I'm not far into this book (Chapter 4), but so far I find it very illuminating. I don't have a lot of project management experience; I'm used to working alone or an small teams, and I don't have an engineering background (lit grad turned programmer). I've got a lot of goals and big ideas for several projects, and this is really giving me a handle on how to approach them, what kind of information to present to people, how to ask good questions, prepare documents.
Just got through the "vision" chapter, so now I'm going over all my active and pending projects and trying to hammer out good vision statements. Next up: "Where Ideas Come From." Berkun's writing is lucid and engaging; a very easy read.
I'll tell you how I use huge icons on my Mac: to counter my worst tendencies.
A lot happens on my Mac's Desktop. Stuff gets downloaded there. I create new projects there before filing them somewhere else more appropriate in my user folder. But I'm kinda bad about putting stuff away. That Desktop can get cluttered pretty fast.
Solution: I set the icon size on the desktop to the largest size. Less room for documents then. End result is I clean up more often, my desktop stays uncluttered, and things get filed the way they should.
I'm not sure that's why they made big icons, but that's how I use 'em.
The study only addresses the issue of size of the indices and returned results. Understandable, and it certainly debunks Yahoo's claims, or at least, makes them irrelevant -- what good is a 19 billion-page index if you don't actually get any more search results?
But the real utility of a search engine is the relevance of those search results. Google has been successful because its search results are relevant to a large portion of its users. The real question when comparing search engines is, can one help you find what you're looking for faster than another?
Yahoo may have a huge index, Google may return more results, but neither metric alone will tell you which one you actually want to use for general internet searching.
At the behest of this article, I'm learning Dvorak. One of the two layouts available under Mac OS X is Dvorak + Qwerty control characters, which means that when you press Command, the layout switches back to Qwerty.
It's not as confusing as it may sound at first, because I've really just memorized a position for a particular effect, rather than a specific combination of keys. More broadly speaking, it is much clearer to me now how much typing in general is a matter of memorizing patterns for whole words, rather than typing individual letters. IOW, I think "table," and just type it; I'm not really thinking, "T-A-B-L-E." Which, of course, is analogous to the way we read, too.
BTW, memorizing the Dvorak layout didn't take long, but trying to touch-type this took over 30 minutes, I think further illustrating my point.
"Embrace and Extend" is a tactic for maintaining a monopoly. This is not Apple's position, and historically hasn't ever been a tactic for them, at least not with Macs (iPods... maybe). Apple's profits are from hardware sales. The software is super extra yummy icing, and it sure helps sell the hardware, but they're just not in a position to be dictating browser direction.
I mean, what would be the strategy? Linux users around the world now use Apple's (open) code? Is Apple going after a browser monopoly? They're going to be closer to taking down Firefox/Mozilla and Internet Explorer as soon as the KDE guys jump to the Safari fork? That just doesn't make sense.
No, of course not; and I should have said that. But my guess is that GTA players have a lower murder rate than, say, the AL population on the whole, confounding the premise of the case, which is that GTA incites people to murder.
Take sample of population of GTA players. Take sample of U.S. population as whole. Take sample of Ala. population. What is the murder rate in each population?
I remember reading an introduction to statistics many years ago that used D&D and suicide hysteria as an example. To wit: RPG players had a lower rate of suicide than the teenage population as a whole. D&D lowers the suicide rate, by that metric.
Any guesses as to what GTA is accomplishing for the people of Alabama, the state with the sixth highest murder rate in the United States (and well above the national average: 7.4 vs 5.5 per 100,000)?
Guy Kawasaki wrote a (at the time) popular book called The Macintosh Way and was one of the first (if not the first) person to bear the title "Evangelist" in a wholly secular, corporate way. If Jobs wielded a reality distortion field, Kawasaki finessed and perfected ways of amplifying it. The Cult of Mac is as much a product of Kawasaki's ebullient One-way-to-salvation marketing savvy as it is a devotion to the teachings of Jobs (who was revered, but never really worshipped by Mac cultists until he returned in A.J. 1 (1997)).
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.
My first home computer was a Mac. I learned a lot from HyperCard and MS-BASIC.
