But why would anyone in their basement feel the need to defend a multi-billion dollar corporation for free? Does devxo think MS can't defend themselves? Does devxo wish to one day be the head of MS and they're getting their brownie points in early? I mean, I can understand wanting to promote OSS because it benefits you if you use OSS to have as many other people contributing as possible, but what would anyone get out of defending MS?
The only thing I can think of is you get shittier products, because people will be more likely to overlook more of MS's flaws if there are more posts excusing/defending MS. Hmm, maybe devxo is an OSS fanatic in disguise...?
I agree, I don't really care what the PC can do for games. Even if I play the same games, it's the console experience I enjoy. FPS, RTS and 'Western-style' RPG (I still enjoy some of these, they are just not my primary genres) are not really genres I care about either, so it matters even less to me. I would also just rather use a gamepad primarily, and this is pretty much the out-of-the-box experience with consoles.
Mouse & keyboard work perfectly fine on consoles. That being said, mouse & keyboard is fine for first person shooters and RTS games, but the precision of analog sticks in a platformer (for example, Mario Galaxy) or a hack & slash (like God of War) is more important, and even unreproducible with a mouse and keyboard. This argument is also pointless for games like Final Fantasy XIII or Dragon Quest IX. These games are all blockbusters, but really work better on a gamepad. But these are only input methods, and all systems are capable of supporting them, so the argument is moot.
In essence, you double-click a large area vs regular-clicking a small button. Sounds like you never want to double-click. Some suggestions: Bind a mouse button to double-click, or perhaps set a keyboard modifier that turns the primary mouse button into a double-click. You may also want to just enable mouse-keys, so you can hover your pointer over the area you wish to double-click, and press the 0 key on the numeric keypad. You might also want to add some fire to this conversation.
There was a bunch of stuff in early Nintendo games that made absolutely no sense. In Zelda you had to burn some random bush to find the entrance of a dungeon, try burning every bush on the map and see how long it takes. Sometimes these frustrations were due to translation errors which gave obtuse or outright botched instructions. Most of the time, these secrets were there so that when you got to the playground, some kid would tell you something that sounded crazy, but you would get home and try it and it would actually work. Perhaps these secrets were introduced to sell Nintendo Power magazines, which mapped out every easter egg, but for a lot of kids it added to the social aspect of gaming. If you happened to jump in that one spot, the next day you'd be talking to your friends about what you found. In any case, you were never required to find that 1up mushroom or hidden vine in Super Mario Bros, it was just a bonus, and you could finish the game without it.
As for GUIs, I have to agree, there needs to be some sort of indicator for the functionality. GNOME is not primarily a touch-based UI, users won't be tapping and dragging to "find" the functionality they're looking for.
This change will dumbfound the average user. They don't know that double-clicking the titlebar will maximize/restore, and when the button to do so disappears, they will switch to dragging the corner of the window in order to expand it. This is tedious and frustrating for novice users who don't recognize the context switching mouse icon when it rolls over a draggable window edge. They often miss the thin window border and end up dragging some other area and wondering why the mouse won't work, or they think they hit the wrong mouse button.
This leads me to wonder, are expandable window borders next on the chopping block?
Double-click the titlebar to toggle between maximize/restore, and click the taskbar button for the active window to minimize or restore it.
I agree that we should have a choice though, maybe a simple option in the "Appearance" settings window that lets you toggle between "Minimalist" and "Standard" settings. The minimalist setting will have the reduced clutter, and the standard setting will retain all of the normal functionality we expect. There could even be more granular settings in an "Advanced" tab.
The more I thought about this change though, I realized I personally never use the minimize/maximize/restore buttons myself, I do tend to just double-click the titlebar, and there is really no reason to minimize a window.
So what you're saying is that the UK will be that much less capable of adopting software patents. They won't just pass a law that requires them to pay tons of royalties all of a sudden. So good.
