How fortunate that you should make your threats today. You see today I received an email from Maryam Abacha regarding the death of her husband, General Sani Abacha the late former head of state of Nigeria. She has deposited $30 million US into a bank account and all I have to do to recover it is help her retrieve the rest of her $700 million. She says all she requires is my phone and fax numbers, but if you'll promise not to threaten me again I'll pass yours on instead. Can I have these details as well as your address please?
If this should fail I am told I qualify for a $300,000 for as little as $700 a month. This is amazing considering my bad credit, but I'll send you that email address too.
If both of these fail may I suggest that you do the following, and I will personally send you the cash: 1) Have a sign made up that says "This is what all us scammers deserve" 2) Castrate yourself. 3) Shove your newly removed member up your backside. 4) Take a picture of this and send it to me by email.
Have a nice day Mr scammer.
Seriously these people have gone from preying on greed to preying on paranoia. They need to go down.
You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.
Absolutely!!! What's worse is that they're usually asked to fit in doing the design amongst their usual day to day work. If they're short staffed or otherwise busy to begin with they often resent spending the time testing or designing an interface and see it as the developer's job.
If you want user buy-in you have to two things:
1) Get them to allocate time to doing it properly - they can't just fit it in between regular priorities, give it no priority and expect the design to turn out good.
2) Give them some technical training about UI design. They may know their job really well but unless they have some understanding of how the UI fits into the technical environment and how to employ proper design priniciples for consistency, all you'll get is an impossible request and a great deal of frustration at the developer for not being able to make it happen.
Even then you need users that have some interest in how the computers work or they'll resent being pulled away from normal duties or make a half hearted effort.
Designing a UI is easy. Designing a truely good one is damn hard.
A lot of the top physicists seem to be socially inept. Isaac Newton, whose chair at Cambridge Hawkins holds (quite poeticly I think) was a harsh asshole with the social skills of a sloth. He was more likely to try to bury you than bet against you. However Newton was brilliant, and even though he was proven "wrong" on gravitation contributed greatly to the advancement of science and maths in a way Hawking hasn't and probably never will.
Weren't the SETI@HOME people working on a next generation tool that could be used for varied data analysis/search tasks - like cancer research for example, based on plugins?
It seems to me that if you're after people donating CPU cycles something generic would be the way to go.
...after you WIN the lawsuit (as per Sun), or after your fortunes fade (as per Apple). Next thing you know your company's viable again, and besides you don't really need your soul while you're still alive do you?:-)
It gets very ugly when they don't develop an uneasy truce. Thankfully in that situation you had a clear line of authority to straighten things out. We got called lots of names but we got paid and that application worked for a good 3 years (surviving until the company was taken over a second time).
Yep Apple has its own standards, and MS has its own, and IBM has its own, and lots of people have written about less specific UI design. There is some common sense overlap in a lot of it, and a standard is better than no standard, but there is no universally adopted standard, and some of what's in the existing standards have to do with furthering commercial interests rather than improving UI design.
Perhaps a large number of standards for different systems is not such a bad thing though. Diversity is important from an evolutionary standpoint.
When a commercial developer works on a GUI, he first has to sit down with his peers, the art department, marketing, and eventually focus groups to yell, scream, and throw things. Out of these heated arguments tends to evolve a product that has a better balance between functionality, looks, and ease of use then what the developer could have produced by himself.
No offence intended here, but have you ever developed a commercial app? Its what I do for a living. One of my biggest frustrations is the "design by committee". I've seen marketing departments in particular do a lot of damage to an interface by insisting on features that are completely contrary to the design paradigm of the system. Usually there's a buzz word or feature thats the latest and greatest that they want no matter how badly it screws up usability.
I once had to sit through whole day meetings every 2 weeks with a panel of about 20-30 high level managers, marketing department heads, legal copliance etc. for a large insurance company. I was one of two developers at the start and took over as sole developer half way through. The online insurance application should have taken 2-4 weeks to develop. Instead it took about 8 months, and about 10-20 times the man hours (not to mention travel costs for the execs etc). We went through screen by screen each week. Instead of reusing existing software, redevelopment which was eventually thrown out in favour of the standard product occurred. In the end it was a case of too many chefs. The application worked out but it was slow and clunky and didn't do as well as it could have (certainly for that cost).
End users and Business Analysts can be the best at GUI design, but only after they're educated about how their GUI fits into an architecture and about GUI standards - why they're good etc. All too often end users just don't want to know. All too often, they tend to view the computer as a magical tool and "you should be able to do it that way" even if that way makes no sense at all.
