And some say FOSS sucks
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@blakeyrat said:
The ONLY thing it can do competently is play videos
Which is why I like it, despite the shit. I suppose that's kinda like enjoying the broken down, rusty jalopy with car AIDS because the radio is good-- and every other radio on the market also has a poorly designed ice blender built into it. Kinda like that.
@blakeyrat said:
I particularly love when it opens a movie off-screen because it saved its maximized window size as its normal window size.
Or when it randomly minimizes itself to the icon tray, then when you start your next vidoe, it stays minimized and you spend the first 5-10 seconds of the video trying to find the fucking icon. You can't click on the notification bubble that says "Now Playing FurryCatSex-xVID-dpi-720[HDActual]-LOL.avi", because that just dismisses the bubble. And upon dismissing the bubble it hides the icon. So then you have to fish for that 5px wide "expand up" symbol in the system tray, open it, find the VLC icon, maximize that. By that time the clip's half-over, the German Sheppard's already pooped on the face of the guy in the Longcat fur suit, and you can't even rewind it the beginning because you've already shot your load onto the keyboard like the Pavlovian sperm monkey you are.
Part of the above may not apply to you.
@blakeyrat said:
The stream/convert feature, you know, *the thing it was designed to do*, is a complete mess.
It has a stream/convert feature? I thought it had the "try to find the confusing as fuck file browser so you can click on a button that says Export to create a 0kb big file with a random name" feature. What the fuck version are you using?
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@boomzilla said:
Despite what you (or blakeyrat) think, that's not me excusing a bad interface, but exposing your lack of imagination.
That's exactly what it sounds like you are doing. Nobody said incorrect or slow software was good, but fast, correct software with a shitty UI is also no good.
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VLC can play pretty much everything I can throw at at* irregardless** of what DirectShow filters and other drivers are installed, considering there's for billion different possible combinations of container format, codec options, and other shit that keeps us from having a One True Video Format™.
MP4 gets us close, but there's still a bajillion different encoding options (an MP4 that ffmpeg spits out can't be decoded by Sony Vegas for example), and MPEG-LA*** still prevents us from adopting it widespread without a nasty lawsuit. Maybe someday we'll have a decoder like LAME where we can just plug a pirated DLL into an application.
* Except MIDI for some reason.
** Merriam-Webster says it's a word, perscripivist asshats.
*** Fun fact: The inventors of MP4 didn't patent it because they wanted it to be widely adopted. MPEG-LA saw that it was unpatented and got themselves the patent on it, thus preventing it from being widely adopted.
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@Lorne Kates said:
@blakeyrat said:
The ONLY thing it can do competently is play videos
Which is why I like it, despite the shit. I suppose that's kinda like enjoying the broken down, rusty jalopy with car AIDS because the radio is good-- and every other radio on the market also has a poorly designed ice blender built into it. Kinda like that.
So the Video LAN Client is only good at playing videos? Shocker.
"Do one thing and do it well."
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@beginner_ said:
Plus a lot of commerical, propretiary software is a lot shitter than FOSS...
[citation needed] Seriously, provide some fucking examples if you're going to make dumb comments like this.
@beginner_ said:
...then you lost because you can't fix it yourself.
Right, because writing patches for your window manager or office suite is clearly the fucking Gold Standard of quality..
@beginner_ said:
Of course stuff like MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. are better than the FOSS versions but then the budgets behind them are gigantic.
So fucking what? I love this fucking goalpost-moving. "FOSS is better than proprietary!" "Really, what about all these shitty apps that can't even compare?" "whine Well, of course the proprietary versions of those are better, but that's not fair to bring up because they have large budgets behind them!!" "Well what FOSS apps are comparable (or ever better) than their proprietary competitors?" "silence Well, even if the FOSS apps do have bugs, at least you can waste a lot of time trying to patch them yourself! Because clearly that pissed-away effort doesn't count against FOSS, it's actually a bonus!"
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@Lorne Kates said:
Or when it randomly minimizes itself to the icon tray, then when you start your next vidoe, it stays minimized and you spend the first 5-10 seconds of the video trying to find the fucking icon. You can't click on the notification bubble that says "Now Playing FurryCatSex-xVID-dpi-720[HDActual]-LOL.avi", because that just dismisses the bubble. And upon dismissing the bubble it hides the icon. So then you have to fish for that 5px wide "expand up" symbol in the system tray, open it, find the VLC icon, maximize that. By that time the clip's half-over, the German Sheppard's already pooped on the face of the guy in the Longcat fur suit, and you can't even rewind it the beginning because you've already shot your load onto the keyboard like the Pavlovian sperm monkey you are.
