Very few. And those who put in bug reports about usability issues are usually either ignored or shouted down, especially if they don't include a patch to fix it. I'm sure this will get marked as Flamebait, but I've tried submitting usability bugs several times to different projects with no results.
Only programmers are respected in the open source world. If you can point out a usability problem like "Gnome apps don't alphabetize files in the Open dialog right" but you can't write code to fix it, you're sunk.
Oh, and I didn't make that up. Gnome apps *don't* alphabetize files right. You'd think that in the year 2007 being able to alphabetize a list of files is a solved problem, but not in the Linux world.
I've not finished the game yet, but I'm pretty far into it and I have to say I'm having a lot of fun with this game. The storyline is, naturally, ridiculous, but the bosses are great and there are tons of them (and the AI tactics are not 'cheap', IMO.) Graphics are also excellent, especially the particle effects. The ability to change your mech's weapons around, mix and match, is great, and the mechs are all well-designed and fun to drive. (I especially like the 'motorcycle' one and the 'tank' one.)
I do agree that your character, both on-foot and in a mech, gets knocked down too often and for too long, sometimes giving you a helpless feeling at certain points. It's not a game-killer. Also the controls are slightly goofy if you're used to Halo, but you'll get used to them very quick.
I think even the most hard-core Apple fans agree that the Finder in OS X is a steaming pile. I won't attempt to defend it.
I do agree with you that Apple's usability is going downhill very quickly. The Dock is horribly flawed in many different ways. (I find it tolerable if you pin it to the left side of the screen so stuff can't get stuck behind it and pin it to the top of the screen.
No he's not. If he read the original story, he'd realize that the problems stem from the writer's attempt to use Linux on Dell's corporate network.
He doesn't control Dell's network, therefore there's nothing he can possibly do to change the server-side setup. And the grandparent's reply basically doesn't apply whatsoever.
So really this article has nothing to do with interoperability with Windows, but it has more to do with Linux applications that advertise features that do not work. Which, frankly, is worse. I can excuse Evolution not being able to talk to Exchange servers, but I can't excuse Evolution *claiming* to be able to, but not actually being able to.
They have the same accessibility options as every other corporation on Earth. Phone and TTY. If you don't want to use them, fine, don't use them... but then don't bitch when you can't get activated. But remember the same applies to your power company, your cable company, your phone company, and every other company in the US where the accessibility options are Phone and TTY.
And what if halfway through the call, suddenly an asteroid falls into their living room and then their phone line is cut off!
Seriously, I know Slashdotters are anti-social and hate talking to people, but can the damned excuses. Either you can use a phone, or you can use TTY. You can come up with crazy situations all day long, but it all comes down to that.
I'd say better than Lost Planet, better than Prey, but not nearly up to Halo/Halo 2 standards. Of course those are all Xbox games, so whether that helps the original poster I don't know.
I mean, I played through Gears and actually slightly cared if the football player died or not, so I guess that's a minor victory right there-- whether I give a crap about a NPC dying. To contrast, though, the cut-scenes in Halo 2 are so well-written that they'd be above average for motion pictures.
Lost Planet, which I'm about halfway through right now, has the most cliched plot and dialog ever. I mean, it's cliched almost to spoof-of-video-games level... it's insane.
So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn't been plucked. Sad, really.
Despite how "powerful" it is, I find that I never do anything with the Unix layer anyway, so that's basically a non-feature as far as I'm concerned. Needless-to-say, the same applies to my parents, my non-technical brother, and probably the majority of Mac users.
Unless you're a Mac user. Macs have always been able to boot off of... well, almost anything. ZIP disks, external SCSI CD-ROM drives, USB memory keys, network natch.
It's PCs and their archaic BIOS that requires floppies. Now, given, most computers are PCs, but one of the reasons Apple got rid of the floppy so early is that Apple computers honestly didn't need it. Just boot off the system CD that came in the box.
Not that Apple doesn't have their own problems. Like the focus-stealing DVD Player and focus-stealing Software Update. Like the fact that you can't move OS applications into subfolders (say, moving iTunes into Applications/Music) or else the next time Software Update runs, it'll download a BRAND NEW COPY of iTunes and put it back. Gruh, that one really pisses me off.
