I didn't ask for a book recommendation, I asked what was wrong with that error message.
If it had said simply "Keyboard error" or "Keyboard not found" or something similarly nonspecific, I would agree that it was a bad error message. But I really don't think there's much improvement that could be made to the example as actually given.
After all, you can operate a car quite well in today's society without knowing anything about cars, as long as you understand the 'gasoline' thing.
You cannot legally operate a car in today's society without demonstrating and gaining accreditation in the fundamentals of car operation. You need to know how to how to signal a turn, how to parallel park, what traffic signs mean. And you have to prove to the state that you know it and can operate a car competently before you're allowed on the roads.
That, in my mind, cannot be considered "not knowing anything about cars".
professional interaction designers that realize "Error: Keyboard not connected; press F1 to continue" is not an acceptable thing to say to people.
What's wrong with that? It clearly and concisely explains what the problem is, and provides information on what the user needs to do to resolve it.
Then again, I'm assuming that the keyboard interface is one that can be hot-plugged, like USB. If it's an older interface where the computer won't recognize the keypress even after the physical connection has been established, making the instructions wrong, I guess you have a point.
Again, I appreciate your openness and availability, but if I have a problem with a Netscape website, the first place I'm going to look is not going to be the website of an individual developer, hosted over at efinke.com. I'm going to go to the Netscape Help page, and if I can't find a simple way to report a problem there I'm going to leave.
Your entire company needs to make a commitment to open dialogue, not just you individually.
That means you expect every user to have the technological savvy to understand that the song collection they bought so easily and conveniently online is just a worthless bunch of bytes if they ever want to use another brand of MP3 player.
I don't see why consumers SHOULDN'T be expected to understand what it is that they're buying before they buy it. I mean, the phrase "caveat emptor" has been around for so long that the language it originated in is now dead!
It's not hard to find official explanations from Apple about what FairPlay is and how it affects people who use the iTunes Store and/or iPod player devices. Apple isn't hiding anything.
Entrapment of users is not more acceptable just because it is possible to evade the trap if you are smart enough.
And attaching openly-disclosed conditions to the purchase of a digital media file is not entrapment.
Clearly he won't settle for less than best in him employees--but viewing from the outside, it's hard to say if that helped or hindered Apple's success.
It's a peculiar argument to make that a greater tolerance for mediocrity could have in some way helped Apple's success.
Spark and Activision probably weren't planning to work with each other in the future again anyway, if their contract dispute had to go to court to be resolved.
What he was saying "no" to is having a plethora of buggy software out there that would endanger the user experience of the phone.
I don't recall Apple ever saying "no" to the chance of having a plethora of buggy software endangering the user experience of their desktop and notebook PC's. Anyone with a code editor and compiler can freely create and distribute code that runs on those machines.
So what is it about a pocket-sized computer like the iPhone that requires Apple's attitude towards third-party development to be any different?
And how is this any different than if Microsoft decreed that no software could run on Vista unless the developer submitted it (along with a processing fee) to them for 'certification'?
You're already paying for the box in your cable bill; indeed, if you went out and bought a cable box, then called Comcast to pick up theirs, you'd still be paying for it.
Read your cable bill. Most cable providers itemize service and hardware rental separately (maybe all do; maybe it is an FCC requirement; I don't know).
If you don't need to use the company's rented cable box, you should not be compelled to rent that hardware from them, and the hardware rental charge should be removed from your bill.
Same as the cable modem.. you're takes a crap, you buy another one, we will replace it free. I really don't see any cost savings here.
I've found Motorola SurfBoards are pretty reliable... I've been using the same one for five years with no issues.
So why should I pay $5/mo to rent one from the cable company, costing me $300 over the course of five years, when I could just buy one at Best Buy for $50 after rebate?
Even if the thing breaks repeatedly, I have an extra $250 in my pocket which I can use to replace it before it costs me more to own than to rent.
The reason is that these boxes are currently the only way to get "digital cable" (which is not to be confused with digital television, since the picture is still NTSC, not highdef, in most cases).
