If you're writing software, but don't feel competent to have an informed opinion about HCI-related topics, you need to read up on the topic.
And I'm not just talking about UIs and user-facing stuff, either. I work on a backend storage system. I have a web browser, a front-end server, and a middle-tier server seperating my back-end servers from my end-users, and I still feel that having taken a cogsci class that presented HCI principles well has been invaluable to my job. Examples include solid API design for the middle-tier folks, and designing fault-evident test automation.
If a human isn't consuming your code in some way, you probably aren't getting paid.:)
At a minimum, I think every programmer should read The Design of Everyday Things. It doesn't talk much about code, but the lessons are 100% applicable.
This is probably a naive suggestion, but if your business is specialized enough, you might be in a relatively small pool of entities competing for these contracts. Perhaps you could take a few of your competitors out to lunch and ask what they think about these clauses?
If enough people in your market find them distasteful and decide to stop accepting such contracts, the contracts will probably become more mutable than they seem to be now. A vocal minority willing to tighten their belts for a few months and offering lucid objections to the clause might be sufficient to effect some flexibility in your clients.
Of course, that will involve passing up work/money. Might be cheaper to just document the stuff.
I don't think this even makes sense for higher-dollar items. All vending machines are designed to ensure that goods are not delivered until payment is provided, and, as a secondary consideration, that after payment is provided, goods are delivered.
Why would anyone care *who* bought the iPod, or what their fingerprint looked like?
This is extremely small niche. The scenario where this is useful is where there is small community of people who make very frequent use of the machine. The biometric identification simply allows them to buy soda quickly once they have an established line of credit with the system. It also lets them buy soda when they lack small bills and/or change.
But obviously, you wouldn't put that in an airport. Maybe company breakrooms.
They're making Bob less trusting, in part because money had always been slowly leaking away due to theft or negligence in payment.
To correct the grandparent, it seems that you have to authenticate *before* the machine will vend a soda, which agrees with some announcements I noticed on the department mailing lists. (I'm not at UCSD any more, but I still get the e-mail.) I suspect the scanning is just for inventory tracking, not payment. Maybe the maintainers get an e-mail whenever x Mt. Dews get dispensed after the most recent restocking. They probably just didn't want to hack the vending machine any deeper to track per-soda purchasing.
My theory is that it has to do with the relative life spans of humans and mice. Humans live about 40 years, as far as evolution is concerned. That means that the body needs to keep reproduction-threatening tumors from ocurring within the first twenty-five or so years of life. Everything after that gives diminishing returns on your fitness function.
Compare with mice.
So if medical science comes up with a hundred ways to cure cancer in rats, but it turns out that human tumors in vivo are already resistant to all but a very few of them... well... I'm not that surprised. Human tumors have to be made of sterner stuff to survive the host organism.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that mice might be a shitty model organism for cancer research if it weren't so hard to suggest a small, cheap, long-lived mammal.
It's okay! There's a link up at the top of this thread, above all those silly comments. There, it says that he has an assistant who goes through all the e-mail that doesn't make it past his whitelists, and summarizes the important stuff for him.
Perhaps. But I posit that just as dwarves suffer a -2 CHA penalty for having an unbecomming obsession with rocks and smithery, so too does our people suffer a similar, if not greater penalty, for our tendancy to break out into stories of imaginary encounters laced with esoteric statistics.
> I've been playing various games for 22 years now, and look forward to teaching my daughter ethics, politics, social skills, math, physics, chemistry, history, ecomomics, and self defence through RPGs once she gets old enough.
Social skills? Seriously, man. We obviously aren't playing with the same broad swaths of humanity if you think DnD teaches social skills!
I do give you credit for omitting hygiene from your list, though.
In my experience, the people of Mt. View are a bit more savvy than that. There are at least a half a dozen access points visible from my appartment. All are secured.
Kind of a bummer in that interim between moving in and the cable guy getting around to switching on the Internet, but otherwise rather refreshing.
> But for that I'd say if you don't have janitorial staff you can trust at least that much, you need to find new janitors.
I disagree. I think your colleagues are making a very prudent move by cleaning those rooms themselves. It's not about trust, it's about money. A janitorial position is simply not worth passing up a hefty bribe.
Fun example: My sister went to school in Ghana for a year. Going price for a human to do menial labor is about $5/month (or something like that,) so the school kept four people watching the international dorm 24/7. Going price to get into the international dorm: about $20. After a "break-in" the guards get fired, take a paid month off, find another shitty job. The burgler gets a laptop to fence. Everyone's happy.
Now, if the school had one person on duty 24/7, and that person was making $20/month, then that person might start valueing the job over bribes. Job security in a position paying 4x what you could get anywhere else is worth a lot more than one month's pay.
Even ignoring the difference in salary, an IT person has a lot invested in their career that a janitor does not. So they're going to be intrinsically much harder to bribe. Even if you get a dishonest one.
Re:Slow games in Civilization
on
Sid Meier Responds
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> What I spent in hardware costs, I'll save in heating expenses, for sure.