Speaking of moronic pop-ups, try using Apple's Dot Mac service. It has more of those per kilobyte than any other software I've run. "Over 5% of your keychains have changed!" Yes, idiot, that's because I ONLY HAVE ONE KEYCHAIN! Like every other OS X user! Christ I hate that pop-up. And it gets worse; it utterly fails to sync Pages files for some reason. I had to actually convert a bunch of files to TextEdit just for Dot Mac to cope with them.
Just yesterday, I was dragging an image from Safari to my desktop and it happened to cross over an iTunes window. Suddenly my computer stalled for a full minute while OS X was... I dunno, apparently figuring out whether you can drop jpegs on iTunes or something. A full minute! I JUST WANT TO DRAG AND DROP!
Sorry. I was a huge fan of OS 9, and while OS X still infuriates me a lot less than Windows, it infuriates me a lot more than previous Macintosh versions did.
GIMP *might* outstrip Photoshop given a few constraints:
1) You don't care how shitty the UI of the application is, and you don't mind yelling at your computer for doing intensely stupid things against your will. (Like GIMP's macros that don't leave the document in the same state it started-- they change selections, layers, etc.)
2) You don't do any work with CMYK printers or RAW images from cameras.
3) You have no need for ImageReady, which is actually pretty damned slick.
It's not distractions from Microsoft like, "you have unused icons on your desktop!"
Mac OS isn't spatial anymore, which is a shame, but it's at least still halfway there. The default install has only one icon on the desktop, your hard drive. Anything else that's there, it's because you put it there.
It is an even playing ground. Musicians know exactly what they're in for when they sign the contract. And if they don't, there's tons of signed musicians they can ask. It doesn't matter how many lawyers and lobbyists (?) the record companies have, that doesn't decide for the musician, whether to sign or not.
Boo hoo. If you sign the deal with the RIAA, you get what the RIAA offers. If it makes you broke, tough crap. I don't have any sympathy for a musician who signs a bad record contract and winds up hungry on the street. It's their own damn fault.
Naive and gullible people make stupid decisions. Nothing you do to "fix" the record industry will fix that... they'll still sign stupid contracts with seedy people, no matter whether those people are part of a RIAA label or some other organization. The only thing that can fix naive and gullible people signing stupid contracts is education. Since that education hasn't happened in the last 30 years of record companies, I can't imagine it happening in the next five.
No, only the iTunes Music Store. At best. And not even all of that.
If you use iTunes to just store and organize your MP3s and AACs without ever buying anything, it's not "defective by design." If you use the Podcast feature, it's not "defective by design." If you go to the music store and download a free track, it's not "defective by design." (Sure, the free track has DRM, but you didn't pay for it.)
Oh yeah, just like copy protection on video games failed because it's anti-consumer!
Remember those companies in the 80s with those ridiculous copy protection scheme, like typing in a word from the manual? Man, that puts me in the mood to play old games like Lemmings or King's Quest. I'm so glad that modern video games don't have any sort of copy protection!
Grab a reality muffin and chew on it. DRM is here to stay, cope.
Uh, duh. DVD/VHS combo devices only have READ-ONLY DVD drives on them. If they thought they were going to record to DVD with them, then they're just rock-stupid... there's nothing more to it.
They do make DVD-recorder set-top boxes, and they work fine to re-record VHS tapes onto DVD.
Musicians SIGN CONTRACTS with the record company while sober and over the age of 18. They have nobody to blame for their eventual financial state than themselves. The record company wasn't holding a shotgun to Matisyahu's head and forcing him to sign against his will.
1) The problem DRM tries to solve is the preservation of a particular business model that allows content packagerss and distributors to use their position in between artists and their audience to keep the largest slice of the creative-works pie for themselves.
Whoa, slow down.
So you're saying that if an artist sold his music DIRECTLY to the public, with no Sony BMG, no iTunes, nothing but a credit card processor... you're saying that it would be perfectly ok to attach DRM to that music?
Whether or not that "particular business model" applies or not is irrelevant to finding a better way of rights management than DRM. It might have been *created* to support that business model, but every other business model also needs some rights management method-- otherwise the only difference between now and then would be that people were copying music directly from artists instead of copying music from record companies.
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Very few. And those who put in bug reports about usability issues are usually either ignored or shouted down, especially if they don't include a patch to fix it. I'm sure this will get marked as Flamebait, but I've tried submitting usability bugs several times to different projects with no results.
Only programmers are respected in the open source world. If you can point out a usability problem like "Gnome apps don't alphabetize files in the Open dialog right" but you can't write code to fix it, you're sunk.
