Hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now, people will look back at the twentieth century: the moon landing will be the most important happening of that century, and quite possible of that millenium.
The average PC user is little more than a sheep doing what he/she is told is a Good Thing. Sorry if I offend some people with that statement, but what's the biggest complaint against Linux? The learning curve is too steep. Why is that? Because people want point and click, they don't like using a keyboard.
Grr. Geeks just don't get it. This is exactly the same lock out mentality as companies like microsoft's. If programmers had ever bothered to make their programs remotely usable, companies like microsoft would never exist. We got what we desrved here. If programmers today were to make remotely usable software, microsoft's business model would be dead in a heartbeat.
With repect to the Ford analogy. If programmers were let near cars, they would be as complicated as jet planes and be less reliable. Would that be ok? Would everybody who couldn't pilot a car be a dummy or a luser? And would we piss on a company that made drivable cars for these lusers? Face facts: there is no competition for IE right now. In the browser marketplace, it's a hands down winner and has been for nearly three years. Most people just want to drive, and programmers are a minority of browser users. --
..you've answered your own questions. That is, the open source model (and it is only a model after all) is not the way to go for your company in terms of the product you are making. This is ok, software does not have to be open as a matter of course. --
I think Cisco could make a go of it here, because their management style is heavily based upon random sampling. That's why Cisco has been able to scale so large and so effectively. Random sampling will working Russia as well as it would anywhere else. You have to randomly sample quality, and you have to randomly sample production and output to make sure the information you as a manager are getting corresponds with the information your customers and employees are getting.
Does anyone know what he's on about? Or even better, can anyone point to a url to tell me what he's on about?
Oh not that Mies van der Rohe nonsense. FFF was simply a soundbite to justify the appearance of buildings that nobody much liked, or understood. FFF barely exists in architecture and product design, it simply isn't present in computing.
There are no bandsaws covered in wrapping paper in computers, chiefly because there are no bandsaws, only layers of wrapping paper. You peel them all away and at the center it's just electrons banging about.
All computing interfaces are syntactic sugar and all computing forms are interfaces. So what are little computers made of?
Each layer is either a patent misrepresentation of the layer below it, or an empowering abstraction, depending on how you want to look at it.
The functionality of computers are in the main formless, that's why they are so powerful. Maybe Morphic is a better word than formless, since really, the form is fully arbitrary. For a computer to be used you have to make a decision on how to represent function. When I say used, I mean allowing a person to operate and interact with the functionality of the computer, maybe that involves building new functionality or new uses. Each of these uses requires an interface.
The truth of computing interfaces is that each interface is a mistruth, because the form of computers functions are arbitrary. A command line interface is no more accurate or correct than a voice command interface. Since you can't prove the correctness of interfaces (they are all lies), you have to justify them. It reduces to pragmatics, personal preferences, rhetoric, force, metrics. Interfaces are political in nature.
The problem with the kind of generic multi-purpose computing tools we have today is that there are too many functions and not enough flexibility with respect to form. You don't have this problem with other mono-purposed computing tools. Most great tools do at most a couple of things very well, ideally they do thing very well. Think paperclips, or toasters. since the function range is limited, the number of potential forms is also constrained. Generic computers are like the spawn of victorinox and the hydra. You close one blade and another three pop-up.
The notion that there is an ideal user interface for a very large set of functions is just that. The idea that a UI like Gnome or Windows, or Bash can accomodate the use of all available functions in a modern computer is just wrong. Now if we want to think about the ideal approach to designing a generic computing device that needs to be used by people, then it seems to me what we need is the ability to move between various misrepresentations of function and chose the one that is least untruthful at any given time.
Re:Scratch a UI purist and 9/10 times and you'll f
on
Suck On Skins And UI
·
· Score: 1
Remember UI's should be designed around the task at hand. Great UI's help get work done. If you broaden your mind here are some Great UIs. Not all of them are 'designed': NTemacs Doom wikiWebs Slashdot (no, really) emacs JDE speedbar Python language Scheme language Squeak environment Photoshop 4 and up bash shell AutoCAD 5 and up Netscape 6 doesn't cut it. Looks like Quake with a blazer on. That damn barbers pole that hurts my eyes. No 3D cues. Skinning is defaulted. Slow as a dog (just what is it doing in there?). Still hasn't got bookmarking done right. Hasn't got newsgroup reading done right. Semantically overloaded back button. Primitive control over active web entities. Rollover circle lights are too hard to see. Why are they circles? No pop-up description of icons. The blue thing in the split bar lights up, but doesn't say why. Lots of other things don't light up and don't say why either. Two rows of drop down menus. No, wait they're actually buttons that lokk like menus, silly me. So those things on the bottom, they're...no...they're menus. Clicking on empty Go menu slots sends you to the home page. Irrelevant one time settings like char encoding at the top menu level. Vertical orientaion of tabs. Use of tabs for saving screen real estate not logical views. My sidebar, oh I thought it was someone elses. Build id is visible, who cares? Runs right into a padlock, that's logical enough. Half a ship's wheel is better than none. I suppose a pen is for writing an email...no, lets try the letter...um, lets just use IE or Opera, it has less problems. They got the preferences window right though. MacOS has traffic lights that are translucent jelly babies (Hi there! I don't the difference between stop and shut!), so it's open season on users I guess. Nobody cares about users, they're a problem not a feature.
"The money does NOT have to come from somewhere. Where does the money for open source coding come from? Nowhere. "
Where do the basic neccessities (food, shelter, computers, software, so forth), come from that allow people to write open source software?
