You forget Godel, who proved that any system like mathemetics is based on non-provable axioms. So you cannot say that mathematics has been proven to be true... There are some axioms at the base which are not provable, but from then on it is everything fine.
Especially if you take into account, that we only care about terrorism in the civilized world... the same week the terrorist attac on WTC caused the death of about 3000 people, nearly the same amount of people were killed in central africa by terrorist attacs. (Sorry, no links, but maybe do some googling...)
BUT: you can get quite easy in these terrorist databases. Shortly after 09/11 there were some "investigations" going on during which some students in our university were interrogated. They were on the list, because they paid television fees and were sucpiciously unsuspicious muslims...
Actually, there are more than three authors of the paper... (OK, judging from our physics department, only half of them understand whats going on, but even then there rest more than three)
Over here in Germany we have them since a long time, so you get used to BSODs and Logon-Screens. Once after standing half an hour searching Ctrl-Alt-Del on these I gave up...
German Railways (Deutsche Bahne) have since about two years some nice ticket vending machines featuring touch screens which are mainly broken/scratched/generally out of order. These machines are running Windows NT 4.0 (I think). These things are rebooted every day at three in the morning, just in case they hang. (BTW. If you touch the screen while rebooting quite often, then they will go into a boot loop...)
Result of these things are really frustrated people in trains without a ticket trying to explain frustrated railway people that the machine wasn't working...
Luckily I have a car;-) (with nearly no electronics inside...)
Actually it is a bit older: Mozart (1756-1791) did a Dice-Sonata: he composed 176 bars of music, of which you choose 16 by playing dice. This gives 11^16 different sonatas!
These kind of musical dice-plays where in fashion in Mozarts time, the oldest known is from 1757: "Johann Philipp Kirnberger: Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen- und Menuettencomponist, Winter. Berlin 1757.".
You can find more info (in german) on this page. There is quite a list of pieces and books...
OK, so everybody used something before. If you would ask a caveman what he thinks is a good user interface and all he knows is "UGH, STICK IS GOOD", then give him a stick, although there might be better Interfaces for hitting other cavemans.
If you have something innovative, which does not resemble anything before, give it to your target audience and see, how they perform. I do not think that Sun put the people in front of GNOME for half an hour (if you read the study, it is somewhere on the GNOME website I think, they put them there for several hours) and used their first reactions. Usability study means letting people accomplish tasks for quite a time...
These Ethnographic studies are somewhat scientific, meaning you can trust at least half of it. If you for example ask people to change the mouse-accessebility features in GNOME, people ranging from noobs to professionals, and look at what they are looking at, you learn quite a lot of how people think things should be organized (and that putting mouse-settings in a tab in an applet for keyboard setting might not be brilliant...)
Saying that the sun study is bullocks just because it takes away some clocks and comes up with things you think are stupid is not fair. If most of the people think, a lot of clocks are confusing, then maybe it is for them... Why not hide this from them in "Add a clock" and put the appearance of the clocks (ie the different clocks) in a preferences dialog. There is no difference in functionality between all the clocks. All of them show the local time. They just look different.
The important thing is: give the user a FUNCTION not a LOOK. Changing the look of things should go to some preferences, not in a lot of Applets which do the same, but just look different.
I completely agree with that. I do not see any reason to not have multiple clocks (or whatever else)... GNOME right now is a mess when it comes to consistency. There used to be a lot of different ways to change appearences, you had to change themes for Window-managers, nautilus and other applications in their respective preferences, in 2.2 these options have disappeared. Now there is the approach to configure everything in a single place (at least, thats my impression, I have no clue about GNOME-development...) which is a good idea (alas, if it works...)
I think the main problem is the common development process. Somebody wants a funky feature like dropshadows for menus, does a quick hack, and then starts doing other things (OK, this is oversimplified). My impression of most of the Linux-Apps is that they were done by a bunch of people to solve their needs, improved by some other people until they ended up being able to read mail with the app and than people got distracted by programming other apps.
