I agree with half of that statement: it's new. Better is subjective... but it's basically just tries to get you to use the search field instead of the traditional "Programs" hierarchy. I guess that's easier, but I honestly don't like the OS guessing what I want to run. So yes, it's new... but from me it gets a solid "meh... so what?"
I like having the OS (shell) guess at what I want to run...
bash$ ck[tab]<s>[tab] cksfv cksum bash$ cksfv [tab] Display all 101 possibilities? (y or n) ...
I agree and I think they're going in the wrong direction, even Apple with their multiple desktop implementation.
One thing that really bugs me today about applications is how I have to spend most of my time organizing windows. Multiple desktops helps, but I still find that I still spend a lot of my time garbage collecting windows I haven't used in a while myself. One of the funniest things I saw was in my HCI class where we had to observe users as they used a computer system. We were observing someone and she was a Mac user. What I found funny was how she spents a good 5 to 10 seconds clicking on the window, moving it around and draging the edges so that the window filled up most of the screen. Most windows users would just hit the maximize button and be done with it (and if you've really been using windows a lot you double click the window title bar), but for every window she had open, she repeated this process.
Anyway, what windowing systems need to do is provide a priority value to each window and when you hit your alt+tab, expose, or whatever other application switcher thingy you have, the top choices that come up are the windows you use the most. I should also be given an option to close out windows that are rarely used right then and there and not have to bring up the app and hit the close button. It would be equivalent of applying something like an LRU memory paging algorithm to windows the user uses.
The windows taskbar and similar can also be greatly improved by placing applications in a better order than simply the way they were started which is pretty much close to random if you're like me and end up with 10+ windows open at the middle of the day. For example, in most offices you use some email client/organizer software quite often and at my office it happens to be Outlook. Well the stupid program is pretty much open all the time, why can't they just stick it in the first slot all the time rather than me having to search my taskbar of flip through alt+tab 10 times before I find it? It's like somehow people thought if they applied sequential search it would work when clearly if something was sorted, searching it is much faster, even for humans.
Finally, how about if the interface gives me instant access to a program or a type of program. For example, if I have Outlook open, why can't I bind a keyboard shortcut to focus on that window rather than simply opening a new instance? So say I hit ctrl+alt+O and up comes Outlook if it's already open. If there were multiple instances of that process, then hitting the combination again would simply rotate through each instance like alt+tab and if one instance wasn't open then the program would be started. Now I don't care how many windows are open, but I know that ctrl+alt+O will always take me to Outlook.
I tried the MiniITX thing with a Via board and Via cpu. Worked, except it was annoyingly hard to upgrade past it's limits. The CPU was fanless and it only had a 120gb hard disk to start with. I gave up on the thing trying to be small, though it had its benefits if all you wanted it to do was one task and only one task. The efficiency marketing isn't that great, you can easily get a laptop that will compete with MiniITX boards or perform even better in terms of fewer watts because most laptops are filled with low power solutions from the cpu to each component.
What I have now is a AMD athlon64 system that's more than a year old now. It was the best price I thought at the time for what I was getting and it had cpu throttling. In the best condition it consumes under 50watts. When the hard disks spin up and the cpu clock goes up the power can go up to 60 to 80watts depending on the load, but most of the time you're idle. I used a regular atx board with a fiarly stripped down via chipset (no fancy pci-e, sound, and other stuff) since it was the least power consuming board I could find. The benefit is, it's fast, and because it is a regular computer it is much easier to upgrade. For example when I first made the box it only had one ethernet connection (1gigabit capable) being used for the dsl connection and a 802.11g Atheros card for wireless access. That worked ok except when you wanted to transfer large amounts of data between computers. So later on I added a gigabit card and now I could connect to it from a wire or from wireless. I would have never been able to do that with the MiniITX since I was limited to 1 pci slot.
