Jesus shit, you're doing it again even KNOWING it's a joke.
It's a JOKE! A JOOOOOKE!
You must be a blast at parties, carefully explaining how your momma isn't in fact fat, she's actually average for her age and height considering the local dietary traditions of her homeland...
If the alarm goes off in a nuclear plant, operating procedure should say: Check briefly if the computer is acting up, and then shut the whole frickin' plant down. Why wasn't it done? Let me guess: It costs a whole bunch of money. So, the accident happened due to greed.
You think there's just a big red button labeled "STOP" like on your band saw? I think nuclear power might be just a tad bit more complicated than that.
What they *really* are against is corporations, not the environment. See, nuclear plants, dams, wind farms, etc. are all controlled by corporations, and the environmental movement *hates* that. What I don't get is why they're still ok with the old corporations that own the coal mines and coal/gas power production.
Being against corporations is fine, but don't pretend to be "environmentalists" if you aren't.
You have to remember, a lot of people on Slashdot posting about Classic MacOS never actually used it. Most of them only adopted Macs after OS X came out, but they like to pretend they were part of the "Classic Club" by giving us little gems like the post you replied to.
If you even slightly think something said on Slashdot might be wrong, go with your gut.
Dragging the disk to the trash was a (poorly-conceived) shortcut to the "Put Away" command. You could also use Command-Y, or select Put Away from the Special menu. People who actually *used* Macs generally were aware of this.
The theory was that "Put Away" put whatever was selected back where it belongs. If it was a file or folder on a desktop, it goes back to where it was before it was moved to the desktop. If it was a floppy disk, it meant you were done working with it and you can put it back in its box.
This is as opposed to "Eject", which should have read, "Eject, but remember for future use." Or, "Let me put in another disk, but I'm still using this one too."
Anyway, the thinking behind the feature was fine. Apple somehow slipped that "drag icon to trash" shortcut in, and it's been a point of criticism since. Not only is dragging the disk to the trash not the only way to put away a disk, it's not even close to the best way.
You can do a lot of stuff when you control the hardware as well as the software. Apple just installed the correct drive in all their machines in the first place.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft "being stupid", it has to do with Microsoft having to run on shit hardware.
I don't have to believe, I can simply point out all of the orgs that have a working Bugzilla implementation.
I didn't say it didn't work, I said it has shitty usability. Please read my post before responding to it.
So that the upstream knows what version you are running. Are you running foosoft 1.0, or foosoft 1.0-ubuntu6_AMD64_whining_willie. There's a big difference between the two.
Because I'm not a xenophobe, worried that my frail mind will be warped and wither away if I see something from outside my own little sphere of independence. I watch French movies if they're good, even though I need subtitles (yes, I can read, and I can read fast enough that subtitles aren't an issue). Same with German, Japanese, Mexican etc.
Dude, relax. I'm not trying to insult or imply anything, I was just asking an honest question.
Anyway, I like watching foreign films, too. I guess I'd just assumed that if 80% of my entertainment options were foreign films, they'd be easier/quicker to obtain legally.
If you truly and honestly believe that, all I can say is I hope to God that you're not making any kind of GUI or web-based software at all. Ever. Because you quite obviously lack the ability to tell a usable piece of software from a steaming turd.
People don't like fileing defects because it requires some effort, such as filling in the version and repro steps.
Yah, which is why I was saying the open source community should make it easier. Did you even read my post? Why the hell should I *have* to fill out the version number, if I could click a link in the program and have it automatically send me to a page with the version number/OS/other services running/etc already filled-in? There's no technical reason this can't happen, so why ain't it?
Most people don't want to do that, they just want to whine about usability.
Well, since you have no clue what constitutes good usability, you're not one to determine what is "whining" and what isn't. Usability bugs are bugs, period.
The problem I was getting at before is that Bugzilla/Sourceforge have so many hundreds of usability bugs right now that their usability bugs are preventing people from telling you about your bugs. (Usability or otherwise.) *Especially* for the class of users who are going to give you the most insight into usability: more casual users who aren't willing to jump through Bugzilla's hoops, learn its arcane terminology, or cope with its oftentimes rude responses.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if a project uses Bugzilla as a bug tracker, they aren't really interested in getting feedback.
IRC is a critical part of distributed software development on the internet.
The Internet of 1992? Yes. The Internet of 2009? No.
The problem is that your Linux-using geek blinders are so dark you no longer have any idea what the software development community looks like outside of your little community. I'll give you a hint: usability matters, and nobody uses IRC.
You're confusing Open source with Ubuntu.
