On one hand there is the tech industry making jokes about how stupid users are and on the other hand you have this, proving that the tech industry is often full of themselves.
Computers don't need to be made difficult to make use of, but the tech industry needs them to be more complicated than what is needed to get the job done.
Two minor problems. First, anything that humans do is easy to learn if you start learning at age 2. Navajo children learn to speak Navajo with no problem. Essentially no one who doesn't know Navajo by age 10 will ever learn it.
Second, there is the annoying problem of the installed base. Of anything, not just computer software. Sure, we could get rid of film cameras tomorrow. If we (a) wanted to retrain the 1 billion or so people who already know how to use a film camera (b) we didn't care about being able to print those pictures of Great-Grandma taken in 1889. But generally we can't afford (a) and do care about (b).
I think addiction to comfort underlies the difference between the prodigious learning capabilities of children and the typical adult. I often wonder whether the difference in the ability to learn languages between children and adults is not at least equally due to this as much as loss of brain plasticity.
Not to disagree necessarily, but the same set of observations also supports the opposite conclusion: kids live in a constant state of discomfort due to lack of knowledge, understanding, and ability to control their environment. Once they hit the point where they can control their environment, they become comfortable. After this point, they resist additional change since that would have the potential to cause discomfort, and that is what they just finished getting away from.
A lot of it has to do with your point of view about life. There is a small percentage of very energetic, aggressive people who think that constant variety and change are not only Good but "inevitable" ("learn to deal with change" he said as he fired 40% of the workforce). Most humans don't agree with that point of view.
The key seperating characteristic of Adults and Children is simple, Fear of Breaking Shit. Children do not have this crippling learning disability, they do not Fear to Break Shit. Adults do. So Adults will not try anything that they aren't sure will not Break Shit.
Yes and no. Your theory is good and can often be observed in operation.
Yet, having worked for almost 20 years in IT and software implementation, I have to say it is more complex than that. First, adults have to deal with something kids do not: consequences. Kid accidently deletes Paint drawing, cries a bit, sits down and does new one. Adult accidently deletes the Accounts Receivable database and remembers that he forgot to change the tape yesterday. He loses his job, and he can't borrow money from his friends because the company went out of business the next day [exaggerated for effect but more realistic scenarios are easy to construct]. When adults do things with computers, there are real effects that have real, and sometimes devastating, consequences. That can understandably create fear, keeping in mind that fear is designed to keep us alive.
Yet even that is too simple, because some adults manage to figure out where they can safely push the barriers, and where they must call for help first. These people manage to teach themselves what they need to know, and often move up to the next level. Yet the person sitting next to an "explorer", with the same job, same educational background, same starting level of knowledge, either (a) sits paralyzed with fear (b) does random stuff until he causes real damage.
What is the difference between these two types of people? How can they be identified in advance? Could the second type be taught to act like the first type?
sPh
"Rebooting" is a disease that should be cured
on
No More Rebooting?
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· Score: 2
Gather round my children and I will tell you of a time far in past. A time when computers actually performed the job that they were designed to perform. A time when systems, including both hardware and software, worked pretty much all the time. Most importantly, a time when designers and support engineers understood their products and could diagnose and fix things that went wrong; when "restarting" the system was an act of desperation, not to be tried until all other solutions had failed. When "restarting" the system was a badge of shame that everyone would work to cure as fast as possible.
Well, that is as cute as I can be this morning, but I hope the point is clear. I was willing to reboot an XT running MS-DOS 2.0 from time to time - it was a crude system and we didn't expect too much of it. But the "reboot" virus has spread FROM Microsoft systems all the way INTO the world of distributed controls. I actually have control system techs say to me "reboot and see what happens". Hello! It isn't supposed to be this way! Systems (particularly embedded sysetms) are supposed to work, not not work!
Faster rebooting would be a crime, not an improvement, since it would help take everyone's attention off the problem, which is that the system failed.
Microsoft announced that they were deferring for the time being the idea of Hailstorm as a fully, explicitly Microsoft-controlled depository in direct competition with their customers. They did not say that Hailstorm was going away, merely that it would now be broken up into multiple repositories managed in partnership with their customers (e.g. large banks and e-commerce sites). Which is not to say that (a) the concept no longer exists (b) the aggregate total will not be under Microsoft's control (c) they might not revive the central repository idea in the future.
