actually she wasn't related to the first GUIU interface, she just worked at PARC once. she also worked at Microsoft as a usability expert.
However, she is a usability expert, so should know a few things about how people interact with computers. I don't think she said anything really outrageous, despite how much the MS fanbois and Apple haters seem to want to think.
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. At NN/g she consults for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, usability of touch devices, cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human computer interaction. She coauthored the NN/g reports on mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children's websites.
Budiu previously worked at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on human-computer interaction, psychology, and cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
not to mention that they can force this on everybody who has no choice in taking it (because "everyone runs Windows") and then force everyone to purchase apps through their store - with their own 30% markup.
Expect the desktop to be obsoleted as soon as they can, as of today you can consider the desktop part of Windows 8 to be the same kind of thing as XP mode in Windows 7 is.
Scotland is a bit of an awkward place for mobile signals - you have 1 of 2 problems.
First, the population is small and the land is large. Hence - few masts get put up, and no masts get put up in the middle of nowhere.
Second, Edinburgh has good coverage, but it is built like a MC Escher painting, imagine a canyon with a bridge over it, and housing/shops/pubs in the valley, and on the bridge, and in the bridge. And all made out of thick, solid stone. Its no wonder your coverage is patchy.
this frequency is the same as that used in *South Korea* which makes most of all the mobile devices around. Its also used across Asia and Australia.... in fact, you could say the only place that is "doing things their own way" is the USA (crazy, I know!).
so it doesn't appear that the UK has pulled a number out their ass, this seems to be a quite sensible decision.
I can that happening already - everyone and their dog is going for web apps, web stuff is the new thinclient computing paradigm. It'd be nice to get more performance and local cached storage, but companies like Microsoft and Google see dollar signs everytime they think of Amazon's subscription server models. That's one reason the cloud stuff is growing now.
I'd take HP into the world of servers (where they already are well known) and bring the thin client back, a lot of ideas were tried before their time - dumb terminals were great back in the day, then they were tried by the likes of Sun (but were so expensive compared to a PC), the time might be right for them to appear for real. A thin linuxy PC running either a browser OS (can't think which one - there will be several to choose from soon) that connects seamlessly to HP servers and . you have the needs of a huge number of companies sorted. Then you can add a line of expensive powerful 'not-so-thin' PCs to the mix that allow more local (ie cached) work to be done that still fits into the same infrastructure.
Of course, their tablets can then be added in to the mix and you have an integrated whole, companies like that.
I'm not sure if its worth bothering about the consumer side of things, everyone else seems to be dedicating all their efforts towards that - it'd be nice to see something business-oriented instead.
oh, I think there's the power - after all Wordperfect ran quite well on computers with much less power than current phones/tablets. Its just the formfactor-ness of it, which requires a keyboard, and that takes it from the tablet and puts it in the world of being a laptop (which, is exactly what MS surface is - a screen with a floppy keyboard you need a table to rest it on)
One day I'm sure we'll get good enough speech recognition to really run word on a tablet, and a better UI to manage a stream of text rather than create a document full of tables and images and embedded powerpoint and excel documents, but until then, we're stuck with laptops... in one shape or another. (hmm, I wonder if the killer app for tablets is a DTP program or something that uses a lightweight markup language like ASCIIDoc, instead of drag and drop GUI, you add content using bits of textual formatting keywords).
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea - an office reader is fine, but there are loads of them that read office documents already. The familiarity factor n olonger applies anyway as Office will look and feel different to normal PC version.
MS has shown that it thinks tablets are the only way now, hence no desktop in the Windows 8 RT version. I agree, I can't see it being popular with businesses either.
Active Directory and Exchange... hasn't stopped Apple from being really popular with businesses, why would they bother with Windows 8 tablets if they already have a load of iPads.
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet. And even then, the thin client had better be much cheaper than the existing no-brand PC they currently use, or they'll continue to use XP on them.
See, there is an opportunity for Linux on the desktop, its just that it's going to be as a PC replacement in the form of a thin terminal running webapps, not a PC clone.
hence the point about teaching students fundamental computing principles rather than how to use whatever technology is currently in use.
A lot of students came out of University knowing C, when the industry moved to Java. Then they came out knowing Java, when the industry had moved on to C#. Now students might be coming out knowing C# when Microsoft is moving back to C++. This is what happens if you let the short-term minds of our industry try to influence how students are taught.
