Desktop icon -- no one opens a PDF reader that way. We open it by double-clicking a PDF document. Since PDF reader software has no other purpose, there is no need to litter the desktop with icons. Software installers should never place icons on the desktop without your explicit consent (and the default should be no desktop icon)
Background process automatically starts. While running reader_sl.exe may improve the startup time of the application, it also consumes RAM and processor cycles needlessly. At the very least, offer the choice of whether to automatically start a background process at system start up. It is possible to turn this off with msconfig, but each time you open Adobe Reader, it recreates the autorun entry, a practice which is dangerously close to those used by malware. I am not calling Adobe Reader malware, I am just saying that the repeated setting of itself in the autostart category despite your orders otherwise is close to the practices of malware.
Open in browser. In some environments, Adobe Reader's implementation of a JavaScript-like language prevents internal Web-based applications from continuing to function once a PDF document is opened. The cure is to disable "open in browser". However, installing any update/upgrade resets it, meaning that support staff must re-disable the function.
Programs' Menu placement:
No one cares that your company is named "Banana Boat Software". We want to be able to do our work. Installers need to use functional menus like "Media Tools\Banana Boat CD-DVD Suite\Banana Boat Plus Edition" instead of company-focused names like "Banana Boat Software\Banana Boat CD-DVD Suite\Banana Boat Plus Edition"
Even better, use the above as a default, and then offer the ability to change it to meet the computer owner's policy.
Can you imagine trying to find something with 18 no name software companies hiding the applications behind their names? We can prevent this by using functional menus (I'd suggest standardizing them, the way that the GNOME and KDE desktop environments seem to have done).
Updater software:
Instead of running an update process in the background at system startup, wait until the customer opens the application, then check for updates and then disconnect from the network and stay disconnected until the next time the application starts.
No one needs (or wants) sixty different updaters that run at system startup. Neither does anyone want a specific "Banana Boat Software Update Manager". Instead, embed the updater (perhaps as a shared library that can be used for multiple apps) into the application, so that it runs when the application starts and only then. It should not be a separate process. Think about how often someone is using a computer and does not know why it is slow, only to find out that some updater process is consuming most of the CPU time, memory, or network bandwidth.
Suite-itis:
Have you ever noticed how often an anti-virus specialist will add an anti-spyware and a firewall to their lineup and then sell them as a packaged "security suite"? Does that mean that you have to accept a bunch of second-rate applications with the good one, just because the vendor wants to sell suites instead of individual applications?
The leading "office applications suite" is a prime example. Typically, the products are purchased and installed as a unit, but internally (and at the file formats level), they are still pretty poorly integrated. Is that vendor's presentation manager measurably better than its competitors, or is it being used by virtue of its being part of the package? Since it isn't really integrated with its suite-mates, end-users might be better off if it was split off and made to stand on its own.
In a nutshell, suite-itis sells different products as a single selling unit which might not stand on their own if sold individually. Ask yourself whether every part of the suite is best-of-breed. If the answer is 'no', you'd be better off buying the parts of the suite that are top quality, while looking elsewhere for other functionality.
Java:
Older versions of Java were very slow to start up and were also somewhat slower than native programs. More modern versions start much faster and run at near-native speeds, but there is still the perception that Java programs are slow.
Updating: When Java updates itself, it seems to leave the former installation intact and merely places a new installation next to it and points the Java path to the newest installation. These older versions are dead for most purposes, so the installer should remove all but the most recent two versions, unless a certain version needs to stay there (which should be configurable during the original installation or using the Java control panel applet).
Installation: the process should create an environment variable called JAVA_PATH which points to the current Java bin directory. It should then prepend JAVA_PATH to your system PATH variable. This should be automatic (on UNIX-like systems, the PATH is stored in one place for sh/bash/ksh shells and somewhere else for csh/tcsh shells. Change both places. This way, any updates merely have to update JAVA_PATH (in the one or two places environment variables are stored on your system).
When the JRE is launched the system tray icon appears, once it is no longer in use, the JRE should shut down and take away its icon.