Most of the working and usable apps have the benefit of the benevolent dictator sitting behind, like Linus and others do for the kernel, who cares for overall integration. All the big gnome apps like Galeon seem to integrate quite well in an overall configuration scheme (although this scheme changes quite often, after doing an update I quite often had to delete my configuration and start with defaults again, because the app changed its conf-format...). The smaller ones all look like beeing in the state of "it works with developers computer" but not in a state for Joe User.
The problem of UIs is, that there is (almost) no overall project. Most of the UI consists of applications written by different people, mostly there is no coordination going on of how to implement things. So most of the applets do not fit in the scheme. KDE seems to to better in that, maybe because QT does not allow much confusion how to do things. GNOME allows a large variety of languages, of versions of GTK,... which allows much more confusion (my impression, not based on facts)
Your comment on intuitive interfaces: most of "intuitive" interfaces are complete crap. But as Sun has done, you can improve usability by putting the people in front of the computer you are programming for and let them figure out how things work. That's the way good websites get done, that should be the way UIs should be done. Most people do not care about drop shadows or transparent mouse-arrows, but how to access files, write a text, do their work. So get Mothers and Grand-Parents and ask them how they would like the Text-Writing-Thing to look. And if they want a classic typewriter, give them a typewriter. But if your target audience is Geeks who prefer VI or emacs (like anyone on slashdot, including me), then give them VI or emacs.
A UI beeing intuitive means you do not have to read the manual to figure out how to do basic things. If you want to do something else, then RTFM. But this depends on your audience...
Most of the GNOME-Users NOW are Unix/Linux-Users. I want my mother to be able to use gnome, but without having to figure aout keybindings, menu-structures etc. for half a year. This does not mean, it has to be like windows, but to be intuitive.
The great thing of Linux is that is configurable. If you don't like some appearance, keybinding whatever, change it. But the default should be simple.
A big chance for GNOME and any other GUI is accessibility. GNOME has the ATK, which for sure needs improvement, but enabling users with some kind of impairment to use a computer is a chance for linux. Windows just sucks with these features. It has a Magnifying thing, it has keyboard mouse, but nearly no Software works with screen-readers, braille-terminals, etc. Linux can handle these...
And having a simple, straight-forward user-interface (KDE, GNOME, Whatever) which uses by default simple key-bindings, intuitive GUI and so helps ordinary people as well. If you want to have the key-bindings of [insert favorite editor], configure it that way. There has to be a default and in my opinion it should be neither VI or Emacs, it should be the thing most people (not UNIXers) know, and that is windows...
The mass of light yuo can easily calculate. Get the Energy from the wavelength E=h/(c*lambda) (h is Plancks constant, c lightspeed, lambda wavelength), then use the famous E=mc^2 and there you are.
Light is always affected by matter, but because of its small mass (see above) only lightly. The critical mass (better mass-density) you can calculate, it depends on the isze of the object. If you want to turn yourself into a black hole, try to be smaller than an atom... You would affect light, but: light as far away as some millimeters from you would just be a little bit bended. Light passing you at angstrom-distance might get absorbed.
Gravity can do this for you. That is why there is the threory of black holes around...
We do, however, have good evidence for the existence of black holes, so no matter how much physicists hate what they do to the math, we may have to simply accept them.
We don't. We have evidence for something really massive, really small. There might be other explanations as a black hole, the gravastar theory would also fit these observations. The problem is: right now we cannot explain the existence of matter, of gravity and a few other things we have a lot better evidence than black holes.
There is a lot of so called renormalizations in quantum-gravity (and other quantum theories) which is basically waving away infinities...
Where you are absolutely right: we have things which behave like black holes, so physics has to explain them, no matter how ugly the math gets
It is not only: take two people. We share 99% of our genome with apes, about 96 or so with other mammals. So why bother about races... And wasn't it only 85% of the genome they mapped ?
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You forget Godel, who proved that any system like mathemetics is based on non-provable axioms. So you cannot say that mathematics has been proven to be true... There are some axioms at the base which are not provable, but from then on it is everything fine.
