I am quite sure that everyone who has even thought about Linux has been directed to the in(famous) article ‘Linux Isn’t Windows’.  It’s the epitome of the classic FOSS response to criticism – It’s not Linux that has the problem, it’s you.

Fortunately, although voluminous, there is very little actually said.  So I’d like to summarise why he’s wrong in three statements.

1. A logical fallacy will not suddenly become truth if you provide two pages of analogies.
2. An outright wrong statement will not turn correct if you provide two pages of examples.
3. Those that shout the loudest have the most to hide.

And onwards…

3: Those that shout the loudest have the most to hide. (Start at the end)

So lets deal with 3. first.  This is hilarious, and cements my argument for the rest of this post.  Check it out:

1. Go to the aforementioned article
2. Click view->page source
3. Read and chuckle

Firstly, the whole page is generated – whoever made it knows zero about HTML and web development though – that much is clear, as proven by such gems as:

<b><span style=""></span></b><span style=""></span>

Bold, styled nothing. Which is the obvious result of a confused WYSIWYG editor.  And not even a good one.  Obviously the guy doesn’t know any HTML, which is fine.

But that’s not all, dig a bit further and you’ll find:

class="MsoNormal"

Liberally sprinkled all over the place.  A bit of digging reveals the class MsoNormal to belong to Microsoft Office.  That’s right, there is a very good chance this whole thing was made with Microsoft Word.  Despite the fact that only an idiot would use Word to make a webpage.  Isn’t that just hilarious?

This of course is the crux of the issue.  He has proven that people use technology, especially computers, to achieve goals while having to learn as little as possible.  Any idiot can make a webpage in Word or any other WYSIWYG app.  Want bold – just click the bold button, insert an image?  No problem!  The fact that the code puts in <span style=”font-style: italic;”> instead of <em> matters not – after all the writer only wants to be a living demonstration of irony, rather than having to spend a significant amount of time learning HTML and doing it the proper way.

1: A logical fallacy will not suddenly become truth if you provide two pages of analogies.

Lying with analogies is fun.  It goes like this:

1. Make a statement comparing two things
2. Create a (tenuous) analogy to a real-world situation
3. Prove that your ‘side’ is superior in the analogy, so must be in real life.

Check this shit out, here’s his first ‘Why Linux rocks’ analogy

OS’s are like cars (it’s traditional)

1. Windows is like a normal car
2. Linux is like a motorbike
3. Windows has doors (as it’s a car)
4. Linux has no doors (as it’s not a car)
5. Windows is more likely to get broken into (viruses)
6. Linux is safe as it has no doors!

Makes perfect sense!  And there was me thinking that this was a complicated issue with nuance and subtlety. And it continues on, and on, and on.  Again the main substance of his argument: Any problem you have is with you not Linux.  If you have a problem it’s because it’s not Windows.

2: An outright wrong statement will not turn correct if you provide two pages of examples.

Let’s look at his views on Usability:

So it is that in most “user-friendly” text editors & word processors, you Cut and Paste by using Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Totally unintuitive, but everybody’s used to these combinations, so they count as a “friendly” combination.

So when somebody comes to vi and finds that it’s “d” to cut, and “p” to paste, it’s not considered friendly: It’s not what anybody is used to.

Is it superior? Well, actually, yes.

With the Ctrl-X approach, how do you cut a word from the document you’re currently in? (No using the mouse!)
From the start of the word, Ctrl-Shift-Right to select the word.
Then Ctrl-X to cut it.

The vi approach? dw deletes the word.

How about cutting five words with a Ctrl-X application?
From the start of the words, Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-X

And with vi?

d5w

The vi approach is far more versatile and actually more intuitive: “X” and “V” are not obvious or memorable “Cut” and “Paste” commands, whereas “dw” to delete a word, and “p” to put it back is perfectly straightforward. But “X” and “V” are what we all know, so whilst vi is clearly superior, it’s unfamiliar. Ergo, it is considered unfriendly. On no other basis, pure familiarity makes a Windows-like interface seem friendly. And as we learned in problem #1, Linux is necessarily different to Windows. Inescapably, Linux always appears less “user-friendly” than Windows.

