Cakewalk Sonar still allows this, although IIRC they won't allow you to transfer keys to a new owner. And if you're not in America they force you to deal with the most bizarre distribution system you could imagine in the digital age - in New Zealand the most active distributor is in Australia. How this is better than dealing with the US I'm not entirely sure.
But hey, they do let me have the software on my rack-mounted teaching machine and my home DAW, as long as I don't lend the teaching machine to anybody who might use it at the same time as me...
As a New Zealander, I'd suggest that their lack of inclination to believe they should be doing anything is somewhat proportional to the amount they experience the effects of the ozone hole each summer relative to us poor bastards here. The burn time on a clear day is something like five minutes in this place, it's outlandish.
Mankind is quite capable of doing serious damage to the planet we occupy, I really wish America would wake up and notice this as, regardless of exclusions of India and China, they're still the problem.
It's sort of like the millionaire neighbour who refuses to clean up the pile of festering garbage on his lawn because the guy down the road who works sixteen hours a day to make ends meet hasn't done the gardening in six months, and doesn't plan on doing it any time soon. That's quite true, but it doesn't exclude you from your social responsibilities - especially when you're better placed to do something in the first place.
I think you're missing the point here by trying to make a nice complicated story. Essentially in your example, a failure occurs. Failures should not occur in this situation. Therefore a hefty fine is entirely reasonable. If your Tibor character breached internal policies in his mission to acquire this trojan, the company can act against him after they get fined. The financial loss can be their reward for failing to ensure their internal security is properly enforced with respect to people capable of opening up sensitive data.
If that internal security policy didn't exist, on the other hand, the company deserves everything it gets.
It is possible to implement systems with "good enough" security, if you're willing to spend the cash on it. And it's also possible to implement internal systems with "good enough" systems of trust and physical security to prevent regular thefts of valuable materials. Banks have been doing it successfully for a long time, and where the systems fall down there are backup plans intended to deal with the fallout. I don't lose the contents of my bank account when a branch gets cleaned out. The fact that this level of thought and attention is not being paid to personal information suggests that - basically - the incentive to do it does not exist. Let's make it exist.
OK, let's assume you do run this job market site. You're not doing it for a favour, right? I'd assume there's some profit there.
If you're profiting from storing and redirecting personal information then I think it's entirely reasonable to fine you for losing your grip on it. If you find IIS and SQL server too vulnerable to securely store the data of private individuals, you might wish to spend a bit of money on obtaining systems with a better security profile and hunt for a vendor who will assume liability in the event of a failure.
If laws to this effect were passed, new "secure data systems" industries would appear, backed by liability insurance that would cover the eventuality of a failure. You would be able to call a contractor to install a system that would be backed by a security guarantee - assuming that correct procedures were followed. This doesn't just assume 100% secure software, all personal information could be encrypted at time of receipt to the public key of a machine which has no online presence, then transferred in a physically secure manner. Physical security is a much better known quantity than IT security these days, so forcing private data to be handled this way might even be a safer bet.... the end result of this would be that you would make a bit less profit on your job market site, but on the other hand the individuals using your site would not be at risk from data loss in the same way that we've seen here. As it stands, what's to stop you saying "Oh, I keep the patches up to date... it's not my fault I got hacked!". Well yeah, but you didn't exactly do anything more than trust a manufacturer that assumes no liability in the event of failure. If Microsoft would assume liability that'd be another issue, but as things stand I think it's quite fair that the buck stops with you in those circumstances.
If there's an industry that can only survive profitably by playing fast and loose with other people's private details, it has to be questioned whether that industry deserves to survive.
When will one of the big audio equipment guys pull their fingers out of their arses and build a Linux-based system based on standard upgradable components with a light GUI (read: X can go fuck itself, it's way too much for this kind of thing) that runs virtual instruments, possibly with a VSTi compatibility layer and a good inbuilt host?
I'd buy one in a second. Music is a server application, not a GUI one - it gets input via external controllers and reponds by either writing data to disk or shoving it out through the sound card.
Any musicians wouldn't pay a couple of grand for a box that could be a drum brain, guitar FX processor, hard disk recorder, digital mixer and god knows what else in a single box? More importantly, one that would boot up quickly, had the ability to build performance live CDs in case of a disk crash and ran a minimal embedded Linux so you didn't have to worry about BSODs or anything else ugly caused by having too much pointless, unrelated crap running in the OS when you're trying to engage in real-time audio use?
It's only a matter of time before somebody does this, IMHO. The problem is, I suspect, that nobody wants to be the IBM who spends all the R&D money - they want to be the clone manufacturers, so they're waiting for a start-up to do it first so they can undercut them and grab the marketplace. The clear expenses here is going to be developing the OS, compatibility layers and API interfaces, and those aren't historically things that the big audio companies like Roland and Yamaha have done a very good job of.
