Sometimes HR people can try to overstep the bounds of reason.
For example, a friend of mine interviewed at a place where HR and the technical team must evaluate how good a fit a candidate is for a job.
In his meeting with the team he would actually work with, things went well, they were impressed by his knowledge, and they felt as he smoothly fit in.
Meanwhile, the HR person blocked hiring him because his degree was from a less prestigious college (his GPA was high though) and that he would be a poor fit for the team because he was too cynical.
Fortunately, the technical team escalated the 'don't hire' decision and got him through, but I find it amazing that an HR person would demand escalation presuming to know more about a person's relative personal fit for a team and technical capability than the technical team he would work with.
And I have to say, references are a total waste of time short of being able to genuinely put down names like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, etc. Anyone can dig up pals to be good references. Unless those references are already known to be incredible first-hand, verifying a reference's usefulness is no easier than evaluating the candidate's usefulness directly.
It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
That is a broken analogy. Each one of those devices has hard-set physical characteristics that inherently conflict with each other. The iPad can do multiple things, but not concurrently. Their UI is in no way hard set to preclude any of the functions people are asking about. A knife can never be a reasonable steering wheel ever, it isn't just that it can't cut and be a wheel at the same time.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
And yet I see in hands on demos people trying various random gestures, and requiring the Apple rep to demonstrate what gesture was needed to perform a task. Notably, pinch to 'go back', how the hell is that intuitive?
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to.
People don't complain about WebOS's realization of small form-factor multitasking, where each app is a full-screened app at pretty much all times. You seem to be attacking the multi-window model, which is a fair thing to question particularly in small form factors, but forbidding a program from executing in the background (doing non-interactive things like receiving instant messages or manipulating audio, etc) is asinine. I wonder what your post will be when Apple does finally cave to allowing third-party apps to background execute, it will happen I can guarantee.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
Umm, you do realize that the daemon they implemented is explicitly a form of background processing? Apple *needs* it to deliver the things they need, and they allow themselves the privilege of background execution, they just deny it to third parties.
For a large part, existing standards could still work, if the hypervisors would more fully embrace their role as 'edge switches'. Most problems already are addressed for edge management when the edge is a physical switch via various standards. The issue is that VMWare particularly doesn't bother to implement those, and as a consequence the networking industry has been applying various higher level hacks to gloss over it or work around it without actually having VMWare budge on their implementation.
For example, VLAN membership. This is simple, we have GVRP/MVRP for standards based solution to the problem. There needs to be nothing special to virtualization here
The goal is to give a customer a holistic, 'everyday' experience to the extent possible in a sedan form factor. Sure, mileage/grid energy usage is the big distinguishing feature of this vehicle, but allowing a 'sport' mode that doesn't impact normal usage seems ok (it's not like it's lugging around an extra few, mostly unused cylinders to provide that boost or anything, it's just modifying the way some parameters work). A customer is free to ignore the button entirely. Also, a customer deciding they want to feel a *little* extra acceleration can do so without having to own an explicitly sportier car (though as the article points out, it won't exactly give sports car performance, but for some it may be enough and is presumably trivial to provide).
Informative... I searched news.google.com for this article and found out that it works, and also that this article's 'preview' is pretty much all they had to say on the matter anyway, so it would have been a complete rip off to subscribe anyway. The rest of the article is basically rehashing the intro in quotations and mentioning the fact that competitors exist.
Some could say that IPv6 went wrong by not being more interoperable with IPv4 or throwing out too much accumulated knowledge with IPv4. On the former point I'm undecided, as one goal was a sane routing scheme and that may well be impossible if preserving IPv4 semantics, but I'll defer to others on that. I tend to agree with the latter, where IPv6 architects for a non-trivial part threw out the entire IPv4 set of best-practices assuming they were all crap and requiring every last bit to debate for re-acceptance (i.e. DHCP was not originally going to exist, bunches of useful DHCP option codes when it would exist are dropped until someone argues them back in, etc).