I'd say the closest thing to HyperCard now is the web, but the underlying structure requires a broad range of knowledge, from markup (HTML), graphics (Photoshop or other image program), code (Javascript, PHP), and persistence (MySQL). It's not at all easy for a beginner, but it's the modern RAD environment that most closely resembles HyperCard.
It seems like a lot of old school D&D players share this sentiment that the AD&D 2E ruined the game with all its extra rules and complexity.
Nah. I played AD&D from age 8 to age 18, from Efreeti-covered DMG to the 2nd edition, and I always thought the best part of 2e was that it reduced complexity.
For instance, in the first edition there were combat tables that you had to consult every time an encounter occurred; in 2nd edition it was a matter of simple arithmetic to determine whether a hit landed. Every character has a statistic called THAC0 -- To hit Armor Class 0 -- the number the player has to roll above on a d20 to land a blow. To hit armor class "2," you must roll above (THAC0 - 2). To hit armor class "-2," you must roll above (THAC0 + 2) (lower AC is better). You could divine these numbers by examining the 1st edition combat matrices, but the 2nd edition properly emphasized THAC0 over combat tables, thus simplifying game play.
Another improvement in the 2nd edition eliminated elements of game play that might only pertain to a particular genre of campaign or storyline. For instance, the first edition listed tables of progress for character classes or professions along with a title for each achieved level. A first level fighter was known as "Veteran"; second level was "Warrior"; third was "Swordsman." Interesting on a lexicographical level and great for a fourth-grader's vocabulary, but not particularly useful for game play.
Some "traditional" classes were rightly left out of the 2nd edition, to the chagrin of some fans, but to the benefit of streamlining the game. In the first Edition, there were four core character classes: Cleric, Fighter, Mage, and Thief. Additionally, there were related subclasses: Druids, neutrally-aligned, nature-loving versions of Clerics; Paladins and Rangers, holy warriors and Aragorn lookalikes who could cast spells as well as wield swords and wear armor; Illusionists, Mages whose spells played with the opponents' mind rather than evoked elements or summoned extra-planar assistance; and Assassins, a Thief subclass whose primary interest was government work. Then there were these "special" classes in the appendix of the Player's Handbook : The Bard and The Monk. To be a Bard, your character had to be a Fighter, change classes after achieving fifth level to Thief, then change classes again to a Mage, then be a mage for three levels, then change to Bard. Or something like that. They were really powerful and really unrealistic. The Monk was modeled after Shaolin/Carradine/Kung-Fu masters and also got weird, deadly, and totally ridiculous powers at higher levels ("quaking palm" -- I think is what is was called -- showed up in Kill Bill Vol. 2).
The 2nd edition decreed an end to the subclasses, and simply said that your character was either a Priest, a Warrior, a Wizard, or a Rogue. The shades and color of your particular specialization was rounded out by role-playing and a beefed-up skills system. A Ranger in the second edition amounts to a Warrior who had specialized in herbs, tracking, and backpacking. A Druid is a Priest who worships a particular set of "nature" deities and maybe carries out some eco-terrorism from time to time. A Bard is just a subclass of Rogue (wrong, really, considering how it's the music executives who should properly be labeled "Thief"). You get the idea.
Subsequent to the release of the 2nd edition, TSR released a series of Character Handbooks which gave specialization profiles for a number of subclasses that would be appropriate for specific genres: Feudal Knight; Paladin; Samurai; Barbarian. Some people got really angry at TSR for releasing all these supplements, but it it was a logical move from a game play standpoint that conveniently (strategically, probably) worked from a marketing standpoint. One of the few criticisms I have for the 2nd edition was that, as I may have alluded, it omitted much of the "flavor" of swords-and-sorcery adventure. You could glean
One of the really nice things about GUI's is that they make rarely used commands (like word count) really easy to discover.
And one of the drawbacks of the GUIs (so far at least) is that it is difficult to use features (like Word Count) in any way but the limited set the software engineers imagined. For instance, what if you want to count the number of words in a text entry field on a web page?
The small, single-purpose utility model is like having a box of Legos that you can use to construct anything you want, on the fly. The drawback is that you have to build everything yourself. The monolithic app model, like a Transformer, has some limited flexibility, and can do some things you probably wouldn't dare on a command line. It works for most people and commonly-used (and occasionally complex) tasks, but has a finite number of states. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.
