I don't use SMS but I can certainly see a use for it. What if you're in a situation where you cannot speak out loud but still want to communicate? If I'm sitting in a boring meeting that I'm required to attend, I can't just ring up my girlfriend and start talking!
Way back in 1980 I interviewed with Texas Instruments. One interviewer had been involved in testing the Speak and Spell. He told me during testing they used lots of dirty words, and everyone hoped the test code never leaked to the public.
More things to consider when designing and coding for internationalization:
When using Unicode or UTF-8 encoding, a byte is not equal to a character, so be careful how you interpret the result of strlen() or similar methods.
If your application needs to wrap text, be aware that different languages have different rules for where to wrap. Spaces separate words in many but not all languages, so you can't just wrap when you see a space. But for languages without spaces between words, some allow you to wrap anywhere but others require certain characters to always remain together. Check out the rules for word wrapping in Thai if you don't believe me.
Each language has its own sorting algorithm. Binary sort order is almost never acceptable.
If you design your initial interface in English you need to allow additional space in your GUI for longer text strings in some other languages. In my experience, Portuguese and German generally produce much longer text than English. Portuguese phrases tend to have more words, German tends to have fewer but longer words. Of course this may vary depending on the text in your app.
Some languages require larger fonts. While a 10-point font may be fine in English, German, etc., you will need a larger font to generate readable text for the Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
Some languages are read from right to left. I've never needed to program for such a language so I don't know what pitfalls exist.
I moved to Colorado at age 22 in May 1980, arriving the day Mount St. Helens erupted. I remember the miniscule amounts of ash accumulating on cars during the following week, but only because the TV news told me to look. I wouldn't have noticed the ash otherwise, and I doubt many other people would. I don't think there would have been enough ash on the ground to track into the house - in bare feet it would have been indistinguishible from other dirt.
But I lived in eastern Colorado. Perhaps the ash was heavier in western Colorado closer to the volcano.
I used to run a BBS (remember those?). One of my users emailed me from his AOL account, but he misspelled my email address. I got the email anyway since it got delivered to the dead letters area of my BBS software. About a week later I began receiving spam addressed to that misspelled account name. I'm sure that particular user did not sign up that address for spam somewhere, so it had to be AOL harvesting outgoing email addresses! Slime! This was about 8 years ago so who knows if they still do it?
If spam gets so bad that the filters cause too many false positive, then it's time for whitelist-only email. For many email users at work, whitelists are all that's needed. For example, 99.5% of email received at my work address is from a coworker. The other 0.5% is from my home account, a former coworker who is keeping in touch, or other addresses I already know. Many people never need to receive messages from unknown senders at their work address. Sure, there are exceptions, but that just means a little more effort maintaining the whitelist (i.e. any email address that originated from my business card scanner should automatically be added to my whitelist).
Most users don't care about source code, but many would like to see design and architecture specs. Especially when selling complex systems to businesses, the customers need to (or should) know how the software will behave under stress, in error conditions, potential security flaws, etc. Most of these things you won't find by a casual reading of the source code, but it won't take long to find out how well they were considered by the architects and designers.
When web ads started getting too obnoxious, I started running ad blockers. I don't mind ads that stick to the margins where I can notice them or ignore them. I do mind when they make noise just by moving the mouse over them, pop-up over other content, pop-under and force me to click, distract me with animations, or distract me with boobies (in the workplace especially!!!!).
I am amazed that Yahoo would force ads at paying customers. I would never pay for a service that displays disruptive advertising to its subscribers.
Go back to simple magazine-style advertising and I will stop running ad blocking software.
Multi-tiered services can work if the pay service offers significant value over the free service. Hook us on the free service, then entice us with goodies to get to our bank accounts.
I'm relatively cheap so I subscribe to very few web sites (but I do pay for a few). One thing that doesn't work for me is to simply take away the ads. I use Eudora for my email client, and I'm very happy with the ad-sponsered free version. The ads are relatively non-intrusive. So why would I pay for Eudora's ad-free version? There are no additional features, so I don't see the point. As a rule I do not give handouts to such high-tech charities if I don't get significant value in return, so Eudora loses, especially during the advertising downturn.
Web sites and software writers who are contemplating free and premium versions of their products and services need to be sure the free version also provides good value without being obnoxious. Of course, most reputable shareware authors learned this long ago. Don't nag too often or you'll chase away your prospective customers.
User interface consistency is certainly a real issue. If you do the same thing day-in and day-out, maybe not. But if you use a number of different software programs infrequently, consistency becomes a must-have.
