Long ago before the IBM PC, the standard computer keyboard layout looked like this:
Standard? What about the IBM 3270 keyboard - which was the most common IBM keyboard layout. (Let's forget the 5250 for now).
What was really amazingly stupid about the IBM PC keyboard layout is not that they threw away the industry standard keyboard layout, nor the abyssmal placement of the backslash/pipe key but that they didn't replace the industry standard computer keyboard layout with a IBM Selectric (IBM's famous typwriter) keyboard layout.
And IBM created the new industry standard.
I think basing it on their most common terminal design rather than a typewriter made a lot of sense.
(I'm waiting for someone to suggest they should have use Dvorak.)
I use emacs and I've never used a keyboardw with Ctrl to the left of A. I'm quite happy with two Ctrl keys, where the left one is in the corner - because it's what I'm used to!
20 years into it, I would have thought that you would have figured out that *YOU* were the one that was supposed to write the spec. It's the customers job to give vague and conflicting requirements. It's your job to get those requirements on paper, get a sign off and then move on
.
As I said:
Seriously I've been in this game for twenty years now and the only spec I usually manage to work to is the one I pick out of the foetid mess I'm presented with. which is pretty much what you said. Sign off is interesting - depending on the relationship (in house or not) sometimes I've had to resort to the classic memo/email : "Unless I hear to the contrary I will proceed on the basis that you agree with the detail of my communication dated the xx/xx/xx" - circulated to all and sundry, including various superiors. It's a last resort CYA scenario when you have to do something but nobody can agree what it is. Normally you start looking for a new job before that stage. I usually manage to get close enough to what the requirement should have been to get away with it, which may be lucky or not depending on whether you've worked with me:-) Remember the quote attributed to Grace Hopper: It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission. Also success excuses most things.
Customers don't provide specs. They don't think like that.
Agreed, part of my job is psychoanalysis and counselling. I bring IT skills to the project, I don't expect the customer to have IT knowledge, I don't have business knowledge but I have to be able to understand enough of the requrement to re-write it and present back to the client as a basis for agreeing what is needed in the project.
I remember one job where I was maintaining a report and found some bugs so that the numbers were wrong. When I informed the client of this I was told "Yes, we know but we like these numbers better, don't fix it" they used this report (with others) to run the company. Go figure.
Change is inevitable, but you'd think you'd want to get as much of the design into the original codebase as possible.
Yes, somehow despite years of experience you never quite give up the hope that "this time it'll be better". It's not an expectation you understand, just a dim hope.
I've been doing it for over fifteen, I haven't seen a clearly specificed project either
Specification? What is this strange thing of which you speak?
I wouldn't know how to work on a project with clearly defined requirements - where is my scope for creative interpretation of vague ambiguous poorly written fantasy? Such a small part of my job is actual coding I might have to brush up some language skills instead of mystic interpretation. Pah!
I'd know how to get my own back though - I'd just give them what they asked for, that would teach them.
Seriously I've been in this game for twenty years now and the only spec I usually manage to work to is the one I pick out of the foetid mess I'm presented with. Very Seriously: if the client/users wouldn't take the time to try and help me understand what they needed, I really would give them what they'd asked for. It can be an effective LART but some refuse to learn.
Twenty years without a spec, I could be in the wrong business...
Add to the mix:
Jimi Hendrix; Black Sabbath; Renaissance; Queen; Lindisfarne; Dire Straits; Louis Armstrong; Duke Ellington; Beethoven; Vaughan Williams; Mahler; Wagner; Steeleye Span; Billy Bragg; Jethro Tull; Talking Heads; The Who; The Clash; Ultravox; Soft Cell; Eurythmics; Kate Bush; Clannad; Emerson Lake and Palmer; Fun Loving Criminals; Bach; Jools Holland;... etc.
There's a lot of music to try - but I don't have any Beatles:-)
Maybe we've been unlucky but I wouldn't touch DAT again with the proverbial barge pole.
They may be cheap but there's a reason for that. Where my friend worked whenever they bought a DLT drive they bought a spare for when the unit in use failed. Then they ordered a new spare. Where I work my team does our own backups (just for our workstations and dev server) and we have 4 dodgy DAT drives. The two DDS 3 units will now only read DDS 2 tapes (or lower) and we daren't try to write with them. Maybe the (real) DDS 2 drives are OK but I can't be bothered with an 8Gb backup device.
We scrounged an old junk 70GB DLT from the warehouse floor, it was going to be dumped as u/s but we took the top off and vacuumed it clean. It's been in use for 18 months now with now problem. We use old taped retired from our production backup cycle which we re-format and we have had no problems, and yes, we do check the tapes and they have been used for restores. When the tapes start reporting errors they're binned.
I haven't tried AIT etc, but I'd trust DLT with my data and not DAT. As you may have guessed if we could get any budget we wouldn't be doing it like this.
