1) Despite writing OS X (or at least Aqua) basically from scratch, we ended up with an OS with at best the exact same level of usability, and arguably much worse usability. (Take, for example, the features in OS 9 that were left out of OS X, like Labels. Also see the OS X Finder, which I believe, the majority of users see as much worse than the Finder in OS 9.)
Since OS X isn't much, if at all, improved from OS 9, I don't see removing OS 9 support as a good thing.
2) Setting the OS aside, major Apple applications have, at best, not improved at all. Some of their flagship applications, like iTunes, are still strange-looking and clunky. Some, like Garage Band, resemble nothing else in the OS. The rest are pretty much bog-standard.
In short, I'm not that impressed with Apple as of late. Microsoft is willing to take risks to challenge common UI concepts, like Office 2007 and their task-based Explorer interface. Whether they work or not, they took the risk.
It would have been nice if the summary had explained what the hell "GMR" is or why anybody should care. I presume it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistive_effect except that the patent for that is held by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert, so I really have no clue if that's what they're talking about or not. Seems applicable to hard drives, at least.
Uh, yeah, but what does a copy of OpenOffice from 2000 look like?
Compare Apples to Apples. If you're going to compare an obsolete version of Word to OpenOffice, at least have the courtesy of comparing to an equally obsolete version of OpenOffice.
It never occurred to you that there's this thing called "usability testing" that can actually *prove* which interface is superior. And that Microsoft made use of this magical thing while designing Office 2007, and came to the conclusion that the ribbon interface was better enough that it was worth changing things around?
Seriously, it takes like 10 minutes to learn, and once you learn it, it's simply much, much better than the old rats nest of menus, dialogs, and toolbars.
Microsoft isn't full of morons; they wouldn't have put their flagship product out there with the ribbon interface unless they could prove statistically, via testing, that the interface is plain better. Hell, even if you totally hate Microsoft, you have to admire their willingness to change things in an effort to improve the stagnant usability computers have had over the last decade-- it's more than Apple is willing to do anymore.
Except this author specifically says he (apparently) prefers "chaotic" user interfaces to (relatively) clean ones:
OpenOffice.org Writer 2.3 retains the look of the older versions of Microsoft Word that it originally borrowed from, with some borrowings from other programs and macros that have been integrated into the program. The result is chaotic, but it has the virtue of at least being familiar chaos. Instead of ribbons, it uses floating toolbars that pop up in the appropriate context. Although these toolbars sometimes spring into existence right where you are working, on the whole they are much less disruptive than a complete interface overhaul.
Verdict: OpenOffice.org, not because it is well-designed, but because Microsoft Word's changes seem pointless and upset users for no good reason.
(Boldface mine.)
There's no mention in the article, natch, that ribbons might be... gasp... better! Saying that OpenOffice's interface is chaotic implies that Microsoft Office's interface isn't. It seems to me that "less chaotic" might be a good reason to change the interface, but since he never stated that in the article he's free to declare it "pointless." Even worse, he says they "seem pointless," so he's not even willing to commit to "pointless" without a qualifier.
Do ribbons upset users? Yeah. Most users are creatures of habit. Is the ribbon interface better than the menu/toolbar interface that came before? Every usability study I've seen shows it is. (Given, these studies are from Microsoft. I think non-Microsoft parties have been too busy jerking their knees to bother to actually test whether it's a better interface or not.)
I think the original grandparent was right: this article is basically just flamebait.
It's a matter of scale. Almost everybody reading Slashdot has heard of EVE Online, and EVE has tens of thousands of regular players. I think it's safe that nearly nobody on Slashdot, apart from the person who posted this story, has ever heard of this "underground Mac community." Guess what, a story about World of Warcraft, which has millions of regular players, would be bigger news than EVE Online news.
Adding to the "who cares" factor:
1) The story is a non-story; there was no coup, and no domain name changed hands. 2) All the people involved are software pirates, so it's really hard to feel any sympathy whatsoever for any plight they might have. 3) The summary is poorly-written and doesn't bother to explain why anybody should give a crap about this story.
and a total disregard for our very unique coastal wildlife.
What does coastal wildlife have to do with light pollution? WTF!
Light pollution is just another example of our culture's unnatural incompatibility with our natural environment.
