Humans are far more prone to error than any decently-coded program. Why do you think we even have computers in the first place? Because they're more reliable and more efficient. Honestly, people will trust Amazon.com to securely process their credit card transactions and their bank to send them monthly statements generated by a computer (not to mention online banking), but they won't trust a computer to add 1 to the appropriate column? That seems like absurd tinfoil-hattery to me.
Let me get this straight. Someone makes a "song" that's 1m 3s of silence. Some other guy makes an audio file that is 1m 3s of silence. He's daring someone to sue him, and everyone here is already screaming about it? No one's done anything! Apple hasn't sued. The artist hasn't sued. The RIAA hasn't sued. What's the big deal?
Re:One thing the editor left off..
on
Apple Updates iPod
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Only if the word "different" is intended to be used as an adverb. Ever been describing an idea and say, for example, "Think 'The Olsen Twins on acid'"? Apple could be using "different" as a broad description of their entire design philosophy.
English-language issues aside, Apple really needs to just gut AppleScript and redo it from scratch. There's just entirely too much confusion as to when you should use an HFS path vs. a POSIX path, for example. Some calls say they return POSIX paths but actually return HFS paths. I worked extensively with AppleScript Studio, and even I couldn't figure out which path to use when. It was all trial-and-error.
But honestly, you never know how much you hate AppleScript until you learn it. The problem with English-language syntax is that good code will be unambiguous. Writing AppleScript is one of the single worst things you can imagine. Sometimes a `the' keyword is required; other times it is not. It can be utterly infuriating. Take it from someone who has written an AppleScript Studio application that was eventually successfully deployed... it's not fun. I did the same thing in Cocoa in about 1/6 the time.
It's not about hip; it's about statistics. Apple's research showed that between 6% and 10% of iPod owners who were not already Mac owners would consider a Mac as their next computer as a result of their iPod experience. Another sizable portion said that they'd love to own a Mac, but that the price was prohibitive. That's why Apple made the Mac mini.
4 million iPods were sold last quarter, and 90% of them to Windows users. So that's 3.6 million Windows users with iPods. If 10% of them switch to Macs as a result of their iPod experience, that's another 360,000 Mac users, or an over 33% increase in unit sales. (Apple sold just over a million Macs last quarter.)
The article itself, and a lot of these "users need to be made aware" replies, I find very irritating.
In the U.S., at least, the attitude of everyone, everywhere is, the user is never accountable for learning anything, no matter how much training is given. Since the managers are all at least as inept and lazy as everyone working for them, they think that's a reasonable attitude to take.
I've had users delete critical files and blame me for their poor training. "I don't even know what files ARE. You should give me training if you want this to work." My response is, "It's not my job to give you training. You were supposed to know how to use this software before you started working here. This is like you smashed your car into other cars in an intersection, and when the cops arrive, you yell at them for not teaching you to drive."
Everything boils down to exactly one problem: the user. The user is the problem, and the user needs to be fixed.
Of course, management doesn't support us disabling such users' accounts until they can prove they can "drive".
Then don't give users permission to delete critical files.
Remember, too, that MOST people fall into the "have to pee on the electric fence" group, and no amount of training will help them see the light. They'll have to lose their life savings to password-stealing crooks before they'll begin to think any of this is important.
If people at a corporation aren't going to take the security of their employer's data seriously, they should be fired. Again, the problem is the user. If the IT department forced employees to memorize a new, randomly-generated password every 60 days, there'd be no problem. Sure, employees would bitch, but if they don't like it, they can quit. Security, especially nowadays, is not an issue to be taken lightly or something to be compromised at the whim of some office secretary's complaints.
As for the article, you can tell the author doesn't do IT for a living. Otherwise, he wouldn't be blaming bad security admins. He'd know that no matter how good the security admin guy is, he can't get support from management to pay for a secure authentication system. Especially when you work for a large enterprise, such systems can't be put in piecemeal, and piecemeal systems aren't practical.
