Artists give us interfaces like ATI's TV recording software. All flash and no function.
Presentations went through a similar trend.
Thanks to Powerpoint (mostly), the emphasis shifted
from conveying the essence of your ideas simply
and succinctly to making things pretty. It
really was due to the laziness of audiences: if
your slide had lots of colors, then it must be
good -- they weren't really paying attention to it
anyway.
My advisor got into that trend. It started when
he told one of the grad students to add some
color to the slide, which was a block
diagram. "What color should I add?"
was the somewhat sarcastic response. It didn't
matter; any color would do, as long as it was
exciting. (No, there were no differences between
the blocks that could be expressed by color.)
Then he had some of our undergrads do some
presentations. One guy went wild, throwing in
pointless animations and sound effects
that did nothing except show off his Powerpoint
skills. But then the advisor started
encouraging this from everyone.
Fortunately, most people didn't go for the
over-the-top stuff, but they still would do
things like put shadows on boxes in
block diagrams, even if that meant using
smaller boxes, and therefore smaller fonts
for the text. So who cares if the people in
the back can't read your slide -- it's pretty!
Some of the best presentations I saw, BTW, were
by someone who was giving an extemporaneous talk,
and was drawing diagrams with a single marker on a clear
sheet.
So what you're saying is that because the Windows UI sucks, it is O.K. for anything else to suck as much, too?
No, I assume what he means is that if MS,
with all its resources, has a
hard time in the only area where they seem to make
a serious effort, then it must be a difficult task.
Another issue I think needs to be discussed is the
way people's biases influence UI design. Some
people, especially younger users, seem to think
GUI==good automatically, and thus, the more
eye candy a UI has, the better it must be.
Conversely, they think that a less graphical
interface is automatically primitive, and that
anyone who criticizes excessively flashy
interfaces must be an old fart pining for the
days of punch cards. Such people will see lots
of eye candy and get a warm fuzzy feeling, and
will think that UI is "easier to use." Even
though all the stuff just gets in the way, and
he has to go down through 4 or 5 levels of
menus and/or screens to do the simplest thing.
Unfortunately, such people seem to dominate
UI surveys, and UI designers get the message.
The result, for me, is endless frustration as
the UI keeps trying to "do things for me" and
I keep having to hunt some setting down in the
dungeons of the preferences editor somewhere to
turn off yet another annoying feature.
Speaking of which, does anyone know how to tell
XP to stop rearranging menus and/or hiding half
of the options? That's such a PITA -- who the
hell thought of such a moronic thing?
CISC was invented in a time that the memory was small, in the CISC way you could store larger programs in the same amount of memory.
That wasn't the only issue. Compiler technology
(especially back-end optimization) was less
mature then. CPU architects added lots of support
for high-level language constructs (look at all the
string ops and BCD support in x86) so that
compilers could translate to those ops directly.
The alternatives were function calls (with high
overheads) or inlining small code fragments
to do the complex instructions (which would often
not compile very efficiently). David Patterson
called this the "semantic gap" (Communications
of the ACM, January 1985).
As we now know, this support was costly. My
favorite example was Zilog's Z-80 8-bit CPU,
which extended the Intel 8080's instruction set
with an indexed addressing mode, designed to
make it easier for compilers to generate
references to local variables in the stack.
Unfortunately, the added instructions were a lot
slower. With hand-coding, I was able to speed
up some critical leaf functions 5x just by avoiding
all the indexed instructions and sticking to
the old 8080 set, and by loading the variables
I needed (not many) into registers at the start.
As compiler back-ends started to approach
assembly-code programmers in efficiency, the
benefits of such high-level instructions lessened.
One time in the late nineties it was a course project for a sophomore computer architecture course in the EE department at the University of Delaware. One of them was kept assembled and is still sometimes used for a Parents' Day demo.
It had stepper motors and could draw really nice curves.
Cornell has turned itself into a Microsoft shop,
so it's appropriate that they're all excited about
something that others did years before.
Write to their feedback page, letters to the editor, or ombudsman. Tell them: 1) their failure to mention that this only affects Windows users running IE needlessly worries people using other OSes and browsers, and 2) their failure to mention alternative browsers means they missed an opportunity to assist the general public on an
important matter.
I did. I also did this a couple of years ago
when some Windows virus came out (can't remember which one -- there are so many) and CNN
failed to mention it was a Windows-only problem.
The next time a major virus came out (I think it was a few weeks), I noticed that CNN actually
mentioned that non-Windows users were not at risk.
Obviously, we need to keep reminding them.
Oh, and if you do, be polite!!!
(And if you already did, then good for you!
