I'd like all workgroup printers to print the user name, the document name, the printer name, the date and time of printing and the page number (and the total number of pages if this can be precalculated) on (say along the top) of each page output. That way, we could identify who printed the piles of uncollected printout that appear next to our printers. Our users consider printing this visibly an intrusion, and header sheets get separated from the rest of the document (stapling them to the rest of the document is considered a nuisance even when the document is thin enough to permit this to be done).
I think you're thinking of the British Miles M.52 - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A882272 and elsewhere. A crucial difference between the Bell XS-1 and the Miles M.52, if I recall correctly, is that the former was rocket powered, and the latter was (Rolls-Royce) jet engine powered.
I'm not an aviation buff, but learnt about this fascinating project from a - I think - BBC TV documentary in August 2004.
Yet another case where 'stuffed shirt' British politicians have pulled the plug on projects in which the UK had a technological lead and more adventurous and entepreneurial Americans did the work necessary to bring the development to fruition, and then sold it back to us!
Probably the oldest standard that people still refer to is AT&T's 1985 System V Interface Definition (SVID).
I routinely use printed Seventh Edition (Bell Labs Research) UNIX manuals, even when writing C for Linux. It also helps one remain blissfully ignorant of the 'cat -v' option and similar excrescences. Also the Tenth Edition UNIX manuals. I have to remember the changes introduced by Standard C and the like, but it's convenient to have the essence of the modern-day manual in printed form. Of course, there are some people out there who delight in using Fifth, Sixth, Seventh etc Editions on PDP-11s etc - see the PDP-11 UNIX Preservation Society, http://minnie.tuhs.org/PUPS/. I wish I had a larger garage! How much would a PDP-11/40 cost me now, anyway?
Peter Salus' book "A Quarter Century of UNIX", Addison-Wesley, 1994 (corrected 1995), ISBN 0-201-547771-5 is a good informal UNIX history.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly."
-- Henry Spencer
Apple fixed the bug exploited in (2) above sometime in early 2005 by having the OS warn you if it was running an application for the first time.
I don't know to which bug you refer, but there was a similar one found and fixed in a week just a couple of weeks ago. A quick experiment with that shows that the warning is given every time a disguised malicious file is downloaded, whether the malicious application has been run before or not. See http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=18378 7. An operating system that prevented users from downloading and executing an executable would be very restrictive. A warning from the operating system won't stop a stupid user from downloading a Trojan horse, however - and, of course, such a user can easily bring a Trojan horse in on a removeable medium without warnng.
>Unlike Linux command-line utilities, which contain their own argument parsers and output >format mechanisms, MSH commands (called Cmdlets) all inherit a single base class, which >ensures that all commands expose the same methods, parse arguments the same way
That's not entirely true about Unix (Linux): first, it omits to mention that Unix shells traditionally expand pattern matches in the given arguments, and match the command to an executable, before passing the arguments to that executable; and, second, everyone has used getopt(1) or getopt(3) (in whatever language) for years now, haven't they? (It's a common Unix newbie misapprehension to think that each executable has to expand the shell filename pattern matches in the arguments itself). These are a good start at maintaining command format consistency. I regret only that the original (Research) Unix didn't define which of: '-d -i' or '-di' and which of '-darg' or '-d arg' was preferable, and POSIX.2 (1991) appears (to me, glancing at it now) simply to have rubber-stamped the original situation.
What does this do to individuals who have had their cataracts replaced by inter-ocular lenses (plastic, possibly with metal fastening wires)? Come to think of it, can the weapon cause cataracts? What does the weapon do to dental fillings?
Let's slice up the apps into their features, each with their GUIs hanging out, then rebundle them into a desktop "meta-app". Which is the sole context, representing many different nonmodal contexts, in which I have to work on all my data.
