Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: no driving licence

Likewise, on the basis of riding motor bikes my dad had a licence for pretty well anything that could go on the road. After a very brief go with my first car on a straight but admittedly narrow bit of quiet road it was decided he'd stick to bikes.

Re: King Andrew in the hot seat

"6. Master Archie Mountbatten-Windsor

7. Miss Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor"

Now prince and Prince and Princess respectively as grandchildren of a reigning monarch.

Re: She was a good one

Lord Chancellors are appointed by governments. The UK constitution functions by keeping Parliament, the judiciary and the armed forces owing separate allegiance to the state in the form of the monarch.

Re: She was a good one

"his mother deliberately kept him away from any meaningful exercise of royal powers even in her old age"

The reality is that he and the other senior members of the family stepped in to substitute for her on more and more occasions in recent years. And short of an actual regency there's no scope for anyone other than the monarch exercising royal powers in any way, meaningful or otherwise.

Re: Just more clickbait drivel..

" If you had any experience of the pre GUI application software, all command line and text menus, and the huge problems ordinary users had gaining even a basic grasp of a limited set of functionality, then you might start to comprehend what a huge leap forward GUI's were."

Puts hand up.

Yes, I was there.

As analyst programmers, DBAs & sysadmins we could see the command line but the users didn't. The users got a text menu system to take them to applications and the applications also had text menus. No faffing about with mice, everything could be done from the keyboard. You might not grok this but it was an efficient way of working. So were the text-based,curses driven IDEs we used so we didn't necessarily spend as much time at the command line as you might think.

And there were far less queries of "How do I do....?". What you need to realise is that the commentards here are all too often on the receiving end of those queries. I can only assume that your ivory tower insulates you from those. We see your failures and are all too familiar with them.

"Why does carmakers produce new models more or less every year. Most likely because they have to look new."

Yes, but as Boris notes - they leave the major controls alone.

Torvalds does the kernel, not the UI nor even the rest of userland*. So there's one thing you clearly didn't know.

And do you know why there are so many Linux desktop environments?

Because the layering of the underlying software makes it possible, because there is no marketing involved so if someone sufficiently talented doesn't like what they're offered they can roll their own and because there are people with different use cases and preferences to keep them all in use.

* Look this term up if it puzzles you.

Re: Too many or too few desktop UIs

"The average user (whether an individual buying for themselves, or management in a business) has no clue about improvements under the hood and will buy on the basis of visible features and bling."

Nobody knows whether there are changes under the hood or not. A change of UI can hide the possibility that there are few or none. But although the first impression might be "Modern" or "Ooo, shiny" the reality soon sets in if usability is compromised or it turns out that resources dedicated to the surface glitz might have been better spent on the quality and functionality of what's actually under the hood.

Re: Agree and Disagree

"One of the things I wish the open source world would do more of is just throw things at the wall to see what sticks."

They've done a fair amount of that and do you know what happens? For the most part users stick with what works for them. For a few that may be exploring the latest shiny. For the rest of us it's KDE, XFCE or whatever. It's particularly noticeable that when Gnome decided to make big changes between versions 2 & 2 the response was not just one but two new projects, Cinnamon and Mate to preserve the original UI. There should be some lessons in that.

Re: UXtards to blame

And we now have a whole field of UX (User Experience) which is all about "delighting" the user and puts emotions and feelings above rational

And yet even there they fail. Nobody here is delighted with their offerings. They may have succeeded in generating emotions and feelings but not good ones.

Re: "The OS companies have insulated themselves from user pain"

I've always assumed that having been forced into the corner of standardising file formats MS couldn't keep up their usual trick of evolving them so as to force any would-be compatible S/W to be in perpetual catch-up mode. Instead they forced their users to learn a new UI whether they wanted to or not so that in a few years all the ribbon-native users would find it harder to transfer across the compatibles. Or at worst, it would force the developers of the rest to play catch-up on UIs.

Re: That's 50's american cars all over again

I'm looking at KDE, right here in front of me. I don't see any of this stuff piled on stuff that mention.

Re: Not the only game in town

Go back a week or so and find Liam's article where he weighed various DEs. You might be surprised.

Re: Skeuomorphism

"WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE WIN95-WIN2K DESIGN LANGUAGE?"

Nowt!

And, contrary to what Rupert says Linux desktops (always excepting Gnome) have remained pretty consistent - differences between the various DEs but on the whole they seem to roll on from one iteration to the next. The one thing that I lack from KDE3 is the ability to specify a corner rather than an edge to unhide the panel (is that tool-bar in Wondows parlance? The thing across the bottom with icons on it.).

