Gee... Hmmm... Lets get an IPO going! We would need to find an subluna grotto where we could perform controlled tests. We could call the initial offering/ teaser: "Space Seed". Hey! How about getting Ricardo Montalban for a PR spokesman?
BTW: the parent post didn't spell "your" incorrectly! ("You're" is the contraction of "You are"; e.g.: "No. You're the moron!")
Huh. My old wallstreet (300Mhz w/ 384M & 10.3.9), while not speedy, doesn't seem to take forever... ofcourse I don't try iPhoto or anything that is really taxing... but then... it does work well for what I use it for: email, ssh, im, interarchy, firefox (looking up stuff while watching the tube)
To put stuff in perspective... it does feel comparable to my old PIII/500 box with KDE & debian.
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Oh yeah. Sure. What's that? 22 years of playing Choplifter on a Commodore64? No wait. You wrote "hello world" on a TRS-80 in the early 80's?
Yeah, I love how every script-kiddie who can insert a CD and install/run some canned software is a computer-support-tech and "Gee, wiz, I typed in foo.bas from Basic programming for Idiots and it ran, so I guess I be a computer system engineer."
That email exchange made me want to recomend Johnny Hughes for sainthood: while reading it I could feel myself sliding towards a BOFH attitude...
Oh. btw: anyone else notice that the City of Tuttle Seal looks like a view through a scope?
Arrogant as it is to have grammer instructions in one's sig, must they be wrong, too?
Um, I don't think it is arrogant to have correct grammar instructions in one's sig... OTOH it is rather arrogant to correct something that isn't wrong.
Mayhaps I should change my sig to my pet grammatical peeve:
you're = = contraction of you and are your = = possessive of you eg: "Didn't you say that you're off to your parents' house?"
Red balling some drug through to distro is kinda scary... Would hate to hear: "We never saw those side-effects in our limited clinical trials... but we cured your HIV/AIDS, and after all what do you really need a {liver, heart, spine, brain} for anyway?"
Or how about: "We'll just use the existing population of desperate people as our clinical sample". Ouch.
(Reminds me of the Stargate SG-1 2010 and 2001 episodes: "We eliminated the plague from your entire species... too bad you're all sterile. oops." 'course that was an all encompasing innoculation.)
But then, if I was one of the unfortunate HIV positive? Hmm... no, I might still hold out for proper testing... Er, hang on. How long are those studies? And what are the odds that things would progress to AIDS before the FDA approved this treatment?
My probable attitude if I had AIDS? "Does it look like it might work? Gimme. Gimme NOW!"
I guess it all comes down to the old rock and a hard place doesn't it? If and when a drug get approved, if there are nasty side effects, no matter how much testing you did, it wasn't enough. If there aren't any problems with the treatment, no matter how fast you got it to market, you were too slow.
er, um, well, I think we were talking linux distro's?
If we wish to open it up to BSD4.3lite "variants"... Yeah, FreeBSD5.x is rather nice. (my fav...) Like the easy option of traditional vs ULE scheduler (really slick!). Also like KLD instead of the old LKM.
Or, why not look at Solaris? the x86 distro is now free (again)...
Erg... been trying to forget those... Yeah, those luggables, running CP/M, rather horrible to work on (one of my old jobs was at a ibm/kaypro/epson dealer. Gosh, I actually remember when we received the first PC/AT...)
Kaypro had tried to make those easy to work on... most everyting hung off of their little card cage (sort-of like a pdp11 qbuss). Unfortuately, it seemed that everything I needed to work on was underneath the cage. Argh! Ergo: I never really enjoyed seeing one of the "portable" kaypros come thru the front door.
I think I have a set of wordstar disks somewhere...
Hmmm. Yeah, there was/ is a standard API. When we moved from 68K to PPC, all we had to do was recompile.
Didn't even really need to do that... Could have let things run under 68K emulation.