Actually I've never submitted feedback to Ubuntu. But I've had that problem with GTK+, Inkscape, Notepad++ and probably a few others. Sure, none of those projects are Firefox, but they're all "famous" open source projects.
(Of the three, the only one who seemed even slightly interested in fixing the bug was Inkscape, but they basically just shuffled it off to GTK+ where it was ignored. Still unfixed today, 3 years later. Notepad++ gave a rude "workaround" which wasn't really a workaround at all. Oh, and the Notepad++ bug? Their menus don't work. Menus, the UI element that was perfected in 1984, don't work on a product released in 2008. Unbelievable.)
I have a serious question, and I'm not trying to flame, I'm just curious.
The UK has a healthy TV/film industry, as does Japan, China, France, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Canada, and probably a dozen more countries I can't think of right now.
Why doesn't Sweden? I mean, why would you even be slightly interested in a show designed for American/Canadian audiences in English only?
Anyway, I just think it's really weird. As an American, I don't think "oh it's tragic you can't get US TV easily in Sweden," I think, "it's tragic Sweden (apparently) doesn't produce its own TV."
That is not a bug.. that is a design flaw.. Bugs require immediate attention, design flaws get addressed over time, and the developer should be collecting a list of flaws to address..
Bugs are bugs, period. Bad usability is as much a bug as crashing under a certain circumstance is.
If you end up classifying usability bugs as "design flaws" (or anything other than "bugs") then you'll never get around to fixing them, because you'll *always* have more real bugs to fix than "design flaws."
That's not to say crashing bugs should be ignored, but that *all* bugs (whether "bugs" or "design flaws") should go through the same triage process.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
Maybe KDE doesn't have the same rules that every other OS does, but...
Aren't right-click menus supposed to be *contextual?* Why would it have both "encrypt" and "decrypt" on it? If the file was encrypted, it should only show decrypt. If it wasn't, it should only show encrypt-related options.
That's a lot more basic flaw that the excitement over encryption, the contextual menu *isn't contextual*.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
Windows has a pretty good one in parts; menus hide things that haven't been used recently.
When's the last time you used Windows? That feature was introduced in Windows/Office 2000, and completely discarded by Windows XP/Office 2003. It was also a godawful UI idea that was rightly criticized by pretty much everybody when it was introduced.
The fact that you're basically encouraging Linux to adopt a feature that has already been tried soundly rejected by the entire computer-using industry says something.
it's doing quite well on the netbooks where people don't want to install everything in their closet: they just want a functional, email-checking, web-surfing laptop and for that almost any OS will do.
No it's not. Do you have a citation for that? Last I heard, the OS distribution for Netbooks was *real* close to the distribution for normal laptops, that is, > 90% Windows.
The concept of "WON'T FIX" is fine, but the execution is awful. How about maybe politeness? Or even a little white lie would be better: say it'll be fixed in vague a future version.
"WON'T FIX" might as well read, "I'M AN ASSHOLE."
Of course, everything in Bugzilla is that way, anyway. It would be a challenge to find a more unfriendly, more buggy, and generally worse bug tracker. If a project is using Bugzilla, you can tell right away that they don't care about bug reports, and save your time.
After you have filed a bug report, and spoken to the devs on the mailing list, and written some horrible pseudocode to resolve an issue, you are now given the right to complain louder than Theo on the blog of your choice.
This is a huge problem right here. If your project is using Bugzilla (or Sourceforge), the poor quality and usability of your bug tracker is driving people way. I can guarantee it.
If you only speak to users via mailing list, you're losing another huge chunk of people who don't want tons of spam to talk about one specific issue with one specific project. (Not to mention your mailing list's website *probably* sucks ass, as well. Most do.) Strike two.
If you only meet on IRC, you're alienating the people who won't install and download an IRC client to talk to you, which is pretty much everybody except those who are already geeks. Strike three.
If you're seriously interested in getting feedback from people, *make it easy*. When Microsoft releases a beta product (for example, Windows 7), there a prominent link "Send Feedback" in the title-bar of *every window*. You click it, type your feedback, and you're done. Why isn't that implemented in any open source projects*?
Of course the next step is to actually read and act on that feedback. Considering most open source projects don't even read their own bug database, I don't hold out much hope in this area.
* Note: I'm excluding Firefox because it's actually run by people who care about listening to user feedback and making a quality product.
You think you are doing something wonderful by piling on the requests but really you are not contributing any effort and that's what is needed.
That's fine if that's what it is, but most open source/Linux projects *ask for people to submit bugs*. They ask me to do it, they make me think I'm helping the project by QAing and submitting bugs. And then what happens? The bug goes ignored. For days. Then weeks. Then years. Then they switch bug trackers, and it disappears forever, still unfixed.