Part of the above may not apply to you.
Yeah, what kind of sick fuck are you?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@boomzilla said:
Despite what you (or blakeyrat) think, that's not me excusing a bad interface, but exposing your lack of imagination.
That's exactly what it sounds like you are doing. Nobody said incorrect or slow software was good, but fast, correct software with a shitty UI is also no good.It only sounds like that if you can't read what's there and put in extra stuff that isn't there. The point I was making (again, the literate among us probably got this the first time) is that there are multiple criteria on which software is judged, and interface is an important but not the only component.
If you're doing the hyperbole (bad / annoying interface = software has failed and is no good) for emphasis, then...OK, I guess. Blakeyrat loves to do this, and it annoys those of us who know how to read and live in the real world, where nothing is perfect and often things that have shitty interfaces allow us to do really useful and profitable things.
But if you're going to make unqualified statements about how something is a failure if X, then someone is going to object when that's incorrect.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@boomzilla said:
Despite what you (or blakeyrat) think, that's not me excusing a bad interface, but exposing your lack of imagination.
That's exactly what it sounds like you are doing. Nobody said incorrect or slow software was good, but fast, correct software with a shitty UI is also no good.
But the UI issue is a lot easier to fix, because the end user is much better able to communicate what the problem is.
For example: You've probably seen reports like this hundreds of times.
"When I do XYZ, the program crashes with an error message."
"OK, so, what's the error message?"
"Well it says an error occurred."
(Repeat 5 or 6 times before finally getting the actual text of the message.) "OK, so how did you get this message?"
"I was doing XYZ, like I said. Didn't you read my report?"
"Yeah, but XYZ has nothing to do with this error; it comes from the W module."
"Yeah, well, I was working in W too, of course."
"What do you mean, of course? You didn't say anything about working in W."
"But I'm always working in W. That's the most useful part of the entire program. Don't you know that?"
(Turns out they're horribly abusing some special-case functionality by trying to treat it as a general case solution, and they ran across an edge case. This takes a week to track down.)
On the other hand:
"The colors look really bad in module X."
"Really? Can you send me a screenshot?"
"Sure. Here you go."
"Hey, you're right. With what you're doing here, the contrast is really bad. I'll tune that a little."
(This takes about an hour or two to track down, most of which is spent waiting on replies from emails.)
I've had to deal with both types of problems. I know which variety I'd rather have to work on...
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@MiffTheFox said:
** Merriam-Webster says it's a word, perscripivist asshats.
It says it's a word. It also says it's nonstandard, is a long way from general acceptance, and to use regardless instead.
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@Lorne Kates said:
Or when it randomly minimizes itself to the icon tray, then when you start your next vidoe, it stays minimized and you spend the first 5-10 seconds of the video trying to find the fucking icon. You can't click on the notification bubble that says "Now Playing FurryCatSex-xVID-dpi-720[HDActual]-LOL.avi", because that just dismisses the bubble. And upon dismissing the bubble it hides the icon. So then you have to fish for that 5px wide "expand up" symbol in the system tray, open it, find the VLC icon, maximize that. By that time the clip's half-over, the German Sheppard's already pooped on the face of the guy in the Longcat fur suit, and you can't even rewind it the beginning because you've already shot your load onto the keyboard like the Pavlovian sperm monkey you are.
Part of the above may not apply to you.
You often say things that make me go "WTF" but this really takes the cake.
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@boomzilla said:
The point I was making (again, the literate among us probably got this the first time) is that there are multiple criteria on which software is judged, and interface is an important but not the only component.
Yes, but nobody claimed otherwise.
@boomzilla said:
If you're doing the hyperbole (bad / annoying interface = software has failed and is no good) for emphasis, then...OK, I guess.
I wouldn't consider that hyperbole. Shitty UIs make shitty software.
@boomzilla said:
Blakeyrat loves to do this, and it annoys those of us who know how to read and live in the real world, where nothing is perfect and often things that have shitty interfaces allow us to do really useful and profitable things.
Yes, people still use shitty software. I never claimed they didn't. Pretty much all the software I use is shitty. If your baseline criteria is "Well, it's shitty, but it's good enough because I can hobble through and do my job", then that's a pretty low fucking bar.
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@joe.edwards said:
So the Video LAN Client is only good at playing videos? Shocker.
It's not particularly good at that. One thing I forgot to mention in addition to its retarded window management: it doesn't even fucking bother to use your color profile, so VLC-played videos always have funky colors.
@joe.edwards said:
"Do one thing and do it well."