If Microsoft isn't Microsoft anymore then we're all winners. I'm glad they're finally getting the idea. Too bad they were forced into this position and they're acting out of desperation. It's a start though, if they see that it's successful maybe they'll start really catching on. Like for reals.
There's less emphasis on giving listeners a full album to experience over and over on different levels, and there's more emphasis on a shallow single that people will get sick of in a week. Nobody wants to pay for an hour of shallow pop. I still buy albums of artists I like, because I appreciate music beyond the new 5 second musical phrase with a hook that sounds good in your ear for a few loops, but that's exactly what "music execs" are trying to push on the consumer (especially through manufactured music). Another win for the indies I guess.
This doesn't sound like a "radical new UI", more like re-thinking widgets, or just simply getting rid of the classic monolithic application and providing the user with a deluge of specific-task-oriented programs. It's just bringing apps that we know from mobile phones (i.e. specific software for specific functions) to the desktop. Which we already have, it's called "widgets," and apart from the weather one, nobody uses them anyway. We also have it on the browser, in the form of iGoogle and Yahoo's main page, and others. Will starting a new activity on your computer require you to sift through a ton of different titles, or to start selecting keywords to narrow down what you want to do? In Windows, you already have a search feature on the Start menu, but do you want to start using that for everything you do? Or will you use voice detection and start shouting out keywords? Good for a kiosk, but kinda lame for the desktop.
In the article, they mention: "Bubbles are auto-generated in various categories (personal, entertainment, gaming, etc.) and can also be created by a user." So that means they provide you with a bunch of default activities, and you can also create your own... but does that mean you have to start choosing what functionality you want and then specify the workflow to tie together that functionality? That sounds like too much work for the average user, and it's getting close to programming.
"Clicking on a bubble brings up a program or interaction item. For example clicking on a bubble for an upcoming flight will display alternate flight times with weather-based probability for delays. Users could use the interface to switch their flight, should the desire."
You could do that pretty easily on a web browser... Same with email, looking up news. Apart from some weird concept art, they're not really showing anything radically new or advantageous.
Yup, I never use the bin, and there's no real reason to delete anything anyway unless it's software that I don't want to use anymore, and that can easily be re-downloaded. I wouldn't really care the bin was just hidden from me until I need it as specified in the summary, but I don't think I'd need it personally.
Versioning on the other hand is much more important, but for that I just save as a new file every time, I don't especially need a file system designed for it, that seems too abstract a concept for me to put faith into. I'll never know when old versions will just disappear, and under what terms they will be kept, it seems harder to keep track of from a user standpoint. Usually just the ~ last changed version is enough for me to recover from a stupid mistake, and that's built-in.
That's fine with me, Steam seems to be accomplishing all of the PCGA's goals anyway with ease.
PCGA is among other things working to develop marketing for PC games, combat piracy, developing new business models beyond retail sales, and establishing minimum hardware requirements for PC games, along with guidelines for developers to make games work for those requirements. According to president Randy Stude, the PC Gaming Alliance is to "help make certain that the PC game industry had a public voice and a pulpit for accurately communicating the size, growth and overall popularity of the single largest gaming platform worldwide." They will also perform market research for their members and the public.
Once the attack was detected in early January, Canadian government cybersecurity officials immediately shut down all internet access at the Finance Department and the Treasury Board, in an attempt to stop stolen information from being sent back to the hackers over the net. In an earlier attack, Defence Research and Development had to shutdown access to one of its servers for two months.
Obama looks about as smart as said journalist right now, and he's running the country. And the media are wetting their pants with their new "cyber terrorism" buzzword. This is all evidence that we need some serious education on the subject in this country. At every level. Seriously, wtf?
Silver's battery doesn't die out in 3 years, its warranty doesn't expire, doesn't require repairs, additional software, or upgrades, and doesn't need a complex manufacturing process. What's your point again?
