Re: Follow up about X clipboard

[Chris Sherlock <csherlock optusnet com au>]

Jerry Haltom wrote:
> > I disagree. I would say that easily 75% of windows users know what a 
> > process is. Not necessarily by name, maybe by "that thing I have to kill 
> > in the task manager." There will be regular users who use the gnome 
> > system monitor and wonder why the program is still running.
>
>
> I would say that 90% of those 75% only know what a process is because of
> a deficiency in Windows of some sort requiring them to deal with a
> process as a process, such as a freeze. This isn't something we should
> accept and say if it's good enough for Microsoft it's good enough for
> us. Does OS X even have a system monitor?

Home: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 
14% of people know that." Hey :)

Yes, OS X has a status monitor. And sorry, I can't say that Mac OS X is 
a paragon of great UI design.

> > I still think it's unreasonable to keep the process going. I see a 
> > better solution as passing off responsibility to the clipd and making 
> > translators smart enough to know how to handle that, what to do. 
> > Something that leaves absolutely no doubt that the copying program was 
> > closed.
>
>
> I still don't understand why. What is so bad about long running
> processes that me or somebody else hasn't already explained? Is it just
> a "design/moral/ethical" argument? You can never win those.

System resources are still finite. If you have an app running in the 
background, how much of the process do you still think is needed? We 
*are* discussing the data in the clipboard, right? Why run a whole 
process???

> > This is just plain wrong. If I mean to hit Ctrl-F to search, and 
> > accidentally hit Ctrl-C, I don't want that program there. Also, what if 
> > I copy from this program, paste into another, then close the copying 
> > program? Why the hell should it stay running in RAM?
>
>
> That's why I suggested a notification area icon (or something) to let
> the user (those that care that they are using memory, most people will
> just not care at all) that would allow the user to clear the clipboard.
> Actually this is probably a good idea in any clipboard design to allow
> users to remove copied passwords/sensitive data.

Agreed.

> > It's been brought up. Yes, it matters. Say the process is eating 99% 
> > CPU. This is consistent behaviour from soemthing like Adobe's Acrobat 
> > Viewer. The last thing I want with this program is that it disappears 
> > into a spot where I can't easily close it from. That so totally 
> > overrules extended clipboard functionality.
>
>
> This argument doesn't really hold any weight. If the user wants to copy
> from Adobe Acrobat, then for the duration of that copy, they must leave
> Adobe Acrobat open, eating 99% CPU, RIGHT NOW. If the user later decides
> they don't want to make a copy, they can clear the clipboard in some
> fashion.
>
> Either way, this program needs to be fixed. This is retarded. I've seen
> it too. If Adobe spends the time to make it long living, they can spend
> a few minutes of that to fix this problem. If they don't, then this
> application is not worth using in any way.

Even more important, I think the question here is: why does you 
operating environment allow a program to hog the whole system? How can 
one program make everything so slow. Putting a limit on how much 
resoures each program is allowed to have would be better, right?

Chris