Is it possible that the UI was too complex?
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
and too configurable or flexible?
I haven't tried it but the videos introducing it showed a 747-cockpit kind of UI (very busy, important info all over the place in unexpected or random locations.)
The value of simplicity (for adoption) cannot be overemphasized.
Simplicity of use (one text-entry field, two buttons), and non-clutteredness with mind-F***ing banner ads, are arguably among the main reasons the google search page was adopted over its competitors in the first place.
There is probably a reason why it took around 3 billion + years for multi-cellular life to become possible. The single cellular life had to evolve to the point where the cells were robust enough and flexible enough in their structure and processes to be able to accept viable combination with other cells, and to be able to take advantage of it. Just because we can't see the many incremental improvements that had to happen to make that feasible doesn't mean they didn't happen.
Remember, the first life on the planet was probably really crap at containing and performing metabolism, faithful reproduction, specialization of cell-part functions. Life, even single cellular, got gradually better at being life. (More robust, more likely to survive a more general, more widely varying set of environmental conditions, more likely to be able to safely evolve new forms, processes, and strategies. Evolution itself evolves and improves, recursively. Cells probably became co-operative about as soon as they were ready and able to, and the change happened because co-operative survival strategies are better than lone-wolf ones, often times. Why struggle against your environment, when you can tame part of it and make it part of you.
All that said, I agree that the wiggle room is probably bigger than I said for the sake of argument. It's probably the cost and limited value to short-lived creatures of 1000 year or million year round trip times that prevents statistically significant exploration of the stellar neighbourhood.
I say short-lived, because entropy works on every individual organism the same way, everywhere in the universe. Life reproduces for a reason. Because entropy defeats every individual copy of the life-information, but luckily, it copies itself faster, on average. That's life.
oh wait, I forgot, they will soon be able to read your thoughts by analysing neuro-electric activity, at least enough to be sure you're hiding something, at which point, it's the rubber mallets.
1. What do you think the US government's encryption-breaking capability REALLY is these days? e.g. for example, are common encryption protocols and key-lengths used in, say, online banking and e-commerce readily crackable by the Feds?
2. Do security agencies of the federal government automatically flag for further investigation all people who use "an excess amount of encrypted traffic"?
3. Does the FBI, a "domestic" intelligence agency, have the right to spy on foreign residents whose net transactions traverse the US border? If they don't have the right, are they doing it anyway, or is that some other agency?
If life evolved at close to the same time throughout the universe, then the Fermi Paradox is self-contradictory and invalid.
The universe must go through several specific stages: first star formation epoch, first star death epoch including supernovas, next star birth epoch where the solar systems include the heavy (structure component) elements produced by the supernovas. Then 4 billion or so years to evolve life to our level of complexity.
If in fact it takes the universe roughly as much time, from its beginning, as it took to create us, to create equivalently complex life elsewhere, then we can see that the other civilizations' lack of travel to visit us is explained by our lack of travel to visit them.
We haven't got there yet (plus it's damned ridiculously expensive/energy intensive to do it right and widely, so we might not bother.)
It's plausible that they haven't got here yet for the same reasons.
Oh and of course the vast distances mean that if we started sending the ships tomorrow, they wouldn't get to where they may be for hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of years.
So they may have beat us by a day, and just launched their ships today, but there is still no paradox.
Of course, there is likely a wiggle factor in the gestational time of complex life in the universe, but it may be only measured in terms of a few millions or 10s of millions of years, and the vast distance argument, and the difficulty/cost argument could plausibly explain lack of contact, with such a narrow time-window of contenders.
It is really important to remember that humans have been deforesting the planet for several thousand years now. I'd be interested in knowing what the pre-human impact, post-last-ice-age forest map looks like. Hint: England, Ireland, Western Europe etc I'm looking at you!