Now from a more practical standpoint. If my web page is going to be making me money and 90%+ of my users are IE users then I better make sure it renders properly in IE. However, that's still no reason not to follow standards. Because if I make a concerted effort to follow the standards then I can be reasonably sure that any other browsers (that I haven't tested it with) stand a good chance of rendering it properly.
A commendable attitude, but it has one flaw: behaving that way doesn't earn Microsoft any money (or Netscape, or WordPerfect, or Wang, or Burroughs... fill in your choice of product category and vendor here). Microsoft would very much prefer that you get locked into its extensions (which are "98.45% W3C compatible") rather than you being vendor neutral. So they will do whatever they can to lock you out of competing products (as did WordPerfect in their day).
Especially if these users are used to browsing the web at work (with IE), or are upgrading from a previous version of AOL, or are coming from a different service (to AOL? yeah.. it COULD happen).
"It USED to work. This new AOL x.y is messed up. I'm going to call Customer Service."
Do you do much front line technical support? When something goes wrong, 99.99% of humans blame whatever is farthest away from them, whatever is least under their control, or some combination of those two entities.
Things I have observed:
End user types wrong data directly into input screen, presses enter, naturally gets wrong result. All other software works as before. "There must be a bug in this software"
E.U. downloads software from Internet (say IE6 or Netscape 6.0), installs, new software crashes and blue-screens the PC on every startup. "There must be something wrong with the configuration of this PC".
E.U. goes to old PC, fires up Netscape 2.0, surfs to site which says in big, bold letters: YOU MUST USE IE4/Netscape 4 TO VIEW THIS SITE, gets garbage. "There must be something wrong with this web site".
The absolutely last thing the end user will do is blame the AOL 7 software. After all, AOL is their friend, the web site designer is not.
sPh
Re:Do not use your more recent data to set your mo
on
Simulating Societies
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· Score: 1
The 'future' data could be physically withheld from the modeller, they could have been in a box since 1986.
Wow, that's adding a new level of unpleasantness to the job of Graduate Assistant! "Spend your postdoc in a sealed box..."
You are probably right. I was thinking of the guys who cataloged the data that Newton used to verify the laws of gravitation. I was thinking they were Kepler and Wren, but working from memory I may be wrong.
1684- In a London inn, Wren ("If you seek a monument, look about you"), Halley, and Hooke debate the consequences of Kepler's third law. Hooke had attacked Newton's theory of light and accused Newton of stealing the inverse square law.
1684, two months later- Halley visits Newton with the Wren problem; "Why, I have calculated it [ellipse from 1/R2]". "But for him in all probability the work would never have been thought of, nor when thought of written, nor when written produced." -DeMorgan
Sorry dude - I don't have all the back issues of Byte or PCMag anymore. Maybe I was thinking of the "Distributed File System", which also never saw the light of day. Or maybe it was the "Object Oriented Desktop". Chicago, Cairo, Memphis, Daytona - where am I????
New features, eh? The only thing that saves Microsoft here is how short everyone's memory is in the tech industry. "Seamless file transfer across devices" sounds very similar to the "object oriented files system", which was first promised for the version of Windows that was going to follow NT 3.5 and was announced in 1991 or so. Of course the follow on to NT 3.5 was NT 4, which was released in 1996 and contained few to none of the promised wizz-bangs.
But now it will be XP 2.0 (dare we call it 3.11?) that will have the good stuff. I am holding my breath, I am.
sPh
Re:Do not use your more recent data to set your mo
on
Simulating Societies
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you use the data say 1970 - 1985 for building your model, you can use 1986 - 2002 as the 'future' you are trying to predict.
That might take care of the explict side (although I would argue that), but it does not address the subconscious bias of the modeler in creating the model - after all, we already know what happened during those time periods. Nor the problem of self-selection described by cyberon22 above.
Amusing analogy but not relevant to this discussion, since simulations of this type (and statistical models of human behaviour in general) assume that human beings are interchangable, non-unique entities. So "birth" is fully reversable by "death", and "death of adult" is fully reversable by "birth + 18 years".
If it were necessary to simulate the "unbirth" of a specific adult, that would imply that humans have enough uniqueness to make statistical models invalid.
I have a friend in the Army who is a CIo for a military hospital [he has a basic understanding of technology]. He has been told that he will be working for Microsoft next year!
Well, we all wondered when Microsoft would break away and create their own state complete with armed forces. Sounds as if they decided to just acquire one ready-made!
You're correct about the models not necessarily being reversable - meaning that you can't predict history from the future. However, the correct method of verifying a simulation as correct is to verify the simulation results against known data.