That just complicates web sites, which should be as intuitive as possible. It might be good for some intranet apps, or perhaps for quick login/logout functions, but other than that keep it off the public web.
When it's an unorganized community of innovative and prescient people either compelled by their own ideas or motivated out of necessity from predicament, not some calculated aloof me-toos who are presumptuously deriving contrivances from something they actually recognize (which may be their only truly valuable contribution) as brilliance. Sometimes people who can briefly awe you with hollow hyperbole can actually draw your attention to the truly worthwhile. Don't confuse that with marketing however, which strives to provoke desire combined with (manufactured or otherwise) mania into extreme stupidity.
Q: If they don't want [gadget users] hanging out, why [offer/advertise wireless for] luring them in?
A: Because if they don't offer [wireless], the [gadget users] will go to Starbucks, where the 700% markup on a cup of coffee makes up for the lost business the seatwarmers bring in?
So they want their customers, but they don't want them? Brilliant. It seems like a better solution would be to remove wifi, and lower prices accordingly. Some will want wifi with high prices, others will want no wifi and the 700% lower price.
I didn't know that laws were just for private citizens. What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander I guess. This kinda makes sense though, Bush's warrantless wiretapping was found to be illegal, Obama excused it, and now he's seeking to make what was illegal into something legal. But not for private citizens. Now I get it, "shackles" is merely a metaphor.
Seems like if there's a "Cyber emergency", then they should just disconnect and/or turn off the affected systems. Why do they need to shut down the infrastructure itself, or disconnect everything altogether? Why is it an all-or-nothing situation? Clearly the systems that are most important or most at risk should be isolated and managed separately from non-critical systems. Also, why waste time worrying about the non-critical systems when you could isolate, organize, and manage the critical systems by themselves much more easily?
Slashdot Mirror
But why would anyone in their basement feel the need to defend a multi-billion dollar corporation for free? Does devxo think MS can't defend themselves? Does devxo wish to one day be the head of MS and they're getting their brownie points in early? I mean, I can understand wanting to promote OSS because it benefits you if you use OSS to have as many other people contributing as possible, but what would anyone get out of defending MS?
The only thing I can think of is you get shittier products, because people will be more likely to overlook more of MS's flaws if there are more posts excusing/defending MS. Hmm, maybe devxo is an OSS fanatic in disguise...?
I agree, I don't really care what the PC can do for games. Even if I play the same games, it's the console experience I enjoy. FPS, RTS and 'Western-style' RPG (I still enjoy some of these, they are just not my primary genres) are not really genres I care about either, so it matters even less to me. I would also just rather use a gamepad primarily, and this is pretty much the out-of-the-box experience with consoles.
Mouse & keyboard work perfectly fine on consoles. That being said, mouse & keyboard is fine for first person shooters and RTS games, but the precision of analog sticks in a platformer (for example, Mario Galaxy) or a hack & slash (like God of War) is more important, and even unreproducible with a mouse and keyboard. This argument is also pointless for games like Final Fantasy XIII or Dragon Quest IX. These games are all blockbusters, but really work better on a gamepad. But these are only input methods, and all systems are capable of supporting them, so the argument is moot.
No, you don't get it, you have to RTFA. The real story here is that they were only drinking Coke Classic during the drafting and review procedures.
In essence, you double-click a large area vs regular-clicking a small button. Sounds like you never want to double-click. Some suggestions: Bind a mouse button to double-click, or perhaps set a keyboard modifier that turns the primary mouse button into a double-click. You may also want to just enable mouse-keys, so you can hover your pointer over the area you wish to double-click, and press the 0 key on the numeric keypad. You might also want to add some fire to this conversation.
