Well despite its many non-human races, on the human end, Star Wars was pretty much entirely white. The only coloured character I can think of from the original trilogy is Lando Calrissian, who was a career criminal. Hell, even James Earl Jones was playing a white man!
No, everyone uses English because the English speakers went round the world subjugating peoples and teaching them it. The US and the UK complain about being swamped with immigrants, but that's our own fault for spreading it.
Modern German doesn't translate names, but this is a very, very recent trend due to the rapid increase in international mobility and an influx of non-native learners with their foreign names. Any language that has not had such an influx will not have abandoned name-marking. There's loads of such languages, and while the easiest solution is tagging on a name suffix (the equivalent of adding -etta or something to all female names) that wouldn't work with R2D2, because it would increase the length of the name and mess up the dub.
English is a bad language as well, but this seems pointlessly complex.
"Seems", not "is". Anything that is different to what you personally do will always feel instinctively wrong. This is where racism, sexism, and all other major types of prejudicial discrimination stem from: "different is bad!" Enlightenment comes from looking past your first reaction and accepting the differences as being something other than signs of inferiority.
Being able to clearly denote the role of a person or thing in a sentence reduces ambiguity and it frees the word order up, so that you can use it to highlight important information. Do you know the song "Old King Cole"? "Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he." The bit after the "and" is an old emphatic structure that was necessarily lost in English due to the loss of noun case markings. In German, this sort of structure is still perfectly normal, because German retains its case marking system.
If you'd ever tried teaching English, you'd understand how much superior this type of language is in terms of clarity. English is a horrible, horrible language, full of inconsistency and dubious logic, yet everyone uses it. It's a bit like Javascript, I suppose....
Yes, but your own link points out that they became extinct there 12,000 years ago. The pre-columbians may have eaten horses (and possibly even drove them to extinction), but they never rode them -- horses were first domesticated much later: probably around 4000BC.
Yeah, I am not called by a different name when I am speaking another language. Even if that language has a similar name. Translating a name does not make good sense.
Actually, in some languages, it does. The Romans didn't just translate names out of snobbery -- Latin just doesn't work without appropriate endings that allow the name to be assigned a grammatical class to match its function in the sentence. Check out the way it worked in Latin here. Navajo has its own complex system of noun declensions, so a name has to be well-formed in the language or you simply cannot use it properly.
The literal back-translation "the short metal thing that's alive" may be long, but it doesn't mean the name in Navajo is. Let's try a more terse English version: "live metalie" -- that's four syllables, just like R2D2. A "live" thing is alive, the suffix "-ie" is a diminutive (little doggies etc) and is now almost always used in relation to living things (including familiar name forms: Johnnie/y, Jeannie, etc).
Now, the fact that they say "that's alive" makes me immediately assume that Navajo has a specific way of distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects, and when I search for "animacy" on the Navajo language WP page, I find that animacy is indicated with a single syllable... at most. In some situations, all that is required is a single consonant. So there's insufficient grounds to conclude that the Navajo name is longer.
Now, why not simply R2D2? Well, the problem is that Navajo is a highly inflected language, so the name has to be alterable to match its grammatical function. Letters and numbers don't work that way. This used to be a problem for most European languages, which is why the names of saints, kings etc are traditionally translated.
The problem is that there's both "bad faith registration" and "bad faith use". If the registerer genuinely uses it for some non-web usages, that means it's not bad faith registration. But the fact that there's revenue generation from accidental browsers constitutes "bad faith use".
Plus in this case it looks very much like bad faith registration, having been registered after a previously busy XBox (1) forum closed down in order to harvest revenue from dead links. Not bad faith against Microsoft, true, but bad faith anyway.
Ah. Now I feel rather stupid. It's going to take me a long time to redownload stuff on this connection. On the other hand, the reduction in Java autoupdates has been welcome.
I was just thinking "Interesting, I'll download this just out of curiosity," then realised I'd uninstalled Java after warnings from practically every member of the software community....
