"Do you care about transistor density?", will get a lot of "Huh?", which will be interpreted as "no, does not care".
"Transistor density is one of the biggest factors in computer speed. Do you care about making transistors more dense in the future to improve computer speed?" will get a lot of "Yes", because people want the computer speed, even if they don't understand transistor density.
Polling has gotten a bad name because the loaded questions spew the results, and make headlines.
Oh, I didn't give this the right headline -- "Slashdot Readers Care More About The Headline", because of the poll question, "Will a bad, uninformative headline that doesn't interest you result in your not clicking on the story?"
If I recall correctly, one was using bank-switching, so that while you had a 640K address range (alright, it was a full 1M, but parts of it were reserved for other memory mapped things because IBM knows how to design for the future), the memory space you reached changed as you adjusted what pages mapped where. This one worked on 286's that could not actually use a 32 bit memory space. I don't recall if it worked on plain 8086's or not.
The other just gave you a straight 32 bit memory range, but required that your users update to a 386 processor.
that crap sucked back then, and neither nostalgia nor hindsight make it suck any less.
If your processor *cannot* access more than 1M of address space no matter what, than you have to come up with some way to do this.
Bank switching is *old* technology. Heck, my Atari 2600 had an add-on expansion that gave it (again, from memory) two switchable 2K banks of memory, so that your 4K addressing range could access a total of 8K of ram, plus routines to load the next section of your game from cassette tape. Surprisingly, the same chips that Atari used in the 2600 gave much better graphics when you upgraded the ram from about 128 bytes to 4K -- over-designed chips.
What if I wanted to do something even simpler? Say, 1.5 times the critical mass, using only off-the-shelf parts, and commercially available explosives? I'm a D student in physics, and I've got this design that I think will work, but my teacher doesn't believe me...
(Side note: If you don't understand the reference, a D student in a physics class *did* design an atom bomb using publicly available material. His design got classified, some publicly available information was classified, and I don't know what happened to his grade.)
Most of these "sticks" I've seen are so wide that they block adjacent ports, so that means it will take up a pair (at least, all the USB ports I've seen have been a pair here, a pair there).
You have devices that need to be powered by the computer, and cannot go into a hub. You have your high-speed devices that take up a full port. You have printers that refuse to work properly through a hub.
By the time you're done? I'm glad that USB is hot swappable, because I'm constantly swapping already.
With no scripts enabled, I see the text at my browser-specified font, the full size of my window. I see most of the images, but clearly I'm missing some.
If I enable his site, I lose *all* of the images and my fontsize is changed so that it's no longer what my eyes can handle -- he knows my eyes, my monitor, my display conditions, etc., better than I do, and has decided that his horrible font is better than my choice.
I'm not sure what I have to enable before his site "works", for some definition of "works" that says "End users don't know how to set up their browser, so I'll override everything".
*that*, as a web-wide "whoops!" (the real meaning of WWW:-), is the problem.
But seriously: adding his site's scripts breaks things even worse?
(Firefox, NoScript, Privacy Badger, and AdBlock. And Stylish to fix a lot of broken "Crippled Styling System" files.)
Disney was willing to build, at it's own expense, a high-speed rail line from the southern tip of BART, to San Diego. A stop at the peopletrap, of course. I think they planned 5 other stops as well.
All they asked from the state was right-of-ways. It would have been a high speed rail line for transferring large chunks of population, large chunks of people over the primary travel locations. And fast.
The state's response? They wanted lots of stops. Not just a small handful.
** High Speed ** does not exist when you have lots of stops. Period.
If you want a high speed rail as a backbone of a state-wide travel system for something like California, then you have to have some sort of feeder and backbone system. Disney was willing to build the backbone and pay for it entirely. California didn't want to make the feeder, told them "Do it all, or don't do it". So Disney didn't do it.
Approximately 5700 years ago, God started a simulation of the universe. Why?
