Most of your complaints are client settings. I have my client set to open a window in the tray and not blink when a new message comes in, that way it doesn't distract me until I want it to.
The main difference between the two forms of communication is that email is asynchronous, and IM (for the most part) is synchronous. An email is fire and forget, and the person will get it when they log in. IM can do the same, although the size of the messages limits what can be transmitted (and files are strictly synchronous), but for the most part IM conversations need to be synchronous, both parties must be online and connected, in order to be most effective.
His point is that in English, da Vinci doesn't have any other connotations, so all we think of is Leonardo. However in (Italian?) da Vinci is more difficult to separate from its innate meaning and thus can cause lexical confusion.
For example, take Princess Diana of Wales. We all know who she is. However if you were to refer to her strictly as "of Wales" the situation becomes extremely confusing for an English speaker.
"ask who should be in charge of developing medicine - the government or industry?"
Yes. Both institutions have a role they can play to advance the field of medicine. These kinds of questions are not XOR questions, I think the biggest consideration to give is how do we help the most people? So I say a resounding BOTH!
Wow, you can fill 200MB hard drive with data in less than a second?
People comment about the bandwidth of a card full of DVDs or Tape Drives and the like, but do they ever stop to think about exactly how LONG it takes to write information to the medium? Driving from one place to another with the data is trivial, but converting the raw data into the transportable message takes absolutely forever.
Yes, but it wasn't a patch that they were running. They were running an application that pushed 'patched' files out to networked computers, and they pushed those patched files out to computers that weren't even running the right operating system, which was caused the crash.
If it were truely running a patch on each system, an SP2 Windows XP patch will recognize the fact that a computer is running Win2K or NT and refuse to execute.
Remember though, it can analyze ground that we haven't seen close-up at all. It has the ability to travel to rough, or mountainous terrain, or explore into a canyon which are places that our current landers cannot reach. For now we have been limited to flat, rather uninteresting surfaces of mars due to mobility limitations.
I don't see how it could be an MS error, perhaps the interface for the app they were using to patch could have been clearer (?) but what they essentially did was overwrite a bunch of OS files on tens of thousands of computers that had no real connection to the OS that was running.
If I were tech support, this is one of those times that I say PIBKAC, a clueless (l)User. Its like taking a hex editor and changing bytes in an executable, and expecting it to still work because the programmers ought to have accounted for it.
And if the application was coded with multiple layers of passwords and a physical key lock and the guy still screwed up? How far are you going to take it before its no longer the application's fault? You know the saying about God inventing a better idiot.
The simple fact is that there is ALWAYS some way to do something that you didn't want, because there are times when you DO want to do that. For example, as soon as the patch checked out fine on the 7 computers maybe they were going to do EXACTLY what happened to them.
There is a level of common sence of the application not fking things up on purpose, but at some point you need to trust the user will make the correct choice that they do want to do something. In this case you cannot blame the 'guy who provided the checkboxes', the admins very simply completely fked it up.
The only advantage is that the mouse is lighter than a battery operated wireless mouse and because the cord is not directly attached to the mouse, it doesn't get in the way. Have you ever had one of those magically shrinking mouse cords? As you use your mouse it slowly drop over the side of the table making it harder to move until you have to reach back and pull out the slack.
However, I think the advantages are very limited and really not worth the trouble. I'll keep my wired optical mouse tyvm.
Damn, and I think I might have just totally misinterpreted what you wrote. I wrote thinking that you were using 'slave to economics' as a reason not to travel... but I just realized that you might have been using it as a reason TO travel, at which point my above post makes absolutely no sence.
I'm looking to do something similar for awhile, and the reason isn't economics. The reason is that I want to spend time in other countries and travel. My life is too short to spend at home until I'm too old to travel.
I want to go abroad, work for awhile, see the world, and appreciate what it has to offer before I choose to settle down. I'm not living my life according to economics, although economics may determine the opportunities available to me and where I decide to go.
Take a look at the article if you haven't yet. I'm not explicitly referring to UI or changing interfaces at all, at least not as an individual thing. I'm referring to the mindset of how people learn, and how people learn TO learn. User interface is only a small part of that, and a part that you don't even need to consider for my point.
