(not on a very limited set of computer illiterate users, who don't know that the right mouse button is there for a reason - results won't be representative at all)
I agree with you, but you have to realize that the vast majority of users fit in this description. At least 90%, probably more. Any *actually* representative usability sample is going to include a *lot* of people who don't use the right mouse button and possibly don't even know there IS a right mouse button.
Have you read Jensen Harris' blog about changes to the Office 12 UI? Microsoft Office is in the same situation you are, where years of people requesting features has resulted in thousands upon thousands of features, and now they have the interesting problem of making those thousands of features discoverable without removing any. The way his team has solved it is pretty goddamned slick, if you ask me.
Of course, it's Microsoft, so of course the knee-jerk Slashdot is that they must have screwed it up, it's got to be half-assed, there's no way Microsoft can make a good product, yadda yadda.
Uh. He called them Nazis. You know, like the UHF quote in your sig... Nazis.
I don't know what country you live in, but in most of Western Civilization, being called a Nazi is pretty goddamned insulting. Linus wasn't just stating an opinion, he was *insulting* people who *add value* to the kernel he creates... I'm sorry, that's a bad move no matter how you look at it.
What would you recommend for skipping forward/backwards a word? There are only so many modifiers... and Macs have one more than most machines. (Well, I guess the Windows key is kind of a modifier.)
Is that a real problem? Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces. Give a dumb interface to a smart guy, and you obtain the Torvalds situation. Give a smart interface to a dumb guy and all you'll obtain is whining about its complexity.
Ok, your use of the words "dumb" and "smart" there are *really* insulting to people who may be extremely smart in the general case, but just have no desire to learn computers.
"Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'."
A quote from the article summary! He didn't say "I prefer KDE now" he also called GNOME developers (on their own mailing list) Nazis! You don't see anything wrong with that?
Firstly, that bar with all the bouncing morphing icons. I really see zero value in that behaviour. Sure, it kinda looks nice for 10 seconds, but after that it simply is distracting.
I agree. The Dock is the dumbest thing Apple's ever invented since the "Font/DA Mover." They should have just swallowed their pride and ripped-off Microsoft's Start menu and taskbar, like you know they wanted to.
After wading through some menues, I finally found the scanner program. The buttons were now behind the transparent bouncing button madness, and I couldn't click on them. I tried to resize the window in the usual manner (by clicking on a corner and dragging) and failed.
Uh, that's a buggy piece of software, not a failing in OS X. A Windows program can open beneath the taskbar also-- would you blame Windows, or the programmer who didn't check where the taskbar was located when determining the size of the window?
But also: MacOS windows *used* (OS 8-9.2.2) to have a nice 3-4 pixel thick border so that you could drag and move them from any size. They got rid of this in OS X. IMO, a stupid move.
I guess to sum up: OS X is still better than Windows XP and Linux interface-wise, but it's worse (IMO) than OS 9.2.2 was. (In every other arena, speed, security, stability, it's better. But the interface is worse.) The OS X Finder is a particular sore spot with me... it's not enough that they got rid of the spatial Finder, but they replaced it with a browser-based one that crashes daily.
Obviously Torvalds has built around himself a thick insulating layer keeping him well-separated from normal computer users. Because I can tell you that if I gave my grandma the choice between GNOME or KDE (you know, the stereotypical neophyte user), they'd pick GNOME every time. So would my mom or dad. And probably my brother.
My experience with KDE is basically Knoppix. Which requires a 700 MB CD, and I only had 650 MB CDs. So I go and borrow a 700 MB CD from a friend, boot up Knoppix to give it a try and it was full of useless crap. Half of the applications seemed to be X11 demos from like 1975 or something. There were many games on the disk, at least two of which didn't work and either ran at about 1 FPS or just drew gibberish on the screen. The control panel program had some many poorly-named options that I had no idea what was going on. And I thought to myself, *this* is what they're using that extra 50 MB for? Games that don't work? 1975 demo applications? Options no rational human would ever use and most users won't even understand?
Then I install Ubuntu with GNOME, and it's clean, quick, the applications are all of decent quality (with no really terrible apps thrown in for the hell of it). It reminds me of BeOS, or version 8 or so of MacOS. It's not ugly. I know which one I prefer.
BTW, this is not really related, why the hell are there dozens of distros, the vast majority of which use either KDE or GNOME, when KDE and GNOME are more different from each other than (say) Ubuntu running GNOME and Redhat running GNOME? GNOME should be a distro; KDE should be a distro.
It runs on any platform out there, and in the exact same way. Learn Emacs once, use it forever;
In other words, if you're a Mac user, don't even attempt to use it because it undoubtedly has some strange alien UI invented in 1960 that goes against every rule OS X has.
