Perhaps this has escaped your notice, but Google does use graphics and colors... and as such, is immensely more appealing than the Jakob Nielsen site in question.
With the release of Slackware 10, I just switched to Slack for the first time. Prior to this, the most complicated distro I've had success with was Fedora. I did make it through a gentoo install once, but couldn't after waiting the 2 days for a GUI install, something wasn't happy, so I scrapped it. Yeah, it was probably my fault, but whatever.
Anyway, I installed Slackware for the first time, and I'm in love with it. I am NOT the most experienced user... but even I can appreciate now, when people say that Slackware "gets out of your way". Everything is easy, and intuitive. The SysVInit style scripts threw me for a minute, but that was literally the only problem I had (user error).
Everything works, perfectly, out of the box. This is an experience I haven't had from even Suse 9.0 Personal, which I run as my primary workstation. I don't know if it's Slackware in general, the X.org vs XFree86 or KDE 3.2, but it also seems MUCH faster than any other distro I've ever experienced. Previous installs left me with a system in which Gnome or KDE were all but unusable due to slowness. Yeah, that could be my fault... it COULD be a configuration option I don't know about, or some arcane setting somewhere that makes the magic happen... I don't know... but with Slackware, X.org and KDE 3.2, it just works. Even on a Celeron 300 with 128 MB RAM... it works, and it's not horribly unusable.
I figure THAT is the point of Slackware, or the reason behind it. I don't know how many people share your opinion, but I sincerely hope that the people that write/package/create Slackware don't, because I plan on using this for a VERY long time.
I just tried it on 3 machines, and it did. One was XP, 2 were 2000. I have no recollection of what it did on 9x boxes, but I seem to recall it not impacting anything. I could be grossly mistaken.
I didn't suggest it to intentionally mislead, rather, to assist a willing party (or one's self) by allowing them to get hooked despite prior bad habits. Think of it like keeping your cigaretts in the fruit bowl to remind you to eat some fruit instead of smoking.
And the easiest way to try it is to assign mozilla the big blue "E" icon for Internet Explorer.
The hardest part (in my experience) for people to make the switch is that they're so used to loading IE, and don't think to look for the little dragon-head icon. Point the "E" to Mozilla and you'll be up to speed in no time.
That's nothing. A friend of mine (who will go unnamed) is a MUCH more skilled hacker than I am. Last year, before all the patching shut him out of business, he made almost $80k playing Everquest.
The beauty of it is that he wasn't playing 10-17 hours a day (as has been mentioned in this thread), but had a bot running that would literally play his character for him. All kinds of cheats were to be had, from decrypting the EverQuest packets as they came in to determine the location of hidden items and alert his character to their presence, to basically macroing repetetive profitable tasks, like building arrows from available parts, selling them.
Other cheats were written to facilitate the existing cheats, like the one where he could sell to merchant characters without having to actually GO to the merchant, etc.,etc... but the one thing that I learned, is that there are very sad people out there willing to pay for virtual EQ items.
Even better, after EverQuest patched him out of business, was that he still had a working cheat program that, while it wouldn't allow him to actually cheat for any profitable means, still allowed him to do some miraculous things (like transport his character to anywhere on the map instantly). When the virtual money dried up, he made real money selling his cheats to desperate EQers.
Long story short, it doesn't necessarily take being a dork to sell to dorks... you just have to be dork-smart.
I was under the impression (from over a year ago, around one of the FIRST game delays) that there was going to be a PvP arena that would allow characters to challenge each other for fame and popularity and whatnot.
Granted, it's not nearly the same as PvP in normal environment, but at least it was considered.
Has this changed from the up and coming release, or is it still a planned way off?
Agreed. I might not run this on my desktop, but I'll for sure run it on my spare Celeron 333 with 8Mbs of video memory. Fast usability being the name of the game.
I'm running XFCE4 on it now, and coupled with Menu Maker, it's already a DRASTIC improvement over the lack of usability I was getting out of Gnome or KDE on FC1.
