Posts by CRConrad 435 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2012
And why minimize anything?
Just make sure to switch to your browser – with Alt-Tab, ferchrissake, no faffing about with mouses and taskbars! – from the actual (and preferably maximized) whatever you're actually working on, so you can switch back to it and continue working on (less than) a moment's notice.
Or, OK, sure, it's a design fail of the application not to ask for confirmation... too.
But 89.57% of the occasions the user needs to answer “Hell no, I didn't mean to!” are because of that idiotic placement of those buttons, so yes, the absolute majority of the responsibility rests squarely on the makers of the (various) GUI(s).
The obvious solution would be for the US to invent a vast number of oddly named and apparently redundant overlapping agencies to act as decoys for the conspiracy theorists - while keeping the real governing bodies secret.... that that's exactly what they're doing.
I mean, sure, who hasn't heard about the National Laboratories... But I thought they were all on the coasts. Who ever heard of the National Laboratory Idaho? Gotta be one of them decoys.
Us bipedal monkeys and what we can do – and make of ourselves – are still the scariest thing I can think of. The Kzinti are – heh! – pussies compared to the Draka. Not to mention... What were they called, those pitch-black high-G-planet-reared genetically-designed war machines, also the products of Pournelle’s (and Niven’s?) imagination(s)... The Saurons, I think.
...look what happened to poor Thanatermesis with one of the original Enlightenment distros Elive (https://www.elivecd.org/)As proper link: https://www.elivecd.org/
Sorry, not getting it – there's nothing on that page to say they killed themselves out of frustration with the library, or anything. So what is it that happened that we're supposed to look at?
Ok, that's a new and application-specific meaning of the term.
Application-specific, perhaps (to the extent that the X server is an “application”), but certainly not “new”, except perhaps to you.
But RDP is not X11: you are using the remote window manager, running the app as root instead of running the remote desktop as rootNow that's a new and weirdly “application”-un-specific term: Since when is the Administrator user ID on Windows called “root”?
Quoth keithpeter:
What organisation is there that could manage the standardisation process...there was an organisation called The Linux Foundation.
How could standards be enforced?This foundation created / sponsored the creation of a specification called the Linux Standard Base, LSB.
By following the LSB, perhaps?How would the thousands of different independent upstream projects ensure that their development cadences coincided to ensure compatibility with standardised libraries?
Yeah, that's the folk etymology people have been forced to make up for themselves since it's been so pervasively used the wrong way around. Congratulations on insisting that that's what passes for “correct” nowadays. Wait, what was TFA about, again...?
And the lovely thing is, you keep paying for it. It's a subscription, not a one-time activation fee.
Or, probably both: If you thought you could save a little money by not subscribing to heated seats during the summer, betcha they're either going to or have already implemented a subscription-activation fee that would eat those savings.
...that the preceding sentence, about how their 97-year-old grandmother installed advanced development tools (or whatever that was supposed to be about), wasnt actually a “true story”, but fiction. (How the heck was this not utterly obvious from context, especially after having had “Jackanory” explained to you?!?)
Besides, Linux is simply not user friendly for most people once you get beyond clicking on icons and have to go into the terminal - search for help with a problem, and often the answers out there make absolutely no sense to a beginner. I cannot imagine most of my non techy family including my 85 year old dad coping with it if anything goes wrong, and that means I'd be doing a lot more remote tech support.So, how great is your old Dad at coping with stuff that goes wrong on Windows? Because that makes so much more sense to non-experts, right?
I'd compare it to the search for the Northwest Passage. Great rewards perhaps if you find one. Eventually they found one. Turns out there are several and none of them are reliable. Which routes, if any, are open in any given year depends on where the Winter's ice pack drifts to in the Spring/Summer. The season is short and even with a warmer climate it's possible that none will ever be usable for much.That's how it used to be, for about the first century after the discovery of the Northwest Passage(s).
Of late, though, what with global warming and stuff, there's already significantly less ice, making the route more viable for commercial purposes.
(Easiest way to measure how far along it is, is probably to check how many rights to build ports along a new Northern Silk Road are being bought up all on the quiet by China.)
"However I do seem to recall that a few years decades ago there was talk of moving from an application-centric model to a document-centric one."
There, FTFY.
Yeah, I remember that too. Even Microsoft was making noises about taking Office in that kind of direction.
Too bad nothing much seems to have come of it.
The RiscOS thing I found most irksome was in fact the scaled scrollbars - brilliant to a point but when editing a very large file, targeting the scrollbar demanded pixel accuracy.I'm sure they'd soon have fixed that, as the solution is so obvious and simple: Make the grab handle proportional to the portion of the document you can see, except if the result is smaller than some minimum value that's easy to grab; if it is, use that minimum in stead.
Yeah, GUIs have been around for about forty years. But what the article said wasn't "GUIs suck!". What it said was that GUIs were at their best, essentially finished, twenty years ago, and most change since then has been frivolous and detrimental to usability.
In short, it said current GUIs suck compared to what they could have been and used to be. And in this, the article was obviously perfectly correct. So your rant had pretty much nothing to do with this article. Learn to read, numbskull.
We found a package that looked good but lacked features. So the company got in touch with them and a couple of guys came out and watched what we were doing and how to understand the process, then they modified the software to do what we needed (which I'd imagine cost a pretty penny).As I read it, this was your stock control package after going back to Windows?
I noticed that any description of having done the same with the supplier of your Linux stock control package was conspicuous for its absence.
Now imagine plopping a Linux desktop onto these machines. Suddenly there is no support; the dev teams have to be replaced/retrained because they don't write code for Linux; the help desk workers have to be replaced/retrained because they don't know Linux. The desktop user is confronted with an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar tools and applications, and since the tools they were using are no longer available, they cannot get any work done.You couldn't come up with a more ridiculous way to do that, could you?
The sensible way to do it is of course in the exact opposite order: First you train your developers and support staff (or get new ones), then you train your users, and only then do you switch everyone's desktop over.
And with many corporate apps living in the browser nowadays (not that I otherwise endorse this development, but this is the one aspect of it that may be useful), there's that much less retraining needed for end users of those apps. Not that re-learning the same app on another OS should be all that hard either: Menus are menus, file-opening dialogues are fairly self-explanatory on most OS GUIs, and so on. How many weeks' retraining would you need ro switch from, say, MS Office Mac to MS Office Windows?
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