As far as I knew it was hardcoded to set itself back an hour/forward an hour based on the date and as far as I knew the NST broadcast did/does not broadcast the time with a DST/nonDST time.
One poster says that the DST/nonDST setting is broadcast as part of the signal. How do you know that my particular watch (the model I never gave) either uses or doesn't use that setting? Or even that it was broadcast at all?
I have a nifty solar watch that sets itself based on the the broadcast signals from the atomic clock in Boulder, CO. It automatically adjusted itself when DST started, and presumably would adjust when it was supposed to end. now it's going to be all fucked up? Wonderful. Fuck you Legislative branch.
3.5 million customers at $15 a month = $52,500,000 a month.
And the game is still buggy as shit according to those few of my friends that still play.
That's enough money to hire at least 500 senior programmers to fix their damn game.
I played it for several months, but got utterly bored with it, tired of all its bugs and lack of promised features and quit back in April. I thought it was too slow paced and repetitive, not to mention the drunken bird flights that took^H^H^H^Hwasted ridiculous amounts of time. I couldn't justify $15 a month for it. Everyone said that it was the fastest paced and best MMO out there but the least rotten piece of fruit is still a rotten piece of fruit.
I mostly agree with you. Especially with this statement: If there is one thing I've learned, it's that ALL computer use is learned. People get "intuitive" mixed up with "ubiquitous" all the time. The fact that most everyone is familiar with one thing is supposed to mean that everyone else automatically gets it, as if knowledge was imparted through osmosis.
But then you went and contradicted yourself with this one (emphasis mine): Honestly, what is more intuitive than learning to tell the computer exactly what you want by typing it in and having the comfort of knowing it'll do the same thing every time you type it (no tricks, gimmicks, or special cases to jump out at you)?
If you have to learn it then it isn't intuitive.
UI design/HCI is a Byzantine field of study. You have to use take many things into account and try to please everyone (but you won't). You can make a UI really simple and easy for the novice and infuriate and frustrate the advanced user.* You can make a complicated and arcane interface for the advanced user and punish grandma in doing so. You can make a simple interface with an option to let the user into the complicated interface, but you still annoy the advanced user because they have to get through this and if the novice accidentally stumbles in there they may be lost panic. If you use new UI elements you created that work perfectly with what you're trying to accomplish then you also increase the learning curve and the amount of time required before the user can begin using your application or whatever. Basically, you'll find perfect interfaces hanging around with unicorns.
*See the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard in Win2k. Even if you want to remove 8 defunct "hardware items" (driver entries really, such as when you move a USB mouse from one port to another, it installs another instance of the drivers, one time I had 10 monitors according to the wizard) you have to step through the entire wizard for each and can only remove one at a time. There is no other GUI way to remove "hardware". Each removal required about 16 mouse clicks or so - the most infuriating thing I've ever encountered in windows. Not only that but the one that is actually in use is totally indistinguishable from the extraneous ones. So every time I had to do this with mice I invariably removed the mouse I was actually using by accident and had to finish the job with the keyboard or reboot. It was totally random too, the mouse currently in use was never the first or the last entry in the list of mice. Again this leads back to the problem of arcane interfaces being bad for the novice. An interface that allows the user to mass select and remove hardware would have been great for me but ridiculously dangerous for the average user.
The number of viruses has more than doubled in just the last six months, while the number of adware and spyware programs has roughly quadrupled during the same period, said Vincent Weafer, a senior director at Symantec, which makes the Norton computer security programs. One reason for the explosion, Symantec executives say, is the growth of high-speed Internet access, which allows people to stay connected to the Internet constantly but creates more opportunity for malicious programs to find their way onto machines.
Sounds to me like some guy in the protection racket trying to boost sales. And how does having more innocent victims connected to the internet lead to an explosion in the number of viruses, adware and spyware programs? That's a slippery slope if I've ever seen one.
Next why don't we ask Pepsi how tasty soft drinks are.
Neat! You pretty much pwned the guy in the article. Especially with the text version.
However, being a User Interface Nazi I have to add some constructive critcism. The button itself gives no indication that it is a clickable button. It just looks like a radio button. The text version looked a little hackish but it was pretty apparent what might happen if you clicked on one of the text links after it exploded into them.
Perhaps a better version would be to combine the two: text immediately followed by the icon (a single anchor) and make it look like something that would expand or something if that's possible. That way the user is informed beforehand that this is not a normal hyperlink. User Interfaces should not surprise the user!
The windows move icon with some extra arrows or some slight modification would do nicely I think.
That was the most incomprehensible body of text I've ever attempted to read.