To avoid #5a problems, all you can really do is try and remember that “user-friendly” doesn’t mean “What I’m used to”: Try doing things your usual way, and if it doesn’t work, try and work out what a total novice would do.

Well we know what a total novice would do, the writer of this article demonstrated it fine.  He’d use Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V to create a website using MS Word.

d5w, intuitive, really?  The only way you would ever know that is if you read the whole vi manual cover-to-cover multiple times.  It’s simply not guessable which is the very point of the word intuitive.  Edit->Cut is intuitive.  Ctrl-X is then intuitive as it told you the shortcut when you did it the long way.  It requires no prior knowledge.  That is intuitive.

The thing is most users don’t know about Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, they don’t realise that Ctrl-Shift selects words.  Fundamentally 99% of computer users, when using Word, have read no manuals, have asked no questions and have no documentation.  I’ve seen people using Word who don’t even know about word wrap and press ‘Enter’ at the end of each line as you would in a manual typewriter.  Yet in the article writers mind somehow vi would be just as easy for them if they sat down in front of it rather than Word?!?  Of course, again, his argument is impenetrable – It’s not Windows.

But the insanity (and inanity) doesn’t stop there:

Subproblem #5b: Inefficient is friendly

This is a sad but inescapable fact. Paradoxically, the harder you make it to access an application’s functionality, the friendlier it can seem to be.

This is because friendliness is added to an interface by using simple, visible ‘clues’ – the more, the better. After all, if a complete novice to computers is put in front of a WYSIWYG word processor and asked to make a bit of text bold, which is more likely:

* He’ll guess that “Ctrl-B” is the usual standard

* He’ll look for clues, and try clicking on the “Edit” menu. Unsuccessful, he’ll try the next likely one along the row of menus: “Format”. The new menu has a “Font” option, which seems promising. And Hey! There’s our “Bold” option. Success!

Next time you do any processing, try doing every job via the menus: No shortcut keys, and no toolbar icons. Menus all the way. You’ll find you slow to a crawl, as every task suddenly demands a multitude of keystrokes/mouseclicks.
Making software “user-friendly” in this fashion is like putting training wheels on a bicycle: It lets you get up & running immediately, without any skill or experience needed. It’s perfect for a beginner. But nobody out there thinks that all bicycles should be sold with training wheels: If you were given such a bicycle today, I’ll wager the first thing you’d do is remove them for being unnecessary encumbrances: Once you know how to ride a bike, training wheels are unnecessary.

And in the same way, a great deal of Linux software is designed without “training wheels” – it’s designed for users who already have some basic skills in place. After all, nobody’s a permanent novice: Ignorance is short-lived, and knowledge is forever. So the software is designed with the majority in mind.

This might seem an excuse: After all, MS Word has all the friendly menus, and it has toolbar buttons, and it has shortcut keys. . . Best of all worlds, surely? Friendly and efficient.

However, this has to be put into perspective: Firstly, the practicalities: having menus and toolbars and shortcuts and all would mean a lot of coding, and it’s not like Linux developers all get paid for their time. Secondly, it still doesn’t really take into account serious power-users: Very few professional wordsmiths use MS Word. Ever meet a coder who used MS Word? Compare that to how many use emacs & vi.

“Ever meet a coder who used MS Word?” – no, but I’ve read a few articles by one.

The mind boggles at the stupidity of this.  He is basically arguing for software to take away the shortcuts and basically massively increasing the barrier of entry.  I though one of the main aims of modern computing is to bring the benefits to the masses, after all you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car, a plumber to flush the toilet or an electrician to use a lightbulb.  Sure, he may think that forcing people to study for hours before being able to do the slightest thing is advantageous, but the fact that just about everyone (including him) would rather use software, rather than learn software, says it all.  If he actually believed what he said he would have learned HTML, rather than just used the ‘training wheels’.

PSA: If you use some arcane shortcut key or in-obvious key sequence it does not give you a better quality of bold than if you click on the bold button.  It’s just as bold, except it didn’t take 3 days to work out how to do it.

