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  • #61
    Originally posted by Agathon
    That's not an interpretation, it is an instance of the law, as I patiently explained to you the other day. If you can't see how it's an instance then you must be an idiot.
    NO, it is NOT, as I've explained to you many times.

    This is not some bull****ty Philosophy law, Agathon, Fitts' law is solely a mathematical equation.

    Any conclusions someone draws from using it are interpretations, not instances of.

    I realize this is hard for your social-sciencey mind to comprehend, but do try. This is not a social science law, it's a science law. There is a difference.

    The only time something is an instance of Fitts' law is if you're giving me a damn equation, okay?

    Why not just admit this small point and save some face, instead of trying to come up with increasingly ridiculous excuses.
    Because it's incredibly, totally wrong. Any person who'd ever taken even an elementary UI course would tell you the same thing. Why do you think the guy who designed the original MacOS dislikes Aqua, since he's clearly a ardent supporter of Fitts' Law? Why do you think the site I just linked to said it was "very poor"? Christ, Agathon, you're out of your league here...

    You're the one that needs to save some face.
    "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
    Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

    Comment

    • #62
      Originally posted by Agathon
      This is your response!!?!?!?!

      So the guy is intelligent enough to pick out the advantages of each system but mentally incompetent when it comes to thinking about them all together?

      Lame.
      I agree, it is lame. I wish he was better at what he did.

      Anyone can see you've been owned on these last two points due to your contradicting yourself.

      I don't think I need say any more.
      I was owned?
      Why, because the guy's conclusion doesn't follow from the preceding facts?

      That's a common practice in many people's papers, you probably know that, don't you? Why don't you quote something else from that article, OTHER than the conclusion, where he mentions OS X being more usable than WinXP?

      Because I can find numerous instances where he liked XP over OS X:
      A full discussion of the pros and cons of each platform as a development environment is far beyond the scope of this document (and, indeed, of our own programming experiences -- we can count the number of commercially released software titles we have programmed on a pair of hands!). However, a few examples may serve useful here. We recently went looking for a good quality FTP client for Mac OS X. We tested more than a dozen, and all were lacking in one form or another. Some suffered from serious bugs (iFTP deleted files on the server without warning!), others had annoying interface quirks (the free app CaptainFTP 1.4 repeatedly selected a file two items higher in the remote files list than the one we wanted); RBrowser, the most promising title overall, was encumbered by mandatory registration and a US$29 fee, and it couldn't even preview a downloaded HTML file while editing in BBedit, our helper application of choice. Fetch, Vicomsoft FTP client, Interarchy, Transmit and the built-in FTP function in the OS lacked features we wanted. Others, including Fugi, Gideon and osXigen and were just dog slow or unacceptably clumsy. And Mac OS X 10.2's built-in FTP support produced mysterious error messages whenever we attempted to upload.

      By comparison, WS_FTP on the Windows platform, and any one of several FTP clients on the Linux side worked exactly as we expected them to -- fast and efficient. Mac users frequently downplay the limited selection of software on their platform of choice, pointing out that the Mac is well equipped with more than enough "killer apps" for the average person.


      OS X 10.0 didn't support ANY third-party CD authoring software out of the box, didn't support the vast majority of scanner drivers, Photoshop plug-ins or VST plug-in filters already developed for Macintosh and supported NO DVD players until 10.1 (and still supports very few external third-party units). These are just a few obvious examples of the inescapable fact that OS X requires all-new apps and all-new device drivers to take advantage of its memory protection and user-interface features. Fortunately, the necessary drivers and updates have, for the most part, been issued and OS X 10.2 is now well-equipped with software and hardware options. Nevertheless, Windows XP natively supports the vast majority of existing 16- and 32-bit Windows and DOS applications, plus most plug-ins and drivers previously released for the Windows 2000 platform. It delivers full memory protection and feature support for virtually ALL legacy apps. OS X, despite its many merits, does not.