Then why the hell does it have a "Convert/Share" feature which composes like 66% of the feature list if the only thing it was supposed to do was play videos?
Look, either it was supposed to only play videos, and all this other shit that doesn't work is some nasty cancer growing off of it, or it was supposed to do a whole bunch of tasks, two thirds of which don't fucking work. You can't have it both ways.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
But the UI issue is a lot easier to fix, because the end user is much better able to communicate what the problem is.
For example: You've probably seen reports like this hundreds of times.
"When I do XYZ, the program crashes with an error message."
"OK, so, what's the error message?"
"Well it says an error occurred."
(Repeat 5 or 6 times before finally getting the actual text of the message.) "OK, so how did you get this message?"
"I was doing XYZ, like I said. Didn't you read my report?"
"Yeah, but XYZ has nothing to do with this error; it comes from the W module."
"Yeah, well, I was working in W too, of course."
"What do you mean, of course? You didn't say anything about working in W."
"But I'm always working in W. That's the most useful part of the entire program. Don't you know that?"
(Turns out they're horribly abusing some special-case functionality by trying to treat it as a general case solution, and they ran across an edge case. This takes a week to track down.)
On the other hand:
"The colors look really bad in module X."
"Really? Can you send me a screenshot?"
"Sure. Here you go."
"Hey, you're right. With what you're doing here, the contrast is really bad. I'll tune that a little."
(This takes about an hour or two to track down, most of which is spent waiting on replies from emails.)
I've had to deal with both types of problems. I know which variety I'd rather have to work on...
Wow, your examples are really skewed and laughable. If only the thing keeping most UIs from being good was a color choice. But, no, the body of evidence would indicate that UI problems are a lot harder to fix (or, at least, they receive a lot less attention, which is really saying the same thing.) A lot of it is because programmers don't know UIs, but they do know how to fix bugs that cause crashes or corruption.
Also, if you think users are going to fix your UI problems, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Most users can't articulate UI problems any better programmers. In fact, they're probably worse. Your average user will spend hours clicking around doing some repetitive task or dealing with badly-designed UIs without thinking anything of it, because to them it's just how the computer works. They have no idea that if the UI received proper attention it could shave hours off what they are doing and save them from carpal tunnel problems.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Wow, your examples are really skewed and laughable. If only the thing keeping most UIs from being good was a color choice. But, no, the body of evidence would indicate that UI problems are a lot harder to fix (or, at least, they receive a lot less attention, which is really saying the same thing.) A lot of it is because programmers don't know UIs, but they do know how to fix bugs that cause crashes or corruption.
Yeah, fixing bugs that cause crashes or corruption is easy. *Finding* them, on the other hand, can be a lot trickier, and that's what my eample illustrates. For most bugs, once you've found them, the fix is obvious and simple.
Also, if you think users are going to fix your UI problems, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Most users can't articulate UI problems any better programmers. In fact, they're probably worse.
Maybe I've just got different users from you. When something doesn't look good, I end up hearing about it, and I can generally get a (at least halfway-decent) description of the problem, complete with a screenshot embedded in a Word document, if not in the initial report then within two iterations of asking for details.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
"The colors look really bad in module X."
If your idea of serious UI problems equates to incorrect colours, I really hope you don't work with UIs.
Here's the short of it: The key part of what makes a UI good or bad is, well, how usable it is. If you're lucky, the best information you'll get from a user is that they're confused or frustrated with some part of it.
Why? Because usability is such a goddamn nebulous word, that's why.
This is more usable than this.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
When something doesn't look good, I end up hearing about it, and I can generally get a (at least halfway-decent) description of the problem, complete with a screenshot embedded in a Word document, if not in the initial report then within two iterations of asking for details.
But we're not talking about "looks good", we're talking about how the UI works. For example: "Does it need to open a new window to enter some value for a task I do 500 times a day?" Most users aren't going to recognize there are better ways to structure interaction so they're not doing a bunch of redundant clicking and typing.
Then there's stuff like "Hey, the UI behaves in some way that is totally counter-intuitive and it causes people to lose work the first couple of times they run into it." That's the kind of thing that a lot of users will simply push through, because they've been trained to think that almost any problem with software was caused by them being dumb. These are the kinds of problems that almost never get bugs filed, because the users don't even realize that the software might be wrong. To them, the UI is just something handed down by the gods and they have just got to learn to accept it.
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@morbiuswilters said:
"Well what FOSS apps are comparable (or ever better) than their proprietary competitors?"
