I don't give 'em that much credit for savvy. Both parties in the states are still pimping for the "moral" voters, and support of a sure-to-die, nearly impossible to implement or pay for measure like this is a great way to get you name attached to a moral agenda without actually having to do anything.
Well, to a degree that is fair, with regards to the "person who knows how to push a button" because that doesn't account for the fact that he may find interface A to be obvious and B to be obscure. I'm not saying all button-based implementations are bad...Hell, I'm not making a case one way or the other...God knows my UI skills are nothing to brag about, so I have no room to talk.
My main point is that implementation aside, all interfaces have a learning curve, even the good ones. The goal is to make a UI that is both powerful for the power user, and yet simple enough for the most basic of users. Jobs' obsession with buttons is only really important in that he clearly believes the proliferation of controls to be a fatal flaw in a good UI; one thing that really is true about all buttons is that they're just on/off, and therefore limited in scope beside a slider or a wheel which has gradiations.
In the end, I think his obsession with simplicity has borne interesting results. The iPhone GUI, though possessed of many "buttons" is actually pretty slick, because all the buttons are always contextually relevant to the current screen. Whatever his quirk, he produces consistently solid results.
I have actually. I used to use it all the time...Then I actually saw it in action a few times, and it gave me a new appreciation of the "intuitiveness" of any interface.
I'm not sure where the nitpickers came from...In my world, "interface" means two parties. Makes sense, right? So I say, "Not really an intuitive interface" and people start jumping up and down saying, "Nuh-uh bitch! Babies are born knowing how to suckle!" which is like saying "All consumers of stereo equipment know how to push a button." It's completely correct, but it utterly (udderly?;) misses the point regarding the interface, the interaction between the two parties, which is the whole point of this thread.
My wife (and poor skinny baby) had crazy problems getting the interface to work, even though both sides are "designed" to work together. And that is a damn simple interface.
I call bullshit. You've got no credentials to put on the table in this forum, so the fallacious appeal to authority, is, as usual, trumped by the "appealtoactualsources"...Your claims that there are never problems with breastfeeding are trumped by tens of thousands of pages saying you're wrong.
Even if you have the experience you claim, which I find highly unlikely, the only other possibility is that you're one of those La Leche style breastfeeding nazi's who refuse to accept that there could ever be a problem with breastfeeding...Equally deluded on the other side of the fence.
Re:No, you just don't understand the subject
on
Steve Jobs Hates Buttons
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· Score: 2, Informative
No, in fact, you are missing the point. People have lots of reflexes. Having a reflex is not the same as being able to perform a task that depends on that reflex. They most certainly do not have a reflex for breastfeeding...They have a reflex for suckling, which is not the same thing at all.
As you are clearly speaking from zero experience, and just as clearly, have never breastfed anything, I'm going to treat your Wikipedia knowledge with the contempt it deserves, doubly so, because you didn't even bother to look up the correct article. Read down to the "Conditions that interfere with breastfeeding" section, then have a nice big glass of STFU on me.
I suggest you inform yourself before you talk to an actual girl.
Uh huh. Out of my wife and the 10 of her friends who've had kids in the last 2 years, about 7 of 'em had nursing problems. In the damn breastfeeding class I got guilt tripped into going to, they talked endlessly about how to "teach" a newborn the correct way to breastfeed. Searching for breastfeeding books on Amazon nets me 9,314 hits (4000 more hits than searching for "home theater"), which would seem to suggest that it's not quite as easy as you seem to think it is.
You can actually get a job as a certified "Lactation Consultant" and there are nursing degrees up to the goddamn Masters level that specialize in this stuff.
But really, I'm just full of it, and these are problems that no one has.
Yea, Luddite, that's me. Who else could be pissed off at a bad interface design? If I was really tech friendly, I'd just crack it open and mod the firmware to make the buttons do the things I think they ought to do. I certainly wouldn't complain.