What is surprising to me though is that Computing classes are not in the list of "hard" subjects being taken up in increasing numbers. This year, computing is falling.
Maybe no-one wants a computing career, long hours, bad colleagues, constant re-learning crap that's itself obsoleted a couple of years later.
Lets hope the raspberry pi does something, or in a decade everything will be outsourced.
I also blame MS, but not for the ribbon (that's just a symptom of a greater underlying disease). The reason MS has dumped the start menu - because their usability labs have decided that users don;t actually use it, 90% of users preferring to stick icons on the desktop (you've seen them) or pinned to the taskbar.
Now while that is undoubtedly true, and shows that quick-access to often-used programs is a very important feature, it forgets to note that people still use the start menu for all apps that are not quick-launched. But, hey, that doesn't matter, the last 10% of user activity can be sacrificed in the name of statistical user input.
Same with the ribbon - its basically a quick-launch menu, only forgetting about the bits you do not use often.
It seems Gnome has the same problem, focussing on a flawed assumption that if a user doesn't use something all the time, then they don't use it at all.
amen to that. I do a bit of reading in the bath.... a tatty paperback is perfect for that, an expensive ereader is not. Same for out and about - a paperback is easy to pack and doesn't matter if someone nicks it.
And not only that, the feel good and they get you laid.
What you forget is that there is a lot of testing involved to make sure these still work - distro x gets an update to kernel y, you'd have to recompile and then see if nothing nasty got added.
With 1 driver per distro, this is pactical, maybe 1 driver per kernel version. What isn't practical is testing all 100.
Still, it would make life easier if the kernel boys did adopt a "we promise we won't break existing drivers" attitude, surely that's not so hard between major kernel versions?
they also bet that the future of application development is cloud-based too - thinking that everything can be managed as a web app (which, I guess 80% of apps can). Stupid thing is they forget about that last 20% in their rush to get a new revenue stream to replace the failing Windows sales and add new revenue streams from application deployment and licensing for Azure services.
Microsoft won't see the problem for a long time, and will think that its part of their strategy when Windows sales decline further - a bit like how XBox cost them a bit but went good in the end, they'll see remarkable similarities in Windows.
I don;t know what will happen, but the best thing that could come from this is a destruction of the old monopoly.
erm, I think you need to learn more about it. You're trying to apply C semantics to C++ programs assuming that the C style is the only way to achieve performance and efficiency. Its not the case.
Most compilers will happily optimise and remove a lot of redundant code, things like RVO (for an example) shows how you can return a full object from a function yet no copying of that object takes place - the compiler optimises it so the returned object occupies the destination space directly.
Even for template code that is instantiated for different types, this isn't much of an issue. Strongly typed code is a tradeoff worth having, code is tiny anyway compared to data.
Now there are cases where you do need a collection of pointers to heap-based objects. You can still have such a thing, even using the STL - a list of void* is still valid, but you can also have a list of shared_ptr types, so you get everything you want (no bloat, no object copy) and everything I think is good (type safety and object semantics) at the same time.
There's also C++ move semantics to in the new C++11 standard. Even Microsoft supports that:)
It is ludicrous to say that the PTO has "stopped checking into prior art."
to be fair, looking at all the patents that are granted recently, I can easily believe the USPTO has gone from a 'patent checking and recording' organisation to a printing business that sells patent certificates.
You don't need to write a exception handler for bad_alloc for 99% of cases, just write a bad_alloc handler for those areas where you try to allocate a large amount of memory.
If you cannot alloc an object of 20 bytes or so, you've got problems no exception handling will solve. Exit gracefully and start again. If you cannot allocate 1mb, then maybe you can do something about it, handle those and... probably exit gracefully anyway.
It could be worse though, in.NET if you run out of stack, you don't even get the exception - it just exits.
ah, don;t get me wrong - inline lambdas for little functions are great, its just a warning not to find this cool new feature and start using them everywhere.
They can make debugging harder and code less readable, but for little functions they're great.
Bad code is bad code, and you can write it in any language, yes, even visual basic.net.
So the point is not so much "how useless are those lousy GCC devs who will write crappy code", but "how good are those GCC devs now they have a more powerful tool in their hands".
