What I do not get, is why the British don't just pay the MPs a fixed amount for the expense of maintaining an extra home.
What I do not get, is why the public are paying for an extra home in the first place. Even more so for buyng a second home vs renting one.
I have heard about this case, only from our local reporters (a live in Denmark, Scandinavia) and they talked of different remedies proposed. And all I could here, was more and more bureaucracy.
Here's a simple solution: don't pay for a second home at all. If politicians need somewhere to stay during work-related trips, put them up in a damn hotel for the duration. Alternatively, for places where large numbers of politicians frequently gather (ie: parliament) take out some long-term leases on nearby serviced apartments.
I cannot even begin to comprehend the thinking behind the idea that taxpayers should be funding anyone's second home. I find it incomprehensible that everyone is arguing about the semantics of first vs second home, without even taking a second to think about the fundamental principle.
So what policy would you advice for organisations where people need to be able to download and execute arbitrary software in order to get their work done?
Throwaway VMWare machines and brutally restrictive firewalling.
and you justify it by claiming you're "saving screen space"...
Where is this justification ?
All I said is that if you have an application where the majority of functionality does not use menus (pretty much describes a media player to a T), then not displaying those menus is not, in itself, an unreasonable UI decision.
If it's a dockable window or a "widget", you might be right in slimming it down (e.g. WinAmp).
Huh ? In terms of functionality, Media Player and WinAmp are basically interchangeable. Why is it OK for one but not the other ?
I'm going to disagree with your definition. I could built a totally unintuitive interface, give you an 8-hour class to train you in its use, and you'd be able to use it "based on the known parameters and rules of the system". It'd still be a wholly unintuitive system.
Which means that any functionality that the training hadn't encompassed (be it already there, or added later) would be, for all intents and purposes, unusable.
If you had an intuitive interface, however, and taught the user the principles of the interface, they *would* be able to access that additional functionality, by processes of deduction.
That's the difference between training and intuition, and why the two are not interchangable.
If I hand you a widget, which hand are you going to grab it with? Probably your right hand â" if you're right-handed. That's intuitive â" TO YOU. To a left-handed person, it would be entirely unintuitive to use their right hand, and if I built widgets that could only be used with the right hand, they'd be irritated.
Left vs right-handedness has nothing to do with intuition. It's an aspect of physical capabilities.
Intuition is based on habit, and habit is based on what you've done repeatedly... or more accurately, what you've done CORRECTLY repeatedly, assuming we generally learn from mistakes. An intuitive system is one in which we don't need the manual, because it "just makes sense" if we attack it using the things we've learned from our encounters with every other system we've used.
Yes. Which is a different thing from being trained how to complete a specific set of tasks in specific ways.
How: It's a single menu that controls every application. The options change depending on which application you've selected. Thus, it's a universal remote.
Wow. Comparing MacOS's single menu bar to a universal remote is such a massive non-sequitur I can't even figure out where to begin (nor can I understand how the discussion got here from the Ribbon and Media Player's disappearing/reappearing menu bar).
That's really the key. Intuition is actually just training; the primary goal is to match your intuition â" everything you've learned over the span of your life so far â" to the interface of the application. Or vice versa, more accurately. "Different" IS unintuitive. (On some rare instances, "different" is [arguably] better, but it's still unintuitive. Enter the Ribbon stage right... okay, I don't think the Ribbon is better than menus, but some people swear by it.)
I have to disagree with your definitions. Training is learning how to do something a specific way. Intuition is figuring out how to do something based on the know parameters and rules of the system. They're _not_ the same thing.
The Apple interface basically uses a universal remote. How popular were those, exactly?
I have no idea how you're getting to that conclusion, or even what point you're trying to make.
In that hypothetical situation I'd agree that malware writers would all suddenly focus their efforts towards Apple and Linux, but the success rate would be limited. Both are built to be secure.
No more so than Windows.
Linux is by far a small and very fast moving target to hit. Each Linux distro has a different choice of software installed by default, slightly modified versions of software in their repositories and an army of people looking over the code before it reaches the end user. I see the most likely source of malware on Linux (when it starts) will be in closed source plugins for apps like Firefox. Flash Player has proven a weak point before, on all platforms.
The most likely source of malware on Linux will be the same as it already is on Windows - the end users.
You seem to be labouring under the illusion that most malware gets in because of OS bugs, flaws, or other "code level" problems. Most malware gets in because the user lets it in.
Eventually, both Linux and OSX will start to see malware, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as Windows is. Windows is a once-in-a-lifetime fuck-up that others have seen and nobody has been stupid enough to emulate.
Unless you think all those current Windows users will stop using computers completely, it will remain a problem. So long as ignorant users can run arbitrary code, malware will be around.
