On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:02:05 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Now, in fairness,
> as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*. But it was pretty
> hard to do from Linux either.

Windows = Internet Connection Sharing
Linux = at least with openSUSE 11.2, YaST -> Firewall -> Masquerading.  
Two NICs need to be configured and running.  You can even set port 
forwarding there.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:32:17 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:

> I loved the Amiga, but I will grant you one thing: It wasn't so great at  
> switching between windows. Each window had two "gadgets" (what we today  
> call widgets), one to raise and one to lower the window. Today you just  
> click on a window and it comes to the front, but the Amiga did not do  
> this. You had to click the gadget.
>
> An obvious consequence of this is that if the gadget was hidden behind  
> something else, it was impossible to bring the window to the front. Or  
> rather, you'd have to lower whatever was obscuring it. Suffice it to say  
> that you could occasionally get into tricky situations where a window  
> would get "lost" and it was quite hard to bring it to the front.
>
> Initially I hated Windoze. Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far  
> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower. (Today of  
> course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,  
> whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too  
> hard to use.)
>
> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar. With this handy gizmo,  
> you can immediately access any window you have open. And then there's  
> the Alt+Tab shortcut - invaluable on crappy laptops that don't have a  
> real mouse.
>
> Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"  
> interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other  
> applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look  
> at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,  
> *sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of  
> the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at  
> the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too  
> simple to get this right most of the time.
>
> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?

I love tabbed browsing. Then I have more space on the taskbar for all my  
other windows.

When anyone else uses my PC at work they keep closing IE when they only  
wanted to close a tab ;->

-- 
-Nekar Xenos-

"The spoon is not real"

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> fairness, as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*. 

Nonsense. Windows has had Internet Connection Sharing since Win98. You just 
have to know what it's called. :-)

I'm pretty sure that's not part of Yast, tho.  I don't think connection 
binding is, but maybe I didn't have the right packages installed to do NAT 
on SuSE.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
> competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
> XP just doesn't work).

Agreed. But you're 2 generations back with that complaint. Vista fixed it so 
it works well, and Vista is already obsolete.

Plus, it's a harder problem if you actually want it to be usable by 
non-nerds. If I'm looking for "Richard" in my files, I don't want it pulling 
up strings out of executables or inside "<Richard>" tags, even if I want it 
pulling it out of "<author name='Richard'>".  I want to find "Clang" in my 
ID3 tags, but not if it shows up as a random string inside the compressed 
music stream.

>   Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.

More like "works well even for people who don't know how it works."

Combine that with "don't want to re-write code that's already available as a 
free download", and you're set to understand what's going on.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> ...so how do you actually do this then?

That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like 
"Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message

Nekar Xenos wrote:
> I love tabbed browsing. Then I have more space on the taskbar for all my 
> other windows.

I put the task bar on the side. I can probably put 40 tabs on there before 
it gets close to full.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >   Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
> > unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
> > like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
> > a thing"?

> I throught that grep is an overly-complicated way of searching for the 
> location of a string within one particular file? (I usually just use my 
> text editor's "search" function.)

  You use your text editor to tell you which files in a directory structure
contain a specified string? Talk about being overly complicated. grep is a
way, way simpler way to do that.

> >   Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
> > other people do.

> I guess I don't very often edit large files...

  What does file size have to do with anything?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" seems to be "figure out what 90% of 
> the population wants to do, and then make *that* so easy that a drooling 
> retard could do it".

  And then they fail even at that.

  "Windows is easy for a beginner to use" is a surprisingly widespread
misconception. I don't understand where it comes from. Probably Microsoft
propaganda.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
> 
>   It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
> that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).

Yes, you don't like Windows, we get it. Plus, you use a version that's old 
enough that it lacks the straightforward tools you're complaining about.

And yes, complex tools for manipulating structured files are hidden from the 
people who would screw things up by using them wrong, then complain because 
they don't understand the system well enough to know they did something 
wrong. However, they're not that hard to find and they're mostly very well 
documented. For popular files, the interfaces are very well documented.

You complaining you can't find the Windows stuff is like Andrew complaining 
he can't work grep. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >   Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> > as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.

> More like "works well even for people who don't know how it works."

> Combine that with "don't want to re-write code that's already available as a 
> free download", and you're set to understand what's going on.

  I don't really.

  What would be the problem of, for example, supporting soft links natively
in Windows Explorer? If they are so scared of newbies getting confused, make
it an option somewhere.

  What would be the problem of adding an option to Windows Explorer to show
exact byte sizes of files? I really can't think of any drawback. If someone
wants to use the current mode, go ahead, but why not offer exact byte counts
for people who want them? What would be the problem?

  (That's actually something I really hate in MacOS X Finder. There's no way
to make it list the actual size in bytes of files. Instead, it shows a rounded
size like Windows... but of the disk space the file is taking rather than the
actual size of the file. This means that if you have eg. 50 small png files
in one directory, it might report them taking 300 kilobytes of space... Which
is true, because that's the amount of *disk space* they are using. However,
that's not the summed size of the files, which might be eg. 30 kilobytes.
You can get this info from a context menu the hard way, but it's very
inconvenient.)

  Why is it so hard to show exact byte counts in graphical file browsers?
Even Konqueror (the default file browser in OpenSUSE) is able to show them
easily.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message