Let's see. You consider it moral that people who are already leeching off me, then kill me, just because I stop them from stealing from me. Compared to you, Jack the Ripper was an honorable man.
And if you think unions help anyone but the union leaders, you're living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
No, the natural order is that people fight for access to resources when resources are scarce. Without government intervention, you could not "own" your house, because another tribe could at any time come in with weapons and force you off it. While I do not agree with Proudhon's statement that "all property is theft", I do recognise that property (=real estate) takes opportunity from the commons and gives it to the individual. If the law deprives me of my natural ability to occupy a plot of land to grow my vegetables or take a fish from the river for my dinner, then it should compensate me adequately.
Think about it: property law deprives us all of the ability to feed ourselves. It does so in the recognition that from society's point of view, there are more productive ways of life than subsistence farming. To the individual with nothing to eat, subsistence farming would be very appealing, but we don't let them do it.
If you want people to value your opinion, wouldn't you be better quoting people other than yourself? I mean, you could quote Donald Knuth. Donald "Everything should be undoable" Knuth. Wikipedia is great, but limited, and one of the best things about it is the huge amount of undoability, but it's not unique to wikipedia. So yes, talk about your work, but talk also about how the principles tie in to the wider world.
Yes, there is. Part of the UI is to protect the users from inadvertent operations. That's part of why various destructive operations in programs have the "are you sure?" dialog box. The good ones also have a checkbox that says "Don't ask this again".
Unfortunately, the first time I delete a folder I get the warning "this will delete all contents" and I click "don't ask me this again", because it's a bunch of classwork for an old university course, or a local copy of the files from an old project repository at work, or just a pile of stupid joke JPEGs a friend emailed me. Clicking "don't ask this again" only guarantees that when I do finally accidentally delete a live folder, it won't make me stop and think about it. "Don't ask this again" is not a safety feature, it's pure user appeasement: imagine if the seat-belt warning in your car had a "don't ask again" option. Millions of people would be more comfortable during their daily commute, but the rise in fatality rates in car crashes would be non-negligible.....
Yup, an obscure hot-key combination is effectively a PIN code, and the Coca-Cola bubbles are basically a hidden keypad for pin entry. However, I suspect that the Coca-Cola machines implemented the bubble buttons as a virtual keypad and would be able to change the code just as they could if it used a physical keypad. If the hotkey combination is implemented in software like a PIN code and can be changed, then the obscurity is only a single layer of the protection. If it's a hard-wired code, that would be bad practice. (Disgruntled former employees, accidental leeks etc)
I would respectfully disagree. I would much prefer a way to unshoot my foot than be bothered by "proper precautions." Why does every action have to be so final? It's not like disk space is at a premium anymore. I know, that programming an undo is hard and tedious, but it's far more helpful than constantly putting up warnings that people learn to ignore.
Donald Knuth, is that you? Why don't you have a/. account yet?
No, it's not. Existing rm implementations have a -f flag. What if -f was removed because people are stupid and rm -rf / a lot?
The GP said "alias" (although the GGP didn't), which leads to an important distinction:
Using a flag for the "dangerous" feature makes it a more complicated operation than the "safe" version. If you alias the "dangerous" version (eg mapping "rm -f" to "del") you remove that complexity, and risk people using the dangerous version by default.
This leads back to the OP's question: can a feature be too easy to use? Yes; if another feature is more appropriate in the the given circumstance, and this feature is easier to use than the correct one, it is too easy.
In most circumstances it will be impossible to follow this rule for every function and use case of the software, though, so at some point you'll just have to accept a compromise....
Yes, but you're forgetting about "yes dear" syndrome. Humans have a remarkable ability to just say "yes" without thinking, just to keep their lives ticking over. It's a very passive word, because you don't have to specify a verb. If you have to say "do it", you accept responsibility. If you just have to say "yes", in your mind you're letting someone else take responsibility and you're just keeping out of their way.
