he OS X Finder overwrites directories without aggregating files in both source and the destination. For example, when a directory called /Photos is copied to /Directory/Photos, it will delete its the contents of /Directory/Photos rather than merging. That serves as a case study where the user is not sufficiently involved and, consequently, data can be lost. This behaviour must have been inherited from Mac OS 9 as Linux does not have this problem and neither does Windows.

Yesterday I spent hours driving myself mad as I realised I had lost data 4 months ago. No back-ups could resurrect that data. File dialogues must always be verbose as data loss is the most frustrating experience of all.

A KDE “overwrite file” dialogue; click image for full-sized view

Developers must begin to involve users in choices that are made, as the example above suggests. “Easier-to-implement” or “automatic” are usually a bad idea. For the very same reasons, for example, image2.jpg appears after image10.jpg in file managers. That is simply a common ‘bug’ that mushroomed into a norm.

indows and Mac users face long procedures of installing and recovering software whenever a computer is bought. This time-consuming process shows the strengths of comprehensive Linux distributions such as SuSE or Fedora.

PC users sometimes assemble a list of programs, each of which needs to be installed in turn. Why not use an image with all the software pre-loaded? Since hard-drive capacity is enormous, redundant bits cannot harm (with the exception of the Windows Registry). Also, one can distribute everything on several machines, without any repeated effort. If this does not illustrate the power of free Open-Source software, what does?

here came a time when I stopped shutting down machines, let alone restarting them. The waiting is unnecessary and re-opening of programs is avoidable. Today’s computer architecture is sophisticated enough to deprive monitors from power and stop the rotation of hard-drives after a specified time-out. What’s more, modern programming languages, standards and fast-growing operating systems make memory leaks rare, while in fact, perhaps needless to mention, memory becomes cheaper.

My personal experience has shown that Windows XP is stable, but it slows down considerably after hours of work. Similarly, the Registry gets bloated after months of regular use. Linux (and branches like Mac OS X) suffers from none of these issues. I typically reboot after 50-100 hours of persistent work. Windows CE suffers from similar problems and needs to be reset quite often (provided it has not already crashed). My Palm gets reboot every 3 weeks or so.

The bottom line: if you tolerate system crashes or reboot too often, consider alternative platforms.

Linux Desktop

Slashdot have spotted a demonstration of Luminocity [sic.] — an experimental OpenGL-intensive window manager for GNOME. For the hi-tech savvy, the site includes stunning videos of Luminocity in action.

An illustration of transparency in KDE

Sneak Peek at Microsoft’s Longhorn

For the curious, there are recent Longhorn screenshots at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

Apple developed a mechanism which enables alignment of windows with respect to the ground. This is done simply by rotation of the windows based on sensor data. The idea was recently taken a step forward so that it allows interaction with programs and games, simply by movement of the (PowerBook) laptop.

Playing games by shifting CoG

he World Wide Web is becoming more open, but there are still sites which refuse to accept it. As an example, Microsoft included some sick humour in the download page for .Net specifications. When entering the page with Mozilla Firefox, the download button intentionally gets a bad placement (see screenshot, click to enlarge).

Once the button is clicked, it disappears outside the screen in an animated fashion! No download is possible until the 3^rd click.

Google made their toolbar available only for Internet Explorer. More recently, they were kind enough to refer to the open Google bar, which builds onto other browsers.

The excellent Google Desktop is only available for Windows. A message from Google said that they work improving it, rather than porting it to work under more operating systems. *sigh*

Finally, have a look at this offensive page from Yahoo.

The Linux enhancement under question is based on OpenGL. It revolves different virtual desktops (if you use a pager) to achieve the illusion that they hover around in space. This looks great, but it is not necessarily practical. See the 3-D Desktop project homepage.