We can only guess. Perhaps someone asked a question, that was so complex that the only way to determine the answer was to simulate the universe, and determine the answer. Given the huge cost and difficulty that this has resulted in, God has now decided that "Seer of Mind" is just too expensive of an ability, and there will be no more "blind justice seekers" into the future. But the existing "justice is blind" seekers have demonstrated just how crazy the view is.
When the answer is determined, the Seer of mind will know the result of the choice, and will then know whether or not to kill her opponent. Later, someone will retcon the choice and the whole "put down your arms and don't fight" will turn out to be the better choice. Hence the whole "be kind to each other" that is preached and ignored in this simulation -- the truth tries to show itself.
(The scary thing? Homestuck actually _works_ as a religion:-).
Side question: How many pages was it from the Vriska/Terezi showdown until the end of the story?
The probability that someone wants to AND is able to simulate the universe is the probability that someone wants to simulate the universe times the probability that they are able to simulate the universe.
Lets start with that simple concept. Do you agree with it, or not?
---
It does not matter what probability measure I use. If both ideas have high probability, then the AND-ed pair will have high probability.
And no, you are not allowed to arbitrarily define measures that support your desired conclusion and call it valid.
My God, the moderation in the MS thread was so bad I thought MS bribed/., but the moderations in this thread are just as stupid. A guy who's not even logged in gets modded up to a 4 for saying Tyson, who holds a PhD in astrophysics isn't a scientist??
WTF????
Moderation on SlashDot is simply users. Sometimes you get uninformed readers.
Which is patently false. I decree that the set of universes which are simulations in the sense of Tyson have measure zero. Therefore, it is a zero probability that the current universe is a simulation.
Seriously? ** You are not allowed to assume your conclusion! **.
---
Basic premise, summed up: Given the assumption that 1) future people are likely to want to run simulations of the past, 2) the computer power to run simulations of the past will exist, then the conclusion that someone will run such a simulation is extremely highly likely.
Now, add the assumption that the ability to run such simulations will be widespread at some point in the future, and the probability that we are a simulation changes from "Maybe" to "Likely".
These are *not* easy assumptions. Moore's law cannot continue to infinity. The energy needed to run an arbitrary complex computation/simulation is arbitrarily high. It may turn out that the energy cost is measured in stars / aka dyson spheres to power the computational complexity.
---
When we look at our universe, we see things that seem to be signs of simulations. Given that, there questions are:
1. Who is running the simulation: Our descendants inside this universe, or some being that exists outside this universe? (NB: Some people call such a being "God".) 2. Is this in fact accurate observations on our part, or is this something that we just aren't looking close enough / well enough at yet? 3. Is physics just weirder than can be possibly understood? (i.e. not actually a simulation).
Question #3 there is actually asking if science is inherently pointless -- if assuming that you can learn by observing, and that the arrow of time does give some sense of A causing B, etc., -- all the basic assumptions of science -- are in fact bad assumptions.
I mean, imagine if the assumptions of science were to yield the result that causality is in fact a lie -- that A never actually causes B, but only ever has a correlation effect that while close to 1 is always measurably less than one.
I mean, that can't be scientific truth, can it?:-)
I'd say that the decline in video games comes to a few key points:
1. Lack of trust / ownership. We're at the point where the makers of the consoles basically say "You don't own it, we can change the terms of usage, you can be locked out of your own device, you can't do any soft modding, and if you try we can wipe your softmod or wreck your device because our TOS says we own it after you pay for it".
See Nintendo and the Wii U. Now realize any of them can do this.
2. Price per game. Lack of any significant discounts.
3. We're not that far from tying your purchased games to a single console, completely eliminating any resale market -- point numbers 1 and 2 to the extreme.
4. As others have mentioned, a normal computer is becoming more convenient than the consoles.
5. The fundamental question: Why bother?
The Wii gave us a reason to bother: the motion-sensing control. And then the improved control that actually senses motion instead of sensing jerks and angles. Now if only the software was actually fixed/improved -- many of the games seemed to operate under "Ok, we're learning how to work with the controls, and got X working, we learn more, make Y much better, we now know how to go back and improve X, but we won't". And this is *before* shipping.