This is a very interesting question with a lot of good arguments and points of view to be hashed out. So I won't make any strong statements about Elphick and fwc's arguments, just that I respectfully disagree with them.
The problem with the "running forward from 1900" test is that the model includes, both explicitly and subconsciously, the model maker's view and understanding of the world that already exists. Including the events that occured between 1900 and 2000, say. So of course you would expect it to show reasonably accurate results for that time period - otherwise it would have been discarded during the development phase. However, that is no guarantee that the model is accurate outside the limits of that perception of the world.
I ran into exactly this problem myself. I developed several system dynamics models that seemed to give a good simulation of the population and wealth of the City of Chicago from 1950 to 1980. But when I ran them starting with the base data for similar cities, I got meaningless results. What seemed on first examination to be a general model of city population was actually just a condensed way of displaying the known state of one particular city.
So stronger tests than just "run forward to known state" are needed. Some argue that human events include irreversible processes, so perhaps the "run backwards" test is not valid. But more is needed than a demonstration between two known states.
sPh
Re:Issac Asimov's Harry Seldon
on
Simulating Societies
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· Score: 3, Interesting
[The Club of Rome]They came to some very interesting (and even disturbing) conclusions.
Yes, those models are fun to play around with. Are there any open source Dynamo systems out there?
Problem is, the Club of Rome predicted that everyone in the Western world would either be starving to death or choked in their own waste by the far-off year 2000. Looking out my window today, I see that things are far from perfect, but we have a higher population, more food, and in many respects less pollution than we did in 1975. So the CoR's models were dead wrong.
The "Foundation" series by Issac Azimov never really seemed too far fetched to me. The ability of dedicated mathematicians to predict the course of large enough groups of human beings seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable, given enough variables and a population size that minimizes the chance for really unique/aberant behaviours. Now we have the computing power to back it all up.
Lack of computing power hasn't been a problem for a long time - I wrote simulations like this on a VAX in the early 80's.
The problems lie elsewhere. Two that come to mind quickly are (1) lack of agreed upon factual data to use as the basis of the hypotheses. Do people with green skin have more or fewer babies out of wedlock than people with orange skin, and has this number increased or decreased over the last 10 years? Even in the US, with the Census data and tremendous amounts of market research, there are no agreed-upon answers to fundamental questions of data. Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.
(2) None of these models are reversible. Put in a starting point of today's conditions, set the time increment to -1, and run the simulation backwards for 100 years. What comes out will be nothing like the world as it actually was in 1900. If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?
Novell hasn't gotten much right except their directory services. By far, Novell NDS/E-Directory is the best you can get in the industry.
Well, I would disagree with that first sentence a bit;-)
However, don't you know that your second sentence violates the Slashdot Code of Posting, which states that Slashdotters can never suggest a Novell (or Lotus Notes) product as a viable solution to any problem?
sPh
PS I think NDS/eDirectory would be an excellent solution to the problem stated - IF enough vendors would support it.
Wow, yet another "I didn't read the article, but I feel fully qualified to comment on it" response...
For you and others like you, it specifically states that a pop-up box appears and requires the user to accept the download, and they rely on the fact that 99.999999% of the non-slashdot population immediately assumes it is something they need and click "Yes".
Most human groups nowadays have this little thing called "society", which is generally formed in an attempt to mitigate the worst aspects of the "dog-eat-dog" model of life/social organization. It one of the things that are generally believed to seperate "humans" from "lower animals".
One thing that "society" tries to do is protect the average joe from the consequences of ignorance. Why do that, you ask? Why not let Darwin take his course? Because as our wealth grows and our world becomes more complex, everyone is ignorant about some areas of life. And today, everyone is ignorant about most things that keep us alive (dug your own well lately?).
So let's be careful here - just because Slashdotters know better than to click on that Yes doesn't mean everyone does or should.
sPh
Re:This may mean nothing but...
on
Carnivore Update
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Now I'm not much of a conspiracy person, but... since when do we get e-mails sent second, first?
I used to have this discussion all the time when e-mail systems were new to the general office population. It is called e-MAIL, not e-INSTANTDELIVERY. The model for e-mail is the physical postal service. E-mail is not a guaranteed-delivery-time system.
In the early days of semi-widespread Net use, with uucp providing mail services, delivery times of 1-2 days were common. Today we have gotten used to e-mail delivery around the globe in 30 seconds or less, but there is nothing in the definition of e-mail service that says this has to be the case.
