...you're either with us or you're against us. Remember when W. said that for the very first time...
"You're either with us or you're against us" is a cliche that predates Bush by at least 50 years, and a concept that probably predates written history.
A major, if not *the* major, reason to buy any product associated with Apple is the UI.
I've got a Moto V600. The "smart" buttons on it can change the vibrate/volume setting when you put the phone in your pocket. Why in God's name you would want to raise the volume on a flip phone when it's closed?!
HCI's not in the Stone Age; it's in the Industrial Age.
There has been *no* innovative research done in HCI since the Mac UI guidelines.
Guys like Tognazzini and this guy just like to make laundry lists of their complaints and harp on Fitt's "law." (I guess "law" sound better than "tautology.")
My basic complaint boils down to this:
These guys think like industrial era efficiency experts. Now, if people who used computers came in at 9 every day and left at 5 and did essentially the same set of tasks for months on end, many of their assumptions would hold water.
It would make sense to have them use corners of the screen. It would make sense to memorize arcane "gestures."
But most people I know face a completely different setup:
Someone else sets up their computer or they often have to use other people's computers. They often have to do other people's jobs, or they are changing jobs quite rapidly.
Moreover, they spend an extraordinary amount of time copying and pasting (or retyping) data from one app to another. When something changes, they have to update it in multiple places.
My analysis is simple: our applications and HCI people are too focused on visual representations of data. So most of what HCI does is nothing more than put an odometer on the mouse.
We need to focus on the logic of the data itself (data fundamentals!) and the way the people learn interfaces.
As it is, the way we're using computers is directly analagous to the way we use paper. That doesn't exploit a fraction of the power mathematics and machines could give us.
Back just as the dotcom bubble was about to burst, myself and another guy had a Great Idea. (And a hell of a sense of timing...) We were starting a dotcom, totally unrelated to porn, but my partner had an excellent point: (paraphrased)
"If we're going to get the e-commerce side of this working, we need to look at porn sites. Most sites on the Web just throw content up there for free and hope they'll get bought out. Porn sites actually do what real businesses do: they market and they collect money."
Come to think of it, considering we really had researched the market, we should have known the bubble was about to burst. C'est la vie.
Regarding potential for being a RDBMS, I would vote for emacs.
Come to think of it, I wrote an implementation of Chris Date's A language in Scheme. Never tried running it under emacs, but that would, techinically, be a *true* RDBMS...
Why on earth should I have to write extra code to check each input field, when I should just be able to send the results to the DB, and return the error message to the client if it fails?
In theory that should work perfectly, but it would require that the DBMS be given enough knowledge of the client that it can formulate an intelligent error message. Oh, and there's the occasional problem of the user speaking a language other than English...
(It's not, IMHO, an insurmountable problem but it would require some way of fully integrating clients with DBMSs to a level where the DBMS stores information on the forms used by client applications. I seriously doubt SQL DBMSs could ever handle this.)
In practice, I've never seen a DBMS that returns error messages that are useful to anyone but a DBA. So it makes sense for clients to at least check for the common errors.
Out of interest, would you name some better IDEs..?
By definition, any "integrated" development environment sucks at least as much as emacs.
It doesn't have to be CLI, but I want an environment where I can swap different tools in. I'll keep struggling along with Unix since that comes closest.
Sorry, you need to turn in your "hardened conservative capitalist" card.
Greed is good, bending or breaking the rules is fine for enough profit, and all that matters is the bottom line.
Of course, I do have a nice, shiney "intelligent, reasonable capitalist" card here for you.
How about this: we'll hold on to our "hardened conservative capitalist" cards and you can hold on to your "blinkered liberal twit" card. Now everyone's happy!
There is nothing about Moz Firebird that's going to make this less of an issue. The fact is that the typical user is going to see http://www.amazon.com@/fakepath/usualAmazoncrap:ru ssianmafia.ru and think it's an Amazon URL.
