I think that attitude is the core of the problem. There IS such a thing as usable, and some designs are just plain BAD. My sister's finishing up a Master's at Stanford in the field, and she's shown me that there's a hell of a lot more to it than I would have thought.
I run a busy (military) website myself, and I've found that a lot of the users on the site don't use the site in the same way I would. They get the information they need, and they put up with a sub-optimal interface, but if I can find out what they're trying to do it's often a matter of a simple change to allow them to do it with a lot more efficiency. You can't ever ignore the users and tell them to "get used to it", just like saying "read the source code" doesn't cut it as documentation for most folks.
The Gentoo site looks about like that of every other distro out there... just fine if you know exactly what you're looking for. How about grabbing a few average Linux users and watching them try to find what they need? I think people just don't realize how poor a lot of the websites and documentation are.
I think Debian, for example, is a fine installation. I've used it frequently. But the website really irritated me when I needed to find some specific floppy images and hardware support the other day. I got so frustrated that I finally gave up and went to FreeBSD. It's far from perfect, but I found what I was looking for in short order and quickly had the machine up and running.
Here's a question for anyone involved in the production of ANY distro out there: Is there ANY form of usability testing that goes into these sites? What's the process these people are using for designing the sites?
I just want to replace my on-board diagnostics port with something useful... like maybe SNMP. Seriously, who creates an interface standard that specifies a connector but not the electrical characteristics of the connector? Give me 9600 or 19200 bps data from a 9-pin RS-232 connector in a standard, well-documented format. I should be able to download the MIBs for a Honda Accord to my laptop, plug it in to the port, and watch all of the engine parameters in a standard viewer.
Really? I thought red was absorbed faster by seawater. Red and yellow markings on gear seem to fade to blue-black quickly. I've got super bright blue LEDs to test, too.
I LOVE that feature. Especially when you've got a new guy rebooting stuff... it's great to watch them scrable around to find the beeping UPS. Apparently it interprets the mouse probing as a 'simulate power failure' command. Wonderful....
Lithium in particular doesn't play well with water. To tell the truth, right now it looks like I'll probably just be using 3 or 4 alkalike D-cells (Duracell says they should be ok for years, especially at 50 degrees F) and sealing it all up with epoxy. The only opening in the pipe will be for the LED, which will be epoxied in place. Hopefully the lens can take immersion in salt water.
I thought about pressurizing the pipe to help counteract the outside pressure, but I just recently had a bad experience with pressurized ABS (spudgun experiment) and I'm wary of trying it again. The window replacement alone cost me $25 last time...
Yeah, batteries are the easiest way to go, but I just like the idea of trying to make an ultra low-power circuit run indefinitely (until component failure) unattented, without access to solar power.
Gah, you've discovered my evil secret! I suppose I may as well give you all the details. I am Man-Ray, scourge of the oceans and destroyer of land-dwellers. Soon, my perpetually blinking submarine LED devices will be placed in all of the world's oceans, a constant reminder of my aquatic domination to those who might venture into my domain! Muahahahahahaha!
I dealt with them years ago, when I discovered that their Powerchute software was vulnerable to DoS. I discovered it like a lot of people - saw port 6667 bound, thought "What the hell is this server doing listening on an IRC port?", fired up mIRC, and watched Powerchute die silently. Their response at the time was that they expected it to be behind a firewall, and didn't really consider network security to be their problem. I'd love to find the email, but it's been years and I don't know where I'd have put it. I guess they've changed their tune now, but I still haven't seen their products improve much.
Yeah, it's all underwater. See post about editors on crack.
There can still be a considerable amount of surge at depth. I remember finding one roughly 1-meter hole in a rock wall near Anacapa that funneled the surge through it with enough force to knock me around and almost tear the regulator from my mouth, and then suck me through and spit me out the other side. It'd be able to generate tons of power, but it'd be way to heavily travelled a spot for my purposes. (See post about underwater lair. =])
I'm not expecting to solve anyone's power problems - I'm trying to figure out how to power a blinking LED for years at a time. See the non-mangled post above.
If the/. 'editors' hadn't mangled my submission, you'd have seen that I already considered that. Here's the full thing:
Ok, so I've gotten into this geocaching thing lately, and while working on
a cache to be hidden in about 60 feet of water off the coast, it occured to me that a blinking LED might make it
easier for divers to spot. No problem, whip up a blinker circuit with an LM3909 and a super-bright green LED and we're
set. But what about power? Sure, four D-cells would let it run for close to a decade,
but where's the fun in that? The undersea environment is quite dynamic, and there's got to be some power down
there that can be harnessed. What I need are some ideas on how to do that.
We keep seeing stories here about tidal
power, and that's cool, but I don't see how it can be done without a column rising all the way to the surface.
