It's been proven there are next to difference between how different layouts affect your typing.
Possible responses:
1. [Trivial] What?
2. [Condescending] Try typing that again.
3. [Pedantic] [Citation needed.]
4. [Professional] It's been shown that the differences are trivial among those first learning to touch-type. Move an experienced, 60 wpm QWERTY typist to another layout, though, and watch him suffer. I've been reading Jensen Harris' blog on the ribbon UI and, frankly, I don't believe a word of his claims that the ribbon is easier to use. His data is based on self-selected users sending data on their real-world activities, plus focus groups, but doesn't include critical factors like:
(a) using the ribbon, do users not just press buttons but complete their work faster using the ribbon?
(b) what is the time delay before a function is invoked (indicative of how hard it was to find)?
(c) how often was a function invoked in error?
(d) how do these factors vary with user experience with earlier versions of the tool -- keeping in mind that nearly all users of the tool will not be naive users, but experienced users that will have to be re-trained in its use?
It's clear from his blog that the ribbon was invented due to the increasing number of functions placed in MS apps, like Word, and their belief that the menu system was suffering from overload. Jensen also notes that the great majority of these functions are very rarely invoked (in about equal amounts of rarely), yet dismisses accusations that their software has become "bloatware". This leads into something I have long suspected, which is that the MS application business model (of making increasingly sophisticated versions of the basic apps) is unsustainable. I mean, look to the future -- at this rate of increase, Word 2020 will have 500 functions. This is needed in a word processor? A point has to be (or maybe already has been) reached at which one needs separate programs for a floor wax and a dessert topping.
And to the next generation of Windows users, the menu will probably seem just as archaic to them as the use of keyboard commands today does to you. ..
Grasshopper, I too go for hours in Word without without using the mouse, and much prefer keyboard commands to menu picks. Please don't stereotype someone you've never met -- it's nekulturny, and beneath you.
Wait 'til you actually have to use the ribbon, and you'll be amazed where the Redmond geniuses put stuff. Try to find where one edits document metadata, for example (the answer, if you ever find it, will surprise you). It's not the ribbon per se to which I object; rather, it's the implementation: If it were actually easy to find stuff, that would be fine. However, I defy you to explain the organization plan used to assign functions in the ribbon. It seems to be totally random.
Let me put it this way: If the ribbon categories were the same as the menu categories (which they should be, since they're categorizing the same set of functions), I'd have little problem with it (other than disappointment over loss of screen space). But randomizing the function locations, especially in a context-varying way, is just unacceptable.
To this day I still get more calls from individuals hunting for things in 2003 than 2007.
You obviously don't have a business relationship with my office. Productivity has gone down significantly with the introduction of 2007, to the point that there is a thriving underground communications network via post-it notes, sharing the locations of much-needed functions people have found (usually via exhaustive search). People are constantly calling each other with questions like, "Didn't you find the gizmo that makes superscripts in text boxes the other day? Where was it?" What a waste.
Perhaps I have a distorted view of the software market, but it is my impression that at any given time the installed user base of MS applications is far, far larger than the number of new users seeing them for the first time. After all, it's 2009, and unless you're pre-pubescent, or just entering the workforce after recovering from a long coma, it's quite likely that you're familiar with the basic MS apps -- they've been around for twenty-five years. Changing their UI in an upgrade then just causes user distress for the entire installed user base, since industry is more-or-less required to purchase the upgrade.
Is it not a bit selfish to say that all users in the future should have to learn a harder to learn, less intuitive system purely because a single set of experienced users who are more able to learn a new system, can't be bothered to?
Now realize that you just typed that on a QWERTY keyboard, and ask me that again.
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
If you don't believe me, ask a collection of users to perform a task with the existing UI, then change to the ribbon and repeat the process. If not convinced, give the users a week to adjust to the ribbon, and repeat the test. I think you'll find that users burdened by the ribbon will perform their tasks significantly slower than those using the more efficient menu system.
To me, the most interesting point of this discovery is that it should improve our understanding of shortwave radio propagation.
