Re:Developers Are Not Good Judges of Their Own UI'
on
What Makes a Good UI?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
UI's that expose all the capabilities of a system. This is not good UI design, in fact it is lazy UI design.
A UI that doesn't let you access all the capabilities of a system is a broken UI. Think about it. If I write a program that can sort a list of numbers in either ascending or descending order, but only provide an interface allowing an ascending sort, what the heck was I doing coding the descending code in the first place?
This doesn't mean that the main screen of the UI needs to access secondary and tertiary functionality, but you need to provide some interface for the user to all the functionality.
Beware of allowing users to customize...
Customization is necessary for most ERPs, simply because no two enterprises have the same needs. If I have been using 9 digit SKUs for the last twenty years, and your software only allows 7 digit SKUs, then your software is going to cause me problems. I've actually encountered this exact scenario at work, where we have one database whose sole purpose is to translate old part numbers into the new part numbers used by our new inventory control system.
More generally, some level of customization is necessary for ALL software simply because no two users are alike. That doesn't mean you have twenty pages in a tabbed dialog for all the little tiny tweaks a user can do. Rather it means that the software has to be flexible enough to accomodate more than the mythical average user.
Don't be afraid of busy screens...
I've seen your screens. And I want to scream every time. While I do want all related necessary information on the same screen, I don't want ALL information on that screen. Based on some screens I've seen, it's almost like some developers have never heard of the "next" button, or expect you to have 1280x3076 monitor.
Dialog design is like writing. As a famous essayist once told me, the key to good writing is to take as much away as you can. Ditto for dialogs. Take away as much as you can. This doesn't preclude "advanced" buttons or multi-paged dialogs, of course.
Keyboard shortcuts, labeled and encouraged.
I absolutely agree. There is this CAD I use that only has keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions, with no way to customize [!] additional shortcuts. The more I improve using this CAD the more frustrated I get with this lack of functionality.
I also agree with your last two points as well. That's three out of six, so I guess that makes one of us only half right:-)
A really good weatherman is someone who knows how to "lie" with statistics.
Accurate weather statistics in a single locale have only been kept for the last one hundred years or less. That's a pretty short time relatively speaking. Imagine the 1910's when everybody was in heart-stopping panic because nearly every day was a new record high or low in temperature. But we're a hundred years out now, so the frequency of records breakers is much much less. But that frequency still isn't zero.
Go play with the numbers yourself. Generate 36,500 random degrees from 0F to 100F (or 50F to 70F, depending on your climate). Put all those on a one hundred year calendar, and then look at the number of record breakers in the hundreth year. Okay, that's a bad model, temperatures aren't random. So put a function in your random degree generator that only allows a small fluctuation (only two degrees from day to day). Now plot them again. You're STILL going to have record breakers in the last year!
I started thinking about this topic back when I realized that one "hottest day on record" was actually cooler than the non-record-breaking day before. After a hundred years (less in my case) of temperature keeping, a "hottest day ever" is pretty damned significant. But the "hottest June 13th in Jackson Hole, Wyoming" isn't anything to get excited about.
All the occurences of "free" in the story were meant in the original sense (free speech).
Original sense? Too bad I don't have a copy of Johnson's dictionary, because I strongly suspect that even there the English word "free" has several different meanings, of which "unencumbered by price" and "unencumbered by excessive legal restrictions" are but two.
if Kerberos were under the GPL, MS's changes would be required to be public
You're operating under the assumption that MS modified Kerberos. They did not. They reimplemented it. Kerberos is actually two things, source code and a protocol. Microsoft forked the protocol, but didn't touch the code (other than to examine it). Kerberos being under the GPL would not have stopped this.
How well do Windows packages install on Solaris?
That's a silly argument and you know it. How well do ReactOS packages install on Linux? Both are GPL/LGPL operating systems, so where's the fscking compatibility you keep harping on? The fact is that Windows and Solaris are two entirely different architectures.
Why can't you install IRIX packages on Solaris? Because they're two completely different HARDWARE architectures! Duh! If you would check, you can't install x86-Linux packages on PPC-Linux either. And it's the same damned kernel!
