Sadly, since the Mac hordes took over Slashdot, discussions of the actual technical merits or usefulness of Linux have gone elsewhere, and the axiom of computer usability here is now that someone's grandma should be able to use the OS
I'm a Mac user (oh no! Part of the horde!), and I'm thinking the problem here is that Apple has shown, beyond a doubt, that it's possible to have the exact same "technical merits" as Linux with the ease-of-use that Apple computers have always had. It's not one or the other, it can be BOTH. And now the Linux users, seeing this, are demanding that Linux be the same way... that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Back when MacOS didn't have technical merits (i.e. co-op multitasking, no protected memory, etc), it was rarely, if ever, discussed on Slashdot. But even then it had usability far surpassing Windows and Linux (and, personally, I think it was more usable than OS X in ways, also.)
I guess my point is that, from my Mac-using point-of-view, technical merits are hogwash. Sure OS 9 had shitty multitasking, and no protected memory, but people using it were *still* more productive than Linux and Windows users... so who cares about the buzzwords "under the hood?"
1) That only fixes half the problems with the Dock. It doesn't fix the most infuriating problem, which is that the Trash moves away from your pointer if you're trying to throw something away and miss by only a few pixels.
2) Top right is better.:) MacOS Classic applications will open underneath the Dock if it's on the bottom or the left of the screen. But Classic apps won't get underneath the Dock on the right. (Besides, the top right is where the task switcher from OS 9 was, so I'm used to it.)
Those are probably the people who were really organized and had slick filing systems in OS Classic, but completely lost their command of the file system in OS X when Apple got rid of spatial Finder and added in their shitty browser-based Finder. At least, that's the case for me... working with the OS X Finder is painful compared to the OS 9 Finder, so I just avoid it as much as possible. Result? Messy desktop.
If Macs are disorganized nowadays, it's because of the shitty Finder.
MacOS X has the powerful and universally-supported AppleScript. If your only reason to avoid "desktop environents" is to have good scripting support... well... you're wrong. Gnome, KDE, Windows and OS X all have scripting capabilities.
Developers could start by doing something very very simple.
Sit a normal user down in front of your computer, show them the program you're working on, and tell them to complete a simple task. If they manage to complete the task without asking you a question, you win! If not, fix what was bothering them and repeat until you win.
Seriously. Usability testing is *that simple*. You don't need a lab, you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars... you don't even need a camcorder! Just stand behind the user with a notepad (so you can see the screen) and use your eyeballs. Yet... almost nobody does this! Why?
This entire topic is going to consist of people going, "doing X is still hard in Linux, a lot harder than it should be." Then the Linux zealots will reply, "well, doing X is hard in Windows too!"
If you want Linux to be better, you have to stop comparing EVERYTHING to Windows! You can't ever be better than Windows if you "defend" Linux in that way! Linux users are utterly obsessed with Windows, and it's just stupid thinking.
When you're on a Apple messageboard, and somebody points out something wrong with OS X, you don't immediately see a hundred replies of "yeah, well, Windows does it wrong too!" That's because Mac users don't constantly compare OS X to Windows.
Look: If X is a problem in Linux, then go in and fix it. It doesn't matter if Windows also has the same problem, it doesn't matter if OS X has the same problem... fix it!
BTW, I wonder if you might have just missed the visual indicator for read-only. When a window for a read only directory is open there is a little pencil with a line through it in the lower left of the window. Though perhaps read-only filesystems don't show them, afraid I can't check just now.
Oh, so it marks *some* read-only folders, but not all of them... that's even worse than not doing it at all. (For the record, my NTFS volume doesn't have any pencil icon, even though it is read-only. Same with CDs.)
I agree that Dashboard is pretty useless, but look at things this way:
How is Konfabulator different from Microsoft's Active Desktop? And that's been around since Windows 98. And, if you're a bit less strict about functionality, what about the Desk Accessories MacOS has had since version 1?
I don't buy that rip-off stuff. The idea for Javascript-based widgets, or little mini-applications, has been around for decades in the computer industry. Apple isn't ripping off Komfabulator anymore than Chrysler is ripping off Ford by manufacturing cars.
I'm with you on most of those, but OS X's Finder sucks. It's maybe a third as usable as the Finder in MacOS 9... which is pathetically bad. Just the other day I had an NTFS disk in the drive and I tried dragging files to it... of course, nothing happened-- NTFS is read-only in OS X. But there was NO visual indication that the volume was read-only. The OS 9 Finder would have put an icon on the window to show that it was read-only. And that's just a single little feature that the old Finder had that the OS X Finder doesn't.
