I think we'll be seeing more and more of this garbage in the years to come - software coded awkwardly to get around useless patents
This has been happening for years. I once worked on a popular shrink-wrap app. We got a threat from IBM regarding a patent on having a print preview on screen at the same time as the standard data view in the application. We got around it by making our print preview modal and full-screen to obscure the data in the main window. I've since noticed several other applications doing the same thing.
... licensed broadcast TV signals have always been in the clear and legal for anyone to recieve.
Not quite true. SelectTV started as an over-the-air scrambled channel. It required a set-top box but no cable. This was back in the early- to mid-1980s.
The abstract can be general, it's just a searching tool for people looking for patents. I don't believe anything said in the abstract really goes to the validity of the patent. It's the claims that matters.
I'm not for over-regulating businesses, but I think we need to go a step further here. If you are a retailer that sells a product that should be recyclable (newspapers, beverage containers, computers, etc.) or requires special disposal (batteries, motor oil, etc.), then you should be required to accept those types of items for recycling and disposal.
Here in California, things are screwed up (surprise). We have a law that requires a deposit on beverage containers, which you can get back when you recycle them. Sounds great. But finding recycling centers is getting harder and harder. There are few of them, they have limited hours, and they issue vouchers instead of cash. Part of the reason they're rare is that people don't use them. Most communities now have a curbside recycling program. Great. But we have to pay for that, too. So we end up paying a fee on every aluminum can, only to throw it into a recycling bin that we have to pay another collection fee on.
Nationwide, they even prohibited state sales tax from being collected on purchases over the internet.
False. The moratorium on Internet taxes did not undo sales and use taxes already imposed by the states. In fact, a law was passed to close a loophole that had allowed a major online bookseller (bn.com, I think, but it may have been borders.com) to skip collection of sales tax in California.
Just because an out-of-state retailer doesn't collect sales or use tax on an online (or catalog) sale doesn't mean that you don't owe that tax.
I agree with you in principle, but we may not be the target audience for the design. I'm sure MS considered the alternatives here. And it probably came down to the fact that most users will have a small number of files in the given folder (assuming the app brings up the dialog with an appropriate folder selected). With the two- or three-column format you get instead of the Details view, there's a good chance that all of the user's files will be visible and clickable without scrolling or changing any settings. Thus for most cases, this is a win.
Determine how the typical user thinks about the task. Figure out their mental model.
Find a mapping between the user's mental model and the programs processing model.
(Usability) Test it.
Debug (the mapping).
Repeat as necessary.
Nope, programmers aren't good at any of these things. It involves problem solving skills. Programmers don't have any of those. It involves detecting, isolating, and correcting mistakes. Step-wise refinement. Nope, programmers can't do that.
Sarcasm aside. A lot of programmers do make horrible, unusable UIs. Some, like Alan Cooper and various people on Slashdot, argue that programmers can't learn how to make a good UI. I disagree. A good UI is a solution to a mapping problem.
The trick is making the UI a priority, properly identifying the problems, and providing for iterative engineering of a solution to the problems. Good user-interface designers are engineers in this sense. It's just that they've specialized in this human-machine domain, so they have a huge head-start on those who would otherwise have to discover everything from scratch. Programmers can learn how "regular users" think about their tasks, even if it's alien to how the programmer would think about it. Cooper says they can't, but I think he's wrong.
Pairing a programmer with a UI expert can be a fantastic thing. The UI expert can help the programmer understand how the users see the task, and the programmer can come up with innovative ways to map that mental model to the program model.
The monopoly laws are still on the books, but most would agree they're hard to enforce. Microsoft got off relatively easy after being convicted of illegal practices with respect to their (legal) monopoly.
Corporate tax rates are at historic lows at all levels of government.
Companies cannot vote, but their executives and lobbyists have unprecedented access to our representatives. Some would argue this is a more direct route to getting the government you want than actually voting.
Environmental protections are being rolled back in some cases and blocked in others.
There is significant support for tort reform, but here industries are at cross purposes the; lawyer lobby doesn't want to see it happen.
I don't think it's so much a matter of fear mongering as it is people who honestly see the same things from very different perspectives.
