Same here. I have to admit from an intrigue/hobbyist point of view I occasionally think "hmm...Linux?". I haven't tried it for a few years, and I think, you know...
And then my logic kicked in. Right or wrong, every time I read recommendations or threads on Slashdot about Linux, everyone says how easy it is to do a b or c, and then follows it up with all these command lines or half a dozen different clicks and applications to run. I'm sure it actually isn't any more complicated than Windows - but I know how to do it on Windows already.
That's the key, I guess. If I were younger, I probably would be keen to invest the time and learn new things. But now? Windows works just fine for what I do, and I have a job, I go to school, and I have a family. Learning Linux is way down on the list of priorities.
Even if all of that changed disappeared and I magically had time to spare, there's one other point. There are so many distributions and I don't know which one to choose. Which is the flavor du jour? Which one gives me a clear edge over the others? What about BSD? Why not Debian? Ubuntu? SuSE? I don't know...and with so many options, I lose interest in doing some research...
Err...I don't think you have actually met any real UI designers, ever, in your life, or even read about what they do. Or else you're thinking of people who calim to be "UI designers" and confusing them with people who actually do HCI. I suspect what you are actually talking about is a graphic designer; but that is very different from someone who designs user interfaces based on well known HCI principles.
It's about far more than making things look pretty (and actual software developers are NOT the experts in that field, either, by the way). It's about studying how to make things usable. I am not an HCI expert, but I work with one, and I know that when she starts a project she sits down with users, interviews them, spends time observing how they work, until she understands the processes they go through better than anyone. Then she works with the developers to implement something that's usable, that makes sense, based on scientific research principles about how people work.
Software developers are not interface designers. That's not their job. It's a different discipline, and when it's done properly it's magic. Software designers might or might not understand the workflows and the business processes. (Usually not, in anything but the simplest possible businesses.) None of this is a criticism of developers; it's recognition that they are experts in their field, and these projects work best when you get other experts in other fields working side by side with your developers.
It's actually kind of frightening you got modded up +5 insightful. You're saying the equivalent of claiming a server administrator is the best at development. He or she might be really good at writing scripts, but real enterprise level software development is not even on the same plane.
Either way - doing it myself in Google, or using your link - gets me a standard search page of results, with pepsi.com at the top. There's no reference to Google+ on the front page.
And if you legitimately could say "you're doing it wrong"... that kind of proves how useless it is, doesn't it? The point is it's supposed to be easy to get there. The methods I'm seeing described here are anything but easy.
Larson stressed that the facts show there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth. He pointed out that even though many scientists have come to the conclusion that the odds of life somewhere else in the universe are fairly high, the chance that any of them are making contact with humans are extremely small, given the distances involved.
Can we just call a do-over and kick everybody out of office and start over?
Well, duh, yes, of course you can. It's called an election. You don't have to vote the incumbents in, you know.
However -
People are bothering the White House with this type of bullshit
Sounds like you are targeting the wrong group of people and what you really want is to kick the entire country out of voting privileges and start over.
SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw.
In other news...
Groklaw Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again
Groklaw has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old grudge match against SCO. Unbelievable! Details at SCO....
I predict endless bleatings of Slashdotters and Groklaw peeps who will fail to recognize that they, as much as anything else, served to hyper-extend the original SCO saga by their vigilant, err, vigil on all things about the case.
Well, that'd be interesting/helpful/whatever, but really, what does it give you in reality? It's a service Google provides, they're saying "here are the payment terms we're going to implement", and you you decide if it's worth it to you.
It might help to read the article. It opens with this question:
Question: Professionally I customize software modules on a well known software package. The version we are working on is one version back and about a year old. Is continuing to work on this old software version hurting my professional marketability?
His answers are set in that context. Although the summary doesn't mention this, he goes on to talk about what you can do, which mainly is pay attention to what the vendor of your package is doing in the product lifecycle.
Honestly, not saying it may not be implemented/integrated very well, but you're talking voice recognition with a search engine that can do some basic natural language processing (NLP).
