Yes, that IS how you start a program. But usability isn't STARTING programs...it's USING them.
I work writing custom solutions for client-server apps. I've never known anybody to have problems starting our software. But using it? Using it, they often have trouble with. Even relatively simple things like searching for a record are beyond some people's immediate grasp. You need to help them "get it."
And I have to say, in the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks. The gimp is a popular example. We don't have Photoshop licenses at work, so I tried working with the Gimp instead. I had what I guess is a good guide which I'd printed out to help me, but I had a lot of trouble. So much in fact, that after three hours of trying to do a relatively simple task (no I won't tell you what it was, because some slashdot pinhead will tell me how "easy it is" and that's not my point) I got in my car and drove the half hour home to do it on my own copy of Photoshop.
Now, I'm not stupid! I'd like to point that out. I've used computers every day for 17 years and I couldn't figure something out! This is a sign of a chronic usability issue, and it's not going to get better unless people stop being smug about how *THEY* figured it out and *EVERYBODY ELSE* should too.
Oh, and the biggest issue with Linux in an office environment is exactly what you recognized. OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla have completely different interfaces from each other, in fact there are few simularities among them. In Windows, almost everything has the same look, and deviations are minor. The sheer number of different looks and feels, UI toolkits, and software development techniques in general has lead to a mishmash of products, leaving the "Linux" operating system looking and feeling like it's a bunch of parts with no real integration. Which makes many users feel like they're using a shoddy system. It's like a car with three different colors of body panels, and two different styles of bucket seats. And no radio.
Word. I never thought of it like this -- that television's primary use is as a tool for community.
But it's true. At work, I find that people who watch the same shows tend to talk to each other more as well. I don't watch much TV, but when I do I'm included in this group. It gives me association, which is the first step towards friendship.
Says a lot for medium...sure it's low brow, idiotic and offers no real insight into the world at large. But it helps prevent you from being uncommunicative. Hell, there are some things I watch I don't even like (wrestling, football), just because it gives me a chance to bond with my core friends on a topic only we share.
He was quoting. He probably should have made the citation. The quote was spoken by a character on the Simpsons who is an educated sociopath. It's supposed to be ironic, and it was really funny in context.
They already have it. anti-virus for PDAs, despite there being no really worthwhile vectors for viruses to spread over the PDA format. After all, you never really sync more than one PDA to the same computer (though you likely sync multiple computers to the same PDA).
I especially enjoy the sales verbage..."The importance of PDAs is growing every day and it is quite likely that these devices will soon become a target for new virus attacks." In other words, "there's currently nothing for the this product to do, but if it ever does become worthwhile, it'll do it after you download something else." Begs the question: why not wait until it becomes an issue, THEN download it? Seems you'd save some money that way, eh?
Oh, and the cost? $20 for a year of nothing. Tell you what, guys...if you're in the market for PDA antivirus protection, I'll beat that price. I'll do nothing for only $10 a year.
I dunno. Your example seems like it wouldn't bother me very much at all, as the transmission vector is kind of worthless. It's easily tracked and requires significant effort on the user's part...it would certainly be less effective than MyDoom, and that doesn't even EXPLOIT a security hole.
I mean, you have to consider internet security the same way you consider office security. Yes, if one of our office doors won't lock, we have an immediate problem. Would it kill us to wait a few days to have it fixed? Probably not. Maybe if it was one of the outside doors...and every time a major hole in an on-by-default protocol has been found, it's been patched before it's exploited. That's what this guy was commenting on...that even if MS' security isn't GREAT, it's certainly GOOD ENOUGH, and part of the blame therefore lies on underfunded (or if you will, lazy) IT departments.
This is still an example of how job choice affects stress, not how technology affects it.
I should also point out I took a pay cut to take my current job. Last year, even with the extra income from Webslum I made 10% less than I did in 2002. But I had SO much less stress, a better relationship with my wife, and a much more positive outlook. No more shitty black metal poetry in my journal! I'm even starting to save money again.