On the DHCPv6 front, one thing is that IPv6 has two distinct scenarios in my mind: stateless autoconfig with service discovery via route advertisement and mdns. Great for networks with self-managed participants. This was the orginal vision intended to encompass the whole usage.
On the other end, centrally managed scenarios are recognised as unavoidable, and that's where DHCPv6 has to come into play. It just so happens if you are centrally managing things, a lot of value is lost when the managed entities are moderately dynamic in nature. This is great in some 'enterprise' contexts or other cases where the number of entities to manage far outnumbers the people to manage them.
In some scenarios, a pre-provisioning capable scheme is required for certain circumstances and that is ostensibly where DHCP should be able to fill the gap, but it is restricted here.
stateless autoconfig w/ mDNS for all service discovery was the original vision of all IPv6 (which still makes sense in many contexts).
dhcp was brought to ipv6 with the recognition that some circumstances for more central management exist.
There are so many ways IPv6 remains broken and too many of the people with influence can tend to say 'working as designed'.
I know that's controversial, so I'll enumerate my pain points: -DHCPv6 DUID is a pain to 'pre-provision'. When any operating system or firmware instance dhcpv6 for the first time, it sends out something that you'll never know what it would be ahead of time. In 99% of cases, the DUID is a generated value at 'OS Install time' that is used only for that specific OS, and a reinstall or livecd boot will change it out completely. stateless boot, multi-boot systems and multi-stage booting (i.e. pxe -> os) cannot hold together a coherent identity because DHCPv6 is explicitly designed not to do that. Binding by MAC is considered 'evil', but it has been the strategy used for ages. I wouldn't mind so much if DUID was commonly implemented as a value retrieved from motherboard firmware tables, but no one is stepping up to drive that behavior in a spec visible to all parties.
No PXE/bootp boot. I believe they are trying to reinvent, from scratch the boot design from IPv4, and are nearing completion. I fear the extent to which the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater (i.e. 'root-path' was dropped and no one has pulled it into dhcpv6).
Some standards are missing the capability to operate in IPv6. I.e. IPMI hase some IPv4 specific portions of the standard without IPv6 capable equivalents.
I also know first hand IBM uses a lot of 9.0.0.0/8 today and that the world would have to do something drastic to make them change their usage as it isn't cost-effective from their standpoint unless they can save/get a large chunk of change.
Now, you'd think that means these devices are publically accessible, but noooo. If 99% of their '9.x.x.x' equipment that does have internet access attempts a connection, it gets NATed outbound to a different address entirely! So they sit on a mountain of globally addressable IP addresses, and then only use them internally for nearly all of them.
Just give me a sane IPv6 environment (give me richer DHCPv6 capability than I have today and a few other things that are just flat-out missing in the IP6 generation) and a/48 (or/56) for my house and I'll be on my way.
If you have 0002, most assume you mean '2', assuming you must have accidentally put three zeroes in.
If I put in a slot/port number for a wiring chart (i.e. slot 5, port 2 as 5/2), it assumes it must have been a date and tags on the current year (incidentally, even if they *were* correct in guessing it to be a year, how the hell can they assume the date is the current year? Who knows when the CSV was created, this is arbitrarily adding more precision to a value than it originally contained).
Often times, for CSV data, it's best to throw up your hands and use a text editor because spreadsheet apps all try to be 'too smart' about the task.
Firefox doesn't already know that CSV should be tied to OO? Shouldn't that have occurred at install time by OO?
This could be a complicated issue. For example, if I cared much about the GUI knowing what to do when I clicked (I usually go via the app to my data), I might get upset if OpenOffice.org re-associated csv from, hypothetically, gvim. CSV is a funky format in that it is quite likely feasible to manipulate with multiple apps installed concurrently. OpenOffice.org installer may be able to ask which ones to do/not do (it might for all I know), but that could also be perceived as asking a user a question that's 'too hard'.
So I got a netbook...Takes a long fucking time to open OO. I mean a LONG time.
