Technically, the 1972 ABM treaty was only with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. I'm not sure whether post-Soviet Russia was officially grandfathered in.
I think that the treaty was more posturing than anything else. Honestly, with each side having 10,000+ warheads, you're going to have more warheads than interceptors. How much of a strategic imbalance is it going to create if the other side can only destroy you 3 times over (as opposed to destroying you 5 times over)?
There actually is still one arcade near to where I live. It does have cabinets of sorts (although I think they technically call them booths). You deposit 50 cents, you get 10 minutes of game time and piece of toilet paper.
Of course, maybe this is Microsoft's strategy. Leisure Suit Larry 13 with photo-realistic rendering would be a smash hit at such an arcade.
A Pandora's box has been opened. Now that Helm's Deep has been recreated in Doom, we're going to have some sick bastard with way too much time and an intact virginity recreate Helm's Deep in Nethack.
There's a reason why there are so few gifted UI designers contributing to open source. People like mosfet call us "so-called usability experts", open source leaders like Eric Raymond proclaim we're completely wrong for explaining things like the fact that interfaces sholuld be designed before code is written, and projects like GNOME and KDE generally make us feel as unwelcome as possible.
At every step of the way the world of open source and free software has done everything possible to keep us out of the process.
If I start seeing eminem CD's being labelled as dolphin-friendly and cans of tuna that I can't copy, I'll known there's a bug in the label making software.
To salvage the truth from a troll, there actually is a high correlation between linux being put on PDA's and those PDA's tending to suck.
Too often, linux developers who have little or no knowledge of interface design say "Ah-ha! Because of linux's spectacular portability, I can port this application that runs on my pentium 4 machines with a 21" monitor to my StrongArm PDA with a 240 x 320 pixel screen." Unfortunately, they really don't take into account the difference in usage between a desktop machine that sits on your desk and something that's so small it fits into your pocket. You tend to see this screwed up way of thinking in PDA's like the Agenda and Zaurus. To be fair, you also tend to see it in messed up designs like WinCE. IBM really should have gone with PalmOS.
Qtopia is a prime example of a desktop UI that was shrunk 20 times to be put into a PDA without any real forthought. Maybe it'll be okay for something like set-top boxes or answering machines, but I would be very disappointed in IBM's human factors department if they actually approved using Qtopia with PDA's.
Apache and the Linux kernel were volunteer efforts. Those were created pretty fast. Of course, those projects had a developer community that was willing to learn about things like OS and webserver design and placed high values on things like security and stability. You don't currently have such a hardcore developer community on the linux desktop that knows half as much about usability design and places as high a value on your grandma being able to use it.
Last week I had a conversation with the Open Source leader Eric Raymond, one of the people who best exemplifies the open source movement, period. I told him most usability people recommend that you design the UI first and then write the code. He said "they're wrong".
If the open source developer community maintains such mindsets that are antithetical to the creation of a high-quality user experience, they will never, ever have a high-quality desktop OS.
If you have to use money to save our asses from the apathy of open source developers towards the end-user experience, we never really had asses that were worth saving.
A radical attitude debugging session will go further than obscenes amount of money.
The dirty judges steals it from us they do. No awardses for Smeagol. Crooked judges, we throttle them in their sleep we will. No, wait, we will lead them to her, and then she will eats them and their bones and their clothes and then maybe she will give the award to us. Yes! Smeagol will lead them to her law firm...
The problem isn't the concept of Open Source, the problem is the type of people currently doing open source. If you have a community of traditionalist unix geeks who put only a fraction of the work into the user experience that they do into technical stuff, their efforts at creating quality desktop software will suck. Why was the Open Source community able to create things as technically brilliant and requiring so much technical effort like Apache and the Linux kernel (in just a couple years), yet have not been able to create a consistant and usable linux UI for over 10 years? Because the unix developer culture does not value usability and the majority of Open Source People come from the unix developer culture.
