Good point: but on the other hand, engineers tend to downplay the importance of things looking good.
Case in point: I was giving advice to one guy who was making a windows front end to "Z26", an atari 2600 emulator (interesting, people who say 'engineers make commandline, let the designers do the ui'--well, the integration is a lot looser, and there are fewer chances for interaction between ui and core engine. anyway.) So he had a skins/wallpaper type option. (It was kind of like a tiling webpage background image thing behind the list of ROMs) I suggested he get rid of it: I mean, who cares what a frickin' game launcher looks like, right? But he says far and away that customizability is what he gets the most complements and feedback on...
Good idea! But it doesn't work if slashdot (or whatever site this is happenign on) is having a server problem, which actually happens just as often as the slow down cowboy issue. Well, it does happen, but your stuck having to carefully leave that window open, rather than being able to cut and paste your message into like a text document...
In the case you describe, I'd suggest it should be a configurable option for "new windows" vs "single gene window", or two seperate options in the context menu, just like IE lets you select "open" vs "open in new window".
There's a chance someone will get upset that they looked at the URL for gene 312, decided to save it for later, opened up gene 741, and then gene 312 is GONE (unless they know to try to use the browser's back button) I've certainly been frustrated by websites that force window reuse on me...sometimes I really do want to multitask/have a window open to come back to.
I can tell you how to fix that in IE: Goto Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced. Look for an item called "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts". Uncheck it.
Interesting...thanks! (It's super dumb that that's a default...in fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of a good scenario for that.)
I assumed it was an OS thing and not an app thing because my startmenu has two shortcuts... I guess one is just to IE as an app, but because it always opens my local start page first, I think of it as being the same kind of thing as my shortcut to the company's intranet.
Heh, reminds me of Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things. He loved picking on things where aesthetics weere given priority over utility, like doorhandles that were the same for push and pull. He dismissed it with a sniff and "probably won an award".
Of course, his own book suffered from the same problem...it was originalled "The Psychology of Everyday Things", which let the book refer to itself as "POET", kinda nice.
Of course, bookstores and other catalogers kept putting it under "psychology" rather than "design".
And, and one other windows annoyance: any (non-browser) program that opens a URL thorugh the OS, be it the start menu, should OPEN UP A NEW FRICKIN' BROWSER WINDOW rather than highjacking an existing one. If I have a window open in the background, there are GOOD ODDS I that I *want* the information that's in there to STAY there. Double Duhhr.
It's a Web App. We're constrained by the browser. Insightful comment, though.
Ah, yeah. Although one level Ctrl-Z does work in textareas on IE at least, once you've gone past the starting page you're often screwed.
Actually, I tend to get screwed a lot by stuff like Slashdot's "wait 2 minutes" limiter...I don't mind waiting so much, but I think the submissions page has "No Cache" or something set, so everything I typed has gone away. I've had a similar problem elsewhere; one hacky solution (when I'm thinking there might be a problem) is to hit ctrl-a ctrl-c (select all, copy) in the main textarea before submitting...and I was wishing there was some way that could happen automatically.
While I'm on the topic of web UIs and usability...another favorite gripe: 9/10 of all "reset form fields" just should NOT exist. Just because it's easy "functionality" to include, some web designers do, so you end up with this little button that looks a LOT like the submit button you mean to press, but it erases everything you typed into the form. Duhhhr! The only time it should be considered is when you're EDITING data, not ENTERING it, and even then some kind of "are you sure" would probably make more sense.
It's a non-trivial problem: * show too much, newbies get scared * hide it too well, and medium-experienced folk will never learn about it and even power users might curse you
And so many "power configurations" are so poorly explained. More than half the time context sensitive help just lists the name of the command, or doesn't give any context as to why you would want to use it.
I have very mixed opinoins about Window's "make unusued menu options go away" way of coping with this kind of problem. It seems clever and sometimes works alright, but menus that are never the same twice can be annoying.
Well, speaking as a programmer who "uses" many other pieces of software...yeah, I think I do have some better ideas for many of the pieces of software I use...
Of course, many of my potential suggestions have to do with "improvements" made in UIs I know, so I have to sort out "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" from "I don't like it for these specific functional reasons" (and that's always with the risk of not seeing why the "improvement" was made...there could be decent reasons for some of them.)