      Try playing a Windows Media audio or video stream delivered using the MMS protocol on a Mac, for a glaring example. Although Windows Media Player is not shipped as a standard feature of the Mac, it is a far more prevalent format on the Web than Apple's own QuickTime (which suffers from its own compatibility issues under Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 and 6.0).

      Windows supports better instant messaging, remote assistance, remote control (built into Windows XP Pro), extensive graphical control over web server settings, and many other features missing from -- or excruciatingly difficult to achieve via the arcane Unix command line -- in OS X. Remote assistance and control are available from Apple only via the Unix telnet application, or via Apple's US$495 Remote Desktop application.


      There are a number of other areas in which Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems have subtle advantages over Linux, such as streaming video -- an area in which the MPEG4 codec in Apple's QuickTime excels -- and codec support. However, the Mac's lack of standard support for full-screen movie playback and limited looping functions in its default media player are serious limitations not shared by Windows. The updated version of Windows Media 9, code-named Corona, further strengthens Microsoft's growing dominance in the streaming media playing field, primarily due to the digital rights management features built into Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media codecs --- features currently missing from the ISO-standard MPEG-4 used by QuickTime 6. Refer to our feature on Net Video Trends for details.


      The lack of some essential services such as a system-wide restore function (aside from the fairly oblique "ditto" command) is, at this writing, a serious limitation in Mac OS X.


      Although Mac OS X fares well in terms of network protocols supported, thanks to its Unix heritage, support for TCP/IP networking over the FireWire ports built into every recent Mac remains experimental at best. Non-developers are likely to achieve the best results via a third-party product such as Unibrain's FireNet. Windows XP (along with other recent Windows releases) fully supports IP over 1394.


      Although graphics performance is, of course, more strictly related to hardware than software, there is no doubt that the fancy 3-D shadows and alpha-blended eye candy of Mac OS X carries an impact and should be considered in a comparison of graphical user interfaces. In this area, the Mac is clearly a leader -- however, the alpha-blended shadows, menu transparency and other eye candy takes a definite toll on the responsiveness of the UI. Whereas Windows allows you to turn off the eye candy effects and even, if you wish, revert to the "classic" Windows 9x/2000 style interface, Mac OS X offers very few options in this area. Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. Again, we think that having the option to turn it on or off at will is best. (Third party utilities for the Mac can help in this regard.)
      Last edited by Asher; May 19, 2003, 00:13.
      "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
      Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

      Comment

      • #63
        What the fück is fitt's law and why should I care? And btw, my internet runs just fine - it goes quite quickly, thankyouverymuch!
        "mono has crazy flow and can rhyme words that shouldn't, like Eminem"
        Drake Tungsten
        "get contacts, get a haircut, get better clothes, and lose some weight"
        Albert Speer

        Comment

        • #64
          Originally posted by Ted Striker
          Linux is NOT stable.

          If it was there wouldn't be 100000000 kernel patches.

          How many times has FreeBSD ever had a patch?

          ONCE!!!!
          Patching a kernel and whether the OS is stable are two different things.
          (\__/) 07/07/1937 - Never forget
          (='.'=) "Claims demand evidence; extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
          (")_(") "Starting the fire from within."

          Comment

          • #65
            Originally posted by Asher
            The very idea that Windows is not as "powerful" as Linux is extraordinarily laughable.
            It is? Just take something easy, say, remote admin. Remote admin is hellish for Windows, yet SSH works great on *nix.
            (\__/) 07/07/1937 - Never forget
            (='.'=) "Claims demand evidence; extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
            (")_(") "Starting the fire from within."

            Comment

            • #66
              Originally posted by Urban Ranger
              It is? Just take something easy, say, remote admin. Remote admin is hellish for Windows, yet SSH works great on *nix.
              I dunno, Remote Desktop lets me do everything I ever wanted to remotely on WinXP...
              "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
              Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

              Comment

              • #67
                Originally posted by Asher
                Agathon will love the category "Adherence to "Fitts's Law", which rates MacOS X at "very poor" and WinXP at "good".
                This, of course, runs smack into a linked site, which states:

                While at first glance, this law might seem patently obvious, it is one of the most ignored principles in design. Fitts's law dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out. Fitt's law dictates that the windows task bar will constantly and unnecessarily get in people's way, and this is proven out.
                (\__/) 07/07/1937 - Never forget
                (='.'=) "Claims demand evidence; extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
                (")_(") "Starting the fire from within."

