As for dragging taskbar buttons around, have you tried Taskbar Shuffle: http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm ? It might work better, although I admit I haven't tried it myself in Windows 7.
No it wasn't. It ran like crap, didn't work for a large percentage of applications, and completely drained your laptop battery (even with no OS 9 apps running.)
If Microsoft released something of that quality, they'd be (rightly) laughed at. Apple only got away with it because of the reality distortion field.
Re:CLI is intrinsically more powerful than GUI
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Ubuntu 9.04 Released
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Yes there is. Our brains are wired to remember words (dozens of thousands of them), and not to run up and down menus looking for options.
Your brain, perhaps. The vast majority of people have brains which are much better at spatial memory (i.e. not having to "run up and down menus" because they remember where the option is) than rote memorization.
The problem is that geeks, generally, are the kind who prefer the memorization. They're the ones in control of Linux, and therefore they see little value to the GUI. They're the ones who removed spatial features from Mac when OS X came out. But they're also a tiny minority of the general population, and that's one of the reasons that Linux alienates so many potential users.
Humans are "wired" for remembering where things are, not for memorizing lists. In the wild, we frequently had to find caches of items previously hidden, remember where predators were, etc. You're going against 2 million years of evolution. If it works for you, fine-- but don't claim it works for everybody, because it doesn't.
Your priority is ease of use. My priority is flexibility, automation and ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed.
The problem is that you don't know jack shit about GUIs, at least not about decent ones. I don't even know why you're still bothering with this thread.
Why do you think those two things are mutually-exclusive? They aren't!
The belief that flexibility, automation, and "ease of understanding" (BS argument for CLI, but I'll let it drop for now) are mutually-exclusive with ease-of-use is plain wrong. How many hundreds of extremely advanced, easy-to-use, software products have to come out before you'll cram that into your skull?
Not at all. They're not simple options either. Italic or not italic is easy to understand. And most options are irrelevant in most of the cases.
The options you can't use (either because you have the wrong object selected, or because they are mutually-exclusive with other options) are conveniently greyed-out and inaccessible-- a feature you won't get in a CLI app.
But my point still applies: there are tons and tons of GUI apps with more than 375 (or whatever it was) options. You saying that this is some extraordinarily rare occurrence, or implying that all of those applications suck, is plain ignorance.
I have only a vague understanding of what this does, and absolutely no clue what the result will look like without trying it.
I have only a vague understanding of what this does, and absolutely no clue what the result will look like without trying it. This option alone will need a few minutes of research or testing to understand it, and there are a couple hundred of that kind after you're done with it.
Wow, if only there was some kind of GUI to give you a graphical preview of the option without having to process your entire movie first...
I will repeat my main point since you can't bother with the rest of the post: The problem with mencoder isn't the interface, it's to understand what the hell it does. If you understand what is chroma and luma, and what is a deblocking filter and why would you want one, then you shouldn't have a lot of problems coming up with the right set of arguments to mencoder. If you don't know, then having those options presented through a GUI isn't going to help you much.
Yeah, but a GUI can help you understand the options. You're seriously arguing that it's easier/quicker to learn all those options by reading them off a manpage, memorizing them by rote, instead of having a GUI environment where you can learn them all by playing with them and getting near-instant feedback on what they all do?
Like I said above, either you've never actually used a GUI, or you're simply not interested in having a honest discussion on the matter. Because you're bringing up extremely easily-refuted-- and frankly kind of stupid-- points to support your position.
It doesn't matter how you cut it, 385 options is a lot of stuff to represent in a GUI. If you know of a program that does something of comparable complexity in an intuitive manner, I'd love to see it.
Are you joking?
Even moderately-complex software has that many options. Basic office applications like Word, Excel, even Powerpoint probably have several times that. Hell, I bet Word has 385 options you can perform on a *single character*.
I did my *income taxes* on a *web app*, and that's got to have tens of thousands of options, at least.
I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of your post, it's obvious you've either never used a GUI app, or you're completely disinterested in an intellectually-honest discussion.
Either you spend the time to cite it properly, or delete it because if you don't find a citation, it's (Wikipedia's equivalent to) untrue.
It's an encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit. You're acting as if the original writer "owns" the article and you can't touch it, except to shit little tags all over every single sentence. [citation needed] is a joke, as are most of those tags.
Putting a "this article needs to be revised" tag on a page without revising it your damn self communicates either: "my shit don't stink" or, "I'm far too important to be bothered with this encyclopedia". It's not a good message.
(The other reply to your post saying that adding "citation needed" tags is just a way to bring your edit count up, that makes sense from a human nature standpoint. It's still fucking annoying, but at least I could understand that behavior.)
1. In a GUI with 20 pages of configuration with 20 options on each it's very difficult to find the current configuration state. Meanwhile on the commandline it's obvious which of the 400 options are being used.
Well, if your GUI has 20 pages with 20 options on each page, then it was designed by a complete retard. The debate is whether a *good* GUI program is better than a CLI program. Obviously, a shitty GUI program will be worse, that's pretty much the definition of "shitty GUI program."
2. Regardless of how pretty you make it, the fact is that mencoder is a low level tool, which requires understanding video concepts to use effectively. A GUI for all its features isn't going to clarify things by much.
Why not? You can have rational presets. You can know which options are mutually-exclusive with other options (something you don't know with a CLI interface.) You can have an integrated real-time help system that would beat the pants off the CLI help system. (A CLI help system can exist, of course, but it can't be real-time and it can't be integrated with the normal usage of the app.)
There's tons of potential for clarification in a GUI that doesn't exist in a CLI.