I got tired of him imagining the girl singing the music (in the video game?) after about 3 paragraphs, so I skipped closer to the end only to find out he was still talking about her and relating the game to Armageddon the movie?
[rabid Tolkien Fan]What the heck are you talking about? There were no sequels to LOTR. Those three movies were The Lord of the Rings; as in one story broken into three parts - not The Fellowship of the Ring II: Frodo Heads to Mordor and the Fellowship of the Ring III: Frodo Blows Up Mordor.
There haven't been nor ever will be a sequel to LOTR because J.R.R. Tolkien is long since deceased.[/rabid Tolkien Fan]
When I'm using a new program, I'd love for my keyboard to show me what keys do what. Hold down shift and a new set of functions pop up on the keyboard. Other modifiers and you get more.
I thought about that then realized that I would probably have to tell the keyboard's software what key combinations did what to begin with.
Or do you really think that the developers of it are really going to preprogram it the keyboard functions of every single program in existence? I'm sure only mainstream programs will get preloaded, the rest you'll have to do yourself. And if you have to tell the keyboard what keys do what before it can tell you, how useful is it?
Also I'm not sure how relabeling the keys on the fly is all that helpful to begin with. Sure you can look down and see that the "Hand tool" in Photoshop is on the key that looks like a hand, but then you simply become dependant on it rather than learning what key is the hand tool. You can't just be like, "Oh, it's the H key, I can hit that without looking at the keyboard." because there is no "H" key. There is only a "Hand Tool" key now. I don't see how this is much improvement over icons on the screen to click. It just moves the clickable icons to pressable keys on the keyboard.
If you ask me, the only value this keyboard has is aesthetic. (Though it is pretty badass looking, especially if you can put badass looking icons on it) Too bad it's not a split keyboard.
Did anybody else notice they monkeyed with the enter key?
It's gigantic and moved WAY off to the right.
I hate when keyboard designers monkey with the goddamn key layouts. When you move keys under one hand relative to the other keys under the same hand you cause typos.
I don't know what the hell those two extra keys are between the apostrophe and the enter key are doing there.
I hate that layout. IMHO that section of the keyboard should be like this*:
but I'm not sure how CSS/js-based buttons that make things look nice and allow for customization of a webpage is a "totally new an [sic] incomprehensible thing". It's a button. You click it. Same as every other web button.
There were no pure buttons on TFA. There were radio buttons that looked like normal images as opposed to interfaces. There were checkboxes that also looked ilke normal images. If not for the article explaining what they were I would not have known. Good interfaces don't need to tell you how to use them, they're intuitive. In the world of HCI, having to spend 3 seconds learning how something works is considered a sub-par interface. It seems picky but that's how you separate the acceptable from the best. If you have to do ANY learning before you can begin USING the interface then there is room for improvement.
Technically, by your view point, Windows is no different than DOS.
I never said anything of the kind. I never even mentioned DOS and if you think that's my viewpoint then you've completely misunderstood it. Leave the slipperly slopes to the playgrounds please.
Is Windows 3.1 and MacOS X the same interface?
I don't know who you're arguing with here but I never said that. In fact I never mentioned MacOS. So you can go right ahead and argue with your invisible friend or whoever it is.
Also, I wasn't "so sure" this time. I asked a question. That denotes a lack of certainty.
Funny, you said this:
I'm sure you use something with a modern interface since you seem to like "simple GUIs" and those OSes are CLI.
Sounds awfully sure of yourself to me.
Your ass is still talking for you I'm afraid. Good day.
Interfaces are constantly changing. They have to. If the interface does not change, it means there are no new features. If there are no new features, it means that we are not getting something out of a product that we could. If you remember the "bag phone" from the 90's. The "portable" cellular phone in a bag for your vehicle. It was big, heavy, bulky and could call people and that's about it. Do you have a cellular phone now? Do you use text messaging? Do you use the web on it? I don't know, maybe you don't, but a LOT of people do!
Change, yes. Improvement yes, but totally new an incomprehensible things? NO
I'm not sure where you get the idea that if the interface doesn't change then there are no new features. You're still using a keyboard and mouse aren't you? Do you have things on your keyboard that aren't keys or buttons? The only new interace to the mouse in.....ever? is the wheel.. Additional buttons are not new features, just more buttons, optical tracking/laser tracking aren't new forms of interface, just better tracking. You still move the mouse around and click buttons. You still press keys on your keyboard with your fingers.
I never said interfaces can't be improved, just that newfangled interfaces do nothing but increase the learning curve.