There really isn't anything new about these separate components. It may be slickly done (probably is, being Apple), but what you've described is nowhere near "state of the art" for AI. I have a 21 year background in AI, for frame of reference.
Seems people are simply not aware of the classics very well
Classics like Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, those kinds of classics? You surely can't be talking about this stuff. Please tell me Slashdot's readership is more enlightened than this...
shame on NASA for making space boring
How old are you? NASA put a man on the moon. Think about that for a moment. They put a man on the moon...over FORTY YEARS AGO. You seriously can't see THAT and get goosebumps? There's something wrong with you.
No, actually it hasn't been pointed out numerous times. What the majority of posts are saying are "why isn't my favorite series/author on the list", ignoring the damned summary (never mind the article) which flat out states this list was generated by 60 thousand of your peers. Losers.
You're currently on the Governing Board of the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Panel. What is the state of standards development, and how big an impact does it have to move national infrastructure communications into the public IP arena so far as our ability to strengthen and expand our infrastructure? Conversely, how big are the threats in this new world?
And when you take a phone call, stand up. Studies have shown that sitting down increases your chance of a heart attack independent of other factors. That means if you exercise but sit down a lot, you're 54% more likely to have a heart attack than someone who exercises and doesn't sit down a lot.
Stand up, frequently. Take a walk to the printer. Take a walk to get a cup of water/tea/coffee twice an hour. I use a headset and almost always stand when I'm on the phone.
FB is starting to look an awful lot like the new MySpace
How so? Facebook started with a very significant paradigm over MySpace. MySpace allowed people a great deal of flexibility over how they laid out their pages, embedded codes, all kinds of things. That led to it becoming a useless buggy unwieldy mess as teenage girls loaded up their profiles with music, videos, flashing graphics, etc.
Facebook said "you will use our template". It's consistent, and keeps the audio-visual messes to a minimum.
Facebook is so idiotic I'm looking forward to not going there if I can help it
So basically you (and the other poster who replied to you) like to snob out and look down your nose at Facebook, but even though you are so condescending towards it you still deign to use it because it offers something that is a compelling function. Nice one.
(And that's exactly why FB remains so popular, despite the elitist bashing - it fills a need and does it really, really well.)
Err, that is a bit disingenous. His statement was quite brief, so here it is in full:
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
It acknowledges the tragedy of death, true. I suppose, strictly speaking, it acknowledges the other bits. But it does so in a mean and sarcastic way which obliterates anything else.
Had he made a commentary in the same respectful and thoughtful manner as your post, it would've made a lot more sense. To do it in this incendiary language will successfully overcome any valid point he may be trying to make.
By the way, he doesn't even explain that first sentence. If you don't know the context (and most people don't - Slashdot readers do not comprise "most people"), then it comes across as petty, stupid, and reactionary.
Actually, it comes across that way even if you do know the context. Badly done, Mr. Stallman. Very badly done.
Were you around in the early days of DOS, Apple II+, Apple IIe, the 1984 era, etc? Steve Jobs did more than anybody to bring computing usability to the masses. For people who stubbornly commit to the "but ALL shall use the CLI", they'll never get it, and I realize that. For those who aren't stuck in some ivory tower, it really was ground breaking.
It's embarrassing to those of us with a brain.
Not really. Putting a friendly face on a heretofore esoteric and impenetrable tool so that people could start to get past the interface and look at the potential was huge. He didn't do it by himself, but he leverage existing work and popularized it. That was the key to his fame.
There's a reason why SO many people equate MP3 player with iPods. Granted, there are people who will buy shiny more expensive stuff just because...but Apple goes way beyond that.
(Except iTunes. iTunes is horrible, and in no way represents a shining piece of usability.)
And if the submitter or the editor had read the article, they'd have come across this gem:
On Sunday night October 25, 2011, I was reading through my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Some new Slashdot stories appeared and I dutifully started reading them. When I started reading about myself and my project, I started to think I had clicked on the wrong feed or I had erred in some fashion. I could not believe I was reading about myself on Slashdot after many years of reading it. My wife was next to me at the time and I tried to explain why I was so ecstatic to be on Slashdot. Explaining to a non-geek about Slashdot is difficult, but I think she could see it was important to me. If the media blitz had died at that point, I would have been happy. It didnâ(TM)t. Over the course of the next day, the story kept on gaining momentum, getting more news stories, and more hits on the website.
