Personal printers are horribly unreliable and very expensive to maintain.
That's my experience with INK 'jet' printers, but I bought a $150 ( Brother HL-2070N Laser printer when I started graduate school three years ago and my experience has been the complete opposite of that. It also came with a $50 rebate that I actually received so the total cost was $100.
It's 2400x600 dpi, 22 pages/minute printing (of text only, graphics are about 5-10 pages/minute depending on content), and includes 10/100 ethernet Rendez-vous (auto discovery) networking, is noise-less when not printing (In fact, it cuts off automatically after 5 minutes) and I love it.
I have put at least 3 thousand pages through it and haven't had to change toner since I depleted and replaced the 'intro' cartridge more than two years ago. Just about every time I use it I remark that it is probably the best $100 I have ever spent.
A-double-plus would buy again in a heart beat.
Except for paper, it has been incredibly cheap to own and use and absolutely, rock solid reliable with absolutely no maintenance what-so-ever.
and before you ask about power, it might use a lot when it prints but when it is off it draws less than 7 watts. I have a kill-a-watt. I checked.
At my school (NCSU), and I would suppose most schools do it now, you are not even allowed to REGISTER for your first semester of graduate class until you sign a 'patent agreement' giving up your ownership of anything you develop while at NC State. Then, upon reviewing your graduation requirements checklist, you are not allowed to register for graduation until they have confirmed that you have filed your 'patent agreement.'
I have always thought that this would be an ideal software company schedule. Our small office would work four days a week every week, eight hours per but at 10-15% below market pay rate BUT with shared profit.
The way I figured it, folks would be inclined to work more focuses on their 'in' days, so the productivity would be there and profit sharing would entice folks to build good products.
I'd certainly be interested in working in a place like that.
The iPhone for the vast majority of people buying it is about having the latest coolest toy.
I am sick and tired of reading/hearing this bullshit.
The iPhone is my 6th cell phone and the first that is an honest pleasure to use and powerful enough to accomplish more than playing 10 second ring tones. The iPhone literally represents the FIRST TIME I have been able to have a good phone, my iPod, email, calendar, contacts, maps, camera, web, etc in a single device that seamlessly syncs to my Mac computer. Period.
If you don't want to buy one, fine, but for me, having an iPhone is about having aall that stuff, and more, in a single device that elegantly works. The fact that it might look nice or 'cool' is merely icing.
Usability and functionally are not 'playing with a cool toy.' Getting things/work done in an intuitive way on your phone is still getting things/work done. Whether or not it was 'cool' or even fun to do it shouldn't take away from the fact that it was accomplished.
I am at a loss to understand why it is so hard for people to understand that futzing with poor UI is not fun for 99% of the people who use computers. The average user hates 'tinkering with their' tools (har!). They just want to USE them to Get Stuff Done. For you, perhaps menu-*-9-5-1-4-2 might be a fast way to access your pictures on your phone but for most people, myself included, it sucks way more than swipe-tap-tap-swipe.
It's an interesting idea but I think you (and folks in general) would be really surprised by the amount preprocessing required to etch an audio signal onto vinyl.
I used to work with a mastering engineer that had specialized in vinyl and he talked about some of the things he would have to contend with when working with records. He mentioned that those problems became really evident after digital had really taken off and become established only to introduce the 'resurgence' of releasing 7inch 'remix' records and having to explain to his clients why the records sounded so much different from the existing digital masters.
Besides the obvious problem of space (signal with a lot of low-freq content can significantly reduce the amount of recording time on one side of a record, for instance, so a lot of modern music, rap, r&b, and rock) would have to be heavily sonically modified to be pressed onto vinyl) in general the low-end and high-end of the source is *very* heavily EQed on the front end (before etching) and then given the 'reverse' of the same EQ on the back-end (after detected by the needle).
Such heavy handed EQ is necessary to 'deal' with the limitations of the format and because there is no such thing as perfect EQ there is always a change in the tone of the original source.
I suspect, but admittedly have no proof, that much of what is 'appealing' to vinyl is the learned tonality of all of this processing. I am not even saying that the process is 'good' or 'bad' I merely mean to suggest that it is there and a large part of that 'vinyl sound.'
A similar process is done with cassette tape recording to address the limitations of the high-end of audible signal and noise.