We really do need a standard for this though. It just needs to be a rack-mounted box to replace the hardware sampler in my rig, if it sells for $3000 or so and provides similar performance and better stability, solidity and boot times than my Windows box I can build for $2000 then I will be one of the first in the queue in the shop...
This is an absolute killer app that could break Linux in the music world. I don't see any other way it will get in there, considering the lead the Windows and Mac big boys have in the software department.
Yeah, I had an Amiga and even used it up until about 1997 armed with a hard disk and a couple of extra meg of RAM.
Great computer. Much more fun to learn and play with than either Windows or Linux, basically because of the fact that all the elements of it basically made sense rather than being the result of a long history of bolting things together. Naturally, as the required feature set expanded people started bolting stuff on, but by that time the Amiga was basically dead as a commercially viable entity so it didn't matter so much, and it never really ruined the fun of it.
Computers got a lot less fun after the Amiga, I have to say. Thankfully, that made me resign my post as a house-bound geek and get a life doing other interesting things. Being a PC nerd always seemed significantly less cool, and having stuck my toe back in the waters in recent years by building a PC and installing Gentoo on it I can only say I have confirmed this - being a PC nerd is much less cool.
Also, the Amiga had the best computer-related publication ever in the form of Amiga Power, RIP.
I have to admit to being a bit old-fasioned, I'd probably crap myself if my car started talking to me or something.
What would be a cool idea would be car-to-car wireless networking combined with this, so you could set up your own little broadcast radio station for other people stuck around you in traffic.
But for UI, I'd probably just prefer to wire up something like my current mouse (an A4tech with two wheels and five buttons) which could basically control everything if you just disabled the mousing functionality and just used it as a tactile control. Hell, you could fit it to the gear-shift lever and be done with it, then you'd actually have an excuse for driving around with your left hand down there all the time other than trying to look cool:) As we all know, that just doesn't work...
You mean you actually look at your radio? Yowch. My driving instructor taught me to be able to do everything (changing gear, etc) without looking so I wouldn't crap myself and crash the first time I had to drive at night. Good advice, and I applied that to the stereo too.
That's probably why I don't like the LCD idea - nothing tactile, so you can't feel what you're pressing without looking. I really don't like the idea of any in-car devices that require you to look at them unless they're essential stuff like fuel, temperature displays and so forth...
I don't praise it, because I don't use it. If I used it and it has the same annoying features as Gnome, I would likely get annoyed by it in the same way.
I will experiment later, I'm off to a client who run their office on macs. If it's really as annoying, then I'll feel vindicated in saying it sucks too:)
In New Zealand and particularly Australia there have been quite a few incidents during the recent real-estate boom where middle-aged (read: 50-55 year old) people have had their entire savings burned by convincing con-men with "investment schemes" to sell. If you have your lifetimes savings burned up by some dickhead with ten years left to retirement, you're pretty much in big trouble. Governments who abdicate responsibility for retirement savings had better crack down heavily on investment scammers with their "get-rich-quick-but-pay-me-$50,000-first" schemes well before doing so.
But it still has many of the same problems described on that UI hall of shame page you linked to, including no easily-visible sense of context inside the directory structure on opening the window! Indeed, that's the first problem they point out with the W95 dialog, yet the Gnome one is actually significantly worse in this respect.
I don't need it? Says who? And what thought did they put into that statement?
I do a lot of work for a lot of clients, and I don't see why I have to create bookmarks every time I want to work on something - I have a sensibly organised filesystem structure that makes them nice and easy to get at from the home directory, thank you very much. I've already put the time into working out a sensible filesystem structure, but the patronising nannying of that goddamn save dialog is driving me up the wall.
I don't see the need for a separate "bookmarks" system, effectively I'm now being asked to whitelist the directories as I make them and then remove them when I'm no longer working on that project. That's daft.
Seriously, explain one thing to me: HOW does NOT HAVING the filesystem visible save anybody time? There's plenty of space in the save dialog to put it there, it's just wasted on overly huge controls - and the situation get gets worse as you make the window bigger. Try it, and tell me that's a sensible allocation of space.
It's a waste of time, and it's not configurable in any humanly locatable way - why not a "Load/Save Dialog Preferences" control in the Desktop Preferences, if you want to make those kind of radical changes to the norm? I feel quite vindicated in saying it is crap. I saved maybe twenty files in different places using it last night, and I had to do that *every* time. What a stupid, stupid bit of UI design. People keep saying "Well, I like the ease of use!"
What ease of use? The Ctrl-L ease of use? The clicking an extra control to save somewhere else ease of use? Just because it treats the user like a retard doesn't make it easy for the majority of people who, contrary to popular opinion amoung many developers it seems, are not retarded. A clear presentation of the file system allowing the user to choose where they put the file is all that is required here.
Gnome's preferences are a bit of a mess. Desktop related stuff is all in one menu, but similarly graphical things like GDM are still in the other System Tools menu. I think a little more centralisation here would be useful, I would see Networking, GDM, Services config etc as being more at home with the other preferences than hidden away with the archiving tool and floppy formatting utility.