If I had posted this, after such a clear dupe reference in the article, I'd have been humiliated.
I'd forgotten about the slider. It never worked so I ignored it. The front page doesn't work; most of the elements overlap so you can't see half the items. I can't get to my account info. Most of the site features just don't work. Test them sometime.
I love Firefox, but I'm sick of having to restart it every 15 minutes, let alone every day. The pauses cause missed clicks and keystrokes, and they drive me nuts.
I have to ask - why do you love it? This is the kind of behavior that drives people screaming from Windows to Linux.
Yep. And sucker me, I'm giving/. page views by responding. But I read the "article" because I couldn't believe the summary described it accurately because, if it did, I was left scratching my head wondering why on earth this was posted.
Unfortunately (and quite remarkably, considering this is Slashdot, after all), the summary was quite accurate. It really is that worthless a story.
I actually decided to read the article and buck another proud Slashdot tradition, but I gave up after three paragraphs. It hurt too much.
But it's real use is to be a front end for the amazon store... the iPad always was meant to be a front end to Apple's stores... but it was always much more than that.
As I look at Silk and it's just making me nervous.
Random punctuation strewn everywhere, incoherent sentences...I know that complaining about grammar on/. gets you slapped down pretty quickly, but I found myself having to read most paragraphs two or three times just to understand what he was trying to say.
Forget it. I can get plenty of insightful content from a hundred different places on the web; there's very little which is important enough that I want to struggle. I'm not wasting my time on this tripe.
That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level. For that you need PMUs which will give you between 30 and 120 readings per second...but that assumes you have something that can ramp up quickly enough to respond. What's that going to be? Batteries, flywheels, that sort of technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. I have to admit from an intrigue/hobbyist point of view I occasionally think "hmm...Linux?". I haven't tried it for a few years, and I think, you know...
And then my logic kicked in. Right or wrong, every time I read recommendations or threads on Slashdot about Linux, everyone says how easy it is to do a b or c, and then follows it up with all these command lines or half a dozen different clicks and applications to run. I'm sure it actually isn't any more complicated than Windows - but I know how to do it on Windows already.
That's the key, I guess. If I were younger, I probably would be keen to invest the time and learn new things. But now? Windows works just fine for what I do, and I have a job, I go to school, and I have a family. Learning Linux is way down on the list of priorities.
Even if all of that changed disappeared and I magically had time to spare, there's one other point. There are so many distributions and I don't know which one to choose. Which is the flavor du jour? Which one gives me a clear edge over the others? What about BSD? Why not Debian? Ubuntu? SuSE? I don't know...and with so many options, I lose interest in doing some research...
Err...I don't think you have actually met any real UI designers, ever, in your life, or even read about what they do. Or else you're thinking of people who calim to be "UI designers" and confusing them with people who actually do HCI. I suspect what you are actually talking about is a graphic designer; but that is very different from someone who designs user interfaces based on well known HCI principles.
It's about far more than making things look pretty (and actual software developers are NOT the experts in that field, either, by the way). It's about studying how to make things usable. I am not an HCI expert, but I work with one, and I know that when she starts a project she sits down with users, interviews them, spends time observing how they work, until she understands the processes they go through better than anyone. Then she works with the developers to implement something that's usable, that makes sense, based on scientific research principles about how people work.
Software developers are not interface designers. That's not their job. It's a different discipline, and when it's done properly it's magic. Software designers might or might not understand the workflows and the business processes. (Usually not, in anything but the simplest possible businesses.) None of this is a criticism of developers; it's recognition that they are experts in their field, and these projects work best when you get other experts in other fields working side by side with your developers.
It's actually kind of frightening you got modded up +5 insightful. You're saying the equivalent of claiming a server administrator is the best at development. He or she might be really good at writing scripts, but real enterprise level software development is not even on the same plane.
