Olin was started by a Babson alum with funds that originated with another Babson alum, on Babson's campus.
Actually, the funds came from the F. W. Olin Foundation, originally from funds left by Franklin W. Olin after his death. He got the money by starting the Olin Corporation which among other things owned Remington rifles and did a lot of chemical engineering. Olin himself was a Cornell graduate.
What if even the users themselves complain about incompetent users? Would you still say that there is no such thing as incompetent users?
Then some of your users are making the same mistake that you are. Please look past their opinions and think about whether you want more people to download your software. If you get enjoyment out of making fun of some people and calling them incompetent, then you're set. Otherwise, try to be humble and put yourself in these other people's shoes. How would you like it if the first time you tried to download some new project a bunch of people you didn't know called you incompetent?
Also, I agree with the post elsewhere that people might be coming in through a search engine straight to your forums. How can you help people understand where they are within your site, and how that relates to the download location? Some sites even go so far as to tell the user 'Hey we see that you came from a Google search for "foo download", are you looking for our DOWNLOAD PAGE (link)?'"
First off sorry if my tone has been a bit combative. I'm very passionate about this issue and I'll try to tone it down a bit. My observations come from experience in user interaction design involving actual user interviews and watching people interact with sites. You'd be surprised what happens. Really. People aren't logical. There's a lot of good literature on it too if you're interested.
1. I've already redesigned the website twice, and people still ask at the forum where they can download it.
I understand your frustration.
2. When I ask those people why they can't find it, they never give an answer! How am I supposed to know what they think when they don't even reply?
They probably never come back to the forum. Also, users aren't the best for diagnosing these kind of problems. Try asking someone why they lost their keys. There's not really a good answer to questions like that. These people are going elsewhere anyway.
3. I asked a lot of other people who *do* reply, but all of them think that the download link is easy to find, and think that the people who can't find the download link are idiots.
People are entitled to their opinions. You seem personally frustrated that these people don't find your download link, so I think you'd want to help them. If the software isn't designed for them, maybe you can make that more clear on your site by describing or showing it better. If it is, keep on trying, there's got to be a way. Otherwise, just live with it I guess.
4. The download link is on the left of the forum link! How is it even possible that one cannot see it?
Who knows? The mind works in mysterious ways that are often unintuitive. I haven't seen your design. Have you tried putting it on the right? Making it bigger? Putting links in multiple places? Putting whitespace around a link so it stands out? All I ask is that you consider other solutions than exclusively linking from within a larger list. I don't even know what your site is, so really I'm just trying to give you some free usability advice.
5. Even on the forum pages, there are all kinds of links that link back to the download page. When a user enters the forum, he's presented with a huge, orange box that tells the user where he can find the download page. This box is much larger than the "Continue to the forums" link.
Tweak it maybe. Does the orange make people skip over it because it's too bright and looks like an ad? Is there sufficient spacing around to make it stand out? You might look into eyetracking studies (here's one) to see where people look first on websites. Try experimenting with things other than putting it in a list and putting it next to the Forum link.
Given all of the above points, what else can you conclude other than that there are indeed incompetent users? Heck, even the users themselves think that incompetent users exist.
The other side of the coin is that users don't always suggest the best solutions. I'll admit that there's a reason you're the website designer and they're not. Use your intuition, but don't let it blind you to alternatives that better fit how people other than yourself see your website. Probably the best thing you could do is watch a few people use your site who haven't seen it before. Watch what they do.
Or maybe try out Google Analytics's site overlay feature to see where most people click. Do they try multiple links before hitting the forum? How many leave the front page without downloading the app or going to the forums? All of this information is interesting and useful, whether or not it matches your perceptions.
If that isn't user incompetence, then what is it? And yes, this happened for real. In fact, it happens all the time, so it's not just 1 or 2 people.
It's evidence that you should consider changing your layout.
You know that they have trouble finding your download link, yet you're stubborn enough not to try to improve your site? That's pretty closed-minded.
I know that it's hard to think that other people could see things differently than you do. Maybe if you want people to download your software more than use your forums, you should separate the Downloads link and make it much larger and prevalent. You're lucky that they even ask where to download, because it's just as easy to close the window.
People naturally don't act logically. Don't ever expect them to or you will fail. It's easy to change a website, and difficult to change a large population. Pick your battles wisely.
Bollocks! The fact that flying an F22 is probably fatal for untrained grandmothers does not mean it has "usibility problems" - not every task in life is meant to be done by idiots, and the more effort is put into idiot proofing software, the less is put into reliability, functionality, and extensibility for the rest of us. Some things are too hard for a segment of the population to do, and ontologically tagging complex relationships between data entries may simply be beyond the average user. That's not a bug, that's a challenge.
