If you're asking for people to donate their time or skilled labor why wouldn't you expect them to spend those limited resources on causes they liked or agreed with? Its not bigotry to choose not to volunteer to help someone or to choose to spend your free time and energy on things that interest and excite you rather than in support of causes or organizations you disagree with.
I agree with you generally. Good user interface design requires the designer to make choices and in some way limit the user from some choices that are trivial if you want to have any hope of ending up with a decent result. Otherwise you end up with one of those configuration UIs with 57 little checkboxes for controlling every little bit of the app because no one could bother to make a choice during design time.
However, given the user reaction it appears, that at least for a vocal portion of the user base, that this was the wrong decision to make. I think the problem rather than developer arrogance is lack of proper usability testing and user feedback or an unwillingness to listen to test results and feedback. How hard can it be to put this in front of a couple of typical users and get their reactions? I think any effort put into usability testing this feature up-front would have identified the problem. After that, all the team needs to do is listen and respond to the feedback.
You're missing the point altogether behind usability. An interface should be intuitive such that someone who has never worked with a computer in their life can walk up and understand what they're doing after a limited amount of time.
While this may be appropriate for a web-site where people will go, do something and maybe come back to at a later point ease-of-first-use isn't always appropriate. In the case of vi, or anytime when you're designing a tool for advanced work in a particular field, you need to look at designing more of an expert user interface. Just like the simple designs the problem is in identifying your users, where they are coming from and what they want to accomplish.
For a powerful text editor you have a system where users may live in the app for most of their productive time. You want to design that more like a space with a lot of room for customization and expansion and, since you know the users will be advanced, fairly powerful features. You can trade off some initial usability for flexibility and power.
Word is the right UI for my mom to write a letter and she'd be lost in vi. Vi is the right tool for my programmer friends to muck about with their work and they'd be stifled and unproductive in Word. Not saying vi can't be improved (and haven't used it recently enough to remember any big wins or flaws) but just that designing for 1st use has its place.
You usually want to reserve designs that require a learning curve for situations where you can be sure that clear and consistent training will be required or at least easily available for those that need it. No one designs in-flight control systems for dummies because pilots are required/want (out of a fear of crashing and dieing) to be trained on how to use the system. Similarly, if you find Photoshop too challenging but think you can make money with it you can buy a book or take a training course.
No one makes money from learning how to use their browser better and they don't really gain an advantage that's meaningful for them by learning to touch-type rather than hunt and peck if all they do is type emails to friends/family. The reality is that none of these things are important enough for people to feel like investing in becoming experts nor should they be. As a designer, you need to think about how your app fits into the context of someone's life. For things where people are unlikely to invest you need to design for experiences that can be easily and quickly (intuitive's a dangerous word) understood. If you design an expert interface for those scenarios your users will just go to a competitor product who designs to better fit into their life.
While you are somewhat right that this minimizes expert users those users either don't exist in sufficient numbers to be worth designing for, can be addressed by using design techniques like progressive disclosure where you can drill down into advanced features or stay at the surface, or can be left to a competitor (LaTeX as a text editor for academic publications is a great example for that) willing to take on the challenge and able to operate in the smaller market of expert users.
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about Beauty, I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Buckminster Fuller
This is one of my favorite quotes about design because it gets to the essential point (and the one you're making as well). Good design is about solving problems and truly good design is beautiful because, as any developer who's ever referred to a piece of code as "elegant" knows, there's a beauty in optimal solutions.
The quintessential response of a liberal to anything they don't agree with: Argument from authority - the weakest of the arguments, and Ad Hominem - 'a genetic fallacy and red herring, and is most often (but not always) an appeal to emotion' (Wikipedia).
You're arguing for creationism and slamming your opponents claiming that they are using an argument from authority...
Castrate yourself before you can breed and spread the dumb any further.
Nine eleven nine eleven, nine eleven nine eleven; nine eleven nine eleven nine eleven. Nine eleven? Nine...eleven, nine eleven. Nine eleven, "Nine eleven! Nine eleven nine eleven (nine eleven) nine eleven."
Nine eleven: nine eleven nine eleven nine eleven, nine eleven! Nine elven nine eleven. Nine elven...
nine (eleven) {
nine eleven;
nine eleven;
nine eleven (nine eleven) {
nine eleven;
}
nine eleven {
nine;
eleven
nine eleven;
}
nine eleven; }
Nine eleven nine eleven, nine eleven.//Nine eleven
Hello Mayor Giuliani. Didn't figure you for a slashdot poster but welcome!