The only reason Linux hasn't forked as badly as commercial Unix, was because there is only one kernel. Fork that off and you're hosed. The reason the kernel hasn't forked isn't due to the license, but due to Linus Torvalds. And even he is having some difficulty with the pressure to fork. There are too many huge patch sets out there for this to remain stable.
To summarize, I think you and a lot of GPL advocates are taking the license way too seriously. You're making a religion out of it, thinking it can solve all the sins of the software world. But it can't. It's just a license.
No software product will achieve usage on a large scale if lots of people are forking it and making incompatible versions of it.
The GPL does not prevent forks or incompatible versions. If someone goes off and makes an incompatible fork of your code, and you don't like it, your only recourse is to merge everything back in yourself.
If someone else can take my creation, add a few useless bits to it, then sell that for a profit...
The GPL does not stop this. Redhat is making a crapload of money selling unmodified and slightly modified GPL software. And not passing *ANY* of the profits back to you. If you think that getting a few bug fixes back qualifies as profit sharing, then what about profits made when the software has NOT been modified at all?
I'm not arguing here that you should get paid for what you have donated to the community. Rather I am arguing that "unfair profits" is a specious justification for copyleft.
It's funny how quickly the BSD apologists forget the lessons of Kerberos.
Last I checked (thirty seconds ago), Kerberos was still there on my system untouched and undamaged by Microsoft. My version might not be compatible with Microsoft's, but no license is going to guarantee compatibility (see first item above). Furthermore, I see that Microsoft didn't "steal" the Kerberos code at all, they reimplemented it. The GPL would have been of no help in this case.
If you want to go back to the bad old days of Unix forking into many incompatible versions
Unix fragmented because it was commercialized, not because it was proprietarized. You can see the same thing with commercial Linux, where a package for one system won't work with the package manager of another. There has been talk of standardizing distributions for a decade, but it still hasn't happened!
If you're going to use some other person's stuff, you have to do it under the terms and conditions they set.
But the GPL explicitly states that mere *usage* is not covered by the license.
Or were you the kind of kid that decided to "borrow" other kids' toys and break them?
Nobody "breaks" GPL code by using. Besides which, the whole toy analogy (or any analogy based on material goods) breaks down upon any sort of examination.
If I borrow your toy, you are deprived of the toy for the amount of time that I have it. But if I borrow your code, you are deprived of nothing. When I take some of your code for me to use, you still have your original code. Nothing I can do to my copy of the code can in any way affect your copy. EVEN if I violate the license! The only thing the GPL protects is the author's fragile sensitivities, because the code itself doesn't need protecting.
The truth is that most free software licenses are incompatable with one another.
No copyleft license is compatible with any other license. This is by purposeful design. There are no exceptions. What seems like exception with "compatible" licenses like the LGPL and BSD, is instead a relicensing. The instant that LGPL, BSD or MIT licensed code touches GPL code, it transforms into pure GPL code.
The FSF disagrees with you and maintains a list of licenses which includes a division by GPL compatability.
The FSF is a master at semantic "spin". All their "compatibility" means is that the other license permits *relicensing* under the GPL. Additionally, the compatibility is a one-way street. You can incorporate BSD licensed code into a GPL code base, but once it is in there, the former BSD licensed code is now GPL licensed. And there is no reciprocity, because you are not allowed to incorporate GPL licensed code into any BSD licensed code base.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for stating the obvious. It's amazing to me how many people can't see the obvious through the marketing crap. How the hell are we supposed to get "workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous" if there are no usable cards for this new X-NextGen?
GNOME is a GNU project. Last I checked, GNU was all about Free Software, including Free Software drivers. What good is all this freedom if the basic infrastructure itself is encumbered?
I'm not asking for video manufacturers to sell their first born, only to provide hardware specs. Is that so much to ask?
Except that "libre" doesn't mean "free as in speech". Instead it means a lack of restraint or encumbrance. Thus while it applies to "free speech", it also applies to the free end of a rope, certain styles of poetry, etc.
Sorry, I can't find a link for you. Google isn't popping anything up, and none of the local papers have online archives older than 2000. It happened in Visalia, California, during 1995 or thereabouts. The cause was the demolition of an old building in downtown by the redevelopment agency. I believe it was part of the convention center expansion.
