Star Open Source Design and the OpenOfficeMouse
Linked by Kroc Camen on Sun 8th Nov 2009 10:21 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Is complexity (and wearing this on the outside) an inherit part of open source design? FactoryJoe compares the OpenOfficeMouse (a mouse with 18 programmable buttons and even an analogue joystick) and the Apple Magic Mouse-"To me, the OpenOfficeMouse seems like such a typical product from the open source community." [Kroc: I honestly believed the OpenOfficeMouse to be a very clever satirical joke, the irony that it isn't suspends belief]
E-mail Print r 3   45 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/hbw
Thread beginning with comment 393572
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

if you value complexity for the sake of it. Some us swim in endless software complexity at work and don't need even more when we come home, especially when it exists to make people feel special and not to improve productivity. I've always felt that design aspects of Unix appeal more to bored admins who want a difficult learning curve rather than to strongly left-brained engineers. The Unix command list was created by programmers who when boys insisted upon secret handshakes for the sake of them. Thank god VMS/NT broke with the unix tradition of silly command line names and counter-intuitive, cryptic design.


Let me guess, you haven't used a contemporary Linux desktop for serious use recently at all, have you?

As a user, there is no need whatsoever to use the command line.

OTOH, if a person has even modest training, then the fact that Linux adopts the same command names for its UNIX work-alike commands is a boon, because it means that shell scripts written for UNIX bash shells will also run on Linux. As it turns out, I myself as a "strongly left-brained engineer" have written (self taught) my own bash scripts (procedure calls and everything). Let me tell you that it is both considerably more powerful and also, at the same time, many times easier to write for than MSDOS and NT.

As for OpenOffice itself ... it is an Office suite. It uses a GUI. It is easier to use and to adapt to for MS Office users than trying to migrate to the ribbon:

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.0/

Edited 2009-11-09 04:56 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

OTOH, if a person has even modest training, then the fact that Linux adopts the same command names for its UNIX work-alike commands is a boon, because it means that shell scripts written for UNIX bash shells will also run on Linux. As it turns out, I myself as a "strongly left-brained engineer" have written (self taught) my own bash scripts (procedure calls and everything). Let me tell you that it is both considerably more powerful and also, at the same time, many times easier to write for than MSDOS and NT.


Look at that!

Modded down for pointing out that "dir" (short for directory) is no less or more cryptic than "ls" (short for list structure), and that bash shell scripts are far, far more powerful and useful than NT/MSDOS batch files, and as a bonus the bash shell scripts are source-backwards-compatible with the industry standard predecessor OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ls

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ls.html

Edited 2009-11-09 09:17 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

nt_jerkface Member since:
2009-08-26

Modded down for pointing out that "dir" (short for directory) is no less or more cryptic than "ls" (short for list structure)


You probably got modded down for plugging OpenOffice and Linux like you do in every story. We all know about OpenOffice and Linux. This is OSNEWS afterall.

As for ls it a lousy acronym where list would be a better choice. But even barring lousy two letter acronyms there are plenty of common Unix commands that have poor names and give no indication as to what they are used for like Grep, Sed, Awk, Emacs, Lpr/Lprm, and Vi to name a few. The fact that they chose 'man' instead of 'help' and didn't even bother creating an alias says enough. What else would someone try if they don't know what to do?

Unix is a silly handshakes club. It gets the job done yes but only after you learn all the silly handshakes.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2

nt_jerkface Member since:
2009-08-26

As a user, there is no need whatsoever to use the command line.


Unless something goes wrong which happened to most people who upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 according to this poll:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1305924&page=2

Command line fix for xorg:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=320524

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2