3. Scripts are easier in a CLI environment. Telling people to check this and that option is very tedious for something with such an amount of options, and following the instructions is equally bothersome. Plain text that can be copy/pasted is a lot more convenient.
Two arguments: 1) AppleScript rocked-ass in MacOS Classic. There's no reason CLI scripting *has* to be better than GUI scripting, you're just dealing with (repeat it with me:) a shitty GUI!
2) The GUI could be used to make presets (saved in files), then the presets could be run either in a GUI or CLI. That would be a definite usability improvement over having to type-in the same parameter string each time you want to use the tool, or having to write your own script to do it.
4. Why put a GUI on a tool that can be used for batch processing work? What if somebody wants to encode videos on a server, with no GUI installed?
1) There are GUIs that are used for batch processing work that are really, really, good. For example, Photoshop's batch processing options. Again, if you're used to shitty GUIs, you don't know these exist.
2) You're also acting as if a GUI and CLI are mutually-exclusive. Stop doing that.
5. Who would use a full GUI adaption of mencoder anyway? It wouldn't make it much easier for normal people. Now a GUI with a more limited purpose, such as a GUI to transcode video to the format portable players want is a lot more limited in scope, needs much fewer options, and in fact has been done already.
Possibly it wouldn't make it easier for "normal people." But I doubt that. If the GUI was done well, it would make it easier for *everybody*, "normal" or not. Now you've gone into pretty much full condescension "everybody who prefers a GUI is a retard" mode. Stop doing that.
6. This seems like a pointless discussion anyway, since we have the best of both worlds already. For those who want scriptability, there's mencoder. For those who want a GUI there are multiple frontends for it. It's the same as burning CDs, K3B is a frontent for cdrecord, and that seems to work just fine.
The point is that there shouldn't have to be two worlds in the first place. If mencoder had a decent GUI, programs like those front-ends wouldn't have to exist. Maintenance would be easier. Programmers can either spend more time adding features/fixing bugs, or move on to other projects that need the manpower.
Basically, all your arguments boil down to either: "I'm so used to shitty GUIs I can't even imagine what good ones look like", or "change is bad! stagnation is good!"
And it's impossible that *you've* changed, the only possible explanation is that games aren't as good as they used to be! Congratulations, you've just discovered the mind-rotting mental phenomena known as "nostalgia."
World of Warcraft isn't in the normal gaming ecosystem to which terms like "Casual" or "Hardcore" apply. It's more like a poker website, without (as much) potential to lose money.
Log on to WOW, and ask some people on the game what other games they play. The vast majority of WOW players *only* play WOW-- they have no interest in casual games, hardcore games, or even other MMOs. They just play WOW. It's in a genre/market all by itself. Except for small minorities, WOW players don't interact with the rest of the gaming world, and the rest of the gaming world doesn't interact with WOW.
Stupid question received stupid answer: Windows is the benchmark, and the OS which the users probably have now.
Possibly. But I'd much rather have a Linux community that's more interested in fixing its own problems than constant penis-measuring against their competitors.
The problem is with Ubuntu, and preventing Ubuntu from being suitable to that particular poster's needs. The problem has *nothing* to do with Windows. In fact, if you fix the problem and Microsoft doesn't, you've just gained a *competitive advantage* over Windows, becoming a better OS instead of simply giving-up when you became "as good as" the other guy.
The problems are of course exacerbated by Vista.
Vista has a ton more drivers than XP. It's far more likely to install on a random piece of off-the-shelf hardware and support all the features... so I don't see how that follows.
That annoys me too, the legion of people willing to slam "citation needed" flags all over an article, so many that it looks like they've been infected with some chicken-pox-like computer virus, but too fucking lazy to look up the citations their damned selves and fix the article.
It seems a bit biased to ignore the Vista debacle,
The "Vista debacle" is only a "debacle" on Slashdot. Everywhere else, it's at best a "minor inconvenience." Please don't fall into the trap of believing that Slashdot represents reality in any way.
The UI elements still look ratty, old-fashioned, and ugly - Apples
that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface - Oranges
Stop comparing the two. The performance of the GUI (what the second reviewer is talking about) has absolutely *nothing* to do with the appearance of the GUI (what the first reviewer is talking about.) Nothing. At all.
How is "XP not working" relevant to "Ubuntu not working?"
The grandparent was talking about a problem in *Ubuntu* preventing *Ubuntu* from being a solution to his problem. He didn't mention Windows. At all. You brought it up.
Moderators: How is this "Insightful" and not, for example, "Off-topic?"
Speaking of Macs, the Gnome widgets have always reminded me strongly of Mac OS 9. In fact, remind might be too weak a word- they look outright copied. That is probably why many commenters here think they look dated.
Fortunately, for desktop applications, there's gtk+, qt, wxwidgets, tk, even swing and such.
And none of those get you as far as (your example) jQuery does on the web. As a ex-Mac user, I can assure that every one of those toolkits is fundamentally flawed on at *least* OS X, and most are flawed on Windows as well. For example, GTK+ can't even use the OS-standard Open/Save dialogs.
Debugging is part of what Firebug does. The DOM inspector and the live CSS tweaking is equally useful.
And IE's DOM Toolbar has all of those features. It even has an integrated JS debugger in IE 8.
Possibly. However, the size absolutely is configurable, and I wouldn't be surprised about the text labels.
I would, it's entirely counter to the direction Apple's been going in the last decade. In any case, pointless to talk about this since I haven't used 10.5, and you aren't sure about Dock options in 10.5 either.
Now, if only more of the system was exposed via the commandline, that would matter a lot more...
What parts of the system aren't?
Server 2003, Vista, and Server 2008 are supposed to have 100% CLI coverage. Now I don't know for certain that they *do* have, but I'm also not going to let you say they *don't* without providing a single example.