                Comment

                • #68
                  Agathon: Please read the definition of Fitts' law:
                  Fitts' Law -- At a glance
                  http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/glance.html


                  Fitts' law is a robust model of human psychomotor behavior developed in 1954. The model is based on time and distance. It enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement, not drawing or writing.

                  It seems intuitive that movement time would be affected by the distance moved and the precision demanded by the size of the target to which one is moving. Fitts discovered that movement time was a logarithmic function of distance when target size was held constant, and that movement time was also a logarithmic function of target size when distance was held constant. Mathematically, Fitts' law is stated as follows:

                  MT = a + b log2(2A/W)

                  where

                • MT = movement time
                • a,b = regression coefficients
                • A = distance of movement from start to target center
                • W = width of the target

                  Now, as you can clearly see, any argument stating that the top of the screen is better is not an instance of this law at all, but rather an interpretation, one that, when taken into account of the big picture, is rather incorrect IMO.

                  Edit: BTW, the argument for the single-menu-bar-at-the-top comes from the idea that the top boundary becomes infinitely large, which means the access time is theoretically far less (maybe this is where he pulled his 5x figure from). This does not take into account that:
                  1) Studies have shown people do not overshoot much at all, particularly once they've used computers for a year or two
                  2) The single-menu-bar on top drastically increases the distances required (and clicks required) when multitasking, which throttles up MT in Fitts' law

                  It is for this reason that OS X is rated "very poor" and WinXP rated "good". MS Research has teams of researchers who do nothing but experiment with UIs and test them on people for functionality, Apple doesn't have an equivalent unit...they do what looks nice.
                Last edited by Asher; May 19, 2003, 00:46.
                "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                Comment

                • #69
                  Originally posted by Urban Ranger
                  This, of course, runs smack into a linked site, which states:

                  I see you missed the other thread -- the guy who wrote that worked for Apple and actually designed the Macintosh pull-down menu.

                  He's out to lunch on that intepretation, and it should be rather obvious since he pulled the "5x faster" figure out of his ass and refuses to explain his rationale for it or provide the equation for Fitts' law with it.
                  "The issue is there are still many people out there that use religion as a crutch for bigotry and hate. Like Ben."
                  Ben Kenobi: "That means I'm doing something right. "

                  Comment

                  • #70
                    To be perfectly frank, Fitt's law sounds to me like a bunch of bunk.
                    "mono has crazy flow and can rhyme words that shouldn't, like Eminem"
                    Drake Tungsten
                    "get contacts, get a haircut, get better clothes, and lose some weight"
                    Albert Speer

                    Comment

                    • #71
                      Originally posted by Asher
                      Debian's installer is practically coded by 12 year olds, and Knoppix just...blegh.
                      I'd cut a little slack for Debian's installer... boot-floppies is intended, AFAICT, to run on ten different architectures, and besides, it's rather historical. More importantly, boot-floppies doesn't really exist to make installation easy (not in the same way as, say, Mandrake's installer does) - it's meant for putting a Debian installation onto a system in a way that breaks only if the user is stupid or ignorant. And besides, most Debian users don't really care how long it takes to install the distro...

                      As for Knoppix, it might be "blegh", and its hdinstall script is meant only for experts... but it still sure makes a nice Linux primer for newbies . And if it's used only for that job, it actually doesn't suck a lot. It just tends to get the time wrong and has to be specified what keyboard layout you're using... which isn't that bad for a LiveCD distro.

                      Hm... seems like I'm being too positive today, so... STOP TALKING ABOUT MACS IN THIS THREAD ! You pushed Winston's thread to 496 posts for crying out loud! Wasn't that enough?

