Admittedly, I haven't played any of the games in this series except the Xbox version, Panzer Dragoon Orta. Despite being too short, it's a great, great, tremendously good game. Best graphics of any Xbox launch title, ingenious, easy-to-learn gameplay, interesting sci-fi setting. I admit it, I cried at the end. Plus it starred the craziest insect-dragon-bone-thing ever: http://schend.net/images/games/dragon.jpg
Yes, well, I never graduated high school or even elementary school! But every day, 40 supermodels come to my house and bathe me twice, and last year I made 4 million dollars while saving the world from terrorists! So you see this article is totally wrong.
Attempts to install on other distributions will result in silent failures of the installer, undocumented files all over the place, or if you are really lucky (as I was) it will install, but then inexplicably fail to launch after two weeks of very buggy use.
So... it works as well on Linux as it does on Windows and OS X?:)
Lotus Notes is a classic example of a developer team that, simply put, does not get it.
Users complain that it's terrible at email; Notes devs answer that it's not designed to do email. Users ask "then why does IBM sell it as an Outlook replacement?" (No answer.) Users ask why the "out of office" feature doesn't work half the time, and they start talking about "replication", "databases", etc. The developers are so out-of-touch with the common computer user, it's like they're aliens or something.
IBM's plan of operation with Notes seems to be to sell Notes/Domino to a business along with a suite of "solutions" (all implemented as Lotus Notes databases.) Then when the business's users complain about how crappy it is, to sell them "consulting" at hugely inflated rates to fix the problems that should have been fixed ten years ago.
You might complain that Exchange/Outlook sucks, but it works out-of-the-box much better than Notes, and it costs half as much per-seat.
(Can you tell I had to work helpdesk at a IBM shop?)
Oh, and memo to IBM: It doesn't count as a "web app" if it relies on Java to do ANYTHING, even a basic menu which would easily be implemented in Javascript.
I can practically guarantee it will suck. It will make the Windows UI look good, and the Windows UI sucks. Prepare for random crashes. Get ready for bloated, super-slow performance. Welcome to the land of UI elements with really teeny fonts, but you can't change the font size.
ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.
All sizes of businesses use Office and Windows. Virtually ALL businesses use Office and Windows. IBM has a stranglehold in some areas, for instance medical industries. That said, I haven't seen a small business anywhere using any IBM products other than perhaps Point Of Sale. For medium and large businesses, I would wager nearly all of them spend more money to Microsoft than they do to IBM. (And I bet they get a hell of a lot more Return of Investment from Microsoft products. The quality difference between, for example, Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes is staggering.)
its joining the open office movement have made the movement pass the critical mass.
Uh. Evidence? Reference? Link?
now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.
Call me when I actually can walk into a randomly-selected office and have a chance of seeing a copy of OpenOffice running.
Personally I found his questions interesting, and I think that there was no right for police to arrest him, I believe that Kerry should have answered his questions and defend himself in political way.
Kerry did answer his question, or try to. The nut-case wouldn't shut up long enough for anybody else to get a word in edgewise. Besides, he was just spouting paranoid conspiracy theories.
This only shows me that in the USA if the government does not like your question, they will use whatever means necessary to silent you.
No it doesn't. It shows that if you're a nutcase disturbing hundreds of people in an auditorium, and you struggle against the police when they try to remove you, the police will use necessary force to remove you.
What country do you live in where this does not/would not happen? Seriously, I'd like to know so I can look up a counter-example in Google News.
And another thing that amused me was how people were just sitting there watching and it seems no one tried to help him.
Help him how? By fighting the police? I guess Americans are just more civilized than you're used to-- the way we fight the police is after the arrest in the court system, we don't start brawls in crowded auditoriums.
Besides, this guy was obstructing the event and monopolizing the speaker. I would wager the other participants were happy to see him taken away, they were trying to listen to Kerry, not this crazy jerk's wild-ass conspiracy theories.
Howly shit, that seems quite similar to what happens in other matters in the USA when people is fucked by their government.
They use the court system to solve the issue? Yes, that is similar to what happens with other matters. It's called "civilization," you should try it.
Interesting. So Vista Home doesn't come with a DVD decoder, but Vista Home Premium does. Would be a lot more accurate for people to state this, instead of just authoritatively stating "Windows doesn't play DVDs." When people say "Windows doesn't play DVDs", and I played a DVD on my vanilla Windows just a few days ago, I start thinking that probably everything else they said was a lie too.
The biggest excuse for Linux users on this forum for ages has been that reviews of Linux are unfair because Windows came pre-installed and Linux didn't. Now you're saying the exact opposite!
