I saw in TFA that the T|X doesn't have vibrate. TFA for the Z22 didn't say. I recently was looking at new Palms to replace my m500, but didn't really like any of them since the ones with features I'd actually want, like a nice color screen, lacked vibrate. Don't the people designing Palms go to meetings and such? I've had a palm (pilot) since 1997 and one of the main things I've always used it for is the alarm feature, and it's always set to vibrate so it doesn't annoy other people I might be with. I'm just not very interested in one w/o vibrate. Maybe I'm the only one, but I find that hard to believe.
The mark of a good user interface is that it is either intuitive (i.e., the function of particular widgets is obvious), or where this is not possible, that it is easy to learn.
I agree these are important criteria for an interface, maybe even the most important in many cases.
However, they are not "the mark of a good interface" [emphasis added]. One big thing you can miss if you only focus on these is expert-friendliness. The Unix command line[*] and Emacs, to give just two examples, are pretty novice-hostile (i.e., hard to learn and non-intuitive). But they are great interfaces for experts.
A really good interface is one that its both easy to learn for novices and powerful for experts. Such interfaces are rare because they're really hard to create.
[*] By this I mean the whole *sh family, including but not limited to: sh, bash, ksh, zsh, csh, tcsh. I know your favorite is infinitely better than all the others, but for purposes of this discussion they're basically identical.
Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.
I think a good illustration of this is the movie 2001. Some things, like the AI, are far ahead of what we have today, but other things, like the computer graphics, have been far surpassed.
Is anybody else using the Firefox extension Radial Context while reading slashdot? If so, is your pie menu now offset downwards about the radius of the inner circle?
I had a few internships, and I highly recommend doing them. However, I'd advise you to ask beforehand if you can get a reference afterwards. It would never have occurred to me, if not for my experience: I worked for a large technology company one summer and it went great; I was doing pretty interesting stuff and my boss seemed really happy with what I was doing, etc. Later, I was updating my resume and asked my boss from there if I could put their name down as a reference. I was amazed to be told, "Our official policy is not to give references, so don't put me down as a reference. If you want to informally tell people to just call me, I'll say great things about you, though." Maybe this is common, I don't know. But to me one of the valuable things from doing an internship (although by no means the only one) is having a good reference. I'm not saying you shouldn't take an internship just on this basis, but you might want to know about it ahead of time instead of only finding out afterwards.
Yes, the license is copyrighted, but so is every work licensed with the GPL. If a GPL'ed work weren't copyrighted, the GPL would have no force because people wouldn't need a license to use the work however they wanted.
I have good friends who work at Microsoft, so I know that some of its employees are highly technically talented and want to Do the Right Thing(TM). I feel a little bit bad for them being tarred with the MS Is Evil brush, but they knew what they were getting into when they joined.
Generally speaking, in a corporation things flow downhill. And if there's insanity, incompetency, antagonism, malice, or whatever flowing from the top, that sets the direction for the company.
As others have pointed out, in spite of good intentions of some of its employees, Microsoft has dealt badly with the OSS community in the past and with for-profit corporations. That's something Microsoft cannot rememdy overnight, certainly not by proclamation alone.
I had an original MessagePad and later a MessagePad 2000. I agree that the MP2000 had good handwriting recognition and was fast enough. I really miss the Newton OS and the user interface. It was designed for pens and was excellent.
I don't miss the physical form factor, though. Too big to carry with me everywhere (my Palm fits in my pocket), but too small to show very much information.
If only there were a steno-pad-sized or larger NewtonOS device...
Can't we just rate the article -5, Troll, and be done with it? With an opening comment like:
I think [Linux is] the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!
is there any point in anyone spending more cycles on it?
Design is a creative process. Even engineering design.
I agree. However, when we don't distinguish between different phases of software construction, I think we oversimplify how hard it is to build software. So I still think it's interesting to compare software construction with construction of physical artifacts, esp. in terms of a framework for thinking about the different types of activities that happen at different phases of construction.
I think it's both, but at different times/phases. The early phase of creating software is like architecture, which has a clear artistic, non-engineering component. It's in this early phase that you have the most freedom to show vision, and where one or a few really talented people can make the largest impact.
Later, during actual construction (i.e., coding), there's less flexibility and fewer choices, and it's more like workers at a construction site. Sure, you want people who know what they're doing, esp. whoever is in charge, but it's more like engineering at this point and less like craft.
Ok, that's enough gross overgeneralization for me for now...
The improvements in capacity of disk are amazing and staggering, I agree.
I only wish it were so for latency. Around 1980, seek times were in the neighborhood of 20ms. CPUs for personal computers were running at about 1 MHz (the Apple ][, for example), or a cycle time of 1 ms. So the computer would wait 20 cycles for a seek.
Today seek times are around 5ms and CPU speeds are 3+ GHz, or a cycle time of about 1/3 nanoseconds. So now CPUs have to wait 15,000 cycles for a seek. Relatively speaking, disk is a lot slower than it used to be.
Hear, hear. For example, I think Swing is pretty darned good now, but in the early days (~1997) it was buggy and the documentation was not complete. Being able to look at the source was a *huge* help.