It has always frustrated me that the same space program that is producing the data needed to understand the physics needed to make accurate, day-to-day predictions of ionospheric propagation -- a hundred-year-old mystery -- is also the same space program that replaced commercial HF communication with satellites, greatly reducing the economic value of such predictions (and, therefore, the science funding to make them). So now that we have the ability, we no longer have the desire . . . unless one is an amateur radio operator, and it's harder to think of an entity lower on the economic value chain than that.
The most difficult path for shortwave links is one that passes near the magnetic poles, like the path from Southeast Asia to the US East Coast that passes over the north magnetic pole. Energy from the solar wind couples into the Earth's magnetic field; in particular, charged particles are directed parallel to the field. This is great for propagation over most of the planet; however, near the poles the magnetic field becomes vertical and these particles are directed perpendicular to the ground, where they form a ring of radio wave attenuation and refraction in the upper atmosphere that closes this path for many days out of a given month. To open this path there has to be minimal energy coupling from the solar wind, and there is very little understanding of when this will occur. Even the best propagation prediction software (e.g., VOACAP and Proplab Pro) is based on statistics, giving one the probability of a given path being open.
This discovery should add to our understanding of how and when these paths will open. Until then, we have to survive on "Space Weather" web sites likethese, and turn on a radio to see for ourselves what the day brings.
(Those interested in an accessible introduction to HF propagation can check out K9LA's propagation site.)
I sit corrected. After looking at news photos of the event, it seems the towers were free-standing (i.e., they had no guys), and were series-fed, meaning that the towers were insulated from ground by insulators placed in each tower leg. While there would have been a brief light show when the excavator first touched the tower above the insulators, the operator was in no serious danger of electrocution as long as he stayed at the controls, since the machine itself would have carried the transmitted current to ground. It's likely that the transmitter's self-protection circuitry would have detected the short circuit at its output very quickly, and shut the transmitter down (before it could be electrically damaged). After that, unless a restart of the transmitter were attempted (either manually, remotely from the studio, or automatically, by a timer), the operator was probably in much greater danger of being killed by falling steel than by anything electrical.
He/They likely took out one of the guy anchors with the machine, and let the resulting imbalance of forces from the other guys pull the tower down. (The guys are insulated from the tower itself.)
This line of thinking has always puzzled me. I'm a co-founder of a small engineering company that my co-owners and I hope to grow. Is it your thesis that our company has been lacking any sort of conscience and empathy since the day we founded it? Or is it non-evil now, but we can expect it to become evil at some point in the future, as it grows? If the latter, at what point does our company become evil? Is there a visible threshold below which we can stay? Should we turn away customers, so as to remain below some specific size? Or make lower-quality or less-innovative products? Please advise.
Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here, here, and here). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog,
Clipperton island is a place where you can see how much impact man has had on land and environment. Seeing the trash washed up on shore when I was on Kure Atoll in 2005 was nothing compared to what is on Clipperton. There are shoes, fishing nets, pieces of buys, lighters, bottles (both plastic and glass), tires and much more.
Not necessarily. One of the first targets in most WW3 nuclear scenarios is landline switching facilities, in order to disrupt the command, communication, and control of the opponent. Because of this, "dynamic adaptive routing" technologies, in which telecom links can be dynamically routed around failed links and/or nodes, is viewed in the US as a strategic technology the export of which is controlled -- see 5A991.c.9 in the Commerce Control List (p.8).
Power Paper. Screen-printed zinc-manganese batteries on paper and polymer substrates are at least ten years old. (They're not the only supplier, either.)
I disagree. The claim element says, in relevant part, "determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including . .." and then lists a number of elements, one of which is "hint elements." The claim does not require a hint element; that's just one of the many elements in the set that could be used. The "including" refers to the set of elements from which any one of the list may be taken.