In summation: I'm sorry your job sucks, but you're the one who took it. Even in a bad market, there are stress free options, but many of them require hard decisions. Like telling your CEO that a product can't be kludged together without becoming unmanagable and requiring a massive amount of work a year down the road. Which is, of course, the sort of thing a good architect tells his boss up front, rather than slipping dates and looking like a fool.
BTW: Even if they eventually want custom features, most of the time, your clients will be perfectly satisfied with what you have now, FOR now, and you can slowly work desired features into the main codebase. This is the ONLY way I've seen customer driven software work. Otherwise, you're stuck supporting multiple code bases, and custom hacking EVERYTHING from here on. Besides, I guarantee your client will need a few weeks (or months, depending on the product) to learn and utilize the current features. In that time, you could engineer a great solution, as opposed to delivering a crappy one right now.
Uh, the article claims that exploits haven't been made for security holes that weren't already patched. It doesn't purport that there aren't unpatched holes. And there's an essential difference between an actively exploited hole, and an unpatched hole. One is an immediate concern, the other is an immanent concern.
Is security about actual threats, or possible ones? Depending on which you believe, MS' security is either sufficient or it isn't. Like I said, I'm a part time Windows admin, not a full time security pundit. I only have time to devote to immediate concerns.
When having an up-to-date machine is not enough, then I'll raise my voice in complaint. But at present it is enough and I'm content even if I'm not thrilled.
Sounds like you have stress due to a shitty job, not due to technology.
I have three computers here, a couple projects, customer calls and am in charge of network security. Yet I don't have any stress. I have priorities, and I follow them. I too sometimes work overtime, but on my own terms...if I can't work overtime, I just say I can't. Obviously if there's so much work that they need you to stay late to do it, they need you, period.
A lot of stress is caused by poor coping skills. You can say "no," you know. In fact, in my experience the ability to say "no" is important. All my managers have had that skill, and that's how they got their jobs. People respect a helpful worker, but they hate a "yes" man. Just be sure to say "yes" enough to make yourself useful, and there will suddenly be less to bitch about.
I wrote the programs my company sells. Doesn't that make me an expert in them, even if I have a vested interest? Or are companies only supposed to employ people who have no idea what they're doing?
As pompous (not to mention unlikely) as this article sounds, I can't remember a time when a working trojan was going around, exploiting an unpatched feature. And I'd remember that, because there would be an uproar. Waiting for microsoft to release a patch while a worm attacked system after system via an unpatchable bug? It'd be a coffin nail.
Is what this guy saying -- that if you had kept your patches current, and your version (reasonably )current, you would have been unaffected by every major trojan or worm released in the past two years? In my experience, yes. So in what way is the guy not an expert? Is it because, according to OSS theory that "open source == secuirty," you'd expect him to be wrong? Or is it just because you don't like the alternate theory he presents?
Me, I don't care. As long as there's a way to keep the machines that I have to use secure, I'll do what it takes...and a $200 OS upgrade every three years or so isn't much compared to some of the support plans I've seen...
Well, not all pop-ups are spam. A lot of web UIs use pop up windows to increase functionality of their site without migrating away from the current page. Believe it or not, most users find these easier to follow than using the forward and back buttons...and it saves on page download costs. So it's become an accepted technique.
And there's not a hard, fast rule on how to stop popups. My credit union does a cross-domain pop-up for its outsourced bill payment setup (which i might add is nicer than what they could do themselves for the fees I pay). And I've seen a number of UIs which pop up functions automatically after a certain wait period...usually download sites.
So basically, when you start blocking pop-ups, you either have to throw a bunch of logic at the problem, or assume people know how to use the pop-up block. If the block is always on, they might not. If they have to download something extra, they'll figure out a bit more information about it.
Not saying it's the best solution...just saying that, "u shud block popups M$" is only looking at half of the problem.
And I still haven't figured out how to make the thing give me a CRLF at the end of each element.
Tabbing, spacing and linefeeds are not required in XML, and everybody wants to use them a little differently. No, MS' API doesn't do it automatically, but you can do it programmatically fairly easily by appending an XmlWhitespace object after each XmlNode. You can retreive one of these from an XmlDocument by calling the doc.CreateWhitespace(sting whitespace) method.