There was a bunch of stuff in early Nintendo games that made absolutely no sense. In Zelda you had to burn some random bush to find the entrance of a dungeon, try burning every bush on the map and see how long it takes. Sometimes these frustrations were due to translation errors which gave obtuse or outright botched instructions. Most of the time, these secrets were there so that when you got to the playground, some kid would tell you something that sounded crazy, but you would get home and try it and it would actually work. Perhaps these secrets were introduced to sell Nintendo Power magazines, which mapped out every easter egg, but for a lot of kids it added to the social aspect of gaming. If you happened to jump in that one spot, the next day you'd be talking to your friends about what you found. In any case, you were never required to find that 1up mushroom or hidden vine in Super Mario Bros, it was just a bonus, and you could finish the game without it.
As for GUIs, I have to agree, there needs to be some sort of indicator for the functionality. GNOME is not primarily a touch-based UI, users won't be tapping and dragging to "find" the functionality they're looking for.
This change will dumbfound the average user. They don't know that double-clicking the titlebar will maximize/restore, and when the button to do so disappears, they will switch to dragging the corner of the window in order to expand it. This is tedious and frustrating for novice users who don't recognize the context switching mouse icon when it rolls over a draggable window edge. They often miss the thin window border and end up dragging some other area and wondering why the mouse won't work, or they think they hit the wrong mouse button.
This leads me to wonder, are expandable window borders next on the chopping block?
Double-click the titlebar to toggle between maximize/restore, and click the taskbar button for the active window to minimize or restore it.
I agree that we should have a choice though, maybe a simple option in the "Appearance" settings window that lets you toggle between "Minimalist" and "Standard" settings. The minimalist setting will have the reduced clutter, and the standard setting will retain all of the normal functionality we expect. There could even be more granular settings in an "Advanced" tab.
The more I thought about this change though, I realized I personally never use the minimize/maximize/restore buttons myself, I do tend to just double-click the titlebar, and there is really no reason to minimize a window.
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So what you're saying is that the UK will be that much less capable of adopting software patents. They won't just pass a law that requires them to pay tons of royalties all of a sudden. So good.
If Microsoft isn't Microsoft anymore then we're all winners. I'm glad they're finally getting the idea. Too bad they were forced into this position and they're acting out of desperation. It's a start though, if they see that it's successful maybe they'll start really catching on. Like for reals.
There's less emphasis on giving listeners a full album to experience over and over on different levels, and there's more emphasis on a shallow single that people will get sick of in a week. Nobody wants to pay for an hour of shallow pop. I still buy albums of artists I like, because I appreciate music beyond the new 5 second musical phrase with a hook that sounds good in your ear for a few loops, but that's exactly what "music execs" are trying to push on the consumer (especially through manufactured music). Another win for the indies I guess.
This doesn't sound like a "radical new UI", more like re-thinking widgets, or just simply getting rid of the classic monolithic application and providing the user with a deluge of specific-task-oriented programs. It's just bringing apps that we know from mobile phones (i.e. specific software for specific functions) to the desktop. Which we already have, it's called "widgets," and apart from the weather one, nobody uses them anyway. We also have it on the browser, in the form of iGoogle and Yahoo's main page, and others. Will starting a new activity on your computer require you to sift through a ton of different titles, or to start selecting keywords to narrow down what you want to do? In Windows, you already have a search feature on the Start menu, but do you want to start using that for everything you do? Or will you use voice detection and start shouting out keywords? Good for a kiosk, but kinda lame for the desktop.
In the article, they mention: "Bubbles are auto-generated in various categories (personal, entertainment, gaming, etc.) and can also be created by a user." So that means they provide you with a bunch of default activities, and you can also create your own... but does that mean you have to start choosing what functionality you want and then specify the workflow to tie together that functionality? That sounds like too much work for the average user, and it's getting close to programming.
"Clicking on a bubble brings up a program or interaction item. For example clicking on a bubble for an upcoming flight will display alternate flight times with weather-based probability for delays. Users could use the interface to switch their flight, should the desire."
You could do that pretty easily on a web browser... Same with email, looking up news. Apart from some weird concept art, they're not really showing anything radically new or advantageous.
