I've seriously wondered if the gradual adoption of more and more standardized icons and emoji is slowly creating an ideographic, common world written language.
I know that a few "fast forwards" and smileys here and there is a long way from verb tenses, and I don't think I've seen people use a string of several symbols to create a meaning that's different from the sum of its parts. But we're only a couple of decades into the process.
"The good news is that you have 30 days to downgrade to the previous version of the OS."
Imagine the average retail user, not expecting an upgrade, not prepared for an upgrade, so perhaps no recent backups and (if it's a home user) perhaps no backups at all. No IT department scan to check application compatibility and peripheral compatibility.
(And does this unsolicited upgrade check to make sure the computer meets Windows 10 system requirements?)
An installation on top of an existing installation, jumping two versions in between (8 and 8.1). But at least going in the direction Microsoft wants, and therefore probably SQAed as well as Microsoft knows how to SQA.
Now suppose the user attempts a downgrade to Windows 7. Another system installation on top of an existing installation, and again jumping over two versions, but this time going in the direction Microsoft thinks is unwanted and unimportant and probably has not tested quite as thoroughly.
What do you think are the chances it works _well_ afterwards?
A program for the Apple ][ that was, IIRC, advertised as "All the programs you will ever need, for just $595?" I believe it was an interview-driven database-query generator or something like that. Wikipedia points me tothis review in Byte. In reality most reviews of the program were lukewarm.
Jokes aside, what kind of reporting is this? "The turbine never came..." What on earth was happening, then? If there was no turbine, what was moving the water? If there was a turbine, why didn't it pull the water into itself?
It's sort of like saying "He fell off the roof, sixty floors up, and thought he was going to be killed when he hit the ground, but the ground never came."
It's hard to parse the terminology, spin, etc. but Cringely's words were "IBMâ(TM)s reorg-from-Hell launches next week: IBMâ(TM)s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone." As I read it, he was talking worldwide. And as I read the current news, it doesn't sound as if that happened. Or did it?
"Be it known that I, AUGUESTE BARTHOLDI, of Paris, in the Republic of France, have originated and produced a Design of a Monumental Statue, representing 'Liberty enlightening the world....'
The statue is that of a female figure standing erect upon a pedestal or block, the body being thrown slightly over to the left, so as to gravitate upon the left leg, the whole figure being thus in equilibrium, and symmetrically arranged with respect to a perpendicular line or axis passing through the ead and left foot... The right arm is thrown up and stretched out, with a flamboyant torch grasped in the hand.... The head, with its classical, yet severe and calm. features, is surmounted by a crown or diadem, from which radiate divergingly seven rays, tapering from'the crown, and representing a halo."
That protected Bartholdi against anyone making copies of the Statue of Liberty for fourteen years.
Donald Knuth's great work is called "The Art of Computer Programming."
There's really no answer to this question, but it may help to consider the motivations and interests of the people who use the names. There is a cluster of meanings that hover around the word "engineering" and around the word "art." Programmers fall somewhere in between the two. The search for absolutes is meaningless.
If you consider a symphony orchestra, it performs an economic job. It has to deliver cost-effective music on schedule. Performances contain defects; people need to decide on the acceptable level of defects. The performer are highly skilled operators of machinery like cellos and celestes. There is a management hierarchy; individual contributors, middle management (the "first seats,") upper management (concertmaster, conductor) etc. etc.
Yet few would call musicians "music engineers."
At the other extreme, the person who decides what heating and cooling systems need to go in a new building, and how the pipes and ducts should be sized and routed, exercises a great degree of creativity, but few would call them "HVAC artists."
What can be said is that management wishes that programming were more predictable, more standardized, and less dependent on individual heroics by non-interchangeable, talented individuals. Management is apt to fall for any smooth talker who claims to be able to organize the work of programming to be less like art and more like engineering.