I am referring to the increasingly common stereotype of "asking the 9 year old next door to fix my computer". I am referring to the increasingly widespread ability to learn independantly, and the apparent result of children quickly surpassing the skill of their parents using technology on their own. My proposal is that this generation, instead of learning all they need to know from their parents and other institutions, what they are doing is instead learning HOW to learn. They are learning to adapt quickly, how to pick up new skills on the fly because they have been exposed to it all their life and are forced to do so because of the rapid change and introduction of new technology.
What I'm saying is that these people as children now, are learning rapid adaptation skills that they are going to carry throughout their lives. This means that sudden change will not scare them, it will be the norm. They will have no problems picking up new ways of doing things, and new tools with which to do them because that is what they already know. If another massive revolution in the way things are done occurs (suppose instantaneous transfer of information, or possibly transfer of matter via energy like teleportation), it will be something that they will take in stride and will take less effort to get used to than our parents generation took to get used to computers.
I am not disparaging my parents generation, I am simply saying that when they were children they learned facts and then they were done with learning. Our generation is being taught not only facts, but how to learn new facts in the future because what they know is going to change. This is a skill acquired by practice, and I think that the children of today are now better equipped to handle the rapid change of what they know than their parents were when the computer revolution took hold.
Sorry, but I wasn't referring to the primary article, the User Interface one (as I mentioned), I was writing in responce to one of the secondary links "The Economist writes against software complexity".
You make valid points, but irrelavent to the point I was attempting to make with my post. Bad UI is a completely different issue (and will always be an issue).
One of my big beefs with a lot of 'user-friendly' design is the very tucking away of esoterica, mostly because its done so badly.
A clean, easy-to use, visible options design shouldn't do its best to hide the advanced functionality from ever being seen. Too often I have spent looking for a piece of functionality that I know exists in a program, only to spend 20 minutes clicking through dozens of Options, Advanced Options, Preferences, Other Preferences, Misc.. etc menus before I find what I'm looking for (if I do at all).
Good UI design should make it easy to use for a novice to access its basic functionality, but if its going to tuck away its advanced uses, they need to be layed out logically enough that they can be found easily *for someone who is looking for them*.
I agree with you completely. I graduate from university in a couple of months and I'm already pursuing opportunities overseas as well as locally (Canada).
I wasn't able to get to the GUI Design article, but I read The Economist's one. One telling point I thought was referring to people as Analogues, Digital Immigrants, and Natives. These being people who are unfamiliar with new technology and ignorant of how to use it (note, not 'ignorant' in general, just the classification of the lowest-skill computer user if at all), then those that came to technology and adapted to it, and finally people who grew up in the digital world.
I think most of this problem is simply the rapid pace of change. We're in the first era that has seen a revolutionary invention go from non-existant to an everyday fact of life in such a short span of time that most people were not only alive when it was something rare and required special talent, but they are still working! The change has simply outpaced a lot of people's ability to adapt to it, so much so that it is shocking to those of us in the 'next' generation that the previous one could be so clueless.
Its not that they are clueless users, its that they have been thrown head-first into a pond that they vaguely knew existed, let alone how to swim. But the upside is that the problems we agonize over, the clueless user, tech support pains, is for the most part a self-fixing problem. In 30 years the older generation will have retired and moved on, while those of us who will take over for the most part are native users, we grew up immersed in technology and rapid change. Thus in another couple of decades, the problems of technological ignorance and inability to use modern systems will dwindle away. Not that it will ever disappear, there will always be people unable to grasp these things, but the fact that everyone has grown up with this knowledge will all but eliminate a lot of the problems we're dealing with today.
There will always be bad interfaces, unusable technology, its a given. But if this rate of rapid change continues, in a generation's time everyone will have been born and raised in an environment of rapid change and cutting edge technology. It will be commonplace, and I think that the issue of entire segments of the population being unable to adapt will no longer exist.
The answer is 'Yes'. Its not a one way street. Sure, video games are culture based, if there wasn't any basis then they wouldn't sell.
But, as with anything, they expand on what we consider our culture to be, they contribute to it. They also serve to reinfoce attitudes and culture that we already have.
Video games aren't the message, they are the medium, and the messages that are being passed through that medium are intertwined with our culture. They express values already held by society (not necessarily in the literal sence), while simultaneously adding to the body of work that make up our basis for those values.