It's more like: You bought a car, you can clearly modify it so it can fly, but every time you take to the mechanic to get the radio fixed they deliberately take off all the stuff you added to make it fly because "they don't support flying". Even though you're fully aware they don't support flying, you just want it to because it's your damn car!
You've heard of this mechanics reputation. In fact, they've told you about this, recommended you not mod your car because of it, and told you that anytime you bring a modded car to them they'll remove it. Your friends have had their mods removed in older model cars and you read all over the web that this mechanic removes custom car mods.
Yet you still buy cars from the mechanic, mod them, and take them back to for repairs. And complain everytime your mods are removed.
Obviously the problem is with the mechanic.
I don't care about modding my iPhone. I don't like AT&T so I just bought another phone that works for me. At this point in time, anyone (but especially Slashdot readers) knows that Apple locks down hardware and isn't friendly to modders. If this works for you, buy a mac. If it doesn't, don't.
I've sat in a fair number of usability studies now and I think "voodoo" is a great description of this. They've ritualised the computing experience to a series of exact definable steps because they're completely afraid of failure or the consequences of a bad choice.
When I (and probably most people here) sat down in front of a computer for the first time I started clicking on everything. I explored. In part this was because I started at an age where that's a natural behavior but in part its also because I didn't really think I could do anything so bad it wasn't fixable. I think many users live in fear of what they can do to or with a computer. For them, having a prescriptive guide that always works is a way of mitigating risk.
Documentation helps here and users will look for help if its available and friendly (though the definition of "friendly" may be several levels lower than we typically peg it). I think what really helps voodoo users is to create an inviting experience that encourages and rewards exploration. Progressive disclosure of new features can help here as can being really clear about the consequences of actions.
The idiot doesn't even know that ID holds to old earth dates, and to darwinian evolution.
This poster speaks the truth. And enough of this knocking on the "flat earth" theory. Everyone knows that those people accept a slight curvature to account for the horizon line.
You know, for years I've been listening to people complain that the Free Software and Open Source communities don't ever invent anything on their own. That they simply re-implement other peoples' ideas. I think it's kind of ironic that the number one suggestion for the future of the GIMP is that it be changed such that it simply re-implements other peoples' ideas.
I once invented an alarm clock that woke you up by punching you in the balls. Completely new, never seen idea. For some reason it never took off.
I'm a committed photoshop user but I've tried GIMP from time to time over the years. The UI was one of my biggest complaints and I'm glad to see at least some movement towards fixing it. Some of the stuff on the blog looks good for a 1st round of design and I'm glad to see them adopt more familiar UI conventions. One of the things that make a good design is that it plays off of familiar concepts and metaphors so you can re-use knowledge you already have. You can choose to throw out that free learning people bring to your product but you really only should do that when your "improvements" have repeatedly tested better than a standard UI. There's a high bar for trying something different.
One of the things you'll have to learn in life is that people who disagree with you sometimes do it for reasons other than stupidity, ignorance, or inferiority.
As for liberty and justice being subjective you just need to ask yourself "who's liberties?" "justice for whom?" before you get into balancing individual liberties vs. group liberties. You also have loads of people arguing that different things constitute "justice", purely criminal concepts, moral, economic and social justice. Different people believe that justice and liberty mean different things. Its why we have different political parties and social movements. If liberty and justice were so easy to define we'd all get on board to support "liberty & justice" and ostracize anyone who wasn't for them.
The idea that liberty and justice exist as universally understood objective things is naive and an indicator of an incurious mind who looks to simplify every issue into black and white, right and wrong regardless of what the reality may be.
"I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?" - Barry Goldwater
And I don't know how you just assume that your particular chosen quote has any "inherent value". From my perspective, it just is a justification for extremism. A suicide bomber would agree with that sentiment.
Liberty and justice are highly subjective concepts. The problem with a lot of the RMS zealots is that they haven't figured that out yet.
Oh come now, so the President doesn't make or break science policy? Ever heard of the National Science Foundation? They do a lot of lobbying in congress for science. I think the Pres. has a lot of influence over congress, don't you?
