There is no such thing as a "harmless deception," particularly in news coverage
They put up a gazillion statistics about an athlete on the screen in real time. They could have put a little banner in the corner of the picture of the fireworks saying "computer simulation." It wouldn't have cost a nickel. It wouldn't have held up the flow of commentary.
Why not? Because they wanted people to believe what they were watching was real... because they know darn well people do care about whether what they see is real or fake, and put less value on something that's faked.
The proof that people care is that it was not disclosed.
This sort of problem is now years past the place where it can be solved by "voting with your dollars," or hoping that exposing the problem will create bad PR and shame the company into correcting it.
I don't know what parts of our constitution are still operative today, but if we can't get the public interested in privacy rights, get Congress interested in passing appropriate legislation, making "phoning home" against the law--and getting those laws enforced--then Apple and Microsoft and Sony and everyone else will continue to do whatever is technologically feasible, convenient, and supportive of their corporate goals.
It's naive to think that there are Good Companies and Evil Companies and that the answer is to put your faith in the Good Companies.
Of course, I do hope that exposing the problem creates bad PR and shames Apple into fixing it.
Much as I dislke Microsoft (and that's a lot), I do wonder how MVS or Multics would fare if they were on machines connected to the Internet, were subject to the same kind of intense scrutiny by researchers as Windows, and provided the same incentives to hackers as Windows.
Of course, it would be good not to have a monoculture, but I wonder whether even having a dozen operating systems dividing the computer population between them roughly equally, would make that much of a difference. When Windows dominates, hackers won't bother working on anything else; but if no OS dominated, wouldn't they be willing to work out a dozen different attacks... or get really clever in finding an exploiting commonalities between "different" OSes?
Don't tell me, let me guess. It will have all the stuff Microsoft that was going to be in every version of Windows since Windows 95.
As the release date approaches, Microsoft will suddenly start echoing all the knocks critics have been making on Vista, saying it is insecure, difficult to use, presents a bad user experience and is generally a piece of junk which only fools would ever have purchased... but, fortunately, Midori will solve all these problems, and will include a Web-standards-compliant browser, an animated character that will pop up and give you only helpful advice and only when you actually need it, WinFS, and Duke Nukem Forever.
And if you believe them, then you'd believe that Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football.
I'm playing fair and answering this from memory. I tried it before Update.1, it didn't work, I tried it briefly and casually after Update.1 and it still didn't seem to work. When I tried it out I checked the documentation.
Here's my answer. It's the key that has a picture of a gear on it. It's a multifunction key. You have to hold at least one other key down at the same time, I think it's ctrl-key, and the multifunction key might actually be the spacebar or a key next to the spacebar.
In the browser, and only in the browser, it acts as a "View Source" key for HTML. Elsewhere, it does nothing whatsoever; there's no feedback that the key has been pressed at all.
Now that I'm on record, I'm going to go get my XO and try again and correct anything I'd said that's wrong.
1) The key with the picture of the gear on it is indeed the spacebar.
2) According to Keyboard Shortcuts, the "View Source" key is Fn+Space, and it is supposed to work "system wide."
On the one hand I was wrong because I said it was "ctrl," on the other hand the location of the "fn" key at the lower-left-hand corner of the keyboard, which is where the "ctrl" key is on my other keyboards. Most likely I in fact pressed the fn key the other times I've tried it.
3) I am looking at the main screen with the XO "buddy" in the center, the segmented doughnut with the Journal showing as the only open application. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
4) I am now opening the Journal. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
5) I am now opening the Browser. When I press fn+space, it does NOT, as I said above, show me HTML source. Instead, it opens the Journal to an entry describing the Browser page?????
6) I am now opening the Terminal. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
7) I am now opening Write. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
So, have I got the right key combination? And am I right or wrong in saying that, based on my observations, the Sugar software currently handles it by ignoring it?
"Why else do you think they wrote Sugar in Python?"
Maybe Sugar is written in Python, but you can't prove it by me. David Pogue praised the Reveal Source button in The New York Times last year, and I thought it was one of the most exciting features of the device... but on my XO the Reveal Source button still doesn't seem to do anything. (And I downloaded Update.1 last month).
This software for the XO laptop is an open source project that is intended to be used by elementary school kids.