Right now I have two hard disks in it: 1 laptop hard disk for the OS/program data that runs the system (laptop hard drives consume much less power compared to regular 3.5" hard disks) and a 250gb disk for storage. Another 250gb will be added whenever I find the time and will mirror the current 250gb. The 250gb disk is almost always shutdown unless I'm accessing something which is only a couple hours per a day. It takes 3seconds or so for the drive to spin up but that's ok since I know waiting those 3 seconds was worth how much power I would save if I had the disk on all the time.
However, I'm not just using the box as a file server, it has many other purposes like being used as a router and an access point. I can also ssh to it from the internet and I have installed some software to test some things at home. I chose the athlon64 because at some point I wanted to have the cpu capability to run encoding jobs that take forever with new things like x264. Sometimes I even use it as a regular computer to do simple things like browse the internet; but since it's linux based there's some software that doesn't run too well without a lot of headache. Likewise, it sometimes sucks working in windows when you can have a command line *nix utility do exactly what you want. So I frequently find myself using both computers to get work done. GNU screen allows me to save the terminal session between computers so I can leave something running in a terminal and access it from pretty much any computer on the internet.
So if you're looking to build one of these with the intention of doing more with it later, I don't recommend ITX.
I disagree with the mnemonics part, even though in my HCI class it was recommended to use mnemonics for things like menu options. The problem is mnemonics map through the composition of letters that comprise the beginning of a word. Well, I think there are better ways to map things. For example, I think it is much better to map things based on their visual positions. The classic example is you have a stove with four burners and four knobs to control each burner. If you arrange the knobs in a straight line, it becomes confusing which knob maps to which burner. However, if you map the knobs in the same fasion as the burners (a square), then it becomes easier to see visually how the knobs map to each burner. In the ideal case you would have the knobs right next to the burner, but then you risk the user getting burned by trying to reach for knobs that aren't positioned in good places away from the burners.
The same applies to graphical user interfaces. The interface is graphical, why doesn't it map graphically? Why do I have to think about what letter to use when I want to open something? What if there are two words that have the same first letter?
Mnemonics for shortcut keys can still be used but their current implementations in current interfaces is broken. Take the example "save" and "save as". "Save as" always gets mapped to some awkward key combination if it even does get mapped. But they both start with "S". Shouldn't I be able to do ctrl+s and then be asked again which option I want out of all commands that start with "s"? The problem with that approach is now you've introduced another step for something that's supposed to be fast. But again, you can fix that by saying ctrl+s twice or some other combination say alt+s will automatically choose the most common option. Not intuitive, but then again if you're at that level you're probably now a power-user and will accept some non-intuitiveness to get work done.
Everytime I'm presenting some sort of list of items, they should be numbered, and the numbers themselves should be hotkeys as well. For example, I open the 'file' menu and see 'new', 'open', 'save', etc. They're never numbered which is fine I guess, but if they were, then it would look like: "1. new 2. open 3. save" and when I hit '2' on the keyboard, it had better choose the second option. Of course, this breaks when the list gets too large.
Another thing I have always been annoyed with is various implementations of "alt+tab". Some "alt+tab" programs even show a preview of the window, but I still have to flip through each one. Well guess what, hitting the 'tab' button 3 times sucks. Why can't the software label each window with a symbol (again that maps visually to the layout of the keys on the keyboard just as they appear on the screen) and I instantly hit the button it corresponds to? My left hand is nearly always on the left hand side of the keyboard while most of the time my other hand is on the mouse and overloaded with functions it must do or vice-versa. People haven't correctly considered that if you could balance the work distributed to both hands you might get faster. So hit the corner of the screen with the mouse in the right hand to trigger the 'alt+tab' or other window selection tool while the left hand picks the window while the right hand has time to reposition the mouse away from the corner. I think some programs like expose might do this, maybe I just haven't run into an implementation on a system I use that I could agree with.
There are many other things that I think can be improved but I think that's enough for now.
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
I don't think it's a skill. I think it's tedious and time consuming work that a computer is perfectly capable of doing for you. I'd rather do something like grep "something really old" * than to tediously organize every piece of information that comes to me.