PSA2: The really, really stupid thing is learning how to use vi does not give you a better understanding of how a computer works – it just means you have wasted loads of time.  Does knowing d5w give you a fundamental insight into the machine?  Or is it just a relic of a time when text-only is all you had?

What is amazing though is that he appears to speak for Linux – (maybe he’s channelling the spirit of tux?) – and likes to say what Linux is, what it isn’t, and even says in his summary:

It’s great, but it’s not the point. The point is to make Linux the best OS that the community is capable of making. Not for other people: For itself. The oh-so-common threats of “Linux will never take over the desktop unless it does such-and-such” are simply irrelevant: The Linux community isn’t trying to take over the desktop. They really don’t care if it gets good enough to make it onto your desktop, so long as it stays good enough to remain on theirs. The highly-vocal MS-haters, pro-Linux zealots, and money-making FOSS purveyors might be loud, but they’re still minorities.

So he is speaking for the thousands of developers (I hope he consulted them first) and got the consensus that none of them want Linux to be a success, and don’t really care about the normal users, just about catering for the already computer literate elite.

I think he’s missed the point: Linux is free, in all senses, as people like him love to state at length.  So why does he have the right to say what it is, and isn’t, what it should be and shouldn’t be, who it’s for and who it’s not for?  What is to stop anyone (who has the time and money) to create a fork to do everything that he says it isn’t?

Linux isn’t anything, it’s just a collection of software packages that happen to be released under a permissive license – that is all.  They are created by exactly the same people that make commercial software, in exactly the same way.  Talk about ‘community built’ all you want but there is no effective difference between a volunteer squad of 10 and a company hiring 10 people.  It’s just software – would Windows change fundamentally if MS just GPL’d the whole lot one day?

Linux, if this guy is their representative, is a collection of elitists who want people to think they are smarter than they really are by using complicated software (And acting like it’s easy) to try to impress.  That is if you really have to put a label on it.

8 comments

I do not know how much of the current email traffic is spam but from what I can gather it is between 96% and 99%, depending on who you ask.  Also the email system is a mess, and really needs to be redesigned from scratch – it was never meant to do what it is doing.  So here is my method of fixing the problem.

The first issue is rip and replace.  It’s not possible to simply remove the current email system and stick something else in its place, the upheaval and requirement of every single email client and server needing to be reprogrammed and reinstalled is immense.  Any replacement would have to be dual-role so that the current system could be eventually retired.

The roll-out plan would be to replace the servers first, initially with dual-use (that is, they ping the target to see if it is also a ‘new’ server before deciding to send new or old style emails).  They would also allow old style clients to connect, even though they would not be able to take advantage of the newer (and more sane) features, as the receiving server would change the format of the message on arrival so the current range of software – from webforms to mobile phones – would still work.

For the server, the basic crux of the idea is for it to send a token, rather than an actual message.  Then (and only then), when you view your inbox and view your message, will it be requested from the source server.  This solves several problems:

1. The burden of storing the spam is on the sender, not the receiver.
2. You can un-send email (but not after it has been read).
3. If the offending server gets turned off, blacklisted or blocked everything it’s sent gets binned.
4. You know that who sent the message is actually who sent the message – spoofing is near on impossible without some complicated MITM attacks.
5. Messages can no longer just disappear (so no using that excuse anymore).

Next, only servers with a valid DNS record should be allowed to send – just an IP address?  Tough luck.  In my opinion if you can’t hold down an IP long enough to point a domain at it you really shouldn’t be running an email server from it.

Blacklists then will be operated automatically (and de-centralized like the current system e.g. Spamhaus), with various methods (bayesian etc) of detecting incoming spam, but also with user based filtering – a ‘report as spam’ button.  Once a server drops below a certain signal-to-noise ratio it’ll go on the list and all its messages will effectively no longer exist.

The automatic part of the blacklist means that any blocks will be lifted after a certain duration (12 hours), with possible increments for repeat offenders.  It should also be possible that, on blocking, the mail server should receive a message (and alert the postmaster) of what happened so he can take steps to deal with it, with the option of re-sending the tokens.

Anyone see any major problems with this?