Look at the variety of OS's doing the rounds, they're ALL based on *nix.
Aren't monocultures supposed to be bad ?
Feel free to convince yourself that things would be different and that Windows is no worse, or no more vulnerable than others. Repeat it enough and you might start believing it; it still won't make it any more true.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that the single biggest reason for malware is not ignorant users. Yours is no better than any of the other correlation == causation dribble.
There's nothing wrong with it, except that it's completely non-intuitive to anybody who's already used to the menus, which nearly everyone who's been anywhere near a computer is.
I've been using Office since the very first version and I didn't find them unituitive. Different, yes. Unintuitive, no.
At any rate, can we at least agree that the hidden menus, as shown in the graphic I linked, are stupid?
Not really, no. If 99% of the functionality the typical user ever needs doesn't require accessing a menu, then not displaying said menus is a reasonable UI choice.
Apple has had support for a two-button mouse for almost ten years.
Context menus on the Mac first appeared with MacOS 8, in mid-1997. Any (supported) two button mouse would automatically invoke them on a right-click.
And that decision was made at the time to conform to the de facto standard.
In 1997, meaningful use of two-button mice had been mainstream for about a year (maybe 18 months tops). Certainly not long enough to really be considered a "de facto standard".
Or the "one-button mouse" problem. I'm not willing to debate the meaning of the word "consistent" in this context, because I have a feeling it would be useless, but the company that doesn't conform to the de facto standard is the one which lacks consistency, and in this case it was Apple.
Whoa there, tiger. What "de facto standards" are you talking about ? Two mouse buttons (that were actually used) weren't "de facto" in any meaningful sense until the mid-late 90s and Windows 9x.
And yes, the person who invented the Ribbon should also be shot.
I don't see the problem. The ribbon does a much better job of making significant amounts of functionality intuitively accessible than dozens of cascading menus.
Just for sake of argument, one could instead say that any software that requires multiple buttons on a mouse to use, is a complete failure in user interface design.
Indeed. And one would be correct, as well.
However, not requiring multiple mouse buttons in no way provides justification for not using them when they are there. OS X (and most Mac applications) makes poor use of multiple mouse buttons, just as it makes poor use of the keyboard.
That said, they've started an alarming trend of hiding the primary menu, too, until you press the Alt key or click some icon. Whoever thought the primary menus for applications should be hidden should be shot, IMHO...
I think he's commenting on the fact that many Windows programs put "essential" commands in the context menu, which is "invisible" until a user right-clicks to bring it up.
This is an _application_ problem. The Windows UI guidelines say that context menus should not be the only location for any function.
The more important point is that the UI is designed so it can be operated perfectly well with only one mouse button.
So is Windows's. The difference is Windows then *also* makes good use of the additional mouse button to accelerate common tasks. Heck, the Windows UI is designed to work without a mouse at all, which why it has vastly superior keyboard accessibility.
True enough. I guess Microsoft has(had?) no interest in offering recent(within the last decade) filesystem technology. Snapshots, replication and clustering have been around in the enterprise storage industry for some time.
Windows+NTFS has supported these for about a decade now.
The Unix based Mach kernel at the core of OSX and Linux inherently make the assumption of the multi-user system. Thus, privilege separation is build into the DNA of the system, and no app assumes you have root privileges.
Your whole premise is wrong. At its core Windows NT is, if anything, *more* of a multiuser OS than the classic UNIX model you are talking about.
It's time to update your knowledge past Windows 95. It's nearly a decade, now, since consumer-level Windows was based on single-user DOS.
How many businesses can you think of that aren't driven by a profit motive (ie: "what's in it for me") ?
In most business there is a market pressure for standardization - customers want to be able to pick and chose components between different companies. Buy a TV from one company, DVD player from another, speakers from another, and so on.
Sure. But what you want is to be able to buy the TV cabinet from one company, the tube (or panel) from another, the tuner from a third, etc, etc.
The OS *is* the component. You pick Windows, you get Windows, whatever Microsoft decides "Windows" is.
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What I do not get, is why the British don't just pay the MPs a fixed amount for the expense of maintaining an extra home.
What I do not get, is why the public are paying for an extra home in the first place. Even more so for buyng a second home vs renting one.
I have heard about this case, only from our local reporters (a live in Denmark, Scandinavia) and they talked of different remedies proposed. And all I could here, was more and more bureaucracy.
Here's a simple solution: don't pay for a second home at all. If politicians need somewhere to stay during work-related trips, put them up in a damn hotel for the duration. Alternatively, for places where large numbers of politicians frequently gather (ie: parliament) take out some long-term leases on nearby serviced apartments.
I cannot even begin to comprehend the thinking behind the idea that taxpayers should be funding anyone's second home. I find it incomprehensible that everyone is arguing about the semantics of first vs second home, without even taking a second to think about the fundamental principle.