What matters isn't what the abstract says, it's what the claims, especially the independent claims, say. Here are the two independent claims in this patent, formatted for improved clarity (I hope). They basically say the same thing, except that the first is a "method" claim, claiming a method for doing something (in this case, "creating a document in XML in a computing device that is understandable by many applications"), while the second is an "apparatus" claim, claiming an apparatus (in this case, "a computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions for interacting with a document") that performs a function:
Claim 1. A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising:
accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features;
determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including:
a style element;
a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document;
a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag;
a document properties element;
a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags;
a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements;
a font element;
a formatting element;
a section element;
a table element;
an outline element;
and a proofing element;
creating the document including the element in said computing device;
and storing the document in said computing device.
Claim 12. A computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions for interacting with a document, comprising:
interpreting a published XSD (Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema Definition), wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features;
and creating an element in an XML file, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including:
a style element;
a hints element that is interpreted according to a hints sch
...so I downloaded the Bothunter executable only to discover that it did not have a valid digital signature. WTF? A security program that's not authenticatable?
At my grandparents' 65th wedding anniversary, my grandfather was asked for the secret to his long marriage. He said, "In any domestic dispute, if it turns out you are right, apologize at once."
Oh, and can we reserve use of the term "hacker" for someone with at least a modicum of technical skills? This guy isn't even a cracker. All he did was talk on a stolen radio.
I was amused to see that Reuters, of all organizations, reports that 21,000-pounds is equal to 9.5 million kg. I guess it's safe to assume that someone who went to a US high school made the conversion.
The term "radio shack" was coined in the early 20th Century, when shipping companies began to add radio to their vessels. Since the ships were already built, the extra room for the radio equipment had to be added -- there was typically no existing space with both access to the antenna (i.e., above deck) and the necessary electrical power from the ship's plant. (The audible noise from the spark equipment of the day also meant that the equipment, which was used largely at night, couldn't be placed near the officers' sleeping quarters.) Paid for out of operating expenses by the frugal shipowners, these added rooms were typically small and poorly constructed, often from wood, and the term "radio shack" quickly followed.
New ship construction, of course, included a purpose-built room for the radio equipment, still called the "radio shack." Even the Queen Elizabeth 2 has a radio shack. The term quickly moved ashore -- amateur radio stations are in shacks, for example -- and "radio shack" came to mean the place where all the equipment was. From there, commercial use soon followed.
?!? Did you read the linked article? It agrees with you, except for Tang -- which was first marketed as a breakfast drink in 1957, and languished in obscurity until NASA selected it for the Gemini program in the mid-1960s.
Slashdot Mirror
Possible responses:
1. [Trivial] What?
2. [Condescending] Try typing that again.
3. [Pedantic] [Citation needed.]
4. [Professional] It's been shown that the differences are trivial among those first learning to touch-type. Move an experienced, 60 wpm QWERTY typist to another layout, though, and watch him suffer. I've been reading Jensen Harris' blog on the ribbon UI and, frankly, I don't believe a word of his claims that the ribbon is easier to use. His data is based on self-selected users sending data on their real-world activities, plus focus groups, but doesn't include critical factors like:
(a) using the ribbon, do users not just press buttons but complete their work faster using the ribbon?
(b) what is the time delay before a function is invoked (indicative of how hard it was to find)?
(c) how often was a function invoked in error?
(d) how do these factors vary with user experience with earlier versions of the tool -- keeping in mind that nearly all users of the tool will not be naive users, but experienced users that will have to be re-trained in its use?
It's clear from his blog that the ribbon was invented due to the increasing number of functions placed in MS apps, like Word, and their belief that the menu system was suffering from overload. Jensen also notes that the great majority of these functions are very rarely invoked (in about equal amounts of rarely), yet dismisses accusations that their software has become "bloatware". This leads into something I have long suspected, which is that the MS application business model (of making increasingly sophisticated versions of the basic apps) is unsustainable. I mean, look to the future -- at this rate of increase, Word 2020 will have 500 functions. This is needed in a word processor? A point has to be (or maybe already has been) reached at which one needs separate programs for a floor wax and a dessert topping.
As I said, I'm just not buying it.
Grasshopper, I too go for hours in Word without without using the mouse, and much prefer keyboard commands to menu picks. Please don't stereotype someone you've never met -- it's nekulturny, and beneath you.
