Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On Monday 26 Sep 2011 23:21:56 Peter Humphrey wrote: On Monday 26 September 2011 22:45:20 Alan McKinnon wrote: It's unrealistic to support everything you ever did forever like MS tried to do (IE6 is *still* hanging around somehow...) Tell me about it! IE6 is the nastiest pain in the backside of any webmaster. I keep having to abandon pretty enhancements of my site because IE6 makes a mess of them. You can use MSIE6 conditional statements in your html to feed this muppet what ever stripped down code it will be able to render in terms of CSS and images. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
[gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
Hi, Happened upon this interview with Linus Torvalds that some of you might find interesting (if you haven't seen it already): http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440 Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 3:37 PM, pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: Hi, Happened upon this interview with Linus Torvalds that some of you might find interesting (if you haven't seen it already): http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440 Yeah, I just saw that. Admittedly, when I saw this section: --begin-section-- I'll add at this point that this isn't just a programmer problem. I've seen entire companies get locked into the idea that “perfecting” the program was everything. They then neglected what the users wanted from the program, supporting the users and so on. Most of us who've been in the business for a while have seen this cycle play out over and over again. Expanding on that second point, Torvalds says that's why the Linux kernel team is “so very anal about the whole ‘no regressions’ thing, for example. Breaking the user experience in order to ‘fix’ something is a totally broken concept; you cannot do it. If you break the user experience, you may feel that you have ‘fixed’ something in the code, but if you fixed it by breaking the user, you just violated that second point; you thought the code was more important than the user. Which is not true.” --end-section-- I immediately thought of the udev thread. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On 26 September 2011 20:44, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, I just saw that. Admittedly, when I saw this section: --begin-section-- I'll add at this point that this isn't just a programmer problem. I've seen entire companies get locked into the idea that “perfecting” the program was everything. They then neglected what the users wanted from the program, supporting the users and so on. Most of us who've been in the business for a while have seen this cycle play out over and over again. Expanding on that second point, Torvalds says that's why the Linux kernel team is “so very anal about the whole ‘no regressions’ thing, for example. Breaking the user experience in order to ‘fix’ something is a totally broken concept; you cannot do it. If you break the user experience, you may feel that you have ‘fixed’ something in the code, but if you fixed it by breaking the user, you just violated that second point; you thought the code was more important than the user. Which is not true.” --end-section-- I immediately thought of the udev thread. The only problem with that attitude is that it eventually leads you to the same position that Microsoft is in with Windows -- where too many years of refusing to drop backwards compatibility were completely holding them back. The direction that they took with Windows XP, drop raw DOS support, release-freeze (9 years!), gather bug reports, fix bugs(!), has actually left them with a pretty stable and functional OS in Windows 7 (The release candidate was not quite as strong). If you read the Old New Thing, you will still find some absolute madness left in there to maintain support for Win3.1 programs, and hacked around in some really awful ways. Breaking User Experience is a major factor of open-source, it's iterative though, and the general consensus is that each generation of software improves on the previous one (that said, I'm pretty worried about the directions of both gnome3 and kde4).
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 3:37 PM, pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: Hi, Happened upon this interview with Linus Torvalds that some of you might find interesting (if you haven't seen it already): http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440 Yeah, I just saw that. Admittedly, when I saw this section: --begin-section-- I'll add at this point that this isn't just a programmer problem. I've seen entire companies get locked into the idea that “perfecting” the program was everything. They then neglected what the users wanted from the program, supporting the users and so on. Most of us who've been in the business for a while have seen this cycle play out over and over again. Expanding on that second point, Torvalds says that's why the Linux kernel team is “so very anal about the whole ‘no regressions’ thing, for example. Breaking the user experience in order to ‘fix’ something is a totally broken concept; you cannot do it. If you break the user experience, you may feel that you have ‘fixed’ something in the code, but if you fixed it by breaking the user, you just violated that second point; you thought the code was more important than the user. Which is not true.” --end-section-- I immediately thought of the udev thread. Kernel and userspace are sometimes different. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
The only problem with that attitude is that it eventually leads you to the same position that Microsoft is in with Windows -- where too many years of refusing to drop backwards compatibility were completely holding them back. i thought of that too. as with many other things, the trick is to find the right balance. important code changes/cleanups sometimes have to be made, even if they break things. if that happens too often its going to annoy the users.
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:06:36 +0200 Jonas de Buhr jonas.de.b...@gmx.net wrote: The only problem with that attitude is that it eventually leads you to the same position that Microsoft is in with Windows -- where too many years of refusing to drop backwards compatibility were completely holding them back. i thought of that too. as with many other things, the trick is to find the right balance. important code changes/cleanups sometimes have to be made, even if they break things. if that happens too often its going to annoy the users. Apple had a nice middle ground, most noticeable in MacOSX. Support the old version in a VM-like environment for two releases then drop the support. I think it's a nice compromise. It's unrealistic to support everything you ever did forever like MS tried to do (IE6 is *still* hanging around somehow...), while the other extreme is probably even worse. The current classic extant example is Amarok2 and kmail2 - in both cases the devs seem to have just decided that anyone running anything older than 6 months isn't worth the effort. Well, that's too bad for Amarok and kmail, there's lots of alternative apps for both. And switching apps is far less pain than trying to deal with upgrades with zero supported upgrade paths. These are hard lessons to learn. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
On Monday 26 September 2011 22:45:20 Alan McKinnon wrote: It's unrealistic to support everything you ever did forever like MS tried to do (IE6 is *still* hanging around somehow...) Tell me about it! IE6 is the nastiest pain in the backside of any webmaster. I keep having to abandon pretty enhancements of my site because IE6 makes a mess of them. -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: [gentoo-user] Slightly OT but interesting nonetheless...
pk wrote: Hi, Happened upon this interview with Linus Torvalds that some of you might find interesting (if you haven't seen it already): http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440 Best regards Peter K Has anyone seen anything about the udev/initramfs thingy and what Linus thinks about it? Just curious. Dale :-) :-)