I don't recall seeing any such message about not touching things - I just had a look now and it doesn't appear. So I remain bemused.
It was mostly a bitterness thing, the amount of time I've had to spend pissing around with RegEdit on windows didn't make the re-appearance of the same GUI on a linux box very welcome. It's nice that OO.o has kept a lot of Excel GUI nonsense that I'm used to, but I don't see why we feel the need to keep the layout of Regedit in our new home away from the evils of Microsoft.
And my Gconf-editor is in the System Tools menu, no submenu. Maybe that's a Gentoo "I wanna-be-a-geek" thing, but I do recall it being in basically the same place in Ubuntu as well.
Please note that I do actually like Gnome a lot more than KDE, but I think it has some surreal omissions considering its maturity in both years, version numbers and features. There's simple features missing here that the Amiga had going years ago in 512kb of RAM, yet somebody has actually bothered to clone RegEdit rather than implement them? That was what set off my rant, rather than any opposition to a centralised configuration editor.
I'm still more narked about the save dialog, it's been annoying me all evening - every time I've saved a file, I had to press that "Show more folders" thing. It doesn't make sense to hide a part of a GUI when you need it every time you do the operation!
That's almost annoying enough to make me look at the source, find that goddamn button and see how easy it is to change the default state.... almost;)
First: I am. I installed Gnome, I thought - as a user will - "What can I do to configure this?". So I went to the configuration menu and selected "Configuration editor".
If I don't like it, I quite understand that I'm free to use other things. However Gnome is a commercially supported project aiming at getting people to use it who DON'T want to rewrite it. Speaking as a user, I don't see the point in Gnome shipping a RegEdit clone so prominantly.
Second: Then why put the damn thing there? If the user isn't going to need it, why is it there? There's certainly lots of things that would be a lot more useful missing, and that thing is an affront to common decency. At the moment it's just a waste of a menu item, because it's totally useless and downright horrible. I thought Gnome was about trying not to confuse the crap out of people - even Windows has the decency not to put RegEdit in the control panel!
My main issue is the GUI. RegEdit is a horrid, horrid user interface for doing anything, and GConf is largely identical. Yes, the idea of structured key/value pairs isn't a bad one, and it's a nice idea to take all of that stuff out of dot files, I do agree. But the way of delivering it to the user sucks. That needs a total rethink.
Re:Open dialog still a monstrosity?
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ctrl-L? Wow, that's... intuitive.. I'm sure everybody will figure that one out!
And why the hell would you want to hide a hierarchy from the user? I had thought that was the whole point of a "spatial" desktop, to help the user envision the structure of their filesystem visually? I can understand hierarchies just fine and *I* find the Gnome dialogue confusing because it has no sense of position inside the filesystem when it opens - I have no idea if I'm looking at ~/www or/var/www, for a start.
And if you're suggesting that all users just want to save every file into "My documents" or the desktop, you're woefully mistaken. Even my mum knows better than that, and she rings me up in a fluster because the computer said a program had performed an illegal operation! It's certainly a bad habit to teach, as it acts to suggest to the user that they make a total mess of their home directory. Way to go...
As for the "Click here for more folders" button saving me time.. that's bollocks. If it defaults to the folder it saved in last time and I just want to save it, that's no time saved on having the other folders displayed to start with. If it defaults to a folder I don't want, then it's a total waste of time.
Either way, no time saved, some time wasted. Useless.
And what's with the use of space in that file save request anyway? If I resize it up to about half the height of my screen on a 1280x1024 display it still only shows a tiny number of folders I can save into after I hit that toggle, the rest of the box is taken up by stupidly huge controls at the top and large empty spaces. Maybe 1/8th of the window is actually doing something useful.
As for the registry, I was talking more about the *user interface paradigm* than an architectural similarity. It's a crap idea for a UI, and not something anybody should be copying. One of the main reasons I like Linux is the absence of a goddamn registry, the last thing I want to see is a clone of the RegEdit GUI!
Because it sounds like something that Snoop Doggy Dog would have on his goddamn lawn, that's why.
Re:Is this GNOME or WinXP with a skin?
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Windowmaker for something a bit different?
Different from what? The 957,000 other UNIX window managers that all have the perplexing misconception that right-click-and-you'll-get-a-big-nested-menu is good UI design? About the first thing I read about UI design was "BIG NESTED MENUS SUCK BALLS!" or words to that effect.
They do, too.
Seriously, I can't stand it. Why is it that on Linux we have to choose between slow, Windows or Mac-alike desktops (Gnome, KDE) and an incessant, constant stream of Just-click-the-right-mouse-button-and-you'll-get-a -menu window managers like fluxbox etc. Surely somebody in the open source community can come up with a clever, minimal solution to what we do with a desktop environment/window manager? I mean seriously, what do we do? Configure a few things, move some files around, launch applications? Even just some improvements on the second function would be welcome rather than that interminal right-mouse menu nonsense. That stuff works great for context-sensitive stuff in applications, but only with small menus. Huge, monolithic RMB menus are the tool of satan!