                      /me remembers he mentioned, eh, alternate OSes quite a many times in that thread... *
                      Last edited by Ari Rahikkala; May 19, 2003, 04:12.
                      This is Shireroth, and Giant Squid will brutally murder me if I ever remove this link from my signature | In the end it won't be love that saves us, it will be mathematics | So many people have this concept of God the Avenger. I see God as the ultimate sense of humor -- SlowwHand

                      Comment

                      • #72
                        Originally posted by elijah
                        Thats a good point. Does one blame windows when a piece of software is lame?
                        Linux is just the kernel, although you could probably safely extend that to any of the major stuff up to a multi-user non-X runlevel (runlevel 3 on slackware, I think 2 on Debian/RH).
                        This is an old story and i don't think it will bring you far: Linux is just the kernel? ok, it's a kernel, this means that it is very basic and without all the GNU "externel" you couldn't do a single task.
                        Moreover, if you want to compare Linux kernel with Windows XP one you'll be surprised to find that XP one is definitely more powerful than Linux one:
                        XP is based on Windows NT Kernel, while Linux is based of the old Unix.


                        I definitely like the GNU system, i just can't stand listening people saying "Linux is great! Linux is the future!" without even knowing that its architecture is the same of Unix back in the '70... probably the HURD (being based on Mach) will be a real advance in GNU kernels, but not Linux.

                        So, if the title of the thread is referring to the kernel, i agree, if it is referring to the GNU/Linux systems i think it's unfair.

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        As for my system, it is a 2.8GHz P4 with 512 megs DDRRAM, it was sluggish and unstable in XP, as I have said, perfectly fine in Linux and BSD.
                        It seems a bit strange to me, i use XP on a 400Mhz and i find it slow but stable (application crashes exactly as they crash under Linux but i never had to reboot) maybe you're talking of XP Home instead of XP Pro?

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        $1000 (thats about £600/700)??? Thats incredible!! I probably have maybe £100 worth. Buy porn instead!
                        I Agree completely

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        OSS contains little or no bloat, so my system can concentrate on performing tasks, rather than executing pointless lines of bloat code. IIRC, windows 2000 had upwards of 30 million lines of code, and god knows about XP!

                        My optimised Linux system has a tiny fraction of that, a little more in FreeBSD than linux.
                        Here i'm afraid i've to agree with Asher, what do you mean with Linux system? if you mean GNU/Linux then i'm afraid that the size is almost the same, while if you're referring to the Linux Kernel then yes, you're right, but you're comparing a Kernel with an OS...

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        The commandline is another aspect that makes linux more powerful...
                        Yes, the lack of a proper shell is a pain for MS OSes, probably it's because they call it "Windows" but forcing the user to do a ton of clicks on a half-dozen of windows is extremely irritating

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        An independent study somewhere (look on linux.com) showed that OSS code has about 0.25 the errors than proprietery code. The bug fixes and updates are released early and often by the linux/bsd community, as opposed to being released by Microsoft who effectivly control their bug-fixes. In linux, when a bug is found, it is fixed pronto, and the fixed released immediately.
                        This is an old debate between proprietary vs open source born specifically for security issues and it's still far from being solved: thanks to the recently discovered bugs in OpenSSH implementation and other opensource products is now clear that Open source is not inherently more secure than closed source, the fact that everyone could browse the code in search for bugs doesn't mean that everyone WILL browse the code in search for bugs; in fact aside from original developers few people browse the code of open source projects in a competent and "security-oriented" way. anyway a lot of people is sure that "since everyone can find and fix bugs, all bugs will be found and fixed!"

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        This way, you know you are getting better code, although you dont have to if you dont want to.
                        Ehm, what i said some rows above?

