I agree with all your sentiments, although "overused" is an odd complaint. "Used at all" might be better.
First and foremost, I despise being locked into the Acrobat-only interpretation of the format. Not that I hate Adobe { you PostScript love if {honk} } but I don't want a separate viewer just to look at stupid text files.
I have dozens of programs that I'd rather use, all of which don't have GUIs that suck as bad as Acrobat. I don't like having to click to accept a license agreement I have no intention of honoring. I don't like Windows launching yet another process to show me a friggin' web page. I also get to spend far too many seconds watching a useless splash screen list off dozens of hated software patents while unneeded module after unneeded module loads up, consuming 16MB in the process, just to display a 65kb file that contains less than 4,000 actual characters. Finally, Windows keeps the lame-ass process hanging around like an ex-girlfriend until I close my browser! Adobe also flagrantly violates the Microsoft GUI guidelines, for they obviously know better than Redmond how people use mice and keyboards on Microsoft's own products. Whether you like it or not when you're in Rome you better do as the friggin' Romans do.
I also want to be able to manipulate any and every file I receive. That means copy, paste, shuffle, paint, edit, everything, anything. A reader-only is a complete waste of both bytes and braincells. And a mostly-opaque file format prevents me from working the way I'm used to working. So, I occasionally have to put up with Acrobat. So I always end up fighting the cursor in Acrobat, trying to make it work the way every other program works on this box. Why does Adobe think they're better? I don't care about the cross-platform experience, I don't give a sh!t how it works on a Mac or on Linux. As a Windows user, it should feel native, and it doesn't -- not by a long shot.
And no thank you, I don't want, nor will I use, an open-source module to display PDFs in Ghostscript. It's still a separate viewer, and I still have most all of the problems listed above, just fewer that say Adobe when loading. I really simply want PDFs to go away, forever and ever. Failing that, if they were handled natively in Mozilla, I might not bitch as much.:-)
Of course that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
I install Mozzie first, then I download and run Spybot Search and Destroy and run the cleanup/immunize functions, and then I install AVG. Nothing else is an "absolute" but I usually install them. (I don't install Visual Studio on other people's boxes, of course!)
There are replacements that work fairly well, but are not universally used. Those would be hardware tokens. Smart cards, USB dongles, even PalmOS devices. They even pass the 'Mom' test.
"See, mom, to get your email you just have to stick your key in the lock slot."
Computer security is traditionally based on a password simply because for the last 40 years the only input device readily available to virtually every user has been a keyboard. Hardware tokens that are used like keys, however, fit the "key" metaphor, and are readily understood by users. They're also protected by the users like keys, too. If the BBC guy had offered them a bar of chocolate for their car keys, he'd have spent the day with no takers at all.
Users imbue hardware keys with a special "security magic" -- they believe security derives from the key, and are reluctant to part with it. But very few people ascribe that value to passwords.
We're getting closer to this, as more and more electronic "keys" hit the consumer marketplace. Chips embedded in smart cards are fairly secure and cheap, but smart card readers are far from universal. USB ports are much more readily available to many home users, although the dongles don't fit nicely on most keyrings. And no average home user is ever going to pay extra for a biometric reader on their own home PC. Dallas Semiconductor's "one-touch" buttons would probably work really well in this respect, as the readers are quite cheap (cheap enough that they could be probably be incorporated on motherboards for under a dollar); and the buttons themselves are also cheap and fit a "coin" form factor, and are easy enough to hang from a physical keyring.
I'd love to see a physical key replace my logins. For the more secure stuff at work, adding a single password to the key requirement would keep my box nice and safe.
Heh. I remember seeing something about secure passwords that went like this:
Corporate Security Password rules:
Your password must contain more than 8 but less than 10 characters.
Your password must contain alternating vowels and consonants.
Your password must contain both upper case and lower case characters.
Your password must contain one numeric digit and one non-alphanumeric character.
Your password must consist of characters typed using alternating hands, starting with the left hand.
Your password may not be a series of letters appearing in order on the keyboard in any direction.
Your password may not contain any proper nouns.
Your password may not be the same as any of your ten previous passwords.
Your password may not be a word from the dictionary.
Your password may not be the same as any password used on any other system.
As a matter of fact, there is only one word that meets all of these requirements. It is therefore the most secure password in the world, and so it has been assigned to you as your password.
I've found that when I'm helping people over the phone, they'll actually speak them out loud as they type them. I think these are the people whose lips move as they read.
Me: Now I need you to log in, please, using your account and password.
They: OK, that's M459465, uhh... k-e-v-i-n-2-1. There. I'm in!
Me: sigh.
No, Minnesota took their tobacco settlement money ($4.5 billion) and after enriching the law firm (to the tune of $450,000,000 which averaged out to around $3000/hr for everyone in the company, including the janitorial staff) actually put a pile of it aside for the intended purpose of preventing kids from smoking. They created a project called "Target Market" and they paid for lots of commercials featuring stuff like body bags being dumped on the steps of R.J.Reynolds Corp., etc. The campaign was supposed to be "edgy", "hip" and "relevant" and all those other current marketing words. They were somewhat interesting, but damned if I know if it worked, I'm older than that and I've never smoked.
Anyway, this year the state eyeballed that big ole Pile-O-Money and said, "Hmm...health of kids vs. budget deficit and a no new taxes pledge." You get 0 points for guessing which one won. Research has shown that youth smoking is up in the six months following the end of the campaign, but whether it's a true cause and effect is anyone's guess.
