A computer will never be truely user freindly until it under stands plain spoke words and gives us what we want, not what we asked for."
Good luck, even *people* can't do that consistently. I very much prefer the precision of a keyboard to the slippery ease of voice interfaces. I want *control* of my machines and I expect to work hard enough to get it.
"We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand."
One of the problems I have with this meaning of "design" is that we create stuff in order to *use* it. If the average user can't figure out how it works, the design is a failure no matter how innovative it is.
I submit that the real challenge facing you is to keep your designs useful and avoid the temptation to just arbitrarily stir things up. Winning awards from fellow designers is great, go for it, but winning acceptance (and sales, however indirectly) from the users is what pays for all those fancy pens. You need to balance these two forms of approval.
On the whole this was more sensible than what I've come to expect from "design", but this guy needs to listen to himself and go talk with the technologists a bit more. For example, we've already got that automagical thingy to switch between WiFi, and cell data: it's called routing, dude. Plug all your media in at once, assign sensible link costs to each, and the routing engine will figure out that WiFi is the best route to everywhere when it's in range and fall back to cell when WiFi stops working because you left the building.
Oh, and some physicists, too. I'm a bit alarmed at this talk of accelerating a curve, since a curve has no position and thus makes no sense w.r.t. acceleration. (Hint: what's the second derivative of a null sentence?) I suppose he means something about society's progress along a path, but then I can pick statistical nits since "society" is not a dimensionless object. Better invite a mathematician as well.
As a citizen of Indiana I have another take on this. Hoosiers are required by law to keep track of and report any tax on out-of-state purchases by mail, phone, or Internet. So we wind up paying anyway, *and* we have to do the figuring ourselves instead of having merchants' IS infrastructure do it for us. This easily *doubles* the hassle-factor at income-tax time.
If the situation Over There is similar, then honest EU citizens weren't saving any money and now their paperwork burden will be reduced.
...but there are two stages to addressing this problem:
1) Passengers, do obey all instructions from the crew. Even if you don't get yourself and your fellow passengers killed, you can get in serious trouble for wilfully interfering with the operation of a vessel under way.
2) Airlines, FIX YOUR AVIONICS. Anything *that* fragile should not be associated with terms like "safety", except in a negative sense. No legally purchased electronic gizmo should be able to disrupt flight systems, period.
"Personally, I think it's a good thing to have several image formats available with wide support in all browsers. The reason for this is it allows developers to choose which format provides the best results for what they're doing. This means which ones look better and compress better for a certain image."
I would agree, except that 99.44% of all page developers don't actually do that. They use GIF for everything except rendering oddball fonts as images -- for that they create the world's ugliest JPEGs. If people used this stuff the way it was meant to be used, the Web would be almost unrecognizable (but lots better).
Commoditizing* the hardware with format standards can help, but the hardware needs to become a lot more capable too.
I've yet to see an ebook viewer that can present (at a readable size) all at once even what would be one full page of text in a pbook; every pbook presents *two* at a time. You can do things with two full pages that would be ugly and unusable with only half a page in view.
A pbook will function acceptably from candlelight to full sunshine. It will operate indefinitely without power. It will operate *underwater* if you must.
I still haven't seen a bookmark scheme that works anywhere near as well as sticking my fingers between the pages.
I can afford to have five books open concurrently and spread out around my workspace, which is a frequent need. Who's going to own five ebook viewers at the same time?
-----------------
* Note that word. That's why it won't happen anytime soon.
Isn't this what we customers have been saying, nay, *screaming*, for years now?
I recall the days when U.S. automakers tried to sell cars by telling the buyer, "you need what we build", before they got clobbered by the imports with their "we'll build what you need" attitude. I wouldn't be looking elsewhere if Microsoft's products met my needs.
OTOH there's a big *natural* market for a company with the Features Uber Alles culture. If Microsoft would be content with a large, secure slice of the pie, instead of trying to grab the whole pie, they could do very well without revolutionary change.
The trouble comes when you try to *impose* your vision of the market on a segment which holds to a radically different vision. Lose the vision, or lose the ambition to own the market; you'll never achieve both together.
Indeed, I just set up a RH9 box. Bare bones they may be, but they look like apatosaurus bones to me. I can't even uninstall all the useless audio gunk (this *server* has no sound card, of course) because the system management tools want Gnome and Gnome wants all the toys.
