In the 1970's I had a book with explicit directions for converting an IBM Selectric into a printer using a handful of solenoids. Unfortunately, at the time a Selectric was cheaper than a letter-quality printer but stil a lot more expensive than I could afford.
We didn't pound the crap out of the Moon with the LEMs. I do wonder if anyone had thought to look if we might have visually observed the impacts of any of the SIV-B's that were deliberately impacted. Those would have been considerably larger than the Deep Impact bullet, and a lot closer too. I can't find any hint that anyone tried to see them visually, though. If they impacted on lunar dayside, the whole event would probably have been lost in the glare.
The Apollo moon missions were observed telescopically by both amateur and professional astronomers. A terrestrial observatory even provided critical tracking information for Apollo 13's final course correction.
RFID tags are indeed transmitters, and it has even been shown that you can snoop the SpeedPass tags from ten meters away as they are normally used.
Tags without batteries are powered by a transmitter in the reader, which in turn activates a transmitter in the tag. (In one common system the tag doesn't technically "transmit" but modulates an antenna which absorbs the reader energy; this makes little difference in the operation.
Tags with batteries can be read tens of meters away. Passive tags can be read tens of meters away if they are activated by a sufficiently powerful or otherwise close read signal. Tags which do not have to be read at high speed (e.g. vehicles) can be read at much greater distances everything else being equal.
With existing technology, it would be quite feasible to give everyone an implant and read their tags with great reliability as they walk past, for example, every street corner in a large city.
It's the major sites like freerepublic.com on the right and democraticunderground and dailykos on the left that everyone reads which set the tone for what trickles down to localroger.somediarysite.com and my twelve occasional readers. Bloggers don't just read each others' blogs; they read each others' blogs to find other stuff to read. NYT has just opted out of being that other stuff. I suspect from your comment that you don't spend much time in the virtual company of bloggers, since you don't seem to really know what bloggers do.
Sure, the NYT will be around. They will probably be New York's Newspaper of Record for a long time. But don't think the blogging phenomenon is going away anytime soon. It is developing galactic centers and niches and a whole structure which promises to be quite stable. I can easily see a future in which most people depend on bloggers to filter their news. If I find someone who has the time to read voraciously and whose links I find interesting, he gets bookmarked. And if he doesn't link the NYT any more, I sure ain't gonna pony up 50 bucks for access to their wares.
The NYT has just cut itself off from the biggest source of international exposure it has. All over the blogosphere, people are saying they won't link NYT columnists any more because they won't expect their readers to subscribe.
The blogosphere is the next great playground in the marketplace of ideas; it's the closest thing to our forgotten history of town-hall meetings and individual participation that most of us have ever experienced. It's participatory mass media, a totally new thing that is remaking the political landscape -- not least by revealing whole new ways for major political organizations to form themselves and raise funds.
And the NYT has just opted out of the whole thing. That shiny new FUTURE thing? That's scary. We don't know how to make money off of it. So we'll give all that business to our competitors like the LA Times (which tried a similar stupid scheme and quickly recanted).
While registration does bug people many of us will deal with it (if only by using bugmenot) in order to discuss the ideas behind the firewall.
Salon seems to be doing OK with ad-based day passes. But fifty bucks a year for the content of one paper based fifteen hundred miles away from where I live? What if all the other newspapers of interest started charging a similar amount? No thanks, guys. As Atrios said, we have too much to sort through as it is. We can get along without the NYT's columnists.
But how will the NYT get along without the buzz of bloggers discussing their content? I guess the answer is "like a local paper." If that's what they want to be, I guess someone else will step up to be the Newspaper of Record.
First of all, I am not a eugenecist, nor do I play one on TV. The reason I do not see "deliberate selective pressure" being applied is that most people abhor the idea of the government picking who can and can't kids -- and I would be protesting right along with them if it tried to do that.
However, when you ask the question "where is evolution taking humanity," the answer is really pretty damn obvious. One way or another the future promises to get real ugly in this regard.
