To me it appears that some of the people in IS are afraid of being made less powerful, less needed, and less relied upon.
They shouldn't be. Any complex system, be it a computer or computer network, an aircraft, or a nuclear power plant, needs maintenance and repair. Mechanical systems suffer from corrosion, abbrasion, and fatigue of materials. Safety-critical systems also require upgrades and modifications as weknesses of design or flaws in manufacturing processes are discovered by the manufacturer or other users. Any air carrier, for instance, thus has aircraft maintenance staff -- aircraft administrators, if you want -- to deal with these things. Although being bound by lots of formalism, like maintenance manuals and bulletins issued by manufacturers, they are by no means less powerful, less needed, or less relied upon. Whether an aircraft safely arrives at its destination or not depends on both pilots and maintenance people (and many more, like airport ground personnel and air traffic controllers). This is really a team effort. Neither pilots nor maintenance staff nor any other party involved is root in this system.
There is no reason why computer system and network administration should be any different. Computer systems suffer from degeneration over time just like any mechanical system, and likewise need continuous maintenance. A company running computer systems cannot do without maintenance staff, nor is there a need for maintenance personnel if there are no users.
This is not to say that there couldn't be some people in IS who confuse technical roles, particularly the root / regular user distinction, with social roles. I guess evolution will finally take care of them.
This is covered in kindergarten here in the U.S. (...)
You are so right. However, the world will never be the same after mankind discovered ways to sell, buy, and sue each other over ASCII strings used as Internet domain names.
My favorite as of late is "worst-case Laufzeit" (worst case runtime).
This is probably just a matter of convenience. "Laufzeit" is short, just two syllables, so one would not gain much expressing it in English instead. But using a German term for "worst-case" would mean to say or write half a sentence: "im schlechtesten Fall". Also, this phrase cannot be used as an adjective, so one would be forced to use postfix notation: "Laufzeit im schlechtesten Fall".
...for three years they've been talking about this amazing.NET thing. And every year the masses go "what the hell is this?"...
I remember that, when I first read about.NET it was described as a strategy. That's probably the most correct description of the key underlying concept.
Especially do not claim that safety-critical systems are hack-proof, since even people who wouldn't normally try to hack them will try.
It does not even need evildoers to defeat safety-critical systems of some complexity. Consider for instance the 1993 Warshaw accident of a Lufthansa A320 (see also this report). Amongst its causes was a safety system meant to prevent deployment of reverse thrust and spoilers unless the plane had its wheels down on the runway. Which makes sense in principle because trying to stop a plane in mid-air is not a good idey, but turned out to be, uh, not quite helpful when this accident happened.
Now one may argue that this particular problem, or any particular problem, could be fixed by improving the systems' design. However, complexity of the system, and of the problem to be solved, makes it unlikely that even the smartest engineers will get it right soon. Now add evil minds to your considerations.
In the case discussed here, an obvious weakness is the need for location-awareness. What if the plane "thinks" it is elsewehre? This issue is addressed in the article, but I do not really see how they are going to solve it. What if the plane "thinks" it is inside such a soft wall, or surrounded by no-fly zones? What if the plane is Air Force One and has an actual reason to enter a no-fly zone? What if the plane just "believes" it might have been Air Force One in a former life? Not to mention the fact that such a system does not prevent the root problem: planes can still be hijacked. Maybe the next hijacked plane hits airport buildings then, killing as many people as the WTC attack did?
So what could be my secret drive or desire behind that omission, from a Freudian point of view?;-) I don't know, but the keyboard certainly is my most valuable input device. I feel it is not because of desks; I still do love it sitting in a train with the laptop computer on my knees, or the stripped-down version my cellphone provides me with for typing of short messages, names, or calendar entries. There may be a reason for this even if we imagine fundamentally different input schemes like really perfect speech recognition were widely available. For instance the keyboard allows me to easily pause at any time, or to go back in already written text and edit an arbitrary portion of it. And a great deal of computer usage is some sort of text processing.
I don't believe that the desktop paradigm is the only possible computer user interface. It's only the dominant UI because the people designing, improving and using the UI all work at desks. Once computers become more ubiquitous, even in other parts of the world where there is less of a desktop user population, so the desktop will be more foreign to more users (...)
You have a valid point here, but I think it is not so much because of the way hackers and designers work. Rather, it is the fact that most computers sit on a desk today. I remember some HCI person giving a talk at the local university about research he did in interaction with smartboards, that is, large touchscreens attached to walls. One thing he mentioned was that typical WIMP interfaces as we know them from desktop machines break down entirely there, for a quite simple reason: the display is much larger than a regular screen and the user is closer to it. This makes e.g. locating a button or window on screen much much harder.