Eh, as an old-school Mac user, I don't buy any of that.
Whether you use a CLI or a GUI program has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are a power user or not.
Our database expert here at work is definitely a power user, and she uses a GUI program to manage databases-- gasp! Horror! The digital film editor mentioned originally is more likely than not pushing his hardware to the absolute limit-- he's a power user, doing a job that can't be done on the CLI. Or consider a 3D modeler for a video game, or movie studio-- same deal.
I think the reason Linux users think you "need" the CLI to be a power user is that most Linux GUIs kind of suck. Mencoder, though a GUI, would probably be just as powerful as the CLI version, if the GUI was good. Hell, at the bare minimum it could have help text to remind you what the hundreds of options are all for. Apple had GUI script-ability mastered back in System 7. (Although like a lot of good things Apple came up with in the last, they've flushed it down the shitter to be more compatible with other systems.)
There's nothing inherent in the CLI that makes it better for your tasks, and there's nothing stopping somebody from making a GUI application that would do just as well.
Yes, so that the rest of the world can spend an extra 20% of their time, on every single website, to benefit your browser.
No, you're doing the math wrong. That's not "the rest of the world", that's "the rest of the *web developers* in the world".
For every web developer user who wants standards support, there are maybe a thousand non-web-developer users who want more speed, more browser features, better usability, better security, etc. So why is the majority of browser development time spent on the *minority* of users? It's retarded.
And, again, Microsoft is following the same retarded path as its competitors in this space. Although at least IE8 added a lot of user-facing fetures in addition to better standards support.
How about this: Since everyone else is already much closer, why not ditch Trident and embed Webkit or Gecko?
Microsoft has a standards-compliant HTML renderer. They use it in Visual Studio and Expression Web. It's not really web-ready, as it doesn't have plug-in support or even Javascript at the moment, and it's super-slow... but if Microsoft were to replace the rendering engine of IE, they'd use that one, since it's developed in-house.
Clearly, you are not a web developer.
Yes, because non-web-developers frequently slam up against the dispHTMLElementCollection retardedness I linked you to in my last posting.
I am a web developer, in fact. Well, something like that-- I'm a specialist in web analytics, which involves tons of Javascript. (Not as much web design-type tasks, though.)
Maybe you're jealous of my "easy" job, but if IE was gone tomorrow, I'd have 20% more time to spend doing something useful. And we all know what happens with 20% time.
More Slashdot posting?
Of course, you've shown your cards, you're squarely an MS fanboi -- so I am sure, in your world, other browsers should just suck it up and conform to the defacto standard, and the Web should go back to the 90's habit of slapping "best viewed in IE x.x" disclaimers on the page and calling it a day.
Yes, because there's clearly no middle ground at all.
Look, whether you like (or admit) it or not, IE shares something like 95% of the standard with every other browser. That's damned good. If you were writing a cross-platform desktop application, you'd find that virtually every widget works entirely different between OS X, Windows, Gnome, and KDE... you'd find that the APIs for those environments are nothing alike each other, you'd find that features you rely on on one OS don't even exist on others.
Your job *is* easy.
CSS is a styling language. WTF do I need math for?
For one thing, CSS has multiple measures, some of which are machine-relative and some of which aren't. Why can't I set the height of something to "5em + 5px"? A simple addition problem, which I can't pre-calculate because at design-time I don't know how many pixels are in an em. (Plus, it could be a non-whole-number value where pixels have to be whole numbers.)
Look at the list of CSS units: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_units.asp Here are the ones you don't know at design-time: in, cm, mm (based on screen res), em, ex (based on default font size), point, pica (based on screen res) Here are the ones you do: %, px
Right now the only way to make use of one of these measures from each category is to use two different elements with different styles, one with the "known" value and one with the "unknown." That's retarded.
The only reason is because the creators of CSS lacked imagination. The fact that you *also* lacked the imagination to come up with a scenario like this just tells me that you've been working in CSS too long.
Honestly, how much time was it?
I don't know, the W3C moves at such a glacial pace anyway, I suppose that it doesn't matter.
Oh, first the standards were crap, and now the job is "easy"?
I'm a power-user and a developer. I use the command-line for anything requiring *real* using of my computer. You can't beat command-lines with piping and scripting for *real* power-use, period.
So, just to cite one example, by your definition, digital film editors aren't *really* using their computers, and they're certainly not power-users?
Or you just define "power-user" to mean "the stuff that I can do on the CLI."
XP. Sometimes it works, but it did not seem to automatically hotplug. And this was, of course, once drivers were installed -- drivers that Ubuntu and OS X provide out of the box.
FYI, Vista has good drivers out-of-the-box. XP does too, if you have a XP SP2 disk, but the original XP disk doesn't include them.
For example, the keystrokes I mentioned in KWin simply do not exist, configurable or not, on Windows or OS X. If they did exist, they were not discoverable. Usability is more than discoverability, but discoverability helps.
They aren't built-in to the GUI, that doesn't mean they don't exist. It means they exist as plug-ins/applications you have to install separately. All the hotkeys in OS X are configurable, but they don't have hot keys for the behaviors you're looking for.
A quick Google would've shown you that, by the way.
I could have, but if you're trying to convince me, you'd do better defining terms that aren't commonly-known.
Speaking of which, it's been awhile since I've even tried to do this elsewhere, but I can right-click the title bar of a window, choose Advanced -> Keep Above Others. Windows certainly allows always-on-top windows, but I haven't seen the window manager itself support this.