Wait 'til you actually have to use the ribbon, and you'll be amazed where the Redmond geniuses put stuff. Try to find where one edits document metadata, for example (the answer, if you ever find it, will surprise you). It's not the ribbon per se to which I object; rather, it's the implementation: If it were actually easy to find stuff, that would be fine. However, I defy you to explain the organization plan used to assign functions in the ribbon. It seems to be totally random.
Let me put it this way: If the ribbon categories were the same as the menu categories (which they should be, since they're categorizing the same set of functions), I'd have little problem with it (other than disappointment over loss of screen space). But randomizing the function locations, especially in a context-varying way, is just unacceptable.
You obviously don't have a business relationship with my office. Productivity has gone down significantly with the introduction of 2007, to the point that there is a thriving underground communications network via post-it notes, sharing the locations of much-needed functions people have found (usually via exhaustive search). People are constantly calling each other with questions like, "Didn't you find the gizmo that makes superscripts in text boxes the other day? Where was it?" What a waste.
Perhaps I have a distorted view of the software market, but it is my impression that at any given time the installed user base of MS applications is far, far larger than the number of new users seeing them for the first time. After all, it's 2009, and unless you're pre-pubescent, or just entering the workforce after recovering from a long coma, it's quite likely that you're familiar with the basic MS apps -- they've been around for twenty-five years. Changing their UI in an upgrade then just causes user distress for the entire installed user base, since industry is more-or-less required to purchase the upgrade.
Now realize that you just typed that on a QWERTY keyboard, and ask me that again.
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
If you don't believe me, ask a collection of users to perform a task with the existing UI, then change to the ribbon and repeat the process. If not convinced, give the users a week to adjust to the ribbon, and repeat the test. I think you'll find that users burdened by the ribbon will perform their tasks significantly slower than those using the more efficient menu system.
To me, the most interesting point of this discovery is that it should improve our understanding of shortwave radio propagation.
It has always frustrated me that the same space program that is producing the data needed to understand the physics needed to make accurate, day-to-day predictions of ionospheric propagation -- a hundred-year-old mystery -- is also the same space program that replaced commercial HF communication with satellites, greatly reducing the economic value of such predictions (and, therefore, the science funding to make them). So now that we have the ability, we no longer have the desire . . . unless one is an amateur radio operator, and it's harder to think of an entity lower on the economic value chain than that.
The most difficult path for shortwave links is one that passes near the magnetic poles, like the path from Southeast Asia to the US East Coast that passes over the north magnetic pole. Energy from the solar wind couples into the Earth's magnetic field; in particular, charged particles are directed parallel to the field. This is great for propagation over most of the planet; however, near the poles the magnetic field becomes vertical and these particles are directed perpendicular to the ground, where they form a ring of radio wave attenuation and refraction in the upper atmosphere that closes this path for many days out of a given month. To open this path there has to be minimal energy coupling from the solar wind, and there is very little understanding of when this will occur. Even the best propagation prediction software (e.g., VOACAP and Proplab Pro) is based on statistics, giving one the probability of a given path being open.
This discovery should add to our understanding of how and when these paths will open. Until then, we have to survive on "Space Weather" web sites like these, and turn on a radio to see for ourselves what the day brings.
(Those interested in an accessible introduction to HF propagation can check out K9LA's propagation site.)
A tower outside of Allentown, PA was deliberately felled the same night. As it was a guyed tower, the vandals cut the guys to bring it down.
I sit corrected. After looking at news photos of the event, it seems the towers were free-standing (i.e., they had no guys), and were series-fed, meaning that the towers were insulated from ground by insulators placed in each tower leg. While there would have been a brief light show when the excavator first touched the tower above the insulators, the operator was in no serious danger of electrocution as long as he stayed at the controls, since the machine itself would have carried the transmitted current to ground. It's likely that the transmitter's self-protection circuitry would have detected the short circuit at its output very quickly, and shut the transmitter down (before it could be electrically damaged). After that, unless a restart of the transmitter were attempted (either manually, remotely from the studio, or automatically, by a timer), the operator was probably in much greater danger of being killed by falling steel than by anything electrical.