In web browsers, the main players are:
Internet Explorer (Trident, Proprietary)
Firefox ([url=https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Developer_Guide/Source_Code/Mercurial]Gecko[/url], FOSS)
Safari ([url=http://www.webkit.org/]Webkit[/url], FOSS)
Chrome (was Webkit, FOSS. Now [url=http://www.chromium.org/Home]Blink[/url], FOSS)
Opera (was Presto, Proprietary. Now [url=http://www.chromium.org/Home]Blink[/url], FOSS)Are you seriously telling me you consider IE to be the best web browser on that list?
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Wait, what's this Blink shit? You mean there's another rendering engine I have to support?
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@boomzilla said:
The point I was making (again, the literate among us probably got this the first time) is that there are multiple criteria on which software is judged, and interface is an important but not the only component.
In my opinion, software is only as good as its worst component. A paint program with a perfect UI, perfect business logic, but crappy import/export options is still crap. A paint program that can read and write every single format ever designed, ever, and which has the most wonderful usable UI imaginable, but which crashes every time you change the brush size, is still crap. And then there is most FOSS which may do a lot right, but has a horrible UI, and it is still crap.
Of course the interface is not the only criterion on which software is judged, but if it is bad, it does not matter how good the rest is: the software, as a whole, is still bad.
Case in point: windows 8 on a non-touch device.
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@powerlord said:
@morbiuswilters said:
"Well what FOSS apps are comparable (or ever better) than their proprietary competitors?"
In web browsers, the main players are:
Internet Explorer (Trident, Proprietary)
Firefox (Gecko, FOSS)
Safari (Webkit, FOSS)
Chrome (was Webkit, FOSS. Now Blink, FOSS)
Opera (was Presto, Proprietary. Now Blink, FOSS)Are you seriously telling me you consider IE to be the best web browser on that list?
No, although I'd say IE 10 is about comparable to Chrome. However, we've covered in detail here why Firefox sucks.
Also, I'm iffy calling Chrome FOSS. I mean, it's obviously open source, but it's developed by a single company using paid developers and a proprietary model. Clearly we're considering more than just "Do I have the source?" when talking about FOSS; it's a model of decentralized, open, community development. Chrome may not be proprietary, but it's not really a proving grounds of the FOSS methodology, either.
So, you've come up with one example where FOSS is comparable. One.
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@joe.edwards said:
Wait, what's this Blink shit? You mean there's another rendering engine I have to support?
Chrome's fork of Webkit, from what I understand. So, yes.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Then there's stuff like "Hey, the UI behaves in some way that is totally counter-intuitive and it causes people to lose work the first couple of times they run into it." That's the kind of thing that a lot of users will simply push through, because they've been trained to think that almost any problem with software was caused by them being dumb. These are the kinds of problems that almost never get bugs filed, because the users don't even realize that the software might be wrong. To them, the UI is just something handed down by the gods and they have just got to learn to accept it.
Ugh, yeah. And not just the UI either. I've got this one user who just doesn't seem to comprehend the concept of "bugs". Like:
"So how's everything going?"
"Oh, it's working well, except I keep having trouble with X."
"Yeah? What's going on?"
"Well, whenever I have X open and I try to do Y, it pops up one of those 'an error has occurred' windows." (Note: The window in question is the reporting dialog from the exception logging system. User in question has been told, repeatedly, that any occurrance of this is a bug, and the generated report should be emailed to me.) "I figure I'm doing something wrong."
"No, that sounds like a real bug. Can you do that one more time, and email me the report? If I get that I can probably fix it."
"Oh? OK, sure. I'll try that."
I don't even know how many times I've had some variation on that same conversation with that same user. :(
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Internet Explorer (Trident, Proprietary, Non-WTF (IE9+))
Firefox (Gecko, Non-commercial FOSS, WTF)
Safari (Webkit, Commercial FOSS, ?-WTF)
Chrome (Webkit/Blink, Commercial FOSS, Non-WTF)
Opera (Presto/Blink, Proprietary/Commercial FOSS, Non-WTF)
See a pattern here?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@joe.edwards said:
Wait, what's this Blink shit? You mean there's another rendering engine I have to support?
Chrome's fork of Webkit, from what I understand. So, yes.
Don't worry. Once we have to start supporting Blink we can stop supporting Webkit.
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@Douglasac said:
The default white is awful (someone should be fired for that), however I find the light grey setting to be fine. The dark grey setting is just weird.
According to my clients they're all too bright (and I agree - but since I use a high-contrast colour scheme, Office uses that, so it only bothers me when I have to set somebody else's computer).
@Douglasac said:Less issues with activation - that being said I was under the impression that was only with the subscription versions needed the live account. Retail boxes have a product key as normal, and my Dreamspark copy of Visio had an option for a key, which I used because I had one.