Usability by its target audience is absolutely of the essence. It is not a project in which the developers can get away with saying "it works for me," nor can they tell their eight-year-old audience "if you don't like it, patch it."
The XO laptop is thus an example of a situation where there are strong "incentives for usability." In fact, the entire enterprise fails if the device is not highly usable by elementary school kids in third world countries with no previous computer experience.
Time will show us how usable the XO software is. It will either be a data point that demonstrates that, indeed, the open source process produces highly usable software provided only that there is an incentive for usability... or that it really has a systemic problem that incentives cannot overcome.
Petty officialdom is no different than it has ever been. There's nothing new about bureaucrats rigidly implementing regulations and claiming that there is no way to make an exception in cases where the rules are patently inapplicable. "The computer made me do it" is just a variant on "Sir, we cannot do anything about it because of our policy."
But I don't think this would have been a problem five decades ago because the word "shit" was truly taboo... because nobody would have been willing to admit that they noticed the English-language vulgarities lurking within a name like Libshitz.
It couldn't have been done by computer, because no executive would have been willing to dictate such words in a specification that an (almost-certainly female) secretary would have to listen to, no secretary would have been willing to type them up, and, very likely, coders would have been unwilling to key them in.
Sure, in those days people might change the spelling of their surname from "Fuchs" to "Fewkes" but nobody would ever dare way why!
(Come to think of it, did Bible translations start using the phrase "gopher wood" in place of "shittim wood?")
"I'd like to hear about a business model whereby the artists produce the music and put it out on the Internet for free."
The same business model whereby writers write books, the publisher sells a single copy to a library and fifty people borrow it for free.
The existence of the public library doesn't stop people from buying books. On the contrary, libraries creates book-lovers and sustain the book business.
I think the "site content analysis" is bogus, too.
The Lithia Motors search presents to images, so just for the heck of it I tried "Norwood Boch," which I think ought to get me to the website of another huge car dealer. Not only does Cuil not pick up the actual dealer website, but the second result is, of all things, a Wikipedia "articles for deletion" discussion... dated 2005... about a biography of the founder of the dealership. With a link that gives a 404 Not Found. But that's not the point.
Accompanying that descripton is, of all things, a picture of a runner in a road race. And, no, no, no, it is not a picture of Ernie Boch, Sr. or Jr.
It also has a link to a current Wikipedia article on Ernie Boch, Jr. The Wikipedia article contains no images. But Cuil accompanies the description with an image of, apparently, two men wearing Mickey Mouse hats and a person in an orca suit. I don't think either of them is Ernie Boch, Jr.--it's hard to tell since Cuil gives me no way to determine the origin of Cuil's image. Given that a Google image search turns up literally dozens of nice, straightforward publicity stills of Ernie Boch, Jr, I'd have to say that Cuil's so-called content analysis--must truly suck.
...the proof is that they launched the site without anyone noticing that it basically doesn't work.
Just one example, from a half-an-hour spent playing with it trying to find something, anything it did better than Google. There is a humongous auto dealership in the Pacific Northwest named Lithia Motors, so big it's listed on the NYSE, stock symbol LAD. If you do a Cuil search on Lithia Motors, the hits that come up on the first page include a Wikipedia article about Lithia Motors, a Reuters report, a news item about its expansion in Iowa, its rank among America's Most Admired companies... every darned thing.
Every darn thing except: the website for Lithia Motors.
Just guessing at the URL and typing "lithia" into the browser's address field works better than using Cuil.
Shades of the bad old days when MBAs called the shots and didn't bother their pretty little heads over product details. Who cared about the product itself, when all that mattered was the pitch?
I can just imagine the pitch for Cuil. Imagine a search engine that indexes more than Google, works better than Google, and is staffed by top-notch Google expatriates.
What I can't imagine is why they unveiled it before it was working. "You only have one chance to make a first impression." They've managed to garner so much publicity that almost anyone potentially interested in it has given it a try... and the first impressions and word-of-mouth are so bad that IMHO if they ever do get it working, their only chance will be to relaunch under a different name.
Use a rapid application development package... Visual Basic is fine for that job, even if I lose all credibility by saying so... and do a mockup.
Get a few users. They should be people who are not members of your group. They should be vaguely typical of the people who will really be using the real application. They should not be managers or anyone with power to dictate their preferences as requirements.