In defense of the software, I've heard that most netbook platforms are pretty slow to open anything (Excel included) to people used to using higher end equipment. Hard to compare when you don't mention if you tried Office 2k7 and didn't see the issue. I think there are faster spreadsheet apps than MS Office or OpenOffice, but in brief I think they are generally only 90% there in terms of capability.
I select all the fields and go to resize them all with a single click but--nothing happens.
This may be a fault of openoffice or merely a difference. I don't use spreadsheets to know the action you are describing (select multiple rows and one click without drag does something?), whether it is an 'obvious' intuitive way to do it or a learned behavior from MS Office. The former would be a fair criticism, the latter an unfair comparison if OpenOffice implements it in an equally accessible, but different way, but I have no idea one way or another.
If you're going to criticize my comments, please take the time to read and comprehend them first. I didn't say that text files wouldn't exist, that's retarded. I said that non-text (specifically, columnar) data wouldn't exist in a text file and thus text editors wouldn't need to include features for handling them.
The problem here is that the mechanism I described can scale to fairly arbitrarily complex structures, but used columnar format as an example as it is straightforward to describe. As useful as regex operators are for common organizations of data that have nice words like 'columnar', there can exist any number of one-off schemes for which you won't have a baked in special-purpose app to describe. Instead, that one-line command instructs vi, which has no idea what 'columnar' means or anything else for that matter on how to become a manager of columnar data. Just like capable programming languages continue to have to be learned to enable implementors to implement arbitrarily complex solutions, advanced operations in any given field, text editing, wordsetting, graphics design, 3d modeling, etc are not possible to be 'intuitive' as they deal with concepts that simply require some sort of acquired knowledge. I'm not sufficiently intimate with the fields to understand exactly why a histogram graph of color data in a still image are important for a graphics designer, but advanced photo editing (i.e. Photoshop) software makes it available despite someone like me not having an 'intuitive' knowledge of what to do with it. It offers all sorts of functions and features I have no idea the point of, but I won't fault them for that as graphics designers know what to do with it and it makes their lives easier to have them at their fingertips.
1) What does "having columnar data in a text file" have anything to do with "offering advanced capability?" You seem to have conflated these two concepts, and I have no idea why or what you're driving at
I used columnar data as a mere example of an operation an advanced text editor is capable of doing at an advanced users behest without any built-in special-purpose/knowledge of the specific task at hand. I would have talked about blender, but I don't know anything about 3D design.
if you have a text file full of columnar data, you should import it into an editor that's designed to support columnar data (i.e. a database, or spreadsheet) and not twiddle with columns in a text editor.
In my example, I accomplish my task in under 15 seconds on a remote system somewhere. If I had to download the data, import it into a spreadsheet app (btw, having to describe to the spreadsheet how the data is delimited), manipulate it, save it (btw, it is nearly guaranteed to screw up the delimiting on writeback), and write it back, that would make me tons less productive. Not to mention that if the data is only a piece of data (i.e. data with prose-style header) it is totally unworkable. Don't tell me that the app ought to write to xls or another spreadsheet specific format/database, as that totally destroys my flexibility for quick text edits, sed, awk, cut, and more. The entire problem with a lot of the 'shitty' Sun, Oracle, IBM software is they subscribe to the concept of special-purpose formats that are awkward to generically manipulate in the name of putting them into the 'right' application. The problem being there often isn't the 'right' application for everyone. Do I expect some guy to sit down never having used any of this and be rapidly productive, of course not. Does this capability existing enable me to get a lot more done a lot more quickly at the expense of requiring experience, absolutely. My point is that ultimate capability comes at a price of requiring learning to occur, and I am happy to see projects come along that aren't afraid of features simply because they would require a learning curve to be effective. I also don't mind a notepad clone opting to skip all of it because their target audience is intentionally one that should never learn anything unless they want to jump to a harder, more capable editor.
If in a holistically-usable environment there is no cause to manipulate text at all, how the hell did you enter your comment, which is itself in text? If a user complains that they have this text data they want to manipulate (not because their app demanded it, but because a friend sent it or who knows what else), the correct response is that capable text editing doesn't belong in a 'usable' environment and therefore applications offering advanced capability have no place in the world?
