How about this, then. When the user visits a page with malformed HTML they get a pop-up window saying 'This page contains incorrect HTML. Would you like to attempt to render it?'.
Nah, that's too intrusive. You're punishing the user when the real criminals are the fuck-knuckled `designers' out there whose malformed drivel is probably the biggest contributer to browser bloat there is. Instead, how about a browser that runs each page through Weblint and mails the nasties to webmaster@host.whatever? Call it a public service.
Perhaps this guy Miller is right about a business model based on Free Software being inherently flawed, perhaps not. But Free Software will always be developed outside of businesses by programmers scratching their personal itches. And it's a Good Thing. It stops the commercial software houses getting lazy and drives up the quality for the end user. It forces commercial software houses to justify their Twilight-Zone pricing structures in the face of free alternatives. Imagine what W2K might have been like if it hadn't been for Linux, Apache, and the rest of the gang breathing down Microsoft's neck... they would've cooked up NT4 SP7, dropped in a few GUI enhancements and shipped it. The much-lauded stability of W2K is a direct response to Free Software. To all those Microsofty ACs that seem to be hanging out on this thread: you're welcome.:-)
Dosen't this just prove that hackers are eventually going to be able to do what they want anyway? Maybe they should just save us the trouble and Open Source EVERYTHING!
I reckon you meant this as a joke but consider: Open Source recognises the ultimate consequence of storing things digitally; namely, you can't police their distribution. When you think about it, copyleft is the only sane response to the digital revolution. Otherwise you spend millions of bucks trying to hunt down pirates and warez-d00dz or inventing burdensome licence agreements and obnoxious copy-protection mechanisms that only serve to annoy your paying customers.
Also, SDMI is totally bogus: it can never work. You want to put a watermark in your music? If your customers can hear it, they're going to be pissed off. If your customers can't hear it, perceptual coding schemes like MP3 will know it's inaudible and strip it out. Heads I win, tails you lose.
You're suggestions have nothing to do with the GUI.
Um, why do you say that?
A file dialog should look as similar as possible for 90% or apps. Why? So that there is consitancy (something that usability study after usability study shows true...
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
read the old Mac UI Design guide).
Read it. A seminal work. Absolutely indispensible if you're designing a 128K monochrome single-tasking computer with 400K floppy disk storage. Things have moved on.
And the filesystem is part of the OS, not the GUI. How could the GNOME or KDE projects make the Linux filesystem flat? All they can do is try and display in a nice fashion the filesystem that they are running on.
[grits teeth, tears hair] Listen to yourself for a moment. The Linux filesystem is flat! It's just long chains of bits encoded in the magnetic domains on the surface of a ferrite-coated disc. It all depends on your representation. A dinky tree control with cute folder icons is no more "real" than any other representation of your filesystem. We could make the filesystem look like a level out of Quake if we wanted to.
See, you're exhibiting precisely the sort of behaviour I complained about in my previous post. You're folding your arms and saying, `we can't do that because no-one has ever done it that way before'. It's a good thing that there are people out there who don't listen to people like you or I'd be sending this by smoke signal...
Personally, I don't think most people like a Windows environment; I don't think they're bothered either way about their OS or UI or whatever, so long as it doesn't interfere egregiously with their real work. I don't think your average office worker engages at that sort of level with their computer. They don't "like" Windows any more than they "like" Xerox photocopiers or they "like" Canon fax machines.
My point is: there are a lot of ease-of-use issues with modern UIs that companies are either unwilling or unable to do anything about, issues that are more or less "invisible" to people who use computers a lot because, hey, "that's the way computers work". But these issues cause new and casual users no end of confusion. Take the distinction between a document in memory vs. a document on disk and the whole business of "saving" things as an example. This is totally non-intuitive to a casual user and is really a relic from the days when RAM and disk space were scarce. "Saving" a document is the interface equivalent of having to do your own memory allocation in C; there are times when you need that kind of power, but there's awk and Perl and a score of other languages for the times when you don't need or want to think about low-level shit like that.
What about so-called "common dialogs" like File Open? I've seen plenty of holy wars on the "best" design for such beasts. But common dialogs are a hack that go back to the first MacOS when the Mac was single-tasking and apps therefore had to have a miniature version of the shell hacked into them. Common file dialogs are a throwback of the GUI Stone Age. If the GNOME and KDE developers took one second out to really look at them, they'd see them for the vestigial growths that they are. Instead they've got one eye on Redmond and the other eye on Cupertino and these anachronisms persist to plague users.
Or how about hierarchical filesystems? Casual users find them very confusing, especially if some rogue program warps them from their accustomed area into some ill-explored cranny of the directory tree. Hackers and scientific types find it easy to move around hierarchical classification systems; mere mortals are apt to have trouble with them. Nor is a tree structure the ideal way of representing all types of information. Why do you think the Web took off and gopher died? Partly because the Web is hyperlinked but gopher was strictly hierarchical.