Reminds me of an old Dilbert about programmers who design UI's: "I'll make the keyboard shortcut something easy to remember, like CRTL-SHIFT-DEL-F4, and if they don't like that they can just modify it in the code."
Having hard coded buttons is pointless; the controls should either be contextual or single function...Too many pieces of consumer electronic equipment have a dozen buttons that most people will never even use. Why are they there? Christ, with video equipment especially, 95% of the functionality could be pushed to a GUI on your screen, leaving only a handful of obvious needed buttons.
You'd think so, but ask any woman who has breastfed a newborn baby, and she'll tell you that you have to teach them to get it right...It's just that it's a...hem..."one button" interface, so it's pretty easy to learn.
Pretty much every interface is a learned interface, but the simpler the interface, the easier it is to learn.
No offense or anything, but every time I look at my home theater interface I want to go after it with a hammer. I work with complicated crap for a living, and I don't get a 1/10th of the performance I could get out of my system, because the interface is cluttered, busy, poorly labeled.
Buttons that have one label are used in conjunction with different modes to change properties not reflected in the labeling of the button...Basically, you have to memorize the manual because the interface is the opposite of intuitive.
It's that way with nearly all consumer electronics. There will be ten buttons but there will be a need for 30 buttons, to follow that button-centric design philosophy, but you can't put 30 buttons on it so the 10 buttons have to have 30 buttons worth of functionality, which means some buttons toggle the functionality of other buttons.
So, in a nutshell, though I am not completely fond of Apple's obsession with minimalist controls, they do an infinitely better job on their crappiest product than any piece of home A/V equipment I've ever seen. One look at a universal remote will tell you that.
Most people don't have that level of backup power...It's too expensive unless you're making obscene money. A hefty ups to get you through an outage of a few hours or less, and that's about all you've got.
That was the first thing to pop into my mind as well. Excellent script, excellent atmosphere, effective sound.
The real weakness of the FPS has been the fact that, until relatively recently, you've been constrained on the GUI. I mean, think of the possible actions in your average RPG or other seriously story driven game, and then think of the FPS "actions" which are as follows: run, shoot, jump, action.
Some games make it work; Undying was great, not because of any imaginative action system, but because the scripting was so good. Same with Deus Ex, though Deus Ex added more in the form of implants, which gave the illusion of having more choices in actions.
Now we're starting to get more serious FPS/Storytelling crossovers with games like Oblivion. I think as the tech matures, and people are really able to have it both ways (e.g. fast paced gameplay with a rich action set), that we'll start seeing storytelling catch up in more of the FPS-style games.
How do you figure? If the law states that candidates must have "professional experience and background in patent or trademark law" and the candidate lacks these (as she does), then they have grounds to open a civil action and attempt to prove it in court. This is right up with the EPA getting sued for not regulating carbon emissions
And the obvious redress would be to kick the unqualified candidate and replace her with a qualified candidate...One whose credentials include more than being J. Dennis Hastert's Counsel for Legal Policy.
Anywhere between 100,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles, depending on the quality of the flash media.
This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even.
Either way, I wouldn't want to keep anything unique on a laptop.
Eh. Depends on what passwords you set it to remember. There are a ton of BS passwords that I don't give a damn if someone steals.
Like anywhere else, you need to make a trade off between usability and security. Sure, it's not perfectly secure, but it's not worth it to me to have to remember the one off junk password I made up for NYTimes.com.
The real issue, as usual, is javascript. I use "NoScript" and am careful about which sites I allow to execute scripts at all. That will do more for your security than anything else.
I'm not disputing that C has its strengths. The problem is its weaknesses cause problems all the time. While ideally we would have super-tight, super-quick code everywhere to squeeze the most out of our hardware, you have to ask yourself whether it is or isn't worth it to be dealing with the inevitable buffer overflows.
There are places where performance demands C, where the inevitable buffer overflow patch cycle is an acceptable trade off for speed. But there are a lot of other places where it's not the best choice but it creeps in anyway, because people are wedded to the idea that one tool really is all you need.