The observation that farm and zoo animals display early puberty, obesity, hypersexuality, and neurotic behaviors like pacing is universal. Ask any zookeeper. The observation that humans are displaying the same changes is kind of obvious. I do not need an "expert" to tell me our entire society is fat, obsessed with sex, and neurotic. Sure, early puberty could be nutritional, but it could also be that we are domesticating ourselves. Given that we know domestication causes these effects in farm animals even when they aren't overfed, I will draw my own conclusions, thank you.
And also with respect to intelligence and sexual deviance: Whenever so many people are so eager to get a particular result, I am suspicious of anything that seems to pander to them. We do know that humans have an extremely weak (bordering on nonexistent) pheremone response, and a very strong focus on imprinted images. The only conclusively proven method by which animals develop imprint images is by seeing them after birth at trigger moments. To assume anything else is at work in humans is the extraordinary claim, yet everybody seems to believe it. It would just be so convenient if it were genetic. If you're gay you can righteously claim it's not your fault, and if you're not you can righteously plan to "solve" the "problem" through eugenics. Given that research produces a mix of results, since it's a complicated problem, have you noticed which ones get reported in the news and lavishly funded?
As far as going back to the eugenics laws, I abhor the very idea, mainly because history shows the "problems" people will attempt to solve with that nifty tool aren't the *real* problem. This is why I brought up intelligence and deviance; you could also toss in mental illness. These things, with their tenuous (if existant at all) genetic connection are what people start enforcing when they use the power of the state to control reproduction. Nobody is going to make the much more important and sensible step of doing something about women who would die in childbirth without radical medical intervention because their parents and grandparents were saved that way.
I suppose next you'll say I am a Luddite. That would be an easy charge to throw too, since I wrote a whole book that seems to argue for the abolition of technology. But the truth is I'm not arguing for anything here. I don't know what the solution is to the problem, if it even has one. We might just be fucked.
But it would be nice if the people who are smart enough to notice the problem would admit it exists instead of pretending we are on a divinely guided path to some kind of perfected state.
If you want to know where evolution is taking homo sapiens, get thee to a barnyard.
Evolution is driven by selection pressure. Selection occurs because some individuals die or otherwise fail to breed. Their heritable traits tend not to be found in the next generation.
So, ask yourself, what consistent selection pressures are acting on us now? Note that things that would have killed us in the past are now regularly taken care of by medical science. In just a couple of generations we have a significant subpopulation that can't breed at all without medical intervention. Some of these traits are heritable, such as difficulties in childbirth or needing IVF techniques to overcome fertility problems.
Other traits which seem to universally pop up in domestic animals are also showing up in humans. The modern urban environment is just as alien and stressful to us as modern farms are to the animals we keep there. So we are seeing hypersexuality, earlier and earlier puberty, obesity, and a lot of neurosis. THAT is the evolutionary future of the human race, and it's already well on its way.
The only way out of this situation is to start applying deliberate selective pressure. Given that this would essentially mean giving up the right of individuals to reproduce at will, I don't see it happening any time soon. Plus, I would imagine that a lot of effort would be thrown at hot-button traits like homosexuality or intelligence which probably aren't even heritable. (I know there are a lot of people who say otherwise; there are good reasons for doubting them, starting with their very eagerness.)
The world's population is already effectively split into two major groups, those who can afford radical medical intervention and those who can't. For another idea on how that might work out check out H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Some things are so basic that they're easier to call before you're well into the trend.
Even with today's materials a car that small has a hell of a time passing the safety tests for US acceptance. Add on the EPA and the fact that, even if you don't want it, they can't design a model that can't at least accept an air conditioner and automatic transmission, and that's why nothign like the Mini is made nowadays.
I used to swear I'd never drive a "pregnant roller skate" but after buying a Geo Prizm (~Toyota Corolla with GM tag) 10 years ago I have flipped, and I'd be interested in a Mini like yours if I could find one now.