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        What I mean by hardware abstraction is closer to the NetBSD sense. Part of the reason that linux has been ported to so many architectures. It is a part of the kernel that creates a unified "interface" for system calls that then interfaces with the hardware itself. Creates a degree of separation, and of course, with a modular approach, greater stability (althuogh in this a bit more RAM usage). Not bad for 4 months of reading!
                        Again i've to agree with Asher (i hate when this happens )
                        Have you ever heard of HAL? No easy jokes please...
                        It's the Hardware Abstraction Layer and it is present in Windows since NT days.

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        Dont. Use straight up debian, or a hard-disk installation of Knoppix.
                        Go for the true Debian, only wimps use other distros

                        Originally posted by elijah
                        I ran XP pro, and it crashed the system. Simple as that. Im not a microserf, so I dont know if what you say is true, but again, just confirms that my system has small faults, and windows isnt fault-tolerant.
                        Again, you depict a Windows9x scenario, WindowsNT (and its child WindowsXP) is a different thing, it IS stable, application crashes but the system still keep running (technically it's the memory management that is different), i'm sure you're not a microserf but you continue to talk like a linuserf...
                        "If it works, it's obsolete."
                        -- Marshall McLuhan

                        Comment

                        • #73
                          Originally posted by Angelo Scotto
                          XP is based on Windows NT Kernel, while Linux is based of the old Unix.
                          Weell... it is Unix-like, but the relationship between WXP and WNT is quite different from the relationship between Linux and the original Unix. Linux was written from scratch to be compatible with Unix; XP is a point release, in fact, IIRC it's version 5.1 of Windows NT while what people usually refer to as "Windows NT" is version 4.x of Windows NT. I don't know how much XP shares code with NT 4.x, though.

                          HURD might become a revolutionary advance instead of only an evolutionary one, but last I checked its performance and stability were abysmal and it supported, well, basically nothing. I'll have them call me back when they show that HURD is ready for real use.

                          So, if the title of the thread is referring to the kernel, i agree, if it is referring to the GNU/Linux systems i think it's unfair.
                          As I said in the first post, I don't really care about the "confusion between the Linux kernel and the inexistent Linux operating system". You know, I would actually prefer to just call the operating system GNU; Unfortunately nobody would know what I'm talking about... "GNU/Linux" is too long to use daily as a name of an operating system, especially if you're supposed to pronounce the slash aloud... so, anyway, the thread title was referring to GNU/Linux distros really.
                          This is Shireroth, and Giant Squid will brutally murder me if I ever remove this link from my signature | In the end it won't be love that saves us, it will be mathematics | So many people have this concept of God the Avenger. I see God as the ultimate sense of humor -- SlowwHand

                          Comment

                          • #74
                            Originally posted by Asher
                            He's out to lunch on that intepretation, and it should be rather obvious since he pulled the "5x faster" figure out of his ass and refuses to explain his rationale for it or provide the equation for Fitts' law with it.
                            Why am not surprised with that, particularly when the original article you linked provided no explanation for its rating of XP vs Linux vs Mac, either? This Fitt's Law, as I see it, is a nice subjective guideline for designing user interfaces. However, it is rather far from any mathematical theorems, let alone laws.
                            (\__/) 07/07/1937 - Never forget
                            (='.'=) "Claims demand evidence; extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
                            (")_(") "Starting the fire from within."

                            Comment

                            • #75
                              Originally posted by Angelo Scotto
                              Again, you depict a Windows9x scenario, WindowsNT (and its child WindowsXP) is a different thing, it IS stable, application crashes but the system still keep running (technically it's the memory management that is different), i'm sure you're not a microserf but you continue to talk like a linuserf...
                              NT is relatively stable, but not as stable as Linux, which is probably not as stable as FreeBSD or OpenBSD. It is not unusual for an application to crash NT, but the big thing are drivers. For some unfathomable reason, MS decided to stick drivers into the NT kernel. Needless to say, that caused a lot of headaches.
                              (\__/) 07/07/1937 - Never forget
                              (='.'=) "Claims demand evidence; extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
                              (")_(") "Starting the fire from within."

                              Comment

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