What I'm saying is, there's plenty of avenues of exploration out there that could make some for truly user-friendly interfaces. We could really wipe the floor with Windows and MacOS if we just broke out of the imitative mindset.
well how can you make everyone happy? The Joe user wants it to look like windows...but wait.....its not good cause it looks like windows.....but no it looks too much unlike windows....who cares...as long as it doesn't come with the problems of windows I am happy
When, oh when is this little piece of received wisdom/ FUD/ whatever going to die?! Joe User doesn't give a flying hoot what his desktop looks like, so long as he gets his job done. Remember, 99% of office workers don't choose the OS and UI they work on; that decision is made by fuck-knuckled IT middle management types who believe everything they read in Microsoftie ZD rags and whose only criteria for buying software is how many tick marks are under that product's column in the executive summary feature matrix chartjunk that inevitably appears in these publications.
IMHO, the developers of KDE and GNOME are rip-off merchants too freakin' lazy to do their own usability and whenever they're taken to task on it, they respond with lame excuses like `the market wants it to look like Windows' or `Microsoft spent a gazillion dollars last year on usability testing, so flat toolbars/ office assistants/ Outlook bars/ HTML filemanagers/ Dumb UI Idiom of the Month must be The Right Thing'.
As to what `the market' wants, just what is your market these days, Mr. GNOME, Mr. KDE? The very real and very visible Linux community who have renounced Windows and all its works and pomps or some imaginary `Joe User' market segment that you plan to steal out of Microsoft's clutches with a product that looks exactly what they have already and spend copious amounts of time bitching about? Get real.
Let one of those CGI tarpit thingies used to tie mail-harvesting spambots up in knots loose on the AltaVista bot, filling the AltaVista datbase with garbage (as if it wasn't full to bursting with irrelevant crap already)
Check the HTTP-REFERRER field on all incoming HTTP requests and redirect to a 404 page if it comes from *.altavista.com. That way AltaVista will get the reputation for being full of stale links. Hell, some Apache wonk out there can probably rustle us up a module to do just that.:-)
Alternatively, instead of redirecting to a 404 page, you could sidetrack to a page explaining why you don't allow direct linking from AltaVista, this page being set to jump to the real page after a few seconds. Greedy companies are already planning to use similar schemes to push ads in our faces (`interstitials' I think they're calling it); turnabout is fair play in my book.
Boycott the Fish and stop plugging it in posts; most of the time an obliging native speakers will post a translation to/. that's much better than AltaVista's ham-fisted attempts anyways.
The Norwegian authorities were tripping over themselves to hand over the guy who wrote DeCSS; I reckon the US State Department owes them a couple of spammers in return.
... but the fact that the airship was coated
in what was essentially thermite did the trick.
I saw a program on it recently. Some ex-NASA guy did some research into the Hindenburg crash. He reckoned that the pictures of the explosion didn't look much like a hydrogen fire; hydrogen burns with a fairly dim blue flame and the pictures of the Hindenburg are a good deal more dramatic than that. He came up with an alternative theory.
He claims the canvas skin of the Hindenburg was coated with aluminium powder to reflect sunlight and stop the tanks heating up. There was also iron oxide present (I can't remember why). The Hindenburg landed in the middle of a storm so it must have been carrying a pretty big charge. When it dropped its mooring ropes, only part of the structure was earthed and an arc was struck between the earthed and unearthed parts of the ship. The thermite ignited. Instant firework.
The programme claimed the Zeppelin company knew about this all along and told no-one for dark insurance reasons of their own; this was probably the ObConspiracyTheory most modern science programmes feel obliged to include to keep Joe Sixpack tuned in.
This was a typical Corel fuck-up. It reminds me of the WordPerfect for fuck-up a few years back; that particular little adventure costing Corel the best part of 50 million bucks. And before that was the network computers. And before that was the video conferencing. And before that was Corel Home...
I worked for Corel's localisation centre in Dublin for ~2.5 years, during which time I saw more savage stupidity and brute incompetence than one person should should have to see in a lifetime. Corel's top management could not get their head around the fact that they weren't just a garage start-up any more, that they were a big multinational company with big revenues and over 1,000 staff to look out for. Worse, it wasn't just a big company that thought it was a start-up; it was a company that thought it was a start-up, but with big company earnings. About as level-headed as a toddler with a tac nuke. Mike Cowpland was the worst. He took the company off on whatever crazy jaunt his magic 8-ball or the voices in his head or whatever the fuck told him to. The shareholders should have nailed his wrinkly ex-pat ass to the wall of Carling Avenue years ago.
There was no management, no processes, nothing that could by any stretch be called an organisation. The fall of Corel was inevitable. They were the engineers of their own doom. They were greedy and stupid, reaching out to grab new markets while their core business was eroding from underneath them.
UNIX sucks. It has become the modern equivalent of OS/360 and COBOL. Hot stuff when it was introduced, now it is a dinosaur.
Perhaps this is the best evidence to back up Lanier's arguments; if software engineering is so damn kewl, why has it failed to produce a credible alternative to these "dinosaur" systems?
