You're missing the real point, which is that the Display Options control panel in Windows works even at 640x480 resolution. And Windows doesn't let you set the resolution lower than 800x600, unless your video card driver is doing something crazy you'll never even get to that point.
The best approach is Apple's and Microsoft's. Make the entire system simple, and trust that experienced users can figure out how to make their own way in it.
Apple doesn't scream "HEY THERE'S A CLI TOOL!" at you, but if you're the type of person who likes CLIs and knows about them you'll find it really easily. Ditto with Windows and, say, disk partitioning.
This coming from a person who still doesn't quite get the concept of "variable-width fonts" and "text-wrapping."
The only thing that is "intuitive" is a nipple.
Could we retire this tired old phrase, please? Not clever.
The notion of installing new Windows apps through the control panel would make perfect sense if the relevant control panel app did what it's name implies.
Yes, well, that was part of the point wasn't it? You can improve on the things Windows gets wrong (which is frankly a lot of things), you don't have to be a perfect clone of Windows. The point is that you should be *at least* as good as Windows, and right now software installation on Linux isn't.
This is one of those areas where Linux really excels but not insisting on being some sort of Windows clone.
A distinct product is going to have some meaningful differences, imagine that.
Yes. OS X and Windows have differences because they came from different multi-tasking philosophies... Macintosh apps were designed (back in the 80s) to take over the screen so that you were using one application at a time. Thus, current Mac applications share the same menu bar at the top of the screen, and its content changes as you change the current app. Windows was designed differently, so it works differently.
It's a meaningful difference. And yet both Windows and OS X are more usable than Linux.
What the Linux community needs to do is to take the best from Windows, the best from OS X, and then improve on that. It especially needs to stop constantly comparing itself to Windows, and judging itself on its own merits. As a Mac-user, it bugs me that both major Linux window environments are complete rips of Windows.
Notes is used for email. I'm not going to go into the spiel, I'm just sick of this "Notes isn't just email!!" defense from every Notes-lover in these threads. Notes is sold as an email product. Notes is compared to Outlook in the marketing materials. I've been to a dozen Notes installations, and all of them used it for email and nothing else. Notes is email. Period.
The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.
It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.
You are aware that Microsoft uses Exchange, right? You are aware that Microsoft has 80,000 users on the same network running from the exact same Exchange cluster, right?
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in?
First of all, the calendaring system *is* Outlook.
Secondly, what do you consider unintuitive? Notes? When I used Notes version 6, you could easily create an calendar item that ended before it started-- really intuitive there! Of course, it completely bombed out all of the sync software (also from IBM) we had to run to get Notes to talk to Palms, and I had to go manually resync all of them every single time.
And only the bad lawyers and secretaries use only office suites. Documents needs to be cataloged, indexed, searchable, and probably versioned. Those things are *groupware* applications. If an employee thinks they don't need groupware then company doesn't provide sufficient training.
I can't speak for IBM's office suite, but Microsoft Office can do all of that no problem.
Although from my experience, WordPerfect is pretty big at law offices, and AFAIK WP doesn't have any versioning, cataloging, etc. features.
That's the biggest defense of Notes, anytime somebody has a complaint. And especially when they compare it to Outlook: "Well, Notes isn't an email client."
Sure, IBM sells it as an email client. And they compare it to Outlook in their marketing materials. And I've been to a dozen companies using Notes that don't use anything *except* the email component of it-- but it's not an email client!!!
Hey IBM fans: If it smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And Notes is an email client. Stop using that lame excuse to defend how much it sucks.
Ok, I object to the assertion that Microsoft "randomly" placed items on the ribbon while IBM (Lotus) carefully planned it. I've used Office, and I've used tons of IBM products, and I know which company does usability and acceptance testing, and I can guarantee it's not IBM. Every GUI product from IBM, from AS/400 Client Access terminal to Notes, to even their Infoprint printer driver control panels screams "FAIL".
It's an endless cycle. They said the same thing when our company upgraded from Notes 5 to Notes 6. At least Notes 6 supported the multi-user features of Windows (only about a decade after Microsoft added them!!), but it was still a huge hog and all the users hated it just as much as 5.
At this point, I think the only way to fix Notes is for IBM to create a small and fast skunkworks team to write a new client, and not tell the old Notes team about it. (So they don't meddle, and say things like "you can't call them emails, you must call them "Memos!" It's not an in-box, it's a "Database!")
Well, but we're talking about email and collaboration here. There's a hundred reasons why you simply do not want to code your own because, frankly, you'll screw it up.
