Quotes of the week

Yea, freeking fantastic there. So you've turned the volume (almost) all the way down. A half hour later you toss your laptop into your bag, expecting it to suspend because thats what it always does, latter you open your bag to find that your laptop has become a wad of melted plastic.

Gnome needs to fire all its usability people because they don't seem to understand this simple relationship:

"Always exactly the behavior I wanted" is better than "deterministic but not always what I want" which is better than "sometimes not the behavior I wanted and not deterministic".

One beautiful thing about computers is that they can be pretty deterministic. If something is not always right, but at least consistent we can work around its idiocy. If it's not deterministic then we have to constantly check that it's not screwing us over.

It is usually not a usability improvement to make the machine right a little more often but far less deterministic. A laptop that always suspends on lid closed or never suspends on lid close is not a fire-hazard. Making that depend on an external monitor being connected is probably safe as long as the detection is _very_ reliable (and consistently wrong when its not reliable). Checking to see if a music player is running? I think thats going to ruin a lot of hardware.