Windows has a distinct disadvantage in that a large proportion of its developers are asshats. For example, think about what would happen if RealNetworks circa 2001 had the ability to set their windows to always-on-top. The Windows API is specifically designed (since about Windows 2000) to preclude developers abusing the system, or otherwise being asshats. So, in general, any feature with the potential for abuse doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist in a manner that's accessible by the user.
There's also the technical issue of what happens when two always-on-top windows overlap each other-- how does that work in KDE?
In Linux ever developed a 3rd-party software ecosystem, they would have to begin installing the same limitations.
So, IE passes Acid2 now?
Who gives a fuck?
IE can render my standards-compliant pages now?
"Standards-compliant" isn't a feature. It's a fucking waste of time. Let's spend 80% of our developer time changing parts of the program that end-users NEVER SEE, only web developers do.
Oh, and despite that, web developers will have to test in each browser *anyway*. So you're barely saving even that tiny percentage of users any time anyway.
Oh, and despite that, web development is still a shit process because the web standards are shit anyway. DOM is a goddamned joke! CSS can't even do math! Seriously, WTF. The only web standard I have any respect for is Javascript, but since it's tied to DOM, it instantly becomes as retarded as DOM is.
Nobody in the real world ever picked their web browser due to standards support. If they did, Opera would be the most widely-used browser for the last 5 years. It's a complete non-feature. It's the kind of thing you should work on when you have free time after all user-facing features are completed, not the kind of thing you should base most of your work on.
And I've yet to have a single person convince me that the XHTML standard is worthwhile. What's the point of a webpage validating as XML? What does it gain me that I can't already do? Nothing. It's just a giant waste of W3C time that *should* have gone into HTML5. (A standard I can actually get behind.) No high-traffic sites validate, why is that? Because they don't care! Why should I?
"Standards-compliance" is just a gigantic geek-wank started by some pissy web developers who think their already-extremely-easy job is just too hard.
And I suppose IE has Adblock, Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug now?
Oh, I forgot to mention, my desktop also uses a USB wifi dongle, a USB HDTV antenna, and a USB video capture card. I bet that's CLI-bait right there in Linux. I'd actually be shocked if any of those worked correctly without resorting to a CLI.
Ah. You must be an OS X fan, then, because I've never seen Windows do this.
You're either a liar, or the last version of Windows you used was Windows 98. Either way, wrong.
Personally, I use KDE. Here's one trivial example: I can bind keys to features I haven't seen on Windows or OS X -- for example, maximize horizontally or vertically (or both), pack a window in a given direction (I've mapped win+right to push the window to the right until it hits the edge of another window or the screen)... Even sloppy focus, the closest I could come on OS X was within Terminal.app, and it only applied to individual terminal windows, while Terminal.app had focus.
My snarky point was that Linux has multiple GUIs, so you can't just say "the GUI is better" without specifying WHICH ONE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!
Anyway, your definition of "better" seems to equate to "more configurable." That's not a universal definition, but I do have to agree that KDE is more configurable than other GUIs.
I can't judge "sloppy focus" unless you bother to explain what it is.
Bring the developers first. That's what happened with Firefox.
You've been bringing developers for a dozen years, it's gotten you nowhere. The truth of the matter is that you don't need more developers, you need more *project managers*. Firefox is a successful project because it's been managed, it's had firm goals, it's been tested (usability and technically) every step of the way, and despite all that it's *still* just on-par with IE.
(Of course you're going to question that last statement. But Firefox on this computer right now refuses to save cookies, for no reason whatsoever. I've cleared cookies, cleared the cache, disabled add-ons, checked the Options to ensure cookies were enabled, and nothing's fixed it. Maybe tonight I'll wipe it and reinstall, see if that helps.
And on my laptop, for some reason, the first time I click the Bookmarks menu, Firefox thinks I want to *add* a bookmark instead of opening the menu. This happens *every single time*, and I have no clue how to fix it. But the weird thing is that it happens *just* on that laptop, I've never seen it happen on any other computers.
Conclusion: Firefox has just as many confusing and quirky bugs as IE. At least, on my computers it does.)
People routinely bring up "you have to use the CLI for everything!" as an argument against modern Linux, for which this is clearly false.
Just two years ago when I tried it, my multiple monitor configuration didn't work without using the CLI. Nor did my wifi networks. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily that "you have to use the CLI for everything!" is true, but my point was that, while that argument may be out-of-date, it's a lot *less* out-of-date than most Linux advocate's arguments.
I'm being generous by saying 5 years; I tried Linux only 2 years ago, and I had to use the CLI. I'd wager that if I wanted to get my desktop (multiple monitors, internet connection sharing) or laptop (hot-swapping monitors, wifi) working today, I'd have to resort to the CLI at least once.
The majority of Mac users would tend to disagree, I think. In particular:
That's because the majority of Mac users *now* either: 1) Didn't appreciate the quality of Mac OS 9's UI. i.e. casual users who don't notice things like that 2) Moved to Macintosh only after OS X came out, so they have no frame of reference
You never noticed this? QuickTime always looked completely unlike the rest of the system, way before OS X. In fact, older versions of QuickTime have been called the Worst UI Ever.
Of course I noticed it, but QuickTime Player wasn't *part of the OS.* It's a pack-in application. Windows Media Player also has a crappy inconsistent UI on Windows, but I don't fault Windows for it because it's a pack-in, not part of the OS.
OS X, however, has two fundamentally different (both in appearance and behavior) window appearances *built-in* to the OS libraries. Applications choos
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That's weird, it's definitely in Vista.
As for dragging taskbar buttons around, have you tried Taskbar Shuffle: http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm ? It might work better, although I admit I haven't tried it myself in Windows 7.
It was a kick-butt achievement
No it wasn't. It ran like crap, didn't work for a large percentage of applications, and completely drained your laptop battery (even with no OS 9 apps running.)