Eh, just find any old battery that will fit (even loosely) inside the casing and break out the soldering iron. I'm sure it'll all be fine.
Alternatively you could get a battery that doesn't fit (bigger is better, right?) and use duct tape to secure it to the outside of the phone and then rewire the battery contacts to ensure a solid connection.
Ok, personally I think that a person who has a cellphone catch on fire against their face, and said cell phone catching on fire because it is in the microwave has bigger problems to worry about.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be so happy if the cells in my head began exploding because the water inside them flash boiled due to microwave radiation.
My pricing issues are very simple. I'm a poor student who has a decent sized debt (~$14,000 Canadian). My monthly budget is entirely up to me, but if I can get away with paying $100 for food and my $375 rent I'm happy. Thus, anything that comes with a 'monthly payment' attached to use, unless its strictly necessary to have, gets dropped to the bottom of the pile.
Thats the money situation, plus the fact that I work for 4 months, then go to school for 4 months and repeat, so I do not bring in a paycheque when studying.
The real kicker is, with my studies I never know when or how much time I'm going to spend on any sort of entertainment. Last semester of school I ended up on campus working 7 days a week, 60+ hours total. That left almost no time for anything fun, and I'm certainly not going to sacrifice my studies for anything so mundane as playing a game. Thus from month to month, I never really know if I'm going to touch the thing, so a $15 USD fee each month is a really bad investment for a potentially sporadic player.
I agree that a monthly charge may be necessary, but I'm not going to be paying it if I don't have a reasonable certainty that I'm even going to use it. In the end I'd rather splurge at once and grab 2 high-quality titles at the beginning of a semester, not care about any sort of pay-to-play scheme, and just jump in when I have time. That way I have no problem with having them sit on my shelf for 2 months straight if I don't have time. But paying $15 US for the priviledge of possibly picking them up is not something I care to do.
Slashdot Mirror
His 75th game... but remember that he only won 74. It would have really seemed to be throwing it if he lost AFTER his 75th victory.
I can say for certain that a cow in the process of shitting on me would be a moving experience... about 5 steps to the left or so.
Most of your complaints are client settings. I have my client set to open a window in the tray and not blink when a new message comes in, that way it doesn't distract me until I want it to.
The main difference between the two forms of communication is that email is asynchronous, and IM (for the most part) is synchronous. An email is fire and forget, and the person will get it when they log in. IM can do the same, although the size of the messages limits what can be transmitted (and files are strictly synchronous), but for the most part IM conversations need to be synchronous, both parties must be online and connected, in order to be most effective.
His point is that in English, da Vinci doesn't have any other connotations, so all we think of is Leonardo. However in (Italian?) da Vinci is more difficult to separate from its innate meaning and thus can cause lexical confusion.
For example, take Princess Diana of Wales. We all know who she is. However if you were to refer to her strictly as "of Wales" the situation becomes extremely confusing for an English speaker.
What, you mean this 'wilderness' thing isn't flattened and paved?!? Bah, so much for equal opportunity and government mandated accessibility laws!
"ask who should be in charge of developing medicine - the government or industry?"
Yes. Both institutions have a role they can play to advance the field of medicine. These kinds of questions are not XOR questions, I think the biggest consideration to give is how do we help the most people? So I say a resounding BOTH!
Wow, you can fill 200MB hard drive with data in less than a second?
People comment about the bandwidth of a card full of DVDs or Tape Drives and the like, but do they ever stop to think about exactly how LONG it takes to write information to the medium? Driving from one place to another with the data is trivial, but converting the raw data into the transportable message takes absolutely forever.
Yes, but it wasn't a patch that they were running. They were running an application that pushed 'patched' files out to networked computers, and they pushed those patched files out to computers that weren't even running the right operating system, which was caused the crash.
If it were truely running a patch on each system, an SP2 Windows XP patch will recognize the fact that a computer is running Win2K or NT and refuse to execute.
Remember though, it can analyze ground that we haven't seen close-up at all. It has the ability to travel to rough, or mountainous terrain, or explore into a canyon which are places that our current landers cannot reach. For now we have been limited to flat, rather uninteresting surfaces of mars due to mobility limitations.