That said: some of my favorite gripes... Windows. Ctrl-F in file explorer... I really miss the old independent app that would pop up. It was so clear that it was a seperate task. This newish sidebar sucks...I hate how I can't tell at a glance if the right pane is search results, or if maybe I had already hit the "X" button and the window is just displaying an ordinary set of folder contents. Duhhrr.
Windows. Ctrl-F in IE...considering how many decent ideas they've had w/ autocomplete of previous URLs in the Address bar, I'm impressed that the Ctrl-F box is so bad. Would it be so hard to make a list of my past searches into a dropdown combo box there? Is there a logical UI reason why sucessful in-page searches have a larger chance of showing up when I hit Ctrl-F next time, when usually it's the failed in-page searches that I want to repeat? Most infuriating is when a page hasn't finished loading...ctrl-F pulls up one of those wacky sidebars again "gee, if your page is taking more than a few seconds to load, maybe you actually want to search the entire frickin' internet through your special OEM-branded portal". GAWD, is there a way to turn that off?
Also recently I upgraded to the latest version of the newsreader Tin (on an old academic user account)...the misfeatures multiply, and only some of them seen configurable, from showing the msg header even after paging down (thus making it 4 times harder to see where one msg stopped and the next began) to color-coding instead of displaying the characters *stuff* _like_/this/ used for emphasis, to always asking if I want to mark all messages as read when exiting a group without reading all of its messages...
Most programmer think they know how to do UI. (Frankly, I think many of them do, to a certain extent, if they're reasonably smart and understand ideas like not throwing too many options at the novice user)
It's visual design where the failing comes in. I think.
he next big upgrade people will be excited about is the ability to do CG in real-time comparable to the stuff we've seen come out of Pixar. Perfectly smooth, anti-aliased, nice shadows, bright color, etc. Unfortunately, consoles are still a ways away from that. What's worse is that when they do reach that point, then what? Heh, you know, I'm surprised how few "perfect spheres" (and no I'm not talking the boobies in DOA volleyball) games have...you can usually see the angles quite obviously. I mean you think a game like monkey ball would be able to have spheres whose shadows have more than 16 or so edges..
I guess it doesn't count as "3G", but for one job in mid-2000 I was playing with this clip-on cellular modem for the Palm, and I found a pretty high correlation to feeling headachey and using the damn thing..can't remember the name of the product though (Hmm! Another symptom?)
Seriously, I'm a little wary when I read that biologist pointing out that we are essentially conducting a massive study of radiation on humans consisting of the entire population of cellphone users. Maybe we should all get tin hats after all.
I suspect that those are the equivalent of an actor's "headshot", mostly for use in 'official' documents, like for the pamphlet of something where he was a speaker.
Narcisist nerds will generally aim for more obviously interesting pictures to show off.
general note: what is it
on
Practical mod_perl
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For people who are wondering what mod_perl is exactly: it's a way of integrating perl into Apache's webserver. I think the main advantage is that you don't have the overhead of firing up perl for each cgi-type request. The main gotchas, for the developers point of view, involve a little perl enviornment staying alive, when a perl script starts, runs, and stops, it cleans up after itself, but when it 'stays alive' inside apache, you have to make sure it's not accumulating too much memory cruft, that you're closing handles, etc etc.
This is what I know mostly by reputation, rather than direct experience, experts please feel free to correct me
"what is the optimal population?" Since the average individual produces MUCH more than he consumes, the obvious answer is A LOT higher than the current population. This goes for Americans too. We also produce much more than we consume. Errr...it depends on how you measure production and consumption, isn't it? I mean, a lot more things get polluted than get made pristine over time, and that's going to impact the living situation.
The simplest example, is comparing price/performance and advancement of the rail industry (government sanctioned monopolies) with the airline industry (competitive free market).
I'm not saying it fully spoils your point, but I wouldn't point to the USA Airline system as an obvious beacon of the triumph of capitalism, what with the bailout and all. And even discounting that as just an industry specific result of WTC, I think most people dislike and distrust the wacky and seemingly inconsistent pricing system, where there might be hundreds of dollars difference in price in two different seats on the exact same flight.
Ah, all those dreamers who saw a future with robots freeing us to a life of leisure and intellectual pursuits...guess that all depends a bit too much on the welfare state.