1. The specification of the problem is not obvious or 2. The design of the solution, once the problem is specified, is not obvious
To me, this patent fails both 1. and 2. as in:
1. Hmm. I wonder if it would be useful or aesthetically pleasing to emulate the page turning of real books on a computer screen? Hands up who thinks that isn't an obvious idea. (so describe the process details inherent in turning a page, as the requirements of the virtual process)
2. How can I use standard graphics models and transformations and standard rendering technologies to realize this? Pretty obvious. Just break the design problem down using standard software design analysis techniques (OO isomorphism of representation and represented things and relationships), functions and subfunctions, calls to well-known rendering and geometry techniques. Bloody obvious to anyone with a good grade in a comp-sci degree and a little time on their hands.
Google made the transit info in my city usable. The previous system written by the local transit authority was a usability and performance nightmare.
Shopping for flights and hotels online is currently a godawful mess of bad user experience, including ridiculously useless middlemen (highwaymen) hijacking your searches.
I once went through a 6, 7 or 8 page form sequence to search for and order an airline ticket (departing from my home city) before it told me obliquely that "you can't do that from your country".
The Government shouldn't have the right to come in to my house and rummage through my letters.
Of course, we have to remember that rights are whatever the people with the guns say they are.
If Google is disclosing our Gmail to various governments, they better send each of us a plain and clear letter (a gmail email) telling us exactly what their policy in this regard is.
If all browsers switched (after a year of widely publicised warning time, say) to displaying an error message rather than render broken pages, then all of the pages whose owners (or readers) care about them would be fixed within another year after the great "web quake" (the transition to valid pages only.)
That would actually be a really smart thing to do, in that it would support a more sane evolution of the technology going forward.
But it wouldn't be a likely thing to be done, given human history, in which "barely good enough, but basically sucks" rules the roost. (e.g. dominant position of Windows etc.)
Students these days could be surfing wherever they feel like using their smartphones.
I wonder what the purpose, effectiveness, relevance of these filtering policies is, particularly given the above consideration.
The purpose can't really be to protect the students from the content anymore. That's no longer practical given web-surfing phones & personal netbooks that use the cell network.
So what is the purpose? Just to protect the schools from legal liability and lambasting by the prude faction?
- including user stories, storyboards etc. I sure wouldn't want to see any code other than technical risk-reduction / tech evaluation spikes included in the first milestone.
If you're talking about code-monkeys incapable of requirements & design specification, maybe it would have been more determinative of your project's success to have tested 3 architects / senior team leads against each other.
Great coders under lousy architect / project engineer will still fail, because their good ideas will be vetoed, and they'll be ordered to charge down the valley like the 600.
We are framing the debate incorrectly. Rather than ask what its effect on the individual human being is (an interesting question but not the centrally important one), we should be asking what is the overall effect on "intelligence resident on Earth" of the combination of humans + computers & the net.
Because clearly, humans + the net of computers is becoming a collective intelligence.
The intelligence and knowledge, is no longer located within an individual person, but rather within the distributed knowledge and communication infrastructure as a whole. We have made our environment, our tools semi-intelligent, and it is becoming irrelevant to ask how much does a person know about the world. The most salient question is, how capable is that person of learning continuously, and how much epistemology do they know and practice; in other words, are they capable of continual theory modification without excess belief commitment, and can they use a principled approach to assessing the credibility and consistency of information in an only semi-coherent sea of information from multiple sources. If they can do these things, they can become a zen master of much of human knowledge; they can become an instant semi-expert in any field that does not require automatic (body) knowledge. Make no mistake. The relevant competition (and co-operation) that will take place going forward will be between these "renaissance person" dialectical minds, enhanced by the net's collective knowledge.
What will that be like, we ought to ask, and yes, also, what will it be like for those who cannot adapt to, or for economic reasons cannot plug into, the presence of an intelligent environment.
To most people, money works kind of like this: $1,$10,$100,$1000,$10,000,$100,000,$gazillions and gazillions
This leads to insane election results, where an incumbent government is kicked out because the documentation was missing on $ 3 million (i.e. $ 3 gazillion) in government spending, on some insignificant program, when the government was managing a $150 billion annual budget. The unaccounted for amount was 1 / 50,000 (=0.002%) of the budget being managed.