Nintendo's own "Wii Fit" is the perfect example of this. I'm sorry -- the quality of working with the balance board is different in the different exercises, and worst, when they made Wii Fit Plus, they did not go back and fix any problems with the older exercises/games.
The Wii Sports Plus, the key game for the Motion plus sensor? Seemed to have the exact same issue.
6. Reduced quality / lack of bug fixes and patches. Yes, computer games get patches and fixes. Can you add a patching system for these cartridge/CD games? Sure. Do they? Nope.
As part of anti-malware prevention, Mac OS X protects a number of critical files from being modified, even by root.
There are two work-arounds:
1. Install a second copy of the OS (repartition the drive to include a second partition). 2. Use the recovery boot
In both of these cases, the system files relative to "/" are still protected, but the files in/Volumes/RealRoot/usr/bin/whatever are now not protected.
** NB: The list of protected files is itself contained in a file! **
Said file is protected, but you *can* boot in the recovery boot, empty that file (or other specify that the entire disk is not protected), and then you have full control (And exposed risk) as root.
Maybe not for eternity, but many people are unchanging for dozens of years, and I can guarantee you that there are plenty of people that are effectively unchanged from their late teens until death.
The sad truth is that a very large number of people can be characterized as, such and such behavior has gotten me this far in life, and is therefore good enough for me to continue doing. Change in behavior only occurs when people recognize that their old behavior is not good enough; merely being not good enough is not sufficient to cause change.
Services that are Generally Marketed Online will have some sort of hidden Internal And Protected code that exists to find a way to pull more money out of your account, or otherwise stick you with a debt. Since this IAP is not fully disclosed, and cannot be disabled, these GMO things are potentially harmful, primarily when a child is using the device. Think of the Children!
*NEVER* let a programmer design a user interface. A programmer will design an interface based on what the programmer wants/likes. A good program will be designed based on what the user wants/likes.
Give the programmer the specs for the UI, just like you give them specs for the program's function.
===
Do you really want details? Ok.
*Every* website that uses CSS to force a given font/size on the users, regardless of what that user says in their preferences is the font and size that they want.
Is your screen 92 DPI? Fine. Why do you assume everyone has a 92 DPI screen?
Are your eyes good enough to read 12 point fonts? Oh, wait -- you're specifying 12 _pixel_ fonts. How big will that be on the user's screen? How good are their eyes? What's the difference between reading a 9 point printed font (At about 1000 DPI) at 12 inches, or a 12 pixel screen font at 92 DPI at 22 inches?
Should I go on?
"Ribbon Bar". Gee, a language that everyone can work with -- an english version, a spanish version, a french version -- just by changing the localization text for the menu display, or a brand new hieroglyph language that isn't previously known to anyone, and where the contents of your bar change every time the program thinks you want to do something else, so that nothing can be depended on? The only reason I was ever able to use any of the "ribbon bar" programs was because I had memorized the key combinations (ctrl-this and ctrl-that).
Now, some things are "User interface designer" issues. Someone had to design and spec that ribbon bar. Someone had to approve that design. Several people should have been fired.
But most web page CSS things seem to be nothing more than a web page authoring tool that just spits out fixed CSS with no real ability to do anything else. And then companies that use that tool without really understanding the horrors of that tool.
So one programmer writes a web page tool with bad CSS output. Another company uses that tool, may even try to design a good UI, and fails because of their upstream.
---
Even in the older days of actual applications: Did a programmer make the GUI for 1-2-3, and other early spreadsheets? Sure. Were they just copied into newer spreadsheets without thinking? Mostly.
Did a programmer make the GUI for almost all X applications? Yep. Every programmer made a different GUI. Was there any way to make things standard?
Xerox actually studied users, and said, "Here's how to make an interface that's usable". Microsoft took half, discarded half, and say "This is how all programs will behave". Good? Bad? Consistent. Could you actually adjust the sizes of things? Sure. Did things fit on-screen if you did? Often, no.