"I was only following orders." is not usually a valid criminal defense, it just adds conspiracy charges.
If there's no law against it, it's not criminal. There are laws against manufacturing firearms without a license, so making one is criminal. But making a meat cleaver that can cut through something of the same size, weight and density as a human skull is not illegal. If you do so knowing it's going to be used to split a human skull, that's conspiracy, and criminal. If you do so think the guy is a butcher and wants to cut up sheep and pigs, but it later turns out the business cards were fake, you've not broken any laws.
A medical system that can deliver a potentially lethal dose of painkillers on the express command of a trained operator is acceptable if there is a clinical situation in which such a dose may be required. If someone later uses it for murder, the manufacturer can't be held liable.
Not software development. UI design. This is only a small part of the discipline but it is an important one. Letting people perform un-reversibly delete data without warning is generally considered a bad thing. This is why the trash can/recycle bin metaphor exists.
But it's a pretty week metaphor. The recycle bin needs managed, but management is mostly limited to "delete contents on logout" (which still results in accidental deletions in the long run) and "empty it now".
The metaphor is a result of the content-agnostic file structure we currently have. A content and context aware database file system could make the distinction between "word document that the user has been working on for days and isn't backed up anywhere" and "gif downloaded from lolcatz" and preserve the former for longer after the user requests a deletion.
The big problem with bug support isn't the cost of fixing the bugs, it's the overhead in finding and verifying, because more often than not what you've actually got is a user who's made a silly error and has immediately assumed it's a bug, reported it as such, provided insufficient detail and then is unwilling to really help you find out what's going because "I told the last guy everything. I haven't got time for this. Come back to me when you've fixed the problem." The strategy taken by many of the bespoke and specialist development houses I've had to deal with is to write costs into the contract for investigating false reports as support calls.
Handled well, this can increase your profits, while giving the customer the assurance of "free bug fixes forever", because you not only get the reliable income stream of user error;-) , but you also get a constant stream of bug reports that are really change requests, and you get the opportunity to quote for constant improvement. And you can generously offer to waive the call costs if they approve the CR. If they weren't reporting "bugs" to you, you'd never find out about these opportunities.
Are you even able to see the crashing non sequitur in that?
It's not necessarily a non-sequitur. You may believe the two to be incomparable, but there is a strong argument against that. The human filter of perception is highly fault tolerent. You know what that last sentence means even though I misspelt the word "tolerant". You have no problem because there is no other likely interpretation of my sentence -- the meaning is unchanged. But the writer, or the coder, isn't restricted to meanings that are clear and ambiguous on the paper, because he already knows what it means -- he wrote it, after all. That known meaning can drastically alter his perception causing him to miss the error. I remember debugging someone's code years ago, and it took me all of five minutes to find the error, but it took at least 15 to convince the guy that wrote it that he'd inserted a single unneeded minus sign and turned 90 degrees clockwise instead of anticlockwise....
Is that one hundred thousand (US decimal) or is it one hundred (Germany)?
The German decimal notation wouldn't be strictly an integer though, would it...? And assuming the UK/US notation is not going to compromise the operation to the mainland Europe spec anyway. Document assumption, move on.
Slashdot Mirror
Well despite its many non-human races, on the human end, Star Wars was pretty much entirely white. The only coloured character I can think of from the original trilogy is Lando Calrissian, who was a career criminal. Hell, even James Earl Jones was playing a white man!
(What I mean is that if we'd taught them Norwegian, they'd all be going to Norway now.)
No, everyone uses English because the English speakers went round the world subjugating peoples and teaching them it. The US and the UK complain about being swamped with immigrants, but that's our own fault for spreading it.
Modern German doesn't translate names, but this is a very, very recent trend due to the rapid increase in international mobility and an influx of non-native learners with their foreign names. Any language that has not had such an influx will not have abandoned name-marking. There's loads of such languages, and while the easiest solution is tagging on a name suffix (the equivalent of adding -etta or something to all female names) that wouldn't work with R2D2, because it would increase the length of the name and mess up the dub.