What OS do I use? Funny you should ask. Funnier that you use VAX and HP/UX as examples. At home I use 2k/XP. At work I use OpenVMS, HP/UX, Concurrent OS, Solaris 8/9/10, Win2k3, XP, 2000. VAX isn't an OS it's a platform that runs OpenVMS.
Don't be so sure next time. I use modern interfaces as well as CLI. I actually prefer CLI for a lot of the things I do at work. As far as application development I think I like good old vi as much as I do Visual Basic.NET's IDE.
You talk alot about interfaces but only use operating systems as examples. Mice are interfaces, keyboard are interfaces, buttons are interfaces, radio buttons, check boxes, sliders, scroll bars, drop downs etc. What new interfaces have you seen since windows 3.1? As near as I can tell it's still radio buttons, buttons, scroll bars, text boxes, pulldowns, checkboxes, icons and windows.
One of the most fundamental concepts of good UI/GUI design is that you DON'T INTRODUCE NEW THINGS.
Everytime you introduce something new the user has to learn how to use it or what the fuck it is. This is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is.
It may seem incredibly anal, stale and anti-progressive but that's the whole point. There's no such thing as an innovative interface because innovation has connotations of something both new and better. In the realm of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) new and better are mutually exclusive. Good UIs are simple, intuitive and introduce absolutely nothing new. Ever.
There are only two truly intuitive interfaces in existance. The nipple and the vagina. The rest you have to learn how to use.
Save the styled checkboxes and radio buttons for other people in your yuppie coffee house. Your average user doesn't want them, won't understand them, won't appreciate them and doesn't care what they look like.
ThermonuclearBomb LittleBoy = new ThermonuclearBomb();
Sure it's easier that malloc'ing but why do I have to tell give the compiler the same information twice? Why not wrap the damn constructor in a memory allocation call giving this:
I'm New Zealander*, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about New Zealander by tourists:
* yes, we are the country with the tazmanian devils * no we don't have a Monarchy government * our fishes are really tasty, yeah * our kids don't go to school by swimming (well, most of them don't) * we don't have sex with sheep that's what Australians do. * never confuse us with Australians. We really dont' like that. It's like confusing Americans with Canadians. They swear at us incomprehensibly if we do this. * We are not fruit * What are the olympics?
That's not to say there isn't something beautiful about an elegant solution to a tricky problem, but I'd say no, it is not "art" though there is an art to it.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I knew it was hardcoded to set itself back an hour/forward an hour based on the date and as far as I knew the NST broadcast did/does not broadcast the time with a DST/nonDST time.
One poster says that the DST/nonDST setting is broadcast as part of the signal. How do you know that my particular watch (the model I never gave) either uses or doesn't use that setting? Or even that it was broadcast at all?
Way to fly off your handlebars just to flame.
What's a date?
those four drives? let me guess, you think 260. There's no way in hell.
My old array of 4 Quantum Atlas 10K IVs on an Adaptec 2100s only gets 70MB/s.
Actually no, it's hardware. nVidia nForce 4 chipset RAID. Should be 150MB my ass. Where did you come up with that figure, yours?
Shitmachine? jealous much?
I have a nifty solar watch that sets itself based on the the broadcast signals from the atomic clock in Boulder, CO. It automatically adjusted itself when DST started, and presumably would adjust when it was supposed to end. now it's going to be all fucked up? Wonderful. Fuck you Legislative branch.
[brag]My quad WD 10k RPM Raptor array pwns this thing.[/brag]
-Very steady- around 80MB/s sustained throughput from the beginning of the array to the end. Peaks of 104MB/s. Troughs of like 72MB/s.
According to this review this 500GB Hitachi starts out at 65MB/s and trails off to a pathetic 35MB/s.
They could pay for all of the servers and years of bandwidth costs out of the $175,000,000 they got for selling the game intially.
The bottom line is they're making money hand over fist and the game is still basically in beta.
Blizzard used to be one of my favorite companies but they've fallen far indeed.
I always thought that the goblins reminded me of ferengi.
And I think you need some perspective. It's a game.
3.5 million customers at $15 a month = $52,500,000 a month.
And the game is still buggy as shit according to those few of my friends that still play.
That's enough money to hire at least 500 senior programmers to fix their damn game.
I played it for several months, but got utterly bored with it, tired of all its bugs and lack of promised features and quit back in April. I thought it was too slow paced and repetitive, not to mention the drunken bird flights that took^H^H^H^Hwasted ridiculous amounts of time. I couldn't justify $15 a month for it. Everyone said that it was the fastest paced and best MMO out there but the least rotten piece of fruit is still a rotten piece of fruit.
A software patent?