Frankly, I think it's health care that stops that vision from becoming reality. It seems like the best health care will always be expensive...I could almost see robots building me a humble paradise, but knowing by accepting a lowerbudget lifestyle I was denying myself the best in life preserving and extending technologies would be a fly in that ointment.
Mod Parent Up...I was thinking the exact same thing. Only a game on an engine about as complex as life itself could cover all the possibilities that a thinking outside the box terrorist has.
Frankly, paper-and-dice roleplaying would have a better bet at getting to something real.
And you know, given how many ways we're vulnerable, it's a little surprising nothing has happened.
Despite decades of research, we have never fully discovered what the Moon is made of," says Manuel Grande at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who built the spacecraft's X-ray spectrometer. Haha! So my cheese theory has not been disproven!
I'm the author of JoustPong, still a work in progress...I found out that an early playable alpha was only 60 bytes over the 1K limit, so I stripped it to 1 player only and sent it in.
Most of the other atari games are previous 4K works, and generally more impressive than the 1K version of my ongoing effort.
Re:Super ultra elite developers
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One thing I've noticed, of which this article is a very good example, is how most everyone who hires software developers claims to be hiring (or at least looking for) the very best of the best.
Yeah, I wonder about that myself. I've heard that "10x as productive" programmer idea before, and while I've definately seen a continuum of good developers and awful developers, I've never met THAT guy. Or gal. And I wonder if that person does exist, finding an ubercoder like that who can also deal with people and the real world...they must be even more rare, a real lottery win.
The Americans spent more than $1 million developing a pen that would write in space. The Russians used a pencil
I heard someone argue that a pencil is really not kind to a life support system, much more particulate debris (wood, graphite) than an ink based system.
So while it does say some positive things about simple Russian engineering vs an American approach of throwing money at a problem, it's not all positive.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point: but on the other hand, engineers tend to downplay the importance of things looking good.
Case in point: I was giving advice to one guy who was making a windows front end to "Z26", an atari 2600 emulator (interesting, people who say 'engineers make commandline, let the designers do the ui'--well, the integration is a lot looser, and there are fewer chances for interaction between ui and core engine. anyway.) So he had a skins/wallpaper type option. (It was kind of like a tiling webpage background image thing behind the list of ROMs) I suggested he get rid of it: I mean, who cares what a frickin' game launcher looks like, right? But he says far and away that customizability is what he gets the most complements and feedback on...
Go figure.
Good idea! But it doesn't work if slashdot (or whatever site this is happenign on) is having a server problem, which actually happens just as often as the slow down cowboy issue. Well, it does happen, but your stuck having to carefully leave that window open, rather than being able to cut and paste your message into like a text document...
In the case you describe, I'd suggest it should be a configurable option for "new windows" vs "single gene window", or two seperate options in the context menu, just like IE lets you select "open" vs "open in new window".
There's a chance someone will get upset that they looked at the URL for gene 312, decided to save it for later, opened up gene 741, and then gene 312 is GONE (unless they know to try to use the browser's back button) I've certainly been frustrated by websites that force window reuse on me...sometimes I really do want to multitask/have a window open to come back to.
I can tell you how to fix that in IE: Goto Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced. Look for an item called "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts". Uncheck it.
Interesting...thanks!
(It's super dumb that that's a default...in fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of a good scenario for that.)
I assumed it was an OS thing and not an app thing because my startmenu has two shortcuts... I guess one is just to IE as an app, but because it always opens my local start page first, I think of it as being the same kind of thing as my shortcut to the company's intranet.
Heh, reminds me of Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things. He loved picking on things where aesthetics weere given priority over utility, like doorhandles that were the same for push and pull. He dismissed it with a sniff and "probably won an award".
;-)
Of course, his own book suffered from the same problem...it was originalled "The Psychology of Everyday Things", which let the book refer to itself as "POET", kinda nice.
Of course, bookstores and other catalogers kept putting it under "psychology" rather than "design".
And indeed, it had won awards.
And, and one other windows annoyance:
any (non-browser) program that opens a URL thorugh the OS, be it the start menu, should OPEN UP A NEW FRICKIN' BROWSER WINDOW rather than highjacking an existing one. If I have a window open in the background, there are GOOD ODDS I that I *want* the information that's in there to STAY there. Double Duhhr.
