OK, so the problems are not in the APE framework, but in the modules that run under it. However, the framework is useless without modules to run under it. The equation is clear enough: install haxies and incur a significant risk of problems. The benefits may, in a sensible person's mind, outweigh the risks, just as was true of extensions in OS 9 and TSR's in MS-DOS, but the risks are not negligible. To say that they don't matter because they're not the fault if the APE framework itself is silly.
Please spare me the enthusiasts for whom no failure is ever the fault of the object of their enthusiasm. For example, Windows advocates who insist that bluescreens don't count because they're caused by "drivers," while ignoring the fact that you needed to install drivers to get your display hardware/Adaptec SCSI card/whatever to work.
True story. Circa late seventies. A friend was praising his NorthStar computer to the skies. I asked if it was reliable. He said it had been 100% reliable and he'd never had any problems at all. I asked him to demonstrate it to me. He said, "Oh, sorry, I can right now, the power supply burned out and I'm waiting for a replacement." I said, "But I thought you said it was 100% reliable." He replied, "The computer works fine--it's just the power supply that's out."
I wish I had clipped and saved the column I saw some years ago in a controlled-circulation publication, I believe it may have been Industrial Photography. It's a very old problem. The columnist described it as how to deal with the client who insists that you could save very large amounts of time and money if you would only provide just very slightly shoddy work.
His answer went something like this: "I am a professional. I am exactly as good as the last job I have delivered. All my work is of professional quality, always, and I do not compromise or scamp my work for anybody, ever, because that is not what professionals do."
He went on to say that a professional must never do shoddy work and must always be willing to risk his job when asked to. He argued that it was committing career suicide to ever have shoddy work in public view with your name on it.
One of the characteristics of a professional is a sense of responsibility to "the profession" and to fellow professionals, as well as to the person who is writing the check.
I expect to get flamed by replies from people who write checks or who have been indoctrinated by people who write checks, and I don't say he was 100% right, but there is an ethical dimension to professional work.
An interesting project, but it certainly seems like a Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson for UK readers) way to go about it.
The Mac G5 approaches this problem by using lots of big, slow-turning fans. It's probably expensive, but I doubt that it's as expensive as active noise cancellation. And Apple did a very good job. The Mac G5 is not silent, but in normal operation it is quieter than any machine I've used since the fanless 1984 Mac and the Apple ][.
OK, I'm curious to see it--but I don't believe a word of it. My brain is capable of converting 2D presentations into 3D using depth cues. I suspect my brain is better at it than their software is. And that wherever their software falls short, there will be an intense mental irritation factor.
In the fifties, a sound engineer whose name escapes me devoted a _lot_ of effort to applying electronic filtering to add a stereo effect to Toscanini's recordings, with the idea that he was preserving them for posterity. Toscanini's recordings and reputation have survived, but it's noteworthy that all the CD remasterings are in mono.
I don't think I've seen any upsurge of interest in "colorized" black-and-white movies, either.
I would expect automatic 3D to suffer from the same issues as colorizing: problems at the edges where things are entering the frame, problems with things that are in the background and hence out of focus, scenes that consists of thousands of moving objects (crowds, tree leaves flexing in the wind, sunlight glancing off rippling water) where the cues are imprecise and the computational effort needed to track thousands of objects is intense...
Seems to me that speaks for itself. If, in 1985, Microsoft thought "Windows" wasn't generic, why did they think they had to qualify it by tacking their corporate name in front?
You don't hear other companies calling their products "the General Motors Cadillac" or "Schering-Plough Claritin" or the "Sanford Sharpie" or "Procter and Gamble Mr. Clean."
Anyone product manager would want their product name to be short and punchy. Nobody would tack the company name on unless the company's own legal department had opined that the name is generic, or close to generic, or in danger of becoming generic.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Michael Hart's decision to make the basic format of PG texts "plain vanilla ASCII" has resulted in texts that are highly accessible by any meaning I can think of for that word. They are also compact, platform-agnostic, and durable. Texts contributed in the 1980s are fully usable today.
While there have been constant complaints about PG using the "wrong" format, opinions on the "right" format have been the flavor-of-the-month (or at least several flavors per decade). Had PG decided to use a "better" format, all of their volunteer time would probably have been taken up converting (say) WordPerfect to RTF to HTML to SGML to XML, leaving relatively little time to digitize and proofread texts.