Grandmothers are not users of military jets. One of the major goals of the Semantic Web is a decentralized and contextualized meaningful information store that experts in disparate fields can contribute to. Thus the intended users of the Semantic Web do include the very people being insulted.
Social software architects are not the sole intended users of social software. Air Force pilots are the intended users of jets. One has to define a user group before applying usability arguments.
There's too many generalizations like "blaming the user is always wrong" and "security through obscurity is not useful" that are incorrect under many conditions, and/. posters and moderators seem to be doing their best to propagate these. People have finite time, money, intelligence, knowledge, skill and experience. Not everything can be easy enough for everyone to use.
A red flag is not the same as "always wrong".
Also, people do not have enough money, intelligence, knowledge, skill, and experience to spend time with a system that doesn't consider them as important. It's a lot easier and more efficient to spend money on making the Semantic Web easier to use than to spend a lot more money training people to use a faulty system.
Blaming the users for anything should raise a huge red flag that you've got some usability problems.
Maybe the Semantic Web should aim to be useful to people rather than require people to be useful to it. There has to be a better way than trying to educate droves of people to a problematic and vulnerable design.
That's their point : in the realm of home console, DreamCast is the only thing that let your run whatever you like. Other consoles don't. You need to either do obscure trick, or do hard/soft modification that can get you expelled (or void your warranty).
Expelled? Void your warranty? I doubt either of these are true. I don't really understand what you mean be getting "expelled" anyway. The GC homebrew community has always done everything it could to ensure that what we do is legal fair use of the hardware, whether we like the laws or not. To my knowledge Nintendo doesn't care (and otherwise wouldn't know) if I use an Action Replay.
So in this perspective, their article doesn't lack that much information. Maybe, it just fails to mention that some hacking technique (soft-mods or bugs exploit) may make the mod-chip un-necessary.
The article is still incorrect in claiming that one needs a modchip. Modchips require opening your device and soldering in a new component in most cases. However, getting a GC to boot software only involves on one hand spoofing a network connection on an official Nintendo broadband adapter and playing an off-the-shelf game, or on the other hand buying an imported official Nintendo SD card adapter (which Nintendo itself sells in Japan) and an Action Replay (which of course is not licensed by Nintendo, but still does nothing damaging to the console). In either case, one can just pull out the game, the SD adapter, the broadband adapter, or whatever, and you still have a stock console, not a modchipped one.
Cory Doctorow came to Olin College a couple of weeks ago. I wrote up a short summary of his talk. The take-home message I personally got from his talk was that the biggest danger comes when DRM creeps into hardware, preventing kids from being able to tinker with technology and learn about it when their minds are most open.
Here is the abstract of his talk which was entitled "0wned -- how Hollywood plans on making the future subservient on the past" .
If you want to buy sub 1-metre resolution satellite pics just go the SPOT consortium in
France. Any interested parties will BUY their data at FAR greater resolution than what
Google supplies.
I disagree. Why spend money and leave a paper trail when you can anonymously look at data using something like Tor? Interested parties would only buy better resolution if they needed that level of detail.
Why assume that a kernel is written in C? I think it would be great if kernel writers could write portions of code in verilog for whatever reason and mix it in with the C.
Ah but you forget that they have a patent called "a process for getting around the RIM situation"
There are two steps described in the patent:
1. find the oldest net-based email-solution you can and use the source without any modifications whatsoever. (better yet use the binary if possible) 2. build a layer on top of it to interact with what is now a local app. It should be possible to use specific screen-grabbing, techniques, etc., that have been in existence for ages to avoid yet more patents.
My favorite is Moxy Früvous's "Entropy".
I found that I knew all of the lyrics to it when I remembered it several years after I first heard it, and then I played it back in my head and thought about the lyrics and now I realize that I know things like that James Joule developed the Law of Conservation of Energy. (Boy I hope that's correct now that I said it!)
Of course they built an autonomous vehicle with Mac OS X! It has Automator! Just drag and drop the Chess AI engine onto a car and you should be good to go!
All this talk of coding, and they didn't even need to do any!
They don't own it, the copyright holders still do.
It's just that the copyright holders can't prevent them from doing anything at all with their works, including selling them on CDs (or as digital downloads) it would seem.
OK so I want this new system and this new game.
Oh OK I just plug in this USB key, I see. Now how do I plug in my joystick?
Oh, its a wireless joystick! Everything is wireless now? Cool!... now where do I plug in this USB key?
The new roots could pigeonhole the US TLD's to.us, so for the rest of the world, microsoft.com.us would route to what the US sees as microsoft.com etc.
And then break all the links! URLs weren't designed to handle translation over several differing namespaces.
One reason that people want Linux drivers uncompiled is so that they could compile it for a platform other than x86.
While I'm not here to say that supporting so many platforms is the right solution from a Linux-on-the-desktop standpoint, it is the state of Linux these days, and opens up the ability to use a lot of older or obscure hardware that never could run Windows in the first place.