As a personal anecdote, when I first started working with digital I admit that I, too, first considered digital to be 'cold' and 'sterile'. But after working with digital more I discovered that the REAL problem with digital was its veracity. Working in analog is often a lot of 'pushing' the waveform to 'extract' a certain sound out of the tape (with FANTASTIC effect -- NOTHING sounds like drums and guitars, recorded VERY hot, to virgin 24-track 2" tape. NOTHING. but you achieve that sound not because analog is better but because of what happens when you do analog 'wrong'.). With digital you get EXACTLY what you put down so in order to achieve a 'sound' you have to generate that sound before you press record on the digital deck. When we first learned this, we would sometimes track drums on 2" analog first (citing my previous comment about 2"), and then dump it to digital to do the rest of the record (that is done a lot less now -- almost never -- we were being lazy).
Most of getting 'good sound' out of digital was more a matter of relearning how to record to the newer medium
Well, I think you are assuming that people use their laptop ONLY as mobile machines.... and for many, like myself, it is my ONLY machine... at home I use a 'big' screen, real KB and mouse. When I am at home, the more my computer is like a desktop, the better.
Why not get a desktop, you might ask? Because then I have to do things like sync them and spend more money.
Personally, I'd *LOVE* to have more memory.... If I am getting page outs, I don't have enough... and I get them all the time on 2gigs of RAM.
I am surprised that no one mentioned Sandia National Labs. I realize that they are DoD and a good bit of the work that I have read about concerning them is network/security related, but as far as I am aware they are nothing but research out there.
Maybe ping the nsf website? (.gov)
Yeah, so folks being able to look at your privates is not great but , hey, if you put it out there you put it out there. That doesn't seem all that different then putting a "Shoot 'em all and let Dog sort 'em out" bumper sticker on your car... or whatever...
But anyway, FTFA, if you get passed over for a job against someone else because of something on your facebook account, maybe you should have studied harder. I mean, aside from Goat.se pics and stripper poles dashing your great opportunity for That Cubicle working for Initech, inc., do you really WANT to work for a company that didn't hire you because you have a picture on your facebook with a beer in your hand or are you too desperate because of poor academic performance to be able to choose where you want to work?
I think that one of the main benefits of PhD-path folks is that they actively pursue increasing the body of knowledge of their field.
The problem with doing research in (most) businesses is that business is typically extremely short-sighted. Profit is the name of the game and it is hard to argue 'outside the box' thinking if there isn't an immediate financial return. I am not trying to argue for or against that.
However, a LOT of the IT-related tools that help businesses increase their margins are a direct result of something that a Computer Science PhD developed as part of their theses work. As a typical employee, and unless you work for a company like Google, you aren't permitted to try radical approaches/sollutions to problems because it is difficult to measure the benefit to the company.
I'd be willing to bet that you are a super-star solution coder, but I question whether the pace of technology would be as brisk if most advanced tools were to be developed outside of academia.
(1) Why is it that when some idiot -- who was wired wrong to begin with -- goes off of the deep end and kills someone that folks like Jack Thompson try and take away MY rights? There is something wrong with the whole premise... I am being punished for what someone else can't manage! Following that logic, all religions should be declared illegal because some extreme Islamic sects have committed terrorist actions.... heck, I should try and sue EVERY CHURCH IN THE WORLD because of what some dipshits did.....sounds stupid doesn't it?...and...
(b) What would happen to 'activists' like Thompson if they weren't collecting 30-50% of their lawsuit damages?
I'm willing to bet people like _him_ at least would go away... (I am NOT trying to say that all lawsuits are frivolous... but I question the TRUE motivation behind hundred million dollar class action suits where the CLASS gets 1/2 the money!)
I'm gonna have to agree... I am on day 4 of getting mine... and all I can say is... WOW!
Reason why I like it better than Apple's 23":
1) All those inputs.
b) I never appreciate HD before I got this monitor... now I LOVE IT.
iii) Price. At US$950 shipped, the price is unbeatable. I'd buy 3 more if I could.
fore) Rotation rotation rotation.... literally 100+ lines of code at once in Portrait Mode in SubEthaEdit... at 14points! Plus it tilts and swivels.....
I was going to suggest string representations, too... I am working an MPI project that deals with passing a lot of stuff around and found that the method of structure passing in MPI caused us to have to represent the structure specifically byte-by-byte anyway, so we have just stuck with doing everything as character arrays in specific formats...