However, I do not see too close a relation between physical desks and current user interfaces. It is somewhat misleading to talk about a desktop metaphor here even though we use to refer to those interfaces as desktops. The desktop metaphor may have been a guiding principle when the first GUIs were developed but since then they have become a thing of their own. Do we really draw conclusions about our computers' domain using concepts from the domain of physical desks and offices as suggested by Lakoff's Contemporary Theory of Metaphor?
For instance, I can see a computer IU based on another very well known and mature interface that Tim made a brief reference to- the automobile.
Such interfaces do exist already -- for computers we use to call cars. No, really. A car is kind of a computer today. But frankly, I don't see how this could be employed as a computer UI if the computer does not control a machine that has an engine and wheels. The navigation metaphor you mention (and use) seems misplaced or at least overstretched here. Navigating the Web is pretty different from spatial navigation. For instance the Web is a discrete space where one jumps from one place to another while a network of streets is so only if viewed at a higher level of abstraction which is irrelevant to actual driving tasks like making a turn or changing lanes. Which might be the reason why those 3D information spaces largely failed so far.
I really wish someone would give these guys a pile of cash to redesign computer GUIs. I can't be the only one that is sick of the slow pace of development of computer interfaces. We really haven't progressed much since the work of Xerox Park.
What you will get is a computer with a color screen and a pointer device, windows, icons, and menus. What we know as computers today is a result of years of evolution. There is not much potential for radical change unless there is a radical change in the way computers work and interface with the real world. What is more likely to happen is more specialization of devices. Cellphones, digital cameras, etc. are besically computers but easier to use because the particular device is designed for some particular pupose(s). Universal computers supporting word processing as well as online brokerage, Java programming as well as image processing, and gaming as well as spamming, are different from that. They do, of course, not fit any particular purpose outstandingly well but that's a feature and not a design bug.
Also, the WIMP approach represents a canonical solution to the lower levels of interaction. Mice and windows help you to express what you want to do as soon as you what you have to do in order to achieve your goal at hand. They do help you to format text in a word processor but they don't tell you how typesetting works and how to produce a nice looking and readable document. Teaching higher level concepts through user interfaces indeed is a problem largely unsolved, but replacing mice and windows with radically different won't solve it either, at least not for general purpose devices.
If you've ever sat down with someone who hasn't used a computer much and watch them struggle to do the simplest things, you'll understand how bad current GUIs are.
Es dauert Jahre, eine Fremdsprache oder eine andere nichttriviale FÃhigkeit halbwegs zu lernen. Warum sollten Computer ohne jeden Lernaufwand zu benutzen sein? (It takes several years to learn to some extent a foreign language or any other non-trivial skill. Why do you think computers could be usable without any effort learning them?) Sure, it would be nice if they were but don't you expect too much here? Is your assessment of the current situation even correct? As a matter of fact, a lot of people is able to use current computers. It takes them time learning what they can do with their machines and how to do it but they do send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, and make friends online. And they achieve much more than just watching kind of interactive TV this way.
Get real, the revolution you are asking for will have to wait until the Holodeck(TM) has been invented, or Direct Brain Access(R).
It is the responsibility of copyright holders to find violations and defend their own hold on ideas.
Besides that, it is probably impossible to develop any system of the size and complexity of a modern operating system and keep track of all potentially relevant intellectual property issues. Such an approach would just not fit the ways and speed of todays software development.
Re:When personality control becomes an industry
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
I read an article the other day from a psychology publication that stated that people nowadays are so bombarded with redundant soundbytes of information, it now takes 6-7 transmissions of the same advertising message to "stick" in a person's head. And every day it gets worse.
It is getting better, actually. This process is known as immunization.
28 is nice: it allows you to be in sync with your environment once a week. I once tried this for a couple of weeks while rushing to get my diploma thesis written down on time. It was an interesting experience, waking up at different times each day, cycling to my workplace through a sleeping town at 3 a.m., and scaring to death the charwoman who didn't expect anybody else to be there at six in the morning. It did, however, require quite some amount of planning for everyday tasks because it is hard to buy some food in the middle of the night here in.de, and it was generally exhausting. I once experienced kind of a blackout when riding back home, becoming almost unable to proceed. So, at least to me, the 28 hours cycle was not really natural and healthy.