Which is pretty much the Unix shell/filter (aka 'tool', 'command') model - for a textual interface, rather than a GUI, of course. (Remember how annoyed we got when a program created a context of its own, with data that couldn't be accessed or operated on by other shell commands without exporting it, processing it and reimporting it?) Unix command line users find this sufficient for much of their use. How might you browse the web with such an interface, without using a monolithic browser? - well, you might map those web pages into your filestore. I leave working out the creation of such a consistent, appealing, and intuitive GUI as an exercise for the reader.:-)
I would have liked to have seen OpenDoc, to see if it really made possible a GUI of the kind described in the original posting. (See the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc for background.) Of course, we've had OLE and similar since, but nothing that I know of that presented itself to the user in quite the same way. I'm probably out of touch, and would like to hear of anything along these lines that did get released.
For Linux, though apparently not yet for Windows and MacOS X, there is the Eternal archival system. See
http://www.parvat.com/index.php?PAGE=products/eter nal/home.php and
http://linux-bangalore.org/2003/schedules/talkdeta ils.php?talkcode=C403.
As so much science fiction has pointed out, there's a Universe (never mind just our galaxy) waiting for us. Plenty of room to expand into if we don't have to stop at threescore years and ten.
Why eat green-dyed processed human flesh when we can eat the Little Green Men?
Harry Harrison's short story "An Alien Agony" comes to mind re. "What If?". If I remember correctly, a (Roman Catholic?) priest accompanies an Earth mission to a planet inhabited by intelligent, but not advanced, life; humanoid aliens with a ferocious capacity for imitation. He evangelises them, only to find himself taken captive, tried, and crucified so that they too can be "saved".
See also 4Dwm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4dwm), which I used to use on an SGI Indy. Of course, it really wasn't 4D in the geometric sense. Now there's an idea for a really counter-intuitive GUI.
Was it the 1994 movie "Disclosure" in which a character played by the actor Michael Douglas put on a virtual reality headset to browse a criminal records database, projected as many virtual folders which had to be manipulated by hand before he miraculously found the right one?
There's 'ease of use' and 'elegance of use'; I think that some user interface designers think that the only way to make computer systems accessible and accepted by the general populace ('ease of use') is to make them mimic what novice users already know. (In the case of 'Disclosure', virtual reality copies of paper files!) I'd rather see the power of the computer being exploited in new ways to give us better interfaces ('elegance of use').
I'm told that at least one of the early makes of automobile had a papier-mache horse molded on the hood in a risible attempt to diminish the 'shock of the new'. Isn't a user interface which models familiar objects which have only familar, direct-manipulation, properties seeking after the same vapid end?
There's been one mention of "novice controls" on this thread. Various software applications I've seen or heard about have them: Adobe Photoshop, various games; but how widespread are they? Do they work in practice? Would they solve ESR's problem? Would he even like them?
I've seen all sorts of things over the years: "wizards", balloon help, "hint" popups etc, but these seem to me to be rather uncoordinated. What is there that is better that I've not mentioned (because I've not seen or don't remember it)?
As a long-time Unix (includes Linux) user, I get rather annoyed by GUI applications which popup "baloon help" and "hint" dialogue boxes, but at least I can turn them off. "Wizards" seem to me liable to discourage user learning and the formation of a user's mental model of the interface. (Everything is a limited conversation with the wizard, 'who' does everything for you.) Do usability studies back my feeling up? Would you even want to interact through a possibly patronising AI (talking head)?
What if a novice user could "tell" an application (or a desktop system) that they were a novice, so it would be "kinder" to them? Once the novice shows evidence of having a mental model of the "novice controls", how do you (as user interface designer) take them to the next level of understanding?
This looks a little like the MicroWriter available in the UK in 1983. See http://www.nifty.demon.co.uk/odd/mw/. I think the inventor was a certain Cy Enfield. The same keyboard was used later in the AgendA, see for instance http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/boog/aghist.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Cy Enfield's Microwriter keyboard - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Endfield
I'd like all workgroup printers to print the user name, the document name, the printer name, the date and time of printing and the page number (and the total number of pages if this can be precalculated) on (say along the top) of each page output. That way, we could identify who printed the piles of uncollected printout that appear next to our printers. Our users consider printing this visibly an intrusion, and header sheets get separated from the rest of the document (stapling them to the rest of the document is considered a nuisance even when the document is thin enough to permit this to be done).