Re:Microsoft is coming out with this too...
on
Linux-Based Cat Feeder
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· Score: 4, Funny
Years ago I got up in the morning and started my commute to work. As I got into the car I detected a faint fishy smell. Twenty miles from work it was a bit stronger. Then miles and I knew something was up. Was it some weird weather that wafted the scent of rotting whales in from the coast two hundred miles distant? Five miles from work and my eyes started to water, as I catch an aroma like there's a fish sauce convention nearby. I finally get to work and notice the hazmat teams in the downtown district of the city where I worked.
Turns out that digging the basement for a new downtown building had broken into two 100+ year old fish oil tanks from 100+ year defunct fish oil company. The downtown was pretty much closed for the entire week. Nasty, nasty, nasty. It was like goatse for the nostrils...
Blame it all on local governments insisting on local monopolies. It doesn't matter how liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist or libertarian the national government is, because all local governments are filled with petty tyrants.
If you're a Windows developer, then.NET is certainly a better solution than that load of aardvark dung that is MFC. I have no problems with Windows developers flocking over to.NET. I just wish Microsoft would stop marketing it as a one-size-fits-all solution, and developers would stop believing their one-size-fits-all rhetoric.
But outside of Windows the primary reason to adopt a.NET clone is because it's popular under Windows. As my mother used to say, "if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?" But outside Windows I don't have the big motivator of MFC to push me towards anything else. I don't have nearly the same advantages for switching to it.
The word "should" implies morality. All discussions of should or should not imply moral discussions. But the issue of dual core licensing is not a moral issue. So to couch it in moral terms is erroneous.
This isn't cheating. It's using the resources available. The lack of a self-imposed handicap isn't a cheat. Why don't any of the Gecko-based GNOME browsers start faster? Preload one of the damned things and get on with it!
This comparison was made so that real people out in the real world could compare between real browsers. In the real world, deliberate handicaps are avoided everywhere but the golf course.
Everybody who works at MS in any capacity shares in the responsibility for their corporation does.
What has Microsoft done that other small and large corporations don't also do? Nothing. Proprietary software and nasty EULAs? A dime a dozen! Exclusive OEM contracts? De rigeur! Bundling? Everyone who can does! The point is, if you're going to insult someone who works for Microsoft, then you might as well snub others for working for Apple, Sun, IBM, Philips, GE, Verizon, Dow, Monsanto, etc, etc. Before you know, you won't even be able to walk into a bar for fear of meeting someone.
I'm glad you're perfect. Standards are great, and the higher the better. But place them on yourself not others, or you'll live in a very lonely world.
I once met an MS employee at a bar. I turned around and left.
You, sir^H^H^H, are an asshole. This person may be a secretary who does nothing more than remind her boss of meetings. It might be the building supervisor who makes sure all the light bulbs work.
You don't have to talk to them, just sit down and drink your beer. That merely makes you rude. But to turn around and walk out, that's what makes you an asshole.
What's the fastest Free Software browser for Free Software operating systems? Konqueror! I can't believe this is being ignored in the summary. I can't believe this is being ignored by the posters. Except for script speed, Konqueror is faster than all other Free browsers on KDE. It's faster than every other desktop's native browser!
KDE needs to trumpet this one loudly. I think that stupid suggestion to replace KHTML with Gecko just died a quick and deserving death.
Gee, we were talking about benchmarks. Benchmarks. As in objective comparisons between two different things. Not anecdotes from mailing lists.
I am under no delusions that FreeBSD is is perfect, but to assume from its imperfection that it must be worse than Linux is unwarranted. It may very well be true that Linux is faster in all aspects than FreeBSD, but without fair and objective benchmarks with optimizations for both sides, I have no way of knowing.
And this is why Dragonfly advocates troll FreeBSD. Really, they're starting to sound like the Gentoo freaks of the BSD world. Everytime FreeBSD is mentioned some twit has to pop up with Dragonfly FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
UI's that expose all the capabilities of a system. This is not good UI design, in fact it is lazy UI design.