I used to own an Amiga. Each application did things its own way, and I used many of them. Each time I went to open a file, the application's open dialog appeared and I had to pause for 5 or 10 seconds to study it to figure out what I had to click to browse the file system. In classic Amiga fashion, wild colors and new ways to select things were used. It certainly showed the creativity of the programmers, but slowed down my productivity tremendously. It wouldn't have been such a big deal if I only used one or two applications, but I used 20 or 30, some infrequently, so it was disruptive.
Similarly, each application invented its own menu item name. Do I "open" a file, "load" it, "read" it, etc.? I think "load" was pretty common on Amiga, but not universal, and the lesser-used menu commands showed more inconsistency. As a result, whenever I launched an app I hadn't used for several days, I had to slow down and re-learn it.
I certainly agree that issues like security, stability, and the other things you mention are important, and need much more attention than they've had in the past. But don't blow off the little things that allows me to complete a task in 5 minutes rather than 8 minutes. Get rid of Clippy's constant interruptions and a business can save real time and money in improved productivity. (assuming the PC doesn't lock-up and have to reboot, which of course is your point!)
The complaint is not that the filepicker and filesaver don't look alike, it's that they don't *act* alike.
Windows has gotten better at this over the years. Its file save dialog appears to be an embedded instance of Explorer, albeit with some restrictions. Generally you can do all the file manipulation commands in the save dialog as you can in a full-blow Explorer window. You can't launch an app, you can't get the double-pane look, and the toolbar looks different, but the majority of the functionality is the same.
This is much better than older versions of Windows. Win 3.1 definitely didn't do this. I don't recall whether 95 did.
But if you ever wanted inconsisent filepicker dialogs, take a look at Amiga. In the early days, every programmer had to write their own filepicker from scratch. That led to some very innovative filepickers, and made the Amiga platform very difficult to use. I think they finally added a standard filepicker in a later OS release (2.1? 3.0?) but all the old apps still used their home-built ones.
Windows 95 introduced the concept of in-place editing throughout Windows. Word and other apps already supported in-place editing of OLE/COM objects (such as a spreadsheet embedded in a document). Win95 extended that concept to the "shell".
The most perverse example of this is renaming a file. I *like* editing the name in-place, but I *detest* the way they chose to implement it. When the filename is selected, single-click on it to rename it. On paper, this sounds fine. I'm sure the Microsoft system engineers approved this requirement as a nice convenience.
But how many times have you attemted to double-click a file and ended up in edit mode? Now to get out of it you have to either hit the Escape key, or single-click elsewhere. Then try the double-click again. If you haven't had your morning coffee yet, your double-clicks are probably a bit slow, so you repeat this cycle three time before you finally succeed at launching that program!
And how many times have you accidentally renamed a file this way and never known it, until you're searching for that file 10 days later?
I'm amazed this "feature" is still in XP. I wish there were a way to disable it.
Immediate pop-up of sub-menus wouldn't be so bad if it was really immediate. But with the default menu animation on Windows, that immediate pop-up turns into 200ms or more. Dragging the mouse along the menus becomes a sluggish and frustrating experience. Hence the default delay.
This one's easy actually - a friend of mine independently came to the same conclusion as me on this one, which is that Microsoft deliberately chose "Program Files" as both a 'long filename' and a filename with a space in it precisely to speed the adoption of long filenames. They did it to bring into sharp relief any program that didn't support LFN properly. Remember, Windows 95 was the time when they introduced their "Designed for Windows" logo, which at the time was a pretty big deal, and as far as I can remember, pretty much mandated support for LFN.
You're exactly right. I read this justification in a Microsoft document in '96 when I was updating a 16-bit app to conform to the "Designed for Windows 95" logo.
I used an IBM 1130 in college (yes, we had electricity in those days). There were half a dozen or so status lamps on the front console. These were bulbs inset into rectanglar holes, with a chunk of translucent colored plastic containing a phrase for the status. One was a green piece of plastic labeled "Power" and another was a red one labeled "Parity Error".
The computer was down for a week due to a parity error when the system was powered up. The IBM tech couldn't figure it out. Eventually somebody looked at a picture of the console in the manual and noticed the Power and Parity Error indicators had been switched. The system was working all along!
If you grew up with UNIX in the 70's, you probably used ed, a command-line text editor. If you entered an invalid command, the error message you got was:
?
Later versions of ed had a verbose option so it would actually give you a clue what was was wrong. Verbose messages were usually one or two word phrases.
Isn't this situation called "I can't wait any longer, I have to go now"??? And the apparatus in question would be to just stand-up and queue for the bathroom use?
But that's not high-tech. Remember, IBM NEEDS PATENTS!
FAQ #17> What if I have to go NOW?
