If done right, something can be made easy to use AND powerful. One thing about Debian that sucked was when I installed it as my first linux distribution and tried using the man pages, the man pages flew down the screen. No pager was assigned to them. When you're a newbie, you *really* need the man pages. I evenutally figured out how to export a pager,but still.... This was just plain stupid. Would putting in a default pager for man have made debian any less powerful? Of course not. Ideally, there would be a default pager, and if you wanted a different one, you could export it yourself. Another example are all the cryptic names that linux has for stuff. would/etc be any less powerful if it was called/preferences? Or/mnt if it was called/disks? Ease of use is all about common sense. You don't have to shove wizards down a user's throat of perform the computer equivalent of wiping their butt for them, but you have to give things intuitive names and give tasks clear and meaningful definitions and implementations. Ideally, an operating system should be a minute to learn, lifetime to master.
If you want to talk about morality artists getting hurt, why don't you mention the different continent codes that DVD's/players have, courtesy of the DVD people. This little scheme is quite immoral. Basically, if you have a DVD you bought in Europe, it won't work on a DVD player in the U.S., and vice-versa. Or if you bought your player in Australia, you can't play DVD's you bought in china This is *damned* immoral because it bars people in one country from watching some great films produced in countries other than their own. Sure, a lot of films will get ported back and forth between continents, but not all of them, especially in the case of independant film. We see this phennomena with game consoles, where the playstation you bought in america might not run some awesome games you can only find in Japan. Same thing. This immoral practice hurts some very talented artists in other countries who have yet to be discovered. Hopefully the DVD crack will end this.
I think that a comparison between packard-bells and the macintosh doesn't work. Sure, they both had proprietary technologies, but the difference between the two is that apple's proprietary served some purpose that often gave the computer more functionality that its PC counterparts. For example, ADB was proprietary, but ADB allowed someone to hook their keyboard to their machine, then chain their mouse to the keyboard. You could even put a third device in the chain,like a second keyboard or keypad, and all along you'd be using only 1 port on the machine (and it was hot pluggable!). It would be a decade before PC's had USB capabilities that would do something similar. Also, mini-din 8 (aka localtalk) cables were also proprietary, but they were easier to put on the back of your computer than serial cables, and they could double as a null modem cable. While it would have been nice if apple's standards were allowed to become open standards, at least their proprietary technologies served some special purpose that justified their existence. The kind of proprietary crap Packard-Bell did really did not give the customer any special advantage. How could a customer benefit from a modem riveted onto a motherboard? As for apple shipping late, one forgets that in the mid-90's, apple over-estimated demand and filled their warehouse with stuff that was hard to move, one of their more costlier blunders. They've moved to a sort of dynamic inventory systems that other makers are using, where they try to keep as little stuff in the warehouse as possible. If you underestimate demand, you lose out on selling opportunities. If you overestimate demand, you lose money. If you ran a company, which would you pick? I'm not shedding any tears over an incompetant company like Packard Bell that didn't give a damn about it's customers. One wonders whether a similar company based in Redmond, Washingon will suffer a similar fate.
debian bad for newbies...from experience...
on
Which BSD?
·
· Score: 1
As a former newbie who started linux with Debian, my experience was totally awful. There was no default pager for the man pages, so what you ended up with was the instructions for learning how to use linux flying by at 8 billion miles an hour. I RTFM'ed with a good linux book and figured out how to use the export function, but still, I shouldn't have needed to do that. Debian is basically the embodiment of the things that are wrong with linux. They mean well and their goal is noble, but they get easily tripped up on the common sense thing. Redhat's much better. Some people may consider Redhat to be on the side of evil and Debian to be on the side of good, but to quote Dark Helmet "Evil will win because good is dumb".
>So the millions of people out there who believe >they're christians because they follow their >bible are... what? Simply deluded?