Re:Open dialog still a monstrosity?
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's pretty crap that it doesn't do the wildcard thing, considering that I remember file dialogs on the Amiga doing that as long ago as about 1993 or 1994 - even on the crappy system-supplied GUI library in Workbench 2.x
And remember folks, that was a machine that could run the entire damn OS from a small ROM and a floppy disk.
I agree, the file open/save dialogs are the worst parts of Gnome at the moment. You don't have a field where you can type/paste a file path, and half the time when you hit "Save" you actually have to click another control in order to be able to save it anywhere other than the current folder or a few fairly retarded locations like/home or /... I mean seriously, I do a lot of work for a whole bunch of clients, why do I always have to go:
Save -> Browse For Other Folders -> find my Folder -> Type a filename
That second step is totally pointless and confusing, and there's no obvious or intuitive way to turn that bastard off the first time you see it, unlike most of the annoying GUI features of Windows. Teaching people to understand how file structures work in an intuitive manner is one of the functions of a file open/save dialog, and the Gnome one just muddies the waters by acting as if Saving Somewhere Else is some kind of advanced "super user" trick that needs a Special Super User Button to enable.
Hopefully there's a way to turn that off, but it's not obvious enough to be user friendly if there is.
And, also - this bugs me... why on earth does Gnome have a Windows-style registry? The registry is one of the worst, most annoying, dumbest features of Windows and a big reason that I like working in Linux. So why on earth would you want to copy it? Please tell me. Has Windows corrupted our minds so much that we think editing registry keys is COOL? Or are we just gearing up so that we can have nice programs like Registry First Aid as well?
emerge game wait 30 minutes come back to PC, find make error Figure out which dependency was missed in the ebuild emerge missed_dependency wait five minutes emerge game wait 30 minutes type name of game hope it works the first time, or you're up for a good hour of hard slog figuring out what went wrong?
Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo. But I wish people would stop making out that Portage is so bulletproof, last time I chcked the most recent unmasked version of Meld had a buggered ebuild (the only way to get it working is to use the masked one - WTF?) and I tried an emerge -u world a couple of days ago and kdelibs failed to build correctly. I'll try it again now, see if anything has changed...
I've been using Gentoo for about a month, and it's very good for what it is. But it's not that amazing, and it's certainly no more bulletproof in terms of package management than, say, a Debian based distro like Ubuntu. Come the release of Hoary Ubuntu I might just look at switching back, depending on how many errors I get in the intervening time... There's one or two things in Gentoo that are quite cool, but overall I think you'd get nearly as nice a system by starting with a very minimal Debian-based install and dedicating the same amount of time to dicking around and configuring as you have to with Gentoo to get it working at all.
Old Boy shouldn't be too hard to find, it did quite well at Cannes last year IIRC. I imagine you'll do better for movies in Melbourne than anywhere here, Auckland only has a population of a little over a million and nothing else even comes close. Enjoy the South Island, it's nice down there - can't speak quite so highly of Auckland though, it's a traffic nightmare and largely boring. Wellington has a bit more of a city atmosphere, but it's too small to hit critical mass. I'd live down there if it wasn't for the fact that there's so few days that aren't horrendously windy!
Katakuris is extremely funny, DOA is extremely... different. Starts by making about the most aggressive opening it possibly could, settles down into a Yakuza movie and then... well... that would kind of spoil the ending! Catch it, it's certainly an experience.
And as for the broadband thing, only just! We're emerging from the land of 128kbps over here very, very slowly. I got an email on Friday from my provider INTRODUCING a 10gb data-cap on my previously unrestricted plan, with no reduction in price. I think they will be finding themselves short a customer soon.
When it comes to festivals you're probably out of luck. There used to be two major ones, the Incredible Film Festival (which would show the likes of DOA, or indeed anything cheap, tacky and worth throwing popcorn at) and the NZFF, which is a bit more upscale and has a much bigger budget.
The Incredible film festival died last year, with the guy who ran it merging the festival into a more upscale segment of the NZFF - basically it means he's harder to fuck with for David Lane and his Christian cronies, and has a bigger budget. However it has had the effect of removing all the cheap-and-cheerful B-movies from our festival rotation, and resulting in a lot less of the fun of sitting around tiny cinemas that look like they're going to go broke, watching old 60s exploitation movies... NZFF is typically around July, so you're going to miss that by a mile - but if you're overseas, you can probably catch 90% of the movies before they make it here in the first place, so you'll not miss much aside from a few small NZ films.
Other than that, there's a few Auckland cinemas that run occasional Asian or European film festivals, with the asian stuff being mostly Korean or Taiwanese or similar (NZ has a big Chinese population, who tend to watch movies from around there).
Speaking of Korean movies, if you haven't seen "Old Boy" I would highly recommend you get hold of it - nasty, but extremely good.