I don't see how it could be an MS error, perhaps the interface for the app they were using to patch could have been clearer (?) but what they essentially did was overwrite a bunch of OS files on tens of thousands of computers that had no real connection to the OS that was running.
If I were tech support, this is one of those times that I say PIBKAC, a clueless (l)User. Its like taking a hex editor and changing bytes in an executable, and expecting it to still work because the programmers ought to have accounted for it.
And if the application was coded with multiple layers of passwords and a physical key lock and the guy still screwed up? How far are you going to take it before its no longer the application's fault? You know the saying about God inventing a better idiot.
The simple fact is that there is ALWAYS some way to do something that you didn't want, because there are times when you DO want to do that. For example, as soon as the patch checked out fine on the 7 computers maybe they were going to do EXACTLY what happened to them.
There is a level of common sence of the application not fking things up on purpose, but at some point you need to trust the user will make the correct choice that they do want to do something. In this case you cannot blame the 'guy who provided the checkboxes', the admins very simply completely fked it up.
The only advantage is that the mouse is lighter than a battery operated wireless mouse and because the cord is not directly attached to the mouse, it doesn't get in the way. Have you ever had one of those magically shrinking mouse cords? As you use your mouse it slowly drop over the side of the table making it harder to move until you have to reach back and pull out the slack.
However, I think the advantages are very limited and really not worth the trouble. I'll keep my wired optical mouse tyvm.
Let me try to translate:
Its bad.
Did I get it right? I kinda got lost between the touchdown and the hummingbird...
Damn, and I think I might have just totally misinterpreted what you wrote. I wrote thinking that you were using 'slave to economics' as a reason not to travel... but I just realized that you might have been using it as a reason TO travel, at which point my above post makes absolutely no sence.
I'm looking to do something similar for awhile, and the reason isn't economics. The reason is that I want to spend time in other countries and travel. My life is too short to spend at home until I'm too old to travel.
I want to go abroad, work for awhile, see the world, and appreciate what it has to offer before I choose to settle down. I'm not living my life according to economics, although economics may determine the opportunities available to me and where I decide to go.
Take a look at the article if you haven't yet. I'm not explicitly referring to UI or changing interfaces at all, at least not as an individual thing. I'm referring to the mindset of how people learn, and how people learn TO learn. User interface is only a small part of that, and a part that you don't even need to consider for my point.
I am referring to the increasingly common stereotype of "asking the 9 year old next door to fix my computer". I am referring to the increasingly widespread ability to learn independantly, and the apparent result of children quickly surpassing the skill of their parents using technology on their own. My proposal is that this generation, instead of learning all they need to know from their parents and other institutions, what they are doing is instead learning HOW to learn. They are learning to adapt quickly, how to pick up new skills on the fly because they have been exposed to it all their life and are forced to do so because of the rapid change and introduction of new technology.
What I'm saying is that these people as children now, are learning rapid adaptation skills that they are going to carry throughout their lives. This means that sudden change will not scare them, it will be the norm. They will have no problems picking up new ways of doing things, and new tools with which to do them because that is what they already know. If another massive revolution in the way things are done occurs (suppose instantaneous transfer of information, or possibly transfer of matter via energy like teleportation), it will be something that they will take in stride and will take less effort to get used to than our parents generation took to get used to computers.
I am not disparaging my parents generation, I am simply saying that when they were children they learned facts and then they were done with learning. Our generation is being taught not only facts, but how to learn new facts in the future because what they know is going to change. This is a skill acquired by practice, and I think that the children of today are now better equipped to handle the rapid change of what they know than their parents were when the computer revolution took hold.
Sorry, but I wasn't referring to the primary article, the User Interface one (as I mentioned), I was writing in responce to one of the secondary links "The Economist writes against software complexity".
You make valid points, but irrelavent to the point I was attempting to make with my post. Bad UI is a completely different issue (and will always be an issue).
One of my big beefs with a lot of 'user-friendly' design is the very tucking away of esoterica, mostly because its done so badly.
A clean, easy-to use, visible options design shouldn't do its best to hide the advanced functionality from ever being seen. Too often I have spent looking for a piece of functionality that I know exists in a program, only to spend 20 minutes clicking through dozens of Options, Advanced Options, Preferences, Other Preferences, Misc.. etc menus before I find what I'm looking for (if I do at all).