Bundling: like with Adobe products, Sun's Java Runtime Environment attempts to bundle other products with a download. Adobe pushes the Yahoo toolbar, while Sun pushes Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, and OpenOffice.org. With the exception of OpenOffice, these are all selected by default. It needs to be the other way around--UNselected by default, so no one unintentionally installs forbidden or unwanted software. Also, include a checkbox that will include command line Java SE SDK tools (especially javac) as well as JRuby, Jython, Nice, Groovy, and BeanShell.
This is just a sampling of things I've run into recently. There are dozens more that any one of us could come up with if we tried hard enough.
Microsoft is now acknowledging it screwed up with its initial launch of Windows Vista, and is ready to try again.
"We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?" So Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, fessed up publicly this week.
In Ohio, I found that the newer, Vista-powered computer continued to lose connectivity to the hotel's wireless network, while the older computer (powered by Linux) worked fine most of the time. In Nebraska, the hotel acknowledged that the weather was hindering their network, and I have found it to be a hit-and-miss thing with the older laptop, while the newer laptop often has usable signal strength in places where the older machine cannot connect at all. The sample size here is too small to say for sure, but it seems that newer wireless cards are more sensitive and able to work in places where the building layout would prevent older WiFi cards from working. At the very least, though, it looks like I have finally found a situation where Vista at least does not hobble the network functionality of the computer.
Vista, as you may recall, has two main selling points:
More secure than XP
Aero, a 3D, multiple desktop interface
Security: Vista is full of little changes meant to make your system more secure. For example, User Account Control (UAC) is meant to correct a situation in which software vendors would write their applications in such a way that the user had to have administrator rights on the computer. Unfortunately, UAC is now known as Vista's "security nanny", for the way it constantly pops up to ask you if you should be doing what you are doing. It has many variations.
"Windows needs your permission to continue" This is probably the most commonly seen dialog. It can get annoying, as you may need it three or four times during a sequence of actions, such as when you are trying to connect the PC to a network. If you are logged in with administrator rights, you merely click 'continue' most of the time. On the other hand, a regular user (which is what almost all users should be,) needs to know the administrator password.
And one of the worst things about it is that there seems to be no logic as to what is locked up behind UAC and what is not. If I use "Start --> Run..." and enter "cmd", even if I am an administrator on the computer, I cannot do anything that might take some administrative authority. If I want a command line with administrative rights, I need to go up the menu and right-click on the "Command Prompt" launcher. That was one of the purposes behind runas, but that has now been limited.
The worst thing about UAC is that it is not hard for a malware writer to evade it, but at the same time, its constant pop-up dialogs train the user to quickly and unthinkingly click on the allow button. So in one swoop, Microsoft is teaching users to ignore important security information. That is about the dumbest thing I can think of. This resembles the mistake that makers of Web browsers have made: If you get multiple pop-ups when you log into Yahoo! mail, you eventually learn to click 'Okay' without reading them. Save pop-up dialogs for the most critical notices and let the rest go with a far more subtle way of informing the user.
Aero 3D interface. Search for 'Vistagate' and you will understand. Many Vista capable computers cannot run the Aero interface. Many of the home socks-and-underwear edition computers are under-powered, either lacking a powerful enough CPU or lacking in RAM. Even some home fully-dressed edition computers lack sufficient display capacity for Aero. Since Aero appears to resemble something that Mac users (and some Linux users) had already years ago, on far less powerful hardware, it does not seem to be anything to crow about anyway.
With Service Pack 1, they have addressed many of the issues that Vista has. However, Vista is one hundred percent the wrong direction for small businesses, one hundred percent the wrong direction for large businesses, and one hundred percent the wrong direction for home users. If you have the option, I recommend that you skip Vista entirely. Transition to Mac or even better, move to Linux Mint or Ubuntu Linux or Mepis Linux. Dell even has some computers for home with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed or business with Red Hat Linux preinstalled. Your family and your business will thank you, a year or three down the road.
Note: Some links may not work correctly. Find all instances of '&' and remove the 'amp;' from the line. Then they should work.
I do not own any videogame systems. But that does not stop me from watching and looking. I notice that VGChartz shows the PS3 outselling the XB360 most recent weeks, even without any real blockbuster games available for PS3. I also see that the XBox360's early start gave it a lead of about five million units. The PS3's initial high price hurt sales enough that the XB360's lead was more than 7 million units in October of 2007. Since then, the PS3's weekly unit sales have generally equalled or exceeded the XB360's unit sales.