:-)
A UI that doesn't let you access all the capabilities of a system is a broken UI. Think about it. If I write a program that can sort a list of numbers in either ascending or descending order, but only provide an interface allowing an ascending sort, what the heck was I doing coding the descending code in the first place?
This doesn't mean that the main screen of the UI needs to access secondary and tertiary functionality, but you need to provide some interface for the user to all the functionality.
Beware of allowing users to customize...
Customization is necessary for most ERPs, simply because no two enterprises have the same needs. If I have been using 9 digit SKUs for the last twenty years, and your software only allows 7 digit SKUs, then your software is going to cause me problems. I've actually encountered this exact scenario at work, where we have one database whose sole purpose is to translate old part numbers into the new part numbers used by our new inventory control system.
More generally, some level of customization is necessary for ALL software simply because no two users are alike. That doesn't mean you have twenty pages in a tabbed dialog for all the little tiny tweaks a user can do. Rather it means that the software has to be flexible enough to accomodate more than the mythical average user.
Don't be afraid of busy screens...
I've seen your screens. And I want to scream every time. While I do want all related necessary information on the same screen, I don't want ALL information on that screen. Based on some screens I've seen, it's almost like some developers have never heard of the "next" button, or expect you to have 1280x3076 monitor.
Dialog design is like writing. As a famous essayist once told me, the key to good writing is to take as much away as you can. Ditto for dialogs. Take away as much as you can. This doesn't preclude "advanced" buttons or multi-paged dialogs, of course.
Keyboard shortcuts, labeled and encouraged.
I absolutely agree. There is this CAD I use that only has keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions, with no way to customize [!] additional shortcuts. The more I improve using this CAD the more frustrated I get with this lack of functionality.
I also agree with your last two points as well. That's three out of six, so I guess that makes one of us only half right
A really good weatherman is someone who knows how to "lie" with statistics.
Accurate weather statistics in a single locale have only been kept for the last one hundred years or less. That's a pretty short time relatively speaking. Imagine the 1910's when everybody was in heart-stopping panic because nearly every day was a new record high or low in temperature. But we're a hundred years out now, so the frequency of records breakers is much much less. But that frequency still isn't zero.
Go play with the numbers yourself. Generate 36,500 random degrees from 0F to 100F (or 50F to 70F, depending on your climate). Put all those on a one hundred year calendar, and then look at the number of record breakers in the hundreth year. Okay, that's a bad model, temperatures aren't random. So put a function in your random degree generator that only allows a small fluctuation (only two degrees from day to day). Now plot them again. You're STILL going to have record breakers in the last year!
I started thinking about this topic back when I realized that one "hottest day on record" was actually cooler than the non-record-breaking day before. After a hundred years (less in my case) of temperature keeping, a "hottest day ever" is pretty damned significant. But the "hottest June 13th in Jackson Hole, Wyoming" isn't anything to get excited about.
All the occurences of "free" in the story were meant in the original sense (free speech).
Original sense? Too bad I don't have a copy of Johnson's dictionary, because I strongly suspect that even there the English word "free" has several different meanings, of which "unencumbered by price" and "unencumbered by excessive legal restrictions" are but two.
if Kerberos were under the GPL, MS's changes would be required to be public
You're operating under the assumption that MS modified Kerberos. They did not. They reimplemented it. Kerberos is actually two things, source code and a protocol. Microsoft forked the protocol, but didn't touch the code (other than to examine it). Kerberos being under the GPL would not have stopped this.
How well do Windows packages install on Solaris?
That's a silly argument and you know it. How well do ReactOS packages install on Linux? Both are GPL/LGPL operating systems, so where's the fscking compatibility you keep harping on? The fact is that Windows and Solaris are two entirely different architectures.
Why can't you install IRIX packages on Solaris? Because they're two completely different HARDWARE architectures! Duh! If you would check, you can't install x86-Linux packages on PPC-Linux either. And it's the same damned kernel!
The only reason Linux hasn't forked as badly as commercial Unix, was because there is only one kernel. Fork that off and you're hosed. The reason the kernel hasn't forked isn't due to the license, but due to Linus Torvalds. And even he is having some difficulty with the pressure to fork. There are too many huge patch sets out there for this to remain stable.