I see a number of problems with the state of the art today, most of them psychological and sociological rather than technological:
The Not Invented Here mentality: there is no algorithm or library so fundamental that some damn weenie won't try to dick with it. Whether this obsessive wheel-reinvention is done for the purposes of vendor lock-in or simply to prove how 31337 the programmer is, is largely immaterial; the point is, programmer-centuries are wasted every year on this. Not to mention the fact that 99.9% of this reinvented code will be inferior to the original due to the programmer's naïveté or bloody-mindedness. The NIH effect also leads to technology holy wars, which if/. is any indicator, probably consumes more potential developer time than anything else.:-)
Overoptimistic estimation: this point was touched upon in The Mythical Man Month, a book written in the early '70s (coincidentally, by the manager of the OS/360 project). The author makes the point that software is consistently late, yet this does not wake up practitioners to the fact that their estimation methodologies (assuming they have any) are bogus. Software people are incorrigible optimistics, it seems.
The Ship 'Em Shit Road to Riches: the very malleable nature of software allows one to fuck up now, patch later. Never mind that scattershot patching increases the entropy in the code base, making maintenance a nightmare and reducing the internal consistency of the product. It's disgraceful that software companies should be allowed get away with this, but it's certainly not hurt Microsoft's or Oracle's bottom line. How can anyone get a sensible debate going on software quality when the largest companies ignore it and their customers still shovel money into their pockets?
I'm sure people here can think of more. All of these things contribute to the noise in the software engineering community at large.
Someone at microsoft implemented a better way than anti-aliasing. The problem with current fonts is that they are not made for the screen.
What you are referring to here is "hinting". The TrueType rasteriser allows a font designer to encode hints in the font to switch off certain features of a glyph at low point sizes and low resolutions so that serifs, etc. don't interfere with the shape of a glyph.
Hinting is time-consuming, takes a lot of skill, and some low-end font creation programs don't even support it. A lot of fonts out there aren't hinted for this reason, which is why so many fonts look like crap at small point sizes.
What Microsoft did was pay some good font designers to come up with new font designs that are properly hinted for on-screen display. These fonts-- Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et. al.-- are freely available for download from Microsoft's typography page.
They also discussed how the Silicon Valley, Chicago's Silicon Prairie, Seattle's Silicon Forest, Scotland's Silicon Glen and
Ireland's Silicon Fen were ironic nomenclatures: Each name evokes nature, but each place produces microchips and processors and other distinctly nonorganic technology.
AFAIK, Silicon Fen is the nickname for the research park near Oxford (or is it Cambridge? One of the University towns anyway) that Microsoft set up a couple of years back. There are a lot of IT companies in Ireland, but they are not all located in one distinctive geographic area. And we don't have "fens" in Ireland, you dumb bastards! We call them bogs!
And I don't think you'd get many geeks signing up for a stint in "Silicon Bog". (:
I am unfamiliar with this lexical function and the VMS Help facility was no use. What version of OpenVMS are you running?
[diving for cover]
Patenting something you don't understand
on
Squatting On Life
·
· Score: 2
I suppose what pissed a lot of people off immediately was the idea that one could apply for (and receive) a patent on a gene sequence that wasn't fully decoded. This is totally illogical.
But then I remembered that I've come across this before in an anniversary of the British magazine, "The Engineer" a couple of years ago. The article covered the patent war between the Victorian-era inventors responsible for the development of the internal combustion engine. Many of the patents granted to these inventors were since found to be based on faulty and sometimes downright erroneous notions of what chemical/ mechanical processes were actually happening in these engines. In other words, the inventors themselves had no more clue what was happening in their engines than anyone else! Yet it did not stop them getting into pointless and vicious disputes and lawsuits with other inventors, which may have slowed down the development of what was probably the invention of the 20th century.
Does patent law allow for the re-evaluation of a patent in the light of new scientific discoveries? What is the status of a patent based on erroneous premises?
Yeah, what's with the damn icons? The hi-colour icons that shipped with the original Win95 Plus! pack looked quite nice-- now they look all cartoony and horrible! It's... infantile. `My Computer', `My Network'... I think MS are using this as the model for their new UI.
Sure, Windows can be themed now but why the hell make it look so cheap and nasty out of the box? We're paying enough for it. MS went and paid some font designers to create some nice typefaces for them, and they got Brian Eno to do that Windows 95 start-up sound; why don't they do the same for the graphics in their default theme?
On a related note, has anyone else noticed the abysmal quality of recent Microsoft help and documentation? I recently downloaded the Windows Scripting Host help (in that wretched HTMLHelp format of theirs) and found it atrocious. The Office help system is equally poor; much of it isn't even installed by default! Is it any wonder that users are barely scratching the surface of Microsoft's gigantic apps with documentation this poor? Meantime, bored teenagers flood the world with macro viruses, because they're the only people with enough time on their hands to decipher the obtuse, uninformative, and shoddily-written dreck that MS tech writers serve up as `help' these days.
IMHO, in the days when MS were building their market share, their online help and documentation were regarded as showcases to demonstrate the cool features of their products as well as an exploratory tool. Now they have everyone locked into their platform, help and doc is at best considered a revenue drain or a potential cash-cow, where you have to take out a subscription to get access to information that used to be free.
It sucks. Open Source documentation is often badly-written (often because English is not the native language of the writer) or woefully lacking, but at least most Open Source writers are genuinely interested in teaching you about their wares and solving your problems. Whereas these days, MS `help' seems only there so MS can write `fully hyperlinked online Help system!' on the back of the box.
