Future historians will say that greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled was not lulling IBM into a false feeling of superiority and then clubbing them to death. Nor was it stealing Apple's revolutionary crown jewel and using it to rule to the desktop. The greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled, they will say, was that he made windows desktop software so ridiculously difficult to install, use, and maintain (via the windows registry) and then convinced everyone to buy into a networked solution,.NET, to solve these problems he created. That will be the legacy of Bill Gates' genius.
The Macintosh was supposed to be named "McIntosh", after mac creator Jef Raskin's "favorite eatin' apple". However, the audio equipment company McIntosh (makers of ridiculously priced record players) already had the name, so Apple changed the name to Macintosh.
Yes, the fact that I know these bits of trivia probably means I do need to get a life.
Loch Ness Monster is no more. But there's the sightings of the fat programmers in silicon valley who jump up and down and make the earth shake. I saw it on Discovery Channel.
Mandrake is a company that understands desktop
on
Mandrakesoft To IPO
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· Score: 4
Red Hat simply isn't. I know people at Red Hat (many of them are in my LUG). They are absolutely stupid and clueless about anything relating to making anything usable. Mandrake makes many useful utilities that make linux easier for newcomers. The UI for the mandrake installer is far more competantly designed than Anaconda. If Mandrake IPO's, redhat's position on anything other than a server is pretty much annihilated.
Of course, given the track records of companies trying to put linux on desktop (as opposed to just to doing server closet support), Mandrake will have a long and difficult fight ahead of them.
Many usability professsionals have sharply criticized microsoft for the adaptive menus feature and Clippy found in Office 2000. Let me add that in Word 2000, there is no "one-stop shopping area" for all the user's configuration needs. Configuration choices are spread throughout the entire program, being found both in "Options" and "Customization" menu selections. One particularly stupid thing I remember was that many spelling options were found under "Options", but the option for the feature that corrects text as you type was found in "Configuration". Finally, those toolbar buttons in O2K are damn near useless. A toolbar button can serve two purposes: it can give a user a graphical representation of what a command does (if the icon is descriptive enough), and it provides a faster way to performing a command than navigating menus (if the toolbar button is large enough). If a toolbar button is very small, it is not fast to access, in accordance with Fitts' Law , which states that the time to access a target is the function of its distance and its size. If a toolbar button has a tiny and undescriptive icon, it really doesn't give a good graphical representation of the command. Microsoft programs (barring IE) generally have both these problems. If Microsoft had added labels to the toolbar buttons like they were supposed to do, the toolbar buttons would be far more descriptive and be faster to access. But that would make O2K more usable and microsoft is anti-usability, despite everything they say. One of the few things GNOME does really well is toolbar buttons: their toolbar icons are big and are labelled. There is a far, far greater chance that a user will use a GNOME toolbar button to execute a command than those tiny, useless things that clutter microsoft programs.
Not that I disagree with the rest of the post. StarOffice is very inadequate in many ways, just like O2K. If you have the choice of inferior or damn inferior, the obvious choice is the first one. But there is advantage in StarOffice: you have the source code to make it not suck. If you can read all those code comments in German.;)
One thing that people forget is that when you're using windows (which I try to do as least as possible, mind you), what happens often when you go to the top most directory in the file browser to save something? Immediately the floppy starts grinding away. Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted. The computer has no way of keeping a record of when a floppy is sitting in the drive. The only solution to this is to poll the floppy, which generates the most grating noise. With the mac floppy drive(which probably should have an eject button that works the same way as the ones on zip drives), every time a floppy is inserted, it generates a disk event that tells the OS "Hey, there's a floppy inside you". When there's no floppy in the mac, the mac understands it's not there, so it's not going to do something futile and useless like searching for data on a floppy disk that doesn't exist. Given, the electronics required for this elegant solution raised the cost of mac floppy drives considerably. It's one of those technical superiority vs. price tradeoffs we see so much in the computer industry (SCSI vs. IDE, etc).
Playing devil's advocate for a minute and flirting with The Dark Side (tm), what about creating open source licenses that forbid any porting of software under said license to wany microsoft operating system (or.NET, for that matter). Should it be done? Talk amongst yourselves, I'm getting verklempt.
If radio stations hadn't been doing this for the past 60 years. What do you think all those prizes they give out are for? Why does my favorite station give out a case of Bud Light (wish it was Guiness) on friday as part of a Bud Light promotion? Really, everything involving technology and marketing hasn't changed for over a hundred years. The technology is the different, but the basic concepts of business remain the same across generations. This is the lesson the remaining dot coms are slowly learning.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess resistance isn't quite so futile after all.
Future historians will say that greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled was not lulling IBM into a false feeling of superiority and then clubbing them to death. Nor was it stealing Apple's revolutionary crown jewel and using it to rule to the desktop. The greatest trick Bill Gates ever pulled, they will say, was that he made windows desktop software so ridiculously difficult to install, use, and maintain (via the windows registry) and then convinced everyone to buy into a networked solution, .NET, to solve these problems he created. That will be the legacy of Bill Gates' genius.
The Macintosh was supposed to be named "McIntosh", after mac creator Jef Raskin's "favorite eatin' apple". However, the audio equipment company McIntosh (makers of ridiculously priced record players) already had the name, so Apple changed the name to Macintosh.
