The story is set earlier, but the book was written later when the world CSL created was more complete. It's like Star Wars - the new films are chronologically set earlier than the originals, but seeing them in chronological order would(I think) make less sense.
On the assumption that this isn't a troll (is it possible that someone hasn't heard of Photoshop?):
Adobe Photoshop is an image editing and manipulation package, originally used for retouching photos (hence the name) but nowadays capable of vastly more. For years it's been the standard for 2D graphical work in design, graphics and DTP, and with QuarkXpress* was part of the reason for the success of the Mac in those fields (there were no PC versions originally). Practically any professional graphics you see nowadays has had Photoshop used on it somewhere. Other programs offer some of the functionality - Paint Shop Pro, and The GIMP which aims to be an open-source Photoshop equivalent - and does pretty well for a lot of things - but Photoshop is still the professional standard.
(* QuarkXPress is pretty much the standard page layout package, most newspapers use it. It too was for a long time only available for the Mac.)
Flash is overused, both for static graphics and for needless bloated front pages where the rest of the site is in normal HTML. However, plugins have many good uses, perhaps most importantly for viewing PDFs. Being able to just click on a PDF and read it is great for me - practically all scientific papers are distributed as PDF these days. And since both PDF viewers and PDF writers are available in open source, it's not really a problem even if the standard itself is proprietary.
Patenting plugins is like patenting the idea of DIY home improvement - ludicrous (although I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already patented the latter...)
No so much defects as veins on his retina - the way he was using the telescope (bright light source, very high f/ number, etc) made it work like an ophthalmoscope. Think of how when you go to the optician and they shine a light in your eys - often you can see the veins. There was an article in Sky and Telescope in 2002, but I don't have the issue to hand.
It's down to abstraction. As described very nicely in the report, inexperienced users (the majority) have the tasks 'hard-coded' into their brains. They know to click a particular sequence of buttons and menus without understanding _why_ they are doing so - and, more often than not in my experience, without even _reading_ the menu or _looking_ properly at the icons. Often, they don't even understand the difference between system, app and desktop. When anything changes, even slightly, they get confused, whereas a more experienced user will understand why they do what they do and try to find an alternative path.
More seriously, this test suffers from small number statistics - with only 20 users being tested on WinXP, the difference between 80% and 85% is one person - not a very significant margin.
With the 'liking the interface' question, 100% of WinXP users liked the interface = 20, 83% of Linux users liked the interface = 50. So I could turn the statistics around and say that more than twice as many users liked the Linux interface. Perfectly true, and just as bogus a conclusion.
Finally, the English version of the report hasn't come out yet and my German is far too rusty to even try looking, but how was XP configured? If it was configured to look like Windows 2000/Me, which is often done in business/govt. environments to remove the colourful distractions, then any user of those older Windows versions would have been instantly at home. And how was KDE configured? KDE can be configured to look and behave very much like Windows, or quite differently, skewing the results either way.
To make this kind of thing sensible, you need:
much larger and more equal samples of people;
through descriptions of the two configurations - or, better still, more test groups - Windows XP in 'colourful' mode and in Win2K mode, KDE in native mode and in Win-clone mode;
a clearer assessment of previous user experience.
Otherwise, tests like this have little real value except for marketing hype...
SMSes are a good use, but there are other, more serious uses also.
Beacons for aircraft navigation transmit their identities using Morse code, or at least used to (I used to listen in on them sometimes when I was a kid and got my first radio). So do some lighthouses and shipping beacons. Morse is also used for signalling with an Aldis Lamp.
Morse code is a very convenient and effective way of sending a short signal (such as an ID or map reference) which requires a minimum of equipment and complexity and so makes it more robust and more effective in an emergency.
In this day and age we're often too ready to build complex solutions when simple ones are perfectly adequate. I think it would be sad to see Morse code skills disappear totally, so if people want to maintain their knowledge of Morse by using it over the net then good for them.
Unfortunately, as the first link in the story points out, Morse in no longer required by the International Telecommunications Union for amateur licences, and is being phased out at nataional level. Depending on your point of view, this can be good or bad. In terms of making it easier to get a licence, it's good, but it's sad that a skill is being lost.
If one wanted to build a Hubble 2 which was very similar to the original, there are easier ways - when Hubble was being built, two copies of many parts were made. In particular, NASA has a second Hubble primary mirror in storage, which, moreover, does not suffer from the same optical error as the one which was sent up. Using this would be far cheaper and easier than stripping and reconditioning the existing Hubble components.
