Knowing Accenture, I'm guessing the stupid.net decision was theirs, and Microsoft's involvement was more along the lines of, "they want to use.net for THIS? Fuck... well let's see what we can do with it!"
Has anybody been involved with a *successful* Accenture project? How are those guys still in business?
There's a bug in their bugtracker (which they haven't read). There's also a bug in there about the feedback email bouncing. (Which also hasn't been read.) I'm guessing all their email addresses are broken, and the Slashdot staff is just sitting around with a big grin going, "wow our website's great, NO BUGS!" Or their incompetent nitwits, one or the other.
The solution is to go to Help and Preferences, and under Discussion: Viewing uncheck the top-most item. (It's called something like "Dynamic Discussion System D2" IIRC.) That should give you the old comments back. There's a *different* setting for the index pages, which you may have to toggle as well.
Of course there are two Deloreans. Doc's and Marty's. It's not a plot hole at all, the whole point is that they can't gut Doc's DeLorean for parts since it would create a paradox and prevent Marty from going back in time to 1885.
It's been a long time since I've seen the movies, but I'm pretty (75%) sure that they not only discuss this, but show Doc's DeLorean broken down in a mine or somewhere.
Too bad it doesn't work anymore. Not on my account at least. (Per usual, the devs here completely ignore the bug report, and the feedback email address at the top of every comment page doesn't fucking work. QUALITY!!)
I suppose it's supposed to add extra evidence to help convert the evolution-nay-sayers, but frankly, they're preaching to a (relatively) deaf choir, in that case.
If I was a evolution nay-sayer, I could very well believe that a computer can *simulate* evolution without also believing that humans are the result of evolution. So... if that's the purpose, someone didn't think it all the way through. I still don't really get it but, ok whatever.
And why one well-paid Unix admin can outperform 10 MCSEs struggling to keep their servers afloat.
Speaking of weasel-words, why are you setting up an unfair comparison? Why if the Windows admins are "well-paid" as well? What happens if the Windows admin is good, but doesn't have an MCSE?
What universe are you living in where there are no good Windows admins and no bad Unix admins? I can tell you from experience: there are good and bad of both. (The worst, however, are Lotus Notes admins. Ugh.)
Microsoft has gotten better lately wrt tools, but overall Windows servers still are light years behind a *nix server with solid hardware.
Ok I'll bite: how? In what way are they behind? What tools do they lack?
Please make sure your argument applies in 2010, i.e. don't give me examples from Windows NT 4 like so many *nix fans usually do.
Yeah, it's great when we can write a few shell or Perl scripts to perform simple tasks, but sometimes that's just not sufficient. Sometimes we do have to write our own code. While UNIX offers a very practical and powerful environment, we shouldn't waste our time trying to convolute its utilities to all sorts of problems, especially when it'll be quicker, easier and significantly more maintainable to roll some tools by hand.
What bugs me more is the assumption that there's some huge divide between "shell scripts" (no debugging! easy piecing together of tools!) and a modern language with a large library. At best it's a continuum.
Look, if you have a 20 line shellscript doing something bug-free, that's going to be 20 lines in C# or Ruby or (insert your favorite) as well. There's no difference between one and the other... if anything, writing your 20 line of shellscript takes a significantly longer time to learn and requires tons of rote memorization.
That doesn't make much more sense than the summary. But at least you didn't bring in as much breathless enthusiasm, and kept it a little more rational.
Look, simple question: what does the app *do*? What's the *point* of "evolving" these things? That's the missing part.
You're right in that they're going about this the wrong way. However, I think the closed nature of the console is exactly what causes these cracks and hacks to appear. What Sony should do is open up a sandbox environment in the PS3 in which homebrew developers can run their own software without problems. I don't see why piracy and homebrew are always treated as one by these console developers.
Xbox 360 supports homebrew officially. There's a small fee, though, $99 IIRC.
That said, the Xbox has probably been cracked anyway (I don't know for sure.)
Some Chiropractors *are* doctors. My friend is a Chiropractor who is also a licensed family medicine doctor, for example. It all depends on what school they went do.