It's a Web App. We're constrained by the browser.
Insightful comment, though.
Ah, yeah. Although one level Ctrl-Z does work in textareas on IE at least, once you've gone past the starting page you're often screwed.
Actually, I tend to get screwed a lot by stuff like Slashdot's "wait 2 minutes" limiter...I don't mind waiting so much, but I think the submissions page has "No Cache" or something set, so everything I typed has gone away. I've had a similar problem elsewhere; one hacky solution (when I'm thinking there might be a problem) is to hit ctrl-a ctrl-c (select all, copy) in the main textarea before submitting...and I was wishing there was some way that could happen automatically.
While I'm on the topic of web UIs and usability...another favorite gripe: 9/10 of all "reset form fields" just should NOT exist. Just because it's easy "functionality" to include, some web designers do, so you end up with this little button that looks a LOT like the submit button you mean to press, but it erases everything you typed into the form. Duhhhr! The only time it should be considered is when you're EDITING data, not ENTERING it, and even then some kind of "are you sure" would probably make more sense.
yeah, I think you nailed re: "power users".
It's a non-trivial problem:
* show too much, newbies get scared
* hide it too well, and medium-experienced folk will never learn about it and even power users might curse you
And so many "power configurations" are so poorly explained. More than half the time context sensitive help just lists the name of the command, or doesn't give any context as to why you would want to use it.
I have very mixed opinoins about Window's "make unusued menu options go away" way of coping with this kind of problem. It seems clever and sometimes works alright, but menus that are never the same twice can be annoying.
Well, speaking as a programmer who "uses" many other pieces of software...yeah, I think I do have some better ideas for many of the pieces of software I use...
... I really miss the old independent app that would pop up. It was so clear that it was a seperate task. This newish sidebar sucks...I hate how I can't tell at a glance if the right pane is search results, or if maybe I had already hit the "X" button and the window is just displaying an ordinary set of folder contents. Duhhrr.
/this/ used for emphasis, to always asking if I want to mark all messages as read when exiting a group without reading all of its messages...
Of course, many of my potential suggestions have to do with "improvements" made in UIs I know, so I have to sort out "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" from "I don't like it for these specific functional reasons" (and that's always with the risk of not seeing why the "improvement" was made...there could be decent reasons for some of them.)
That said: some of my favorite gripes...
Windows. Ctrl-F in file explorer
Windows. Ctrl-F in IE...considering how many decent ideas they've had w/ autocomplete of previous URLs in the Address bar, I'm impressed that the Ctrl-F box is so bad. Would it be so hard to make a list of my past searches into a dropdown combo box there? Is there a logical UI reason why sucessful in-page searches have a larger chance of showing up when I hit Ctrl-F next time, when usually it's the failed in-page searches that I want to repeat? Most infuriating is when a page hasn't finished loading...ctrl-F pulls up one of those wacky sidebars again "gee, if your page is taking more than a few seconds to load, maybe you actually want to search the entire frickin' internet through your special OEM-branded portal". GAWD, is there a way to turn that off?
Also recently I upgraded to the latest version of the newsreader Tin (on an old academic user account)...the misfeatures multiply, and only some of them seen configurable, from showing the msg header even after paging down (thus making it 4 times harder to see where one msg stopped and the next began) to color-coding instead of displaying the characters *stuff* _like_
See, it's not so hard to play armchair UI guru...
Err, did you suggest at least trying Ctrl-Z or right-click "Undo"?
... now... whoops" with that.
I'm surprised how many programs that's pretty effective for. I've corrected many the errant "first ctrl-a
Most programmer think they know how to do UI.
(Frankly, I think many of them do, to a certain extent, if they're reasonably smart and understand ideas like not throwing too many options at the novice user)
It's visual design where the failing comes in. I think.
Or maybe I'm just generalizing from me.
Yeah, even a game like Soul Caliber 2 ignores the floor when it would be inconvenient for the animation...
he next big upgrade people will be excited about is the ability to do CG in real-time comparable to the stuff we've seen come out of Pixar. Perfectly smooth, anti-aliased, nice shadows, bright color, etc. Unfortunately, consoles are still a ways away from that. What's worse is that when they do reach that point, then what?
