I think it is a bit far fetched to expect the average programmer to do very well with usability. Many people spend several years in school learning the right way to design interfaces. This isn't something that's easy for most programmers to just "pick up". It's better to hire someone who is very good at interface design and let them shine.
That said, I'm starting to the study the subject a bit since I'm often in the situation where I can't give the interface design over to someone else. As a developer, I need to be able to fake it better than I'm able to now. I'll never be as good of designer as someone who has studied it extensively and has a natural knack, but hopefully I'll be able to get passed the woefully aweful stage I'm in now.
Right... and what does having to use it everyday have to do with calculating future revenues and costs? Google does get a nice bump in its value because it is such an established powerful brand, but you still need to make money - which they do.
Excellent point. This has a whole lot to do with having an arguably superior OS to compete on IBM hardware and not as much to do with running on former OSX machines.
That said, Sun and Apple have a pretty cozy relationship on the Java side of things, so perhaps Sun is trying to highlight the Apple hardware as enterprise ready?
Sounds like you made the right call. Anyway, people skilling in HCI are something this industry needs badly. Even better if you have enough programming skills that you can be the developer who knows how to make an interface work.
Both my father and my wife's father have had these sorts of operations and both are quite happy.
My father in law needed glasses before the operation but his eyes weren't terrible. His vision is nearly perfect now and he never wears glasses.
My dad's vision used to be really, really bad. Without glasses, he couldn't recognize people and certaintly couldn't drive. He's happy with the surgery as well although he does need reading glasses for computer work and reading.
Increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and global surface and air temperatures.
The size of the whole in the ozone layer.
Changes in frog population (see above).
Rates of asthma in areas where poultion is heavy vs areas where polution is light.
I can measure the size of the lower class.
I can also measure the multiple between a factory worker's an a CEO's pay.
I can measure the rate of workplace injuries.
I can measure deforestation.
I can measure the number of species that are driven to extinction annually.
I can measure the number of people who join the army not from patriotic duty but from fiscal need and subsequently get maimed or killed.
These things, and many more, can be measured. Many of them are. At the end of the day though, these things do come down to subjective decisions.
Is it better to polute than let jobs go? Is it better to polute than to worsen returns for the nation's ivestors? Why should I care if someone else gets hurt in a workplace injury and loses use of their arm? I worked in a comfortable air conditioned place.
So yes, the Left often falls back to emotional arguments, because the numbers are there. The facts are there. It's the emotional argument that makes up the decision making for most people and when viewed with the facts in mind, it is the core and key issue.
Except for the small portion of the Right which simply believes that they should just do what is best for themselves (local maximization) and everyone else doesn't count, the Right's arguments are all geared around emotion bullcrap too. Let's wave the flag non-stop (Fox). Or let's decry the moral influence the homosexuals are having on our youth (religous right). Let's just trust the President because that's the right thing to do. These are all moral aka emotional, subjective and superstitious arguments.
I won't reject the Right wholesale though. They are also feverishly fighting for what they believe is right and good.
When you stop listening, you're no longer any use in this Democracy.
Eh.. sort of. The constituational convention was called to alter the Articles. It was only after they realized that the first 3 pages of the Articles needed to be struck out and totally replaced did they abandon that end and start writing a new draft.
Regardless, if we are on Republic #2, the first only lasted 11 years and the current one is well over two hundred years old - not too shabby.
Nice little logical twist you put in there. Because traditional Judeo-Christian views on sex were more common prior to the sexual revolution and because women had a lower standing prior to the world war II, you associate the idea that sex should be between man and wife with oppression of women. That's bull and I'm calling you on it.
Yes, attitudes on both subjects changed at roughly the same period of history. So did attitudes and laws regarding race in this country. Your argument has only slightly more merit than saying a Christian views on love and marriage are to blame for Jim Crow.
Now, I think sex is 'special' and not because of historical matters. It's just the closest you can be to someone. It's intimate and great.