The one where commands to the browser are given textually, line by line. It's not that hard to figure out. I've admitted from the very beginning that there's a set of visually oriented tasks for which a GUI is the natural choice. It is in no way hypocritical of me to use them where appropriate. Nice try though.
You know this whole conversation is pointless considering the above and this:
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
Which are also command line environments.
Yes, they're command-line environments, but they don't have command-line *interfaces*. Which, you may recall, is obstensibly what we were fucking talking about!
So you consider *everything* a CLI, even if it's just a CL. Proving one of two things: 1) You're not making any statement about CLIs, you're just talking about preferring text to other types of input. 2) You don't even know what CLI actually is.
If applications that let you type script (into a GUI window) and execute it (using a GUI IDE environment) counts as a CLI, well, then... so does pretty much everything! Hey, you can type commands like "=lorem(100,100)" into Word, therefore Word's is a CLI application!! You can type formulas into Excel, therefore Excel's a CLI application!
Seriously, man. WTF is wrong with you. What a waste of both our time.
Any organization small enough to have trouble funding and domain controller Doesn't need one.
Possibly not, but if Microsoft sells a server in that space (Small Business Server), and *nux doesn't, then Microsoft is going to get those sales. Whether or not they "needed" the server.
Vimperator puts a command line at the bottom of the firefox window (and removes the menu/toolbar) so I can view a document graphically and manipulate it textually within the same window. It's a pretty wonderful fusion.
Under what Laws of Time and Space is using that *not* using a GUI? "Yes, CLIs are superior. I know because I use this GUI all the time. It kind of resembles a CLI if you squint a bit."
If you believe CLIs are that superior, why are *you* of all people not using one? Christ. Now you're delusional *and* a hypocrite.
Here's one I encountered not too long ago. We have a folder full of image files, either TIFF or JPG, but they were saved without extensions. Add the proper extension to each file, and convert every TIFF that doesn't have a JPG counterpart to JPG, saving the TIFF original.
I love these crazy examples. How often do you have to do that? Once a day? Once a week? Once every 10 years? Maybe?
The GUI user who brought me this task had no clue how to do it with a GUI. I have no clue how to do it with a GUI.
So you know for sure CLIs are more powerful than GUIs, but you don't know how to fucking USE ONE?! Tell us again why you're qualified to have an opinion on this point?
It was only a couple lines in Bash though. You could, I suppose, write a custom batch rename GUI for such a task.
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
The average GUI user would right click and open every file and manually convert each one with "save as". That gets exceedingly tedious after the first couple dozen.
That says nothing about GUIs or CLIs, it only says if someone is ignorant of computers they might do the task manually. It's just as likely this hypothetical person would manually convert each one on the CLI.
If the analogy in quotes isn't intended to clarify the point immediately preceding it that I allegedly missed, then I don't know what it was for.
It is, but you're thinking too narrowly. First statement was specific to ease-of-learning. You got that.
But the second part (in quotes) was a more generalized example lampooning your method of arbitrarily discarding aspects of the product you didn't like in order to make it more competitive. In this second part, I used passenger capacity, speed, and safety as the criteria I was ignoring, *not* ease-of-use. It wasn't intended to clarify the preceding sentence, but to expand on it.
Note that this isn't the only place you think to narrowly. For example, this entire conversation!
Vimperator actually. Viewing documents, like images and videos, is a visual task for which a GUI is useful. For actually interacting with the document, I still prefer a command environment.
So you open it up in Vimperator (which appears to be Firefox), but keep a CLI handy in another window (or another computer entirely-- after all windows are a nasty GUI concept you hate!) with Lynx to fill-in forms? One GUI browser to look at the pretty pictures, and another CLI browser to interact with the document?
Yeah, right.
Not sure why you'd do that.
There's a kajillion reasons, but I doubt you care because you're stuck in self-destructive a "no software made after 1977 can possibly be any good" mindset.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Loops, variables, pipes, etc.
What TASKS do you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Excuse me, for a moment there I thought I was talking to a normal human being speaking normal human being English, and not some kind of ridiculous caricature of a bearded Unix hacker. If you're unable to separate the concept of "tasks" from "features", then I guess it's pretty hopeless, huh?