You can't just say, "Only super-leet programmers should be allowed to program C, because we never make mistakes."
First off, it's not true. Even experienced programmers make mistakes, and I've had issues where the API I was writing to was incomplete, and my implementation and the other guys implementation were just different enough that, in the right circumstance, you could have a problem. That stuff happens. It's always going to happen.
Second, in my experience, no C programmer ever thinks that they make these mistakes, it's always crappy programmers from somewhere else. At some point, you have to own up to the fact that it's a problem of the language and that, as long as you use the language, you're going to have the problem.
Now, if we could find something that ran with the performance curve of well programmed and tuned C, but without C's baggage of errors, leaks, and overflows, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, that language does not exist, and hardware hasn't gotten to a level yet to make language performance irrelevant for consumer applications.
So we have to put up with C's issues. But if a new language is developed, or if processors keep increasing, the day will come when C will join Fortran as one of those languages that really only academics need to know, and it's because of crap like this.
Occasionally I have to go onsite for some kind of troubleshooting, and it's a huge pain in the ass to do that without a "Known good machine." And sometimes I like carrying it around, just to stave off computer withdrawal.
Other than that, though, I absolutely could. I suppose that makes me pretty hardcore on desktops, which shows my bias as far as this article is concerned.
Why the hell would you ever need 4 laptops? You'd need Popeye arms to carry more than two.
More than one or maybe two laptops makes no sense to me. They have a much higher failure rate than PCs, they cost more for less performance, and they're far more likely to be stolen or misplaced.
Laptops are just as durable as PCs...More durable, actually. If you set your laptop on a desk and never moved it, it'd last quite a long time, whereas if you lugged your pc with you everywhere, used it to hold elevator doors open, beat down muggers, etc, it would have a 15% per year failure rate too.
I think that's a bit premature. I see lots of nice new laptops coming through where I work, and I've never once felt the need to replace my desktop with one...It's a performance hit, it's a usability hit, it's a hit in screen size...The work I do doesn't benefit from working in a coffeeshop.
I have a laptop. I use it every few months. I'll get a new one when it dies, and I happen to notice because I need to use it. One of my desktops on the other hand, I'd notice if it died within hours, and I'd either fix it or replace it within a few days.
When laptop technology moves to the point where you only need to recharge 'em once a day, and they're the performance equal of a desktop with the same stats, I'll start thinking about scaling back my desktops.
On a related note, they announced today that they were going to stop banning lighters. Not that the shoe bomber guy used a lighter (he used matches which have never been banned), but still. Semtex is a plastic explosive, and not readily flammable. It used to be really popular with the terrorists, but they've taken steps to make it much more easily detectable.
The TSA guy was quoted in the article saying that "Taking lighters away is security theater." Nice to see someone in charge gets it, and, even more choice, in getting it, quotes Bruce Schneier's catch phrase.
I just stopped carrying luggage. Now when I travel, if I'm forced to fly commercial, I carry a backpack with what I need, and ship the rest.
Homeland security is a bad joke; they only prepare for the least likely attacks...I can't carry a soda on the plane because I may have 50,000 dollars worth of chemistry equipment shoved up my ass which would allow me to manufacture that soda into a bomb? Give me an effing break.
I have to x-ray my shoes because my shoes may explode? Do I look like James Bond? And, insult to injury, they only x-ray the damn things, so if, for example, they were semtex encased in a thin layer of rubber that I was going to detonate with junk stored in my laptop or cell phone, it still wouldn't be caught.
...You don't think that a modern cell or virus was the first life do you?
Obviously I don't know, but the cells and viruses that we see today are the product of an even longer evolutionary cycle than anything else on the planet, and it seems unlikely that something on the order of one of those came into existence without any simpler ancestor.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't give 'em that much credit for savvy. Both parties in the states are still pimping for the "moral" voters, and support of a sure-to-die, nearly impossible to implement or pay for measure like this is a great way to get you name attached to a moral agenda without actually having to do anything.