If you wish to be placed at the head of the queue, enter your payment information below. A $15 charge will be deducted from your credit card or bank account.
>> We dedicated that patent to the public so that we could continue focusing on our high-quality patent portfolio.
> Seem to be in conflict.IBM and patents seem to me to be a issue of quantity not quality.
I used to work for a large corporation (not IBM) who was among the top five companies issued the most patents annually in the US. The culture there encouraged us to apply for as many patents as possible, and granted cash awards to people just for filing. We filed many patents of questionable utility. Apparently it was more important to try to be #1 in patents than to make money. I'm sure the culture at IBM is the same.
The company I now work for also encourages many patent applications, but they will only file patents that have a clear revenue generation opportunity. Otherwise, it's a waste of money to pursue and maintain the patent.
I've been blocking ads for years. Not that I don't like to see ads - sometimes I really am interested in the products being offered. But such a large fraction of ads are now so visually annoying that I can't take them anymore. I don't want to punch the fscking monkey. I don't want bouncing pong balls drawing my eyes away from a software review. When I'm at work reading financial sites I don't want a huge pair of hooters trying to sell me an X10 cam - it's unprofessional in an office environment.
I prefer magazine-style ads: occasional full-page ads I can easily skip or read, smaller ads in the margins that are not intrusive. When I look at them, there they are, and when I look away, they don't pull my eyes back. The web was like this in the early days of advertising. Then the monkey-punching games and Vegas-style animations started to take over, and now we have big honking animated ads with an inch of content wrapped around them, too distracting to read the actual web page content.
On TV the commercials are clustered together, then go away so you can view a few minutes of uninterrupted program content. If TV worked like the web, you would have a commercial running in the middle 60% of the sitcom stage with the actors squeezed into the margins around it, speaking lines between the commerical's music, and ducking under other smaller commericals, all competing for your attention. How long do you think people would watch such a program?
Bring back the days of less intrusive ads and I will turn off my ad blocker.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang, should have replaced those Firestones!
Doubtful. My car has sensors on each door to alert me when one is not fully closed. I'm sure NASA put multiple sensors on the cargo bay door.
After listening to this afternoon's NASA press conference, it looks like the left wing may have been the first thing to go.
I shudder to think what's supposed to be plugged into the "Geek Port" mentioned on the Specifications page.
I don't use SMS but I can certainly see a use for it. What if you're in a situation where you cannot speak out loud but still want to communicate? If I'm sitting in a boring meeting that I'm required to attend, I can't just ring up my girlfriend and start talking!
Way back in 1980 I interviewed with Texas Instruments. One interviewer had been involved in testing the Speak and Spell. He told me during testing they used lots of dirty words, and everyone hoped the test code never leaked to the public.
More things to consider when designing and coding for internationalization:
When using Unicode or UTF-8 encoding, a byte is not equal to a character, so be careful how you interpret the result of strlen() or similar methods.
If your application needs to wrap text, be aware that different languages have different rules for where to wrap. Spaces separate words in many but not all languages, so you can't just wrap when you see a space. But for languages without spaces between words, some allow you to wrap anywhere but others require certain characters to always remain together. Check out the rules for word wrapping in Thai if you don't believe me.
Each language has its own sorting algorithm. Binary sort order is almost never acceptable.
If you design your initial interface in English you need to allow additional space in your GUI for longer text strings in some other languages. In my experience, Portuguese and German generally produce much longer text than English. Portuguese phrases tend to have more words, German tends to have fewer but longer words. Of course this may vary depending on the text in your app.
Some languages require larger fonts. While a 10-point font may be fine in English, German, etc., you will need a larger font to generate readable text for the Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
Some languages are read from right to left. I've never needed to program for such a language so I don't know what pitfalls exist.
I moved to Colorado at age 22 in May 1980, arriving the day Mount St. Helens erupted. I remember the miniscule amounts of ash accumulating on cars during the following week, but only because the TV news told me to look. I wouldn't have noticed the ash otherwise, and I doubt many other people would. I don't think there would have been enough ash on the ground to track into the house - in bare feet it would have been indistinguishible from other dirt.
But I lived in eastern Colorado. Perhaps the ash was heavier in western Colorado closer to the volcano.
I used to run a BBS (remember those?). One of my users emailed me from his AOL account, but he misspelled my email address. I got the email anyway since it got delivered to the dead letters area of my BBS software. About a week later I began receiving spam addressed to that misspelled account name. I'm sure that particular user did not sign up that address for spam somewhere, so it had to be AOL harvesting outgoing email addresses! Slime! This was about 8 years ago so who knows if they still do it?