One of the reasons I immediately liked Mac OS X was because Terminal.app understood drag-and-drop, and behaved in every way I expected a GUI app to behave (unlike cmd.exe, to single out a particularly weak terminal emulator). By the same token, many OS X GUI apps have understood the power of a CLI; you can pipe a file into BBEdit, for instance. BBEdit can use shell scripts (and any arbitrary scripting language) on text within its GUI windows, and in turn redirect its output back to the CLI (or another program via AppleEvents).
I disagree strongly with this analysis. First, I'm a middle-of-the road independent (don't declare affiliation with any party). Most of my friends are Democrats. I have many friends and relatives who are Republican. Most of them voted for Kerry. I live in California.
Kerry did everything right in my opinion, which is why I am so disconcerted by the outcome. He ran against his opponent's record, not against his opponent's intellect or morality. He stuck to the concrete and the tangible, and hammered it home. He showed calm under pressure and demonstrated a command of nuanced and complex issues. His platform was pragmatic and populist. He had a record of bipartisanship and a history of public service. Kerry was a great candidate. Who would have appealed more to moderate Republicans? Not Dean. Who would have appealed to Environmentalists? Not Lieberman. Who would have appealed to people who initially supported war but were now having second thoughts? Not Gephart.
Exit polling showed that the #1 "issue" for a large number of Bush voters was "morality." They were voting on abortion and religion. Kerry voters were voting on war, the environment and the economy. Kerry didn't lose because he was a terrible candidate. He lost because evangelicals and secularists have dramatically different priorities, and there are more people who identify with the former group than the latter. This was a very important election with two strong and extremely different candidates. The outcome is a reflection of America, not of John Kerry.
In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote but acted as if he had a 60% mandate. I shudder to think what the next four years portend, with Bush's very real 51% victory, a subservient House and Senate, and an increasingly conservative federal bench.
No, it didn't. Word went steadily from 1.x to 2.x to 3.x (which sucked like a Hoover) to 4.x (part of the first "Office" Suite, I believe, with Excel 2.x or 3.x; can't remember), finally to Word 5, which was System 7-savvy. Publish & Subscribe and all that goodness.
Word was un-Maclike from version 1.x. Copy-protected disks, disappearing menu options, no font menu. The interface didn't change much until 5, which added toolbars and a better menu layout (as I recall).
That is like saying my home is ultra secure because it has never been broken into, when, in reality, I leave my doors unlocked and all my windows open.
Your home may not be "secure," but it is safe; that is to say, it is a statement of social dynamics more than the number of padlocks on your doors when you say "I live in a safe neighborhood; I can leave my doors unlocked at night." That may be naive, and the first attack is always the most remarkable, but still it can essentially be true. Saying you don't need to lock up is true if you live in a community where break-ins are rare.
A similar statement can also be true of Macs and viruses, presently. Right now, it's simply a safer neighborhood. Growth may change that, but it hasn't, so far.
A graphic designer is going to earn the price of a new full version of Photoshop in 15-30 hours. Maybe even faster than that if she's good and been in the business a while.
The price is only a small hurdle. If the choice is between expensive software that works well vs. free software that drives you mad, the designer is going to consider the fleeting nature of youth, health, sanity, and life and drop the Franklins.
All of your points are important ones, but you omitted the most important one: user testing.
Early and often, developers should get their product into the hands of key *users* and performing formal and informal user testing. Thinking about UI alone won't solve or even uncover important usability issues. By following something like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, or Microsoft's Interface guidelines you'll get close to where you need to be, but the last and most important parts still require active testing.
Any professional designer does usability testing, whether it's airplane cockpits, voice mail systems or web sites.
Usability tests can be as simple as drawing wireframes and using sticky notes, with a designer as the "operating system" and the user pointing and telling the designer what they expect to hapen and when. Tests can be customized development versions of the program you're working on with click hotspot metering and video of the users using the program.
Maybe it's just grabbing a few people passing in the hallway outside your office and saying, "hey, come here, tell me what you think of this," when you're still in development. Whatever you do, you've got to test with a small audience before you release to the big one.
I was introduced to BASIC first on a friend's Apple IIe and subsequently on my own first computer, an original Macintosh.