I think you're thinking of the British Miles M.52 - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A882272 and elsewhere. A crucial difference between the Bell XS-1 and the Miles M.52, if I recall correctly, is that the former was rocket powered, and the latter was (Rolls-Royce) jet engine powered.
I'm not an aviation buff, but learnt about this fascinating project from a - I think - BBC TV documentary in August 2004.
Yet another case where 'stuffed shirt' British politicians have pulled the plug on projects in which the UK had a technological lead and more adventurous and entepreneurial Americans did the work necessary to bring the development to fruition, and then sold it back to us!
Probably the oldest standard that people still refer to is AT&T's 1985 System V Interface Definition (SVID).
I routinely use printed Seventh Edition (Bell Labs Research) UNIX manuals, even when writing C for Linux. It also helps one remain blissfully ignorant of the 'cat -v' option and similar excrescences. Also the Tenth Edition UNIX manuals. I have to remember the changes introduced by Standard C and the like, but it's convenient to have the essence of the modern-day manual in printed form. Of course, there are some people out there who delight in using Fifth, Sixth, Seventh etc Editions on PDP-11s etc - see the PDP-11 UNIX Preservation Society, http://minnie.tuhs.org/PUPS/. I wish I had a larger garage! How much would a PDP-11/40 cost me now, anyway?
Peter Salus' book "A Quarter Century of UNIX", Addison-Wesley, 1994 (corrected 1995), ISBN 0-201-547771-5 is a good informal UNIX history.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly."
-- Henry Spencer
Apple fixed the bug exploited in (2) above sometime in early 2005 by having the OS warn you if it was running an application for the first time.8 7. An operating system that prevented users from downloading and executing an executable would be very restrictive. A warning from the operating system won't stop a stupid user from downloading a Trojan horse, however - and, of course, such a user can easily bring a Trojan horse in on a removeable medium without warnng.
I don't know to which bug you refer, but there was a similar one found and fixed in a week just a couple of weeks ago. A quick experiment with that shows that the warning is given every time a disguised malicious file is downloaded, whether the malicious application has been run before or not. See http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1837
... I'm trying to listen to the lecturer.
If they'd made it out of green plastic, they could have marketed it as the "Johnny Seven". (That's a comment for males of a certain age.)
:-)
Or is it alien technology?
>Unlike Linux command-line utilities, which contain their own argument parsers and output
>format mechanisms, MSH commands (called Cmdlets) all inherit a single base class, which
>ensures that all commands expose the same methods, parse arguments the same way
That's not entirely true about Unix (Linux): first, it omits to mention that Unix shells traditionally expand pattern matches in the given arguments, and match the command to an executable, before passing the arguments to that executable; and, second, everyone has used getopt(1) or getopt(3) (in whatever language) for years now, haven't they? (It's a common Unix newbie misapprehension to think that each executable has to expand the shell filename pattern matches in the arguments itself). These are a good start at maintaining command format consistency. I regret only that the original (Research) Unix didn't define which of: '-d -i' or '-di' and which of '-darg' or '-d arg' was preferable, and POSIX.2 (1991) appears (to me, glancing at it now) simply to have rubber-stamped the original situation.
Thank you for the correction!
Plus que ca change, plus que c'est la meme chose.
Good; that's Thunderbird 2 done. Now for Thunderbirds 1, and 3 through 5.
Oops, I meant 'intra-ocular', not 'inter-ocular', lenses.
What does this do to individuals who have had their cataracts replaced by inter-ocular lenses (plastic, possibly with metal fastening wires)? Come to think of it, can the weapon cause cataracts? What does the weapon do to dental fillings?