There's no retail box anymore - only PKC (Product Key-card), which requires you to enter that key online before your copy of Office will activate (if you enter the key to Office before you enter it online, it sends you to login to Office.com - and if you don't enter it there then, it doesn't activate). Only the volume license versions don't need that, but most of the clients I deal with are too small to buy those (5 license minimum, not to mention that the OL Standard version is nearly twice the price of PKC Home & Business, and you only get the useless Publisher for the price difference). I don't know about Dreamspark, but ActionPack, Technet and MSDN subscriptions all get Office Professional Plus, which is another VL version.
Also, Microsoft's website lies about activation - it claims it's possible to activate by phone, and refers to dialog boxes that don't exist in 2013.
@Douglasac said:I like the smooth motion. There's something nice about it I can't really describe beyond liking it.
For me it's extremely distracting, since the caret was always 1-2 cm behind where I was typing. Disabling that only makes it slightly better - the caret still lags, but only by 1 character (really, how did they manage to screw that up?)
@Douglasac said:That being said, if you find it irksome you can force it to whatever case you like simply by going into the Customize Ribbon screen, and renaming each label by putting a space on the start or end of their name to get the desired effect, or give them entirely different names.
I did that, but FILE is still screaming at me, and that can't be fixed.
Oh, and I found several e-mail messages that crash Outlook 2013 when they're accessed over IMAP.
Also, the only way to install non-VL versions of Office is through Click-to-run (even if you download the DVD image - another stupidity here: the only difference between Home&Business and Pro DVD images is in setup32.exe and setup64.exe in one of subfolders - everything else is the same, but if you use the wrong image for the type of product key, the installer will start downloading everything off the Internet as soon as it finishes checking the key, and it's nearly impossible to abort that).
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@ender said:
There's no retail box anymore
There's no retail box anymore in a number of markets. We still have them in Australia, along with the keycards (I got a keycard for the University dealio).@ender said:but most of the clients I deal with are too small to buy those
Have you looked into the new Office 365 offerings? For something like $15\head\month, they get five licenses of Office along with Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Lync Online... there's no minimum amount of users, but you can have up to 300 before you have to fork out about $35\month.@ender said:For me it's extremely distracting, since the caret was always 1-2 cm behind where I was typing. Disabling that only makes it slightly better - the caret still lags, but only by 1 character (really, how did they manage to screw that up?)
Either you type insanely fast (I type 80wpm and have no issue), your computer is slow or - as odd as it sounds - have you updated your video driver?@ender said:I did that, but FILE is still screaming at me, and that can't be fixed.
Again, as I have the ability to hold my attention on what I'm doing for an extended period of time, I don't see how it's distracting, but whatever.@ender said:I don't know about Dreamspark, but ActionPack, Technet and MSDN subscriptions all get Office Professional Plus, which is another VL version.
Dreamspark doesn't get Office, it gets a few of the individual applications (Access, OneNote, Project and Visio off the top of my head)@ender said:Also, the only way to install non-VL versions of Office is through Click-to-run
So you always have the latest version - that was Microsoft's intent.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Let's compare the following FOSS vs. proprietary programs:
- A not-shit image-editing program.
- A video program that doesn't have a case of HIV.
- A filesystem with modern features like usable block-level snapshots. (ZFS doesn't count--it was created as a proprietary software product by a proprietary company. It wasn't developed by the FOSS community. Just like Java doesn't count--it was open sourced after a decade of proprietary development. FOSStards trying to claim credit for that is like me trying to claim credit for bringing a chick to orgasm after the vibrator warmed her up for 20 minutes and all I did is pant and groan for 8 seconds before collapsing and falling asleep.)
- A desktop environment that isn't an ineptly-assembled piece of shit.
I'm probably what you'd consider to be a FOSStard. But I'll give you the following rebuttal.
1) Granted. The GIMP isn't on par with anything and manages to offend all at the same time.
2) Granted. Partially because video editing is reasonably esoteric domain knowledge. That and the whole FOSS allergy to multimedia patents.
3) Meh. The vibrator is very important in my marriage, and I actually work the vibrator most of the time, so it's a push.
4) I actually like Gnome 3, so I'm in the distinct minority. Although they really bollocks'd up 3.8. Nautilus is practically unusable and they removed transparency from the terminal because they couldn't be arsed to fix some bugs caused by it.On the other hand Chromium (the base of Google Chrome, not the netbook OS) and Firefox are better than IE, although IE is getting better due to the competition. I can't compare either to Opera or Safari as I haven't used either (except for the latter on the aformentioned wife's iPhone, which is hardly a comparison). On the third hand the "F" part of the "FOSS" community doesn't actually care in the slightest if their software is better than the proprietary equivalent. It's more of a political/moral statement. You can think that's batshit insane, but if their goal isn't to be technically better than Photoshop, there isn't much of a point in pointing out they aren't technically better.