What does the tool have to do with the end product? Nothing stops me from making the Best Application Ever with a tool like RealBasic and, in fact, I'd probably get it done a lot quicker than the competitor writing the Best Application Ever in C.
You're just being an elitist. You can't blame the tool for the bad product, any more than you can blame a specific brand of paint for an ugly landscape painting.
Ok, between the trip to the Comic Con, the Japanese smiley, the 1337-speke, the "Goddess bless", the "Planet Baka" sig, and owning a buggy MP3 player that barely works because it's cheap-ass...
I have to say that that post is the geekiest thing I've ever read in my life by far. I don't know whether to congratulate you, or curl into a ball and cry.
Back when I saw it, it seemed to be about some pale guy who had three chicks fawning over him and then every so often they got into giant robots and smacked down aliens.
Of course, I didn't like it at all, so I didn't watch much.
WoW kind of tried, with the rest system and some other things. But since release, every single patch has catered to hard-core players, and there is NOTHING new for casual players... I quit the game because of this very issue.
It's telling that a Blizzard dev made a forum post about adding a new "casual" raid dungeon into the game-- his idea of "casual" was 20 players and 2 hours! (Forget that it takes at least 2 hours to even gather 20 players!) In fact, I think I can trace that to the exact moment when I quit the game.
Not only is WoW putting in only hard-core features, but it hasn't added anything for smaller guilds. I like small guilds, where you can know every other person by name and have meaningful discussions with them, but when half the dungeons in WoW require 20-40 level 60 players, only the largest guilds can gather players.
Considering one of the leading open source projects is named GIMP, I say go for it.
In fact, just pick the absolute worst name for everything in the community.
"Hey, man, I installed FartSmell 2.4 on my new AssLicker distribution. You wouldn't believe how fast the new HookerPuke drivers run SquirtIntestine 4!"
How about you guys come up with some terminology that you can explain to a stranger on the street in 30 seconds or less?
Even as a computer professional of many years (Mac user), I find statements like this:
But in the context of "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or even "FLOSS" (Free/Libre Open Source Software), the whole reason to add "Free" to the more traditional "OSS" was to convey "Free as in speech."
Secondly, things you say in the past can come back to haunt you in the future. Duh. Haven't you ever seen an election? They go back 30 years looking for dirt on candidates. (Given, Cohen's not running for office, but it's still a 'duh' issue.) This applies in every nation on Earth, not "only in America."
People will eventually tire pre-processed, big production entertainment.
Bullshit. As people grow older, they might. But there's always another generation of young people just waiting to get their hands on that new Pop CD or that blockbuster movie about fighting aliens.
Sorry, I think your entire premise here is flawed.
Slashdot.org has a huge network effect (yes, like Windows does) which makes it very very difficult to produce a competing site with any kind of popularity.
Obviously, Slashdot's quality of content is very low. The site is popular not because of the content, but because of the commenters... there are other sites with similar moderation schemes and more advanced code, but they aren't as popular because they don't have the number of commenters that Slashdot does.
In short, you might have a point, but Slashdot is a very bad example to prove it.
Personally I almost feel compelled to yell at people who have "W 04" bumper stickers, but I have to understand that they have the right to exercise their political views, even if it's so very wrong.
I'm glad you're here to tell us which political views are right and wrong.
But I do reserve the right to yell at anybody with a Howard Dean bumper sticker. That's just sad.
It's odd, but we're talking about the converse of the problem when people mispronounce a word that they know from reading but have never heard. It's fun, because it almost always means that person reads a lot, but suddenly I'm thinking about something besides the subject.
That happens to me. It took me years to finally nail the pronounciation of "array." (I always said it air-ray.) It's a good example; a word that appears very often in books, but not very often in casual speech. Then again, since I had the pronounciation wrong, maybe it occured in casual speech more than I was aware and my brain just filtered it out as an 'unknown word, figure it out from context.'
Apple was selling them at $2500 and couldn't keep up with demand. What makes you think they'd be able to keep up with the *increased* demand if they lowered the price? Not only would they have more unhappy customers who couldn't buy their computer, but they'd be making less money on each computer they sold.
That's pretty stupid. Every movie is supposed to be a "much superior" movie to what it ends up being... do you think the Director comes to work every day and says, "let's make us a mediocre piece of crap movie!" (Well, maybe From Justin to Kelly...)
