The default install doesn't have a screen-reader, either... does that mean it's acceptable for an application developer to release an application that doesn't work with screen-readers? Your disabled users will say "hell no."
I'm sorry, ALL this blame goes on the application developer. Lotus Notes has been shipped for every version of the NT kernel since 4.x (and probably before), and didn't support multi-user correctly until Windows XP. And it *still* doesn't support roaming profiles. Go ahead; figure out a way to blame that one on Microsoft. No, the blame lies squarely on Lotus.
Psst... the Xbox supports 1080i. Which brings up an interesting question; did the Xbox games that supported 1080i (Enter the Matrix, Dragon's Lair, and Syberia) cost more initially than other Xbox games? No; in fact, I recall Syberia selling at $30 even in the first week it was out.
I know a kid who spent 800 on his 360 at launch and didnt have any money left for a single game. He just played his old xbox games for a month before he had enough saved up to buy a 360 game.
Just so long as we all agree that the list price of the 360 is $400, and street price $800 at launch is not really a fair comparison to the list price of the Wii. For all we know, the Wii will end up costing $800 due to high demand as well.
Also, that kid's an idiot. Marble Blast on Live only costs, what, $5 and it's more fun than most off-the-shelf games for the system.
They say they want free trade, but they won't buy IBM PCs after China bought the brand (no other difference).
The US State Department != "Americans." Do you understand that the US can promote free trade and, at the same time, the US government can decide not to buy a certain brand of product? That's not mutually exclusive in any way, shape or form.
They say they want democracy in the Middle East, but when there is democracy in the Middle East, they don't respect the outcome (Hamas).
Another poster answered this already. Let me ask you this, is Darth Vader was running in a democratic election, and the US elected him to office, how would you expect the world community to react?
Anyone still wonder why the rest of the world spits on America?
Europe spits on us because they can't compete against us in a fair marketplace. Why else would they sue every successful US corporation instead of, you know, just competing against them fair and square? Where's my French-made web browser? How about my German operating system? Europe dropped the ball, and now they're jealous that the US has been steering the ship while they were off playing space invaders.
State something which is technically foolish (640Kb is all anyone will ever need)
PROVE IT. I've seen this quote attributed to Bill Gates about 30,000 times and never have I ever seen proof of it. What publication was it in? What year? Who was interviewing him? *anything*?!
Well, in that case, it would have been quicker for them to rent a DV cam and film clouds for a few hours instead of wasting all that time with a renderer. Because I didn't get crap out of the movie other than, "hey, look, open source is so great you can produce high-quality animation using it!... and a team of 20 animators!... and over a year of work!"
But it's not the same end-result, because it means that every time I talk to my boss about switching something to open source, he'll reply to me, "you mean those hobbyists that can't even update their own products? Look at Sourceforge, millions of defunct, useless lines of code with no support, no documentation, nothing." And how do I reply to that? "Well... some projects are different. We hope. Maybe."
The open source project is supposed to create software of higher quality; we read that on Slashdot a dozen times each week. It's not supposed to create thousands of crappy, unsupported scripts-- that doesn't help anybody.
"Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki"
I have seen many. Maybe your problem is more located in inability to _find_ the documentation.
Good documentation that the average user can't find is the exact same thing as no documentation. People will assume that there's no documentation before they assume there's substantial documentation that they just couldn't manage to find... *especially* in the open source community where 85% of the projects actually have no documentation.
"Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)"
Linux is usually downloaded... If you can download Linux you can browse around in a wiki. If you buy Linux on a CD, then it's up to RedHat/Novell/Whoever sold you that CD to help you, not the OSS developers.
Fine, it's the *responsibility* of the guy who sold/gave you the CD. How is that an excuse for making the documentation harder to use than it needs to be?
Or said another way: It's the responsibility of Dell to make sure that Windows XP on your new computer has the correct drivers; does that imply that Microsoft should do nothing to make installing drivers easier?
"it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot."
It would get _YOU_ better results, not the developers. That half-hour developer time is better spent developing. Even in closed-source projects, developers are notoriously bad at documentaton. That's just how it is. The solution is not for users to whine about that, the solution is for the whiners to pick up the shovel and help the digging.