Actually, digital cable IS to be confused with digital television, as they are the same thing.
Digital cable/TV signals are ATSC, just like HDTV signals, only they're transmitted at resolutions comparable to that of analog NTSC video (512x480, for example).
Yes, I do think it is problematic and confusing that all at the same time, the television industry is migrating: - from analog to digital - from standard definition to high definition - from 4:3 to 16:9 widescreen - from CRT to flat-screen
Is it any wonder the adoption rate on all these new technologies is trailing behind expecations? Consumers are confused about what they're getting.
HD-DVD players can only read two layers, therefore no movie can ever have more than two layers.
No movie disc conforming to the HD-DVD spec can have required data on more than two layers. But there's always the possibility that the HD-DVD spec could be abandoned altogether for a newer specification that allows an arbitrary number of layers per disc.
There could even be "HD-DVD Plus" discs that have HD-DVD standard content on layers 0 and 1, and then premium content on layers 2 and up that can only be accessed if you have a special HD-DVD+ player. It's not too far off in concept from how videocassette players were able to introduce features like enhanced picture quality, longer play modes, stereo sound, etc. a decade after the product first came to market -- without sacrificing any compatibility with the original standards.
I would think that spammers would automatically avoid domains with SPF records to increase their hit rate, but apparently not.
Spammers don't care about hit rates and neither do the folks that employ them. Who cares if it's 10 people out of 100 that fall for the bait or 10 people out of 100,000 -- it's still 10 sales that they can credit to spamming.
But your employer should provide you with everything you need to get certified: books, time, good courses if required.
Bingo.
If your company is not willing to give your team either time or training towards gaining J2EE proficiency, but have set that as a goal you must achieve in 2007, that's a problem. They're either clueless, or expecting you to fail so they can get rid of you all. I'm leaning towards the latter. Maybe those of you that do manage to pass certification by studying on evenings and weekends at your own expense will be absorbed into other departments, but I'd be worried if I were you guys.
"We filter out all the crap music you don't want to hear!"
Unfortunately they've had that filter set to lowpass instead of highpass for a couple decades now, and have been giving us the crap music while getting rid of the brilliant stuff.
A musician can get a job making music for industrial purposes (movies, TV shows, even local productions such as local TV commercials, etc). A musician can get a job teaching others how to play music. A musician can get a job working on soundtracks for video games or other goods.
Unlikely. Every music school composition student dreams of being the next John Williams, but few have a chance of even being the next John Williams's Orchestrator's Copyist's Assistant. There's simply way more candidates than work available in the field.
If you're a tiny band and I bootleg your music, you have NO chance of suing me and winning -- I probably have more money than you
Perhaps, but I have fact of law on my side. The only time we'll be spending in court is working out exactly how much of your money you will have to give to me, because if I have a registered copyright and you were caught red-handed distributing my work without my permission, you have already lost.
(In case the artist dies shortly after creating a work, their family should benefit from profits).
Why? The family didn't contribute anything to the progress of the arts; the late artist did.
Not that I disagree that some amount of post-death protection is advisable. We don't want evil media companies killing off creative artists just to force their works into the public domain.
She was also really old and maybe should have just asked her grandson, who was driving the then parked car, for assistance.
Then HE would have been the one to suffer severe burns.
McDonald's didn't get in trouble because their coffee was hot. They got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than coffee should ever conceivably be. It was unfit for consumption, and not just the way food and beverages from McD's normally are.
The key example of this is forum software. Truly heirarchical in nature, the data is also of varying sizes, full of binary blobs, and generally unsuitable for your average SQL system.
Hierarchichal? Yes, but I don't see any problem using SQL to access hierarchical information. It's easy to have parent/child relationships.
Data of varying sizes? I thought this problem was solved 20 years ago when ANSI adopted a SQL standard including a VARCHAR datatype.
Full of binary blobs? Why? What in the hell for? So that each user can have an obnormous enoxious "signature banner" graphic that readers have to look at 20 times in any given thread?
There's very little data that belongs in a forum interface that can't be represented in plaintext. For the rest, store it on the filesystem and just store a reference to it in the database.
