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17 comments

1. 1. John

   Jun 20, 07:02
   

   I would not call people mind­less sheep, however Microsoft has created a new gen­er­a­tion (arguably gen­er­a­tions) of com­puter users who are ‘dumbed down’. The soft­ware comes bundled with every PC they pur­chase, they use the Microsoft Windows system as it is.

   I have to dis­agree on this comment. You have to remem­ber once you take out the home hob­by­ist and the acad­e­mia tin­ker­ers, most people at home or in busi­ness buy a tool to do one or many jobs. They need to tool to accom­plish a set of tasks. True they can learn to drive the tools better, but for most the outcome is the impor­tant thing. If the tool came in mul­ti­ple flavours or sizes they would, if slightly edu­cated buy the tool most useful to accom­plish the aim of the tool.

   They do not want to dis­sas­em­ble the tool to find out what makes it tick, they just want to get the answer. For example a plumber does not pull apart his pipe cutter to see how he can improve it by build­ing an alter­nate with more stuff than the first one, he gets on with the job.

   This does not mean Microsoft, Open Source, Mac­in­tosh etc are wrong or right, they just provide dif­fer­ent sets of pipe cutters that can ccom­plish very similar jobs just in a slightly dif­fer­ent way

2. 2. Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale

   Jun 20, 08:14
   

   “I know a fair number of Windows user also and a not a single one has remarked about the benefit of a con­sisent user inter­face.”

   Making a point based on the behav­iour of people you know is a bit dubious, but even assum­ing that’s true in general the purpose of a con­sis­tent user inter­face is IMO to make sure you *don’t* notice it. If you start notic­ing the UI, it’s because it’s getting in your way.

   Some exam­ples, apart from having all the widgets look the same, which is an impor­tant first start: having “OK” and “Cancel” in con­sis­tent places on dia­logue boxes, so you don’t need to think about where to click; having con­sis­tent key­board short­cuts (even simple ones, such as alt-f to get to the File menu), having con­sis­tent idioms (such as always *having* a File menu and always having it in the same place). These are all areas where free desk­tops tend to fall down, even within a single envi­ron­ment (though it’s getting bettter). That said there are plenty of areas where the Windows UI is incon­sis­tent, and Microsoft doesn’t set a good example here because they keep chang­ing the UI of their office prod­ucts in order to make the upgrades worth­while, which is why we get crap like buttons that only become 3D when you mouse over them. To be honest I think Apple has done a far better job with respect to con­sis­tence, and even they couldn’t resist adding new window types: in addi­tion to Aqua, you now also get brushed metal, a slightly lighter, less-​textured brushed metal, and the weird hybrid that iTunes uses.

   My point is basi­cally that getting a con­sis­tent UI is hard, unre­ward­ing in a certain sense (you are basi­cally trying to make your appli­ca­tion *not* stand out) and you will be con­tin­u­ally fight­ing with people who want to do cool things at the expense of con­sis­tency. It’s tempt­ing to argue that KDE and GNOME feed off each other, but really the two projects rep­re­sent a large amount of dupli­cated effort, and the desire to do some­thing dif­fer­ent is at the root of it.. There are lots of tech­ni­cal dis­tinc­tions between the two — and for ages KDE was a lot better engi­neered, though I doubt that’s still true — but fun­da­men­tally there is nothing so majorly dif­fer­ent that the two envi­ron­ments couldn’t merge, for an overall improve­ment in the con­sis­tency of the big appli­ca­tions. I seri­ously doubt this will ever happen, but it would be nice.

   All this said, I agree with you that it’s not really impor­tant, in terms of Linux adop­tion, to get a con­sis­tent user inter­face. IMO people learn to work with the quirks of their favourite appli­ca­tions, so after a small learn­ing period they just won’t notice the user inter­face unless it really gets in their way. However, a con­sis­tent UI is part of what makes using a Mac such a relax­ing expe­ri­ence: I can start any appli­ca­tion and imme­di­ately know a lot about how to use it without having to poke around: getting a good set of appli­ca­tions that people want to use on Linux will foster its adop­tion, but getting a con­sis­tent user inter­face will help to make using Linux GUI appli­ca­tions enjoy­able.