The main benefit for us was that our message passing code became generic and we got the side effect of passing large values between machines without respect for endianess or word size.
Not scorn, so much, more like disbelief and only if he ALSO asked whether it was a good idea... there's a difference.... The Author didn't ask if we thought he should just use pen and paper. Going to college I think it could be assumed that he has used them before.
Wax Rolls are EMP proof.
But they sound like shit.
And if we would start forward thinking instead of relying on old war fighting tactics, maybe we wouldn't NEED something to be EMP proof. Now THAT's thinking outside of the box.
Of course, if you are close enough to a blast zone to be effected by an EMP, the last thing you are gonna care about is your afternoon Latte date with Sally, Monkey Boy.
oh come on,
What is it with so many folks pissing all over the desires of others of late?
If you don't want to/can't help the author, shut the fuck up and read some other article on slashdot and stop bitching about how YOU fucking did it better years ago with no shoes, electricity, and only sand and a stick to doodle with.
Next you're gonna remind us how you still walk to work, have no need for this fancy "Email" and "Internet" crap, and all your music is preserved in their original Wax Roll form.
I can't believe people are having this argument so much.
There are two reasons why this is fairly much a moot point:
(1) How many Mac users CARE about the hardware? I have a Samsung monitor, an old Gateway keyboard, and a logitech mouse. Most of my storage is on external FireWire drives. My personal exposure to the BOX is only when I move it. OS X is what makes a Mac so great... who cares what it is running on... and
(b) How do most people even KNOW what CPU their machine is running? How many users have actually opened up the box and pulled the CPU out, taken off the heat sink and compared the numbers on the chip to a reference? Not me. I only know what a G4 is because that's what the OS is telling me it is. It could be a ShitSparc 7000 for all I know. Hell, all of those descriptions of how great the G5 is and how awesome the pipelining is are moot unless you actually: designed the chip or write assembly or other code that accesses the registers on the CPU directly.
I'm working on an MPI project in C. It will run on ANY cluster of machines with MPICH installed. It makes no difference what processor is on it.
Get over it already! It JUST DOESN'T MATTER. Only that FASTER == MORE GOOD.
THAT'S what we should care about... I feel the need... the NEED FOR SPEED.
Well, regardless of the fact that being a good programmer will help you in your CS pursuits, if she wants to develop software I would suggest not worrying about the language as much.
Despite all of the/. rhetoric, bombast, and bad-mouthing about coders who can't write/construct threaded GUI apps in assembly using nothing but a one-shot CLI typescript entry (editors are for wimps), there are plenty of high-level languages that allow people to build extremely useful and powerful software tools without having to know anything about bit-shifting or loop optimizations.
That said, I would direct her to learn about Data Structures, Object-oriented Analysis and Design. _Planning_ what to build will make MUCH more of a difference in developing software applications than coding style/fu ever will. Horribly planned development makes projects harder to write, harder to maintain, and, worse, harder to use. If a project is designed well, you can always go back and improve sections with better techniques (aha, instead of sorting these everytime for easier searching, I'll just hash them instead)... whatever.
The science part of comp sci should (hopefully) give you skills to improve design and power by applying abstract ideas to real code but honestly what most of CS will do is show you the questions you have to ask, how to ask them, whether they can be solved, and then how to try and solve them...
if she wants to make software, tell her to study design... any dumbass can code... and mouth-off on/.
I am taking a class in Software Engineering and Chapter 4.12 (Interface Design Principals) in the book is all about UI, with suggestions on consistency, choice and order of words in menu, icons, etc. It might not be the most comprehensive, but it should give you a great start.
General Guildlines Section:
1. Be Consistent
2. Provide shortcuts
3. Offer useful, meaningful feedback
4. Design a beginning, middle, and end for each sequence of actions
5. prevent catestrophic mistakes
6. Verify Deletion tasks
7. Allow easy reversal of most action
8. Make user focus on task, not interface
9. Do not rely on user memory
10. Display only currently relevant information.
Realize that this is just how the section starts... there is a lot more in there....
You can probably check it out at a University Library.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot 'The Gay'.
That's my experience with INK 'jet' printers, but I bought a $150 ( Brother HL-2070N Laser printer when I started graduate school three years ago and my experience has been the complete opposite of that. It also came with a $50 rebate that I actually received so the total cost was $100.