As a result of all that acceptance-testing the grandparent mention, Outlook will work just fine if you happen to hire a new consultant who lives in Israel and prefers his computer set to Hebrew. Will your home-brew, self-developed product work in that situation? Probably not.
And Outlook will sync with a Palm or Blackberry, can your home-brew? Well, maybe, with a lot more time and work into it... You quickly come to the conclusion that the home-brew solution is a lot more expensive than just swallowing your pride and buying the Exchange license.
Doesn't it bother Notes users that every single issue brought up by somebody is the result of "misconfiguration" or "corruption?"
It never occurs that, since Notes is so easily "misconfigured" or "corrupted" that that's a flaw in the product? Namely, that it's extremely hard to configure and more delicate than most programs? You don't often hear people responding to Outlook complaints by saying that it's "misconfigured" or "corrupted", because Outlook isn't prone to those problems in the same way Notes is.
In any case, I think the real problem is the terrible GUI. I haven't used Notes in awhile, but IIRC in version 6, doing a search in your email list by default only searched the subject lines. It was extremely easy to mistake this subject-line search for a full-text search, since the full-text option was hidden behind a button or something else obscure.
I do remember from experience that Notes: 1) Defaulted to its own HTML renderer, which made IE 4 look like the bastion of standards support and compatibility. I think it's safe to say never saw Notes *correctly* render an HTML document the entire time I used it. 2) Made it nearly impossible to find the option to switch to using IE to render HTML content. It was buried under "Location Settings", as if I'd want to use the Notes browser at home and IE at work!!! Ridiculous placement of an option that shouldn't have even existed in the first place.
If your program has an option that, from a practical standpoint, can be described as "Work Correctly", and that option is turned off by default, you've failed.
My guess would be coming up with a decent GUI for Notes (and no, the Notes 8 interface isn't it-- if you're running in Eclipse, you've already failed) would suddenly and miraculously fix all of these "misconfiguration" errors.
Expensive-- well that doesn't narrow it down, since Notes has always been twice the per-seat cost of Exchange/Outlook.
Bloated-- I've yet to see a version of Notes that wasn't extremely bloated and taking at least three times the RAM it needed to complete its task, so that doesn't narrow it down.
Unfriendly-- Arguably early pre-Windows 95/Mac OS 7 versions weren't 'unfriendly' since nobody at that time had really defined what a friendly system looked like, so I guess that narrows it to, what, Notes 4 and up?
And the really big problem there, and why I think IBM is going to be sweating in this space in the near future if they aren't already, is that Microsoft now has Sharepoint. Sharepoint pretty much takes care of the (very few) tasks Notes was still better than Office/Exchange at, and I hope that a lot of big Notes users are at least considering the switch.
I used to be an IT guy supporting a office full of Notes email users, and frankly, I think that product deserves to fail. It's so far behind, so full of terrible UI ideas, it's incredible that it's lasted this long. I honestly and truly thing that Notes exists merely to employ expensive IBM consultants, who invariably have to come in and fix all the problems the default Notes install has.
Oregon Trail was all about risk management and long-term vs. short-term gain. It wasn't educational if you set the difficulty to "easy" and just constantly hunted deer and buffalo.
Bah, you just haven't tried the right ones. Obviously The Oregon Trail didn't suck, it was played by millions of a full decade. (I'm sure it's still on most school computers today.) Rocky's Boots, which badly needs a revival, was a great way to learn logic and programming. I had it on my C-64 when I was a kid, and I don't go a week without thinking back to something I learned in that game.
Could a fervent Microsoft Windows user please explain what drivers them to beg their vendor for features and support for products which they have paid, and in different ways, continue to pay for?
What are you talking about? XP support goes until 2014. This article is about offering XP on new computers, which Microsoft is trying to discourage.
I do know that in my 30 years on this planet the ocean level hasn't raise a single centimeter, much less 30 meters. Somehow I don't think it'll rise 30 meters in the next 30 years.
Look, I'm sure you believe what you're saying. I don't.
Essentially, the reason you hear so much negativity is that there is actually very little positive about it.
Maybe it bugs me because I have a well-developed bullshit filter.
The ocean levels are going to rise 30 meters at a minimum? From the expansion of water in the heat, without even counting melting ice? Do you seriously believe that, because it trips the hell out of my bullshit filter. Of course you don't give a timespan on when this is all going to occur; I'd believe 30 meters in a million years, maaaybe.
Then again, I'm actually taking a post about global warming written by a guy who can't spell the word "global" seriously... maybe I'm just being trolled.