It would probably work better if some sort of board could evaluate hardware drivers and give a rating ranging from Open Source to Unusable (although no hardware manufacturer would put the Unusable rating badge on their box!)
Then Linux people could only buy hardware or complete systems that check out with a rating of Pre-Compiled Driver Available or Open Source or whatever level of support they desire.
But it would need to be someone people would trust, like the FSF or someone. Although the FSF probably wouldn't make much of a distinction between pre-compiled and doesn't work.
The remix in question is by Mighty Dub Katz, a collaboration between Norman Cook (you probably know him as Fatboy Slim) and a certain G Money (who I haven't personally heard of).
And while I'm pretty darn sure that Steppenwolf is well-credited all over the releases, the artist is listed as Mighty Dub Katz for their version, so it might be more accurate to call it a sample-heavy cover rather than a remix.
It would be nicer if people would quote sources instead of looking at the random files they grab off of KaZaA or Grokster (does anyone actually use Grokster?)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the funds came from the F. W. Olin Foundation, originally from funds left by Franklin W. Olin after his death. He got the money by starting the Olin Corporation which among other things owned Remington rifles and did a lot of chemical engineering. Olin himself was a Cornell graduate.
Then some of your users are making the same mistake that you are. Please look past their opinions and think about whether you want more people to download your software. If you get enjoyment out of making fun of some people and calling them incompetent, then you're set. Otherwise, try to be humble and put yourself in these other people's shoes. How would you like it if the first time you tried to download some new project a bunch of people you didn't know called you incompetent?
Also, I agree with the post elsewhere that people might be coming in through a search engine straight to your forums. How can you help people understand where they are within your site, and how that relates to the download location? Some sites even go so far as to tell the user 'Hey we see that you came from a Google search for "foo download", are you looking for our DOWNLOAD PAGE (link)?'"
First off sorry if my tone has been a bit combative. I'm very passionate about this issue and I'll try to tone it down a bit. My observations come from experience in user interaction design involving actual user interviews and watching people interact with sites. You'd be surprised what happens. Really. People aren't logical. There's a lot of good literature on it too if you're interested.
I understand your frustration.
They probably never come back to the forum. Also, users aren't the best for diagnosing these kind of problems. Try asking someone why they lost their keys. There's not really a good answer to questions like that. These people are going elsewhere anyway.
People are entitled to their opinions. You seem personally frustrated that these people don't find your download link, so I think you'd want to help them. If the software isn't designed for them, maybe you can make that more clear on your site by describing or showing it better. If it is, keep on trying, there's got to be a way. Otherwise, just live with it I guess.
Who knows? The mind works in mysterious ways that are often unintuitive. I haven't seen your design. Have you tried putting it on the right? Making it bigger? Putting links in multiple places? Putting whitespace around a link so it stands out? All I ask is that you consider other solutions than exclusively linking from within a larger list. I don't even know what your site is, so really I'm just trying to give you some free usability advice.
Tweak it maybe. Does the orange make people skip over it because it's too bright and looks like an ad? Is there sufficient spacing around to make it stand out? You might look into eyetracking studies (here's one) to see where people look first on websites. Try experimenting with things other than putting it in a list and putting it next to the Forum link.
The other side of the coin is that users don't always suggest the best solutions. I'll admit that there's a reason you're the website designer and they're not. Use your intuition, but don't let it blind you to alternatives that better fit how people other than yourself see your website. Probably the best thing you could do is watch a few people use your site who haven't seen it before. Watch what they do.
Or maybe try out Google Analytics's site overlay feature to see where most people click. Do they try multiple links before hitting the forum? How many leave the front page without downloading the app or going to the forums? All of this information is interesting and useful, whether or not it matches your perceptions.
It's evidence that you should consider changing your layout.
You know that they have trouble finding your download link, yet you're stubborn enough not to try to improve your site? That's pretty closed-minded.
I know that it's hard to think that other people could see things differently than you do. Maybe if you want people to download your software more than use your forums, you should separate the Downloads link and make it much larger and prevalent. You're lucky that they even ask where to download, because it's just as easy to close the window.
People naturally don't act logically. Don't ever expect them to or you will fail. It's easy to change a website, and difficult to change a large population. Pick your battles wisely.
Grandmothers are not users of military jets. One of the major goals of the Semantic Web is a decentralized and contextualized meaningful information store that experts in disparate fields can contribute to. Thus the intended users of the Semantic Web do include the very people being insulted.
Social software architects are not the sole intended users of social software. Air Force pilots are the intended users of jets. One has to define a user group before applying usability arguments.
A red flag is not the same as "always wrong".
Also, people do not have enough money, intelligence, knowledge, skill, and experience to spend time with a system that doesn't consider them as important. It's a lot easier and more efficient to spend money on making the Semantic Web easier to use than to spend a lot more money training people to use a faulty system.