I'm not convinced that pointilism is compression.
It is approximation by partial representation
I apologize: compression does not necessarily imply "loss" of information. Perhaps compaction would have been a more appropriate word, or perhaps I should have said "lossy" compression. Regardless, how would you define lossy compression if not "an approximation by partial representation?" I think that's an almost perfect definition.
In any case, I would disagree with you in that it's a pointer to a memory -- I am easily able to recognize the 19th century Mediterranean seashore in Monet's paintings without ever having been on the Mediterranean (or lived in the 19th century.) Perhaps I don't experience the remembered sense of salt spray on the face, or the scent on the breeze, or the sounds of the local birds. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize the picture for what it is, regardless of the dots used to represent it. It's still a form of compression -- and my mind is capable of decompressing the image, although it will be lossy.
I think it would be more likely that the reverse is true: I would need to experience Monet in order to understand pointilism. But not understanding pointilism doesn't prevent me from understanding the images.
You're right in that a name would be more akin to a pointer (it's Handel not Handle, btw) but try to keep your analogies tied together: Referring to a picture by the name of "Les villas à Bordighera" would be a pointer to a specific image, (or it would be, if I was familiar enough with his work to recognize the name.) Handel's Messiah is simply more well known.
Artists have known since at least the time of Rembrandt [i.e. almost 400 years] that the human eye can be fooled into seeing what it wants to see; in the case of Rembrandt and his pointilism, the eye [or the part of the brain responsible for processing data collected by the eye] merges small dots of color into a larger whole that it would prefer to see.
You've just described compression. A particularily artful, beautiful form of compression (especially Monet,) but it's compression nonetheless. You just proved point the previous poster made: nobody is going to be fooled into believeing that a pointilist painting is actually a scene taking place in front of them. You may admire it for its beauty, for the technical and artistic prowess required to render it to the canvas, for any number of reasons. But it's not a "perfect" rendition; if you 'believe' you're at the seashore any more or less than you would by staring at a photograph of the seashore it's an emotional decision, not a rational one. And you certainly wouldn't settle for seeing James Bond rendered in a pointillistic style for two hours, not when you know you can see it in all of its Technicolor glory in the next theatre over. It's different -- it's an art form.
Now, there's almost nothing artful about audio compression. (I say almost because there are artists applying all sorts of distortion to their sounds to create new ones, including overcompression.) For the most part, the distortion caused by compression is just a nasty side-effect. But the ear is indeed "fooled" by the compression. When you listen to a compressed audio stream, you hear music. It may be poorly reproduced, tinnily digitized, and companded down to the level of a phone line, but you still hear the music behind it. That's "fooling" the ear -- at least as much as pointilist art "fools" the eye (and without the art.)
Anyway, setting all "golden ear" arguments aside and getting back on topic, I very seriously doubt they'd use compression at all on the audio. The imaging they're doing on each frame is lossless (each frame is probably around 40MB RAW), and this guy didn't get funding for 800 Macs by being stupid and cheap.
Yeah, you do pay for many channels you don't watch, but then how do you decide the value of the channel?
It should be easy. Your cable company will publish their menu of channels, with an a la carte rate. Go through the list of channels you already programmed out of your VCR or Tivo and strike those first. Next, go through the list of channels you know you rarely watch, strike those, and see where you're at financially. If you're above $38 (which is the point at which you've already established that cable TV is of value to you) then strike a few more of those "iffy" channels.
I know that for me there are less than two dozen channels I even bother surfing. I bet a la carte could cut my bill in half.
Oh, yeah, they're quick. They had the whole Wizard of Oz-like "Follow the only road" across Canada episode (which ended with the new Prime Minister of Canada actually turning out to be a puppet operated by Saddam Hussein from a spider hole) done on a Wednesday, and Saddam had been captured only the previous Saturday.
I was thinking that they could have had some of it planned or even done earlier (they've always portrayed Saddam as Canadian) but the Canadian jokes were also very timely, and revolved around current Canadian issues with their new Prime Minister, so I really think the whole show must have been produced in the five days they had.
Speaking of which, does anybody know what happened in Hawaii that caused South Park to not play the new Lemmiwinks episode last night? I really didn't understand their splash screen that read something to the effect of: "Due to the recent events in Hawaii, the Lemmiwinks episode will not be shown tonight." Now, the A.W.E.S.O.M.O. episode was still pretty funny, but I just didn't get the Hawaii thing.
Carrying this to the absurd extreme then indicates that the BSA is ultimately going to do more to drive Joe Sixpack to Linux anyway, since he's never, ever going to pony up real money for Longhorn and TrustedOffice.NET
As you may have guessed, I was mostly joking by making a PocketPC slam. But I've watched several friends over the years try different approaches to solve the multiple personal device problem.
Friend 1 had a Palm VII for several years, then switched to a Tungsten T with Bluetooth and a T610 phone. For data and SMS he keeps the phone in his pocket, and just uses it via the Tungsten. For phone calls, the Tungsten stays in his pocket and the phone comes out. He's also purchased a Bluetooth car kit that has turned his car into a speakerphone whenever he's in it.
Friend 2 has owned every cell-phone/PalmOS combined machine ever produced (minus the Qualcomm brick of the mid '90s.) He's had everything from the Visorphone on up to today's most recent Kyocera. His Kyocera lives in a holster on his belt. He recently added a Bluetooth transceiver adapter plugged into the headset jack of the phone and now uses a Jabra handsfree Bluetooth headset (that he also keeps in the belt holster.) Holy Utility Belts, Batman, that was the wrong way to go!