3. 3. Leon Brooks

   Jun 20, 09:00
   

   Of the many MS-​Windows users _I_ know, those that give a flying hoot about the user inter­face are all com­plain­ing about missing or degraded fea­tures in XP (I ain’t gunner sit through their wailing about Vicious^WVista’s lacks), the are NOT rejoic­ing in con­sis­tency or added utility.

   The rest of them com­plain about viruses, spyware et al, which all seems to be a core concept for MS-​Windows and to have stayed so for a very long time.

   In summary, MS-​Windows users gen­er­ally don’t revel in any inter­face feature; rather, they quail at the prospect of a virus/XYZware/whatever (includ­ing just the fun­de­man­tal system as shipped) delet­ing or alter­ing their work and “pos­ses­sions” on the com­puter. And often without the slight­est warning.

4. 4. John

   Jun 20, 12:26
   

   Leon,

   You rant as usual…what does what you said have much to do with the topic?

5. 5. Pascal

   Jun 20, 17:24
   

   Leon,

   You rant as usual…what does what you said have much to do with the topic?

   In my post I strayed off one user inter­face article also and went on to talk about MS and Apple for a bit before con­ven­ing back to the topic. I think Leon notes a variety of rel­e­vant issues that do relate to what I dis­cussed in the actual entry.

6. 6. Pascal

   Jun 20, 18:47
   

   You have to remem­ber once you take out the home hob­by­ist and the acad­e­mia tin­ker­ers, most people at home or in busi­ness buy a tool to do one or many jobs. They need to tool to accom­plish a set of tasks. True they can learn to drive the tools better, but for most the outcome is the impor­tant thing. If the tool came in mul­ti­ple flavours or sizes they would, if slightly edu­cated buy the tool most useful to accom­plish the aim of the tool.

   That is in part my point. People are not inter­ested in think­ing about the soft­ware they use, whether there might perhaps be an alter­na­tive that could poten­tially allow them to acheive their job more effi­ciently or cut the IT costs.

   The average white-​collar worker learned how to use the soft­ware once and since then, and I think con­se­quently even, there have not been and changes, even if that would have been for the good. This was in fact one of Microsoft’s mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Teach­ing people how to use Windows and Microsoft Office early on means that later in life they won’t or would be reluc­tant to change.

   Now that mar­ket­ing strat­egy has become more unfair. Both the private and public school sectors use Microsoft Windows for their systems and further cor­po­rate prod­ucts on those. Pimping the prod­ucts of a company should not be per­mit­ted in the public edu­ca­tion sector.

   They do not want to dis­sas­em­ble the tool to find out what makes it tick, they just want to get the answer. For example a plumber does not pull apart his pipe cutter to see how he can improve it by build­ing an alter­nate with more stuff than the first one, he gets on with the job.

   I support and use free soft­ware yet I do not touch the source code. Would you not agree with me that the plumber would be better off if he would be able to be in direct contact with the folks who designed and man­u­fac­tured his or her pipe cutter offer­ing advice con­cern­ing how he uses it for example. This would benefit the company, it’s cus­tomers, right down to the plumber.

   Alright, granted, the plumber is there to do a job, and white collar workers, sci­en­tists and even soft­ware devel­op­ers also have a job. However, unlike a pipe cutter as an example of a tool, soft­ware, also a tool, is upgraded, worked on - simply evolves - con­tin­u­ously. As tech­nol­ogy adapts, improves and gets better, more com­pli­cated and ulti­mately ben­e­fi­cial to us we need to have the ade­quate soft­ware to run on it. In this example, my ideas in the pre­vi­ous para­graph are of direct impor­tance as in this setting allow­ing people to inno­vate freely really begins to shine.

   When you have a com­mu­nity of enthu­si­as­tic, tal­ented people who can freely share their ideas and brain­dumps you get very inno­v­a­tive results. The users of those results should play an impor­tant role in the pre­vi­ous process and they can by com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the cre­ators who then can further polish the cre­ation.