First programs included the standard:
10 print "Enter your name: " 20 input NAME$ 30 print NAME$ " is a doofus." 40 goto 30
About that time, I started getting 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, a science and nature periodical written for kids who had grown out of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. In the back of every issue was the "BASIC Training" feature, which had simple games and programs for a variety of platforms. The IBM versions were usually the only ones I could use; Apple IIe and Commodore 64 PEEK and POKE calls were meaningless in Mac MS-BASIC.
But later, BASIC facilitated an (extremely sketchy) introduction to the Macintosh toolbox. MS-BASIC on the mac had built-in pseudo toolbox calls so that you could change fonts, draw graphics primitives and buttons. I ended up writing a grade tracking program that was a snare of interwoven GOTOs and GOSUBs.
I breezed through two years of programming courses in high school and learned C in my own time. Looking back, I'm a little ticked off that my HS didn't offer "real" computer science with Pascal or C or any sort of AP treatment.
Then I learned Perl. Now I do websites. I've forgotten most of BASIC. I have been told this is a good thing. But sometimes (actually, lately, more and more) I have to deal with VBScript and I see "LEFT" and "MID" and I think "what the hell is this crap?"
Um, you don't just create investigators out of thin air. Either they have to be moved from other areas (fraud, organized crime, terrorism, x-files, etc.) to pr0n, or you have to hire new agents. Which costs money (affecting other investigations).
What version of MacOS was your professor using? You never just see "scrolling text" take over the GUI.
If OS X kernel panics, the screen dims and you get a message in multiple languages saying a reboot is necessary.
You can view crash logs with/Applications/Utilities/Console.app. Usually what you get is a dialog saying "The application -blah- has unexpectedly quit," and a log file is written to one of several convenent locations.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not far into this book (Chapter 4), but so far I find it very illuminating. I don't have a lot of project management experience; I'm used to working alone or an small teams, and I don't have an engineering background (lit grad turned programmer). I've got a lot of goals and big ideas for several projects, and this is really giving me a handle on how to approach them, what kind of information to present to people, how to ask good questions, prepare documents.
Just got through the "vision" chapter, so now I'm going over all my active and pending projects and trying to hammer out good vision statements. Next up: "Where Ideas Come From." Berkun's writing is lucid and engaging; a very easy read.
parent: Rectangles are more simple natural shaps, hexagons just look wrong.
Dude. Hexagons are everywhere in nature. Moreso than squares, certainly.
Re:"What's the point of HUGE icons????"
I'll tell you how I use huge icons on my Mac: to counter my worst tendencies.
A lot happens on my Mac's Desktop. Stuff gets downloaded there. I create new projects there before filing them somewhere else more appropriate in my user folder. But I'm kinda bad about putting stuff away. That Desktop can get cluttered pretty fast.
Solution: I set the icon size on the desktop to the largest size. Less room for documents then. End result is I clean up more often, my desktop stays uncluttered, and things get filed the way they should.
I'm not sure that's why they made big icons, but that's how I use 'em.
The study only addresses the issue of size of the indices and returned results. Understandable, and it certainly debunks Yahoo's claims, or at least, makes them irrelevant -- what good is a 19 billion-page index if you don't actually get any more search results?
But the real utility of a search engine is the relevance of those search results. Google has been successful because its search results are relevant to a large portion of its users. The real question when comparing search engines is, can one help you find what you're looking for faster than another?
Yahoo may have a huge index, Google may return more results, but neither metric alone will tell you which one you actually want to use for general internet searching.
At the behest of this article, I'm learning Dvorak. One of the two layouts available under Mac OS X is Dvorak + Qwerty control characters, which means that when you press Command, the layout switches back to Qwerty.
It's not as confusing as it may sound at first, because I've really just memorized a position for a particular effect, rather than a specific combination of keys. More broadly speaking, it is much clearer to me now how much typing in general is a matter of memorizing patterns for whole words, rather than typing individual letters. IOW, I think "table," and just type it; I'm not really thinking, "T-A-B-L-E." Which, of course, is analogous to the way we read, too.
BTW, memorizing the Dvorak layout didn't take long, but trying to touch-type this took over 30 minutes, I think further illustrating my point.
"Embrace and Extend" is a tactic for maintaining a monopoly. This is not Apple's position, and historically hasn't ever been a tactic for them, at least not with Macs (iPods... maybe). Apple's profits are from hardware sales. The software is super extra yummy icing, and it sure helps sell the hardware, but they're just not in a position to be dictating browser direction.