The learning curve is irrelevant when you're comparing capabilities. What matters is how much can be done, not how much can be done by a naive user within 10 minutes.
Why? By what metrics?
Similarly an OS might be easy to use, but over the long term less useful than one that takes longer to learn but can do more.
Ok I'll bite: what OS is "less useful" than another? In what way?
Your example is bogus. The 777 is easier to learn to fly,
The example didn't use learning curve as a parameter. Congratulations! Not only did you fail to understand it, you failed to even COMPREHEND it! The rare Double-Fail.
Use Vim and reload the browser when you write out the file.
You mean Lynx? Or are you saying to run the browser in a *gasp* GUI? (Because the latter I count as cheating: you're using a GUI for the task! Cheater.)
Writing code itself is a CLI. There's a reason computer languages are textual and not graphical. Figure that out and you'll understand why the CLI is superior.
Not if you're writing the code in a IDE, which is what I was referring to. I guess I have to be more explicit next time... or perhaps you also count an IDE as a "CLI"? Since you're already cheating on the browser example, I'm guessing you might.
The GUI is easier to learn, but it's also less capable.
How?
The CLI is harder to learn, but you can do a lot more with it.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
That makes it superior.
No; that makes it a trade off. If I'm Hatta, and I completely discount learning curve as a factor in judging something, CLI's *might* be better than a GUI. (But... still probably not.) But again: you're cheating. You can't just arbitrary decide that certain factors aren't important when considering two things, not unless those factors are the same across-the-board.
Look at my 777 vs. Wright Flyer example, that's exactly what you're doing!
It's not even worth trying to discuss this with you.
It's the other way around. The GUI is superior for a few tasks (random access file picking, image manipulation), and inferior for everything else.
So you edit films in a CLI? Play video games in a CLI? Write your documents in a CLI, even though you don't get WYSIWYG that way? Create websites in a CLI? (How do you preview them?)
Hell, for that matter, write computer code in a CLI? Even *writing code* has been supplanted by the GUI solution....
You're either the least-imaginative person on Earth, or completely deluding yourself.
The reason the GUI was adopted so widely is because it's easier to learn, not because it's superior in general.
Being easier-to-learn *makes* it superior. Way to miss the point. "If you ignore the fact that it can transport 200+ people in comfort, safety at 550 MPH, the 777 is far inferior to the Wright Flyer."
And that makes sense, a tool that is less powerful is generally easier to use.
The "less powerful" assertion here is not only unproved, but not actually supported at all. As far as I'm concerned, giving millions or billions of people the power to edit movies, photos, create beautiful documents, etc. makes the GUI significantly *more* powerful than any CLI around.
(The term also extremely vague, meaning you'll just redefine it to make CLIs look superior the instant you need to.)
Let's look at your argument through the traditional car analogy. That the automatic transmission is so widely used must mean that it's superior to the manual transmission right?
Yes.
No. For someone who knows what they are doing, the manual transmission is superior in every way.
Wrong: it's not superior when my goal is to drive while eating french fries. So you're factually wrong off the bat.
But let's assume you're correct. If a manual transmission is superior *in every way* (your words) than an automatic, why are millions of automatic transmissions sold each year? What's your explanation for your phenomenon? Do you honestly believe millions of people are going out of their way to use the inferior product? Do you think everybody in the world except you is insane?
Look, it's really retarded to even have this conversation, because the last 20 years of computer sales have already proven beyond a doubt that the GUI is the superior interface. The only way you can even slightly support your position is to arbitrary discount points in the GUI's favor (its ease-of-use.) Other than that, the only real support you've given is the term "more powerful" which is conveniently re-definable to be whatever you'd like it to be.
My last remaining question is, do you literally and genuinely believe this ridiculous position? Or are you arguing for some other reason?
I'd add that usability is often a rather different discipline to software design, and for some reason usability experts don't seem to be too common in the F/OSS world.
Usability advice on open source projects is, at best, completely ignored. At worst, they're yelled at for pointing out solvable issues with providing patches. This is untested advice, of course, as genuine usability testing requires at least some amount of money and most open source projects won't shell out for it.