Give them absolutely minimal directions. Let them try to use the application. Watch them. Resist the temptation to say anything unless they get so very stuck that there's no longer any hope of learning by watching them; then coach them just enough to get them unstuck.
See what they do. See what they assume. See where they make mistakes. I guarantee you you'll learn more in ten minutes than in hours of having people familiar with the code review slides. The places where you think they'll get stuck are the places they'll breeze through. The places where they do get stuck will surprise you completely. And you'll suddenly see glaring, obvious, easily fixed goofs in the UI design that you didn't notice in any review.
If you want to do a big formal megillah with one-way glass and video typing and people with psychology degrees, fine, but that's not important. The important thing is real users really playing with a functioning application.
Reviewing slides is nuts. Having people who develop the application review slides is nuts. You can't possibly figure out how something is going to work and feel by looking at slides. It's like figuring out whether a car will be fun to drive by looking at a static picture of the dashboard.
Some years ago someone was showing off an application... one of those GUI-like database applications that ran on character-oriented screens... that his group had done. I was playing with it. He was bragging about the screen refresh, the way they'd implemented scroll bars with characters, and so forth.
I noticed that three successive screens required me to key in the identical piece of information three time in a row. I also noticed there wasn't even a copy-and-paste function.
I pointed it out to him. He said, "Yeah, I know." I said "Are you going to fix it?" He said, "No." He whipped out a 3/4" thick spec. He said "It took six months of review to hammer out this spec. It's done. What you saw is what the spec says."
I said "You mean nobody noticed that problem during the review?" He sighed. "Apparently not."
"Well," I said, "why not just fix it?"
"Look," he said, "it took six months to get this spec signed off on, we're not going to open it again or it will take more months, we need to get this through SQA, and what SQA will be doing is checking to make sure we conform to this spec.?
Notice that the spokesperson says "We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept."
What he doesn't say is what their actual false positive rate in testing was... or any reason for believing the false positive rate will, in fact, be anywhere near that low.
I've come to be very leery of that sort of hypothetical statement... ones that lead you to think something has been said that hasn't been said. He's saying that 3:1 is a plausible goal, but he's not saying they've achieved it!
And what does he mean by a "false positives?" Let's say the system is installed to detect (say) humans trespassing on private property in a wooded area. Let's say that no deer had wandered through during the period when the baseline was being established. One day a deer wanders through and an alarm is triggered. Would BRS count this as a false positive, because it was not a human intruder? Or would they count is as correct functioning, because it was "unusual activity?"
Much of what is said in the article is pretty hard to believe on the face of it, at least not without further explanation.
"The BRS Labs software can establish a baseline in anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on how much activity the camera recognizes and how regular the patterns of behavior are." But it talks specifically about "wooded areas," i.e. outdoor scenes. Will it be able to ignore snow, branches falling in a windstorm, etc. if those events did not occur during the training period?
On that "busy highway," where the baseline can be established in "half an hour," will the software know that the bicycle race or Fourth of July parade is not unusual?
We didn't find any results for "boston public library"
Some reasons might be...
* a typo. Please check your spelling. * your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute. * too many search terms. Please try fewer terms. * Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
We didn't find any results for "episcopalian church in cleveland"
Some reasons might be... (etc).
"lithia motors"
returns eleven hits that are displayed and summarized on the first page, not one of which is http://www.lithia.com, the website for Lithia Motors (huge dealership in Oregon).
Google, of course, returns www.lithia.com as its first hit.
Business types who refuse to listen to techies...
on
The Pragmatic CSO
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Business-side executives who think they can manage without understanding anything at all about the technical details are just as arrogant and dangerous to the bottom line as techies who think they don't need to understand anything about the business.
In a wonderful Dilbert cartoon, the PHB says "Reasoning that anything I don't understand must be easy..." and assigns Dilbert an impossible task predestined for failure.
People on both the money side and the technical side need to work for mutual respect and understanding, and both need to be patient enough to listen to, and understand, material that doesn't fall within their specialty.
I'm not sure I know what is or isn't owed to the public in the way of medical disclosure, but it's inappropriate to single out Apple and Steve Jobs as if they were an egregious case. Holding back adverse medical information about CEOs, or "spinning" it to minimize it, is par for the course.