Oh, and I didn't make that up. Gnome apps *don't* alphabetize files right. You'd think that in the year 2007 being able to alphabetize a list of files is a solved problem, but not in the Linux world.
I've not finished the game yet, but I'm pretty far into it and I have to say I'm having a lot of fun with this game. The storyline is, naturally, ridiculous, but the bosses are great and there are tons of them (and the AI tactics are not 'cheap', IMO.) Graphics are also excellent, especially the particle effects. The ability to change your mech's weapons around, mix and match, is great, and the mechs are all well-designed and fun to drive. (I especially like the 'motorcycle' one and the 'tank' one.)
I do agree that your character, both on-foot and in a mech, gets knocked down too often and for too long, sometimes giving you a helpless feeling at certain points. It's not a game-killer. Also the controls are slightly goofy if you're used to Halo, but you'll get used to them very quick.
My favorite pointless ad campaign was "Plastics Make It Possible."
I always wanted to say, "wow, I was going to by that wooden laptop, but because of that ad, I think I'll buy the plastic version! Thank!
I think even the most hard-core Apple fans agree that the Finder in OS X is a steaming pile. I won't attempt to defend it.
I do agree with you that Apple's usability is going downhill very quickly. The Dock is horribly flawed in many different ways. (I find it tolerable if you pin it to the left side of the screen so stuff can't get stuck behind it and pin it to the top of the screen.
No he's not. If he read the original story, he'd realize that the problems stem from the writer's attempt to use Linux on Dell's corporate network.
He doesn't control Dell's network, therefore there's nothing he can possibly do to change the server-side setup. And the grandparent's reply basically doesn't apply whatsoever.
Isn't connecting with Exchange one of Evolution's features? It's on their website: http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/features.s html (Look for "Collaboration Server support".)
So really this article has nothing to do with interoperability with Windows, but it has more to do with Linux applications that advertise features that do not work. Which, frankly, is worse. I can excuse Evolution not being able to talk to Exchange servers, but I can't excuse Evolution *claiming* to be able to, but not actually being able to.
They have the same accessibility options as every other corporation on Earth. Phone and TTY. If you don't want to use them, fine, don't use them... but then don't bitch when you can't get activated. But remember the same applies to your power company, your cable company, your phone company, and every other company in the US where the accessibility options are Phone and TTY.
And what if halfway through the call, suddenly an asteroid falls into their living room and then their phone line is cut off!
Seriously, I know Slashdotters are anti-social and hate talking to people, but can the damned excuses. Either you can use a phone, or you can use TTY. You can come up with crazy situations all day long, but it all comes down to that.
I'd say better than Lost Planet, better than Prey, but not nearly up to Halo/Halo 2 standards. Of course those are all Xbox games, so whether that helps the original poster I don't know.
I mean, I played through Gears and actually slightly cared if the football player died or not, so I guess that's a minor victory right there-- whether I give a crap about a NPC dying. To contrast, though, the cut-scenes in Halo 2 are so well-written that they'd be above average for motion pictures.
Lost Planet, which I'm about halfway through right now, has the most cliched plot and dialog ever. I mean, it's cliched almost to spoof-of-video-games level... it's insane.
http://blakeyrat.com/2007/01/lost-planet.html
To quote myself:
So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn't been plucked. Sad, really.
Despite how "powerful" it is, I find that I never do anything with the Unix layer anyway, so that's basically a non-feature as far as I'm concerned. Needless-to-say, the same applies to my parents, my non-technical brother, and probably the majority of Mac users.
Unless you're a Mac user. Macs have always been able to boot off of... well, almost anything. ZIP disks, external SCSI CD-ROM drives, USB memory keys, network natch.
It's PCs and their archaic BIOS that requires floppies. Now, given, most computers are PCs, but one of the reasons Apple got rid of the floppy so early is that Apple computers honestly didn't need it. Just boot off the system CD that came in the box.
Not that Apple doesn't have their own problems. Like the focus-stealing DVD Player and focus-stealing Software Update. Like the fact that you can't move OS applications into subfolders (say, moving iTunes into Applications/Music) or else the next time Software Update runs, it'll download a BRAND NEW COPY of iTunes and put it back. Gruh, that one really pisses me off.
Speaking of moronic pop-ups, try using Apple's Dot Mac service. It has more of those per kilobyte than any other software I've run. "Over 5% of your keychains have changed!" Yes, idiot, that's because I ONLY HAVE ONE KEYCHAIN! Like every other OS X user! Christ I hate that pop-up. And it gets worse; it utterly fails to sync Pages files for some reason. I had to actually convert a bunch of files to TextEdit just for Dot Mac to cope with them.
