Well if it is something you don't want normal users to touch then saying "simply tell Firefox" probably isn't the best description of a solution. YMMV of course.
But whether it is a "normal" user or not, talking about usability is at that point is not silly - the setting is there for a reason and even if it is only for super duper uber advanced tech people, usability is still an issue. Naming things with the clearest possible labels relating to their purpose is about good usability and everybody benefits from good usability. In this case usability may translate into good maintainability but it is still good usability.
Having had to read lots and lots of other people's code I can tell you good choice of names is in fact a usability issue.
Maybe the developers were just tired of getting almost done implementing a system and then having marketing come in yet again and say to them "hey and it also needs to do xyz - that's not a problem to just stick that in there, right?"
They somehow think putting together a user form should require 2 weeks and multiple degrees in computer science. On the contrary, it should be ridiculously simple to throw together a user form.
Of course it doesn't take all that. That kind of qualification only comes into play when it is necessary to put together a good user form. People who think it is ridiculously simple to "throw together" a (good) user form don't understand that even the seemingly simple is often complex. That is why there is so much crap available.
HCI, GUI design etc. does take a lot of knowledge (and experience) to get right. Where should the initial focus go? What's the best order for focus to follow as the user hits tab? What are the best colours for the form? What's the best layout of buttons, text areas etc.etc. so the user finds it a natural experience and is lead down the path which minimizes problems/errors in filling out the form? What's the best layout so that the user resizing the form still gets something that looks right and is still useful? etc. etc. etc.
ou can simply tell Firefox to not cache anything by setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 in about:config.
You know there is something about that sentence....
the part up to "anything" gives me the impression that there is going to be some switch to do with turning caching on and off... which in turn leads me to expect the switch to maybe have the word "cache" (or some variant) in its name... then I get to to the second half of the sentence where I find the switch name is very long but does not have "cache" in it anywhere.... There's probably a good reason for that but somewhere in my mind it rubs something the wrong way and the thing it is rubbing is labelled "why users find software difficult to use"...
We never had to pay extra for physics/chem labs with equipment - thank god we didn't have to pay for supplies or wear either, in one physics lab course I got fascinated with the things you could do with liquid nitrogen - the planned 2 day speed of sound in air experiment turned into a two month detour for me lol!
BUt it seems to me that any of the schools for the classic professions (law, engineering, medicine, architecture etc.) had seriously higher tuition than the "regular" degrees.
Engineering was a bit of a different kettle of fish because much of their increased cost was because the Eng students had to take about 21%-33% more credit hours than a standard B.Sc. or B.Sc. Hons. Student (120/132/160 where I did my undergrad). Seemed pretty clear to me why engineers were known for pranks... for a few semesters (3 a year, no summer breaks) I did the same number of credits/semester as Eng students and I was ready for some pranking too LOL. Fortunately then I discovered the basement of the pub along with the drinking capacities of students in other disciplines, and things mellowed out a whole lot...
I think this has been gong on for a very very long time. For example it seems to me universities charge more for being a law student or medical student...
I have to say that is the general feeling I'm getting about a lot of stuff.
I want to play around a bit with GPU programming for scientific calculation and the feeling I am getting is that my choices are either Linux with NVidia or Windows with ATI (or NVidia).
It's pretty much the same with Linux itself. I talked the wife into using Linux instead of Windows on her desktop and netbook but that pretty much meant Ubuntu. I don't want to have to maintain two different flavors so that means I run Ubuntu too. My experience with Ubuntu has been one of feeling like an unpaid beta (or sometimes alpha) tester. Things keep changing, afaics often just for the sake of change.
Now the latest is the complete replacement of Gnome so my multi-screen desktop can function more like a phone??? This may make perfect sense for Canonical. And it may be fine for people with lots of time to be continually trying out new things - but I don't have that time to spare anymore. I don't have time to learn a new major metaphor every year, or to figure out how to undo things to get back my old desktop, or my old audio player, or my old mail client, or my old IM client, or whatever. I want to use my time on my actual goal(s) not overcoming or undoing unasked for changes.
So after 6-7 years of trying I'm considering new directions. For the time being I'm sticking with 10.04 then if that becomes more problematic I will either try one more flavor of Linux - probably straight Debian - or just surrender to the dark side and for all its ugliness go back to Windows.
Our time is worth something and we want it to be expended on our actual goals.
I buy AMD hardware because it is usually better bang for the buck and because I want to support the market underdog if possible. With GPU computing my solution was to get a system just to run Win7 on... because I don't have the necessary significant time to invest just to find out if I can successfully do GPU computing with the combination of ATI/AMD and Linux. But now I'm having to keep current with two OS's - that's not likely to feel time effective for very long.
Wow, except for the Win7 stuff that sounds so much like my experience with my old HP notebook/tablet. I finally did go back to Vista on that.