It's 2400x600 dpi, 22 pages/minute printing (of text only, graphics are about 5-10 pages/minute depending on content), and includes 10/100 ethernet Rendez-vous (auto discovery) networking, is noise-less when not printing (In fact, it cuts off automatically after 5 minutes) and I love it.
I have put at least 3 thousand pages through it and haven't had to change toner since I depleted and replaced the 'intro' cartridge more than two years ago. Just about every time I use it I remark that it is probably the best $100 I have ever spent.
A-double-plus would buy again in a heart beat.
Except for paper, it has been incredibly cheap to own and use and absolutely, rock solid reliable with absolutely no maintenance what-so-ever.
and before you ask about power, it might use a lot when it prints but when it is off it draws less than 7 watts. I have a kill-a-watt. I checked.
http://www.brother-usa.com/printer/modeldetail.aspx?PRODUCTID=HL2070N&tab=spec
At my school (NCSU), and I would suppose most schools do it now, you are not even allowed to REGISTER for your first semester of graduate class until you sign a 'patent agreement' giving up your ownership of anything you develop while at NC State. Then, upon reviewing your graduation requirements checklist, you are not allowed to register for graduation until they have confirmed that you have filed your 'patent agreement.'
:Dave
I have always thought that this would be an ideal software company schedule. Our small office would work four days a week every week, eight hours per but at 10-15% below market pay rate BUT with shared profit.
:Dave
The way I figured it, folks would be inclined to work more focuses on their 'in' days, so the productivity would be there and profit sharing would entice folks to build good products.
I'd certainly be interested in working in a place like that.
Except that sentence should end with "... but my *lawyers* will take millions and I'll take my $10."
The iPhone is my 6th cell phone and the first that is an honest pleasure to use and powerful enough to accomplish more than playing 10 second ring tones. The iPhone literally represents the FIRST TIME I have been able to have a good phone, my iPod, email, calendar, contacts, maps, camera, web, etc in a single device that seamlessly syncs to my Mac computer. Period.
If you don't want to buy one, fine, but for me, having an iPhone is about having aall that stuff, and more, in a single device that elegantly works. The fact that it might look nice or 'cool' is merely icing.
Usability and functionally are not 'playing with a cool toy.' Getting things/work done in an intuitive way on your phone is still getting things/work done. Whether or not it was 'cool' or even fun to do it shouldn't take away from the fact that it was accomplished.
I am at a loss to understand why it is so hard for people to understand that futzing with poor UI is not fun for 99% of the people who use computers. The average user hates 'tinkering with their' tools (har!). They just want to USE them to Get Stuff Done. For you, perhaps menu-*-9-5-1-4-2 might be a fast way to access your pictures on your phone but for most people, myself included, it sucks way more than swipe-tap-tap-swipe.
Sorry, man, I know it seems that way... but your statement is ...
simply http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
not http://http//www.ubuprojex.net/archives/bugs.html#vinyl
true http://http//slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=401196&cid=21849066
If I only had mod points. Best B&T reference I've heard all day... :)
I used to work with a mastering engineer that had specialized in vinyl and he talked about some of the things he would have to contend with when working with records. He mentioned that those problems became really evident after digital had really taken off and become established only to introduce the 'resurgence' of releasing 7inch 'remix' records and having to explain to his clients why the records sounded so much different from the existing digital masters.
Besides the obvious problem of space (signal with a lot of low-freq content can significantly reduce the amount of recording time on one side of a record, for instance, so a lot of modern music, rap, r&b, and rock) would have to be heavily sonically modified to be pressed onto vinyl) in general the low-end and high-end of the source is *very* heavily EQed on the front end (before etching) and then given the 'reverse' of the same EQ on the back-end (after detected by the needle).
Such heavy handed EQ is necessary to 'deal' with the limitations of the format and because there is no such thing as perfect EQ there is always a change in the tone of the original source.
I suspect, but admittedly have no proof, that much of what is 'appealing' to vinyl is the learned tonality of all of this processing. I am not even saying that the process is 'good' or 'bad' I merely mean to suggest that it is there and a large part of that 'vinyl sound.'
A similar process is done with cassette tape recording to address the limitations of the high-end of audible signal and noise.