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@stinerman said:
...and they removed transparency from the terminal because they couldn't be arsed to fix some bugs caused by it.
REALLY?? gnome-terminal was the only Gnome app I liked.. :(
I gave up on Gnome 3 pretty much out of the gate. Went back to Gnome 2 for awhile, then settled on OpenBox (at least it's a fast, lightweight piece of shit..) After seeing Unity and Gnome 3, I'm pretty sure whatever Linux Desktop that existed is now dead.
@stinerman said:
On the other hand Chromium (the base of Google Chrome, not the netbook OS) and Firefox are better than IE, although IE is getting better due to the competition.
I'd say at this point IE 10 and Firefox 21 are on-par. Chrome is a bit better than both, but I feel like they've lost a lot of forward momentum.
@stinerman said:
I can't compare either to Opera or Safari as I haven't used either (except for the latter on the aformentioned wife's iPhone, which is hardly a comparison).
Opera is fast but about half of sites break in it (at least, last time I used it.) The numbers for Opera are so laughably low I never even bother testing in it. Safari is okay, but a bit dumbed down. Mobile Safari (like Mobile Chrome) sucks.
@stinerman said:
It's more of a political/moral statement.
And as I've pointed out several times before, it's a somewhat dubious one. What's the point of something free if it sucks?
@stinerman said:
...but if their goal isn't to be technically better than Photoshop, there isn't much of a point in pointing out they aren't technically better.
And yet, you're probably the first FOSStard I've met who doesn't insist--with spittle-flecked vitriol--that FOSS is technically superior. I mean, this fucking thread is just about such a thing. In fact, this may be the first time I've even heard someone say the goal isn't to be technically better than proprietary software. Admittedly, they usually play up the "free" angle, but that's just because they're playing to their strength, like when a fat chick has a good sense of humor.
So, yeah, I honestly don't know if what you are saying is accurate. Most FOSStards would say FOSS is technically superior. I think even
Stall-Manwould try to argue wget is superior to IE.
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@morbiuswilters said:
So, yeah, I honestly don't know if what you are saying is accurate. Most FOSStards would say FOSS is technically superior.
Free Software folks generally believe that using, writing, suggesting, "non-free" software is ethically and morally wrong. And the "free" is in speech, not beer.
Open Source folks do make the claim that the Open Source model tends to produce technically better software than proprietary development methods.
@morbiuswilters said:
I think even
Stall-Manwould try to argue wget is superior to IE.I'm sure he'd argue that it is ethically superior, but not technically. Of course he doesn't care if it is technically superior. Here's suggested reading.
The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
In other words, Stallman would say that GNU Hello is "superior" to IE.
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@stinerman said:
Free Software folks generally believe that using, writing, suggesting, "non-free" software is ethically and morally wrong.
Which is insane. Also, you act as if the free software folks don't also claim technical superiority.
@stinerman said:
Here's suggested reading.
I'm well-aware of Stallman's laughably asinine views.
Edit: And it always struck me as hilarious that open source licenses are freer than "free software" licenses--they actually allow you to do what you want with the software, whereas "free software" imposes severe restrictions on anyone who wants to use or modify it. It's not "free as in speech", it's "free as in a mandatory stint in a labor camp"..
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@morbiuswilters said:
And it always struck me as hilarious that open source licenses are freer than "free software" licenses--they actually allow you to do what you want with the software, whereas "free software" imposes severe restrictions on anyone who wants to use or modify it. It's not "free as in speech", it's "free as in a mandatory stint in a labor camp"..
Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but all free software licenses are open source licenses (but not necessarily vice versa, and that's assuming that you define "open source" as based on the OSI definition of the same). I'm pretty sure you mean copyleft v. non-copyleft (ie. the GNU GPL vs. one of the BSD variants, or my personal favorite, the WTFPL).
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@Douglasac said:
We still have them in Australia, along with the keycards (I got a keycard for the University dealio).
Retail boxes aren't available here (but even if they were, from what I hear the DVD has the exact same content as the image downloaded from Microsoft's site, so it's still click-to-run, and still requires a Live account to activate).
@Douglasac said:Have you looked into the new Office 365 offerings? For something like $15\head\month, they get five licenses of Office along with Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Lync Online... there's no minimum amount of users, but you can have up to 300 before you have to fork out about $35\month.