On the topic of corporate mistakes, one of my favorites is IBM and GE (and others, but I don't know who) turning down the patent for photocopying when its inventor offered it to them. They didn't think there was a market for copiers.
I agree that undergrads in CS programs should be taught to write code well, since that's what they'll most likely be doing. I like your idea of teaching things like design patterns, too.
However, I think you're construing "computer science" very narrowly. The software engineering subdiscipline may be the most practicaly useful for most undergrads and therefore should be emphasized more than it its, but there's a *lot* more to computer science than software engineering. Here's just a few other subdisciplines that I can think of off the top of my head:
The fact that the keyboard is more efficient for interacting with the majority of computer operations that people do really just goes to show that our culture hasn't advanced from thinking in pipelineable data chunks to true objects.
So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are? I'm not sure what you mean by the former, but I'm guessing you mean linear streams of tokens, for example, text files.
For certain domains, I agree that linear streams of tokens are not the right thing. For example, graphical editing programs (structured or un-).
However, a lot of the data that I both read and write is natural language, which is basically a linear stream of tokens. Sure, there is hypertext and you can arrange the tokens so their spatial position has meaning, but there's a lot of one-character-after-another text being both read and written out there.
So it seems to me that at least for Western, alphabet-based languages, the keyboard is still an excellent input device. (For Chinese and other asian languages with huge symbol sets a pen is probably better, but I don't have as much experience or knowledge with that so I'm not sure.)
If there is a better way of doing things why not do it? I think constraining yourself to the way Windows does things is a little pointless.
Why not do it? Because users don't like change. Because sometimes habit and comfort are more important than making it marginally better. Unless you can make a dramatic value addition for the user, change is probably a bad idea.
This is one of the things that makes user interface design hard: most users say, "Make it better. But don't change it."
Unless you can make a dramatic value addition for the user, change is probably a bad idea.
I agree completely. Most of the time, for people to change what they use for anything, the new thing doesn't have to be a little bit better, it has to be a lot better. And in ways they can see and appreciate.
I may be the only one here, but I really liked the beams from the shadow ships in Babylon 5. Purple and silent, they cut through just about any other ship like it wasn't even there. A spooky weapon for a spooky ship.
Another vote for Speakeasy. I had DSL from them at home and it was great. Static IP, support for Linux, good connectivity.
Now I can't get DSL (In the middle of the Northern VA burbs, too. What's up with that??), so I had to go with Comcast cable. It's more expensive than it ought to be (~$55/mo), but it has been totally reliable so far.
In the wake of the Apple and Intel cooperation and now the USPTO actually denying/rescinding/rejecting a patent, I think it's clear that slashdot needs a new logo. Something representing hell freezing over, or perhaps pigs flying...
I agree, except I also object to animated ads. I use Flashblock in Firefox because flash is nearly always animated ads. And I disable images from sites that serve animated image ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw in TFA that the T|X doesn't have vibrate. TFA for the Z22 didn't say. I recently was looking at new Palms to replace my m500, but didn't really like any of them since the ones with features I'd actually want, like a nice color screen, lacked vibrate. Don't the people designing Palms go to meetings and such? I've had a palm (pilot) since 1997 and one of the main things I've always used it for is the alarm feature, and it's always set to vibrate so it doesn't annoy other people I might be with. I'm just not very interested in one w/o vibrate. Maybe I'm the only one, but I find that hard to believe.
However, they are not "the mark of a good interface" [emphasis added]. One big thing you can miss if you only focus on these is expert-friendliness. The Unix command line[*] and Emacs, to give just two examples, are pretty novice-hostile (i.e., hard to learn and non-intuitive). But they are great interfaces for experts.
A really good interface is one that its both easy to learn for novices and powerful for experts. Such interfaces are rare because they're really hard to create.
[*] By this I mean the whole *sh family, including but not limited to: sh, bash, ksh, zsh, csh, tcsh. I know your favorite is infinitely better than all the others, but for purposes of this discussion they're basically identical.
I think a good illustration of this is the movie 2001. Some things, like the AI, are far ahead of what we have today, but other things, like the computer graphics, have been far surpassed.
I haven't read all the comments (who ever does?), but I wish I had mod points, because this is the most insightful comments I've seen on this post.
Is anybody else using the Firefox extension Radial Context while reading slashdot? If so, is your pie menu now offset downwards about the radius of the inner circle?
I had a few internships, and I highly recommend doing them. However, I'd advise you to ask beforehand if you can get a reference afterwards. It would never have occurred to me, if not for my experience: I worked for a large technology company one summer and it went great; I was doing pretty interesting stuff and my boss seemed really happy with what I was doing, etc. Later, I was updating my resume and asked my boss from there if I could put their name down as a reference. I was amazed to be told, "Our official policy is not to give references, so don't put me down as a reference. If you want to informally tell people to just call me, I'll say great things about you, though." Maybe this is common, I don't know. But to me one of the valuable things from doing an internship (although by no means the only one) is having a good reference. I'm not saying you shouldn't take an internship just on this basis, but you might want to know about it ahead of time instead of only finding out afterwards.
