That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
Amusingly enough, the only OSS desktop applications with good UIs got them by shamelessly stealing from commercial software that had actual paid engineers and UI/UX researchers.
The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.
Depends on your system. A few years ago I ran it on a MacBook where scrolling on an empty page took ages. Seems nobody tried it out on a Mac before releasing the port since it was totally unusable. Hopefully it's fixed now, but I wouldn't recommend a piece of software I don't trust to anyone.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this?
The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.
Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it.
Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
FWIW, starting a sentence with "Honestly ..." always makes me think the rest of what this person has to say is dishonest.
Your BIO on HN is:
> I HAVEN'T SHOWERED AT ALL! THAT'S WHY I REEK! WORKING IN FINTECH! AIN'T SHAVED IN WEEKS! POUR CRUMBS FROM MY KEYBOARD! THAT'S WHAT I EAT! WROTE A CURRENCY LIBRARY! 3RD TIME THIS WEEK! LURKING HN! I PREFER /b/! IN MOM'S BASEMENT! I'M THIRTY THREE! IT'S 3'O'CLOCK AM! THAT'S WHEN I SLEEP! AH!!!! COME ON FUCK A GUY!!!!
"Honestly" is a colloquialism used to indicate disbelief with the previous statement or to preface candidness. Choosing to interpret the colloquial use of "honestly" as an indication that everything else that person says is dishonest is a very weird trait I've only seen show up in grammarian literalists and pedants that only makes yourself seem like a disingenuous person.
In case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now:
"Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that has two voltage states can convey two bits of information per symbol.
"Bit rate" refers to the amount of digital data conveyed. If there are two states per symbol, then the baud rate and bit rate are equivalent. 56K modems used 7 bits per symbol, so the bit rate was 7x the baud rate.
Not sure about your last point but in serial comms there are start and stop bits and sometimes parity. We generally used 8 data bits with no parity so in effect there are 10 bits per character including the stop and start bits. That pretty much matched up with file transfer speeds achieved using one of the good protocols that used sliding windows to remove latency. To calculate expected speed just divide baud by 10 to covert from bits per second to characters per second then there is a little efficiency loss due to protocol overhead. This is direct without modems once you introduce those the speed could be variable.
Yes, except that in modern infra i.e. WiFi 6 is 1024-QAM, which is to say there are 1024 states per symbol, so you can transfer up to 10bits per symbol.
Yes, because at that time, a modem didn't actually talk to a modem over a switched analog line. Instead, line cards digitized the analog phone signal, the digital stream was then routed through the telecom network, and the converted back to analog. So the analog path was actually two short segments. The line cards digitized at 8kHz (enough for 4kHz analog bandwidth), using a logarithmic mapping (u-law? a-law?), and they managed to get 7 bits reliably through the two conversions.
ISDN essentially moved that line card into the consumer's phone. So ISDN "modems" talked directly digital, and got to 64kbit/s.
An ISDN BRI (basic copper) actually had 2 64kbps b channels, for pots dialup as an ISP you typically had a PRI with 23 b, and 1 d channel.
56k only allowed one ad/da from provider to customer.
When I was troubleshooting clients, the problem was almost always on the customer side of the demarc with old two line or insane star junctions being the primary source.
You didn’t even get 33k on analog switches, but at least US West and GTE had isdn capable switches backed by at least DS# by the time the commercial internet took off. Lata tariffs in the US killed BRIs for the most part.
T1 CAS was still around but in channel CID etc… didn’t really work for their needs.
33.6k still depended on DS# backhaul, but you could be pots on both sides, 56k depended on only one analog conversion.
As someone that started with 300/300 and went via 1200/75 to 9600 etc - I don't believe conflating signalling changes with bps is an indication of physical or temporal proximity.
Oh, I got the implication, but I think it was such a common mistake back then, that I don't think it's age-related now - it's a bit of a trope, to assume baud and bps mean the same thing, and people tend to prefer to use a more technical term even when it's not fully understood. Hence we are where we are with terms like decimate, myriad, nubile, detox etc, forcefully redefined by common (mis)usage. I need a cup of tea, clearly.