Well, to a degree that is fair, with regards to the "person who knows how to push a button" because that doesn't account for the fact that he may find interface A to be obvious and B to be obscure. I'm not saying all button-based implementations are bad...Hell, I'm not making a case one way or the other...God knows my UI skills are nothing to brag about, so I have no room to talk.
My main point is that implementation aside, all interfaces have a learning curve, even the good ones. The goal is to make a UI that is both powerful for the power user, and yet simple enough for the most basic of users. Jobs' obsession with buttons is only really important in that he clearly believes the proliferation of controls to be a fatal flaw in a good UI; one thing that really is true about all buttons is that they're just on/off, and therefore limited in scope beside a slider or a wheel which has gradiations.
In the end, I think his obsession with simplicity has borne interesting results. The iPhone GUI, though possessed of many "buttons" is actually pretty slick, because all the buttons are always contextually relevant to the current screen. Whatever his quirk, he produces consistently solid results.
I have actually. I used to use it all the time...Then I actually saw it in action a few times, and it gave me a new appreciation of the "intuitiveness" of any interface.
;) misses the point regarding the interface, the interaction between the two parties, which is the whole point of this thread.
I'm not sure where the nitpickers came from...In my world, "interface" means two parties. Makes sense, right? So I say, "Not really an intuitive interface" and people start jumping up and down saying, "Nuh-uh bitch! Babies are born knowing how to suckle!" which is like saying "All consumers of stereo equipment know how to push a button." It's completely correct, but it utterly (udderly?
My wife (and poor skinny baby) had crazy problems getting the interface to work, even though both sides are "designed" to work together. And that is a damn simple interface.
I call bullshit. You've got no credentials to put on the table in this forum, so the fallacious appeal to authority, is, as usual, trumped by the "appeal to actual sources"...Your claims that there are never problems with breastfeeding are trumped by tens of thousands of pages saying you're wrong.
Even if you have the experience you claim, which I find highly unlikely, the only other possibility is that you're one of those La Leche style breastfeeding nazi's who refuse to accept that there could ever be a problem with breastfeeding...Equally deluded on the other side of the fence.
No, in fact, you are missing the point. People have lots of reflexes. Having a reflex is not the same as being able to perform a task that depends on that reflex. They most certainly do not have a reflex for breastfeeding...They have a reflex for suckling, which is not the same thing at all.
As you are clearly speaking from zero experience, and just as clearly, have never breastfed anything, I'm going to treat your Wikipedia knowledge with the contempt it deserves, doubly so, because you didn't even bother to look up the correct article. Read down to the "Conditions that interfere with breastfeeding" section, then have a nice big glass of STFU on me.
I suggest you inform yourself before you talk to an actual girl.
Uh huh. Out of my wife and the 10 of her friends who've had kids in the last 2 years, about 7 of 'em had nursing problems. In the damn breastfeeding class I got guilt tripped into going to, they talked endlessly about how to "teach" a newborn the correct way to breastfeed. Searching for breastfeeding books on Amazon nets me 9,314 hits (4000 more hits than searching for "home theater"), which would seem to suggest that it's not quite as easy as you seem to think it is.
You can actually get a job as a certified "Lactation Consultant" and there are nursing degrees up to the goddamn Masters level that specialize in this stuff.
But really, I'm just full of it, and these are problems that no one has.
Yea, Luddite, that's me. Who else could be pissed off at a bad interface design? If I was really tech friendly, I'd just crack it open and mod the firmware to make the buttons do the things I think they ought to do. I certainly wouldn't complain.
Reminds me of an old Dilbert about programmers who design UI's: "I'll make the keyboard shortcut something easy to remember, like CRTL-SHIFT-DEL-F4, and if they don't like that they can just modify it in the code."