Look, if your project doesn't have the resources to look at bug reports, that's fine, but *don't ask people to submit them*. Otherwise you're just wasting their time and effort.
Developers are developers, not free tech support. Point to the devs.
Any time a user has to resort to tech support (for anything other than hardware failure) for your project, your project has failed them and should be fixed. If a user calls tech support because they can't find the button to print, that's a bug in your product: the print button should be easier to find. Period.
At least, that's how you should respond to tech support requests if you actually care about software quality. Most open source programmers do not; they just do the bare minimum to make a functional program, then call it "done".
It's a well-known fact that if you say your Slashdot post will be modded down, it will in fact be modded up. I'm sure he was just demonstrating some dramatic flair.:)
Hell yah. I used to be in this camp, then I actually switched to Windows when it became apparent (after releasing Office 2007) that Microsoft was actually interested in improving the usability of their product, something that can't be said for Apple in the last 5-10 years.
What I don't get is why these exchanges (which happen constantly) were never reported when Bush was in office. What makes them "news" now when they weren't "news" a year ago?
You're either smoking crack, or you've never used Windows. Microsoft's development environment blows Linux's out of the water, period. You can debug any code, anywhere... for web development, that means you can debug every line of code from sending the AJAX request to your page, to running the SQL query, to receiving it, to parsing it in JS.
Hell, web development alone: point to me a better web development environment on Linux than Expression Web on Windows. Show me it. And Expression Web isn't even as powerful as Visual Studio at web development.
Of course, you're still smoking crack. Because even if Microsoft did have poor development tools, the single fact that you can run your Windows application on over 90% of the world's computers with no modification makes it far more relevant than any other system.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus shit, you're doing it again even KNOWING it's a joke.
It's a JOKE! A JOOOOOKE!
You must be a blast at parties, carefully explaining how your momma isn't in fact fat, she's actually average for her age and height considering the local dietary traditions of her homeland...
Or you could, you know, TAKE A FUCKING JOKE and not write long drawn-out replies to a funny post.
Christ, there are some humorless people on this forum.
If the alarm goes off in a nuclear plant, operating procedure should say: Check briefly if the computer is acting up, and then shut the whole frickin' plant down. Why wasn't it done? Let me guess: It costs a whole bunch of money. So, the accident happened due to greed.
You think there's just a big red button labeled "STOP" like on your band saw? I think nuclear power might be just a tad bit more complicated than that.
What they *really* are against is corporations, not the environment. See, nuclear plants, dams, wind farms, etc. are all controlled by corporations, and the environmental movement *hates* that. What I don't get is why they're still ok with the old corporations that own the coal mines and coal/gas power production.
Being against corporations is fine, but don't pretend to be "environmentalists" if you aren't.
Yah.
You have to remember, a lot of people on Slashdot posting about Classic MacOS never actually used it. Most of them only adopted Macs after OS X came out, but they like to pretend they were part of the "Classic Club" by giving us little gems like the post you replied to.
If you even slightly think something said on Slashdot might be wrong, go with your gut.
Dragging the disk to the trash was a (poorly-conceived) shortcut to the "Put Away" command. You could also use Command-Y, or select Put Away from the Special menu. People who actually *used* Macs generally were aware of this.
The theory was that "Put Away" put whatever was selected back where it belongs. If it was a file or folder on a desktop, it goes back to where it was before it was moved to the desktop. If it was a floppy disk, it meant you were done working with it and you can put it back in its box.
This is as opposed to "Eject", which should have read, "Eject, but remember for future use." Or, "Let me put in another disk, but I'm still using this one too."
Anyway, the thinking behind the feature was fine. Apple somehow slipped that "drag icon to trash" shortcut in, and it's been a point of criticism since. Not only is dragging the disk to the trash not the only way to put away a disk, it's not even close to the best way.
Landmines or medieval swords?
You can do a lot of stuff when you control the hardware as well as the software. Apple just installed the correct drive in all their machines in the first place.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft "being stupid", it has to do with Microsoft having to run on shit hardware.
I don't have to believe, I can simply point out all of the orgs that have a working Bugzilla implementation.
I didn't say it didn't work, I said it has shitty usability. Please read my post before responding to it.
So that the upstream knows what version you are running. Are you running foosoft 1.0, or foosoft 1.0-ubuntu6_AMD64_whining_willie. There's a big difference between the two.
Please *read* my post before responding to it.
Because I'm not a xenophobe, worried that my frail mind will be warped and wither away if I see something from outside my own little sphere of independence. I watch French movies if they're good, even though I need subtitles (yes, I can read, and I can read fast enough that subtitles aren't an issue). Same with German, Japanese, Mexican etc.