I agree. The guy sounds suspiciously like users who complain to me about having to change their passwords every 60 days. They should be grateful that we don't assign them random passwords every 60 days and just let them choose their own. But oh no, we actually make them use both numbers and letters! And the password has to be at least 8 characters long! What Draconian torture we put our students, faculty and staff through!
The article is like some bad "How to do Stuff" TV show. "How to cure cancer...First, create a marvelous cure for cancer. Then have a party."
"How to solve the password problem...first, put in a wonderful authentication system. Then have a party."
the tougher rules only make them harder for users to remember, not harder for hackers to guess
I don't see how this makes any sense. If we assume that the hardest passwords to remember are randomly-generated ones, then wouldn't it follow that they'd be the hardest to "guess"? If your password is just a series of random digits, then it's very highly improbable for any hacker to guess it, and it takes a lot longer for it to be brute-forced.
And the guy's example of ATMs as "getting by" for the past 20 years isn't a very good indictment of having longer, more random passwords. ATMs don't just rely on 4-digit PINs, for Christ's sake. You have to have a card, which is another layer of security. And there's also a camera at the ATM machine. I'd love to see how good ATM security turned out to be if there was no camera and a total reliance on a 4-digit PIN.
The problem here isn't that passwords are ineffective; it's user ignorance and stupidity. If companies started enforcing a strict standard of making their employees memorize a 12-digit sequence of random characters, then weak passwords in corporations wouldn't be a problem. It takes all of 15 minutes to memorize a random password through muscle memory alone.
Users need to be made aware of the repercussions of having a weak password to a network. A lot of students at my university will constantly bitch and moan about our policy of making everyone change their passwords every 60 days. We tell them it's for security. They say, "Well I don't care if someone gets into my e-mail." It's not just the student's e-mail that's at risk. It's the network. If someone obtains a legitimate username and password for an account at my school, they have access to all of our site-licensed software as well as the VPN server. With access to the VPN server comes access to the SMTP server, which means that our SMTP server could be used as a spam relay, and that hurts everyone.
The problem isn't so much that you can't use a multi-button mouse but rather that the programs tend not to do anything useful with the extra buttons once you have them. Look at Photoshop for a really good example of this as the right-button still doesn't do anything particularly useful in the Windows version, which is a side effect of the Mac heritage.
One of the UI benefits from having a standard, one-button mouse is that it forces developers to design their apps in such a way that they can be easily used with just one mouse button. That's a good thing. A right-click is great, don't get me wrong. I use it a lot. But it's supposed to serve as a shortcut to certain functions, not as the sole means of accessing them.
That's what I do. I upgraded my home mouse to a Logitech MX1000, so I stuck my old MX500 on my work machine instead of using that POS Microsoft 5-button optical mouse that they gave me.
I think that's a very silly statement. You seem to paint it as if the Macintosh way is Correct(tm) and the Microsoft way is Incorrect(tm). Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe each approach has both pros and cons? Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps some people don't LIKE the Macintosh way?
Sure has. That's why I said that I hate it. Me, personally. How is telling you that I hate Microsoft's UI approach a "stupid statement"? I never said that it was the wrong approach, just that I hated it. That's also why I said that I'm obsessive about aesthetic layout. Surely you didn't miss that part. You took the time to jump to conclusions about my opinions on user interfaces as a result. Maybe you should learn to read what other people write before applying labels, asshole.
Well, I'm going to be mean here, but my impression of Mac users is that they assume because they use a Mac that they know something about UI design. Similar to how people who buy expensive sports cars think they're suddenly transformed into professional racing car drivers.
I know enough to know that putting a shut-down function under a "Start" menu is just non-sensical and stupid. And personally, yes, I do think that Mac OS X has a better UI because Apple used the "fresh start" to really establish consistent UI behaviors across all applications with its development tools. All toolbars act exactly the same. They are customizable through the exact same interface. "Preferences" is under the same menu in every application. On any other platform (including Mac OS 9), you have to hunt around for them. Sometimes they're in "Tools" or "Edit" or somewhere else entirely. Sheets make it easy to associate certain actions with certain windows. Drag-and-drop works everywhere, consistently. But hey, if those things don't matter to you, fine. UI is extremely subjective in nature.