It might not fill a LOT of niches, but on that machine, it's perfect. I don't want to have to suffer with a source-based distro like Gentoo when I just really don't need the bloat of your typical modern distro.
First of all, I think it was a dumb, bone-headed, overtly stupid move, and I think he rues the day that it ever got out in public that he was in bed with SCO.
However, as a FORMER long-time customer of EV1 (I moved to serverbeach shortly after the announcement), I believe that "headsurfer" (CEO of ev1) tends to genuinely speak from the heart. He posts on the ev1 messageboard (and the rackshack board before that), and makes obviously unedited statements (replete with grammatical errors and what appear to be heartfelt sentiments).
I don't believe he puts much corporate spin on anything, and really kind of views his business as a mom&pop shop. In a lot of ways, it's really run like that too. It's endearing, and despite my having left ev1, they had never done me wrong as a customer.
It's one of the few companies you don't have to be quite as cynical about. Whether that's for better or worse, I'm not educated enough to say.
While I agree with you, and use Suse & Fedora exclusively, the grandparent has a point, tho I don't think he expressed it that well.
The desktop is usable, but it's not THAT usable. It's not perfect, and it has a lot of... well, just weirdness going on. There aren't enough applications, installation is not always as easy as it should be, despite apt, yum, rpm et al.
What I gleaned from the grandparent post is that although we're getting feedback like he mentioned already, we're not necessarily invested in correcting it. If Joe User says "Hey, why can't I get my remote desktop connection to work," we say "You don't know how to use it."
If somebody has a vested corporate interest, like HP or Novell, and have customers to answer to, they say "Thanks for the input, we'll try and make it easier for you." Then, shortly after, they should begin development efforts to make it easier, which should be changes that are given back to all distros, which make things better for all.
I'm not a Linux expert, tho I can manage my way okay, and there are still things that I don't know how to do or don't understand. Perhaps it's my naivete, but it shouldn't be that hard to learn and use. That my scanner keeps forgetting how to work is insane, when it works fine in Windows. It might be that I'm doing something wrong, but that doesn't matter to my wife (more Jane user than tech), when she has to reboot into Windows to scan in a picture. The impression is that Linux sucks, despite how much she loves a lot of it.
Hopefully he's improved on his big-screen capabilities since the original Buffy and Alien 4. Ick.
Actually tho, seeing how he much time he's taken in perfecting the series runs he's had, I have little doubt that Serenity will be spectacular. I just hope that he's able to work within a 2 hour movie. His best plots have taken seasons to develop, much less a few hours.
I haven't read this, but if it's anything like other "formidable" works, it could be that he's referring to a barrier to entry. For example, in Neil Gaiman's "Sandman", you have to get into a certain frame of mind, which if you're coming off of dissimilar works, or aren't familiar with his style of writing, can be a "formidable" challenge.
The captivation is that once you've entered that realm, and passed that roadblock, you're treated to a wonderfully captivating story that makes you genuinely pissed off when it's over, not because of the ending, just because you want more.
If that works, I owe you dinner, or something. I've been using it for a long time, and that's been one of my major gripes. You might well have made a happier man out of me.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this has escaped your notice, but Google does use graphics and colors... and as such, is immensely more appealing than the Jakob Nielsen site in question.
-9mm-
With the release of Slackware 10, I just switched to Slack for the first time. Prior to this, the most complicated distro I've had success with was Fedora. I did make it through a gentoo install once, but couldn't after waiting the 2 days for a GUI install, something wasn't happy, so I scrapped it. Yeah, it was probably my fault, but whatever.
Anyway, I installed Slackware for the first time, and I'm in love with it. I am NOT the most experienced user... but even I can appreciate now, when people say that Slackware "gets out of your way". Everything is easy, and intuitive. The SysVInit style scripts threw me for a minute, but that was literally the only problem I had (user error).