And my apologies for implying you didn't.)
My employer assigned me a new Thinkpad with XP
on it (their choice, not mine), and I don't think
I've ever seen a genuine BSOD. MS must've heard
too many complaints about those and decided to
fix them.
Instead of those annoying blue screens, my system
has a less intrusive way of alerting me to
problems. It freezes the cursor and won't do
anything until I hit the power button.
Sometimes I'll come back from lunch and tind that
the machine took the initiative to reboot on
its own. When I log back in, there's an error
report asking me if I want to "help" Microsoft
fix the bug by sending them a report or something.
(Yeah, right.) I typically get about one incident
a week. (Not counting the reboots I'm required to
do after every virus patch -- why on Earth
does MS insist on rebooting even when you're
just patching an app?
It's not really so bad, though. Besides Outlook,
I mainly use the Windows box to connect vis VPC
to a Linux server, where I do my real work. With
VPC, you run an X server on the remote machine,
and VPC runs its own display program on the local
machine, linked by its own protocol. The
advantage of this over Exceed (which run an
X server on the Windows machine) is that you
don't lose anything if the Windows box goes down.
After the Windows box comes back up, just
reconnect to the remove server, and all your
windows are in the same state.
About every year or so, they reboot the machine
to upgrade the kernel, and I complain about
the time it takes to restart my KDE desktop.
The Windows users look at me like I'm from
outer space or something.
So basically, they're relying on the computing
monoculture, and also on the
"hide everything from the user and keep him
clueless" philosophy behind it.
BTW, notice the deliberate manipulation here?
They choose an album guaranteed to get high sales
because the band is pieced together from two
well-known bands, then claim the high sales proves
copy-protection is acceptable to the consumers.
(When probably it's just so feeble that it wasn't
even noticed most of the time.)
I've always wanted to own one but they are a LOT of work. It's almost a full time job. If you don't have work for them they will just go insane. Better to keep them on a farm...
Then can you train them to do your laundry or mow the lawn or something? Or delete all the spam from your inbox?
Some girl in one of my classes NEVER silenced her phone, not even during finals, when she got hurt that the professor would not let her leave the room to answer her phone.
When I taught classes (some of them large),
there would be the occasional ring, mostly because
people just forget to turn them off. My policy
was, if that happens during an exam, you get a 0.
At the start of each exam, I would remind the
class of this policy and suggest that now
would be a good time to check your phone to be
sure it's off.
There is excellent, whole-skeletal proof of dinosaurs.
But Satan put them there, to try to mislead people.
Or God put them there, to test our faith.... and WHAT wiped them out (and whether or not they were really all wiped out simultaneously).
Don't you know they were all too big to fit on
Noah's Ark? Noah could've lashed the big sauropods
to the side of the ark, like pontoons, but he
ran out of rope. The little ones, like
Archaeopteryx, got on the boat but were eaten
by tigers or something. After all, the Bible
says they were at sea for over a year -- there
couldn't possibly have been enough food for all
the thousands of animals, so Noah decided to
prune the food chain a little bit.
the 2nd person plural version is used instead of 2nd person singular when being polite.
It's almost the same in English (and German,
which is related), but nobody uses thee (2nd
person singular) and ye (2nd person plural)
anymore. You'll only see them in the King
James Bible and Shakespeare. (I guess 'ye' was
still being used in the early 19th Century.)
I guess that means that MS really IS
better than
Linux. MS says so, and they haven't been sued,
so they must be telling the truth!
Not getting sued doesn't say anything
about whether or not you're telling the truth.
There have been high-profile libel suits i
the U.S. before
and not many have been successful.
Basically, if you have the money to pay for
lawyers and any kind of claim to being a
serious journalist, you can beat just about any
kind of libel suit. Which means people won't
even try.
Back in the day, there were far fewer machines on the net, and therefore fewer opportunities for something to spread
Back in the day, there were many more types of
machines with many different software packages
performing the same functions (such as email).
Infections spread more rapidly in monocultures,
in both biological and computer ecosystems.
In a just world, you'd be able to invade
all your neighbors, enslave their women for sex,
use their civilians for bayonet practice and launch
suprise attacks on other countries without
people doing nasty things to you!
If someone releases some code they own under the GPL, they still own it and can do whatever they like with that code outside the context of the GPLed product
So if I were to write some code and release it
under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the
same code to a company that wants to add it to
their proprietary product? Of course, that would
lead to a fork, as any contributions made by others
to the GPL version couldn't be given to the
company (without their authors' permissions).
Would I be able to make additions to both the
GPL and proprietary branches, if the changes
could be merged into both without having to
involve code contributed by others to the GPL
branch?