   I think society would benefit from the inno­v­a­tive input from it’s cit­i­zens. Workers should not only be focused on the job at hand but every once in a while also con­sider the tool they are using. Is it applic­a­ble for the job at hand? Have times changed? Is there some­thing about this tool that could be improved? If there are faults what can I do?

   This does not mean Microsoft, Open Source, Mac­in­tosh etc are wrong or right, they just provide dif­fer­ent sets of pipe cutters that can ccom­plish very similar jobs just in a slightly dif­fer­ent way

   I think the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between each pipe cutter and their cre­ators which you have just men­tioned is the way the cutters were created and what you can do with it, the pipe cutter. I will not choose Microsoft’s pipe cutter because if I use it for some­thing other than pipes I’m afraid of being sued. More­over Microsoft’s pipe cutter does not cut my pipes as well as I have seen certain other pipe cutters achieve. The same might apply to Apple’s pipe cutter as well.

   I think I am going to go for the pipe cutter that allows me to do my job most effi­ciently, the free soft­ware pipe cutter. If perhaps I find a problem with the pipe cutter I am sure I can not only find and talk to several thou­sand pipe cutter enthu­si­asts but prob­a­bly a whole variety of dif­fer­ent people. Some might be pipe design­ers, spanner design­ers and some might even create hammers.

   And finally, if I have an idea that makes use of the pipe cutter in one way or another, I can do with the pipe cutter what I want and chances are there will be at least ten people out of those thou­sands of other enthu­si­as­tic plumbers, car­pen­ters, elec­tri­cians and so forth who might be inter­ested also in my new idea.

   That’s the power of freedom.

   If you do not want to excer­cise the free­doms you posses in regard to your pipe cutter then just use it for your job. Nothing is stop­ping you from that. ;)

7. 7. Leon Brooks

   Jun 20, 20:57
   

   John: I’m iden­ti­fy­ing what real ‘Doze users evi­dently care about, as dis­tinct from the article’s claims.

   Pascal: the implied vote of con­fi­dence is welcome.

8. 8. John

   Jun 21, 15:46
   

   Alright, granted, the plumber is there to do a job, and white collar workers, sci­en­tists and even soft­ware devel­op­ers also have a job. However, unlike a pipe cutter as an example of a tool, soft­ware, also a tool, is upgraded, worked on - simply evolves - con­tin­u­ously. As tech­nol­ogy adapts, improves and gets better, more com­pli­cated and ulti­mately ben­e­fi­cial to us we need to have the ade­quate soft­ware to run on it.

   no pipe cutter is free. not paying for it still requires an invest­ment of time and effort to master its spe­cific require­ments to operate suc­cess­fully. Don’t fall for the cost of acquis­tion equals the cost of oper­a­tion fallacy.

   If the pipe doesn’t change why upgrade to a new beaut pipe cutter with many new fea­tures if it doesn’t cut the pipe any better than the one you already own. Hence when taken to a research or busi­ness sce­nario unless a process changes or gets optomised then the tools don’t really need to change.

   One thing that is never really stated, yes you pay money to lock your­self into Apple or Microsoft etc as a choice. When you select an open source plat­form you also lock your­self into the vendor of that version. The dis­tri­b­u­tions, tools, tech­nolo­gies are dif­fer­ent between releases, so you learn Redhat in detail, does not auto­mat­i­cally mean you can admin­is­ter a SUSE or Ubuntu box any better or worse, and switch­ing between releases red hat to ubuntu is no less complex than moving between windows releases.

9. 9. Pascal

   Jun 21, 23:54
   

   no pipe cutter is free. not paying for it still requires an invest­ment of time and effort to master its spe­cific require­ments to operate suc­cess­fully. Don’t fall for the cost of acquis­tion equals the cost of oper­a­tion fallacy.