If Microsoft released something of that quality, they'd be (rightly) laughed at. Apple only got away with it because of the reality distortion field.
Yes there is. Our brains are wired to remember words (dozens of thousands of them), and not to run up and down menus looking for options.
Your brain, perhaps. The vast majority of people have brains which are much better at spatial memory (i.e. not having to "run up and down menus" because they remember where the option is) than rote memorization.
The problem is that geeks, generally, are the kind who prefer the memorization. They're the ones in control of Linux, and therefore they see little value to the GUI. They're the ones who removed spatial features from Mac when OS X came out. But they're also a tiny minority of the general population, and that's one of the reasons that Linux alienates so many potential users.
Humans are "wired" for remembering where things are, not for memorizing lists. In the wild, we frequently had to find caches of items previously hidden, remember where predators were, etc. You're going against 2 million years of evolution. If it works for you, fine-- but don't claim it works for everybody, because it doesn't.
What about "I started to revise the article, but putting food on my children's table is more urgent to me than finishing the whole article"?
Why would you even start if your kids are hungry? Priorities, man, priorities. :)
Your priority is ease of use. My priority is flexibility, automation and ease of understanding of the full list of actions being performed.
The problem is that you don't know jack shit about GUIs, at least not about decent ones. I don't even know why you're still bothering with this thread.
Why do you think those two things are mutually-exclusive? They aren't!
The belief that flexibility, automation, and "ease of understanding" (BS argument for CLI, but I'll let it drop for now) are mutually-exclusive with ease-of-use is plain wrong. How many hundreds of extremely advanced, easy-to-use, software products have to come out before you'll cram that into your skull?
Not at all. They're not simple options either. Italic or not italic is easy to understand. And most options are irrelevant in most of the cases.
The options you can't use (either because you have the wrong object selected, or because they are mutually-exclusive with other options) are conveniently greyed-out and inaccessible-- a feature you won't get in a CLI app.
But my point still applies: there are tons and tons of GUI apps with more than 375 (or whatever it was) options. You saying that this is some extraordinarily rare occurrence, or implying that all of those applications suck, is plain ignorance.
I have only a vague understanding of what this does, and absolutely no clue what the result will look like without trying it.
I have only a vague understanding of what this does, and absolutely no clue what the result will look like without trying it. This option alone will need a few minutes of research or testing to understand it, and there are a couple hundred of that kind after you're done with it.
Wow, if only there was some kind of GUI to give you a graphical preview of the option without having to process your entire movie first...
I will repeat my main point since you can't bother with the rest of the post: The problem with mencoder isn't the interface, it's to understand what the hell it does. If you understand what is chroma and luma, and what is a deblocking filter and why would you want one, then you shouldn't have a lot of problems coming up with the right set of arguments to mencoder. If you don't know, then having those options presented through a GUI isn't going to help you much.
Yeah, but a GUI can help you understand the options. You're seriously arguing that it's easier/quicker to learn all those options by reading them off a manpage, memorizing them by rote, instead of having a GUI environment where you can learn them all by playing with them and getting near-instant feedback on what they all do?
Like I said above, either you've never actually used a GUI, or you're simply not interested in having a honest discussion on the matter. Because you're bringing up extremely easily-refuted-- and frankly kind of stupid-- points to support your position.
It doesn't matter how you cut it, 385 options is a lot of stuff to represent in a GUI. If you know of a program that does something of comparable complexity in an intuitive manner, I'd love to see it.
Are you joking?
Even moderately-complex software has that many options. Basic office applications like Word, Excel, even Powerpoint probably have several times that. Hell, I bet Word has 385 options you can perform on a *single character*.
I did my *income taxes* on a *web app*, and that's got to have tens of thousands of options, at least.
I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of your post, it's obvious you've either never used a GUI app, or you're completely disinterested in an intellectually-honest discussion.
Either you spend the time to cite it properly, or delete it because if you don't find a citation, it's (Wikipedia's equivalent to) untrue.
It's an encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit. You're acting as if the original writer "owns" the article and you can't touch it, except to shit little tags all over every single sentence. [citation needed] is a joke, as are most of those tags.
Putting a "this article needs to be revised" tag on a page without revising it your damn self communicates either: "my shit don't stink" or, "I'm far too important to be bothered with this encyclopedia". It's not a good message.
(The other reply to your post saying that adding "citation needed" tags is just a way to bring your edit count up, that makes sense from a human nature standpoint. It's still fucking annoying, but at least I could understand that behavior.)
1. In a GUI with 20 pages of configuration with 20 options on each it's very difficult to find the current configuration state. Meanwhile on the commandline it's obvious which of the 400 options are being used.
Well, if your GUI has 20 pages with 20 options on each page, then it was designed by a complete retard. The debate is whether a *good* GUI program is better than a CLI program. Obviously, a shitty GUI program will be worse, that's pretty much the definition of "shitty GUI program."
2. Regardless of how pretty you make it, the fact is that mencoder is a low level tool, which requires understanding video concepts to use effectively. A GUI for all its features isn't going to clarify things by much.
Why not? You can have rational presets. You can know which options are mutually-exclusive with other options (something you don't know with a CLI interface.) You can have an integrated real-time help system that would beat the pants off the CLI help system. (A CLI help system can exist, of course, but it can't be real-time and it can't be integrated with the normal usage of the app.)
There's tons of potential for clarification in a GUI that doesn't exist in a CLI.
3. Scripts are easier in a CLI environment. Telling people to check this and that option is very tedious for something with such an amount of options, and following the instructions is equally bothersome. Plain text that can be copy/pasted is a lot more convenient.
