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  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

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Our desktops still rely on many very old technologies and ideas. Motif is not even a very old tookit if you look at the age of the whole WIMP metaphor (windows, icons, menus, pointer). As Pici, genii and TiredWolf reminded us today, this is in fact true of most, if not all technology.

Working on my dissertation, I was going through my field notes again today. I came across this snippet from my IRC logs, concerning the high-level design of the GNOME desktop.

<Amaranth> An option where two people disagree on how something will work? Not gnome
<Amaranth> Automatically figuring out what to do based on the circumstances? Gnome

‘Nuff said. Should apply to any user-facing software.

But yes, even after this Zen moment, I’m still writing the book. =)