Oh, gimme a break. "A Sound of Thunder" is an exquisitely crafted short story that is based on a) an idea, and b) nicely constructed verbal imagery. It works by stimulating the imagination.
It's a pretty solid meme. I know quite a few people who remember "that story about the time-traveller who steps on the butterfly" but cannot remember the title or author. (Do you think Edward Lorenz might have had a fading engram of the story in his mind when he came up with the title "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"
I can see it working quite well as (say) a half-hour radio play, but there's no way to make a movie out of this without losing everything in the story that made it great.
It would make a much sense to make an action blockbuster out of a Basho haiku, or a Broadway rock musical from a Zen koan.
Only published in paper and long out of print--but available from second-hand booksellers such as abebooks--you may want to read Barbara O'Brien's haunting book "Operators and Things." This 1958 book was written by a spontaneously-recovered schizophrenic and is a first-person view of the schizophrenic experience.
The title refers to her delusional revelation that what seems to be human beings in the world are actually two different kinds of beings, Operators and Things, and that she is a Thing.
A good essay always consists of an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing paragraph.
It is essential that every paragraph begin with a topic sentence. The first paragraph should state the thesis, or point of the essay. Since computers cannot actually understand the entire essay, you can assume that it will only be judging the local coherence of writing which is free to run like a river, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, taking us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.
The second paragraph should make a point that present a countervailing view, the antithesis. Once again, spelling should be correct, the essay should be capable of passing a Microsoft Word grammar check, but after that we pass through grass behind the bush where a gull calls, coming far, ending here. Finn again? Take, but softly memory till thousands are given the keys to a way a lone a last a loved a long the river runs.
The third paragraph should synthesize the material covered in the first two paragraphs. It is, however, important that any material obtained from external sources be modified so that it cannot be detected as an exact match for anything on the Web. So, she went into the garden to cut a lettuce leaf to make an mince pie; and at the same time a great wolverine, coming up the street, goes into the store. "What! No laundry detergent?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
In conclusion, the final paragraph should recapitulate and summarize what has gone before: since you can be sure that a computer is capable of counting paragraphs, a good essay always consists of five paragraphs. If it has the right number of paragraphs and every word is spelled correctly, you are almost certain to get at least a passing grade.
I skipped the upgrade from Office 98 to Office 2001 because according to accounts I read in mailing lists, virtually none of the bugs that had (and have) been plaguing me in Office 98 were fixed.
(The worst is: unwanted and seemingly unpredictable behavior in the numbering and formatting of numbered lists when minor edits are made in other portions of the document).
I was unable to obtain from Microsoft anything corresponding to what other vendors refer to as "release notes" for Office 2001, or any list of bugs that were fixed.
Are there release notes or bug fix lists for Office 2004?
...to learn about the respective merits of Windows and Open Source has already made up their mind. There's no point in trying to counter such a seminar.
The only thing worth doing is to try to understand the internal politics that must be going on in your organization if they intend to send anyone to such a seminar.
Langa's criticism sounds fair to me. I've been there, done that so many times. Official spec sheet says product X supports product Y. You have product Y. You buy product X. Product Y doesn't work with it. You complain. Then you hear variations on the following theme
*Very few of our customers are using product Y.
*Personally, I would never have recommended product Y.
*Why are you using product Y? Product Z is so much better.
*You don't really need to have product Y work with product X.
*By "support," all we meant is basic functionality. It does allow product Y to frangulate over the standard three-gnorgl raniseft. I know that the main selling point of product Y is that it can frangulate over eight gnorgls more than standard products, but we only support the basic functionality.
*Anyone knowledgeable could have told you that X's support for Y sucks. It was your dumb fault for believing the spec sheet.
*We've found that most of our customers LIKE having Product Y hang, freeze, and emit smoke.
*Oh, we're sorry about that, but it was marketing that put that on the spec sheet, not engineering.
...and wait until the King Features Syndicate and/or the heirs of Billy Rose start knocking at the door. The comic strip was created by Billy DeBeck in 1919, so I guess maybe they're in the clear until the next copyright-extension law gets passed--although the comic strip still exists, as "Snuffy Smith." The song is later than that and is probably still under copyright. You all know it, right?
Right?