Two arguments:
1) AppleScript rocked-ass in MacOS Classic. There's no reason CLI scripting *has* to be better than GUI scripting, you're just dealing with (repeat it with me:) a shitty GUI!
2) The GUI could be used to make presets (saved in files), then the presets could be run either in a GUI or CLI. That would be a definite usability improvement over having to type-in the same parameter string each time you want to use the tool, or having to write your own script to do it.
4. Why put a GUI on a tool that can be used for batch processing work? What if somebody wants to encode videos on a server, with no GUI installed?
1) There are GUIs that are used for batch processing work that are really, really, good. For example, Photoshop's batch processing options. Again, if you're used to shitty GUIs, you don't know these exist.
2) You're also acting as if a GUI and CLI are mutually-exclusive. Stop doing that.
5. Who would use a full GUI adaption of mencoder anyway? It wouldn't make it much easier for normal people. Now a GUI with a more limited purpose, such as a GUI to transcode video to the format portable players want is a lot more limited in scope, needs much fewer options, and in fact has been done already.
Possibly it wouldn't make it easier for "normal people." But I doubt that. If the GUI was done well, it would make it easier for *everybody*, "normal" or not. Now you've gone into pretty much full condescension "everybody who prefers a GUI is a retard" mode. Stop doing that.
6. This seems like a pointless discussion anyway, since we have the best of both worlds already. For those who want scriptability, there's mencoder. For those who want a GUI there are multiple frontends for it. It's the same as burning CDs, K3B is a frontent for cdrecord, and that seems to work just fine.
The point is that there shouldn't have to be two worlds in the first place. If mencoder had a decent GUI, programs like those front-ends wouldn't have to exist. Maintenance would be easier. Programmers can either spend more time adding features/fixing bugs, or move on to other projects that need the manpower.
Basically, all your arguments boil down to either: "I'm so used to shitty GUIs I can't even imagine what good ones look like", or "change is bad! stagnation is good!"
Great post- but what the hell does it have to do with comparing "ugly widgets" to "good performance?"
And it's impossible that *you've* changed, the only possible explanation is that games aren't as good as they used to be! Congratulations, you've just discovered the mind-rotting mental phenomena known as "nostalgia."
World of Warcraft isn't in the normal gaming ecosystem to which terms like "Casual" or "Hardcore" apply. It's more like a poker website, without (as much) potential to lose money.
Log on to WOW, and ask some people on the game what other games they play. The vast majority of WOW players *only* play WOW-- they have no interest in casual games, hardcore games, or even other MMOs. They just play WOW. It's in a genre/market all by itself. Except for small minorities, WOW players don't interact with the rest of the gaming world, and the rest of the gaming world doesn't interact with WOW.
Stupid question received stupid answer: Windows is the benchmark, and the OS which the users probably have now.
Possibly. But I'd much rather have a Linux community that's more interested in fixing its own problems than constant penis-measuring against their competitors.
The problem is with Ubuntu, and preventing Ubuntu from being suitable to that particular poster's needs. The problem has *nothing* to do with Windows. In fact, if you fix the problem and Microsoft doesn't, you've just gained a *competitive advantage* over Windows, becoming a better OS instead of simply giving-up when you became "as good as" the other guy.
The problems are of course exacerbated by Vista.
Vista has a ton more drivers than XP. It's far more likely to install on a random piece of off-the-shelf hardware and support all the features... so I don't see how that follows.
That annoys me too, the legion of people willing to slam "citation needed" flags all over an article, so many that it looks like they've been infected with some chicken-pox-like computer virus, but too fucking lazy to look up the citations their damned selves and fix the article.
It seems a bit biased to ignore the Vista debacle,
The "Vista debacle" is only a "debacle" on Slashdot. Everywhere else, it's at best a "minor inconvenience." Please don't fall into the trap of believing that Slashdot represents reality in any way.
The UI elements still look ratty, old-fashioned, and ugly - Apples
that elusive slick-and-speedy feel you get from applications launching fast, windows moving around without jerkiness, and everything simply being where it should be in the user interface - Oranges
Stop comparing the two. The performance of the GUI (what the second reviewer is talking about) has absolutely *nothing* to do with the appearance of the GUI (what the first reviewer is talking about.) Nothing. At all.
How is "XP not working" relevant to "Ubuntu not working?"
The grandparent was talking about a problem in *Ubuntu* preventing *Ubuntu* from being a solution to his problem. He didn't mention Windows. At all. You brought it up.
Moderators: How is this "Insightful" and not, for example, "Off-topic?"
Speaking of Macs, the Gnome widgets have always reminded me strongly of Mac OS 9. In fact, remind might be too weak a word- they look outright copied. That is probably why many commenters here think they look dated.
More Slashdot posting?
Back at ya.
Lighten up, Francis. It was a joke.
Fortunately, for desktop applications, there's gtk+, qt, wxwidgets, tk, even swing and such.
And none of those get you as far as (your example) jQuery does on the web. As a ex-Mac user, I can assure that every one of those toolkits is fundamentally flawed on at *least* OS X, and most are flawed on Windows as well. For example, GTK+ can't even use the OS-standard Open/Save dialogs.
Debugging is part of what Firebug does. The DOM inspector and the live CSS tweaking is equally useful.
And IE's DOM Toolbar has all of those features. It even has an integrated JS debugger in IE 8.
Possibly. However, the size absolutely is configurable, and I wouldn't be surprised about the text labels.
I would, it's entirely counter to the direction Apple's been going in the last decade. In any case, pointless to talk about this since I haven't used 10.5, and you aren't sure about Dock options in 10.5 either.
Now, if only more of the system was exposed via the commandline, that would matter a lot more...