You're starting from a flawed premise, i.e. there is an inherent guarantee to make money.
Uh, no. He's starting from the premise that
if people consume what you offer for sale, then
they'll pay the price you set. If they don't
want to pay your price (and can't talk you down),
they simply won't consume it. Your premise is
true, but irrelevant. You might as well
argue that shoplifting is OK,
because the store owner opened his store without
an "inherent guarantee to make money."
Slashdot Mirror
Presentations went through a similar trend. Thanks to Powerpoint (mostly), the emphasis shifted from conveying the essence of your ideas simply and succinctly to making things pretty. It really was due to the laziness of audiences: if your slide had lots of colors, then it must be good -- they weren't really paying attention to it anyway.
My advisor got into that trend. It started when he told one of the grad students to add some color to the slide, which was a block diagram. "What color should I add?" was the somewhat sarcastic response. It didn't matter; any color would do, as long as it was exciting. (No, there were no differences between the blocks that could be expressed by color.) Then he had some of our undergrads do some presentations. One guy went wild, throwing in pointless animations and sound effects that did nothing except show off his Powerpoint skills. But then the advisor started encouraging this from everyone.
Fortunately, most people didn't go for the over-the-top stuff, but they still would do things like put shadows on boxes in block diagrams, even if that meant using smaller boxes, and therefore smaller fonts for the text. So who cares if the people in the back can't read your slide -- it's pretty!
Some of the best presentations I saw, BTW, were by someone who was giving an extemporaneous talk, and was drawing diagrams with a single marker on a clear sheet.
No, I assume what he means is that if MS, with all its resources, has a hard time in the only area where they seem to make a serious effort, then it must be a difficult task.
Another issue I think needs to be discussed is the way people's biases influence UI design. Some people, especially younger users, seem to think GUI==good automatically, and thus, the more eye candy a UI has, the better it must be. Conversely, they think that a less graphical interface is automatically primitive, and that anyone who criticizes excessively flashy interfaces must be an old fart pining for the days of punch cards. Such people will see lots of eye candy and get a warm fuzzy feeling, and will think that UI is "easier to use." Even though all the stuff just gets in the way, and he has to go down through 4 or 5 levels of menus and/or screens to do the simplest thing.
Unfortunately, such people seem to dominate UI surveys, and UI designers get the message. The result, for me, is endless frustration as the UI keeps trying to "do things for me" and I keep having to hunt some setting down in the dungeons of the preferences editor somewhere to turn off yet another annoying feature.
Speaking of which, does anyone know how to tell XP to stop rearranging menus and/or hiding half of the options? That's such a PITA -- who the hell thought of such a moronic thing?
And what would those be?
That wasn't the only issue. Compiler technology (especially back-end optimization) was less mature then. CPU architects added lots of support for high-level language constructs (look at all the string ops and BCD support in x86) so that compilers could translate to those ops directly. The alternatives were function calls (with high overheads) or inlining small code fragments to do the complex instructions (which would often not compile very efficiently). David Patterson called this the "semantic gap" (Communications of the ACM, January 1985).
As we now know, this support was costly. My favorite example was Zilog's Z-80 8-bit CPU, which extended the Intel 8080's instruction set with an indexed addressing mode, designed to make it easier for compilers to generate references to local variables in the stack. Unfortunately, the added instructions were a lot slower. With hand-coding, I was able to speed up some critical leaf functions 5x just by avoiding all the indexed instructions and sticking to the old 8080 set, and by loading the variables I needed (not many) into registers at the start.
As compiler back-ends started to approach assembly-code programmers in efficiency, the benefits of such high-level instructions lessened.
Cornell has turned itself into a Microsoft shop, so it's appropriate that they're all excited about something that others did years before.
Write to their feedback page, letters to the editor, or ombudsman. Tell them: 1) their failure to mention that this only affects Windows users running IE needlessly worries people using other OSes and browsers, and 2) their failure to mention alternative browsers means they missed an opportunity to assist the general public on an important matter.
I did. I also did this a couple of years ago when some Windows virus came out (can't remember which one -- there are so many) and CNN failed to mention it was a Windows-only problem. The next time a major virus came out (I think it was a few weeks), I noticed that CNN actually mentioned that non-Windows users were not at risk.
Obviously, we need to keep reminding them.
Oh, and if you do, be polite!!!
(And if you already did, then good for you! And my apologies for implying you didn't.)
Actually, I think it was just the Senate at this time.
But you have a good point about the lopsided vote. Kind of makes me skeptical of claims that only Republicans are lapdogs for Big Business.