Wishing, however, will not make it so, and the CMM Level 5 firms will continue to produce both good and bad work--healthcare.gov was the product of a CMM Level 5 organization. And meanwhile, both bad and good work will continue to be done by "undocumented, chaotic, ad hoc, reactive" manner by small teams of good people who give a damn.
I always preferred to be called a "programmer" because I have always felt that "engineer" sent a signal that I was working for someone who didn't really understand the nature of my work. I think a violinist would prefer to be called a "violinist" than a "chordophonic engineer."
There are many examples of fine old technology that can be admired for the ingenuity that went into devising non-digital solutions, and that depended on being precisely made.
Slide rules were nice. They were a working tool for just about a century, very roughly 1870 to 1970. There are always some virtues to old technology that are lost when it's supplanted by new--the discipline of keeping the characteristic in your head and never losing track of the order of magnitude, the freedom from the illusion of precision.
They were only mildly status symbols, at least at MIT during the 1960s. There was a certain amount of discussion of the comparative merits of Keuffel & Esser (wood) versus Pickett & Eckel (aluminum), whether it was better to fold the scales at pi or at the square root of ten, and so forth. Plenty of people got by with cheap slide rules. I never heard of any cases of slide rules being stolen.
Keeping them properly lubricated, keeping the scales aligned, keep everything tensioned just right so that the slide and the cursor would move easily when you slide them and then stay put when you stopped pushing was a bear. More than once, people were embarrassed when the slide would actually slip out of the slide rule and clatter on the floor.
When I saw my first HP-35 pocket calculator, $295 IIRC, I said "There, at least, is something that I'd accept in place of a slide rule--if you promised me it would last for decades and never break.
Yes, I feel some nostalgia for slide rules--but let's not exaggerate.
Oh, by the way--that "2 x 2 is 3.96" joke above is wrong. On an exact answer like that, on a well-made slide rule if you put the index of the C scale over 2 on the D scale--and you can get it so that it looks perfect, and the eye has darn good vernier acuity--the 2 on the C scale will be perfectly aligned with the 4 on the D scale. You would read it as "4." You couldn't possibly read it as 3.96, 3.96 is two full scale divisions away from 4.
The problem comes when the answer lies between two scale divisions. For example, 3.98 and 4.00 are two adjacent marks. You would be hard-pressed to tell whether an answer were, say, 3.99 or 3.993.
In 1990 or thereabouts Gartner predicted that OS/2 would become the dominant operating system within about three or four years. It wasn't a throwaway statement, it was a detailed report with a chart and table showing the exact percentages and numbers of installations for MS-DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX, and OS/2. Windows was going to fade very quickly.
But that's the way it is with predictions. People will pay for them and just don't seem to care about the accuracy of past predictions.
Car owners are upset because they will surely need to have their cars recalled and have the chips replaced, and depending on which way VW makes the tradeoffs, may find that their cars drive badly after replacement or fail inspection after replacement or both. And also that the resale value of their car just plummeted.
The loss of HP, as it was from perhaps 1950 to 2000, wasn't just the loss of a brand or a manufacturer, it was the loss of an art form, a craft, a cherished part of engineering culture.
Their stuff was just so damn good, all of it.
A little detail that isn't often mentioned. In the 1980s or thereabouts, everything HP advertised was real. They never played the vaporware game, they never cheated just a bit on timing the ads. If you saw the ad in a magazine, it was finished, it was real, you could order it, it would arrive in a week or two--and it would work the way it was supposed to and meet all the specs. This, in a day when their competitors would run ads based on models or empty cases up to six months before the product was finished.
Using an incandescent light bulb as a feedback element in their audio oscillators was sheer elegance.
All their instruments were works of art. All of them had front panels that today's user interface designers ought to be studying. All the groupings made sense, almost every control was individually designed to perform its intended function. HP instruments looked good, felt good, were easy to use, and did exactly what they were supposed to do.
The first LaserJet was a revelation, and it worked perfectly, The first DeskJet was in many ways even more amazing--a 300 dpi printer for $600 when laser printers cost $3,000 and every other $600 machine was about 80 dpi if you were lucky.