Either way - doing it myself in Google, or using your link - gets me a standard search page of results, with pepsi.com at the top. There's no reference to Google+ on the front page.
And if you legitimately could say "you're doing it wrong" ... that kind of proves how useless it is, doesn't it? The point is it's supposed to be easy to get there. The methods I'm seeing described here are anything but easy.
You missed a key point from the MSNBC article.
Larson stressed that the facts show there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth. He pointed out that even though many scientists have come to the conclusion that the odds of life somewhere else in the universe are fairly high, the chance that any of them are making contact with humans are extremely small, given the distances involved.
In reverse order...
Can we just call a do-over and kick everybody out of office and start over?
Well, duh, yes, of course you can. It's called an election. You don't have to vote the incumbents in, you know.
However -
People are bothering the White House with this type of bullshit
Sounds like you are targeting the wrong group of people and what you really want is to kick the entire country out of voting privileges and start over.
SCO Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again.
SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw.
In other news...
Groklaw Zombie Creaks Into Motion Again
Groklaw has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old grudge match against SCO. Unbelievable! Details at SCO. ...
I predict endless bleatings of Slashdotters and Groklaw peeps who will fail to recognize that they, as much as anything else, served to hyper-extend the original SCO saga by their vigilant, err, vigil on all things about the case.
Well, that'd be interesting/helpful/whatever, but really, what does it give you in reality? It's a service Google provides, they're saying "here are the payment terms we're going to implement", and you you decide if it's worth it to you.
It might help to read the article. It opens with this question:
Question: Professionally I customize software modules on a well known software package. The version we are working on is one version back and about a year old. Is continuing to work on this old software version hurting my professional marketability?
His answers are set in that context. Although the summary doesn't mention this, he goes on to talk about what you can do, which mainly is pay attention to what the vendor of your package is doing in the product lifecycle.
Honestly, not saying it may not be implemented/integrated very well, but you're talking voice recognition with a search engine that can do some basic natural language processing (NLP).
There really isn't anything new about these separate components. It may be slickly done (probably is, being Apple), but what you've described is nowhere near "state of the art" for AI. I have a 21 year background in AI, for frame of reference.
Seems people are simply not aware of the classics very well
Classics like Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, those kinds of classics? You surely can't be talking about this stuff. Please tell me Slashdot's readership is more enlightened than this...
shame on NASA for making space boring
How old are you? NASA put a man on the moon. Think about that for a moment. They put a man on the moon...over FORTY YEARS AGO. You seriously can't see THAT and get goosebumps? There's something wrong with you.
No, actually it hasn't been pointed out numerous times. What the majority of posts are saying are "why isn't my favorite series/author on the list", ignoring the damned summary (never mind the article) which flat out states this list was generated by 60 thousand of your peers. Losers.
You're currently on the Governing Board of the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Panel. What is the state of standards development, and how big an impact does it have to move national infrastructure communications into the public IP arena so far as our ability to strengthen and expand our infrastructure? Conversely, how big are the threats in this new world?
And when you take a phone call, stand up. Studies have shown that sitting down increases your chance of a heart attack independent of other factors. That means if you exercise but sit down a lot, you're 54% more likely to have a heart attack than someone who exercises and doesn't sit down a lot.
Stand up, frequently. Take a walk to the printer. Take a walk to get a cup of water/tea/coffee twice an hour. I use a headset and almost always stand when I'm on the phone.
FB is starting to look an awful lot like the new MySpace
How so? Facebook started with a very significant paradigm over MySpace. MySpace allowed people a great deal of flexibility over how they laid out their pages, embedded codes, all kinds of things. That led to it becoming a useless buggy unwieldy mess as teenage girls loaded up their profiles with music, videos, flashing graphics, etc.
Facebook said "you will use our template". It's consistent, and keeps the audio-visual messes to a minimum.
You could replace "Facebook" in that diatribe with "Slashdot", you know...
Facebook is so idiotic I'm looking forward to not going there if I can help it
So basically you (and the other poster who replied to you) like to snob out and look down your nose at Facebook, but even though you are so condescending towards it you still deign to use it because it offers something that is a compelling function. Nice one.