As a personal anecdote, when I first started working with digital I admit that I, too, first considered digital to be 'cold' and 'sterile'. But after working with digital more I discovered that the REAL problem with digital was its veracity. Working in analog is often a lot of 'pushing' the waveform to 'extract' a certain sound out of the tape (with FANTASTIC effect -- NOTHING sounds like drums and guitars, recorded VERY hot, to virgin 24-track 2" tape. NOTHING. but you achieve that sound not because analog is better but because of what happens when you do analog 'wrong'.). With digital you get EXACTLY what you put down so in order to achieve a 'sound' you have to generate that sound before you press record on the digital deck. When we first learned this, we would sometimes track drums on 2" analog first (citing my previous comment about 2"), and then dump it to digital to do the rest of the record (that is done a lot less now -- almost never -- we were being lazy).
Most of getting 'good sound' out of digital was more a matter of relearning how to record to the newer medium
Imagine a botnet cluster of those...
*duck*
Well, I think you are assuming that people use their laptop ONLY as mobile machines.... and for many, like myself, it is my ONLY machine... at home I use a 'big' screen, real KB and mouse. When I am at home, the more my computer is like a desktop, the better.
Why not get a desktop, you might ask? Because then I have to do things like sync them and spend more money.
Personally, I'd *LOVE* to have more memory.... If I am getting page outs, I don't have enough... and I get them all the time on 2gigs of RAM.
I'd say 2 was the prime suspect, at least... 8)
I am surprised that no one mentioned Sandia National Labs. I realize that they are DoD and a good bit of the work that I have read about concerning them is network/security related, but as far as I am aware they are nothing but research out there. Maybe ping the nsf website? (.gov)
But extending the commitment of terms like this is at best unethical and at worst, completely illegal, I believe.
It must be true, I heard it on Clark Howard!
Yeah, so folks being able to look at your privates is not great but , hey, if you put it out there you put it out there. That doesn't seem all that different then putting a "Shoot 'em all and let Dog sort 'em out" bumper sticker on your car... or whatever...
But anyway, FTFA, if you get passed over for a job against someone else because of something on your facebook account, maybe you should have studied harder. I mean, aside from Goat.se pics and stripper poles dashing your great opportunity for That Cubicle working for Initech, inc., do you really WANT to work for a company that didn't hire you because you have a picture on your facebook with a beer in your hand or are you too desperate because of poor academic performance to be able to choose where you want to work?
I think that one of the main benefits of PhD-path folks is that they actively pursue increasing the body of knowledge of their field.
The problem with doing research in (most) businesses is that business is typically extremely short-sighted. Profit is the name of the game and it is hard to argue 'outside the box' thinking if there isn't an immediate financial return. I am not trying to argue for or against that.
However, a LOT of the IT-related tools that help businesses increase their margins are a direct result of something that a Computer Science PhD developed as part of their theses work. As a typical employee, and unless you work for a company like Google, you aren't permitted to try radical approaches/sollutions to problems because it is difficult to measure the benefit to the company.
I'd be willing to bet that you are a super-star solution coder, but I question whether the pace of technology would be as brisk if most advanced tools were to be developed outside of academia.
dave
(1) Why is it that when some idiot -- who was wired wrong to begin with -- goes off of the deep end and kills someone that folks like Jack Thompson try and take away MY rights? There is something wrong with the whole premise... I am being punished for what someone else can't manage! Following that logic, all religions should be declared illegal because some extreme Islamic sects have committed terrorist actions.... heck, I should try and sue EVERY CHURCH IN THE WORLD because of what some dipshits did.....sounds stupid doesn't it? ...and...
(b) What would happen to 'activists' like Thompson if they weren't collecting 30-50% of their lawsuit damages?
I'm willing to bet people like _him_ at least would go away... (I am NOT trying to say that all lawsuits are frivolous... but I question the TRUE motivation behind hundred million dollar class action suits where the CLASS gets 1/2 the money!)
Reason why I like it better than Apple's 23":
1) All those inputs.
b) I never appreciate HD before I got this monitor... now I LOVE IT.
iii) Price. At US$950 shipped, the price is unbeatable. I'd buy 3 more if I could.
fore) Rotation rotation rotation.... literally 100+ lines of code at once in Portrait Mode in SubEthaEdit... at 14points! Plus it tilts and swivels.....
Wheeeeeeee!
dave
I was going to suggest string representations, too... I am working an MPI project that deals with passing a lot of stuff around and found that the method of structure passing in MPI caused us to have to represent the structure specifically byte-by-byte anyway, so we have just stuck with doing everything as character arrays in specific formats...