So here are the ideas I've got right now. Keep in mind that the device will probably be housed in a length of
4-inch PVC or ABS pipe, and it needs about 0.5 ma at 1.5 volts:
Surge power. Put a couple of funnels back-to-back with a CPU cooling fan-sized turbine and generator in the
middle, and run the output through a rectifier and capacitor. But how reliable will those moving parts be after
years underwater?
Self-winding watch
concept. Float the thing tethered to the bottom and install some sort of pendulum inside with a magnet on it,
moving through a coil. The moving parts are protected, but will it be enough power?
Yank the chain. Again, tether it, but use the varying tension on the tether to drive a dynamo of some sort.
Magnetohydrodynamic generator. Like
the surge power thing, but using the flow of cunductive seawater through a magnetic field to generate a current. I
have no idea how much power this would generate, if any, or how to deal with ion accumulation at the electrodes.
The generator need not fit inside the 4-inch cache tube, but it shouldn't be huge, either. It needs to be
practical to build, and not terribly expensive. Above all it's got to be reliable and enduring. Any ideas?
Right, 'Enter' is the first key I think of when I want to exit a screen, and Space is of course the logical way to get out of the help system.
WHO WRITES THESE THINGS???
There ARE good interfaces out there. Take Pine, for example. It's still my favorite *nix mail program. It's got a simple command structure, and the appropriate menus are always available. Make dselect more like Pine and less like vi and I might use it more often. Not that I've got anything against vi, I've learned it and use it often, but I don't have the time and patience to learn obscure command sets for every program I use because some developer thought that it was OK to ignore usability issues because it didn't need to be 'beginner friendly'.
I want a digital camera with integrated GPS and digital compass. When I get home from a trip, I should be able to download all of my images and see them as icons on a map, indicating where the picture was taken, in what direction, and at what time.
Last time I installed a Mozilla milestone release, it lasted about 20 seconds. I tried to resize a frame and it died horribly.
And why is it that no one ever tests the browsers extensively in a proxy configuration? Netscape and IE, at least, both handle failed name resolution very poorly if you're using a proxy.
If I'm not mistaken, Executive Software, makers of the disk defragmentation software that now comes bundled with Windows, are Scientologist-controlled.
It's been in use for some time. I think we tend to underestimate the amount of technology available to farmers today. Last summer my cousin in Iowa gave me a tour of some of his cooler toys... the cab of his combine is reminiscent of an x-wing cockpit.
Slashdot Mirror
It's MY quote. How can it be wrong?
I don't know who the other one's from, but I saw this one someplace and liked it. So nyaaaah.
If you used the flawed software they used for that color of the universe thing.
I think that attitude is the core of the problem. There IS such a thing as usable, and some designs are just plain BAD. My sister's finishing up a Master's at Stanford in the field, and she's shown me that there's a hell of a lot more to it than I would have thought.
I run a busy (military) website myself, and I've found that a lot of the users on the site don't use the site in the same way I would. They get the information they need, and they put up with a sub-optimal interface, but if I can find out what they're trying to do it's often a matter of a simple change to allow them to do it with a lot more efficiency. You can't ever ignore the users and tell them to "get used to it", just like saying "read the source code" doesn't cut it as documentation for most folks.
The Gentoo site looks about like that of every other distro out there... just fine if you know exactly what you're looking for. How about grabbing a few average Linux users and watching them try to find what they need? I think people just don't realize how poor a lot of the websites and documentation are.
I think Debian, for example, is a fine installation. I've used it frequently. But the website really irritated me when I needed to find some specific floppy images and hardware support the other day. I got so frustrated that I finally gave up and went to FreeBSD. It's far from perfect, but I found what I was looking for in short order and quickly had the machine up and running.
Here's a question for anyone involved in the production of ANY distro out there: Is there ANY form of usability testing that goes into these sites? What's the process these people are using for designing the sites?
I just want to replace my on-board diagnostics port with something useful... like maybe SNMP. Seriously, who creates an interface standard that specifies a connector but not the electrical characteristics of the connector? Give me 9600 or 19200 bps data from a 9-pin RS-232 connector in a standard, well-documented format. I should be able to download the MIBs for a Honda Accord to my laptop, plug it in to the port, and watch all of the engine parameters in a standard viewer.
Really? I thought red was absorbed faster by seawater. Red and yellow markings on gear seem to fade to blue-black quickly. I've got super bright blue LEDs to test, too.
I LOVE that feature. Especially when you've got a new guy rebooting stuff... it's great to watch them scrable around to find the beeping UPS. Apparently it interprets the mouse probing as a 'simulate power failure' command. Wonderful....
Lithium in particular doesn't play well with water. To tell the truth, right now it looks like I'll probably just be using 3 or 4 alkalike D-cells (Duracell says they should be ok for years, especially at 50 degrees F) and sealing it all up with epoxy. The only opening in the pipe will be for the LED, which will be epoxied in place. Hopefully the lens can take immersion in salt water.
I thought about pressurizing the pipe to help counteract the outside pressure, but I just recently had a bad experience with pressurized ABS (spudgun experiment) and I'm wary of trying it again. The window replacement alone cost me $25 last time...