HP's desk calculators were sweet, and the HP-35 was just a revelation when it came out. Everyone was proud of being able to do a square root, and here's this beautiful thing. Did everything a slide rule could do, everything, to ten-place accuracy when a slide rule would get you at most three. And, again unlike the competition--most particularly unlike TI--the math was impeccable, no glitches, no odd cases--they knew their numerical analysis and they got it right. RPN seemed weird, but at least it was consistent.The competition could never get this right--they would claim that you entered it "algebraically" but you would key in 30, then "sin" instead of sin(30).
The loss of the engineering days of HP was the loss of a whole discipline, a whole body of corporate memory on how to do things right. An irreparable loss of know-how. And it was engineering in the full sense of the word--these weren't self-indulgent overengineered toys, they were priced competitively and sold against competition in a real marketplace--and they were still so good.
IÂve been reading "Winklevoss Twins close to launching bitcoin ETF" stories since mid-2013. It has always just about cleared the last regulatory hurdle and it is always going to launch in a month or two and it is always "still on track." Slashdot just seems to be an amplifier of the latest publicity blitz.
OK, fine. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. No particular reason I know to pay attention to it until it does.
Funniest thing I've read about it appeared in January, 2015: "We believe that anyone who believes that gold is an important asset to hold in their portfolio should seriously consider adding bitcoin to their portfolio. When we consider all of the qualities that make money money, Bitcoin when compared to gold matches or surpasses gold in every measure of money. This is why we and others call bitcoin 'gold 2.0' or 'digital gold,' Winklevoss explained in his email."
When I saw that there was a demo, I figured it meant I would get to dictate a voice question and have SoundHound answer it.
Watch a video? That isn't a demo. If all you can do is watch a prepared video, nothing has been demonstrated at all.
You might as well say Maelzel gave a "demo" of his mechanical chess player. In a non-interactive video, you don't even know for sure it's a machine answering the question or a little man hidden in the cabinet.
Why shouldn't a DVD play when you pop it in? Surely that can't be all that problematical to support. Ditto Solitaire, which if memory serves has been there since Windows 3.0 (or possible 3.1?) What grand self-serving strategic move is this supposed to be?
The name of the product says it all. It is not intended for communication, education, or the thoughtful display of information. It's not supposed to facilitate critical thinking by the audience.
It's intended to give the presenter the power to cloud men's minds... to convince... to project the presenter's views into the minds of the audience as forcefully as possible.
The once-competitive product from a once-competitor was named Aldus Persuasion. Not Aldus Display, not Aldus Presentation, not Aldus Foils--Aldus Persuasion.
Someone once called word processors (in the early days before everyone had them) "automatic weapons for inter-corporation turf wars." Much the same can be said of PowerPoint.
...you don't get blocked for edit-warring until there have been three successive reverts. If there's a handy list of the affected pages I'd be glad to hop in and revert a few of them, and then bow out and let someone else hop in if needed.
People used to do real tests with real people, in controlled situations, measuring response time, counting errors, videotaping what they were actually doing, finding out where people are getting stuck and using that feedback to redesign and try again.
This was common all the way back to the 1970s. People like Ben Schneiderman were doing formal research and writing textbooks in the 1980s.
Why do I no longer hear about any of this being done? Why is it all about the visual tastes of individual designers?
There's nothing wrong with beauty--the original edition of Inside Mac, 1983, said in so many words "objects are designed to look beautiful on the screen." But beauty and style are not the same as usability.
All of the insane "mystery meat" UI of today, in which you cannot find an affordance unless you already know where to click to make it visible, cannot possible be usable, even if some people enjoy developing the necessary skill set.
Without real testing, you always get the same things: the personal taste of the manager in charge, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody; or, the personal taste of the developer, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody.