Baaaaaaaarney Google! With the goo-goo-googley eyes! Baaaaaaaarney Google! Had a wife three times his size! She sued Barney for divorce-- Now he's living with his horse-- Baaaaaaaarney Google! With the goo-goo-googley eyes!
Best quote in the article: "Windows users are so accustomed to usability problems that they don't even recognize them as usability problems."
Unfortunately, this extends far, far beyond Windows. This is a problem for the entire industry.
It reminds me of the way nuclear power plants are (were?) licensed. If, during review, the nuclear regulatory commission finds a safety issue that is unique to the particular installation, the licensee must address it before it can be licensed. If, however, the licensee can demonstrate that the issue is actually "generic"--that is common to all nuclear power plants--the licensee need not do anything about it.
In the PC world, any problem that persists for more than a few years is not longer perceived as a problem. It becomes "generic."
The phenomenon is even getting worse over time, thanks to the general public's increasing familiarity with computers. During the eighties, when manufacturers were trying to seduce individuals into buying home PCs (and IT managers into abandoning those hard-to-use green screens for easy-to-use GUIs), usability disasters were treated as important. No more.
Computers hit their peak of usability sometime in the eighties and have been in steady decline ever since.
One of the biggest issues noted in the article is the instability of Windows over time as software packages are installed and uninstalled. But this is hardly limited to Windows. The irony here is that the ability to uninstall software properly was supposed to be a logo requirement for Windows NT 4.0 software, and one of the features that Microsoft used to urge its superiority to 3.5.
Unfortunately, software installation and uninstallation is not a trivial problem. To do it right would require a great deal of functionality that can only be performed by the OS, which would need, for example, to track which system components were in use by which applications. And it would need to have the ability to associate specific versions of system components with applications, so that it would not be vulnerable to the assumption that Version 3.6.1 of the Frammis Service is absolutely guaranteed to have fewer bugs and be totally backward compatible with every previous version of the Frammis Service that has ever been released.
And before sixteen people reply explaining that.NET fixes all that, spare me. As I pointed out, it has been true FOREVER that Microsoft has claimed that the next release of NT/Win2K/WinXP/Longhorn/whatever would fix all that.
Microsoft didn't solve the problem. They just sort of declared that it had been solved. Installshield and friends kludge their way through installations, merrily making clumsy guesses and assumptions about the history of the system and the needs of other applications and overwriting files and changing registry settings. SQA departments are happy if the installed application runs after installation on a clean OS with no other software installed and don't have the time or the mission to make sure that (say) installing the application doesn't break anybody else's application. (Indeed, one suspects that in some parts of the industry, it's consider a plus if installing one application breaks other applications, if they happen to be competing applications).
I could go on and on. (Indeed, I already have). In the world of PC's (and I include both WIndows and Macs--and nothing I've read makes me think Linux is very different), an awful lot of things don't work very well and NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE because it's "always" been that way. Laypeople have gotten accustomed to blaming themselves ("my computer hates me,") IT departments don't even expect computers to work properly after about three years; developers/hackers/sophisticated users enjoy the challenge of troubleshooting the latest glitch......and formerly tame, humble consumer devices like televisions sets, cars, and cameras are getting computers built into them and are declining in usability too.
Reminds of a Dave Barry column...
on
G5 in an iMac
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...in which he's speculating about how the Schick razor company came up with the idea of the Quattro razor with four blades. He imagines some marketing executive reading about Gillette's introduction of the Mach 3 3-blad razor and saying "Quick! Set up a focus group to find out what number comes after 3!"
If you don't know Spanish very well, plug that link http://www.baja-beachclub.com/bajaes/asp/zonavip.a spx into Babelfish and read it. It's all futures. In Babelfish's translation:
Q: Conrad, you think that the VeriChip will have good welcome? A: If, I know much people with desire to implant it to it. At the moment, almost everybody takes piercings, tattoos or silicone.
They're not doing it yet. They don't know whether anyone will be willing to use it.
Die gedanken sind frei, my thoughts freely flower Die gedanken sind frei, my thoughs give me power No scholar can map them, no hunter can trap them No man can deny, Die gedanken sind frei!
I think as I please, and this gives me pleasure My conscience decress this right I must treasure My thoughts will not cater to Duke or Dictator No man can deny, Die gedanken sind frei!
And should tyrants take me and throw me in prison My thoughts will burst free, like blossoms in season Foundations will crumble the structures will tumble and free men shall cry, "Die gedanken sind frei"
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution may be nominally "non-partisan," but it is usually described as a "conservative think tank."