Let me get this straight...
1) It takes me a week to do task A. 2) It takes Bob a half-hour to do task A, and Bob gets better results. 3) Yet it's more efficient for me to spend a week on it than Bob?
Your explanation makes no damned sense.
You want the OSS developers to do things for you that they don't do right now? They are volunteers and have the full right to do as they please. Or: How much are you paying for their service?
That's not the point. Open source developers keep going on about how the open source philosophy produces *better* software. Software without documentation is not better than close-sourced software. Software that's extremely hard to use is not better than close-sourced software.
So either the open source community cares about quality and should respond to the points this article brings up, or every single person on Slashdot who said "the open source process produces quality software" is lying. Which is it? The open source community has made their bed; now they have to lie in it.
If you don't care about it, then don't release it to the public. Especially if you're going to be a jackass when someone inevitably asks for support. That does nothing but give open source projects a bad name.
Re:better problem if examples (real) were given
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The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
2.0 beta releases aren't stable releases.
GAIM developers *promised* 2 months until a stable release, give or take. Read it carefully. "Give or take" doesn't extend to 7 months. What does that mean? That means GAIM developers *lied* to their users. Lies are unacceptable.
What's hilarious is that just a few days ago there was an article here on Slashdot lambasting Linspire because they were following the *word* of the GPL and not the *spirit* of it (by bundling proprietary software with their OS.) Now you're just posting the exact opposite viewpoint...
Which is it?
Re:I seem to be saying this a lot lately...
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The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 1
If you're encouraging your novice users to go into CVS and compile all kinds of source releases, you're utterly defeating the point of him running a program repository. Not to mention how hard and time-consuming it is for someone to learn how to install software via the "make; make install" method and then, almost as hard, to find how to run it.
Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki. Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)
Anyway, I look at it as an efficiency issue. If I don't know how to do X, it might take me a week of fiddling before I come up with a method to do X, and when I do I'm as likely as not to be told by the developers that my way of doing it is "the wrong way" and having my documentation rejected for that reason. If the developer who wrote the feature had documented it in the first place, it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot.
Yeah, but if you don't care about creating a product people will use... why bother? The entire point of software is for people to use it... if you're going to be hostile to users, why not just take up tennis and get some exercise or something?
Apple always discontinues old models as they introduce new ones. They've had the same product lines since they simplified the mid-90s mess in 1997-1998, with the exception of the G4 Cube. There's always 3-4 workstations (PowerMac), 3 cheap laptops (iBook/Mac Book), 3 upscale laptops (PowerBook/Mac Book Pro), a couple models for education (eMac), a couple desktop models (iMac), and a few servers (xserve.)
Once they discontinued a dual 1.8 ghz G5 PowerMac with 8GB max memory in favor of an identical PowerMac with 4 GB max memory. Other than shorting the new one of potential memory, they were entirely identical. Natch, I got the 4 GB max one.
I didn't think it was a joke. It was marked "insightful" by the mods... of course, moderation around here is so hit-and-miss that I doubt half the mods even know what "insightful" even means. But either way, it stuck me as a stupid criticism of Windows, especially since you can use other text editors. (But you can't use "another" copy and paste mechanism, and it's obvious the one in Linux *is* broken if you're trying to move anything except text.)
What happenned to the economic growh of Netscape when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows
Ok, I know it's off-topic, but the only one to blame for Netscape's problem is Netscape. The reason IE became more popular than Netscape is because, at the time, IE was *better* than Netscape. It had nothing to do with integration with the OS. Netscape crashed regularly, got rid of their stand-alone browser in favor of a behemoth that did everything poorly and nothing well, and then to completely finish themselves, didn't release a product for something like 3 solid years.
(Want proof? Apple shipped both Netscape and IE on its OS disks for many years, and the vast majority of Mac users still chose IE over Netscape. You can't say Microsoft had any undue influence there, and IE still won out.)
How about some information I can sink my teeth into? What was the process name? How did it infect you? What should I be looking for? How do I remove it?
Could terrorists with a little knowledge and a few well-placed EMP generators disable major segments of the internet?