Yes, the license is copyrighted, but so is every work licensed with the GPL. If a GPL'ed work weren't copyrighted, the GPL would have no force because people wouldn't need a license to use the work however they wanted.
Another highly recommended book on this topic is The Transparent Society, by David Brin. (Yes, the same David Brin who write sci fi.)
"It doesn't take all kinds, we just have all kinds."
I think the author was Gene Spafford, but I'm not sure.
I have good friends who work at Microsoft, so I know that some of its employees are highly technically talented and want to Do the Right Thing(TM). I feel a little bit bad for them being tarred with the MS Is Evil brush, but they knew what they were getting into when they joined.
Generally speaking, in a corporation things flow downhill. And if there's insanity, incompetency, antagonism, malice, or whatever flowing from the top, that sets the direction for the company.
As others have pointed out, in spite of good intentions of some of its employees, Microsoft has dealt badly with the OSS community in the past and with for-profit corporations. That's something Microsoft cannot rememdy overnight, certainly not by proclamation alone.
I had an original MessagePad and later a MessagePad 2000. I agree that the MP2000 had good handwriting recognition and was fast enough. I really miss the Newton OS and the user interface. It was designed for pens and was excellent.
I don't miss the physical form factor, though. Too big to carry with me everywhere (my Palm fits in my pocket), but too small to show very much information.
If only there were a steno-pad-sized or larger NewtonOS device...
I think it's both, but at different times/phases. The early phase of creating software is like architecture, which has a clear artistic, non-engineering component. It's in this early phase that you have the most freedom to show vision, and where one or a few really talented people can make the largest impact.
Later, during actual construction (i.e., coding), there's less flexibility and fewer choices, and it's more like workers at a construction site. Sure, you want people who know what they're doing, esp. whoever is in charge, but it's more like engineering at this point and less like craft.
Ok, that's enough gross overgeneralization for me for now...
The improvements in capacity of disk are amazing and staggering, I agree.
I only wish it were so for latency. Around 1980, seek times were in the neighborhood of 20ms. CPUs for personal computers were running at about 1 MHz (the Apple ][, for example), or a cycle time of 1 ms. So the computer would wait 20 cycles for a seek.
Today seek times are around 5ms and CPU speeds are 3+ GHz, or a cycle time of about 1/3 nanoseconds. So now CPUs have to wait 15,000 cycles for a seek. Relatively speaking, disk is a lot slower than it used to be.
Hear, hear. For example, I think Swing is pretty darned good now, but in the early days (~1997) it was buggy and the documentation was not complete. Being able to look at the source was a *huge* help.
On the topic of corporate mistakes, one of my favorites is IBM and GE (and others, but I don't know who) turning down the patent for photocopying when its inventor offered it to them. They didn't think there was a market for copiers.
I agree that undergrads in CS programs should be taught to write code well, since that's what they'll most likely be doing. I like your idea of teaching things like design patterns, too.
However, I think you're construing "computer science" very narrowly. The software engineering subdiscipline may be the most practicaly useful for most undergrads and therefore should be emphasized more than it its, but there's a *lot* more to computer science than software engineering. Here's just a few other subdisciplines that I can think of off the top of my head:
* Operating systems
* Compilers
* Graphics
* Human-computer interaction
* Theory
* Databases
* Networking
* Robotics
* Artificial intelligence
* Architecture
* Security
So are you saying that "pipeline data chunks" are the wrong way to think about most of our data and "objects" are? I'm not sure what you mean by the former, but I'm guessing you mean linear streams of tokens, for example, text files.
For certain domains, I agree that linear streams of tokens are not the right thing. For example, graphical editing programs (structured or un-).
However, a lot of the data that I both read and write is natural language, which is basically a linear stream of tokens. Sure, there is hypertext and you can arrange the tokens so their spatial position has meaning, but there's a lot of one-character-after-another text being both read and written out there.
So it seems to me that at least for Western, alphabet-based languages, the keyboard is still an excellent input device. (For Chinese and other asian languages with huge symbol sets a pen is probably better, but I don't have as much experience or knowledge with that so I'm not sure.)
I agree completely. Most of the time, for people to change what they use for anything, the new thing doesn't have to be a little bit better, it has to be a lot better. And in ways they can see and appreciate.
I may be the only one here, but I really liked the beams from the shadow ships in Babylon 5. Purple and silent, they cut through just about any other ship like it wasn't even there. A spooky weapon for a spooky ship.
Another vote for Speakeasy. I had DSL from them at home and it was great. Static IP, support for Linux, good connectivity.
Now I can't get DSL (In the middle of the Northern VA burbs, too. What's up with that??), so I had to go with Comcast cable. It's more expensive than it ought to be (~$55/mo), but it has been totally reliable so far.
In the wake of the Apple and Intel cooperation and now the USPTO actually denying/rescinding/rejecting a patent, I think it's clear that slashdot needs a new logo. Something representing hell freezing over, or perhaps pigs flying...
I agree, except I also object to animated ads. I use Flashblock in Firefox because flash is nearly always animated ads. And I disable images from sites that serve animated image ads.