(What I *prefer* to do is to get a kernel and basic toolkit up and running from a floppy, then NFS-mount a working box and copy it all over. I've been cloning the heavily-updated remains of a Slackware 1.2 system this way since abount 1994, to build most of my boxes.)
That may be where the dividend checks come from, but IBM is an everywhere company. It would be just as sensible to say that the U.S. is an IBM country.
What part of "In-ter-na-tion-al" did you fail to understand?
More than two. The Giants use circulating black holes to generate the stressfields for their nifty propulsion and communication systems. (_Inherit the Stars_, _The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_, _Giants' Star_, _Entoverse_.)
I wondered how many milliseconds it would take for someone to think of _Thrice Upon a Time_.
...but in ourselves. We don't take time to do the job right. We concentrate on trivial stuff like skins and ignore important stuff like does-it-work. We don't hang coders caught reading from a socket into an 'auto' buffer. We release undocumented products (which means we don't even understand our own creation) and stick the end user with solving a black-box problem. As customers, we continue to exchange good money for others' bad code and don't complain when it fails.
Incidentally, the reliability of million-dollar computers, which is what you were using 30 years ago, has improved *enormously*. It's the reliability of $299.95 computers you find at the supermarket which is questionable. You can get much better stuff if you're willing to spend a little more money and, more important, a little more time learning about the in'ards of the products.
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A computer will never be truely user freindly until it under stands plain spoke words and gives us what we want, not what we asked for."
Good luck, even *people* can't do that consistently. I very much prefer the precision of a keyboard to the slippery ease of voice interfaces. I want *control* of my machines and I expect to work hard enough to get it.
"We can design some public plaza space or neighborhood that is absolutely award-winning, and on the cutting edge of the design world. The problem is, we often have to (at our client's direction) water our design down to something that the average Joe can understand."
One of the problems I have with this meaning of "design" is that we create stuff in order to *use* it. If the average user can't figure out how it works, the design is a failure no matter how innovative it is.
I submit that the real challenge facing you is to keep your designs useful and avoid the temptation to just arbitrarily stir things up. Winning awards from fellow designers is great, go for it, but winning acceptance (and sales, however indirectly) from the users is what pays for all those fancy pens. You need to balance these two forms of approval.
On the whole this was more sensible than what I've come to expect from "design", but this guy needs to listen to himself and go talk with the technologists a bit more. For example, we've already got that automagical thingy to switch between WiFi, and cell data: it's called routing, dude. Plug all your media in at once, assign sensible link costs to each, and the routing engine will figure out that WiFi is the best route to everywhere when it's in range and fall back to cell when WiFi stops working because you left the building.
Oh, and some physicists, too. I'm a bit alarmed at this talk of accelerating a curve, since a curve has no position and thus makes no sense w.r.t. acceleration. (Hint: what's the second derivative of a null sentence?) I suppose he means something about society's progress along a path, but then I can pick statistical nits since "society" is not a dimensionless object. Better invite a mathematician as well.
Sorry, I hold the U.S. patent on "method for boarding a bus". You'll have to pay me for a license first. :-)
"I tihnk we need to develop a totally swanky GUI on top of VMS....errrr...oh...right...that's Windows...ummmmm...."
No, that's CDE. (I suppose DECwindows is long gone....)
Nah, anybody can yield a chainsaw if he wants to. That's what the store clerk did when I held out some money and said, "I'll buy that chainsaw".
You've all missed: "...do you feel lucky?"
Uh, as I recall the remaining Golgafrinchans were then wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
As a citizen of Indiana I have another take on this. Hoosiers are required by law to keep track of and report any tax on out-of-state purchases by mail, phone, or Internet. So we wind up paying anyway, *and* we have to do the figuring ourselves instead of having merchants' IS infrastructure do it for us. This easily *doubles* the hassle-factor at income-tax time.
If the situation Over There is similar, then honest EU citizens weren't saving any money and now their paperwork burden will be reduced.
I would've thought software would clog the turbopumps.
...but there are two stages to addressing this problem:
1) Passengers, do obey all instructions from the crew. Even if you don't get yourself and your fellow passengers killed, you can get in serious trouble for wilfully interfering with the operation of a vessel under way.
2) Airlines, FIX YOUR AVIONICS. Anything *that* fragile should not be associated with terms like "safety", except in a negative sense. No legally purchased electronic gizmo should be able to disrupt flight systems, period.
