Piestar

One thing I’ve learnt from my years as a Linux user is that even the most honest, well-intended projects will falter simply because of the ideological baggage Linux carries. What you suggest is a grand idea, Kerberos, but lots of others (including myself) have suggested similar improvements and have promptly either been shot down or given up in frustration.

I’ve reached the inescapable conclusion that: 1) Linux is unchangable unless the inherent ideology is ditched and 2) the inherent ideology cannot be ditched.

Wiping the slate clean will be seen as unnecessary, because Linux is already perfect. Any attempt to build on an idea from Microsoft will be seen as heresy, because anything MS does is a bad idea and automatically corrupt by association. Any improvement put forth will be seen as a personal affront and rejected. Even if a new project moves past the above obstacles, it will stagnate as developers lose interest and get frustrated with the attitude of the Linux crowd. They’ll divide into camps of pro- and anti- users and call your product bloated, a black eye, etc.

It’s hopeless.

Isn’t this kind of what Ubuntu Brainstorm is for?

Helping PC-BSD or Haiku would be a far better use of your time man, even if you managed to make this awesome GUI, it would still have Linux below, and all the problems associated with it, the community being the worse.
Note: I know that since it would just be a prototype, the dependency on Linux is irrelevant, whoever I certainly wouldn’t participate in this if Linux was the target.
“It” doesn’t want to be helped.

“The problem is I have found going to these projects and saying ‘your UI/usability sucks’ never ends well and you always get bogged down (as stated above) by the zealots who want to defend everything”

Of course.

“The aim would be to sidestep the whole mess and do what is needs to be done rather than fight from a bottom-up position for radical change.”

I think everyone understood the idea.

I’d be down, even though I’m something of a noob and not a developer or anything, but maybe that could be an asset. I assume the goal would be to design a GUI that’s accessible to somebody like myself.

At the very least, it could be a fun, interesting exercise, and maybe yield some unexpected and cool results. What’s the harm?

‘Make a non-existent Linux distro. That is appeal to people that are interested in usability, UI design and graphic design. Through a process of debate and discussion create a virtual ‘dream OS’ concept. Reconsider everything. Do not start out with Gnome/KDE and go from there. Re-examine every assumption about the current desktop situation and then create a series of mockups with HID guidelines, behaviour guides and working prototypes (do it in Flash even).‘

Canonical are already doing this, see: the last paragraph on Michael Forrest’s blog post:

‘So here I am. I’m back doing Flash (after a frantic couple of weeks trying desparately to find a better way to produce prototypes than with Flash). I’m making a fake version of Ubuntu in which we prototype user interaction designs [...]‘

and Flash-Ubuntu. The one big difference is that Canonical’s designs are hidden, not open for discussion.

It also seems most of the Ubuntu team use Macs, so I applauding their lack of Freetardery. However, it’s easy to see from whence the Mac influence on Ubuntu comes.

‘What I really learned is that having such discussions is entirely pointless. The advocates are going to get upset, confusing criticising parts of Linux with criticising all of Linux and realistically the people who already agreed with me agree with me and the people who don’t skim read it and then call me an idiot. Simply put, it’s not exactly productive.‘

It’s anecdotal but the evidence changed my mind and my wife’s (personally I liked the button positioning, before reading your post). What you have to remember is: out of all the people who read the article, how many commented one way or the other? Perhaps the majority read the post, thought, ‘Good point!’ and moved on.

I’m starting to quite like this Michael Forrest, he’s a bit of a fucking ponce, but he’s right about Linux:

‘My experiences with the Ubuntu codebase so far have been that far too much emphasis is being placed on how the machine works, with little emphasis on modelling the real world or coming up with APIs and toolkits that work nicely from a human perspective.

The phenotypical results of the underlying architectural problems are rife. My file-system suddenly became read-only yesterday. I hadn’t done anything – I’d just walked across the room to talk to someone for two minutes. Sure, it’s alpha, but seriously… how could this happen? Another time, during a UDS session while listening to something in my headphones, not realising until somebody told me that, embarrassingly, the sound was also coming from my laptop speakers.‘

Sorry for the long copy-pasta, but he’s right-fucking-on about these problems IMO. Freetard developers spend far too long on ‘new’ and ‘cool’ (differentiation) than satisfying user’s basic expectations.