Non-computer-oriented users have no idea what is possible or what is necessary or, usually, even that their system is compromised and is spamming the crap out of their neighbors. As long as it puts up the pretty desktop and does the few things they have always understood, why should they do something they don't understand that will have no obvious benefit (to them) and might make it stop working?
Imagine that there is a technology so crappy that even Microsoft have to admit to themselves that it is sheer, utter, unusable crap that they don't dare stake the last two nanofibres of their reputation on. Imagine that they come across something like this every year or two, and we never hear about it unless the money mags gurgle about the investment.
Now they have a way to get some money for that botulism-ridden dogfood.
I went through the first half of the writeup wondering what this radio telescope thingy would be needing with an Atari 2600 video game console. (The VCS was codenamed Stella and still referred to that way by retrogamers and retroprogrammers who like to play with it.)
You know, we used to understand that space travel was dangerous and that astronauts are not just special because of their training, but because any time you sit atop a thirty meter tall bomb and light it there is a chance you're not gonna make it back in one piece. Props to the guys and gals who are willing to take that chance and all.
One of the many things I have always disliked about the Shuttle space-car fantasy is the illusion that this risk has somehow gone away and "shuttling off" to space is now no different than catching the subway to work in the morning. It's not that way, and it's never going to be that way with the technology at hand. It takes a massive amount of energy to get into space, and controlling large amounts of energy is always risky whether it's getting into orbit or an ordinary domestic chemical plant.
Let us understand that space travel is risky as well as expensive. Let us do what we can to minimize those risks. And then give the men and women who are willing to take those risks the tools they need and the opportunity do their damn jobs. Let us mourn when they pay the ultimate price, and let us celebrate when they give us things we never could have had without their sacrifice.
It's legal to copy music from family and _close_ friends.
This is just begging to be abused. How "close" is close enough? Did we have to go to school together? My coworkers? The customer I see once a year? Someone I just met in a bar? The random stranger who also happened to have an IPod in the park?
This is why the American Bill of Rights is a Good Idea. You don't realize just how important it is until something this brain-numbingly stupid reminds you.
As I read this comment she came on the radio singing "True Colors." I still seem to like it. Oh, and Enterprise is pretty good, considering it's a TV series. It was better in the first season (wasn't TOS too?) back before everyone started telling them what they had to do to "improve," but I still find myself tuning in when it's on. That's what the TV game is all about.
He assumed it's an electret. I find it amazing that someone who is trying to convert an old phone to anything doesn't know they have carbon button microphones, which produce a varying resistance according to incoming sound wave pressure.
Oddly, they used to make drop-in replacements for those carbon buttons that were more modern, but it's probably getting harder to find them than the genuine thing.
Also, the user interface issue of not knowing whether there was a problem with the call makes the hack much less cool, since much more annoying. Even if it ruined the retro feel some indication should have been given of call status. An unobtrusive LED near the base of the phone would do. For that matter some old office phones had a "message waiting" light that was incandescent, but you wouldn't notice the difference if you dropped a white LED under the dome. That could have flashed a few status messages to let you know why things weren't working as they are supposed to.
I suspect this will just be another thing I have to turn off in order to use a new computer. The list is already getting pretty long:
Start menu --> Classic Mode
Screen --> Themes --> Windows Classic
Background --> anything simple and non-distracting
Appearance --> Effects --> disable transition effects, font smoothing, shadows, and alt-underline hiding (this is the kind of "enhancement" that most likely requires the video extravagance in Longhorn)
In Explorer, Tools --> Folder Options --> View --> Don't hide the fucking file extensions, show hidden and system files
Search --> turn off animated character
That's the start -- not counting all the shit I have to turn off in MSoffice and various other applications to make the computer an environment for work that is not constantly annoying and distracting. Sounds like I'll have to turn off even more crap when Longhorn comes out, if our company is still stuck in Windoze land (which, alas and for good reasons, it probably will be).
Little controllers like this are the only thing around now that approaches the simplicity and understandability of early computers. Plus, you can get relatively inexpensive kits that use the BSII to do cool things like desktop robotics. And since the stamps use a real PC as the interface, the progression is natural to more flexible and hard to understand languages when PBasic isn't enough any more.