A simple entry in the tools/options menu that says "advanced features" which pulled up about:config in a separate window along with better documentation and some tweaks to the UI display for about:config to allow deep help searches would be enough.
I agree about the latter part but it's easy enough to create a bookmark for about:config and put that on the personal toolbar if you like.
If the tree structure is for human use, why is it such a common structure for computers? They're used in the file system because they're efficient for computers.
They're used in computers because computers (especially OS) are designed by humans, and humands find it easier to work with. There's really no objective reason to have/bin/sbin/opt etc. separate.
The suggestion that a human could place all their files into one directory and the computer "couldn't care less" is wrong - there is a bound on the number of files which can be contained in a directory. Why is that?
Because the filesystem ihasn't been updated to cope with a larger number of files. When OSs are modified to cope with 64bit addressing this shouldn't be an issue.
Imagine if the file system was unstructured (a flat list), but with the filenames given standardised names like:etc:X11:XF8Config. You would find that, although unique names are provided for each file, the computer quickly bogs down. Every time it needs to access a file it needs to load and search a massive list to find it's location on the disk.
Or it could use a hash to reduce this search through the index of file locations considerably, and I'd be very surprised if there weren't better ways I haven't thought of in the 2 secs I gave it.
Anyway, my point was that users have been prevented from constructing wider tree structures which they can use spatial information to navigate.
Prevented how? They may have not been encouraged but that's a different thing. A nice analogy would be that you can write a word processor in Fortran if you want to, but it (Fortran) doesn't make it easy.
Computer users tend to create logically clean (but deep) tree structures, as a *result* of computer science creating tools to manage trees efficiently. But a user (relying on spatial information) doesn't *need* logically clean tree structures, and (it is argued) is faster with wider trees.
Maybe both the design of the OS and the way people use them are a reflection of how most people think. Most library classification systems are similar too. I'm not saying that we can't do better with an intuitive leap and some clever design, but I'm far from convinced that trees are as evil as some people are suggesting. Databases use trees a lot because they give fast access and there's been a lot of research on this. OS are moving towards a database oriented approach now too.
With a really good UI design the user should be able to use whatever method works for them with no regard to how the data is stored at the filesystem level, it's called abstraction, and that would be far more useful than forcing people to use either a tree or spatial paradigm.
A computer is a tool, and should be approached as such. A user (newbie or otherwise) should not be forced to adapt their mind to structures used for efficient electronic computation. The spatial metaphor is founded on the idea that the human mind is not a computer, and so the most suitable structure for electronic computers is not the most suitable structure for humans.
Rubbish. Most of the time the file structure is irrelevant to the computer. The tree structure is so that people can find things easily. You can put all your documents in one folder if you like, mp3, documents, spreadsheets, grpahics - your computer couldn't care less but it'd probably be a mess for you to deal with.
A similar approach is taken with Epiphany's bookmark system where users categorise their bookmarks by selecting (possibly multiple) topics to associate a bookmark with.
That's a different thing - I readily agree that the tree structure has limitations and a multi-dimensional approach would probably be better.
In my father in law's case it was because Manchester is damp. I believe Manchester has the highest rainfall of any city in the UK (Cumbria has more rain but no cities). He has severe asthma and the outback in summer was, almost literally, killing him. I've heard some fun tales about outback hotels in the 50s, they were designed to be bearable in the heat of summer but in winter they were cold.
The matter is more complicated than you apparently understand.
When I said:
Now if only the printer manufacturers and MS etc
would make A4 the default on localized versions of their software - why should the UK version of word default to letter, it's irritating.
I think that speaks to your comments appropriately.
I actually meant that I expected Australians and New Zealanders to know what fish and chips is but that I wasn't 100% sure.
I assume that Oz and NZ are culturally more clued up than most of the rest of the world. My sister in law is Australian. My father in law emigrated in the 50s, most of his family followed, then my mother in law went too and married him. Then he came back to the UK (with wife and child) for health reasons. It's bizarre at first sight but he moved to Manchester because of the climate.
Now that's a decent challenge and if it weren't for the lack of the characters in unicode....
One example I remember was two APL one liners to do the same thing, one version took one hundred thousand times longer to run than the other. I kind of like APL though.
I never did much APL which is why I quite like it, even though I can't remember much really.
But that is useless! (or at least unwanted)
When you set that, it will print letter-formatted output on A4 sheets. May be tolerable in case you want to print some foreign PDF file, but often you will find that the application (like Word) has somehow found a way to set its papersize to letter, and all output from there is formatted for letter.
When you override that to A4, there will be a very large bottom margin on each page. Not good.
Very useful for those of not in the US and who use A4 paper. Hp et al probably sell more printers outside the US than in and it makes sense for them not to make two sets of electronics. Now if only the printer manufacturers and MS etc would make A4 the default on localized versions of their software - why should the UK version of word default to letter, it's irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
View 1) everything which is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
View 2) everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed.