Along comes the browser interface. Everything scrolls. No more "won't fit". User-specified base font, and site-specific "bigger/smaller" from that. Oh, wait -- programmers override the "everything scrolls". Programmers override the user font. Do things now fit? Often, no. Can you force bigger fonts? Sure. Do things overlap, or go off-screen, or get clipped, or otherwise ruined? Yep.
Does the computer make it trivial to support large fonts, or other accessibility features for people who need it? Yes. Does the law require that it be used? Not in the USA -- the Americans with Disability act only applies to physical places, not cyberspace.
====
User interfaces are not trivial. They are second only to "correctness" of program behavior. "Documentation" is third. "Performance", "Behavior", "Features", etc., are fourth.
That's a restatement of "First, make it work; then, make it work well". "Make it work" includes "Make it usable".
So how am I, an end user, supposed to tell what is a good or bad cable, or charger, etc.?
I see mention/discussions of A to C cables, C to C cables, C devices being A's internally, etc., and I really don't know what I'm seeing.
I'm assuming that "A" is the old, large connector that I have on my computer or disk drive, B is the smaller one typically on cameras, and C is the tiny one on cell phones and tablets.
I know that my phone will sometimes tell me "This cable is not recommended for this device", without any explanation why, if I'm not using the company's cable.
I understand (or think I understand) that the spec calls for delivering 5A of power to a device, at different voltage levels based on what the device can handle, with 100 to 500 watts being available over normal ports/hubs (and direct connections to a computer able to get more than that).
But... how can I tell what's a good/proper device/cable/procedure? What makes some cables/chargers good and others not?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I did not know that.
Meanwhile, given that this new TPU has lower watt per computation, maybe a better question is, can it mine bitcoins cheaper?
The real problem isn't that "go back" loses your work.
The real problem is that "Go forward" doesn't take you back where you were.
Where I was is a state, not a URL.
I don't want the URL reloaded, I want the state of the page restored.
The real question on advances over GPU's: Can it mine bitcoin faster and for less electricity?
See, this is what's wrong with polls.
"Do you care about transistor density?", will get a lot of "Huh?", which will be interpreted as "no, does not care".
"Transistor density is one of the biggest factors in computer speed. Do you care about making transistors more dense in the future to improve computer speed?" will get a lot of "Yes", because people want the computer speed, even if they don't understand transistor density.
Polling has gotten a bad name because the loaded questions spew the results, and make headlines.
Oh, I didn't give this the right headline -- "Slashdot Readers Care More About The Headline", because of the poll question, "Will a bad, uninformative headline that doesn't interest you result in your not clicking on the story?"
If I recall correctly, one was using bank-switching, so that while you had a 640K address range (alright, it was a full 1M, but parts of it were reserved for other memory mapped things because IBM knows how to design for the future), the memory space you reached changed as you adjusted what pages mapped where. This one worked on 286's that could not actually use a 32 bit memory space. I don't recall if it worked on plain 8086's or not.
The other just gave you a straight 32 bit memory range, but required that your users update to a 386 processor.
that crap sucked back then, and neither nostalgia nor hindsight make it suck any less.
If your processor *cannot* access more than 1M of address space no matter what, than you have to come up with some way to do this.
Bank switching is *old* technology. Heck, my Atari 2600 had an add-on expansion that gave it (again, from memory) two switchable 2K banks of memory, so that your 4K addressing range could access a total of 8K of ram, plus routines to load the next section of your game from cassette tape. Surprisingly, the same chips that Atari used in the 2600 gave much better graphics when you upgraded the ram from about 128 bytes to 4K -- over-designed chips.
What if I wanted to do something even simpler? Say, 1.5 times the critical mass, using only off-the-shelf parts, and commercially available explosives? I'm a D student in physics, and I've got this design that I think will work, but my teacher doesn't believe me ...
(Side note: If you don't understand the reference, a D student in a physics class *did* design an atom bomb using publicly available material. His design got classified, some publicly available information was classified, and I don't know what happened to his grade.)
Why does that sound like the plot of Alpha Centauri? The game from Sid?
So who has any spare ports available anyways?
Most of these "sticks" I've seen are so wide that they block adjacent ports, so that means it will take up a pair (at least, all the USB ports I've seen have been a pair here, a pair there).