Yeah, batteries are the easiest way to go, but I just like the idea of trying to make an ultra low-power circuit run indefinitely (until component failure) unattented, without access to solar power.
Gah, you've discovered my evil secret! I suppose I may as well give you all the details. I am Man-Ray, scourge of the oceans and destroyer of land-dwellers. Soon, my perpetually blinking submarine LED devices will be placed in all of the world's oceans, a constant reminder of my aquatic domination to those who might venture into my domain! Muahahahahahaha!
And stay off the lawn, damnit!
I dealt with them years ago, when I discovered that their Powerchute software was vulnerable to DoS. I discovered it like a lot of people - saw port 6667 bound, thought "What the hell is this server doing listening on an IRC port?", fired up mIRC, and watched Powerchute die silently. Their response at the time was that they expected it to be behind a firewall, and didn't really consider network security to be their problem. I'd love to find the email, but it's been years and I don't know where I'd have put it. I guess they've changed their tune now, but I still haven't seen their products improve much.
Yeah, it's all underwater. See post about editors on crack.
There can still be a considerable amount of surge at depth. I remember finding one roughly 1-meter hole in a rock wall near Anacapa that funneled the surge through it with enough force to knock me around and almost tear the regulator from my mouth, and then suck me through and spit me out the other side. It'd be able to generate tons of power, but it'd be way to heavily travelled a spot for my purposes. (See post about underwater lair. =])
I'm not expecting to solve anyone's power problems - I'm trying to figure out how to power a blinking LED for years at a time. See the non-mangled post above.
See my reply to the message above. Moderators on crack? It's the editors we've got to worry about. =]
Ok, so I've gotten into this geocaching thing lately, and while working on a cache to be hidden in about 60 feet of water off the coast, it occured to me that a blinking LED might make it easier for divers to spot. No problem, whip up a blinker circuit with an LM3909 and a super-bright green LED and we're set. But what about power? Sure, four D-cells would let it run for close to a decade, but where's the fun in that? The undersea environment is quite dynamic, and there's got to be some power down there that can be harnessed. What I need are some ideas on how to do that.
We keep seeing stories here about tidal power, and that's cool, but I don't see how it can be done without a column rising all the way to the surface. So here are the ideas I've got right now. Keep in mind that the device will probably be housed in a length of 4-inch PVC or ABS pipe, and it needs about 0.5 ma at 1.5 volts:
The generator need not fit inside the 4-inch cache tube, but it shouldn't be huge, either. It needs to be practical to build, and not terribly expensive. Above all it's got to be reliable and enduring. Any ideas?
...for all of the manufactured boy bands out there. Remember the Party Posse on the Simpsons?
Right, 'Enter' is the first key I think of when I want to exit a screen, and Space is of course the logical way to get out of the help system.
WHO WRITES THESE THINGS???
There ARE good interfaces out there. Take Pine, for example. It's still my favorite *nix mail program. It's got a simple command structure, and the appropriate menus are always available. Make dselect more like Pine and less like vi and I might use it more often. Not that I've got anything against vi, I've learned it and use it often, but I don't have the time and patience to learn obscure command sets for every program I use because some developer thought that it was OK to ignore usability issues because it didn't need to be 'beginner friendly'.
I want a digital camera with integrated GPS and digital compass. When I get home from a trip, I should be able to download all of my images and see them as icons on a map, indicating where the picture was taken, in what direction, and at what time.
Last time I installed a Mozilla milestone release, it lasted about 20 seconds. I tried to resize a frame and it died horribly.
And why is it that no one ever tests the browsers extensively in a proxy configuration? Netscape and IE, at least, both handle failed name resolution very poorly if you're using a proxy.
If I'm not mistaken, Executive Software, makers of the disk defragmentation software that now comes bundled with Windows, are Scientologist-controlled.
It's been in use for some time. I think we tend to underestimate the amount of technology available to farmers today. Last summer my cousin in Iowa gave me a tour of some of his cooler toys... the cab of his combine is reminiscent of an x-wing cockpit.
I guess it's only a matter of time before we've got little Tacquitos running around here, eh?
Congrats Taco! May your marriage be happier than mine was!
Though I usually just use the power switch. Can't beat a powered-off firewall for security.
Additional charges for:
- 'Premium' port traffic: Only business users would need IMAP or POP3 access to anything besides the ISP's own mail server, right?
- More than 4 simultaneous TCP sessions. Your browser and mail program don't need any more than that, do they?
- Email attachments over 1 MB. If you're sending big files, you're probably using it for business. And remember, no outside POP3!
- Anything lower than an 8:1 download/upload packet ratio. Lower than that and you're obviously one of those peer-to-peer pirate scumbags.
And don't even THINK of trying to tunnel or encrypt traffic!
Considering that's close to four times Tuvalu's GDP. Maybe they'll pave the road. =]