The King James Bible was written during a time when there was no acknowlegement of the original cultures of the bible. Many Christian institutions during the time of the King James bible *were* deluded, ignorant twits. Case in point: all those pictures of middle eastern biblical figures portrayed as white Europeans. Raphael and Michelangelo were awesome painters, but didn't they didn't have a clue when it came to their own religion. The same thing goes for biblical texts. The Europeans were highly prejudiced against the original cultures responsible for the biblical texts, arrogantly holding greek translations of the bible superior to those done in the original hebrew/aramaic. The ancient Greeks gave Europe homer and mythology, so surely they must have known everything about the bible, right? As a result, you have flawed translations that can get across the wrong idea. In Hebrew, words can often have more than one meaning (for example, the verb for 'to know' also mean 'to have sex with', hense the term "knowing in the biblical sense"). If the translation is screwed up, what you believe will be screwed up. If your screwed up ideas make you a better person, more power to you. But if the wrong translation is used as an argument to do nasty things that go against the grain of the original text, such as the case with the game, translation definately becomes an issue.
Windows is about as consistent as linux as far as the interface goes. How many different keyboard shortcuts exist in different windows programs for the same exact function, like quitting the program, for example. One program might have Alt+F4 (a poorly chosen shortcut) for quit, another might be alt+f+alt+x, another might be ctl+q etc.Microsoft themselves can't even standardize shortcuts between their apps. Then, for things like selecting menus, the menu selection for configuration information (i.e. 'preferences')might be under the edit menu in one program, some weird menu in another program. No consistency whatsoever. I think the guy should return the gateway and get his father an imac. If you want true consistency, get a mac. Macs have consistent menus, consisten keyboard shortcuts, and consistent programmers. My apologies for the evangelism, but the mac is the only one that has had developers who have never blasted GUIs and has a long-standing tradition of making consistent, easy to use interfaces. If you don't believe me, fire up a mac and take a look for yourself how similar many applications are in the way they behave. Linux might eventually become as easy to use as a mac (windows certainly never will) but the linux coders need to have a major attitude adjustment before that will happen.
The point is that the architecture *does* need to be changed. CISC chips were nice, then 1980 arrived. I think that Intel is reaching the upper limit in terms of how powerful they can push the whole x86 thing. You kind of see this when Apple's RISC G3 line easily kicks the butt of pentium chips whose clock speed is easily over 100mhz faster. Intel has to keep on adding multimedia instruction sets just to attempt to keep an edge over Alpha/PowerPc/Sparc etc. Changing the architecture is not as painful as it sounds. Apple very successfully made the switch from CISC motorola 68000 series to the RISC PowerPc, and they did a pretty good job of keeping backwards compatibility with older programs. A chip as powerful as merced, with its EPIC architecture, should have no problem running an emulated environment for x86 programs.
I try to invoke the early years of computing when coding. Sounds crazy, but it got me through a lot of hard CS work. That light my fire instrumental just puts me in the mood to right elegant code.
I'm not suprised that Codewarrior for windows crashed constantly and lacked serious usability. I think the guys at metrowerks, known for making a damn fine Mac IDE, went above and beyond the call of duty and gave their port a true win32 look and feel.
The reason for the bracket shortcuts is that those are the same shortcuts that macs use for forward-backwards...sort of. Except instead of pressing ctl (at far end of keyboard, damn uncomfy), macs use the command key (located where the alt key would be on PC's). Try pressing alt [ or alt ]. Doesn't that feel good? Unfortunately, Mozilla did something akin to microsoft, copying a good idea from MacOS and then changing something enough that the idea is no longer so good. Steve Jobs (quoting Picasso) once said "Good artists create, great artists steal." It's okay to be a great artist, just remember to be a good thief.
I disagree with you on two main points. First, I don't think that site is necessarily windows-centric because that represents a majority opinion, but rather that windows 95/NT tends to be the most flagrant violator of ease-of-use principles. I wouldn't be suprised if more than half the people posting to that site were mac users forced to tolerate crappy windows interfaces. Native windows users tend to ignore/accept bad interface design, because they have never used a more intuitive GUI or because they just say "that's the way computers/Microsoft are. Second, I think designing a program to be easy *is* easy. It would take the most novice, inexperienced mac programmer about 10 minutes to think up an easy application interface that is universally consistent and avoids the many pitfalls listed on the site. If programmers for that platform can do it, programmers for other platforms should be able to do it as well.
It is interesting to note that the guy who created e-bay got the idea for the company while trying to sell/trade pez dispensers. If Pez were the schmucks they are way back, there might have never been an e-bay. Taste the bitter candy of censorship as our freedoms are dispensed with.