(This actually happened in Canada).
Or, when asked what a government should do to cut costs, many voters say: "The bastards should cut their MP (representative) salaries in half!"
(Thereby probably saving something like a whopping 1 / 10,000 (0.01%) of the annual budget.)
Anything we can do to make people start being able to at least figure in rough orders of magnitude, and to understand what "in the noise" means, has my vote!
Yes. You should ask for a raise and a job title change. Just go through exactly what you said in your post:...That you have taken on responsibilities that formerly were performed by, what is it, 3 other people.
If that fails, then like someone said, fallback to asking for the title change only, and start looking for another job. That being said, make sure the new title you ask for is the kind of work you want in your next job.
So if gas cost you 4x as much as it does, similar to the price in Europe, and a minimal definition of the amount it should cost to pay for alternative energy research and pollution and future global warming remediation costs, would it still "just fit"?
You can choose to use the Internet to be smarter - search a lot, explore widely and deeply, and let it coordinate your everyday life to unburden that cognitive load...
or...
you can become a single neuron in the group-think texting twitter-mind, and spend the rest of your time touching up your facebook image and ogling celebrity gossip sites and cat/fail videos.
Be the miner or the mined when it comes to new knowledge. It's up to you.
While I don't disagree that more local responsibility and governance would be a good trend, the idea that adding more information and more information flow efficiency makes the system inherently ungovernable is both counter-intuitive, and almost certainly wrong.
It's true that adding more information and failing to manage that information and its use would make a mess. But along with more information, we've also added such things as - Google, to select just the information you need from the sea of information, like - Wikis, to make intranet (distributed) team cooperation much more effective, like - service-oriented architectures and workflow systems, to pool the services of multiple agencies into a more informed, coherent larger decision-support and transaction system.
And the Internet, through social information sharing and interaction, is breaking down cultural barriers (and making ignorance or parochialism a necessarily willful and socially unacceptable state to be in.)
I predict that the Internet, and distributed information and transaction systems, will allow for more effective governance at even larger scales than the nation-state, as well as more effective nested federal (jurisdiction-sharing) forms of governance at every level down the hierarchy.
We just got a global nervous-system, and the beginnings of a global memory and mind. That's only likely to cause us to descend to tribalism if it provokes a fearful backlash from the willfully ignorant, or those unwilling to compromise, discuss, and share at many levels with many sizes of surrounding societies.
If done while maintaining democracy and responsibility at all levels, this technology could lead to better governance, and governance at the global scale we clearly require to face down several serious global issues we have created for ourselves. We've got global trade and business. A counterbalancing force of effective and democratic global governance is now needed, and technologically possible.
Yabbut.. It should be a degree with lots and lots of programming and lots of software engineering process stuff and lots of crunchy math stuff, logic stuff, and data modelling stuff etc etc.
I expect good programming skill as one key outcome of such a degree. Any compsci degree program that isn't weeding out people who can't program fairly well is doing a disservice to their graduates (all of whose qualifications are being devalued) and to industry.
I'm noticing a lot of supposed comp sci bsc degree holders who are very superficial in their knowledge of, for example, basic object-oriented concepts. They seem to be parroting back certain terms like polymorphism, encapsulation etc without really understanding what they are or why the might be important. Also, everyone says "java" skills, j2ee etc but has no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean.
All this bespeaks cookie-cutter exam-passing types of knowledge and a seeming lack of i-depth experience with the problems and issues encountered when doing serious system creation with software.
Slashdot Mirror
and too configurable or flexible?
I haven't tried it but the videos introducing it showed a 747-cockpit kind of UI (very busy, important info
all over the place in unexpected or random locations.)
The value of simplicity (for adoption) cannot be overemphasized.
Simplicity of use (one text-entry field, two buttons), and non-clutteredness with mind-F***ing banner ads,
are arguably among the main reasons the google
search page was adopted over its competitors in the first place.