Our culture IS PART OF OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. We didn't come from Mars and build cities here, we've always been here. This is the part of environmentalism that always bugs me the most... why do they draw this arbitrary line between "natural" and, I guess, "not natural?"
Uh, how is that different than any other MMO game on the market?
When the WOW expansion was released, it was easy to find Outlands *green* items in the first hour of questing there that were much better than the blues or purples you'd been repeatedly entering boring-ass dungeons for over the last year.
I would just like to say that Dungeon Seige is the most boring game I've ever purchased.
It also had a very strange plotline, wherein you kill a giant killer dragon and you think the game is over (oh thank God it's finally over!) only to find out you need to keep going another few hours. The ACTUAL boss of the game is "just some guy" in a dungeon, I beat him without even realizing I was beating the game, then it ended. Weird.
On second thought, Doom 3 does that also: you kill the big monster in hell (oh thank God it's finally over!) then you get into an elevator and it's back in the mars base for another few hours of tedium. Ugh.
The part that's confusing me is that if you set iTunes to NOT organize your music, won't each version of iTunes have its own XML file? My laptop and desktop are set up that way; each has their own XML file, and so there's no conflicts. (Of course, one's a Mac and one's a PC, I don't know if that makes a difference.)
Oh well, I'm not trying to be an "arrogant prick." I have the same setup as you and it works fine for me. I don't know what else to tell you.
Well, I have around 40GB of music and would like it to be accessible for my wife and I whether we're using Windows, Mac or Solaris. Letting iTunes organize things makes that impossible.
How so?
An NFS/Samba share containing all the music is much more easily managed.
So tell iTunes to store the library there. How does that prevent Windows or Solaris from using it? Alternatively, if you're super picky about folder structure, tell iTunes to use the files located there but not enforce its own organization. (It still keeps its own organization in its XML file, but it won't move anything in the filesystem.)
It sounds to me you just don't know how to use iTunes.
So when you boot iTunes for the first time and it asks, "do you want to manage your music manually, or have iTunes manage it for you?" answer "manually." I mean, cripes, why complain about something that's just a checkbox in the preferences dialog and that iTunes actually specifically ASKS you about when you first start it up?
I'm not trying to knock miranda, I'd likely be using it if I were on Windows, but there is something to be said for shared libraries and cross platform compatibility.
Yes, and it's basically this:
It's really stupid to have to download an entire set of GTK libraries on an OS that comes with all that functionality built-in and could be avoided if the original developers had ported the program properly in the first place.
I hate half-ported software. If you're going to port something, do it all the way or don't bother. (My major pet peeve: X11 software is not OS X software; port if you're gonna!)
Hey, you brought it up. You can't bring it up and then call it off-topic when someone questions it. What you could do is make use of this innovative new invention called the "hyperlink" to provide a source without cluttering up the topic.
There are several indicators that suggest that the actual cost to provide a domain name registration at the registry level is only a few cents per year (I estimate that it is less than $0.03).
I'd like to see some evidence of this before I believe your estimate. No offense, but there's a lot of infrastructure in the DNS system that has to be maintained, and although there are a lot of domain names out there, I don't buy your figure.
Now, ICANN is run by incumbent registries, registrars, and business interests that like the status quo. They set domain name price floors (the registry fee), sales terms (such as UDRP, whois, and terms of 1 to 10 years in one year increments), as well as decide who may and who may not sell names in that marketplace, who must be used as resellers
Ok, I agree with you here.
on top of it all, ICANN extracts an override on all sales.
What does the phrase "extract an override" mean?
It looks like and smells like a combination of insiders who restrain the trade of domain names. Illegal?
Yes, it kind of stinks. But obviously it's not illegal, or some lawyer (of which we have roughly 47 million by this point) would have made his career by prosecuting it.
I have no idea what he's talking about. My new Dell came with Home Premium and the sidebar is actually hooked into Google, not Live Search. I don't know what the Vista Home Premium installs by default, it might be Live Search, but it's a real stretch to say every Vista computer comes with it.
And this is the same justice department that can't seem to see that ICANN is a combination in restraint of trade on the internet that is costing domain name consumers something on the order of $500,000,000 per year in excessive fees for domain names.
Have any more information on this? This is the first I've heard that claim against ICANN.
In my country, Denmark, it is indeed illegal. From what I understand, I am glad it is so.