"Hi, my name is Bill, and I'm calling on behalf of [one of the 412 representatives] to remind you to vote for [name of rep]. During his/her last term, he/she fought for your rights to eat dinner without the interruption of annoying commercial telemarketing calls. Of course, this call is exempt, since it's part of a political campaign."
You saved me a long post. I'm also a text editor and plain TeX author. I made a macro package that allows me to do some simple, basic markup (e.g., \beginchapter). I've got two implementations that I can swap between. One gives the old-fashioned manuscript format that many editors still prefer (and is great for hardcopy edits), the other prints like a nicely typeset book (prefered by those who give me feedback).
As a programmer, I'm very comfortable with the concept of source code and compiled results. WYSIWYG editors simply don't make any sense. Why should I tie my formatting decisions to my text?
My few miserable attempts at using MS Word have produced frustration beyond anything I've experienced in my nearly 30 years of experience with computers. Everything Word does is absolutely counter-intuitive to me.
... software patents do not encourage innovation and R&D.
Really? What's the evidence? I look at things like PNG (Portable Network Graphics file format), which was an innovative, technologically superior solution that probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the patent restrictions on the compression used by GIF (CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format).
If we think that patents are useful in some fields but not others, what distinguishes those fields? How will we draw the line? What happens when the line between software and hardware blurs (microcode?)? Is the real problem with software patents that software is somehow a different beast? Or is the real problem that overly general patents are granted?
I suspect the problems aren't fundamental. I'd like to see an honest attempt at fixing the problem by tuning the system before we chuck it all. Eliminate business method patents (software or otherwise). Increase patent application scrutiny. Shorten the duration of patent protection for rapidly evolving fields.
First of all, everybody chill. When you can buy 120+/- GB disk drives for $60, who cares about a 10% difference? Especially given that filesystems waste so much of the drive with unused portions of clusters, etc.
And why are they suing the computer companies rather than the disk drive companies? This is just a nuisance suit because the drive companies generally remember to put the footnote on the box, but the computer ads are already too packed to squeeze in any more caveats.
Different disk drive companies use MB to mean different quantities. Believe it or not, there are more than two choices. You may think MB should be 2^20 or 10^6 bytes, but many disk drive companies use 1000 KB (or 1000 * 1024 bytes).
And hard drives actually have more space than advertised. A significant portion of the drive holds spare sectors, and there's quite a few ECC bits on there, too.
It's the computer folks that corrupted the meanings of the SI prefixes. To distinguish the difference, many used to use capital K to mean 1024 and reserved lowercase k for 1000. And nobody really cared about a ~2.5% difference. That was fine until we got to megabytes, since M and m are both standard SI prefixes.
The odds of a cosmic ray flipping one of your bits when you had 64KB RAM was infinitessimal, and we had parity bits just in case. But now RAM sizes have grown a million fold, and we've practically eliminated parity and ECC bits. (Though the odds of a cosmic ray flipping an important bit is still tiny since most of your bits are stupid bitmaps, MP3 samples, and spyware data.) In a sense, aren't the hard drive companies more noble by using that few extra percent to protect your data than the RAM manufacturers who give you a few percent more buy no longer make an effort to ensure data integrity?
And finally, I find the claims of the plaintiffs amusing when they estimate how many digital photos you could store in the "missing" space. Isn't a vague estimate without regard to image size, resolution, color depth, file format, and file system potentially just as misleading as the footnote on your hard drive's retail box?
Re:The problem is: that's not the problem
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 2
But with ever-increasing CPU horsepower, memory bandwidth, memory size, etc., there simply is no incentive for optimizing the things you're talking about.
Not entirely true. We've got more memory and CPU power, but the storage bandwidth has not kept pace. Every significant performance problem I've tackled in the past few years has had to do with cache misses and/or page faults. I've worked on shrink wrap code where the customers have decent though not high-end machines. Load times can be 30 seconds of building fix-up tables for the scores of dynamic libraries before you hit the first line of main(). Add another minute of thrashing while the minimal amount of data is loaded from disk into the far reaches of your address space, and you've got a user who's already wandered off to get another cup of coffee.
Improving locality of data is nearly impossible if your language is too high-level or if you've delegated to a very general-purpose container library. I once improved the performance of a function from more than a minute to about a second. It was looking up 900 items in an STL map that had somehow spread itself out over zillions of pages causing endless VM thrashing. I replaced the map with a simple array and used bsearch. Zoom.