(And that's exactly why FB remains so popular, despite the elitist bashing - it fills a need and does it really, really well.)
Err, that is a bit disingenous. His statement was quite brief, so here it is in full:
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
It acknowledges the tragedy of death, true. I suppose, strictly speaking, it acknowledges the other bits. But it does so in a mean and sarcastic way which obliterates anything else.
Had he made a commentary in the same respectful and thoughtful manner as your post, it would've made a lot more sense. To do it in this incendiary language will successfully overcome any valid point he may be trying to make.
By the way, he doesn't even explain that first sentence. If you don't know the context (and most people don't - Slashdot readers do not comprise "most people"), then it comes across as petty, stupid, and reactionary.
Actually, it comes across that way even if you do know the context. Badly done, Mr. Stallman. Very badly done.
Were you around in the early days of DOS, Apple II+, Apple IIe, the 1984 era, etc? Steve Jobs did more than anybody to bring computing usability to the masses. For people who stubbornly commit to the "but ALL shall use the CLI", they'll never get it, and I realize that. For those who aren't stuck in some ivory tower, it really was ground breaking.
It's embarrassing to those of us with a brain.
Not really. Putting a friendly face on a heretofore esoteric and impenetrable tool so that people could start to get past the interface and look at the potential was huge. He didn't do it by himself, but he leverage existing work and popularized it. That was the key to his fame.
There's a reason why SO many people equate MP3 player with iPods. Granted, there are people who will buy shiny more expensive stuff just because...but Apple goes way beyond that.
(Except iTunes. iTunes is horrible, and in no way represents a shining piece of usability.)
And if the submitter or the editor had read the article, they'd have come across this gem:
On Sunday night October 25, 2011, I was reading through my RSS feeds on Google Reader. Some new Slashdot stories appeared and I dutifully started reading them. When I started reading about myself and my project, I started to think I had clicked on the wrong feed or I had erred in some fashion. I could not believe I was reading about myself on Slashdot after many years of reading it. My wife was next to me at the time and I tried to explain why I was so ecstatic to be on Slashdot. Explaining to a non-geek about Slashdot is difficult, but I think she could see it was important to me. If the media blitz had died at that point, I would have been happy. It didnâ(TM)t. Over the course of the next day, the story kept on gaining momentum, getting more news stories, and more hits on the website.
If I had posted this, after such a clear dupe reference in the article, I'd have been humiliated.
I'd forgotten about the slider. It never worked so I ignored it. The front page doesn't work; most of the elements overlap so you can't see half the items. I can't get to my account info. Most of the site features just don't work. Test them sometime.
Safety for external functions. It isn't so much designed to help the satellite's problem as to prevent other services from being disrupted.
I love Firefox, but I'm sick of having to restart it every 15 minutes, let alone every day. The pauses cause missed clicks and keystrokes, and they drive me nuts.
I have to ask - why do you love it? This is the kind of behavior that drives people screaming from Windows to Linux.
Yep. And sucker me, I'm giving /. page views by responding. But I read the "article" because I couldn't believe the summary described it accurately because, if it did, I was left scratching my head wondering why on earth this was posted.
Unfortunately (and quite remarkably, considering this is Slashdot, after all), the summary was quite accurate. It really is that worthless a story.
I actually decided to read the article and buck another proud Slashdot tradition, but I gave up after three paragraphs. It hurt too much.
But it's real use is to be a front end for the amazon store... the iPad always was meant to be a front end to Apple's stores... but it was always much more than that.
As I look at Silk and it's just making me nervous.
Random punctuation strewn everywhere, incoherent sentences...I know that complaining about grammar on /. gets you slapped down pretty quickly, but I found myself having to read most paragraphs two or three times just to understand what he was trying to say.
Forget it. I can get plenty of insightful content from a hundred different places on the web; there's very little which is important enough that I want to struggle. I'm not wasting my time on this tripe.
That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level. For that you need PMUs which will give you between 30 and 120 readings per second...but that assumes you have something that can ramp up quickly enough to respond. What's that going to be? Batteries, flywheels, that sort of technology.