You have devices that need to be powered by the computer, and cannot go into a hub.
You have your high-speed devices that take up a full port.
You have printers that refuse to work properly through a hub.
By the time you're done? I'm glad that USB is hot swappable, because I'm constantly swapping already.
It's worse.
With no scripts enabled, I see the text at my browser-specified font, the full size of my window. I see most of the images, but clearly I'm missing some.
If I enable his site, I lose *all* of the images and my fontsize is changed so that it's no longer what my eyes can handle -- he knows my eyes, my monitor, my display conditions, etc., better than I do, and has decided that his horrible font is better than my choice.
I'm not sure what I have to enable before his site "works", for some definition of "works" that says "End users don't know how to set up their browser, so I'll override everything".
*that*, as a web-wide "whoops!" (the real meaning of WWW :-), is the problem.
But seriously: adding his site's scripts breaks things even worse?
(Firefox, NoScript, Privacy Badger, and AdBlock. And Stylish to fix a lot of broken "Crippled Styling System" files.)
Ok, so it seems that stacksocial.com is the "must be permitted" site. Carry on.
Slashdot seems to want a lot of domains whitelisted in noscript to reply, so this is just a test since my last reply was eaten.
That california high-speed rail? It's cost?
Disney was willing to build, at it's own expense, a high-speed rail line from the southern tip of BART, to San Diego. A stop at the peopletrap, of course. I think they planned 5 other stops as well.
All they asked from the state was right-of-ways. It would have been a high speed rail line for transferring large chunks of population, large chunks of people over the primary travel locations. And fast.
The state's response? They wanted lots of stops. Not just a small handful.
** High Speed ** does not exist when you have lots of stops. Period.
If you want a high speed rail as a backbone of a state-wide travel system for something like California, then you have to have some sort of feeder and backbone system. Disney was willing to build the backbone and pay for it entirely. California didn't want to make the feeder, told them "Do it all, or don't do it". So Disney didn't do it.
Approximately 5700 years ago, God started a simulation of the universe. Why?
We can only guess. Perhaps someone asked a question, that was so complex that the only way to determine the answer was to simulate the universe, and determine the answer. Given the huge cost and difficulty that this has resulted in, God has now decided that "Seer of Mind" is just too expensive of an ability, and there will be no more "blind justice seekers" into the future. But the existing "justice is blind" seekers have demonstrated just how crazy the view is.
When the answer is determined, the Seer of mind will know the result of the choice, and will then know whether or not to kill her opponent. Later, someone will retcon the choice and the whole "put down your arms and don't fight" will turn out to be the better choice. Hence the whole "be kind to each other" that is preached and ignored in this simulation -- the truth tries to show itself.
(The scary thing? Homestuck actually _works_ as a religion :-).
Side question: How many pages was it from the Vriska/Terezi showdown until the end of the story?
The probability that someone wants to AND is able to simulate the universe is the probability that someone wants to simulate the universe times the probability that they are able to simulate the universe.
Lets start with that simple concept. Do you agree with it, or not?
---
It does not matter what probability measure I use. If both ideas have high probability, then the AND-ed pair will have high probability.
And no, you are not allowed to arbitrarily define measures that support your desired conclusion and call it valid.
My God, the moderation in the MS thread was so bad I thought MS bribed /., but the moderations in this thread are just as stupid. A guy who's not even logged in gets modded up to a 4 for saying Tyson, who holds a PhD in astrophysics isn't a scientist??
WTF????
Moderation on SlashDot is simply users. Sometimes you get uninformed readers.
Which is patently false. I decree that the set of universes which are simulations in the sense of Tyson have measure zero. Therefore, it is a zero probability that the current universe is a simulation.
Seriously? ** You are not allowed to assume your conclusion! **.
---
Basic premise, summed up: Given the assumption that 1) future people are likely to want to run simulations of the past, 2) the computer power to run simulations of the past will exist, then the conclusion that someone will run such a simulation is extremely highly likely.