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Cakewalk Sonar still allows this, although IIRC they won't allow you to transfer keys to a new owner. And if you're not in America they force you to deal with the most bizarre distribution system you could imagine in the digital age - in New Zealand the most active distributor is in Australia. How this is better than dealing with the US I'm not entirely sure.
But hey, they do let me have the software on my rack-mounted teaching machine and my home DAW, as long as I don't lend the teaching machine to anybody who might use it at the same time as me...
As a New Zealander, I'd suggest that their lack of inclination to believe they should be doing anything is somewhat proportional to the amount they experience the effects of the ozone hole each summer relative to us poor bastards here. The burn time on a clear day is something like five minutes in this place, it's outlandish.
Mankind is quite capable of doing serious damage to the planet we occupy, I really wish America would wake up and notice this as, regardless of exclusions of India and China, they're still the problem.
It's sort of like the millionaire neighbour who refuses to clean up the pile of festering garbage on his lawn because the guy down the road who works sixteen hours a day to make ends meet hasn't done the gardening in six months, and doesn't plan on doing it any time soon. That's quite true, but it doesn't exclude you from your social responsibilities - especially when you're better placed to do something in the first place.
I think you're missing the point here by trying to make a nice complicated story. Essentially in your example, a failure occurs. Failures should not occur in this situation. Therefore a hefty fine is entirely reasonable. If your Tibor character breached internal policies in his mission to acquire this trojan, the company can act against him after they get fined. The financial loss can be their reward for failing to ensure their internal security is properly enforced with respect to people capable of opening up sensitive data.
If that internal security policy didn't exist, on the other hand, the company deserves everything it gets.
It is possible to implement systems with "good enough" security, if you're willing to spend the cash on it. And it's also possible to implement internal systems with "good enough" systems of trust and physical security to prevent regular thefts of valuable materials. Banks have been doing it successfully for a long time, and where the systems fall down there are backup plans intended to deal with the fallout. I don't lose the contents of my bank account when a branch gets cleaned out. The fact that this level of thought and attention is not being paid to personal information suggests that - basically - the incentive to do it does not exist. Let's make it exist.
OK, let's assume you do run this job market site. You're not doing it for a favour, right? I'd assume there's some profit there.
... the end result of this would be that you would make a bit less profit on your job market site, but on the other hand the individuals using your site would not be at risk from data loss in the same way that we've seen here. As it stands, what's to stop you saying "Oh, I keep the patches up to date... it's not my fault I got hacked!". Well yeah, but you didn't exactly do anything more than trust a manufacturer that assumes no liability in the event of failure. If Microsoft would assume liability that'd be another issue, but as things stand I think it's quite fair that the buck stops with you in those circumstances.
If you're profiting from storing and redirecting personal information then I think it's entirely reasonable to fine you for losing your grip on it. If you find IIS and SQL server too vulnerable to securely store the data of private individuals, you might wish to spend a bit of money on obtaining systems with a better security profile and hunt for a vendor who will assume liability in the event of a failure.
If laws to this effect were passed, new "secure data systems" industries would appear, backed by liability insurance that would cover the eventuality of a failure. You would be able to call a contractor to install a system that would be backed by a security guarantee - assuming that correct procedures were followed. This doesn't just assume 100% secure software, all personal information could be encrypted at time of receipt to the public key of a machine which has no online presence, then transferred in a physically secure manner. Physical security is a much better known quantity than IT security these days, so forcing private data to be handled this way might even be a safer bet.
If there's an industry that can only survive profitably by playing fast and loose with other people's private details, it has to be questioned whether that industry deserves to survive.
When will one of the big audio equipment guys pull their fingers out of their arses and build a Linux-based system based on standard upgradable components with a light GUI (read: X can go fuck itself, it's way too much for this kind of thing) that runs virtual instruments, possibly with a VSTi compatibility layer and a good inbuilt host?
I'd buy one in a second. Music is a server application, not a GUI one - it gets input via external controllers and reponds by either writing data to disk or shoving it out through the sound card.
Any musicians wouldn't pay a couple of grand for a box that could be a drum brain, guitar FX processor, hard disk recorder, digital mixer and god knows what else in a single box? More importantly, one that would boot up quickly, had the ability to build performance live CDs in case of a disk crash and ran a minimal embedded Linux so you didn't have to worry about BSODs or anything else ugly caused by having too much pointless, unrelated crap running in the OS when you're trying to engage in real-time audio use?
It's only a matter of time before somebody does this, IMHO. The problem is, I suspect, that nobody wants to be the IBM who spends all the R&D money - they want to be the clone manufacturers, so they're waiting for a start-up to do it first so they can undercut them and grab the marketplace. The clear expenses here is going to be developing the OS, compatibility layers and API interfaces, and those aren't historically things that the big audio companies like Roland and Yamaha have done a very good job of.
We really do need a standard for this though. It just needs to be a rack-mounted box to replace the hardware sampler in my rig, if it sells for $3000 or so and provides similar performance and better stability, solidity and boot times than my Windows box I can build for $2000 then I will be one of the first in the queue in the shop...