I do find it amusing that you take the poster's most sensuous point (ALL YOU YOU!) and can only respond with a trite remark about threesomes. Every piece of relationship advice I've ever seen, be it at church, in the newspaper, online, in Cosmo... has said that if you value the relationship, don't do a threesome. More often than not, someone is going to be jealous and the relationship will be strained.
I think that if you ask people who believe in the sacredness of the marriage bed, few will say that women should only concern herself with family and home duties. The "rules" are as strict for men as women and are geared for the joy of each.
Sorry, but as of Jun 4th, we're 9th in the world. A single point behind Germany. That's one of the things that pisses the world off about us. Even when we don't care about something (like soccer) we're still pretty damn good at it.
I've got the equivilant of a paid Yahoo account through my ISP. They've cleanup the interface, and there are no adds that I can see - text or otherwise.
2 gigs is plenty of space, but doesn't really strike me as being significantly differant that one gig. But then again, I'll probably find a way to use it.
As a customer, I'm really happy with this shift. Mostly because the interface is cleaner and easier to read. The extra space wasn't going to be needed for six months at the earliest, but is nice to have now.
Still, when gmail rolls out, I'll give it a shot. I'll want to see how the searching and threaded conversations work.
I did have an email sent to me today with a large attachment. It seems to have been split up into three emails and I can't get the attachment. I'm not sure if the sending program (outlook) is to blame or to Yahoo, but I'm not real happy about the situation.
Do you suggest that the FDA process is a government conspiracy to keep large pharamacuticals richer than smaller players and any public safety benifits are an afterthought?
No, I hadn't considered that possibility. I thought setting up large scale human trials and paying insurance on that crap was expensive. I'm no expert though.
I'm a recent grad (2 years out of CU-Boulder) and we still had a course in assembly programming for the 8086. This was part of a series of courses that we called Digital 1,2,3 or the love your fellow engineer courses.
They put CS, ECE and EE students together and grouped us up for the first two courses - assembly programming was the first. Wiring chips together and programming FPGLAs was the second. The capstone was a general "how computers work from top to bottom" course that discussed processor design and had us writing some MIPs assembly. Anyway, it was a miserable series of classes to actually take, but verry useful and great in getting engineers from slightly different disciplines to practice working together. The CS guys tended to really help a group in assembly programming while the other guys tended to be more competent when wiring things together.
I really feel that the time I took understanding computer achitecture is a bit more useful that the time I spent learning assembly - although to a certain extent learning assembly forces you to learn the archeticture. Keeping in mind that with a relatively small set of data, all the work will be done on the CPU at blazingly fast speeds, while a single fetch out to the disk changes the times you're messing in by orders of maginitude.
Being able to read assembly is good for debugging but I'm not convinced it is required to write great code. Pure blazing speed is important for some applications, but for many it just isn't. The guy in the article mentions word processors and how they aren't 16,000 times faster than they used to be. Frankly, I'm not sure how you'd measure. I know the Macs I used in high school were slow enough that a fast typer could outpace their ability to render new characters, but my current word processor puts up characters quickly enough. It also checks my spelling and grammar on the fly and unlike old word processors it's more or less WUSISYG and not markup. The only slow part is launch time. That's more a process of big code requiring disk access to be loaded rather than slow code.
For me, good code is the following: 1. It gets the jobs done. 2. It's very readable. 3. It's designed in such a way that I can change it without destroying the system:) 4. It's efficient. Now, if the code requires next year's processor to work in a reasonable way, it fails at #1. If it's job is to RIP MP3s, it's job is to be fast.
For most applications though, the easiest algorith to read is the best one to use. That said, I agree with the author that it's best to know when you are writing code that is inefficient. It should make you wince.
I winced a lot when writing a mock-up of simple app that ran against the contact database of my customer. However, despite each request looking through every record in 2 tables I worked worked with instead of using some sensible SQL, it ran effectively instaneously on an average machine. So would I look at that level of ineffiency as aweful code? Probably. Should I? I'm not so sure.
biotech becomes really easy for consumers to use/create
This is the part I'm objecting to. Knowledge is mostly fine. Of course, I would support censoring instructions for how to build a nuclear weapon:). Censorship is scary and should be avoided most of the time.
