Bert Freudenberg wrote:
[...] If anything is an anathema, then it's the huge body of
impenetrable C code in linux, the libraries, X11, gecko, gtk, cairo,
and, yes, underlying Python, too, and even Squeak, though to a much
lesser extent. This prevents opening the hood, seeing how things work,
modifying it, constructing new things etc. *This* is against the OLPC
philosophy, which explicitly encourages constructionist learning.
If you're going to flame, can't you do any better than that? ;-)
Sure there are lessons to be learned from the mistakes of the past, and
we're forced to use software that sucks because there's currently no
better alternative, but you should be more specific and suggest better
alternatives when you complain about what's wrong, if you want to
advance the state of the art!
-Don
PS: Here are some examples of old constructive flames that I hope
inspire people to fix problems instead of deciding to feel offended.
========
X-Windows:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
[...]
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just
plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years
of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit
of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks,
and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race
conditions, and promulgated double standards.
X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock
tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed
all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have
enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility
consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.
[...]
========
Sun Desktop Environment:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/deskset.html
[...]
PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your
example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed.
That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools
seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres
of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job
efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells
and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars -
huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small,
efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming
at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein
painting on your bedroom wall.
[...]
========
SGI Irix "Software Usability II" Memo:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html
[...]
The following, which claims to be an internal Silicon Graphics memo, has
already seen fairly broad network distribution. I have no way of
verifying that it is what it claims to be, but (a) I'm told by someone
with close dealings with SGI that it fits with what he's heard; (b) if
it's a fake, someone put a huge amount of effort into producing it.
I forward it to RISKS as a wonderful record of what goes wrong with
large software projects, and why. It would be as useful if all the
names, including the company and product names, were removed. This memo
should not be seen as an indictment of SGI, which is hardly unique.
There is good evidence that Sun, for example, had very similar problems
in producing Solaris; and I watched the same thing happen with the late,
unlamented DEC Professional series of PC's, and something like it almost
happen with firmware for DEC terminals a number of years back.
I hope that Tom Davis's position hasn't been badly hurt by the broad
distribution of his memo - but based on the traditional reaction to
bearers of bad news, especially when the bad news becomes widely known,
I can't say I'm sanguine about it. -- Jerry
[...]
========
IRIX 6.x Audio Panel
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/audio-panel.html
[...]
Oh please, could the new SGI audio panel possibly be more overengineered
and awkward? It's like this weird Frankenstein panel with strange
prosthetic limbs protruding from every orifice, hindering basic bodily
functions like breathing and eating and watching TV.
What's up with the whole "multiple widget-laden panels in a subwindow
with a scrollbar so you can scroll around between the panels because the
main window isn't big enough" cuteness? Why do people think this is so
cool? It's like the audio balance widgets are a little document! I
though the old "MultiTrack" program was supplied by SGI as a proof that
this kind of user interface metaphor was mistake and should not be repeated.
[...]
========
Jojo on UI:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-on-ui.html
[...]
XBorges.
One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers
falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are
provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an
open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting
upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding
them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant
retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users
before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They
have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely
traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate
(open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky
and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to
closed-form solutions.
* Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.
[...]
========
Window Manager Flames
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.html
[...]
The ICCCM, abbreviated I39L, sucks. I39L is a hash for the acronymic
expansion of ICCCM for "Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual".
Please read it if you don't believe me that it sucks! It really does.
However, we must live with it. But how???
[...]
Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for
anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did
to the previous state of the art.
[...]
========
Motif Angst Page
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html
[...]
/*
* This is a horrible function which should not be needed.
* use it to put the resize method back the way the XlwMenu
* class initializer put it. Motif screws with this when
* the XlwMenu class gets instantiated.
*/
[...]
========
Using XBugTool to File a Bug Report Against Itself
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugtool.html
[...]
Synopsis: I have no mouse motion and my input focus is stuck in xbugtool!!!
Keywords: I have no mouth and I must scream [Harlan Ellison]
Severity: 1
Priority: 1
Description:
This is my worst nightmare! None of my TNT or XView applications are
getting any mouse motion events, just clicks. And my input focus is
stuck in xbugtool, of all places!!! When I click in cmdtool, it gets
sucked back into xbugtool when I release the button! And I'm *not* using
click-to-type! I can make selections from menus (tnt, olwm, and xview) if
I click them up instead of dragging, but nobody's receiving any mouse
motion!
I just started up a fresh server, ran two jets and a cmdtool, fired up
a bugtool from one of the jets (so input focus must have been working
then), and after xbugtool had throbbed and grunted around for a while
and finally put up its big dumb busy window, I first noticed something
was wrong when I could not drag windows around!
Lucky thing my input focus ended up stuck in xbugtool!
The scrollbar does not warp my cursor either... I can switch the input focus
to any of xbugtool's windows, but I can't ... -- oomph errrgh aaaaahhh!
There, yes!
Aaaaah! What a relief! It stopped! I can move my mouse again!!
Hurray!!! It started working when I opened a "jet" window, found I
could type into *it*, so I moved the mouse around, the cursor
disappeared, I typed, there were a couple of beeps, I still couldn't
find the cursor, so I hit the "Open" key, the jet closed to an icon,
and I could type to xbugtool again! And lo and behold now I can type
into the cmdtool, *too*! Just by moving my cursor into it! What a
technological wonder! Now I can start filing bug reports against
cmdtool, which was the only reason I had the damn thing on my screen in
the first place!!! I am amazed at the way the window system seems to
read my mind and predict my every move, seeming to carry out elaborate
practical jokes to prevent me from filing bugs against it. I had no
idea the Open Windows desktop had such sophisticated and well
integrated interclient communication!
[...]
========
Worst Job in the World
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html
[...]
I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix
system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell.
[...]
But there are many who must dwell in this miasma both day and night.
What makes my friend's job so ugly is that he doesn't only work with
just any strain of Unix -- he works with Solaris. And he doesn't just
deal with just any braindead users -- his users are the executives at
Sun Microsystems.
Let me tell you about Sun Microsystems. At Sun, there's a long history
of executives playing pranks on one another. For April Fools, these
rowdies would play tricks like putting a golf course (complete with
putting green) in Scott McNealy's office, or floating Bill Joy's Ferrari
in one of the landscaped ponds. Things have come a long way since then.
Now every day is April Fools, and my friend doesn't like it one bit.
[...]
========
Preface to the Unix-Haters Handbook
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/preface.html
[...]
"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an
undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer
from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can
tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By
the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think
that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."
Ken Pier, Xerox PARC
[...]
Who We Are
We are academics, hackers, and professionals. None of us were born in
the computing analog of Ken Pier's East Africa. We have all experienced
much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or
ever can be. Some of these systems have increasingly forgotten names,
such as TOPS-20, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System), Multics,
Apollo Domain, the Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, and the Dorado. Some of us
even use Macs and Windows boxes. Many of us are highly proficient
programmers who have served our time trying to practice our craft upon
Unix systems. It's tempting to write us off as envious malcontents,
romantic keepers of memories of systems put to pasture by the commercial
success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are
keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic. We seek
progress, not the reestablishment of ancient relics.
[...]
========
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