Actually, the IRIX GUI _is_ a desktop environment, with a filemanager, trashcan, desktop icons and the rest. And all this more than ten years ago.
Gnumeric and non-English Excel
on
Gnumeric Turns 5
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· Score: 5, Interesting
How well does Gnumeric handle xls files from non-English versions of Excel?
In particular, the formulae in non-English versions of Excel are saved into the xls files using their non-English names - can Gnumeric cope with that? (This is totally brain dead behaviour, IMHO, - not only does it mean that an English Excel can't understand non-English files, but if the function name has a non-Latin 1 character in it and you don't have that font, then even if you have the right language version of Excel you still can't edit the formula, only run it! This kills sharing Excel spreadsheets internationally. Why, oh why didn't they use numeric codes in the file and translate?). [Disclaimer: I've seen this for Excel = v.97, haven't looked at newer versions.]
As a side question, how does Gnumeric save formulae in its own-format files?
I originally tried Gnumeric a long time ago, in v. 0.something, at the time it didn't have the functionality I needed. I shall certainly try it again. Thanks for all the hard work!
Unfortunately, even SciAm has gone downhill compared to, say, ten years ago - the actual science content has been significantly reduced, with articles often being very superficial. And where are Mathematical Recreations, Amateur Scientist and other such features? They were inspirational. Now all we get are silly little aimed-at-12-year-olds explanations of how various things work; all well and good but no substitute for the previous content.
Other odd items which I have seen or know at first hand as having been sent throught the British Royal Mail - a postcard scratched onto a piece of slate, sent by a field trip back to the Sedgwick Museum of Geology in Cambridge [received, and now used as a slate sample in teaching students, still with stamp and message], a jelly in an envelope [received in a plastic bag with an apology for its somewhat squashed state] and a biscuit, unwrapped with stamp directly attached [received, IRC also in plastic]. Somebody should write a book on odd things sent through the post, it would be a great read.
I was also particularly impressed when my mother received a letter from abroad with just her name and the town as the address; the town is a suburb of London and must number several tens of thousands of inhabitants at the very least.
In general, I'm still rather angry about things like the spy agencies not giving satellite time.
The 'spy agencies' (or more specifically, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) did offer their satellites, it was NASA management who refused to request pictures because they didn't think it would be useful. This is one of the NASA failures singled out by the accident inquiry preliminary report.
The question of whether a rescure should have been attempted is a thorny one. I personally think it should have been. There are a lot of very capable people at NASA who would have come up with a plan and made it work (c.f. Apollo 13). Either way, though, management should have at least thoroughly considered the possibility. The problem is complacency, the same problem that brought down Challenger.
Slashdot Mirror
The story is set earlier, but the book was written later when the world CSL created was more complete. It's like Star Wars - the new films are chronologically set earlier than the originals, but seeing them in chronological order would(I think) make less sense.
Adobe Photoshop is an image editing and manipulation package, originally used for retouching photos (hence the name) but nowadays capable of vastly more. For years it's been the standard for 2D graphical work in design, graphics and DTP, and with QuarkXpress* was part of the reason for the success of the Mac in those fields (there were no PC versions originally). Practically any professional graphics you see nowadays has had Photoshop used on it somewhere. Other programs offer some of the functionality - Paint Shop Pro, and The GIMP which aims to be an open-source Photoshop equivalent - and does pretty well for a lot of things - but Photoshop is still the professional standard.
(* QuarkXPress is pretty much the standard page layout package, most newspapers use it. It too was for a long time only available for the Mac.)
And the evidence for this is ....?
Patenting plugins is like patenting the idea of DIY home improvement - ludicrous (although I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already patented the latter...)
No so much defects as veins on his retina - the way he was using the telescope (bright light source, very high f/ number, etc) made it work like an ophthalmoscope. Think of how when you go to the optician and they shine a light in your eys - often you can see the veins. There was an article in Sky and Telescope in 2002, but I don't have the issue to hand.
It's down to abstraction. As described very nicely in the report, inexperienced users (the majority) have the tasks 'hard-coded' into their brains. They know to click a particular sequence of buttons and menus without understanding _why_ they are doing so - and, more often than not in my experience, without even _reading_ the menu or _looking_ properly at the icons. Often, they don't even understand the difference between system, app and desktop. When anything changes, even slightly, they get confused, whereas a more experienced user will understand why they do what they do and try to find an alternative path.