OK. But your arguments for OOo not driving the MS Office prices down was that OOo is just the same as MS Office? If that is true, then OOo should be driving MS Office's prices down, because they are equal (equally bad, you seem to argue).
There's nothing resembling a logical chain of thought in here. If two products are equal, they must drive each other's prices down? How the hell did you come to that conclusion? There's more to competition than being cheaper than the other guy. OpenOffice is not driving the price of Microsoft Office down because it creates no compelling incentive to switch over. "It's free" is not a compelling incentive on its own. In fact, "Free" generally sets off alarm bells. "It's free, so it's probably not reliable."
And personally, I hate it. But I'm a Mac user, so I'm spoiled with regards to UI design. And I hate Microsoft's "One Window To Rule Them All" approach to application design, which is what Linux open source developers are copying. They do it because they think it'll ease the transition, but they assume that there will even be a transition in the first place. People don't move to another product because it's the same as what they already have.
I use the Writer component on a 1GHz machine and it's fast. Very fast. Takes less than 3 seconds from clicking the icon in Nautilus to the document being in front of me. Typing and scrolling documents is smooth.
I never said anything about OpenOffice's snappiness. I said that it's UI blows, just like Microsoft Office's.
The predictive spellchecker is easy to use. Creating tables is not painful like in Word. Dialogs look good and open up instantaneously. The toolbar layout is excellent. The menus are intelligent (with some minor exceptions for the menus related to table editing). The Stylist is intelligently designed. Fields are easy to use. Numbered outlines are trivially enabled. Equations are easy to write. I adore the templating system. Everything I need from a word processor is in OO.org Writer. I'm really happy with it. I use OO.org Writer in preference to Microsoft Word, and I paid for Word!
I'm glad it works for you, but this obsession with toolbars in the Windows/Linux community has led to some pretty piss-poor software. Every god damn function in the app has to have a toolbar button associated with it, and those buttons are all tiny 32x32 pixel boxes with tiny icons so that you can cram 800 of them into a single row. Then there's the attitude of "Everything Must Go in It's Own Tab," which is just intolerable at this point. It's like spawning a new window is a fucking crime now. But again, this is just one Mac user's rant about Linux and Windows user interfaces. I openly admit that I'm obsessive about UI cleanliness.
When was the last time you used GIMP? The most common grievance with GIMP was the right-click menu. That's deprecated. The menu is now at the top of the window, just like other applications. The interface is now quite sensible. In fact, I'd have to the say the GIMP has the least travesty points for FLOSS applications that I use.
Probably a few months ago. I just remember spending 15 minutes trying to figure out how to crop an image while maintaining a certain aspect ratio.
Those are individual cases that (shock!) do not fall in the consumer space, which is what I was talking about. Countries and corporations have the leverage to negotiate different prices with Microsoft; Joe Consumer does not. Has the off-the-shelf price of Windows XP dropped because of Linux? No. Amazingly enough, Joe Consumer isn't about to travel to Taiwan or order from there just to get his OS more cheaply. That little price sticker on the Windows XP box is still displaying the obscenely large figure it always has.
So basically you're saying: OpenOffice doesn't compete with MS Office because it generally is the same (with the same disadvantages) and is cheaper? I don't think your logics teacher will be too impressed.
And I don't think your reading comprehension teacher would be very happy, considering I never claimed that OpenOffice doesn't compete with Microsoft Office; I said that OpenOffice isn't driving the price of Microsoft Office down, you blithering idiot.
The thing this article misses is that also when things get popular open source people come in too and write their own versions for free. And they do it better than propriterary software usually.
Which is the real thing that drives prices down.