Having hard coded buttons is pointless; the controls should either be contextual or single function...Too many pieces of consumer electronic equipment have a dozen buttons that most people will never even use. Why are they there? Christ, with video equipment especially, 95% of the functionality could be pushed to a GUI on your screen, leaving only a handful of obvious needed buttons.
You'd think so, but ask any woman who has breastfed a newborn baby, and she'll tell you that you have to teach them to get it right...It's just that it's a...hem..."one button" interface, so it's pretty easy to learn.
Pretty much every interface is a learned interface, but the simpler the interface, the easier it is to learn.
No offense or anything, but every time I look at my home theater interface I want to go after it with a hammer. I work with complicated crap for a living, and I don't get a 1/10th of the performance I could get out of my system, because the interface is cluttered, busy, poorly labeled.
Buttons that have one label are used in conjunction with different modes to change properties not reflected in the labeling of the button...Basically, you have to memorize the manual because the interface is the opposite of intuitive.
It's that way with nearly all consumer electronics. There will be ten buttons but there will be a need for 30 buttons, to follow that button-centric design philosophy, but you can't put 30 buttons on it so the 10 buttons have to have 30 buttons worth of functionality, which means some buttons toggle the functionality of other buttons.
So, in a nutshell, though I am not completely fond of Apple's obsession with minimalist controls, they do an infinitely better job on their crappiest product than any piece of home A/V equipment I've ever seen. One look at a universal remote will tell you that.
Most people don't have that level of backup power...It's too expensive unless you're making obscene money. A hefty ups to get you through an outage of a few hours or less, and that's about all you've got.
That was the first thing to pop into my mind as well. Excellent script, excellent atmosphere, effective sound.
The real weakness of the FPS has been the fact that, until relatively recently, you've been constrained on the GUI. I mean, think of the possible actions in your average RPG or other seriously story driven game, and then think of the FPS "actions" which are as follows: run, shoot, jump, action.
Some games make it work; Undying was great, not because of any imaginative action system, but because the scripting was so good. Same with Deus Ex, though Deus Ex added more in the form of implants, which gave the illusion of having more choices in actions.
Now we're starting to get more serious FPS/Storytelling crossovers with games like Oblivion. I think as the tech matures, and people are really able to have it both ways (e.g. fast paced gameplay with a rich action set), that we'll start seeing storytelling catch up in more of the FPS-style games.
You clearly don't work for the US government. Politics have trumped competence for years now.
How do you figure? If the law states that candidates must have "professional experience and background in patent or trademark law" and the candidate lacks these (as she does), then they have grounds to open a civil action and attempt to prove it in court. This is right up with the EPA getting sued for not regulating carbon emissions
And the obvious redress would be to kick the unqualified candidate and replace her with a qualified candidate...One whose credentials include more than being J. Dennis Hastert's Counsel for Legal Policy.
from the preventing-fema-style-patent-problems dept.
It's about 10 years too late for that, at a bare minimum.
Still, anything to prevent another craptacular old-boy style crony appointee.
Anywhere between 100,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles, depending on the quality of the flash media.
This may or may not be a lot more than a conventional hard drive depending on abuse; in a perfect world, a conventional harddrive would last much longer, but in a laptop, with all the bouncing, the odds are closer to even.
Either way, I wouldn't want to keep anything unique on a laptop.
Eh. Depends on what passwords you set it to remember. There are a ton of BS passwords that I don't give a damn if someone steals.
Like anywhere else, you need to make a trade off between usability and security. Sure, it's not perfectly secure, but it's not worth it to me to have to remember the one off junk password I made up for NYTimes.com.
The real issue, as usual, is javascript. I use "NoScript" and am careful about which sites I allow to execute scripts at all. That will do more for your security than anything else.
I'm not disputing that C has its strengths. The problem is its weaknesses cause problems all the time. While ideally we would have super-tight, super-quick code everywhere to squeeze the most out of our hardware, you have to ask yourself whether it is or isn't worth it to be dealing with the inevitable buffer overflows.
