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On the Humble Default
Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."
Do the defaults on slashdot still require posters to manually type HTML codes for line breaks?
I always thought the misleading options on the posting form were a pretty funny newbie filter. Welcome to slashdot, RTFM.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I don't subscribe to his crazy theory. If defaults are to be defined as a configurable initial state, then they've been around for a lot longer than he's claiming. He's just writing for the sake of reading his own words.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That is NOT what default means. That's called STANDARD.
Default is when you DON'T choose an option and then it's already set in some way _exactly because_ you did not choose any.
That's what default means. When an option is set because you did not set it yourself. It's NOT the same as _standard_.
Does convoluted writing add credibility to your statement?
Does not knowing the slightest thing about cognitive psychology help you get attention?
Not in the rest of the world, but on /. it gets you to the front page.
I remember running into this type of issue at my first programming job, almost thirty years ago. I told my boss (the owner of the company) that in order to get the software to do what he wanted, we had to change some of the defaults on the computer. He insisted that I was wrong, because he hadn't missed any payments on any loans, and I was never able to get him to understand that the term had a different meaning when you're talking about computers. Still, he wasn't a techno-phobe by any means, he was computerizing his business long before it became common.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The limited production in ages past meant that EVERYTHING was default. Want a car? Here's a Model T. It comes in black. Want bread? It comes in white. Sliced. (Wooo!) Defaults aren't new, they are a return to an older, simpler time, when many of your choices were assumed based on limitations.
Yay me!
If you read The Economist, you may have noticed a recent review of the book "Nudge".
I have more than a sneaking suspicion the original poster (and TFA) have been reading this as well.
Suffice it to say that the shallow commentary here pales in comparison to the jaunt through behavioural economics that the book provides. If you can get past it's focus on public policy and just absorb all the core information, the book provides good advice than you'd ever think existed on the art of defaults.
It was picked up from common usage outside of computer science, and was general use well before then.
Phew, for a moment there I thought that before computer science was invented, everything came in random configuration.
This whole story is a waste of space. Slow news day I guess.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Funny, but insightful as well. I see so many geeks bitch about how stuff is made wrong (yeah, I've done this too :P), but it's really because we have some ridiculous setup that is probably unique to us in all of the world.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
And in some countries, the default side of the road is the left, not the right! Some countries DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!! Believe it or not.
Back to computer defaults: It really, really pisses me off when software defaults to Letter size paper, Imperial (non-metric) measures, MDY dates, American spelling. Often WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING OR ASKING THE USER. And so 90% of people in the world (okay, 90% of the computers in other countries I have personally seen) are set up with these inappropriate settings. So print jobs are weirdly distorted, spelling is mysteriously "corrected", spreadsheet dates are scrambled. Etc, etc. All thanks to "User friendly" install defaults.
I know this is going to start a brushfire:
ORIGINAL SIN.
Actually, the term has exactly the same meaning when talking about computers, you just need to put it in context and use it correctly. "Default" means "failure to act", so a loan "default" means you failed to make payments. When talking about computers, the proper term is "default configuration", which means you have not changed it (or failed to change it) from its factory settings.
Using "default" without qualification is ambiguous unless the context is expressely clear; you do not know if your boss bought the computer with a loan, for example. I bet that had you said "default configuration" instead of just "default", it would have sounded much less of a financial term, perhaps prompting him to ask you to explain what it was. However, I can see this working only from the beginning, when establishing context; as soon as he takes hold of a financial context, his concerns and bias will taint and load the term from then on.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
The concept of default arrived when choices started to appear. The 'default' paintjob on the T-Ford was black. No sense in calling it default then. When choices appear you also have people saying 'duh, i don't care'. Hence the default (cheapest) option provided by the producer. Did someone really need a whole article for this?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
It should just default to AC saying 'First Post!'
macbook:~$ man defaults
DEFAULTS(1) BSD General Commands Manual DEFAULTS(1)
NAME
defaults -- access the Mac OS X user defaults system