after being /.'d off the face of the internet for the second time in as many weeks , i'm moving the plasma website to another server. d solbach stepped up to offer a really decent package to ensure that the site will be able to withstand future pain. sweet!
on the other hand, it would be really nice if people would let me know when they are about to hose my bandwidth by posting something to a place like slashdot. really, i was hoping to have this kind of attention in a few months, not so much right now when there are fewer concrete results to show.
but hey, nothing like mounting the pressure on by raising expectations, right? ;)
now, it's always better to define yourself in terms of what you are rather than what you aren't. i've tried to present plasma in this way, but sometimes there are some things you just have to say "we aren't this." something that plasma must not become is bloat: it must remain lean and fast. this is not optional. it must look sexy and it must be performant. i commit to testing it on my pII-400 with with old matrox video card in it and use that a low-end baseline. this is an achievable goal, as long as we keep performance in mind from the very start and are willing to allow looks to be sacrificed to speed when running on a machine that lacks the horsepower.
one of the reactions people are having to the concept of a new, modern desktop/panels concept is "oh no! i'll need a dual opteron with 2gb of ram and a wicked fast graphics card!" well, i don't want to see that happen. i can't let that happen. let me tell you a story:
today i was depositing a cheque into an atm machine at the bank. they have a spanky new interface on their atm's that they recently installed. it looks nice: little throbers where they belong, nice transitional effects, beautiful buttons, cutesy little mimic of a ballance sheet on screen while entering your deposits, etc. but it feels at least 3-4 times slower now than the old interface
contrast: when i take money out of a machine in germany, i'm always amazed at how bloody fast they are. input my pin *bam* next screen! say how much i want *bam* money pours out. i don't even really remember how sexy the interfaces are, just that i'm blown away by the speed of the transactions. and you know why? because that's what matters: i'm trying to do banking, not be entertained.
now .. given a choice between a fast atm and a fast atm that has a sexy and intuitive interface, i know which i'll choose. but if i have to drop either "fast" or "sexy", i'll take fast any day. because every time i've gone to use my bank's atm in the last month i've been totally pissed off at how much of my time they are wasting just to wank off in my face their ability to hire a graphic designer or two.
screw that. give me speed and let me get my work done, baby.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
I fully agree on the plasma statement for several reasons.
The first is that even the sweetest eye candy gets boring or is in the way if it's too slow. It's nice to look at it and say "wow" but then after some days you'd disable it because it's simply in the way and slows you down.
One comment on German ATM machines: Unfortunately not all of them are as fast as you are presuming. For example the same thing you described happened to the ATMs of the Hamburgger Sparkasse a few month ago. Before, they had a simple interface which was conveniently fast... Then they changed it to something with a lot of pictures and animations and now the machines are horribly slow :-(
But the Dresdner Bank and HypoVereinsbank manage to have a shiny, colorful interface without forfeiting speed (=usability).
Please make Plasma as fast as possible, many I know have still some old machines lying around(like the one I'm currently working on - a Celeron 600) and KDE 3.4 did run smoothly on a 350 MHz PII with 128 MB of RAM. Another case is the use of KDE on X terminals, if it's too bloated it'll limit the server resources without actually doing something useful (erm, I mean it will do something useful, but most of the time I don't use the current kicker anyway it is just there)
Thought you would like this. business opportunities
Hi i am totally blown away with the blogs people have created its so much fun to read alot of good info and you have also one of the best blogs !! Have some time check my link to !!Affordable home based business opportunity
Thought you would like this. ways to make money fast
I just added your blog to my book marks and will be checking back often
I have a business free money own start site. It's a membership site about business free money own start related stuff.
Come and check it out if you get time :-)
Post a Comment