I do that at the beginning of the program, assing the whitespace to a variable called xCRLF (along with another called xTAB), then every time I do a Node.AppendChild(element), i call Node.AppendChild(xCRLF) as well. Result is perfect tabbing.
MS' xml API is pretty robust and fairly easy to use, even if it gets a little crazy. For the longest time they had a superior XSL processor (now it's about equal to XALAN), at least from a "I am an XML idiot trying to learn how to use the technology BEHIND the keynote speeches" standpoint.
Well, the idea here is that drawings, and computer generated art, do not really harm anybody outright because they do not require an illegal act to be performed. It can be completely invented.
There is a big difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. And as such, the courts have made a distinction between a recording of an actual event, and an interpretation of an invented one.
Like it matters -- in a lot of communities in the US, this sort of art is against the law even if it's protected by the supreme court's interpretation. After all, do you want to be known as the "Kiddie Porn" legislator? End result of this is that you may find yourself rotting in prison waiting for an appeal on what's essentially legal art...not really worth the effort, in my opinion.
Rarely are people prosecuted for possession anyway -- they're prosecuted for trafficking.
There's been government sanction against us upskirt fetishists for years. New York even made it illegal to secretly film people in public places for the purposes of masturbation. Now we've got to have other purposes! I yearn for the days when we'll be free, free as a cotton sundress blowing in the spring breeze, lifting the soft, thin material like a lover's gentle caress to reveal a round --
Um, the line for "child porn," at least in The States, is drawn thusly:
You can talk about it all you like. You just can't do it. You can draw it or make 3d art of it. But you can't take real pictures.
Basically, you can't perform sex acts with children, because there's a very good chance you'll harm them. And you can't display pictures of real children engaged in such acts because it could cause shame and further damage to the victim and it encourages others to do the same.
Personally, I'm okay with this. I think there needs to be an outlet for people to talk about illegal things, even if they're reprehensible.
However, this also means that if people want to ban images of necrophilia and cannibalism for the same reasons, I guess I'm okay with that as well. As long as the censorship allows you to TALK about the subject without sanction, I'd be okay with it.
And still have no menus. I love slashdot nonsolutions..."do more work for less value just to say you did it." I wish I could get that patriotic about technology.
"Hey guy! Why not put all the DVDs onto a massive reel of MiniDV tape, and then just play that in a continuous loop! It'd be like an homage to the great days of 8 track tape man those things were cool!"
So true. I just wrote an export script to send some of our product's GIS data to a file for mail merge. I promptly discovered that, between Office 2000 (which I use) and Office XP, Microsoft COMPLETELY changed how mail merge worked, and my solution was no longer the easy way to do it. In fact, during testing every single one of our QA staff managed to do it wrong. And since they're also the ones who take the calls, I gotta fix it.
Luckily, I was just scratching out this function for a demo and have time to revamp it before release. But it does set me back at least a day while I research the various versions of Office to make sure our solution is backwards compatible. And all I'm doing is making a comma delimited list!
Re:For anyone too lazy to read the entire article.
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Sheesh. I'll be on the lookout for the personals ad:
"MWM seeks SF for good times. Must have unpatched copy of XP Home. No smokers."
Same goes, for the NY Times : THey have great articles at times, and registering with my register/spam-email account is totally worth it.
Right. And if your privacy concerns are so acute that you can't register for a website, you shouldn't be using the world wide web to get your news in the first place. Their weblogs are probably far more useful in tracking you than some stupid username.
In fact, when I worked for an online newspaper provider, I would generally have mine the logs when we needed more information on a user. Example: somebody posted a death threat to a reporter using our forums. His username pointed to a yahoo account, no use there. Luckily, I was able to trace his account's last login back to one of our reverse cache servers, and get his IP address from the logs. His local PD used this info to contact his ISP, and they tracked him down pretty good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that IS how you start a program. But usability isn't STARTING programs...it's USING them.
I work writing custom solutions for client-server apps. I've never known anybody to have problems starting our software. But using it? Using it, they often have trouble with. Even relatively simple things like searching for a record are beyond some people's immediate grasp. You need to help them "get it."