I mean, what would be the strategy? Linux users around the world now use Apple's (open) code? Is Apple going after a browser monopoly? They're going to be closer to taking down Firefox/Mozilla and Internet Explorer as soon as the KDE guys jump to the Safari fork? That just doesn't make sense.
OP: We're going the way of the fucking Romans.
Nah. The Soviets, maybe. Travel papers... bureaucracy, single party rule, etc.
If we're supposed to be the Romans, where are the vomitoriums? I want a vomitorium!
OP: Apple is going to have a very small market here.
Hint: designers will love not being tied to a desktop computer and Wacom tablet. Designers tend to like Macs. The good ones can afford them.
Why do you think business users need tablet PCs? Most business use is email and data entry, peppered with spreadsheets and presentations.
I imagine that Apple would bring something compelling to the idea, as they have done with personal computers, laptops, PDAs, and MP3 players.
No, of course not; and I should have said that. But my guess is that GTA players have a lower murder rate than, say, the AL population on the whole, confounding the premise of the case, which is that GTA incites people to murder.
Take sample of population of GTA players. Take sample of U.S. population as whole. Take sample of Ala. population. What is the murder rate in each population?
I remember reading an introduction to statistics many years ago that used D&D and suicide hysteria as an example. To wit: RPG players had a lower rate of suicide than the teenage population as a whole. D&D lowers the suicide rate, by that metric.
Any guesses as to what GTA is accomplishing for the people of Alabama, the state with the sixth highest murder rate in the United States (and well above the national average: 7.4 vs 5.5 per 100,000)?
Guy Kawasaki wrote a (at the time) popular book called The Macintosh Way and was one of the first (if not the first) person to bear the title "Evangelist" in a wholly secular, corporate way. If Jobs wielded a reality distortion field, Kawasaki finessed and perfected ways of amplifying it. The Cult of Mac is as much a product of Kawasaki's ebullient One-way-to-salvation marketing savvy as it is a devotion to the teachings of Jobs (who was revered, but never really worshipped by Mac cultists until he returned in A.J. 1 (1997)).
Kawasaki was Paul to Job's Jesus.
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.
My first home computer was a Mac. I learned a lot from HyperCard and MS-BASIC.
I'd say the closest thing to HyperCard now is the web, but the underlying structure requires a broad range of knowledge, from markup (HTML), graphics (Photoshop or other image program), code (Javascript, PHP), and persistence (MySQL). It's not at all easy for a beginner, but it's the modern RAD environment that most closely resembles HyperCard.
It seems like a lot of old school D&D players share this sentiment that the AD&D 2E ruined the game with all its extra rules and complexity.
Nah. I played AD&D from age 8 to age 18, from Efreeti-covered DMG to the 2nd edition, and I always thought the best part of 2e was that it reduced complexity.
For instance, in the first edition there were combat tables that you had to consult every time an encounter occurred; in 2nd edition it was a matter of simple arithmetic to determine whether a hit landed. Every character has a statistic called THAC0 -- To hit Armor Class 0 -- the number the player has to roll above on a d20 to land a blow. To hit armor class "2," you must roll above (THAC0 - 2). To hit armor class "-2," you must roll above (THAC0 + 2) (lower AC is better). You could divine these numbers by examining the 1st edition combat matrices, but the 2nd edition properly emphasized THAC0 over combat tables, thus simplifying game play.
Another improvement in the 2nd edition eliminated elements of game play that might only pertain to a particular genre of campaign or storyline. For instance, the first edition listed tables of progress for character classes or professions along with a title for each achieved level. A first level fighter was known as "Veteran"; second level was "Warrior"; third was "Swordsman." Interesting on a lexicographical level and great for a fourth-grader's vocabulary, but not particularly useful for game play.