(There are exceptions; both KDE and GNOME used to do good usability work, but I haven't been keeping up on what they're doing now. Firefox managed to get usability by giving usability-obsessed developers say on UI-related development. But finding people who are good at both usability *and* development is near-impossible.)
Another poster here mentioned this (and sadly I didn't bookmark it), but the real attribute lacking from open source developers is *empathy*. Before you can make any advances in usability, you have to care that your software is hard-to-use, and frankly I don't think most open source developers care.
My guess is that they tried telling a few F/OSS developers how unusable their product was and are still in hospital.
It doesn't have to be Linux's fault to be Linux's problem.
The CLI is used because it is superior to the GUI, much like verbal language is superior to pointing and grunting. If learning a new language is too much for you, don't switch to Linux and don't move to Rome.
For some small subset of tasks, it's superior to the GUI. For the majority of tasks, it is not. This seems pretty obvious to me; if that wasn't the case, why would the GUI even have been invented and widely deployed?
Well, not that it excuses ranting or FUD, but Bing has been far more successful for making Google (gasp) actually *compete* than any other search service before. Look how quickly Google scrambled to improve their image and video search after Bing showed them how it should be done.
If I worked on Bing, I'd be proud of it too, is what I'm saying.
The Dymaxion car was a long, hollow aluminum tube on three wheels. Efficient, perhaps, but a safety nightmare-- Fuller was lucky that there were practically no safety requirements for cars at the time.
In everyday usage, it could be shortened to FuckOff, like:
"What's that Open Source office suite you are using?"
"FuckOff."
"Wow, thanks. Gotta get me some of that." or
"How can I convert this mysterious ODF document into Word format to read it on my Win98 computer?"
"FuckOff."
"Thank you, helpful person."
I know you're joking, but that name still beats GIMP!
Slashdot Mirror
The correct (human) response to that is: "you're an asshole!" If it says anything else, it's a bot.
Knowing Accenture, I'm guessing the stupid .net decision was theirs, and Microsoft's involvement was more along the lines of, "they want to use .net for THIS? Fuck... well let's see what we can do with it!"
Has anybody been involved with a *successful* Accenture project? How are those guys still in business?
There's a bug in their bugtracker (which they haven't read). There's also a bug in there about the feedback email bouncing. (Which also hasn't been read.) I'm guessing all their email addresses are broken, and the Slashdot staff is just sitting around with a big grin going, "wow our website's great, NO BUGS!" Or their incompetent nitwits, one or the other.
The solution is to go to Help and Preferences, and under Discussion: Viewing uncheck the top-most item. (It's called something like "Dynamic Discussion System D2" IIRC.) That should give you the old comments back. There's a *different* setting for the index pages, which you may have to toggle as well.
Of course there are two Deloreans. Doc's and Marty's. It's not a plot hole at all, the whole point is that they can't gut Doc's DeLorean for parts since it would create a paradox and prevent Marty from going back in time to 1885.
It's been a long time since I've seen the movies, but I'm pretty (75%) sure that they not only discuss this, but show Doc's DeLorean broken down in a mine or somewhere.
Too bad it doesn't work anymore. Not on my account at least. (Per usual, the devs here completely ignore the bug report, and the feedback email address at the top of every comment page doesn't fucking work. QUALITY!!)
I suppose it's supposed to add extra evidence to help convert the evolution-nay-sayers, but frankly, they're preaching to a (relatively) deaf choir, in that case.
If I was a evolution nay-sayer, I could very well believe that a computer can *simulate* evolution without also believing that humans are the result of evolution. So... if that's the purpose, someone didn't think it all the way through. I still don't really get it but, ok whatever.
And why one well-paid Unix admin can outperform 10 MCSEs struggling to keep their servers afloat.
Speaking of weasel-words, why are you setting up an unfair comparison? Why if the Windows admins are "well-paid" as well? What happens if the Windows admin is good, but doesn't have an MCSE?
What universe are you living in where there are no good Windows admins and no bad Unix admins? I can tell you from experience: there are good and bad of both. (The worst, however, are Lotus Notes admins. Ugh.)
Microsoft has gotten better lately wrt tools, but overall Windows servers still are light years behind a *nix server with solid hardware.