I'm sick to the back teeth of watching all these fevered egos in the KDE and GNOME camps whacking off in public like two troops of rabid spider monkeys. Snipe followed by counter-snipe followed by smug insinuation followed by all-out shit-slinging rarely seen outside the monkey house at the Zoo. Where they get the time to code is beyond me.
Point is, I've tried both and they both suck. Why? Because they are shamelessly ripping off a UI paradigm popularised by Microsoft, a paradigm they ripped off in turn from Apple, who designed for a 128K monochrome machine with a 400K floppy drive. If I wanted my machine to work like Windows, why would I have bothered installing Linux in the first place? Both GNOME and KDE actually boast about the extent to which they follow Windows-- "no retraining-- it works just like Windows!" they crow.
This is cowardly bullshit. Any real user you talk to will tell you how much Windows and the MacOS suck. KDE and GNOME are appealing to the same middle-tier IS management types who mandate the use of Windows throughout their organisation; empty-headed MBA jackals with one hand turning the pages of some gushing ZD publication loaded with "handy" product feature matrices and the other hand tugging at their atrophied genitals. These, all you GNOME and KDE advocates, these are the assholes that put Microsoft on the map, and you are lining up, learning to talk their talk and walk their walk so you can kiss their asses. "No retraining-- it works just like Windows!" You fucking whores!
Why does the Open Source community have such an inferiority complex when it comes to original UI design? Is it because we don't really "get" GUIs? Is it because deep down we'd just be happy with a command line if it wasn't for those pesky users wanting their icons and their flat toolbars? So instead of sitting down and thinking through this whole UI thing, we just clone Windows? Are you so desperate for mindshare and flattering media coverage that you'd take over screwing your users where Bill Gates left off? A reaming from the Free Software community is going to feel much the same as a reaming from Microsoft come morning. "Microsoft spend millions on usability! We don't have the resources!" scream the apologists. You idiots. That's a PR exercise if ever I saw one. Microsoft spend that money to impress the middle managers who are their real customers; the rest can go hang. Do you really think Microsoft ever ditched a single line of interface code because it raised a usability issue? The whole thing is a snow-job; it gives Microsoft plausible denial: "What? You say our products are unusable? Well, we spent squillions on usability last year-- you must be a retard or something."
The 15-year old Mac GUI metaphor is creaking badly; it doesn't scale. I have a 6GB hard disk at home (tiny by today's standards); how am I meant to navigate it, to manage? With a GTK+ tree control? Think again, Mr. GNOME Man. Furthermore, we're stuck with Mac UI dogma that made sense on a 128K box but not on a machine with 32MB or more of RAM. A one-shot Clipboard in this day and age? Puh-lease! You want me to click File, Save every five minutes? Give me a break; I could record every damn keystroke in my word processor including ^H and never run short on hard disk space. File Open dialog boxes? They were a hack because the first MacOS was single tasking and you couldn't get at the shell!
Think, you freaks, think! All this sniping about code reuse and re-inventing the wheel. Both camps started re-inventing the wheel before the first line of GNOME or KDE code was written, and you didn't even notice.
Doubtless the Sony sysadmins are already cursing this idiot's name as every 1337 script kiddie on the planet reading these remarks polishes off his rootkit and warms up his portscanner.
Perhaps someone would like to start a book on how soon sony.com gets 0wned or reduced to smoking rubble?
However, a "Tarantella" has nothing to do with spiders like others have said... It's a type of dance. A Spanish or Mexican dance I believe, in an energetic fast-3 feel (more like a fast 6/8 that's counted in two).
It would be like naming your company "Waltz" or "Tango." Or Lambada if that's your thing.
Or Samba?:-)
Actually, AFAIK, the tarantella does have something to do with spiders. Supposedly, the dance originated as a way for sufferers of a tarantula bite to sweat the venom out of their systems!
Read that in the Childrens' Brittanica when I was a kid, before all this Web nonsense started...
... Post trails off into incoherent old-fart mutterings...
Sorry, I can't resist being nitpicky, but that's not unique to Japanese: Latin typically puts the verb at the end of the sentence too.
Putting the verb at the end of a sentence in Latin is a convention, not a feature of the language. Latin is heavily inflected, so you can tell from a word's ending what job it's doing in a sentence (Subject, Object, Verb, Indirect Object, etc.) This means you can put Latin words in pretty much any order you like and still be unambiguous. English used to be inflected too, but over the centuries has moved to a system where a word's position in a sentence indicates the job it's doing. For more information, please see the "Romans Go Home" sketch in Monty Python's Life of Brian.:-)
In Latinate Perl, if such an abomination were to exist, tokens could occur anywhere in a statement. The convention of suffixing variables to indicate their type would have to be extended to commands; also, you'd need suffixes to indicate lvalues and rvalues in assignment operations... it would be More Than One Way To Do Things (tm) philosophy taken to its (il)logical conclusion!
The core of Miguel's argument is that the
Unix world is in chaos because the
designers of Unix have failed to form and
enforce policy down the years. A good point.
But let's look at the history of Unix here:
Invented in the '60s by two researchers as a skunkworks
project;
Grew to maturity in the '70s in an academic environment;
Tinkered with in the '90s by scores of independently-minded hackers scattered all over the world.
