Cleaning my USB flash drive



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Joeyg said:
    "Scroll Lock" is a pretty explanatory term - no divination needed.

    Wow, what planet do you live on? Sure, it's self-explanatory if you've been fiddling with Linux for 5 years. For normal people? No.

    You youngsters really crack me up sometimes



  • @blakeyrat said:

    As long as their problem is fixed and they leave happy, I don't care how long they stay on the line.

    I'm not sure if I envy you, but you've got far more patience than me. (Though I don't do tech support in any capacity.)

    @Joeyg said:
    "Scroll Lock" is a pretty explanatory term - no divination needed.

    Wow, what planet do you live on? Sure, it's self-explanatory if you've been fiddling with Linux for 5 years. For normal people? No.

    People throw that at me a lot, and I have no way to respond to it. I've been using Linux since I was eight and haven't a clue how "normal" people use their computers.

    But I'm jealous of Windows and its there's-a-keyboard-shortcut-for-everything UI, and it's sad to see people would want that taken away.

    @Joeyg said:
    It's more intuitive than 'Insert', which toggles overwrite mode. And that one works pretty much everywhere.

    Yes, and I believe that key should be removed as well. But thanks for attempting to paint me as a hypocrite.

    Not a hypocrite, just incorrect about "scroll lock" being unintuitive. As for Insert, I hate that keybinding too. vi has used R and I for "Replace" and "Insert" modes for decades, and that makes sense.



  • @Joeyg said:

    (Though I don't do tech support in any capacity.) ... People throw that at me a lot, and I have no way to respond to it. I've been using Linux since I was eight and haven't a clue how "normal" people use their computers.

    Then why did you bring it up, as if it was a qualified opinion? I mean, I'm not in tech support anymore, but I was for 3 years, and I know how many hundreds of hours a year are lost because of those stupid keyboard keys.

    @Joeyg said:

    vi ... makes sense.

    Goddamned. If Linux users spent as much time figuring out how to make things more usable as they do writing debuggers and hating end-users, they'd rule the world in two years flat.



  • @Joeyg said:

    "Scroll Lock" is a pretty explanatory term - no divination needed.
     

    It does not lock scrolling.

    It is a key that locks the cell selection and enables scrolling.

    I agree on the Insert key label.

    Given that in every text editor, the exact same feature is accessed with Ctrl+Up|Down, Excel should use that instead, and then we can dump the scroll lock key.

     @Joeyg said:

    vi has used R and I for "Replace" and "Insert" modes for decades, and that makes sense.

    You're discussing the intuitional merits of a text editor that requires a tutorial to allow one to begin typing.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Joeyg said:

    "Scroll Lock"
     

    Insert key

     

    The most interestingly named key is of course the [Pause] key. Does it pause anything?
    Or for that matter, does Break break anything? I'd try, but I have no backup laptop.



  • You know, all those keys ignored by Windows applications and dropped by the Mac keyboard actually DO have a perfectly reasonable and intuitive function in other software ecosystems.  Where I come from, the insert key DOES insert.  Well, okay, it's actually bound to shift+insert, because ctrl+insert does paste, but it's still about inserting text.

    And the scroll lock locks the screen from scrolling text off the top, so you can, e.g., read messages as they fly by before they get dropped off your buffer. This can come in very handy if you need to read error messages at boot time.  And the pause key it actually pauses the program!  (This is a ^Z, still perfectly usable and useful in Linux, it suspends GUI programs just as well.)  And the system request key makes a system request! (See also: Linux's magic sysreq)

    (I've never been on a computer where print screen actually creates a printout of the screen, but it's repurposed screenshotting seems pretty fine.)

    You poor Windows lusers, even the keyboard confounds you...

    Next you'll complain that the home key doesn't take you to your internets' homepage.



  • In most text editing contexts, the Insert key switches between Overwrite mode and Insert mode. The name is only confusing because Insert mode is always the default and nobody uses Overwrite mode, so people don't know that Insert mode has a name.



  • Disclaimer for pedants: when I say "Unix" I mean all Unix-alike OSes. It's much less retarded than typing "*nix". Also: don't be a pedant.

    @Xyro said:

    You poor Windows lusers, even the keyboard confounds you...

    Wow, you're a fucking asshole. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I address the rest of your post.

    @Xyro said:

    Next you'll complain that the home key doesn't take you to your internets' homepage.

    Mine does. It's at the top of the keyboard, labelled "Web/Home", and has a little picture of a house on it. It's nice, because Google decided to hide the "New Window" menu item in a weird submenu I never think to look in. (Yes, obviously the concept of "New Window" makes me think of a wrench! Good design, Google. Of course I guess I'm a luser for using menus instead of keyboard shortcuts, and for giving a shit about usability...)

    There's another Home key in a block of 6 keys to the right of Backspace. It doesn't do what it says... based on its function, it should be labeled "beginning of line." The reason I don't use it is because the same key in Mac Classic brought you to the beginning of the document/textbox, not just the beginning of the line. So, since I learned it as a different key, its function on my current computer confuses me.

    (I mean, hell... computers are typesetters, not typewriters, right? It should at least go to the beginning of the paragraph, since the beginning of the line is an arbitrary measure I, as a user, never set. It also varies based on how wide the window/textbox is. But... just another case of Apple's keyboard being designed, and the Windows one evolving from older systems. I guess the key should be labelled, "the beginning of the last linewrap even though the linewrap location depends on textbox width and you never marked that location in any way")

    @Xyro said:

    You know, all those keys ignored by Windows applications and dropped by the Mac keyboard actually DO have a perfectly reasonable and intuitive function in other software ecosystems.

    Dude, you're going to talk about Unix and you used the word "intuitive." You're in for a fucking world of rhetorical hurt, you know that right? Nothing in Unix is intuitive, nor has it ever been, nor was it designed to be... anybody who calls Unix intuitive is either delusional or a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. I look at those people the same way I'd look at somebody who called Lotus Notes "well-designed."

    Here's a quick tip: if something is only intuitive after you've been working with it for several years, it's not really intuitive.

    @Xyro said:

    Where I come from, the insert key DOES insert.

    Inserts what? An address? Your bloodtype? A transcript of the last State of the Union address? A photo of Wil Wheaton? That Ric Astley music video?

    @Xyro said:

    Well, okay, it's actually bound to shift+insert, because ctrl+insert does paste, but it's still about inserting text.

    So wait... shift-insert inserts the photo of Wil Wheaton. Control-insert does paste (grudgingly, I admit, that somewhat makes sense, although it's still an inferior keyboard shortcut than control-V.)

    But now it's *only* about text? That's not very intuitive, it should be labelled "Insert Text-Based Thing" at least. But wait, what if you have a non-text item copied? Then wouldn't using control-insert insert something other than text?

    Oh wait, you use fucking Unix, so of course you fail to acknowledge any form of data other than text exists. To you, the CLI is a wondrous marvelous world of whimsy because you've never in your life, for example, repaired the white-balance in a photo, or edited together a quick documentary video, or created a flowchart of a complex process. You live in your own little teeny text-based universe, and Unix is fine for that. Obviously, the Insert key only inserts text-- what else is there!?

    (I used to have long, stupid debates with Linux users over how they've never gotten copy&paste working correctly. It turned out after much debating that the reason Linux users thought copy&paste worked was because it worked on text! To them, the fact that it didn't work correctly with any other kind of data was simply a non-issue. You could usually shut them up by, for example, showing them a Windows or Mac box copy some spreadsheet cells and paste them into a bitmap paint program, and it working.

    Then of course the Linux user would go, "well that's stupid, because you could just take a screenshot of the cells you want, then paste the screenshot into the bitmap editor, and then crop out the rest of the spreadsheet app. And I'd say, "well, duh, or I could just hit "paste", which does the same thing in one step? Anyway.)