It at least didn't say *Good* person of the ____. I.e. Hitler was a strong candidate for 'person of the century' in Time magazine's reckoning, but happened to be edged out by positive people (probably because they feared people assuming 'person of the century' was automatically an honor and therefore it was safer to go with Einstein). Most of these lists purport not to measure 'good' but how influential a person was.
That's like deciding to remove the checksums from TCP and IP because a few protocols provide their own checksums.
Funny you should mention IP checksums, that's one feature removed from the IP layer in IPv6 precisely because the 'important' protocols do it themselves anyway (i.e. TCP).
(Fact: The end user doesn't know what he/she wants, the marketing guys do.)
Depends on your user. Some users are clueless and marketing types can figure it out better than they can. Some users know very damn well what they want and marketing driven design actually hurts them. One commonly emphasised application development philosophy is rapid prototyping to users for feedback and adjusting design. No one can shorten that cycle like a community who knows how to write code and actually uses the product.
An userfriendly interface does NOT have a learning curve, it's simply logical and well organized (customization is not a criteria).
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100, I can do a regex in vi using:s/\(\S*\s*\S*\s*\)\S*\(.*\)/\1\2/. It is always at hand and immediately accessible, but no way in hell someone knows to do that 'intuitively' without learning and any 'intuitive' interface would have to bury a feature like this so deep that it would be a royal pain to access when needed once you understand how to use it. Also, though customization is not a criteria for your 'userfriendly', it is a criteria that is independently important for many users, so it cannot be discounted.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes HR people can try to overstep the bounds of reason.
For example, a friend of mine interviewed at a place where HR and the technical team must evaluate how good a fit a candidate is for a job.
In his meeting with the team he would actually work with, things went well, they were impressed by his knowledge, and they felt as he smoothly fit in.
Meanwhile, the HR person blocked hiring him because his degree was from a less prestigious college (his GPA was high though) and that he would be a poor fit for the team because he was too cynical.
Fortunately, the technical team escalated the 'don't hire' decision and got him through, but I find it amazing that an HR person would demand escalation presuming to know more about a person's relative personal fit for a team and technical capability than the technical team he would work with.
And I have to say, references are a total waste of time short of being able to genuinely put down names like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, etc. Anyone can dig up pals to be good references. Unless those references are already known to be incredible first-hand, verifying a reference's usefulness is no easier than evaluating the candidate's usefulness directly.
Parents claim they want schools with touch academics
I thought teachers get in a lot of trouble over providing that sort of thing?
It's high thyme we put a steak in the ground. If this keeps happening, we will brake our language irreversibly.
I think python may fit that bill better than Tcl
Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.
As usual, Windows makes networking less secure, why am I not surprised.
It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
That is a broken analogy. Each one of those devices has hard-set physical characteristics that inherently conflict with each other. The iPad can do multiple things, but not concurrently. Their UI is in no way hard set to preclude any of the functions people are asking about. A knife can never be a reasonable steering wheel ever, it isn't just that it can't cut and be a wheel at the same time.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
And yet I see in hands on demos people trying various random gestures, and requiring the Apple rep to demonstrate what gesture was needed to perform a task. Notably, pinch to 'go back', how the hell is that intuitive?
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to.
People don't complain about WebOS's realization of small form-factor multitasking, where each app is a full-screened app at pretty much all times. You seem to be attacking the multi-window model, which is a fair thing to question particularly in small form factors, but forbidding a program from executing in the background (doing non-interactive things like receiving instant messages or manipulating audio, etc) is asinine. I wonder what your post will be when Apple does finally cave to allowing third-party apps to background execute, it will happen I can guarantee.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
Umm, you do realize that the daemon they implemented is explicitly a form of background processing? Apple *needs* it to deliver the things they need, and they allow themselves the privilege of background execution, they just deny it to third parties.
For a large part, existing standards could still work, if the hypervisors would more fully embrace their role as 'edge switches'. Most problems already are addressed for edge management when the edge is a physical switch via various standards. The issue is that VMWare particularly doesn't bother to implement those, and as a consequence the networking industry has been applying various higher level hacks to gloss over it or work around it without actually having VMWare budge on their implementation.