I think ultimately the talk of linux is pointless. What you really want is a thought experiment in UI design. By billing it as Linux you lose the mindshare of all those people who think that Linux needs some tweaking to compete when this is not at all the case.

I can understand why people might be reluctant, if not downright defeatist, but there seems to be a community of like-minded people here who don’t have any pretenses about Linux, who don’t dump disproportionate amounts of their identity and self-worth into an OS and who won’t mindlessly defend it against any and all criticism. That Linux community you always wanted? Well, guess what? We’re IT. And my guess is there’s even more of us out there who’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this.

If something were to actually come of this, then as long as the right people appreciate it, who cares what the freetard majority thinks? Why should we let their lack of perspective, their counter-productive screeching, their knee-jerk zealotry dictate what we do?

We all enjoy this blog for one reason or another; I’ve gained quite a few insights from it myself. Don’t we at least owe Kerberosa a brainstorming session? No long term commitment, just a brainstorming session.

A lot of bloggers dole out criticism, but how many actually invite you to participate in something other than commenting on it?

C’mon, just ONE brainstorming session.

What say you all?

I fear that you underestimate two problems:

1.) Who would care ?
As John Gruber put it years ago: “Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves.” So the remaining Linux users are those who don’t care about usability (because they are technical enough to still use it, they use it out of ideology and / or they are cheapskates). And developers are by definition the worst: If you are technical enough to use vi or emacs, then usability is not an itch you feel any need to scratch.

2.) How hard would it be ?
No, good ideas are not enough, you need good data, too. Please read this post first:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2009/10/29/ux-research-tools-and-techniques.aspx
This should give you an idea of what is involved in UI research these days. Do you have a test place with an eye-tracking camera etc. ? How do you attract non-technical people as testers for a basically non-existing OS ? (Anybody caring to read your blog is surely not non-technical.)

Sorry, it really would be nice, but I can’t see how it could be done.

Greetings from the land of good beer,
Carsten

Thanks, Adam, that was most enlightening.

And now back to the topic. Stung as I was by the suggestion that I didn’t read your previous post and just commented “me too,” I’m going to do something different this time.

Well, actually, I’m still going to say “me too,” but it’ll be different, because I disagree with most of the posters above. I think this is an interesting (if difficult) idea. Me too!

It doesn’t have to fit Carsten’s model of a complex usability lab, since it’s neither commercial nor part of academia. It doesn’t have to aim for 1% of the desktop market, or even 0.0000000001% of the desktop market. It doesn’t have to aim for any market at all. And best of all, there’s absolutely no point in using Linux as a base.

In fact, it wouldn’t be necessary to pick an OS as a base at all. What you’re looking at is a FOSS-esque collaborative project to “build a desktop from scratch,” except that it’s not really from scratch because you’d be using an underlying GUI framework. (You could reinvent that as well, but why bother?) Just pick a framework that works across OSes, and you’re there.

I’d be tempted by wxWidgets, but actually any one of the Web GUI frameworks (is Flash a framework? Can’t think of a better word) would do.

The problem comes when you have to deal with the management side, because frankly the open source model is a steaming pile of shit. Move the metaphor. It’s not a bazaar, it’s not a cathedral, it’s … the Knights Templar! Just make sure somebody is really in charge (vote them off if necessary), and that there’s an actual road-map — not a wish-list — with an identifiable individual responsible for each milestone. It’s a lot of work for everybody, mind. I’d seriously consider only allowing *retired* software engineers to apply, because at least they have the time.

And the great thing about the Knights Templar model is that you can sell the idea as the basis for Dan Brown’s next book, and bingo! You’re a made man!

Then again, I may be misinterpreting this idea.

“I’d be tempted by wxWidgets, but actually any one of the Web GUI frameworks (is Flash a framework? Can’t think of a better word) would do.”

wxWidgets wouldn’t be a very good idea, to really do this you’d have to drop lower and program it from the ground up, flash would work very well though, even if I hate flash.
Liked when it was made by macromedia, now it’s just awful (talking about the IDE, not the plugin).

Also as far a usability testing goes, they really exaggerate nowadays, I had an interface design class this semester and we had to do usability testing.
We had to measure the time it took for users to find stuff, compare the times it took for different paths to the same goal, calculate GOMS and KLM crap, make questionnaires stuff like that.