When I was first diagnosed with ADD (ADHD minus the hyperactive aspect) and put on Adderall, I was amazed to discover that it really was possible to follow the thread of an entire meeting and sit down for hours doing work that didn't absolutely fascinate me.
Even more fascinating would be a meeting that achieves continuous attention of attendees for hours by itself.
Translation: I like Linux. Therefore SCO must be wrong in accusing Linux of stealing their IP. If SCO were suing MS, you'd be applauding them.
Yes, I like Linux. And I like music, books, and computer games, too, and I do buy them, using money I earned by producing non-open source software. But I like human creativity as well, and I do not like the idea of lawyers and some company's management inhibiting it. Human culture, parts of which nowadays are software and the Internet, develops in an evolutionary process with each new thing building upon what existed before. As Sir Isaac Newton put it: If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. That's why I don't like intellectual property struggles like this. How can one be free and use one's brain if the most likely result is a lawsuit?
It costs drug companies millions of dollars and many chemists and scientists to develop life-saving drugs.
Actually, in some cases it may cost them millions of marketing dollars and a few mad scientists to invent a disease that can be be treated with their new product. See also this.
When is SCO going to get crushed like a lone sidewalk snail?
Why hope to see them crushed? They provide a pretty useful service to the public: demonstrating that the concept of intellectual property leads to poor results if applied in the manner shown by SCO. Intellectual property is a nice idea if used e.g. by an artist to protect her works from unauthorized altering, or if it helps an inventor to make a living. It is not if separated from the actual, individual creators of something; it is not if used to revoke transactions after the fact; it is not if applied to prevent people from tinkering with things they did buy. Now we have a showcase. Thank you, SCO!
That's what it had started with. 70 years ago, in May 1933, books were burning all over Germany. The Nazi regime tried to wipe out "un-German" culture before starting to wipe out "un-Aryan" people.
Just imagine they had had a restrictions management system enabling them to cleanse not only bookstores, public libraries, museums, etc. but also all the private bookshelves with the push of a button.
Ever wondered why there are so many "Undocumented X" or "X Secrets" books out there, with X invariably referring to some product of one particular well-known vendor of Windows(tm) operating systems? After looking at some arbitrary F/OSS source code one would expect there to be a myriad of "Undocumented Linux/*BSD/whatever" books, yet those are rarely seen. The reason might be this.
Encouraging developers to use unofficial, undocumented APIs of some particular implementation of something is quite efficient a way of creating incompatibilities between independent implementations even of otherwise standardized APIs. Now such subtle incompatibilities happen to
make that particular implementation look "better" or "more stable" than others if a sufficient amount of software is using the undocumented stuff, and
I guess there are certain companies out there that appreciate such effects, and could thus be tempted to help it a little by encouraging authors to write how-to manuals whose contents is against all good developer's reason. Wannabe developers, who after learning X in 21 days don't accomplish much the clean way will do the rest.
You mean that socialist understand, or rather socialists _claim_ that progress of mankind is not and cannot be the property of individuals or small groups.
It certainly can be. The question is, however, why a democracy may want to vote for it. And if it may want to do so, whether it may also want to elect a monarch, and why.
Slashdot Mirror
They shouldn't be. Any complex system, be it a computer or computer network, an aircraft, or a nuclear power plant, needs maintenance and repair. Mechanical systems suffer from corrosion, abbrasion, and fatigue of materials. Safety-critical systems also require upgrades and modifications as weknesses of design or flaws in manufacturing processes are discovered by the manufacturer or other users. Any air carrier, for instance, thus has aircraft maintenance staff -- aircraft administrators, if you want -- to deal with these things. Although being bound by lots of formalism, like maintenance manuals and bulletins issued by manufacturers, they are by no means less powerful, less needed, or less relied upon. Whether an aircraft safely arrives at its destination or not depends on both pilots and maintenance people (and many more, like airport ground personnel and air traffic controllers). This is really a team effort. Neither pilots nor maintenance staff nor any other party involved is root in this system.
There is no reason why computer system and network administration should be any different. Computer systems suffer from degeneration over time just like any mechanical system, and likewise need continuous maintenance. A company running computer systems cannot do without maintenance staff, nor is there a need for maintenance personnel if there are no users.
This is not to say that there couldn't be some people in IS who confuse technical roles, particularly the root / regular user distinction, with social roles. I guess evolution will finally take care of them.
You are so right. However, the world will never be the same after mankind discovered ways to sell, buy, and sue each other over ASCII strings used as Internet domain names.
Wouldn't it be even more effective to dismiss a conception of intellectual property that leads to such claims?