   I’d like to point out the errors in that. I agree that the cost of acqui­si­tion does not equal the cost of oper­a­tion, however, I think every­one should con­sider the fol­low­ing:

   A busi­ness is pro­vid­ing a product/service which requires the daily use of servers and ter­mi­nal machines for the employ­ees to use. Right now the busi­ness is using a pro­pri­etary solu­tion, with Microsoft. If that busi­ness were to change from a Windows server to a Linux server and the ter­mi­nals to Linux boxes also. The costs involved would be pur­chas­ing a dis­tri­b­u­tion (if it’s from a company), the down­time during which the network is replaced, and the retrain­ing, or perhaps re-​hiring of staff (inc. tech support).

   Why would a company do this? If they can say yes to this ques­tion: “will we save more money in the future years to come, on the whole if we move from our current solu­tion to a free soft­ware solu­tion?”. Yes there will be moving costs, yes there may be skills issues, but ulti­mately if the busi­ness can save more money using free soft­ware which does the same job, I find, mostly faster, more effi­ciently than what the busi­ness is cur­rently using and paying a decent amount of money for then it will be worth it.

   If the pipe doesn’t change why upgrade to a new beaut pipe cutter with many new fea­tures if it doesn’t cut the pipe any better than the one you already own. Hence when taken to a research or busi­ness sce­nario unless a process changes or gets optomised then the tools don’t really need to change.

   Unless I am mis­taken we’re using the pipe and the pipe cutter metaphor­i­cally to rep­re­sent a job at hand and the tool respec­tively, in regards to IT. Now, tech­nol­ogy changes rapidly, we’re dou­bling our speeds and storage capac­ity every 18-24 months and there­fore the job at hand will change. Five years ago there were very little web devel­op­ers working on such things as AJAX and web apps. Five years ago there was no demand for blogs and thus no need for people to spend time cre­at­ing a blog­ging portal.

   The pipe is chang­ing, every­day. And in this envi­ron­ment so must the tools. So most def­i­nitely one’s toolset must be adapt­able and one wishing to stay in the loop must also be adapt­able to meet new tech­nolo­gies and sub­se­quent demand. The only way to do that is being an adap­tive person with an open mind in regard to the tools you’ve got in your digital toolbox…

   One thing that is never really stated, yes you pay money to lock your­self into Apple or Microsoft etc as a choice. When you select an open source plat­form you also lock your­self into the vendor of that version. The dis­tri­b­u­tions, tools, tech­nolo­gies are dif­fer­ent between releases, so you learn Redhat in detail, does not auto­mat­i­cally mean you can admin­is­ter a SUSE or Ubuntu box any better or worse, and switch­ing between releases red hat to ubuntu is no less complex than moving between windows releases.

   That is FUD. When you select a free soft­ware plat­form you are most cer­tainly not locking your­self in. Firstly, your data is by default stored in open stan­dard formats which you are guar­an­teed to be able to find a program to open them with in 10, 20 years time. Sec­ondly when and if you must move from one dis­tri­b­u­tion to another, say some­thing went down the drain and you must change from Redhat to some­thing else you have many very, very similar dis­tri­b­u­tions avail­able at your fin­ger­tips. In the case of Redhat… well you’ve got Fedora Core as an obvious choice, oth­er­wise, CentOS. SUSE Linux is not very dif­fer­ent now either, espe­cially with the folks moving over to the Smart package manager (yes, that means YUM and APT and YOU, all in one).

   However, I am par­tic­u­larly intrigued by this:

   …and switch­ing between releases red hat to ubuntu is no less complex than moving between windows releases.

   That is plain wrong. Had you have said moving from BSD to Ubuntu perhaps I may have agreed but I am sure to say that anyone who admin­is­ters servers, includ­ing Windows and Mac servers will agree that moving from one dis­tri­b­u­tion to another is a piece of cake. In the desktop arena this might be some­what dif­fer­ent, but hey, if you’ve got GNOME and KDE avail­able and you were using one of them before there is little dif­fer­ence yet again

   Heck I even did it. Moved from SUSE Linux 10.0 to Ubuntu 5.10. I even moved from being solely a KDE users to using GNOME, from one day to the next. Package man­age­ment was just as easy, the menus were just as simple, the same appli­ca­tions ran. That was from a RPM system to a Debian system and I had no prob­lems.