Now, add the assumption that the ability to run such simulations will be widespread at some point in the future, and the probability that we are a simulation changes from "Maybe" to "Likely".
These are *not* easy assumptions. Moore's law cannot continue to infinity. The energy needed to run an arbitrary complex computation/simulation is arbitrarily high. It may turn out that the energy cost is measured in stars / aka dyson spheres to power the computational complexity.
---
When we look at our universe, we see things that seem to be signs of simulations. Given that, there questions are:
1. Who is running the simulation: Our descendants inside this universe, or some being that exists outside this universe? (NB: Some people call such a being "God".)
2. Is this in fact accurate observations on our part, or is this something that we just aren't looking close enough / well enough at yet?
3. Is physics just weirder than can be possibly understood? (i.e. not actually a simulation).
Question #3 there is actually asking if science is inherently pointless -- if assuming that you can learn by observing, and that the arrow of time does give some sense of A causing B, etc., -- all the basic assumptions of science -- are in fact bad assumptions.
I mean, imagine if the assumptions of science were to yield the result that causality is in fact a lie -- that A never actually causes B, but only ever has a correlation effect that while close to 1 is always measurably less than one.
I mean, that can't be scientific truth, can it? :-)
(Hint: It is).
I'd say that the decline in video games comes to a few key points:
1. Lack of trust / ownership. We're at the point where the makers of the consoles basically say "You don't own it, we can change the terms of usage, you can be locked out of your own device, you can't do any soft modding, and if you try we can wipe your softmod or wreck your device because our TOS says we own it after you pay for it".
See Nintendo and the Wii U.
Now realize any of them can do this.
2. Price per game. Lack of any significant discounts.
3. We're not that far from tying your purchased games to a single console, completely eliminating any resale market -- point numbers 1 and 2 to the extreme.
4. As others have mentioned, a normal computer is becoming more convenient than the consoles.
5. The fundamental question: Why bother?
The Wii gave us a reason to bother: the motion-sensing control. And then the improved control that actually senses motion instead of sensing jerks and angles. Now if only the software was actually fixed/improved -- many of the games seemed to operate under "Ok, we're learning how to work with the controls, and got X working, we learn more, make Y much better, we now know how to go back and improve X, but we won't". And this is *before* shipping.
Nintendo's own "Wii Fit" is the perfect example of this. I'm sorry -- the quality of working with the balance board is different in the different exercises, and worst, when they made Wii Fit Plus, they did not go back and fix any problems with the older exercises/games.
The Wii Sports Plus, the key game for the Motion plus sensor? Seemed to have the exact same issue.
6. Reduced quality / lack of bug fixes and patches. Yes, computer games get patches and fixes. Can you add a patching system for these cartridge/CD games? Sure. Do they? Nope.
Oh, so they are sloths passing jokes in the office?
As part of anti-malware prevention, Mac OS X protects a number of critical files from being modified, even by root.
There are two work-arounds:
1. Install a second copy of the OS (repartition the drive to include a second partition).
2. Use the recovery boot
In both of these cases, the system files relative to "/" are still protected, but the files in /Volumes/RealRoot/usr/bin/whatever are now not protected.
** NB: The list of protected files is itself contained in a file! **
Said file is protected, but you *can* boot in the recovery boot, empty that file (or other specify that the entire disk is not protected), and then you have full control (And exposed risk) as root.
So you can disable or work-around this feature.
Maybe not for eternity, but many people are unchanging for dozens of years, and I can guarantee you that there are plenty of people that are effectively unchanged from their late teens until death.
The sad truth is that a very large number of people can be characterized as, such and such behavior has gotten me this far in life, and is therefore good enough for me to continue doing. Change in behavior only occurs when people recognize that their old behavior is not good enough; merely being not good enough is not sufficient to cause change.
$413 dollars in developer time ...
Did they spend $612 to have someone troll slashdot with this news?
Services that are Generally Marketed Online will have some sort of hidden Internal And Protected code that exists to find a way to pull more money out of your account, or otherwise stick you with a debt. Since this IAP is not fully disclosed, and cannot be disabled, these GMO things are potentially harmful, primarily when a child is using the device. Think of the Children!