The reason is that the average computer use does not do ipods or cameras.
Are you serious? This has to be a troll. My parents, with no computer skills (or really much interest) have between them 2 iPods (one white b/w 30gb one, one newer Shuffle) and a Fuji digital camera. And are capable of using those devices with no problems, although they do only sync one iPod to the laptop and one to the desktop.
Oh the laptop's also on a wifi network, I guess that's a "power user" thing to your mind too.
My copy of Windows Media Player on my brand new install of Vista Home Premium plays DVDs just fine. As does Media Center. You're the second person in this discussion to say that Windows Media Player doesn't play DVDs... what makes you say this?
Really? I bought a new computer, put in a DVD and Windows Media Player started up and played it right away. I didn't think it did a tremendous job of it (used way too much CPU for something so basic), but it played DVDs and the computer had nothing but Windows.
This is really a Dell configuration issue - they should have included a touchpad sensitivity tool in the System--Preferences menu. They didn't think of it. If someone reports the bug to them, they'll likely fix it in their next install image. But let's not confuse OEM configuration with OS flaws.
Is he reviewing Linux, or reviewing this specific model of laptop? If the latter, then it's perfectly fair for him to point out that it lacks a tool to adjust touchpad sensitivity.
Eh dunno, I'm not a software developer. Firefox and OpenOffice seem to manage it with no problem. (Well, OpenOffice isn't native on OS X, but there is a native OS X project for it which shows that making it native isn't too tough.)
Re:This is exactly why I hate GUIs
on
The GIMP UI Redesign
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The GUI they use now would have been great on Mac Classic, where all an application's windows were on the same layer and there was only one application menu at the top of the screen. (In fact, this is what Photoshop looked like when it was originally developed for Macintosh.) The reason this worked is because when you switched from one application to another, ALL of the first application's windows moved behind ALL of the second application's windows... applications were in their own "layer."
This no longer applies. OS X doesn't do it. Windows doesn't (and never did) do it. Linux GUIs don't (and never did) do it. GIMP is using a 1984 GUI model in the modern era, and it's simply not working. (Personally, I liked Mac Classic's model, but I'm also pretty good at coping with reality when things change.)
Even worse, each of the GIMP windows have menus in them, leaving you in that mysterious position of not being to figure out exactly which ones are supposed to be palettes and which are supposed to contain the image. (Especially when you, as a new user, first open the program.) To make things even worse-worse, GIMP used to have two seperate File menus, one of which was actually used to open an image file, and the other one... totally different.
So my first suggestion is for GIMP to implement its palettes like virtually every modern application does. Paint.NET would be an excellent model on Windows... its palettes can exist happily in the main window, or outside it, but it's always clearly obvious which windows are palettes. (Don't use the Macromedia/Dreamweaver Flash example, which constantly pisses me off.)
Secondly, and this is a major change that will probably take a few revisions, but ditch your widget library. GTK, I believe. It requires a seperate application package on Windows, which gives the user a headache for virtually no benefit. It requires that the Mac OS X port run in X11, which is a usability nightmare on Macs. (And has irritating bugs on Mac that never seem to get addressed and/or fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 has been a thorn in my side for a year now, and it's still "unconfirmed.")
But what GIMP really needs is lots, and lots of development. This means community-building, the way the Firefox team did before the release of 1.0. GIMP needs a totally new UI, it needs a ton more features if it desires to be competitive with Photoshop, and it needs the community with the size and activity to make this happen. Right now, GIMP development is glacial. (My first suggestion would be to change the name, so people could say in public "I work on GIMP" without being laughed at or feeling embarassed.)
Add my name to your list. GIMP (or The GIMP) is among the worst software names ever. "Image Manipulation Program" isn't much better. (Imp would be better, through, go figure.) If you're a GIMP big-shot and you want some name ideas, pop me off an email. I could come up with tons in a couple hours.
It reminds me of when I learned that the Chrysler PT Cruiser (which is a cool name) actually stood for "Personal Transportation Cruiser" (possibly the worst name ever.) Except that GIMP isn't a cool name to start with.
Skins are almost always a bad idea. Skins make supporting a product nearly impossible. ("How do I do X?" "You click the circle then..." "I don't have a circle." "Oh, what skin are you using?" "I dunno.")
But more to the point, skins can't solve actual usability issues, only skin over them. For instance, if you're using a pop-up menu with 36,000 items in it, it's going to be hard to use no matter what skin is running. There's no way to skin that into a menu with a sane number of options. Skinning GIMP on Windows won't (and can't) fix it's awkward treatment of control palettes, it'll just make the awkward palettes look different.