For example, VLAN membership. This is simple, we have GVRP/MVRP for standards based solution to the problem. There needs to be nothing special to virtualization here
The goal is to give a customer a holistic, 'everyday' experience to the extent possible in a sedan form factor. Sure, mileage/grid energy usage is the big distinguishing feature of this vehicle, but allowing a 'sport' mode that doesn't impact normal usage seems ok (it's not like it's lugging around an extra few, mostly unused cylinders to provide that boost or anything, it's just modifying the way some parameters work). A customer is free to ignore the button entirely. Also, a customer deciding they want to feel a *little* extra acceleration can do so without having to own an explicitly sportier car (though as the article points out, it won't exactly give sports car performance, but for some it may be enough and is presumably trivial to provide).
Informative... I searched news.google.com for this article and found out that it works, and also that this article's 'preview' is pretty much all they had to say on the matter anyway, so it would have been a complete rip off to subscribe anyway. The rest of the article is basically rehashing the intro in quotations and mentioning the fact that competitors exist.
Oh, and I meant to say a sanely routed /48 ;)
I base my experience on 'who' output on a system I ssh to, which puts me on a different IP.
If I ssh out, my source ip is different than what it appears to be locally.
Some could say that IPv6 went wrong by not being more interoperable with IPv4 or throwing out too much accumulated knowledge with IPv4. On the former point I'm undecided, as one goal was a sane routing scheme and that may well be impossible if preserving IPv4 semantics, but I'll defer to others on that. I tend to agree with the latter, where IPv6 architects for a non-trivial part threw out the entire IPv4 set of best-practices assuming they were all crap and requiring every last bit to debate for re-acceptance (i.e. DHCP was not originally going to exist, bunches of useful DHCP option codes when it would exist are dropped until someone argues them back in, etc).
On the DHCPv6 front, one thing is that IPv6 has two distinct scenarios in my mind:
stateless autoconfig with service discovery via route advertisement and mdns. Great for networks with self-managed participants. This was the orginal vision intended to encompass the whole usage.
On the other end, centrally managed scenarios are recognised as unavoidable, and that's where DHCPv6 has to come into play. It just so happens if you are centrally managing things, a lot of value is lost when the managed entities are moderately dynamic in nature. This is great in some 'enterprise' contexts or other cases where the number of entities to manage far outnumbers the people to manage them.
I recognize this as a possibility, but I'd kinda like to not manage multiple networks when it comes down to it.
In some scenarios, a pre-provisioning capable scheme is required for certain circumstances and that is ostensibly where DHCP should be able to fill the gap, but it is restricted here.
stateless autoconfig w/ mDNS for all service discovery was the original vision of all IPv6 (which still makes sense in many contexts).
dhcp was brought to ipv6 with the recognition that some circumstances for more central management exist.
There are so many ways IPv6 remains broken and too many of the people with influence can tend to say 'working as designed'.
I know that's controversial, so I'll enumerate my pain points:
-DHCPv6 DUID is a pain to 'pre-provision'. When any operating system or firmware instance dhcpv6 for the first time, it sends out something that you'll never know what it would be ahead of time. In 99% of cases, the DUID is a generated value at 'OS Install time' that is used only for that specific OS, and a reinstall or livecd boot will change it out completely. stateless boot, multi-boot systems and multi-stage booting (i.e. pxe -> os) cannot hold together a coherent identity because DHCPv6 is explicitly designed not to do that. Binding by MAC is considered 'evil', but it has been the strategy used for ages. I wouldn't mind so much if DUID was commonly implemented as a value retrieved from motherboard firmware tables, but no one is stepping up to drive that behavior in a spec visible to all parties.
No PXE/bootp boot. I believe they are trying to reinvent, from scratch the boot design from IPv4, and are nearing completion. I fear the extent to which the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater (i.e. 'root-path' was dropped and no one has pulled it into dhcpv6).
