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It seems likely that everyone here has heard the old saw "No one ever got fired for buying|using Microsoft". Well, times change.
The government of the Italian province of South Tyrol wants to save money and, noting Munich's savings of over 10 million euros, it sees Free Software as a solution. (The freedom thing isn't lost on them either.)
Governor Arno Kompatscher says "We've started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these." The new policy is meant to reduce IT costs. Should this fail, the region must resort to reduce its workforce, in order to balance the region's budget.
Did you catch the nuance? If you are a gov't employee and they can't change software because you aren't adaptable enough to use something other than Windows, you can plan on being the first one out the door. Hat tip to Robert Pogson for just the right spin on this story.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tibman on Monday April 21 2014, @01:47PM
Help in closed source software is a joke. Pressing F1 always results in facepalm. It is far better/faster to just google the thing you want to do. If F1 is a reference manual then it is probably okay. But most of the time it is a thick tomb of fluff that someone wrote to justify their job (no offense to any technical writers out there). I stopped using the built-in help right around the early-2000's. Help in the form of a howto is usually what you need. IMO of course : )
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(Score: 2) by kebes on Monday April 21 2014, @03:38PM
But I think crappy help documentation is only part of the problem. Maybe only a symptom. I think our current paradigm of software-help is wrong. Consider what often happens when you are trying to figure out how to do something with a piece of software. Whether you use the built-in help or the web, you end up doing something like:
1. Type some search terms
2. Scan through the search results
3. Click into some entries, read through them quickly
4. Identify a candidate solution
5. Follow the steps described in the solution (click this Menu item, look for this option, etc.)
6. If it didn't work, go back to a previous step and try some more...
This seems silly. In particular, it seems rather ridiculous to have a web-page open, and then to be searching through your GUI app for the button/item that the document is referring to; especially when one considers possible version or setup inconsistencies. (This is of course better with commandline tools, where you can copy-paste something from the web.) It would be better if you could simply activate the presented solution. I'm not suggesting giving your web-browser complete access to your computer... Consider instead if every button/item in the GUI were (behind the scenes) intelligently tagged, and linked to various help-topics. So, you use some kind of built-in search, type what you're trying to do... and you see various entries pop-up. Importantly, those entries don't explain what button to press, they actually perform the task. In other words, the help system is more like a way to search and activate all the functionality that is available inside the application.
The only downside I can think of (besides implementation effort) is that this prevents users from learning where a given option is located. However, I think that a user who wanted to use a function repeatedly would put in the effort to find out where the option is located (the search-activate function could also highlight the button it's activating on your behalf). Moreover, the search-activate system could itself become a viable way to access functionality. You could learn what words to type (maybe just a couple characters required) to activate the functionality you wanted. This is potentially much more efficient than searching through dozens of GUI panels, even for common tasks.
There have been occasional forays into such ideas (such as the the Enso software, the Firefox Ubiquity [mozilla.org] plug-in, or Unity's searchable menubar), but I've never seen an application that fully developed this idea: where every single GUI element is tagged and thus can be activated using a (pseudo-natural-language) search interface. One difficulty is the developer effort required to make it all work. On the other hand, I believe the right solution is to have an online database of help-entries. Users can then submit entries for fixing common problems or performing particular sequences of steps, essentially providing a way to share simple user macros. (Obviously some vetting process is necessary.) So when you search, you're searching through everyone else's problems/solutions, and you're able to activate/try a particular solution with a single click.
(Score: 1) by paddym on Monday April 21 2014, @06:36PM
Have to agree with how ridiculous F1 is. It's like they decided to fire up old netscape on some modem-network to find the answer. You can pull the real help from some server in Japan faster than to grep a file somewhere on your computer. And the best part is how the help never is useful because all the stuff in there is how things should work, not what to do when they don't work the way they should.
It's right up there with that "search the web to find a program to open this file". 1 extra mouse button every time I open an unidentifiable file. I often thought of starting a Microsoft Power magazine to have back stories for all these weird things that happen in windows that are still there. "And woe to ye who actually searches the web for a program to open a new file. Ye shall find nothing but misery as a constant reminder of why the gods wanted to integrate Internet Explorer into the operating system yet were banned to do so by the anti-Trust."