As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others - probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.
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Member since:2005-07-07
It's not about hate for MS or any other company making and selling proprietary software. Many are decent and are doing a great job. But I sincerely believe the businessmodel behind proprietary software is bad for society. When I write Free, I'm not talking about free but Libre. Not free beer but freedom of thought. The freedom to aquire, share and develop knowledge which can help people. The freedom of political expression. The freedom to do with whatever hardware you bought whatever you want. The only restraint on human freedom should be another person's freedom - no more, no less.
Economically speaking, proprietary software has a tendency to lead to a monopoly. Every economist can tell you - a marginal cost of zero leads to a monopoly. And almost every economist will tell you a monopoly is bad. It raises prices, lowers efficiency and kills innovation. Maybe not immediately, but in the end, it's what happens.
Socially speaking, proprietary software developers have a financial incentive to limit the freedom of their users. They don't HAVE to do it, sure. Some will, some won't. But as long as there is that incentive, as soon as a small company grows into a big company, it becomes more and more likely to happen. And I think that's dangerous, as we slowly begin to depend more and more on computersoftware to express ourselves, to share information, knowledge and art.
So I think economical freedom, the free market economy, is good for people. I also believe personal and political freedom are good for people. Therefore I believe proprietary software is bad for humankind in the long run. Which is why I promote Free Software (Linux/BSD/KDE/Gnome), Free Culture (Blender/Magnatune/Creative Commons) and Free Knowledge (Wikipedia & friends).
Member since:2005-07-24
MollyC said:
...
Every time a Microsoft article is posted here, the haters come out of the woodwork to spout the usual lines on how Microsoft...
...
derailing every single Microsoft article's thread with pro-OSS anti-Microsoft bilge.
And then superstoned said:
It is not hard to see which of you is letting her hatred get the better of her in this thread.
Edited 2008-06-02 06:43 UTC
Member since:2005-09-13
//Therefore I believe proprietary software is bad for humankind in the long run. Which is why I promote Free Software (Linux/BSD/KDE/Gnome), Free Culture (Blender/Magnatune/Creative Commons) and Free Knowledge (Wikipedia & friends).//
OK ... so ... how does Microsoft's existence prevent you from doing/using any of that? I'm confused. I thought Linux/OSS was growing every year?
Member since:2008-06-03
As a economist I have to correct you slightly: To develop software has *not* a marginal cost of zero. Because if you hand out more copies of your products you have a much larger user base to support and this produces costs. Even if you have the counter argument that they do not sell support -- which they certainly do -- you have to respect a larger user base because of existing competition and long term involvement in the market.
By the way a monopoly does not have to be bad. There are certainly some goods that profit from a monopoly. For example the production of money.
The real question that arises is: Is a monopoly in SW production bad, if it is done for free software or information in general as it is done for printing money. I find this somehow interesting.
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"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Member since:
2006-07-04
Clearly, those that are using Windows and want certain things "fixed" (I put that in quotes because many of the things listed in the article aren't bugs, but are requests), have an incentive to report said issues. Who are you to tell them not to do that, or look down on them for doing it? You don't think it's worthwhile to report problems in Windows (because it's not OSS or whatever)? Fine, then don't. That's your choice. But it's others' choice to go ahead and report the problems they find. Your calling these people saps for reporting problems with a closed source product is akin to a closed source dev calling an open source dev a sap for working for free to enrich the pockets of the investors and execs of a company that distributes the resulting OSS product. That's what you sound like when I read your self-righteous, self-congratulatory post.
I get the feeling that what really upsets you about this is that you hate Microsoft (you've said as much in your post), and therefore *want* their products to suck and can't abide any effort to improve their products undertaken by those that use said products.
Oh, and save the self-righteous "owned by the community" bull. The people reporting these UI problems aren't necessarily developers, they are users. And non-dev users aren't part of the "community" that "owns" OSS. For example, I and most I know use Firefox, an open source product, but none of us feel that we are in some "community that owns" Firefox, anymore than we'd feel that we "owned" Opera, IE, or any other closed-source browser. That's because we don't give a damn that the code is OSS. It's just another product.
One last thing: This article has nothing to do with OSS advocacy or your anti-Microsoft crusade. Every time a Microsoft article is posted here, the haters come out of the woodwork to spout the usual lines on how Microsoft sucks and how some OSS alternative is better or the OSS "philosophy" is better, or some other claptrap. When an Linux article is posted, you almost NEVER see some Windows fanboy derailing the thread with anti-Linux BS or pro-MS advocacy. To put is simply: This article is NOT about you. It's about Windows users that want to improve it. Not everything is about you. You want to advocate OSS? Then do it in an appropriate article rather than derailing every single Microsoft article's thread with pro-OSS anti-Microsoft bilge.
Edited 2008-06-02 01:11 UTC