The point is, when someone is writing open source software, that someone is almost certainly being subsidised by another activity (that they may or may not be doing themselves), which as likely as not, involves the tranasction of value (money probably) for that activity. People write open source for no financial gain as a matter of choice, but that choice is made possible by the availibilty of means acquired at some point using the exchange of value for labour.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone please explain to me how this gets a 1?
Hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now, people will look back at the twentieth century: the moon landing will be the most important happening of that century, and quite possible of that millenium.
Grr. Geeks just don't get it. This is exactly the same lock out mentality as companies like microsoft's. If programmers had ever bothered to make their programs remotely usable, companies like microsoft would never exist. We got what we desrved here. If programmers today were to make remotely usable software, microsoft's business model would be dead in a heartbeat.
With repect to the Ford analogy. If programmers were let near cars, they would be as complicated as jet planes and be less reliable. Would that be ok? Would everybody who couldn't pilot a car be a dummy or a luser? And would we piss on a company that made drivable cars for these lusers? Face facts: there is no competition for IE right now. In the browser marketplace, it's a hands down winner and has been for nearly three years. Most people just want to drive, and programmers are a minority of browser users.
--
Wrong Question. Ask: "do you want a cool extra for your free car, that happens to run well on most roads?". The overwhelming answer is yes.
..you've answered your own questions. That is, the open source model (and it is only a model after all) is not the way to go for your company in terms of the product you are making. This is ok, software does not have to be open as a matter of course.
--
Nonsense. Law, Medicine, Catering, Farming.
--
Does anyone know what he's on about? Or even better, can anyone point to a url to tell me what he's on about?
Oh not that Mies van der Rohe nonsense. FFF was simply a soundbite to justify the appearance of buildings that nobody much liked, or understood. FFF barely exists in architecture and product design, it simply isn't present in computing.
There are no bandsaws covered in wrapping paper in computers, chiefly because there are no bandsaws, only layers of wrapping paper. You peel them all away and at the center it's just electrons banging about.
All computing interfaces are syntactic sugar and all computing forms are interfaces. So what are little computers made of?
Each layer is either a patent misrepresentation of the layer below it, or an empowering abstraction, depending on how you want to look at it.
The functionality of computers are in the main formless, that's why they are so powerful. Maybe Morphic is a better word than formless, since really, the form is fully arbitrary. For a computer to be used you have to make a decision on how to represent function. When I say used, I mean allowing a person to operate and interact with the functionality of the computer, maybe that involves building new functionality or new uses. Each of these uses requires an interface.
The truth of computing interfaces is that each interface is a mistruth, because the form of computers functions are arbitrary. A command line interface is no more accurate or correct than a voice command interface. Since you can't prove the correctness of interfaces (they are all lies), you have to justify them. It reduces to pragmatics, personal preferences, rhetoric, force, metrics. Interfaces are political in nature.
The problem with the kind of generic multi-purpose computing tools we have today is that there are too many functions and not enough flexibility with respect to form. You don't have this problem with other mono-purposed computing tools. Most great tools do at most a couple of things very well, ideally they do thing very well. Think paperclips, or toasters. since the function range is limited, the number of potential forms is also constrained. Generic computers are like the spawn of victorinox and the hydra. You close one blade and another three pop-up.
The notion that there is an ideal user interface for a very large set of functions is just that. The idea that a UI like Gnome or Windows, or Bash can accomodate the use of all available functions in a modern computer is just wrong. Now if we want to think about the ideal approach to designing a generic computing device that needs to be used by people, then it seems to me what we need is the ability to move between various misrepresentations of function and chose the one that is least untruthful at any given time.
Remember UI's should be designed around the task at hand. Great UI's help get work done. If you broaden your mind here are some Great UIs. Not all of them are 'designed': NTemacs Doom wikiWebs Slashdot (no, really) emacs JDE speedbar Python language Scheme language Squeak environment Photoshop 4 and up bash shell AutoCAD 5 and up Netscape 6 doesn't cut it. Looks like Quake with a blazer on. That damn barbers pole that hurts my eyes. No 3D cues. Skinning is defaulted. Slow as a dog (just what is it doing in there?). Still hasn't got bookmarking done right. Hasn't got newsgroup reading done right. Semantically overloaded back button. Primitive control over active web entities. Rollover circle lights are too hard to see. Why are they circles? No pop-up description of icons. The blue thing in the split bar lights up, but doesn't say why. Lots of other things don't light up and don't say why either. Two rows of drop down menus. No, wait they're actually buttons that lokk like menus, silly me. So those things on the bottom, they're...no...they're menus. Clicking on empty Go menu slots sends you to the home page. Irrelevant one time settings like char encoding at the top menu level. Vertical orientaion of tabs. Use of tabs for saving screen real estate not logical views. My sidebar, oh I thought it was someone elses. Build id is visible, who cares? Runs right into a padlock, that's logical enough. Half a ship's wheel is better than none. I suppose a pen is for writing an email...no, lets try the letter...um, lets just use IE or Opera, it has less problems. They got the preferences window right though. MacOS has traffic lights that are translucent jelly babies (Hi there! I don't the difference between stop and shut!), so it's open season on users I guess. Nobody cares about users, they're a problem not a feature.
Any UI designer worth their salt will have these books.
Where do the basic neccessities (food, shelter, computers, software, so forth), come from that allow people to write open source software?
The point is, when someone is writing open source software, that someone is almost certainly being subsidised by another activity (that they may or may not be doing themselves), which as likely as not, involves the tranasction of value (money probably) for that activity. People write open source for no financial gain as a matter of choice, but that choice is made possible by the availibilty of means acquired at some point using the exchange of value for labour.