Ok I'll bite: how? In what way are they behind? What tools do they lack?
Please make sure your argument applies in 2010, i.e. don't give me examples from Windows NT 4 like so many *nix fans usually do.
Yeah, it's great when we can write a few shell or Perl scripts to perform simple tasks, but sometimes that's just not sufficient. Sometimes we do have to write our own code. While UNIX offers a very practical and powerful environment, we shouldn't waste our time trying to convolute its utilities to all sorts of problems, especially when it'll be quicker, easier and significantly more maintainable to roll some tools by hand.
What bugs me more is the assumption that there's some huge divide between "shell scripts" (no debugging! easy piecing together of tools!) and a modern language with a large library. At best it's a continuum.
Look, if you have a 20 line shellscript doing something bug-free, that's going to be 20 lines in C# or Ruby or (insert your favorite) as well. There's no difference between one and the other... if anything, writing your 20 line of shellscript takes a significantly longer time to learn and requires tons of rote memorization.
That doesn't make much more sense than the summary. But at least you didn't bring in as much breathless enthusiasm, and kept it a little more rational.
Look, simple question: what does the app *do*? What's the *point* of "evolving" these things? That's the missing part.
You're right in that they're going about this the wrong way. However, I think the closed nature of the console is exactly what causes these cracks and hacks to appear. What Sony should do is open up a sandbox environment in the PS3 in which homebrew developers can run their own software without problems. I don't see why piracy and homebrew are always treated as one by these console developers.
Xbox 360 supports homebrew officially. There's a small fee, though, $99 IIRC.
That said, the Xbox has probably been cracked anyway (I don't know for sure.)
Here's my personal judging criteria:
1) Can use product without feeling urge to kill myself:
* Sharepoint: Yes
* Notes: No
The guy who created Lotus Notes was supposed to help Windows and Office become slimmer? For reals?
Who wrote this article? What a load of garbage. Microsoft should be thankful he didn't crapify any of their products, not lamenting losing his advice.
Some Chiropractors *are* doctors. My friend is a Chiropractor who is also a licensed family medicine doctor, for example. It all depends on what school they went do.
The one where commands to the browser are given textually, line by line. It's not that hard to figure out. I've admitted from the very beginning that there's a set of visually oriented tasks for which a GUI is the natural choice. It is in no way hypocritical of me to use them where appropriate. Nice try though.
You know this whole conversation is pointless considering the above and this:
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
Which are also command line environments.
Yes, they're command-line environments, but they don't have command-line *interfaces*. Which, you may recall, is obstensibly what we were fucking talking about!
So you consider *everything* a CLI, even if it's just a CL. Proving one of two things:
1) You're not making any statement about CLIs, you're just talking about preferring text to other types of input.
2) You don't even know what CLI actually is.
If applications that let you type script (into a GUI window) and execute it (using a GUI IDE environment) counts as a CLI, well, then ... so does pretty much everything! Hey, you can type commands like "=lorem(100,100)" into Word, therefore Word's is a CLI application!! You can type formulas into Excel, therefore Excel's a CLI application!
Seriously, man. WTF is wrong with you. What a waste of both our time.
Any organization small enough to have trouble funding and domain controller Doesn't need one.
Possibly not, but if Microsoft sells a server in that space (Small Business Server), and *nux doesn't, then Microsoft is going to get those sales. Whether or not they "needed" the server.
Although, frankly, I think you're dead wrong.
Vimperator puts a command line at the bottom of the firefox window (and removes the menu/toolbar) so I can view a document graphically and manipulate it textually within the same window. It's a pretty wonderful fusion.
Under what Laws of Time and Space is using that *not* using a GUI? "Yes, CLIs are superior. I know because I use this GUI all the time. It kind of resembles a CLI if you squint a bit."
If you believe CLIs are that superior, why are *you* of all people not using one? Christ. Now you're delusional *and* a hypocrite.
Here's one I encountered not too long ago. We have a folder full of image files, either TIFF or JPG, but they were saved without extensions. Add the proper extension to each file, and convert every TIFF that doesn't have a JPG counterpart to JPG, saving the TIFF original.
I love these crazy examples. How often do you have to do that? Once a day? Once a week? Once every 10 years? Maybe?