I'm sure this will be as big a success for Microsoft as their acquisition of Danger, Incorporated, developer of the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick, which led the innovative, exciting, youth-oriented Microsoft Kin. And the rest is history.
If I were asked that question, I think I'd answer it well. Not because I would be able to figure it out quickly under pressure, but because this brainteaser is very old.
When I was a kid in the 1950s I read both it and the original intended correct answer (the North Pole) in a book of brainteasers.
When I got into high school, someone who was actually smart discovered that the answer wasn't unique and that there was an infinite family of additional answers all involving points close to the South Pole, and I read about that, too. I'm not sure where; I think it was in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.
There must be million of people who know the answer, not because they figured it out by themselves, but because they read or heard the answer somewhere.
Of all the candidates who give Mr. Musk the correct answer, I imagine very few of them are solving it on the spot. I wonder how many of the others are honest enough to volunteer the information that they had already read the answer.
Or perhaps that's the point--perhaps it's an honesty test rather than a brain-teaser.
They were just saying this was true to resist antitrust actions. The Department of Justice said bundling IE was illegal "tying." Microsoft claimed that IE was an integral part of Windows and that it was impossible, for technical reasons, to unbundle it and allow competition on a level playing field from other browsers.
Edward Felten proved to Microsoft to be lying, in court, in 1998, in a live demo, by removing IE from Windows without breaking Windows.
What exactly ARE we seeing in that "flythrough?"
on
Hubble Turns 25
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· Score: 1
Flythrough video -- I have no objection to enhanced pictures but I do want to understand exactly what I am looking at. There can't possibly be enough parallax for any traditional stereo imaging.
Where does the depth information in a video like this come from, and what has happened here--has the image been basically digitized and then completely regenerated by shifting every image pixel in it according to its distance from the virtual "camera" position?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seriously wondered if the gradual adoption of more and more standardized icons and emoji is slowly creating an ideographic, common world written language.
I know that a few "fast forwards" and smileys here and there is a long way from verb tenses, and I don't think I've seen people use a string of several symbols to create a meaning that's different from the sum of its parts. But we're only a couple of decades into the process.
"The good news is that you have 30 days to downgrade to the previous version of the OS."
Imagine the average retail user, not expecting an upgrade, not prepared for an upgrade, so perhaps no recent backups and (if it's a home user) perhaps no backups at all. No IT department scan to check application compatibility and peripheral compatibility.
(And does this unsolicited upgrade check to make sure the computer meets Windows 10 system requirements?)
An installation on top of an existing installation, jumping two versions in between (8 and 8.1). But at least going in the direction Microsoft wants, and therefore probably SQAed as well as Microsoft knows how to SQA.
Now suppose the user attempts a downgrade to Windows 7. Another system installation on top of an existing installation, and again jumping over two versions, but this time going in the direction Microsoft thinks is unwanted and unimportant and probably has not tested quite as thoroughly.
What do you think are the chances it works _well_ afterwards?
A program for the Apple ][ that was, IIRC, advertised as "All the programs you will ever need, for just $595?" I believe it was an interview-driven database-query generator or something like that. Wikipedia points me to this review in Byte. In reality most reviews of the program were lukewarm.
Jokes aside, what kind of reporting is this? "The turbine never came..." What on earth was happening, then? If there was no turbine, what was moving the water? If there was a turbine, why didn't it pull the water into itself?
It's sort of like saying "He fell off the roof, sixty floors up, and thought he was going to be killed when he hit the ground, but the ground never came."
It's hard to parse the terminology, spin, etc. but Cringely's words were "IBMâ(TM)s reorg-from-Hell launches next week: IBMâ(TM)s big layoff-cum-reorganization called Project Chrome kicks-off next week when 26 percent of IBM employees will get calls from their managers followed by thick envelopes on their doorsteps. By the end of February all 26 percent will be gone." As I read it, he was talking worldwide. And as I read the current news, it doesn't sound as if that happened. Or did it?
What can you say? Some old folks just don't.