Dude, relax. I'm not trying to insult or imply anything, I was just asking an honest question.
Anyway, I like watching foreign films, too. I guess I'd just assumed that if 80% of my entertainment options were foreign films, they'd be easier/quicker to obtain legally.
Bugzilla and sourceforge are perfectly usable
If you truly and honestly believe that, all I can say is I hope to God that you're not making any kind of GUI or web-based software at all. Ever. Because you quite obviously lack the ability to tell a usable piece of software from a steaming turd.
People don't like fileing defects because it requires some effort, such as filling in the version and repro steps.
Yah, which is why I was saying the open source community should make it easier. Did you even read my post? Why the hell should I *have* to fill out the version number, if I could click a link in the program and have it automatically send me to a page with the version number/OS/other services running/etc already filled-in? There's no technical reason this can't happen, so why ain't it?
Most people don't want to do that, they just want to whine about usability.
Well, since you have no clue what constitutes good usability, you're not one to determine what is "whining" and what isn't. Usability bugs are bugs, period.
The problem I was getting at before is that Bugzilla/Sourceforge have so many hundreds of usability bugs right now that their usability bugs are preventing people from telling you about your bugs. (Usability or otherwise.) *Especially* for the class of users who are going to give you the most insight into usability: more casual users who aren't willing to jump through Bugzilla's hoops, learn its arcane terminology, or cope with its oftentimes rude responses.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if a project uses Bugzilla as a bug tracker, they aren't really interested in getting feedback.
IRC is a critical part of distributed software development on the internet.
The Internet of 1992? Yes. The Internet of 2009? No.
The problem is that your Linux-using geek blinders are so dark you no longer have any idea what the software development community looks like outside of your little community. I'll give you a hint: usability matters, and nobody uses IRC.
You're confusing Open source with Ubuntu.
Actually I've never submitted feedback to Ubuntu. But I've had that problem with GTK+, Inkscape, Notepad++ and probably a few others. Sure, none of those projects are Firefox, but they're all "famous" open source projects.
(Of the three, the only one who seemed even slightly interested in fixing the bug was Inkscape, but they basically just shuffled it off to GTK+ where it was ignored. Still unfixed today, 3 years later. Notepad++ gave a rude "workaround" which wasn't really a workaround at all. Oh, and the Notepad++ bug? Their menus don't work. Menus, the UI element that was perfected in 1984, don't work on a product released in 2008. Unbelievable.)
I have a serious question, and I'm not trying to flame, I'm just curious.
The UK has a healthy TV/film industry, as does Japan, China, France, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Canada, and probably a dozen more countries I can't think of right now.
Why doesn't Sweden? I mean, why would you even be slightly interested in a show designed for American/Canadian audiences in English only?
Anyway, I just think it's really weird. As an American, I don't think "oh it's tragic you can't get US TV easily in Sweden," I think, "it's tragic Sweden (apparently) doesn't produce its own TV."
That is not a bug.. that is a design flaw.. Bugs require immediate attention, design flaws get addressed over time, and the developer should be collecting a list of flaws to address..
Bugs are bugs, period. Bad usability is as much a bug as crashing under a certain circumstance is.
If you end up classifying usability bugs as "design flaws" (or anything other than "bugs") then you'll never get around to fixing them, because you'll *always* have more real bugs to fix than "design flaws."
That's not to say crashing bugs should be ignored, but that *all* bugs (whether "bugs" or "design flaws") should go through the same triage process.
Maybe KDE doesn't have the same rules that every other OS does, but...
Aren't right-click menus supposed to be *contextual?* Why would it have both "encrypt" and "decrypt" on it? If the file was encrypted, it should only show decrypt. If it wasn't, it should only show encrypt-related options.
That's a lot more basic flaw that the excitement over encryption, the contextual menu *isn't contextual*.
Windows has a pretty good one in parts; menus hide things that haven't been used recently.
When's the last time you used Windows? That feature was introduced in Windows/Office 2000, and completely discarded by Windows XP/Office 2003. It was also a godawful UI idea that was rightly criticized by pretty much everybody when it was introduced.
The fact that you're basically encouraging Linux to adopt a feature that has already been tried soundly rejected by the entire computer-using industry says something.
DRM tilt bits causing HDMI dropouts,
Have you actually seen that happen? Ever?
15 different media players depending on what format you want to play,
When's the last time you used Windows? 1997? Seriously, even Windows Media Player can play all the formats worth watching.
having to use the awful half-assed applications included with your hardware. Ever installed anything from HP?