    @Xyro said:

    And the scroll lock locks the screen from scrolling text off the top,

    And this is useful in what context? Usually when the screen is scrolling text off the top, it's because the user has their mouse firmly gripped on the scrollbar thumb, and that's exactly what they want to happen. I shouldn't even say "usually", more like, "always". So you're saying that this key actually prevents the user from doing what they want to do?

    Fortunately, it turns out you're fucking wrong, and the Scroll Lock key *doesn't* do that at all. I dunno; maybe it Linux is does. More likely, you're explaining what he key does from your tiny little myopic world and you never considered what "text scrolling off the screen" means to anybody else on fucking planet Earth. The clue was you using "screen" when you meant "window."

    @Xyro said:

    so you can, e.g., read messages as they fly by before they get dropped off your buffer.

    Or I could just move the scrollbar the other way. And not worry about my "buffer" because in any sane program, the "buffer" stores the entire document/piece of data being displayed.

    @Xyro said:

    This can come in very handy if you need to read error messages at boot time.

    Or I could use the Event Viewer built into my computer, which is both significantly easier and enables me to boot my computer without reams of random useless text flying all over. Unix seriously doesn't have an event log-type functionality? Seriously? The 80s ended, guys.

    @Xyro said:

    And the pause key it actually pauses the program!

    Nope. Just tried it in iTunes, Windows Media Center, and VLC. None of my programs were paused.

    Oh, but what's this! This keyboard has an alternate set of keys, with VCR-like labels, and those DO pause iTunes and VLC. So there is a key that performs the function of pausing, it's just not labeled Pause.

    @Xyro said:

    And the system request key makes a system request!

    Like what, get me a sandwich? I request that you make money stuffing envelopes at home? What does that even mean?

    @Xyro said:

    (I've never been on a computer where print screen actually creates a printout of the screen, but it's repurposed screenshotting seems pretty fine.)

    Yes, but even in that case, it's a rare-enough operation that it doesn't need a key. Mac Classic assigned it to Command-Shift-3, which is an awful shotcut, but also indicative of how often they expected people to use it-- all the better shortcuts were assigned to more common tasks already.

    Look, the real point to all of this is: nobody, and I mean nobody, should be taking usability advice from Unix users.



  • basically yes



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Xyro said:
    You poor Windows lusers, even the keyboard confounds you...

    Wow, you're a fucking asshole. Just wanted to get that out of the way before I address the rest of your post.

    @Xyro said:

    Next you'll complain that the home key doesn't take you to your internets' homepage.

    Mine does. It's at the top of the keyboard, labelled "Web/Home", and has a little picture of a house on it. It's nice, because Google decided to hide the "New Window" menu item in a weird submenu I never think to look in. (Yes, obviously the concept of "New Window" makes me think of a wrench! Good design, Google. Of course I guess I'm a luser for using menus instead of keyboard shortcuts, and for giving a shit about usability...)

    Ctrl+N has been "new window" in every windowing browser I have ever used. Even IE 4 could do this. For tabs, Ctrl+T has been the shortcut for every browser since it introduced tabs.

    There's another Home key in a block of 6 keys to the right of Backspace. It doesn't do what it says... based on its function, it should be labeled "beginning of line." The reason I don't use it is because the same key in Mac Classic brought you to the beginning of the document/textbox, not just the beginning of the line. So, since I learned it as a different key, its function on my current computer confuses me.

    (I mean, hell... computers are typesetters, not typewriters, right? It should at least go to the beginning of the paragraph, since the beginning of the line is an arbitrary measure I, as a user, never set. It also varies based on how wide the window/textbox is. But... just another case of Apple's keyboard being designed, and the Windows one evolving from older systems. I guess the key should be labelled, "the beginning of the last linewrap even though the linewrap location depends on textbox width and you never marked that location in any way")

    It's used to move the cursor to a specific location on the screen, where you're looking at, so you don't have to decipher your document structure to figure out where a typo is located relative to the start of the paragraph. You just move the cursor where you're looking. That's also why 'Up' doesn't move you back one sentence. If you want to hop around based on paragraphs and words, vim has facilities for that. But of course, you don't like vi...

    @Xyro said:
    You know, all those keys ignored by Windows applications and dropped by the Mac keyboard actually DO have a perfectly reasonable and intuitive function in other software ecosystems.

    Dude, you're going to talk about Unix and you used the word "intuitive." You're in for a fucking world of rhetorical hurt, you know that right? Nothing in Unix is intuitive, nor has it ever been, nor was it designed to be... anybody who calls Unix intuitive is either delusional or a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. I look at those people the same way I'd look at somebody who called Lotus Notes "well-designed."

    Here's a quick tip: if something is only intuitive after you've been working with it for several years, it's not really intuitive.

    And if something is no more useful after you've been working with it for several years, it's a piece of garbage. Why do you feel everything should be immediately obvious? The only way that is humanly possible is if "everything" in fact means almost nothing.

    [snip whining about copy-and-paste functionality that hasn't been true in KDE or GNOME for as long as I can remember..]

    In Linux I can copy and paste between terminals by selecting text to copy, and right-clicking to paste. Under windows I need to load a GUI to even [i]get[/i] more than one terminal, and copying and pasting is a goddamned nightmare. (Though Windows deftly avoids this by making its command line completely useless, to the point where you're better off using PuTTY to log into a real computer. And PuTTY, thankfully, does copy-and-paste correctly.)

    [snip whining about Scroll Lock]

    The button is out of the way, and it has a light. Even if it did absolutely nothing, it's not hurting anyone.

    @Xyro said:
    This can come in very handy if you need to read error messages at boot time.

    Or I could use the Event Viewer built into my computer, which is both significantly easier and enables me to boot my computer without reams of random useless text flying all over. Unix seriously doesn't have an event log-type functionality? Seriously? The 80s ended, guys.

    Unix has had dmesg since at least System V. And there's a [i]lot[/i] more information than the six-clicks-from-Start "event viewer" Windows has. And it's a hell of a lot easier to search through and sort than any dumbed-down information-free GUIfied list.

    [snip whining about the keys beside Scroll Lock]

    If you want 'pause' to pause your music, you're free to bind the key. (Well, not in iTunes or WMP, they're too "usable" to customize the keyboard.) But in any real player. Most people would never do that because the space bar does pause/play and it's a lot more convenient to reach. (Again, you seem happy reaching [i]past[/i] the keyboard to use a mouse for things, so this might not have occurred to you.)

    Look, the real point to all of this is: nobody, and I mean nobody, should be taking usability advice from Unix users.

    Aye. Just because we can sort and filter vast amounts of data, use computers with multiple user accounts, enforce quotas and file permissions, use computers regardless of their physical location, recover them even when completely locked up (see SysRq, which you implied was useless), customize everything that doesn't work "intuitively" and automate almost everything we do, means nothing. We're clearly morons with Stockholm Syndrome, doddering through our lives completely unaware that we are total basket cases unable to use computers well enough to even make a slideshow video.


  •  @Joeyg said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Of course I guess I'm a luser for using menus instead of keyboard shortcuts

    Ctrl+N has been

    Yes. I don't think he really cares. 

    Also, I wonder if your info on Windows is really recent. The list you give has not been a problem since, well, even NT4 did that pretty well. As for blakeyrat, there are by now plenty GUIs for Unix/Linux that don't totally suck. Seriously.

    Last but not least, I'd like to make the case that "intuitive" is at least partly relative to your previous experiences. For instance my kids (4 and 5)  have absolutely no problem at all using a mouse, or a dvd player, or recognising an [OK] button. To them, that's intuitive. My mother on the other hand, intuitively presses each button on a phone for at least a second to make sure the dumb things gets it, which often leads to interesting results.