Did I mention that we have never had your problem with telemarketing either? Or that email and SMS spam is strictly illegal and swiftly and harshly prosecuted?
Or that we actually have an efficient and respected state department which looks after consumer rights in cases like deceptive marketing and defective products?
Also, due to clever science, the weather is never bad in Denmark, and delicious apples grow from lampposts. (Needless to say, the lamps never burn out as well!) And robots rise from the ground every thursday and wash our cars for free!
The point is that the existence of this group is against Facebook's Terms of Service. Whether or not you agree with those Terms, you have to agree that it's stupid for Facebook to put them up, and then fail to enforce them-- even when vocally encouraged to enforce them by thousands of people.
Yes, you can hate whoever you want. However, if you're going to use Facebook's servers, you have to abide by Facebook's rules. The story here is that Facebook apparently doesn't see any need to enforce their own rules.
So you have to maintain a pure capitalist model for health-care even though it's really inefficient,
Ok, most people would say our system is inefficient because it's nothing close to a "pure capitalist model." Not even remotely close to one; the government interferes on every level.
As a Brit, I feel grateful that our Empire went out in a blaze of glory. Yours is just imploding. My sympathies.
as long as you follow the sane rule of making each word start with capital and continue lowercase, even if an acronym (so XmlParser not XMLParser or, God forbid, XMLparser - though of course XML_parser would be better than any of those).
You reminded me of my favorite Javascript-ism:
"XMLHttpRequest()" Who decided that the acronym "XML" should be in all-caps while the acronym "HTTP" right next to it shouldn't? WTF!
Dude, we're talking about monitors here. OS X will work flawlessly with any monitor that has anything even resembling a VGA or DVI port. I've never seen Mac OS (X or Classic) mis-detect a monitor and set it to too low a resolution, nor have I ever seen Mac OS ever put a monitor out-of-range.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the problem with Apple is two-fold:
1) Despite writing OS X (or at least Aqua) basically from scratch, we ended up with an OS with at best the exact same level of usability, and arguably much worse usability. (Take, for example, the features in OS 9 that were left out of OS X, like Labels. Also see the OS X Finder, which I believe, the majority of users see as much worse than the Finder in OS 9.)
Since OS X isn't much, if at all, improved from OS 9, I don't see removing OS 9 support as a good thing.
2) Setting the OS aside, major Apple applications have, at best, not improved at all. Some of their flagship applications, like iTunes, are still strange-looking and clunky. Some, like Garage Band, resemble nothing else in the OS. The rest are pretty much bog-standard.
In short, I'm not that impressed with Apple as of late. Microsoft is willing to take risks to challenge common UI concepts, like Office 2007 and their task-based Explorer interface. Whether they work or not, they took the risk.
It would have been nice if the summary had explained what the hell "GMR" is or why anybody should care. I presume it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistive_effect except that the patent for that is held by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert, so I really have no clue if that's what they're talking about or not. Seems applicable to hard drives, at least.
Uh, yeah, but what does a copy of OpenOffice from 2000 look like?
Compare Apples to Apples. If you're going to compare an obsolete version of Word to OpenOffice, at least have the courtesy of comparing to an equally obsolete version of OpenOffice.
It never occurred to you that there's this thing called "usability testing" that can actually *prove* which interface is superior. And that Microsoft made use of this magical thing while designing Office 2007, and came to the conclusion that the ribbon interface was better enough that it was worth changing things around?
Seriously, it takes like 10 minutes to learn, and once you learn it, it's simply much, much better than the old rats nest of menus, dialogs, and toolbars.
Microsoft isn't full of morons; they wouldn't have put their flagship product out there with the ribbon interface unless they could prove statistically, via testing, that the interface is plain better. Hell, even if you totally hate Microsoft, you have to admire their willingness to change things in an effort to improve the stagnant usability computers have had over the last decade-- it's more than Apple is willing to do anymore.
Except this author specifically says he (apparently) prefers "chaotic" user interfaces to (relatively) clean ones:
OpenOffice.org Writer 2.3 retains the look of the older versions of Microsoft Word that it originally borrowed from, with some borrowings from other programs and macros that have been integrated into the program. The result is chaotic, but it has the virtue of at least being familiar chaos. Instead of ribbons, it uses floating toolbars that pop up in the appropriate context. Although these toolbars sometimes spring into existence right where you are working, on the whole they are much less disruptive than a complete interface overhaul.