Of all that you know what was the most useful? Just talking to the person, listening to what they though, what could be improved, what they liked, what they disliked, what made sense, what didn’t.

Also, you don’t really need a camera, just log the users actions, could be easily made from a web interface.
Not as good, but still very useful.

Now that I think of it, this project does interest me, “Dream Desktop Project”, hehe, has a nice ring to it .

@Kerberos
Found more info about elementary os… It’s a total mac ripoff (including hiding the filesystem) with a stolen logo from enlightenment (I actually thought they used enlightenment at first since I can only find minuscule screenshots of that).
Just another useless “fork”… Disappointed , guess that’s to be expected from anything Linux related.

Kerberos, I’d be interesting in helping out.

I’d suggest not going any further than mockups until you were sure everything was right. Something like Balsamiq Mockups is a good tool for that; Even Shuttleworth uses it. However, it too makes a lot of assumptions for its widgets, so I’d say one initial rule might be to only use basic boxes, lines and icons if possible.

If for no other reason, that link to Balsamiq mockups makes the thread worthwhile. Can I has it free for teh Linux render stationz?

Dunno about “target audience” as a block, but I agree it would be worth doing the Joel thing and “inventing” users, complete with pseudo-biogs. It’s a good approach if you want to be able to say “works for someone who can program Hello World, but not for Queefer.” (That, of course, is the rock-bottom know-nothing end of the spectrum, but you get my drift.)

The whole concept needs, er, a manifesto, however. I’d assume that everybody here has a different mental model of what’s intended. My mental model doesn’t actually involve real applications _at all_, although it would be nice to have a scripting language (hell, make it Javascript) to make pretty moving pictures when an “application” pops up. Assuming applications are supposed to “pop up.”

(FWIW, my mental model also involves dual monitors — one for the GUI itself and one to list running commentaries, etc. In other words, the second monitor “pretends” to be an OS.)

The thing to avoid is a RAD-style development where whole swathes of stuff get thrown away every month whilst people bicker about the exact shade of puce used for the windicators. Well, my experience leads me to run away from RAD for that reason; YMMV. Sadly I think Balsamiq is likely to lead in this direction, not least because of the round-trip between sketches and “implementation” and back again.

Note that a computer OS is the only thing that Richard Branson hasn’t sunk his clammy little paws into yet. Taking a leaf from Ubuntu’s tendency to rip off the Mac (badly), perhaps we could call the project “O’Virgin?” Our man’s already been to space…

Slightly OT: Here’s my personal pie-in-the-sky dream, feel free to pick any useful ideas you might find.
Assumption: I had the kind of money that Mark S. has.
Mission: Create a usable Desktop OS – just to show the Linux fanboys what they should have done. Avoid GPL software wherever possible. Make it marketable.
Name: Something simple, my personal favorite would be “Eagle”. (Probably allready trademarked)
As a base we need a kernel etc. – one of the BSDs should do. (Include OSS for audio.) We need an application framework, which should be .NET because it exists, isn’t bad (AFAIK it’s even pretty good) and there are existing applications. X11 doesn’t cut it, so create a graphic “layer” to sit on the kernel and provide the necessary services for the .NET framework. If QT provides any help with this, license it and use it.
Marketing, target audience etc.:
Once it runs Paint.NET, call it Eagle 1.0 and give it away to interested tinkerers / nerds. Once it gets actually useful and some ISVs have been persuaded / “bribed” to porting useful stuff, call it 2.0 and use it as the base for customized “appliances”, eg:
If we can get Cubase and some other stuff, create a HW/SW bundle and sell it to recording studios as the “Recording Eagle”. “Movie Eagle” for rendering, “Photo Eagle”
might be other applications of the same principle. Once games are written in .NET, maybe even a “Games Monster”.
OK, I told you it’s pie-in-the sky.

I’ve just realised that my mental model of all this is horribly reminiscent of Xerox Parc.

Who’s going to supply all the bean-bags?

I think you chaps are falling into the same trap Freetards do: worrying about the technical details when you don’t even know what your target market is and who your users are.

As for asking users what they want, Henry Ford understood what his users’ goals are, they want to travel from A to B, faster. Do you know what your users’ goals are? That is, the mythical users, not people who will use this UI research to build operating systems.