If spam gets so bad that the filters cause too many false positive, then it's time for whitelist-only email. For many email users at work, whitelists are all that's needed. For example, 99.5% of email received at my work address is from a coworker. The other 0.5% is from my home account, a former coworker who is keeping in touch, or other addresses I already know. Many people never need to receive messages from unknown senders at their work address. Sure, there are exceptions, but that just means a little more effort maintaining the whitelist (i.e. any email address that originated from my business card scanner should automatically be added to my whitelist).
Most users don't care about source code, but many would like to see design and architecture specs. Especially when selling complex systems to businesses, the customers need to (or should) know how the software will behave under stress, in error conditions, potential security flaws, etc. Most of these things you won't find by a casual reading of the source code, but it won't take long to find out how well they were considered by the architects and designers.
My phone number is 911-555-1212. Still wondering whether any telemarketers have called me.
One word: Proxomitron
When web ads started getting too obnoxious, I started running ad blockers. I don't mind ads that stick to the margins where I can notice them or ignore them. I do mind when they make noise just by moving the mouse over them, pop-up over other content, pop-under and force me to click, distract me with animations, or distract me with boobies (in the workplace especially!!!!).
I am amazed that Yahoo would force ads at paying customers. I would never pay for a service that displays disruptive advertising to its subscribers.
Go back to simple magazine-style advertising and I will stop running ad blocking software.
Multi-tiered services can work if the pay service offers significant value over the free service. Hook us on the free service, then entice us with goodies to get to our bank accounts.
I'm relatively cheap so I subscribe to very few web sites (but I do pay for a few). One thing that doesn't work for me is to simply take away the ads. I use Eudora for my email client, and I'm very happy with the ad-sponsered free version. The ads are relatively non-intrusive. So why would I pay for Eudora's ad-free version? There are no additional features, so I don't see the point. As a rule I do not give handouts to such high-tech charities if I don't get significant value in return, so Eudora loses, especially during the advertising downturn.
Web sites and software writers who are contemplating free and premium versions of their products and services need to be sure the free version also provides good value without being obnoxious. Of course, most reputable shareware authors learned this long ago. Don't nag too often or you'll chase away your prospective customers.
My 20 year stash of National Geographic magazines will become worthless - all the maps will be upside down!
User interface consistency is certainly a real issue. If you do the same thing day-in and day-out, maybe not. But if you use a number of different software programs infrequently, consistency becomes a must-have.
I used to own an Amiga. Each application did things its own way, and I used many of them. Each time I went to open a file, the application's open dialog appeared and I had to pause for 5 or 10 seconds to study it to figure out what I had to click to browse the file system. In classic Amiga fashion, wild colors and new ways to select things were used. It certainly showed the creativity of the programmers, but slowed down my productivity tremendously. It wouldn't have been such a big deal if I only used one or two applications, but I used 20 or 30, some infrequently, so it was disruptive.
Similarly, each application invented its own menu item name. Do I "open" a file, "load" it, "read" it, etc.? I think "load" was pretty common on Amiga, but not universal, and the lesser-used menu commands showed more inconsistency. As a result, whenever I launched an app I hadn't used for several days, I had to slow down and re-learn it.
I certainly agree that issues like security, stability, and the other things you mention are important, and need much more attention than they've had in the past. But don't blow off the little things that allows me to complete a task in 5 minutes rather than 8 minutes. Get rid of Clippy's constant interruptions and a business can save real time and money in improved productivity. (assuming the PC doesn't lock-up and have to reboot, which of course is your point!)
The complaint is not that the filepicker and filesaver don't look alike, it's that they don't *act* alike.
Windows has gotten better at this over the years. Its file save dialog appears to be an embedded instance of Explorer, albeit with some restrictions. Generally you can do all the file manipulation commands in the save dialog as you can in a full-blow Explorer window. You can't launch an app, you can't get the double-pane look, and the toolbar looks different, but the majority of the functionality is the same.
This is much better than older versions of Windows. Win 3.1 definitely didn't do this. I don't recall whether 95 did.
But if you ever wanted inconsisent filepicker dialogs, take a look at Amiga. In the early days, every programmer had to write their own filepicker from scratch. That led to some very innovative filepickers, and made the Amiga platform very difficult to use. I think they finally added a standard filepicker in a later OS release (2.1? 3.0?) but all the old apps still used their home-built ones.
Windows 95 introduced the concept of in-place editing throughout Windows. Word and other apps already supported in-place editing of OLE/COM objects (such as a spreadsheet embedded in a document). Win95 extended that concept to the "shell".