One example which comes to mind is the diagnosis of Dr. An Wang with esophageal cancer. Dr. Wang was at least as important to Wang Laboratories, Inc. as Steve Jobs is to Apple, and esophageal cancer is a very dangerous form of cancer.
But when Dr. Wang failed to make a scheduled appearance to address a meeting of the Boston Computer Society, a company representative explained that he was suffering from "a sore throat."
A quick database check of The Boston Globe indicates that his true condition was not disclosed until March 9, 1990, sixteen days before his death on March 25th, even though he had had surgery for his cancer eight months earlier. Indeed, it can be said that it was not even disclosed on March 9th, as a Wang spokesperson was quoted as saying "The diagnosis of his present condition is not available at this time."
Very clever piece of PR on Microsoft's part. Nobody said ever said they weren't great at PR.
Speaking of blind taste tests, a funny thing happened a long time ago... my son was about six years old, we were at a mall where they were inviting people to "take the Pepsi challenge." My son was all excited, and so we lined up. They put two plastic cups in front of him. He tasted both. They asked which one he liked better.
"I like this one better," he said with a great air of seriousness, but, unfortunately for Pepsi, he went on solemnly, "because it's colder and it has more bubbles in it." The presenters tried to bull ahead ("You chose Pepsi!") but it was too late... everyone within earshot was cracking up.
That's interesting, because a virtually identical view was available in a Wang Laboratories software product called Clearview, released in 1989, which ran on Windows 2.0.
(Clearview was one of a genre of Windows add-ons, HP NewWave being probably the best known, that plastered improved graphics shells or desktop managers on top of Windows).
And Clearview itself was nothing more than an improved version of a directory display that was used in the Wang Laboratories OIS circa 1977. They were logically the same, although visually different because the OIS was constrained by having a character-oriented screen. At least within Wang itself, Clearview's directory display was regarded a spiffy bitmapped graphic version of the OIS's display.
I seriously doubt that Wang was first or even close to first, but Wang was definitely shipping large numbers of commercial products that offered tree views of directories long before 1995.
...in financial transactions. Database transactions are interlocked in such a way that if $1000 is transferred from an account in bank A to an account in bank B, then no matter what happens, come hell or high water, when the dust settles the $1000 has either been moved to bank B or remains in bank A. There cannot be $0 in both or $1000 in both.
If file systems aren't designed to work this way, it's not because of any intrinsic limitation on what is or is not possible, it's because system designers have made a conscious effort to favor speed over reliability.
"Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand..."
All that meant, of course, is that you could bring a dollar bill to the bank and get four quarters in change. Big deal.
You can still exchange your dollars for precious metal at the local coin shop, by the way.
--because she's had too many bad experiences with things breaking, after updates;
--because updates are unwanted interruptions, there are too many of them, they take too long, they interfere with her work, and she's sick of them;
--because vendors are too dishonest about giving the reasons for any particular update. The reasons given are vague and almost always the same ("improve application stability") ("correct a security problem.") Many of them are self-serving (e.g. ratcheting up DRM being billed as "security").
--because it is virtually impossible for my wife to figure out which updates she actually needs, and she simply refuses to install all of them blindly.
For example, recently she's been bombarded with updates that are billed as "improving Vista compatibility." She's running XP. Does she need them or not? Her attitude is, "I'm not running Vista, forget it."
The story says "The computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds."
If that's accurate, that's astonishing to me.
I don't know much about "The Raw Story," which describes itself as an "alternative" news source. If this had appeared in the mainstream media I would regard it as something close to a smoking gun. I hope this isn't the end of the story.
And in further news, responding to charges that some escort services provide illegal services, the announced that effective today will carry only the "big 25" Yellow Pages sections: A through D and F through Z.
I just don't get it. I know that Microsoft doesn't regard end-users as their customers, so I'm not surprised when Microsoft doesn't listen to end-users.
But doesn't Dell consider home users to be desirable customers?
What exactly is so hard about the idea of listening to what customers are asking for, and giving them what they want?
More to the point, why don't home users get the same consideration that business users get? Does Dell secretly not want to sell to home users? Is this this new thing of trying to get rid of your less profitable customers by deliberately pissing them off?
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Of course it matters.