This is what a design patent is like:
"Be it known that I, AUGUESTE BARTHOLDI, of Paris, in the Republic of France, have originated and produced a Design of a Monumental Statue, representing 'Liberty enlightening the world....'
The statue is that of a female figure standing erect upon a pedestal or block, the body being thrown slightly over to the left, so as to gravitate upon the left leg, the whole figure being thus in equilibrium, and symmetrically arranged with respect to a perpendicular line or axis passing through the ead and left foot... The right arm is thrown up and stretched out, with a flamboyant torch grasped in the hand.... The head, with its classical, yet severe and calm. features, is surmounted by a crown or diadem, from which radiate divergingly seven rays, tapering from'the crown, and representing a halo."
That protected Bartholdi against anyone making copies of the Statue of Liberty for fourteen years.
Donald Knuth's great work is called "The Art of Computer Programming."
There's really no answer to this question, but it may help to consider the motivations and interests of the people who use the names. There is a cluster of meanings that hover around the word "engineering" and around the word "art." Programmers fall somewhere in between the two. The search for absolutes is meaningless.
If you consider a symphony orchestra, it performs an economic job. It has to deliver cost-effective music on schedule. Performances contain defects; people need to decide on the acceptable level of defects. The performer are highly skilled operators of machinery like cellos and celestes. There is a management hierarchy; individual contributors, middle management (the "first seats,") upper management (concertmaster, conductor) etc. etc.
Yet few would call musicians "music engineers."
At the other extreme, the person who decides what heating and cooling systems need to go in a new building, and how the pipes and ducts should be sized and routed, exercises a great degree of creativity, but few would call them "HVAC artists."
What can be said is that management wishes that programming were more predictable, more standardized, and less dependent on individual heroics by non-interchangeable, talented individuals. Management is apt to fall for any smooth talker who claims to be able to organize the work of programming to be less like art and more like engineering.
Wishing, however, will not make it so, and the CMM Level 5 firms will continue to produce both good and bad work--healthcare.gov was the product of a CMM Level 5 organization. And meanwhile, both bad and good work will continue to be done by "undocumented, chaotic, ad hoc, reactive" manner by small teams of good people who give a damn.
I always preferred to be called a "programmer" because I have always felt that "engineer" sent a signal that I was working for someone who didn't really understand the nature of my work. I think a violinist would prefer to be called a "violinist" than a "chordophonic engineer."
There are many examples of fine old technology that can be admired for the ingenuity that went into devising non-digital solutions, and that depended on being precisely made.
Slide rules were nice. They were a working tool for just about a century, very roughly 1870 to 1970. There are always some virtues to old technology that are lost when it's supplanted by new--the discipline of keeping the characteristic in your head and never losing track of the order of magnitude, the freedom from the illusion of precision.
They were only mildly status symbols, at least at MIT during the 1960s. There was a certain amount of discussion of the comparative merits of Keuffel & Esser (wood) versus Pickett & Eckel (aluminum), whether it was better to fold the scales at pi or at the square root of ten, and so forth. Plenty of people got by with cheap slide rules. I never heard of any cases of slide rules being stolen.
Keeping them properly lubricated, keeping the scales aligned, keep everything tensioned just right so that the slide and the cursor would move easily when you slide them and then stay put when you stopped pushing was a bear. More than once, people were embarrassed when the slide would actually slip out of the slide rule and clatter on the floor.
When I saw my first HP-35 pocket calculator, $295 IIRC, I said "There, at least, is something that I'd accept in place of a slide rule--if you promised me it would last for decades and never break.
Yes, I feel some nostalgia for slide rules--but let's not exaggerate.
Oh, by the way--that "2 x 2 is 3.96" joke above is wrong. On an exact answer like that, on a well-made slide rule if you put the index of the C scale over 2 on the D scale--and you can get it so that it looks perfect, and the eye has darn good vernier acuity--the 2 on the C scale will be perfectly aligned with the 4 on the D scale. You would read it as "4." You couldn't possibly read it as 3.96, 3.96 is two full scale divisions away from 4.