I love the idea of open source, but if you honestly think that it drives the prices of commercial software down, you're kidding yourself, at least on the consumer level. OpenOffice is nice and all, but it's just as bloated as Microsoft Office, and it's got the same nightmarish, crappy user interface. OpenOffice is too busy trying to imitate Microsoft Office. And don't get me started on the Gimp. Again, great idea, but the user interface is a travesty.
Things like Firefox and Gaim are pretty well-done, but they aren't replacements for commercial software; they are replacements for shitty free software like Internet Explorer and AIM.
As to the multiple rows of tabs, it's a poor design. I always managed to confuse the fuck out of myself when trying to wander through an Office app's preferences. When I click a tab in one row, the whole layout of the window changes. How much sense does that make? Apple has a system for application preferences where each preferences is a toolbar icon that is ever-present in whatever form the user wants (icon and text, icon only, text only, or just not there at all). And it works a whole lot nicer. You have each category dilineated by an icon rather than some tab, and you don't end up playing musical tabs every time you switch categories.
I don't know whether all the issues you mention are described there, though - I didn't see anything that addressed the number of toolbar buttons, but it does give other recommendations for toolbars, so if by "a row of 20 NSButtons" you mean "something just using a row of NSButtons rather than using NSToolbar", doing the latter might give you toolbar behavior suggested in the Human Interface Guidelines that you wouldn't get with a row of NSButtons.
Exactly. And, the last time I tried NeoOffice, it did this same thing. It used a non-standard toolbar that had Aqua "drapes," but was clunky and had way too many functions.
And yes, NSToolbar will give you a fully customizable toolbar via drag-and-drop.
But I wasn't really ranting on interface guidelines. Most of them make sense, from the HIG to Gnome's, KDE's and Windows'. But most app developers simply don't follow them, not even the people who write them. Apple, for example, keeps finding new excuses to use the awful brushed metal appearance for apps which have no need for it. Microsoft loads up toolbars with hoards of shit, and the interface for customizing those toolbars just blows. Every time I try setting up a customizable toolbar in Word, I have to hunt through about 10,000 different options before I find what I'm looking for. That's frustrating and just fucking dumb.
And frankly, having 32x32 pixel toolbar items is a stupid idea held over from when there was too little screen realestate to implement something more effective. On today's high-resolution monitors, the icons are way too small, there are no static text labels and they're difficult to target. Apple had it right when they introduced 128x128 toolbar icons.
Because the everyday person doesn't need it, and it's fucking confusing for anyone but a geek. If geeks want it, they can install it. Why don't you just tell Microsoft that they need to include their POSIX layer with every Windows install and smack a "Getting Started With Windows Unix Services" tutorial on the screen during initial setup?
And you can still use binary sections in an XML file. The great thing about XML is that it's very straightforward and intuitive. Every OS under the sun has an API for manipulating XML. I can open an XML file in a text editor and think, "Okay, this is how I have to parse this, this and this." Can't do that with a binary file. XML is far easier to write parsers for.
The point is that if you can avoid having to use a binary file type, do it. The legitimate concern you raise has to do with the portability of folders. If I'm on a Mac, I can recognize the extension on the folder, and the OS will display it as a file. But someone who writes a parser for Windows will have to deal with it somehow, if that even happens.
They wouldn't be able to do it right anyway. Seriously, a lot of people are under the misconception that Aqua is a set of nifty-looking widgets. It's an interface standard for clean apps.
If your app has some shitty Office-like toolbar consisting of a row of 20 NSButtons, that's a shitty design. If your app's preferences are organized into 3 rows of 10 tabs each, that's a shitty design. If you can find the same function in 4 different places, that's a shitty design. Doesn't matter if it has an Aqua titlebar and Aqua buttons. Look to Office 2004 as an example of how Aqua cannot save fundamentally bad UI design. The OO.org guys would've just made the same mistake.