Here are some of the departments under the executive branch that might be influenced by a President that wanted to make or break science policy (from http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/fedgov.html).
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Farm Service Agency Forest Service National Agricultural Library Natural Resources Conservation Service Rural Development National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Ocean Service National Technical Information Service (NTIS) National Telecommunications and Information Administration National Weather Service Patent and Trademark Office Databases Department of Defense (DOD) Department of Education Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Institute of Education Sciences (IES) National Library of Education (NLE) Department of Energy (DOE) Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Los Alamos National Laboratory Office of Health, Safety and Security Office of Science Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Library of Medicine (NLM) Bureau of Land Management Bureau of Reclamation Fish and Wildlife Service Minerals Management Service National Park Service (NPS) Office of Surface Mining United States Geological Survey (USGS) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
National Science Foundation (NSF) - LOL!!!!!!
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) Smithsonian Institution (SI)
So, if I'm catching this right, your argument is "Screw your decades of data collected at a global scale. Lemme open the window and I'll tell you something about climate"
From the point of view of humanity as a whole, and considering how many people die or are born each day, I'm not sure a murder matters that much compared to the problems caused to so many people by closed source software...
And this is why, when it comes to questions of morality or immorality, the free software movement is the LAST place you should be looking. I'm sorry, but there's nothing that I can do with software licensing that compares to the murder of another human being. At worst, you're inconvenienced by closed source software and have to build or commission a free alternative. Get some perspective.
You have a very good point and while there's probably not much point arguing about if Skype or Pidgin better encapsulates VOIP it seems pretty clear that calling image editing software something that calls to mind either a cruel name used to torment the physically handicapped or a sex-slave in Pulp Fiction is a terrible idea. It's really embarrassing that they've let it linger on this long. My only fear is that it could end up worse.
It's also good enough to fly the plane into the nearest skyscraper, once you disable/disrupt/jam/take over the legitimate transmitter and know the protocol and encryption keys.
I can't see how changing the attack scenario from "lets get 5 guys and some box cutters to bust down the door and grab the steering wheel" to "Lets get a highly technical person to crack the encryption to take over the automatic pilot" could be seen as anything but successful security. You've massively increased the cost of an attack to the point where it's probably not worth it compared to other types of high-profile attacks.
Language changes over time and the meaning of the word "hacker" is now commonly understood to mean what geeks would term "cracker". Similarly, "gay" doesn't just mean happy and when I call someone a "bastard" I don't mean that they're the product of unmarried parents. You're fighting a battle that you lost at least 10 years ago.
Limiting your users to the point that they avoid you like the plague so that the IT guy can relax and play golf makes as much sense as telling them to shit in their trashcan so the janitor can go fishing. Run the business to run the business, not make the support staff's lives easier.
Let's apply Occam's Razor here. Did Maynor fail to demo a hijack -- despite the fact that it would restore at least some his credibility -- because he thought it was just as convincing to piece together circumstantial evidence from Apple press releases? Or did he fail to demo a hijack because he can't? Are we supposed to believe that after all this time and humiliation, Maynor really doesn't "feel the need" to back up his inflammatory words? I don't buy it, and I don't see how any rational observer can.
This is really the key point. To believe Maynor at this point you need to believe that someone who is concerned about repairing a tarnished reputation is so worried about people figuring out how he could exploit an already patched vulnerability that he decides to only show the crash rather than the take-over exploit. Maynor has a bone to pick with Apple/Apple users and managed to find a bug he couldn't find last year with the help of Apple's patch notes.
If you need a security consultant to analyze your patch notes and find known vulnerabilities he's your man. Otherwise, he's a joke.
Actually, what I'm saying is that whether a file is DRM'd or not is a point of purchase decision that has effects at some later time and expecting users to make good decisions in that situation is kinda silly.
Here's how it plays out. I'm on the iTunes music store but I don't own an iPod. I buy "oh, the delicious pain of it all" by that hot indie band The-Flavor-of-the-Month, a non-DRM'd track from an indie label. I also buy the latest Metallica song "Fire, BAD!!!", a DRM'd song from a major label. I put both of them in my playlist and synch to my player. At this point only the indie song will play on my non-Apple player. To understand what went wrong I need to have some way to tell DRM'd tracks from non-DRM'd tracks and enough conceptual knowledge of what DRM is to know why that's the reason I can't hear my song.
