Scott Balneaves wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 01:19:18PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> 
>> If the user doesn't know enough to care (or just plain doesn't care)
>> about outstanding requests, there's no way to get them to wait anyway.
> 
> Same with right clicking and selecting eject.
> 
> Let me relate a short story on human interface design.
> 
> Older busses in my neck of the woods used to have a "gate" on the back
> door in order to get it to open.  You had to pass through the gate in order to
> get to the door to get off the bus.  It was simple, obvious, and failsafe:
> if you wanted to exit, you HAD to go through the gate.  No one ever had
> problems figuring it out.
> 
> Now, in order to save space on newer busses, they've got rid of the swinging
> gate, and replaced it with a tactile yellow strip on the door.  You push
> the strip (which, while long, and vertically aligned, is only about 2 cm 
> wide),
> which triggers the door opening mechanism.
> 
> Even though there's signs EVERYWHERE telling you how to open the door, 
> I'd estimate 40% of people can't do it effectively.  They either stand there,
> unsure of how to get the door open, or push too hard on the strip, ringing
> the "door being forced" alarm, or don't push hard enough, etc etc etc.
> 
> It's just a bad design.  Because it's not blatently obvious what you should 
> do.
> 
> The same goes for forcing people to right click and select a menu option
> to "eject" something that, really, doesn't physically eject (like a vcr tape,
> or a cd, etc) anyway.
> 
> ltspfs mounts the media with no cacheing, and unmounts in the background
> promptly on idle usage.  I've yet to receive a bug report from anyone
> of corrupted media because of an early eject.
> 
> It just makes sense: I'm done with the usb key, so I wait for the light
> to stop flashing, yank it, and stick it in my pocket.
> 
> It's simple, obvious, and what the users expect.  Try explaining to your
> grandma why you should "eject" something that doesn't eject?  You'll be
> reduced to saying "Well, it's just something you have to do."
> 
> And if something's a thing that "just has to be done", why not let the
> computer do it?

Somebody should file a bug report with Gnome, KDE and all the distros, 
to tell them that removable media should be fixed, to be as easy as it 
is with LTSP.

Jim McQuillan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



> 
> </soapbox>
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Scott
> 

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