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, since the Mac hordes took over Slashdot, discussions of the actual technical merits or usefulness of Linux have gone elsewhere, and the axiom of computer usability here is now that someone's grandma should be able to use the OS
I'm a Mac user (oh no! Part of the horde!), and I'm thinking the problem here is that Apple has shown, beyond a doubt, that it's possible to have the exact same "technical merits" as Linux with the ease-of-use that Apple computers have always had. It's not one or the other, it can be BOTH. And now the Linux users, seeing this, are demanding that Linux be the same way... that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Back when MacOS didn't have technical merits (i.e. co-op multitasking, no protected memory, etc), it was rarely, if ever, discussed on Slashdot. But even then it had usability far surpassing Windows and Linux (and, personally, I think it was more usable than OS X in ways, also.)
I guess my point is that, from my Mac-using point-of-view, technical merits are hogwash. Sure OS 9 had shitty multitasking, and no protected memory, but people using it were *still* more productive than Linux and Windows users... so who cares about the buzzwords "under the hood?"
1) That only fixes half the problems with the Dock. It doesn't fix the most infuriating problem, which is that the Trash moves away from your pointer if you're trying to throw something away and miss by only a few pixels.
:) MacOS Classic applications will open underneath the Dock if it's on the bottom or the left of the screen. But Classic apps won't get underneath the Dock on the right. (Besides, the top right is where the task switcher from OS 9 was, so I'm used to it.)
2) Top right is better.
Those are probably the people who were really organized and had slick filing systems in OS Classic, but completely lost their command of the file system in OS X when Apple got rid of spatial Finder and added in their shitty browser-based Finder. At least, that's the case for me... working with the OS X Finder is painful compared to the OS 9 Finder, so I just avoid it as much as possible. Result? Messy desktop.
If Macs are disorganized nowadays, it's because of the shitty Finder.
MacOS X has the powerful and universally-supported AppleScript. If your only reason to avoid "desktop environents" is to have good scripting support... well... you're wrong. Gnome, KDE, Windows and OS X all have scripting capabilities.
Then why are you even posting this topic? If you're happy with Linux and think it's perfect as-is, why didn't you just skip by it?
Seriously, I don't get people like you.
Developers could start by doing something very very simple.
Sit a normal user down in front of your computer, show them the program you're working on, and tell them to complete a simple task. If they manage to complete the task without asking you a question, you win! If not, fix what was bothering them and repeat until you win.
Seriously. Usability testing is *that simple*. You don't need a lab, you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars... you don't even need a camcorder! Just stand behind the user with a notepad (so you can see the screen) and use your eyeballs. Yet... almost nobody does this! Why?
This entire topic is going to consist of people going, "doing X is still hard in Linux, a lot harder than it should be." Then the Linux zealots will reply, "well, doing X is hard in Windows too!"
If you want Linux to be better, you have to stop comparing EVERYTHING to Windows! You can't ever be better than Windows if you "defend" Linux in that way! Linux users are utterly obsessed with Windows, and it's just stupid thinking.
When you're on a Apple messageboard, and somebody points out something wrong with OS X, you don't immediately see a hundred replies of "yeah, well, Windows does it wrong too!" That's because Mac users don't constantly compare OS X to Windows.
Look: If X is a problem in Linux, then go in and fix it. It doesn't matter if Windows also has the same problem, it doesn't matter if OS X has the same problem... fix it!
(Sorry, that's all a huge pet peeve of mine.)
BTW, I wonder if you might have just missed the visual indicator for read-only. When a window for a read only directory is open there is a little pencil with a line through it in the lower left of the window. Though perhaps read-only filesystems don't show them, afraid I can't check just now.
Oh, so it marks *some* read-only folders, but not all of them... that's even worse than not doing it at all. (For the record, my NTFS volume doesn't have any pencil icon, even though it is read-only. Same with CDs.)
I agree that Dashboard is pretty useless, but look at things this way:
How is Konfabulator different from Microsoft's Active Desktop? And that's been around since Windows 98. And, if you're a bit less strict about functionality, what about the Desk Accessories MacOS has had since version 1?
I don't buy that rip-off stuff. The idea for Javascript-based widgets, or little mini-applications, has been around for decades in the computer industry. Apple isn't ripping off Komfabulator anymore than Chrysler is ripping off Ford by manufacturing cars.
I'm with you on most of those, but OS X's Finder sucks. It's maybe a third as usable as the Finder in MacOS 9... which is pathetically bad. Just the other day I had an NTFS disk in the drive and I tried dragging files to it... of course, nothing happened-- NTFS is read-only in OS X. But there was NO visual indication that the volume was read-only. The OS 9 Finder would have put an icon on the window to show that it was read-only. And that's just a single little feature that the old Finder had that the OS X Finder doesn't.
What does the tool have to do with the end product? Nothing stops me from making the Best Application Ever with a tool like RealBasic and, in fact, I'd probably get it done a lot quicker than the competitor writing the Best Application Ever in C.