I have, but nobody's really interested - the price here is 12,80€/month, and most of the clients know that they'll use the computer for 5+ years, so the PKC option is cheaper, even if the price is paid upfront.
@Douglasac said:Either you type insanely fast (I type 80wpm and have no issue), your computer is slow or - as odd as it sounds - have you updated your video driver?
I don't type particularly fast, and my computer is anything but slow (at work I have i5 2400 with 12GB RAM and at home it's Xeon E5-1620 with 32GB). Both are running the nvidia 320.18 drivers (and the work computer also has Intel 3062, since I use 4 monitors on that one). The lagging caret really bothers me for some reason (and I don't particularly like the smooth fade in/out it does now, and the smooth moving of selected cell in Excel - no idea why, because I eg. like the minimize/restore animations in Windows).
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@ender said:
The lagging caret really bothers me for some reason
I don't think you need to defend that statement. I rarely use Office, and I don't have 2013, but it's hard to imagine how / why this could happen. I think I would stop using a program that did something so awful.
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@boomzilla said:
but it's hard to imagine how / why this could happen.
It's animated.
No that's not a joke; it really is animated. It fades in/out, and smoothly shifts to its new location after typing.
however
I believe it can be gotten used to. After all, it's the same for games, where every single control scheme is subtly different from another in terms if timing and smoothness. And you get used to it.
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@stinerman said:
Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but all free software licenses are open source licenses (but not necessarily vice versa, and that's assuming that you define "open source" as based on the OSI definition of the same). I'm pretty sure you mean copyleft v. non-copyleft (ie. the GNU GPL vs. one of the BSD variants, or my personal favorite, the WTFPL).
Here, you get a slightly off-topic Miffyrant instead.
Android is an illustration of why open source without copyleft is a bad idea. Since anybody can just take Android's source, fuck with it however they want (new UI, new launcher, etc.), slap it on a device with "ANDROID!" logos all over it, and lock down the OS harder than Josef Fritzl's wife without paying a cent to Google, people have done just that. People buy these shit shovelware devices, which don't get new versions of Android because the vendor is too lazy to port their hacks to it, so they're stuck on a phone with no security features and no modern app support and decry that Android is shit.
Imagine what people would be thinking of iOS if there were first-generation iPhones still on the market and laypeople couldn't tell them from the current hotness.
Now, if Android wasn't open source, the vendors couldn't fuck with it like they do. They'd have to license it from Google, and play by Google's rules. Google could forbid them from modifying the stock UI/Launcher/etc.. Google could even go like Apple and decree that Android won't be available on anything but Nexus devices.
Now, if Android was copyleft, on the other hand, vendors wouldn't be able to lock it down at all and third parties can bring builds of stock AOSP to it. In almost all cases, installing a third party rom on an Android device requires either a nasty hack or is impossible, notable exceptions including Google's aforementioned Nexus devices.
Then again, if Google cared about third parties tarnishing their reputation they wouldn't let people take out ads with third-party content, such as another company's ads. But I digress.
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@MiffTheFox said:
and lock down the OS harder than Josef Fritzl's wife
"daughter," Shirley?
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@dhromed said:
It's animated.
No that's not a joke; it really is animated. It fades in/out, and smoothly shifts to its new location after typing.
Wow. So, instead of fading in wherever it should be, it draws everything and just lags? It would make more sense to not show anything while typing than this. Or...at least update the position correctly, whatever the animated phase of the caret is.
@dhromed said:
I believe it can be gotten used to. After all, it's the same for games, where every single control scheme is subtly different from another in terms if timing and smoothness. And you get used to it.
Almost anything can be gotten used to. HOW CAN ANYONE TRUST SOFTWARE THAT CAN'T EVEN GET THIS SIMPLE THING RIGHT?!
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@boomzilla said:
@dhromed said:
It's animated.
No that's not a joke; it really is animated. It fades in/out, and smoothly shifts to its new location after typing.
Wow. So, instead of fading in wherever it should be, it draws everything and just lags? It would make more sense to not show anything while typing than this. Or...at least update the position correctly, whatever the animated phase of the caret is.
@dhromed said:
I believe it can be gotten used to. After all, it's the same for games, where every single control scheme is subtly different from another in terms if timing and smoothness. And you get used to it.
Almost anything can be gotten used to. HOW CAN ANYONE TRUST SOFTWARE THAT CAN'T EVEN GET THIS SIMPLE THING RIGHT?!
We probably should have seen this coming, after they changed the progress bar in Vista from a bar that actually shows what your progress is to a bar that shows a smooth animation vaguely representing the concept of progress at the expense of accuracy. It's the next logical step, right?