Friend 3 has a Symbion(?) based phone/Java thing. I don't personally understand it, and it doesn't run Palm OS, but he can surf the web on it. It has bright colorful graphics, a flip-down keypad, a camera, a memory stick, and can play some kind of proprietary streaming video off the web. The screen is halfway between a nice Tungsten screen and the tiny Kyocera screen. Personally, I think a phone with a "screen saver" is more than a little overkill, but it's only one device, and he's happy with it. I have too much invested in PalmOS to want a different thing, though.
Friend 1 is the most smugly satisfied with the cleanliness of his setup. He's only considering upgrading to a newer Tungsten that supports 802.11 and has the soft Graffiti area, and doesn't have a broken power switch.
Friend 2 has had it with the combined devices. He's forever cleaning grease off his screens, his screens are too tiny, the machines are too limited, the battery life sucks, and the machines are too big to carry in a shirt pocket and so require a belt holster. He's switching to the Tungsten 3 (or maybe 4 when they come out) and a Bluetooth phone. His plans are for the phone to remain hidden in his pocket forever, and to use the headset for speaking and the Tungsten for data.
As for me, I was too stupid to sign up with a phone provider that offered data connectivity (AT&T PCS service has SMS only) so I have a completely unconnected Tungsten T, and a tiny dead-simple Nokia phone (B&W screen with no real graphics and an antiquated but refreshingly clean keyboard layout. Oh, and it has analog fallback, which I consider a bonus since I go lots of places that GSM doesn't.) I can carry both devices comfortably in my shirt pocket. Apart from the complete lack of data access, I'm not unhappy.
I've already decided that when I upgrade it will be to a tiny data-enabled phone with Bluetooth. I really don't want a combined device. They all have severe screen size limitations, they're about a generation behind on Palm handheld technologies, and they end up totally gross after every phone call. The separate devices are each optimized for their functions, and so they do them better.
New PDA: palm, phone, mp3 player, RFID scanner. I'd pay good money for that, yes.
(BTW, you left out 802.11 and Bluetooth support.) The real question is: would you want to carry it? A Palm with all that extra crap would weigh almost as much as a Pocket PC device!
Try this link. It's a kit that can be ordered to come with a 5140, and is not a standard part of their ordinary 5140.
It looks like they're trying to market these to niche businesses: security companies, disabled assistance companies, meter reading companies, etc. I don't think there will be much general call for them. Many of the user scenarios they describe are already pretty silly: "Distress Assistance: Touch a tag on your clothing such as a belt, and the phone initiates an emergency call." Like that's going to catch on.
Perhaps if retail RFID catches on the way WalM*rt hopes, some consumers will be interested enough to want a personally owned device to read their tags. How many WalM*rt shoppers are even literate enough to read their laundry tags, let alone RFID tags, is a different debate.:-)
So they're incorporating an RFID reader in a phone. This is similar to the barcode scanners for Palm devices that came out a few years ago. I had a couple of them (evaluations for work) but never found a compelling personal use for them.
This is novel in that it contains a portable "user-level" RFID scanner. (The phone bit is simply an already existant battery box.) So, now the questions are: what can end users do with it, and can we hack it?
One thing to keep in mind is that with the small antenna inherent to a cell phone footprint, this will pretty much be an "almost-contact" scanner with a range of centimeters, not meters.
Wow, sorry, I didn't mean to strike such a nerve with so many people.
First, let me say that I acknowledge that I don't have an "artistic eye" when it comes to GUI. Yes, I know what looks good, and yes, I certainly can tell a bad one from a good one. But I do find it difficult to build a visually pleasing interface. I simply don't have the color-coordinated eyeball required to see if my own screens are pretty. I consider making an aesthetically pleasing screen "hard", because I can't do it myself. More open source developers need to acknowledge this weakness in their own programs, and seek outside artists.
I've gone through weeks of usability labs (including the fully equipped ones with remote cameras, one-way mirrors and three observers) on various projects, fine-tuning interfaces and flow. I've interviewed many people, and made lots of improvements to our applications over the years based on user feedback. While not "hard" in the sense of juggling lit torches (I can't juggle, either!) I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to improve the interface.
In the end, it's worth it -- I actually discovered how much "money" I save for each second I shave off of a transaction, and it's two orders of magnitude more than my original guess -- but it's still a lot of work.
The original article hypothesised that open source projects are failing to catch on because of UI deficiencies (among other reasons.) Given that Joe Sixpack has already been shown to download Kazaa to save a few bucks on the latest Britney Spears CD, and puts up with listening to a crap encoded 64kbps MP3, we need to answer the questions, "why isn't this same cheap Joe Sixpack downloading and running open source applications by the millions? And why is Microsoft still in business?" Could it be that the original author is actually on to something, and that UIs among open source projects are not perceived to be consistent (or are at least "different" in that they're out of the typical Windows user's comfort zone?) There has got to be a reason that every cheapskate Joe Sixpack hasn't abandoned expensive Windows for free (as in beer) Linux. Inconsistent UI is as good a guess as any.
I actually think you proved my point for me here, and quite nicely.