I agree. I'm not saying an open-source type approach to some biotech issues is a bad idea. The parent's power to the people bit is a bit different in my view.
Let's assume we do away with them though. Now let's compare two business models. In one, I spend hundreds of millions developing new drugs. Once I pass the very expensive FDA process, I sell my drugs at market rates. In the other, I sit on my ass and wait for someone else to develop drugs. Then I spend a million bucks reproducing the other guy's results and sell the same drugs at market rates.
Which one would you choose? I wouldn't waste my / my shareholders money on R&D, I'd wait. Everyone would. R&D would almost only happen in the public sector and in academia. We'd either see a drastic reduction in new drugs coming to market or the government would need to pay through the nose to do the research.
True, you don't deprive me of the ability to make the drug I developed when you infringe no my patent. However, you get hundreds of millions of in research for free and by competing with me, make my return on that research far less than it otherwise would be.
Throwing some quote in about slavery doesn't help your case any more. It's like if I saw eating candy is great and you equate that to saying slavery is great. Therefore eating candy is bad. You need to develop that argument some more so us dumb people can follow you.
Further drug monopolies should only last 20 years. Some companies use tricks to extend that, and I despise that behavior. But in a properly functioning system, drug patents work just like car patents do. The airplane (and I believe the auto) were patented. That gave monopoly / royalty rights to the patent holders for 20 years. The system wasn't broken. The inventor profited nicely and with time competition could come in. Just as it comes in with generic drugs down the line.
Now when there are life saving drugs in question with no alternative treatment, this takes on a bit of a morbid twist. Perhaps, the taxpayers of the industrialized countries would like to buy the patents on these drugs to make them widely available and still reward the company for doing the work to invent the drug. Keep in mind that if nobody spends the time, energy and cash to develop a drug, those people are going to die anyway.
Now, in the case of catastophe like AIDS, it seems reasonable for American firms to provide low cost drugs to those who can't afford them - purely because that's a nice thing to do. There's been some progress along these lines, but it has been painfully slow. Equally painful has been conservative objections to the low cost item that could even prevent Aids - the condom.
Unless you want to present a viable alternative where drugs will be developed and put through FDA trials by somebody else, patents still seem to be the way to go.
No. We don't want a lot of power in the hands of the people biotech wise. The less people who can make a highly infective deadly virus in the privacy of their own home, the happier I am.
What we do want to see is greater openness and cooperation between academia, doctors, and biotech companies.
Yes, but it was mentioned by Slashdotters not Sun. I don't think there's a chance Sun would GPL their code. They don't seem to be a big fans of the license. They perfer either licenses where they still retain some degree of control or licenses which are more liberal than the GPL -> ones that don't require all subsequent derivitive works to also be GPLed.
You've hit upon one of the most common pieces of advice for people buying stocks. Buy stock in companies whose products you like and use.
Now, if I bought stock in company A, and they proceeded to hand out shares to everyone who bought their product, I'd be pissed off. Why? Because each share that's handed out dilutes the value of my shares, making me lose money. That's why what you're describing won't happen. All the owners of the company (shareholders) would lose money if this program went into effect. Not many of the owners of the company would support that.
Wow... that's pretty bad. While I can imagine someone downloading a couple songs of an artist and then deciding to go buy a CD or three, I can't see how watching a movie on a computer is going to make many people go out and buy a ticket.
Further, ushers have historically wandered the aisles - often with flashlights. I'd appreciate it if they were there, but didn't wave around any bright lights that I could see.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to know when you're build starts to fail. I don't think we really need lava lamps to do it.
I think it is a bit far fetched to expect the average programmer to do very well with usability. Many people spend several years in school learning the right way to design interfaces. This isn't something that's easy for most programmers to just "pick up". It's better to hire someone who is very good at interface design and let them shine.