As anyone with a compsci degree or equivalent experience can tell you, creating a custom database is not that hard.
And as anyone who has ever done software development in the real world can tell you, custom components almost always suck worse than similar standard components.
.. but when is the rest of the USA going to follow suit?
When the units of the metric system become relevant to our everyday tasks.
I know how long a distance "1 foot" is, because it's roughly equivalent to the length of one of my feet. What's the metric equivalent to a foot? A meter is too large, a centimeter is too small, and no one uses "decimeter" (possibly because they can't keep it and "decameter" straight).
Imperial measures were derived from practical everyday quantities. The meter was originally defined as "1/40,000,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth". Do you have any special relationship with the polar circumference of the Earth, or with the arbitrary magic number Forty Million?
Not at that price tag, they're not. That's with a two year agreement with Cingular. That's way, way beyond most peoples' price points
Way beyond most people's, yes. But way beyond the price point of the rabit technophiles who would buy an Apple Toilet if it was made of translucent white plastic and you used a clickwheel to flush it?
This thing is an engineering marvel from what I can tell. Personally, I don't think it's that much better than a Palm- or Windows Mobile-based Treo 700 that I'd be willing to pay twice as much for it, but I don't doubt that there's a sufficient number of people out there who would.
It costs the police department money to dust for fingerprints, and subsequently run them against a database. Most likely more than the $450 value of the property that was stolen from you and damaged.
Even if good fingerprints were found and matched to someone, that doesn't go very far towards proving guilt. Maybe somebody rested their hand on your car door during a jog down your street.
I can't say I blame them for not assigning their top CSI experts to the case. And I say that as someone whose car has been broken into more than once and was disappointed by how little the police seemed to do about it.
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I didn't ask for a book recommendation, I asked what was wrong with that error message.
If it had said simply "Keyboard error" or "Keyboard not found" or something similarly nonspecific, I would agree that it was a bad error message. But I really don't think there's much improvement that could be made to the example as actually given.
After all, you can operate a car quite well in today's society without knowing anything about cars, as long as you understand the 'gasoline' thing.
You cannot legally operate a car in today's society without demonstrating and gaining accreditation in the fundamentals of car operation. You need to know how to how to signal a turn, how to parallel park, what traffic signs mean. And you have to prove to the state that you know it and can operate a car competently before you're allowed on the roads.
That, in my mind, cannot be considered "not knowing anything about cars".
professional interaction designers that realize "Error: Keyboard not connected; press F1 to continue" is not an acceptable thing to say to people.
What's wrong with that? It clearly and concisely explains what the problem is, and provides information on what the user needs to do to resolve it.
Then again, I'm assuming that the keyboard interface is one that can be hot-plugged, like USB. If it's an older interface where the computer won't recognize the keypress even after the physical connection has been established, making the instructions wrong, I guess you have a point.
Again, I appreciate your openness and availability, but if I have a problem with a Netscape website, the first place I'm going to look is not going to be the website of an individual developer, hosted over at efinke.com. I'm going to go to the Netscape Help page, and if I can't find a simple way to report a problem there I'm going to leave.
Your entire company needs to make a commitment to open dialogue, not just you individually.
That means you expect every user to have the technological savvy to understand that the song collection they bought so easily and conveniently online is just a worthless bunch of bytes if they ever want to use another brand of MP3 player.
I don't see why consumers SHOULDN'T be expected to understand what it is that they're buying before they buy it. I mean, the phrase "caveat emptor" has been around for so long that the language it originated in is now dead!
It's not hard to find official explanations from Apple about what FairPlay is and how it affects people who use the iTunes Store and/or iPod player devices. Apple isn't hiding anything.
Entrapment of users is not more acceptable just because it is possible to evade the trap if you are smart enough.
And attaching openly-disclosed conditions to the purchase of a digital media file is not entrapment.
Clearly he won't settle for less than best in him employees--but viewing from the outside, it's hard to say if that helped or hindered Apple's success.
It's a peculiar argument to make that a greater tolerance for mediocrity could have in some way helped Apple's success.