You developed an interface. You sat down and watched your users. You came up with some novel solutions, and streamlined your users' tasks. You brought the GUI to someone with an artistic eye (your sister.) You repeated the process until your users' workflow was optimized.
Think about how much work went into the steps you detailed here. You actually described that you went through the process I mentioned in my earlier post, from making decisions about data to be entered, workflow, aesthetics, and went on to a usability lab (OK, you watched it in production, but the key was you watched it.) That sounds like a lot of work over a long period of time. Plus, you had the luxury of drawing a paycheck while it was happening.
Getting someone to do all that work is hard. And once you've gone through it once or twice, you realize the benefits you gain from it. But open source project developers frequently don't have that experience, and nobody ever considers it the "glamour" work, even though you may know you'll derive lots of satisfaction from seeing happier users.
(to bring up the obvious - there is no open source clippy)
And maybe that's the problem.
I'm one of those guys who can't wait to take a hammer to the options and smash sh!t like that Clippy into the flaming embers of hell itself. Don't hide stuff from me, show me fully qualified paths, give me dangerous options, don't tell me what to do, don't hold my hand, I don't want your useless tip of the day, that kind of stuff. And I hang around with people of a like mind -- my friends are all techies, and they, of course, feel the same way I do about Clippy (I think.) It's an evil blight upon computerdom, foisted off upon us by Darth Gates.
So you might say I was more than a little surprised when I was setting up Office for my wife and I was going in to turn off the "dog" agent (one of the Clippy variants) when she said "Oh, don't turn it off. I like it."
Stunned silence. She liked it. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Here I was, having spent the last thirty-one years of my life learning how to use and program computers, bursting at the seams with pride of my "|\/|4D s|<i11z", secretly laughing at those people who don't know enough about computers to even turn Clippy off, only to find that my wife of twenty years uses Clippy. And she likes it.
Fortunately, I was too stunned to open my mouth and say something that might have been hurtful to her. It gave me time to think about what she said. She liked it. She found it useful. And I consider her to be a very intelligent woman.
So, now I at least understand that there is a place for Clippy, at least among the vast majority of "users" out there. And Microsoft apparently understands that, too. Open source developers? We're still mocking Clippy. But we should be learning from him.
Someone setup a GUI Guidlines wiki, and we can solve this argument once and for all.
It's not just the document. It's the visionary, the enforcer, the guy with the big stick that beats you until your GUI is perfect.
I'm guessing there is already a GUI guidelines wiki somewhere (I'm not going to bother looking right now.) And I'm sure it has great advice. Just as I'm sure there's a set of KDE GUI guidelines somewhere, and a set of Gnome GUI guidelines somewhere else. But by themselves, those documents don't cause one moment of review. They don't fix any problems unless the developer consults them regularly. Even if the developer designs a nice GUI for revision 1.0, hires a UI designer, runs a month of user acceptance labs, it still doesn't translate to ongoing review of GUI changes. Version 1.1 may come out with a rhinocerous horn sticking out from the middle of the screen. No enforcement or review is ever guaranteed, and no continuity of the GUI is assured.
It would be nice if a wiki could solve that problem. I'd love it, and I think it would go a long ways towards solving open source acceptance. But active, ongoing review is going to take more than a musty document.
Hmm... I wonder if it would be possible to set up a neural network program or genetic learning program to recognize "good" GUIs from "bad" GUIs? That would be a killer app for the open source movement, a GUI rater. Each revision of your open source project, you could run it through this GUI rater and publish your results: "Gnomovision 2.3 scored a 93 on the guiometer!" So you only got a score of 71? Go back and tweak it some more.
You touched on what I think is the heart of the matter: "simple, one-click." In the article her first point is User Interface Design. She says "I suspect that there isn't one single reason for the poor quality of user interfaces, but here are some explanations I've heard roaming the Open Source circles"
I think she missed the biggest reason of all here: Designing a good GUI is very hard. Wait -- let me further clarify that: it's very, very hard.
Designing a GUI from scratch requires a sense of aesthetics (balance, color, flow) and the ability to decide exactly what needs to be up front, and what needs to be hidden behind a menu, option button, or some such. Frequently the developer will have a fervent opinion about "this is the most important thing, it must be on top" whereas a good user interface designer can step back and see what will work for the users. A good UI designer will also run user acceptance labs to test their designs. Many open source projects end up with little more than "Hey Bill, would you check this out for me?" And Bill, being aware of the project from its inception, and having heard about it over the lunch table for the last five months, already posesses a deeper understanding of the task that prevents him from being able to adequately judge the design.
Apple, of course, has always been at the forefront of GUI design (at least as a commercial success, I'm fully aware of the contributions of Xerox Parc, et al.) I believe this comes from a strong, single, visionary designer, a rigid set of GUI design guidelines that must be absolutely followed, and a corporate mindset that the GUI is the most important aspect of an application. They undergo rigorous testing procedures, and countless user feedback labs. Microsoft hasn't ever caught up to Apple in that respect, although they do have a good set of GUI guidelines and some very strong products.
But nobody in the open source world wants to be "told what to do". Also, nobody in the open source world feels they have the authority to stand up and say "you must design your GUI in this fashion." Some projects, of course, will have beautiful, solid GUIs thanks to having a quality GUI designer on the project. But that currently doesn't pan out beyond the scope of the single good application. So the consistency isn't there, and it will never be there until someone puts together a GUI committee that has the authority to stamp "Tux Approved -- Good GUI Inside" on open source projects. It will require a single, strong voice. And that voice has to have a world of talent behind it. That's a mighty tall order for hundreds of grass-roots volunteer efforts to come up with.