I personally read the article as an attack on the Open Source community on the basis of its being sort of leftish or socialistic--much like Darl McBride's claim that the GPL is unconstitutional--but a much cleverer, well-reasoned, subtle attack than Darl's.
Turing was quite a guy. When I was a grad student in zoology, I was casually interested for a while in differentiation--the process by which a bunch of seemingly similar cells decide that some of them should become a liver, some lungs, etc. I ran across a 1950s paper, I think it was in Transactions of the Royal Academy of Science that touched on the subject in some depth--and my jaw dropped when I discovered it was by Alan Turing. I had to blink twice and double check to confirm that it really was the Turing-machine Turing and not other Alan Turing. (Google search on "turing embryology" for more).
Apple stuff is so overpriced... why, the lowest-cost OS X platform you can buy from Apple is a $799 eMac.
With just a little bit of work and a decent motherboard you can put together a smokin' Wintel box for $400, tops and, well, sure, the eMac includes a monitor but you probably already have one.
So what if it runs at 1/200 the speed of a Mac? Hey, put a cooler on the chip and overclock it, then it will run at 1/100 the speed of the Mac!
Dan Bricklin criticized this concept some years ago. He presented his criticism in the form of an hysterically funny demo program created with his demo program tool. You can find it at
http://www.bricklin.com/chiapaint.htm
Of course, that was the dialup days... and of course we're all on high-speed connections now, right? And they never go down? And they have zero latency? And there are never any version skew issues, because Web-based standards are so superbly engineered with respect to forward compatibility, and vendors, regardless of their business strategy, fully understand that it is in their best interests to be punctilious about following them?
In a 1946 essay entitled "You and the Atom Bomb," George Orwell wrote:
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff.... But curiously little has been said, at any rate, in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"...Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace.'"
George Orwell,Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol 4, item #2
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so the problems are not in the APE framework, but in the modules that run under it. However, the framework is useless without modules to run under it. The equation is clear enough: install haxies and incur a significant risk of problems. The benefits may, in a sensible person's mind, outweigh the risks, just as was true of extensions in OS 9 and TSR's in MS-DOS, but the risks are not negligible. To say that they don't matter because they're not the fault if the APE framework itself is silly.
Please spare me the enthusiasts for whom no failure is ever the fault of the object of their enthusiasm. For example, Windows advocates who insist that bluescreens don't count because they're caused by "drivers," while ignoring the fact that you needed to install drivers to get your display hardware/Adaptec SCSI card/whatever to work.
True story. Circa late seventies. A friend was praising his NorthStar computer to the skies. I asked if it was reliable. He said it had been 100% reliable and he'd never had any problems at all. I asked him to demonstrate it to me. He said, "Oh, sorry, I can right now, the power supply burned out and I'm waiting for a replacement." I said, "But I thought you said it was 100% reliable." He replied, "The computer works fine--it's just the power supply that's out."
I wish I had clipped and saved the column I saw some years ago in a controlled-circulation publication, I believe it may have been Industrial Photography. It's a very old problem. The columnist described it as how to deal with the client who insists that you could save very large amounts of time and money if you would only provide just very slightly shoddy work.
His answer went something like this: "I am a professional. I am exactly as good as the last job I have delivered. All my work is of professional quality, always, and I do not compromise or scamp my work for anybody, ever, because that is not what professionals do."
He went on to say that a professional must never do shoddy work and must always be willing to risk his job when asked to. He argued that it was committing career suicide to ever have shoddy work in public view with your name on it.
One of the characteristics of a professional is a sense of responsibility to "the profession" and to fellow professionals, as well as to the person who is writing the check.
I expect to get flamed by replies from people who write checks or who have been indoctrinated by people who write checks, and I don't say he was 100% right, but there is an ethical dimension to professional work.
An interesting project, but it certainly seems like a Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson for UK readers) way to go about it.
The Mac G5 approaches this problem by using lots of big, slow-turning fans. It's probably expensive, but I doubt that it's as expensive as active noise cancellation. And Apple did a very good job. The Mac G5 is not silent, but in normal operation it is quieter than any machine I've used since the fanless 1984 Mac and the Apple ][.
...then I'll be prepared to say that someone has actually managed to improve on Cinerama.