Terrorists with a single crate full of dynamite can take out the power grid of half the nation with a coordinated attack against rural high-tension lines. Most of those rural lines go weeks in-between inspections-- even a single terrorist with a cell-phone trigger could wire up a half-dozen towers in only a few days and set it off from Puerto Rico at their leisure. The odds of well-placed dynamite being noticed on those towers in the course of an average week is slim to none.
Worry about that. The internet relies on the power grid, not the other way around.
It's hard to judge something before it exists. Before I played Chronicles of Riddick the game, I would have said it's impossible to make a truly great videogame from a movie property, for instance.
Why won't we wait until we have more than.hack//net.com/whatever as examples before we make our final decision?
Don't say "ala Xbox 360" like it was Microsoft's idea. Bethestha is offering the same "content", for the same price, on their website for PC users. The only thing Microsoft did was provide the Live system that makes it possible. (But it also makes possible, for instance, me playing 8-player Marble Blast Gold with people all over the world.)
Probably because you're getting your gaming news from Slashdot, which is horribly biased towards Nintendo products. (Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but you just have to acknowledge that it's there.)
In any case, the Xbox 360 isn't priced unreasonably by any standard. The PS3 might be, but I'll reserve judgement until it's out-- after all Sony could still pull off something spectacular. Doubtful, but who knows?
When your entire platform is based on "we're not them!", you'll fail either way. Howard Dean might have made better whooping sounds when he lost the election, but the Demos were damned because of their failure to create a compelling reason to vote for them other than "we're not them!"
Hint, Demos: People vote *for* politicians, not *against* them.
You can't impeach a President just because you don't like them. They have to break the law first. Clinton was found to be lying to a grand jury; that's *against the law*, and that's why he was impeached. It wasn't just because some Republican was out on a vendetta or something.
Anyway, when Bush actually breaks the law, then you can start up impeachment proceedings. Until then, it's just ranting.
Slashdot Mirror
The default install doesn't have a screen-reader, either... does that mean it's acceptable for an application developer to release an application that doesn't work with screen-readers? Your disabled users will say "hell no."
I'm sorry, ALL this blame goes on the application developer. Lotus Notes has been shipped for every version of the NT kernel since 4.x (and probably before), and didn't support multi-user correctly until Windows XP. And it *still* doesn't support roaming profiles. Go ahead; figure out a way to blame that one on Microsoft. No, the blame lies squarely on Lotus.
Psst... the Xbox supports 1080i. Which brings up an interesting question; did the Xbox games that supported 1080i (Enter the Matrix, Dragon's Lair, and Syberia) cost more initially than other Xbox games? No; in fact, I recall Syberia selling at $30 even in the first week it was out.
I know a kid who spent 800 on his 360 at launch and didnt have any money left for a single game. He just played his old xbox games for a month before he had enough saved up to buy a 360 game.
Just so long as we all agree that the list price of the 360 is $400, and street price $800 at launch is not really a fair comparison to the list price of the Wii. For all we know, the Wii will end up costing $800 due to high demand as well.
Also, that kid's an idiot. Marble Blast on Live only costs, what, $5 and it's more fun than most off-the-shelf games for the system.
They say they want free trade, but they won't buy IBM PCs after China bought the brand (no other difference).
The US State Department != "Americans." Do you understand that the US can promote free trade and, at the same time, the US government can decide not to buy a certain brand of product? That's not mutually exclusive in any way, shape or form.
They say they want democracy in the Middle East, but when there is democracy in the Middle East, they don't respect the outcome (Hamas).
Another poster answered this already. Let me ask you this, is Darth Vader was running in a democratic election, and the US elected him to office, how would you expect the world community to react?
Anyone still wonder why the rest of the world spits on America?
Europe spits on us because they can't compete against us in a fair marketplace. Why else would they sue every successful US corporation instead of, you know, just competing against them fair and square? Where's my French-made web browser? How about my German operating system? Europe dropped the ball, and now they're jealous that the US has been steering the ship while they were off playing space invaders.
State something which is technically foolish (640Kb is all anyone will ever need)
PROVE IT. I've seen this quote attributed to Bill Gates about 30,000 times and never have I ever seen proof of it. What publication was it in? What year? Who was interviewing him? *anything*?!