Isn't That an easy conclusion you're jumping to ? Do you live in Japan ? Do you know how kids are raised in Japan ? Did you study psychology ?
No, No, and no. What about yourself? I didn't think you had to be an expert to have an opinion. An educated opinion is better, and as I understand it from what I've read, and seen there is a problem with extremely high expectations in Japan leading to higher than normal rates of childhood depression.
There are some things that are culturally dependant and there are others that aren't. If you place too many expectations and pressures on an individual some cultures may have better prepared people for that than others but the bottom line is that we all share similar biology and excessive stress is harmful.
They are not going to improve the risk by deciding not to do it then giving their staff too little time to get it done when they finally turn their decision around.
I definitely want Hubble serviced. What I don't want is this BS should we shouldn't we crap that has the potential to cost lives and slow down the space program even more.
If its on, give it the time and funding it deserves. If its off, don't waste resources on it. This to and fro nonsense just wastes money that could be used elsewhere and increases the risks if a mission does eventually go ahead.
No one's willing to take risks or make a decision anymore. All we need is another damn shuttle disaster to slow everything down and have people screaming "its too dangerous to explore space - spend all your money down here".
Japanese schoolkids have enough pressure to deal with as it is. Tagging them like animals isn't going to do them good. Just how high a youth suicide rate do they want?
I said last time around I said if I heard this comment one more time I would scream, and, well, I just scared my poor dog. Who the heck is this "Mozilla team" you are insulting? Last time I checked mozilla source code was readily available to you. Patch it. Done. If someone "official" doesn't want to include it in the nightly build, too bad. Put up a little website at geocities.com/securemozilla and post a message on your geek board of choice.
This attitude is EXACTLY why end users will go for Windows until open source developers learn their less.
Fix it yourself isn't good enough.
RTFM isn't good enough, especially when TFM is unintelligible to the end user.
The software must be simple to use, intuitive, and accessible to the end user who's purpose in using the software is not that they love learning about computers.
You do not expect a driver to be a mechanic. You don't tell them to just change over the engine if their car is stuffed. All they'll know is how to keep the tire pressure and fluid levels in a car up. So why do intelligent Unix users expect an end user to understand software development and release procedures and to make changes given access to source ocde?
The shame is that you and others have the luxury of doing for free what others would be grateful to do to provide food and healthcare for themselves and their families.
Nice argument. You've just said that anyone that can afford to should sit on their asses and do nothing.
Digital photographs are highly distributable (Email them, or post them on a web site and/. the site) and certainly infinitely copyable.
As for affecting all photographers ever more, a good photograph that gets a lot of publicity will. A good set in a particular style will set the tone for others to emulate. Even more so with a painting where artists and art critics will specialize in a particular period of a particular painter's work.
Also, only the best of software on the most widely distributed of platforms will have a chance of changing the world the way you envision. There are a hell of a lot of good software inventions and improvements that are ignored or die out.
Its possible that you're so involved with computing and software engineering that you're taking too narrow a view of the world.
If a wedding photographer did walk out like that often enough I suspect they'd end up being sued out of business and rightly so.
As long as the photographer is paid, he/she should have no problem with someone else covering the event for free or otherwise. Photographers who make their livings holding people to ransom with negatives of their special occassions get no sympathy from me.
Thankfully, we're not far away from having digital prosumer cams that do take pictures good enough to outdo the pro. The difference between my Olympus C-750 and my D70 is negligible for an A4 print....oh and typos happen. Get over it, you're being "rEdiculous".
Quick, stop everyone taking snapshots at a wedding because the wedding photographers will go out of business! Video cameras too! The MPAA is under threat! Movie sales will plummet as everyone watches home made flicks.
Stop everyone from learning to paint, because it will starve already starving artists.
Stop anyone from learning to cook, or cooking meals at home, because the chefs will go out of business.
Every kid in a garage band, quick arrest them before they put pro musicians out of business. (Ok there are a few people who might want to stop the crappy garage bands granted).
We need to license these things now before its too late! People may actually find fulfilment in their lives outside of work! Stop the madness.
What's the argument here? That MS is so bad it can't stand competition from dedicated hobbyists?
Slashdot Mirror
Ha shows what you know. Slashdoters make amateur porn? They're consumers not producers!
Dear Mr Nigerian Scammer,
How fortunate that you should make your threats today. You see today I received an email from Maryam Abacha regarding the death of her husband, General Sani Abacha the late former head of state of Nigeria. She has deposited $30 million US into a bank account and all I have to do to recover it is help her retrieve the rest of her $700 million. She says all she requires is my phone and fax numbers, but if you'll promise not to threaten me again I'll pass yours on instead. Can I have these details as well as your address please?