This is an absolute killer app that could break Linux in the music world. I don't see any other way it will get in there, considering the lead the Windows and Mac big boys have in the software department.
Do you live in your car, or something? When else would you want it?
Yeah, I had an Amiga and even used it up until about 1997 armed with a hard disk and a couple of extra meg of RAM.
Great computer. Much more fun to learn and play with than either Windows or Linux, basically because of the fact that all the elements of it basically made sense rather than being the result of a long history of bolting things together. Naturally, as the required feature set expanded people started bolting stuff on, but by that time the Amiga was basically dead as a commercially viable entity so it didn't matter so much, and it never really ruined the fun of it.
Computers got a lot less fun after the Amiga, I have to say. Thankfully, that made me resign my post as a house-bound geek and get a life doing other interesting things. Being a PC nerd always seemed significantly less cool, and having stuck my toe back in the waters in recent years by building a PC and installing Gentoo on it I can only say I have confirmed this - being a PC nerd is much less cool.
Also, the Amiga had the best computer-related publication ever in the form of Amiga Power, RIP.
I have to admit to being a bit old-fasioned, I'd probably crap myself if my car started talking to me or something.
:) As we all know, that just doesn't work...
What would be a cool idea would be car-to-car wireless networking combined with this, so you could set up your own little broadcast radio station for other people stuck around you in traffic.
But for UI, I'd probably just prefer to wire up something like my current mouse (an A4tech with two wheels and five buttons) which could basically control everything if you just disabled the mousing functionality and just used it as a tactile control. Hell, you could fit it to the gear-shift lever and be done with it, then you'd actually have an excuse for driving around with your left hand down there all the time other than trying to look cool
You mean you actually look at your radio? Yowch. My driving instructor taught me to be able to do everything (changing gear, etc) without looking so I wouldn't crap myself and crash the first time I had to drive at night. Good advice, and I applied that to the stereo too.
That's probably why I don't like the LCD idea - nothing tactile, so you can't feel what you're pressing without looking. I really don't like the idea of any in-car devices that require you to look at them unless they're essential stuff like fuel, temperature displays and so forth...
Really? Dang, that must make me a woman...
Shouldn't you be watching the road?
I don't praise it, because I don't use it. If I used it and it has the same annoying features as Gnome, I would likely get annoyed by it in the same way.
:)
I will experiment later, I'm off to a client who run their office on macs. If it's really as annoying, then I'll feel vindicated in saying it sucks too
I couldn't agree with you more.
In New Zealand and particularly Australia there have been quite a few incidents during the recent real-estate boom where middle-aged (read: 50-55 year old) people have had their entire savings burned by convincing con-men with "investment schemes" to sell. If you have your lifetimes savings burned up by some dickhead with ten years left to retirement, you're pretty much in big trouble. Governments who abdicate responsibility for retirement savings had better crack down heavily on investment scammers with their "get-rich-quick-but-pay-me-$50,000-first" schemes well before doing so.
Most people just aren't that finance savvy.
But it still has many of the same problems described on that UI hall of shame page you linked to, including no easily-visible sense of context inside the directory structure on opening the window! Indeed, that's the first problem they point out with the W95 dialog, yet the Gnome one is actually significantly worse in this respect.
I don't need it? Says who? And what thought did they put into that statement?
I do a lot of work for a lot of clients, and I don't see why I have to create bookmarks every time I want to work on something - I have a sensibly organised filesystem structure that makes them nice and easy to get at from the home directory, thank you very much. I've already put the time into working out a sensible filesystem structure, but the patronising nannying of that goddamn save dialog is driving me up the wall.
I don't see the need for a separate "bookmarks" system, effectively I'm now being asked to whitelist the directories as I make them and then remove them when I'm no longer working on that project. That's daft.
Seriously, explain one thing to me: HOW does NOT HAVING the filesystem visible save anybody time? There's plenty of space in the save dialog to put it there, it's just wasted on overly huge controls - and the situation get gets worse as you make the window bigger. Try it, and tell me that's a sensible allocation of space.
It's a waste of time, and it's not configurable in any humanly locatable way - why not a "Load/Save Dialog Preferences" control in the Desktop Preferences, if you want to make those kind of radical changes to the norm? I feel quite vindicated in saying it is crap. I saved maybe twenty files in different places using it last night, and I had to do that *every* time. What a stupid, stupid bit of UI design. People keep saying "Well, I like the ease of use!"
What ease of use? The Ctrl-L ease of use? The clicking an extra control to save somewhere else ease of use? Just because it treats the user like a retard doesn't make it easy for the majority of people who, contrary to popular opinion amoung many developers it seems, are not retarded. A clear presentation of the file system allowing the user to choose where they put the file is all that is required here.
Gnome's preferences are a bit of a mess. Desktop related stuff is all in one menu, but similarly graphical things like GDM are still in the other System Tools menu. I think a little more centralisation here would be useful, I would see Networking, GDM, Services config etc as being more at home with the other preferences than hidden away with the archiving tool and floppy formatting utility.