User testing wireframes and functional prototypes is good for getting users to concentrate on how stuff works, instead of how it looks; introducing user testing for this is one reason not to do it last. However, if by ‘user testing’ you mean ‘Freetards raising bugs’ then yes, I agree.

As for a name and LogoCompetition™, I’d hold off until you know exactly what you’re doing, although a couple of possibilities spring to mind:

Usable
Work (as in, get’s the fuck out of your way and let’s you work)
Spritely
Slight (as in, small and slender, but also a slight against UNIXtards and their stuck-in-the-1970′s era philosophy)

A simple description of what the project is for: Writing code is easy, creating a user experience is hard.

‘Eagle’ is a little generic, in my opinion, it doesn’t convey anything about the project. Good name for a release though.

I’m not trying to discourage – I just think the best approach to take here is what Apple did with the first iPhone. Decide on a core set of features, and do them well – *then* add the more interesting stuff.

Agreed. It’s less about how the UI will look and more about how it will work and the principles it will employ. For example, iPhone guidelines dictate that switching between pages should always have some sort of transition effect; a slide, fade, flip, etc. This wasn’t done just to look neat, the principle behind it was so that people wouldn’t get lost.

For example, one one screen slides left to reveal another, when the screen slides right again, you know you’re back at the previous screen. No jumping, no jarring, no disorientation. These are the sorts of UX considerations that have to be taken into account, anticipated, tested and measured.

Two things that I would like to see in OSes, usability-wise:
1) During setup, a dialog where I can set the following (with sliders):
- Size of UI elements (fonts, icons, buttons etc.), from “I’m blind as a mole” to “20/20″. (Unfortunately, just changing screen resolution as we did in CRT days doesn’t work well with LCDs, and some of us are severely short-sighted.)
- Security and privacy, from “Just let me do everything, I’ve nothing to hide” to “Paranoid”. Default setting should be 3/4 to paranoid, with dire warnings if the users sets it lower.
- Assistance level, from “I know what I’m doing, spare me those explanations” to “Help !”
- Overall look, from “I want my Win95 look back” to “Gimme all that fancy bling !”
Of course, these settings should be respected by all apps, and they should be easily accessible after setup.

2.) An assistant within the file manager that would help you to do that kind of stuff the CLI fans allways blabber on about: “For all files that meet the following criteria (long list of file attributes), rename to …/ copy to …/ move to …/ delete / apply comand …”

@Kommenter:
(font size) “Don’t really agree much with this one, i think the best way is for the font size that applications should use to be specified in the interface guidelines (and made dificult to change in the API),”
That would be a prerequisite to make it possible to change that globally, yes.

“while changing the font size should be easy for the user (internet explorer style zoom button)”
The button would go where ? Systray maybe ? (I guess I could live with a button as well as with “my” slider, as long as the function is there.)

“and also possible per application ”
I’ve once had to change font sizes in Outlook
I would love to have one central place to change the size of stuff on-screen globally – and with a vector-based GUI that should be really easy. Per-app settings might be a nice addition, but not a substitute.

(security) “Not enough”
Once again, this should be an easy way to adjust stuff globally – of course there should be more “screws to turn” for experienced users / domain admins, but as a first rough setting during setup this would be nice IMHO.
Signed drivers ? Definitely.

“Consistency is good.”
Absofuckinglutely. (And I like buttons that look like buttons – something that seems to be out in Redmond.)

“Maybe something like Automator on Mac OSX?”
Why am I not surprised someone has allready come up with this idea, and that the someone would be Apple ?

@Kommenter, when it comes to desktops they tend to be a bit pricier since desktops have more space and the parts are more commoditized. However, when you compare all the higher end laptops like the Vaio line, Dell XPS line, etc. They all wind up being about the same price and usually lack something the macbook has; Either it’s heavier, less battery, too thick, etc.

Most laptops get dirty/worn eventually, so I guess that’s one trait Apple overcharges on; They’re one of the more expensive brands to get dirty

Geez, I just went to the Apple site to see what the prices actually are now. Ever tried to customise a Mac Pro? Forget 2-3x, more like 10x.

“Ever tried to customise a Mac Pro? Forget 2-3x, more like 10x.”

Apple’s profit margins on the Mac Pro are outrageous once you go beyond the base spec – especially on RAM. It’s far, far cheaper to buy a model with base RAM and just buy the additional RAM.