     

     



  • @b_redeker said:

    I wonder if your info on Windows is really recent.

    I'm using Windows 7 right now and the command-line history doesn't work properly (try pressing Up a few times and then Down - it loses items and confuses them), and copy/paste is still a complete mess. Pasting requires you mouse over to Menu->Edit->Paste, and copying requires you select a rectangular area via Menu->Edit->Mark and then Enter to copy. It still does not come with grep, sed, find, awk, head, tail, bash or equivalents.

    I downloaded all those tools from somewhere (can't for the life of me remember where), so my command line is usable now, but copy and paste is still near-impossible. I have a lot of trouble using the mouse - it routinely takes me four or five tries to hit a textbox, and the effort required to reach the damn thing in the first place is a pain. Most keyboard shortcuts I can use before I even consciously think of them.

    Having said that, I love mouse gestures in Opera. No need for precision, and no need to switch between the keyboard and mouse more than once.



  • @Joeyg said:

    Ctrl+N has been "new window" in every windowing browser I have ever used. Even IE 4 could do this. For tabs, Ctrl+T has been the shortcut for every browser since it introduced tabs.

    And that is a defense of Chrome's retarded menu icon... how? Or, in other words, what's your fucking point?

    @Joeyg said:

    It's used to move the cursor to a specific location on the screen, where you're looking at, so you don't have to decipher your document structure to figure out where a typo is located relative to the start of the paragraph.

    What are the odds the typo is at the beginning of the line? Are they greater or worse than the odds it's somewhere in the middle? Or, in other words, do you have any research to back-up your assertion that this is a good use for the Home key?

    Personally, I think a key that goes back to the beginning of the sentence would be more useful. I also wouldn't mind a separate pair of keys to jump back/forward one word, without having to use modifiers, because I find that I do that all the freakin' time. But, then again, without usability research, I'd never create that layout and proclaim it better. But it simply makes more sense (to me, again, no research) to navigate based on the structure of the language-- Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Sections, Document-- than it does to navigate based on arbitrary lines.

    It may be that the current setup is ideal. And that the people who designed the Home and End key actually researched how useful they would be. But I highly doubt it.

    @Joeyg said:

    If you want to hop around based on paragraphs and words, vim has facilities for that. But of course, you don't like vi...

    Are those facilities usable? No? Well, then, no I don't like them.

    @Joeyg said:

    And if something is no more useful after you've been working with it for several years, it's a piece of garbage.

    I agree. But what's your point?

    @Joeyg said:

    Why do you feel everything should be immediately obvious?

    I don't. And I never made that claim. Please refrain from making shit up, then implying I said it, that really pisses me off.

    @Joeyg said:

    [snip whining about copy-and-paste functionality that hasn't been true in KDE or GNOME for as long as I can remember..]

    Pro-tip: the phrase "used to" implies that the event happened in the past.

    @Joeyg said:

    In Linux I can copy and paste between terminals by selecting text to copy, and right-clicking to paste.

    Ok. I can do the same thing in DOS... what the holy shit is your point?

    @Joeyg said:

    Under windows I need to load a GUI to even get more than one terminal, and copying and pasting is a goddamned nightmare.

    Yeah, Windows' whole "right-click to paste" thing is such a goddamned nightmare! They should make it the same as Unix's "right-click to paste" thing-- I mean, what were they thinking? Idiots.

    @Joeyg said:

    (Though Windows deftly avoids this by making its command line completely useless, to the point where you're better off using PuTTY to log into a real computer.

    Windows doesn't really have a "command line" except by circumstance-- cmd.exe is the remnants of a previous operating system that Windows just happens to be backwards compatible with, and is only present for that purpose. Windows isn't designed to be used via the CLI, because it was designed by (relatively) sane people.

    The one benefit the CLI has over the GUI is ease of scripting, and to address that Windows has several scripting languages, one of which is actually quite good. That said, Mac Classic (which had absolutely no CLI whatsoever) had a completely GUI-based scripting language, AppleScript, that was also quite good.

    So you see, us "lusers" have that all covered.

    @Joeyg said:

    The button is out of the way, and it has a light. Even if it did absolutely nothing, it's not hurting anyone.

    Wow, we're having a mobius strip of a thread. The entire reason for this debate is that the Scoll Lock key does hurt users-- it makes them think their computer is broken! And it does hurt me when I'm doing support-- it wastes my time answering calls from people who think their computer is broken when it is not! This conversation started from a discussion of how the Scroll Lock key hurts people

    Christ.

    @Joeyg said:

    Unix has had dmesg since at least System V.

    Then why the fuck are Unix users hitting Scroll Lock during boot?

    @Joeyg said:

    And there's a lot more information than the six-clicks-from-Start "event viewer" Windows has. And it's a hell of a lot easier to search through and sort than any dumbed-down information-free GUIfied list.

    That's most likely because Windows only bothers with useful information. "More information" is not a good thing-- in fact, most of the time, it's a very bad thing.

    @Joeyg said:

    (Again, you seem happy reaching past the keyboard to use a mouse for things, so this might not have occurred to you.)

    I like how me pointing out a bad menu icon turned into "Blakeyrat never uses the keyboard! He must click letters on the on-screen keyboard to type!!!"

    Is it so inconceivable that I might use the keyboard shortcuts *and* be interested how well the menu is designed? Do you guys even *write* software? How come the concept of criticizing a UI is so alien to you?

    @Joeyg said:

    Aye. Just because we can sort and filter vast amounts of data, use computers with multiple user accounts, enforce quotas and file permissions, use computers regardless of their physical location, ... customize everything that doesn't work "intuitively" and automate almost everything we do, means nothing.

    I'm sorry, which one of those things requires Linux to do? Or, in other words, for like the fourth time, what in God's name is your fucking POINT!?

    @Joeyg said:

    recover them even when completely locked up (see SysRq, which you implied was useless)

    At the risk of typing a tautology, if you can recover them, then they're not completely locked up.

    @Joeyg said:

    We're clearly morons with Stockholm Syndrome, doddering through our lives completely unaware that we are total basket cases unable to use computers well enough to even make a slideshow video.

    Wow, talk about missing the point.

    The point isn't your ability to use computers. That was never in question, and I'm sure you're quite good at it.

    The point is that Unix users, after being exposed to Unix for several years, start thinking that Unix represents the right way to do things, that it's intuitive and usable, and that it's superior to other OSes. None of those things are true. That's the Stockholm Syndrome I'm talking about.

    That's not to say that Unix is worse than other OSes. It's better in some ways, and worse in others-- just like every other OS! But people with Unix Stockholm Syndrome can't operate with those levels of grey-- to them, Unix is the only way. The things it does well (massive amounts of text data) are praised, while the things it does poorly (being usable by the average man) is glossed over entirely. When writing new software, you don't bother to test its usability. You (at best) either rip-off other popular software products, or (at worst) write it "The Unix Way" which is wholly inappropriate for the vast majority of software out there that isn't sorting large amounts of text data. (See: the add-in that embeds Google Maps in emacs.)

    This is the *same thing* that Lotus Notes developers do, BTW. Do you really want to have any behaviors in common with Lotus Notes developers?

    And note that the things that Unix is good at are very, very narrowly focused-- sure it's good at sorting massive amounts of text data, but throw in even a slight wrench (ok, now it's a relational database of massive amounts of text data) and the traditional Unix tools choke and die, and you're forced to use something else anyway. Compare to Microsoft's PowerShell, which is quite good at dealing with any type of data, even data in relational databases.



  • @Joeyg said:

    In Linux I can copy and paste between terminals by selecting text to copy, and right-clicking to paste. Under windows I need to load a GUI to even get more than one terminal, and copying and pasting is a goddamned nightmare. (Though Windows deftly avoids this by making its command line completely useless, to the point where you're better off using PuTTY to log into a real computer. And PuTTY, thankfully, does copy-and-paste correctly.)
     