My employer assigned me a new Thinkpad with XP on it (their choice, not mine), and I don't think I've ever seen a genuine BSOD. MS must've heard too many complaints about those and decided to fix them.
Instead of those annoying blue screens, my system has a less intrusive way of alerting me to problems. It freezes the cursor and won't do anything until I hit the power button. Sometimes I'll come back from lunch and tind that the machine took the initiative to reboot on its own. When I log back in, there's an error report asking me if I want to "help" Microsoft fix the bug by sending them a report or something. (Yeah, right.) I typically get about one incident a week. (Not counting the reboots I'm required to do after every virus patch -- why on Earth does MS insist on rebooting even when you're just patching an app?
It's not really so bad, though. Besides Outlook, I mainly use the Windows box to connect vis VPC to a Linux server, where I do my real work. With VPC, you run an X server on the remote machine, and VPC runs its own display program on the local machine, linked by its own protocol. The advantage of this over Exceed (which run an X server on the Windows machine) is that you don't lose anything if the Windows box goes down. After the Windows box comes back up, just reconnect to the remove server, and all your windows are in the same state.
About every year or so, they reboot the machine to upgrade the kernel, and I complain about the time it takes to restart my KDE desktop. The Windows users look at me like I'm from outer space or something.
BTW, notice the deliberate manipulation here? They choose an album guaranteed to get high sales because the band is pieced together from two well-known bands, then claim the high sales proves copy-protection is acceptable to the consumers. (When probably it's just so feeble that it wasn't even noticed most of the time.)
I suppose the next thing will be some collie getting an MCSE. Though that wouldn't be saying much.
That's only 0.429 years old!
Then can you train them to do your laundry or
mow the lawn or something?
Or delete all the spam from your inbox?
What if I just happened to use a lot of metal in the construction of the building?
When I taught classes (some of them large), there would be the occasional ring, mostly because people just forget to turn them off. My policy was, if that happens during an exam, you get a 0. At the start of each exam, I would remind the class of this policy and suggest that now would be a good time to check your phone to be sure it's off.
I never had a ring disturb the class.
I see. So it's something like this:
"I plugged my camera into my Linux box, and it doesn't work."
"See? Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet. Microsoft r00lz!"
"But it didn't work under Windows either."
How dare you blame Microsoft for what is obviously a driver problem?"
But Satan put them there, to try to mislead people. Or God put them there, to test our faith. ... and WHAT wiped them out (and whether or not they were really all wiped out simultaneously).
Don't you know they were all too big to fit on Noah's Ark? Noah could've lashed the big sauropods to the side of the ark, like pontoons, but he ran out of rope. The little ones, like Archaeopteryx, got on the boat but were eaten by tigers or something. After all, the Bible says they were at sea for over a year -- there couldn't possibly have been enough food for all the thousands of animals, so Noah decided to prune the food chain a little bit.
If it's all the same to you, I'd rather look at non-explosive fossils.
It's almost the same in English (and German, which is related), but nobody uses thee (2nd person singular) and ye (2nd person plural) anymore. You'll only see them in the King James Bible and Shakespeare. (I guess 'ye' was still being used in the early 19th Century.)
At least the modern "art" all over the campus
won't be alone in getting complaints about
aesthetics.
Not getting sued doesn't say anything about whether or not you're telling the truth. There have been high-profile libel suits i the U.S. before and not many have been successful. Basically, if you have the money to pay for lawyers and any kind of claim to being a serious journalist, you can beat just about any kind of libel suit. Which means people won't even try.
Back in the day, there were many more types of machines with many different software packages performing the same functions (such as email). Infections spread more rapidly in monocultures, in both biological and computer ecosystems.
In a just world, you'd be able to invade all your neighbors, enslave their women for sex, use their civilians for bayonet practice and launch suprise attacks on other countries without people doing nasty things to you!
So if I were to write some code and release it under the GPL, could I simultaneously license the same code to a company that wants to add it to their proprietary product? Of course, that would lead to a fork, as any contributions made by others to the GPL version couldn't be given to the company (without their authors' permissions). Would I be able to make additions to both the GPL and proprietary branches, if the changes could be merged into both without having to involve code contributed by others to the GPL branch?
Well I'm applying for a patent on my business /. by posting jokes
model of trying to get karma on
about filing stupid patents.
Uh, no. He's starting from the premise that if people consume what you offer for sale, then they'll pay the price you set. If they don't want to pay your price (and can't talk you down), they simply won't consume it. Your premise is true, but irrelevant. You might as well argue that shoplifting is OK, because the store owner opened his store without an "inherent guarantee to make money."