Everything works, perfectly, out of the box. This is an experience I haven't had from even Suse 9.0 Personal, which I run as my primary workstation. I don't know if it's Slackware in general, the X.org vs XFree86 or KDE 3.2, but it also seems MUCH faster than any other distro I've ever experienced. Previous installs left me with a system in which Gnome or KDE were all but unusable due to slowness. Yeah, that could be my fault... it COULD be a configuration option I don't know about, or some arcane setting somewhere that makes the magic happen... I don't know... but with Slackware, X.org and KDE 3.2, it just works. Even on a Celeron 300 with 128 MB RAM... it works, and it's not horribly unusable.
I figure THAT is the point of Slackware, or the reason behind it. I don't know how many people share your opinion, but I sincerely hope that the people that write/package/create Slackware don't, because I plan on using this for a VERY long time.
-9mm-
Maybe he just wants to keep the private parts of his site private, and allow the rest to be indexed?
It could be that he's got a private web community or message board, and doesn't want random people joining up?
-9mm-
I just tried it on 3 machines, and it did. One was XP, 2 were 2000. I have no recollection of what it did on 9x boxes, but I seem to recall it not impacting anything. I could be grossly mistaken.
-9mm-
Yeah. Wrong.
If you delete the file, it gets recreated instantly.
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That's how the results keep growing!!!
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I don't know if it's his reason, but a really good reason would be because business care who is supporting whatever they just spent their money on.
Big business wants to know that Suse is going to be around in 3 months, and with Novell as backer, they can feel pretty sure that is the case.
-9mm-
I didn't suggest it to intentionally mislead, rather, to assist a willing party (or one's self) by allowing them to get hooked despite prior bad habits. Think of it like keeping your cigaretts in the fruit bowl to remind you to eat some fruit instead of smoking.
-9mm-
And the easiest way to try it is to assign mozilla the big blue "E" icon for Internet Explorer.
The hardest part (in my experience) for people to make the switch is that they're so used to loading IE, and don't think to look for the little dragon-head icon. Point the "E" to Mozilla and you'll be up to speed in no time.
-9mm-
Well, according to Matt Groening it kind of does.
link
Oh, and yes, we're talking about Portland, Oregon.
-9mm-
Depends on how you interpret the law I suppose, but you're mostly correct, I'll agree, and which is why I left my friend unnamed.
-9mm-
That's nothing. A friend of mine (who will go unnamed) is a MUCH more skilled hacker than I am. Last year, before all the patching shut him out of business, he made almost $80k playing Everquest.
The beauty of it is that he wasn't playing 10-17 hours a day (as has been mentioned in this thread), but had a bot running that would literally play his character for him. All kinds of cheats were to be had, from decrypting the EverQuest packets as they came in to determine the location of hidden items and alert his character to their presence, to basically macroing repetetive profitable tasks, like building arrows from available parts, selling them.
Other cheats were written to facilitate the existing cheats, like the one where he could sell to merchant characters without having to actually GO to the merchant, etc.,etc... but the one thing that I learned, is that there are very sad people out there willing to pay for virtual EQ items.
Even better, after EverQuest patched him out of business, was that he still had a working cheat program that, while it wouldn't allow him to actually cheat for any profitable means, still allowed him to do some miraculous things (like transport his character to anywhere on the map instantly). When the virtual money dried up, he made real money selling his cheats to desperate EQers.
Long story short, it doesn't necessarily take being a dork to sell to dorks... you just have to be dork-smart.
-9mm-
Synaptic is a fine GUI. You should try it.
-9mm-
I was under the impression (from over a year ago, around one of the FIRST game delays) that there was going to be a PvP arena that would allow characters to challenge each other for fame and popularity and whatnot.
Granted, it's not nearly the same as PvP in normal environment, but at least it was considered.
Has this changed from the up and coming release, or is it still a planned way off?
Happy birthday.