And I have to say, in the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks. The gimp is a popular example. We don't have Photoshop licenses at work, so I tried working with the Gimp instead. I had what I guess is a good guide which I'd printed out to help me, but I had a lot of trouble. So much in fact, that after three hours of trying to do a relatively simple task (no I won't tell you what it was, because some slashdot pinhead will tell me how "easy it is" and that's not my point) I got in my car and drove the half hour home to do it on my own copy of Photoshop.
Now, I'm not stupid! I'd like to point that out. I've used computers every day for 17 years and I couldn't figure something out! This is a sign of a chronic usability issue, and it's not going to get better unless people stop being smug about how *THEY* figured it out and *EVERYBODY ELSE* should too.
Oh, and the biggest issue with Linux in an office environment is exactly what you recognized. OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla have completely different interfaces from each other, in fact there are few simularities among them. In Windows, almost everything has the same look, and deviations are minor. The sheer number of different looks and feels, UI toolkits, and software development techniques in general has lead to a mishmash of products, leaving the "Linux" operating system looking and feeling like it's a bunch of parts with no real integration. Which makes many users feel like they're using a shoddy system. It's like a car with three different colors of body panels, and two different styles of bucket seats. And no radio.
Wait...you'r actually WORRYING about the trolls on slashdot?
Dude...we ALL know too much about the goatse guy.
Word. I never thought of it like this -- that television's primary use is as a tool for community.
But it's true. At work, I find that people who watch the same shows tend to talk to each other more as well. I don't watch much TV, but when I do I'm included in this group. It gives me association, which is the first step towards friendship.
Says a lot for medium...sure it's low brow, idiotic and offers no real insight into the world at large. But it helps prevent you from being uncommunicative. Hell, there are some things I watch I don't even like (wrestling, football), just because it gives me a chance to bond with my core friends on a topic only we share.
Right. It'd be like running an adult novelty store called "Toys Are Us" and advertising it with a cartoon giraffe.
He was quoting. He probably should have made the citation. The quote was spoken by a character on the Simpsons who is an educated sociopath. It's supposed to be ironic, and it was really funny in context.
Of course it did. The Open Source community is willing to do nothing for free. I can't compete with that!
Which is why my target market those who are successful but uninformed and wish to be proactive (aka "fools with money.")
They already have it. anti-virus for PDAs, despite there being no really worthwhile vectors for viruses to spread over the PDA format. After all, you never really sync more than one PDA to the same computer (though you likely sync multiple computers to the same PDA).
I especially enjoy the sales verbage..."The importance of PDAs is growing every day and it is quite likely that these devices will soon become a target for new virus attacks." In other words, "there's currently nothing for the this product to do, but if it ever does become worthwhile, it'll do it after you download something else." Begs the question: why not wait until it becomes an issue, THEN download it? Seems you'd save some money that way, eh?
Oh, and the cost? $20 for a year of nothing. Tell you what, guys...if you're in the market for PDA antivirus protection, I'll beat that price. I'll do nothing for only $10 a year.
Yep. In management textbooks it's called "leadership," but they have different terms for everything.
I dunno. Your example seems like it wouldn't bother me very much at all, as the transmission vector is kind of worthless. It's easily tracked and requires significant effort on the user's part...it would certainly be less effective than MyDoom, and that doesn't even EXPLOIT a security hole.
I mean, you have to consider internet security the same way you consider office security. Yes, if one of our office doors won't lock, we have an immediate problem. Would it kill us to wait a few days to have it fixed? Probably not. Maybe if it was one of the outside doors...and every time a major hole in an on-by-default protocol has been found, it's been patched before it's exploited. That's what this guy was commenting on...that even if MS' security isn't GREAT, it's certainly GOOD ENOUGH, and part of the blame therefore lies on underfunded (or if you will, lazy) IT departments.
This is still an example of how job choice affects stress, not how technology affects it.
I should also point out I took a pay cut to take my current job. Last year, even with the extra income from Webslum I made 10% less than I did in 2002. But I had SO much less stress, a better relationship with my wife, and a much more positive outlook. No more shitty black metal poetry in my journal! I'm even starting to save money again.