I'd hope they start to discover the STL too, and use the standard containers at the very least - no need to use custom ones unless you either continue to use the existing C-based ones, or you have some very specific performance issues that you absolutely cannot fix any other way (and generally, you don't have this problem with the STL)
Now, sure, I hope they don't discover cool new features like STL algorithms and start to litter the code with lamba-d functors.
I also understood that USB required some polling whereas PS/2 is a straight hardware interrupt type affair.
quick google... yes, PS/2 is less intensive on your system, faster and doesn't suffer keypress limits and it also doesn't get delayed because some other USB device is hogging the USB bandwidth (which is more important if you've plugged your keyboard into a USB extension port on your monitor)
I mean, sure - fans on those heatsinks will need replacing (but a new fan = brand new), and old hard drives should be replaced with a new one too. The end result of 2 replaced items is something with the same reliability as brand new equipment (and with added burn-in so its possibly more reliable in some aspects).
The problem is warranty - if an old PC dies, you can't phone up dell and have them send an engineer round to fix it. But I guess if you have a couple of spares you wouldn't need to.
alternatively make them easier to recycle. If the components weren't a complete mismash of every type of rare metal known to man, they might be a lot easier to melt down and reuse.
There are a lot of places that you can drop off metals for recycling - metal recycling rates are so high I can take an old copper heatsink (from a 1U server) and get £4 for it's scrap value. Steel chassis and parts are also valuable. Its the cost of recycling the circuit boards that has a negative value, so you don't get to drop an appliance off and receive a bit of cash. If that was different, you can bet people would be doing it a lot more.
Having breakable equipment provides jobs in making and selling new ones - I'm ok with that, but I'd like to make even more jobs in easily breaking up the bits of old stuff to make the new stuff with.
you make the mistake of assuming closed source software is better than open source, and that Twitter would be able to purchase licences for a twitter-feed product someone else wrote.
Twitter undoubtedly would be ok with any platform when they started, but today they have so much scale they need to tweak that code, the close source platform would have to be rewritten completely in something, at least the OSS stuff gave them a big head start.
You're right that staff costs are big, but when you're serving so many people even that fades into insignificance - it doesn't matter how much you pay your staff and infrastructure if you cannot serve up tweets.
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actually she wasn't related to the first GUIU interface, she just worked at PARC once. she also worked at Microsoft as a usability expert.
However, she is a usability expert, so should know a few things about how people interact with computers. I don't think she said anything really outrageous, despite how much the MS fanbois and Apple haters seem to want to think.
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. At NN/g she consults for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, usability of touch devices, cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human computer interaction. She coauthored the NN/g reports on mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children's websites.
Budiu previously worked at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on human-computer interaction, psychology, and cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
not to mention that they can force this on everybody who has no choice in taking it (because "everyone runs Windows") and then force everyone to purchase apps through their store - with their own 30% markup.
Expect the desktop to be obsoleted as soon as they can, as of today you can consider the desktop part of Windows 8 to be the same kind of thing as XP mode in Windows 7 is.
Scotland is a bit of an awkward place for mobile signals - you have 1 of 2 problems.
First, the population is small and the land is large. Hence - few masts get put up, and no masts get put up in the middle of nowhere.
Second, Edinburgh has good coverage, but it is built like a MC Escher painting, imagine a canyon with a bridge over it, and housing/shops/pubs in the valley, and on the bridge, and in the bridge. And all made out of thick, solid stone. Its no wonder your coverage is patchy.
wha?
this frequency is the same as that used in *South Korea* which makes most of all the mobile devices around. Its also used across Asia and Australia.... in fact, you could say the only place that is "doing things their own way" is the USA (crazy, I know!).
so it doesn't appear that the UK has pulled a number out their ass, this seems to be a quite sensible decision.
I can that happening already - everyone and their dog is going for web apps, web stuff is the new thinclient computing paradigm. It'd be nice to get more performance and local cached storage, but companies like Microsoft and Google see dollar signs everytime they think of Amazon's subscription server models. That's one reason the cloud stuff is growing now.
I'd take HP into the world of servers (where they already are well known) and bring the thin client back, a lot of ideas were tried before their time - dumb terminals were great back in the day, then they were tried by the likes of Sun (but were so expensive compared to a PC), the time might be right for them to appear for real. A thin linuxy PC running either a browser OS (can't think which one - there will be several to choose from soon) that connects seamlessly to HP servers and . you have the needs of a huge number of companies sorted. Then you can add a line of expensive powerful 'not-so-thin' PCs to the mix that allow more local (ie cached) work to be done that still fits into the same infrastructure.