This is important only to those who are interested in playing the games (and to those who sell them). At this point, I think all three systems are successful and profitable. None of the three manufacturers is likely to follow Sega's example and retreat from the console business, and that is what I mean by successful in this context. Sony is very glad to see this, as the initial reception had to be tremendously embarassing.
I am not going to buy all three, so I'll probably get the Wii and then decide from there whether to buy a second system.
Many other estimates of sales / market share are based on manufacturer channel shipments, that is, how many units the product maker ships to its distribution and marketing channel partners. This could account for some of the differences between VGChartz' estimates and other estimates.
The Wii is still hot, even if the numbers behind the article may be questionable.
I give up. I can?t support OpenOffice Write any more, and it?s nobody?s fault but their own. For anything more than simple tasks, their software is terrible. Their only saving grace is that Microsoft Office has its own brand of polished turd, named Word. Collectively, they are racing to the bottom of a decade-long decline in useability.
No, that?s too generous. The thing is, they?re at the bottom. They are useless for any but the most trivial tasks, and the most trivial tasks are better accomplished elsewhere, anyway.
This isn't, as far as I can tell, really about OpenOffice.org (OOo). This is about the way that word processors promote poor work practices. This is common to the whole of office software. Have you ever watched highly-paid engineers spending sizable amounts of time trying to fit their reports into a defined area of a Word or Excel form? That is because office suites, particularly word processors, encourage users to put form before function. Our writing suffers, because we interrupt the flow of what we are writing to tinker with the way it looks: bold here, italics there, underline over there, indent over here, large text, small text, left alignment, right alignment, center alignment.
The result of this is that the quality of writing has diminished, while we impose ever more complex visual formatting requirements. At the W3C, they have an idea called the semantic Web, based around the idea that XHTML and XML markup should focus on the meaning of the document and its parts, while stylesheets should focus on the appearance (based, of course, on the underlying meanings).
If you write first for meaning and expressiveness, then come back later to add formatting based on the underlying meaning, you will constantly be fighting with your tools. The word processor thinks it is being helpful when it reformats your text into a numbered or bulleted list. And perhaps it is, until you try to embed a list inside of another list. Then it fights your efforts. It is being helpful when it corrects your spelling, except when you type 'Hesperia' (a city in California) or someone's uncommon name.
And yet, writing for meaning and expressiveness, putting out content and then formatting it later on is exactly the way people should write.
How frequently do you see a spreadsheet being used in order to give tabular formatting (appearance) to a set of information? Instead of using any of the calculation tools that a spreadsheet is meant to impart, it is being used for the equivalent of writing text on graph paper.
Don't get angry here. I am hoping to enlighten your mind a little. Using the right tools for the job at hand involves additional training and learning. But just as the tomatoes you pick in your own back yard taste better than the squishy orangish-green things you buy at the supermarket, writing semantically will generally give you a better quality of output. Depending upon your workplace or customers, you may or may not be immediately more productive without using mish mashes like your typical office software, but if you have the opportunity to do it for a while, you are quite likely to see a remarkable boost.
In any case, even if you decide to attempt change, you will not be able to just cut over. You will have to transition. In the mean time, be sure to use ODF for your word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation files and support attempts to get governments to use ODF as well.
It seems that free software, often a contentious world, actually works to bring disparate individuals together. It crosses generational, political, national, and even ethnic boundaries, boundaries of language, and even boundaries of income and social standing.
I would guess that one reason is that the developer behind a free application has no incentive to try to lock the user into his product, to accuse the user of theft, or (usually) to limit functionality as a way to extract a higher price from certain users. In free software, the business model is not normally based on acting against the interests of customers and end-users, as it is with proprietary software (and encrypted music).
In many free software projects, users can and do contribute code that helps to improve the product for its whole user base. Passionate users promote and distribute the software better than paid sales and advertising teams, often sharing their knowledge and experience as free support, training, and integration help.
So, yes, free / libre and open source software can often bring people together who would not otherwise have much in common.
Now that I've had a little bit of time with the newest Ubuntu, I have to say that I like it. It is noticeably faster. That said, I still had to tweak it a little.