I'll be honest. The files on my computer are a mess. My inbox is a mess. I rarely delete files if ever. I loath anything that comes to me in paper. I use minimal organization to keep stuff around, for example, all music files shall go into a folder called music. But beyond that I don't care if the file is named "08 evening star" or "Dragonforce - 08 - Evening Star". The ID3 tag and other meta data storage techniques were invented for a reason.
Why should I keep my electronic information organized when the computer can do it for me? If I really need to find something, chances are I probably remember something about that item. Therefore, I should be able to search for it with a computer rather than search for it myself. The inbox idea is stupid. It should be something like 'your email'. Then you should be able to select a view of 'unread messages'. I shouldn't ever need to delete something with consumer level storage mediums like DVDs for less that a dollar. If something is important, I should be able to add meta data to it, not organize it. That's the job of the computer and software, I'm just giving it the data it needs to keep things indexed.
You're right except the part about the "hole in his bank account" if you are suggesting that WoW is expensive. MMOs are successful because they're actually very cheap for the customer. You can easily waste more than $15 at a club, restuarant, and even a movie. Compare that to WoW and other MMOs where you pay $15 and play as much as you want for a month. Even compared to some consoles titles, MMOs are cheap over time. If you gather say 12 console games a year at the cost of $40 a game, vs the cost of WoW for a year it's easily $40 * 12 vs ($15 * 12) + $40 (we'll ignore the cost of the console/computer).
I actually did this with my linux box. I'm currently only storing the log files on the flash drive. I bought a few CF to IDE converters that make the compact flash card look like a regular disk to the computer, rather than a usb device which is actually pretty nice. (In another experiment I was able to get DSL to boot off of a CF card with a DSL hard drive installation to the flash disk and bam, I had a computer without a real hard drive.) I did this in order to reduce the amount of access to the hard disk so the hard disk could remain off more often with a little bit of power savings and hopefully a little less wear on the disk itself. The raw throughput of my CF card is a little slow because it was a cheaper 1gb card.
Ideally I'd like to get a CF card to have enough capacity to run all of the software and OS specific files while the hard disk just acts as a backup and file storage device. It's quite nice not having to listen to the hard drive hums and clicks while reading data and makes a silent computer possible.
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I like having the OS (shell) guess at what I want to run...
I agree and I think they're going in the wrong direction, even Apple with their multiple desktop implementation.
One thing that really bugs me today about applications is how I have to spend most of my time organizing windows. Multiple desktops helps, but I still find that I still spend a lot of my time garbage collecting windows I haven't used in a while myself. One of the funniest things I saw was in my HCI class where we had to observe users as they used a computer system. We were observing someone and she was a Mac user. What I found funny was how she spents a good 5 to 10 seconds clicking on the window, moving it around and draging the edges so that the window filled up most of the screen. Most windows users would just hit the maximize button and be done with it (and if you've really been using windows a lot you double click the window title bar), but for every window she had open, she repeated this process.
Anyway, what windowing systems need to do is provide a priority value to each window and when you hit your alt+tab, expose, or whatever other application switcher thingy you have, the top choices that come up are the windows you use the most. I should also be given an option to close out windows that are rarely used right then and there and not have to bring up the app and hit the close button. It would be equivalent of applying something like an LRU memory paging algorithm to windows the user uses.
The windows taskbar and similar can also be greatly improved by placing applications in a better order than simply the way they were started which is pretty much close to random if you're like me and end up with 10+ windows open at the middle of the day. For example, in most offices you use some email client/organizer software quite often and at my office it happens to be Outlook. Well the stupid program is pretty much open all the time, why can't they just stick it in the first slot all the time rather than me having to search my taskbar of flip through alt+tab 10 times before I find it? It's like somehow people thought if they applied sequential search it would work when clearly if something was sorted, searching it is much faster, even for humans.
Finally, how about if the interface gives me instant access to a program or a type of program. For example, if I have Outlook open, why can't I bind a keyboard shortcut to focus on that window rather than simply opening a new instance? So say I hit ctrl+alt+O and up comes Outlook if it's already open. If there were multiple instances of that process, then hitting the combination again would simply rotate through each instance like alt+tab and if one instance wasn't open then the program would be started. Now I don't care how many windows are open, but I know that ctrl+alt+O will always take me to Outlook.