Quick check: how many of you bought something online and actually checked the lock icon? While shopping during Christmas? When you were under pressure to get something done?
This is a human interface architecture issue, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with IE, nothing to do with SSL or any TLAs and everything to do with the fact that URLs and the web were not designed with security and human interface in mind.
To fix this, we need to transition to a standard way of verifying security. A quick fix to this problem would be to redesign the address bar to actually show the protocol and the host, something along the lines of:
The people who sue you are the ones who's children have birth defects.
People sue you when their dumbass kids eat lead paint chips or because the air conditioner is moldy. The hell with the lawyers, I'm sick of living in the goddamned 19th century.
Pointing out that it was only 44 people is kindof silly. So what.
Because it's 44 vs. thousands dead from asphyxiation due to asthma generated by pollution from burning coal and oil.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but I just had to say it. If you're going to feel guilty about not donating, feel guilty because you're not paying them for the huge effort they put in to create something you enjoy.
Look, by that logic, they should be donating to me.
Technically, he's right: if the Dock had been introduced as "shareware" it wouldn't have flown because it couldn't have done half that stuff.
It's not a troll: what people like Tog don't understand is that some aspects of the Dock represent features that take advantage of certain completely new capabilities in OS X.
First off, the Dock would have looked like a solid block to due limitations in Quickdraw, much like Windows' taskbar.
Second, because you'd have to use tiny 32x32 icons, you couldn't look at the Dock with peripheral vision the way you can with larger icons. (Mine are at 48x48, at least.) The larger icons mean that any change to a live Dock icon, such as new mail arriving, is instantly obvious.
Background processes never worked well with OS 9, so live icons wouldn't have worked. And forget being able to Force Quit a process from the Dock!
Many blasphemous new features in OS X arrived because the folks at Apple decided to take advantage of their new technology. You have to experiment to see if things really work, and you can't do that with an OS until there are apps that use the new features.
From what I remember they didn't bust down on people that extended the iTunes music sharing beyond the LAN.
That's because extending iTunes sharing simply required connecting to the built in HTTP server. It also didn't defeat DRM because protected AAC files aren't unencrypted by iTunes sharing. (It literally is a form of encryption as the key is downloaded from Apple's servers when you "authorize" the device.)
With this you need fairly specialized knowledge of how QuickTime works, so it makes sense (from a lawyer's point of view) to go after the few people who know how to do it.
"What about DVDs? They were cracked, and DVD sales are just the same as before. When CDs were created, nobody expected equipment to rip and burn them would be accessable to consumers, and yet CDs are still around."
DVDs and CDs are a huge market compared to iTMS, larger by several orders of magnitude.
Here's how the grandparent and your reply would sound on the other side:
"I run a dot-com company... we survived the bubble bursting, we were able to retain most of our staff...
After finding out our revenues would be much smaller than expected, the director of HR was worried we would lose our best talent to other companies. I looked at him in bafflement and told him he should be thankful any would stay on at all. We should be happy not to go under."
"I sympathize with your idealism,... but it's cuddly statements like yours that motivate employees to run like rats from a sinking ship.
If they think they can make a few bucks more elsewhere, THEY WILL leave. We did everything humanly possible to make sure they had a steady paycheck for years so they could go home and relax once the day's work was done... one bump and all that counts for nothing."
As far as the article that started this thread, it is idiotic. It was either done by someone who has no clue about software engineering, or who suffers from recto-cranial insertion. Probably both!
According to the article, the author cowrote an essay on the Matrix and evolutionary psychology.
I guess that proves your point...
But I would NOT want my wife to have to use it, nor my daughter the neuroscientist!
I agree, but not because the command line is inherently hard.
For example, it's great to be able to say:
find . -name \*foo -exec rm \{\} \;
That's not a complicated thing, and in fact nothing on the command line is actually difficult to comprehend.