If displays become that cheap, wouldn't it be possible to stick a whole bunch of post-it note displays to your house and show on each display an image of the background behind the house, thus creating a sort of makeshift cloaking device? It would be really handy for when the Jehova's witnesses come around. But seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if the military quickly snapped up the technology and used it for cameoflage, sort of like that creature in "Predator"
While bugs certainly suck and no doubt cost billions in productivity, I think that one thing left out of the sucky software picture is lack of user-friendliness. In the world of Windows and Linux, if a program is hard to use or has a cumbersome interface, nobody gives a second thought about. Keyboard shortcuts for basic functions (like quitting an app) are often poorly chosen and differ from one application to the next. Different applications often deviate from a standard interface, making each new program a confusing challenge to learn. And yet people continue to tolerate this. Microsoft continues to use big words like "user-friendly", but no one questions why a fully 32-bit non-backwards-compatible OS like windows NT still sticks with unintelligible DOS naming conventions for system files. And these problems are *NOT* due to management pressure and short deadlines. They are totally the fault of the programmers. While certainly the mac/apple has had it's faults, mac applications have always had interfaces consistent with that of the operating system. Keyboard shortcuts for mac appliations have *always* been consistent and well thought out. I think the windows/linux users have something to learn from the mac users, who will not hesitate to harshly criticize a program whose UI is crap.
While bugs certainly suck and no doubt cost billions in productivity, I think that one thing left out of the sucky software picture is lack of user-friendliness. In the world of Windows and Linux, if a program is hard to use or has a cumbersome interface, nobody gives a second thought about. Keyboard shortcuts for basic functions (like quitting an app) are often poorly chosen and differ from one application to the next. Different applications often deviate from a standard interface, making each new program a confusing challenge. And yet people continue to tolerate this. Microsoft continues to use big words like "user-friendly", but no one questions why a fully 32-bit non-backwards-compatible OS like windows NT still sticks with unintelligible DOS naming conventions for program files. While certainly the mac has had it's fault in certain areas, the applications for it always for a standard
1. If this specially designed anti-bear suit sees wide use, what's going to happen when the bears start carrying rocket launchers? Could a giant human vs. bears arms race be started?
2. Will the suit run linux? I don't think I'd trust windows CE to protect me from bears.
The problem, as I've observed, is that what makes M$ economically viable is not market dynamics but rather politics. In a lot of universities (and a lot of businesses, too) IT is a highly political area. It doesn't matter that macs are statistically proven to have a lower TOC than Winblows machines. It doesn't matter linux servers are more robust than NT servers. The IT people have power to force windows on everyone, and if you don't like it, go look for another job/school. When Microsoft gives away software, they just give more legitimacy to greedy, incompentant, power-hungry IT departments who have never had the school's/company's best interest in mind.
NT is stable operating system...until you install software for it. You're registry gets blown out and its goodbye NT. If I can have my NT machine running for 2 weeks without a complete reinstall, I'm amazed. Meanwhile, I can install all the stuff I want on my mac, and it *never* breaks the OS.
As the subject says, chill out. So IBM is basically announcing a product that puts itself on roughly the same footing as all other linux-incompatible laptops. The linux community knows what it likes, and will have the good sense to take their business elsewhere. It opens the way for a lot of great smaller vendors who are *actually* committed to linux to profit from IBM's shortsightedness. Don't get mad at corporate stupidity, take advantage of it.
Apple (if they have any business sense) does care about whether firewire is adopted! FireWire is built into every new G3/G4 desktop. If PC's adopt FireWire as a standard, there will be lots of devices that those macs can use, which goes towards eliminating the whole "macs never have any hardware" argument. As for your quote
"Why would your average computer user need a hyper speed external port? " I leave you with a quote from Bill Gates in the early 80's "I don't ever see anyone needing more than 640k of RAM". Ukab's Law: "Data expands to fill the bandwidth allotted."