There is probably a reason why it took around 3 billion + years for multi-cellular life to become possible.
The single cellular life had to evolve to the point where the cells were robust enough and flexible enough in their
structure and processes to be able to accept viable combination with other cells, and to be able to take advantage
of it. Just because we can't see the many incremental improvements that had to happen to make that feasible
doesn't mean they didn't happen.
Remember, the first life on the planet was probably really crap at containing and performing metabolism, faithful
reproduction, specialization of cell-part functions. Life, even single cellular, got gradually better at being life.
(More robust, more likely to survive a more general, more widely varying set of environmental conditions, more
likely to be able to safely evolve new forms, processes, and strategies. Evolution itself evolves and improves,
recursively. Cells probably became co-operative about as soon as they were ready and able to, and the change
happened because co-operative survival strategies are better than lone-wolf ones, often times. Why struggle against
your environment, when you can tame part of it and make it part of you.
All that said, I agree that the wiggle room is probably bigger than I said for the sake of argument.
It's probably the cost and limited value to short-lived creatures of 1000 year or million year round trip times
that prevents statistically significant exploration of the stellar neighbourhood.
I say short-lived, because entropy works on every individual organism the same way, everywhere in the universe.
Life reproduces for a reason. Because entropy defeats every individual copy of the life-information, but luckily,
it copies itself faster, on average. That's life.
eat it, burn it, or flush it after memorizing it
oh wait, I forgot, they will soon be able to read your thoughts by analysing neuro-electric activity,
at least enough to be sure you're hiding something, at which point, it's the rubber mallets.
Here are some awkward related questions:
1. What do you think the US government's encryption-breaking capability REALLY is these days? e.g. for example,
are common encryption protocols and key-lengths used in, say, online banking and e-commerce readily crackable by the Feds?
2. Do security agencies of the federal government automatically flag for further investigation all people who use "an excess
amount of encrypted traffic"?
3. Does the FBI, a "domestic" intelligence agency, have the right to spy on foreign residents whose net transactions
traverse the US border? If they don't have the right, are they doing it anyway, or is that some other agency?
If life evolved at close to the same time throughout the universe, then the Fermi Paradox is self-contradictory and invalid.
The universe must go through several specific stages: first star formation epoch, first star death epoch including supernovas, next star birth epoch where the solar systems include the heavy (structure component) elements produced by the supernovas. Then 4 billion or so years to evolve life to our level of complexity.
If in fact it takes the universe roughly as much time, from its beginning, as it took to create us, to create equivalently complex life elsewhere, then we can see that the other civilizations' lack of travel to visit us is explained by our lack of travel to visit them.
We haven't got there yet (plus it's damned ridiculously expensive/energy intensive to do it right and widely, so we might not bother.)
It's plausible that they haven't got here yet for the same reasons.
Oh and of course the vast distances mean that if we started sending the ships tomorrow, they wouldn't get to where they may be for hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of years.
So they may have beat us by a day, and just launched their ships today, but there is still no paradox.
Of course, there is likely a wiggle factor in the gestational time of complex life in the universe, but it may be only measured in terms of a few millions or 10s of millions of years, and the vast distance argument, and the difficulty/cost argument could plausibly explain lack of contact, with such a narrow time-window of contenders.
It is really important to remember that humans have been deforesting the planet for several thousand years now. I'd be interested in knowing what the pre-human impact, post-last-ice-age forest map looks like. Hint: England, Ireland, Western Europe etc I'm looking at you!
is only a benefit if:
1. The specification of the problem is not obvious
or
2. The design of the solution, once the problem is specified, is not obvious
To me, this patent fails both 1. and 2. as in:
1. Hmm. I wonder if it would be useful or aesthetically pleasing to emulate the page turning of real books on a computer screen?
Hands up who thinks that isn't an obvious idea.