The problem is that there are far too many kluges that are regarded as l33t skillz, such as escaping and the proliferation of executable configuration files. (Being executable, of course, it's not possible to write a decent configurator for them.) Every program you use has a different way of doing things, and open source just makes it worse because it grants immortality to poor design decisions. To top it off, the terminal interface, the lamest interface ever concocted, is regarded as sacred by CLI luddites. (Oh, but I can make it 50% transparent!)
The reason CLIs are used by so few is that a handful of zealots refuse to fix the bugs and insist on sticking to stupid POSIX anachronisms. So the rest of the world moved past them.
Simple as that. Well, not quite, because I'll also advise anyone I talk to never to buy a Belkin router.
Software designers absolutely depend on routers passing data through unmolested.
A router that periodically alters, denies or appends HTTP requests can break apps in any number of ways and it would be exceedingly difficult to detect a problem, let alone fix it.
It's like having a hard drive that periodically replaces files at random.
I would never buy a product from a company that has such poor judgment, ever. Someone in management needs to be hung, drawn and quartered.
Slashdot Mirror
...you're either with us or you're against us. Remember when W. said that for the very first time...
"You're either with us or you're against us" is a cliche that predates Bush by at least 50 years, and a concept that probably predates written history.
I am so tired of people shoving everything into relational databases.
What relational DBMSs? All I've heard discussed are SQL products.
The filesystem is really really efficient (for e-mail) and really really reliable.
I'm tired of everyone shoveling everything into a filesystem.
How are you going to run queries against your contacts? Or your appointments?
How does a filesystem guarantee referential integrity? Can a filesystem guarantee an appointment doesn't exist for a bogus contact?
*Any* kind of integrity? Can a filesystem guarantee that a message is well formed?
USB 2.0 ... # Bluetooth, and yes, you can copy MP3's that way too
Odd, becuase according to the FAQ
Can I use Bluetooth or USB to transfer music to my phone?
To transfer music to your phone, you need to use iTunes 4.9 or later and the USB cable that came with your phone. The ROKR supports USB 1.1.
I was surprised to see that it only supported USB 1.1 because it's a pretty slow standard.
I would *not* want to transfer tunes via Bluetooth.
I wouldn't buy it.
A major, if not *the* major, reason to buy any product associated with Apple is the UI.
I've got a Moto V600. The "smart" buttons on it can change the vibrate/volume setting when you put the phone in your pocket. Why in God's name you would want to raise the volume on a flip phone when it's closed?!
HCI's not in the Stone Age; it's in the Industrial Age.
There has been *no* innovative research done in HCI since the Mac UI guidelines.
Guys like Tognazzini and this guy just like to make laundry lists of their complaints and harp on Fitt's "law." (I guess "law" sound better than "tautology.")
My basic complaint boils down to this:
These guys think like industrial era efficiency experts. Now, if people who used computers came in at 9 every day and left at 5 and did essentially the same set of tasks for months on end, many of their assumptions would hold water.
It would make sense to have them use corners of the screen. It would make sense to memorize arcane "gestures."
But most people I know face a completely different setup:
Someone else sets up their computer or they often have to use other people's computers. They often have to do other people's jobs, or they are changing jobs quite rapidly.
Moreover, they spend an extraordinary amount of time copying and pasting (or retyping) data from one app to another. When something changes, they have to update it in multiple places.
My analysis is simple: our applications and HCI people are too focused on visual representations of data. So most of what HCI does is nothing more than put an odometer on the mouse.
We need to focus on the logic of the data itself (data fundamentals!) and the way the people learn interfaces.
As it is, the way we're using computers is directly analagous to the way we use paper. That doesn't exploit a fraction of the power mathematics and machines could give us.
what other technologies has Porno driven?
Back just as the dotcom bubble was about to burst, myself and another guy had a Great Idea. (And a hell of a sense of timing...) We were starting a dotcom, totally unrelated to porn, but my partner had an excellent point: (paraphrased)
"If we're going to get the e-commerce side of this working, we need to look at porn sites. Most sites on the Web just throw content up there for free and hope they'll get bought out. Porn sites actually do what real businesses do: they market and they collect money."