OK, I'm curious to see it--but I don't believe a word of it. My brain is capable of converting 2D presentations into 3D using depth cues. I suspect my brain is better at it than their software is. And that wherever their software falls short, there will be an intense mental irritation factor.
In the fifties, a sound engineer whose name escapes me devoted a _lot_ of effort to applying electronic filtering to add a stereo effect to Toscanini's recordings, with the idea that he was preserving them for posterity. Toscanini's recordings and reputation have survived, but it's noteworthy that all the CD remasterings are in mono.
I don't think I've seen any upsurge of interest in "colorized" black-and-white movies, either.
I would expect automatic 3D to suffer from the same issues as colorizing: problems at the edges where things are entering the frame, problems with things that are in the background and hence out of focus, scenes that consists of thousands of moving objects (crowds, tree leaves flexing in the wind, sunlight glancing off rippling water) where the cues are imprecise and the computational effort needed to track thousands of objects is intense...
Seems to me that speaks for itself. If, in 1985, Microsoft thought "Windows" wasn't generic, why did they think they had to qualify it by tacking their corporate name in front?
You don't hear other companies calling their products "the General Motors Cadillac" or "Schering-Plough Claritin" or the "Sanford Sharpie" or "Procter and Gamble Mr. Clean."
Anyone product manager would want their product name to be short and punchy. Nobody would tack the company name on unless the company's own legal department had opined that the name is generic, or close to generic, or in danger of becoming generic.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Michael Hart's decision to make the basic format of PG texts "plain vanilla ASCII" has resulted in texts that are highly accessible by any meaning I can think of for that word. They are also compact, platform-agnostic, and durable. Texts contributed in the 1980s are fully usable today.
While there have been constant complaints about PG using the "wrong" format, opinions on the "right" format have been the flavor-of-the-month (or at least several flavors per decade). Had PG decided to use a "better" format, all of their volunteer time would probably have been taken up converting (say) WordPerfect to RTF to HTML to SGML to XML, leaving relatively little time to digitize and proofread texts.
Oh, gimme a break. "A Sound of Thunder" is an exquisitely crafted short story that is based on a) an idea, and b) nicely constructed verbal imagery. It works by stimulating the imagination.
It's a pretty solid meme. I know quite a few people who remember "that story about the time-traveller who steps on the butterfly" but cannot remember the title or author. (Do you think Edward Lorenz might have had a fading engram of the story in his mind when he came up with the title "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"
I can see it working quite well as (say) a half-hour radio play, but there's no way to make a movie out of this without losing everything in the story that made it great.
It would make a much sense to make an action blockbuster out of a Basho haiku, or a Broadway rock musical from a Zen koan.
Only published in paper and long out of print--but available from second-hand booksellers such as abebooks--you may want to read Barbara O'Brien's haunting book "Operators and Things." This 1958 book was written by a spontaneously-recovered schizophrenic and is a first-person view of the schizophrenic experience.
The title refers to her delusional revelation that what seems to be human beings in the world are actually two different kinds of beings, Operators and Things, and that she is a Thing.
A good essay always consists of an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing paragraph.
It is essential that every paragraph begin with a topic sentence. The first paragraph should state the thesis, or point of the essay. Since computers cannot actually understand the entire essay, you can assume that it will only be judging the local coherence of writing which is free to run like a river, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, taking us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.
The second paragraph should make a point that present a countervailing view, the antithesis. Once again, spelling should be correct, the essay should be capable of passing a Microsoft Word grammar check, but after that we pass through grass behind the bush where a gull calls, coming far, ending here. Finn again? Take, but softly memory till thousands are given the keys to a way a lone a last a loved a long the river runs.
The third paragraph should synthesize the material covered in the first two paragraphs. It is, however, important that any material obtained from external sources be modified so that it cannot be detected as an exact match for anything on the Web. So, she went into the garden to cut a lettuce leaf to make an mince pie; and at the same time a great wolverine, coming up the street, goes into the store. "What! No laundry detergent?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
In conclusion, the final paragraph should recapitulate and summarize what has gone before: since you can be sure that a computer is capable of counting paragraphs, a good essay always consists of five paragraphs. If it has the right number of paragraphs and every word is spelled correctly, you are almost certain to get at least a passing grade.
I skipped the upgrade from Office 98 to Office 2001 because according to accounts I read in mailing lists, virtually none of the bugs that had (and have) been plaguing me in Office 98 were fixed.