Yes, the fact that I know these bits of trivia probably means I do need to get a life.
(my attempt at writing a childish troll)
NeXT File bundles rule, packages drool. Friends don't let friends reinvent the M$ registry.
(troll complete. awaiting negative karma)
Loch Ness Monster is no more. But there's the sightings of the fat programmers in silicon valley who jump up and down and make the earth shake. I saw it on Discovery Channel.
When it comes to microsoft customs, the only the we have to declare is that linux will kick their sorry ass.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~David.Lockwood/Macinto sh_RIP.html
Red Hat simply isn't. I know people at Red Hat (many of them are in my LUG). They are absolutely stupid and clueless about anything relating to making anything usable. Mandrake makes many useful utilities that make linux easier for newcomers. The UI for the mandrake installer is far more competantly designed than Anaconda. If Mandrake IPO's, redhat's position on anything other than a server is pretty much annihilated.
Of course, given the track records of companies trying to put linux on desktop (as opposed to just to doing server closet support), Mandrake will have a long and difficult fight ahead of them.
Mandrake will be IPOing. Gael, prepare the taunts and the cows. This time it's personal.
Many usability professsionals have sharply criticized microsoft for the adaptive menus feature and Clippy found in Office 2000. Let me add that in Word 2000, there is no "one-stop shopping area" for all the user's configuration needs. Configuration choices are spread throughout the entire program, being found both in "Options" and "Customization" menu selections. One particularly stupid thing I remember was that many spelling options were found under "Options", but the option for the feature that corrects text as you type was found in "Configuration". Finally, those toolbar buttons in O2K are damn near useless. A toolbar button can serve two purposes: it can give a user a graphical representation of what a command does (if the icon is descriptive enough), and it provides a faster way to performing a command than navigating menus (if the toolbar button is large enough). If a toolbar button is very small, it is not fast to access, in accordance with Fitts' Law , which states that the time to access a target is the function of its distance and its size. If a toolbar button has a tiny and undescriptive icon, it really doesn't give a good graphical representation of the command. Microsoft programs (barring IE) generally have both these problems. If Microsoft had added labels to the toolbar buttons like they were supposed to do, the toolbar buttons would be far more descriptive and be faster to access. But that would make O2K more usable and microsoft is anti-usability, despite everything they say. One of the few things GNOME does really well is toolbar buttons: their toolbar icons are big and are labelled. There is a far, far greater chance that a user will use a GNOME toolbar button to execute a command than those tiny, useless things that clutter microsoft programs.
Not that I disagree with the rest of the post. StarOffice is very inadequate in many ways, just like O2K. If you have the choice of inferior or damn inferior, the obvious choice is the first one. But there is advantage in StarOffice: you have the source code to make it not suck. If you can read all those code comments in German. ;)
"Hyperion follows the Sun". Sun is building robots? I thought Bill Joy was against the whole robot thing.
It's those hieroglyphs that really suck.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~David.Lockwood/Macinto sh_RIP.html
Don't let Charlie Brown build pyramids.
One thing that people forget is that when you're using windows (which I try to do as least as possible, mind you), what happens often when you go to the top most directory in the file browser to save something? Immediately the floppy starts grinding away. Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted. The computer has no way of keeping a record of when a floppy is sitting in the drive. The only solution to this is to poll the floppy, which generates the most grating noise. With the mac floppy drive(which probably should have an eject button that works the same way as the ones on zip drives), every time a floppy is inserted, it generates a disk event that tells the OS "Hey, there's a floppy inside you". When there's no floppy in the mac, the mac understands it's not there, so it's not going to do something futile and useless like searching for data on a floppy disk that doesn't exist. Given, the electronics required for this elegant solution raised the cost of mac floppy drives considerably. It's one of those technical superiority vs. price tradeoffs we see so much in the computer industry (SCSI vs. IDE, etc).
With all those people downloading "Thong Song", it was only a matter of time.
IBM has a pvc lab? Is this that "smart pipes" techology everyone has been talking about?
The Cocoa API is essential for any cappuccino machine
If the disclaimer "does not actually shoot" is true, then how the hell are you supposed to taunt your action figures?
"He would make an excellent king of France"--Jef Raskin, talking on the subject of Steve Jobs
Playing devil's advocate for a minute and flirting with The Dark Side (tm), what about creating open source licenses that forbid any porting of software under said license to wany microsoft operating system (or .NET, for that matter). Should it be done? Talk amongst yourselves, I'm getting verklempt.
If radio stations hadn't been doing this for the past 60 years. What do you think all those prizes they give out are for? Why does my favorite station give out a case of Bud Light (wish it was Guiness) on friday as part of a Bud Light promotion? Really, everything involving technology and marketing hasn't changed for over a hundred years. The technology is the different, but the basic concepts of business remain the same across generations. This is the lesson the remaining dot coms are slowly learning.
They put a certificate of authenticity in every windows box. Hey, it works for the franklin mint.
When the U.S. government says that they won't tolerate no bullshit, they literally mean it.
It would be interesting to see how many MB of space those "This is GPL" disclaimers take up.