Actually, it is. Their is no doubt that temps are going up. If GW is caused by man (and all the evidence says it is), then yes, you are contributing to the war in dafur (fighting over water/land) and numerous other issues.
Because droughts and ethnic cleansing never happened before the Industrial Revolution? I call BS on that.
But, I agree with you about the overreaction. The idea of converting food to energy had to be one of the stupiest ideas that I have seen.
I'm glad we agree on that. I think most of the anti-Global Warming stance is from people who are just sick of the propaganda and "the world's ending!" extremism. They sound like the religious zealot with the hand-drawn sign standing on the city street corner. Given, most of this is from the media, who make everything super-exaggerated scaremongoring, but that doesn't change people's reaction to it.
The idea of converting food to energy had to be one of the stupiest ideas that I have seen. W. only did his stunt on ethanol to try and buy farmers. Most of the farmers here in Colorado say that this is the dumbest idea that has come out of washington, but they are still going to take the money.
To be fair, W's first energy plan was to power hydrogen fuel cell cars using nuclear power. It was doomed to failure for three reasons: 1) Because of crazy scaremongoring environmentalists, it's nearly impossible to build a nuclear reactor in the US. 2) The technology for hydrogen fuel cell cars is more than 8 years away 3)... and therefore the next President would have just canceled any programs Bush had started on anyway.
The hydrogen + nuclear power plan is not a bad plan. It's just impossible to implement with our current political structure in the US. (China could do it in 10 years if they wanted, since they can just force people to do things without endless debate.)
We need to get intelligent ppl into politics.
Yes, we can do a test: if they can't spell the word "people", they're out!
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You're missing the real point, which is that the Display Options control panel in Windows works even at 640x480 resolution. And Windows doesn't let you set the resolution lower than 800x600, unless your video card driver is doing something crazy you'll never even get to that point.
Oh yes, three times the GUI development!
The best approach is Apple's and Microsoft's. Make the entire system simple, and trust that experienced users can figure out how to make their own way in it.
Apple doesn't scream "HEY THERE'S A CLI TOOL!" at you, but if you're the type of person who likes CLIs and knows about them you'll find it really easily. Ditto with Windows and, say, disk partitioning.
Frozen Bubble is available on Linux, as well as a lot of good games
Frozen Bubble is just a blatant rip-off of Bust-A-Move, it's available on just about anything. Including cell phones. Hell, I had a copy for Xbox.
I'd feel better about the rip-off if Linux "Frozen Bubble is great!" users would at least acknowledge the original when they mentioned it.
If you're the "tech guy" for your fiancee, please, please, get her to download FoxIt PDF Reader, and not that steaming turd known as "Adobe Reader."
This coming from a person who still doesn't quite get the concept of "variable-width fonts" and "text-wrapping."
The only thing that is "intuitive" is a nipple.
Could we retire this tired old phrase, please? Not clever.
The notion of installing new Windows apps through the
control panel would make perfect sense if the relevant
control panel app did what it's name implies.
Yes, well, that was part of the point wasn't it? You can improve on the things Windows gets wrong (which is frankly a lot of things), you don't have to be a perfect clone of Windows. The point is that you should be *at least* as good as Windows, and right now software installation on Linux isn't.
This is one of those areas where Linux really excels
but not insisting on being some sort of Windows clone.
A distinct product is going to have some meaningful
differences, imagine that.
Yes. OS X and Windows have differences because they came from different multi-tasking philosophies... Macintosh apps were designed (back in the 80s) to take over the screen so that you were using one application at a time. Thus, current Mac applications share the same menu bar at the top of the screen, and its content changes as you change the current app. Windows was designed differently, so it works differently.
It's a meaningful difference. And yet both Windows and OS X are more usable than Linux.
What the Linux community needs to do is to take the best from Windows, the best from OS X, and then improve on that. It especially needs to stop constantly comparing itself to Windows, and judging itself on its own merits. As a Mac-user, it bugs me that both major Linux window environments are complete rips of Windows.
Usability testing? With an OPEN SOURCE product?!
This article is pure fiction. After all, usability testing is one of those things that evil proprietary software companies like Microsoft do!
Notes is used for email. I'm not going to go into the spiel, I'm just sick of this "Notes isn't just email!!" defense from every Notes-lover in these threads. Notes is sold as an email product. Notes is compared to Outlook in the marketing materials. I've been to a dozen Notes installations, and all of them used it for email and nothing else. Notes is email. Period.
The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.
It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.