... sex in the workplace, to much of the same effect. My employer, however, fails to support this.
According to this German tabloid, he is also going to stop spam, and Microsoft is to give away $ 10,000,000,000.
This is probably just a matter of convenience. "Laufzeit" is short, just two syllables, so one would not gain much expressing it in English instead. But using a German term for "worst-case" would mean to say or write half a sentence: "im schlechtesten Fall". Also, this phrase cannot be used as an adjective, so one would be forced to use postfix notation: "Laufzeit im schlechtesten Fall".
The result of a bug in Word. It was supposed to be .NOT but Word autocorrected it and nobody noticed.
I remember that, when I first read about .NET it was described as a strategy. That's probably the most correct description of the key underlying concept.
It does not even need evildoers to defeat safety-critical systems of some complexity. Consider for instance the 1993 Warshaw accident of a Lufthansa A320 (see also this report). Amongst its causes was a safety system meant to prevent deployment of reverse thrust and spoilers unless the plane had its wheels down on the runway. Which makes sense in principle because trying to stop a plane in mid-air is not a good idey, but turned out to be, uh, not quite helpful when this accident happened.
Now one may argue that this particular problem, or any particular problem, could be fixed by improving the systems' design. However, complexity of the system, and of the problem to be solved, makes it unlikely that even the smartest engineers will get it right soon. Now add evil minds to your considerations.
In the case discussed here, an obvious weakness is the need for location-awareness. What if the plane "thinks" it is elsewehre? This issue is addressed in the article, but I do not really see how they are going to solve it. What if the plane "thinks" it is inside such a soft wall, or surrounded by no-fly zones? What if the plane is Air Force One and has an actual reason to enter a no-fly zone? What if the plane just "believes" it might have been Air Force One in a former life? Not to mention the fact that such a system does not prevent the root problem: planes can still be hijacked. Maybe the next hijacked plane hits airport buildings then, killing as many people as the WTC attack did?
So what could be my secret drive or desire behind that omission, from a Freudian point of view? ;-) I don't know, but the keyboard certainly is my most valuable input device. I feel it is not because of desks; I still do love it sitting in a train with the laptop computer on my knees, or the stripped-down version my cellphone provides me with for typing of short messages, names, or calendar entries. There may be a reason for this even if we imagine fundamentally different input schemes like really perfect speech recognition were widely available. For instance the keyboard allows me to easily pause at any time, or to go back in already written text and edit an arbitrary portion of it. And a great deal of computer usage is some sort of text processing.
You have a valid point here, but I think it is not so much because of the way hackers and designers work. Rather, it is the fact that most computers sit on a desk today. I remember some HCI person giving a talk at the local university about research he did in interaction with smartboards, that is, large touchscreens attached to walls. One thing he mentioned was that typical WIMP interfaces as we know them from desktop machines break down entirely there, for a quite simple reason: the display is much larger than a regular screen and the user is closer to it. This makes e.g. locating a button or window on screen much much harder.
However, I do not see too close a relation between physical desks and current user interfaces. It is somewhat misleading to talk about a desktop metaphor here even though we use to refer to those interfaces as desktops. The desktop metaphor may have been a guiding principle when the first GUIs were developed but since then they have become a thing of their own. Do we really draw conclusions about our computers' domain using concepts from the domain of physical desks and offices as suggested by Lakoff's Contemporary Theory of Metaphor?
Such interfaces do exist already -- for computers we use to call cars. No, really. A car is kind of a computer today. But frankly, I don't see how this could be employed as a computer UI if the computer does not control a machine that has an engine and wheels. The navigation metaphor you mention (and use) seems misplaced or at least overstretched here. Navigating the Web is pretty different from spatial navigation. For instance the Web is a discrete space where one jumps from one place to another while a network of streets is so only if viewed at a higher level of abstraction which is irrelevant to actual driving tasks like making a turn or changing lanes. Which might be the reason why those 3D information spaces largely failed so far.
That's a tautology. Of course we wouldn't need as many lawyers then.
What you will get is a computer with a color screen and a pointer device, windows, icons, and menus. What we know as computers today is a result of years of evolution. There is not much potential for radical change unless there is a radical change in the way computers work and interface with the real world. What is more likely to happen is more specialization of devices. Cellphones, digital cameras, etc. are besically computers but easier to use because the particular device is designed for some particular pupose(s). Universal computers supporting word processing as well as online brokerage, Java programming as well as image processing, and gaming as well as spamming, are different from that. They do, of course, not fit any particular purpose outstandingly well but that's a feature and not a design bug.