"But, but, but" people say "but Mac OS X is unix, and they've been able to validate the concept of a unix desktop." Just the opposite. The mac developer community is inherently different from the unix developer community. Mac developers value putting a lot of work into the user experience, and you can see this in the fact that Mac OS X has been able to accomplish in 2-3 years what traditionalist unix developers have not been able to do for nearly 20. If anything, Mac OS X's success does the opposite of validating linux on the desktop--it shows that linux on the desktop is severely lacking in the mindset needed to create successful desktop software despite their over-abundance of programmers and technically minded-people.
I'm not saying that Open Source is damned to failure, I'm just saying that it needs a major house cleaning and the traditionalist unix developers who don't give a damn about end-users and who are intolerant of the "nit picking" needed to create quality UI's need to be replaced by people who care enough to do a quality job. Out with the bad, in with the good.
Kazaa's next legal defense will be that their software is not a file-sharing service but really an instant messaging server with a security hole that can be exploited to give access to a user's hard drive.
There are plenty of us UI designers and human factors people. Of course actually getting PDA companies (and technology companies in general) to listen to us and bring us in early in the design process is the really difficult part.
To make Sharp look even more stupid, the original Palm design was simply hammered out by a guy fashioning a block of wood in a rough shape of a PDA and carrying it around with him for a month or two and pondering how the thing should work.
Stick with Palm. Even though they aren't as astute to human factors issues as they once were, their interface still has better design principles than WinCE or the Zaurus.
You're absolutely right. Software companies felt that it was less important to design a good user experience and more important to sell support, features, etc. They felt there was impunity from the consequences bad design. They said "we can make the interface as bad as we want, and we won't ever get punished for it." And they were dead wrong.
Eventually, end-users who are made miserable by their computers will revolt. They will get wise to the fact that the Intel commercials showing shiny, happy, end users getting so much done now that they have a processor four times as fast as their old one are complete bullshit. They will get wise to the fact that the greeting-card software they bought at Wal-mart that claimed to be "intuitive" and "easy-to-use" cost them 10 times as many weekends pulling out hair than if they grabbed their kid's crayola set and did it by hand.
But the end-users are slowly learning. And they are very, very pissed off. They start saying "I hate computers. I want to do as little with them as possible. The computers I use at work completely treat me like crap. Why do I want the exact same experience at home? I'm just going to keep it to web surfing and e-mail, thank you very much!"
And guess what happens when all of a sudden you have an entire economy spring up that is built around people wanting to do so much more with their computers than merely surfing the web and writing e-mails?
What goes around comes around. There will always be punishment for bad design that makes users frustrated and unproductive, it's just that it takes a while to manifest and it's directed at whole entire categories of products, not just at one specific offending brand. The end users got pissed off at the way they were being treated and collectively punished the entire high tech industry. And that's what really caused the tech crash.
Users don't want software that wipes their ass, they want software that doesn't kick it.
You can't make software idiot proof because the first idiot brought into the design process is usually the idiot programmer who doesn't want to learn about how to design usable interfaces. People of such limited intelligence and industry should be chained inside a server closet where they can do no more damage.
I don't think it's so much a lack of original ideas to make software more usable as the fact that these original ideas require programmers to make these ideas into reality. The people with the original ideas are usually not programmers, and usually have to spend so much time doing research in fields like cognitive psychology and human computer interaction that they don't have time learn how to code.
An idea can only happen if it gets turned into code, so that pretty much makes programmers the gatekeepers of technical change. If the programmers don't want change, you won't have it. And this is the situation we are in today. There are so many good ideas out there for making computers better, but they'll never get anywhere because there are hardly any businesses out there willing to assign programmers to turn these ideas into code.
It's at this point one would think that Open Source could provide a solution for this problem because there seems to be a great abundance of open source programmers working on tens of thousands of different projects and who don't care whether their project will be a great commerical success. But of all the programmers out there, Open Source programmers are typically the most hostile towards people in the field of UI design and towards fresh, new, innovative ideas that are meant to improve the user experience.
There's a reason why there's a such dearth of people doing usability for open source software.