There is no such thing as a "harmless deception," particularly in news coverage
They put up a gazillion statistics about an athlete on the screen in real time. They could have put a little banner in the corner of the picture of the fireworks saying "computer simulation." It wouldn't have cost a nickel. It wouldn't have held up the flow of commentary.
Why not? Because they wanted people to believe what they were watching was real... because they know darn well people do care about whether what they see is real or fake, and put less value on something that's faked.
The proof that people care is that it was not disclosed.
This sort of problem is now years past the place where it can be solved by "voting with your dollars," or hoping that exposing the problem will create bad PR and shame the company into correcting it.
I don't know what parts of our constitution are still operative today, but if we can't get the public interested in privacy rights, get Congress interested in passing appropriate legislation, making "phoning home" against the law--and getting those laws enforced--then Apple and Microsoft and Sony and everyone else will continue to do whatever is technologically feasible, convenient, and supportive of their corporate goals.
It's naive to think that there are Good Companies and Evil Companies and that the answer is to put your faith in the Good Companies.
Of course, I do hope that exposing the problem creates bad PR and shames Apple into fixing it.
Much as I dislke Microsoft (and that's a lot), I do wonder how MVS or Multics would fare if they were on machines connected to the Internet, were subject to the same kind of intense scrutiny by researchers as Windows, and provided the same incentives to hackers as Windows.
Of course, it would be good not to have a monoculture, but I wonder whether even having a dozen operating systems dividing the computer population between them roughly equally, would make that much of a difference. When Windows dominates, hackers won't bother working on anything else; but if no OS dominated, wouldn't they be willing to work out a dozen different attacks... or get really clever in finding an exploiting commonalities between "different" OSes?
Don't tell me, let me guess. It will have all the stuff Microsoft that was going to be in every version of Windows since Windows 95.
As the release date approaches, Microsoft will suddenly start echoing all the knocks critics have been making on Vista, saying it is insecure, difficult to use, presents a bad user experience and is generally a piece of junk which only fools would ever have purchased... but, fortunately, Midori will solve all these problems, and will include a Web-standards-compliant browser, an animated character that will pop up and give you only helpful advice and only when you actually need it, WinFS, and Duke Nukem Forever.
And if you believe them, then you'd believe that Lucy will finally let Charlie Brown kick the football.
I'm playing fair and answering this from memory. I tried it before Update.1, it didn't work, I tried it briefly and casually after Update.1 and it still didn't seem to work. When I tried it out I checked the documentation.
Here's my answer. It's the key that has a picture of a gear on it. It's a multifunction key. You have to hold at least one other key down at the same time, I think it's ctrl-key, and the multifunction key might actually be the spacebar or a key next to the spacebar.
In the browser, and only in the browser, it acts as a "View Source" key for HTML. Elsewhere, it does nothing whatsoever; there's no feedback that the key has been pressed at all.
Now that I'm on record, I'm going to go get my XO and try again and correct anything I'd said that's wrong.
1) The key with the picture of the gear on it is indeed the spacebar.
2) According to Keyboard Shortcuts, the "View Source" key is Fn+Space, and it is supposed to work "system wide."
On the one hand I was wrong because I said it was "ctrl," on the other hand the location of the "fn" key at the lower-left-hand corner of the keyboard, which is where the "ctrl" key is on my other keyboards. Most likely I in fact pressed the fn key the other times I've tried it.
3) I am looking at the main screen with the XO "buddy" in the center, the segmented doughnut with the Journal showing as the only open application. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
4) I am now opening the Journal. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
5) I am now opening the Browser. When I press fn+space, it does NOT, as I said above, show me HTML source. Instead, it opens the Journal to an entry describing the Browser page?????
6) I am now opening the Terminal. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
7) I am now opening Write. When I press fn+space, nothing appears to happen.
So, have I got the right key combination? And am I right or wrong in saying that, based on my observations, the Sugar software currently handles it by ignoring it?
"Why else do you think they wrote Sugar in Python?"
Maybe Sugar is written in Python, but you can't prove it by me. David Pogue praised the Reveal Source button in The New York Times last year, and I thought it was one of the most exciting features of the device... but on my XO the Reveal Source button still doesn't seem to do anything. (And I downloaded Update.1 last month).
This software for the XO laptop is an open source project that is intended to be used by elementary school kids.