   And if you were to conduct this change from a server per­spec­tive chances are it would be just as easy. The basic and most impor­tant tools and pack­ages are exactly the same, DNS, Samba, DHCP, NTP, NFS, what­ever.

   As for moving from one Windows release to another, well at least perhaps until Vista really comes out, when­ever it will, I think there has not really been much of a dif­fer­ence from one release to another. Some­times even recog­nised bugs make their way into the new, com­mer­cial release, and other than that users have a half-​arsed icon set, a slightly more pol­ished desktop envi­ron­ment but ulti­mately below the core it’s similar stuff.

10. 10. John

    Jun 22, 08:11
    

    A busi­ness is pro­vid­ing a product/service which requires the daily use of servers and ter­mi­nal machines for the employ­ees to use. Right now the busi­ness is using a pro­pri­etary solu­tion, with Microsoft. If that busi­ness were to change from a Windows server to a Linux server and the ter­mi­nals to Linux boxes also. The costs involved would be pur­chas­ing a dis­tri­b­u­tion (if it’s from a company), the down­time during which the network is replaced, and the retrain­ing, or perhaps re-​hiring of staff (inc. tech support).

    This is where all Open Source dis­cus­sions fall down. The reason people adopt a certain tech­nol­ogy isn’t to have a spe­cific oper­at­ing system, it is the appli­ca­tions running on that plat­form, where the appli­ca­tion keeps the doors of the busi­ness open not the oper­at­ing system. Shift­ing the oper­at­ing system between various vendors does not ensure the busness can con­tinue to oper​ate…it is the appli­ca­tion that runs on the OS that keeps the doors open.

    Now if you had said there was an appli­ca­tion with equiv­a­lent func­tion­al­ity in Open Source, was avail­able from the vendor on mul­ti­ple OS’s then I would say fine a migra­tion could be what the company needs, but switch­ing the OS doesn’t solve any problem.

11. 11. Pascal

    Jun 24, 17:19
    

    This is where all Open Source dis­cus­sions fall down. The reason people adopt a certain tech­nol­ogy isn’t to have a spe­cific oper­at­ing system, it is the appli­ca­tions running on that plat­form, where the appli­ca­tion keeps the doors of the busi­ness open not the oper­at­ing system. Shift­ing the oper­at­ing system between various vendors does not ensure the busness can con­tinue to operate…it is the appli­ca­tion that runs on the OS that keeps the doors open.

    Not at all. Sure, if a busi­ness is using Adobe Illus­tra­tor on Windows the only real alter­na­tive there is moving to a Mac plat­form if you were to want to change, but that is where we’re not exactly at fault. The person who decided to use Illus­tra­tor is mostly to blame along with Adobe for only pro­vid­ing their product under Mac and Windows plat­forms.

    Per­son­ally in this regard, I think most com­puter ter­mi­nals used by white-​collar workers could easily run GNU/Linux. OpenOf​fice.org, KOffice, Gnu­meric and Abiword easily cover the office suite needs, Evo­lu­tion, Thun­der­bird and Kontact look after all email­ing, contact, task and time man­age­ment, Firefox, Epiphany, Opera and Kon­queror and Nau­tilus cover all your web brows­ing and file man­age­ment needs.

    In the average office setting I think the appli­ca­tions listed above easily fulfil the require­ments and wants of your average office worker. To top it all off you’ve just saved an average of about 500 USD per machine because not only your office appli­ca­tions (not to mention 17, 000 pack­ages) did not cost you any­thing but in this example the machine is running GNU/Linux and you’ve saved money there too.

    For more spe­cific jobs such as a graphic designer - fair enough - they may have only the skillset to use and operate Adobe graphic design appli­ca­tions, which run only only on Mac and Windows plat­forms. Per­son­ally I would go for Inkscape, The GIMP and Blender, free soft­ware appli­ca­tions again, because they’ve allowed me to do all the graphic work I’ve done in the last two years without prob­lems of func­tion­al­ity or a lack of fea­tures. For an idea what sort of work you can achieve with free software/open source graphic design tools such as the three I just men­tioned check out http://​orange.​blender.org.