The GUI user who brought me this task had no clue how to do it with a GUI. I have no clue how to do it with a GUI.
So you know for sure CLIs are more powerful than GUIs, but you don't know how to fucking USE ONE?! Tell us again why you're qualified to have an opinion on this point?
It was only a couple lines in Bash though. You could, I suppose, write a custom batch rename GUI for such a task.
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
The average GUI user would right click and open every file and manually convert each one with "save as". That gets exceedingly tedious after the first couple dozen.
That says nothing about GUIs or CLIs, it only says if someone is ignorant of computers they might do the task manually. It's just as likely this hypothetical person would manually convert each one on the CLI.
If the analogy in quotes isn't intended to clarify the point immediately preceding it that I allegedly missed, then I don't know what it was for.
It is, but you're thinking too narrowly. First statement was specific to ease-of-learning. You got that.
But the second part (in quotes) was a more generalized example lampooning your method of arbitrarily discarding aspects of the product you didn't like in order to make it more competitive. In this second part, I used passenger capacity, speed, and safety as the criteria I was ignoring, *not* ease-of-use. It wasn't intended to clarify the preceding sentence, but to expand on it.
Note that this isn't the only place you think to narrowly. For example, this entire conversation!
Vimperator actually. Viewing documents, like images and videos, is a visual task for which a GUI is useful. For actually interacting with the document, I still prefer a command environment.
So you open it up in Vimperator (which appears to be Firefox), but keep a CLI handy in another window (or another computer entirely-- after all windows are a nasty GUI concept you hate!) with Lynx to fill-in forms? One GUI browser to look at the pretty pictures, and another CLI browser to interact with the document?
Yeah, right.
Not sure why you'd do that.
There's a kajillion reasons, but I doubt you care because you're stuck in self-destructive a "no software made after 1977 can possibly be any good" mindset.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Loops, variables, pipes, etc.
What TASKS do you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
Excuse me, for a moment there I thought I was talking to a normal human being speaking normal human being English, and not some kind of ridiculous caricature of a bearded Unix hacker. If you're unable to separate the concept of "tasks" from "features", then I guess it's pretty hopeless, huh?
The learning curve is irrelevant when you're comparing capabilities. What matters is how much can be done, not how much can be done by a naive user within 10 minutes.
Why? By what metrics?
Similarly an OS might be easy to use, but over the long term less useful than one that takes longer to learn but can do more.
Ok I'll bite: what OS is "less useful" than another? In what way?
Your example is bogus. The 777 is easier to learn to fly,
The example didn't use learning curve as a parameter. Congratulations! Not only did you fail to understand it, you failed to even COMPREHEND it! The rare Double-Fail.
Use Vim and reload the browser when you write out the file.
You mean Lynx? Or are you saying to run the browser in a *gasp* GUI? (Because the latter I count as cheating: you're using a GUI for the task! Cheater.)
Writing code itself is a CLI. There's a reason computer languages are textual and not graphical. Figure that out and you'll understand why the CLI is superior.
Not if you're writing the code in a IDE, which is what I was referring to. I guess I have to be more explicit next time... or perhaps you also count an IDE as a "CLI"? Since you're already cheating on the browser example, I'm guessing you might.
The GUI is easier to learn, but it's also less capable.
How?
The CLI is harder to learn, but you can do a lot more with it.
What more can you do? What can you do with a CLI that you can't with a GUI?
That makes it superior.
No; that makes it a trade off. If I'm Hatta, and I completely discount learning curve as a factor in judging something, CLI's *might* be better than a GUI. (But ... still probably not.) But again: you're cheating. You can't just arbitrary decide that certain factors aren't important when considering two things, not unless those factors are the same across-the-board.
Look at my 777 vs. Wright Flyer example, that's exactly what you're doing!
It's not even worth trying to discuss this with you.
It's the other way around. The GUI is superior for a few tasks (random access file picking, image manipulation), and inferior for everything else.
So you edit films in a CLI? Play video games in a CLI? Write your documents in a CLI, even though you don't get WYSIWYG that way? Create websites in a CLI? (How do you preview them?)