I think it is important to start with something like PBasic instead of Java or C because it teaches the fundamentals like binary math, finite math, flow control, and what variables and instructions are without overwhelming a young mind with cruft. When you learn those core concepts first the more advanced stuff is much easier, and you're more motivated to "get into it" because you know where it's going.
Something about multimedia seems to drive programmers insane. Skins are great, but there is a default user interface for a given OS and programs should fricking use that interface by default. There is a way that buttons, menus, and the screen controls are supposed to look, and nothing is more annoying than opening an application that has tried so hard to look cute that you can't figure out how to close it because all the controls are hidden as hot spots in some clever bitmap image.
My job is to write software for industrial controllers. Most of the people who do what I do are not "programmers." We started out as technicians or engineers, and cracked the manual the day a "programmable" device arrived on our bench.
Poor user interface design is the second biggest failure of this kind of software. (The first is failure to plan for failure, but that's a different problem.) The problem isn't that guys like me don't understand how to design a user interface; it's that we don't even think about it because we tend to be thinking in terms of the process or machine rather than the human user.
There are no universal guidelines for how to lay out a user interface. The only sure method is to code it, then try using it and see if it feels natural. Often an interface that "follows the rules" will feel clunky in use, and when that happens you should rewrite it and try again until it is intuitive. When you've gotten it to feel right yourself, you should put it in front of the people who will use it all day long and see how they like it. And you should be willing to rearrange it until they find it natural and intuitive.
One reason those field-programmable controllers have become so popular is that people like me, working in the field, can do this. If a manufacturer builds, say, a batch process controller, it must implement every possible function that any process might ever need. This usually results in a bewildering user interface since most actual processes will only use a fraction of the controller's functions. By writing a custom controller in a programmable device, I can give the user just the controls he needs to do his job.
It used to be a once a month occurrence for us to get a service call along the lines of "our scale is only weighing about half what we put on it," because a user accidentally switched from pounds to kilograms. Newer devices let us turn off modes the end user will never use, and the result is less friction all around.
It goes without saying of course that you put the most-used controls where they are easiest to find and most obvious, you only put controls that are used constantly where they are always visible. You always provide keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING. Especially in the workplace, day-in day-out users will learn all those shortcuts, but the temp timer needs the GUI. Both are absolutely necessary. Not putting in keyboard shortcuts is the single biggest screw-up in industrial GUI's I have used.
The art comes in determining what controls are really used most often, and when things like confirmation dialogs shift from being a useful safeguard to an annoyance. I can't begin to count the times when I've installed a relatively simple system only to find that some control I'd buried in a deep menu is used much more often than I'd realized. Usage patterns are often radically different in simulation than they are with a real machine connected to real processes. The job isn't done when you close the build file and put field installation on your calendar; you will almost always have to refactor at least once based on end user feedback. If you don't plan for this and budget for it, it's a big, big mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1970's I had a book with explicit directions for converting an IBM Selectric into a printer using a handful of solenoids. Unfortunately, at the time a Selectric was cheaper than a letter-quality printer but stil a lot more expensive than I could afford.
We didn't pound the crap out of the Moon with the LEMs. I do wonder if anyone had thought to look if we might have visually observed the impacts of any of the SIV-B's that were deliberately impacted. Those would have been considerably larger than the Deep Impact bullet, and a lot closer too. I can't find any hint that anyone tried to see them visually, though. If they impacted on lunar dayside, the whole event would probably have been lost in the glare.
The Apollo moon missions were observed telescopically by both amateur and professional astronomers. A terrestrial observatory even provided critical tracking information for Apollo 13's final course correction.
TSIA.
Tags without batteries are powered by a transmitter in the reader, which in turn activates a transmitter in the tag. (In one common system the tag doesn't technically "transmit" but modulates an antenna which absorbs the reader energy; this makes little difference in the operation.