Now, Miguel, could you please tell me precisely how is one
going to enforce policy on such a disparate user
base, most of whom are going to react with
instinctive loathing towards anybody attempting
to throw their weight around, to say my thing
is The Right Thing damnit, for whatever
reason?
Unix has survived precisely because there is
no hallowed policy handed down from above. It
evolves. It changes to meet new needs. Those components of Unix that are shared, like glibc, have developed through
consensus and bitter experience. If you
want to develop in an enforced-policy environment, well, there's Windows NT or VMS or OS/390.
The Cluetrain has already left the station,
Miguel. You on it or under it?
I personally love coding in Perl for that exact reason, that there are tons of ways to do everything. It also makes for entertaining conversation with friends to see how different people solved the same or similar problems in different ways.
This is a questionable feature of Perl, IMHO. While I hate "fascist" languages that insist on you doing things their way and their way alone, Perl's looseness can lead to maintenance nightmares. Few people will have the time to learn all of Perl's multifarious ways of accomplishing a single task; therefore it's possible to have two Perl wizards in the same organisation whose working sets of favoured Perl idioms don't overlap much. If one wizard leaves and the other undertakes to maintain their scripts, the maintainer is going to have some fun deciphering just what the hell the other wizard was up to. Now, all languages are going to have this problem to an extent (e.g. witness how something as trivial an unfamiliar indenting style in a C program can throw you off), but Perl amplifies it to a perverse degree.
He did not understand the value of innovation, and he and Nolan Bushnell quickly locked horns, just like Steve Jobs and the idiot-from-PepsiCo.
Unfair. Jobs' behaviour left Sculley no choice but to fire his ass. He humiliated the members of the Lisa team. He humiliated the members of the ][ team, despite the fact that the Apple ][ was the only machine Apple was making that was actually selling at the time. He played favourites. Like Jef Raskin put it: `you can't use the words "management" and "Steve Jobs" in the same sentence.'
Like Jobs at Apple, Bushnell was forced out of his own company and the new management destoyed the corporate culture. Unlike Apple, Atari did not pull its innovative culture back together....and it fell.
IMNSHO, it ceases to be your company when you IPO. That was shareholder's money Jobs was burning to fuel his delusions.
And Bushnell? Bushnell was a flake. Chuck E. Cheese? Petsters? Give me a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, that's too intrusive. You're punishing the user when the real criminals are the fuck-knuckled `designers' out there whose malformed drivel is probably the biggest contributer to browser bloat there is. Instead, how about a browser that runs each page through Weblint and mails the nasties to webmaster@host.whatever? Call it a public service.
Perhaps this guy Miller is right about a business model based on Free Software being inherently flawed, perhaps not. But Free Software will always be developed outside of businesses by programmers scratching their personal itches. And it's a Good Thing. It stops the commercial software houses getting lazy and drives up the quality for the end user. It forces commercial software houses to justify their Twilight-Zone pricing structures in the face of free alternatives. Imagine what W2K might have been like if it hadn't been for Linux, Apache, and the rest of the gang breathing down Microsoft's neck... they would've cooked up NT4 SP7, dropped in a few GUI enhancements and shipped it. The much-lauded stability of W2K is a direct response to Free Software. To all those Microsofty ACs that seem to be hanging out on this thread: you're welcome. :-)
I reckon you meant this as a joke but consider: Open Source recognises the ultimate consequence of storing things digitally; namely, you can't police their distribution. When you think about it, copyleft is the only sane response to the digital revolution. Otherwise you spend millions of bucks trying to hunt down pirates and warez-d00dz or inventing burdensome licence agreements and obnoxious copy-protection mechanisms that only serve to annoy your paying customers.
Also, SDMI is totally bogus: it can never work. You want to put a watermark in your music? If your customers can hear it, they're going to be pissed off. If your customers can't hear it, perceptual coding schemes like MP3 will know it's inaudible and strip it out. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Um, why do you say that?
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read it. A seminal work. Absolutely indispensible if you're designing a 128K monochrome single-tasking computer with 400K floppy disk storage. Things have moved on.
[grits teeth, tears hair] Listen to yourself for a moment. The Linux filesystem is flat! It's just long chains of bits encoded in the magnetic domains on the surface of a ferrite-coated disc. It all depends on your representation. A dinky tree control with cute folder icons is no more "real" than any other representation of your filesystem. We could make the filesystem look like a level out of Quake if we wanted to.
See, you're exhibiting precisely the sort of behaviour I complained about in my previous post. You're folding your arms and saying, `we can't do that because no-one has ever done it that way before'. It's a good thing that there are people out there who don't listen to people like you or I'd be sending this by smoke signal...
Personally, I don't think most people like a Windows environment; I don't think they're bothered either way about their OS or UI or whatever, so long as it doesn't interfere egregiously with their real work. I don't think your average office worker engages at that sort of level with their computer. They don't "like" Windows any more than they "like" Xerox photocopiers or they "like" Canon fax machines.