From http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2004/03/do nt-blame-the-users
Maybe the Semantic Web should aim to be useful to people rather than require people to be useful to it. There has to be a better way than trying to educate droves of people to a problematic and vulnerable design.
Heh.
Expelled? Void your warranty? I doubt either of these are true. I don't really understand what you mean be getting "expelled" anyway. The GC homebrew community has always done everything it could to ensure that what we do is legal fair use of the hardware, whether we like the laws or not. To my knowledge Nintendo doesn't care (and otherwise wouldn't know) if I use an Action Replay.
The article is still incorrect in claiming that one needs a modchip. Modchips require opening your device and soldering in a new component in most cases. However, getting a GC to boot software only involves on one hand spoofing a network connection on an official Nintendo broadband adapter and playing an off-the-shelf game, or on the other hand buying an imported official Nintendo SD card adapter (which Nintendo itself sells in Japan) and an Action Replay (which of course is not licensed by Nintendo, but still does nothing damaging to the console). In either case, one can just pull out the game, the SD adapter, the broadband adapter, or whatever, and you still have a stock console, not a modchipped one.
Lemon Smackers! - It's like a punch in the mouth, with a lemon!
Cory Doctorow came to Olin College a couple of weeks ago. I wrote up a short summary of his talk. The take-home message I personally got from his talk was that the biggest danger comes when DRM creeps into hardware, preventing kids from being able to tinker with technology and learn about it when their minds are most open. Here is the abstract of his talk which was entitled "0wned -- how Hollywood plans on making the future subservient on the past" .
Episode I: Attack of the Clones?
You must have watched a different Star Wars than I did.
Except for trademark law. Just because someone stops using a trademark doesn't mean they give up the rights to it. At least for a long time.
Why assume that a kernel is written in C? I think it would be great if kernel writers could write portions of code in verilog for whatever reason and mix it in with the C.
Ah but you forget that they have a patent called "a process for getting around the RIM situation"
There are two steps described in the patent:
1. find the oldest net-based email-solution you can and use the source without any modifications whatsoever. (better yet use the binary if possible)
2. build a layer on top of it to interact with what is now a local app. It should be possible to use specific screen-grabbing, techniques, etc., that have been in existence for ages to avoid yet more patents.
Apparently yes.
My favorite is Moxy Früvous's "Entropy". I found that I knew all of the lyrics to it when I remembered it several years after I first heard it, and then I played it back in my head and thought about the lyrics and now I realize that I know things like that James Joule developed the Law of Conservation of Energy. (Boy I hope that's correct now that I said it!)
Of course it makes sense to trust an Anonymous Coward.
Firefox 1.5 (now in beta) will have auto-update.
f ox-auto-update/
Reference: http://www.techspot.com/staff/38/thoughts-on-fire
Of course they built an autonomous vehicle with Mac OS X! It has Automator! Just drag and drop the Chess AI engine onto a car and you should be good to go!
All this talk of coding, and they didn't even need to do any!
Silly slashdotters!
They don't own it, the copyright holders still do.
It's just that the copyright holders can't prevent them from doing anything at all with their works, including selling them on CDs (or as digital downloads) it would seem.
OK so I want this new system and this new game. Oh OK I just plug in this USB key, I see. Now how do I plug in my joystick? Oh, its a wireless joystick! Everything is wireless now? Cool! ... now where do I plug in this USB key?
And then break all the links! URLs weren't designed to handle translation over several differing namespaces.
One reason that people want Linux drivers uncompiled is so that they could compile it for a platform other than x86. While I'm not here to say that supporting so many platforms is the right solution from a Linux-on-the-desktop standpoint, it is the state of Linux these days, and opens up the ability to use a lot of older or obscure hardware that never could run Windows in the first place. It would probably work better if some sort of board could evaluate hardware drivers and give a rating ranging from Open Source to Unusable (although no hardware manufacturer would put the Unusable rating badge on their box!) Then Linux people could only buy hardware or complete systems that check out with a rating of Pre-Compiled Driver Available or Open Source or whatever level of support they desire. But it would need to be someone people would trust, like the FSF or someone. Although the FSF probably wouldn't make much of a distinction between pre-compiled and doesn't work.
The remix in question is by Mighty Dub Katz, a collaboration between Norman Cook (you probably know him as Fatboy Slim) and a certain G Money (who I haven't personally heard of).
And while I'm pretty darn sure that Steppenwolf is well-credited all over the releases, the artist is listed as Mighty Dub Katz for their version, so it might be more accurate to call it a sample-heavy cover rather than a remix.
It would be nicer if people would quote sources instead of looking at the random files they grab off of KaZaA or Grokster (does anyone actually use Grokster?)