"Beta suffered from the 1 hour 20 minute syndrome."
No, Beta suffered from the $499.95-player syndrome. Many were willing to sacrifice a little image quality to save $300.00.
"Anyway, the real problem with PNG is that aren't supported properly in most browsers."
:-}
Sure it is. Haven't you seen the ponstings saying that animation and transparency don't work?
"Personally, I think it's a good thing to have several image formats available with wide support in all browsers. The reason for this is it allows developers to choose which format provides the best results for what they're doing. This means which ones look better and compress better for a certain image."
I would agree, except that 99.44% of all page developers don't actually do that. They use GIF for everything except rendering oddball fonts as images -- for that they create the world's ugliest JPEGs. If people used this stuff the way it was meant to be used, the Web would be almost unrecognizable (but lots better).
[partial transparency]
I'm still trying to figure out why this is considered so important. Pretty, or interesting, yes, but *important*?
...what is the difference between "optimizing for a benchmark" and "cheating"? I don't see it.
Commoditizing* the hardware with format standards can help, but the hardware needs to become a lot more capable too.
I've yet to see an ebook viewer that can present (at a readable size) all at once even what would be one full page of text in a pbook; every pbook presents *two* at a time. You can do things with two full pages that would be ugly and unusable with only half a page in view.
A pbook will function acceptably from candlelight to full sunshine. It will operate indefinitely without power. It will operate *underwater* if you must.
I still haven't seen a bookmark scheme that works anywhere near as well as sticking my fingers between the pages.
I can afford to have five books open concurrently and spread out around my workspace, which is a frequent need. Who's going to own five ebook viewers at the same time?
-----------------
* Note that word. That's why it won't happen anytime soon.
Sonny Jim, I've done graphics on a *keypunch*. ASCII art is a relatively simple problem.
Isn't this what we customers have been saying, nay, *screaming*, for years now?
I recall the days when U.S. automakers tried to sell cars by telling the buyer, "you need what we build", before they got clobbered by the imports with their "we'll build what you need" attitude. I wouldn't be looking elsewhere if Microsoft's products met my needs.
OTOH there's a big *natural* market for a company with the Features Uber Alles culture. If Microsoft would be content with a large, secure slice of the pie, instead of trying to grab the whole pie, they could do very well without revolutionary change.
The trouble comes when you try to *impose* your vision of the market on a segment which holds to a radically different vision. Lose the vision, or lose the ambition to own the market; you'll never achieve both together.
Indeed, I just set up a RH9 box. Bare bones they may be, but they look like apatosaurus bones to me. I can't even uninstall all the useless audio gunk (this *server* has no sound card, of course) because the system management tools want Gnome and Gnome wants all the toys.
(What I *prefer* to do is to get a kernel and basic toolkit up and running from a floppy, then NFS-mount a working box and copy it all over. I've been cloning the heavily-updated remains of a Slackware 1.2 system this way since abount 1994, to build most of my boxes.)
"Last time I looked, IBM was a US company."
That may be where the dividend checks come from, but IBM is an everywhere company. It would be just as sensible to say that the U.S. is an IBM country.
What part of "In-ter-na-tion-al" did you fail to understand?
More than two. The Giants use circulating black holes to generate the stressfields for their nifty propulsion and communication systems. (_Inherit the Stars_, _The Gentle Giants of Ganymede_, _Giants' Star_, _Entoverse_.)
I wondered how many milliseconds it would take for someone to think of _Thrice Upon a Time_.
"Why not start by moving youre entire long distance network over to IP?"
/. story?
Because circuit-switched voice doesn't suffer from dropouts every time there's a sudden interest in the latest
VoIP is like hauling gravel via airplane. You can do it, but that's not what airplanes are good at.
...but in ourselves. We don't take time to do the job right. We concentrate on trivial stuff like skins and ignore important stuff like does-it-work. We don't hang coders caught reading from a socket into an 'auto' buffer. We release undocumented products (which means we don't even understand our own creation) and stick the end user with solving a black-box problem. As customers, we continue to exchange good money for others' bad code and don't complain when it fails.
Incidentally, the reliability of million-dollar computers, which is what you were using 30 years ago, has improved *enormously*. It's the reliability of $299.95 computers you find at the supermarket which is questionable. You can get much better stuff if you're willing to spend a little more money and, more important, a little more time learning about the in'ards of the products.
Buy a CD player.