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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."
response by default
... of de programming language that your code doesn't compile!
Long? What do you mean the signature at the bottom of every comment I post on Slashdot is too lo
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.
More and more are taking the choice to default than ever before.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Default was first used in computer science in the 1960s because that is when computer science, as we knew it, began. It was picked up from common usage outside of computer science, and was general use well before then. Unfortunately I am old enough to remember it as a common term in the 1950s. For example the default land area for a house (at least in my part of the world) was a quarter of an acre and it used to be referred to as the default area.
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.
We might not have called it that, but default solutions and default products have been around since the invention of mass production. From then on, there was a "default" product, a standard product that works as the default if you didn't order something specifically different.
Hell, even the spanish inquisition had a default verdict.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
OK.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Non English speakers / translators!
Did you have trouble translating the word "default" into other languages? How difficult/easy was it to find a translation for "default" for user manuals in, say, jp or cn or fr?
Asking because I had trouble figuring out a good word for it in Hindi. Still not sure if we have the right word.
Do note that /. only allows ascii in posts.
Can't see Hindi?
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.
Ever since Lehman Brothers, the default has definitely been making a comeback. Let's see how much money I lost today.
No real geek/nerd would ever even consider using the default settings. Only real men use the default, real geeks use their own settings. Thats why none of their shit works.
I'm trying to think of something prior to 1950 that had an overridable, configurable default. It's hard. Business telephone systems had some configurable defaults, but setting them up required physical wiring. The same was true of Plan 55-A Teletype message switching. IBM plugboard-wired tabulators didn't really have defaults as we think of them today. Machine tools had adjustable speeds and feeds, but no real defaults. Jacquard looms didn't have defaults. Linotypes didn't have defaults. Chain-programmed embroidery machines - no.
The closest thing I can think of was General Railway Signal's NX signaling system for controlling railroad interlockings. This 1930s system may have been the first "user-friendly interface". An NX system controlled multiple switches and signals in an area (an "interlocking") preventing conflicts. Interlocked signal controls had been around for years, and they handled the safety issue, but before NX, it was the user's responsibility to figure out the desired path from A to B. With an NX system, you selected an "entry" point where a train was going to enter the interlocking, and all the reachable "exit" points would light up. The "reachable" logic took into account other trains that were in the interlocking area. When the operator selected an "exit", the NX system would pick a path between the entry and exit, routing around other trains or even track locked out of service.
A default "best" routing was hard-wired into the system, but the operator could override the default routing manually, by picking some intermediate point along the path as the "exit", then selecting that as an "entry" and picking the final "exit".
That's the oldest system I know of with a real "default" mechanism.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Asking because I had trouble figuring out a good word for it in Hindi. Still not sure if we have the right word. Forgot to add: the closest translation I could come to was "pre-decided" and that doesn't seem to mean the same thing as "default" - it should actually be a word or phrase that means "pre-decided but modifiable to something else".
Can't see Hindi?
Each house is almost 11,000 square feet?
Land area means the land the house sits on, not only the house. A quarter acre is not really that large.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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!
Quite easy in Chinese. Since /. is too US-centric to tolerate Unicode, I'll just post the Unicode codepoints for these two characters: U+9ED8 and U+8BA4. Look them up in a Unicode table ;)
This Chinese word for "default", in a more literal translation, means "tacitly accepted/recognized". It has nothing to do with the financial meaning of the word "default", which translates to a completely different word in Chinese.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Like the light switch being in the OFF position when it's first installed. Not that you can see it, because the lights are off.
But if you are looking for another computer word that has made it into common usage, how about "reboot"? It's now used to describe starting anything over from scratch, especially in things like movies. For instance, the new Star Trek movie has been called a reboot by several movie critics.
I can imagine a time far in the future where "reboot" is listed in the dictionary with the etymology saying "origin unclear, borrowed from computer terminology". 95% of people will not know that it comes from the REpeating the action of BOOTstrapping a computer. Bootstrapping or booting a computer comes from the term "to lift oneself up by the bootstraps", which is impossible and refers to the apparent chicken and egg problem of a computer loading itself up with software.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
That's the beauty of a default: it'll just freaking work. Not ideally, but good enough to get you going and let you change it later on, at your own pace.
Wrong. That's hardware detection. And it's gotten so good I don't even have an xorg.conf anymore.
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.
But defaults aren't automatically good. Good defaults are good. Bad defaults aren't ;).
;).
;).
So what are good defaults for configuration? I think of it as a form of compression.
The most common+safe+useful settings should be the default. The trouble is figuring out the right balance of safety and usability for your product or system.
It's not easy to get right, and that's why a lot of stuff is crappy or just mediocre[1]
For many things it doesn't have to be just "default vs ADVANCED mode with zillions of settings".
It could be: Small, Regular, Large, Extra Large, Custom/Advanced. With Regular being the default selected option.
See the compression of the decision tree? You don't want most of your users to have to make too many unnecessary decisions. Even if they can make the decisions - it's more work for them and makes things more error prone.
McD doesn't have their staff ask users the details of what they want upfront- they don't ask whether you want ketchup, pickle etc. The sets are listed and there's Regular and Large (and supersize?). Any further customization if possible is on demand.
And they go "Will you have fries with that" even if you already said "No" or "yes" to fries... Hmmm maybe McD isn't such a good example
[1] The dev gives up thinking really hard about what the default should be, picks the first somewhat usable one and replies with "WORKSFORME" if users complain.
In Icelandic
It is "SjÃlfgefiÃ" or "Sjalfgefid"(since the special characters get fubar) which translated literally to English, would mean "Given by itself".
I think it's a very old word, since it also can mean "taking something for granted".
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
Assuming we're talking about the noun "default", it translates very differently to different languages. For example, Finnish uses constructions based on "oletus-" ("assumed"), such as "oletusarvo" (default value) or "oletusselain" (default browser). In Swedish, "förvald" ("preselected") is used for default somethings (e.g. "förvalt värde" for default value) and a default in general is a "förval" ("preselection").
Spend enough time using a translated computer system or studying or practising CS in a language and you'll pick up the terminology. The problems start when translators have decided to translate things differently. For example, both Windows and Mac OS have "File" menus, but Finnish Windows calls them "Tiedosto" ("File") and Finnish Mac OS (IIRC) calls them "Arkisto" ("Archive").
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.
On the right? Nonsense. They are on the side by the handle, opposite the hinges. And which way the door is hung depends on the configuration of the rooms.
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)
Don't most Indians speak English too?
About 10% of them do, which is enough to make them numerically the country with the second-most English speakers. Of those, about a third speak it as a third language. My experience tells me that about half (with a very wide margin of error) of Indian English speakers can read it well but not have a functional conversation with a native English speaker. About a third of the population is entirely illiterate.
I suspect English language skills correlate fairly well with computer literacy, since both are the product of the higher education not available to many of the population. Since it's certainly not a one-to-one correlation, I'd stick with Hindi.
tienanmen
tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen
here, they may look at it no more, talk freely
Oh, everybody in China knows what Tiananmen Square is. It's a beautiful plaza in Beijing, not secret or forbidden at all. Nice tourist spot. Mao's mausoleum is right next door. You should go there sometime.
And in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, nothing at all happened. Why do you Westerners use that name as if it's some sort of forbidden thing?