... almost ;)
I don't recall seeing any such message about not touching things - I just had a look now and it doesn't appear. So I remain bemused.
It was mostly a bitterness thing, the amount of time I've had to spend pissing around with RegEdit on windows didn't make the re-appearance of the same GUI on a linux box very welcome. It's nice that OO.o has kept a lot of Excel GUI nonsense that I'm used to, but I don't see why we feel the need to keep the layout of Regedit in our new home away from the evils of Microsoft.
And my Gconf-editor is in the System Tools menu, no submenu. Maybe that's a Gentoo "I wanna-be-a-geek" thing, but I do recall it being in basically the same place in Ubuntu as well.
Please note that I do actually like Gnome a lot more than KDE, but I think it has some surreal omissions considering its maturity in both years, version numbers and features. There's simple features missing here that the Amiga had going years ago in 512kb of RAM, yet somebody has actually bothered to clone RegEdit rather than implement them? That was what set off my rant, rather than any opposition to a centralised configuration editor.
I'm still more narked about the save dialog, it's been annoying me all evening - every time I've saved a file, I had to press that "Show more folders" thing. It doesn't make sense to hide a part of a GUI when you need it every time you do the operation!
That's almost annoying enough to make me look at the source, find that goddamn button and see how easy it is to change the default state.
First: I am. I installed Gnome, I thought - as a user will - "What can I do to configure this?". So I went to the configuration menu and selected "Configuration editor".
If I don't like it, I quite understand that I'm free to use other things. However Gnome is a commercially supported project aiming at getting people to use it who DON'T want to rewrite it. Speaking as a user, I don't see the point in Gnome shipping a RegEdit clone so prominantly.
Second: Then why put the damn thing there? If the user isn't going to need it, why is it there? There's certainly lots of things that would be a lot more useful missing, and that thing is an affront to common decency. At the moment it's just a waste of a menu item, because it's totally useless and downright horrible. I thought Gnome was about trying not to confuse the crap out of people - even Windows has the decency not to put RegEdit in the control panel!
My main issue is the GUI. RegEdit is a horrid, horrid user interface for doing anything, and GConf is largely identical. Yes, the idea of structured key/value pairs isn't a bad one, and it's a nice idea to take all of that stuff out of dot files, I do agree. But the way of delivering it to the user sucks. That needs a total rethink.
Ctrl-L? Wow, that's... intuitive.. I'm sure everybody will figure that one out!
/var/www, for a start.
And why the hell would you want to hide a hierarchy from the user? I had thought that was the whole point of a "spatial" desktop, to help the user envision the structure of their filesystem visually? I can understand hierarchies just fine and *I* find the Gnome dialogue confusing because it has no sense of position inside the filesystem when it opens - I have no idea if I'm looking at ~/www or
And if you're suggesting that all users just want to save every file into "My documents" or the desktop, you're woefully mistaken. Even my mum knows better than that, and she rings me up in a fluster because the computer said a program had performed an illegal operation! It's certainly a bad habit to teach, as it acts to suggest to the user that they make a total mess of their home directory. Way to go...
As for the "Click here for more folders" button saving me time.. that's bollocks. If it defaults to the folder it saved in last time and I just want to save it, that's no time saved on having the other folders displayed to start with. If it defaults to a folder I don't want, then it's a total waste of time.
Either way, no time saved, some time wasted. Useless.
And what's with the use of space in that file save request anyway? If I resize it up to about half the height of my screen on a 1280x1024 display it still only shows a tiny number of folders I can save into after I hit that toggle, the rest of the box is taken up by stupidly huge controls at the top and large empty spaces. Maybe 1/8th of the window is actually doing something useful.
As for the registry, I was talking more about the *user interface paradigm* than an architectural similarity. It's a crap idea for a UI, and not something anybody should be copying. One of the main reasons I like Linux is the absence of a goddamn registry, the last thing I want to see is a clone of the RegEdit GUI!
You've not got me convinced, sorry.
Because it sounds like something that Snoop Doggy Dog would have on his goddamn lawn, that's why.
Windowmaker for something a bit different?
a -menu window managers like fluxbox etc. Surely somebody in the open source community can come up with a clever, minimal solution to what we do with a desktop environment/window manager? I mean seriously, what do we do? Configure a few things, move some files around, launch applications? Even just some improvements on the second function would be welcome rather than that interminal right-mouse menu nonsense. That stuff works great for context-sensitive stuff in applications, but only with small menus. Huge, monolithic RMB menus are the tool of satan!
Different from what? The 957,000 other UNIX window managers that all have the perplexing misconception that right-click-and-you'll-get-a-big-nested-menu is good UI design? About the first thing I read about UI design was "BIG NESTED MENUS SUCK BALLS!" or words to that effect.
They do, too.