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If done right, something can be made easy to use AND powerful. One thing about Debian that sucked was when I installed it as my first linux distribution and tried using the man pages, the man pages flew down the screen. No pager was assigned to them. When you're a newbie, you *really* need the man pages. I evenutally figured out how to export a pager,but still.... This was just plain stupid. Would putting in a default pager for man have made debian any less powerful? Of course not. Ideally, there would be a default pager, and if you wanted a different one, you could export it yourself. Another example are all the cryptic names that linux has for stuff. would /etc be any less powerful if it was called /preferences? Or /mnt if it was called /disks? Ease of use is all about common sense. You don't have to shove wizards down a user's throat of perform the computer equivalent of wiping their butt for them, but you have to give things intuitive names and give tasks clear and meaningful definitions and implementations. Ideally, an operating system should be a minute to learn, lifetime to master.
If you want to talk about morality artists getting hurt, why don't you mention the different continent codes that DVD's/players have, courtesy of the DVD people. This little scheme is quite immoral. Basically, if you have a DVD you bought in Europe, it won't work on a DVD player in the U.S., and vice-versa. Or if you bought your player in Australia, you can't play DVD's you bought in china This is *damned* immoral because it bars people in one country from watching some great films produced in countries other than their own. Sure, a lot of films will get ported back and forth between continents, but not all of them, especially in the case of independant film. We see this phennomena with game consoles, where the playstation you bought in america might not run some awesome games you can only find in Japan. Same thing. This immoral practice hurts some very talented artists in other countries who have yet to be discovered. Hopefully the DVD crack will end this.
I think that a comparison between packard-bells and the macintosh doesn't work. Sure, they both had proprietary technologies, but the difference between the two is that apple's proprietary served some purpose that often gave the computer more functionality that its PC counterparts. For example, ADB was proprietary, but ADB allowed someone to hook their keyboard to their machine, then chain their mouse to the keyboard. You could even put a third device in the chain,like a second keyboard or keypad, and all along you'd be using only 1 port on the machine (and it was hot pluggable!). It would be a decade before PC's had USB capabilities that would do something similar. Also, mini-din 8 (aka localtalk) cables were also proprietary, but they were easier to put on the back of your computer than serial cables, and they could double as a null modem cable. While it would have been nice if apple's standards were allowed to become open standards, at least their proprietary technologies served some special purpose that justified their existence. The kind of proprietary crap Packard-Bell did really did not give the customer any special advantage. How could a customer benefit from a modem riveted onto a motherboard?
As for apple shipping late, one forgets that in the mid-90's, apple over-estimated demand and filled their warehouse with stuff that was hard to move, one of their more costlier blunders. They've moved to a sort of dynamic inventory systems that other makers are using, where they try to keep as little stuff in the warehouse as possible. If you underestimate demand, you lose out on selling opportunities. If you overestimate demand, you lose money. If you ran a company, which would you pick?
I'm not shedding any tears over an incompetant company like Packard Bell that didn't give a damn about it's customers. One wonders whether a similar company based in Redmond, Washingon will suffer a similar fate.
As a former newbie who started linux with Debian, my experience was totally awful. There was no default pager for the man pages, so what you ended up with was the instructions for learning how to use linux flying by at 8 billion miles an hour. I RTFM'ed with a good linux book and figured out how to use the export function, but still, I shouldn't have needed to do that. Debian is basically the embodiment of the things that are wrong with linux. They mean well and their goal is noble, but they get easily tripped up on the common sense thing. Redhat's much better. Some people may consider Redhat to be on the side of evil and Debian to be on the side of good, but to quote Dark Helmet "Evil will win because good is dumb".
>So the millions of people out there who believe >they're christians because they follow their >bible are... what? Simply deluded?
The King James Bible was written during a time when there was no acknowlegement of the original cultures of the bible. Many Christian institutions during the time of the King James bible *were* deluded, ignorant twits. Case in point: all those pictures of middle eastern biblical figures portrayed as white Europeans. Raphael and Michelangelo were awesome painters, but didn't they didn't have a clue when it came to their own religion. The same thing goes for biblical texts. The Europeans were highly prejudiced against the original cultures responsible for the biblical texts, arrogantly holding greek translations of the bible superior to those done in the original hebrew/aramaic. The ancient Greeks gave Europe homer and mythology, so surely they must have known everything about the bible, right? As a result, you have flawed translations that can get across the wrong idea. In Hebrew, words can often have more than one meaning (for example, the verb for 'to know' also mean 'to have sex with', hense the term "knowing in the biblical sense"). If the translation is screwed up, what you believe will be screwed up. If your screwed up ideas make you a better person, more power to you. But if the wrong translation is used as an argument to do nasty things that go against the grain of the original text, such as the case with the game, translation definately becomes an issue.