I do not really use desktop search tools, such as Beagle or Google Desktop. Therefore, I do not leave them installed, so that I don't have to fight with their indexing processes to get some CPU and memory. I would much rather use a physical yellow sticky note than a software sticky note, so Tomboy is out. I also avoid using Evolution any more. (At one time, I loved it.)
I upgraded three computers to 8.04 "hardy heron". All three were successful, but each experience was different. One is a P3 with 512MB of RAM. It was a slow process, but there were no hitches of any kind.
I upgraded my desktop, which was the fastest of all, but which had one error. (I had to kill a process, which then restarted without error.)
Finally, I upgraded my road dog, a Dell XPS M140 with a Pentium M 1.86 GHz and 512MB of RAM. This computer was originally running Linux Mint. I "upstreamed" it during a previous upgrade (by removing the Mint repositories and using only the Ubuntu ones). I eventually plan to completely install from scratch with a Ubuntu CD. This computer had two errors: gcl and nice were both already up-to-date, so the installer couldn't replace them. I just told it to reinstall them after the upgrade was completed.
The new version is really popular. It took about twelve hours for each computer to download it. Since Windows sales are down by 24% from last quarter, maybe a lot more people will get to know the great feeling that comes with freedom.
Coming soon, I'm upgrading the virtual machine I use for PHP work from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. I hope the process goes as smoothly as this one did.
In this article, the BytesFree organization lays out a succinct expression of how our focus on enriching corporations at the expense of our nation and its people is hurting us. It hurts us in music and media and on the 'Net as well.
As a Hotmail user, I get dumped on the MSN.com front page when I log out. A few days ago, I saw a health-related link to an article on health.msn.com. Interesting article, but I was busy with PHP stuff at the time, so I closed it and went on.
All I really knew was that it was about "10 foods" and food contamination, and that it was on MSN Health.
Later that same day, I decided to find that article and forward the information to some relatives. Hey, it is an MSN article, so I'll just use MSN's search. Two or three days later (most of which was spent with the embedded search on MSN Health), I gave up on MSN. I went to Google and there it was, the third result.
If MSN/Live Search cannot even locate things on their own sites, how can they expect people to use it for external sites? This is the problem that dogs the whole Yahoo takeover strategy. Microsoft has been pushing MSN since the mid-to-late 1990s, including making it the default search for the Internet Explorer browser. Yet, primarily because it continues to lag its competitors in terms of producing useful results, MSN Search is a distant third in market share. Buying Yahoo (where the desired result was first on the page) would put Microsoft at a distant second, but once all the useful (but not MSFT-product-related) results are stripped out, they will sink below Ask.com within 18 months.
It amazes me that with all the smart people working in Redmond WA, they can't figure out why they are losing share in search and in online advertising. Instead of trying to use everything to trap people into continuing to use their software, they need to break off their online businesses and run them as a completely separate enterprise with different corporate ownership and stock issuance, including allowing the use of non-Microsoft technologies. (Hotmail went through a period where it was frequently down and functionality was unreliable after MSFT bought it. They were changing from an open architecture based on FreeBSD to a Windows-based architecture. It took quite a while to stabilize.) Without the requirement to trap users, and without the corporate subsidies, I'd expect MSN/Live to fix its problems within a year or two, starting with eliminating the strong preference for MSIE and Windows Media Player on their properties, and moving on to embrace interoperability through open formats, technologies, and platforms.
(Note: Comments are still disabled while we attempt to gain more robust spam protection. You can respond from your own blog.)
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems (owner of MySQL) tells the story.
Quite familiar. Just by virtue of fewer licensing hassles and not going through the budget pre-approval process, there is real benefit to enterprises that utilize FLOSS. It is a pity that some enterprises squelch this through repressive policies that force their IT staffers to use expensive and suboptimal proprietary solutions, often failing to meet the needs they are intending to solve.
There is even more benefit to be had in smaller, locally-owned businesses that utilize FLOSS in the place of expensive, generic proprietary software. Not only is the financial hit proportionally larger in a smaller enterprise, but because of their size, they are not in a position to convince software vendors to customize the applications for their needs. With software that has an open license, your business can use any skilled resources available to create necessary modifications without having to beg for permission from the original vendor.
Nucleus allows you to easily maintain your own weblog(s) on your own server. It offers a system that is easy to install, but still offers maximum flexibility. (PHP4/MySQL)