My point is: there are a lot of ease-of-use issues with modern UIs that companies are either unwilling or unable to do anything about, issues that are more or less "invisible" to people who use computers a lot because, hey, "that's the way computers work". But these issues cause new and casual users no end of confusion. Take the distinction between a document in memory vs. a document on disk and the whole business of "saving" things as an example. This is totally non-intuitive to a casual user and is really a relic from the days when RAM and disk space were scarce. "Saving" a document is the interface equivalent of having to do your own memory allocation in C; there are times when you need that kind of power, but there's awk and Perl and a score of other languages for the times when you don't need or want to think about low-level shit like that.
What about so-called "common dialogs" like File Open? I've seen plenty of holy wars on the "best" design for such beasts. But common dialogs are a hack that go back to the first MacOS when the Mac was single-tasking and apps therefore had to have a miniature version of the shell hacked into them. Common file dialogs are a throwback of the GUI Stone Age. If the GNOME and KDE developers took one second out to really look at them, they'd see them for the vestigial growths that they are. Instead they've got one eye on Redmond and the other eye on Cupertino and these anachronisms persist to plague users.
Or how about hierarchical filesystems? Casual users find them very confusing, especially if some rogue program warps them from their accustomed area into some ill-explored cranny of the directory tree. Hackers and scientific types find it easy to move around hierarchical classification systems; mere mortals are apt to have trouble with them. Nor is a tree structure the ideal way of representing all types of information. Why do you think the Web took off and gopher died? Partly because the Web is hyperlinked but gopher was strictly hierarchical.
What I'm saying is, there's plenty of avenues of exploration out there that could make some for truly user-friendly interfaces. We could really wipe the floor with Windows and MacOS if we just broke out of the imitative mindset.
When, oh when is this little piece of received wisdom/ FUD/ whatever going to die?! Joe User doesn't give a flying hoot what his desktop looks like, so long as he gets his job done. Remember, 99% of office workers don't choose the OS and UI they work on; that decision is made by fuck-knuckled IT middle management types who believe everything they read in Microsoftie ZD rags and whose only criteria for buying software is how many tick marks are under that product's column in the executive summary feature matrix chartjunk that inevitably appears in these publications.
IMHO, the developers of KDE and GNOME are rip-off merchants too freakin' lazy to do their own usability and whenever they're taken to task on it, they respond with lame excuses like `the market wants it to look like Windows' or `Microsoft spent a gazillion dollars last year on usability testing, so flat toolbars/ office assistants/ Outlook bars/ HTML filemanagers/ Dumb UI Idiom of the Month must be The Right Thing'.
As to what `the market' wants, just what is your market these days, Mr. GNOME, Mr. KDE? The very real and very visible Linux community who have renounced Windows and all its works and pomps or some imaginary `Joe User' market segment that you plan to steal out of Microsoft's clutches with a product that looks exactly what they have already and spend copious amounts of time bitching about? Get real.
A few more ideas on the same theme:
Alternatively, instead of redirecting to a 404 page, you could sidetrack to a page explaining why you don't allow direct linking from AltaVista, this page being set to jump to the real page after a few seconds. Greedy companies are already planning to use similar schemes to push ads in our faces (`interstitials' I think they're calling it); turnabout is fair play in my book.
The Norwegian authorities were tripping over themselves to hand over the guy who wrote DeCSS; I reckon the US State Department owes them a couple of spammers in return.
I saw a program on it recently. Some ex-NASA guy did some research into the Hindenburg crash. He reckoned that the pictures of the explosion didn't look much like a hydrogen fire; hydrogen burns with a fairly dim blue flame and the pictures of the Hindenburg are a good deal more dramatic than that. He came up with an alternative theory.
He claims the canvas skin of the Hindenburg was coated with aluminium powder to reflect sunlight and stop the tanks heating up. There was also iron oxide present (I can't remember why). The Hindenburg landed in the middle of a storm so it must have been carrying a pretty big charge. When it dropped its mooring ropes, only part of the structure was earthed and an arc was struck between the earthed and unearthed parts of the ship. The thermite ignited. Instant firework.
The programme claimed the Zeppelin company knew about this all along and told no-one for dark insurance reasons of their own; this was probably the ObConspiracyTheory most modern science programmes feel obliged to include to keep Joe Sixpack tuned in.
It was on TV so it must be true!
This was a typical Corel fuck-up. It reminds me of the WordPerfect for fuck-up a few years back; that particular little adventure costing Corel the best part of 50 million bucks. And before that was the network computers. And before that was the video conferencing. And before that was Corel Home...
I worked for Corel's localisation centre in Dublin for ~2.5 years, during which time I saw more savage stupidity and brute incompetence than one person should should have to see in a lifetime. Corel's top management could not get their head around the fact that they weren't just a garage start-up any more, that they were a big multinational company with big revenues and over 1,000 staff to look out for. Worse, it wasn't just a big company that thought it was a start-up; it was a company that thought it was a start-up, but with big company earnings. About as level-headed as a toddler with a tac nuke. Mike Cowpland was the worst. He took the company off on whatever crazy jaunt his magic 8-ball or the voices in his head or whatever the fuck told him to. The shareholders should have nailed his wrinkly ex-pat ass to the wall of Carling Avenue years ago.
There was no management, no processes, nothing that could by any stretch be called an organisation. The fall of Corel was inevitable. They were the engineers of their own doom. They were greedy and stupid, reaching out to grab new markets while their core business was eroding from underneath them.