    No, you don't need a GUI to copy and paste.  Where do you get your information / experience?  So are you saying that opening a terminal window in linux/unix isn't a GUI, but opening command prompt in Windows is?  

    Using the command prompt, you click and drag over the text you want to copy, right click on it, then right click in the other command prompt.  Why do you seem to not be able to do this?  

    As to your last point, what exactly is "copy-and-paste correctly" supposed to mean?  And who made you the fucking governing body over how copy and paste should work?




  • I like prawns, they're nice.



  • @Xyro said:

    I like prawns, they're nice.

    I admire your courage to come back here and stand-up for your opinions.

    A lesser person might just make a couple one-liner non-sequitur posts.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Xyro said:
    I like prawns, they're nice.

    I admire your courage to come back here and stand-up for your opinions.

    A lesser person might just make a couple one-liner non-sequitur posts.

    But a much lesser person would have gotten into a flamewar about keyboard keys.



  •  



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Joeyg said:
    It's used to move the cursor to a specific location on the screen, where you're looking at, so you don't have to decipher your document structure to figure out where a typo is located relative to the start of the paragraph.

    What are the odds the typo is at the beginning of the line? Are they greater or worse than the odds it's somewhere in the middle? Or, in other words, do you have any research to back-up your assertion that this is a good use for the Home key?

    It's irrelevant [i]where[/i] the typo is located, only that you can move the cursor to that part of the screen. That's why the cursor moves relative to the text box rather than relative to the paragraph structure. One is visible, the other is not.

    Personally, I think a key that goes back to the beginning of the sentence would be more useful. I also wouldn't mind a separate pair of keys to jump back/forward one word, without having to use modifiers, because I find that I do that all the freakin' time. But, then again, without usability research, I'd never create that layout and proclaim it better. But it simply makes more sense (to me, again, no research) to navigate based on the structure of the language-- Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Sections, Document-- than it does to navigate based on arbitrary lines.

    Vi has 'b' and 'w' to go to previous and next words, '(' and ')' for sentences, and '{' and '}' for paragraphs. That is exactly what you just asked for, and it's perfectly usable. No extra peripherals, no modifier keys, no leaving the main keyboard area.

    [...snip bizarre series of "what's your point?" followed by my points...]

    [...snip "the command line is not even necessary"...]

    @Joeyg said:
    The button is out of the way, and it has a light. Even if it did absolutely nothing, it's not hurting anyone.

    Wow, we're having a mobius strip of a thread. The entire reason for this debate is that the Scoll Lock key does hurt users-- it makes them think their computer is broken! And it does hurt me when I'm doing support-- it wastes my time answering calls from people who think their computer is broken when it is not! This conversation started from a discussion of how the Scroll Lock key hurts people

    Christ.

    People are stupid. If "too many keys" are confusing them, perhaps you should just take their entire computers away.

    @Joeyg said:
    Unix has had dmesg since at least System V.

    Then why the fuck are Unix users hitting Scroll Lock during boot?

    To read the dmesg before the system has booted enough to log in. How does Windows handle this?

    @Joeyg said:
    And there's a lot more information than the six-clicks-from-Start "event viewer" Windows has. And it's a hell of a lot easier to search through and sort than any dumbed-down information-free GUIfied list.

    That's most likely because Windows only bothers with useful information. "More information" is not a good thing-- in fact, most of the time, it's a very bad thing.

    Well, if you have no facilities to sort or search through it, sure. But that was never a problem until DOS came on the scene. (Also, Windows generally supplies almost [b]no[/b] information, which is useless by definition.)

    @Joeyg said:

    (Again, you seem happy reaching past the keyboard to use a mouse for things, so this might not have occurred to you.)

    I like how me pointing out a bad menu icon turned into "Blakeyrat never uses the keyboard! He must click letters on the on-screen keyboard to type!!!"

    @Joeyg said:
    Aye. Just because we can sort and filter vast amounts of data, use computers with multiple user accounts, enforce quotas and file permissions, use computers regardless of their physical location, ... customize everything that doesn't work "intuitively" and automate almost everything we do, means nothing.

    I'm sorry, which one of those things requires Linux to do? Or, in other words, for like the fourth time, what in God's name is your fucking POINT!?

    Linux [i]comes[/i] with utilities to manage that sort of thing. On Windows it's no small feat to get the system from "bootable" to "usable".

    @Joeyg said:
    recover them even when completely locked up (see SysRq, which you implied was useless)

    At the risk of typing a tautology, if you can recover them, then they're not completely locked up.

    Oh..well, okay. Then I guess Linux never locks up.

    [...snip repeat of "Linux can handle text and only text"...]

    Again, GNOME and KDE are both able to copy/paste differently formatted data between different applications, in some cases better than Windows does. Saying "that wasn't true in the past, you admitted it!" isn't helping your case, and saying "that isn't true in the present!" is simply false.



  • (I apologize for the double-post, but community server really hates Opera. For some reason clicking 'Quote' only ever works on the fourth try (and it's always the fourth try, weirdly enough). I would try for 'Edit', but it's a rare sight to see the page load before the timeout expires.)

    @amischiefr said:

    No, you don't need a GUI to copy and paste.  Where do you get your information / experience?

    I never said such a thing. I explicitly said the opposite of that.

    So are you saying that opening a terminal window in linux/unix isn't a GUI, but opening command prompt in Windows is?
    No, I am not. But I didn't explicitly say the opposite, so you're getting better.
    Using the command prompt, you click and drag over the text you want to copy, right click on it, then right click in the other command prompt.  Why do you seem to not be able to do this?
    I have a different mouse than you? I have no idea why clicking and dragging does nothing. All I know is that it does. Such is the nature of closed source.

    As to your last point, what exactly is "copy-and-paste correctly" supposed to mean?  And who made you the fucking governing body over how copy and paste should work?


    Well, it should presumably work with a keyboard. And if not, require fewer than 3 clicks for each action. And if not, not require dragging a rectangular area of a line-based console. And if not, well, that's fine. I've long since given up on it anyway.


  • @Joeyg said:

    It's irrelevant where the typo is located, only that you can move the cursor to that part of the screen. That's why the cursor moves relative to the text box rather than relative to the paragraph structure. One is visible, the other is not.

    Wait, what? The paragraph structure is invisible? What the fuck does your computer screen look like?

    Look, go back and read what I typed. I'm not necessarily saying the current method of navigating via Home/End/Arrows is necessarily a terrible, awful, idea. What I'm saying is that if it happens to be a good idea (and I doubt it is), then it is so only by chance: the person who implemented it almost certainly did zero usability testing of it.

    The real question here is, "is our current keyboard layout the best way of doing things?" The answer is almost certainly no.

    @Joeyg said:

    Vi has 'b' and 'w' to go to previous and next words, '(' and ')' for sentences, and '{' and '}' for paragraphs. That is exactly what you just asked for, and it's perfectly usable.

    No, it's not. As another poster pointed out, if you need a tutorial just to learn how to put text on the screen and save a file, the program is not usable no matter what features it includes. Also, call me crazy, but I'd kind of assume that typing 'b' would insert the letter 'b' into the document I'm editing.

    @Joeyg said:

    People are stupid.

    Let's say for argument's sake you truly believe that. Don't you think we should use the power of computers to make people smarter, instead of making computers specialized tools only a small subset of the population can use? Make sure to take into-account the fact that people will use the computers either way.

    If you're a card-holding member of the Priesthood of Technology, then you're in such a black hole of "deluded" that there's no way to even continue this conversation. Congratulations, you're also the reason Linux has virtually no marketshare despite being both free and reasonably good.