Given the right collection of artwork for buttons, colours etc. a KDE desktop can look very much like something from the W95/NT/W2K era. In fact that's just what mine looks like except the desktop icons & fonts look a bit better then the W2K that lurks in a VB. That and multiple workspaces.

The theory behind splitting the interface from the implementation was that the interface could remain stable while the implementation could be changed for improvement. This releives consumers of the interface from having to change to keep up with the mplementation. Microsoft seem to have turned that on its head: the interface is changed for dis-improvement whilst the implementation doesn't necessarily change that much (or so we are reassured from time to time).

Re: A cunning plan

Not Baldrick. This is Yes Minister Series 1, Episode 1: "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Sir Humphrey lives!

Re: Genius?

Maybe you never used CDE - a block of several in the middle of the bottom of the screen. That gave us the "Which menu is it on" problem. A good set of cascading menus in one place is a better solution. I've always assumed it was a inspired by a desire to simplify the CDE UI.

But then with a WIMP interface you have other alternatives. You can have application links on the desktop. And you can automate the choice of application according to the file to be opened and have file icons on the desktop. There's two additional approaches. You can have most frequently used applications as buttons on tool bars. So the premise - everything si squished into one button - is false and it's not intrinsically a bad idea any way. And there's no sign of it being patented - the KDE desktop in front of me also has a single button in the bottom left although arguably it's better implemented.

Re: I believe I see what is going on

Maybe it's just a touch of "Not Invented Here" where "Here" is the latest lot of crayon wielders.

I'm not sure if the typography of the KDE menu would suit this particular critic but it just works and what's more, just works the way I want it because I can edit the options as I want them. Just works is the first thing that should be expected of any UI gadget.

Re: Software engineering is an oxymoron.

One quote from TMMM is particularly relevant here: “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”

Many of the professions quoted previously are rooted in basic laws of physics. Biology*, the root of medicine and pharmacy, is slightly less well tied down (we're usually pleased to get 2 sigma) but still based on the physical world. The difference between these and software is real.

* A long time ago there were threats to make the practice of various sciences dependent on membership of the relevant chartered institutions so I took the pre-emptive step of joining mine. If its regular publication was any guide it seemed to be largely populated by biology teachers and the best bit of said publication was the regular page of exam howlers.

Re: Hardly on topic

"He even uses multiples of 10 to allow for later intermediate additions if creation order isn't ideal."

A FORTRAN programmer obviously. Basic programmers never bothered about ideal order.

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

The application used both the fixed and removable disks. The problem was then to back up both of these whilst only having the removable drive. The only backup route is fixed to removable.

So first remove the working removable and replace with a blank disk to back up the fixed. Half the job done.

Now how do we back up the working removable? Because it can only be backed up from the fixed disk it has to be downloaded to that first, then backed up to a second blank disk.

We now have the fixed disk occupied by the copy of the working removable so that has to be overwritten by the backup taken at the first stage.

All understandable when you think about it. It's also easy to understand how it can go wrong if you're not thinking too carefully about it.

Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

The New Rurals are like that everywhere. If it's not aircraft it's the village church bells, the farm animals, the tractors - anything that's been around since the estate agent brought them to view at the quietest time of the week.

Re: Ho, hum...

Didn't is simply return "Bingo!"?

Re: Classic BOFH

"the teabags with the string and paper tag"

Them's southerner's teabags. Yorkshire Tea has no such accoutrements.

Re: you owe me

And....

"How did you glue it back together?"

"With thermal paste,"

Re: Photocopier challange

They should have stopped people sending their children out to work.

Re: Accountants and modern technology

"The head accountant pointed out that modern technology had done nothing to make life easier."

If he wasn't using it then it couldn't, at least not for him.

Re: Backups and Restores

Disk packs. Yes, that really was once upon a time.

Re: Backups and Restores

Your first go at restoring a backup can be educational.

Re: Photocopier challange

My first car was an Anglia so I never thought a Ford gearbox was in any way mysterious. One day we were helping out with a student field trip to a site which my wife was investigating. We rolled up on site with the equipment, possibly in my car, more likely in the Botany Dept Mini. No sign of the lecturer with the hired Transit-based mini-bus full of students. When he finally arrived it turned out he'd missed a turn-off, Never having driven a Ford (his car was a Hillman Imp) he couldn't find reverse and ended up driving miles to find his way back without reversing.

Re: Photocopier challange

I love the "Crkrkrkrk" when you pull it up that leaves you feeling secure that it's not going anywhere.

Press the button to release the ratchet, pull it up silently so the teeth are not wearing with the "Crkrkrkrk". Then release the button. That way that you increase the probability that it's not going anywhere.