I think all points except perhaps #3 have been mentioned so far, but I wrote the thing as an essay before reading so live with it.
Though I agree that in an entirely GUI environment that the hard disk icon is a somewhat outdated metaphor, some questions remain about what happens when you remove it.
1. The author poses desktops as "anchors" to the hard disk which cannot be created, moved, or deleted at whim. How then, does a user create a new desktop? The author says there will be multiple desktops, but one would assume the default would be one desktop. After all, in the real world, we only have one desk. Perhaps, the user be limited to a specific number of desktops that the OS decides should be available? If so, what if a user wants more or less desktops? Does the user simply buy another hard drive even though it might not be full to get more desktops? Does the user ignore unneeded desktops, languishing them in the darkness of the hard drive?
2. This is an important phrase to consider: "The desktop has a visual limit beyond which it begins to look cluttered." This is true. However, the tolerance for clutter is vastly different between two different people. For example, I have a friend who will almost literally fill his entire windows desktop with icons. I, however, simply cannot tolerate more than 10 icons on my desktop at any given time. To me, more than 10 icons simply become difficult to organise on the desktop in a meaningful manner. In a desktop methaphor environment, in order to continue filling my hard drive with files I want, one would assume that I would have to adopt the useless ugly clutter that my friend uses. Otherwise, it seems I would have to accept that I will never fill my hard drive more than 10%.
3. What does the stacked desktop metaphor represent to the user? Can the desktops be set to a theme, such as music, video, and program storage? If so, can the theme of these desktops be changed, or is the user again saddled with what is given to them? I can just imagine the following sentence being uttered somewhere in a terrible future: "I need to buy another hard drive so that I can get the video desktop."
In short, I believe the article poses an interesting opinion about what the next step is in the continuing move away from the text interface and towards the completely GUI interface. The problem is that it fails to deal with some important issues that arise when old (but useful) metaphors are eliminated, and how users will be affected by the new metaphor that is proposed.
The sheer number of people who do not understand this principle baffles me.
Volts mean nothing when it comes to whether or not you will feel a shock.. its the amps! the amps!
The most irritating thing is that already, several posts down, someone has already posted without a clear understanding of this concept. To paraphrase: I've been shocked by a 9v battery, so i don't know what they are talking about feeling 3500V when I.. ug.
Moderators: please mod the parent post up. Maybe then at least a few people will get a clue.
Get your hands off me you damn, dirty amps! - sorry, couldn't resist.
Say you could create a worm that fixed the problem.. Aren't you potentially making the problem that much worse?
I can just see two worms endlessly chasing each other around the net, wasting tremendous amounts of bandwidth.
If the white hat worm went and patched the security hole that the first worm uses to get itself in, this wouldn't occur, but wouldn't you still have thousands of white hat worms spraying the net with data instead?
The number of potential problems created by releasing a "predator" worm into the net environment could potentially be disasterous, not the least of which is the bandwidth that would be used up by rabid worms.
Back when I was working in the IT deparment at Montana State, we ran this crack to audit our passwords overnight..
As I remember, it cracked 50% of the passwords in less than 4 hours. Names and dictionary words comprised a very large percentage of passwords. A mass mail was sent out to scold everyone for having such easy passwords. Of course, anyone who has ever been in IT knows that scolding doesn't work. We ran it a month later with similar results. I guess once an easy password, always an easy password. The psychology of trying to descibe oneself with a password goes a long way to explaining that, I think. Still, why not add a number to your word, like the year of your birth? Instant (semi)cryptic password...
Luckily, none of the admin passwords were cracked by it. Cryptics all, I suppose.
Waaaaaayy back when I was in high school, Sega had a hand held device called the GameGear. It was 8 bit, however, it was superior in at least a couple ways to todays GameBoy Adv, 8+ years later.
It had both a backlit display and a TV tuner, neither of which the LameBoy Adv. has. I suspect if Sega had the money right now, they would produce a handheld that was 64 bit, played games off CD, played CDs, mp3 CDs, VCDs, and DVDs, and STILL nobody would buy it...
Nintendo sucks. I am so sick of the lack of games, the high price point, the cartrige (read suck) using, peice of junk machines that they produce. I swear, I will never buy another Nintendo machine.
Xbox and Playstation 2, you will compete for my hard earned cash! Who will take it! Whos gaming reigns supreme!?!