Your post reminded me of my initial reluctance to adopt UML techniques. My first exposure to this was about 10 years ago when Booch, Rumbaugh, et al, were still busy duking it out whether you should draw relationships as dashed lines or dotted lines to red clouds or black boxes. There were some really heinous proposals floating around (Booch had some of the worst, as I recall, because they all centered on "you should draw this thing exactly this way," where a stray curlique on the left side of a comment box might mean "but only in odd years preceding a leap year.")
UML still suffers from some of that: filled arrowheads vs. stick arrowheads, for example. Arrows do inherently express a relationship (at least to me,) but neither filled nor hollow represents "synchronous" vs "asynchronous". The UML is an 800 page standard, of which about 750 pages are useless detail fluff of this nature. Yet they're all "part of the standard" and thus are all equally important, at least to the AR+ people who religiously push these things. I understand that if you want to precisely express an idea that you should use the precise syntax in the language. But practical use of UML shouldn't require knowing all 800 pages, just as writing practical C++ code doesn't require an intimate knowledge of templates.
Please don't dismiss me immediately as a UML critic (or a template critic!) One of the places that I find it of value is that it gives us developers a common ground on which to meet the analysts and business users. But much of the syntax is simply too cryptic to be of real working value in expressing ideas. And if you look at developers as the "compilers" of UML (the people who have to interpret it into code) we would have to know every last comma of the standard to perfectly implement it. Not a realistic assessment.
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First and foremost, I despise being locked into the Acrobat-only interpretation of the format. Not that I hate Adobe { you PostScript love if {honk} } but I don't want a separate viewer just to look at stupid text files.
I have dozens of programs that I'd rather use, all of which don't have GUIs that suck as bad as Acrobat. I don't like having to click to accept a license agreement I have no intention of honoring. I don't like Windows launching yet another process to show me a friggin' web page. I also get to spend far too many seconds watching a useless splash screen list off dozens of hated software patents while unneeded module after unneeded module loads up, consuming 16MB in the process, just to display a 65kb file that contains less than 4,000 actual characters. Finally, Windows keeps the lame-ass process hanging around like an ex-girlfriend until I close my browser! Adobe also flagrantly violates the Microsoft GUI guidelines, for they obviously know better than Redmond how people use mice and keyboards on Microsoft's own products. Whether you like it or not when you're in Rome you better do as the friggin' Romans do.
I also want to be able to manipulate any and every file I receive. That means copy, paste, shuffle, paint, edit, everything, anything. A reader-only is a complete waste of both bytes and braincells. And a mostly-opaque file format prevents me from working the way I'm used to working. So, I occasionally have to put up with Acrobat. So I always end up fighting the cursor in Acrobat, trying to make it work the way every other program works on this box. Why does Adobe think they're better? I don't care about the cross-platform experience, I don't give a sh!t how it works on a Mac or on Linux. As a Windows user, it should feel native, and it doesn't -- not by a long shot.
And no thank you, I don't want, nor will I use, an open-source module to display PDFs in Ghostscript. It's still a separate viewer, and I still have most all of the problems listed above, just fewer that say Adobe when loading. I really simply want PDFs to go away, forever and ever. Failing that, if they were handled natively in Mozilla, I might not bitch as much. :-)
Of course that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
At least he had the courage required to create a troll account before admitting that he's a Windows user ...
I install Mozzie first, then I download and run Spybot Search and Destroy and run the cleanup/immunize functions, and then I install AVG. Nothing else is an "absolute" but I usually install them. (I don't install Visual Studio on other people's boxes, of course!)
"See, mom, to get your email you just have to stick your key in the lock slot."
Computer security is traditionally based on a password simply because for the last 40 years the only input device readily available to virtually every user has been a keyboard. Hardware tokens that are used like keys, however, fit the "key" metaphor, and are readily understood by users. They're also protected by the users like keys, too. If the BBC guy had offered them a bar of chocolate for their car keys, he'd have spent the day with no takers at all.
Users imbue hardware keys with a special "security magic" -- they believe security derives from the key, and are reluctant to part with it. But very few people ascribe that value to passwords.
We're getting closer to this, as more and more electronic "keys" hit the consumer marketplace. Chips embedded in smart cards are fairly secure and cheap, but smart card readers are far from universal. USB ports are much more readily available to many home users, although the dongles don't fit nicely on most keyrings. And no average home user is ever going to pay extra for a biometric reader on their own home PC. Dallas Semiconductor's "one-touch" buttons would probably work really well in this respect, as the readers are quite cheap (cheap enough that they could be probably be incorporated on motherboards for under a dollar); and the buttons themselves are also cheap and fit a "coin" form factor, and are easy enough to hang from a physical keyring.
I'd love to see a physical key replace my logins. For the more secure stuff at work, adding a single password to the key requirement would keep my box nice and safe.
Corporate Security Password rules:
As a matter of fact, there is only one word that meets all of these requirements. It is therefore the most secure password in the world, and so it has been assigned to you as your password.
Me: Now I need you to log in, please, using your account and password.
They: OK, that's M459465, uhh... k-e-v-i-n-2-1. There. I'm in!
Me: sigh.