The problem comes when the answer lies between two scale divisions. For example, 3.98 and 4.00 are two adjacent marks. You would be hard-pressed to tell whether an answer were, say, 3.99 or 3.993.
Playboy without nudes would be like Sports Illustrated without swimsuits. Wait, maybe I need to rephrase that.
In 1990 or thereabouts Gartner predicted that OS/2 would become the dominant operating system within about three or four years. It wasn't a throwaway statement, it was a detailed report with a chart and table showing the exact percentages and numbers of installations for MS-DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX, and OS/2. Windows was going to fade very quickly.
But that's the way it is with predictions. People will pay for them and just don't seem to care about the accuracy of past predictions.
Car owners are upset because they will surely need to have their cars recalled and have the chips replaced, and depending on which way VW makes the tradeoffs, may find that their cars drive badly after replacement or fail inspection after replacement or both. And also that the resale value of their car just plummeted.
The loss of HP, as it was from perhaps 1950 to 2000, wasn't just the loss of a brand or a manufacturer, it was the loss of an art form, a craft, a cherished part of engineering culture.
Their stuff was just so damn good, all of it.
A little detail that isn't often mentioned. In the 1980s or thereabouts, everything HP advertised was real. They never played the vaporware game, they never cheated just a bit on timing the ads. If you saw the ad in a magazine, it was finished, it was real, you could order it, it would arrive in a week or two--and it would work the way it was supposed to and meet all the specs. This, in a day when their competitors would run ads based on models or empty cases up to six months before the product was finished.
Using an incandescent light bulb as a feedback element in their audio oscillators was sheer elegance.
All their instruments were works of art. All of them had front panels that today's user interface designers ought to be studying. All the groupings made sense, almost every control was individually designed to perform its intended function. HP instruments looked good, felt good, were easy to use, and did exactly what they were supposed to do.
The first LaserJet was a revelation, and it worked perfectly, The first DeskJet was in many ways even more amazing--a 300 dpi printer for $600 when laser printers cost $3,000 and every other $600 machine was about 80 dpi if you were lucky.
HP's desk calculators were sweet, and the HP-35 was just a revelation when it came out. Everyone was proud of being able to do a square root, and here's this beautiful thing. Did everything a slide rule could do, everything, to ten-place accuracy when a slide rule would get you at most three. And, again unlike the competition--most particularly unlike TI--the math was impeccable, no glitches, no odd cases--they knew their numerical analysis and they got it right. RPN seemed weird, but at least it was consistent.The competition could never get this right--they would claim that you entered it "algebraically" but you would key in 30, then "sin" instead of sin(30).
The loss of the engineering days of HP was the loss of a whole discipline, a whole body of corporate memory on how to do things right. An irreparable loss of know-how. And it was engineering in the full sense of the word--these weren't self-indulgent overengineered toys, they were priced competitively and sold against competition in a real marketplace--and they were still so good.
Right. It's Gemini, the other bitcoin project of theirs. The one they say they is not distracting them from launching the COIN ETF.
IÂve been reading "Winklevoss Twins close to launching bitcoin ETF" stories since mid-2013. It has always just about cleared the last regulatory hurdle and it is always going to launch in a month or two and it is always "still on track." Slashdot just seems to be an amplifier of the latest publicity blitz.
OK, fine. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. No particular reason I know to pay attention to it until it does.
Funniest thing I've read about it appeared in January, 2015: "We believe that anyone who believes that gold is an important asset to hold in their portfolio should seriously consider adding bitcoin to their portfolio. When we consider all of the qualities that make money money, Bitcoin when compared to gold matches or surpasses gold in every measure of money. This is why we and others call bitcoin 'gold 2.0' or 'digital gold,' Winklevoss explained in his email."
I see an intriguing resemblance to Wain's cats--paintings made by Louis Wain, while going insane, perhaps from schizophrenia.