Asshat.
I mostly agree with you. Especially with this statement: If there is one thing I've learned, it's that ALL computer use is learned. People get "intuitive" mixed up with "ubiquitous" all the time. The fact that most everyone is familiar with one thing is supposed to mean that everyone else automatically gets it, as if knowledge was imparted through osmosis.
But then you went and contradicted yourself with this one (emphasis mine): Honestly, what is more intuitive than learning to tell the computer exactly what you want by typing it in and having the comfort of knowing it'll do the same thing every time you type it (no tricks, gimmicks, or special cases to jump out at you)?
If you have to learn it then it isn't intuitive.
UI design/HCI is a Byzantine field of study. You have to use take many things into account and try to please everyone (but you won't). You can make a UI really simple and easy for the novice and infuriate and frustrate the advanced user.* You can make a complicated and arcane interface for the advanced user and punish grandma in doing so. You can make a simple interface with an option to let the user into the complicated interface, but you still annoy the advanced user because they have to get through this and if the novice accidentally stumbles in there they may be lost panic. If you use new UI elements you created that work perfectly with what you're trying to accomplish then you also increase the learning curve and the amount of time required before the user can begin using your application or whatever. Basically, you'll find perfect interfaces hanging around with unicorns.
*See the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard in Win2k. Even if you want to remove 8 defunct "hardware items" (driver entries really, such as when you move a USB mouse from one port to another, it installs another instance of the drivers, one time I had 10 monitors according to the wizard) you have to step through the entire wizard for each and can only remove one at a time. There is no other GUI way to remove "hardware". Each removal required about 16 mouse clicks or so - the most infuriating thing I've ever encountered in windows. Not only that but the one that is actually in use is totally indistinguishable from the extraneous ones. So every time I had to do this with mice I invariably removed the mouse I was actually using by accident and had to finish the job with the keyboard or reboot. It was totally random too, the mouse currently in use was never the first or the last entry in the list of mice. Again this leads back to the problem of arcane interfaces being bad for the novice. An interface that allows the user to mass select and remove hardware would have been great for me but ridiculously dangerous for the average user.
Next why don't we ask Pepsi how tasty soft drinks are.
Neat! You pretty much pwned the guy in the article. Especially with the text version.
However, being a User Interface Nazi I have to add some constructive critcism. The button itself gives no indication that it is a clickable button. It just looks like a radio button. The text version looked a little hackish but it was pretty apparent what might happen if you clicked on one of the text links after it exploded into them.
Perhaps a better version would be to combine the two: text immediately followed by the icon (a single anchor) and make it look like something that would expand or something if that's possible. That way the user is informed beforehand that this is not a normal hyperlink. User Interfaces should not surprise the user!
The windows move icon with some extra arrows or some slight modification would do nicely I think.
You don't learn touch typing by looking at the keyboard.
That was the most incomprehensible body of text I've ever attempted to read.
I got tired of him imagining the girl singing the music (in the video game?) after about 3 paragraphs, so I skipped closer to the end only to find out he was still talking about her and relating the game to Armageddon the movie?
[rabid Tolkien Fan]What the heck are you talking about? There were no sequels to LOTR. Those three movies were The Lord of the Rings; as in one story broken into three parts - not The Fellowship of the Ring II: Frodo Heads to Mordor and the Fellowship of the Ring III: Frodo Blows Up Mordor.
There haven't been nor ever will be a sequel to LOTR because J.R.R. Tolkien is long since deceased.[/rabid Tolkien Fan]
Or do you really think that the developers of it are really going to preprogram it the keyboard functions of every single program in existence? I'm sure only mainstream programs will get preloaded, the rest you'll have to do yourself. And if you have to tell the keyboard what keys do what before it can tell you, how useful is it?
Also I'm not sure how relabeling the keys on the fly is all that helpful to begin with. Sure you can look down and see that the "Hand tool" in Photoshop is on the key that looks like a hand, but then you simply become dependant on it rather than learning what key is the hand tool. You can't just be like, "Oh, it's the H key, I can hit that without looking at the keyboard." because there is no "H" key. There is only a "Hand Tool" key now. I don't see how this is much improvement over icons on the screen to click. It just moves the clickable icons to pressable keys on the keyboard.
If you ask me, the only value this keyboard has is aesthetic. (Though it is pretty badass looking, especially if you can put badass looking icons on it) Too bad it's not a split keyboard.
It's gigantic and moved WAY off to the right.
I hate when keyboard designers monkey with the goddamn key layouts. When you move keys under one hand relative to the other keys under the same hand you cause typos.