This is not a "consumers are dumb" argument. I think it's unreasonable to expect users to understand those issues and unrealistic to expect the iTunes UI to handle the user education piece needed to close the gap (though they could distinguish visually between DRM and non-DRM tracks). Slashdot is not average by any sense of the word. Normal people just don't know/care about these issues.
Oh, but wait then there will be songs they can play on their (non-iPod) player from iTunes but others that they want to buy but cannot play because they are DRMed. Now they will start complaining to Apple with the argument "how come I can get this song without DRM but not this one, please make it not have DRM".
I think this is exactly the user confusion the GP was talking about. You'd not only need to identify songs at purchase time (and explain what DRM was/why I'd want it or not) but in iTunes. It's unclear whether or not you'd need to expose this info in portable players or other music playing software but it's possible you would. Just taking purchase on the iTunes store and playing in iTunes the user has to:
1)identify that your DRM'd song is different from a non-DRM'd song 2)understand the differences and impliations of picking a DRM'd song over an alternative 3)be able to identify DRM'd and non-DRM'd songs in iTunes when making playlists
Without doing that users will be put in the situation you described -- they'll get another player and half their songs won't play. How is that not confusing? Your argument seems to be that because the confusion would lead to a state you find politically attractive (users protest to apple) then it's not confusing. Huh?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're asking for people to donate their time or skilled labor why wouldn't you expect them to spend those limited resources on causes they liked or agreed with? Its not bigotry to choose not to volunteer to help someone or to choose to spend your free time and energy on things that interest and excite you rather than in support of causes or organizations you disagree with.
I agree with you generally. Good user interface design requires the designer to make choices and in some way limit the user from some choices that are trivial if you want to have any hope of ending up with a decent result. Otherwise you end up with one of those configuration UIs with 57 little checkboxes for controlling every little bit of the app because no one could bother to make a choice during design time.
However, given the user reaction it appears, that at least for a vocal portion of the user base, that this was the wrong decision to make. I think the problem rather than developer arrogance is lack of proper usability testing and user feedback or an unwillingness to listen to test results and feedback. How hard can it be to put this in front of a couple of typical users and get their reactions? I think any effort put into usability testing this feature up-front would have identified the problem. After that, all the team needs to do is listen and respond to the feedback.
While this may be appropriate for a web-site where people will go, do something and maybe come back to at a later point ease-of-first-use isn't always appropriate. In the case of vi, or anytime when you're designing a tool for advanced work in a particular field, you need to look at designing more of an expert user interface. Just like the simple designs the problem is in identifying your users, where they are coming from and what they want to accomplish.
For a powerful text editor you have a system where users may live in the app for most of their productive time. You want to design that more like a space with a lot of room for customization and expansion and, since you know the users will be advanced, fairly powerful features. You can trade off some initial usability for flexibility and power.
Word is the right UI for my mom to write a letter and she'd be lost in vi. Vi is the right tool for my programmer friends to muck about with their work and they'd be stifled and unproductive in Word. Not saying vi can't be improved (and haven't used it recently enough to remember any big wins or flaws) but just that designing for 1st use has its place.
You usually want to reserve designs that require a learning curve for situations where you can be sure that clear and consistent training will be required or at least easily available for those that need it. No one designs in-flight control systems for dummies because pilots are required/want (out of a fear of crashing and dieing) to be trained on how to use the system. Similarly, if you find Photoshop too challenging but think you can make money with it you can buy a book or take a training course.
No one makes money from learning how to use their browser better and they don't really gain an advantage that's meaningful for them by learning to touch-type rather than hunt and peck if all they do is type emails to friends/family. The reality is that none of these things are important enough for people to feel like investing in becoming experts nor should they be. As a designer, you need to think about how your app fits into the context of someone's life. For things where people are unlikely to invest you need to design for experiences that can be easily and quickly (intuitive's a dangerous word) understood. If you design an expert interface for those scenarios your users will just go to a competitor product who designs to better fit into their life.
While you are somewhat right that this minimizes expert users those users either don't exist in sufficient numbers to be worth designing for, can be addressed by using design techniques like progressive disclosure where you can drill down into advanced features or stay at the surface, or can be left to a competitor (LaTeX as a text editor for academic publications is a great example for that) willing to take on the challenge and able to operate in the smaller market of expert users.