    @Joeyg said:

    To read the dmesg before the system has booted enough to log in. How does Windows handle this?

    Handle what? I guess by not having errors during boot in the first place. I'm not sure what you're asking. To answer literally, Windows doesn't handle this, because windows doesn't have dmesg and therefore there's no reason for it to provide a facility to read it.

    Also, I'm confused. Before you implied dmesg was a event logging program. Now you seem to be telling me it's the spew that you get when you boot a Unix? Which is it?

    @Joeyg said:

    Well, if you have no facilities to sort or search through it, sure.

    Extraneous information is always harmful when trying to solve an issue. This is why we, for example, try to find the smallest possible set of repro steps when reporting bugs. (I'm assuming, once again, that you actually do software development-- maybe you don't.)

    At this point you seem to have screwed up your quoting somehow.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Joeyg said:
    It's irrelevant where the typo is located, only that you can move the cursor to that part of the screen. That's why the cursor moves relative to the text box rather than relative to the paragraph structure. One is visible, the other is not.

    Wait, what? The paragraph structure is invisible? What the fuck does your computer screen look like?

    Not invisible, per se, but not easy to see. You need to look for hard stops (and usually ellipses are soft stops, but sometimes not), and if there aren't blank lines between paragraphs often it really [i]is[/i] invisible whether a line break is a line-wrap or end-of-paragraph.

    Look, go back and read what I typed. I'm not necessarily saying the current method of navigating via Home/End/Arrows is necessarily a terrible, awful, idea. What I'm saying is that if it happens to be a good idea (and I doubt it is), then it is so only by chance: the person who implemented it almost certainly did zero usability testing of it.

    The real question here is, "is our current keyboard layout the best way of doing things?" The answer is almost certainly no.

    Aye. QWERTY, much? ;)
    @Joeyg said:
    Vi has 'b' and 'w' to go to previous and next words, '(' and ')' for sentences, and '{' and '}' for paragraphs. That is exactly what you just asked for, and it's perfectly usable.

    No, it's not. As another poster pointed out, if you need a tutorial just to learn how to put text on the screen and save a file, the program is not usable no matter what features it includes. Also, call me crazy, but I'd kind of assume that typing 'b' would insert the letter 'b' into the document I'm editing.


    That's just silly. I use vi perfectly well, and far faster than it is even possible to use an "ordinary" text editor with only one mode, modifier keys, and menus. You would need a "tutorial" to understand Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, too, if you didn't know them. Does that make those apps "unusable"?

    @Joeyg said:
    People are stupid.

    Let's say for argument's sake you truly believe that. Don't you think we should use the power of computers to make people smarter, instead of making computers specialized tools only a small subset of the population can use? Make sure to take into-account the fact that people will use the computers either way.


    Removing keys that confuse people is not going to "make them smarter". And more importantly, the United States (and much of the developed world) has a majority population who is now functionally illiterate. The line between that and "actually illiterate" is pretty thin and disappears altogether if you make them read too quickly. Computers won't help there.

    As for dmesg:
    dmesg is a log file in /var/dmesg. Typing 'dmesg' invokes a program (usually /bin/dmesg) (and usually a script) that simply dumps its contents to the screen. The log is filled by the kernel and its modules from boot through to shutdown.

    The reason it's there is not only for program debugging and to correct faulty software, but also for finding hardware problems, out-of-resource problems, network issues and driver issues. And if your hard drive is tanking, chances are you'll need a dump before the boot is configured.

    @Joeyg said:
    Well, if you have no facilities to sort or search through it, sure.

    Extraneous information is always harmful when trying to solve an issue.


    No, it's not. Extraneous information often turns out to be useful, and it's easy to discard if its not. The reason you get the smallest number of steps to repro a problem is to get the minimal input from users (who, in general, are stupid). When you're actually [i]fixing[/i] a problem you crank up all the debug information and get as much [i]actual[/i] data as possible.



  • @Joeyg said:

    That's just silly. I use vi perfectly well, and far faster than it is even possible to use an "ordinary" text editor with only one mode, modifier keys, and menus. You would need a "tutorial" to understand Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, too, if you didn't know them. Does that make those apps "unusable"?

    There's this thing known as a "continuum." Usability is one of those.

    Is it blatantly obviously that control-C copies and control-V pastes? No. It is blatantly obvious what the "copy" mechanic even does? No. (For one thing, the clipboard is entirely invisible in most OSes. Although, again, the well-designed Mac Classic could show it as a window in Finder.)

    But the benefit of learning those keyboard shortcuts are:
    1) They work in any application
    2) They work with any type of data
    3) They can be hit with only the left hand, meaning they do not interfere with mousing
    4) Copy has a useful mnemonic making the shortcut easier to remember
    5) They are (relatively) discoverable, meaning that there is an on-screen menu item listing the operation with its keyboard shortcut, so the shortcut can be looked-up if it's forgotten

    None of those points apply to your vi example.

    No app is completely unusable, by definition. Even Lotus Notes.

    @Joeyg said:

    Removing keys that confuse people is not going to "make them smarter".

    Of course not. I never said that. Remember that thing about making up bullshit then claiming I said it? Stop it.

    But it could make their lives easier, their work more pleasant, and save a lot of currently-waste time. Therefore, it's still a worthwhile pursuit.

    Even if you could define "intelligence" in a neutral way, it would be silly to design software around that alone... human beings have emotions, Mr. Spock. Maybe you should spend more time with them, and less with computers. Or, if you're more motivated by green, people are more likely to buy software that makes them happy, so you can make money meeting that need.

    @Joeyg said:

    And more importantly, the United States (and much of the developed world) has a majority population who is now functionally illiterate.

    What the...? Where is this coming from? This is crazy. We've gone to the crazy place.

    @Joeyg said:

    As for dmesg: dmesg is a log file in /var/dmesg. Typing 'dmesg' invokes a program (usually /bin/dmesg) (and usually a script) that simply dumps its contents to the screen.

    So your better solution to event logging is a text file? What if I know an error is between 2:00 and 2:15, can I pull up only the entries from that time? What if I know it's related to, say, a disk driver? Can I pull up only events related to disk drivers?

    Everything is text to Unix users. Everything!

    I mean, you could argue that Microsoft's Event Viewer software interface sucks (and it does), but to seriously claim that a text file is superior to a database with meta-data, that's crazy-talk.

    @Joeyg said:

    Extraneous information often turns out to be useful, and it's easy to discard if its not.

    If it's useful, then it's not extraneous. I think what you're trying to say is, "some things that at first appear to be extraneous later turn out to be useful." Which is true, but an ideal system would know what is useful and what is not and show you only the useful things.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    No app is completely unusable, by definition. Even Lotus Notes.
     

    For sufficiently small values of "not completely unusable".



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Joeyg said:
    That's just silly. I use vi perfectly well, and far faster than it is even possible to use an "ordinary" text editor with only one mode, modifier keys, and menus. You would need a "tutorial" to understand Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, too, if you didn't know them. Does that make those apps "unusable"?

    There's this thing known as a "continuum." Usability is one of those.

    Is it blatantly obviously that control-C copies and control-V pastes? No. It is blatantly obvious what the "copy" mechanic even does? No. (For one thing, the clipboard is entirely invisible in most OSes. Although, again, the well-designed Mac Classic could show it as a window in Finder.)

    But the benefit of learning those keyboard shortcuts are:
    1) They work in any application
    2) They work with any type of data
    3) They can be hit with only the left hand, meaning they do not interfere with mousing
    4) Copy has a useful mnemonic making the shortcut easier to remember
    5) They are (relatively) discoverable, meaning that there is an on-screen menu item listing the operation with its keyboard shortcut, so the shortcut can be looked-up if it's forgotten

    None of those points apply to your vi example.