Tags with batteries can be read tens of meters away. Passive tags can be read tens of meters away if they are activated by a sufficiently powerful or otherwise close read signal. Tags which do not have to be read at high speed (e.g. vehicles) can be read at much greater distances everything else being equal.
With existing technology, it would be quite feasible to give everyone an implant and read their tags with great reliability as they walk past, for example, every street corner in a large city.
Sure, the NYT will be around. They will probably be New York's Newspaper of Record for a long time. But don't think the blogging phenomenon is going away anytime soon. It is developing galactic centers and niches and a whole structure which promises to be quite stable. I can easily see a future in which most people depend on bloggers to filter their news. If I find someone who has the time to read voraciously and whose links I find interesting, he gets bookmarked. And if he doesn't link the NYT any more, I sure ain't gonna pony up 50 bucks for access to their wares.
The blogosphere is the next great playground in the marketplace of ideas; it's the closest thing to our forgotten history of town-hall meetings and individual participation that most of us have ever experienced. It's participatory mass media, a totally new thing that is remaking the political landscape -- not least by revealing whole new ways for major political organizations to form themselves and raise funds.
And the NYT has just opted out of the whole thing. That shiny new FUTURE thing? That's scary. We don't know how to make money off of it. So we'll give all that business to our competitors like the LA Times (which tried a similar stupid scheme and quickly recanted).
While registration does bug people many of us will deal with it (if only by using bugmenot) in order to discuss the ideas behind the firewall. Salon seems to be doing OK with ad-based day passes. But fifty bucks a year for the content of one paper based fifteen hundred miles away from where I live? What if all the other newspapers of interest started charging a similar amount? No thanks, guys. As Atrios said, we have too much to sort through as it is. We can get along without the NYT's columnists.
But how will the NYT get along without the buzz of bloggers discussing their content? I guess the answer is "like a local paper." If that's what they want to be, I guess someone else will step up to be the Newspaper of Record.
However, when you ask the question "where is evolution taking humanity," the answer is really pretty damn obvious. One way or another the future promises to get real ugly in this regard.
The observation that farm and zoo animals display early puberty, obesity, hypersexuality, and neurotic behaviors like pacing is universal. Ask any zookeeper. The observation that humans are displaying the same changes is kind of obvious. I do not need an "expert" to tell me our entire society is fat, obsessed with sex, and neurotic. Sure, early puberty could be nutritional, but it could also be that we are domesticating ourselves. Given that we know domestication causes these effects in farm animals even when they aren't overfed, I will draw my own conclusions, thank you.
And also with respect to intelligence and sexual deviance: Whenever so many people are so eager to get a particular result, I am suspicious of anything that seems to pander to them. We do know that humans have an extremely weak (bordering on nonexistent) pheremone response, and a very strong focus on imprinted images. The only conclusively proven method by which animals develop imprint images is by seeing them after birth at trigger moments. To assume anything else is at work in humans is the extraordinary claim, yet everybody seems to believe it. It would just be so convenient if it were genetic. If you're gay you can righteously claim it's not your fault, and if you're not you can righteously plan to "solve" the "problem" through eugenics. Given that research produces a mix of results, since it's a complicated problem, have you noticed which ones get reported in the news and lavishly funded?
As far as going back to the eugenics laws, I abhor the very idea, mainly because history shows the "problems" people will attempt to solve with that nifty tool aren't the *real* problem. This is why I brought up intelligence and deviance; you could also toss in mental illness. These things, with their tenuous (if existant at all) genetic connection are what people start enforcing when they use the power of the state to control reproduction. Nobody is going to make the much more important and sensible step of doing something about women who would die in childbirth without radical medical intervention because their parents and grandparents were saved that way.
I suppose next you'll say I am a Luddite. That would be an easy charge to throw too, since I wrote a whole book that seems to argue for the abolition of technology. But the truth is I'm not arguing for anything here. I don't know what the solution is to the problem, if it even has one. We might just be fucked.
But it would be nice if the people who are smart enough to notice the problem would admit it exists instead of pretending we are on a divinely guided path to some kind of perfected state.