In general, both GNOME and KDE developers usually do an excellent job of chasing away people with UI design abilities. There's this attitude among the developers that HCI is a far less important endeavor than, say, something technical like programming. And the developers will let you know it every step of the way. The developers also tend to have the attitude that principles of cognitive psychology (the things you need to exploit in an interface to make it very usable) are a load of bull or nothing more than just one person's opinion. It won't matter how many journal issues you might cite. You can't reason with people who think that Fitts' Law is a TV show about lawyers.
Also, if you're a mac person, it's really going to annoy the hell out of you that GNOME and KDE developers refuse to believe that microsoft is capable of making really bad UI design decisions. One of people in charge of this new-fangled GNOME/KDE truce told me that Microsoft UI design incompetance was "a myth". Guess he never saw multi-row tabs.
One thing you want to do is to look at the first year and a half of the "gnome-gui" list (that was the main gnome usability list for awhile) versus the GNOME usability mailing list of today. Notice how the first year or two of the old mailing list had people from a wide variety of UI design backgrounds who brought really good usability ideas to the table. Over the last several years, the GNOME usability movement has degenerated into a "hackers good ole boys club" consisting of a bunch of linux programmers who seem like they'd rather be spending their time in vi writing bash scripts.
Until there's a good direction to turn to, a distro or open source project that actually values the input of usability folks, you're probably best off staying where you are. The current batch of projects and distributions are committed to shooting themselves (and their end users) in the foot.
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It's called beer. Drink enough of it, the ugliest face will be transplanted with that of a supermodel.
Warning: may induce vomiting and only lasts 3 hours.
Technically, the 1972 ABM treaty was only with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. I'm not sure whether post-Soviet Russia was officially grandfathered in.
I think that the treaty was more posturing than anything else. Honestly, with each side having 10,000+ warheads, you're going to have more warheads than interceptors. How much of a strategic imbalance is it going to create if the other side can only destroy you 3 times over (as opposed to destroying you 5 times over)?
48 moons? Ha!
No. You got it totally wrong. It should be:
"48, 48 moons! Ha, ha, ha..."
Giving kids powerbooks was the safest choice to make.
There actually is still one arcade near to where I live. It does have cabinets of sorts (although I think they technically call them booths). You deposit 50 cents, you get 10 minutes of game time and piece of toilet paper.
Of course, maybe this is Microsoft's strategy. Leisure Suit Larry 13 with photo-realistic rendering would be a smash hit at such an arcade.
(with apologies to who ever wrote the folk song clementine)
In a crater, on the dark side
Excavating for H3
Dwelt a Chinese Lunar miner
And his daughter, dear Ping-Lee.
Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, dear Ping-Lee
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, sweet Ping-Lee
Fat she was just like a dump truck
And her waist size 43
Oil drums with airtight helmets
Were the spacesuits for Ping-Lee
Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, dear Ping-Lee
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, sweet Ping-Lee
Drove she rover to the module
Every day at half past three
When she crashed and pierced the spacesuit
Which decompressed quite horribly
Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, dear Ping-Lee
Thou art lost and gnome forever
Dreadful sorry, sweet Ping-Lee
A Pandora's box has been opened. Now that Helm's Deep has been recreated in Doom, we're going to have some sick bastard with way too much time and an intact virginity recreate Helm's Deep in Nethack.
There's a reason why there are so few gifted UI designers contributing to open source. People like mosfet call us "so-called usability experts", open source leaders like Eric Raymond proclaim we're completely wrong for explaining things like the fact that interfaces sholuld be designed before code is written, and projects like GNOME and KDE generally make us feel as unwelcome as possible.
At every step of the way the world of open source and free software has done everything possible to keep us out of the process.
If I start seeing eminem CD's being labelled as dolphin-friendly and cans of tuna that I can't copy, I'll known there's a bug in the label making software.
To salvage the truth from a troll, there actually is a high correlation between linux being put on PDA's and those PDA's tending to suck.