The main benefit for us was that our message passing code became generic and we got the side effect of passing large values between machines without respect for endianess or word size.
hope that helps,
dave
wah?.... it's the tactile OUTPUT that would make it really interesting...
8)
...you would cast scorn and derision on...
Not scorn, so much, more like disbelief and only if he ALSO asked whether it was a good idea... there's a difference.... The Author didn't ask if we thought he should just use pen and paper. Going to college I think it could be assumed that he has used them before.
Wax Rolls are EMP proof.
But they sound like shit.
And if we would start forward thinking instead of relying on old war fighting tactics, maybe we wouldn't NEED something to be EMP proof. Now THAT's thinking outside of the box.
Of course, if you are close enough to a blast zone to be effected by an EMP, the last thing you are gonna care about is your afternoon Latte date with Sally, Monkey Boy.
:)
oh come on, What is it with so many folks pissing all over the desires of others of late?
If you don't want to/can't help the author, shut the fuck up and read some other article on slashdot and stop bitching about how YOU fucking did it better years ago with no shoes, electricity, and only sand and a stick to doodle with.
Next you're gonna remind us how you still walk to work, have no need for this fancy "Email" and "Internet" crap, and all your music is preserved in their original Wax Roll form.
Ass hats.
I can't believe people are having this argument so much.
There are two reasons why this is fairly much a moot point:
(1) How many Mac users CARE about the hardware? I have a Samsung monitor, an old Gateway keyboard, and a logitech mouse. Most of my storage is on external FireWire drives. My personal exposure to the BOX is only when I move it. OS X is what makes a Mac so great... who cares what it is running on... and
(b) How do most people even KNOW what CPU their machine is running? How many users have actually opened up the box and pulled the CPU out, taken off the heat sink and compared the numbers on the chip to a reference? Not me. I only know what a G4 is because that's what the OS is telling me it is. It could be a ShitSparc 7000 for all I know. Hell, all of those descriptions of how great the G5 is and how awesome the pipelining is are moot unless you actually: designed the chip or write assembly or other code that accesses the registers on the CPU directly.
I'm working on an MPI project in C. It will run on ANY cluster of machines with MPICH installed. It makes no difference what processor is on it.
Get over it already! It JUST DOESN'T MATTER. Only that FASTER == MORE GOOD.
THAT'S what we should care about... I feel the need... the NEED FOR SPEED.
dave
Well, regardless of the fact that being a good programmer will help you in your CS pursuits, if she wants to develop software I would suggest not worrying about the language as much.
/. rhetoric, bombast, and bad-mouthing about coders who can't write/construct threaded GUI apps in assembly using nothing but a one-shot CLI typescript entry (editors are for wimps), there are plenty of high-level languages that allow people to build extremely useful and powerful software tools without having to know anything about bit-shifting or loop optimizations.
/.
Despite all of the
That said, I would direct her to learn about Data Structures, Object-oriented Analysis and Design. _Planning_ what to build will make MUCH more of a difference in developing software applications than coding style/fu ever will. Horribly planned development makes projects harder to write, harder to maintain, and, worse, harder to use. If a project is designed well, you can always go back and improve sections with better techniques (aha, instead of sorting these everytime for easier searching, I'll just hash them instead)... whatever.
The science part of comp sci should (hopefully) give you skills to improve design and power by applying abstract ideas to real code but honestly what most of CS will do is show you the questions you have to ask, how to ask them, whether they can be solved, and then how to try and solve them...
if she wants to make software, tell her to study design... any dumbass can code... and mouth-off on
dave
I am taking a class in Software Engineering and Chapter 4.12 (Interface Design Principals) in the book is all about UI, with suggestions on consistency, choice and order of words in menu, icons, etc. It might not be the most comprehensive, but it should give you a great start.
1 74225X/qid=1108739673/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-8239742-6614463?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020
"Project Based Software Engineering: an Object-Oriented Approach"
General Guildlines Section:
1. Be Consistent
2. Provide shortcuts
3. Offer useful, meaningful feedback
4. Design a beginning, middle, and end for each sequence of actions
5. prevent catestrophic mistakes
6. Verify Deletion tasks
7. Allow easy reversal of most action
8. Make user focus on task, not interface
9. Do not rely on user memory
10. Display only currently relevant information.
Realize that this is just how the section starts... there is a lot more in there.... You can probably check it out at a University Library.
--Dave