In summation: I'm sorry your job sucks, but you're the one who took it. Even in a bad market, there are stress free options, but many of them require hard decisions. Like telling your CEO that a product can't be kludged together without becoming unmanagable and requiring a massive amount of work a year down the road. Which is, of course, the sort of thing a good architect tells his boss up front, rather than slipping dates and looking like a fool.
BTW: Even if they eventually want custom features, most of the time, your clients will be perfectly satisfied with what you have now, FOR now, and you can slowly work desired features into the main codebase. This is the ONLY way I've seen customer driven software work. Otherwise, you're stuck supporting multiple code bases, and custom hacking EVERYTHING from here on. Besides, I guarantee your client will need a few weeks (or months, depending on the product) to learn and utilize the current features. In that time, you could engineer a great solution, as opposed to delivering a crappy one right now.
Uh, the article claims that exploits haven't been made for security holes that weren't already patched. It doesn't purport that there aren't unpatched holes. And there's an essential difference between an actively exploited hole, and an unpatched hole. One is an immediate concern, the other is an immanent concern.
Is security about actual threats, or possible ones? Depending on which you believe, MS' security is either sufficient or it isn't. Like I said, I'm a part time Windows admin, not a full time security pundit. I only have time to devote to immediate concerns.
When having an up-to-date machine is not enough, then I'll raise my voice in complaint. But at present it is enough and I'm content even if I'm not thrilled.
Sounds like you have stress due to a shitty job, not due to technology.
I have three computers here, a couple projects, customer calls and am in charge of network security. Yet I don't have any stress. I have priorities, and I follow them. I too sometimes work overtime, but on my own terms...if I can't work overtime, I just say I can't. Obviously if there's so much work that they need you to stay late to do it, they need you, period.
A lot of stress is caused by poor coping skills. You can say "no," you know. In fact, in my experience the ability to say "no" is important. All my managers have had that skill, and that's how they got their jobs. People respect a helpful worker, but they hate a "yes" man. Just be sure to say "yes" enough to make yourself useful, and there will suddenly be less to bitch about.
I wrote the programs my company sells. Doesn't that make me an expert in them, even if I have a vested interest? Or are companies only supposed to employ people who have no idea what they're doing?
As pompous (not to mention unlikely) as this article sounds, I can't remember a time when a working trojan was going around, exploiting an unpatched feature. And I'd remember that, because there would be an uproar. Waiting for microsoft to release a patch while a worm attacked system after system via an unpatchable bug? It'd be a coffin nail.
Is what this guy saying -- that if you had kept your patches current, and your version (reasonably )current, you would have been unaffected by every major trojan or worm released in the past two years? In my experience, yes. So in what way is the guy not an expert? Is it because, according to OSS theory that "open source == secuirty," you'd expect him to be wrong? Or is it just because you don't like the alternate theory he presents?
Me, I don't care. As long as there's a way to keep the machines that I have to use secure, I'll do what it takes...and a $200 OS upgrade every three years or so isn't much compared to some of the support plans I've seen...
Nicely rebutted.
Well, not all pop-ups are spam. A lot of web UIs use pop up windows to increase functionality of their site without migrating away from the current page. Believe it or not, most users find these easier to follow than using the forward and back buttons...and it saves on page download costs. So it's become an accepted technique.
And there's not a hard, fast rule on how to stop popups. My credit union does a cross-domain pop-up for its outsourced bill payment setup (which i might add is nicer than what they could do themselves for the fees I pay). And I've seen a number of UIs which pop up functions automatically after a certain wait period...usually download sites.
So basically, when you start blocking pop-ups, you either have to throw a bunch of logic at the problem, or assume people know how to use the pop-up block. If the block is always on, they might not. If they have to download something extra, they'll figure out a bit more information about it.
Not saying it's the best solution...just saying that, "u shud block popups M$" is only looking at half of the problem.
And I still haven't figured out how to make the thing give me a CRLF at the end of each element.
Tabbing, spacing and linefeeds are not required in XML, and everybody wants to use them a little differently. No, MS' API doesn't do it automatically, but you can do it programmatically fairly easily by appending an XmlWhitespace object after each XmlNode. You can retreive one of these from an XmlDocument by calling the doc.CreateWhitespace(sting whitespace) method.