Some standards are missing the capability to operate in IPv6. I.e. IPMI hase some IPv4 specific portions of the standard without IPv6 capable equivalents.
I also know first hand IBM uses a lot of 9.0.0.0/8 today and that the world would have to do something drastic to make them change their usage as it isn't cost-effective from their standpoint unless they can save/get a large chunk of change.
Now, you'd think that means these devices are publically accessible, but noooo. If 99% of their '9.x.x.x' equipment that does have internet access attempts a connection, it gets NATed outbound to a different address entirely! So they sit on a mountain of globally addressable IP addresses, and then only use them internally for nearly all of them.
Just give me a sane IPv6 environment (give me richer DHCPv6 capability than I have today and a few other things that are just flat-out missing in the IP6 generation) and a /48 (or /56) for my house and I'll be on my way.
All spreadsheets feel the need to fubar csv data.
If you have 0002, most assume you mean '2', assuming you must have accidentally put three zeroes in.
If I put in a slot/port number for a wiring chart (i.e. slot 5, port 2 as 5/2), it assumes it must have been a date and tags on the current year (incidentally, even if they *were* correct in guessing it to be a year, how the hell can they assume the date is the current year? Who knows when the CSV was created, this is arbitrarily adding more precision to a value than it originally contained).
Often times, for CSV data, it's best to throw up your hands and use a text editor because spreadsheet apps all try to be 'too smart' about the task.
Firefox doesn't already know that CSV should be tied to OO? Shouldn't that have occurred at install time by OO?
This could be a complicated issue. For example, if I cared much about the GUI knowing what to do when I clicked (I usually go via the app to my data), I might get upset if OpenOffice.org re-associated csv from, hypothetically, gvim. CSV is a funky format in that it is quite likely feasible to manipulate with multiple apps installed concurrently. OpenOffice.org installer may be able to ask which ones to do/not do (it might for all I know), but that could also be perceived as asking a user a question that's 'too hard'.
So I got a netbook ...Takes a long fucking time to open OO. I mean a LONG time.
In defense of the software, I've heard that most netbook platforms are pretty slow to open anything (Excel included) to people used to using higher end equipment. Hard to compare when you don't mention if you tried Office 2k7 and didn't see the issue. I think there are faster spreadsheet apps than MS Office or OpenOffice, but in brief I think they are generally only 90% there in terms of capability.
I select all the fields and go to resize them all with a single click but--nothing happens.
This may be a fault of openoffice or merely a difference. I don't use spreadsheets to know the action you are describing (select multiple rows and one click without drag does something?), whether it is an 'obvious' intuitive way to do it or a learned behavior from MS Office. The former would be a fair criticism, the latter an unfair comparison if OpenOffice implements it in an equally accessible, but different way, but I have no idea one way or another.
If you're going to criticize my comments, please take the time to read and comprehend them first. I didn't say that text files wouldn't exist, that's retarded. I said that non-text (specifically, columnar) data wouldn't exist in a text file and thus text editors wouldn't need to include features for handling them.
The problem here is that the mechanism I described can scale to fairly arbitrarily complex structures, but used columnar format as an example as it is straightforward to describe. As useful as regex operators are for common organizations of data that have nice words like 'columnar', there can exist any number of one-off schemes for which you won't have a baked in special-purpose app to describe. Instead, that one-line command instructs vi, which has no idea what 'columnar' means or anything else for that matter on how to become a manager of columnar data. Just like capable programming languages continue to have to be learned to enable implementors to implement arbitrarily complex solutions, advanced operations in any given field, text editing, wordsetting, graphics design, 3d modeling, etc are not possible to be 'intuitive' as they deal with concepts that simply require some sort of acquired knowledge. I'm not sufficiently intimate with the fields to understand exactly why a histogram graph of color data in a still image are important for a graphics designer, but advanced photo editing (i.e. Photoshop) software makes it available despite someone like me not having an 'intuitive' knowledge of what to do with it. It offers all sorts of functions and features I have no idea the point of, but I won't fault them for that as graphics designers know what to do with it and it makes their lives easier to have them at their fingertips.