A fully-specced out Mac Pro costs near double what a Dell Precision does, and the Dell will have more and faster storage, faster CPUs, a graphics card suitable for heavy-duty 3D or CAD (instead of a mid-range gaming card) and more RAM.

Learn the truth! About Islam! The so called religion of piece! That psychologically programs it’s followers to hate freedom! That turns women into sex slaves for men! That declares war upon Jesus! That declares war upon America! That declares war on the white race! Learn the truth!

Gotta love the actual links

I think Mac still markets to higher education. Xgrid has shown some success out and about. I’m sure this is not still the case but a few years ago the fastest grid was a set of like 2k iMacs at the University of Virginia. At the same time, my University went the iMac route for their computer science and biology labs and windows pc’s everywhere else. I had never realized it but there are a lot of chemistry programs that are Mac and the CS department was actually pretty small so they elected for Unix without the constant need of babysitting like a Linux distro would require.

To be fair there are plenty of ways to make Flash content without actually buying Flash. Pretty much everything but the charting library and the more recent video library are freely available in the Flex SDK.

If you want to make fancy animations you’re screwed (fancy doing it programmatically?), but for little web apps there’s like five different ways to do it.

Quoting: “The thing to avoid is a RAD-style development where whole swathes of stuff get thrown away every month whilst people bicker about the exact shade of puce used for the windicators. Well, my experience leads me to run away from RAD for that reason; YMMV. Sadly I think Balsamiq is likely to lead in this direction, not least because of the round-trip between sketches and “implementation” and back again.”

RAD is only as good as the tools used. The issue is that it became a huge FAD and lots of developers didn’t learn how to develop software well, efficiently, and with good design decisions.

There are large systems written in Windows Forms, Delphi, and WPF that perform more than acceptably and have great look and feels.

The problem with RAD in F/OSS is that most of those developers look for results, as opposed to good designs and implementations. That’s why the closed or quasi-closed source model is more successful at delivering great software, IMO.

If you’re developing a new desktop environment, you probably won’t evne have the tooling available to facilitate this type of RAD development, anyways, unless you’re forking some other desktop environment.

This sounds very interesting until I think of the possibility of working on a GNOME or KDE fork, personally…

And I’d use OpenSolaris or a BSD as a base before I’d mess with Linux, for obvious reasons.

That brings up a good point; What criteria do we use to evaluate an interface? A few I can think of:

Discoverability – How easy is it to figure out where to start and how to finish? Ideally this should be rated on how many cues were needed? How obvious were the cues, did they require excessive reading? etc.

Ease of Use – How many actions, or more importantly, decisions, did the user have to make to get from start to finish?

Aesthetics – How pleasing to the eye is it for the majority of people? If bad, do they impact productivity (poor contrast, for example)?

Responsiveness – Does the interface respond in a timely manner? Are there cases where the user will think the UI has become unresponsive (greater than 100ms is when users start noticing)? Are animations taking too long and hampering the user’s progress?

@TMR: “Want to write some music? Windows can, OSX can, Linux…can’t ”
and @Delano: “Well, I wouldn’t say making music in Linux is *impossible*, …”

I have been an amateur musician for quite a while, and so I had Steinberg Cubase. In discussions with freetards I sometimes mentioned the point that there is no equivalent to Cubase in OSS land. The program names thrown at me as an alternative have varied over the years, but a real alternative was never among them. Last time The Alternative was “Ardour and Rosegarden”. This tiny detail that you have to JACK together two different programs to get something remotely resembling Cubase of course didn’t deter the freetard (and neither the fact that he doesn’t know a thing about music SW in the first place), but the real coup de grace was the following page on the Ardour homepage:
http://ardour.org/support_expectations
Well, at least they are rather realistic (except for the occasional pat on the back), and I wish them all the luck – but if I were still making music, I’d just stick with Cubase, thank you. (And of course Cubase is just one of the many _good_ music stuff you can use on Windows and MacOS but not on Linux.)

That thing about RAD, btw; I did qualify it with “YMMV.” Like “agile,” it often falls into the category of a Silver Bullet. Where possible, I try to avoid jobs that are based around a silver bullet. It’s increasingly impossible.

@Carsten: Pretty much everything Joel has written about UI development would apply, although I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerberos was there before him and has thought more carefully about it afterwards. It’s a useful resource for ignoramuses like me, however.