The basic API stayed fairly constant from OS4.X - OS8.6 (sure there were some obsoleted hooks,
but as long as you were a "good boy" (followed apple's implementation suggestions), and didn't try to do
an end run to the hardware, moving code up the OS path was trivial (one of my apps compiled in 1989 runs
fine under OS9.2)).
Moving to OSX has been a little more traumatic. But then hey, it's a whole different beast. If apple does
move to another cpu architecture, I'm not really concerned. The core API will probably be the same. I'll expect
that the only thing I'll have to worry about is big-endian vs. little-endian. I'll just (if need be) fix some pointer arith, recompile (using the dev tools that apple bundles w/ the OS... they're rather nice! ), put down the jolt citrus climax, and go have a beer.
[begin vent] I almost stopped reading the article after the " Or that it would be easier to get a handgun or rifle than a fishing license?" falsehood. Why did the author decide to include this bit of tripe in the preamble? It doesn't help his case. Usually one puts tautologies in the preamble. These help to open your reader to new ideas. Putting a blatant falsehood/ media-fabrication in the preamble only serves to put the entire following body of " research" in doubt.[end vent]
Well, having vented... I've been appalled by the numbers of college freshman who can not easily remember the last time they read a book for enjoyment. They can easily tell you how many minutes it has been since their last online experience. Usually the only books that they do remember reading were those assigned in some HS class! Any read the newspaper? Nope. (well ok, i guess i get most of my news online also...) Do they read their textbooks? Nope: usually just skim them for the right-seeming formula to cut-and-paste.
Now, having said all that... I'm not sure that I agree fully with the first teacher in the article. Will my child have a computer? Yeah. Kinda hard for the kid not to have one. I'll just let him/her use one of the spares... Will I try to limit their time spent online? If it's nice outside? You bet... If its nasty outside? Not sure. If I can, I'll try to interest them is a communal sort of game. Failing that, well, playing at the bit-cruncher is better than staring at the tube (imho).
For all it's worth, I could end up being one big hypocrite. Check back in a few years: My first kid is due in 9 weeks 4 days (plus-or-minus a big delta).
Yup. I remember being forced to take those sociology courses. After all, you really need those courses in order to become a well rounded systems engineer, right? Geez....One of the things that really bugged me about those classes was the flawed statistical drivel that was touted as gospel. But anyway, I digress...
The book basically takes the division of classes to the next level... Yeah, ok, sounds again like something from Sociology 101! What does the author propose to span this rift and break down these "class barriers"? Should this be similar to Pol Pot's idea except in reverse: we march everyone out of the fields and place them in cyber-gulags? (Sorry, one of my Soc instructors had the odd opinion that Pol Pot's original idea was sound but the implementation was flawed! Talk about yer... oops, again I digress!) What will we eat? Soylent Green?
Anyway, but back to the original topic: in regards to human interaction, I see electronically based information as an isolating factor. When was the last time you walked down to the corner store to buy the newspaper? (For me, only on Sundays... mostly for the sales/coupons, comics and TV guide sections of the paper... been a long time since I read the paper in-depth for news!)
BTW: the only people from work with whom I socialise after business hours are those who would have become my friends had I met them elsewhere. I don't work for a social club, and therefore, should not have to socialise at or with work!
Seems rather interesting that this appears soon after the paperback release of Larry Niven's book "Rainbow Mars" which featured a moisture sucking "tree" whose center of mass is at geosync. This tree was used by the natives as an elevator. Earth wanted it and got one to anchor on the coast of Brazil at the equator.
Overall a good read (for those who still do hardcopy) -dean
-----------------------
Hmmm... I kinda liked the old atari 800 (not that silly 400 with the chicklet kbd). There were 3 or 4 or 5 OS's for it, had a very nice macro assembler, a decent C compiler, the alternate cartridge slot (there were two slots) could be configured as a reader/burner, you weren't forced to have basic anywhere near the machine, the full bus was easily accessable, roms were easily swapped... All in all, it was a cute little machine.