I tried the MiniITX thing with a Via board and Via cpu. Worked, except it was annoyingly hard to upgrade past it's limits. The CPU was fanless and it only had a 120gb hard disk to start with. I gave up on the thing trying to be small, though it had its benefits if all you wanted it to do was one task and only one task. The efficiency marketing isn't that great, you can easily get a laptop that will compete with MiniITX boards or perform even better in terms of fewer watts because most laptops are filled with low power solutions from the cpu to each component.
What I have now is a AMD athlon64 system that's more than a year old now. It was the best price I thought at the time for what I was getting and it had cpu throttling. In the best condition it consumes under 50watts. When the hard disks spin up and the cpu clock goes up the power can go up to 60 to 80watts depending on the load, but most of the time you're idle. I used a regular atx board with a fiarly stripped down via chipset (no fancy pci-e, sound, and other stuff) since it was the least power consuming board I could find. The benefit is, it's fast, and because it is a regular computer it is much easier to upgrade. For example when I first made the box it only had one ethernet connection (1gigabit capable) being used for the dsl connection and a 802.11g Atheros card for wireless access. That worked ok except when you wanted to transfer large amounts of data between computers. So later on I added a gigabit card and now I could connect to it from a wire or from wireless. I would have never been able to do that with the MiniITX since I was limited to 1 pci slot.
Right now I have two hard disks in it: 1 laptop hard disk for the OS/program data that runs the system (laptop hard drives consume much less power compared to regular 3.5" hard disks) and a 250gb disk for storage. Another 250gb will be added whenever I find the time and will mirror the current 250gb. The 250gb disk is almost always shutdown unless I'm accessing something which is only a couple hours per a day. It takes 3seconds or so for the drive to spin up but that's ok since I know waiting those 3 seconds was worth how much power I would save if I had the disk on all the time.
However, I'm not just using the box as a file server, it has many other purposes like being used as a router and an access point. I can also ssh to it from the internet and I have installed some software to test some things at home. I chose the athlon64 because at some point I wanted to have the cpu capability to run encoding jobs that take forever with new things like x264. Sometimes I even use it as a regular computer to do simple things like browse the internet; but since it's linux based there's some software that doesn't run too well without a lot of headache. Likewise, it sometimes sucks working in windows when you can have a command line *nix utility do exactly what you want. So I frequently find myself using both computers to get work done. GNU screen allows me to save the terminal session between computers so I can leave something running in a terminal and access it from pretty much any computer on the internet.
So if you're looking to build one of these with the intention of doing more with it later, I don't recommend ITX.
I disagree with the mnemonics part, even though in my HCI class it was recommended to use mnemonics for things like menu options. The problem is mnemonics map through the composition of letters that comprise the beginning of a word. Well, I think there are better ways to map things. For example, I think it is much better to map things based on their visual positions. The classic example is you have a stove with four burners and four knobs to control each burner. If you arrange the knobs in a straight line, it becomes confusing which knob maps to which burner. However, if you map the knobs in the same fasion as the burners (a square), then it becomes easier to see visually how the knobs map to each burner. In the ideal case you would have the knobs right next to the burner, but then you risk the user getting burned by trying to reach for knobs that aren't positioned in good places away from the burners.
The same applies to graphical user interfaces. The interface is graphical, why doesn't it map graphically? Why do I have to think about what letter to use when I want to open something? What if there are two words that have the same first letter?
Mnemonics for shortcut keys can still be used but their current implementations in current interfaces is broken. Take the example "save" and "save as". "Save as" always gets mapped to some awkward key combination if it even does get mapped. But they both start with "S". Shouldn't I be able to do ctrl+s and then be asked again which option I want out of all commands that start with "s"? The problem with that approach is now you've introduced another step for something that's supposed to be fast. But again, you can fix that by saying ctrl+s twice or some other combination say alt+s will automatically choose the most common option. Not intuitive, but then again if you're at that level you're probably now a power-user and will accept some non-intuitiveness to get work done.