To summarize, I think you and a lot of GPL advocates are taking the license way too seriously. You're making a religion out of it, thinking it can solve all the sins of the software world. But it can't. It's just a license.
No software product will achieve usage on a large scale if lots of people are forking it and making incompatible versions of it.
The GPL does not prevent forks or incompatible versions. If someone goes off and makes an incompatible fork of your code, and you don't like it, your only recourse is to merge everything back in yourself.
If someone else can take my creation, add a few useless bits to it, then sell that for a profit...
The GPL does not stop this. Redhat is making a crapload of money selling unmodified and slightly modified GPL software. And not passing *ANY* of the profits back to you. If you think that getting a few bug fixes back qualifies as profit sharing, then what about profits made when the software has NOT been modified at all?
I'm not arguing here that you should get paid for what you have donated to the community. Rather I am arguing that "unfair profits" is a specious justification for copyleft.
It's funny how quickly the BSD apologists forget the lessons of Kerberos.
Last I checked (thirty seconds ago), Kerberos was still there on my system untouched and undamaged by Microsoft. My version might not be compatible with Microsoft's, but no license is going to guarantee compatibility (see first item above). Furthermore, I see that Microsoft didn't "steal" the Kerberos code at all, they reimplemented it. The GPL would have been of no help in this case.
If you want to go back to the bad old days of Unix forking into many incompatible versions
Unix fragmented because it was commercialized, not because it was proprietarized. You can see the same thing with commercial Linux, where a package for one system won't work with the package manager of another. There has been talk of standardizing distributions for a decade, but it still hasn't happened!
If you're going to use some other person's stuff, you have to do it under the terms and conditions they set.
But the GPL explicitly states that mere *usage* is not covered by the license.
Or were you the kind of kid that decided to "borrow" other kids' toys and break them?
Nobody "breaks" GPL code by using. Besides which, the whole toy analogy (or any analogy based on material goods) breaks down upon any sort of examination.
If I borrow your toy, you are deprived of the toy for the amount of time that I have it. But if I borrow your code, you are deprived of nothing. When I take some of your code for me to use, you still have your original code. Nothing I can do to my copy of the code can in any way affect your copy. EVEN if I violate the license! The only thing the GPL protects is the author's fragile sensitivities, because the code itself doesn't need protecting.
The truth is that most free software licenses are incompatable with one another.
No copyleft license is compatible with any other license. This is by purposeful design. There are no exceptions. What seems like exception with "compatible" licenses like the LGPL and BSD, is instead a relicensing. The instant that LGPL, BSD or MIT licensed code touches GPL code, it transforms into pure GPL code.
The FSF disagrees with you and maintains a list of licenses which includes a division by GPL compatability.
The FSF is a master at semantic "spin". All their "compatibility" means is that the other license permits *relicensing* under the GPL. Additionally, the compatibility is a one-way street. You can incorporate BSD licensed code into a GPL code base, but once it is in there, the former BSD licensed code is now GPL licensed. And there is no reciprocity, because you are not allowed to incorporate GPL licensed code into any BSD licensed code base.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for stating the obvious. It's amazing to me how many people can't see the obvious through the marketing crap. How the hell are we supposed to get "workspace switching effects so lavish they make Keynote jealous" if there are no usable cards for this new X-NextGen?
GNOME is a GNU project. Last I checked, GNU was all about Free Software, including Free Software drivers. What good is all this freedom if the basic infrastructure itself is encumbered?
I'm not asking for video manufacturers to sell their first born, only to provide hardware specs. Is that so much to ask?
Except that "libre" doesn't mean "free as in speech". Instead it means a lack of restraint or encumbrance. Thus while it applies to "free speech", it also applies to the free end of a rope, certain styles of poetry, etc.
Sorry, I can't find a link for you. Google isn't popping anything up, and none of the local papers have online archives older than 2000. It happened in Visalia, California, during 1995 or thereabouts. The cause was the demolition of an old building in downtown by the redevelopment agency. I believe it was part of the convention center expansion.