Come to think of it, considering we really had researched the market, we should have known the bubble was about to burst. C'est la vie.
Regarding potential for being a RDBMS, I would vote for emacs.
Come to think of it, I wrote an implementation of Chris Date's A language in Scheme. Never tried running it under emacs, but that would, techinically, be a *true* RDBMS...
Why on earth should I have to write extra code to check each input field, when I should just be able to send the results to the DB, and return the error message to the client if it fails?
In theory that should work perfectly, but it would require that the DBMS be given enough knowledge of the client that it can formulate an intelligent error message. Oh, and there's the occasional problem of the user speaking a language other than English...
(It's not, IMHO, an insurmountable problem but it would require some way of fully integrating clients with DBMSs to a level where the DBMS stores information on the forms used by client applications. I seriously doubt SQL DBMSs could ever handle this.)
In practice, I've never seen a DBMS that returns error messages that are useful to anyone but a DBA. So it makes sense for clients to at least check for the common errors.
Out of interest, would you name some better IDEs..?
By definition, any "integrated" development environment sucks at least as much as emacs.
It doesn't have to be CLI, but I want an environment where I can swap different tools in. I'll keep struggling along with Unix since that comes closest.
Sorry, you need to turn in your "hardened conservative capitalist" card.
Greed is good, bending or breaking the rules is fine for enough profit, and all that matters is the bottom line.
Of course, I do have a nice, shiney "intelligent, reasonable capitalist" card here for you.
How about this: we'll hold on to our "hardened conservative capitalist" cards and you can hold on to your "blinkered liberal twit" card. Now everyone's happy!
There is nothing about Moz Firebird that's going to make this less of an issue. The fact is that the typical user is going to see http://www.amazon.com@/fakepath/usualAmazoncrap:ru ssianmafia.ru and think it's an Amazon URL.
Quick check: how many of you bought something online and actually checked the lock icon? While shopping during Christmas? When you were under pressure to get something done?
This is a human interface architecture issue, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with IE, nothing to do with SSL or any TLAs and everything to do with the fact that URLs and the web were not designed with security and human interface in mind.
To fix this, we need to transition to a standard way of verifying security. A quick fix to this problem would be to redesign the address bar to actually show the protocol and the host, something along the lines of:
[protocol: http, insecure] [host: www.russianmfia.ru] [user:www.amazon.com] [path:...]
A larger fix would be to transition to a set of protocols and interface standards that establish how a user chooses privacy and security options.
If it's in a cache it's not being compiled "just in time." It's being compiled beforehand and cached.
The people who sue you are the ones who's children have birth defects.
People sue you when their dumbass kids eat lead paint chips or because the air conditioner is moldy. The hell with the lawyers, I'm sick of living in the goddamned 19th century.
Pointing out that it was only 44 people is kindof silly. So what.
Because it's 44 vs. thousands dead from asphyxiation due to asthma generated by pollution from burning coal and oil.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but I just had to say it. If you're going to feel guilty about not donating, feel guilty because you're not paying them for the huge effort they put in to create something you enjoy.
Look, by that logic, they should be donating to me.
Technically, he's right: if the Dock had been introduced as "shareware" it wouldn't have flown because it couldn't have done half that stuff.
It's not a troll: what people like Tog don't understand is that some aspects of the Dock represent features that take advantage of certain completely new capabilities in OS X.
First off, the Dock would have looked like a solid block to due limitations in Quickdraw, much like Windows' taskbar.
Second, because you'd have to use tiny 32x32 icons, you couldn't look at the Dock with peripheral vision the way you can with larger icons. (Mine are at 48x48, at least.) The larger icons mean that any change to a live Dock icon, such as new mail arriving, is instantly obvious.
Background processes never worked well with OS 9, so live icons wouldn't have worked. And forget being able to Force Quit a process from the Dock!