Everytime I'm presenting some sort of list of items, they should be numbered, and the numbers themselves should be hotkeys as well. For example, I open the 'file' menu and see 'new', 'open', 'save', etc. They're never numbered which is fine I guess, but if they were, then it would look like: "1. new 2. open 3. save" and when I hit '2' on the keyboard, it had better choose the second option. Of course, this breaks when the list gets too large.
Another thing I have always been annoyed with is various implementations of "alt+tab". Some "alt+tab" programs even show a preview of the window, but I still have to flip through each one. Well guess what, hitting the 'tab' button 3 times sucks. Why can't the software label each window with a symbol (again that maps visually to the layout of the keys on the keyboard just as they appear on the screen) and I instantly hit the button it corresponds to? My left hand is nearly always on the left hand side of the keyboard while most of the time my other hand is on the mouse and overloaded with functions it must do or vice-versa. People haven't correctly considered that if you could balance the work distributed to both hands you might get faster. So hit the corner of the screen with the mouse in the right hand to trigger the 'alt+tab' or other window selection tool while the left hand picks the window while the right hand has time to reposition the mouse away from the corner. I think some programs like expose might do this, maybe I just haven't run into an implementation on a system I use that I could agree with.
There are many other things that I think can be improved but I think that's enough for now.
I don't think it's a skill. I think it's tedious and time consuming work that a computer is perfectly capable of doing for you. I'd rather do something like grep "something really old" * than to tediously organize every piece of information that comes to me.
I'll be honest. The files on my computer are a mess. My inbox is a mess. I rarely delete files if ever. I loath anything that comes to me in paper. I use minimal organization to keep stuff around, for example, all music files shall go into a folder called music. But beyond that I don't care if the file is named "08 evening star" or "Dragonforce - 08 - Evening Star". The ID3 tag and other meta data storage techniques were invented for a reason.
Why should I keep my electronic information organized when the computer can do it for me? If I really need to find something, chances are I probably remember something about that item. Therefore, I should be able to search for it with a computer rather than search for it myself. The inbox idea is stupid. It should be something like 'your email'. Then you should be able to select a view of 'unread messages'. I shouldn't ever need to delete something with consumer level storage mediums like DVDs for less that a dollar. If something is important, I should be able to add meta data to it, not organize it. That's the job of the computer and software, I'm just giving it the data it needs to keep things indexed.
SlashBack is Slashdot's way of communicating: /^H
You're right except the part about the "hole in his bank account" if you are suggesting that WoW is expensive. MMOs are successful because they're actually very cheap for the customer. You can easily waste more than $15 at a club, restuarant, and even a movie. Compare that to WoW and other MMOs where you pay $15 and play as much as you want for a month. Even compared to some consoles titles, MMOs are cheap over time. If you gather say 12 console games a year at the cost of $40 a game, vs the cost of WoW for a year it's easily $40 * 12 vs ($15 * 12) + $40 (we'll ignore the cost of the console/computer).
I actually did this with my linux box. I'm currently only storing the log files on the flash drive. I bought a few CF to IDE converters that make the compact flash card look like a regular disk to the computer, rather than a usb device which is actually pretty nice. (In another experiment I was able to get DSL to boot off of a CF card with a DSL hard drive installation to the flash disk and bam, I had a computer without a real hard drive.) I did this in order to reduce the amount of access to the hard disk so the hard disk could remain off more often with a little bit of power savings and hopefully a little less wear on the disk itself. The raw throughput of my CF card is a little slow because it was a cheaper 1gb card.
Ideally I'd like to get a CF card to have enough capacity to run all of the software and OS specific files while the hard disk just acts as a backup and file storage device. It's quite nice not having to listen to the hard drive hums and clicks while reading data and makes a silent computer possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Pixmap_file_ format
Unfortunately I don't think the group 415 or whatever header matches up to the dimensions of an image.