This is one of my favorite quotes about design because it gets to the essential point (and the one you're making as well). Good design is about solving problems and truly good design is beautiful because, as any developer who's ever referred to a piece of code as "elegant" knows, there's a beauty in optimal solutions.
You're arguing for creationism and slamming your opponents claiming that they are using an argument from authority...
Castrate yourself before you can breed and spread the dumb any further.
Hello Mayor Giuliani. Didn't figure you for a slashdot poster but welcome!
You've heard of this mechanics reputation. In fact, they've told you about this, recommended you not mod your car because of it, and told you that anytime you bring a modded car to them they'll remove it. Your friends have had their mods removed in older model cars and you read all over the web that this mechanic removes custom car mods.
Yet you still buy cars from the mechanic, mod them, and take them back to for repairs. And complain everytime your mods are removed.
Obviously the problem is with the mechanic.
I don't care about modding my iPhone. I don't like AT&T so I just bought another phone that works for me. At this point in time, anyone (but especially Slashdot readers) knows that Apple locks down hardware and isn't friendly to modders. If this works for you, buy a mac. If it doesn't, don't.
I've sat in a fair number of usability studies now and I think "voodoo" is a great description of this. They've ritualised the computing experience to a series of exact definable steps because they're completely afraid of failure or the consequences of a bad choice.
When I (and probably most people here) sat down in front of a computer for the first time I started clicking on everything. I explored. In part this was because I started at an age where that's a natural behavior but in part its also because I didn't really think I could do anything so bad it wasn't fixable. I think many users live in fear of what they can do to or with a computer. For them, having a prescriptive guide that always works is a way of mitigating risk.
Documentation helps here and users will look for help if its available and friendly (though the definition of "friendly" may be several levels lower than we typically peg it). I think what really helps voodoo users is to create an inviting experience that encourages and rewards exploration. Progressive disclosure of new features can help here as can being really clear about the consequences of actions.
Oh, and Hi Tom!
This poster speaks the truth. And enough of this knocking on the "flat earth" theory. Everyone knows that those people accept a slight curvature to account for the horizon line.
WHY WON'T YOU TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!!!!1!!!!
I once invented an alarm clock that woke you up by punching you in the balls. Completely new, never seen idea. For some reason it never took off.
I'm a committed photoshop user but I've tried GIMP from time to time over the years. The UI was one of my biggest complaints and I'm glad to see at least some movement towards fixing it. Some of the stuff on the blog looks good for a 1st round of design and I'm glad to see them adopt more familiar UI conventions. One of the things that make a good design is that it plays off of familiar concepts and metaphors so you can re-use knowledge you already have. You can choose to throw out that free learning people bring to your product but you really only should do that when your "improvements" have repeatedly tested better than a standard UI. There's a high bar for trying something different.
One of the things you'll have to learn in life is that people who disagree with you sometimes do it for reasons other than stupidity, ignorance, or inferiority.
As for liberty and justice being subjective you just need to ask yourself "who's liberties?" "justice for whom?" before you get into balancing individual liberties vs. group liberties. You also have loads of people arguing that different things constitute "justice", purely criminal concepts, moral, economic and social justice. Different people believe that justice and liberty mean different things. Its why we have different political parties and social movements. If liberty and justice were so easy to define we'd all get on board to support "liberty & justice" and ostracize anyone who wasn't for them.
The idea that liberty and justice exist as universally understood objective things is naive and an indicator of an incurious mind who looks to simplify every issue into black and white, right and wrong regardless of what the reality may be.
Sound familiar?
"I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?" - Barry Goldwater
And I don't know how you just assume that your particular chosen quote has any "inherent value". From my perspective, it just is a justification for extremism. A suicide bomber would agree with that sentiment.
Liberty and justice are highly subjective concepts. The problem with a lot of the RMS zealots is that they haven't figured that out yet.
Here are some of the departments under the executive branch that might be influenced by a President that wanted to make or break science policy (from http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/fedgov.html).
Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Agricultural Research Service
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
Farm Service Agency
Forest Service
National Agricultural Library
Natural Resources Conservation Service
Rural Development
National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)
National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
National Ocean Service
National Technical Information Service (NTIS)
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
National Weather Service
Patent and Trademark Office Databases
Department of Defense (DOD)
Department of Education
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)
Institute of Education Sciences (IES)
National Library of Education (NLE)
Department of Energy (DOE)
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Office of Health, Safety and Security
Office of Science
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Bureau of Land Management
Bureau of Reclamation
Fish and Wildlife Service
Minerals Management Service
National Park Service (NPS)
Office of Surface Mining
United States Geological Survey (USGS)
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
National Science Foundation (NSF) - LOL!!!!!!
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC)
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB)
Smithsonian Institution (SI)
So, if I'm catching this right, your argument is "Screw your decades of data collected at a global scale. Lemme open the window and I'll tell you something about climate"
Dumbass
Maybe if you stopped assuming that people who didn't agree with you weren't dumb you'd have more people agreeing with you.
And this is why, when it comes to questions of morality or immorality, the free software movement is the LAST place you should be looking. I'm sorry, but there's nothing that I can do with software licensing that compares to the murder of another human being. At worst, you're inconvenienced by closed source software and have to build or commission a free alternative. Get some perspective.
You have a very good point and while there's probably not much point arguing about if Skype or Pidgin better encapsulates VOIP it seems pretty clear that calling image editing software something that calls to mind either a cruel name used to torment the physically handicapped or a sex-slave in Pulp Fiction is a terrible idea. It's really embarrassing that they've let it linger on this long. My only fear is that it could end up worse.
Language changes over time and the meaning of the word "hacker" is now commonly understood to mean what geeks would term "cracker". Similarly, "gay" doesn't just mean happy and when I call someone a "bastard" I don't mean that they're the product of unmarried parents. You're fighting a battle that you lost at least 10 years ago.
Limiting your users to the point that they avoid you like the plague so that the IT guy can relax and play golf makes as much sense as telling them to shit in their trashcan so the janitor can go fishing. Run the business to run the business, not make the support staff's lives easier.
This is really the key point. To believe Maynor at this point you need to believe that someone who is concerned about repairing a tarnished reputation is so worried about people figuring out how he could exploit an already patched vulnerability that he decides to only show the crash rather than the take-over exploit. Maynor has a bone to pick with Apple/Apple users and managed to find a bug he couldn't find last year with the help of Apple's patch notes.
If you need a security consultant to analyze your patch notes and find known vulnerabilities he's your man. Otherwise, he's a joke.
Actually, what I'm saying is that whether a file is DRM'd or not is a point of purchase decision that has effects at some later time and expecting users to make good decisions in that situation is kinda silly.
Here's how it plays out. I'm on the iTunes music store but I don't own an iPod. I buy "oh, the delicious pain of it all" by that hot indie band The-Flavor-of-the-Month, a non-DRM'd track from an indie label. I also buy the latest Metallica song "Fire, BAD!!!", a DRM'd song from a major label. I put both of them in my playlist and synch to my player. At this point only the indie song will play on my non-Apple player. To understand what went wrong I need to have some way to tell DRM'd tracks from non-DRM'd tracks and enough conceptual knowledge of what DRM is to know why that's the reason I can't hear my song.
This is not a "consumers are dumb" argument. I think it's unreasonable to expect users to understand those issues and unrealistic to expect the iTunes UI to handle the user education piece needed to close the gap (though they could distinguish visually between DRM and non-DRM tracks). Slashdot is not average by any sense of the word. Normal people just don't know/care about these issues.
I think this is exactly the user confusion the GP was talking about. You'd not only need to identify songs at purchase time (and explain what DRM was/why I'd want it or not) but in iTunes. It's unclear whether or not you'd need to expose this info in portable players or other music playing software but it's possible you would. Just taking purchase on the iTunes store and playing in iTunes the user has to:
1)identify that your DRM'd song is different from a non-DRM'd song
2)understand the differences and impliations of picking a DRM'd song over an alternative
3)be able to identify DRM'd and non-DRM'd songs in iTunes when making playlists
Without doing that users will be put in the situation you described -- they'll get another player and half their songs won't play. How is that not confusing? Your argument seems to be that because the confusion would lead to a state you find politically attractive (users protest to apple) then it's not confusing. Huh?
Judy Miller had to resign, under pressure if you watched the recent episodes of Frontline, from the NYT but Wikipedia thinks this situation (with their admin, not Judy Miller) is OK. Wikipedia is a lot worse than the NYT in this case.