I replaced the hard-drive with an ssd - which stopped the thing's exhaust from scorching me and extends the battery life a bit... now I have an overpriced, overweight but moderately nice to use in dim light ebook reader. In tablet mode a single page of a magazine like SciAm fits perfectly on the screen and is still readable so it pretty much eliminates scrolling.
It's interesting that your power consumption went up in Win7... good to know as I had been thinking of installing it to get out of using Vista.
Anyhow I'm not sure who to blame, HP, ATI,... maybe a combination of several entities, but somebody sure screwed it up.
If you manage to get to be a tenured prof at a decent university then it is probably pretty satisfying... you have a *reasonable* income, job security and a tremendous amount of freedom compared to most occupations.
If you are a project scientist developing something amazing then it is probably pretty satisfying and maybe even financially rewarding.
For pretty much anything else it seems like science sucks as a career unless you have for some reason ended up with a passion for science, or the idea of science, that makes the drawbacks sufficiently unimportant.
What actually bothers me is the lack of regard society has for scientists. Our society tends to show high regard by bestowing large amounts of money - not always, but mostly. IMHO people dedicated to truth, the pursuit of knowledge and, usually, improving the human condition should be held in very high regard but seemingly aren't - says a lot about our society and the prevalent values.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history.
That's not how I "learned science"... we formed hypotheses, did experiments to test the hypotheses, analysed data etc. etc.
Of course if he is talking about learning a scientific field, which is an entirely different thing, then he may be at least partially correct. OTOH if you've learned some science then you are in a much better position to judge the things that you read and then develop an informed opinion on the information you read. Furthermore it is the goal of any good scientist to disprove theories, which is a fundamentally different approach than things requiring "faith". This is why it is so important to protect the conduct and reporting of scientific investigation in general, and the peer review process in particular, from being poisoned by political, monetary and other influences. Sadly I fear we may be too late.
Depends on what it is... music I would likely listen to over and over so even the least popular (to me) single piece might be be played many times over the years. With books it is going to be a far smaller set that gets to have my attention beyond the original reading. With movies there are very few I would bother to watch more than once.
So essentially I agree with you. Pare it down. Keep all the music - it's small anyway. Keep all the books - also small. Turf the movies that really don't deserve a second watch. TV? Turf 99% of it.
Yeah they are definitely weird stuff. Some years back I noticed that a patch of skin about 1"x1" was completely devoid of hair. I don't know how it happened or when because it was underneath my beard where it was fairly well hidden but when I noticed it I could see that every single follicle was hairless... "weird" I thought. One day weeks later I notice it is starting to grow back in... hmmm "weirder" I thought. Then about 6 months after that I notice a different patch is starting to lose its hair and the same size patch develops... ok this time it was off to the doctor who said it was an autoimmune response.
I remember the moderator of a fairly famous Usenet newsgroup who was also selling a software product. This person complained about some free software that people were giving away - because it wasn't nearly as good as the commercial product but hurt their sales [ed. apparently because it was enough functionality at the right price for most people]. The righteous indignation at these people having the temerity to give their work away was priceless.
Some people are very good a hiding who they really are - until they get what they want. Girls are practically trained for this in our society. And stop blaming the victim.
And the idea that males may be the victims of abuse is actively repressed by social science "researchers" and statistics gathering agencies. It's awful hard to know how many men are being abused when, for example, a domestic violence "research" project based in hospital emergency rooms only asks the female patients if their injuries are from partners. Why only females? Well "we" "know" they are the vast majority of victims so it would be a waste of resources to even bother asking how many male victims exist... um, right?
The press helps this along by generally only giving attention to female victims - in both "news" articles and in opinion pieces.
A particularly egregious example was in Calgary Alberta where the police were directly ordered, as official policy, to make an arrest on any domestic violence call. Didn't matter if there were no evident signs of violence - if the neighbours heard shouting and screaming and reported domestic violence then it was a DV call and they had to make an arrest. Guess which spouse got the criminal record... sure helps bolster those stats on spousal violence against women.
It's pretty much the same process that promotes the "womeno nly make $0.65 on the dollar compared to men" bit of propaganda that is still repeated by people who know better.
I don't have any argument with what you are saying but I want to add that one of the things that goes along with ADHD is a lessening of impulse control - I suppose because it is hard for your brain to keep in control if it is constantly being distracted.
So it may be that no matter what the parents do - short of trying to address the underlying cause as best as possible - they may be unable to "fix" the self-control issue. And in how many cases are the effects on life being seen by the study the result strictly of self-control alone or of ADHD?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not seeing how to enable the wireless N in that solution.
Well if it is something you don't want normal users to touch then saying "simply tell Firefox" probably isn't the best description of a solution. YMMV of course.