Oh give me a fucking break. Aqua is one window server; X11 is another. When developers write for either, they use different APIs. If you can think of an easy way to bridge the two completely toll-free so that no code modification is required, I'd love to hear it.
That's why there's a published schema, genius. So that the architects of that format can tell you about "those little parameters." The point is that it is possible to write a fully compatible importer for Keynote presentations on any platform. This level of openness is impossible with closed, binary formats like Word.
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Humans are far more prone to error than any decently-coded program. Why do you think we even have computers in the first place? Because they're more reliable and more efficient. Honestly, people will trust Amazon.com to securely process their credit card transactions and their bank to send them monthly statements generated by a computer (not to mention online banking), but they won't trust a computer to add 1 to the appropriate column? That seems like absurd tinfoil-hattery to me.
Let me get this straight. Someone makes a "song" that's 1m 3s of silence. Some other guy makes an audio file that is 1m 3s of silence. He's daring someone to sue him, and everyone here is already screaming about it? No one's done anything! Apple hasn't sued. The artist hasn't sued. The RIAA hasn't sued. What's the big deal?
Only if the word "different" is intended to be used as an adverb. Ever been describing an idea and say, for example, "Think 'The Olsen Twins on acid'"? Apple could be using "different" as a broad description of their entire design philosophy.
English-language issues aside, Apple really needs to just gut AppleScript and redo it from scratch. There's just entirely too much confusion as to when you should use an HFS path vs. a POSIX path, for example. Some calls say they return POSIX paths but actually return HFS paths. I worked extensively with AppleScript Studio, and even I couldn't figure out which path to use when. It was all trial-and-error.
But honestly, you never know how much you hate AppleScript until you learn it. The problem with English-language syntax is that good code will be unambiguous. Writing AppleScript is one of the single worst things you can imagine. Sometimes a `the' keyword is required; other times it is not. It can be utterly infuriating. Take it from someone who has written an AppleScript Studio application that was eventually successfully deployed ... it's not fun. I did the same thing in Cocoa in about 1/6 the time.
It's not about hip; it's about statistics. Apple's research showed that between 6% and 10% of iPod owners who were not already Mac owners would consider a Mac as their next computer as a result of their iPod experience. Another sizable portion said that they'd love to own a Mac, but that the price was prohibitive. That's why Apple made the Mac mini.
4 million iPods were sold last quarter, and 90% of them to Windows users. So that's 3.6 million Windows users with iPods. If 10% of them switch to Macs as a result of their iPod experience, that's another 360,000 Mac users, or an over 33% increase in unit sales. (Apple sold just over a million Macs last quarter.)
And the guy's example of ATMs as "getting by" for the past 20 years isn't a very good indictment of having longer, more random passwords. ATMs don't just rely on 4-digit PINs, for Christ's sake. You have to have a card, which is another layer of security. And there's also a camera at the ATM machine. I'd love to see how good ATM security turned out to be if there was no camera and a total reliance on a 4-digit PIN.
The problem here isn't that passwords are ineffective; it's user ignorance and stupidity. If companies started enforcing a strict standard of making their employees memorize a 12-digit sequence of random characters, then weak passwords in corporations wouldn't be a problem. It takes all of 15 minutes to memorize a random password through muscle memory alone.
Users need to be made aware of the repercussions of having a weak password to a network. A lot of students at my university will constantly bitch and moan about our policy of making everyone change their passwords every 60 days. We tell them it's for security. They say, "Well I don't care if someone gets into my e-mail." It's not just the student's e-mail that's at risk. It's the network. If someone obtains a legitimate username and password for an account at my school, they have access to all of our site-licensed software as well as the VPN server. With access to the VPN server comes access to the SMTP server, which means that our SMTP server could be used as a spam relay, and that hurts everyone.
That's what I do. I upgraded my home mouse to a Logitech MX1000, so I stuck my old MX500 on my work machine instead of using that POS Microsoft 5-button optical mouse that they gave me.
Apple's been doing the same thing with OpenGL for quite a while now.