Good UI design should make it easy to use for a novice to access its basic functionality, but if its going to tuck away its advanced uses, they need to be layed out logically enough that they can be found easily *for someone who is looking for them*.
I agree with you completely. I graduate from university in a couple of months and I'm already pursuing opportunities overseas as well as locally (Canada).
I wasn't able to get to the GUI Design article, but I read The Economist's one. One telling point I thought was referring to people as Analogues, Digital Immigrants, and Natives. These being people who are unfamiliar with new technology and ignorant of how to use it (note, not 'ignorant' in general, just the classification of the lowest-skill computer user if at all), then those that came to technology and adapted to it, and finally people who grew up in the digital world.
I think most of this problem is simply the rapid pace of change. We're in the first era that has seen a revolutionary invention go from non-existant to an everyday fact of life in such a short span of time that most people were not only alive when it was something rare and required special talent, but they are still working! The change has simply outpaced a lot of people's ability to adapt to it, so much so that it is shocking to those of us in the 'next' generation that the previous one could be so clueless.
Its not that they are clueless users, its that they have been thrown head-first into a pond that they vaguely knew existed, let alone how to swim. But the upside is that the problems we agonize over, the clueless user, tech support pains, is for the most part a self-fixing problem. In 30 years the older generation will have retired and moved on, while those of us who will take over for the most part are native users, we grew up immersed in technology and rapid change. Thus in another couple of decades, the problems of technological ignorance and inability to use modern systems will dwindle away. Not that it will ever disappear, there will always be people unable to grasp these things, but the fact that everyone has grown up with this knowledge will all but eliminate a lot of the problems we're dealing with today.
There will always be bad interfaces, unusable technology, its a given. But if this rate of rapid change continues, in a generation's time everyone will have been born and raised in an environment of rapid change and cutting edge technology. It will be commonplace, and I think that the issue of entire segments of the population being unable to adapt will no longer exist.
The answer is 'Yes'. Its not a one way street. Sure, video games are culture based, if there wasn't any basis then they wouldn't sell.
But, as with anything, they expand on what we consider our culture to be, they contribute to it. They also serve to reinfoce attitudes and culture that we already have.
Video games aren't the message, they are the medium, and the messages that are being passed through that medium are intertwined with our culture. They express values already held by society (not necessarily in the literal sence), while simultaneously adding to the body of work that make up our basis for those values.
How much harm can one website do? This is slashdot. We blow up poor people's servers for fun!
Eh, just find any old battery that will fit (even loosely) inside the casing and break out the soldering iron. I'm sure it'll all be fine.
Alternatively you could get a battery that doesn't fit (bigger is better, right?) and use duct tape to secure it to the outside of the phone and then rewire the battery contacts to ensure a solid connection.
Ok, personally I think that a person who has a cellphone catch on fire against their face, and said cell phone catching on fire because it is in the microwave has bigger problems to worry about.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be so happy if the cells in my head began exploding because the water inside them flash boiled due to microwave radiation.
My pricing issues are very simple. I'm a poor student who has a decent sized debt (~$14,000 Canadian). My monthly budget is entirely up to me, but if I can get away with paying $100 for food and my $375 rent I'm happy. Thus, anything that comes with a 'monthly payment' attached to use, unless its strictly necessary to have, gets dropped to the bottom of the pile.
Thats the money situation, plus the fact that I work for 4 months, then go to school for 4 months and repeat, so I do not bring in a paycheque when studying.
The real kicker is, with my studies I never know when or how much time I'm going to spend on any sort of entertainment. Last semester of school I ended up on campus working 7 days a week, 60+ hours total. That left almost no time for anything fun, and I'm certainly not going to sacrifice my studies for anything so mundane as playing a game. Thus from month to month, I never really know if I'm going to touch the thing, so a $15 USD fee each month is a really bad investment for a potentially sporadic player.
I agree that a monthly charge may be necessary, but I'm not going to be paying it if I don't have a reasonable certainty that I'm even going to use it. In the end I'd rather splurge at once and grab 2 high-quality titles at the beginning of a semester, not care about any sort of pay-to-play scheme, and just jump in when I have time. That way I have no problem with having them sit on my shelf for 2 months straight if I don't have time. But paying $15 US for the priviledge of possibly picking them up is not something I care to do.