Speaking of Carnivore: for 3 months, just after September 11th. I noticed that all of my traffic was being routed through Arlington VA. This stopped about two months ago. Now my packets travel normally, (no Arlington node in every traceorute). Was that Carnivore?
Its possible, and something you might want to think about.
OTOH, a large percentage of the East Coast's Internet infrastructure was located in and around WTC, and much was destroyed and/or shut down. Different routes were certainly used while this stuff was under repair.
In related news, Bill Gates announced that he is retiring from Microsoft to take over Linus Torvalds' role as gatekeeper and godfather of Linux. "Ever since I left Harvard I have been itching to get back to hardcore coding," Mr. Gates stated. "Taking the reins of Linux is just the opportunity I was seeking."
Asked whether the success of Linux might affect his $42B in Microsoft stock, Mr. Gates replied, "I only play one way - that's to win. I hope Melinda stashed a few million in a Swiss bank account for herself and the kids."
After having to figure out which stories are real and which stories are April Fool's jokes in my half asleep state, I must say this one has me confused. If it's real, then April Fool's day isn't the best time to post it. If it's a joke then "ha ha".
None of the A.F. jokes this year are very good in and of themselves, but the way they are being scattered among the real stories is a masterful job of creating confusion. For example, I know that there actually are super-toilets in Japan as described in the story below, but is the submitted story real or fake? Hard to tell; hard to tell.
That's BULL! I don't care if your 15, 16, 17 or 18....if you are living with the parent then your subject to their rules. How is this an abuse???
I agree that the word "abuse" is overused and perhaps not applicable in this case. However, for a good treatment of this question you might read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which besides being a good novel with a poorly written ending has an extensive discussion of what happens to children who are raised in an over-protective environment and what risks it might be necessary for a parent to take to ensure that their children are successful in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, there is the annoying problem of the installed base. Of anything, not just computer software. Sure, we could get rid of film cameras tomorrow. If we (a) wanted to retrain the 1 billion or so people who already know how to use a film camera (b) we didn't care about being able to print those pictures of Great-Grandma taken in 1889. But generally we can't afford (a) and do care about (b).
sPH
A lot of it has to do with your point of view about life. There is a small percentage of very energetic, aggressive people who think that constant variety and change are not only Good but "inevitable" ("learn to deal with change" he said as he fired 40% of the workforce). Most humans don't agree with that point of view.
sPh
Yet, having worked for almost 20 years in IT and software implementation, I have to say it is more complex than that. First, adults have to deal with something kids do not: consequences. Kid accidently deletes Paint drawing, cries a bit, sits down and does new one. Adult accidently deletes the Accounts Receivable database and remembers that he forgot to change the tape yesterday. He loses his job, and he can't borrow money from his friends because the company went out of business the next day [exaggerated for effect but more realistic scenarios are easy to construct]. When adults do things with computers, there are real effects that have real, and sometimes devastating, consequences. That can understandably create fear, keeping in mind that fear is designed to keep us alive.
Yet even that is too simple, because some adults manage to figure out where they can safely push the barriers, and where they must call for help first. These people manage to teach themselves what they need to know, and often move up to the next level. Yet the person sitting next to an "explorer", with the same job, same educational background, same starting level of knowledge, either (a) sits paralyzed with fear (b) does random stuff until he causes real damage.
What is the difference between these two types of people? How can they be identified in advance? Could the second type be taught to act like the first type?
sPh
Well, that is as cute as I can be this morning, but I hope the point is clear. I was willing to reboot an XT running MS-DOS 2.0 from time to time - it was a crude system and we didn't expect too much of it. But the "reboot" virus has spread FROM Microsoft systems all the way INTO the world of distributed controls. I actually have control system techs say to me "reboot and see what happens". Hello! It isn't supposed to be this way! Systems (particularly embedded sysetms) are supposed to work, not not work!
Faster rebooting would be a crime, not an improvement, since it would help take everyone's attention off the problem, which is that the system failed.
sPh
Microsoft announced that they were deferring for the time being the idea of Hailstorm as a fully, explicitly Microsoft-controlled depository in direct competition with their customers. They did not say that Hailstorm was going away, merely that it would now be broken up into multiple repositories managed in partnership with their customers (e.g. large banks and e-commerce sites). Which is not to say that (a) the concept no longer exists (b) the aggregate total will not be under Microsoft's control (c) they might not revive the central repository idea in the future.
sPh
sPh
Things I have observed:
- End user types wrong data directly into input screen, presses enter, naturally gets wrong result. All other software works as before. "There must be a bug in this software"
The absolutely last thing the end user will do is blame the AOL 7 software. After all, AOL is their friend, the web site designer is not.E.U. downloads software from Internet (say IE6 or Netscape 6.0), installs, new software crashes and blue-screens the PC on every startup. "There must be something wrong with the configuration of this PC".