(The worst is: unwanted and seemingly unpredictable behavior in the numbering and formatting of numbered lists when minor edits are made in other portions of the document).
I was unable to obtain from Microsoft anything corresponding to what other vendors refer to as "release notes" for Office 2001, or any list of bugs that were fixed.
Are there release notes or bug fix lists for Office 2004?
...to learn about the respective merits of Windows and Open Source has already made up their mind. There's no point in trying to counter such a seminar.
The only thing worth doing is to try to understand the internal politics that must be going on in your organization if they intend to send anyone to such a seminar.
Langa's criticism sounds fair to me. I've been there, done that so many times. Official spec sheet says product X supports product Y. You have product Y. You buy product X. Product Y doesn't work with it. You complain. Then you hear variations on the following theme
*Very few of our customers are using product Y.
*Personally, I would never have recommended product Y.
*Why are you using product Y? Product Z is so much better.
*You don't really need to have product Y work with product X.
*By "support," all we meant is basic functionality. It does allow product Y to frangulate over the standard three-gnorgl raniseft. I know that the main selling point of product Y is that it can frangulate over eight gnorgls more than standard products, but we only support the basic functionality.
*Anyone knowledgeable could have told you that X's support for Y sucks. It was your dumb fault for believing the spec sheet.
*We've found that most of our customers LIKE having Product Y hang, freeze, and emit smoke.
*Oh, we're sorry about that, but it was marketing that put that on the spec sheet, not engineering.
...and wait until the King Features Syndicate and/or the heirs of Billy Rose start knocking at the door. The comic strip was created by Billy DeBeck in 1919, so I guess maybe they're in the clear until the next copyright-extension law gets passed--although the comic strip still exists, as "Snuffy Smith." The song is later than that and is probably still under copyright. You all know it, right?
Right?
Baaaaaaaarney Google!
With the goo-goo-googley eyes!
Baaaaaaaarney Google!
Had a wife three times his size!
She sued Barney for divorce--
Now he's living with his horse--
Baaaaaaaarney Google!
With the goo-goo-googley eyes!
Well, it WAS a big hit. A long time ago.
Best quote in the article: "Windows users are so accustomed to usability problems that they don't even recognize them as usability problems."
.NET fixes all that, spare me. As I pointed out, it has been true FOREVER that Microsoft has claimed that the next release of NT/Win2K/WinXP/Longhorn/whatever would fix all that.
...and formerly tame, humble consumer devices like televisions sets, cars, and cameras are getting computers built into them and are declining in usability too.
Unfortunately, this extends far, far beyond Windows. This is a problem for the entire industry.
It reminds me of the way nuclear power plants are (were?) licensed. If, during review, the nuclear regulatory commission finds a safety issue that is unique to the particular installation, the licensee must address it before it can be licensed. If, however, the licensee can demonstrate that the issue is actually "generic"--that is common to all nuclear power plants--the licensee need not do anything about it.
In the PC world, any problem that persists for more than a few years is not longer perceived as a problem. It becomes "generic."
The phenomenon is even getting worse over time, thanks to the general public's increasing familiarity with computers. During the eighties, when manufacturers were trying to seduce individuals into buying home PCs (and IT managers into abandoning those hard-to-use green screens for easy-to-use GUIs), usability disasters were treated as important. No more.
Computers hit their peak of usability sometime in the eighties and have been in steady decline ever since.
One of the biggest issues noted in the article is the instability of Windows over time as software packages are installed and uninstalled. But this is hardly limited to Windows. The irony here is that the ability to uninstall software properly was supposed to be a logo requirement for Windows NT 4.0 software, and one of the features that Microsoft used to urge its superiority to 3.5.
Unfortunately, software installation and uninstallation is not a trivial problem. To do it right would require a great deal of functionality that can only be performed by the OS, which would need, for example, to track which system components were in use by which applications. And it would need to have the ability to associate specific versions of system components with applications, so that it would not be vulnerable to the assumption that Version 3.6.1 of the Frammis Service is absolutely guaranteed to have fewer bugs and be totally backward compatible with every previous version of the Frammis Service that has ever been released.