Perhaps this is the best evidence to back up Lanier's arguments; if software engineering is so damn kewl, why has it failed to produce a credible alternative to these "dinosaur" systems?
I see a number of problems with the state of the art today, most of them psychological and sociological rather than technological:
I'm sure people here can think of more. All of these things contribute to the noise in the software engineering community at large.
What you are referring to here is "hinting". The TrueType rasteriser allows a font designer to encode hints in the font to switch off certain features of a glyph at low point sizes and low resolutions so that serifs, etc. don't interfere with the shape of a glyph.
Hinting is time-consuming, takes a lot of skill, and some low-end font creation programs don't even support it. A lot of fonts out there aren't hinted for this reason, which is why so many fonts look like crap at small point sizes.
What Microsoft did was pay some good font designers to come up with new font designs that are properly hinted for on-screen display. These fonts-- Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et. al.-- are freely available for download from Microsoft's typography page.
AFAIK, Silicon Fen is the nickname for the research park near Oxford (or is it Cambridge? One of the University towns anyway) that Microsoft set up a couple of years back. There are a lot of IT companies in Ireland, but they are not all located in one distinctive geographic area. And we don't have "fens" in Ireland, you dumb bastards! We call them bogs!
And I don't think you'd get many geeks signing up for a stint in "Silicon Bog". (:
I am unfamiliar with this lexical function and the VMS Help facility was no use. What version of OpenVMS are you running?
[diving for cover]
I suppose what pissed a lot of people off immediately was the idea that one could apply for (and receive) a patent on a gene sequence that wasn't fully decoded. This is totally illogical.
But then I remembered that I've come across this before in an anniversary of the British magazine, "The Engineer" a couple of years ago. The article covered the patent war between the Victorian-era inventors responsible for the development of the internal combustion engine. Many of the patents granted to these inventors were since found to be based on faulty and sometimes downright erroneous notions of what chemical/ mechanical processes were actually happening in these engines. In other words, the inventors themselves had no more clue what was happening in their engines than anyone else! Yet it did not stop them getting into pointless and vicious disputes and lawsuits with other inventors, which may have slowed down the development of what was probably the invention of the 20th century.
Does patent law allow for the re-evaluation of a patent in the light of new scientific discoveries? What is the status of a patent based on erroneous premises?
Yeah, what's with the damn icons? The hi-colour icons that shipped with the original Win95 Plus! pack looked quite nice-- now they look all cartoony and horrible! It's... infantile. `My Computer', `My Network'... I think MS are using this as the model for their new UI.
Sure, Windows can be themed now but why the hell make it look so cheap and nasty out of the box? We're paying enough for it. MS went and paid some font designers to create some nice typefaces for them, and they got Brian Eno to do that Windows 95 start-up sound; why don't they do the same for the graphics in their default theme?
On a related note, has anyone else noticed the abysmal quality of recent Microsoft help and documentation? I recently downloaded the Windows Scripting Host help (in that wretched HTMLHelp format of theirs) and found it atrocious. The Office help system is equally poor; much of it isn't even installed by default! Is it any wonder that users are barely scratching the surface of Microsoft's gigantic apps with documentation this poor? Meantime, bored teenagers flood the world with macro viruses, because they're the only people with enough time on their hands to decipher the obtuse, uninformative, and shoddily-written dreck that MS tech writers serve up as `help' these days.
IMHO, in the days when MS were building their market share, their online help and documentation were regarded as showcases to demonstrate the cool features of their products as well as an exploratory tool. Now they have everyone locked into their platform, help and doc is at best considered a revenue drain or a potential cash-cow, where you have to take out a subscription to get access to information that used to be free.
It sucks. Open Source documentation is often badly-written (often because English is not the native language of the writer) or woefully lacking, but at least most Open Source writers are genuinely interested in teaching you about their wares and solving your problems. Whereas these days, MS `help' seems only there so MS can write `fully hyperlinked online Help system!' on the back of the box.
I'm sick to the back teeth of watching all these fevered egos in the KDE and GNOME camps whacking off in public like two troops of rabid spider monkeys. Snipe followed by counter-snipe followed by smug insinuation followed by all-out shit-slinging rarely seen outside the monkey house at the Zoo. Where they get the time to code is beyond me.
Point is, I've tried both and they both suck. Why? Because they are shamelessly ripping off a UI paradigm popularised by Microsoft, a paradigm they ripped off in turn from Apple, who designed for a 128K monochrome machine with a 400K floppy drive. If I wanted my machine to work like Windows, why would I have bothered installing Linux in the first place? Both GNOME and KDE actually boast about the extent to which they follow Windows-- "no retraining-- it works just like Windows!" they crow.
This is cowardly bullshit. Any real user you talk to will tell you how much Windows and the MacOS suck. KDE and GNOME are appealing to the same middle-tier IS management types who mandate the use of Windows throughout their organisation; empty-headed MBA jackals with one hand turning the pages of some gushing ZD publication loaded with "handy" product feature matrices and the other hand tugging at their atrophied genitals. These, all you GNOME and KDE advocates, these are the assholes that put Microsoft on the map, and you are lining up, learning to talk their talk and walk their walk so you can kiss their asses. "No retraining-- it works just like Windows!" You fucking whores!