    Now if you had said there was an appli­ca­tion with equiv­a­lent func­tion­al­ity in Open Source, was avail­able from the vendor on mul­ti­ple OS’s then I would say fine a migra­tion could be what the company needs, but switch­ing the OS doesn’t solve any problem.

    I think it does solve a lot of prob­lems. If the busi­ness is cur­rently running Windows there are issues of secu­rity the IT team have to con­stantly worry about. Then comes the price tag. A busi­ness is paying thou­sands of dollars, if not more, each year to pay for licens­ing and so forth for those Windows desktop and server systems which could be saved and that is a fixed problem; some­thing good, a step in the right direc­tion if we could save all that money and still have a secure, stable and pow­er­ful network of servers and desktop machines.

    I think people need to get off their butt and try it out for a change rather than just com­plain­ing, spread­ing FUD and having so much doubt - most I would guess - having never actu­ally tried a free software/open source solu­tion in an average office envi­ron­ment. A lot of IT people in the indus­try seem so con­ser­v­a­tive to me. I think one of the most impor­tant values someone who desires to be a suc­cess­ful person, espe­cially in regard to the IT arena needs to have an open mind and be pre­pared to try out new things, the bleed­ing edge and thus stay ahead in the loop, espe­cially with tech­nol­ogy chang­ing so rapidly.

12. 12. John

    Jun 28, 21:51
    

    When I mean line of busi­ness appli­ca­tion that keep the doors open I mean Oracle finan­cials, SAP, Siebel, CRM solu­tions. The apps users have locally are per­sonal in many respects and do not add up to a com­mer­cial solu­tion. Even the email client is not rel­e­vant, but high avail­abilty for the email server is…any client will do as long as it inte­grates and com­mu­ni­cat­eds with the rel­e­vant LOB systems.

    Do not focus on what is in front of you at a work­sta­tion. Con­sider what the organ­i­sa­tion needs as it sits in the data centre and then the best way to present it to the user, in the form rel­e­vant to the users skills (web, appli­ca­tion based, via a spread­sheet etc)

13. 13. Pascal

    Jun 29, 19:17
    

    I think the major­ity of the busi­nesses out there are small to medium sized ones which could easily manage their IT require­ments using free soft­ware, and if not at least with a Samba server. I hold with my opinion that free soft­ware, most def­i­nitely already in the server arena and now also in the desktop arena is a viable, cost effec­tive, more secure and ulti­mately better solu­tion in most cases than using a pro­pri­etary solu­tion pro­vided by the folks over at Redmond. :)

14. 14. John

    Jul 02, 18:28
    

    hhmm what about the pro­pri­etary vendors from salt lake city

15. 15. Pascal

    Jul 02, 21:51
    

    What about them…? =?

16. 16. John

    Jul 03, 07:35
    

    You seem to blame Microsoft for ever­thing very Leon about you, what about HP, Novell, Sun, IBM etc. They is their own way have been sig­nif­i­cantly worse than Microsoft ever has been, espe­cially IBM. If selling more hard­ware means support more plat­forms IBM will do any­thing to sell the kit and espe­cially include main­te­nance. What runs on the plat­form is not rel­e­vant to them util you move into the big boys pants away from toddler stuff

17. 17. Pascal

    Jul 03, 13:21
    

    We dis­cussed the use of free soft­ware in the busi­ness envi­ron­ment - but as far as blame goes if you want to hand it out, Microsoft of course is not the only one in the arena that is prac­tic­ing unfair busi­ness. In their his­to­ries, Sun, IBM, HP, and Novell def­i­nitely have had their fair share of par­tic­u­lar inci­dents.

    I never denied nor sug­gested that. In fact, I thank you bring­ing that up, because you’ve just helped suggest that even the more open-source/free soft­ware friendly busi­nesses out there deal dirty some­times, which leaves one to ponder what things all the others get up to.

    This only really leaves one with one solid con­clus­sion: if you don’t want to be or have any­thing to do with being screwed over, don’t support the large major­ity of all cor­po­ra­tions out there - simple as that. I guess it does sound some­what radical in a cap­i­tal­ist system, but that is essen­tially the solu­tion… =\