I guess my point is we do need to fight the bloat. We need tools that load the bare-minimum. If we surrender some of our control to higher-level languages and libraries, then we need a back door to take control back when it matters.
Re:Extortion [Re:Stealing by the RIAA]
on
RIAA Bits
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· Score: 1
The 60-70 million filesharer estimates *are* for global usage, not just the US.
Re:Extortion [Re:Stealing by the RIAA]
on
RIAA Bits
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· Score: 1
There are more filesharers than the number of people who voted in the last presidential election.
You might want to double check your sig. I believe the actual statistic is that there are more filesharers than people who voted for Bush (or Gore or any of the other candidates). But, last I heard, it was not more than the total number of votes cast. Gore received a little less than 50 million votes. Bush got a little bit less than that. So total votes cast is on the order of 100 million. Estimates of file sharers vary, but I've seen a lot place it in the 60-70 million range.
You must be using Internet Explorer for Windows - the only browser I can find that doesn't allow you to change the text size.
I hate when misinformation gets modded "Informative." Yes, I'm using IE. But IE does let you change the font size. At least is does for 90% of the websites I visit. Zeldman's page seems to override IE for nearly all of the text on his page. And even his style sheet changer, which another Slashdotter kindly pointed me to, only improves the size and contrast for some of the text on the page.
I'd buy an electric car in a heartbeat, but I can't find any commerical electric models available anymore. GM still has the ev1 website which will direct you to a Saturn dealership, but the dealer says they haven't had any in years. The hybrids don't (currently) qualify for the carpool lanes here in california, but electrics and natural gas cars do.
let's remember that this is the kind of stuff that stops innovation
I disagree. I think stuff like this inspires innovation in two ways. (1) Little guys everywhere see that a good invention or idea is so powerful, you can go up against a Goliath like Microsoft. (2) The repercussions of this (if Eolas does indeed prevail) will inspire lots of people to come up with new, and possibly better, solutions to the integration of rich media with browsing.
Seamless! Yeah right. For protection, I have IE prompt me before launching any ActiveX control (many of them, like Flash, hang almost every system I've ever owned). I don't mind the single prompt dialog. What drives me bonkers is the chatising second message that pops up when I say "no."
I see the anti-patent argument here, but deep down I'm a little gleeful. So many websites use these multimedia plugins gratuitously--flash over substance.
This Zeldman guy doesn't seem like much of a usability/accessibility guru if his web site refuses to let me enlarge the font to something legible, not to mention improve the contrast.
His comments were hardly "in-depth". I don't think he added anything the C|Net story didn't cover.
I questioned the sales rep when I was in the same situation. He said that it's used for nothing but the credit check.
Then I got my first bill and saw that the first half of the account number was a significant portion of my SSN. I suppose that could be a 1/10000 coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
The filing date on the patent is December 20, 2002.
This has been happening for years. I once worked on a popular shrink-wrap app. We got a threat from IBM regarding a patent on having a print preview on screen at the same time as the standard data view in the application. We got around it by making our print preview modal and full-screen to obscure the data in the main window. I've since noticed several other applications doing the same thing.
Then again, we didn't see this asteroid that just crossed our path, either. Smaller than a hypothetical planet, true, but much, much closer.
Not quite true. SelectTV started as an over-the-air scrambled channel. It required a set-top box but no cable. This was back in the early- to mid-1980s.
The abstract can be general, it's just a searching tool for people looking for patents. I don't believe anything said in the abstract really goes to the validity of the patent. It's the claims that matters.
Those solar-powered cell-based emergency call boxes along the highway automatically call for help when they are knocked over.
You must admit, though, that this patent is certainly one of the most readable ones you've ever seen.
I'm not for over-regulating businesses, but I think we need to go a step further here. If you are a retailer that sells a product that should be recyclable (newspapers, beverage containers, computers, etc.) or requires special disposal (batteries, motor oil, etc.), then you should be required to accept those types of items for recycling and disposal.
Here in California, things are screwed up (surprise). We have a law that requires a deposit on beverage containers, which you can get back when you recycle them. Sounds great. But finding recycling centers is getting harder and harder. There are few of them, they have limited hours, and they issue vouchers instead of cash. Part of the reason they're rare is that people don't use them. Most communities now have a curbside recycling program. Great. But we have to pay for that, too. So we end up paying a fee on every aluminum can, only to throw it into a recycling bin that we have to pay another collection fee on.