Back in 81, choices in 6502 machines were pretty much limited to apple and atari. I had been looking at an apple II+, but couldn't justify the price tag, and settled on the atari... I was rather glad that I did. The only sad point wrt atari was that, in the US, atari was synonymous with game (arcade and console), and as such many non-atari owners considered the 6502 computer line as a glorified game console.
... come to think of it, a lot of us atari owners looked down upon the commodore64 with laughter...;)
Gee... I guess you don't like modal dialogs (those are the ones that cannot be moved or made temporarily inactive) Modal dialogs are supposed to be used only when user input is required for the machine to continue/ execute the requested task. They are also supposed to present all the information the user needs to answer dialog's questions. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Blame that on the application programmer. The only modal dialog currently used by the macOS is for media format. I believe that will also be modalless in OS X. The application programmer has the option of modal/ modalless dialog, and most use the correct type in the appropriate settings. Some do not.
But, anyway, back to the main point: "What is important in a user interface?" 1) Consistency: Having frequently used, common commands, in a familiar place/form significantly reduces user frustration. 2) Keep the main part of the user interface simple. Not every user needs every command at his/her fingertips. This also reduces the fear factor for newbies and/or the slide-rule generation. We don't always need superuser status. 3) Customizable but retaining the ability to easily return to "factory" defaults. 4) Consistent API's!!!... ('nuf said on this one?)
Aside from those? I'm not sure... After all, we're talking about UI, not OS...
Slashdot Mirror
Gee... Hmmm... Lets get an IPO going! We would need to find an subluna grotto where we could perform controlled tests. We could call the initial offering/ teaser: "Space Seed". Hey! How about getting Ricardo Montalban for a PR spokesman?
BTW: the parent post didn't spell "your" incorrectly! ("You're" is the contraction of "You are"; e.g.: "No. You're the moron!")
Huh. My old wallstreet (300Mhz w/ 384M & 10.3.9), while not speedy, doesn't seem to take forever... ofcourse I don't try iPhoto or anything that is really taxing... but then... it does work well for what I use it for: email, ssh, im, interarchy, firefox (looking up stuff while watching the tube)
To put stuff in perspective... it does feel comparable to my old PIII/500 box with KDE & debian.
But hey, ymmv.
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Oh yeah. Sure. What's that? 22 years of playing Choplifter on a Commodore64? No wait. You wrote "hello world" on a TRS-80 in the early 80's?
Yeah, I love how every script-kiddie who can insert a CD and install/run some canned software is a computer-support-tech and "Gee, wiz, I typed in foo.bas from Basic programming for Idiots and it ran, so I guess I be a computer system engineer."
That email exchange made me want to recomend Johnny Hughes for sainthood: while reading it I could feel myself sliding towards a BOFH attitude...
Oh. btw: anyone else notice that the City of Tuttle Seal looks like a view through a scope?
But wait! Is this the town named after "Tom Tuttle from Tacoma Washington?
Geez!
Arrogant as it is to have grammer instructions in one's sig, must they be wrong, too?
Um, I don't think it is arrogant to have correct grammar instructions in one's sig... OTOH it is rather arrogant to correct something that isn't wrong.
Mayhaps I should change my sig to my pet grammatical peeve:
you're = = contraction of you and are
your = = possessive of you
eg: "Didn't you say that you're off to your parents' house?"
Red balling some drug through to distro is kinda scary... Would hate to hear: "We never saw those side-effects in our limited clinical trials... but we cured your HIV/AIDS, and after all what do you really need a {liver, heart, spine, brain} for anyway?"
Or how about: "We'll just use the existing population of desperate people as our clinical sample". Ouch.
(Reminds me of the Stargate SG-1 2010 and 2001 episodes: "We eliminated the plague from your entire species... too bad you're all sterile. oops." 'course that was an all encompasing innoculation.)
But then, if I was one of the unfortunate HIV positive? Hmm... no, I might still hold out for proper testing... Er, hang on. How long are those studies? And what are the odds that things would progress to AIDS before the FDA approved this treatment?