*Obviously* you’d have to include aesthetics, however difficult that criterion might be to judge. Where would anything marketed by Jobs be without aesthetics? There’s at least one basic issue to resolve asap, which is to choose between pixel-based font-rendering and aesthetics-based font-rendering (Joel again).

I’m a programmer, not a designer, so a couple of other things spring to mind.

You also have to consider Unity. (I can’t think of a better word to describe what I mean.) An obvious counter-example to Unity is the long-standing X issue with cut & paste. Who knows when it will work and when it won’t? It’s not unreasonable to start with the Linux Desktop as a series of inaccurately linked design decisions and then consciously strive to avoid all of them. (From an Apple point of view, Unity seems to be embedded by virtue of Cocoa, so I’d still want a mandatory scripting framework for absolutely everything.)

One more thing which is *not* part of any current desktop, so far as I can see. There’s enough computing power out there, these days, to allow for an UberPaperclip to offer sensible AI-style help. Maybe current HMI work is going in this direction, although I have no information on the subject. It’d be really nice if one could utilise anti-spam techniques in reverse and actually “guess” what the user is thinking — related files or apps, maybe relevant personal contacts or music/visuals, whatever.

It’s not strictly part of the remit, but it would be a fabulous addition. No idea how you’d make it unobtrusive, though…

The sliding rule interface is a simple version of what I was muddle-headedly aiming at: I’m trying to get away from the browser paradigm, which essentially does this with absolutely no intelligence attached. I think what I’m suggesting is a sort of “event network,” whereby the UI captures what it can — launching apps, task switching, button-pressing, etc — and tries to make sense of it for a given session or workflow. This is more akin to what the better automated test tools do.

Project-oriented (asset-oriented) storage in some form would be great. There’s a reason IDEs exist … in fact, representing the entire file system in an IDE (with pluggable extensions, yet) would be a heck of a better paradigm that this stupid folder thing.

Of course, third-party installers (ie the whole of the rest of the world) would still insist on the old paradigm, so you’d still need a mirror filesystem that looks like, sigh, the Unix one. Well, Linux still needs a CLI. I guess you need a certain degree of backward compatibility.

“Mission: Create a usable Desktop OS – just to show the Linux fanboys what they should have done. Avoid GPL software wherever possible. Make it marketable.”

So we’ll use…what?

“As a base we need a kernel etc. – one of the BSDs should do.”

Because those kernels are more….something than Linux. Or less something else. Less compatible, and popular for sure. But hey, if the BSD license is so rad-tastic it will liberate us from the evils of the Linux Kernel with all its…Linuxy stuff, then ok.

“(Include OSS for audio.)”

Because it’s old and sucks, and will really showcase the audio capabilities of our hypothetical non-Linux Eagle-BSD…the ultimate desktop…WATCH OUT APPLE! I can’t wait to see who starts mixing records on Logic 8 for Eagle-BSD featuring the OSS audio architecture: A quantum Leap forward in sound sub-systems. Take that, Linux! We’ll have OSS!

” We need an application framework, which should be .NET because it…”

…Blows, has memory leaks, couldn’t even be used as a core language for Windows, is only implemented properly *on* Windows, requires a VM, reflects the biases of the posters here, and may infringe on Microsoft Intellectual Property rights if you implement it in Mono– oh yes, and will result in slow-as-fuck apps like all the ones on Linux you hate. Not even “Linux Zealots” like Mono much, but you’ll show them!

“exists, isn’t bad (AFAIK it’s even pretty good) and there are existing applications.”

For Windows. Or did you mean the GPL apps like F-Spot (ghey) and Banshee?

“X11 doesn’t cut it, so create a graphic “layer” to sit on the kernel and provide the necessary services for the .NET framework. ”

Yeah, only a Linux nerd would use X11. Let’s conjure up a “layer” thingie and provide…WinForms? Or DirectX controls? Good luck licensing that.

“If QT provides any help with this, license it and use it.”

Ummm….with yer thingie layer-dealie? Or?? Is that tied right into the Warp Engines?

Fucking amazing. I think the blog owner cited the Dunning-Kruger effect in another post. I hope his readers Googled that. I just thank the Usability Gods that you guys are here to save the Heathens from the fatally-flawed Linux. Whew.