Many blasphemous new features in OS X arrived because the folks at Apple decided to take advantage of their new technology. You have to experiment to see if things really work, and you can't do that with an OS until there are apps that use the new features.
It may very well be that Kim Jonh Il feels that Internet access is critical to his nation's development
Or it could just be another of the whims of a demented lunatic.
From what I remember they didn't bust down on people that extended the iTunes music sharing beyond the LAN.
That's because extending iTunes sharing simply required connecting to the built in HTTP server. It also didn't defeat DRM because protected AAC files aren't unencrypted by iTunes sharing. (It literally is a form of encryption as the key is downloaded from Apple's servers when you "authorize" the device.)
With this you need fairly specialized knowledge of how QuickTime works, so it makes sense (from a lawyer's point of view) to go after the few people who know how to do it.
"What about DVDs? They were cracked, and DVD sales are just the same as before. When CDs were created, nobody expected equipment to rip and burn them would be accessable to consumers, and yet CDs are still around."
DVDs and CDs are a huge market compared to iTMS, larger by several orders of magnitude.
"If you are new to the .NET Compact Framework, you are about to embark upon a challenging yet rewarding path by writing CF applications."
You can't just hack some software together nowadays, everything's a goddamned quest with trials and tribulations.
At least now I know who does those fucking motivational posters.
Grammar Disclaimer: Read what I meant, not what I wrote.
That should be a "Semantic Disclaimer" as bad grammar doesn't affect meaning.
What exactly is your goal in doing this?
Methinks she doth protest too much...
I have a little surprise for you:
sex isn't dirty.
You don't do your own laundry, I take it.
Here's how the grandparent and your reply would sound on the other side:
... but it's cuddly statements like yours that motivate employees to run like rats from a sinking ship.
"I run a dot-com company... we survived the bubble bursting, we were able to retain most of our staff...
After finding out our revenues would be much smaller than expected, the director of HR was worried we would lose our best talent to other companies. I looked at him in bafflement and told him he should be thankful any would stay on at all. We should be happy not to go under."
"I sympathize with your idealism,
If they think they can make a few bucks more elsewhere, THEY WILL leave. We did everything humanly possible to make sure they had a steady paycheck for years so they could go home and relax once the day's work was done... one bump and all that counts for nothing."
As far as the article that started this thread, it is idiotic. It was either done by someone who has no clue about software engineering, or who suffers from recto-cranial insertion. Probably both!
According to the article, the author cowrote an essay on the Matrix and evolutionary psychology.
I guess that proves your point...
But I would NOT want my wife to have to use it, nor my daughter the neuroscientist!
I agree, but not because the command line is inherently hard.
For example, it's great to be able to say:
find . -name \*foo -exec rm \{\} \;
That's not a complicated thing, and in fact nothing on the command line is actually difficult to comprehend.
The problem is that there are far too many kluges that are regarded as l33t skillz, such as escaping and the proliferation of executable configuration files. (Being executable, of course, it's not possible to write a decent configurator for them.) Every program you use has a different way of doing things, and open source just makes it worse because it grants immortality to poor design decisions. To top it off, the terminal interface, the lamest interface ever concocted, is regarded as sacred by CLI luddites. (Oh, but I can make it 50% transparent!)
The reason CLIs are used by so few is that a handful of zealots refuse to fix the bugs and insist on sticking to stupid POSIX anachronisms. So the rest of the world moved past them.
Simple as that. Well, not quite, because I'll also advise anyone I talk to never to buy a Belkin router.
Software designers absolutely depend on routers passing data through unmolested.
A router that periodically alters, denies or appends HTTP requests can break apps in any number of ways and it would be exceedingly difficult to detect a problem, let alone fix it.
It's like having a hard drive that periodically replaces files at random.
I would never buy a product from a company that has such poor judgment, ever. Someone in management needs to be hung, drawn and quartered.