Oh dear ....
More seriously, this test suffers from small number statistics - with only 20 users being tested on WinXP, the difference between 80% and 85% is one person - not a very significant margin.
With the 'liking the interface' question, 100% of WinXP users liked the interface = 20, 83% of Linux users liked the interface = 50. So I could turn the statistics around and say that more than twice as many users liked the Linux interface. Perfectly true, and just as bogus a conclusion.
Finally, the English version of the report hasn't come out yet and my German is far too rusty to even try looking, but how was XP configured? If it was configured to look like Windows 2000/Me, which is often done in business/govt. environments to remove the colourful distractions, then any user of those older Windows versions would have been instantly at home. And how was KDE configured? KDE can be configured to look and behave very much like Windows, or quite differently, skewing the results either way.
To make this kind of thing sensible, you need:
- much larger and more equal samples of people;
- through descriptions of the two configurations - or, better still, more test groups - Windows XP in 'colourful' mode and in Win2K mode, KDE in native mode and in Win-clone mode;
- a clearer assessment of previous user experience.
Otherwise, tests like this have little real value except for marketing hypeBeacons for aircraft navigation transmit their identities using Morse code, or at least used to (I used to listen in on them sometimes when I was a kid and got my first radio). So do some lighthouses and shipping beacons. Morse is also used for signalling with an Aldis Lamp.
Morse code is a very convenient and effective way of sending a short signal (such as an ID or map reference) which requires a minimum of equipment and complexity and so makes it more robust and more effective in an emergency. In this day and age we're often too ready to build complex solutions when simple ones are perfectly adequate. I think it would be sad to see Morse code skills disappear totally, so if people want to maintain their knowledge of Morse by using it over the net then good for them.
Unfortunately, as the first link in the story points out, Morse in no longer required by the International Telecommunications Union for amateur licences, and is being phased out at nataional level. Depending on your point of view, this can be good or bad. In terms of making it easier to get a licence, it's good, but it's sad that a skill is being lost.
If one wanted to build a Hubble 2 which was very similar to the original, there are easier ways - when Hubble was being built, two copies of many parts were made. In particular, NASA has a second Hubble primary mirror in storage, which, moreover, does not suffer from the same optical error as the one which was sent up. Using this would be far cheaper and easier than stripping and reconditioning the existing Hubble components.
Actually, the IRIX GUI _is_ a desktop environment, with a filemanager, trashcan, desktop icons and the rest. And all this more than ten years ago.
How well does Gnumeric handle xls files from non-English versions of Excel?
In particular, the formulae in non-English versions of Excel are saved into the xls files using their non-English names - can Gnumeric cope with that? (This is totally brain dead behaviour, IMHO, - not only does it mean that an English Excel can't understand non-English files, but if the function name has a non-Latin 1 character in it and you don't have that font, then even if you have the right language version of Excel you still can't edit the formula, only run it! This kills sharing Excel spreadsheets internationally. Why, oh why didn't they use numeric codes in the file and translate?). [Disclaimer: I've seen this for Excel = v.97, haven't looked at newer versions.]
As a side question, how does Gnumeric save formulae in its own-format files?
I originally tried Gnumeric a long time ago, in v. 0.something, at the time it didn't have the functionality I needed. I shall certainly try it again. Thanks for all the hard work!
Unfortunately, even SciAm has gone downhill compared to, say, ten years ago - the actual science content has been significantly reduced, with articles often being very superficial. And where are Mathematical Recreations, Amateur Scientist and other such features? They were inspirational. Now all we get are silly little aimed-at-12-year-olds explanations of how various things work; all well and good but no substitute for the previous content.
I was also particularly impressed when my mother received a letter from abroad with just her name and the town as the address; the town is a suburb of London and must number several tens of thousands of inhabitants at the very least.
The 'spy agencies' (or more specifically, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency) did offer their satellites, it was NASA management who refused to request pictures because they didn't think it would be useful. This is one of the NASA failures singled out by the accident inquiry preliminary report.
The question of whether a rescure should have been attempted is a thorny one. I personally think it should have been. There are a lot of very capable people at NASA who would have come up with a plan and made it work (c.f. Apollo 13). Either way, though, management should have at least thoroughly considered the possibility. The problem is complacency, the same problem that brought down Challenger.