Get AMD's CPU drivers if your motherboard supports Cool-N-Quiet (tm). I've tested it out, and my brand new AMD 64 chip underclocks to about 1 Ghz when idle. That translates to less heat, which can in turn lead to a quieter system, as well. (Some mobos can dynamically undervolt the fan to slow it down when the chip is cool.)
What you save in electricity, you can use to heat your house more efficiently.:)
Fair points for a bank and many other commercial entities, but the poster I was responding to was talking about a bloody University.
But I also think that if you're using these arguments to justify blocking access to a list of webmail providers, then your security needs probably require you to block access to the Internet. The insider threat you describe is just as serious without access to webmail, (via groups, forums, ssh/scp, ftp, et c) and advertizing is ubiquitous on the Internet.
Actually, that's incorrect. The DMCA does not have any exemptions for copyright holders trying to circumvent control mechanism to their own work.
IANAL, but I did attend a talk held by one, and this is one of the peculiarities of the act that he pointed out. He gave a hypothetical example of database access controls. What if you buy a database, and put your own copyrighted work into it, but then your license expires and the DB locks you out using those access controls? Can you break the access controls to get your work back out?
Not under the letter of the DMCA. But of course, this has not been tested in court.
I don't think so, either, and the actual article doesn't make any such claims. Just the/. summary.
There is actually a similar (in concept) device that has already been tested in humans. IIRC, the guy walks around with a hefty wearable computer/power source.
One drawback to the this approach (plugging into the eye) is that by interfacing with the optical system so close to the surface, you preclude the possibility of helping people who have damage to their optic nerve. But there's a lot to be said for the reduced invasiveness, too.
> Who this will benefit are people who have went blind at some point during their adult life due to injury, glaucoma, diabetes (yes, it can make you go blind), drinking too much rubbing alcohol, or something similar.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're writing software, but don't feel competent to have an informed opinion about HCI-related topics, you need to read up on the topic.
:)
And I'm not just talking about UIs and user-facing stuff, either. I work on a backend storage system. I have a web browser, a front-end server, and a middle-tier server seperating my back-end servers from my end-users, and I still feel that having taken a cogsci class that presented HCI principles well has been invaluable to my job. Examples include solid API design for the middle-tier folks, and designing fault-evident test automation.
If a human isn't consuming your code in some way, you probably aren't getting paid.
At a minimum, I think every programmer should read The Design of Everyday Things. It doesn't talk much about code, but the lessons are 100% applicable.
This is probably a naive suggestion, but if your business is specialized enough, you might be in a relatively small pool of entities competing for these contracts. Perhaps you could take a few of your competitors out to lunch and ask what they think about these clauses?
If enough people in your market find them distasteful and decide to stop accepting such contracts, the contracts will probably become more mutable than they seem to be now. A vocal minority willing to tighten their belts for a few months and offering lucid objections to the clause might be sufficient to effect some flexibility in your clients.
Of course, that will involve passing up work/money. Might be cheaper to just document the stuff.
Sarcastic tone. Inflamatory, baseless personal attacks.
You, sir, are trolling. I'm not 100% sure you know you're trolling, but you are.
> The President objects to things he doesn't understand.
Clearly untrue! The President has always been an avid supporter of the war in Iraq.
I don't think this even makes sense for higher-dollar items. All vending machines are designed to ensure that goods are not delivered until payment is provided, and, as a secondary consideration, that after payment is provided, goods are delivered.
Why would anyone care *who* bought the iPod, or what their fingerprint looked like?
This is extremely small niche. The scenario where this is useful is where there is small community of people who make very frequent use of the machine. The biometric identification simply allows them to buy soda quickly once they have an established line of credit with the system. It also lets them buy soda when they lack small bills and/or change.
But obviously, you wouldn't put that in an airport. Maybe company breakrooms.
They're making Bob less trusting, in part because money had always been slowly leaking away due to theft or negligence in payment.
To correct the grandparent, it seems that you have to authenticate *before* the machine will vend a soda, which agrees with some announcements I noticed on the department mailing lists. (I'm not at UCSD any more, but I still get the e-mail.) I suspect the scanning is just for inventory tracking, not payment. Maybe the maintainers get an e-mail whenever x Mt. Dews get dispensed after the most recent restocking. They probably just didn't want to hack the vending machine any deeper to track per-soda purchasing.
My theory is that it has to do with the relative life spans of humans and mice. Humans live about 40 years, as far as evolution is concerned. That means that the body needs to keep reproduction-threatening tumors from ocurring within the first twenty-five or so years of life. Everything after that gives diminishing returns on your fitness function.
Compare with mice.
So if medical science comes up with a hundred ways to cure cancer in rats, but it turns out that human tumors in vivo are already resistant to all but a very few of them... well... I'm not that surprised. Human tumors have to be made of sterner stuff to survive the host organism.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that mice might be a shitty model organism for cancer research if it weren't so hard to suggest a small, cheap, long-lived mammal.