What parts of the system aren't?
Server 2003, Vista, and Server 2008 are supposed to have 100% CLI coverage. Now I don't know for certain that they *do* have, but I'm also not going to let you say they *don't* without providing a single example.
Eh, as an old-school Mac user, I don't buy any of that.
Whether you use a CLI or a GUI program has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are a power user or not.
Our database expert here at work is definitely a power user, and she uses a GUI program to manage databases-- gasp! Horror! The digital film editor mentioned originally is more likely than not pushing his hardware to the absolute limit-- he's a power user, doing a job that can't be done on the CLI. Or consider a 3D modeler for a video game, or movie studio-- same deal.
I think the reason Linux users think you "need" the CLI to be a power user is that most Linux GUIs kind of suck. Mencoder, though a GUI, would probably be just as powerful as the CLI version, if the GUI was good. Hell, at the bare minimum it could have help text to remind you what the hundreds of options are all for. Apple had GUI script-ability mastered back in System 7. (Although like a lot of good things Apple came up with in the last, they've flushed it down the shitter to be more compatible with other systems.)
There's nothing inherent in the CLI that makes it better for your tasks, and there's nothing stopping somebody from making a GUI application that would do just as well.
Yes, so that the rest of the world can spend an extra 20% of their time, on every single website, to benefit your browser.
No, you're doing the math wrong. That's not "the rest of the world", that's "the rest of the *web developers* in the world".
For every web developer user who wants standards support, there are maybe a thousand non-web-developer users who want more speed, more browser features, better usability, better security, etc. So why is the majority of browser development time spent on the *minority* of users? It's retarded.
And, again, Microsoft is following the same retarded path as its competitors in this space. Although at least IE8 added a lot of user-facing fetures in addition to better standards support.
How about this: Since everyone else is already much closer, why not ditch Trident and embed Webkit or Gecko?
Microsoft has a standards-compliant HTML renderer. They use it in Visual Studio and Expression Web. It's not really web-ready, as it doesn't have plug-in support or even Javascript at the moment, and it's super-slow... but if Microsoft were to replace the rendering engine of IE, they'd use that one, since it's developed in-house.
Clearly, you are not a web developer.
Yes, because non-web-developers frequently slam up against the dispHTMLElementCollection retardedness I linked you to in my last posting.
I am a web developer, in fact. Well, something like that-- I'm a specialist in web analytics, which involves tons of Javascript. (Not as much web design-type tasks, though.)
Maybe you're jealous of my "easy" job, but if IE was gone tomorrow, I'd have 20% more time to spend doing something useful. And we all know what happens with 20% time.
More Slashdot posting?
Of course, you've shown your cards, you're squarely an MS fanboi -- so I am sure, in your world, other browsers should just suck it up and conform to the defacto standard, and the Web should go back to the 90's habit of slapping "best viewed in IE x.x" disclaimers on the page and calling it a day.
Yes, because there's clearly no middle ground at all.
Look, whether you like (or admit) it or not, IE shares something like 95% of the standard with every other browser. That's damned good. If you were writing a cross-platform desktop application, you'd find that virtually every widget works entirely different between OS X, Windows, Gnome, and KDE... you'd find that the APIs for those environments are nothing alike each other, you'd find that features you rely on on one OS don't even exist on others.
Your job *is* easy.
CSS is a styling language. WTF do I need math for?
For one thing, CSS has multiple measures, some of which are machine-relative and some of which aren't. Why can't I set the height of something to "5em + 5px"? A simple addition problem, which I can't pre-calculate because at design-time I don't know how many pixels are in an em. (Plus, it could be a non-whole-number value where pixels have to be whole numbers.)
Look at the list of CSS units: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_units.asp
Here are the ones you don't know at design-time: in, cm, mm (based on screen res), em, ex (based on default font size), point, pica (based on screen res)
Here are the ones you do: %, px
Right now the only way to make use of one of these measures from each category is to use two different elements with different styles, one with the "known" value and one with the "unknown." That's retarded.
The only reason is because the creators of CSS lacked imagination. The fact that you *also* lacked the imagination to come up with a scenario like this just tells me that you've been working in CSS too long.
Honestly, how much time was it?
I don't know, the W3C moves at such a glacial pace anyway, I suppose that it doesn't matter.
Oh, first the standards were crap, and now the job is "easy"?
"easy" in a relative
I'm a power-user and a developer. I use the command-line for anything requiring *real* using of my computer. You can't beat command-lines with piping and scripting for *real* power-use, period.
So, just to cite one example, by your definition, digital film editors aren't *really* using their computers, and they're certainly not power-users?
Or you just define "power-user" to mean "the stuff that I can do on the CLI."
XP. Sometimes it works, but it did not seem to automatically hotplug. And this was, of course, once drivers were installed -- drivers that Ubuntu and OS X provide out of the box.
FYI, Vista has good drivers out-of-the-box. XP does too, if you have a XP SP2 disk, but the original XP disk doesn't include them.
For example, the keystrokes I mentioned in KWin simply do not exist, configurable or not, on Windows or OS X. If they did exist, they were not discoverable. Usability is more than discoverability, but discoverability helps.
They aren't built-in to the GUI, that doesn't mean they don't exist. It means they exist as plug-ins/applications you have to install separately. All the hotkeys in OS X are configurable, but they don't have hot keys for the behaviors you're looking for.
A quick Google would've shown you that, by the way.
I could have, but if you're trying to convince me, you'd do better defining terms that aren't commonly-known.
Speaking of which, it's been awhile since I've even tried to do this elsewhere, but I can right-click the title bar of a window, choose Advanced -> Keep Above Others. Windows certainly allows always-on-top windows, but I haven't seen the window manager itself support this.