1) What does "having columnar data in a text file" have anything to do with "offering advanced capability?" You seem to have conflated these two concepts, and I have no idea why or what you're driving at
I used columnar data as a mere example of an operation an advanced text editor is capable of doing at an advanced users behest without any built-in special-purpose/knowledge of the specific task at hand. I would have talked about blender, but I don't know anything about 3D design.
if you have a text file full of columnar data, you should import it into an editor that's designed to support columnar data (i.e. a database, or spreadsheet) and not twiddle with columns in a text editor.
In my example, I accomplish my task in under 15 seconds on a remote system somewhere. If I had to download the data, import it into a spreadsheet app (btw, having to describe to the spreadsheet how the data is delimited), manipulate it, save it (btw, it is nearly guaranteed to screw up the delimiting on writeback), and write it back, that would make me tons less productive. Not to mention that if the data is only a piece of data (i.e. data with prose-style header) it is totally unworkable. Don't tell me that the app ought to write to xls or another spreadsheet specific format/database, as that totally destroys my flexibility for quick text edits, sed, awk, cut, and more. The entire problem with a lot of the 'shitty' Sun, Oracle, IBM software is they subscribe to the concept of special-purpose formats that are awkward to generically manipulate in the name of putting them into the 'right' application. The problem being there often isn't the 'right' application for everyone. Do I expect some guy to sit down never having used any of this and be rapidly productive, of course not. Does this capability existing enable me to get a lot more done a lot more quickly at the expense of requiring experience, absolutely. My point is that ultimate capability comes at a price of requiring learning to occur, and I am happy to see projects come along that aren't afraid of features simply because they would require a learning curve to be effective. I also don't mind a notepad clone opting to skip all of it because their target audience is intentionally one that should never learn anything unless they want to jump to a harder, more capable editor.
If in a holistically-usable environment there is no cause to manipulate text at all, how the hell did you enter your comment, which is itself in text? If a user complains that they have this text data they want to manipulate (not because their app demanded it, but because a friend sent it or who knows what else), the correct response is that capable text editing doesn't belong in a 'usable' environment and therefore applications offering advanced capability have no place in the world?
It at least didn't say *Good* person of the ____. I.e. Hitler was a strong candidate for 'person of the century' in Time magazine's reckoning, but happened to be edged out by positive people (probably because they feared people assuming 'person of the century' was automatically an honor and therefore it was safer to go with Einstein). Most of these lists purport not to measure 'good' but how influential a person was.
That's like deciding to remove the checksums from TCP and IP because a few protocols provide their own checksums.
Funny you should mention IP checksums, that's one feature removed from the IP layer in IPv6 precisely because the 'important' protocols do it themselves anyway (i.e. TCP).
(Fact: The end user doesn't know what he/she wants, the marketing guys do.)
Depends on your user. Some users are clueless and marketing types can figure it out better than they can. Some users know very damn well what they want and marketing driven design actually hurts them. One commonly emphasised application development philosophy is rapid prototyping to users for feedback and adjusting design. No one can shorten that cycle like a community who knows how to write code and actually uses the product.
An userfriendly interface does NOT have a learning curve, it's simply logical and well organized (customization is not a criteria).
This can depend on the definition of 'userfriendly', but assuming your definition for a moment, the parent and designers didn't say they were aiming for that vision. They are aiming at another metric which may conflict with 'userfriendly', rapidly accessible advanced operations. To take it to the text editing world, if I wanted to remove the third column of a roughly whitespace delimited columnar format text file on lines 50-100, I can do a regex in vi using :s/\(\S*\s*\S*\s*\)\S*\(.*\)/\1\2/. It is always at hand and immediately accessible, but no way in hell someone knows to do that 'intuitively' without learning and any 'intuitive' interface would have to bury a feature like this so deep that it would be a royal pain to access when needed once you understand how to use it. Also, though customization is not a criteria for your 'userfriendly', it is a criteria that is independently important for many users, so it cannot be discounted.