My probable attitude if I had AIDS? "Does it look like it might work? Gimme. Gimme NOW!"
I guess it all comes down to the old rock and a hard place doesn't it? If and when a drug get approved, if there are nasty side effects, no matter how much testing you did, it wasn't enough. If there aren't any problems with the treatment, no matter how fast you got it to market, you were too slow.
"FreeBSD"???
er, um, well, I think we were talking linux distro's?
If we wish to open it up to BSD4.3lite "variants"... Yeah, FreeBSD5.x is rather nice. (my fav...) Like the easy option of traditional vs ULE scheduler (really slick!). Also like KLD instead of the old LKM.
Or, why not look at Solaris? the x86 distro is now free (again)...
Erg... been trying to forget those... Yeah, those luggables, running CP/M, rather horrible to work on (one of my old jobs was at a ibm/kaypro/epson dealer. Gosh, I actually remember when we received the first PC/AT...)
Kaypro had tried to make those easy to work on... most everyting hung off of their little card cage (sort-of like a pdp11 qbuss). Unfortuately, it seemed that everything I needed to work on was underneath the cage. Argh! Ergo: I never really enjoyed seeing one of the "portable" kaypros come thru the front door.
I think I have a set of wordstar disks somewhere...
Heh. Ya beat me to this point!
Hmmm. Yeah, there was/ is a standard API. When we moved from 68K to PPC, all we had to do was recompile. Didn't even really need to do that... Could have let things run under 68K emulation.
The basic API stayed fairly constant from OS4.X - OS8.6 (sure there were some obsoleted hooks, but as long as you were a "good boy" (followed apple's implementation suggestions), and didn't try to do an end run to the hardware, moving code up the OS path was trivial (one of my apps compiled in 1989 runs fine under OS9.2)).
Moving to OSX has been a little more traumatic. But then hey, it's a whole different beast. If apple does move to another cpu architecture, I'm not really concerned. The core API will probably be the same. I'll expect that the only thing I'll have to worry about is big-endian vs. little-endian. I'll just (if need be) fix some pointer arith, recompile (using the dev tools that apple bundles w/ the OS... they're rather nice! ), put down the jolt citrus climax, and go have a beer.
Hmm... '19-something' indeed? Well, er, actually, by your own admission, it is.
Last I checked,
(and (prefix? '19 '1996) (prefix? '19 '1998)) => true
fwiw: I agree that he should have 'looked it up his/herself' before flaming ya.
Hmmm...
[begin vent] I almost stopped reading the article after the " Or that it would be easier to get a handgun or rifle than a fishing license?" falsehood. Why did the author decide to include this bit of tripe in the preamble? It doesn't help his case. Usually one puts tautologies in the preamble. These help to open your reader to new ideas. Putting a blatant falsehood/ media-fabrication in the preamble only serves to put the entire following body of " research" in doubt.[end vent]
Well, having vented... I've been appalled by the numbers of college freshman who can not easily remember the last time they read a book for enjoyment. They can easily tell you how many minutes it has been since their last online experience. Usually the only books that they do remember reading were those assigned in some HS class! Any read the newspaper? Nope. (well ok, i guess i get most of my news online also...) Do they read their textbooks? Nope: usually just skim them for the right-seeming formula to cut-and-paste.
Now, having said all that... I'm not sure that I agree fully with the first teacher in the article. Will my child have a computer? Yeah. Kinda hard for the kid not to have one. I'll just let him/her use one of the spares... Will I try to limit their time spent online? If it's nice outside? You bet... If its nasty outside? Not sure. If I can, I'll try to interest them is a communal sort of game. Failing that, well, playing at the bit-cruncher is better than staring at the tube (imho).
For all it's worth, I could end up being one big hypocrite. Check back in a few years: My first kid is due in 9 weeks 4 days (plus-or-minus a big delta).
-dean
-----------------------
Hmmm...
Yup. I remember being forced to take those sociology courses. After all, you really need those courses in order to become a well rounded systems engineer, right? Geez....One of the things that really bugged me about those classes was the flawed statistical drivel that was touted as gospel. But anyway, I digress...