6 comments

Personally I blame Gizmodo for inciting this whole pointless debate.  I was originally going to talk about the idiots talking about it, but now I realise I’d rather talk about the idiots at Gizmodo who caused the idiots to talk about it.  Personally when someone asks me ‘Should I get an Apple or a PC’, I advise them to get whatever they like the best as for 99% of people it doesn’t matter.  I did the whole Mac vs PC fanboy thing 15 years ago when it was new and fresh.  Now it’s pointless and boring – use whatever you please, nobody is really losing out anything much by not having the others platform.

But that being said looking for quotes on Gizmodo makes the whole site seem suspiciously biased, if not then the writers really need to grow out of their platform fanboy stage as it’s embarassing.  For example take these two quotes:

Quote 1: From an article entitled “Why Microsoft Should Give Windows 7 Away“:

“Windows 7 is shaping up to be an awesome OS. It’s everything people wanted Vista to be and more.”

“Word-of-mouth sentiment for Windows 7 has been overwhelmingly positive, even from Mossberg, a dude who spent half of his Sprint Instinct review pre-reviewing the iPhone 3G. Windows 7 is slimmed down when it needs to be, running fantastically on netbooks.”

Now aside from the obvious answer to this retarded statement “Because they want to stay in business” if you search Gizmodo to see what they thought about Apple charging users of the iPod Touch for software updates of what it should have launched with in the first place? “Worth It” is the scathing verdict.

So with that in mind lets look at the lastest “Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard” article (Quote 2):

“It’s easier than ever to pit Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard head-to-head: They’re launching soon, both within a month of each other—and both are basically glorified service packs of the current OS.”

So despite the fact that just about everybody who has used Windows 7 has raved about how much better than Vista it is, about the fact that it runs really well even on low-spec netbooks and the UI has been given the biggest overhaul since the Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 transition, it is now a ‘glorified service pack’, on par with Snow Leopard in its abilities.  Right.  But the bone of contention is here:

“Snow Leopard socks Windows 7 on both counts here: It’s shipping in September for just $29. Windows 7 doesn’t hit until Oct. 22″

Socks it indeed.  Those Apple users are so lucky, getting new versions of OSX for only $29 each time it comes out … wait … hang on …

OSX (original) – $129
Jaguar – $129
Panther – $129
Tiger – $129
Leopard – $129

Which asks the question – Why is Snow Leopard only $29 quid, a negligible sum when newer versions of OSX have been pretty consistantly priced.  I can only think of two reasons:

1: Apple does not consider the changes significant enough to charge full retain for.  From what I have heard it is largely behind-the-scenes speed improvements and bug fixes with little in the way of new features or interface work.  More than service pack but less than a full version.

2: A childish spoiler attempt to try and mock the Windows 7 release by acting like Windows is so overpriced (glass houses much?).

I hope it’s not two – I doubt it is, and if not, why is Snow Leopard such a fantastic deal?  And is the next release ‘Cougar’ (will it run on old hardware?) going to be $29 rather than $129 and if not why not?

Anyway Gizmodo are hopeless Apple fanboys who should be ignored because their opinion is fundamentally biased, simply because:

1: They seem to have forgotten that every previous OSX release is $129 and present no compelling reason why this one is $29 except for the goodness of Apples heart (despite them charging for firmware for MP3 players) and seem to have mysteriously forgotten the historical $129 price point.

2: They think that completely redoing the UI, large portions of the included apps, graphics, sound and basically making the system requirements 1/3 of what they were previously is a ‘service pack’.

Ultimatley if you swapped the company names on the top of the software and told them to review them again, they’d be whining that MS was trying to nickle and dime you for a service pack while Apple was pushing the boundaries of usability and performance.  And that’s the truth.

5 comments

…and come with me back to the summer of 2004.  It was a time of hope, a time of potential change.  Just like the 2008 American elections, or the election of New Labour after living under the Torys for so long, the future looked bright and full of promise.

So what was this event you may ask?  In a nutshell, large portions of the Linux, and FOSS, community realised they had a usability problem and looked like they were starting to take it seriously.  It was largely triggered by this post, The Luxury of Ignorance by Eric S Raymond (and part 2) and although he didn’t say anything that hundreds of people were not already saying, for such a heavyweight of the FOSS community to say such things was unheard of.  Everyone was pretty much forced to sit up and take notice.  For a while you could even suggest in public that Linux was seriously lacking in usability and only be flamed to a partial crisp.