It's okay! There's a link up at the top of this thread, above all those silly comments. There, it says that he has an assistant who goes through all the e-mail that doesn't make it past his whitelists, and summarizes the important stuff for him.
Your criticisms are valid, but any service with hundreds of millions of users is hardly irrelevant.
If history repeats itself, MS will make Hotmail better than gmail, only this time, they won't have to come from behind to dominate the market.
It's still their game to lose.
Perhaps. But I posit that just as dwarves suffer a -2 CHA penalty for having an unbecomming obsession with rocks and smithery, so too does our people suffer a similar, if not greater penalty, for our tendancy to break out into stories of imaginary encounters laced with esoteric statistics.
> I've been playing various games for 22 years now, and look forward to teaching my daughter ethics, politics, social skills, math, physics, chemistry, history, ecomomics, and self defence through RPGs once she gets old enough.
Social skills? Seriously, man. We obviously aren't playing with the same broad swaths of humanity if you think DnD teaches social skills!
I do give you credit for omitting hygiene from your list, though.
In my experience, the people of Mt. View are a bit more savvy than that. There are at least a half a dozen access points visible from my appartment. All are secured.
Kind of a bummer in that interim between moving in and the cable guy getting around to switching on the Internet, but otherwise rather refreshing.
Actually, that's not too far from the truth. MS has a campus in Mt. View, within walking distance of Google's campus.
o rthernca/siliconvalley.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/info/usaoffices/n
Nice post.
> But for that I'd say if you don't have janitorial staff you can trust at least that much, you need to find new janitors.
I disagree. I think your colleagues are making a very prudent move by cleaning those rooms themselves. It's not about trust, it's about money. A janitorial position is simply not worth passing up a hefty bribe.
Fun example: My sister went to school in Ghana for a year. Going price for a human to do menial labor is about $5/month (or something like that,) so the school kept four people watching the international dorm 24/7. Going price to get into the international dorm: about $20. After a "break-in" the guards get fired, take a paid month off, find another shitty job. The burgler gets a laptop to fence. Everyone's happy.
Now, if the school had one person on duty 24/7, and that person was making $20/month, then that person might start valueing the job over bribes. Job security in a position paying 4x what you could get anywhere else is worth a lot more than one month's pay.
Even ignoring the difference in salary, an IT person has a lot invested in their career that a janitor does not. So they're going to be intrinsically much harder to bribe. Even if you get a dishonest one.
> What I spent in hardware costs, I'll save in heating expenses, for sure.
:)
Get AMD's CPU drivers if your motherboard supports Cool-N-Quiet (tm). I've tested it out, and my brand new AMD 64 chip underclocks to about 1 Ghz when idle. That translates to less heat, which can in turn lead to a quieter system, as well. (Some mobos can dynamically undervolt the fan to slow it down when the chip is cool.)
What you save in electricity, you can use to heat your house more efficiently.
Fair points for a bank and many other commercial entities, but the poster I was responding to was talking about a bloody University.
But I also think that if you're using these arguments to justify blocking access to a list of webmail providers, then your security needs probably require you to block access to the Internet. The insider threat you describe is just as serious without access to webmail, (via groups, forums, ssh/scp, ftp, et c) and advertizing is ubiquitous on the Internet.
I haven't seen an animated ad on Hotmail for quite a while.
"...the IT people blocked the hotmail URL because it was very dangerous..."
I call bullshit. What does that even mean?
Seriously. This guy needs to learn to let go.
Actually, that's incorrect. The DMCA does not have any exemptions for copyright holders trying to circumvent control mechanism to their own work.
IANAL, but I did attend a talk held by one, and this is one of the peculiarities of the act that he pointed out. He gave a hypothetical example of database access controls. What if you buy a database, and put your own copyrighted work into it, but then your license expires and the DB locks you out using those access controls? Can you break the access controls to get your work back out?
Not under the letter of the DMCA. But of course, this has not been tested in court.
> Few PHBs have the spine to actually find out for themselves, or to stick to their guns if challenged.
You're right on the first point, but wrong on the second.
The network IS the computer!
So we need big powerful servers and very thin clients. I'd bet my business on it.
They probably all have the ethic exemption to feminine immunity to prosecution.
Thanks. :) I went out and tracked down some linkage on this:
r .html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_p
It's a really fun read.
I don't think so, either, and the actual article doesn't make any such claims. Just the /. summary.
There is actually a similar (in concept) device that has already been tested in humans. IIRC, the guy walks around with a hefty wearable computer/power source.
One drawback to the this approach (plugging into the eye) is that by interfacing with the optical system so close to the surface, you preclude the possibility of helping people who have damage to their optic nerve. But there's a lot to be said for the reduced invasiveness, too.
> Who this will benefit are people who have went blind at some point during their adult life due to injury, glaucoma, diabetes (yes, it can make you go blind), drinking too much rubbing alcohol, or something similar.
You forgot masturbation.