I do that at the beginning of the program, assing the whitespace to a variable called xCRLF (along with another called xTAB), then every time I do a Node.AppendChild(element), i call Node.AppendChild(xCRLF) as well. Result is perfect tabbing.
MS' xml API is pretty robust and fairly easy to use, even if it gets a little crazy. For the longest time they had a superior XSL processor (now it's about equal to XALAN), at least from a "I am an XML idiot trying to learn how to use the technology BEHIND the keynote speeches" standpoint.
Fark is going out of business
Oh no! What will I do without their crummy photoshops, porn links, and retard jokes ?!?!
Well, the idea here is that drawings, and computer generated art, do not really harm anybody outright because they do not require an illegal act to be performed. It can be completely invented.
There is a big difference between dreaming something and actually doing it. And as such, the courts have made a distinction between a recording of an actual event, and an interpretation of an invented one.
Like it matters -- in a lot of communities in the US, this sort of art is against the law even if it's protected by the supreme court's interpretation. After all, do you want to be known as the "Kiddie Porn" legislator? End result of this is that you may find yourself rotting in prison waiting for an appeal on what's essentially legal art...not really worth the effort, in my opinion.
Rarely are people prosecuted for possession anyway -- they're prosecuted for trafficking.
There's been government sanction against us upskirt fetishists for years. New York even made it illegal to secretly film people in public places for the purposes of masturbation. Now we've got to have other purposes! I yearn for the days when we'll be free, free as a cotton sundress blowing in the spring breeze, lifting the soft, thin material like a lover's gentle caress to reveal a round --
Oh, uh, excuse me. I think I need more Xanax.
Um, the line for "child porn," at least in The States, is drawn thusly:
You can talk about it all you like. You just can't do it. You can draw it or make 3d art of it. But you can't take real pictures.
Basically, you can't perform sex acts with children, because there's a very good chance you'll harm them. And you can't display pictures of real children engaged in such acts because it could cause shame and further damage to the victim and it encourages others to do the same.
Personally, I'm okay with this. I think there needs to be an outlet for people to talk about illegal things, even if they're reprehensible.
However, this also means that if people want to ban images of necrophilia and cannibalism for the same reasons, I guess I'm okay with that as well. As long as the censorship allows you to TALK about the subject without sanction, I'd be okay with it.
And still have no menus. I love slashdot nonsolutions..."do more work for less value just to say you did it." I wish I could get that patriotic about technology.
"Hey guy! Why not put all the DVDs onto a massive reel of MiniDV tape, and then just play that in a continuous loop! It'd be like an homage to the great days of 8 track tape man those things were cool!"
So true. I just wrote an export script to send some of our product's GIS data to a file for mail merge. I promptly discovered that, between Office 2000 (which I use) and Office XP, Microsoft COMPLETELY changed how mail merge worked, and my solution was no longer the easy way to do it. In fact, during testing every single one of our QA staff managed to do it wrong. And since they're also the ones who take the calls, I gotta fix it.
Luckily, I was just scratching out this function for a demo and have time to revamp it before release. But it does set me back at least a day while I research the various versions of Office to make sure our solution is backwards compatible. And all I'm doing is making a comma delimited list!
Sheesh. I'll be on the lookout for the personals ad:
"MWM seeks SF for good times. Must have unpatched copy of XP Home. No smokers."
Same goes, for the NY Times : THey have great articles at times, and registering with my register/spam-email account is totally worth it.
Right. And if your privacy concerns are so acute that you can't register for a website, you shouldn't be using the world wide web to get your news in the first place. Their weblogs are probably far more useful in tracking you than some stupid username.
In fact, when I worked for an online newspaper provider, I would generally have mine the logs when we needed more information on a user. Example: somebody posted a death threat to a reporter using our forums. His username pointed to a yahoo account, no use there. Luckily, I was able to trace his account's last login back to one of our reverse cache servers, and get his IP address from the logs. His local PD used this info to contact his ISP, and they tracked him down pretty good.