Mac for inept user?
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From: R on 22 Mar 2010 05:43 Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote: > It's a thankless task because the important parts of the man > pages are marked "FIXME: This needs to be clarified and documented > thoroughly." and that attitude sums up most of the Open Source > "community". I downloaded the 'gdb' documentation in pdf format yesterday. The link: http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.pdf.gz And here's what the contents pages look like: http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1OXzp7PvUhZpwPp5LHEIy9C0q8knso Maybe it's invisible ink. Vinegar anyone?
From: Ian Piper on 22 Mar 2010 12:54 On 2010-03-20 15:11:47 +0000, Conor <conor(a)gmx.co.uk> said: > On 20/03/2010 13:32, Jim wrote: >> Conor<conor(a)gmx.co.uk> wrote: >> >>> As a newcomer to Mac OS X, I'm more than a little pissed that it is >>> barely much better than Ubuntu and in some cases it is worse, especially >>> with Apples reluctance to even acknowledge yet alone fix 20 exploits >>> currently out in the wild. >> >> Because for all its faults OS X is still about 100x easier to use than >> any Linux. >> >> And yes, I've tried a few. >> > Any recently? <churchill>ohhhhhhh yuss</churchill> Every six months or so I get a rush of blood to the brain and decide to try installing a Linux distribution. I understand that it's a bit like childbirth - the process of agony amnesia that is - and about six months is long enough for me to forget how truly dreadful is the business of installing and configuring Linux. So then I download the latest Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, and go through the whole misery again. It's not just the 70s style character-display based installation game, with the baffling questions and faux-twee acronyms, it's the tweaking and configuration that follows. The latest was just two days ago, when Fedora 10 just refused to accept resizing of the display to 1280 x 1024. The display is capable of it, the option is there in the control panel, you can select it and the lying robot alleges that it has set the new resolution. So you restart the X-server (for non-Linux fans, that's a thing you don't have to do if you change your Mac's display resolution) and nothing changes. I recently installed Ubuntu and the sound is terrible - there is supposed to be a rather charming drum-beat effect on login, but on my machine it came out in five or six chopped and distorted sections. And so on. I'm quite sure that if I ploughed through the newsgroups, endured the pointy-heads who manage to emphasise the triviality of my problem while not actually offering a solution, and finally found an answer that involved rebuilding the kernel, I could probably solve the problem. Guess what I did, each time? That's right. Deleted the offending OS and turned gratefully back to my Mac. Bitter? No, just hacked off that what could be a great OS is spoiled in the delivery through being dominated by geeks who are mostly divorced from the reality of the lives of even competent computer users. Goodness me I needed that. Ian. -- Ian Piper Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development", Apress, December 2009 Learn more here: http://learnxcodebook.com/� --�
From: Chris Ridd on 22 Mar 2010 13:17 On 2010-03-22 16:54:57 +0000, Ian Piper said: > The latest was just two days ago, when Fedora 10 just refused to accept > resizing of the display to 1280 x 1024. To be fair though, Fedora 10 is pretty ancient. Aren't they up to 12 or so now? -- Chris
From: Gavin on 22 Mar 2010 13:19 On 2010-03-22 17:17:10 +0000, Chris Ridd <chrisridd(a)mac.com> said: > On 2010-03-22 16:54:57 +0000, Ian Piper said: > >> The latest was just two days ago, when Fedora 10 just refused to accept >> resizing of the display to 1280 x 1024. > > To be fair though, Fedora 10 is pretty ancient. Aren't they up to 12 or so now? So is 10.1, but that seems to "just work" -- Gavin. ACSP 10.5 http://www.stoof.co.uk http://www.twitter.com/gavin_wilby
From: Ian Piper on 22 Mar 2010 13:20
On 2010-03-20 19:02:05 +0000, Conor <conor(a)gmx.co.uk> said: > On 20/03/2010 16:05, Chris Ridd wrote: >> On 2010-03-20 16:01:50 +0000, Jim said: >> >>> Chris Ridd <chrisridd(a)mac.com> wrote: >>> >>>>> How does a modern Gnome or KDE desktop cope with that? Honest question, >>>>> I genuinely don't know the answer. >>>>> >>>> >>>> Sun added a *lot* of accessibility code to GNOME, so that they could >>>> ship it in a commercial operating system. >>> >>> That's good to know. >> >> There are blind OpenSolaris (uses GNOME) users, so there are probably >> blind Linux users too. I don't know if they provide all the different >> things that blind users might need, but they provide at least a bare >> minimum. >> > Well it covers Braille, Screen Readers, Magnification and High Contrast > Schemes so I reckon pretty much everything needed. I wonder whether that was just ignorant or intentionally offensive. Making computer systems is no more about working with a screen reader or printing Braille and improved visibility than usability is about putting lipstick on a pig. Have you never heard of accessibility design? The way that a blind user interacts with a computer program is much more than just pointing a screen reader at it. Programs designed for good accessibility on the Mac will interact well with VoiceOver for example, having a predictable process for navigating around a user interface with the keyboard and describing the controls based on informative text built into the application. Maybe you should try turning on VoiceOver and running a few programs through it. It will be an eye-opener (no pun intended) to learn how well some programs cope, and how badly others do. I would be absolutely staggered if Linux has one percent of the capability of Mac OS X in providing genuine accessibility. Ian. -- Ian Piper Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development", Apress, December 2009 Learn more here: http://learnxcodebook.com/� --� |