    Actually, all of them do: 1. Vi keys work in all my text editors (even emacs, if you make it), they work in Firefox, and they work in mutt and lynx. 2. Unlike Windows, text and binary data are identical - so you can indeed copy/paste blobs using a text editor, if you were so inclined. 3. With vi, you don't even need a mouse, so you have have two hands on the keyboard at all times. That seems a lot nicer than "not interrupting mousing". And single-key commands can be hit with either hand anyway. 4. yy stands for Yank and dd for Delete. p means Paste. The vi keys have mnemonics too, and they play well with each other: dw deletes a word, d$ deletes to end-of-line. 5. vim has :help, or just google it. There are vi cheatsheets out there if you're starting out. Once you've gotten used to them, they're [i]way[/i] faster than any modifier keys or mousing, and a lot less intrusive to your workflow.
    @Joeyg said:
    Removing keys that confuse people is not going to "make them smarter".

    Of course not. I never said that. Remember that thing about making up bullshit then claiming I said it? Stop it.


    I never said you said that. You inferred it and then accused me of it.

    @Joeyg said:
    And more importantly, the United States (and much of the developed world) has a majority population who is now functionally illiterate.

    What the...? Where is this coming from? This is crazy. We've gone to the crazy place.


    You're in tech support. You see it. Or if you really don't, try listening to popular music or read the news. You'll find an astonishing dearth of intelligence..but that's a whole other subject.

    @Joeyg said:
    As for dmesg: dmesg is a log file in /var/dmesg. Typing 'dmesg' invokes a program (usually /bin/dmesg) (and usually a script) that simply dumps its contents to the screen.

    So your better solution to event logging is a text file? What if I know an error is between 2:00 and 2:15, can I pull up only the entries from that time? What if I know it's related to, say, a disk driver? Can I pull up only events related to disk drivers?

    Yes, filtering and sorting is easy, as I've said. And you can do it with the same tools you use to filter and sort anything else. grep will filter out anything related to drivers, you can use awk to read and filter the time field (or perl, or php, or shell, or whatever you want), or you can use a GUI tool if you really want that. But then you lose the ability to pipe and redirect information, run it through other programs, send it to other machines or printers or serial ports or emails (unless the program explicitly supports those things), and the ability to do any of those automatically.

    Everything is text to Unix users. Everything!

    Yes. Text is readable. Text is universal.

    I mean, you could argue that Microsoft's Event Viewer software interface sucks (and it does), but to seriously claim that a text file is superior to a database with meta-data, that's crazy-talk.

    It's not. If something is wrong with your data and you can't edit it without specialized knowledge of its format, or even view it, you've got a completely unnecessary handicap. Plus you've probably got
    @Joeyg said:
    Extraneous information often turns out to be useful, and it's easy to discard if its not.

    If it's useful, then it's not extraneous. I think what you're trying to say is, "some things that at first appear to be extraneous later turn out to be useful." Which is true, but an ideal system would know what is useful and what is not and show you only the useful things.


    Yes, but such a system could just fix the bugs in the first place, then you wouldn't need bug reports or developers.



  • @Joeyg said:

    @Blakeyrat said:
    @Joeyg said:
    Removing keys that confuse people is not going to "make them smarter".

    Of course not. I never said that. Remember that thing about making up bullshit then claiming I said it? Stop it.


    I never said you said that. You inferred it and then accused me of it.

    Then where did the quotation marks come from, smartass?

    @Joeyg said:

    You're in tech support. You see it. Or if you really don't, try listening to popular music or read the news. You'll find an astonishing dearth of intelligence..but that's a whole other subject.

    I also took psychology courses in college, and came away convinced that there's no collective agreement on what "intelligent" even means, nor will there probably ever be.

    From my experience, people like you are just classifying everybody who thinks identically to you as "intelligent" and everybody who doesn't as "stupid." Because that way you can be a condescending prick, because you get some kind of high from being "smarter" than everybody else.

    @Joeyg said:

    Yes. Text is readable. Text is universal.

    It's universal! As long as your universe consists of only people who speak the same language you do. In the same cultural context. And are sighted. And are literate.

    Your universe, Joeyg, is extremely small, and I'm sure glad that I'm not in it.

    @Joeyg said:

    It's not. If something is wrong with your data and you can't edit it without specialized knowledge of its format, or even view it, you've got a completely unnecessary handicap.

    So when your computer has a strange entry in your event log, you "edit it?" I suppose in your little world, if you edit the error out of the event log, that means it never happened, right? Most people would consider the event log read only.

    You are right about one thing: this industry lacks a standard file format for relational data. I guess XML was designed to meet that need, but from my experience, XML is pretty useless unless you already know the relations beforehand.

    @Joeyg said:

    @Blakeyray said:
    @Joeyg said:
    Extraneous information often turns out to be useful, and it's easy to discard if its not.
    If it's useful, then it's not extraneous. I think what you're trying to say is, "some things that at first appear to be extraneous later turn out to be useful." Which is true, but an ideal system would know what is useful and what is not and show you only the useful things.
    Yes, but such a system could just fix the bugs in the first place, then you wouldn't need bug reports or developers.

    And maybe we wouldn't need condescending prick misanthropes like you! It would truly be a golden age.



  • @Joeyg said:

    Using the command prompt, you click and drag over the text you want to copy, right click on it, then right click in the other command prompt.  Why do you seem to not be able to do this?

    I have a different mouse than you? I have no idea why clicking and dragging does nothing. All I know is that it does. Such is the nature of closed source.

    You can enable QuickEdit mode in console properties, then it will do what [b]amischiefr[/b] is describing.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Joeyg said:
    @Blakeyrat said:
    @Joeyg said:
    Removing keys that confuse people is not going to "make them smarter".

    Of course not. I never said that. Remember that thing about making up bullshit then claiming I said it? Stop it.


    I never said you said that. You inferred it and then accused me of it.

    Then where did the quotation marks come from, smartass?


    You did in fact use the words "make them smarter".

    @Joeyg said:

    You're in tech support. You see it. Or if you really don't, try listening to popular music or read the news. You'll find an astonishing dearth of intelligence..but that's a whole other subject.

    I also took psychology courses in college, and came away convinced that there's no collective agreement on what "intelligent" even *means*, nor will there probably ever be.

    From my experience, people like you are just classifying everybody who thinks identically to you as "intelligent" and everybody who doesn't as "stupid." Because that way you can be a condescending prick, because you get some kind of high from being "smarter" than everybody else.

    You're right. Every time I start a job and find a website so densely populated with SQL vulnerabilities and incomprehensible spaghetti logic that I have to rewrite the entire thing, line by line, I smile to myself and think "I'm so fucking brilliant". Ditto for when I'm explaining why the drug war can't possibly justify its costs and people reply "but drugs are [i]bad[/i]". I'm so fucking brilliant. In fact, this entire conversation I've been laughing to myself because I'm just so much smarter than the mouth-breathers around me, using their mice and replying to email scams.

    I didn't factor on you having taken college psychology courses and seeing right through me, though.

    @Joeyg said:
    Yes. Text is readable. Text is universal.

    It's universal! As long as your universe consists of only people who speak the same language you do. In the same cultural context. And are sighted. And are literate.

    Your universe, Joeyg, is extremely small, and I'm sure glad that I'm not in it.

    If you want to read and interpret data, you need to be able to read it. If it's in a text format, you can do, even if you don't understand the language, even if you can't read the words, and even if you're socially clueless and never talk to people. All you need to do is understand what the symbols mean and what they do. In a text-based format, there are clear separations based on punctuation and whitespace. There is readable metadata that separates data from its meaning.

    Plus you can just run them through grep or sed if you just want to translate it for somebody (or something) else.

    Binary formats and proprietary formats get you none of that. To even read the data you need to run it through a hexdump, and to understand it is a bigger challenge.