Just yesterday, I was dragging an image from Safari to my desktop and it happened to cross over an iTunes window. Suddenly my computer stalled for a full minute while OS X was... I dunno, apparently figuring out whether you can drop jpegs on iTunes or something. A full minute! I JUST WANT TO DRAG AND DROP!
Sorry. I was a huge fan of OS 9, and while OS X still infuriates me a lot less than Windows, it infuriates me a lot more than previous Macintosh versions did.
Wow, it might be a thousand times better than Final Cut Pro, but who can tell from their shitty website?
Here's something Final Cut Pro has that Cinerrrrara doesn't: http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/ -- A website with screenshots and a feature list! Amazing.
GIMP *might* outstrip Photoshop given a few constraints:
1) You don't care how shitty the UI of the application is, and you don't mind yelling at your computer for doing intensely stupid things against your will. (Like GIMP's macros that don't leave the document in the same state it started-- they change selections, layers, etc.)
2) You don't do any work with CMYK printers or RAW images from cameras.
3) You have no need for ImageReady, which is actually pretty damned slick.
Yeah, but it's all HIS stuff.
It's not distractions from Microsoft like, "you have unused icons on your desktop!"
Mac OS isn't spatial anymore, which is a shame, but it's at least still halfway there. The default install has only one icon on the desktop, your hard drive. Anything else that's there, it's because you put it there.
Nope, I just believe in personal responsibility.
It is an even playing ground. Musicians know exactly what they're in for when they sign the contract. And if they don't, there's tons of signed musicians they can ask. It doesn't matter how many lawyers and lobbyists (?) the record companies have, that doesn't decide for the musician, whether to sign or not.
Boo hoo. If you sign the deal with the RIAA, you get what the RIAA offers. If it makes you broke, tough crap. I don't have any sympathy for a musician who signs a bad record contract and winds up hungry on the street. It's their own damn fault.
Naive and gullible people make stupid decisions. Nothing you do to "fix" the record industry will fix that... they'll still sign stupid contracts with seedy people, no matter whether those people are part of a RIAA label or some other organization. The only thing that can fix naive and gullible people signing stupid contracts is education. Since that education hasn't happened in the last 30 years of record companies, I can't imagine it happening in the next five.
No, only the iTunes Music Store. At best. And not even all of that.
If you use iTunes to just store and organize your MP3s and AACs without ever buying anything, it's not "defective by design." If you use the Podcast feature, it's not "defective by design." If you go to the music store and download a free track, it's not "defective by design." (Sure, the free track has DRM, but you didn't pay for it.)
Oh yeah, just like copy protection on video games failed because it's anti-consumer!
Remember those companies in the 80s with those ridiculous copy protection scheme, like typing in a word from the manual? Man, that puts me in the mood to play old games like Lemmings or King's Quest. I'm so glad that modern video games don't have any sort of copy protection!
Grab a reality muffin and chew on it. DRM is here to stay, cope.
Uh, duh. DVD/VHS combo devices only have READ-ONLY DVD drives on them. If they thought they were going to record to DVD with them, then they're just rock-stupid... there's nothing more to it.
They do make DVD-recorder set-top boxes, and they work fine to re-record VHS tapes onto DVD.
Musicians SIGN CONTRACTS with the record company while sober and over the age of 18. They have nobody to blame for their eventual financial state than themselves. The record company wasn't holding a shotgun to Matisyahu's head and forcing him to sign against his will.
1) The problem DRM tries to solve is the preservation of a particular business model that allows content packagerss and distributors to use their position in between artists and their audience to keep the largest slice of the creative-works pie for themselves.
Whoa, slow down.
So you're saying that if an artist sold his music DIRECTLY to the public, with no Sony BMG, no iTunes, nothing but a credit card processor... you're saying that it would be perfectly ok to attach DRM to that music?
Whether or not that "particular business model" applies or not is irrelevant to finding a better way of rights management than DRM. It might have been *created* to support that business model, but every other business model also needs some rights management method-- otherwise the only difference between now and then would be that people were copying music directly from artists instead of copying music from record companies.
So people can watch their TV without glare. Duh.
Guh, Regular = regulate.
Her privacy stance may have gained your vote, but her video game censorship stance has definitely lost mine.