Hmmm, we've been building permanent dwellings for thousands of years. We've been building software for fifty, and doing so on a large scale for about thirty.
Not to mention that the complexity and novelty of the average piece of software dwarfs that of all but the most unique and large-scale building projects.
Then why are we building software skyscrapers, rather than more modest dwellings? Scale is our enemy, until we understand how to manage it. We need much less complex software than we in fact receive.
At the risk of bludgeoning the obvious to a pulpy mess...
This wouldn't be an issue if people used the simplest possible format, most suited to the message. Ideas need well-constructed sentences and paragraphs, separated wisely by whitespace. Fonts and colors frequently serve to disguise poor writing and badly organized thoughts.
At work anything that smells like a document arrives as a Word doc, and anything vaguely tabular becomes an Excel spreadsheet. Why wait for a huge, and expensive, application to load, only to reveal that the information is irrelevant?
If you absolutely need a more advanced presentation then step up to HTML. Just make sure you are improving communication, not decoration.
Yes, it will have all these additional multimedia capabilities. But that doesn't stop PCs from becoming dumbed down appliances. They'll just have on-screen buttons and knobs instead of physical ones.
How many people actually "program" these flexible devices to better handle repetitive tasks? No, it's "point, click, point, click...", even if it's 100 point/clicks done 1000 times the same way.
No need to wait for the future. Today's computers serve more as modular consumer appliances than as computing devices.
All these estimates for the cost of virus cleanup, web surfing on the job, etc. have a fatal flaw in the calculation. They assume if people aren't doing the undesirable activity they would be doing the ideal alternative 100% of the time.
Humans take breaks. Humans often fill break time with some the other things they have queued up. Some examples of filler tasks are: cleaning up after viruses and web surfing.
Software piracy provides an even more glaring example of excessive cost allocation. I would confidently guess that most illegitimate copies of software would not be replaced by legitimate ones if piracy magically disappeared. Yet when experts calculate this cost they assign 100% value to each unlicensed copy, as if each would otherwise be licensed at the full price.
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Then why are we building software skyscrapers, rather than more modest dwellings? Scale is our enemy, until we understand how to manage it. We need much less complex software than we in fact receive.
At the risk of bludgeoning the obvious to a pulpy mess...
:)
This wouldn't be an issue if people used the simplest possible format, most suited to the message. Ideas need well-constructed sentences and paragraphs, separated wisely by whitespace. Fonts and colors frequently serve to disguise poor writing and badly organized thoughts.
At work anything that smells like a document arrives as a Word doc, and anything vaguely tabular becomes an Excel spreadsheet. Why wait for a huge, and expensive, application to load, only to reveal that the information is irrelevant?
If you absolutely need a more advanced presentation then step up to HTML. Just make sure you are improving communication, not decoration.
So there.
Ok, we go from Jackson's remedies, which included both behavioral remedies and a split to just a behavioral "fix". And this is better?
Who says Microsoft won't appeal even these remedies to death?
I don't see how we gain an anything here. It's lose-lose all the way.
Yes, it will have all these additional multimedia capabilities. But that doesn't stop PCs from becoming dumbed down appliances. They'll just have on-screen buttons and knobs instead of physical ones.
How many people actually "program" these flexible devices to better handle repetitive tasks? No, it's "point, click, point, click...", even if it's 100 point/clicks done 1000 times the same way.
No need to wait for the future. Today's computers serve more as modular consumer appliances than as computing devices.
It will only get worse.
All these estimates for the cost of virus cleanup, web surfing on the job, etc. have a fatal flaw in the calculation. They assume if people aren't doing the undesirable activity they would be doing the ideal alternative 100% of the time.
Humans take breaks. Humans often fill break time with some the other things they have queued up. Some examples of filler tasks are: cleaning up after viruses and web surfing.
Software piracy provides an even more glaring example of excessive cost allocation. I would confidently guess that most illegitimate copies of software would not be replaced by legitimate ones if piracy magically disappeared. Yet when experts calculate this cost they assign 100% value to each unlicensed copy, as if each would otherwise be licensed at the full price.
Dumb.