Anyway, this year the state eyeballed that big ole Pile-O-Money and said, "Hmm...health of kids vs. budget deficit and a no new taxes pledge." You get 0 points for guessing which one won. Research has shown that youth smoking is up in the six months following the end of the campaign, but whether it's a true cause and effect is anyone's guess.
I apologize: compression does not necessarily imply "loss" of information. Perhaps compaction would have been a more appropriate word, or perhaps I should have said "lossy" compression. Regardless, how would you define lossy compression if not "an approximation by partial representation?" I think that's an almost perfect definition.
In any case, I would disagree with you in that it's a pointer to a memory -- I am easily able to recognize the 19th century Mediterranean seashore in Monet's paintings without ever having been on the Mediterranean (or lived in the 19th century.) Perhaps I don't experience the remembered sense of salt spray on the face, or the scent on the breeze, or the sounds of the local birds. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize the picture for what it is, regardless of the dots used to represent it. It's still a form of compression -- and my mind is capable of decompressing the image, although it will be lossy.
I think it would be more likely that the reverse is true: I would need to experience Monet in order to understand pointilism. But not understanding pointilism doesn't prevent me from understanding the images.
You're right in that a name would be more akin to a pointer (it's Handel not Handle, btw) but try to keep your analogies tied together: Referring to a picture by the name of "Les villas à Bordighera" would be a pointer to a specific image, (or it would be, if I was familiar enough with his work to recognize the name.) Handel's Messiah is simply more well known.
Artists have known since at least the time of Rembrandt [i.e. almost 400 years] that the human eye can be fooled into seeing what it wants to see; in the case of Rembrandt and his pointilism, the eye [or the part of the brain responsible for processing data collected by the eye] merges small dots of color into a larger whole that it would prefer to see.
You've just described compression. A particularily artful, beautiful form of compression (especially Monet,) but it's compression nonetheless. You just proved point the previous poster made: nobody is going to be fooled into believeing that a pointilist painting is actually a scene taking place in front of them. You may admire it for its beauty, for the technical and artistic prowess required to render it to the canvas, for any number of reasons. But it's not a "perfect" rendition; if you 'believe' you're at the seashore any more or less than you would by staring at a photograph of the seashore it's an emotional decision, not a rational one. And you certainly wouldn't settle for seeing James Bond rendered in a pointillistic style for two hours, not when you know you can see it in all of its Technicolor glory in the next theatre over. It's different -- it's an art form.
Now, there's almost nothing artful about audio compression. (I say almost because there are artists applying all sorts of distortion to their sounds to create new ones, including overcompression.) For the most part, the distortion caused by compression is just a nasty side-effect. But the ear is indeed "fooled" by the compression. When you listen to a compressed audio stream, you hear music. It may be poorly reproduced, tinnily digitized, and companded down to the level of a phone line, but you still hear the music behind it. That's "fooling" the ear -- at least as much as pointilist art "fools" the eye (and without the art.)
Anyway, setting all "golden ear" arguments aside and getting back on topic, I very seriously doubt they'd use compression at all on the audio. The imaging they're doing on each frame is lossless (each frame is probably around 40MB RAW), and this guy didn't get funding for 800 Macs by being stupid and cheap.
In Soviet Russian spacecraft, you scam Nigerians!
It should be easy. Your cable company will publish their menu of channels, with an a la carte rate. Go through the list of channels you already programmed out of your VCR or Tivo and strike those first. Next, go through the list of channels you know you rarely watch, strike those, and see where you're at financially. If you're above $38 (which is the point at which you've already established that cable TV is of value to you) then strike a few more of those "iffy" channels.
I know that for me there are less than two dozen channels I even bother surfing. I bet a la carte could cut my bill in half.
I was thinking that they could have had some of it planned or even done earlier (they've always portrayed Saddam as Canadian) but the Canadian jokes were also very timely, and revolved around current Canadian issues with their new Prime Minister, so I really think the whole show must have been produced in the five days they had.
Speaking of which, does anybody know what happened in Hawaii that caused South Park to not play the new Lemmiwinks episode last night? I really didn't understand their splash screen that read something to the effect of: "Due to the recent events in Hawaii, the Lemmiwinks episode will not be shown tonight." Now, the A.W.E.S.O.M.O. episode was still pretty funny, but I just didn't get the Hawaii thing.
Carrying this to the absurd extreme then indicates that the BSA is ultimately going to do more to drive Joe Sixpack to Linux anyway, since he's never, ever going to pony up real money for Longhorn and TrustedOffice.NET
Wouldn't that just be an amusing twist?
Friend 1 had a Palm VII for several years, then switched to a Tungsten T with Bluetooth and a T610 phone. For data and SMS he keeps the phone in his pocket, and just uses it via the Tungsten. For phone calls, the Tungsten stays in his pocket and the phone comes out. He's also purchased a Bluetooth car kit that has turned his car into a speakerphone whenever he's in it.
Friend 2 has owned every cell-phone/PalmOS combined machine ever produced (minus the Qualcomm brick of the mid '90s.) He's had everything from the Visorphone on up to today's most recent Kyocera. His Kyocera lives in a holster on his belt. He recently added a Bluetooth transceiver adapter plugged into the headset jack of the phone and now uses a Jabra handsfree Bluetooth headset (that he also keeps in the belt holster.) Holy Utility Belts, Batman, that was the wrong way to go!