Many Open Source Usability cottage projects sprang up, and several large projects announced that they were putting usability to the forefront – I distinctly remember a quote from Gnome stating they were putting usability at the centre of their effort.  It was meant to be a new dawn of user friendly FOSS.

That was five years ago.  So what went wrong?

The nail was, amusingly, hit pretty much on the head almost immediately by John Gruber with his article Ronco Spray-on Usability in which he makes my first point, and to quote:

UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between:

• software that performs function X; and
• software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface

isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.

Which is exactly true.  You cannot code leaky crap in C and expect to easily fix it later, you cannot easily retrofit security as an afterthought (ask Microsoft about that one), so why the belief that usability is just a theme-pack away?

Anyway, there’s been a five year wait, which is a literal ice-age in terms of computing – why the lack of progress?  There is a simple answer:

Programmers for FOSS projects are largely not interested in usability.

The simply proof for this is that if they were, it wouldn’t be a problem.  The majority of good programmers I know are not programmers because they picked it in university because they thought it would make them money, but were in fact born programmers.  It’s almost a calling – and I know this because I started when I was 8.

However the sheer fact that a ‘call to arms’ is even necessary demonstrates how little interest their really is.  Which brings me to my second point on why so little has been achieved:

All the effort on fixing usability has been aimed at making the FOSS developers better at usability rather than trying to involve the people who actually know about it.

The unfortunate ethos of the FOSS movement appears to be ‘The Programmer is King’.  Unless you are personally willing to fork the project and code it youself, the chances of having any input on anything, irrespective of ability, is pretty much zero.  Even the attempts at engaging non-developers suffer the same fate

Adventures in Failure

Every now and then I forget this key point (do it yourself or GTFO) and stupidly try to ‘contribute’, the last time being a couple of years ago on the run up to the Hardy launch (moving forward in time a few years).  Again it was another time of optimism and there was a call for non-developers (the ridiculous thing about all this is I am a developer.  Full time.  Paid) to help contribute to the Ubuntu art team.  Now I am not amazing at graphic design, but passable, and have spent quite a few years doing it as I realised I had an interest.

Since I whinge a lot about what should be done I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and give it a bash and maybe help do some good.

So I signed up to the mailing list, created a very basic (but indicative of the direction I wanted to go in) design and started posting (first design ever is here).  A few people liked it, a few people hated it, I received a bit of feedback, acted on it, and posted again.  As this cycle continued though and as I saw many people much more talented than me post work, get comments, then disappear I realised something surprising: Nobody with any actual authority over anything was bothering to read the mailinglist or look at the wiki.

You’ll remember the launch of Hardy and the exciting new theme culminating in a fancy wallpaper – It had nothing to do with the quality of the submissions.  Rather than as in every single professional design project I have worked on where several concepts are submitted, whittled down to a few and then to one, it was clear that this process was never going to happen since there was nobody at the wheel who was going to make the initial choices.

I never received any feedback from anybody official on my work, and the bulk of feedback was solicited by spamming various Linux forums with links asking for opinions.  Again if this was a professional business I was dealing with who were paying me to do it I would be told Yes/No and given reasons for the decision from which point I would either go back to the drawing board or work on addressing the issues raised and thus be able to move forwards.  Alas, nobody was at the wheel and all you could hear was the sound of crickets.  As a result it’s impossible to improve as there is no indication of *what* needs improved.

I started pushing the issue after a while as the deadline for Hardy was a few months away and even if my design was not considered (I didn’t really expect it to be), at least someone else’s would have been that I could have helped out on – I was willing at this point to learn how to do some theming too.  But again, there was no official decision or feedback.

Soon into this discussion it was made clear that if I wanted my design to be considered I should ‘Make a theme out of it and post it on Gnome look’.  So what started as a campaign to involve non-developers in Ubuntu – and bear in mind this is just a skin-job and not even touching the usability elephant in the room – turned into a ‘learn to program, we’re not going to do it for you’.  I was pretty much expected to sink dozens of hours of my time into creating a theme, adding it to an already massive list and then hoping the Ubuntu devs spot it on the off chance that they actually look through that site.