Spark and Activision probably weren't planning to work with each other in the future again anyway, if their contract dispute had to go to court to be resolved.
Or better yet, look at the mode of bonus distribution -- what bonus amount is most commonly given to employees of the company?
I would bet that the mode ends up being $0.
What he was saying "no" to is having a plethora of buggy software out there that would endanger the user experience of the phone.
I don't recall Apple ever saying "no" to the chance of having a plethora of buggy software endangering the user experience of their desktop and notebook PC's. Anyone with a code editor and compiler can freely create and distribute code that runs on those machines.
So what is it about a pocket-sized computer like the iPhone that requires Apple's attitude towards third-party development to be any different?
And how is this any different than if Microsoft decreed that no software could run on Vista unless the developer submitted it (along with a processing fee) to them for 'certification'?
I think the industry has established by now what are good programming habits and methodologies and what aren't.
And five years from now, the industry's opinions about what good programming habits and methodologies are will have changed substantially.
Let's not assume that since Java is an extremely popular language right now, that all languages forevermore should try to be like Java.
You're already paying for the box in your cable bill; indeed, if you went out and bought a cable box, then called Comcast to pick up theirs, you'd still be paying for it.
Read your cable bill. Most cable providers itemize service and hardware rental separately (maybe all do; maybe it is an FCC requirement; I don't know).
If you don't need to use the company's rented cable box, you should not be compelled to rent that hardware from them, and the hardware rental charge should be removed from your bill.
Same as the cable modem.. you're takes a crap, you buy another one, we will replace it free. I really don't see any cost savings here.
I've found Motorola SurfBoards are pretty reliable... I've been using the same one for five years with no issues.
So why should I pay $5/mo to rent one from the cable company, costing me $300 over the course of five years, when I could just buy one at Best Buy for $50 after rebate?
Even if the thing breaks repeatedly, I have an extra $250 in my pocket which I can use to replace it before it costs me more to own than to rent.
The reason is that these boxes are currently the only way to get "digital cable" (which is not to be confused with digital television, since the picture is still NTSC, not highdef, in most cases).
Actually, digital cable IS to be confused with digital television, as they are the same thing.
Digital cable/TV signals are ATSC, just like HDTV signals, only they're transmitted at resolutions comparable to that of analog NTSC video (512x480, for example).
Yes, I do think it is problematic and confusing that all at the same time, the television industry is migrating:
- from analog to digital
- from standard definition to high definition
- from 4:3 to 16:9 widescreen
- from CRT to flat-screen
Is it any wonder the adoption rate on all these new technologies is trailing behind expecations? Consumers are confused about what they're getting.
HD-DVD players can only read two layers, therefore no movie can ever have more than two layers.
No movie disc conforming to the HD-DVD spec can have required data on more than two layers. But there's always the possibility that the HD-DVD spec could be abandoned altogether for a newer specification that allows an arbitrary number of layers per disc.
There could even be "HD-DVD Plus" discs that have HD-DVD standard content on layers 0 and 1, and then premium content on layers 2 and up that can only be accessed if you have a special HD-DVD+ player. It's not too far off in concept from how videocassette players were able to introduce features like enhanced picture quality, longer play modes, stereo sound, etc. a decade after the product first came to market -- without sacrificing any compatibility with the original standards.
I would think that spammers would automatically avoid domains with SPF records to increase their hit rate, but apparently not.
Spammers don't care about hit rates and neither do the folks that employ them. Who cares if it's 10 people out of 100 that fall for the bait or 10 people out of 100,000 -- it's still 10 sales that they can credit to spamming.
But your employer should provide you with everything you need to get certified: books, time, good courses if required.
Bingo.
If your company is not willing to give your team either time or training towards gaining J2EE proficiency, but have set that as a goal you must achieve in 2007, that's a problem. They're either clueless, or expecting you to fail so they can get rid of you all. I'm leaning towards the latter. Maybe those of you that do manage to pass certification by studying on evenings and weekends at your own expense will be absorbed into other departments, but I'd be worried if I were you guys.