Anyway, I didn't think my throw-away comment would engender such a large response. I guess we're not the only olds around here!
No, just that confusing the two was ubiquitous at the time 14.4k, 28k, and 56k modems were the standard.
Like it was more common than confusing Kbps and KBps.
I mean, the 3.5" floppy disk could store 1.44 MB... and by that people meant the capacity was 1,474,560 bytes = 1.44 * 1024 * 1000. Accuracy and consistency in terminology has never been particularly important to marketing and advertising, except marketing and advertising is exactly where most laypersons first learn technical terms.
I started out with a 2400 baud US Robotics modem with my "ISP" being my local university to surf gopher and BBS. When both baud rates and bits per second were being marketed side by side I kinda lost the thread tbh. Using different bases for storage vs transmission rates didn't help.
I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)
Reminds me of a) the breathtaking vox pop done by the BBC [0] in 1978 as metric adoption nipped at their imperial heels, and some spectacularly bewildered misunderstandings manifested -- the first citizen here inventing the word kilomileometres and (I wish she were joking) asserting that your car's mileage is reduced because you'll be using litres,
and b) the comedy radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, running since the 1970's but includes a game called Mornington Crescent [1] (since season 6) wherein the panel take it in turns to 'get to Mornington Crescent' using the London Underground map as a playing board. Many rules and variations are cited and vaguely explained, but it's all just made up -- nonetheless there has been an abundance of people who've listened to this madness, and then written to the BBC to demand a rulebook.
The point? Not sure. Does this reflect positively upon the some style of comedy favoured by the Brits, or negatively about their credulity? As a nominal Brit, I can't comment with any impartiality.
It is deeply offensive to the serious players of the game to suggest Mornington Crescent is "made up". Yes, to neophytes it can seem random and unstructured but it is preposterous to suggest game with such a lineage is fictional.
The Mornington Crescent Players Association (MCPA - often lovingly renlffered to as The Scottish Father) unanimously voted through the Flodden amendments last year. The Mornington Crescent Rules Committee (not to be confused with the Rules Committee of Mornington Crescent) will be voting on the topic on December 25th. Whereupon it will be passed to the International Board for ratification.
The only controversial point is it will be applied retroactively over the last decade, changing the results of no less than 3 world championship matches
> Does this reflect positively upon the some style of comedy favoured by the Brits, or negatively about their credulity?
People function by simplistic rules of thumb rather than understanding underlying principles. We all probably do it to some extent, simply because the world is too complex to understand in full. Some people do it to a greater extent.
A good example for the HN crowd is watching people with limited understanding of the technology use a computer or a phone. A lot rely heavily memorised sequences of actions. Put them in front of a slightly different GUI and they effectively have to relearn from scratch. Something as simple as a panel on the side instead of a start men plus taskbar will complete throw people. Now apply the same thinking elsewhere.
> The point? Not sure. Does this reflect positively upon the some style of comedy favoured by the Brits, or negatively about their credulity? As a nominal Brit, I can't comment with any impartiality.
You’re just bitter that you never spot the ostrich first.
Prosaically, one step removed: Mornington Crescent absolutely has rules, and the joy of the show is everyone on the show is playing by them.
Finding participant / sample sizes for this is difficult, as it seems to be somewhere between a systematic review and a meta-analysis, but heavier on the recommendations than the analysis.
(I went looking because the 'nearly all' thing sounded like a bit of a stretch. Not that I would be surprised if this were true, but I would be surprised if they could make that claim with much confidence.)
Yup - I recall when this feature was released, maybe a dozen years ago, with KDEConnect. Real QoL improvement. Glad to hear some other OS's are catching up.
Solar PVC output directly and immediately correlates to sun landing on the panels.
Solar thermal runs well into the evening, and its output is not impacted by the occasional cloud.
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