Your call : does your Bill of Rights define all of the rights which you have?
If Star Bores^WWars is on the list I should think that Brazil certainly should be too.
I think basing it on their most common terminal design rather than a typewriter made a lot of sense. (I'm waiting for someone to suggest they should have use Dvorak.)
I use emacs and I've never used a keyboardw with Ctrl to the left of A. I'm quite happy with two Ctrl keys, where the left one is in the corner - because it's what I'm used to!
Remember the quote attributed to Grace Hopper: It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.
Also success excuses most things. Agreed, part of my job is psychoanalysis and counselling. I bring IT skills to the project, I don't expect the customer to have IT knowledge, I don't have business knowledge but I have to be able to understand enough of the requrement to re-write it and present back to the client as a basis for agreeing what is needed in the project.
I remember one job where I was maintaining a report and found some bugs so that the numbers were wrong. When I informed the client of this I was told "Yes, we know but we like these numbers better, don't fix it" they used this report (with others) to run the company. Go figure.
I wouldn't know how to work on a project with clearly defined requirements - where is my scope for creative interpretation of vague ambiguous poorly written fantasy? Such a small part of my job is actual coding I might have to brush up some language skills instead of mystic interpretation. Pah!
I'd know how to get my own back though - I'd just give them what they asked for, that would teach them.
Seriously I've been in this game for twenty years now and the only spec I usually manage to work to is the one I pick out of the foetid mess I'm presented with.
Very Seriously: if the client/users wouldn't take the time to try and help me understand what they needed, I really would give them what they'd asked for. It can be an effective LART but some refuse to learn.
Twenty years without a spec, I could be in the wrong business...
IF IBM bought Novell I see absolutely no reason why they would need to buy SCO, what with owning the UNIX codebase (not the trademark) and all.
Thanks, that's a nice site - I'm now lisiting to Secret Agent now, chilling out on /. before going to bed.
Jimi Hendrix; Black Sabbath; Renaissance; Queen; Lindisfarne; Dire Straits; Louis Armstrong; Duke Ellington; Beethoven; Vaughan Williams; Mahler; Wagner; Steeleye Span; Billy Bragg; Jethro Tull; Talking Heads; The Who; The Clash; Ultravox; Soft Cell; Eurythmics; Kate Bush; Clannad; Emerson Lake and Palmer; Fun Loving Criminals; Bach; Jools Holland;
There's a lot of music to try - but I don't have any Beatles :-)
It's not actually true - some babies have to be taught to suckle.
They may be cheap but there's a reason for that. Where my friend worked whenever they bought a DLT drive they bought a spare for when the unit in use failed. Then they ordered a new spare.
Where I work my team does our own backups (just for our workstations and dev server) and we have 4 dodgy DAT drives. The two DDS 3 units will now only read DDS 2 tapes (or lower) and we daren't try to write with them. Maybe the (real) DDS 2 drives are OK but I can't be bothered with an 8Gb backup device.
We scrounged an old junk 70GB DLT from the warehouse floor, it was going to be dumped as u/s but we took the top off and vacuumed it clean. It's been in use for 18 months now with now problem. We use old taped retired from our production backup cycle which we re-format and we have had no problems, and yes, we do check the tapes and they have been used for restores. When the tapes start reporting errors they're binned. I haven't tried AIT etc, but I'd trust DLT with my data and not DAT. As you may have guessed if we could get any budget we wouldn't be doing it like this.
Oh, and that goes for Dark Star too.
I'm not saying that we can't do better with an intuitive leap and some clever design, but I'm far from convinced that trees are as evil as some people are suggesting. Databases use trees a lot because they give fast access and there's been a lot of research on this. OS are moving towards a database oriented approach now too.
With a really good UI design the user should be able to use whatever method works for them with no regard to how the data is stored at the filesystem level, it's called abstraction, and that would be far more useful than forcing people to use either a tree or spatial paradigm.
When pushed off by Montoya.
In my father in law's case it was because Manchester is damp. I believe Manchester has the highest rainfall of any city in the UK (Cumbria has more rain but no cities). He has severe asthma and the outback in summer was, almost literally, killing him.
I've heard some fun tales about outback hotels in the 50s, they were designed to be bearable in the heat of summer but in winter they were cold.
I assume that Oz and NZ are culturally more clued up than most of the rest of the world.
My sister in law is Australian. My father in law emigrated in the 50s, most of his family followed, then my mother in law went too and married him.
Then he came back to the UK (with wife and child) for health reasons. It's bizarre at first sight but he moved to Manchester because of the climate.
One example I remember was two APL one liners to do the same thing, one version took one hundred thousand times longer to run than the other.
I kind of like APL though.
I never did much APL which is why I quite like it, even though I can't remember much really.
You're quite right, the French haven't had any bars since they went metric. No houses either.