You're just being an elitist. You can't blame the tool for the bad product, any more than you can blame a specific brand of paint for an ugly landscape painting.
Ok, between the trip to the Comic Con, the Japanese smiley, the 1337-speke, the "Goddess bless", the "Planet Baka" sig, and owning a buggy MP3 player that barely works because it's cheap-ass...
I have to say that that post is the geekiest thing I've ever read in my life by far. I don't know whether to congratulate you, or curl into a ball and cry.
Back when I saw it, it seemed to be about some pale guy who had three chicks fawning over him and then every so often they got into giant robots and smacked down aliens.
Of course, I didn't like it at all, so I didn't watch much.
WoW kind of tried, with the rest system and some other things. But since release, every single patch has catered to hard-core players, and there is NOTHING new for casual players... I quit the game because of this very issue.
It's telling that a Blizzard dev made a forum post about adding a new "casual" raid dungeon into the game-- his idea of "casual" was 20 players and 2 hours! (Forget that it takes at least 2 hours to even gather 20 players!) In fact, I think I can trace that to the exact moment when I quit the game.
Not only is WoW putting in only hard-core features, but it hasn't added anything for smaller guilds. I like small guilds, where you can know every other person by name and have meaningful discussions with them, but when half the dungeons in WoW require 20-40 level 60 players, only the largest guilds can gather players.
Considering one of the leading open source projects is named GIMP, I say go for it.
In fact, just pick the absolute worst name for everything in the community.
"Hey, man, I installed FartSmell 2.4 on my new AssLicker distribution. You wouldn't believe how fast the new HookerPuke drivers run SquirtIntestine 4!"
How about you guys come up with some terminology that you can explain to a stranger on the street in 30 seconds or less?
Even as a computer professional of many years (Mac user), I find statements like this:
But in the context of "FOSS" or "F/OSS" or even "FLOSS" (Free/Libre Open Source Software), the whole reason to add "Free" to the more traditional "OSS" was to convey "Free as in speech."
completely baffling.
Who modded this as "insightful"?
First of all, he's *not* being prosecuted.
Secondly, things you say in the past can come back to haunt you in the future. Duh. Haven't you ever seen an election? They go back 30 years looking for dirt on candidates. (Given, Cohen's not running for office, but it's still a 'duh' issue.) This applies in every nation on Earth, not "only in America."
Uh, hello? Did you even read the Grokster decision?
Grokster produces software (WITH illegal intent)
People use software to perform illegal acts.
I hate to tell you this, but your little rant there has very little to do with this article...
People will eventually tire pre-processed, big production entertainment.
Bullshit. As people grow older, they might. But there's always another generation of young people just waiting to get their hands on that new Pop CD or that blockbuster movie about fighting aliens.
Sorry, I think your entire premise here is flawed.
Slashdot.org has a huge network effect (yes, like Windows does) which makes it very very difficult to produce a competing site with any kind of popularity.
Obviously, Slashdot's quality of content is very low. The site is popular not because of the content, but because of the commenters... there are other sites with similar moderation schemes and more advanced code, but they aren't as popular because they don't have the number of commenters that Slashdot does.
In short, you might have a point, but Slashdot is a very bad example to prove it.
Personally I almost feel compelled to yell at people who have "W 04" bumper stickers, but I have to understand that they have the right to exercise their political views, even if it's so very wrong.
I'm glad you're here to tell us which political views are right and wrong.
But I do reserve the right to yell at anybody with a Howard Dean bumper sticker. That's just sad.
It's odd, but we're talking about the converse of the problem when people mispronounce a word that they know from reading but have never heard. It's fun, because it almost always means that person reads a lot, but suddenly I'm thinking about something besides the subject.
That happens to me. It took me years to finally nail the pronounciation of "array." (I always said it air-ray.) It's a good example; a word that appears very often in books, but not very often in casual speech. Then again, since I had the pronounciation wrong, maybe it occured in casual speech more than I was aware and my brain just filtered it out as an 'unknown word, figure it out from context.'
Hah! Lemme guess, PowerPC 4400? I had a 4400/200 which had to be opened that way... what a pain in the ass.
I think you're missing something.
Apple was selling them at $2500 and couldn't keep up with demand. What makes you think they'd be able to keep up with the *increased* demand if they lowered the price? Not only would they have more unhappy customers who couldn't buy their computer, but they'd be making less money on each computer they sold.
That's pretty stupid. Every movie is supposed to be a "much superior" movie to what it ends up being... do you think the Director comes to work every day and says, "let's make us a mediocre piece of crap movie!" (Well, maybe From Justin to Kelly...)