    @Joeyg said:
    It's not. If something is wrong with your data and you can't edit it without specialized knowledge of its format, or even view it, you've got a completely unnecessary handicap.

    So when your computer has a strange entry in your event log, you "edit it?" I suppose in your little world, if you edit the error out of the event log, that means it never happened, right? Most people would consider the event log read only.

    Of course. But if you're reading a log file, I'd expect you'd want to run it through some filters, maybe store pieces in other places or pipe it to other programs to distribute or interpret the information. All things that are mind-numbingly simple for text files and frustrating with metadata-laden binary files. (And if the file is not a log, but a configuration file, I'd expect you'd want to be able to edit that. With text files, you use a text editor. With binary files, you need to know exactly what the file is and what program is necessary to edit it. And if it requires a GUI and you're logged in remotely, chances are you're screwed.)

    Also, I have been courteous (sort of) and civil throughout this discussion. I am not hurling insults around or discounting arguments on the basis of whether I feel they are a "prick".



  • @Joeyg said:

    Also, I have been courteous (sort of) and civil throughout this discussion. I am not hurling insults around or discounting arguments on the basis of whether I feel they are a "prick".

    I'm just angry because you're the type of person who makes my job, all my jobs, so fucking hard. The misanthrope geek who writes software with zero consideration for usability, zero consideration for the feelings of end-user, in fact, zero consideration for anybody other than themselves. It's worse than don't even care, it's active hostility to them.

    And the Linux community is *full* of you. Your kind already destroyed all the great progress Apple was making in usability after taking it over from the people who actually cared.

    You're writing fucking dancing bear-ware in fucking 2010, it's disgraceful. I mean, shit man. Even fucking Eric S Fucking Raymond recognizes and cares when software usability sucks shit.

    I'm sorry I can't express my disgust more productively.



  • @Joeyg said:

    That's just silly. I use vi perfectly well, and far faster than it is even possible to use an "ordinary" text editor with only one mode, modifier keys, and menus.
     

    It's not silly, it's fact. You are already comfortable with entering text commands and probably even derive please from being proficient at it. So do I. It feels good to hit up a few magic words and have the machine do your bidding. But Vi is still absurdly inaccessible to the novice. I googled around and just found that it has a built-in tutorial. Which is not mentioned in the startup screen, which in turn is (obviously) not displayed when opening a document via vi <filename>. I'm very happy that you find vi an awesome editor, and maybe I will too, if I work with it a little more. Nonetheless, it's ridiculously unintuitive. Almost every single command must be divined from an external source of help. That's pretty bad.

    @Joeyg said:

    You would need a "tutorial" to understand Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, too, if you didn't know them.
     

    They're commonly displayed next to the menu item, and often also in the tooltip of the menu bar button.

     

    The rest of you points: ok. I don't disagree with them anymore than I disagree with blakey's, with which I agree. It's a common debug tactic for tricky shit to pepper your code with logging statements that may or may not be useful, which might count as "a lot of extraneous information". If you do that right, though, you should do it with care, and not just dump shit without an explanation because then you're just generating log noise. I don't know if a dmesg log fals into the first or second category.

    @blakeyrat said:

    but to seriously claim that a text file is superior to a database with meta-data, that's crazy-talk.
     

    ... spectateswamp 

    O_O

    @blakeyrat said:

    I think what you're trying to say is, "some things that at first appear to be extraneous later turn out to be useful." Which is true, but an ideal system would know what is useful and what is not and show you only the useful things.

    Er, we don't have that magical system. Usefulness is a property of information in context, not of information, so a program can not, not ever, divine what information is useful to you, when you yourself have, as of yet, a foggy idea of the situation i.e. context.

    @Joeyg said:

    Text is readable. Text is universal.
     

    Yup.

    Crazy place.

     Also, spectateswamp. Hey, we know a guy who stores everything in text then searches it using what is technically a commandline search application called SSDS. You'll love him.

    @Spectre said:

    You can enable QuickEdit mode in console properties, then it will do what amischiefr is describing.
     

    But let's not forget to all agree that windows' cmd.exe is rather shitty, before it gets out of hand.

    [quote user="Joeyg"]I have no idea why clicking and dragging does nothing. All I know is that it does. Such is the nature of closed source.[/quote]

    What does the license have to do with it? Are you suggesting that you would like to inspect the code and see what's going on?



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    I
    think what you're trying to say is, "some things that at first appear to
    be extraneous later turn out to be useful." Which is true, but an ideal
    system would know what is useful and what is not and show you only the
    useful things.

    Er, we don't have that magical system.
    Usefulness is a property of information in context, not of
    information, so a program can not, not ever, divine what information is
    useful to you, when you yourself have, as of yet, a foggy idea of the
    situation i.e. context.

    Thus the word "ideal," which you seemed to have glossed over. :)

    @dhromed said:

    @Spectre said:

    You can enable QuickEdit mode in console
    properties, then it will do what amischiefr is
    describing.
     

    But let's not forget to all agree that
    windows' cmd.exe is rather shitty, before it gets out of hand.

    Oh, definitely agreed. Like I said above, I like to pretend the only reason it exists at all is for compatibility with old information systems that rely on BAT files. (Sadly, that's probably not the case, but I'd like to believe it is.)

    For scripting, which is the most Linux-like thing a normal user would ever want to do, there's already VBScript, JScript and PowerShell.

    Edit: and hell, Visual Studio Express-- VB.net or C# is actually easier than most previously available scripting languages. Compiled or not, it beats the pants off VBScript and JScript.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Thus the word "ideal," which you seemed to have glossed over. :)
     

    I think of an ideal system as a flawless one that nonetheless adheres to the laws of physics and information theory. Impossible, but a lofty goal.

    Your ideal system is like, say, a magical perfect motherboard that flies in on its butterfly wings and installs itself into your case. Lo! How you and your perfect girlfriend are brimming with mirth at this fruitful occurrence!

    I guess it's a matter of defining words.



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Thus the word "ideal," which you seemed to have glossed over. :)
     

    I think of an ideal system as a flawless one that nonetheless adheres to the laws of physics and information theory. Impossible, but a lofty goal.

    Fair enough.

    And more to the point, a truly ideal system wouldn't need any kind of error reporting because it would have no errors.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I mean, you could argue that Microsoft's Event Viewer software interface sucks (and it does), but to seriously claim that a text file is superior to a database with meta-data, that's crazy-talk.
    As somebody who administers both Windows and Linux systems, I must say that finding anything in the Event Viewer (be it the classic or the new one that appeared with Vista/2008) is a much harder task than going through logs in /var/log (not to mention that in the time Event Viewer loads I have usually already located the problem in the plain text logs). Of course, this assumes that the logs are actually human-readable - I remember debugging some program on Aix which wrote it's own log, for which you needed the instruction manual to decrypt what the numbers there meant.



  • @Joeyg said:

    (I apologize for the double-post, but community server really hates Opera. For some reason clicking 'Quote' only ever works on the fourth try (and it's always the fourth try, weirdly enough). I would try for 'Edit', but it's a rare sight to see the page load before the timeout expires.)

    This never would have happened on a Unix system.



  • @sys said:

    @Joeyg said:

    (I apologize for the double-post, but community server really hates Opera. For some reason clicking 'Quote' only ever works on the fourth try (and it's always the fourth try, weirdly enough). I would try for 'Edit', but it's a rare sight to see the page load before the timeout expires.)

     

    This never would have happened on a Unix system.

     

    Right, because it doesn't have a filesystem.



  • Actually it's probably just because he didn't have scroll lock on.  That happens to me all the time.



  • @b_redeker said:

    Or for that matter, does Break break anything? I'd try, but I have no backup laptop.
     