You are aware that Microsoft uses Exchange, right? You are aware that Microsoft has 80,000 users on the same network running from the exact same Exchange cluster, right?
In short: you're full of crap.
I (have to) use it fairly often these days, and I can't say I see what the big deal is about it besides it's unintuitive, but integrated and collaborative calendaring system. Any one care to clue me in?
First of all, the calendaring system *is* Outlook.
Secondly, what do you consider unintuitive? Notes? When I used Notes version 6, you could easily create an calendar item that ended before it started-- really intuitive there! Of course, it completely bombed out all of the sync software (also from IBM) we had to run to get Notes to talk to Palms, and I had to go manually resync all of them every single time.
And only the bad lawyers and secretaries use only office suites. Documents needs to be cataloged, indexed, searchable, and probably versioned. Those things are *groupware* applications. If an employee thinks they don't need groupware then company doesn't provide sufficient training.
I can't speak for IBM's office suite, but Microsoft Office can do all of that no problem.
Although from my experience, WordPerfect is pretty big at law offices, and AFAIK WP doesn't have any versioning, cataloging, etc. features.
That's the biggest defense of Notes, anytime somebody has a complaint. And especially when they compare it to Outlook: "Well, Notes isn't an email client."
Sure, IBM sells it as an email client. And they compare it to Outlook in their marketing materials. And I've been to a dozen companies using Notes that don't use anything *except* the email component of it-- but it's not an email client!!!
Hey IBM fans: If it smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And Notes is an email client. Stop using that lame excuse to defend how much it sucks.
Ok, I object to the assertion that Microsoft "randomly" placed items on the ribbon while IBM (Lotus) carefully planned it. I've used Office, and I've used tons of IBM products, and I know which company does usability and acceptance testing, and I can guarantee it's not IBM. Every GUI product from IBM, from AS/400 Client Access terminal to Notes, to even their Infoprint printer driver control panels screams "FAIL".
It's an endless cycle. They said the same thing when our company upgraded from Notes 5 to Notes 6. At least Notes 6 supported the multi-user features of Windows (only about a decade after Microsoft added them!!), but it was still a huge hog and all the users hated it just as much as 5.
At this point, I think the only way to fix Notes is for IBM to create a small and fast skunkworks team to write a new client, and not tell the old Notes team about it. (So they don't meddle, and say things like "you can't call them emails, you must call them "Memos!" It's not an in-box, it's a "Database!")
Well, but we're talking about email and collaboration here. There's a hundred reasons why you simply do not want to code your own because, frankly, you'll screw it up.
As a result of all that acceptance-testing the grandparent mention, Outlook will work just fine if you happen to hire a new consultant who lives in Israel and prefers his computer set to Hebrew. Will your home-brew, self-developed product work in that situation? Probably not.
And Outlook will sync with a Palm or Blackberry, can your home-brew? Well, maybe, with a lot more time and work into it... You quickly come to the conclusion that the home-brew solution is a lot more expensive than just swallowing your pride and buying the Exchange license.
Doesn't it bother Notes users that every single issue brought up by somebody is the result of "misconfiguration" or "corruption?"
It never occurs that, since Notes is so easily "misconfigured" or "corrupted" that that's a flaw in the product? Namely, that it's extremely hard to configure and more delicate than most programs? You don't often hear people responding to Outlook complaints by saying that it's "misconfigured" or "corrupted", because Outlook isn't prone to those problems in the same way Notes is.
In any case, I think the real problem is the terrible GUI. I haven't used Notes in awhile, but IIRC in version 6, doing a search in your email list by default only searched the subject lines. It was extremely easy to mistake this subject-line search for a full-text search, since the full-text option was hidden behind a button or something else obscure.
I do remember from experience that Notes:
1) Defaulted to its own HTML renderer, which made IE 4 look like the bastion of standards support and compatibility. I think it's safe to say never saw Notes *correctly* render an HTML document the entire time I used it.
2) Made it nearly impossible to find the option to switch to using IE to render HTML content. It was buried under "Location Settings", as if I'd want to use the Notes browser at home and IE at work!!! Ridiculous placement of an option that shouldn't have even existed in the first place.
If your program has an option that, from a practical standpoint, can be described as "Work Correctly", and that option is turned off by default, you've failed.
My guess would be coming up with a decent GUI for Notes (and no, the Notes 8 interface isn't it-- if you're running in Eclipse, you've already failed) would suddenly and miraculously fix all of these "misconfiguration" errors.
Well, let's see...