Windows has a distinct disadvantage in that a large proportion of its developers are asshats. For example, think about what would happen if RealNetworks circa 2001 had the ability to set their windows to always-on-top. The Windows API is specifically designed (since about Windows 2000) to preclude developers abusing the system, or otherwise being asshats. So, in general, any feature with the potential for abuse doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist in a manner that's accessible by the user.
There's also the technical issue of what happens when two always-on-top windows overlap each other-- how does that work in KDE?
In Linux ever developed a 3rd-party software ecosystem, they would have to begin installing the same limitations.
So, IE passes Acid2 now?
Who gives a fuck?
IE can render my standards-compliant pages now?
"Standards-compliant" isn't a feature. It's a fucking waste of time. Let's spend 80% of our developer time changing parts of the program that end-users NEVER SEE, only web developers do.
Oh, and despite that, web developers will have to test in each browser *anyway*. So you're barely saving even that tiny percentage of users any time anyway.
Oh, and despite that, web development is still a shit process because the web standards are shit anyway. DOM is a goddamned joke! CSS can't even do math! Seriously, WTF. The only web standard I have any respect for is Javascript, but since it's tied to DOM, it instantly becomes as retarded as DOM is.
For example, something I discovered just yesterday: http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2009/04/gigantic-javascript-wtf-disphtmlelementcollection/
Nobody in the real world ever picked their web browser due to standards support. If they did, Opera would be the most widely-used browser for the last 5 years. It's a complete non-feature. It's the kind of thing you should work on when you have free time after all user-facing features are completed, not the kind of thing you should base most of your work on.
And I've yet to have a single person convince me that the XHTML standard is worthwhile. What's the point of a webpage validating as XML? What does it gain me that I can't already do? Nothing. It's just a giant waste of W3C time that *should* have gone into HTML5. (A standard I can actually get behind.) No high-traffic sites validate, why is that? Because they don't care! Why should I?
"Standards-compliance" is just a gigantic geek-wank started by some pissy web developers who think their already-extremely-easy job is just too hard.
And I suppose IE has Adblock, Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug now?
Oh, I forgot to mention, my desktop also uses a USB wifi dongle, a USB HDTV antenna, and a USB video capture card. I bet that's CLI-bait right there in Linux. I'd actually be shocked if any of those worked correctly without resorting to a CLI.
Ah. You must be an OS X fan, then, because I've never seen Windows do this.
You're either a liar, or the last version of Windows you used was Windows 98. Either way, wrong.
Personally, I use KDE. Here's one trivial example: I can bind keys to features I haven't seen on Windows or OS X -- for example, maximize horizontally or vertically (or both), pack a window in a given direction (I've mapped win+right to push the window to the right until it hits the edge of another window or the screen)... Even sloppy focus, the closest I could come on OS X was within Terminal.app, and it only applied to individual terminal windows, while Terminal.app had focus.
My snarky point was that Linux has multiple GUIs, so you can't just say "the GUI is better" without specifying WHICH ONE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!
Anyway, your definition of "better" seems to equate to "more configurable." That's not a universal definition, but I do have to agree that KDE is more configurable than other GUIs.
I can't judge "sloppy focus" unless you bother to explain what it is.
Bring the developers first. That's what happened with Firefox.
You've been bringing developers for a dozen years, it's gotten you nowhere. The truth of the matter is that you don't need more developers, you need more *project managers*. Firefox is a successful project because it's been managed, it's had firm goals, it's been tested (usability and technically) every step of the way, and despite all that it's *still* just on-par with IE.
(Of course you're going to question that last statement. But Firefox on this computer right now refuses to save cookies, for no reason whatsoever. I've cleared cookies, cleared the cache, disabled add-ons, checked the Options to ensure cookies were enabled, and nothing's fixed it. Maybe tonight I'll wipe it and reinstall, see if that helps.
And on my laptop, for some reason, the first time I click the Bookmarks menu, Firefox thinks I want to *add* a bookmark instead of opening the menu. This happens *every single time*, and I have no clue how to fix it. But the weird thing is that it happens *just* on that laptop, I've never seen it happen on any other computers.
Conclusion: Firefox has just as many confusing and quirky bugs as IE. At least, on my computers it does.)
People routinely bring up "you have to use the CLI for everything!" as an argument against modern Linux, for which this is clearly false.
Just two years ago when I tried it, my multiple monitor configuration didn't work without using the CLI. Nor did my wifi networks. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily that "you have to use the CLI for everything!" is true, but my point was that, while that argument may be out-of-date, it's a lot *less* out-of-date than most Linux advocate's arguments.
I'm being generous by saying 5 years; I tried Linux only 2 years ago, and I had to use the CLI. I'd wager that if I wanted to get my desktop (multiple monitors, internet connection sharing) or laptop (hot-swapping monitors, wifi) working today, I'd have to resort to the CLI at least once.
The majority of Mac users would tend to disagree, I think. In particular:
That's because the majority of Mac users *now* either:
1) Didn't appreciate the quality of Mac OS 9's UI. i.e. casual users who don't notice things like that
2) Moved to Macintosh only after OS X came out, so they have no frame of reference
You never noticed this? QuickTime always looked completely unlike the rest of the system, way before OS X. In fact, older versions of QuickTime have been called the Worst UI Ever.
Of course I noticed it, but QuickTime Player wasn't *part of the OS.* It's a pack-in application. Windows Media Player also has a crappy inconsistent UI on Windows, but I don't fault Windows for it because it's a pack-in, not part of the OS.
OS X, however, has two fundamentally different (both in appearance and behavior) window appearances *built-in* to the OS libraries. Applications choos