Friend 3 has a Symbion(?) based phone/Java thing. I don't personally understand it, and it doesn't run Palm OS, but he can surf the web on it. It has bright colorful graphics, a flip-down keypad, a camera, a memory stick, and can play some kind of proprietary streaming video off the web. The screen is halfway between a nice Tungsten screen and the tiny Kyocera screen. Personally, I think a phone with a "screen saver" is more than a little overkill, but it's only one device, and he's happy with it. I have too much invested in PalmOS to want a different thing, though.
Friend 1 is the most smugly satisfied with the cleanliness of his setup. He's only considering upgrading to a newer Tungsten that supports 802.11 and has the soft Graffiti area, and doesn't have a broken power switch.
Friend 2 has had it with the combined devices. He's forever cleaning grease off his screens, his screens are too tiny, the machines are too limited, the battery life sucks, and the machines are too big to carry in a shirt pocket and so require a belt holster. He's switching to the Tungsten 3 (or maybe 4 when they come out) and a Bluetooth phone. His plans are for the phone to remain hidden in his pocket forever, and to use the headset for speaking and the Tungsten for data.
As for me, I was too stupid to sign up with a phone provider that offered data connectivity (AT&T PCS service has SMS only) so I have a completely unconnected Tungsten T, and a tiny dead-simple Nokia phone (B&W screen with no real graphics and an antiquated but refreshingly clean keyboard layout. Oh, and it has analog fallback, which I consider a bonus since I go lots of places that GSM doesn't.) I can carry both devices comfortably in my shirt pocket. Apart from the complete lack of data access, I'm not unhappy.
I've already decided that when I upgrade it will be to a tiny data-enabled phone with Bluetooth. I really don't want a combined device. They all have severe screen size limitations, they're about a generation behind on Palm handheld technologies, and they end up totally gross after every phone call. The separate devices are each optimized for their functions, and so they do them better.
Do you have a web site with a demo of your home automation setup? It sounds kind of neat.
(BTW, you left out 802.11 and Bluetooth support.) The real question is: would you want to carry it? A Palm with all that extra crap would weigh almost as much as a Pocket PC device!
It looks like they're trying to market these to niche businesses: security companies, disabled assistance companies, meter reading companies, etc. I don't think there will be much general call for them. Many of the user scenarios they describe are already pretty silly: "Distress Assistance: Touch a tag on your clothing such as a belt, and the phone initiates an emergency call." Like that's going to catch on.
Perhaps if retail RFID catches on the way WalM*rt hopes, some consumers will be interested enough to want a personally owned device to read their tags. How many WalM*rt shoppers are even literate enough to read their laundry tags, let alone RFID tags, is a different debate. :-)
This is novel in that it contains a portable "user-level" RFID scanner. (The phone bit is simply an already existant battery box.) So, now the questions are: what can end users do with it, and can we hack it?
One thing to keep in mind is that with the small antenna inherent to a cell phone footprint, this will pretty much be an "almost-contact" scanner with a range of centimeters, not meters.
First, let me say that I acknowledge that I don't have an "artistic eye" when it comes to GUI. Yes, I know what looks good, and yes, I certainly can tell a bad one from a good one. But I do find it difficult to build a visually pleasing interface. I simply don't have the color-coordinated eyeball required to see if my own screens are pretty. I consider making an aesthetically pleasing screen "hard", because I can't do it myself. More open source developers need to acknowledge this weakness in their own programs, and seek outside artists.
I've gone through weeks of usability labs (including the fully equipped ones with remote cameras, one-way mirrors and three observers) on various projects, fine-tuning interfaces and flow. I've interviewed many people, and made lots of improvements to our applications over the years based on user feedback. While not "hard" in the sense of juggling lit torches (I can't juggle, either!) I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to improve the interface.
In the end, it's worth it -- I actually discovered how much "money" I save for each second I shave off of a transaction, and it's two orders of magnitude more than my original guess -- but it's still a lot of work.
The original article hypothesised that open source projects are failing to catch on because of UI deficiencies (among other reasons.) Given that Joe Sixpack has already been shown to download Kazaa to save a few bucks on the latest Britney Spears CD, and puts up with listening to a crap encoded 64kbps MP3, we need to answer the questions, "why isn't this same cheap Joe Sixpack downloading and running open source applications by the millions? And why is Microsoft still in business?" Could it be that the original author is actually on to something, and that UIs among open source projects are not perceived to be consistent (or are at least "different" in that they're out of the typical Windows user's comfort zone?) There has got to be a reason that every cheapskate Joe Sixpack hasn't abandoned expensive Windows for free (as in beer) Linux. Inconsistent UI is as good a guess as any.
You developed an interface. You sat down and watched your users. You came up with some novel solutions, and streamlined your users' tasks. You brought the GUI to someone with an artistic eye (your sister.) You repeated the process until your users' workflow was optimized.
Think about how much work went into the steps you detailed here. You actually described that you went through the process I mentioned in my earlier post, from making decisions about data to be entered, workflow, aesthetics, and went on to a usability lab (OK, you watched it in production, but the key was you watched it.) That sounds like a lot of work over a long period of time. Plus, you had the luxury of drawing a paycheck while it was happening.
Getting someone to do all that work is hard. And once you've gone through it once or twice, you realize the benefits you gain from it. But open source project developers frequently don't have that experience, and nobody ever considers it the "glamour" work, even though you may know you'll derive lots of satisfaction from seeing happier users.
And maybe that's the problem.