Well, in that case, it would have been quicker for them to rent a DV cam and film clouds for a few hours instead of wasting all that time with a renderer. Because I didn't get crap out of the movie other than, "hey, look, open source is so great you can produce high-quality animation using it! ... and a team of 20 animators! ... and over a year of work!"
But it's not the same end-result, because it means that every time I talk to my boss about switching something to open source, he'll reply to me, "you mean those hobbyists that can't even update their own products? Look at Sourceforge, millions of defunct, useless lines of code with no support, no documentation, nothing." And how do I reply to that? "Well... some projects are different. We hope. Maybe."
The open source project is supposed to create software of higher quality; we read that on Slashdot a dozen times each week. It's not supposed to create thousands of crappy, unsupported scripts-- that doesn't help anybody.
Ok, it's on.
"Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki"
I have seen many. Maybe your problem is more located in inability to _find_ the documentation.
Good documentation that the average user can't find is the exact same thing as no documentation. People will assume that there's no documentation before they assume there's substantial documentation that they just couldn't manage to find... *especially* in the open source community where 85% of the projects actually have no documentation.
"Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)"
Linux is usually downloaded... If you can download Linux you can browse around in a wiki. If you buy Linux on a CD, then it's up to RedHat/Novell/Whoever sold you that CD to help you, not the OSS developers.
Fine, it's the *responsibility* of the guy who sold/gave you the CD. How is that an excuse for making the documentation harder to use than it needs to be?
Or said another way: It's the responsibility of Dell to make sure that Windows XP on your new computer has the correct drivers; does that imply that Microsoft should do nothing to make installing drivers easier?
"it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot."
It would get _YOU_ better results, not the developers. That half-hour developer time is better spent developing. Even in closed-source projects, developers are notoriously bad at documentaton. That's just how it is. The solution is not for users to whine about that, the solution is for the whiners to pick up the shovel and help the digging.
Let me get this straight...
1) It takes me a week to do task A.
2) It takes Bob a half-hour to do task A, and Bob gets better results.
3) Yet it's more efficient for me to spend a week on it than Bob?
Your explanation makes no damned sense.
You want the OSS developers to do things for you that they don't do right now? They are volunteers and have the full right to do as they please. Or: How much are you paying for their service?
That's not the point. Open source developers keep going on about how the open source philosophy produces *better* software. Software without documentation is not better than close-sourced software. Software that's extremely hard to use is not better than close-sourced software.
So either the open source community cares about quality and should respond to the points this article brings up, or every single person on Slashdot who said "the open source process produces quality software" is lying. Which is it? The open source community has made their bed; now they have to lie in it.
If you don't care about it, then don't release it to the public. Especially if you're going to be a jackass when someone inevitably asks for support. That does nothing but give open source projects a bad name.
2.0 beta releases aren't stable releases.
GAIM developers *promised* 2 months until a stable release, give or take. Read it carefully. "Give or take" doesn't extend to 7 months. What does that mean? That means GAIM developers *lied* to their users. Lies are unacceptable.
What's hilarious is that just a few days ago there was an article here on Slashdot lambasting Linspire because they were following the *word* of the GPL and not the *spirit* of it (by bundling proprietary software with their OS.) Now you're just posting the exact opposite viewpoint...
Which is it?
If you're encouraging your novice users to go into CVS and compile all kinds of source releases, you're utterly defeating the point of him running a program repository. Not to mention how hard and time-consuming it is for someone to learn how to install software via the "make; make install" method and then, almost as hard, to find how to run it.
What's the solution?
Your *theory* of wikis is interesting, but in practice I've yet to see an open source project that had a useful Wiki. Add to that the fact that wikis aren't available unless the computer is online. (How do you explain to the user how to install their network card? "Read the wiki?" If they could do that, they wouldn't need to install the network card!)
Anyway, I look at it as an efficiency issue. If I don't know how to do X, it might take me a week of fiddling before I come up with a method to do X, and when I do I'm as likely as not to be told by the developers that my way of doing it is "the wrong way" and having my documentation rejected for that reason. If the developer who wrote the feature had documented it in the first place, it would have taken him maybe a half-hour... saving me an entire week *and* getting better results to boot.