Too often, linux developers who have little or no knowledge of interface design say "Ah-ha! Because of linux's spectacular portability, I can port this application that runs on my pentium 4 machines with a 21" monitor to my StrongArm PDA with a 240 x 320 pixel screen." Unfortunately, they really don't take into account the difference in usage between a desktop machine that sits on your desk and something that's so small it fits into your pocket. You tend to see this screwed up way of thinking in PDA's like the Agenda and Zaurus. To be fair, you also tend to see it in messed up designs like WinCE. IBM really should have gone with PalmOS.
Qtopia is a prime example of a desktop UI that was shrunk 20 times to be put into a PDA without any real forthought. Maybe it'll be okay for something like set-top boxes or answering machines, but I would be very disappointed in IBM's human factors department if they actually approved using Qtopia with PDA's.
Apache and the Linux kernel were volunteer efforts. Those were created pretty fast. Of course, those projects had a developer community that was willing to learn about things like OS and webserver design and placed high values on things like security and stability. You don't currently have such a hardcore developer community on the linux desktop that knows half as much about usability design and places as high a value on your grandma being able to use it.
Last week I had a conversation with the Open Source leader Eric Raymond, one of the people who best exemplifies the open source movement, period. I told him most usability people recommend that you design the UI first and then write the code. He said "they're wrong".
If the open source developer community maintains such mindsets that are antithetical to the creation of a high-quality user experience, they will never, ever have a high-quality desktop OS.
If you have to use money to save our asses from the apathy of open source developers towards the end-user experience, we never really had asses that were worth saving.
A radical attitude debugging session will go further than obscenes amount of money.
When I briefly scanned the headline I had originally thought it read "Record Label Thieves Selling CDs."
The dirty judges steals it from us they do. No awardses for Smeagol. Crooked judges, we throttle them in their sleep we will. No, wait, we will lead them to her, and then she will eats them and their bones and their clothes and then maybe she will give the award to us. Yes! Smeagol will lead them to her law firm...
Harsh, but preferable to some jerk putting DRM in my hardware.
The problem isn't the concept of Open Source, the problem is the type of people currently doing open source. If you have a community of traditionalist unix geeks who put only a fraction of the work into the user experience that they do into technical stuff, their efforts at creating quality desktop software will suck. Why was the Open Source community able to create things as technically brilliant and requiring so much technical effort like Apache and the Linux kernel (in just a couple years), yet have not been able to create a consistant and usable linux UI for over 10 years? Because the unix developer culture does not value usability and the majority of Open Source People come from the unix developer culture.
"But, but, but" people say "but Mac OS X is unix, and they've been able to validate the concept of a unix desktop." Just the opposite. The mac developer community is inherently different from the unix developer community. Mac developers value putting a lot of work into the user experience, and you can see this in the fact that Mac OS X has been able to accomplish in 2-3 years what traditionalist unix developers have not been able to do for nearly 20. If anything, Mac OS X's success does the opposite of validating linux on the desktop--it shows that linux on the desktop is severely lacking in the mindset needed to create successful desktop software despite their over-abundance of programmers and technically minded-people.
I'm not saying that Open Source is damned to failure, I'm just saying that it needs a major house cleaning and the traditionalist unix developers who don't give a damn about end-users and who are intolerant of the "nit picking" needed to create quality UI's need to be replaced by people who care enough to do a quality job. Out with the bad, in with the good.
That's Gecko, not GEICO.
Kazaa's next legal defense will be that their software is not a file-sharing service but really an instant messaging server with a security hole that can be exploited to give access to a user's hard drive.
There are plenty of us UI designers and human factors people. Of course actually getting PDA companies (and technology companies in general) to listen to us and bring us in early in the design process is the really difficult part.
To make Sharp look even more stupid, the original Palm design was simply hammered out by a guy fashioning a block of wood in a rough shape of a PDA and carrying it around with him for a month or two and pondering how the thing should work.
Stick with Palm. Even though they aren't as astute to human factors issues as they once were, their interface still has better design principles than WinCE or the Zaurus.
Several billion years ago someone got an e-mail message titled "INCREASE YOUR UNIVERSE SIZE!!!".
They hit reply and the rest is history.