(so describe the process details inherent in turning a page, as the requirements of the virtual process)
2. How can I use standard graphics models and transformations and standard rendering technologies to realize this?
Pretty obvious. Just break the design problem down using standard software design analysis techniques (OO isomorphism of representation and represented things and relationships), functions and subfunctions, calls to well-known rendering and geometry techniques. Bloody obvious to anyone with a good grade in a comp-sci degree and a little time on their hands.
...well at least those of use who don't want to pay them will all be on the same page...
Google made the transit info in my city usable. The previous system written by the local transit authority was a usability and performance nightmare.
Shopping for flights and hotels online is currently a godawful mess of bad user experience,
including ridiculously useless middlemen (highwaymen) hijacking your searches.
I once went through a 6, 7 or 8 page form sequence to search for and order an airline ticket (departing from my home city) before it told me obliquely that "you can't do that from your country".
The Government shouldn't have the right to come in to my house and rummage through my letters.
Of course, we have to remember that rights are whatever the people with the guns say they are.
If Google is disclosing our Gmail to various governments, they better send each of us a plain and clear letter (a gmail email) telling us exactly what their policy in this regard is.
If all browsers switched (after a year of widely publicised warning time, say) to displaying an error message rather than render broken pages, then all of the pages whose owners (or readers) care about them would be fixed within another year after the great "web quake" (the transition to valid pages only.)
That would actually be a really smart thing to do, in that it would support a more sane evolution of the technology going forward.
But it wouldn't be a likely thing to be done, given human history, in which "barely good enough, but basically sucks" rules the roost. (e.g. dominant position of Windows etc.)
Students these days could be surfing wherever they feel like using their smartphones.
I wonder what the purpose, effectiveness, relevance of these filtering policies is, particularly
given the above consideration.
The purpose can't really be to protect the students from the content anymore. That's no longer
practical given web-surfing phones & personal netbooks that use the cell network.
So what is the purpose? Just to protect the schools from legal liability and lambasting
by the prude faction?
- including user stories, storyboards etc. I sure wouldn't want to see any code other than technical risk-reduction / tech evaluation spikes included in the first milestone.
If you're talking about code-monkeys incapable of requirements & design specification, maybe it would have been more determinative of your project's success to have tested 3 architects / senior team leads against each other.
Great coders under lousy architect / project engineer will still fail, because their good ideas will be vetoed, and they'll be ordered to charge down the valley like the 600.
We are framing the debate incorrectly. Rather than ask what its effect on the individual human being is (an interesting question but not the centrally important one), we should be asking what is the overall effect on "intelligence resident on Earth" of the combination of humans + computers & the net.
Because clearly, humans + the net of computers is becoming a collective intelligence.
The intelligence and knowledge, is no longer located within an individual person, but rather within the distributed knowledge and communication infrastructure as a whole. We have made our environment, our tools semi-intelligent, and it is becoming irrelevant to ask how much does a person know about the world. The most salient question is, how capable is that person of learning continuously, and how much epistemology do they know and practice; in other words, are they capable of continual theory modification without excess belief commitment, and can they use a principled approach to assessing the credibility and consistency of information in an only semi-coherent sea of information from multiple sources. If they can do these things, they can become a zen master of much of human knowledge; they can become an instant semi-expert in any field that does not require automatic (body) knowledge. Make no mistake. The relevant competition (and co-operation) that will take place going forward will be between these "renaissance person" dialectical minds, enhanced by the net's collective knowledge.
What will that be like, we ought to ask, and yes, also, what will it be like for those who cannot adapt to, or for economic reasons cannot plug into, the presence of an intelligent environment.
To most people, money works kind of like this:
$1,$10,$100,$1000,$10,000,$100,000,$gazillions and gazillions
This leads to insane election results, where an incumbent government is kicked out
because the documentation was missing on $ 3 million (i.e. $ 3 gazillion) in government spending, on some
insignificant program, when the government was managing a $150 billion annual budget.
The unaccounted for amount was 1 / 50,000 (=0.002%) of the budget being managed.
(This actually happened in Canada).
Or, when asked what a government should do to cut costs, many voters say:
"The bastards should cut their MP (representative) salaries in half!"