Usability by its target audience is absolutely of the essence. It is not a project in which the developers can get away with saying "it works for me," nor can they tell their eight-year-old audience "if you don't like it, patch it."
The XO laptop is thus an example of a situation where there are strong "incentives for usability." In fact, the entire enterprise fails if the device is not highly usable by elementary school kids in third world countries with no previous computer experience.
Time will show us how usable the XO software is. It will either be a data point that demonstrates that, indeed, the open source process produces highly usable software provided only that there is an incentive for usability... or that it really has a systemic problem that incentives cannot overcome.
Petty officialdom is no different than it has ever been. There's nothing new about bureaucrats rigidly implementing regulations and claiming that there is no way to make an exception in cases where the rules are patently inapplicable. "The computer made me do it" is just a variant on "Sir, we cannot do anything about it because of our policy."
But I don't think this would have been a problem five decades ago because the word "shit" was truly taboo... because nobody would have been willing to admit that they noticed the English-language vulgarities lurking within a name like Libshitz.
It couldn't have been done by computer, because no executive would have been willing to dictate such words in a specification that an (almost-certainly female) secretary would have to listen to, no secretary would have been willing to type them up, and, very likely, coders would have been unwilling to key them in.
Sure, in those days people might change the spelling of their surname from "Fuchs" to "Fewkes" but nobody would ever dare way why!
(Come to think of it, did Bible translations start using the phrase "gopher wood" in place of "shittim wood?")
"I'd like to hear about a business model whereby the artists produce the music and put it out on the Internet for free."
The same business model whereby writers write books, the publisher sells a single copy to a library and fifty people borrow it for free.
The existence of the public library doesn't stop people from buying books. On the contrary, libraries creates book-lovers and sustain the book business.
I think the "site content analysis" is bogus, too.
The Lithia Motors search presents to images, so just for the heck of it I tried "Norwood Boch," which I think ought to get me to the website of another huge car dealer. Not only does Cuil not pick up the actual dealer website, but the second result is, of all things, a Wikipedia "articles for deletion" discussion... dated 2005... about a biography of the founder of the dealership. With a link that gives a 404 Not Found. But that's not the point.
Accompanying that descripton is, of all things, a picture of a runner in a road race. And, no, no, no, it is not a picture of Ernie Boch, Sr. or Jr.
It also has a link to a current Wikipedia article on Ernie Boch, Jr. The Wikipedia article contains no images. But Cuil accompanies the description with an image of, apparently, two men wearing Mickey Mouse hats and a person in an orca suit. I don't think either of them is Ernie Boch, Jr.--it's hard to tell since Cuil gives me no way to determine the origin of Cuil's image. Given that a Google image search turns up literally dozens of nice, straightforward publicity stills of Ernie Boch, Jr, I'd have to say that Cuil's so-called content analysis--must truly suck.
...the proof is that they launched the site without anyone noticing that it basically doesn't work.
Just one example, from a half-an-hour spent playing with it trying to find something, anything it did better than Google. There is a humongous auto dealership in the Pacific Northwest named Lithia Motors, so big it's listed on the NYSE, stock symbol LAD. If you do a Cuil search on Lithia Motors, the hits that come up on the first page include a Wikipedia article about Lithia Motors, a Reuters report, a news item about its expansion in Iowa, its rank among America's Most Admired companies... every darned thing.
Every darn thing except: the website for Lithia Motors.
Just guessing at the URL and typing "lithia" into the browser's address field works better than using Cuil.
Shades of the bad old days when MBAs called the shots and didn't bother their pretty little heads over product details. Who cared about the product itself, when all that mattered was the pitch?
I can just imagine the pitch for Cuil. Imagine a search engine that indexes more than Google, works better than Google, and is staffed by top-notch Google expatriates.
What I can't imagine is why they unveiled it before it was working. "You only have one chance to make a first impression." They've managed to garner so much publicity that almost anyone potentially interested in it has given it a try... and the first impressions and word-of-mouth are so bad that IMHO if they ever do get it working, their only chance will be to relaunch under a different name.
Use a rapid application development package... Visual Basic is fine for that job, even if I lose all credibility by saying so... and do a mockup.