Also, the WIMP approach represents a canonical solution to the lower levels of interaction. Mice and windows help you to express what you want to do as soon as you what you have to do in order to achieve your goal at hand. They do help you to format text in a word processor but they don't tell you how typesetting works and how to produce a nice looking and readable document. Teaching higher level concepts through user interfaces indeed is a problem largely unsolved, but replacing mice and windows with radically different won't solve it either, at least not for general purpose devices.
Es dauert Jahre, eine Fremdsprache oder eine andere nichttriviale FÃhigkeit halbwegs zu lernen. Warum sollten Computer ohne jeden Lernaufwand zu benutzen sein? (It takes several years to learn to some extent a foreign language or any other non-trivial skill. Why do you think computers could be usable without any effort learning them?) Sure, it would be nice if they were but don't you expect too much here? Is your assessment of the current situation even correct? As a matter of fact, a lot of people is able to use current computers. It takes them time learning what they can do with their machines and how to do it but they do send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, and make friends online. And they achieve much more than just watching kind of interactive TV this way.
Get real, the revolution you are asking for will have to wait until the Holodeck(TM) has been invented, or Direct Brain Access(R).
Besides that, it is probably impossible to develop any system of the size and complexity of a modern operating system and keep track of all potentially relevant intellectual property issues. Such an approach would just not fit the ways and speed of todays software development.
It is getting better, actually. This process is known as immunization.
28 is nice: it allows you to be in sync with your environment once a week. I once tried this for a couple of weeks while rushing to get my diploma thesis written down on time. It was an interesting experience, waking up at different times each day, cycling to my workplace through a sleeping town at 3 a.m., and scaring to death the charwoman who didn't expect anybody else to be there at six in the morning. It did, however, require quite some amount of planning for everyday tasks because it is hard to buy some food in the middle of the night here in .de, and it was generally exhausting. I once experienced kind of a blackout when riding back home, becoming almost unable to proceed. So, at least to me, the 28 hours cycle was not really natural and healthy.
Even more fascinating would be a meeting that achieves continuous attention of attendees for hours by itself.
SCNR
Yes, I like Linux. And I like music, books, and computer games, too, and I do buy them, using money I earned by producing non-open source software. But I like human creativity as well, and I do not like the idea of lawyers and some company's management inhibiting it. Human culture, parts of which nowadays are software and the Internet, develops in an evolutionary process with each new thing building upon what existed before. As Sir Isaac Newton put it: If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. That's why I don't like intellectual property struggles like this. How can one be free and use one's brain if the most likely result is a lawsuit?
Actually, in some cases it may cost them millions of marketing dollars and a few mad scientists to invent a disease that can be be treated with their new product. See also this.
Why hope to see them crushed? They provide a pretty useful service to the public: demonstrating that the concept of intellectual property leads to poor results if applied in the manner shown by SCO. Intellectual property is a nice idea if used e.g. by an artist to protect her works from unauthorized altering, or if it helps an inventor to make a living. It is not if separated from the actual, individual creators of something; it is not if used to revoke transactions after the fact; it is not if applied to prevent people from tinkering with things they did buy. Now we have a showcase. Thank you, SCO!
That's what it had started with. 70 years ago, in May 1933, books were burning all over Germany. The Nazi regime tried to wipe out "un-German" culture before starting to wipe out "un-Aryan" people.
Just imagine they had had a restrictions management system enabling them to cleanse not only bookstores, public libraries, museums, etc. but also all the private bookshelves with the push of a button.
For more information on Nazi book burnings see http://www.ushmm.org/.
Learn tracking even more objects with juggling.org.
Ever wondered why there are so many "Undocumented X" or "X Secrets" books out there, with X invariably referring to some product of one particular well-known vendor of Windows(tm) operating systems? After looking at some arbitrary F/OSS source code one would expect there to be a myriad of "Undocumented Linux/*BSD/whatever" books, yet those are rarely seen. The reason might be this.
Encouraging developers to use unofficial, undocumented APIs of some particular implementation of something is quite efficient a way of creating incompatibilities between independent implementations even of otherwise standardized APIs. Now such subtle incompatibilities happen to
I guess there are certain companies out there that appreciate such effects, and could thus be tempted to help it a little by encouraging authors to write how-to manuals whose contents is against all good developer's reason. Wannabe developers, who after learning X in 21 days don't accomplish much the clean way will do the rest.
It certainly can be. The question is, however, why a democracy may want to vote for it. And if it may want to do so, whether it may also want to elect a monarch, and why.