I'm one of those guys who can't wait to take a hammer to the options and smash sh!t like that Clippy into the flaming embers of hell itself. Don't hide stuff from me, show me fully qualified paths, give me dangerous options, don't tell me what to do, don't hold my hand, I don't want your useless tip of the day, that kind of stuff. And I hang around with people of a like mind -- my friends are all techies, and they, of course, feel the same way I do about Clippy (I think.) It's an evil blight upon computerdom, foisted off upon us by Darth Gates.
So you might say I was more than a little surprised when I was setting up Office for my wife and I was going in to turn off the "dog" agent (one of the Clippy variants) when she said "Oh, don't turn it off. I like it."
Stunned silence. She liked it. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Here I was, having spent the last thirty-one years of my life learning how to use and program computers, bursting at the seams with pride of my "|\/|4D s|<i11z", secretly laughing at those people who don't know enough about computers to even turn Clippy off, only to find that my wife of twenty years uses Clippy. And she likes it.
Fortunately, I was too stunned to open my mouth and say something that might have been hurtful to her. It gave me time to think about what she said. She liked it. She found it useful. And I consider her to be a very intelligent woman.
So, now I at least understand that there is a place for Clippy, at least among the vast majority of "users" out there. And Microsoft apparently understands that, too. Open source developers? We're still mocking Clippy. But we should be learning from him.
It's not just the document. It's the visionary, the enforcer, the guy with the big stick that beats you until your GUI is perfect.
I'm guessing there is already a GUI guidelines wiki somewhere (I'm not going to bother looking right now.) And I'm sure it has great advice. Just as I'm sure there's a set of KDE GUI guidelines somewhere, and a set of Gnome GUI guidelines somewhere else. But by themselves, those documents don't cause one moment of review. They don't fix any problems unless the developer consults them regularly. Even if the developer designs a nice GUI for revision 1.0, hires a UI designer, runs a month of user acceptance labs, it still doesn't translate to ongoing review of GUI changes. Version 1.1 may come out with a rhinocerous horn sticking out from the middle of the screen. No enforcement or review is ever guaranteed, and no continuity of the GUI is assured.
It would be nice if a wiki could solve that problem. I'd love it, and I think it would go a long ways towards solving open source acceptance. But active, ongoing review is going to take more than a musty document.
Hmm... I wonder if it would be possible to set up a neural network program or genetic learning program to recognize "good" GUIs from "bad" GUIs? That would be a killer app for the open source movement, a GUI rater. Each revision of your open source project, you could run it through this GUI rater and publish your results: "Gnomovision 2.3 scored a 93 on the guiometer!" So you only got a score of 71? Go back and tweak it some more.
I think she missed the biggest reason of all here: Designing a good GUI is very hard. Wait -- let me further clarify that: it's very, very hard.
Designing a GUI from scratch requires a sense of aesthetics (balance, color, flow) and the ability to decide exactly what needs to be up front, and what needs to be hidden behind a menu, option button, or some such. Frequently the developer will have a fervent opinion about "this is the most important thing, it must be on top" whereas a good user interface designer can step back and see what will work for the users. A good UI designer will also run user acceptance labs to test their designs. Many open source projects end up with little more than "Hey Bill, would you check this out for me?" And Bill, being aware of the project from its inception, and having heard about it over the lunch table for the last five months, already posesses a deeper understanding of the task that prevents him from being able to adequately judge the design.
Apple, of course, has always been at the forefront of GUI design (at least as a commercial success, I'm fully aware of the contributions of Xerox Parc, et al.) I believe this comes from a strong, single, visionary designer, a rigid set of GUI design guidelines that must be absolutely followed, and a corporate mindset that the GUI is the most important aspect of an application. They undergo rigorous testing procedures, and countless user feedback labs. Microsoft hasn't ever caught up to Apple in that respect, although they do have a good set of GUI guidelines and some very strong products.
But nobody in the open source world wants to be "told what to do". Also, nobody in the open source world feels they have the authority to stand up and say "you must design your GUI in this fashion." Some projects, of course, will have beautiful, solid GUIs thanks to having a quality GUI designer on the project. But that currently doesn't pan out beyond the scope of the single good application. So the consistency isn't there, and it will never be there until someone puts together a GUI committee that has the authority to stamp "Tux Approved -- Good GUI Inside" on open source projects. It will require a single, strong voice. And that voice has to have a world of talent behind it. That's a mighty tall order for hundreds of grass-roots volunteer efforts to come up with.
UML still suffers from some of that: filled arrowheads vs. stick arrowheads, for example. Arrows do inherently express a relationship (at least to me,) but neither filled nor hollow represents "synchronous" vs "asynchronous". The UML is an 800 page standard, of which about 750 pages are useless detail fluff of this nature. Yet they're all "part of the standard" and thus are all equally important, at least to the AR+ people who religiously push these things. I understand that if you want to precisely express an idea that you should use the precise syntax in the language. But practical use of UML shouldn't require knowing all 800 pages, just as writing practical C++ code doesn't require an intimate knowledge of templates.
Please don't dismiss me immediately as a UML critic (or a template critic!) One of the places that I find it of value is that it gives us developers a common ground on which to meet the analysts and business users. But much of the syntax is simply too cryptic to be of real working value in expressing ideas. And if you look at developers as the "compilers" of UML (the people who have to interpret it into code) we would have to know every last comma of the standard to perfectly implement it. Not a realistic assessment.
Hahahaha -- I read your comment and saw the last icon as "Sucks". It worked for me...