Of course, their tablets can then be added in to the mix and you have an integrated whole, companies like that.
I'm not sure if its worth bothering about the consumer side of things, everyone else seems to be dedicating all their efforts towards that - it'd be nice to see something business-oriented instead.
oh, I think there's the power - after all Wordperfect ran quite well on computers with much less power than current phones/tablets. Its just the formfactor-ness of it, which requires a keyboard, and that takes it from the tablet and puts it in the world of being a laptop (which, is exactly what MS surface is - a screen with a floppy keyboard you need a table to rest it on)
One day I'm sure we'll get good enough speech recognition to really run word on a tablet, and a better UI to manage a stream of text rather than create a document full of tables and images and embedded powerpoint and excel documents, but until then, we're stuck with laptops... in one shape or another. (hmm, I wonder if the killer app for tablets is a DTP program or something that uses a lightweight markup language like ASCIIDoc, instead of drag and drop GUI, you add content using bits of textual formatting keywords).
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea - an office reader is fine, but there are loads of them that read office documents already. The familiarity factor n olonger applies anyway as Office will look and feel different to normal PC version.
MS has shown that it thinks tablets are the only way now, hence no desktop in the Windows 8 RT version. I agree, I can't see it being popular with businesses either.
Active Directory and Exchange... hasn't stopped Apple from being really popular with businesses, why would they bother with Windows 8 tablets if they already have a load of iPads.
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet. And even then, the thin client had better be much cheaper than the existing no-brand PC they currently use, or they'll continue to use XP on them.
See, there is an opportunity for Linux on the desktop, its just that it's going to be as a PC replacement in the form of a thin terminal running webapps, not a PC clone.
hence the point about teaching students fundamental computing principles rather than how to use whatever technology is currently in use.
A lot of students came out of University knowing C, when the industry moved to Java. Then they came out knowing Java, when the industry had moved on to C#. Now students might be coming out knowing C# when Microsoft is moving back to C++. This is what happens if you let the short-term minds of our industry try to influence how students are taught.
What is surprising to me though is that Computing classes are not in the list of "hard" subjects being taken up in increasing numbers. This year, computing is falling.
Maybe no-one wants a computing career, long hours, bad colleagues, constant re-learning crap that's itself obsoleted a couple of years later.
Lets hope the raspberry pi does something, or in a decade everything will be outsourced.
Media studies... pah. You can get a degree in Facebook today. How about that for the ultimate in uselessness.
I also blame MS, but not for the ribbon (that's just a symptom of a greater underlying disease). The reason MS has dumped the start menu - because their usability labs have decided that users don;t actually use it, 90% of users preferring to stick icons on the desktop (you've seen them) or pinned to the taskbar.
Now while that is undoubtedly true, and shows that quick-access to often-used programs is a very important feature, it forgets to note that people still use the start menu for all apps that are not quick-launched. But, hey, that doesn't matter, the last 10% of user activity can be sacrificed in the name of statistical user input.
Same with the ribbon - its basically a quick-launch menu, only forgetting about the bits you do not use often.
It seems Gnome has the same problem, focussing on a flawed assumption that if a user doesn't use something all the time, then they don't use it at all.
amen to that. I do a bit of reading in the bath.... a tatty paperback is perfect for that, an expensive ereader is not. Same for out and about - a paperback is easy to pack and doesn't matter if someone nicks it.
And not only that, the feel good and they get you laid.
What you forget is that there is a lot of testing involved to make sure these still work - distro x gets an update to kernel y, you'd have to recompile and then see if nothing nasty got added.
With 1 driver per distro, this is pactical, maybe 1 driver per kernel version. What isn't practical is testing all 100.
Still, it would make life easier if the kernel boys did adopt a "we promise we won't break existing drivers" attitude, surely that's not so hard between major kernel versions?
they also bet that the future of application development is cloud-based too - thinking that everything can be managed as a web app (which, I guess 80% of apps can). Stupid thing is they forget about that last 20% in their rush to get a new revenue stream to replace the failing Windows sales and add new revenue streams from application deployment and licensing for Azure services.
Microsoft won't see the problem for a long time, and will think that its part of their strategy when Windows sales decline further - a bit like how XBox cost them a bit but went good in the end, they'll see remarkable similarities in Windows.