I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about Windows and not HP. Microsoft has no control over what HP ships on their computers.
Yah, HP's software is shit. If HP shipped machines with Linux, do you think their software would magically become non-shit? Seriously?
Windows is consistent, but none of the applications you get are,
And yet, they're still *more* consistent than the same set of Linux applications is. Go figure.
and you have to go hunt down some random application from some dodgy site to get anything other than checking email and surfing the web done.
I have no idea what you're even talking about here. What the hell kind of applications are you downloading?
You're obviously quite happy with choosing something predefined but easy, so Windows is great.
And you've obviously entirely ignorant of Windows. You're not qualified to compare the two.
it's doing quite well on the netbooks where people don't want to install everything in their closet: they just want a functional, email-checking, web-surfing laptop and for that almost any OS will do.
No it's not. Do you have a citation for that? Last I heard, the OS distribution for Netbooks was *real* close to the distribution for normal laptops, that is, > 90% Windows.
The concept of "WON'T FIX" is fine, but the execution is awful. How about maybe politeness? Or even a little white lie would be better: say it'll be fixed in vague a future version.
"WON'T FIX" might as well read, "I'M AN ASSHOLE."
Of course, everything in Bugzilla is that way, anyway. It would be a challenge to find a more unfriendly, more buggy, and generally worse bug tracker. If a project is using Bugzilla, you can tell right away that they don't care about bug reports, and save your time.
After you have filed a bug report, and spoken to the devs on the mailing list, and written some horrible pseudocode to resolve an issue, you are now given the right to complain louder than Theo on the blog of your choice.
This is a huge problem right here. If your project is using Bugzilla (or Sourceforge), the poor quality and usability of your bug tracker is driving people way. I can guarantee it.
If you only speak to users via mailing list, you're losing another huge chunk of people who don't want tons of spam to talk about one specific issue with one specific project. (Not to mention your mailing list's website *probably* sucks ass, as well. Most do.) Strike two.
If you only meet on IRC, you're alienating the people who won't install and download an IRC client to talk to you, which is pretty much everybody except those who are already geeks. Strike three.
If you're seriously interested in getting feedback from people, *make it easy*. When Microsoft releases a beta product (for example, Windows 7), there a prominent link "Send Feedback" in the title-bar of *every window*. You click it, type your feedback, and you're done. Why isn't that implemented in any open source projects*?
Of course the next step is to actually read and act on that feedback. Considering most open source projects don't even read their own bug database, I don't hold out much hope in this area.
* Note: I'm excluding Firefox because it's actually run by people who care about listening to user feedback and making a quality product.
You think you are doing something wonderful by piling on the requests but really you are not contributing any effort and that's what is needed.
That's fine if that's what it is, but most open source/Linux projects *ask for people to submit bugs*. They ask me to do it, they make me think I'm helping the project by QAing and submitting bugs. And then what happens? The bug goes ignored. For days. Then weeks. Then years. Then they switch bug trackers, and it disappears forever, still unfixed.
Look, if your project doesn't have the resources to look at bug reports, that's fine, but *don't ask people to submit them*. Otherwise you're just wasting their time and effort.
Developers are developers, not free tech support. Point to the devs.
Any time a user has to resort to tech support (for anything other than hardware failure) for your project, your project has failed them and should be fixed. If a user calls tech support because they can't find the button to print, that's a bug in your product: the print button should be easier to find. Period.
At least, that's how you should respond to tech support requests if you actually care about software quality. Most open source programmers do not; they just do the bare minimum to make a functional program, then call it "done".
It's a well-known fact that if you say your Slashdot post will be modded down, it will in fact be modded up. I'm sure he was just demonstrating some dramatic flair. :)
Hell yah. I used to be in this camp, then I actually switched to Windows when it became apparent (after releasing Office 2007) that Microsoft was actually interested in improving the usability of their product, something that can't be said for Apple in the last 5-10 years.
What I don't get is why these exchanges (which happen constantly) were never reported when Bush was in office. What makes them "news" now when they weren't "news" a year ago?
You're either smoking crack, or you've never used Windows. Microsoft's development environment blows Linux's out of the water, period. You can debug any code, anywhere... for web development, that means you can debug every line of code from sending the AJAX request to your page, to running the SQL query, to receiving it, to parsing it in JS.
Hell, web development alone: point to me a better web development environment on Linux than Expression Web on Windows. Show me it. And Expression Web isn't even as powerful as Visual Studio at web development.
Of course, you're still smoking crack. Because even if Microsoft did have poor development tools, the single fact that you can run your Windows application on over 90% of the world's computers with no modification makes it far more relevant than any other system.