In order to make denial of constitutional rights Posix compliant, you need to add:
#define DANGEROUS_STUDENT IQ > 90
struct WarningSigns
{
char favoriteBooks [MAX_BOOKS];
char favoriteMusic [MAX_MUSIC];
char hairstyle [MAX_HAIRSTYLE];
bool harassedByJocks;
bool likesComputers;
bool wearsBlack;
bool wearsTrechcoat;
}
if (WarningSigns.harassedByJocks == true)
faculty.ignore(harassmentByJocks);
if (student.rampages())
{
faculty.forget(harassmentByJocks);
press.forget (harassmentByJocks);
press.blame (internet, geeks, DOOM);
}
Windows is about as consistent as linux as far as the interface goes. How many different keyboard shortcuts exist in different windows programs for the same exact function, like quitting the program, for example. One program might have Alt+F4 (a poorly chosen shortcut) for quit, another might be alt+f+alt+x, another might be ctl+q etc.Microsoft themselves can't even standardize shortcuts between their apps. Then, for things like selecting menus, the menu selection for configuration information (i.e. 'preferences')might be under the edit menu in one program, some weird menu in another program. No consistency whatsoever. I think the guy should return the gateway and get his father an imac.
If you want true consistency, get a mac. Macs have consistent menus, consisten keyboard shortcuts, and consistent programmers. My apologies for the evangelism, but the mac is the only one that has had developers who have never blasted GUIs and has a long-standing tradition of making consistent, easy to use interfaces. If you don't believe me, fire up a mac and take a look for yourself how similar many applications are in the way they behave. Linux might eventually become as easy to use as a mac (windows certainly never will) but the linux coders need to have a major attitude adjustment before that will happen.
The point is that the architecture *does* need to be changed. CISC chips were nice, then 1980 arrived. I think that Intel is reaching the upper limit in terms of how powerful they can push the whole x86 thing. You kind of see this when Apple's RISC G3 line easily kicks the butt of pentium chips whose clock speed is easily over 100mhz faster. Intel has to keep on adding multimedia instruction sets just to attempt to keep an edge over Alpha/PowerPc/Sparc etc. Changing the architecture is not as painful as it sounds. Apple very successfully made the switch from CISC motorola 68000 series to the RISC PowerPc, and they did a pretty good job of keeping backwards compatibility with older programs. A chip as powerful as merced, with its EPIC architecture, should have no problem running an emulated environment for x86 programs.
I try to invoke the early years of computing when coding. Sounds crazy, but it got me through a lot of hard CS work. That light my fire instrumental just puts me in the mood to right elegant code.
I'm not suprised that Codewarrior for windows crashed constantly and lacked serious usability.
I think the guys at metrowerks, known for making a
damn fine Mac IDE, went above and beyond the call of duty and gave their port a true win32 look and feel.
The reason for the bracket shortcuts is that those are the same shortcuts that macs use for forward-backwards...sort of. Except instead of pressing ctl (at far end of keyboard, damn uncomfy), macs use the command key (located where the alt key would be on PC's). Try pressing alt [ or alt ]. Doesn't that feel good? Unfortunately, Mozilla did something akin to microsoft, copying a good idea from MacOS and then changing something enough that the idea is no longer so good. Steve Jobs (quoting Picasso) once said "Good artists create, great artists steal." It's okay to be a great artist, just remember to be a good thief.
I disagree with you on two main points. First, I don't think that site is necessarily windows-centric because that represents a majority opinion, but rather that windows 95/NT tends to be the most flagrant violator of ease-of-use principles. I wouldn't be suprised if more than half the people posting to that site were mac users forced to tolerate crappy windows interfaces. Native windows users tend to ignore/accept bad interface design, because they have never used a more intuitive GUI or because they just say "that's the way computers/Microsoft are. Second, I think designing a program to be easy *is* easy. It would take the most novice, inexperienced mac programmer about 10 minutes to think up an easy application interface that is universally consistent and avoids the many pitfalls listed on the site. If programmers for that platform can do it, programmers for other platforms should be able to do it as well.