Evolution is driven by selection pressure. Selection occurs because some individuals die or otherwise fail to breed. Their heritable traits tend not to be found in the next generation.
So, ask yourself, what consistent selection pressures are acting on us now? Note that things that would have killed us in the past are now regularly taken care of by medical science. In just a couple of generations we have a significant subpopulation that can't breed at all without medical intervention. Some of these traits are heritable, such as difficulties in childbirth or needing IVF techniques to overcome fertility problems.
Other traits which seem to universally pop up in domestic animals are also showing up in humans. The modern urban environment is just as alien and stressful to us as modern farms are to the animals we keep there. So we are seeing hypersexuality, earlier and earlier puberty, obesity, and a lot of neurosis. THAT is the evolutionary future of the human race, and it's already well on its way.
The only way out of this situation is to start applying deliberate selective pressure. Given that this would essentially mean giving up the right of individuals to reproduce at will, I don't see it happening any time soon. Plus, I would imagine that a lot of effort would be thrown at hot-button traits like homosexuality or intelligence which probably aren't even heritable. (I know there are a lot of people who say otherwise; there are good reasons for doubting them, starting with their very eagerness.)
The world's population is already effectively split into two major groups, those who can afford radical medical intervention and those who can't. For another idea on how that might work out check out H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Some things are so basic that they're easier to call before you're well into the trend.
So they can assemble spare parts into copies of themselves. Where do they get the spare parts? Oh right.
I used to swear I'd never drive a "pregnant roller skate" but after buying a Geo Prizm (~Toyota Corolla with GM tag) 10 years ago I have flipped, and I'd be interested in a Mini like yours if I could find one now.
Non-computer-oriented users have no idea what is possible or what is necessary or, usually, even that their system is compromised and is spamming the crap out of their neighbors. As long as it puts up the pretty desktop and does the few things they have always understood, why should they do something they don't understand that will have no obvious benefit (to them) and might make it stop working?
Imagine that there is a technology so crappy that even Microsoft have to admit to themselves that it is sheer, utter, unusable crap that they don't dare stake the last two nanofibres of their reputation on. Imagine that they come across something like this every year or two, and we never hear about it unless the money mags gurgle about the investment.
Now they have a way to get some money for that botulism-ridden dogfood.
Otherwise, wouldn't it be integrated into Windows by now?
I went through the first half of the writeup wondering what this radio telescope thingy would be needing with an Atari 2600 video game console. (The VCS was codenamed Stella and still referred to that way by retrogamers and retroprogrammers who like to play with it.)
One of the many things I have always disliked about the Shuttle space-car fantasy is the illusion that this risk has somehow gone away and "shuttling off" to space is now no different than catching the subway to work in the morning. It's not that way, and it's never going to be that way with the technology at hand. It takes a massive amount of energy to get into space, and controlling large amounts of energy is always risky whether it's getting into orbit or an ordinary domestic chemical plant.
Let us understand that space travel is risky as well as expensive. Let us do what we can to minimize those risks. And then give the men and women who are willing to take those risks the tools they need and the opportunity do their damn jobs. Let us mourn when they pay the ultimate price, and let us celebrate when they give us things we never could have had without their sacrifice.
I suspect another order of magnitude advance will be necessary before they can measure GWB's.
This is just begging to be abused. How "close" is close enough? Did we have to go to school together? My coworkers? The customer I see once a year? Someone I just met in a bar? The random stranger who also happened to have an IPod in the park?
This is why the American Bill of Rights is a Good Idea. You don't realize just how important it is until something this brain-numbingly stupid reminds you.
As I read this comment she came on the radio singing "True Colors." I still seem to like it. Oh, and Enterprise is pretty good, considering it's a TV series. It was better in the first season (wasn't TOS too?) back before everyone started telling them what they had to do to "improve," but I still find myself tuning in when it's on. That's what the TV game is all about.
Oddly, they used to make drop-in replacements for those carbon buttons that were more modern, but it's probably getting harder to find them than the genuine thing.