News flash: Software is supposed to follow the OS guidelines.
What does any of this mean to me? Anything at all?
Let's go back to Journalism 101 and remember that every article should include the "why does it matter?" part.
Why don't these fan-made games...
on
King's Quest 9 Lives!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Why don't these fan-made games ever ask for permission *before* they spend hundreds of hours on development? It seems like it would save a lot of trouble if/when the rights-holder decides to shut them down.
I have Dish Network, also. Their HD decoders are expensive as hell, *especially* if you want DVR ($1000, last I checked! OUCH!). So I stick with the cheap non-HD DVR and just use my HDTV for my Xbox. (And Xbox 360 when I get one.)
So yeah, I have a HDTV and yeah, it's not broadcasting HD content, but at least I'm aware of it and have a good reason.
Remember the scene in Empire Strikes Back when the Star Destroyers are scanning the asteroid field for the Millenium Falcon? There's a shot of one of the Star Destroyers' bridge getting smashed by an asteroid. The next shot is Vader in a conference call with the commanders in all the ships... the hologram of the commander hit by the asteroid puts his hands up in terror, and the image disappears.
I never, EVER knew that was there watching the full-screen VHS release until the Star Wars were re-released to theaters in the late-90s.
From that moment on, I've always bought the widescreen except by accident. (And then most places will exchange it without any problem.)
Some of which were even admittedly defective, and still haven't been replaced.
Source?
Microsoft's official line is that they will use next-day shipping to exchange or repair any crashing Xbox 360s that were purchased. Do you have a source that says otherwise?
(I guess if you have a defective one, and didn't call Microsoft or return it to the store you bought it from, then yes some "still haven't been replaced.")
Slashdot Mirror
(not on a very limited set of computer illiterate users, who don't know that the right mouse button is there for a reason - results won't be representative at all)
I agree with you, but you have to realize that the vast majority of users fit in this description. At least 90%, probably more. Any *actually* representative usability sample is going to include a *lot* of people who don't use the right mouse button and possibly don't even know there IS a right mouse button.
All that and I forgot the damned link.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/
Have you read Jensen Harris' blog about changes to the Office 12 UI? Microsoft Office is in the same situation you are, where years of people requesting features has resulted in thousands upon thousands of features, and now they have the interesting problem of making those thousands of features discoverable without removing any. The way his team has solved it is pretty goddamned slick, if you ask me.
Of course, it's Microsoft, so of course the knee-jerk Slashdot is that they must have screwed it up, it's got to be half-assed, there's no way Microsoft can make a good product, yadda yadda.
Uh. He called them Nazis. You know, like the UHF quote in your sig... Nazis.
I don't know what country you live in, but in most of Western Civilization, being called a Nazi is pretty goddamned insulting. Linus wasn't just stating an opinion, he was *insulting* people who *add value* to the kernel he creates... I'm sorry, that's a bad move no matter how you look at it.
What would you recommend for skipping forward/backwards a word? There are only so many modifiers... and Macs have one more than most machines. (Well, I guess the Windows key is kind of a modifier.)
Is that a real problem? Dumb people want dumb interfaces. Smart people want smart interfaces. Give a dumb interface to a smart guy, and you obtain the Torvalds situation. Give a smart interface to a dumb guy and all you'll obtain is whining about its complexity.
Ok, your use of the words "dumb" and "smart" there are *really* insulting to people who may be extremely smart in the general case, but just have no desire to learn computers.
"Gnome seems to be developed by interface nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'."
A quote from the article summary! He didn't say "I prefer KDE now" he also called GNOME developers (on their own mailing list) Nazis! You don't see anything wrong with that?
Firstly, that bar with all the bouncing morphing icons. I really see zero value in that behaviour. Sure, it kinda looks nice for 10 seconds, but after that it simply is distracting.
I agree. The Dock is the dumbest thing Apple's ever invented since the "Font/DA Mover." They should have just swallowed their pride and ripped-off Microsoft's Start menu and taskbar, like you know they wanted to.
After wading through some menues, I finally found the scanner program. The buttons were now behind the transparent bouncing button madness, and I couldn't click on them. I tried to resize the window in the usual manner (by clicking on a corner and dragging) and failed.
Uh, that's a buggy piece of software, not a failing in OS X. A Windows program can open beneath the taskbar also-- would you blame Windows, or the programmer who didn't check where the taskbar was located when determining the size of the window?
But also: MacOS windows *used* (OS 8-9.2.2) to have a nice 3-4 pixel thick border so that you could drag and move them from any size. They got rid of this in OS X. IMO, a stupid move.