When I saw that there was a demo, I figured it meant I would get to dictate a voice question and have SoundHound answer it.
Watch a video? That isn't a demo. If all you can do is watch a prepared video, nothing has been demonstrated at all.
You might as well say Maelzel gave a "demo" of his mechanical chess player. In a non-interactive video, you don't even know for sure it's a machine answering the question or a little man hidden in the cabinet.
Why shouldn't a DVD play when you pop it in? Surely that can't be all that problematical to support. Ditto Solitaire, which if memory serves has been there since Windows 3.0 (or possible 3.1?) What grand self-serving strategic move is this supposed to be?
The name of the product says it all. It is not intended for communication, education, or the thoughtful display of information. It's not supposed to facilitate critical thinking by the audience.
It's intended to give the presenter the power to cloud men's minds... to convince... to project the presenter's views into the minds of the audience as forcefully as possible.
The once-competitive product from a once-competitor was named Aldus Persuasion. Not Aldus Display, not Aldus Presentation, not Aldus Foils--Aldus Persuasion.
Someone once called word processors (in the early days before everyone had them) "automatic weapons for inter-corporation turf wars." Much the same can be said of PowerPoint.
...you don't get blocked for edit-warring until there have been three successive reverts. If there's a handy list of the affected pages I'd be glad to hop in and revert a few of them, and then bow out and let someone else hop in if needed.
People used to do real tests with real people, in controlled situations, measuring response time, counting errors, videotaping what they were actually doing, finding out where people are getting stuck and using that feedback to redesign and try again.
This was common all the way back to the 1970s. People like Ben Schneiderman were doing formal research and writing textbooks in the 1980s.
Why do I no longer hear about any of this being done? Why is it all about the visual tastes of individual designers?
There's nothing wrong with beauty--the original edition of Inside Mac, 1983, said in so many words "objects are designed to look beautiful on the screen." But beauty and style are not the same as usability.
All of the insane "mystery meat" UI of today, in which you cannot find an affordance unless you already know where to click to make it visible, cannot possible be usable, even if some people enjoy developing the necessary skill set.
Without real testing, you always get the same things: the personal taste of the manager in charge, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody; or, the personal taste of the developer, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody.
I'm sure this will be as big a success for Microsoft as their acquisition of Danger, Incorporated, developer of the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick, which led the innovative, exciting, youth-oriented Microsoft Kin. And the rest is history.
If I were asked that question, I think I'd answer it well. Not because I would be able to figure it out quickly under pressure, but because this brainteaser is very old.
When I was a kid in the 1950s I read both it and the original intended correct answer (the North Pole) in a book of brainteasers.
When I got into high school, someone who was actually smart discovered that the answer wasn't unique and that there was an infinite family of additional answers all involving points close to the South Pole, and I read about that, too. I'm not sure where; I think it was in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.
There must be million of people who know the answer, not because they figured it out by themselves, but because they read or heard the answer somewhere.
Of all the candidates who give Mr. Musk the correct answer, I imagine very few of them are solving it on the spot. I wonder how many of the others are honest enough to volunteer the information that they had already read the answer.
Or perhaps that's the point--perhaps it's an honesty test rather than a brain-teaser.
They were just saying this was true to resist antitrust actions. The Department of Justice said bundling IE was illegal "tying." Microsoft claimed that IE was an integral part of Windows and that it was impossible, for technical reasons, to unbundle it and allow competition on a level playing field from other browsers.
Edward Felten proved to Microsoft to be lying, in court, in 1998, in a live demo, by removing IE from Windows without breaking Windows.
Flythrough video -- I have no objection to enhanced pictures but I do want to understand exactly what I am looking at. There can't possibly be enough parallax for any traditional stereo imaging.
Where does the depth information in a video like this come from, and what has happened here--has the image been basically digitized and then completely regenerated by shifting every image pixel in it according to its distance from the virtual "camera" position?