Seriously, I can't stand it. Why is it that on Linux we have to choose between slow, Windows or Mac-alike desktops (Gnome, KDE) and an incessant, constant stream of Just-click-the-right-mouse-button-and-you'll-get-
It's pretty crap that it doesn't do the wildcard thing, considering that I remember file dialogs on the Amiga doing that as long ago as about 1993 or 1994 - even on the crappy system-supplied GUI library in Workbench 2.x And remember folks, that was a machine that could run the entire damn OS from a small ROM and a floppy disk. I agree, the file open/save dialogs are the worst parts of Gnome at the moment. You don't have a field where you can type/paste a file path, and half the time when you hit "Save" you actually have to click another control in order to be able to save it anywhere other than the current folder or a few fairly retarded locations like /home or / ... I mean seriously, I do a lot of work for a whole bunch of clients, why do I always have to go:
Save -> Browse For Other Folders -> find my Folder -> Type a filename
That second step is totally pointless and confusing, and there's no obvious or intuitive way to turn that bastard off the first time you see it, unlike most of the annoying GUI features of Windows. Teaching people to understand how file structures work in an intuitive manner is one of the functions of a file open/save dialog, and the Gnome one just muddies the waters by acting as if Saving Somewhere Else is some kind of advanced "super user" trick that needs a Special Super User Button to enable.
Hopefully there's a way to turn that off, but it's not obvious enough to be user friendly if there is.
And, also - this bugs me... why on earth does Gnome have a Windows-style registry? The registry is one of the worst, most annoying, dumbest features of Windows and a big reason that I like working in Linux. So why on earth would you want to copy it? Please tell me. Has Windows corrupted our minds so much that we think editing registry keys is COOL? Or are we just gearing up so that we can have nice programs like Registry First Aid as well?
You mean,
emerge game
wait 30 minutes
come back to PC, find make error
Figure out which dependency was missed in the ebuild
emerge missed_dependency
wait five minutes
emerge game
wait 30 minutes
type name of game
hope it works the first time, or you're up for a good hour of hard slog figuring out what went wrong?
Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo. But I wish people would stop making out that Portage is so bulletproof, last time I chcked the most recent unmasked version of Meld had a buggered ebuild (the only way to get it working is to use the masked one - WTF?) and I tried an emerge -u world a couple of days ago and kdelibs failed to build correctly. I'll try it again now, see if anything has changed...
I've been using Gentoo for about a month, and it's very good for what it is. But it's not that amazing, and it's certainly no more bulletproof in terms of package management than, say, a Debian based distro like Ubuntu. Come the release of Hoary Ubuntu I might just look at switching back, depending on how many errors I get in the intervening time... There's one or two things in Gentoo that are quite cool, but overall I think you'd get nearly as nice a system by starting with a very minimal Debian-based install and dedicating the same amount of time to dicking around and configuring as you have to with Gentoo to get it working at all.
Old Boy shouldn't be too hard to find, it did quite well at Cannes last year IIRC. I imagine you'll do better for movies in Melbourne than anywhere here, Auckland only has a population of a little over a million and nothing else even comes close. Enjoy the South Island, it's nice down there - can't speak quite so highly of Auckland though, it's a traffic nightmare and largely boring. Wellington has a bit more of a city atmosphere, but it's too small to hit critical mass. I'd live down there if it wasn't for the fact that there's so few days that aren't horrendously windy!
Katakuris is extremely funny, DOA is extremely... different. Starts by making about the most aggressive opening it possibly could, settles down into a Yakuza movie and then... well... that would kind of spoil the ending! Catch it, it's certainly an experience.
And as for the broadband thing, only just! We're emerging from the land of 128kbps over here very, very slowly. I got an email on Friday from my provider INTRODUCING a 10gb data-cap on my previously unrestricted plan, with no reduction in price. I think they will be finding themselves short a customer soon.
When it comes to festivals you're probably out of luck. There used to be two major ones, the Incredible Film Festival (which would show the likes of DOA, or indeed anything cheap, tacky and worth throwing popcorn at) and the NZFF, which is a bit more upscale and has a much bigger budget.
The Incredible film festival died last year, with the guy who ran it merging the festival into a more upscale segment of the NZFF - basically it means he's harder to fuck with for David Lane and his Christian cronies, and has a bigger budget. However it has had the effect of removing all the cheap-and-cheerful B-movies from our festival rotation, and resulting in a lot less of the fun of sitting around tiny cinemas that look like they're going to go broke, watching old 60s exploitation movies... NZFF is typically around July, so you're going to miss that by a mile - but if you're overseas, you can probably catch 90% of the movies before they make it here in the first place, so you'll not miss much aside from a few small NZ films.
Other than that, there's a few Auckland cinemas that run occasional Asian or European film festivals, with the asian stuff being mostly Korean or Taiwanese or similar (NZ has a big Chinese population, who tend to watch movies from around there).
Speaking of Korean movies, if you haven't seen "Old Boy" I would highly recommend you get hold of it - nasty, but extremely good.