But whether it is a "normal" user or not, talking about usability is at that point is not silly - the setting is there for a reason and even if it is only for super duper uber advanced tech people, usability is still an issue. Naming things with the clearest possible labels relating to their purpose is about good usability and everybody benefits from good usability. In this case usability may translate into good maintainability but it is still good usability.
Having had to read lots and lots of other people's code I can tell you good choice of names is in fact a usability issue.
Maybe the developers were just tired of getting almost done implementing a system and then having marketing come in yet again and say to them "hey and it also needs to do xyz - that's not a problem to just stick that in there, right?"
Of course it doesn't take all that. That kind of qualification only comes into play when it is necessary to put together a good user form. People who think it is ridiculously simple to "throw together" a (good) user form don't understand that even the seemingly simple is often complex. That is why there is so much crap available.
HCI, GUI design etc. does take a lot of knowledge (and experience) to get right. Where should the initial focus go? What's the best order for focus to follow as the user hits tab? What are the best colours for the form? What's the best layout of buttons, text areas etc.etc. so the user finds it a natural experience and is lead down the path which minimizes problems/errors in filling out the form? What's the best layout so that the user resizing the form still gets something that looks right and is still useful? etc. etc. etc.
You know there is something about that sentence.... the part up to "anything" gives me the impression that there is going to be some switch to do with turning caching on and off... which in turn leads me to expect the switch to maybe have the word "cache" (or some variant) in its name... then I get to to the second half of the sentence where I find the switch name is very long but does not have "cache" in it anywhere.... There's probably a good reason for that but somewhere in my mind it rubs something the wrong way and the thing it is rubbing is labelled "why users find software difficult to use"...
We never had to pay extra for physics/chem labs with equipment - thank god we didn't have to pay for supplies or wear either, in one physics lab course I got fascinated with the things you could do with liquid nitrogen - the planned 2 day speed of sound in air experiment turned into a two month detour for me lol!
BUt it seems to me that any of the schools for the classic professions (law, engineering, medicine, architecture etc.) had seriously higher tuition than the "regular" degrees.
Engineering was a bit of a different kettle of fish because much of their increased cost was because the Eng students had to take about 21%-33% more credit hours than a standard B.Sc. or B.Sc. Hons. Student (120/132/160 where I did my undergrad). Seemed pretty clear to me why engineers were known for pranks... for a few semesters (3 a year, no summer breaks) I did the same number of credits/semester as Eng students and I was ready for some pranking too LOL. Fortunately then I discovered the basement of the pub along with the drinking capacities of students in other disciplines, and things mellowed out a whole lot...
I think this has been gong on for a very very long time. For example it seems to me universities charge more for being a law student or medical student...
I have to say that is the general feeling I'm getting about a lot of stuff.
I want to play around a bit with GPU programming for scientific calculation and the feeling I am getting is that my choices are either Linux with NVidia or Windows with ATI (or NVidia).
It's pretty much the same with Linux itself. I talked the wife into using Linux instead of Windows on her desktop and netbook but that pretty much meant Ubuntu. I don't want to have to maintain two different flavors so that means I run Ubuntu too. My experience with Ubuntu has been one of feeling like an unpaid beta (or sometimes alpha) tester. Things keep changing, afaics often just for the sake of change.
Now the latest is the complete replacement of Gnome so my multi-screen desktop can function more like a phone??? This may make perfect sense for Canonical. And it may be fine for people with lots of time to be continually trying out new things - but I don't have that time to spare anymore. I don't have time to learn a new major metaphor every year, or to figure out how to undo things to get back my old desktop, or my old audio player, or my old mail client, or my old IM client, or whatever. I want to use my time on my actual goal(s) not overcoming or undoing unasked for changes.
So after 6-7 years of trying I'm considering new directions. For the time being I'm sticking with 10.04 then if that becomes more problematic I will either try one more flavor of Linux - probably straight Debian - or just surrender to the dark side and for all its ugliness go back to Windows.
Our time is worth something and we want it to be expended on our actual goals.
I buy AMD hardware because it is usually better bang for the buck and because I want to support the market underdog if possible. With GPU computing my solution was to get a system just to run Win7 on... because I don't have the necessary significant time to invest just to find out if I can successfully do GPU computing with the combination of ATI/AMD and Linux. But now I'm having to keep current with two OS's - that's not likely to feel time effective for very long.
Wow, except for the Win7 stuff that sounds so much like my experience with my old HP notebook/tablet. I finally did go back to Vista on that.
... maybe a combination of several entities, but somebody sure screwed it up.
I replaced the hard-drive with an ssd - which stopped the thing's exhaust from scorching me and extends the battery life a bit... now I have an overpriced, overweight but moderately nice to use in dim light ebook reader. In tablet mode a single page of a magazine like SciAm fits perfectly on the screen and is still readable so it pretty much eliminates scrolling.