(Thereby probably saving something like a whopping 1 / 10,000 (0.01%) of the annual budget.)
Anything we can do to make people start being able to at least figure in
rough orders of magnitude, and to understand what "in the noise" means,
has my vote!
Yes. You should ask for a raise and a job title change. ...That you have taken on responsibilities that formerly were performed by,
Just go through exactly what you said in your post:
what is it, 3 other people.
If that fails, then like someone said, fallback to asking for the title change only,
and start looking for another job. That being said, make sure the new title you ask
for is the kind of work you want in your next job.
So if gas cost you 4x as much as it does, similar to the price in Europe, and a minimal definition of the amount it should cost to pay for alternative energy research and pollution and future global warming remediation costs, would it still "just fit"?
Yeah. My Walk-in refridgerator is EnergyStar on a per-volume-cooled basis, but running it still dims the local streetlights.
I can't figure out why.
to make telephone books (or newspapers for that matter),
now that we have the perfectly good Interweb (and ipads).
You can choose to use the Internet to be smarter - search a lot, explore widely and deeply, and let it coordinate your everyday life to unburden that cognitive load...
or...
you can become a single neuron in the group-think texting twitter-mind, and spend the rest of your time touching up your facebook image and ogling celebrity gossip sites and cat/fail videos.
Be the miner or the mined when it comes to new knowledge. It's up to you.
While I don't disagree that more local responsibility and governance would be a good trend, the idea that adding more information and more information flow efficiency makes the system inherently ungovernable is both counter-intuitive, and almost certainly wrong.
It's true that adding more information and failing to manage that information and its use would make a mess. But along with more information, we've also added such things as - Google, to select just the information you need from the sea of information, like - Wikis, to make intranet (distributed) team cooperation much more effective, like - service-oriented architectures and workflow systems, to pool the services of multiple agencies into a more informed, coherent larger decision-support and transaction system.
And the Internet, through social information sharing and interaction, is breaking down cultural barriers (and making ignorance or parochialism a necessarily willful and socially unacceptable state to be in.)
I predict that the Internet, and distributed information and transaction systems, will allow for more effective governance at even larger scales than the nation-state, as well as more effective nested federal (jurisdiction-sharing) forms of governance at every level down the hierarchy.
We just got a global nervous-system, and the beginnings of a global memory and mind. That's only likely to cause us to descend to tribalism if it provokes a fearful backlash from the willfully ignorant, or those unwilling to compromise, discuss, and share at many levels with many sizes of surrounding societies.
If done while maintaining democracy and responsibility at all levels, this technology could lead to better governance, and governance at the global scale we clearly require to face down several serious global issues we have created for ourselves. We've got global trade and business. A counterbalancing force of effective and democratic global governance is now needed, and technologically possible.
Yeah, well back in my comp sci degree days, we hewed software systems out of stacks of punch cards with our bare hands.
Just kidding. I missed that by maybe five years.
Actually, in the interview, I gave the candidate the choice of explaining what one of the following terms meant, roughly:
"Object-relational impedance mismatch"
"Polymorphic collection"
And it was 0/2 pretty much across the board.
I think what we have here are people who know how to drive cars, but don't know how to build cars.
Yabbut.. It should be a degree with lots and lots of programming and lots of software engineering process stuff and lots of crunchy math stuff, logic stuff, and data modelling stuff etc etc.
I expect good programming skill as one key outcome of such a degree. Any compsci degree program that isn't weeding out people who can't program fairly well is doing a disservice to their graduates (all of whose qualifications are being devalued) and to industry.
I'm noticing a lot of supposed comp sci bsc degree holders who are very superficial in their knowledge of, for example, basic object-oriented concepts. They seem to be parroting back certain terms like polymorphism, encapsulation etc without really understanding what they are or why the might be important.
Also, everyone says "java" skills, j2ee etc but has no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean.
All this bespeaks cookie-cutter exam-passing types of knowledge and a seeming lack of i-depth experience with the problems and issues encountered when doing serious system creation with software.