I guess to sum up: OS X is still better than Windows XP and Linux interface-wise, but it's worse (IMO) than OS 9.2.2 was. (In every other arena, speed, security, stability, it's better. But the interface is worse.) The OS X Finder is a particular sore spot with me... it's not enough that they got rid of the spatial Finder, but they replaced it with a browser-based one that crashes daily.
Damn straight. I agree that regardless of his preference, wording it in this manner is certainly not constructive in any way shape or form.
Obviously Torvalds has built around himself a thick insulating layer keeping him well-separated from normal computer users. Because I can tell you that if I gave my grandma the choice between GNOME or KDE (you know, the stereotypical neophyte user), they'd pick GNOME every time. So would my mom or dad. And probably my brother.
My experience with KDE is basically Knoppix. Which requires a 700 MB CD, and I only had 650 MB CDs. So I go and borrow a 700 MB CD from a friend, boot up Knoppix to give it a try and it was full of useless crap. Half of the applications seemed to be X11 demos from like 1975 or something. There were many games on the disk, at least two of which didn't work and either ran at about 1 FPS or just drew gibberish on the screen. The control panel program had some many poorly-named options that I had no idea what was going on. And I thought to myself, *this* is what they're using that extra 50 MB for? Games that don't work? 1975 demo applications? Options no rational human would ever use and most users won't even understand?
Then I install Ubuntu with GNOME, and it's clean, quick, the applications are all of decent quality (with no really terrible apps thrown in for the hell of it). It reminds me of BeOS, or version 8 or so of MacOS. It's not ugly. I know which one I prefer.
BTW, this is not really related, why the hell are there dozens of distros, the vast majority of which use either KDE or GNOME, when KDE and GNOME are more different from each other than (say) Ubuntu running GNOME and Redhat running GNOME? GNOME should be a distro; KDE should be a distro.
It's worth it if it keeps cheaters off Live. IMO.
Yes, I care more about people cheating in online games than I do about "software freedom."
It'll be busy building a shield around its stolen Pfhor starship so that it can survive the Big Crunch and become God in the second Big Bang.
I see your Asimov reference, and raise you a Marathon reference.
It runs on any platform out there, and in the exact same way. Learn Emacs once, use it forever;
In other words, if you're a Mac user, don't even attempt to use it because it undoubtedly has some strange alien UI invented in 1960 that goes against every rule OS X has.
News flash: Software is supposed to follow the OS guidelines.
Slashdot: The place where old computer jokes go to die.
Well, since I have absolutely no clue what the article's talking about, it's a little hard for me to judge whether it matters to me or not, huh?
What does any of this mean to me? Anything at all?
Let's go back to Journalism 101 and remember that every article should include the "why does it matter?" part.
Why don't these fan-made games ever ask for permission *before* they spend hundreds of hours on development? It seems like it would save a lot of trouble if/when the rights-holder decides to shut them down.
Windows freezes are caused by hardware 95% of the time, from my experience. It really isn't buggy at all.
And OS X ain't such a champ, either. I have to restart Finder like 3 times a day because it's constantly crashing or freezing.
Is Casey Kasem acceptable?
"The Podjacker Threat?" Didn't I see this at like 3:00 AM on the Sci-Fi channel? I'm pretty sure...
I have Dish Network, also. Their HD decoders are expensive as hell, *especially* if you want DVR ($1000, last I checked! OUCH!). So I stick with the cheap non-HD DVR and just use my HDTV for my Xbox. (And Xbox 360 when I get one.)
So yeah, I have a HDTV and yeah, it's not broadcasting HD content, but at least I'm aware of it and have a good reason.
Remember the scene in Empire Strikes Back when the Star Destroyers are scanning the asteroid field for the Millenium Falcon? There's a shot of one of the Star Destroyers' bridge getting smashed by an asteroid. The next shot is Vader in a conference call with the commanders in all the ships... the hologram of the commander hit by the asteroid puts his hands up in terror, and the image disappears.
I never, EVER knew that was there watching the full-screen VHS release until the Star Wars were re-released to theaters in the late-90s.
From that moment on, I've always bought the widescreen except by accident. (And then most places will exchange it without any problem.)
You mean Slashdot might have posted an anti-Microsoft story that wasn't entirely true? GASP! SHOCK! HORROR! HUGE DOSE OF SARCASM!!!
Some of which were even admittedly defective, and still haven't been replaced.
Source?
Microsoft's official line is that they will use next-day shipping to exchange or repair any crashing Xbox 360s that were purchased. Do you have a source that says otherwise?
(I guess if you have a defective one, and didn't call Microsoft or return it to the store you bought it from, then yes some "still haven't been replaced.")
I know it's an off-topic question, but what little gremlins are running around in OS X breaking file permissions? I mean, seriously, what the hell?
I did do Repair Permissions, and there were a bunch that needed repairing, but I don't get what's going around changing permissions.