I don't know what the hell those two extra keys are between the apostrophe and the enter key are doing there.
I hate that layout. IMHO that section of the keyboard should be like this*:And don't fucking muck with it!
Their design looks like this*:wtf is wrong with them?
*Stupid
There were no pure buttons on TFA. There were radio buttons that looked like normal images as opposed to interfaces. There were checkboxes that also looked ilke normal images. If not for the article explaining what they were I would not have known. Good interfaces don't need to tell you how to use them, they're intuitive. In the world of HCI, having to spend 3 seconds learning how something works is considered a sub-par interface. It seems picky but that's how you separate the acceptable from the best. If you have to do ANY learning before you can begin USING the interface then there is room for improvement.
I never said anything of the kind. I never even mentioned DOS and if you think that's my viewpoint then you've completely misunderstood it. Leave the slipperly slopes to the playgrounds please.
I don't know who you're arguing with here but I never said that. In fact I never mentioned MacOS. So you can go right ahead and argue with your invisible friend or whoever it is.
Funny, you said this:
Sounds awfully sure of yourself to me.
Your ass is still talking for you I'm afraid. Good day.
How completely useless for us touch typists.
Also, if you need to look down to see what key does what in an FPS game (Quake (III?) is depicted) you're already dead.
http://www.frankmahler.de/mshame/ShameRecent.htm
Change, yes. Improvement yes, but totally new an incomprehensible things? NO
I'm not sure where you get the idea that if the interface doesn't change then there are no new features. You're still using a keyboard and mouse aren't you? Do you have things on your keyboard that aren't keys or buttons? The only new interace to the mouse in.....ever? is the wheel.. Additional buttons are not new features, just more buttons, optical tracking/laser tracking aren't new forms of interface, just better tracking. You still move the mouse around and click buttons. You still press keys on your keyboard with your fingers.
I never said interfaces can't be improved, just that newfangled interfaces do nothing but increase the learning curve.
What OS do I use? Funny you should ask. Funnier that you use VAX and HP/UX as examples. At home I use 2k/XP. At work I use OpenVMS, HP/UX, Concurrent OS, Solaris 8/9/10, Win2k3, XP, 2000. VAX isn't an OS it's a platform that runs OpenVMS.
Don't be so sure next time. I use modern interfaces as well as CLI. I actually prefer CLI for a lot of the things I do at work. As far as application development I think I like good old vi as much as I do Visual Basic
You talk alot about interfaces but only use operating systems as examples. Mice are interfaces, keyboard are interfaces, buttons are interfaces, radio buttons, check boxes, sliders, scroll bars, drop downs etc. What new interfaces have you seen since windows 3.1? As near as I can tell it's still radio buttons, buttons, scroll bars, text boxes, pulldowns, checkboxes, icons and windows.
Way to talk out your ass.
One of the most fundamental concepts of good UI/GUI design is that you DON'T INTRODUCE NEW THINGS.
Everytime you introduce something new the user has to learn how to use it or what the fuck it is. This is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is.
It may seem incredibly anal, stale and anti-progressive but that's the whole point. There's no such thing as an innovative interface because innovation has connotations of something both new and better. In the realm of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) new and better are mutually exclusive. Good UIs are simple, intuitive and introduce absolutely nothing new. Ever.
There are only two truly intuitive interfaces in existance. The nipple and the vagina. The rest you have to learn how to use.
Save the styled checkboxes and radio buttons for other people in your yuppie coffee house. Your average user doesn't want them, won't understand them, won't appreciate them and doesn't care what they look like.
Yeah this is real elegant:
ThermonuclearBomb LittleBoy = new ThermonuclearBomb();
Sure it's easier that malloc'ing but why do I have to tell give the compiler the same information twice? Why not wrap the damn constructor in a memory allocation call giving this:
LittleBoy = new ThermonuclearBomb();
I'm New Zealander*, and want to clarify some stuff I keep hearing about New Zealander by tourists:
* yes, we are the country with the tazmanian devils
* no we don't have a Monarchy government
* our fishes are really tasty, yeah
* our kids don't go to school by swimming (well, most of them don't)
* we don't have sex with sheep that's what Australians do.
* never confuse us with Australians. We really dont' like that. It's like confusing Americans with Canadians. They swear at us incomprehensibly if we do this.
* We are not fruit
* What are the olympics?
*I'm not really a New Zealander
No. Given that I'm a gifted programmer and have all the creative talent of a rock in the mud.
I'm entirely left brained.
That's not to say there isn't something beautiful about an elegant solution to a tricky problem, but I'd say no, it is not "art" though there is an art to it.