Slashdot Mirror
Advice for Developers: Make Common Usage Easy
Ken Hendrickson writes "Thomas Sowell has some fantastic common-sense advice for software developers from the viewpoint of an ordinary user: Make it easy to do what almost everybody wants to do. I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"
>Oh this is slashdot, I'm just supposed to assume that Free Software is better in all respects.
It also helps a story get accepted from the editors.
The story specifies nothing directly about OpenSource or MS or Apple. I actually would like to see this person comment on the Apple UI. Yet apparently the jab at MS is valid.
Next story to get approved:
"New planet found. MS blamed for not finding it sooner, clear evidence that Free Software is better."
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
First, it's hard to believe that Sowell - usually such a total idiot in his own supposed areas of exerptise - could be so right about something in ours. Second, it's hard to believe that the OP tried to turn this into a "free software is better" message. As has been noted before, "option clutter" is a characteristic trait of much free software, as every disgruntled dev-team member is appeased by adding their favorite feature and every dispute over how some feature should work is "solved" by make it work seven ways and/or adding an option to control it. The people who most need to hear this message are in the free-software world, not the commercial world when there really is someome to put their foot down and impose a coherent vision on the other developers. That doesn't mean all proprietary software is more usable - just that this particular usability problem is not one that afflicts them the most.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Notice how he didn't name any names so as not to piss off his corporate backers? This guy is just another right-wing idiot. townhall.com has never had anything worth reading and even /. is too civilized to be promoting that crap.
The Farewell Tour II
Mr. Sowell's bio;
Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, he left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics.
After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University (1958), he went on to receive his master's in economics from Columbia University (1959) and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968).
In the early '60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, he began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments include Rutgers University, Amherst University, Brandeis University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught in the early '70s and also from 1984 to 1989.
Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Moreover, much of his writing is considered ground-breaking -- work that will outlive the great majority of scholarship done today.
Though Sowell had been a regular contributor to newspapers in the late '70s and early '80s, he did not begin his career as a newspaper columnist until 1984. George F. Will's writing, says Sowell, proved to him that someone could say something of substance in so short a space (750 words). And besides, writing for the general public enables him to address the heart of issues without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompany academic writing.
In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute.
Currently Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.
I'd say that you are not only wrong in calling him an idiot, you are a virulent racist. (And a left wing idiot.)