Verdict: OpenOffice.org, not because it is well-designed, but because Microsoft Word's changes seem pointless and upset users for no good reason.
(Boldface mine.)
There's no mention in the article, natch, that ribbons might be... gasp... better! Saying that OpenOffice's interface is chaotic implies that Microsoft Office's interface isn't. It seems to me that "less chaotic" might be a good reason to change the interface, but since he never stated that in the article he's free to declare it "pointless." Even worse, he says they "seem pointless," so he's not even willing to commit to "pointless" without a qualifier.
Do ribbons upset users? Yeah. Most users are creatures of habit. Is the ribbon interface better than the menu/toolbar interface that came before? Every usability study I've seen shows it is. (Given, these studies are from Microsoft. I think non-Microsoft parties have been too busy jerking their knees to bother to actually test whether it's a better interface or not.)
I think the original grandparent was right: this article is basically just flamebait.
It's a matter of scale. Almost everybody reading Slashdot has heard of EVE Online, and EVE has tens of thousands of regular players. I think it's safe that nearly nobody on Slashdot, apart from the person who posted this story, has ever heard of this "underground Mac community." Guess what, a story about World of Warcraft, which has millions of regular players, would be bigger news than EVE Online news.
Adding to the "who cares" factor:
1) The story is a non-story; there was no coup, and no domain name changed hands.
2) All the people involved are software pirates, so it's really hard to feel any sympathy whatsoever for any plight they might have.
3) The summary is poorly-written and doesn't bother to explain why anybody should give a crap about this story.
Wow, you had me until the last paragraph.
and a total disregard for our very unique coastal wildlife.
What does coastal wildlife have to do with light pollution? WTF!
Light pollution is just another example of our culture's unnatural incompatibility with our natural environment.
Our culture IS PART OF OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. We didn't come from Mars and build cities here, we've always been here. This is the part of environmentalism that always bugs me the most... why do they draw this arbitrary line between "natural" and, I guess, "not natural?"
Uh, how is that different than any other MMO game on the market?
When the WOW expansion was released, it was easy to find Outlands *green* items in the first hour of questing there that were much better than the blues or purples you'd been repeatedly entering boring-ass dungeons for over the last year.
I would just like to say that Dungeon Seige is the most boring game I've ever purchased.
It also had a very strange plotline, wherein you kill a giant killer dragon and you think the game is over (oh thank God it's finally over!) only to find out you need to keep going another few hours. The ACTUAL boss of the game is "just some guy" in a dungeon, I beat him without even realizing I was beating the game, then it ended. Weird.
On second thought, Doom 3 does that also: you kill the big monster in hell (oh thank God it's finally over!) then you get into an elevator and it's back in the mars base for another few hours of tedium. Ugh.
The part that's confusing me is that if you set iTunes to NOT organize your music, won't each version of iTunes have its own XML file? My laptop and desktop are set up that way; each has their own XML file, and so there's no conflicts. (Of course, one's a Mac and one's a PC, I don't know if that makes a difference.)
Oh well, I'm not trying to be an "arrogant prick." I have the same setup as you and it works fine for me. I don't know what else to tell you.
Is there anything more unhip than putting the word hip in quotes?
Well, I have around 40GB of music and would like it to be accessible for my wife and I whether we're using Windows, Mac or Solaris. Letting iTunes organize things makes that impossible.
How so?
An NFS/Samba share containing all the music is much more easily managed.
So tell iTunes to store the library there. How does that prevent Windows or Solaris from using it? Alternatively, if you're super picky about folder structure, tell iTunes to use the files located there but not enforce its own organization. (It still keeps its own organization in its XML file, but it won't move anything in the filesystem.)
It sounds to me you just don't know how to use iTunes.
So when you boot iTunes for the first time and it asks, "do you want to manage your music manually, or have iTunes manage it for you?" answer "manually." I mean, cripes, why complain about something that's just a checkbox in the preferences dialog and that iTunes actually specifically ASKS you about when you first start it up?
I'm not trying to knock miranda, I'd likely be using it if I were on Windows, but there is something to be said for shared libraries and cross platform compatibility.
Yes, and it's basically this:
It's really stupid to have to download an entire set of GTK libraries on an OS that comes with all that functionality built-in and could be avoided if the original developers had ported the program properly in the first place.