He/They likely took out one of the guy anchors with the machine, and let the resulting imbalance of forces from the other guys pull the tower down. (The guys are insulated from the tower itself.)
I think this is at least one of the Science articles to which the post (almost) refers.
This line of thinking has always puzzled me. I'm a co-founder of a small engineering company that my co-owners and I hope to grow. Is it your thesis that our company has been lacking any sort of conscience and empathy since the day we founded it? Or is it non-evil now, but we can expect it to become evil at some point in the future, as it grows? If the latter, at what point does our company become evil? Is there a visible threshold below which we can stay? Should we turn away customers, so as to remain below some specific size? Or make lower-quality or less-innovative products? Please advise.
I can't give you pictures of the entire gyre, but there are several taken during the March 2008 DXpedition to Clipperton Island, a small (9 square kilometers, 3.5 square miles), uninhabited (and rarely visited) island in the North Pacific about 1100 km (700 mi) off the coast of Mexico.
Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here, here, and here). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog,
Most of their outdoor photos have plastic trash in them.
...not if you're using gasoline to fuel a jet engine, no.
Not necessarily. One of the first targets in most WW3 nuclear scenarios is landline switching facilities, in order to disrupt the command, communication, and control of the opponent. Because of this, "dynamic adaptive routing" technologies, in which telecom links can be dynamically routed around failed links and/or nodes, is viewed in the US as a strategic technology the export of which is controlled -- see 5A991.c.9 in the Commerce Control List (p.8).
Or even the ARRL.
Power Paper. Screen-printed zinc-manganese batteries on paper and polymer substrates are at least ten years old. (They're not the only supplier, either.)
I disagree. The claim element says, in relevant part, "determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including . . ." and then lists a number of elements, one of which is "hint elements." The claim does not require a hint element; that's just one of the many elements in the set that could be used. The "including" refers to the set of elements from which any one of the list may be taken.
What matters isn't what the abstract says, it's what the claims, especially the independent claims, say. Here are the two independent claims in this patent, formatted for improved clarity (I hope). They basically say the same thing, except that the first is a "method" claim, claiming a method for doing something (in this case, "creating a document in XML in a computing device that is understandable by many applications"), while the second is an "apparatus" claim, claiming an apparatus (in this case, "a computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions for interacting with a document") that performs a function:
...so I downloaded the Bothunter executable only to discover that it did not have a valid digital signature. WTF? A security program that's not authenticatable?
At my grandparents' 65th wedding anniversary, my grandfather was asked for the secret to his long marriage. He said, "In any domestic dispute, if it turns out you are right, apologize at once."
See, there is some good news occasionally.
Oh, and can we reserve use of the term "hacker" for someone with at least a modicum of technical skills? This guy isn't even a cracker. All he did was talk on a stolen radio.
I was amused to see that Reuters, of all organizations, reports that 21,000-pounds is equal to 9.5 million kg. I guess it's safe to assume that someone who went to a US high school made the conversion.
(It's actually 9.5 million g, or 9500 kg.)
The term "radio shack" was coined in the early 20th Century, when shipping companies began to add radio to their vessels. Since the ships were already built, the extra room for the radio equipment had to be added -- there was typically no existing space with both access to the antenna (i.e., above deck) and the necessary electrical power from the ship's plant. (The audible noise from the spark equipment of the day also meant that the equipment, which was used largely at night, couldn't be placed near the officers' sleeping quarters.) Paid for out of operating expenses by the frugal shipowners, these added rooms were typically small and poorly constructed, often from wood, and the term "radio shack" quickly followed.
New ship construction, of course, included a purpose-built room for the radio equipment, still called the "radio shack." Even the Queen Elizabeth 2 has a radio shack. The term quickly moved ashore -- amateur radio stations are in shacks, for example -- and "radio shack" came to mean the place where all the equipment was. From there, commercial use soon followed.
?!? Did you read the linked article? It agrees with you, except for Tang -- which was first marketed as a breakfast drink in 1957, and languished in obscurity until NASA selected it for the Gemini program in the mid-1960s.
According to The New York Times .