*NEVER* let a programmer design a user interface.
A programmer will design an interface based on what the programmer wants/likes.
A good program will be designed based on what the user wants/likes.
Give the programmer the specs for the UI, just like you give them specs for the program's function.
===
Do you really want details? Ok.
*Every* website that uses CSS to force a given font/size on the users, regardless of what that user says in their preferences is the font and size that they want.
Is your screen 92 DPI? Fine. Why do you assume everyone has a 92 DPI screen?
Are your eyes good enough to read 12 point fonts? Oh, wait -- you're specifying 12 _pixel_ fonts. How big will that be on the user's screen? How good are their eyes? What's the difference between reading a 9 point printed font (At about 1000 DPI) at 12 inches, or a 12 pixel screen font at 92 DPI at 22 inches?
Should I go on?
"Ribbon Bar". Gee, a language that everyone can work with -- an english version, a spanish version, a french version -- just by changing the localization text for the menu display, or a brand new hieroglyph language that isn't previously known to anyone, and where the contents of your bar change every time the program thinks you want to do something else, so that nothing can be depended on? The only reason I was ever able to use any of the "ribbon bar" programs was because I had memorized the key combinations (ctrl-this and ctrl-that).
Now, some things are "User interface designer" issues. Someone had to design and spec that ribbon bar. Someone had to approve that design. Several people should have been fired.
But most web page CSS things seem to be nothing more than a web page authoring tool that just spits out fixed CSS with no real ability to do anything else. And then companies that use that tool without really understanding the horrors of that tool.
So one programmer writes a web page tool with bad CSS output.
Another company uses that tool, may even try to design a good UI, and fails because of their upstream.
---
Even in the older days of actual applications: Did a programmer make the GUI for 1-2-3, and other early spreadsheets? Sure. Were they just copied into newer spreadsheets without thinking? Mostly.
Did a programmer make the GUI for almost all X applications? Yep. Every programmer made a different GUI. Was there any way to make things standard?
Xerox actually studied users, and said, "Here's how to make an interface that's usable".
Microsoft took half, discarded half, and say "This is how all programs will behave".
Good? Bad? Consistent.
Could you actually adjust the sizes of things? Sure.
Did things fit on-screen if you did? Often, no.
Along comes the browser interface. Everything scrolls. No more "won't fit". User-specified base font, and site-specific "bigger/smaller" from that.
Oh, wait -- programmers override the "everything scrolls". Programmers override the user font. Do things now fit? Often, no. Can you force bigger fonts? Sure. Do things overlap, or go off-screen, or get clipped, or otherwise ruined? Yep.
Does the computer make it trivial to support large fonts, or other accessibility features for people who need it? Yes.
Does the law require that it be used? Not in the USA -- the Americans with Disability act only applies to physical places, not cyberspace.
====
User interfaces are not trivial. They are second only to "correctness" of program behavior. "Documentation" is third. "Performance", "Behavior", "Features", etc., are fourth.
That's a restatement of "First, make it work; then, make it work well". "Make it work" includes "Make it usable".
So how am I, an end user, supposed to tell what is a good or bad cable, or charger, etc.?
I see mention/discussions of A to C cables, C to C cables, C devices being A's internally, etc., and I really don't know what I'm seeing.
I'm assuming that "A" is the old, large connector that I have on my computer or disk drive, B is the smaller one typically on cameras, and C is the tiny one on cell phones and tablets.
I know that my phone will sometimes tell me "This cable is not recommended for this device", without any explanation why, if I'm not using the company's cable.
I understand (or think I understand) that the spec calls for delivering 5A of power to a device, at different voltage levels based on what the device can handle, with 100 to 500 watts being available over normal ports/hubs (and direct connections to a computer able to get more than that).
But ... how can I tell what's a good/proper device/cable/procedure?
What makes some cables/chargers good and others not?
Git has one big benefit over other source code control systems that I have used: Branch support.
Oh, and a command-line syntax that is probably turing complete :-)