Get a few users. They should be people who are not members of your group. They should be vaguely typical of the people who will really be using the real application. They should not be managers or anyone with power to dictate their preferences as requirements.
Give them absolutely minimal directions. Let them try to use the application. Watch them. Resist the temptation to say anything unless they get so very stuck that there's no longer any hope of learning by watching them; then coach them just enough to get them unstuck.
See what they do. See what they assume. See where they make mistakes. I guarantee you you'll learn more in ten minutes than in hours of having people familiar with the code review slides. The places where you think they'll get stuck are the places they'll breeze through. The places where they do get stuck will surprise you completely. And you'll suddenly see glaring, obvious, easily fixed goofs in the UI design that you didn't notice in any review.
If you want to do a big formal megillah with one-way glass and video typing and people with psychology degrees, fine, but that's not important. The important thing is real users really playing with a functioning application.
Reviewing slides is nuts. Having people who develop the application review slides is nuts. You can't possibly figure out how something is going to work and feel by looking at slides. It's like figuring out whether a car will be fun to drive by looking at a static picture of the dashboard.
Some years ago someone was showing off an application... one of those GUI-like database applications that ran on character-oriented screens... that his group had done. I was playing with it. He was bragging about the screen refresh, the way they'd implemented scroll bars with characters, and so forth.
I noticed that three successive screens required me to key in the identical piece of information three time in a row. I also noticed there wasn't even a copy-and-paste function.
I pointed it out to him. He said, "Yeah, I know." I said "Are you going to fix it?" He said, "No." He whipped out a 3/4" thick spec. He said "It took six months of review to hammer out this spec. It's done. What you saw is what the spec says."
I said "You mean nobody noticed that problem during the review?" He sighed. "Apparently not."
"Well," I said, "why not just fix it?"
"Look," he said, "it took six months to get this spec signed off on, we're not going to open it again or it will take more months, we need to get this through SQA, and what SQA will be doing is checking to make sure we conform to this spec.?
Notice that the spokesperson says "We think a three-to-one ratio of alerts to actual events is what the market will accept."
What he doesn't say is what their actual false positive rate in testing was... or any reason for believing the false positive rate will, in fact, be anywhere near that low.
I've come to be very leery of that sort of hypothetical statement... ones that lead you to think something has been said that hasn't been said. He's saying that 3:1 is a plausible goal, but he's not saying they've achieved it!
And what does he mean by a "false positives?" Let's say the system is installed to detect (say) humans trespassing on private property in a wooded area. Let's say that no deer had wandered through during the period when the baseline was being established. One day a deer wanders through and an alarm is triggered. Would BRS count this as a false positive, because it was not a human intruder? Or would they count is as correct functioning, because it was "unusual activity?"
Much of what is said in the article is pretty hard to believe on the face of it, at least not without further explanation.
"The BRS Labs software can establish a baseline in anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on how much activity the camera recognizes and how regular the patterns of behavior are." But it talks specifically about "wooded areas," i.e. outdoor scenes. Will it be able to ignore snow, branches falling in a windstorm, etc. if those events did not occur during the training period?
On that "busy highway," where the baseline can be established in "half an hour," will the software know that the bicycle race or Fourth of July parade is not unusual?
We didn't find any results for "boston public library"
Some reasons might be...
* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
* Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
We didn't find any results for "episcopalian church in cleveland"
Some reasons might be... (etc).
"lithia motors"
returns eleven hits that are displayed and summarized on the first page, not one of which is http://www.lithia.com, the website for Lithia Motors (huge dealership in Oregon).
Google, of course, returns www.lithia.com as its first hit.
Business-side executives who think they can manage without understanding anything at all about the technical details are just as arrogant and dangerous to the bottom line as techies who think they don't need to understand anything about the business.
In a wonderful Dilbert cartoon, the PHB says "Reasoning that anything I don't understand must be easy..." and assigns Dilbert an impossible task predestined for failure.
People on both the money side and the technical side need to work for mutual respect and understanding, and both need to be patient enough to listen to, and understand, material that doesn't fall within their specialty.
I'm not sure I know what is or isn't owed to the public in the way of medical disclosure, but it's inappropriate to single out Apple and Steve Jobs as if they were an egregious case. Holding back adverse medical information about CEOs, or "spinning" it to minimize it, is par for the course.