That said, I'm starting to the study the subject a bit since I'm often in the situation where I can't give the interface design over to someone else. As a developer, I need to be able to fake it better than I'm able to now. I'll never be as good of designer as someone who has studied it extensively and has a natural knack, but hopefully I'll be able to get passed the woefully aweful stage I'm in now.
Right... and what does having to use it everyday have to do with calculating future revenues and costs? Google does get a nice bump in its value because it is such an established powerful brand, but you still need to make money - which they do.
Yes. I for one would be curious if there was an example.
Excellent point. This has a whole lot to do with having an arguably superior OS to compete on IBM hardware and not as much to do with running on former OSX machines.
That said, Sun and Apple have a pretty cozy relationship on the Java side of things, so perhaps Sun is trying to highlight the Apple hardware as enterprise ready?
Sounds like you made the right call. Anyway, people skilling in HCI are something this industry needs badly. Even better if you have enough programming skills that you can be the developer who knows how to make an interface work.
Both my father and my wife's father have had these sorts of operations and both are quite happy.
My father in law needed glasses before the operation but his eyes weren't terrible. His vision is nearly perfect now and he never wears glasses.
My dad's vision used to be really, really bad. Without glasses, he couldn't recognize people and certaintly couldn't drive. He's happy with the surgery as well although he does need reading glasses for computer work and reading.
Cheers
Things I can measure:
Increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and global surface and air temperatures.
The size of the whole in the ozone layer.
Changes in frog population (see above).
Rates of asthma in areas where poultion is heavy vs areas where polution is light.
I can measure the size of the lower class.
I can also measure the multiple between a factory worker's an a CEO's pay.
I can measure the rate of workplace injuries.
I can measure deforestation.
I can measure the number of species that are driven to extinction annually.
I can measure the number of people who join the army not from patriotic duty but from fiscal need and subsequently get maimed or killed.
These things, and many more, can be measured. Many of them are. At the end of the day though, these things do come down to subjective decisions.
Is it better to polute than let jobs go? Is it better to polute than to worsen returns for the nation's ivestors? Why should I care if someone else gets hurt in a workplace injury and loses use of their arm? I worked in a comfortable air conditioned place.
So yes, the Left often falls back to emotional arguments, because the numbers are there. The facts are there. It's the emotional argument that makes up the decision making for most people and when viewed with the facts in mind, it is the core and key issue.
Except for the small portion of the Right which simply believes that they should just do what is best for themselves (local maximization) and everyone else doesn't count, the Right's arguments are all geared around emotion bullcrap too. Let's wave the flag non-stop (Fox). Or let's decry the moral influence the homosexuals are having on our youth (religous right). Let's just trust the President because that's the right thing to do. These are all moral aka emotional, subjective and superstitious arguments.
I won't reject the Right wholesale though. They are also feverishly fighting for what they believe is right and good.
When you stop listening, you're no longer any use in this Democracy.
Eh.. sort of. The constituational convention was called to alter the Articles. It was only after they realized that the first 3 pages of the Articles needed to be struck out and totally replaced did they abandon that end and start writing a new draft.
Regardless, if we are on Republic #2, the first only lasted 11 years and the current one is well over two hundred years old - not too shabby.
Nice little logical twist you put in there. Because traditional Judeo-Christian views on sex were more common prior to the sexual revolution and because women had a lower standing prior to the world war II, you associate the idea that sex should be between man and wife with oppression of women. That's bull and I'm calling you on it.
Yes, attitudes on both subjects changed at roughly the same period of history. So did attitudes and laws regarding race in this country. Your argument has only slightly more merit than saying a Christian views on love and marriage are to blame for Jim Crow.
Now, I think sex is 'special' and not because of historical matters. It's just the closest you can be to someone. It's intimate and great.
I do find it amusing that you take the poster's most sensuous point (ALL YOU YOU!) and can only respond with a trite remark about threesomes. Every piece of relationship advice I've ever seen, be it at church, in the newspaper, online, in Cosmo... has said that if you value the relationship, don't do a threesome. More often than not, someone is going to be jealous and the relationship will be strained.