If this should fail I am told I qualify for a $300,000 for as little as $700 a month. This is amazing considering my bad credit, but I'll send you that email address too.
If both of these fail may I suggest that you do the following, and I will personally send you the cash:
1) Have a sign made up that says "This is what all us scammers deserve"
2) Castrate yourself.
3) Shove your newly removed member up your backside.
4) Take a picture of this and send it to me by email.
Have a nice day Mr scammer.
Seriously these people have gone from preying on greed to preying on paranoia. They need to go down.
You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.
Absolutely!!! What's worse is that they're usually asked to fit in doing the design amongst their usual day to day work. If they're short staffed or otherwise busy to begin with they often resent spending the time testing or designing an interface and see it as the developer's job.
If you want user buy-in you have to two things:
1) Get them to allocate time to doing it properly - they can't just fit it in between regular priorities, give it no priority and expect the design to turn out good.
2) Give them some technical training about UI design. They may know their job really well but unless they have some understanding of how the UI fits into the technical environment and how to employ proper design priniciples for consistency, all you'll get is an impossible request and a great deal of frustration at the developer for not being able to make it happen.
Even then you need users that have some interest in how the computers work or they'll resent being pulled away from normal duties or make a half hearted effort.
Designing a UI is easy. Designing a truely good one is damn hard.
A lot of the top physicists seem to be socially inept. Isaac Newton, whose chair at Cambridge Hawkins holds (quite poeticly I think) was a harsh asshole with the social skills of a sloth. He was more likely to try to bury you than bet against you. However Newton was brilliant, and even though he was proven "wrong" on gravitation contributed greatly to the advancement of science and maths in a way Hawking hasn't and probably never will.
Okay, cool should've read more of the article. Just read about a specialist task and thought it was a whole new software project.
Weren't the SETI@HOME people working on a next generation tool that could be used for varied data analysis/search tasks - like cancer research for example, based on plugins?
It seems to me that if you're after people donating CPU cycles something generic would be the way to go.
...after you WIN the lawsuit (as per Sun), or after your fortunes fade (as per Apple). Next thing you know your company's viable again, and besides you don't really need your soul while you're still alive do you? :-)
It gets very ugly when they don't develop an uneasy truce. Thankfully in that situation you had a clear line of authority to straighten things out. We got called lots of names but we got paid and that application worked for a good 3 years (surviving until the company was taken over a second time).
No word processor is complete without MS Word pinball!
I'm in 2 minds about this.
Yep Apple has its own standards, and MS has its own, and IBM has its own, and lots of people have written about less specific UI design. There is some common sense overlap in a lot of it, and a standard is better than no standard, but there is no universally adopted standard, and some of what's in the existing standards have to do with furthering commercial interests rather than improving UI design.
Perhaps a large number of standards for different systems is not such a bad thing though. Diversity is important from an evolutionary standpoint.
When a commercial developer works on a GUI, he first has to sit down with his peers, the art department, marketing, and eventually focus groups to yell, scream, and throw things. Out of these heated arguments tends to evolve a product that has a better balance between functionality, looks, and ease of use then what the developer could have produced by himself.
No offence intended here, but have you ever developed a commercial app? Its what I do for a living. One of my biggest frustrations is the "design by committee". I've seen marketing departments in particular do a lot of damage to an interface by insisting on features that are completely contrary to the design paradigm of the system. Usually there's a buzz word or feature thats the latest and greatest that they want no matter how badly it screws up usability.
I once had to sit through whole day meetings every 2 weeks with a panel of about 20-30 high level managers, marketing department heads, legal copliance etc. for a large insurance company. I was one of two developers at the start and took over as sole developer half way through. The online insurance application should have taken 2-4 weeks to develop. Instead it took about 8 months, and about 10-20 times the man hours (not to mention travel costs for the execs etc). We went through screen by screen each week. Instead of reusing existing software, redevelopment which was eventually thrown out in favour of the standard product occurred. In the end it was a case of too many chefs. The application worked out but it was slow and clunky and didn't do as well as it could have (certainly for that cost).
End users and Business Analysts can be the best at GUI design, but only after they're educated about how their GUI fits into an architecture and about GUI standards - why they're good etc. All too often end users just don't want to know. All too often, they tend to view the computer as a magical tool and "you should be able to do it that way" even if that way makes no sense at all.
Isn't That an easy conclusion you're jumping to ? Do you live in Japan ? Do you know how kids are raised in Japan ? Did you study psychology ?