Expensive-- well that doesn't narrow it down, since Notes has always been twice the per-seat cost of Exchange/Outlook.
Bloated-- I've yet to see a version of Notes that wasn't extremely bloated and taking at least three times the RAM it needed to complete its task, so that doesn't narrow it down.
Unfriendly-- Arguably early pre-Windows 95/Mac OS 7 versions weren't 'unfriendly' since nobody at that time had really defined what a friendly system looked like, so I guess that narrows it to, what, Notes 4 and up?
And the really big problem there, and why I think IBM is going to be sweating in this space in the near future if they aren't already, is that Microsoft now has Sharepoint. Sharepoint pretty much takes care of the (very few) tasks Notes was still better than Office/Exchange at, and I hope that a lot of big Notes users are at least considering the switch.
I used to be an IT guy supporting a office full of Notes email users, and frankly, I think that product deserves to fail. It's so far behind, so full of terrible UI ideas, it's incredible that it's lasted this long. I honestly and truly thing that Notes exists merely to employ expensive IBM consultants, who invariably have to come in and fix all the problems the default Notes install has.
Oregon Trail was all about risk management and long-term vs. short-term gain. It wasn't educational if you set the difficulty to "easy" and just constantly hunted deer and buffalo.
Bah, you just haven't tried the right ones. Obviously The Oregon Trail didn't suck, it was played by millions of a full decade. (I'm sure it's still on most school computers today.) Rocky's Boots, which badly needs a revival, was a great way to learn logic and programming. I had it on my C-64 when I was a kid, and I don't go a week without thinking back to something I learned in that game.
Could a fervent Microsoft Windows user please explain what drivers them to beg their vendor for features and support for products which they have paid, and in different ways, continue to pay for?
What are you talking about? XP support goes until 2014. This article is about offering XP on new computers, which Microsoft is trying to discourage.
Has it? Or has it lied to you?
I guess you won't know until you look.
Guess not.
I do know that in my 30 years on this planet the ocean level hasn't raise a single centimeter, much less 30 meters. Somehow I don't think it'll rise 30 meters in the next 30 years.
Look, I'm sure you believe what you're saying. I don't.
Don't beleive me because I typed it.
Cheers! I think I'll do just that.
The only question is, do YOU want to be intelectually curious OR do YOU want to decide you know everything and soly depend on your "bull shit" filter?
Bullshit filter's worked so far.
Essentially, the reason you hear so much negativity is that there is actually very little positive about it.
Maybe it bugs me because I have a well-developed bullshit filter.
The ocean levels are going to rise 30 meters at a minimum? From the expansion of water in the heat, without even counting melting ice? Do you seriously believe that, because it trips the hell out of my bullshit filter. Of course you don't give a timespan on when this is all going to occur; I'd believe 30 meters in a million years, maaaybe.
Then again, I'm actually taking a post about global warming written by a guy who can't spell the word "global" seriously... maybe I'm just being trolled.
You eat bald eagles?
Actually, it is. Their is no doubt that temps are going up. If GW is caused by man (and all the evidence says it is), then yes, you are contributing to the war in dafur (fighting over water/land) and numerous other issues.
... and therefore the next President would have just canceled any programs Bush had started on anyway.
Because droughts and ethnic cleansing never happened before the Industrial Revolution? I call BS on that.
But, I agree with you about the overreaction. The idea of converting food to energy had to be one of the stupiest ideas that I have seen.
I'm glad we agree on that. I think most of the anti-Global Warming stance is from people who are just sick of the propaganda and "the world's ending!" extremism. They sound like the religious zealot with the hand-drawn sign standing on the city street corner. Given, most of this is from the media, who make everything super-exaggerated scaremongoring, but that doesn't change people's reaction to it.
The idea of converting food to energy had to be one of the stupiest ideas that I have seen. W. only did his stunt on ethanol to try and buy farmers. Most of the farmers here in Colorado say that this is the dumbest idea that has come out of washington, but they are still going to take the money.
To be fair, W's first energy plan was to power hydrogen fuel cell cars using nuclear power. It was doomed to failure for three reasons:
1) Because of crazy scaremongoring environmentalists, it's nearly impossible to build a nuclear reactor in the US.
2) The technology for hydrogen fuel cell cars is more than 8 years away
3)
The hydrogen + nuclear power plan is not a bad plan. It's just impossible to implement with our current political structure in the US. (China could do it in 10 years if they wanted, since they can just force people to do things without endless debate.)
We need to get intelligent ppl into politics.
Yes, we can do a test: if they can't spell the word "people", they're out!