As an exercise, look at it this way: Imagine that you took the even-more-terrible GIMP 1.x UI (where virtually every command was in one HUGE contextual, but not really contextual, menu), and skinned it to look like OS X. Do you honestly believe that would have improved its usability on OS X?
1) You're assuming that this change is intended purely to alienate Linux users. This change was probably made for some other reason, and alienating Linux users was a (possibly unintended) side-effect of it.
2) The iPod never claimed to carry any sort of support for Linux whatsoever. It seems to me that if you wanted to support Linux, you'd buy a product that actually supports Linux instead of one that doesn't-- and then complaining when the hack you're using to get it to work no longer works!
Translation: Remember when we copied Google in the whole mapping and Google Earth thing? Yeah, that was actually totally our idea. I don't recall who came first but I'm certain it was Microsoft.
Uh, didn't Terraserver come about 1-2 years before Google Earth ever got started up? I certainly remember browsing Terraserver before I'd even heard of Google Maps or Google Earth.
Just look at how late they were in offering a memory-protected multitasking OS.
They beat Apple, an equally well-established company with a huge userbase, by nearly a decade. Just to inject a teeny bit of reality into the equation there.
Or, it could just mean that they're making a network game/MMO and want to use Linux to power the servers that talk to Windows clients. This could easily be explained if they already have a good portion of the Windows networking code working for the game (thus porting from Windows to Linux for the server.) It could be they started development with the idea of using Windows Server, but then decided to switch to Linux or add a Linux option.
Well, firstly, I don't think a lot of people DO care a lot about Gamerscores and Achievements. If you could provide some evidence for that claim, I'd appreciate it.
Secondly, since Halo 2 keeps tracks of stats whether or not you "care" about them, how can you possibly know whether most players playing Halo 2 do so because it's fun, or because they can increase their stats?
Thirdly, being a fun game and catering to people who like to compete are not in any way, shape or form mutually-exclusive, so I don't really even see any illustration of the point at all.
You're making a couple leaps of logic there, and I'm not willing to leap behind you without something a bit more meatier. It seems like we're in "wow, everything Nintendo does is better, rah rah rah" territory at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly, I haven't played any of the games in this series except the Xbox version, Panzer Dragoon Orta. Despite being too short, it's a great, great, tremendously good game. Best graphics of any Xbox launch title, ingenious, easy-to-learn gameplay, interesting sci-fi setting. I admit it, I cried at the end. Plus it starred the craziest insect-dragon-bone-thing ever:
http://schend.net/images/games/dragon.jpg
Yes, well, I never graduated high school or even elementary school! But every day, 40 supermodels come to my house and bathe me twice, and last year I made 4 million dollars while saving the world from terrorists! So you see this article is totally wrong.
Attempts to install on other distributions will result in silent failures of the installer, undocumented files all over the place, or if you are really lucky (as I was) it will install, but then inexplicably fail to launch after two weeks of very buggy use.
:)
So... it works as well on Linux as it does on Windows and OS X?
Amen.
Lotus Notes is a classic example of a developer team that, simply put, does not get it.
Users complain that it's terrible at email; Notes devs answer that it's not designed to do email. Users ask "then why does IBM sell it as an Outlook replacement?" (No answer.) Users ask why the "out of office" feature doesn't work half the time, and they start talking about "replication", "databases", etc. The developers are so out-of-touch with the common computer user, it's like they're aliens or something.
IBM's plan of operation with Notes seems to be to sell Notes/Domino to a business along with a suite of "solutions" (all implemented as Lotus Notes databases.) Then when the business's users complain about how crappy it is, to sell them "consulting" at hugely inflated rates to fix the problems that should have been fixed ten years ago.
You might complain that Exchange/Outlook sucks, but it works out-of-the-box much better than Notes, and it costs half as much per-seat.
(Can you tell I had to work helpdesk at a IBM shop?)
Oh, and memo to IBM: It doesn't count as a "web app" if it relies on Java to do ANYTHING, even a basic menu which would easily be implemented in Javascript.
Dude, have you tried IBM Lotus Notes for Mac?
I can practically guarantee it will suck. It will make the Windows UI look good, and the Windows UI sucks. Prepare for random crashes. Get ready for bloated, super-slow performance. Welcome to the land of UI elements with really teeny fonts, but you can't change the font size.
It'll suck.
ibm is a much more trusted source in the eyes of all sizes of businesses.
All sizes of businesses use Office and Windows. Virtually ALL businesses use Office and Windows. IBM has a stranglehold in some areas, for instance medical industries. That said, I haven't seen a small business anywhere using any IBM products other than perhaps Point Of Sale. For medium and large businesses, I would wager nearly all of them spend more money to Microsoft than they do to IBM. (And I bet they get a hell of a lot more Return of Investment from Microsoft products. The quality difference between, for example, Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes is staggering.)
its joining the open office movement have made the movement pass the critical mass.