Years ago I got up in the morning and started my commute to work. As I got into the car I detected a faint fishy smell. Twenty miles from work it was a bit stronger. Then miles and I knew something was up. Was it some weird weather that wafted the scent of rotting whales in from the coast two hundred miles distant? Five miles from work and my eyes started to water, as I catch an aroma like there's a fish sauce convention nearby. I finally get to work and notice the hazmat teams in the downtown district of the city where I worked.
Turns out that digging the basement for a new downtown building had broken into two 100+ year old fish oil tanks from 100+ year defunct fish oil company. The downtown was pretty much closed for the entire week. Nasty, nasty, nasty. It was like goatse for the nostrils...
Blame it all on local governments insisting on local monopolies. It doesn't matter how liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist or libertarian the national government is, because all local governments are filled with petty tyrants.
Pick the RIGHT solution
.NET is certainly a better solution than that load of aardvark dung that is MFC. I have no problems with Windows developers flocking over to .NET. I just wish Microsoft would stop marketing it as a one-size-fits-all solution, and developers would stop believing their one-size-fits-all rhetoric.
.NET clone is because it's popular under Windows. As my mother used to say, "if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?" But outside Windows I don't have the big motivator of MFC to push me towards anything else. I don't have nearly the same advantages for switching to it.
If you're a Windows developer, then
But outside of Windows the primary reason to adopt a
The word "should" implies morality. All discussions of should or should not imply moral discussions. But the issue of dual core licensing is not a moral issue. So to couch it in moral terms is erroneous.
Remember, only you the customer can prevent vendor lock-in!
This isn't cheating. It's using the resources available. The lack of a self-imposed handicap isn't a cheat. Why don't any of the Gecko-based GNOME browsers start faster? Preload one of the damned things and get on with it!
This comparison was made so that real people out in the real world could compare between real browsers. In the real world, deliberate handicaps are avoided everywhere but the golf course.
Everybody who works at MS in any capacity shares in the responsibility for their corporation does.
What has Microsoft done that other small and large corporations don't also do? Nothing. Proprietary software and nasty EULAs? A dime a dozen! Exclusive OEM contracts? De rigeur! Bundling? Everyone who can does! The point is, if you're going to insult someone who works for Microsoft, then you might as well snub others for working for Apple, Sun, IBM, Philips, GE, Verizon, Dow, Monsanto, etc, etc. Before you know, you won't even be able to walk into a bar for fear of meeting someone.
I'm glad you're perfect. Standards are great, and the higher the better. But place them on yourself not others, or you'll live in a very lonely world.
I once met an MS employee at a bar. I turned around and left.
You, sir^H^H^H, are an asshole. This person may be a secretary who does nothing more than remind her boss of meetings. It might be the building supervisor who makes sure all the light bulbs work.
You don't have to talk to them, just sit down and drink your beer. That merely makes you rude. But to turn around and walk out, that's what makes you an asshole.
What's the fastest Free Software browser for Free Software operating systems? Konqueror! I can't believe this is being ignored in the summary. I can't believe this is being ignored by the posters. Except for script speed, Konqueror is faster than all other Free browsers on KDE. It's faster than every other desktop's native browser!
KDE needs to trumpet this one loudly. I think that stupid suggestion to replace KHTML with Gecko just died a quick and deserving death.
Funny, just last week, before this comparison came out, all the Firefox people were saying that I should switch to it because it's faster.
Gee, we were talking about benchmarks. Benchmarks. As in objective comparisons between two different things. Not anecdotes from mailing lists.
I am under no delusions that FreeBSD is is perfect, but to assume from its imperfection that it must be worse than Linux is unwarranted. It may very well be true that Linux is faster in all aspects than FreeBSD, but without fair and objective benchmarks with optimizations for both sides, I have no way of knowing.
And this is why Dragonfly advocates troll FreeBSD. Really, they're starting to sound like the Gentoo freaks of the BSD world. Everytime FreeBSD is mentioned some twit has to pop up with Dragonfly FUD.
Even though its quite known FreeBSD 5.3 ain't doing very well (DFBSD is)...
Considerign that Dragonfly hasn't yet released a stable version, this marks your whole post as a troll.
Let me guess, the benchmarks you use to prove this didn't optimize FreeBSD either?