The book basically takes the division of classes to the next level... Yeah, ok, sounds again like something from Sociology 101! What does the author propose to span this rift and break down these "class barriers"? Should this be similar to Pol Pot's idea except in reverse: we march everyone out of the fields and place them in cyber-gulags? (Sorry, one of my Soc instructors had the odd opinion that Pol Pot's original idea was sound but the implementation was flawed! Talk about yer... oops, again I digress!) What will we eat? Soylent Green?
Anyway, but back to the original topic: in regards to human interaction, I see electronically based information as an isolating factor. When was the last time you walked down to the corner store to buy the newspaper? (For me, only on Sundays... mostly for the sales/coupons, comics and TV guide sections of the paper... been a long time since I read the paper in-depth for news!)
BTW: the only people from work with whom I socialise after business hours are those who would have become my friends had I met them elsewhere. I don't work for a social club, and therefore, should not have to socialise at or with work!
-dean
-----------------------
for those wondering about prefixes:
1 kilobyte = 2^10 Bytes = 1024 bytes
1 Megabyte = 2^20 Bytes = 1024 kilobytes
1 gigabyte = 2^30 Bytes = 1024 Megabytes
1 terabyte = 2^40 Bytes = 1024 gigabytes
1 petabyte = 2^50 Bytes = 1024 terabytes
1 Exabyte = 2^60 Bytes = 1024 petabytes
1 Zettabyte = 2^70 Bytes = 1024 Exabytes
1 Yottabyte = 2^80 Bytes = 1024 Zettabytes
Gee... I wonder how long I have to wait $14 a zettabyte?
-dean
-----------------------
Seems rather interesting that this appears soon after the paperback release of Larry Niven's book "Rainbow Mars" which featured a moisture sucking "tree" whose center of mass is at geosync. This tree was used by the natives as an elevator. Earth wanted it and got one to anchor on the coast of Brazil at the equator.
Overall a good read (for those who still do hardcopy)
-dean
-----------------------
"...some sort of home PC..."?
... come to think of it, a lot of us atari owners looked down upon the commodore64 with laughter... ;)
Hmmm... I kinda liked the old atari 800 (not that silly 400 with the chicklet kbd). There were 3 or 4 or 5 OS's for it, had a very nice macro assembler, a decent C compiler, the alternate cartridge slot (there were two slots) could be configured as a reader/burner, you weren't forced to have basic anywhere near the machine, the full bus was easily accessable, roms were easily swapped... All in all, it was a cute little machine.
Back in 81, choices in 6502 machines were pretty much limited to apple and atari. I had been looking at an apple II+, but couldn't justify the price tag, and settled on the atari... I was rather glad that I did. The only sad point wrt atari was that, in the US, atari was synonymous with game (arcade and console), and as such many non-atari owners considered the 6502 computer line as a glorified game console.
-dean
-----------------------
Gee... I guess you don't like modal dialogs (those are the ones that cannot be moved or made temporarily inactive) Modal dialogs are supposed to be used only when user input is required for the machine to continue/ execute the requested task. They are also supposed to present all the information the user needs to answer dialog's questions. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Blame that on the application programmer. The only modal dialog currently used by the macOS is for media format. I believe that will also be modalless in OS X. The application programmer has the option of modal/ modalless dialog, and most use the correct type in the appropriate settings. Some do not.
But, anyway, back to the main point: "What is important in a user interface?"
1) Consistency: Having frequently used, common commands, in a familiar place/form significantly reduces user frustration.
2) Keep the main part of the user interface simple. Not every user needs every command at his/her fingertips. This also reduces the fear factor for newbies and/or the slide-rule generation. We don't always need superuser status.
3) Customizable but retaining the ability to easily return to "factory" defaults.
4) Consistent API's!!!... ('nuf said on this one?)
Aside from those? I'm not sure... After all, we're talking about UI, not OS...