And before sixteen people reply explaining that
Microsoft didn't solve the problem. They just sort of declared that it had been solved. Installshield and friends kludge their way through installations, merrily making clumsy guesses and assumptions about the history of the system and the needs of other applications and overwriting files and changing registry settings. SQA departments are happy if the installed application runs after installation on a clean OS with no other software installed and don't have the time or the mission to make sure that (say) installing the application doesn't break anybody else's application. (Indeed, one suspects that in some parts of the industry, it's consider a plus if installing one application breaks other applications, if they happen to be competing applications).
I could go on and on. (Indeed, I already have). In the world of PC's (and I include both WIndows and Macs--and nothing I've read makes me think Linux is very different), an awful lot of things don't work very well and NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE because it's "always" been that way. Laypeople have gotten accustomed to blaming themselves ("my computer hates me,") IT departments don't even expect computers to work properly after about three years; developers/hackers/sophisticated users enjoy the challenge of troubleshooting the latest glitch...
...in which he's speculating about how the Schick razor company came up with the idea of the Quattro razor with four blades. He imagines some marketing executive reading about Gillette's introduction of the Mach 3 3-blad razor and saying "Quick! Set up a focus group to find out what number comes after 3!"
Sometimes keyboard noise can be very expressive even without computer analysis. I've occasionally heard something like this from several cubes away:
Click-click (Beep!) Click-click (Beep!) (Long pause) (Mouse click, mouse click). Click-click (Beep!) Click-click (Beep!) (Pause) Click-click (Beep!)
Followed by a primal scream.
If you don't know Spanish very well, plug that link http://www.baja-beachclub.com/bajaes/asp/zonavip.a spx into Babelfish and read it. It's all futures. In Babelfish's translation:
Q: Conrad, you think that the VeriChip will have good welcome?
A: If, I know much people with desire to implant it to it. At the moment, almost everybody takes piercings, tattoos or silicone.
They're not doing it yet. They don't know whether anyone will be willing to use it.
All together now, in four-part harmony:
Die gedanken sind frei, my thoughts freely flower
Die gedanken sind frei, my thoughs give me power
No scholar can map them, no hunter can trap them
No man can deny, Die gedanken sind frei!
I think as I please, and this gives me pleasure
My conscience decress this right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater to Duke or Dictator
No man can deny, Die gedanken sind frei!
And should tyrants take me and throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst free, like blossoms in season
Foundations will crumble the structures will tumble
and free men shall cry, "Die gedanken sind frei"
Oh, wait...
Sorry, posted to wrong discussion...
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution may be nominally "non-partisan," but it is usually described as a "conservative think tank."
I personally read the article as an attack on the Open Source community on the basis of its being sort of leftish or socialistic--much like Darl McBride's claim that the GPL is unconstitutional--but a much cleverer, well-reasoned, subtle attack than Darl's.
Turing was quite a guy. When I was a grad student in zoology, I was casually interested for a while in differentiation--the process by which a bunch of seemingly similar cells decide that some of them should become a liver, some lungs, etc. I ran across a 1950s paper, I think it was in Transactions of the Royal Academy of Science that touched on the subject in some depth--and my jaw dropped when I discovered it was by Alan Turing. I had to blink twice and double check to confirm that it really was the Turing-machine Turing and not other Alan Turing. (Google search on "turing embryology" for more).
Apple stuff is so overpriced... why, the lowest-cost OS X platform you can buy from Apple is a $799 eMac.
With just a little bit of work and a decent motherboard you can put together a smokin' Wintel box for $400, tops and, well, sure, the eMac includes a monitor but you probably already have one.
So what if it runs at 1/200 the speed of a Mac? Hey, put a cooler on the chip and overclock it, then it will run at 1/100 the speed of the Mac!
And for less than half the price!
Well, OK, for $0.50 more than half price.
Dan Bricklin criticized this concept some years ago. He presented his criticism in the form of an hysterically funny demo program created with his demo program tool. You can find it at
http://www.bricklin.com/chiapaint.htm
Of course, that was the dialup days... and of course we're all on high-speed connections now, right? And they never go down? And they have zero latency? And there are never any version skew issues, because Web-based standards are so superbly engineered with respect to forward compatibility, and vendors, regardless of their business strategy, fully understand that it is in their best interests to be punctilious about following them?
In a 1946 essay entitled "You and the Atom Bomb," George Orwell wrote:
...Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace.'"
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff.... But curiously little has been said, at any rate, in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"
George Orwell,Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol 4, item #2