False. The moratorium on Internet taxes did not undo sales and use taxes already imposed by the states. In fact, a law was passed to close a loophole that had allowed a major online bookseller (bn.com, I think, but it may have been borders.com) to skip collection of sales tax in California.
Just because an out-of-state retailer doesn't collect sales or use tax on an online (or catalog) sale doesn't mean that you don't owe that tax.
I agree with you in principle, but we may not be the target audience for the design. I'm sure MS considered the alternatives here. And it probably came down to the fact that most users will have a small number of files in the given folder (assuming the app brings up the dialog with an appropriate folder selected). With the two- or three-column format you get instead of the Details view, there's a good chance that all of the user's files will be visible and clickable without scrolling or changing any settings. Thus for most cases, this is a win.
Nope, programmers aren't good at any of these things. It involves problem solving skills. Programmers don't have any of those. It involves detecting, isolating, and correcting mistakes. Step-wise refinement. Nope, programmers can't do that.
Sarcasm aside. A lot of programmers do make horrible, unusable UIs. Some, like Alan Cooper and various people on Slashdot, argue that programmers can't learn how to make a good UI. I disagree. A good UI is a solution to a mapping problem.
The trick is making the UI a priority, properly identifying the problems, and providing for iterative engineering of a solution to the problems. Good user-interface designers are engineers in this sense. It's just that they've specialized in this human-machine domain, so they have a huge head-start on those who would otherwise have to discover everything from scratch. Programmers can learn how "regular users" think about their tasks, even if it's alien to how the programmer would think about it. Cooper says they can't, but I think he's wrong.
Pairing a programmer with a UI expert can be a fantastic thing. The UI expert can help the programmer understand how the users see the task, and the programmer can come up with innovative ways to map that mental model to the program model.
I don't think it's so much a matter of fear mongering as it is people who honestly see the same things from very different perspectives.
So let's start patenting all of the nefarious ways RFIDs could be used to invade privacy. Then we can block such uses, or at least get well paid.
Either that, or we'll bring about a revolution in the patent system, which I know many Slashdotters would welcome.
Ring.
"Hi, my name is Bill, and I'm calling on behalf of [one of the 412 representatives] to remind you to vote for [name of rep]. During his/her last term, he/she fought for your rights to eat dinner without the interruption of annoying commercial telemarketing calls. Of course, this call is exempt, since it's part of a political campaign."
"How did you get my number?"
"From the national Do-Not-Call list."
You saved me a long post. I'm also a text editor and plain TeX author. I made a macro package that allows me to do some simple, basic markup (e.g., \beginchapter). I've got two implementations that I can swap between. One gives the old-fashioned manuscript format that many editors still prefer (and is great for hardcopy edits), the other prints like a nicely typeset book (prefered by those who give me feedback).
As a programmer, I'm very comfortable with the concept of source code and compiled results. WYSIWYG editors simply don't make any sense. Why should I tie my formatting decisions to my text?
My few miserable attempts at using MS Word have produced frustration beyond anything I've experienced in my nearly 30 years of experience with computers. Everything Word does is absolutely counter-intuitive to me.
From the letter:
Really? What's the evidence? I look at things like PNG (Portable Network Graphics file format), which was an innovative, technologically superior solution that probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for the patent restrictions on the compression used by GIF (CompuServe's Graphics Interchange Format).
If we think that patents are useful in some fields but not others, what distinguishes those fields? How will we draw the line? What happens when the line between software and hardware blurs (microcode?)? Is the real problem with software patents that software is somehow a different beast? Or is the real problem that overly general patents are granted?
I suspect the problems aren't fundamental. I'd like to see an honest attempt at fixing the problem by tuning the system before we chuck it all. Eliminate business method patents (software or otherwise). Increase patent application scrutiny. Shorten the duration of patent protection for rapidly evolving fields.
First of all, everybody chill. When you can buy 120+/- GB disk drives for $60, who cares about a 10% difference? Especially given that filesystems waste so much of the drive with unused portions of clusters, etc.