Hell, for that matter, write computer code in a CLI? Even *writing code* has been supplanted by the GUI solution....
You're either the least-imaginative person on Earth, or completely deluding yourself.
The reason the GUI was adopted so widely is because it's easier to learn, not because it's superior in general.
Being easier-to-learn *makes* it superior. Way to miss the point. "If you ignore the fact that it can transport 200+ people in comfort, safety at 550 MPH, the 777 is far inferior to the Wright Flyer."
And that makes sense, a tool that is less powerful is generally easier to use.
The "less powerful" assertion here is not only unproved, but not actually supported at all. As far as I'm concerned, giving millions or billions of people the power to edit movies, photos, create beautiful documents, etc. makes the GUI significantly *more* powerful than any CLI around.
(The term also extremely vague, meaning you'll just redefine it to make CLIs look superior the instant you need to.)
Let's look at your argument through the traditional car analogy. That the automatic transmission is so widely used must mean that it's superior to the manual transmission right?
Yes.
No. For someone who knows what they are doing, the manual transmission is superior in every way.
Wrong: it's not superior when my goal is to drive while eating french fries. So you're factually wrong off the bat.
But let's assume you're correct. If a manual transmission is superior *in every way* (your words) than an automatic, why are millions of automatic transmissions sold each year? What's your explanation for your phenomenon? Do you honestly believe millions of people are going out of their way to use the inferior product? Do you think everybody in the world except you is insane?
Look, it's really retarded to even have this conversation, because the last 20 years of computer sales have already proven beyond a doubt that the GUI is the superior interface. The only way you can even slightly support your position is to arbitrary discount points in the GUI's favor (its ease-of-use.) Other than that, the only real support you've given is the term "more powerful" which is conveniently re-definable to be whatever you'd like it to be.
My last remaining question is, do you literally and genuinely believe this ridiculous position? Or are you arguing for some other reason?
I'd add that usability is often a rather different discipline to software design, and for some reason usability experts don't seem to be too common in the F/OSS world.
Usability advice on open source projects is, at best, completely ignored. At worst, they're yelled at for pointing out solvable issues with providing patches. This is untested advice, of course, as genuine usability testing requires at least some amount of money and most open source projects won't shell out for it.
(There are exceptions; both KDE and GNOME used to do good usability work, but I haven't been keeping up on what they're doing now. Firefox managed to get usability by giving usability-obsessed developers say on UI-related development. But finding people who are good at both usability *and* development is near-impossible.)
Another poster here mentioned this (and sadly I didn't bookmark it), but the real attribute lacking from open source developers is *empathy*. Before you can make any advances in usability, you have to care that your software is hard-to-use, and frankly I don't think most open source developers care.
My guess is that they tried telling a few F/OSS developers how unusable their product was and are still in hospital.
Yah pretty much.
Vendor lock-in is not Linux's fault.
It doesn't have to be Linux's fault to be Linux's problem.
The CLI is used because it is superior to the GUI, much like verbal language is superior to pointing and grunting. If learning a new language is too much for you, don't switch to Linux and don't move to Rome.
For some small subset of tasks, it's superior to the GUI. For the majority of tasks, it is not. This seems pretty obvious to me; if that wasn't the case, why would the GUI even have been invented and widely deployed?
Well, not that it excuses ranting or FUD, but Bing has been far more successful for making Google (gasp) actually *compete* than any other search service before. Look how quickly Google scrambled to improve their image and video search after Bing showed them how it should be done.
If I worked on Bing, I'd be proud of it too, is what I'm saying.
Apple had it, back in the mid-late-80s. Then lost it in the early-90s. Then (just recently) got it again.
The Dymaxion car was a long, hollow aluminum tube on three wheels. Efficient, perhaps, but a safety nightmare-- Fuller was lucky that there were practically no safety requirements for cars at the time.
In everyday usage, it could be shortened to FuckOff, like:
"What's that Open Source office suite you are using?"
"FuckOff."
"Wow, thanks. Gotta get me some of that."
or
"How can I convert this mysterious ODF document into Word format to read it on my Win98 computer?"
"FuckOff."
"Thank you, helpful person."
I know you're joking, but that name still beats GIMP!