    In WinXP at least, when you're running a continuous ping (i.e. with the -t option), hitting Ctrl+Break will show a summary of packets sent, received and lost before the ping resumes.

    Now back to our scheduled flamewar...



  • @b_redeker said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    No app is completely unusable, by definition. Even Lotus Notes.
     

    For sufficiently small values of "not completely unusable".

     

    Just don't forget to take Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle into account when you try to measure those values. ;)

     Cosmic radiation may exert an influence, too! :)



  •  So are we talking Quantum Unusability or does that mean the Lotus Notes waveform can collapse any moment?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Google decided to hide the "New Window" menu item in a weird submenu I never think to look in. (Yes, obviously the concept of "New Window" makes me think of a wrench! Good design, Google.
    I assume you're talking about Chrome. New window is created by clicking the + for new tab, and then dragging the tab off the bar. In a few years' time, this whole flamewar will seem laughably antiquated - we're just seeing the start of the keyboardless web. Next time you're sitting at home browsing the web - not posting on forums, or writing emails, or such - try pushing your keyboard a few feet away and sticking to just the mouse. You can go hours without entering any text longer than a word or two. With predictive text capabilities, three buttons becomes enough to type with - without chordal input - so I doubt the keyboard will be around much longer. Good riddance - frankly, it's as much an embarrassment in this day and age as it would be to have horses pulling carts around our street. All those buttons... Eugh.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Google decided to hide the "New Window" menu item in a weird submenu I never think to look in. (Yes, obviously the concept of "New Window" makes me think of a wrench! Good design, Google.
    I assume you're talking about Chrome. New window is created by clicking the + for new tab, and then dragging the tab off the bar. In a few years' time, this whole flamewar will seem laughably antiquated - we're just seeing the start of the keyboardless web. Next time you're sitting at home browsing the web - not posting on forums, or writing emails, or such - try pushing your keyboard a few feet away and sticking to just the mouse. You can go hours without entering any text longer than a word or two. With predictive text capabilities, three buttons becomes enough to type with - without chordal input - so I doubt the keyboard will be around much longer. Good riddance - frankly, it's as much an embarrassment in this day and age as it would be to have horses pulling carts around our street. All those buttons... Eugh.
     

    Yeah, predictive text can always guess what words comming next.  It Will never make grammar or capitalization mistakes.



  • @DescentJS said:

    Yeah, predictive text can always guess what words comming next.  It Will never make grammar or capitalization mistakes.
    It's not perfect, but as your post shows, neither is typing on a keyboard. Predictive text is slightly misleading here as nomenclature, but it's just a name for a system that makes use of fewer than 26(+) buttons to input text. Mobile phones use 10 buttons for it, but you can get it down to less than half that with no loss in efficiency. One button for consonants, one for vowels, one to cycle through options, mouse-gesture for 'end-word' - for someone who can already type fast, there isn't an obvious huge advantage, and even for hunt-and-peck typists it's not necessarily easier to learn - but it lets you function without using a keyboard.



  • So basically you suggest a system that's slower and harder to use? And this is somehow better?



  • For all you keyboard haters, I give you the MacBook Wheel.



  • @DescentJS said:

    So basically you suggest a system that's slower and harder to use? And this is somehow better?
    What I'm saying is that the keyboard is increasingly becoming redundant. It'll end up (at best) as a niche input device like a graphics tablet - although that's not happening any time soon, and it'll still be far more widespread. In the context of cli vs mouse-driven GUI, though, the logical next development is to do away with the keyboard altogether - not just whittle it down by a few keys, but junk all hundred-odd of them.

    This isn't about better or worse, really. It's just the way things are going. I was looking for a holiday on-line the other day, and I didn't touch the keyboard once I'd typed in my initial google search - "last minute holidays". Everything else was either from another search, generated by highlighting text and clicking 'search Google for...', or involved selections from drop-down boxes or pop-up calendars. If I'd actually not had a keyboard, I could eventually have got the initial search up with some other combination of clicking via my 'favourites' shortcuts, which would be silly, but since it was only a few characters long, it wouldn't have been a problem if I had to tap it in relatively slowly with an onscreen keyboard or some other mouse-only input system.

    I wouldn't want to write a book, or even an essay, like that unless the mouse-input-system was capable of achieving speeds comparable to (or exceeding) my typing speed, but the key here is that most people never (or very rarely) write anything longer than a twitter message. This is about coming to terms with the changes in usage of computers. In the same way that Unix's focus on plain-text used to be justifiable because that was what computers were for, so the focus on the keyboard is becoming less justifiable as the primary usage of PCs moves away from office applications, specifically word processing.

    So yeah, if instead of just rambling I try and make a point, it's simply that although they may be useful for many people, keyboards are not a necessity by any means.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Handle what? I guess by not having errors during boot in the first place. I'm not sure what you're asking. To answer literally, Windows doesn't handle this, because windows doesn't have dmesg and therefore there's no reason for it to provide a facility to read it.

    I have I had quite a few situations in which (real) boot time logging could have saved me from reimaging user's computer (Windows (XP) does have boot time logging, but it's only for finding out if your startup drivers are broken. After those driver's are loaded, it thinks we can boot to Windows without problems).

    In the end, both Windows and Linux have their pros and cons for almost every user type. And you can generally offset those with some extra work in both (like I love how Windows' UI is designed so that you can do pretty much anything with just keyboard, but you can get pretty close in Linux by binding the keys yourself in your favorite desktop environment. But then I love Linux's detailed logging & log filtering capabilities even in recovery mode, but you can also get quite close with powershell)



  • @Buzer said:

    I love how Windows' UI is designed so that you can do pretty much anything with just keyboard, but you can get pretty close in Linux by binding the keys yourself in your favorite desktop environment.

    Can you do this in Gnome? Last I checked it was nearly impossible, and with KDE things are not much better. Linux GUI's are a joke when it comes to keyboard accessibility.

    One major offender is PCB. Fortunately, it's a small enough program that I could download the source and fix the UI a little without any hassle, but when I'm trying to bind some forward/next keys to Amarok or setting Windows+C to open a calculator, I haven't a clue how or why it doesn't work.



  • @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @DescentJS said:
    So basically you suggest a system that's slower and harder to use? And this is somehow better?
    What I'm saying is that the keyboard is increasingly becoming redundant. It'll end up (at best) as a niche input device like a graphics tablet - although that's not happening any time soon, and it'll still be far more widespread. In the context of cli vs mouse-driven GUI, though, the logical next development is to do away with the keyboard altogether - not just whittle it down by a few keys, but junk all hundred-odd of them.
     

    Or it could go the way of the Nintendo DS: discard the keyboard in favor of a touch-screen multifunction input device.

    Need a keyboard and still want a fuill screen left? Here it is. Prefer some point and click input? No problem. Need 6 keys and a big slider? Yes can do.



  • @b-redeker said:

    @davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

    @DescentJS said:
    So basically you suggest a system that's slower and harder to use? And this is somehow better?
    What I'm saying is that the keyboard is increasingly becoming redundant. It'll end up (at best) as a niche input device like a graphics tablet - although that's not happening any time soon, and it'll still be far more widespread. In the context of cli vs mouse-driven GUI, though, the logical next development is to do away with the keyboard altogether - not just whittle it down by a few keys, but junk all hundred-odd of them.
     

    Or it could go the way of the Nintendo DS: discard the keyboard in favor of a touch-screen multifunction input device.

    Need a keyboard and still want a fuill screen left? Here it is. Prefer some point and click input? No problem. Need 6 keys and a big slider? Yes can do.

    I'm thinking of smartphones as well, and the next generation of consoles will probably have proper web-browsing capability, but no more than a vestigial keyboard. People are still going to need to enter text from time to time, but it might be a rarely used function with consequent priority in the ease-of-access stakes.


Log in to reply