It took me less than two weeks to write a version control/archive system in asp, using an oracle database for document info and saving files to the filesystem.
The advantage to it was that it used an interface they were already used to using (web browser), so they didn't have to be trained to use it.
You may want to consider writing your own, it has some distinct advantages:
You only have to pay for the time it would take someone to code it.
The system will match the needs of your particular company.
The system can be changed at any time if your needs change.
You are right, Java does multicasting. The difference is subtle.
UDP broadcasting sends a UDP packet to all computers on a network segment.
Multicasting also sends a message to all machines on a segment, but it uses a special set of IPs. It sends out a packet addressed in a certain range (not your IP) to everyone.
One of the problems here is when you try to deal with clients coded in languages other than Java, say C/C++. Multicasting is a harder to implement than a simple IP broadcasting system in most languages, and thus it is a pain to have to work with multicasting just because Java security doesn't allow for broadcasting.
Sorry, I omitted the word "broadcasting". Java doesn't do UDP broadcasting. At least not easily. I think there is a way you can do it, but invovles some security overrides. Anyway, it's a pain in the rear end, and a drawback, in my opinion.
JSP is a whole different animal than running java for client applications, though. Honestly, I think JSP is really one of the areas where Java shines. Java is really nice as a server side language. It works on the client side, but its strengths do not lie in that area. So before you go off saying Java sucks, maybe you should experiment a little with it in server side programming.
Sure, Java has it's drawbacks (hint: where is UDP?), but it has a lot more positives than negatives, in my opinion.
I also find it funny that you say Java sucks, and yet the first line of one of the pages that you link to says: "I think Java is the best language going today". He goes on to say that it is merely slightly more acceptable than others, but he does mention that it easier to work with than C,C++,Perl,and Tcl/Tk.
I'm no Java crusader, but I would like to point out that Java does have its uses, and people shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
Slashdot Mirror
I think all points except perhaps #3 have been mentioned so far, but I wrote the thing as an essay before reading so live with it.
Though I agree that in an entirely GUI environment that the hard disk icon is a somewhat outdated metaphor, some questions remain about what happens when you remove it.
1. The author poses desktops as "anchors" to the hard disk which cannot be created, moved, or deleted at whim. How then, does a user create a new desktop? The author says there will be multiple desktops, but one would assume the default would be one desktop. After all, in the real world, we only have one desk. Perhaps, the user be limited to a specific number of desktops that the OS decides should be available? If so, what if a user wants more or less desktops? Does the user simply buy another hard drive even though it might not be full to get more desktops? Does the user ignore unneeded desktops, languishing them in the darkness of the hard drive?
2. This is an important phrase to consider: "The desktop has a visual limit beyond which it begins to look cluttered." This is true. However, the tolerance for clutter is vastly different between two different people. For example, I have a friend who will almost literally fill his entire windows desktop with icons. I, however, simply cannot tolerate more than 10 icons on my desktop at any given time. To me, more than 10 icons simply become difficult to organise on the desktop in a meaningful manner. In a desktop methaphor environment, in order to continue filling my hard drive with files I want, one would assume that I would have to adopt the useless ugly clutter that my friend uses. Otherwise, it seems I would have to accept that I will never fill my hard drive more than 10%.
3. What does the stacked desktop metaphor represent to the user? Can the desktops be set to a theme, such as music, video, and program storage? If so, can the theme of these desktops be changed, or is the user again saddled with what is given to them? I can just imagine the following sentence being uttered somewhere in a terrible future: "I need to buy another hard drive so that I can get the video desktop."
In short, I believe the article poses an interesting opinion about what the next step is in the continuing move away from the text interface and towards the completely GUI interface. The problem is that it fails to deal with some important issues that arise when old (but useful) metaphors are eliminated, and how users will be affected by the new metaphor that is proposed.
Who is the dumbass that modded this post down?
r s/Lovelace,_Ada/
If you know absolutely fucking nothing about the topic which someone is posting about DON'T MODERATE IT.
At least check the link! directory.google.com/Top/Computers/History/Pionee
What the hell is more on topic than that?!
The sheer number of people who do not understand this principle baffles me.
Volts mean nothing when it comes to whether or not you will feel a shock.. its the amps! the amps!
The most irritating thing is that already, several posts down, someone has already posted without a clear understanding of this concept. To paraphrase: I've been shocked by a 9v battery, so i don't know what they are talking about feeling 3500V when I.. ug.