I hate half-ported software. If you're going to port something, do it all the way or don't bother. (My major pet peeve: X11 software is not OS X software; port if you're gonna!)
Well, this is getting a bit off topic - but OK.
Hey, you brought it up. You can't bring it up and then call it off-topic when someone questions it. What you could do is make use of this innovative new invention called the "hyperlink" to provide a source without cluttering up the topic.
There are several indicators that suggest that the actual cost to provide a domain name registration at the registry level is only a few cents per year (I estimate that it is less than $0.03).
I'd like to see some evidence of this before I believe your estimate. No offense, but there's a lot of infrastructure in the DNS system that has to be maintained, and although there are a lot of domain names out there, I don't buy your figure.
Now, ICANN is run by incumbent registries, registrars, and business interests that like the status quo. They set domain name price floors (the registry fee), sales terms (such as UDRP, whois, and terms of 1 to 10 years in one year increments), as well as decide who may and who may not sell names in that marketplace, who must be used as resellers
Ok, I agree with you here.
on top of it all, ICANN extracts an override on all sales.
What does the phrase "extract an override" mean?
It looks like and smells like a combination of insiders who restrain the trade of domain names. Illegal?
Yes, it kind of stinks. But obviously it's not illegal, or some lawyer (of which we have roughly 47 million by this point) would have made his career by prosecuting it.
I have no idea what he's talking about. My new Dell came with Home Premium and the sidebar is actually hooked into Google, not Live Search. I don't know what the Vista Home Premium installs by default, it might be Live Search, but it's a real stretch to say every Vista computer comes with it.
And this is the same justice department that can't seem to see that ICANN is a combination in restraint of trade on the internet that is costing domain name consumers something on the order of $500,000,000 per year in excessive fees for domain names.
Have any more information on this? This is the first I've heard that claim against ICANN.
In my country, Denmark, it is indeed illegal. From what I understand, I am glad it is so.
Did I mention that we have never had your problem with telemarketing either? Or that email and SMS spam is strictly illegal and swiftly and harshly prosecuted?
Or that we actually have an efficient and respected state department which looks after consumer rights in cases like deceptive marketing and defective products?
Also, due to clever science, the weather is never bad in Denmark, and delicious apples grow from lampposts. (Needless to say, the lamps never burn out as well!) And robots rise from the ground every thursday and wash our cars for free!
(Christ, get over yourself, Denmarkians.)
Hello Mr. Missing The Point.
The point is that the existence of this group is against Facebook's Terms of Service. Whether or not you agree with those Terms, you have to agree that it's stupid for Facebook to put them up, and then fail to enforce them-- even when vocally encouraged to enforce them by thousands of people.
Yes, you can hate whoever you want. However, if you're going to use Facebook's servers, you have to abide by Facebook's rules. The story here is that Facebook apparently doesn't see any need to enforce their own rules.
So you have to maintain a pure capitalist model for health-care even though it's really inefficient,
Ok, most people would say our system is inefficient because it's nothing close to a "pure capitalist model." Not even remotely close to one; the government interferes on every level.
As a Brit, I feel grateful that our Empire went out in a blaze of glory. Yours is just imploding. My sympathies.
Dude, you guys were beat by Ghandi. GHANDI!
as long as you follow the sane rule of making each word start with capital and continue lowercase, even if an acronym (so XmlParser not XMLParser or, God forbid, XMLparser - though of course XML_parser would be better than any of those).
You reminded me of my favorite Javascript-ism:
"XMLHttpRequest()" Who decided that the acronym "XML" should be in all-caps while the acronym "HTTP" right next to it shouldn't? WTF!
Actually I am serious. Both of those incidents happened. Excuse me if I value my constitutional rights.
Hm, do you think it's possible to value your constitutional rights and NOT be a complete asshole? You should try that.
What difference does it make who submitted the story?
You have the "what" in your comment, but you certainly don't have the "why should I give a crap" covered.
Sounds like they just implemented the "Mendel" AI robot from that "Galopagos" video game in real life. Been there, seen that, yawn. :)
Dude, we're talking about monitors here. OS X will work flawlessly with any monitor that has anything even resembling a VGA or DVI port. I've never seen Mac OS (X or Classic) mis-detect a monitor and set it to too low a resolution, nor have I ever seen Mac OS ever put a monitor out-of-range.