No, No, and no. What about yourself? I didn't think you had to be an expert to have an opinion. An educated opinion is better, and as I understand it from what I've read, and seen there is a problem with extremely high expectations in Japan leading to higher than normal rates of childhood depression.
There are some things that are culturally dependant and there are others that aren't. If you place too many expectations and pressures on an individual some cultures may have better prepared people for that than others but the bottom line is that we all share similar biology and excessive stress is harmful.
They are not going to improve the risk by deciding not to do it then giving their staff too little time to get it done when they finally turn their decision around.
I definitely want Hubble serviced. What I don't want is this BS should we shouldn't we crap that has the potential to cost lives and slow down the space program even more.
If its on, give it the time and funding it deserves. If its off, don't waste resources on it. This to and fro nonsense just wastes money that could be used elsewhere and increases the risks if a mission does eventually go ahead.
No one's willing to take risks or make a decision anymore. All we need is another damn shuttle disaster to slow everything down and have people screaming "its too dangerous to explore space - spend all your money down here".
Japanese schoolkids have enough pressure to deal with as it is. Tagging them like animals isn't going to do them good. Just how high a youth suicide rate do they want?
Apologies for the typos.
This attitude is EXACTLY why end users will go for Windows until open source developers learn their less.
I meant lesson.
And source ocde is obviously source code.
I said last time around I said if I heard this comment one more time I would scream, and, well, I just scared my poor dog. Who the heck is this "Mozilla team" you are insulting? Last time I checked mozilla source code was readily available to you. Patch it. Done. If someone "official" doesn't want to include it in the nightly build, too bad. Put up a little website at geocities.com/securemozilla and post a message on your geek board of choice.
This attitude is EXACTLY why end users will go for Windows until open source developers learn their less.
Fix it yourself isn't good enough.
RTFM isn't good enough, especially when TFM is unintelligible to the end user.
The software must be simple to use, intuitive, and accessible to the end user who's purpose in using the software is not that they love learning about computers.
You do not expect a driver to be a mechanic. You don't tell them to just change over the engine if their car is stuffed. All they'll know is how to keep the tire pressure and fluid levels in a car up. So why do intelligent Unix users expect an end user to understand software development and release procedures and to make changes given access to source ocde?
I'm in Sydney. All this standing on my head is making my neck sore.
Oh and could you turn the sun up just a tad. I hate winter.
The shame is that you and others have the luxury of doing for free what others would be grateful to do to provide food and healthcare for themselves and their families.
Nice argument. You've just said that anyone that can afford to should sit on their asses and do nothing.
Let them eat cake.
If you don't shut up now I'll start singing his songs! *smirk*
TDA - Another TLA for an PDA which IMO is worth sweet FA.
You're obviously not an Aussie.
:-)
This interface has already been invented by Rolf Harris
Digital photographs are highly distributable (Email them, or post them on a web site and /. the site) and certainly infinitely copyable.
As for affecting all photographers ever more, a good photograph that gets a lot of publicity will. A good set in a particular style will set the tone for others to emulate. Even more so with a painting where artists and art critics will specialize in a particular period of a particular painter's work.
Also, only the best of software on the most widely distributed of platforms will have a chance of changing the world the way you envision. There are a hell of a lot of good software inventions and improvements that are ignored or die out.
Its possible that you're so involved with computing and software engineering that you're taking too narrow a view of the world.
If a wedding photographer did walk out like that often enough I suspect they'd end up being sued out of business and rightly so.
...oh and typos happen. Get over it, you're being "rEdiculous".
As long as the photographer is paid, he/she should have no problem with someone else covering the event for free or otherwise. Photographers who make their livings holding people to ransom with negatives of their special occassions get no sympathy from me.
Thankfully, we're not far away from having digital prosumer cams that do take pictures good enough to outdo the pro. The difference between my Olympus C-750 and my D70 is negligible for an A4 print.
...on the basis they hurt the economy?
Quick, stop everyone taking snapshots at a wedding because the wedding photographers will go out of business! Video cameras too! The MPAA is under threat! Movie sales will plummet as everyone watches home made flicks.
Stop everyone from learning to paint, because it will starve already starving artists.
Stop anyone from learning to cook, or cooking meals at home, because the chefs will go out of business.
Every kid in a garage band, quick arrest them before they put pro musicians out of business. (Ok there are a few people who might want to stop the crappy garage bands granted).
We need to license these things now before its too late! People may actually find fulfilment in their lives outside of work! Stop the madness.
What's the argument here? That MS is so bad it can't stand competition from dedicated hobbyists?