Why does the Open Source community have such an inferiority complex when it comes to original UI design? Is it because we don't really "get" GUIs? Is it because deep down we'd just be happy with a command line if it wasn't for those pesky users wanting their icons and their flat toolbars? So instead of sitting down and thinking through this whole UI thing, we just clone Windows? Are you so desperate for mindshare and flattering media coverage that you'd take over screwing your users where Bill Gates left off? A reaming from the Free Software community is going to feel much the same as a reaming from Microsoft come morning. "Microsoft spend millions on usability! We don't have the resources!" scream the apologists. You idiots. That's a PR exercise if ever I saw one. Microsoft spend that money to impress the middle managers who are their real customers; the rest can go hang. Do you really think Microsoft ever ditched a single line of interface code because it raised a usability issue? The whole thing is a snow-job; it gives Microsoft plausible denial: "What? You say our products are unusable? Well, we spent squillions on usability last year-- you must be a retard or something."
The 15-year old Mac GUI metaphor is creaking badly; it doesn't scale. I have a 6GB hard disk at home (tiny by today's standards); how am I meant to navigate it, to manage? With a GTK+ tree control? Think again, Mr. GNOME Man. Furthermore, we're stuck with Mac UI dogma that made sense on a 128K box but not on a machine with 32MB or more of RAM. A one-shot Clipboard in this day and age? Puh-lease! You want me to click File, Save every five minutes? Give me a break; I could record every damn keystroke in my word processor including ^H and never run short on hard disk space. File Open dialog boxes? They were a hack because the first MacOS was single tasking and you couldn't get at the shell!
Think, you freaks, think! All this sniping about code reuse and re-inventing the wheel. Both camps started re-inventing the wheel before the first line of GNOME or KDE code was written, and you didn't even notice.
Read this and this and then come back to me.
Doubtless the Sony sysadmins are already cursing this idiot's name as every 1337 script kiddie on the planet reading these remarks polishes off his rootkit and warms up his portscanner.
Perhaps someone would like to start a book on how soon sony.com gets 0wned or reduced to smoking rubble?
Or Samba? :-)
Actually, AFAIK, the tarantella does have something to do with spiders. Supposedly, the dance originated as a way for sufferers of a tarantula bite to sweat the venom out of their systems!
Read that in the Childrens' Brittanica when I was a kid, before all this Web nonsense started...
... Post trails off into incoherent old-fart mutterings...
Putting the verb at the end of a sentence in Latin is a convention, not a feature of the language. Latin is heavily inflected, so you can tell from a word's ending what job it's doing in a sentence (Subject, Object, Verb, Indirect Object, etc.) This means you can put Latin words in pretty much any order you like and still be unambiguous. English used to be inflected too, but over the centuries has moved to a system where a word's position in a sentence indicates the job it's doing. For more information, please see the "Romans Go Home" sketch in Monty Python's Life of Brian. :-)
In Latinate Perl, if such an abomination were to exist, tokens could occur anywhere in a statement. The convention of suffixing variables to indicate their type would have to be extended to commands; also, you'd need suffixes to indicate lvalues and rvalues in assignment operations... it would be More Than One Way To Do Things (tm) philosophy taken to its (il)logical conclusion!
The core of Miguel's argument is that the Unix world is in chaos because the designers of Unix have failed to form and enforce policy down the years. A good point.
But let's look at the history of Unix here:
Now, Miguel, could you please tell me precisely how is one going to enforce policy on such a disparate user base, most of whom are going to react with instinctive loathing towards anybody attempting to throw their weight around, to say my thing is The Right Thing damnit, for whatever reason?
Unix has survived precisely because there is no hallowed policy handed down from above. It evolves. It changes to meet new needs. Those components of Unix that are shared, like glibc, have developed through consensus and bitter experience. If you want to develop in an enforced-policy environment, well, there's Windows NT or VMS or OS/390.
The Cluetrain has already left the station, Miguel. You on it or under it?
--
Cat Mara
Love me, I'm a liberal!
This is a questionable feature of Perl, IMHO. While I hate "fascist" languages that insist on you doing things their way and their way alone, Perl's looseness can lead to maintenance nightmares. Few people will have the time to learn all of Perl's multifarious ways of accomplishing a single task; therefore it's possible to have two Perl wizards in the same organisation whose working sets of favoured Perl idioms don't overlap much. If one wizard leaves and the other undertakes to maintain their scripts, the maintainer is going to have some fun deciphering just what the hell the other wizard was up to. Now, all languages are going to have this problem to an extent (e.g. witness how something as trivial an unfamiliar indenting style in a C program can throw you off), but Perl amplifies it to a perverse degree.
Unfair. Jobs' behaviour left Sculley no choice but to fire his ass. He humiliated the members of the Lisa team. He humiliated the members of the ][ team, despite the fact that the Apple ][ was the only machine Apple was making that was actually selling at the time. He played favourites. Like Jef Raskin put it: `you can't use the words "management" and "Steve Jobs" in the same sentence.'
IMNSHO, it ceases to be your company when you IPO. That was shareholder's money Jobs was burning to fuel his delusions.
And Bushnell? Bushnell was a flake. Chuck E. Cheese? Petsters? Give me a break.