Uh. Evidence? Reference? Link?
now open office and variants are practically de facto office suites of future.
Call me when I actually can walk into a randomly-selected office and have a chance of seeing a copy of OpenOffice running.
Personally I found his questions interesting, and I think that there was no right for police to arrest him, I believe that Kerry should have answered his questions and defend himself in political way.
Kerry did answer his question, or try to. The nut-case wouldn't shut up long enough for anybody else to get a word in edgewise. Besides, he was just spouting paranoid conspiracy theories.
This only shows me that in the USA if the government does not like your question, they will use whatever means necessary to silent you.
No it doesn't. It shows that if you're a nutcase disturbing hundreds of people in an auditorium, and you struggle against the police when they try to remove you, the police will use necessary force to remove you.
What country do you live in where this does not/would not happen? Seriously, I'd like to know so I can look up a counter-example in Google News.
And another thing that amused me was how people were just sitting there watching and it seems no one tried to help him.
Help him how? By fighting the police? I guess Americans are just more civilized than you're used to-- the way we fight the police is after the arrest in the court system, we don't start brawls in crowded auditoriums.
Besides, this guy was obstructing the event and monopolizing the speaker. I would wager the other participants were happy to see him taken away, they were trying to listen to Kerry, not this crazy jerk's wild-ass conspiracy theories.
Howly shit, that seems quite similar to what happens in other matters in the USA when people is fucked by their government.
They use the court system to solve the issue? Yes, that is similar to what happens with other matters. It's called "civilization," you should try it.
But can I use it to buy David Carradine's masterpiece, Death Race 2000?
Interesting. So Vista Home doesn't come with a DVD decoder, but Vista Home Premium does. Would be a lot more accurate for people to state this, instead of just authoritatively stating "Windows doesn't play DVDs." When people say "Windows doesn't play DVDs", and I played a DVD on my vanilla Windows just a few days ago, I start thinking that probably everything else they said was a lie too.
The biggest excuse for Linux users on this forum for ages has been that reviews of Linux are unfair because Windows came pre-installed and Linux didn't. Now you're saying the exact opposite!
The reason is that the average computer use does not do ipods or cameras.
Are you serious? This has to be a troll. My parents, with no computer skills (or really much interest) have between them 2 iPods (one white b/w 30gb one, one newer Shuffle) and a Fuji digital camera. And are capable of using those devices with no problems, although they do only sync one iPod to the laptop and one to the desktop.
Oh the laptop's also on a wifi network, I guess that's a "power user" thing to your mind too.
My copy of Windows Media Player on my brand new install of Vista Home Premium plays DVDs just fine. As does Media Center. You're the second person in this discussion to say that Windows Media Player doesn't play DVDs... what makes you say this?
MS and Apple can pay this, Ubuntu can't.
Why not?
Firefox seems to be able to pay all its bills. So does Wikipedia, although they're almost always having a funding drive. Why can't Ubuntu?
Really? I bought a new computer, put in a DVD and Windows Media Player started up and played it right away. I didn't think it did a tremendous job of it (used way too much CPU for something so basic), but it played DVDs and the computer had nothing but Windows.
This is really a Dell configuration issue - they should have included a touchpad sensitivity tool in the System--Preferences menu. They didn't think of it. If someone reports the bug to them, they'll likely fix it in their next install image. But let's not confuse OEM configuration with OS flaws.
Is he reviewing Linux, or reviewing this specific model of laptop? If the latter, then it's perfectly fair for him to point out that it lacks a tool to adjust touchpad sensitivity.
Eh dunno, I'm not a software developer. Firefox and OpenOffice seem to manage it with no problem. (Well, OpenOffice isn't native on OS X, but there is a native OS X project for it which shows that making it native isn't too tough.)
The GUI they use now would have been great on Mac Classic, where all an application's windows were on the same layer and there was only one application menu at the top of the screen. (In fact, this is what Photoshop looked like when it was originally developed for Macintosh.) The reason this worked is because when you switched from one application to another, ALL of the first application's windows moved behind ALL of the second application's windows... applications were in their own "layer."
This no longer applies. OS X doesn't do it. Windows doesn't (and never did) do it. Linux GUIs don't (and never did) do it. GIMP is using a 1984 GUI model in the modern era, and it's simply not working. (Personally, I liked Mac Classic's model, but I'm also pretty good at coping with reality when things change.)