You're absolutely right. Software companies felt that it was less important to design a good user experience and more important to sell support, features, etc. They felt there was impunity from the consequences bad design. They said "we can make the interface as bad as we want, and we won't ever get punished for it." And they were dead wrong.
Eventually, end-users who are made miserable by their computers will revolt. They will get wise to the fact that the Intel commercials showing shiny, happy, end users getting so much done now that they have a processor four times as fast as their old one are complete bullshit. They will get wise to the fact that the greeting-card software they bought at Wal-mart that claimed to be "intuitive" and "easy-to-use" cost them 10 times as many weekends pulling out hair than if they grabbed their kid's crayola set and did it by hand.
But the end-users are slowly learning. And they are very, very pissed off. They start saying "I hate computers. I want to do as little with them as possible. The computers I use at work completely treat me like crap. Why do I want the exact same experience at home? I'm just going to keep it to web surfing and e-mail, thank you very much!"
And guess what happens when all of a sudden you have an entire economy spring up that is built around people wanting to do so much more with their computers than merely surfing the web and writing e-mails?
What goes around comes around. There will always be punishment for bad design that makes users frustrated and unproductive, it's just that it takes a while to manifest and it's directed at whole entire categories of products, not just at one specific offending brand. The end users got pissed off at the way they were being treated and collectively punished the entire high tech industry. And that's what really caused the tech crash.
Users don't want software that wipes their ass, they want software that doesn't kick it.
You can't make software idiot proof because the first idiot brought into the design process is usually the idiot programmer who doesn't want to learn about how to design usable interfaces. People of such limited intelligence and industry should be chained inside a server closet where they can do no more damage.
I don't think it's so much a lack of original ideas to make software more usable as the fact that these original ideas require programmers to make these ideas into reality. The people with the original ideas are usually not programmers, and usually have to spend so much time doing research in fields like cognitive psychology and human computer interaction that they don't have time learn how to code.
An idea can only happen if it gets turned into code, so that pretty much makes programmers the gatekeepers of technical change. If the programmers don't want change, you won't have it.
And this is the situation we are in today. There are so many good ideas out there for making computers better, but they'll never get anywhere because there are hardly any businesses out there willing to assign programmers to turn these ideas into code.
It's at this point one would think that Open Source could provide a solution for this problem because there seems to be a great abundance of open source programmers working on tens of thousands of different projects and who don't care whether their project will be a great commerical success. But of all the programmers out there, Open Source programmers are typically the most hostile towards people in the field of UI design and towards fresh, new, innovative ideas that are meant to improve the user experience.
There's a reason why there's a such dearth of people doing usability for open source software.
In general, both GNOME and KDE developers usually do an excellent job of chasing away people with UI design abilities. There's this attitude among the developers that HCI is a far less important endeavor than, say, something technical like programming. And the developers will let you know it every step of the way. The developers also tend to have the attitude that principles of cognitive psychology (the things you need to exploit in an interface to make it very usable) are a load of bull or nothing more than just one person's opinion. It won't matter how many journal issues you might cite. You can't reason with people who think that Fitts' Law is a TV show about lawyers.
Also, if you're a mac person, it's really going to annoy the hell out of you that GNOME and KDE developers refuse to believe that microsoft is capable of making really bad UI design decisions. One of people in charge of this new-fangled GNOME/KDE truce told me that Microsoft UI design incompetance was "a myth". Guess he never saw multi-row tabs.
One thing you want to do is to look at the first year and a half of the "gnome-gui" list (that was the main gnome usability list for awhile) versus the GNOME usability mailing list of today. Notice how the first year or two of the old mailing list had people from a wide variety of UI design backgrounds who brought really good usability ideas to the table. Over the last several years, the GNOME usability movement has degenerated into a "hackers good ole boys club" consisting of a bunch of linux programmers who seem like they'd rather be spending their time in vi writing bash scripts.
Until there's a good direction to turn to, a distro or open source project that actually values the input of usability folks, you're probably best off staying where you are. The current batch of projects and distributions are committed to shooting themselves (and their end users) in the foot.