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@Mason Wheeler said:
they changed the progress bar in Vista from a bar that actually shows what your progress is to a bar that shows a smooth animation vaguely representing the concept of progress at the expense of accuracy.
?
It's still just a bar. It... progresses.
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@boomzilla said:
HOW CAN ANYONE TRUST SOFTWARE THAT CAN'T EVEN GET THIS SIMPLE THING RIGHT?!
Whoa there, Blakeyzilla.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Your average user will spend hours clicking around doing some repetitive task or dealing with badly-designed UIs without thinking anything of it, because to them it's just how the computer works. [...] To them, the UI is just something handed down by the gods and they have just got to learn to accept it.
This needs requoting because I only just noticed it.
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@Mason Wheeler said:
We probably should have seen this coming, after they changed the progress bar in Vista from a bar that actually shows what your progress is to a bar that shows a smooth animation vaguely representing the concept of progress at the expense of accuracy. It's the next logical step, right?
That was just being honest. No Windows user trusts a progress bar to be accurate.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
HOW CAN ANYONE TRUST SOFTWARE THAT CAN'T EVEN GET THIS SIMPLE THING RIGHT?!
Whoa there, Blakeyzilla.I probably should have given credit for the inspiration in the tags or something.
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@morbiuswilters said:
So, you've come up with one example where FOSS is comparable. One.
Here, I'll take 30 seconds to think up a second example. Done. It wasn't a stretch since it's the other half of the same protocol:
Microsoft Internet Information Server - Proprietary
Apache - FOSS
Lighthttpd - FOSS
nginx - FOSS
From what I can tell, Apache's popularity is dropping while nginx's popularity is rising.
Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, FOSS end-user products are usually pretty poor. Which is why most examples are going to be on the server-side.
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@stinerman said:
Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but
You know when a post starts with this, we will have pedantic dickweedery the likes of which even God has never seen!
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@blakeyrat said:
we will have pedantic dickweedery the likes of which even God has never seen!
It was much better as a book than a movie.
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@ender said:
The lagging caret really bothers me for some reason (and I don't particularly like the smooth fade in/out it does now, and the smooth moving of selected cell in Excel - no idea why, because I eg. like the minimize/restore animations in Windows).
Because it's change and all change is bad and horrible and OMGOMG OMG!!!
I believe the point of the smooth typing feature is that the characters appearing is much less distracting when you're retyping a document from paper or another monitor on your computer. From my experience, people who type the most only glance at the window they're typing *in* once every sentence or so, the rest of the time they're typing from some other document or notes or outline or something.
Even if that's not the purpose, it definitely makes that situation much nicer because the typing appearing in the corner of your vision is less jarring. I last used Word 2013 while typing API documentation based on source code (I know, bad me) and I kept my eyes on the IDE. Oh and I typed some notes from a training meeting, and likewise it was easier to keep my eyes on the presenter/slides.
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@powerlord said:
Microsoft Internet Information Server - Proprietary
Apache - FOSS
Comparable? Only on features.
IIS is SO much easier to use and maintain. IIS has much better performance, even when running same PHP apps as Apache. (That said, Nginx closes the performance gap somewhat.) And that's not even getting into the ease of developing IIS+.net, which is an order of magnitude better than developing Apache+any open source language in every goddamned way.
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
VLC is shit. The ONLY thing it can do competently is play videos, and even that it frequently fucks up. (I particularly love when it opens a movie off-screen because it saved its maximized window size as its normal window size.) The stream/convert feature, you know, *the thing it was designed to do*, is a complete mess.
I've never tried to stream anything with it, but I've never had it open up off screen. Generally, it just starts playing and I watch.
I'm more and more convinced Blakeyrat has truly shitty systems, where good software goes bad, but he likes to rant about software so bias forces him to think all software is shit.
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@dhromed said:
No that's not a joke; it really is animated. It fades in/out, and smoothly shifts to its new location after typing.
You can disable the smooth transition - but that just makes it lag less.
I'm similarly annoyed by the smooth progress bar updates in recent Windows versions - the progress bar lags behind, and for fast operations it's not uncommon to get the Done notification, and then half a second later, the progress bar fills to the end.
@blakeyrat said:Because it's change and all change is bad and horrible and OMGOMG OMG!!!
Definitely not. The smooth minimizing/restoring of windows I mentioned is new for me, too (like I said, I use a high-contrast colour scheme, and pre-8 this meant that I couldn't use desktop composition; the non-composited minimize/restore animation annoyed me). Anyway, if every single other program can keep the caret behind the last typed letter, why can't Office 2013?