The most perverse example of this is renaming a file. I *like* editing the name in-place, but I *detest* the way they chose to implement it. When the filename is selected, single-click on it to rename it. On paper, this sounds fine. I'm sure the Microsoft system engineers approved this requirement as a nice convenience.
But how many times have you attemted to double-click a file and ended up in edit mode? Now to get out of it you have to either hit the Escape key, or single-click elsewhere. Then try the double-click again. If you haven't had your morning coffee yet, your double-clicks are probably a bit slow, so you repeat this cycle three time before you finally succeed at launching that program!
And how many times have you accidentally renamed a file this way and never known it, until you're searching for that file 10 days later?
I'm amazed this "feature" is still in XP. I wish there were a way to disable it.
Immediate pop-up of sub-menus wouldn't be so bad if it was really immediate. But with the default menu animation on Windows, that immediate pop-up turns into 200ms or more. Dragging the mouse along the menus becomes a sluggish and frustrating experience. Hence the default delay.
Once again, beauty wins over usability.
This one's easy actually - a friend of mine independently came to the same conclusion as me on this one, which is that Microsoft deliberately chose "Program Files" as both a 'long filename' and a filename with a space in it precisely to speed the adoption of long filenames. They did it to bring into sharp relief any program that didn't support LFN properly. Remember, Windows 95 was the time when they introduced their "Designed for Windows" logo, which at the time was a pretty big deal, and as far as I can remember, pretty much mandated support for LFN.
You're exactly right. I read this justification in a Microsoft document in '96 when I was updating a 16-bit app to conform to the "Designed for Windows 95" logo.
I used an IBM 1130 in college (yes, we had electricity in those days). There were half a dozen or so status lamps on the front console. These were bulbs inset into rectanglar holes, with a chunk of translucent colored plastic containing a phrase for the status. One was a green piece of plastic labeled "Power" and another was a red one labeled "Parity Error".
The computer was down for a week due to a parity error when the system was powered up. The IBM tech couldn't figure it out. Eventually somebody looked at a picture of the console in the manual and noticed the Power and Parity Error indicators had been switched. The system was working all along!
If you grew up with UNIX in the 70's, you probably used ed, a command-line text editor. If you entered an invalid command, the error message you got was:
?
Later versions of ed had a verbose option so it would actually give you a clue what was was wrong. Verbose messages were usually one or two word phrases.
Isn't this situation called "I can't wait any longer, I have to go now"??? And the apparatus in question would be to just stand-up and queue for the bathroom use?
But that's not high-tech. Remember, IBM NEEDS PATENTS!
FAQ #17> What if I have to go NOW?
If you wish to be placed at the head of the queue, enter your payment information below. A $15 charge will be deducted from your credit card or bank account.
IBM's patent attorneys should be happy now.
>> We dedicated that patent to the public so that we could continue focusing on our high-quality patent portfolio.
> Seem to be in conflict.IBM and patents seem to me to be a issue of quantity not quality.
I used to work for a large corporation (not IBM) who was among the top five companies issued the most patents annually in the US. The culture there encouraged us to apply for as many patents as possible, and granted cash awards to people just for filing. We filed many patents of questionable utility. Apparently it was more important to try to be #1 in patents than to make money. I'm sure the culture at IBM is the same.
The company I now work for also encourages many patent applications, but they will only file patents that have a clear revenue generation opportunity. Otherwise, it's a waste of money to pursue and maintain the patent.
I've been blocking ads for years. Not that I don't like to see ads - sometimes I really am interested in the products being offered. But such a large fraction of ads are now so visually annoying that I can't take them anymore. I don't want to punch the fscking monkey. I don't want bouncing pong balls drawing my eyes away from a software review. When I'm at work reading financial sites I don't want a huge pair of hooters trying to sell me an X10 cam - it's unprofessional in an office environment.
I prefer magazine-style ads: occasional full-page ads I can easily skip or read, smaller ads in the margins that are not intrusive. When I look at them, there they are, and when I look away, they don't pull my eyes back. The web was like this in the early days of advertising. Then the monkey-punching games and Vegas-style animations started to take over, and now we have big honking animated ads with an inch of content wrapped around them, too distracting to read the actual web page content.
On TV the commercials are clustered together, then go away so you can view a few minutes of uninterrupted program content. If TV worked like the web, you would have a commercial running in the middle 60% of the sitcom stage with the actors squeezed into the margins around it, speaking lines between the commerical's music, and ducking under other smaller commericals, all competing for your attention. How long do you think people would watch such a program?
Bring back the days of less intrusive ads and I will turn off my ad blocker.
If not Oracle, then Microsoft. I'm sure you will be happy trusting your identification to SQL Server and passport.com