Some "traditional" classes were rightly left out of the 2nd edition, to the chagrin of some fans, but to the benefit of streamlining the game. In the first Edition, there were four core character classes: Cleric, Fighter, Mage, and Thief. Additionally, there were related subclasses: Druids, neutrally-aligned, nature-loving versions of Clerics; Paladins and Rangers, holy warriors and Aragorn lookalikes who could cast spells as well as wield swords and wear armor; Illusionists, Mages whose spells played with the opponents' mind rather than evoked elements or summoned extra-planar assistance; and Assassins, a Thief subclass whose primary interest was government work. Then there were these "special" classes in the appendix of the Player's Handbook : The Bard and The Monk. To be a Bard, your character had to be a Fighter, change classes after achieving fifth level to Thief, then change classes again to a Mage, then be a mage for three levels, then change to Bard. Or something like that. They were really powerful and really unrealistic. The Monk was modeled after Shaolin/Carradine/Kung-Fu masters and also got weird, deadly, and totally ridiculous powers at higher levels ("quaking palm" -- I think is what is was called -- showed up in Kill Bill Vol. 2).
The 2nd edition decreed an end to the subclasses, and simply said that your character was either a Priest, a Warrior, a Wizard, or a Rogue. The shades and color of your particular specialization was rounded out by role-playing and a beefed-up skills system. A Ranger in the second edition amounts to a Warrior who had specialized in herbs, tracking, and backpacking. A Druid is a Priest who worships a particular set of "nature" deities and maybe carries out some eco-terrorism from time to time. A Bard is just a subclass of Rogue (wrong, really, considering how it's the music executives who should properly be labeled "Thief"). You get the idea.
Subsequent to the release of the 2nd edition, TSR released a series of Character Handbooks which gave specialization profiles for a number of subclasses that would be appropriate for specific genres: Feudal Knight; Paladin; Samurai; Barbarian. Some people got really angry at TSR for releasing all these supplements, but it it was a logical move from a game play standpoint that conveniently (strategically, probably) worked from a marketing standpoint. One of the few criticisms I have for the 2nd edition was that, as I may have alluded, it omitted much of the "flavor" of swords-and-sorcery adventure. You could glean
parent:
And one of the drawbacks of the GUIs (so far at least) is that it is difficult to use features (like Word Count) in any way but the limited set the software engineers imagined. For instance, what if you want to count the number of words in a text entry field on a web page?
The small, single-purpose utility model is like having a box of Legos that you can use to construct anything you want, on the fly. The drawback is that you have to build everything yourself. The monolithic app model, like a Transformer, has some limited flexibility, and can do some things you probably wouldn't dare on a command line. It works for most people and commonly-used (and occasionally complex) tasks, but has a finite number of states. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses.
One of the reasons I immediately liked Mac OS X was because Terminal.app understood drag-and-drop, and behaved in every way I expected a GUI app to behave (unlike cmd.exe, to single out a particularly weak terminal emulator). By the same token, many OS X GUI apps have understood the power of a CLI; you can pipe a file into BBEdit, for instance. BBEdit can use shell scripts (and any arbitrary scripting language) on text within its GUI windows, and in turn redirect its output back to the CLI (or another program via AppleEvents).
I disagree strongly with this analysis. First, I'm a middle-of-the road independent (don't declare affiliation with any party). Most of my friends are Democrats. I have many friends and relatives who are Republican. Most of them voted for Kerry. I live in California.
Kerry did everything right in my opinion, which is why I am so disconcerted by the outcome. He ran against his opponent's record, not against his opponent's intellect or morality. He stuck to the concrete and the tangible, and hammered it home. He showed calm under pressure and demonstrated a command of nuanced and complex issues. His platform was pragmatic and populist. He had a record of bipartisanship and a history of public service. Kerry was a great candidate. Who would have appealed more to moderate Republicans? Not Dean. Who would have appealed to Environmentalists? Not Lieberman. Who would have appealed to people who initially supported war but were now having second thoughts? Not Gephart.
Exit polling showed that the #1 "issue" for a large number of Bush voters was "morality." They were voting on abortion and religion. Kerry voters were voting on war, the environment and the economy. Kerry didn't lose because he was a terrible candidate. He lost because evangelicals and secularists have dramatically different priorities, and there are more people who identify with the former group than the latter. This was a very important election with two strong and extremely different candidates. The outcome is a reflection of America, not of John Kerry.
In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote but acted as if he had a 60% mandate. I shudder to think what the next four years portend, with Bush's very real 51% victory, a subservient House and Senate, and an increasingly conservative federal bench.
Wireless technology would mean the death of battery life.