-9mm-
Agreed. I might not run this on my desktop, but I'll for sure run it on my spare Celeron 333 with 8Mbs of video memory. Fast usability being the name of the game.
I'm running XFCE4 on it now, and coupled with Menu Maker, it's already a DRASTIC improvement over the lack of usability I was getting out of Gnome or KDE on FC1.
It might not fill a LOT of niches, but on that machine, it's perfect. I don't want to have to suffer with a source-based distro like Gentoo when I just really don't need the bloat of your typical modern distro.
-9mm-
I did you one better, and put "Do not want to do business with SCO" in the reason field of my account cancellation.
-9mm-
First of all, I think it was a dumb, bone-headed, overtly stupid move, and I think he rues the day that it ever got out in public that he was in bed with SCO.
However, as a FORMER long-time customer of EV1 (I moved to serverbeach shortly after the announcement), I believe that "headsurfer" (CEO of ev1) tends to genuinely speak from the heart. He posts on the ev1 messageboard (and the rackshack board before that), and makes obviously unedited statements (replete with grammatical errors and what appear to be heartfelt sentiments).
I don't believe he puts much corporate spin on anything, and really kind of views his business as a mom&pop shop. In a lot of ways, it's really run like that too. It's endearing, and despite my having left ev1, they had never done me wrong as a customer.
It's one of the few companies you don't have to be quite as cynical about. Whether that's for better or worse, I'm not educated enough to say.
-9mm-
While I agree with you, and use Suse & Fedora exclusively, the grandparent has a point, tho I don't think he expressed it that well.
The desktop is usable, but it's not THAT usable. It's not perfect, and it has a lot of... well, just weirdness going on. There aren't enough applications, installation is not always as easy as it should be, despite apt, yum, rpm et al.
What I gleaned from the grandparent post is that although we're getting feedback like he mentioned already, we're not necessarily invested in correcting it. If Joe User says "Hey, why can't I get my remote desktop connection to work," we say "You don't know how to use it."
If somebody has a vested corporate interest, like HP or Novell, and have customers to answer to, they say "Thanks for the input, we'll try and make it easier for you." Then, shortly after, they should begin development efforts to make it easier, which should be changes that are given back to all distros, which make things better for all.
I'm not a Linux expert, tho I can manage my way okay, and there are still things that I don't know how to do or don't understand. Perhaps it's my naivete, but it shouldn't be that hard to learn and use. That my scanner keeps forgetting how to work is insane, when it works fine in Windows. It might be that I'm doing something wrong, but that doesn't matter to my wife (more Jane user than tech), when she has to reboot into Windows to scan in a picture. The impression is that Linux sucks, despite how much she loves a lot of it.
-9mm-
Hopefully he's improved on his big-screen capabilities since the original Buffy and Alien 4. Ick.
Actually tho, seeing how he much time he's taken in perfecting the series runs he's had, I have little doubt that Serenity will be spectacular. I just hope that he's able to work within a 2 hour movie. His best plots have taken seasons to develop, much less a few hours.
-9mm-
I haven't read this, but if it's anything like other "formidable" works, it could be that he's referring to a barrier to entry. For example, in Neil Gaiman's "Sandman", you have to get into a certain frame of mind, which if you're coming off of dissimilar works, or aren't familiar with his style of writing, can be a "formidable" challenge.
The captivation is that once you've entered that realm, and passed that roadblock, you're treated to a wonderfully captivating story that makes you genuinely pissed off when it's over, not because of the ending, just because you want more.
-9mm-
Wouldn't they FBI have just confiscated the redundant systems too?
-9mm-
Didn't work. I don't know if you've got a different software or hardware version than I, but plain and simply, I don't have those options at all.
;)
Sorry. You'll have to buy your own dinner!
-9mm-
If that works, I owe you dinner, or something. I've been using it for a long time, and that's been one of my major gripes. You might well have made a happier man out of me.
-9mm-