And why are they suing the computer companies rather than the disk drive companies? This is just a nuisance suit because the drive companies generally remember to put the footnote on the box, but the computer ads are already too packed to squeeze in any more caveats.
Different disk drive companies use MB to mean different quantities. Believe it or not, there are more than two choices. You may think MB should be 2^20 or 10^6 bytes, but many disk drive companies use 1000 KB (or 1000 * 1024 bytes).
And hard drives actually have more space than advertised. A significant portion of the drive holds spare sectors, and there's quite a few ECC bits on there, too.
It's the computer folks that corrupted the meanings of the SI prefixes. To distinguish the difference, many used to use capital K to mean 1024 and reserved lowercase k for 1000. And nobody really cared about a ~2.5% difference. That was fine until we got to megabytes, since M and m are both standard SI prefixes.
The odds of a cosmic ray flipping one of your bits when you had 64KB RAM was infinitessimal, and we had parity bits just in case. But now RAM sizes have grown a million fold, and we've practically eliminated parity and ECC bits. (Though the odds of a cosmic ray flipping an important bit is still tiny since most of your bits are stupid bitmaps, MP3 samples, and spyware data.) In a sense, aren't the hard drive companies more noble by using that few extra percent to protect your data than the RAM manufacturers who give you a few percent more buy no longer make an effort to ensure data integrity?
And finally, I find the claims of the plaintiffs amusing when they estimate how many digital photos you could store in the "missing" space. Isn't a vague estimate without regard to image size, resolution, color depth, file format, and file system potentially just as misleading as the footnote on your hard drive's retail box?
Not entirely true. We've got more memory and CPU power, but the storage bandwidth has not kept pace. Every significant performance problem I've tackled in the past few years has had to do with cache misses and/or page faults. I've worked on shrink wrap code where the customers have decent though not high-end machines. Load times can be 30 seconds of building fix-up tables for the scores of dynamic libraries before you hit the first line of main(). Add another minute of thrashing while the minimal amount of data is loaded from disk into the far reaches of your address space, and you've got a user who's already wandered off to get another cup of coffee.
Improving locality of data is nearly impossible if your language is too high-level or if you've delegated to a very general-purpose container library. I once improved the performance of a function from more than a minute to about a second. It was looking up 900 items in an STL map that had somehow spread itself out over zillions of pages causing endless VM thrashing. I replaced the map with a simple array and used bsearch. Zoom.
I guess my point is we do need to fight the bloat. We need tools that load the bare-minimum. If we surrender some of our control to higher-level languages and libraries, then we need a back door to take control back when it matters.
The 60-70 million filesharer estimates *are* for global usage, not just the US.
You might want to double check your sig. I believe the actual statistic is that there are more filesharers than people who voted for Bush (or Gore or any of the other candidates). But, last I heard, it was not more than the total number of votes cast. Gore received a little less than 50 million votes. Bush got a little bit less than that. So total votes cast is on the order of 100 million. Estimates of file sharers vary, but I've seen a lot place it in the 60-70 million range.
I hate when misinformation gets modded "Informative." Yes, I'm using IE. But IE does let you change the font size. At least is does for 90% of the websites I visit. Zeldman's page seems to override IE for nearly all of the text on his page. And even his style sheet changer, which another Slashdotter kindly pointed me to, only improves the size and contrast for some of the text on the page.
I'd buy an electric car in a heartbeat, but I can't find any commerical electric models available anymore. GM still has the ev1 website which will direct you to a Saturn dealership, but the dealer says they haven't had any in years. The hybrids don't (currently) qualify for the carpool lanes here in california, but electrics and natural gas cars do.
Probably bad form to reply to myself, but consider this: We have PNG (a superior lossless image format) because GIF had patent problems.
I disagree. I think stuff like this inspires innovation in two ways. (1) Little guys everywhere see that a good invention or idea is so powerful, you can go up against a Goliath like Microsoft. (2) The repercussions of this (if Eolas does indeed prevail) will inspire lots of people to come up with new, and possibly better, solutions to the integration of rich media with browsing.
A whole mess of reactions to this:
I questioned the sales rep when I was in the same situation. He said that it's used for nothing but the credit check.
Then I got my first bill and saw that the first half of the account number was a significant portion of my SSN. I suppose that could be a 1/10000 coincidence.