Even worse, each of the GIMP windows have menus in them, leaving you in that mysterious position of not being to figure out exactly which ones are supposed to be palettes and which are supposed to contain the image. (Especially when you, as a new user, first open the program.) To make things even worse-worse, GIMP used to have two seperate File menus, one of which was actually used to open an image file, and the other one... totally different.
So my first suggestion is for GIMP to implement its palettes like virtually every modern application does. Paint.NET would be an excellent model on Windows... its palettes can exist happily in the main window, or outside it, but it's always clearly obvious which windows are palettes. (Don't use the Macromedia/Dreamweaver Flash example, which constantly pisses me off.)
Secondly, and this is a major change that will probably take a few revisions, but ditch your widget library. GTK, I believe. It requires a seperate application package on Windows, which gives the user a headache for virtually no benefit. It requires that the Mac OS X port run in X11, which is a usability nightmare on Macs. (And has irritating bugs on Mac that never seem to get addressed and/or fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 has been a thorn in my side for a year now, and it's still "unconfirmed.")
But what GIMP really needs is lots, and lots of development. This means community-building, the way the Firefox team did before the release of 1.0. GIMP needs a totally new UI, it needs a ton more features if it desires to be competitive with Photoshop, and it needs the community with the size and activity to make this happen. Right now, GIMP development is glacial. (My first suggestion would be to change the name, so people could say in public "I work on GIMP" without being laughed at or feeling embarassed.)
Add my name to your list. GIMP (or The GIMP) is among the worst software names ever. "Image Manipulation Program" isn't much better. (Imp would be better, through, go figure.) If you're a GIMP big-shot and you want some name ideas, pop me off an email. I could come up with tons in a couple hours.
It reminds me of when I learned that the Chrysler PT Cruiser (which is a cool name) actually stood for "Personal Transportation Cruiser" (possibly the worst name ever.) Except that GIMP isn't a cool name to start with.
Skins are almost always a bad idea. Skins make supporting a product nearly impossible. ("How do I do X?" "You click the circle then..." "I don't have a circle." "Oh, what skin are you using?" "I dunno.")
But more to the point, skins can't solve actual usability issues, only skin over them. For instance, if you're using a pop-up menu with 36,000 items in it, it's going to be hard to use no matter what skin is running. There's no way to skin that into a menu with a sane number of options. Skinning GIMP on Windows won't (and can't) fix it's awkward treatment of control palettes, it'll just make the awkward palettes look different.
As an exercise, look at it this way: Imagine that you took the even-more-terrible GIMP 1.x UI (where virtually every command was in one HUGE contextual, but not really contextual, menu), and skinned it to look like OS X. Do you honestly believe that would have improved its usability on OS X?
I guess the first step would be to stop the blatant lies in the Slashdot posts. ;)
Two points:
1) You're assuming that this change is intended purely to alienate Linux users. This change was probably made for some other reason, and alienating Linux users was a (possibly unintended) side-effect of it.
2) The iPod never claimed to carry any sort of support for Linux whatsoever. It seems to me that if you wanted to support Linux, you'd buy a product that actually supports Linux instead of one that doesn't-- and then complaining when the hack you're using to get it to work no longer works!
Translation: Remember when we copied Google in the whole mapping and Google Earth thing? Yeah, that was actually totally our idea. I don't recall who came first but I'm certain it was Microsoft.
Uh, didn't Terraserver come about 1-2 years before Google Earth ever got started up? I certainly remember browsing Terraserver before I'd even heard of Google Maps or Google Earth.
Just look at how late they were in offering a memory-protected multitasking OS.
They beat Apple, an equally well-established company with a huge userbase, by nearly a decade. Just to inject a teeny bit of reality into the equation there.
Or, it could just mean that they're making a network game/MMO and want to use Linux to power the servers that talk to Windows clients. This could easily be explained if they already have a good portion of the Windows networking code working for the game (thus porting from Windows to Linux for the server.) It could be they started development with the idea of using Windows Server, but then decided to switch to Linux or add a Linux option.
Well, firstly, I don't think a lot of people DO care a lot about Gamerscores and Achievements. If you could provide some evidence for that claim, I'd appreciate it.
Secondly, since Halo 2 keeps tracks of stats whether or not you "care" about them, how can you possibly know whether most players playing Halo 2 do so because it's fun, or because they can increase their stats?
Thirdly, being a fun game and catering to people who like to compete are not in any way, shape or form mutually-exclusive, so I don't really even see any illustration of the point at all.
You're making a couple leaps of logic there, and I'm not willing to leap behind you without something a bit more meatier. It seems like we're in "wow, everything Nintendo does is better, rah rah rah" territory at this point.