One example which comes to mind is the diagnosis of Dr. An Wang with esophageal cancer. Dr. Wang was at least as important to Wang Laboratories, Inc. as Steve Jobs is to Apple, and esophageal cancer is a very dangerous form of cancer.
But when Dr. Wang failed to make a scheduled appearance to address a meeting of the Boston Computer Society, a company representative explained that he was suffering from "a sore throat."
A quick database check of The Boston Globe indicates that his true condition was not disclosed until March 9, 1990, sixteen days before his death on March 25th, even though he had had surgery for his cancer eight months earlier. Indeed, it can be said that it was not even disclosed on March 9th, as a Wang spokesperson was quoted as saying "The diagnosis of his present condition is not available at this time."
Very clever piece of PR on Microsoft's part. Nobody said ever said they weren't great at PR.
Speaking of blind taste tests, a funny thing happened a long time ago... my son was about six years old, we were at a mall where they were inviting people to "take the Pepsi challenge." My son was all excited, and so we lined up. They put two plastic cups in front of him. He tasted both. They asked which one he liked better.
"I like this one better," he said with a great air of seriousness, but, unfortunately for Pepsi, he went on solemnly, "because it's colder and it has more bubbles in it." The presenters tried to bull ahead ("You chose Pepsi!") but it was too late... everyone within earshot was cracking up.
That's interesting, because a virtually identical view was available in a Wang Laboratories software product called Clearview, released in 1989, which ran on Windows 2.0.
(Clearview was one of a genre of Windows add-ons, HP NewWave being probably the best known, that plastered improved graphics shells or desktop managers on top of Windows).
And Clearview itself was nothing more than an improved version of a directory display that was used in the Wang Laboratories OIS circa 1977. They were logically the same, although visually different because the OIS was constrained by having a character-oriented screen. At least within Wang itself, Clearview's directory display was regarded a spiffy bitmapped graphic version of the OIS's display.
I seriously doubt that Wang was first or even close to first, but Wang was definitely shipping large numbers of commercial products that offered tree views of directories long before 1995.
...in financial transactions. Database transactions are interlocked in such a way that if $1000 is transferred from an account in bank A to an account in bank B, then no matter what happens, come hell or high water, when the dust settles the $1000 has either been moved to bank B or remains in bank A. There cannot be $0 in both or $1000 in both.
If file systems aren't designed to work this way, it's not because of any intrinsic limitation on what is or is not possible, it's because system designers have made a conscious effort to favor speed over reliability.
Even in supposedly mission-critical servers.
"Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand..."
All that meant, of course, is that you could bring a dollar bill to the bank and get four quarters in change. Big deal.
You can still exchange your dollars for precious metal at the local coin shop, by the way.
--because she's had too many bad experiences with things breaking, after updates;
--because updates are unwanted interruptions, there are too many of them, they take too long, they interfere with her work, and she's sick of them;
--because vendors are too dishonest about giving the reasons for any particular update. The reasons given are vague and almost always the same ("improve application stability") ("correct a security problem.") Many of them are self-serving (e.g. ratcheting up DRM being billed as "security").
--because it is virtually impossible for my wife to figure out which updates she actually needs, and she simply refuses to install all of them blindly.
For example, recently she's been bombarded with updates that are billed as "improving Vista compatibility." She's running XP. Does she need them or not? Her attitude is, "I'm not running Vista, forget it."
How odd that the article doesn't even hint at what the metal is. I wonder why not?
The story says "The computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds."
If that's accurate, that's astonishing to me.
I don't know much about "The Raw Story," which describes itself as an "alternative" news source. If this had appeared in the mainstream media I would regard it as something close to a smoking gun. I hope this isn't the end of the story.
And in further news, responding to charges that some escort services provide illegal services, the announced that effective today will carry only the "big 25" Yellow Pages sections: A through D and F through Z.
I just don't get it. I know that Microsoft doesn't regard end-users as their customers, so I'm not surprised when Microsoft doesn't listen to end-users.
But doesn't Dell consider home users to be desirable customers?
What exactly is so hard about the idea of listening to what customers are asking for, and giving them what they want?
More to the point, why don't home users get the same consideration that business users get? Does Dell secretly not want to sell to home users? Is this this new thing of trying to get rid of your less profitable customers by deliberately pissing them off?