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ? Putting the OS on a quality SSD gave lots of people immense performance gains.
Sounds like they need more RAM.
So what policy would you advice for organisations where people need to be able to download and execute arbitrary software in order to get their work done?
Throwaway VMWare machines and brutally restrictive firewalling.
and you justify it by claiming you're "saving screen space"...
Where is this justification ?
All I said is that if you have an application where the majority of functionality does not use menus (pretty much describes a media player to a T), then not displaying those menus is not, in itself, an unreasonable UI decision.
If it's a dockable window or a "widget", you might be right in slimming it down (e.g. WinAmp).
Huh ? In terms of functionality, Media Player and WinAmp are basically interchangeable. Why is it OK for one but not the other ?
I'm going to disagree with your definition. I could built a totally unintuitive interface, give you an 8-hour class to train you in its use, and you'd be able to use it "based on the known parameters and rules of the system". It'd still be a wholly unintuitive system.
Which means that any functionality that the training hadn't encompassed (be it already there, or added later) would be, for all intents and purposes, unusable.
If you had an intuitive interface, however, and taught the user the principles of the interface, they *would* be able to access that additional functionality, by processes of deduction.
That's the difference between training and intuition, and why the two are not interchangable.
If I hand you a widget, which hand are you going to grab it with? Probably your right hand â" if you're right-handed. That's intuitive â" TO YOU. To a left-handed person, it would be entirely unintuitive to use their right hand, and if I built widgets that could only be used with the right hand, they'd be irritated.
Left vs right-handedness has nothing to do with intuition. It's an aspect of physical capabilities.
Intuition is based on habit, and habit is based on what you've done repeatedly... or more accurately, what you've done CORRECTLY repeatedly, assuming we generally learn from mistakes. An intuitive system is one in which we don't need the manual, because it "just makes sense" if we attack it using the things we've learned from our encounters with every other system we've used.
Yes. Which is a different thing from being trained how to complete a specific set of tasks in specific ways.
How: It's a single menu that controls every application. The options change depending on which application you've selected. Thus, it's a universal remote.
Wow. Comparing MacOS's single menu bar to a universal remote is such a massive non-sequitur I can't even figure out where to begin (nor can I understand how the discussion got here from the Ribbon and Media Player's disappearing/reappearing menu bar).
That's really the key. Intuition is actually just training; the primary goal is to match your intuition â" everything you've learned over the span of your life so far â" to the interface of the application. Or vice versa, more accurately. "Different" IS unintuitive. (On some rare instances, "different" is [arguably] better, but it's still unintuitive. Enter the Ribbon stage right... okay, I don't think the Ribbon is better than menus, but some people swear by it.)
I have to disagree with your definitions. Training is learning how to do something a specific way. Intuition is figuring out how to do something based on the know parameters and rules of the system. They're _not_ the same thing.
The Apple interface basically uses a universal remote. How popular were those, exactly?
I have no idea how you're getting to that conclusion, or even what point you're trying to make.
In that hypothetical situation I'd agree that malware writers would all suddenly focus their efforts towards Apple and Linux, but the success rate would be limited. Both are built to be secure.
No more so than Windows.
Linux is by far a small and very fast moving target to hit. Each Linux distro has a different choice of software installed by default, slightly modified versions of software in their repositories and an army of people looking over the code before it reaches the end user. I see the most likely source of malware on Linux (when it starts) will be in closed source plugins for apps like Firefox. Flash Player has proven a weak point before, on all platforms.
The most likely source of malware on Linux will be the same as it already is on Windows - the end users.
You seem to be labouring under the illusion that most malware gets in because of OS bugs, flaws, or other "code level" problems. Most malware gets in because the user lets it in.
Eventually, both Linux and OSX will start to see malware, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as Windows is. Windows is a once-in-a-lifetime fuck-up that others have seen and nobody has been stupid enough to emulate.
Unless you think all those current Windows users will stop using computers completely, it will remain a problem. So long as ignorant users can run arbitrary code, malware will be around.
Look at the variety of OS's doing the rounds, they're ALL based on *nix.
Aren't monocultures supposed to be bad ?
Feel free to convince yourself that things would be different and that Windows is no worse, or no more vulnerable than others. Repeat it enough and you might start believing it; it still won't make it any more true.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that the single biggest reason for malware is not ignorant users. Yours is no better than any of the other correlation == causation dribble.
There's nothing wrong with it, except that it's completely non-intuitive to anybody who's already used to the menus, which nearly everyone who's been anywhere near a computer is.
I've been using Office since the very first version and I didn't find them unituitive. Different, yes. Unintuitive, no.