Moderators: please mod the parent post up. Maybe then at least a few people will get a clue.
Get your hands off me you damn, dirty amps! - sorry, couldn't resist.
Say you could create a worm that fixed the problem.. Aren't you potentially making the problem that much worse? I can just see two worms endlessly chasing each other around the net, wasting tremendous amounts of bandwidth. If the white hat worm went and patched the security hole that the first worm uses to get itself in, this wouldn't occur, but wouldn't you still have thousands of white hat worms spraying the net with data instead? The number of potential problems created by releasing a "predator" worm into the net environment could potentially be disasterous, not the least of which is the bandwidth that would be used up by rabid worms.
Why a prequel? In my opinion, two words: Rick Berman
- harborpirate -
Back when I was working in the IT deparment at Montana State, we ran this crack to audit our passwords overnight..
As I remember, it cracked 50% of the passwords in less than 4 hours. Names and dictionary words comprised a very large percentage of passwords. A mass mail was sent out to scold everyone for having such easy passwords. Of course, anyone who has ever been in IT knows that scolding doesn't work. We ran it a month later with similar results. I guess once an easy password, always an easy password. The psychology of trying to descibe oneself with a password goes a long way to explaining that, I think. Still, why not add a number to your word, like the year of your birth? Instant (semi)cryptic password...
Luckily, none of the admin passwords were cracked by it. Cryptics all, I suppose.
- harborpirate -
Waaaaaayy back when I was in high school, Sega had a hand held device called the GameGear. It was 8 bit, however, it was superior in at least a couple ways to todays GameBoy Adv, 8+ years later.
It had both a backlit display and a TV tuner, neither of which the LameBoy Adv. has. I suspect if Sega had the money right now, they would produce a handheld that was 64 bit, played games off CD, played CDs, mp3 CDs, VCDs, and DVDs, and STILL nobody would buy it...
Nintendo sucks. I am so sick of the lack of games, the high price point, the cartrige (read suck) using, peice of junk machines that they produce. I swear, I will never buy another Nintendo machine.
Xbox and Playstation 2, you will compete for my hard earned cash! Who will take it! Whos gaming reigns supreme!?!
- harborpirate -
It took me less than two weeks to write a version control/archive system in asp, using an oracle database for document info and saving files to the filesystem. The advantage to it was that it used an interface they were already used to using (web browser), so they didn't have to be trained to use it.
You may want to consider writing your own, it has some distinct advantages:
You only have to pay for the time it would take someone to code it.
The system will match the needs of your particular company.
The system can be changed at any time if your needs change.
- harborpirate -
And a very merry unsigning bonus to you!
- harborpirate -
The picture looks like the robot is turning on a quarter, rather than a dime. Not that it matters...
- harborpirate -
You are right, Java does multicasting. The difference is subtle. UDP broadcasting sends a UDP packet to all computers on a network segment. Multicasting also sends a message to all machines on a segment, but it uses a special set of IPs. It sends out a packet addressed in a certain range (not your IP) to everyone. One of the problems here is when you try to deal with clients coded in languages other than Java, say C/C++. Multicasting is a harder to implement than a simple IP broadcasting system in most languages, and thus it is a pain to have to work with multicasting just because Java security doesn't allow for broadcasting.
- harborpirate -
Sorry, I omitted the word "broadcasting". Java doesn't do UDP broadcasting. At least not easily. I think there is a way you can do it, but invovles some security overrides. Anyway, it's a pain in the rear end, and a drawback, in my opinion.
Sorry about the error.
- harborpirate -
JSP is a whole different animal than running java for client applications, though. Honestly, I think JSP is really one of the areas where Java shines. Java is really nice as a server side language. It works on the client side, but its strengths do not lie in that area. So before you go off saying Java sucks, maybe you should experiment a little with it in server side programming.
Sure, Java has it's drawbacks (hint: where is UDP?), but it has a lot more positives than negatives, in my opinion.
I also find it funny that you say Java sucks, and yet the first line of one of the pages that you link to says: "I think Java is the best language going today". He goes on to say that it is merely slightly more acceptable than others, but he does mention that it easier to work with than C,C++,Perl,and Tcl/Tk.
I'm no Java crusader, but I would like to point out that Java does have its uses, and people shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
- harborpirate -