Yeah, but if you don't care about creating a product people will use... why bother? The entire point of software is for people to use it... if you're going to be hostile to users, why not just take up tennis and get some exercise or something?
Apple always discontinues old models as they introduce new ones. They've had the same product lines since they simplified the mid-90s mess in 1997-1998, with the exception of the G4 Cube. There's always 3-4 workstations (PowerMac), 3 cheap laptops (iBook/Mac Book), 3 upscale laptops (PowerBook/Mac Book Pro), a couple models for education (eMac), a couple desktop models (iMac), and a few servers (xserve.)
Once they discontinued a dual 1.8 ghz G5 PowerMac with 8GB max memory in favor of an identical PowerMac with 4 GB max memory. Other than shorting the new one of potential memory, they were entirely identical. Natch, I got the 4 GB max one.
I didn't think it was a joke. It was marked "insightful" by the mods... of course, moderation around here is so hit-and-miss that I doubt half the mods even know what "insightful" even means. But either way, it stuck me as a stupid criticism of Windows, especially since you can use other text editors. (But you can't use "another" copy and paste mechanism, and it's obvious the one in Linux *is* broken if you're trying to move anything except text.)
Two main causes:
1) "Well, I know the doctor said to take these antibiotics for two weeks, but I feel better now... I'll just skip the rest."
2) "Welcome to Russian black market. How many antibiotics do you want? $4 a barrel!"
What happenned to the economic growh of Netscape when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows
Ok, I know it's off-topic, but the only one to blame for Netscape's problem is Netscape. The reason IE became more popular than Netscape is because, at the time, IE was *better* than Netscape. It had nothing to do with integration with the OS. Netscape crashed regularly, got rid of their stand-alone browser in favor of a behemoth that did everything poorly and nothing well, and then to completely finish themselves, didn't release a product for something like 3 solid years.
(Want proof? Apple shipped both Netscape and IE on its OS disks for many years, and the vast majority of Mac users still chose IE over Netscape. You can't say Microsoft had any undue influence there, and IE still won out.)
How about some information I can sink my teeth into? What was the process name? How did it infect you? What should I be looking for? How do I remove it?
Could terrorists with a little knowledge and a few well-placed EMP generators disable major segments of the internet?
Terrorists with a single crate full of dynamite can take out the power grid of half the nation with a coordinated attack against rural high-tension lines. Most of those rural lines go weeks in-between inspections-- even a single terrorist with a cell-phone trigger could wire up a half-dozen towers in only a few days and set it off from Puerto Rico at their leisure. The odds of well-placed dynamite being noticed on those towers in the course of an average week is slim to none.
Worry about that. The internet relies on the power grid, not the other way around.
It's hard to judge something before it exists. Before I played Chronicles of Riddick the game, I would have said it's impossible to make a truly great videogame from a movie property, for instance.
.hack//net.com/whatever as examples before we make our final decision?
Why won't we wait until we have more than
Don't say "ala Xbox 360" like it was Microsoft's idea. Bethestha is offering the same "content", for the same price, on their website for PC users. The only thing Microsoft did was provide the Live system that makes it possible. (But it also makes possible, for instance, me playing 8-player Marble Blast Gold with people all over the world.)
Probably because you're getting your gaming news from Slashdot, which is horribly biased towards Nintendo products. (Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but you just have to acknowledge that it's there.)
In any case, the Xbox 360 isn't priced unreasonably by any standard. The PS3 might be, but I'll reserve judgement until it's out-- after all Sony could still pull off something spectacular. Doubtful, but who knows?
When your entire platform is based on "we're not them!", you'll fail either way. Howard Dean might have made better whooping sounds when he lost the election, but the Demos were damned because of their failure to create a compelling reason to vote for them other than "we're not them!"
Hint, Demos: People vote *for* politicians, not *against* them.
You can't impeach a President just because you don't like them. They have to break the law first. Clinton was found to be lying to a grand jury; that's *against the law*, and that's why he was impeached. It wasn't just because some Republican was out on a vendetta or something.
Anyway, when Bush actually breaks the law, then you can start up impeachment proceedings. Until then, it's just ranting.