I don;t know what will happen, but the best thing that could come from this is a destruction of the old monopoly.
erm, I think you need to learn more about it. You're trying to apply C semantics to C++ programs assuming that the C style is the only way to achieve performance and efficiency. Its not the case.
Most compilers will happily optimise and remove a lot of redundant code, things like RVO (for an example) shows how you can return a full object from a function yet no copying of that object takes place - the compiler optimises it so the returned object occupies the destination space directly.
Even for template code that is instantiated for different types, this isn't much of an issue. Strongly typed code is a tradeoff worth having, code is tiny anyway compared to data.
Now there are cases where you do need a collection of pointers to heap-based objects. You can still have such a thing, even using the STL - a list of void* is still valid, but you can also have a list of shared_ptr types, so you get everything you want (no bloat, no object copy) and everything I think is good (type safety and object semantics) at the same time.
There's also C++ move semantics to in the new C++11 standard. Even Microsoft supports that :)
It is ludicrous to say that the PTO has "stopped checking into prior art."
to be fair, looking at all the patents that are granted recently, I can easily believe the USPTO has gone from a 'patent checking and recording' organisation to a printing business that sells patent certificates.
You don't need to write a exception handler for bad_alloc for 99% of cases, just write a bad_alloc handler for those areas where you try to allocate a large amount of memory.
If you cannot alloc an object of 20 bytes or so, you've got problems no exception handling will solve. Exit gracefully and start again. If you cannot allocate 1mb, then maybe you can do something about it, handle those and ... probably exit gracefully anyway.
It could be worse though, in .NET if you run out of stack, you don't even get the exception - it just exits.
ah, don;t get me wrong - inline lambdas for little functions are great, its just a warning not to find this cool new feature and start using them everywhere.
They can make debugging harder and code less readable, but for little functions they're great.
Bad code is bad code, and you can write it in any language, yes, even visual basic.net.
So the point is not so much "how useless are those lousy GCC devs who will write crappy code", but "how good are those GCC devs now they have a more powerful tool in their hands".
I'd hope they start to discover the STL too, and use the standard containers at the very least - no need to use custom ones unless you either continue to use the existing C-based ones, or you have some very specific performance issues that you absolutely cannot fix any other way (and generally, you don't have this problem with the STL)
Now, sure, I hope they don't discover cool new features like STL algorithms and start to litter the code with lamba-d functors.
I also understood that USB required some polling whereas PS/2 is a straight hardware interrupt type affair.
quick google... yes, PS/2 is less intensive on your system, faster and doesn't suffer keypress limits and it also doesn't get delayed because some other USB device is hogging the USB bandwidth (which is more important if you've plugged your keyboard into a USB extension port on your monitor)
is reliability such a problem for old kit?
I mean, sure - fans on those heatsinks will need replacing (but a new fan = brand new), and old hard drives should be replaced with a new one too. The end result of 2 replaced items is something with the same reliability as brand new equipment (and with added burn-in so its possibly more reliable in some aspects).
The problem is warranty - if an old PC dies, you can't phone up dell and have them send an engineer round to fix it. But I guess if you have a couple of spares you wouldn't need to.
alternatively make them easier to recycle. If the components weren't a complete mismash of every type of rare metal known to man, they might be a lot easier to melt down and reuse.
There are a lot of places that you can drop off metals for recycling - metal recycling rates are so high I can take an old copper heatsink (from a 1U server) and get £4 for it's scrap value. Steel chassis and parts are also valuable. Its the cost of recycling the circuit boards that has a negative value, so you don't get to drop an appliance off and receive a bit of cash. If that was different, you can bet people would be doing it a lot more.
Having breakable equipment provides jobs in making and selling new ones - I'm ok with that, but I'd like to make even more jobs in easily breaking up the bits of old stuff to make the new stuff with.
you make the mistake of assuming closed source software is better than open source, and that Twitter would be able to purchase licences for a twitter-feed product someone else wrote.
Twitter undoubtedly would be ok with any platform when they started, but today they have so much scale they need to tweak that code, the close source platform would have to be rewritten completely in something, at least the OSS stuff gave them a big head start.
You're right that staff costs are big, but when you're serving so many people even that fades into insignificance - it doesn't matter how much you pay your staff and infrastructure if you cannot serve up tweets.