Yup, I never use the bin, and there's no real reason to delete anything anyway unless it's software that I don't want to use anymore, and that can easily be re-downloaded. I wouldn't really care the bin was just hidden from me until I need it as specified in the summary, but I don't think I'd need it personally.
Versioning on the other hand is much more important, but for that I just save as a new file every time, I don't especially need a file system designed for it, that seems too abstract a concept for me to put faith into. I'll never know when old versions will just disappear, and under what terms they will be kept, it seems harder to keep track of from a user standpoint. Usually just the ~ last changed version is enough for me to recover from a stupid mistake, and that's built-in.
PCGA is among other things working to develop marketing for PC games, combat piracy, developing new business models beyond retail sales, and establishing minimum hardware requirements for PC games, along with guidelines for developers to make games work for those requirements. According to president Randy Stude, the PC Gaming Alliance is to "help make certain that the PC game industry had a public voice and a pulpit for accurately communicating the size, growth and overall popularity of the single largest gaming platform worldwide." They will also perform market research for their members and the public.
From Wikipedia
You're supposed to be working.
Did they block all non-work-related sites, or is this just discrimination?
Send it the magic packet?
It seems from the article that a journalist actually thought that there was a big red button somewhere labeled "INTERNET KILL SWITCH - DO NOT TOUCH"
Yeah? And? Obama seems to think that he actually needs a kill switch to protect his country.
Canada didn't need a kill switch.
Once the attack was detected in early January, Canadian government cybersecurity officials immediately shut down all internet access at the Finance Department and the Treasury Board, in an attempt to stop stolen information from being sent back to the hackers over the net. In an earlier attack, Defence Research and Development had to shutdown access to one of its servers for two months.
Obama looks about as smart as said journalist right now, and he's running the country. And the media are wetting their pants with their new "cyber terrorism" buzzword. This is all evidence that we need some serious education on the subject in this country. At every level. Seriously, wtf?
Silver's battery doesn't die out in 3 years, its warranty doesn't expire, doesn't require repairs, additional software, or upgrades, and doesn't need a complex manufacturing process. What's your point again?
That just complicates web sites, which should be as intuitive as possible. It might be good for some intranet apps, or perhaps for quick login/logout functions, but other than that keep it off the public web.
When it's an unorganized community of innovative and prescient people either compelled by their own ideas or motivated out of necessity from predicament, not some calculated aloof me-toos who are presumptuously deriving contrivances from something they actually recognize (which may be their only truly valuable contribution) as brilliance. Sometimes people who can briefly awe you with hollow hyperbole can actually draw your attention to the truly worthwhile. Don't confuse that with marketing however, which strives to provoke desire combined with (manufactured or otherwise) mania into extreme stupidity.
Q: If they don't want [gadget users] hanging out, why [offer/advertise wireless for] luring them in?
A: Because if they don't offer [wireless], the [gadget users] will go to Starbucks, where the 700% markup on a cup of coffee makes up for the lost business the seatwarmers bring in?
So they want their customers, but they don't want them? Brilliant. It seems like a better solution would be to remove wifi, and lower prices accordingly. Some will want wifi with high prices, others will want no wifi and the 700% lower price.
I didn't know that laws were just for private citizens. What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander I guess. This kinda makes sense though, Bush's warrantless wiretapping was found to be illegal, Obama excused it, and now he's seeking to make what was illegal into something legal. But not for private citizens. Now I get it, "shackles" is merely a metaphor.
Can't anything be done through the legal system anymore? Or is that just for those without money?
Seems like if there's a "Cyber emergency", then they should just disconnect and/or turn off the affected systems. Why do they need to shut down the infrastructure itself, or disconnect everything altogether? Why is it an all-or-nothing situation? Clearly the systems that are most important or most at risk should be isolated and managed separately from non-critical systems. Also, why waste time worrying about the non-critical systems when you could isolate, organize, and manage the critical systems by themselves much more easily?