At any rate, can we at least agree that the hidden menus, as shown in the graphic I linked, are stupid?
Not really, no. If 99% of the functionality the typical user ever needs doesn't require accessing a menu, then not displaying said menus is a reasonable UI choice.
Apple has had support for a two-button mouse for almost ten years.
Context menus on the Mac first appeared with MacOS 8, in mid-1997. Any (supported) two button mouse would automatically invoke them on a right-click.
And that decision was made at the time to conform to the de facto standard.
In 1997, meaningful use of two-button mice had been mainstream for about a year (maybe 18 months tops). Certainly not long enough to really be considered a "de facto standard".
Or the "one-button mouse" problem. I'm not willing to debate the meaning of the word "consistent" in this context, because I have a feeling it would be useless, but the company that doesn't conform to the de facto standard is the one which lacks consistency, and in this case it was Apple.
Whoa there, tiger. What "de facto standards" are you talking about ? Two mouse buttons (that were actually used) weren't "de facto" in any meaningful sense until the mid-late 90s and Windows 9x.
Philosophy? I'll give you philosophy. Interfaces should be consistent.
A second mouse button has no more impact on that than having more modifier keys than "Shift" on the keyboard.
And yes, the person who invented the Ribbon should also be shot.
I don't see the problem. The ribbon does a much better job of making significant amounts of functionality intuitively accessible than dozens of cascading menus.
Just for sake of argument, one could instead say that any software that requires multiple buttons on a mouse to use, is a complete failure in user interface design.
Indeed. And one would be correct, as well.
However, not requiring multiple mouse buttons in no way provides justification for not using them when they are there. OS X (and most Mac applications) makes poor use of multiple mouse buttons, just as it makes poor use of the keyboard.
That said, they've started an alarming trend of hiding the primary menu, too, until you press the Alt key or click some icon. Whoever thought the primary menus for applications should be hidden should be shot, IMHO...
It's not hidden, it's replaced.
I think he's commenting on the fact that many Windows programs put "essential" commands in the context menu, which is "invisible" until a user right-clicks to bring it up.
This is an _application_ problem. The Windows UI guidelines say that context menus should not be the only location for any function.
The more important point is that the UI is designed so it can be operated perfectly well with only one mouse button.
So is Windows's. The difference is Windows then *also* makes good use of the additional mouse button to accelerate common tasks. Heck, the Windows UI is designed to work without a mouse at all, which why it has vastly superior keyboard accessibility.
True enough. I guess Microsoft has(had?) no interest in offering recent(within the last decade) filesystem technology. Snapshots, replication and clustering have been around in the enterprise storage industry for some time.
Windows+NTFS has supported these for about a decade now.
People are usually not that smart, but birds learn quickly.
Rubbish. Show me one person who has been hit by an airplane or sucked into an engine more than once.
French civil law lacks the concept of precedent, at least in theory, while English common law (from which the U.S. system draws) embraces it.
Ah. So in the French system, a case is decided on it merits, rather than which prior case it happens to be most similar to ?
Microsoft was supposed to release WinFS, but they gave up. I'm guessing it's because filesystems are hard to get right.
WinFS isn't (wasn't ?) a filesystem. It was a metadata layer on top of NTFS.
File system stack in Windows is slow. No. It's SLOOOOOOWWWW.
Benchmarks ?
Well the idea that NTFS got it right is funny to start with. Defrag??? I still have to freaking Defrag?
No. Not unless you've got some sort of pathological disk access pattern that is also going to require a "defrag" on _any_ filesystem.
Take a look at the feature set of ZFS and NTFS and tell me that NTFS got it right.
Interestingly enough, there are a few ZFS features that NTFS had first (eg: compression, encryption).
The Unix based Mach kernel at the core of OSX and Linux inherently make the assumption of the multi-user system. Thus, privilege separation is build into the DNA of the system, and no app assumes you have root privileges.
Your whole premise is wrong. At its core Windows NT is, if anything, *more* of a multiuser OS than the classic UNIX model you are talking about.
It's time to update your knowledge past Windows 95. It's nearly a decade, now, since consumer-level Windows was based on single-user DOS.
Not really.
How many businesses can you think of that aren't driven by a profit motive (ie: "what's in it for me") ?
In most business there is a market pressure for standardization - customers want to be able to pick and chose components between different companies. Buy a TV from one company, DVD player from another, speakers from another, and so on.
Sure. But what you want is to be able to buy the TV cabinet from one company, the tube (or panel) from another, the tuner from a third, etc, etc.
The OS *is* the component. You pick Windows, you get Windows, whatever Microsoft decides "Windows" is.
Exactly how they think. They don't care about making it easy for users to have a decent cross-platform filesystem. They want lock in and control.
So.... Just like every other business then ?