Those are individual cases that (shock!) do not fall in the consumer space, which is what I was talking about. Countries and corporations have the leverage to negotiate different prices with Microsoft; Joe Consumer does not. Has the off-the-shelf price of Windows XP dropped because of Linux? No. Amazingly enough, Joe Consumer isn't about to travel to Taiwan or order from there just to get his OS more cheaply. That little price sticker on the Windows XP box is still displaying the obscenely large figure it always has.
Things like Firefox and Gaim are pretty well-done, but they aren't replacements for commercial software; they are replacements for shitty free software like Internet Explorer and AIM.
One word: palettes.
As to the multiple rows of tabs, it's a poor design. I always managed to confuse the fuck out of myself when trying to wander through an Office app's preferences. When I click a tab in one row, the whole layout of the window changes. How much sense does that make? Apple has a system for application preferences where each preferences is a toolbar icon that is ever-present in whatever form the user wants (icon and text, icon only, text only, or just not there at all). And it works a whole lot nicer. You have each category dilineated by an icon rather than some tab, and you don't end up playing musical tabs every time you switch categories.
And yes, NSToolbar will give you a fully customizable toolbar via drag-and-drop.
But I wasn't really ranting on interface guidelines. Most of them make sense, from the HIG to Gnome's, KDE's and Windows'. But most app developers simply don't follow them, not even the people who write them. Apple, for example, keeps finding new excuses to use the awful brushed metal appearance for apps which have no need for it. Microsoft loads up toolbars with hoards of shit, and the interface for customizing those toolbars just blows. Every time I try setting up a customizable toolbar in Word, I have to hunt through about 10,000 different options before I find what I'm looking for. That's frustrating and just fucking dumb.
And frankly, having 32x32 pixel toolbar items is a stupid idea held over from when there was too little screen realestate to implement something more effective. On today's high-resolution monitors, the icons are way too small, there are no static text labels and they're difficult to target. Apple had it right when they introduced 128x128 toolbar icons.
Because the everyday person doesn't need it, and it's fucking confusing for anyone but a geek. If geeks want it, they can install it. Why don't you just tell Microsoft that they need to include their POSIX layer with every Windows install and smack a "Getting Started With Windows Unix Services" tutorial on the screen during initial setup?
And you can still use binary sections in an XML file. The great thing about XML is that it's very straightforward and intuitive. Every OS under the sun has an API for manipulating XML. I can open an XML file in a text editor and think, "Okay, this is how I have to parse this, this and this." Can't do that with a binary file. XML is far easier to write parsers for.
The point is that if you can avoid having to use a binary file type, do it. The legitimate concern you raise has to do with the portability of folders. If I'm on a Mac, I can recognize the extension on the folder, and the OS will display it as a file. But someone who writes a parser for Windows will have to deal with it somehow, if that even happens.
They wouldn't be able to do it right anyway. Seriously, a lot of people are under the misconception that Aqua is a set of nifty-looking widgets. It's an interface standard for clean apps.
If your app has some shitty Office-like toolbar consisting of a row of 20 NSButtons, that's a shitty design. If your app's preferences are organized into 3 rows of 10 tabs each, that's a shitty design. If you can find the same function in 4 different places, that's a shitty design. Doesn't matter if it has an Aqua titlebar and Aqua buttons. Look to Office 2004 as an example of how Aqua cannot save fundamentally bad UI design. The OO.org guys would've just made the same mistake.
Oh give me a fucking break. Aqua is one window server; X11 is another. When developers write for either, they use different APIs. If you can think of an easy way to bridge the two completely toll-free so that no code modification is required, I'd love to hear it.
That's why there's a published schema, genius. So that the architects of that format can tell you about "those little parameters." The point is that it is possible to write a fully compatible importer for Keynote presentations on any platform. This level of openness is impossible with closed, binary formats like Word.
Then you'll be thrilled to know that you already have a MAC. Every computer does.