It is interesting to note that the guy who created e-bay got the idea for the company while trying to sell/trade pez dispensers. If Pez were the schmucks they are way back, there might have never been an e-bay. Taste the bitter candy of censorship as our freedoms are dispensed with.
If displays become that cheap, wouldn't it be possible to stick a whole bunch of post-it note displays to your house and show on each display an image of the background behind the house, thus creating a sort of makeshift cloaking device? It would be really handy for when the Jehova's witnesses come around. But seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if the military quickly snapped up the technology and used it for cameoflage, sort of like that creature in "Predator"
While bugs certainly suck and no doubt cost billions in productivity, I think that one thing left out of the sucky software picture is lack of user-friendliness. In the world of Windows and Linux, if a program is hard to use or has a cumbersome interface, nobody gives a second thought about. Keyboard shortcuts for basic functions (like quitting an app) are often poorly chosen and differ from one application to the next. Different applications often deviate from a standard interface, making each new program a confusing challenge to learn. And yet people continue to tolerate this. Microsoft continues to use big words like "user-friendly", but no one questions why a fully 32-bit non-backwards-compatible OS like windows NT still sticks with unintelligible DOS naming conventions for system files. And these problems are *NOT* due to management pressure and short deadlines. They are totally the fault of the programmers. While certainly the mac/apple has had it's faults, mac applications have always had interfaces consistent with that of the operating system. Keyboard shortcuts for mac appliations have *always* been consistent and well thought out. I think the windows/linux users have something to learn from the mac users, who will not hesitate to harshly criticize a program whose UI is crap.
While bugs certainly suck and no doubt cost billions in productivity, I think that one thing left out of the sucky software picture is lack of user-friendliness. In the world of Windows and Linux, if a program is hard to use or has a cumbersome interface, nobody gives a second thought about. Keyboard shortcuts for basic functions (like quitting an app) are often poorly chosen and differ from one application to the next. Different applications often deviate from a standard interface, making each new program a confusing challenge. And yet people continue to tolerate this. Microsoft continues to use big words like "user-friendly", but no one questions why a fully 32-bit non-backwards-compatible OS like windows NT still sticks with unintelligible DOS naming conventions for program files. While certainly the mac has had it's fault in certain areas, the applications for it always for a standard
1. If this specially designed anti-bear suit sees wide use, what's going to happen when the bears start carrying rocket launchers? Could a giant human vs. bears arms race be started?
2. Will the suit run linux? I don't think I'd trust windows CE to protect me from bears.
So does this mean that Linus will be knighted?
The problem, as I've observed, is that what makes M$ economically viable is not market dynamics but rather politics. In a lot of universities (and a lot of businesses, too) IT is a highly political area. It doesn't matter that macs are statistically proven to have a lower TOC than Winblows machines. It doesn't matter linux servers are more robust than NT servers. The IT people have power to force windows on everyone, and if you don't like it, go look for another job/school. When Microsoft gives away software, they just give more legitimacy to greedy, incompentant, power-hungry IT departments who have never had the school's/company's best interest in mind.
NT is stable operating system...until you install software for it. You're registry gets blown out and its goodbye NT. If I can have my NT machine running for 2 weeks without a complete reinstall, I'm amazed. Meanwhile, I can install all the stuff I want on my mac, and it *never* breaks the OS.
As the subject says, chill out. So IBM is basically announcing a product that puts itself on roughly the same footing as all other linux-incompatible laptops. The linux community knows what it likes, and will have the good sense to take their business elsewhere. It opens the way for a lot of great smaller vendors who are *actually* committed to linux to profit from IBM's shortsightedness. Don't get mad at corporate stupidity, take advantage of it.
For the terminal software, I definately recommend z-term.
Apple (if they have any business sense) does care about whether firewire is adopted! FireWire is built into every new G3/G4 desktop. If PC's adopt FireWire as a standard, there will be lots of devices that those macs can use, which goes towards eliminating the whole "macs never have any hardware" argument. As for your quote
"Why would your average computer user need a hyper speed external port? " I leave you with a quote from Bill Gates in the early 80's
"I don't ever see anyone needing more than 640k of RAM". Ukab's Law: "Data expands to fill the bandwidth allotted."