Also, the user interface issue of not knowing whether there was a problem with the call makes the hack much less cool, since much more annoying. Even if it ruined the retro feel some indication should have been given of call status. An unobtrusive LED near the base of the phone would do. For that matter some old office phones had a "message waiting" light that was incandescent, but you wouldn't notice the difference if you dropped a white LED under the dome. That could have flashed a few status messages to let you know why things weren't working as they are supposed to.
- Start menu --> Classic Mode
- Screen --> Themes --> Windows Classic
- Background --> anything simple and non-distracting
- Appearance --> Effects --> disable transition effects, font smoothing, shadows, and alt-underline hiding (this is the kind of "enhancement" that most likely requires the video extravagance in Longhorn)
- Screen Saver --> NONE (ain't LCD monitors wonderful?)
- In Explorer, Tools --> Folder Options --> View --> Don't hide the fucking file extensions, show hidden and system files
- Search --> turn off animated character
That's the start -- not counting all the shit I have to turn off in MSoffice and various other applications to make the computer an environment for work that is not constantly annoying and distracting. Sounds like I'll have to turn off even more crap when Longhorn comes out, if our company is still stuck in Windoze land (which, alas and for good reasons, it probably will be).I think it is important to start with something like PBasic instead of Java or C because it teaches the fundamentals like binary math, finite math, flow control, and what variables and instructions are without overwhelming a young mind with cruft. When you learn those core concepts first the more advanced stuff is much easier, and you're more motivated to "get into it" because you know where it's going.
my True Love gave to me,
Four hacked boxen
Three spywares
Two viruses
And another Windows vulnerability.
Something about multimedia seems to drive programmers insane. Skins are great, but there is a default user interface for a given OS and programs should fricking use that interface by default. There is a way that buttons, menus, and the screen controls are supposed to look, and nothing is more annoying than opening an application that has tried so hard to look cute that you can't figure out how to close it because all the controls are hidden as hot spots in some clever bitmap image.
Poor user interface design is the second biggest failure of this kind of software. (The first is failure to plan for failure, but that's a different problem.) The problem isn't that guys like me don't understand how to design a user interface; it's that we don't even think about it because we tend to be thinking in terms of the process or machine rather than the human user.
There are no universal guidelines for how to lay out a user interface. The only sure method is to code it, then try using it and see if it feels natural. Often an interface that "follows the rules" will feel clunky in use, and when that happens you should rewrite it and try again until it is intuitive. When you've gotten it to feel right yourself, you should put it in front of the people who will use it all day long and see how they like it. And you should be willing to rearrange it until they find it natural and intuitive.
One reason those field-programmable controllers have become so popular is that people like me, working in the field, can do this. If a manufacturer builds, say, a batch process controller, it must implement every possible function that any process might ever need. This usually results in a bewildering user interface since most actual processes will only use a fraction of the controller's functions. By writing a custom controller in a programmable device, I can give the user just the controls he needs to do his job.
It used to be a once a month occurrence for us to get a service call along the lines of "our scale is only weighing about half what we put on it," because a user accidentally switched from pounds to kilograms. Newer devices let us turn off modes the end user will never use, and the result is less friction all around.
It goes without saying of course that you put the most-used controls where they are easiest to find and most obvious, you only put controls that are used constantly where they are always visible. You always provide keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING. Especially in the workplace, day-in day-out users will learn all those shortcuts, but the temp timer needs the GUI. Both are absolutely necessary. Not putting in keyboard shortcuts is the single biggest screw-up in industrial GUI's I have used.
The art comes in determining what controls are really used most often, and when things like confirmation dialogs shift from being a useful safeguard to an annoyance. I can't begin to count the times when I've installed a relatively simple system only to find that some control I'd buried in a deep menu is used much more often than I'd realized. Usage patterns are often radically different in simulation than they are with a real machine connected to real processes. The job isn't done when you close the build file and put field installation on your calendar; you will almost always have to refactor at least once based on end user feedback. If you don't plan for this and budget for it, it's a big, big mistake.