Especially if you take into account, that we only care about terrorism in the civilized world... the same week the terrorist attac on WTC caused the death of about 3000 people, nearly the same amount of people were killed in central africa by terrorist attacs. (Sorry, no links, but maybe do some googling...)
BUT: you can get quite easy in these terrorist databases. Shortly after 09/11 there were some "investigations" going on during which some students in our university were interrogated. They were on the list, because they paid television fees and were sucpiciously unsuspicious muslims...
Actually, there are more than three authors of the paper... (OK, judging from our physics department, only half of them understand whats going on, but even then there rest more than three)
And if you happen to live in Germany, you also have to pay for the letter T (like T-Com, former Telekom, former Post)...
...
There is now some stupid domain wars going on, T-COm i sueing poeple with domains like t-bag.de
Over here in Germany we have them since a long time, so you get used to BSODs and Logon-Screens. Once after standing half an hour searching Ctrl-Alt-Del on these I gave up...
;-) (with nearly no electronics inside...)
German Railways (Deutsche Bahne) have since about two years some nice ticket vending machines featuring touch screens which are mainly broken/scratched/generally out of order. These machines are running Windows NT 4.0 (I think). These things are rebooted every day at three in the morning, just in case they hang. (BTW. If you touch the screen while rebooting quite often, then they will go into a boot loop...)
Result of these things are really frustrated people in trains without a ticket trying to explain frustrated railway people that the machine wasn't working...
Luckily I have a car
Look at the display: if it says 100003 ...100004....100005 you go up.
Actually it is a bit older: Mozart (1756-1791) did a Dice-Sonata: he composed 176 bars of music, of which you choose 16 by playing dice. This gives 11^16 different sonatas!
These kind of musical dice-plays where in fashion in Mozarts time, the oldest known is from 1757: "Johann Philipp Kirnberger: Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen- und Menuettencomponist, Winter. Berlin 1757.".
You can find more info (in german) on this page. There is quite a list of pieces and books...
OK, so everybody used something before. If you would ask a caveman what he thinks is a good user interface and all he knows is "UGH, STICK IS GOOD", then give him a stick, although there might be better Interfaces for hitting other cavemans.
If you have something innovative, which does not resemble anything before, give it to your target audience and see, how they perform. I do not think that Sun put the people in front of GNOME for half an hour (if you read the study, it is somewhere on the GNOME website I think, they put them there for several hours) and used their first reactions. Usability study means letting people accomplish tasks for quite a time...
These Ethnographic studies are somewhat scientific, meaning you can trust at least half of it. If you for example ask people to change the mouse-accessebility features in GNOME, people ranging from noobs to professionals, and look at what they are looking at, you learn quite a lot of how people think things should be organized (and that putting mouse-settings in a tab in an applet for keyboard setting might not be brilliant...)
Saying that the sun study is bullocks just because it takes away some clocks and comes up with things you think are stupid is not fair. If most of the people think, a lot of clocks are confusing, then maybe it is for them... Why not hide this from them in "Add a clock" and put the appearance of the clocks (ie the different clocks) in a preferences dialog. There is no difference in functionality between all the clocks. All of them show the local time. They just look different.
The important thing is: give the user a FUNCTION not a LOOK. Changing the look of things should go to some preferences, not in a lot of Applets which do the same, but just look different.
I completely agree with that. I do not see any reason to not have multiple clocks (or whatever else)... GNOME right now is a mess when it comes to consistency. There used to be a lot of different ways to change appearences, you had to change themes for Window-managers, nautilus and other applications in their respective preferences, in 2.2 these options have disappeared. Now there is the approach to configure everything in a single place (at least, thats my impression, I have no clue about GNOME-development...) which is a good idea (alas, if it works...)
... which allows much more confusion (my impression, not based on facts)
I think the main problem is the common development process. Somebody wants a funky feature like dropshadows for menus, does a quick hack, and then starts doing other things (OK, this is oversimplified). My impression of most of the Linux-Apps is that they were done by a bunch of people to solve their needs, improved by some other people until they ended up being able to read mail with the app and than people got distracted by programming other apps.