E.U. goes to old PC, fires up Netscape 2.0, surfs to site which says in big, bold letters: YOU MUST USE IE4/Netscape 4 TO VIEW THIS SITE, gets garbage. "There must be something wrong with this web site".
sPh
sPh
Ah, here's a quote:
sPh
Sorry dude - I don't have all the back issues of Byte or PCMag anymore. Maybe I was thinking of the "Distributed File System", which also never saw the light of day. Or maybe it was the "Object Oriented Desktop". Chicago, Cairo, Memphis, Daytona - where am I????
sPh
But now it will be XP 2.0 (dare we call it 3.11?) that will have the good stuff. I am holding my breath, I am.
sPh
sPh
If it were necessary to simulate the "unbirth" of a specific adult, that would imply that humans have enough uniqueness to make statistical models invalid.
sPh
sPh
The problem with the "running forward from 1900" test is that the model includes, both explicitly and subconsciously, the model maker's view and understanding of the world that already exists. Including the events that occured between 1900 and 2000, say. So of course you would expect it to show reasonably accurate results for that time period - otherwise it would have been discarded during the development phase. However, that is no guarantee that the model is accurate outside the limits of that perception of the world.
I ran into exactly this problem myself. I developed several system dynamics models that seemed to give a good simulation of the population and wealth of the City of Chicago from 1950 to 1980. But when I ran them starting with the base data for similar cities, I got meaningless results. What seemed on first examination to be a general model of city population was actually just a condensed way of displaying the known state of one particular city.
So stronger tests than just "run forward to known state" are needed. Some argue that human events include irreversible processes, so perhaps the "run backwards" test is not valid. But more is needed than a demonstration between two known states.
sPh
Problem is, the Club of Rome predicted that everyone in the Western world would either be starving to death or choked in their own waste by the far-off year 2000. Looking out my window today, I see that things are far from perfect, but we have a higher population, more food, and in many respects less pollution than we did in 1975. So the CoR's models were dead wrong.
sPh
The problems lie elsewhere. Two that come to mind quickly are (1) lack of agreed upon factual data to use as the basis of the hypotheses. Do people with green skin have more or fewer babies out of wedlock than people with orange skin, and has this number increased or decreased over the last 10 years? Even in the US, with the Census data and tremendous amounts of market research, there are no agreed-upon answers to fundamental questions of data. Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.
(2) None of these models are reversible. Put in a starting point of today's conditions, set the time increment to -1, and run the simulation backwards for 100 years. What comes out will be nothing like the world as it actually was in 1900. If we can't accuratly predict what happened in the past, how can we have any belief that the models tell us anything meaningful about the future?
sPh
sPh
However, don't you know that your second sentence violates the Slashdot Code of Posting, which states that Slashdotters can never suggest a Novell (or Lotus Notes) product as a viable solution to any problem?
sPh
PS I think NDS/eDirectory would be an excellent solution to the problem stated - IF enough vendors would support it.
One thing that "society" tries to do is protect the average joe from the consequences of ignorance. Why do that, you ask? Why not let Darwin take his course? Because as our wealth grows and our world becomes more complex, everyone is ignorant about some areas of life. And today, everyone is ignorant about most things that keep us alive (dug your own well lately?).
So let's be careful here - just because Slashdotters know better than to click on that Yes doesn't mean everyone does or should.
sPh
In the early days of semi-widespread Net use, with uucp providing mail services, delivery times of 1-2 days were common. Today we have gotten used to e-mail delivery around the globe in 30 seconds or less, but there is nothing in the definition of e-mail service that says this has to be the case.
sPh
OTOH, a large percentage of the East Coast's Internet infrastructure was located in and around WTC, and much was destroyed and/or shut down. Different routes were certainly used while this stuff was under repair.
sPh
Asked whether the success of Linux might affect his $42B in Microsoft stock, Mr. Gates replied, "I only play one way - that's to win. I hope Melinda stashed a few million in a Swiss bank account for herself and the kids."
sPh
Hint: no challenge + no risk = no growth.
sPh