With 802.11g, my iPod becomes the remote control for my stereo, from any room in the house. You know they're working on it.
No, it didn't. Word went steadily from 1.x to 2.x to 3.x (which sucked like a Hoover) to 4.x (part of the first "Office" Suite, I believe, with Excel 2.x or 3.x; can't remember), finally to Word 5, which was System 7-savvy. Publish & Subscribe and all that goodness.
Word was un-Maclike from version 1.x. Copy-protected disks, disappearing menu options, no font menu. The interface didn't change much until 5, which added toolbars and a better menu layout (as I recall).
That is like saying my home is ultra secure because it has never been broken into, when, in reality, I leave my doors unlocked and all my windows open.
Your home may not be "secure," but it is safe; that is to say, it is a statement of social dynamics more than the number of padlocks on your doors when you say "I live in a safe neighborhood; I can leave my doors unlocked at night." That may be naive, and the first attack is always the most remarkable, but still it can essentially be true. Saying you don't need to lock up is true if you live in a community where break-ins are rare.
A similar statement can also be true of Macs and viruses, presently. Right now, it's simply a safer neighborhood. Growth may change that, but it hasn't, so far.
A graphic designer is going to earn the price of a new full version of Photoshop in 15-30 hours. Maybe even faster than that if she's good and been in the business a while.
The price is only a small hurdle. If the choice is between expensive software that works well vs. free software that drives you mad, the designer is going to consider the fleeting nature of youth, health, sanity, and life and drop the Franklins.
All of your points are important ones, but you omitted the most important one: user testing.
Early and often, developers should get their product into the hands of key *users* and performing formal and informal user testing. Thinking about UI alone won't solve or even uncover important usability issues. By following something like the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, or Microsoft's Interface guidelines you'll get close to where you need to be, but the last and most important parts still require active testing.
Any professional designer does usability testing, whether it's airplane cockpits, voice mail systems or web sites. Usability tests can be as simple as drawing wireframes and using sticky notes, with a designer as the "operating system" and the user pointing and telling the designer what they expect to hapen and when. Tests can be customized development versions of the program you're working on with click hotspot metering and video of the users using the program.
Maybe it's just grabbing a few people passing in the hallway outside your office and saying, "hey, come here, tell me what you think of this," when you're still in development. Whatever you do, you've got to test with a small audience before you release to the big one.
BASIC's text munging sux compared to Perl's, that's all I was saying.
I was introduced to BASIC first on a friend's Apple IIe and subsequently on my own first computer, an original Macintosh.
First programs included the standard:
10 print "Enter your name: "
20 input NAME$
30 print NAME$ " is a doofus."
40 goto 30
About that time, I started getting 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, a science and nature periodical written for kids who had grown out of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. In the back of every issue was the "BASIC Training" feature, which had simple games and programs for a variety of platforms. The IBM versions were usually the only ones I could use; Apple IIe and Commodore 64 PEEK and POKE calls were meaningless in Mac MS-BASIC.
But later, BASIC facilitated an (extremely sketchy) introduction to the Macintosh toolbox. MS-BASIC on the mac had built-in pseudo toolbox calls so that you could change fonts, draw graphics primitives and buttons. I ended up writing a grade tracking program that was a snare of interwoven GOTOs and GOSUBs.
I breezed through two years of programming courses in high school and learned C in my own time. Looking back, I'm a little ticked off that my HS didn't offer "real" computer science with Pascal or C or any sort of AP treatment.
Then I learned Perl. Now I do websites. I've forgotten most of BASIC. I have been told this is a good thing. But sometimes (actually, lately, more and more) I have to deal with VBScript and I see "LEFT" and "MID" and I think "what the hell is this crap?"
Ah, memories.
Um, you don't just create investigators out of thin air. Either they have to be moved from other areas (fraud, organized crime, terrorism, x-files, etc.) to pr0n, or you have to hire new agents. Which costs money (affecting other investigations).
What version of MacOS was your professor using? You never just see "scrolling text" take over the GUI.
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app. Usually what you get is a dialog saying "The application -blah- has unexpectedly quit," and a log file is written to one of several convenent locations.
If OS X kernel panics, the screen dims and you get a message in multiple languages saying a reboot is necessary.
You can view crash logs with
Where did you get lines of scrolling text?