Most of the working and usable apps have the benefit of the benevolent dictator sitting behind, like Linus and others do for the kernel, who cares for overall integration. All the big gnome apps like Galeon seem to integrate quite well in an overall configuration scheme (although this scheme changes quite often, after doing an update I quite often had to delete my configuration and start with defaults again, because the app changed its conf-format...). The smaller ones all look like beeing in the state of "it works with developers computer" but not in a state for Joe User.
The problem of UIs is, that there is (almost) no overall project. Most of the UI consists of applications written by different people, mostly there is no coordination going on of how to implement things. So most of the applets do not fit in the scheme. KDE seems to to better in that, maybe because QT does not allow much confusion how to do things. GNOME allows a large variety of languages, of versions of GTK,
Your comment on intuitive interfaces: most of "intuitive" interfaces are complete crap. But as Sun has done, you can improve usability by putting the people in front of the computer you are programming for and let them figure out how things work. That's the way good websites get done, that should be the way UIs should be done. Most people do not care about drop shadows or transparent mouse-arrows, but how to access files, write a text, do their work. So get Mothers and Grand-Parents and ask them how they would like the Text-Writing-Thing to look. And if they want a classic typewriter, give them a typewriter. But if your target audience is Geeks who prefer VI or emacs (like anyone on slashdot, including me), then give them VI or emacs.
A UI beeing intuitive means you do not have to read the manual to figure out how to do basic things. If you want to do something else, then RTFM. But this depends on your audience...
Most of the GNOME-Users NOW are Unix/Linux-Users. I want my mother to be able to use gnome, but without having to figure aout keybindings, menu-structures etc. for half a year. This does not mean, it has to be like windows, but to be intuitive.
The great thing of Linux is that is configurable. If you don't like some appearance, keybinding whatever, change it. But the default should be simple.
A big chance for GNOME and any other GUI is accessibility. GNOME has the ATK, which for sure needs improvement, but enabling users with some kind of impairment to use a computer is a chance for linux. Windows just sucks with these features. It has a Magnifying thing, it has keyboard mouse, but nearly no Software works with screen-readers, braille-terminals, etc. Linux can handle these...
And having a simple, straight-forward user-interface (KDE, GNOME, Whatever) which uses by default simple key-bindings, intuitive GUI and so helps ordinary people as well. If you want to have the key-bindings of [insert favorite editor], configure it that way. There has to be a default and in my opinion it should be neither VI or Emacs, it should be the thing most people (not UNIXers) know, and that is windows...
As we all know, Voyager will still work in 200 years, when Kirk has to rescue Earth from it returning... ;)
I would't share myself, but I could live with a copy of Jennifer Lopez ;-)
The mass of light yuo can easily calculate. Get the Energy from the wavelength E=h/(c*lambda) (h is Plancks constant, c lightspeed, lambda wavelength), then use the famous E=mc^2 and there you are.
Light is always affected by matter, but because of its small mass (see above) only lightly. The critical mass (better mass-density) you can calculate, it depends on the isze of the object. If you want to turn yourself into a black hole, try to be smaller than an atom... You would affect light, but: light as far away as some millimeters from you would just be a little bit bended. Light passing you at angstrom-distance might get absorbed.
Gravity can do this for you. That is why there is the threory of black holes around...
We don't. We have evidence for something really massive, really small. There might be other explanations as a black hole, the gravastar theory would also fit these observations. The problem is: right now we cannot explain the existence of matter, of gravity and a few other things we have a lot better evidence than black holes.
There is a lot of so called renormalizations in quantum-gravity (and other quantum theories) which is basically waving away infinities...
Where you are absolutely right: we have things which behave like black holes, so physics has to explain them, no matter how ugly the math gets
It is not only: take two people. We share 99% of our genome with apes, about 96 or so with other mammals. So why bother about races... And wasn't it only 85% of the genome they mapped ?