I think that if you ask people who believe in the sacredness of the marriage bed, few will say that women should only concern herself with family and home duties. The "rules" are as strict for men as women and are geared for the joy of each.
Sorry, but as of Jun 4th, we're 9th in the world. A single point behind Germany. That's one of the things that pisses the world off about us. Even when we don't care about something (like soccer) we're still pretty damn good at it.
I've got the equivilant of a paid Yahoo account through my ISP. They've cleanup the interface, and there are no adds that I can see - text or otherwise.
2 gigs is plenty of space, but doesn't really strike me as being significantly differant that one gig. But then again, I'll probably find a way to use it.
As a customer, I'm really happy with this shift. Mostly because the interface is cleaner and easier to read. The extra space wasn't going to be needed for six months at the earliest, but is nice to have now.
Still, when gmail rolls out, I'll give it a shot. I'll want to see how the searching and threaded conversations work.
I did have an email sent to me today with a large attachment. It seems to have been split up into three emails and I can't get the attachment. I'm not sure if the sending program (outlook) is to blame or to Yahoo, but I'm not real happy about the situation.
Do you suggest that the FDA process is a government conspiracy to keep large pharamacuticals richer than smaller players and any public safety benifits are an afterthought?
No, I hadn't considered that possibility. I thought setting up large scale human trials and paying insurance on that crap was expensive. I'm no expert though.
I'm a recent grad (2 years out of CU-Boulder) and we still had a course in assembly programming for the 8086. This was part of a series of courses that we called Digital 1,2,3 or the love your fellow engineer courses.
:) 4. It's efficient. Now, if the code requires next year's processor to work in a reasonable way, it fails at #1. If it's job is to RIP MP3s, it's job is to be fast.
They put CS, ECE and EE students together and grouped us up for the first two courses - assembly programming was the first. Wiring chips together and programming FPGLAs was the second. The capstone was a general "how computers work from top to bottom" course that discussed processor design and had us writing some MIPs assembly. Anyway, it was a miserable series of classes to actually take, but verry useful and great in getting engineers from slightly different disciplines to practice working together. The CS guys tended to really help a group in assembly programming while the other guys tended to be more competent when wiring things together.
I really feel that the time I took understanding computer achitecture is a bit more useful that the time I spent learning assembly - although to a certain extent learning assembly forces you to learn the archeticture. Keeping in mind that with a relatively small set of data, all the work will be done on the CPU at blazingly fast speeds, while a single fetch out to the disk changes the times you're messing in by orders of maginitude.
Being able to read assembly is good for debugging but I'm not convinced it is required to write great code. Pure blazing speed is important for some applications, but for many it just isn't. The guy in the article mentions word processors and how they aren't 16,000 times faster than they used to be. Frankly, I'm not sure how you'd measure. I know the Macs I used in high school were slow enough that a fast typer could outpace their ability to render new characters, but my current word processor puts up characters quickly enough. It also checks my spelling and grammar on the fly and unlike old word processors it's more or less WUSISYG and not markup. The only slow part is launch time. That's more a process of big code requiring disk access to be loaded rather than slow code.
For me, good code is the following: 1. It gets the jobs done. 2. It's very readable. 3. It's designed in such a way that I can change it without destroying the system
For most applications though, the easiest algorith to read is the best one to use. That said, I agree with the author that it's best to know when you are writing code that is inefficient. It should make you wince.
I winced a lot when writing a mock-up of simple app that ran against the contact database of my customer. However, despite each request looking through every record in 2 tables I worked worked with instead of using some sensible SQL, it ran effectively instaneously on an average machine. So would I look at that level of ineffiency as aweful code? Probably. Should I? I'm not so sure.
Or maybe MCSEs could crash some LUGS - if only to jeer and heckle.
Ok, interesting. Would you elaborate on how that drives down prices while still providing incentive for the R&D to develop the drug?
biotech becomes really easy for consumers to use/create
:). Censorship is scary and should be avoided most of the time.