There are places where performance demands C, where the inevitable buffer overflow patch cycle is an acceptable trade off for speed. But there are a lot of other places where it's not the best choice but it creeps in anyway, because people are wedded to the idea that one tool really is all you need.
You can't just say, "Only super-leet programmers should be allowed to program C, because we never make mistakes."
First off, it's not true. Even experienced programmers make mistakes, and I've had issues where the API I was writing to was incomplete, and my implementation and the other guys implementation were just different enough that, in the right circumstance, you could have a problem. That stuff happens. It's always going to happen.
Second, in my experience, no C programmer ever thinks that they make these mistakes, it's always crappy programmers from somewhere else. At some point, you have to own up to the fact that it's a problem of the language and that, as long as you use the language, you're going to have the problem.
Now, if we could find something that ran with the performance curve of well programmed and tuned C, but without C's baggage of errors, leaks, and overflows, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, that language does not exist, and hardware hasn't gotten to a level yet to make language performance irrelevant for consumer applications.
So we have to put up with C's issues. But if a new language is developed, or if processors keep increasing, the day will come when C will join Fortran as one of those languages that really only academics need to know, and it's because of crap like this.
Occasionally I have to go onsite for some kind of troubleshooting, and it's a huge pain in the ass to do that without a "Known good machine." And sometimes I like carrying it around, just to stave off computer withdrawal.
Other than that, though, I absolutely could. I suppose that makes me pretty hardcore on desktops, which shows my bias as far as this article is concerned.
Why the hell would you ever need 4 laptops? You'd need Popeye arms to carry more than two.
More than one or maybe two laptops makes no sense to me. They have a much higher failure rate than PCs, they cost more for less performance, and they're far more likely to be stolen or misplaced.
Laptops are just as durable as PCs...More durable, actually. If you set your laptop on a desk and never moved it, it'd last quite a long time, whereas if you lugged your pc with you everywhere, used it to hold elevator doors open, beat down muggers, etc, it would have a 15% per year failure rate too.
I think that's a bit premature. I see lots of nice new laptops coming through where I work, and I've never once felt the need to replace my desktop with one...It's a performance hit, it's a usability hit, it's a hit in screen size...The work I do doesn't benefit from working in a coffeeshop.
I have a laptop. I use it every few months. I'll get a new one when it dies, and I happen to notice because I need to use it. One of my desktops on the other hand, I'd notice if it died within hours, and I'd either fix it or replace it within a few days.
When laptop technology moves to the point where you only need to recharge 'em once a day, and they're the performance equal of a desktop with the same stats, I'll start thinking about scaling back my desktops.
On a related note, they announced today that they were going to stop banning lighters. Not that the shoe bomber guy used a lighter (he used matches which have never been banned), but still. Semtex is a plastic explosive, and not readily flammable. It used to be really popular with the terrorists, but they've taken steps to make it much more easily detectable.
The TSA guy was quoted in the article saying that "Taking lighters away is security theater." Nice to see someone in charge gets it, and, even more choice, in getting it, quotes Bruce Schneier's catch phrase.
I just stopped carrying luggage. Now when I travel, if I'm forced to fly commercial, I carry a backpack with what I need, and ship the rest.
Homeland security is a bad joke; they only prepare for the least likely attacks...I can't carry a soda on the plane because I may have 50,000 dollars worth of chemistry equipment shoved up my ass which would allow me to manufacture that soda into a bomb? Give me an effing break.
I have to x-ray my shoes because my shoes may explode? Do I look like James Bond? And, insult to injury, they only x-ray the damn things, so if, for example, they were semtex encased in a thin layer of rubber that I was going to detonate with junk stored in my laptop or cell phone, it still wouldn't be caught.
...You don't think that a modern cell or virus was the first life do you?
Obviously I don't know, but the cells and viruses that we see today are the product of an even longer evolutionary cycle than anything else on the planet, and it seems unlikely that something on the order of one of those came into existence without any simpler ancestor.