"We filter out all the crap music you don't want to hear!"
Unfortunately they've had that filter set to lowpass instead of highpass for a couple decades now, and have been giving us the crap music while getting rid of the brilliant stuff.
A musician can get a job making music for industrial purposes (movies, TV shows, even local productions such as local TV commercials, etc). A musician can get a job teaching others how to play music. A musician can get a job working on soundtracks for video games or other goods.
Unlikely. Every music school composition student dreams of being the next John Williams, but few have a chance of even being the next John Williams's Orchestrator's Copyist's Assistant. There's simply way more candidates than work available in the field.
If you're a tiny band and I bootleg your music, you have NO chance of suing me and winning -- I probably have more money than you
Perhaps, but I have fact of law on my side. The only time we'll be spending in court is working out exactly how much of your money you will have to give to me, because if I have a registered copyright and you were caught red-handed distributing my work without my permission, you have already lost.
(In case the artist dies shortly after creating a work, their family should benefit from profits).
Why? The family didn't contribute anything to the progress of the arts; the late artist did.
Not that I disagree that some amount of post-death protection is advisable. We don't want evil media companies killing off creative artists just to force their works into the public domain.
She was also really old and maybe should have just asked her grandson, who was driving the then parked car, for assistance.
Then HE would have been the one to suffer severe burns.
McDonald's didn't get in trouble because their coffee was hot. They got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than coffee should ever conceivably be. It was unfit for consumption, and not just the way food and beverages from McD's normally are.
The key example of this is forum software. Truly heirarchical in nature, the data is also of varying sizes, full of binary blobs, and generally unsuitable for your average SQL system.
Hierarchichal? Yes, but I don't see any problem using SQL to access hierarchical information. It's easy to have parent/child relationships.
Data of varying sizes? I thought this problem was solved 20 years ago when ANSI adopted a SQL standard including a VARCHAR datatype.
Full of binary blobs? Why? What in the hell for? So that each user can have an obnormous enoxious "signature banner" graphic that readers have to look at 20 times in any given thread?
There's very little data that belongs in a forum interface that can't be represented in plaintext. For the rest, store it on the filesystem and just store a reference to it in the database.
As anyone with a compsci degree or equivalent experience can tell you, creating a custom database is not that hard.
And as anyone who has ever done software development in the real world can tell you, custom components almost always suck worse than similar standard components.
In fact it looks to work far worse than 3D prototype printers I saw demonstrated 5-7 years ago did.
Yes, but this one is expected to cost $2,500, and the ones you saw cost at least twenty times that.
.. but when is the rest of the USA going to follow suit?
When the units of the metric system become relevant to our everyday tasks.
I know how long a distance "1 foot" is, because it's roughly equivalent to the length of one of my feet. What's the metric equivalent to a foot? A meter is too large, a centimeter is too small, and no one uses "decimeter" (possibly because they can't keep it and "decameter" straight).
Imperial measures were derived from practical everyday quantities. The meter was originally defined as "1/40,000,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth". Do you have any special relationship with the polar circumference of the Earth, or with the arbitrary magic number Forty Million?
Not at that price tag, they're not. That's with a two year agreement with Cingular. That's way, way beyond most peoples' price points
Way beyond most people's, yes. But way beyond the price point of the rabit technophiles who would buy an Apple Toilet if it was made of translucent white plastic and you used a clickwheel to flush it?
This thing is an engineering marvel from what I can tell. Personally, I don't think it's that much better than a Palm- or Windows Mobile-based Treo 700 that I'd be willing to pay twice as much for it, but I don't doubt that there's a sufficient number of people out there who would.
It costs the police department money to dust for fingerprints, and subsequently run them against a database. Most likely more than the $450 value of the property that was stolen from you and damaged.
Even if good fingerprints were found and matched to someone, that doesn't go very far towards proving guilt. Maybe somebody rested their hand on your car door during a jog down your street.
I can't say I blame them for not assigning their top CSI experts to the case. And I say that as someone whose car has been broken into more than once and was disappointed by how little the police seemed to do about it.