and if it's not enough, you can always extend it. I've once made a playlist by mpg123 `perl -e 'xxxxxxxx'` where xxxxxxx was around three screen lines long
On the other hand, show me an explorer.exe/KDE/whatever way to say "change all the filenames in this dir to lowercase". Or even "rename all these files from *.foo to *.bar".
The GUI may be easier for a granny-type user, but face it, we still don't have anything better than the good old command line.
The pros and cons of a GUI are:
+ easier for a beginner
+ faster to use if you're not used to the program in question
- not scriptable
- memorized commands work faster than well-known menus
- you can't do anything that was not thought of by the coder
In other words, GUIs work only until the moment you begin to need to repeatedly do the same or similar tasks.
The last time I used BASIC was 20 years ago, when I was six -- and I'll be damned if I ever come back.
We got so many programming languages -- good ones and bad ones, that is simply doesn't make any sense altogether to use a Cobol-lookalike. Repent, folks!
Wrong, your parent is right. Who says CmdrTaco would give up after the first attempt?
Well, blow me down. Here in Poland, our monopolistic telco takes around 10% of the average income for a 512/128kbps line, and have outages of more than a month. You need to pay the bill for the time the line was down, of course -- unless you're willing to face a 5-10 years long legal battle for your money. Lost profits? Who cares.
Thus, if India is a 3rd-world country, the US are 4th-world, Zambia 100th and Poland approximately 89th.
All 4 of us who lived in that appartament shared his view on TV.
Ugh, how can you compare something that causes people to completely fuck up their lives (drugs) to something that is a supposed to be a compromise between greed and the flow of works?
Drugs: give people (criminals) money for fucking up people's lives. Financial benefit for bad acts.
Copyright: gives people (artists) money for creating new works. Financial benefit for good acts.
Thus, in principle, copyright potentially can be a good thing. It is supposed to give fair compensation to the artists -- the thing that that compensation is not given but instead seized by **AA/record labels/bean counters/etc/etc is a different story. Of course, an unhindered flow of works is something much more beneficial to the society, and it used to lie at the base of our culture for millenia.
Drugs are something inheretly bad. Piracy is just working around a misused system.