It's interesting that your power consumption went up in Win7... good to know as I had been thinking of installing it to get out of using Vista.
Anyhow I'm not sure who to blame, HP, ATI,
If you manage to get to be a tenured prof at a decent university then it is probably pretty satisfying... you have a *reasonable* income, job security and a tremendous amount of freedom compared to most occupations.
If you are a project scientist developing something amazing then it is probably pretty satisfying and maybe even financially rewarding.
For pretty much anything else it seems like science sucks as a career unless you have for some reason ended up with a passion for science, or the idea of science, that makes the drawbacks sufficiently unimportant.
What actually bothers me is the lack of regard society has for scientists. Our society tends to show high regard by bestowing large amounts of money - not always, but mostly. IMHO people dedicated to truth, the pursuit of knowledge and, usually, improving the human condition should be held in very high regard but seemingly aren't - says a lot about our society and the prevalent values.
That's not how I "learned science"... we formed hypotheses, did experiments to test the hypotheses, analysed data etc. etc.
Of course if he is talking about learning a scientific field, which is an entirely different thing, then he may be at least partially correct. OTOH if you've learned some science then you are in a much better position to judge the things that you read and then develop an informed opinion on the information you read. Furthermore it is the goal of any good scientist to disprove theories, which is a fundamentally different approach than things requiring "faith". This is why it is so important to protect the conduct and reporting of scientific investigation in general, and the peer review process in particular, from being poisoned by political, monetary and other influences. Sadly I fear we may be too late.
"To bring it back home, would you expect Dennis Ritchie to be able to fabricate a modern GPU in his garage?"
Yes. Yes I would.
Everybody? That's a huge and unfounded assumption which is quite likely very wrong both for the general population and for the /. sub-population.
In many domains it was no longer the case at least 20 years ago.
I would have said it was a toss up between the Social "Sciences" people and the Education people.
Depends on what it is... music I would likely listen to over and over so even the least popular (to me) single piece might be be played many times over the years. With books it is going to be a far smaller set that gets to have my attention beyond the original reading. With movies there are very few I would bother to watch more than once.
So essentially I agree with you. Pare it down. Keep all the music - it's small anyway. Keep all the books - also small. Turf the movies that really don't deserve a second watch. TV? Turf 99% of it.
The replicants Deckard pursued were military right? The Hollywood prequel writes itself... Replicants vs Aliens vs Predators
Yeah they are definitely weird stuff. Some years back I noticed that a patch of skin about 1"x1" was completely devoid of hair. I don't know how it happened or when because it was underneath my beard where it was fairly well hidden but when I noticed it I could see that every single follicle was hairless... "weird" I thought. One day weeks later I notice it is starting to grow back in... hmmm "weirder" I thought. Then about 6 months after that I notice a different patch is starting to lose its hair and the same size patch develops... ok this time it was off to the doctor who said it was an autoimmune response.
I remember the moderator of a fairly famous Usenet newsgroup who was also selling a software product. This person complained about some free software that people were giving away - because it wasn't nearly as good as the commercial product but hurt their sales [ed. apparently because it was enough functionality at the right price for most people]. The righteous indignation at these people having the temerity to give their work away was priceless.
Some people are very good a hiding who they really are - until they get what they want. Girls are practically trained for this in our society. And stop blaming the victim.
And the idea that males may be the victims of abuse is actively repressed by social science "researchers" and statistics gathering agencies. It's awful hard to know how many men are being abused when, for example, a domestic violence "research" project based in hospital emergency rooms only asks the female patients if their injuries are from partners. Why only females? Well "we" "know" they are the vast majority of victims so it would be a waste of resources to even bother asking how many male victims exist... um, right?
The press helps this along by generally only giving attention to female victims - in both "news" articles and in opinion pieces.
A particularly egregious example was in Calgary Alberta where the police were directly ordered, as official policy, to make an arrest on any domestic violence call. Didn't matter if there were no evident signs of violence - if the neighbours heard shouting and screaming and reported domestic violence then it was a DV call and they had to make an arrest. Guess which spouse got the criminal record... sure helps bolster those stats on spousal violence against women.
It's pretty much the same process that promotes the "womeno nly make $0.65 on the dollar compared to men" bit of propaganda that is still repeated by people who know better.
you're too smart - there's a penalty for that you know. We don't like your kind.
The rules aren't clear... can I use a gun?
That's a bit harsh on his secretary, don't you think?
I don't have any argument with what you are saying but I want to add that one of the things that goes along with ADHD is a lessening of impulse control - I suppose because it is hard for your brain to keep in control if it is constantly being distracted.
So it may be that no matter what the parents do - short of trying to address the underlying cause as best as possible - they may be unable to "fix" the self-control issue. And in how many cases are the effects on life being seen by the study the result strictly of self-control alone or of ADHD?