Which is pretty much the Unix shell/filter (aka 'tool', 'command') model - for a textual interface, rather than a GUI, of course. (Remember how annoyed we got when a program created a context of its own, with data that couldn't be accessed or operated on by other shell commands without exporting it, processing it and reimporting it?) Unix command line users find this sufficient for much of their use. How might you browse the web with such an interface, without using a monolithic browser? - well, you might map those web pages into your filestore. I leave working out the creation of such a consistent, appealing, and intuitive GUI as an exercise for the reader.
I would have liked to have seen OpenDoc, to see if it really made possible a GUI of the kind described in the original posting. (See the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc for background.) Of course, we've had OLE and similar since, but nothing that I know of that presented itself to the user in quite the same way. I'm probably out of touch, and would like to hear of anything along these lines that did get released.
For Linux, though apparently not yet for Windows and MacOS X, there is the Eternal archival system. See http://www.parvat.com/index.php?PAGE=products/eter nal/home.php and
http://linux-bangalore.org/2003/schedules/talkdeta ils.php?talkcode=C403.
As so much science fiction has pointed out, there's a Universe (never mind just our galaxy) waiting for us. Plenty of room to expand into if we don't have to stop at threescore years and ten.
Why eat green-dyed processed human flesh when we can eat the Little Green Men?
Harry Harrison's short story "An Alien Agony" comes to mind re. "What If?". If I remember correctly, a (Roman Catholic?) priest accompanies an Earth mission to a planet inhabited by intelligent, but not advanced, life; humanoid aliens with a ferocious capacity for imitation. He evangelises them, only to find himself taken captive, tried, and crucified so that they too can be "saved".
:-)
Science Fiction got there first, I think.
See also 4Dwm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4dwm), which I used to use on an SGI Indy. Of course, it really wasn't 4D in the geometric sense. Now there's an idea for a really counter-intuitive GUI.
Was it the 1994 movie "Disclosure" in which a character played by the actor Michael Douglas put on a virtual reality headset to browse a criminal records database, projected as many virtual folders which had to be manipulated by hand before he miraculously found the right one?
There's 'ease of use' and 'elegance of use'; I think that some user interface designers think that the only way to make computer systems accessible and accepted by the general populace ('ease of use') is to make them mimic what novice users already know. (In the case of 'Disclosure', virtual reality copies of paper files!) I'd rather see the power of the computer being exploited in new ways to give us better interfaces ('elegance of use').
I'm told that at least one of the early makes of automobile had a papier-mache horse molded on the hood in a risible attempt to diminish the 'shock of the new'. Isn't a user interface which models familiar objects which have only familar, direct-manipulation, properties seeking after the same vapid end?
There's been one mention of "novice controls" on this thread. Various software applications I've seen or heard about have them: Adobe Photoshop, various games; but how widespread are they? Do they work in practice? Would they solve ESR's problem? Would he even like them? I've seen all sorts of things over the years: "wizards", balloon help, "hint" popups etc, but these seem to me to be rather uncoordinated. What is there that is better that I've not mentioned (because I've not seen or don't remember it)? As a long-time Unix (includes Linux) user, I get rather annoyed by GUI applications which popup "baloon help" and "hint" dialogue boxes, but at least I can turn them off. "Wizards" seem to me liable to discourage user learning and the formation of a user's mental model of the interface. (Everything is a limited conversation with the wizard, 'who' does everything for you.) Do usability studies back my feeling up? Would you even want to interact through a possibly patronising AI (talking head)? What if a novice user could "tell" an application (or a desktop system) that they were a novice, so it would be "kinder" to them? Once the novice shows evidence of having a mental model of the "novice controls", how do you (as user interface designer) take them to the next level of understanding?
For another fictional treatment of a fast-onset Ice Age, see Douglas Orgill's and John Gribbin's ``The Sixth Winter'', published in 1980.
Amazon says it's out of print, unfortunately
This looks a little like the MicroWriter available in the UK in 1983. See http://www.nifty.demon.co.uk/odd/mw/. I think the inventor was a certain Cy Enfield. The same keyboard was used later in the AgendA, see for instance http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/boog/aghist.htm