This is the part I'm objecting to. Knowledge is mostly fine. Of course, I would support censoring instructions for how to build a nuclear weapon
I agree. I'm not saying an open-source type approach to some biotech issues is a bad idea. The parent's power to the people bit is a bit different in my view.
Patents are good.
Let's assume we do away with them though. Now let's compare two business models. In one, I spend hundreds of millions developing new drugs. Once I pass the very expensive FDA process, I sell my drugs at market rates. In the other, I sit on my ass and wait for someone else to develop drugs. Then I spend a million bucks reproducing the other guy's results and sell the same drugs at market rates.
Which one would you choose? I wouldn't waste my / my shareholders money on R&D, I'd wait. Everyone would. R&D would almost only happen in the public sector and in academia. We'd either see a drastic reduction in new drugs coming to market or the government would need to pay through the nose to do the research.
True, you don't deprive me of the ability to make the drug I developed when you infringe no my patent. However, you get hundreds of millions of in research for free and by competing with me, make my return on that research far less than it otherwise would be.
Throwing some quote in about slavery doesn't help your case any more. It's like if I saw eating candy is great and you equate that to saying slavery is great. Therefore eating candy is bad. You need to develop that argument some more so us dumb people can follow you.
Further drug monopolies should only last 20 years. Some companies use tricks to extend that, and I despise that behavior. But in a properly functioning system, drug patents work just like car patents do. The airplane (and I believe the auto) were patented. That gave monopoly / royalty rights to the patent holders for 20 years. The system wasn't broken. The inventor profited nicely and with time competition could come in. Just as it comes in with generic drugs down the line.
Now when there are life saving drugs in question with no alternative treatment, this takes on a bit of a morbid twist. Perhaps, the taxpayers of the industrialized countries would like to buy the patents on these drugs to make them widely available and still reward the company for doing the work to invent the drug. Keep in mind that if nobody spends the time, energy and cash to develop a drug, those people are going to die anyway.
Now, in the case of catastophe like AIDS, it seems reasonable for American firms to provide low cost drugs to those who can't afford them - purely because that's a nice thing to do. There's been some progress along these lines, but it has been painfully slow. Equally painful has been conservative objections to the low cost item that could even prevent Aids - the condom.
Unless you want to present a viable alternative where drugs will be developed and put through FDA trials by somebody else, patents still seem to be the way to go.
No. We don't want a lot of power in the hands of the people biotech wise. The less people who can make a highly infective deadly virus in the privacy of their own home, the happier I am.
What we do want to see is greater openness and cooperation between academia, doctors, and biotech companies.
Cheaper drugs good. Death and destruction bad.
My bad, thanks.
Yes, but it was mentioned by Slashdotters not Sun. I don't think there's a chance Sun would GPL their code. They don't seem to be a big fans of the license. They perfer either licenses where they still retain some degree of control or licenses which are more liberal than the GPL -> ones that don't require all subsequent derivitive works to also be GPLed.
You've hit upon one of the most common pieces of advice for people buying stocks. Buy stock in companies whose products you like and use.
Now, if I bought stock in company A, and they proceeded to hand out shares to everyone who bought their product, I'd be pissed off. Why? Because each share that's handed out dilutes the value of my shares, making me lose money. That's why what you're describing won't happen. All the owners of the company (shareholders) would lose money if this program went into effect. Not many of the owners of the company would support that.
What it Means to be a Modern Troll:
You have to believe that wasting other people's time is not a waste of your own time.
You have to believe that if you just click reload fast enough and get first post privilages, you'll somehow do something useful.
eh fuck it.
You just have to be an asshole.
Wow... that's pretty bad. While I can imagine someone downloading a couple songs of an artist and then deciding to go buy a CD or three, I can't see how watching a movie on a computer is going to make many people go out and buy a ticket.
Further, ushers have historically wandered the aisles - often with flashlights. I'd appreciate it if they were there, but didn't wave around any bright lights that I could see.