Ultimately Linux development is only for those that 1: have the time and 2: are programmers, and despite the lip service they pay to usability and design, the focus on a developer-centric solution to every problem is simply not yielding any results.

Comments Off

Why on earth is the “Apple Expo” called the “World Wide Developer Conference”? It would be like Nintendo having the “World Game Development Conference”.

It seems a bit bizarre to have a (hardware) company that is notoriously closed and anti-developer pretending to be the champion of developers worldwide.

http://mobileapps.blackberry.com/devicesoftware/entry.do?code=appworld

1 comment

So, there’s been a big debacle recently about Microsoft and their ’3 app limit’ for netbooks.  Apart from the fact that it would probably contravene the Sale of Goods Act* (it’s a great law) it would cause no end of bad press as people try to do more and realise that they are limited for no other reason than greed.  After the tepid response Vista got and the promise of 7 they probably realise that they, in fact, really don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot again.

I do totally see where they are coming from though.  Prices of computers are dropping through the floor and you can pick up a decent laptop or netbook for under £300 (not to mention desktops) no problems now, which is a far cry from the Windows heyday of £1000+ machines.  What they really want is a flat percentage (or a ‘tax’ if you will) on the sales of every machine.  They want to make the money on the larger ticket items, but they also don’t want to abandon the netbook market.  Fair enough.

One of my old clients, who incidentally was actually old, had a desktop PC.  It was about 4 years old and ran Windows 98 (If I remember correctly).  Anyway he got a new laptop, which was running XP, (this is an old story) as he left the country quite a lot.  Yet he always insisted on using the desktop pc running 98 when he was at home as he considered it to be better as it was ‘full size’, and since the laptop is just a mini portable computer it can’t be as good, can it?

Anyway my wife’s venerable old (three years old!) laptop finally died a death so I impulse bought her a Samsung NC-10 as I had heard good things about it and it was just so cute.

Old Specs: 800mhz-ish Celeron, 256mb RAM**, 40gb HDD, 1280×1024 screen, 2hrs battery
New Specs: 1.6ghz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160gb HDD, 1024×600 screen, 5hrs battery

The simple truth is that netbooks are to laptops what laptops are to desktops.  Sure the keyboard is a touch smaller but it’s fine once you get used to it and the screen isn’t a problem either – and these facts are easily offset by the insane battery life and the fact that it is actually portable (it’s so light you can stick it in a handbag).

Sure there is a small proportion of the population that would require something better – developers, gamers, graphics peeps – I myself have 2×21″ monitors on my main workstation – but for 95% of the people who just want email, facebook and iTunes, it is literally all they need.  Think of it this way – the average new netbook is probably going to be more capable than the average man-off-of-the-street’s current laptop.

I am not going to make any predictions about the future – I’ve seen too many people fail spectacularly at that in the past – but I am fairly sure that the netbook market is going to put more than a serious dent in the normal laptop market over the next few years.  I also distinctly remember many years ago making exactly the same argument that laptops would eclipse desktops – and outside the corporate sphere I have not met anyone that has bought a desktop in years – yet I was countered with exactly the same reasons that people will use in the notebook vs laptop debate – screen size, keyboard, cpu, hdd.

My point?  Ahh, yes.  Microsoft better work something out on how to deal with this without making up 1/3 of the cost of a netbook, and without giving users a crippled or deliberately sub-par experience.  With prices this low and margins as thin as they are their traditional business model and price points are going to become less and less tenable.  There is almost a convergence between low-end netbooks and high-end mobile phones – and when was the last time you saw someone willing to splash out £100 extra for an OS for their phone?

Coming up with a solution is their job, not mine (same problem as the RIAA and MPAA), but it’ll be interesting to watch none the less.

* Unless Microsoft were to advertise clearly that the computer they sold you is purposefully crippled so they can sell you the same thing twice.

** Upgraded that to 512mb a day after seeing it.

Comments Off