Heh, you know, I'm surprised how few "perfect spheres" (and no I'm not talking the boobies in DOA volleyball) games have...you can usually see the angles quite obviously. I mean you think a game like monkey ball would be able to have spheres whose shadows have more than 16 or so edges..
I guess it doesn't count as "3G", but for one job in mid-2000 I was playing with this clip-on cellular modem for the Palm, and I found a pretty high correlation to feeling headachey and using the damn thing..can't remember the name of the product though (Hmm! Another symptom?)
Seriously, I'm a little wary when I read that biologist pointing out that we are essentially conducting a massive study of radiation on humans consisting of the entire population of cellphone users. Maybe we should all get tin hats after all.
I suspect that those are the equivalent of an actor's "headshot", mostly for use in 'official' documents, like for the pamphlet of something where he was a speaker.
Narcisist nerds will generally aim for more obviously interesting pictures to show off.
For people who are wondering what mod_perl is exactly: it's a way of integrating perl into Apache's webserver. I think the main advantage is that you don't have the overhead of firing up perl for each cgi-type request. The main gotchas, for the developers point of view, involve a little perl enviornment staying alive, when a perl script starts, runs, and stops, it cleans up after itself, but when it 'stays alive' inside apache, you have to make sure it's not accumulating too much memory cruft, that you're closing handles, etc etc.
This is what I know mostly by reputation, rather than direct experience, experts please feel free to correct me
"what is the optimal population?"
Since the average individual produces MUCH more than he consumes, the obvious answer is A LOT higher than the current population.
This goes for Americans too. We also produce much more than we consume.
Errr...it depends on how you measure production and consumption, isn't it? I mean, a lot more things get polluted than get made pristine over time, and that's going to impact the living situation.
We aren't free of entropy.
The simplest example, is comparing price/performance and advancement of the rail industry (government sanctioned monopolies) with the airline industry (competitive free market).
I'm not saying it fully spoils your point, but I wouldn't point to the USA Airline system as an obvious beacon of the triumph of capitalism, what with the bailout and all. And even discounting that as just an industry specific result of WTC, I think most people dislike and distrust the wacky and seemingly inconsistent pricing system, where there might be hundreds of dollars difference in price in two different seats on the exact same flight.
Ah, all those dreamers who saw a future with robots freeing us to a life of leisure and intellectual pursuits...guess that all depends a bit too much on the welfare state.
Frankly, I think it's health care that stops that vision from becoming reality. It seems like the best health care will always be expensive...I could almost see robots building me a humble paradise, but knowing by accepting a lowerbudget lifestyle I was denying myself the best in life preserving and extending technologies would be a fly in that ointment.
Mod Parent Up...I was thinking the exact same thing. Only a game on an engine about as complex as life itself could cover all the possibilities that a thinking outside the box terrorist has.
Frankly, paper-and-dice roleplaying would have a better bet at getting to something real.
And you know, given how many ways we're vulnerable, it's a little surprising nothing has happened.
Despite decades of research, we have never fully discovered what the Moon is made of," says Manuel Grande at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who built the spacecraft's X-ray spectrometer.
Haha! So my cheese theory has not been disproven!
Dang...this is one of the quietest slashdot posts I've ever seen...
ah well!
I'm the author of JoustPong, still a work in progress...I found out that an early playable alpha was only 60 bytes over the 1K limit, so I stripped it to 1 player only and sent it in.
Most of the other atari games are previous 4K works, and generally more impressive than the 1K version of my ongoing effort.
One thing I've noticed, of which this article is a very good example, is how most everyone who hires software developers claims to be hiring (or at least looking for) the very best of the best.
Yeah, I wonder about that myself. I've heard that "10x as productive" programmer idea before, and while I've definately seen a continuum of good developers and awful developers, I've never met THAT guy. Or gal. And I wonder if that person does exist, finding an ubercoder like that who can also deal with people and the real world...they must be even more rare, a real lottery win.
The Americans spent more than $1 million developing a pen that would write in space. The Russians used a pencil
I heard someone argue that a pencil is really not kind to a life support system, much more particulate debris (wood, graphite) than an ink based system.
So while it does say some positive things about simple Russian engineering vs an American approach of throwing money at a problem, it's not all positive.