English is a bad language as well, but this seems pointlessly complex.
"Seems", not "is". Anything that is different to what you personally do will always feel instinctively wrong. This is where racism, sexism, and all other major types of prejudicial discrimination stem from: "different is bad!" Enlightenment comes from looking past your first reaction and accepting the differences as being something other than signs of inferiority.
Being able to clearly denote the role of a person or thing in a sentence reduces ambiguity and it frees the word order up, so that you can use it to highlight important information. Do you know the song "Old King Cole"? "Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he." The bit after the "and" is an old emphatic structure that was necessarily lost in English due to the loss of noun case markings. In German, this sort of structure is still perfectly normal, because German retains its case marking system.
If you'd ever tried teaching English, you'd understand how much superior this type of language is in terms of clarity. English is a horrible, horrible language, full of inconsistency and dubious logic, yet everyone uses it. It's a bit like Javascript, I suppose....
Yes, but your own link points out that they became extinct there 12,000 years ago. The pre-columbians may have eaten horses (and possibly even drove them to extinction), but they never rode them -- horses were first domesticated much later: probably around 4000BC.
If R2D2 is translated to "short metal thing that's alive", couldn't "Stormtrooper" be translated to "white man"?
That would be absolutely poetic. Oh please, please let them do this!
(I am a white European.)
Yeah, I am not called by a different name when I am speaking another language. Even if that language has a similar name. Translating a name does not make good sense.
Actually, in some languages, it does. The Romans didn't just translate names out of snobbery -- Latin just doesn't work without appropriate endings that allow the name to be assigned a grammatical class to match its function in the sentence. Check out the way it worked in Latin here. Navajo has its own complex system of noun declensions, so a name has to be well-formed in the language or you simply cannot use it properly.
The literal back-translation "the short metal thing that's alive" may be long, but it doesn't mean the name in Navajo is. Let's try a more terse English version: "live metalie" -- that's four syllables, just like R2D2. A "live" thing is alive, the suffix "-ie" is a diminutive (little doggies etc) and is now almost always used in relation to living things (including familiar name forms: Johnnie/y, Jeannie, etc).
Now, the fact that they say "that's alive" makes me immediately assume that Navajo has a specific way of distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects, and when I search for "animacy" on the Navajo language WP page, I find that animacy is indicated with a single syllable... at most. In some situations, all that is required is a single consonant. So there's insufficient grounds to conclude that the Navajo name is longer.
Now, why not simply R2D2? Well, the problem is that Navajo is a highly inflected language, so the name has to be alterable to match its grammatical function. Letters and numbers don't work that way. This used to be a problem for most European languages, which is why the names of saints, kings etc are traditionally translated.
The problem is that there's both "bad faith registration" and "bad faith use". If the registerer genuinely uses it for some non-web usages, that means it's not bad faith registration. But the fact that there's revenue generation from accidental browsers constitutes "bad faith use".
Plus in this case it looks very much like bad faith registration, having been registered after a previously busy XBox (1) forum closed down in order to harvest revenue from dead links. Not bad faith against Microsoft, true, but bad faith anyway.
Ah. Now I feel rather stupid. It's going to take me a long time to redownload stuff on this connection. On the other hand, the reduction in Java autoupdates has been welcome.
I was just thinking "Interesting, I'll download this just out of curiosity," then realised I'd uninstalled Java after warnings from practically every member of the software community....
Let's see. You consider it moral that people who are already leeching off me, then kill me, just because I stop them from stealing from me. Compared to you, Jack the Ripper was an honorable man.
And if you think unions help anyone but the union leaders, you're living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
No, the natural order is that people fight for access to resources when resources are scarce. Without government intervention, you could not "own" your house, because another tribe could at any time come in with weapons and force you off it. While I do not agree with Proudhon's statement that "all property is theft", I do recognise that property (=real estate) takes opportunity from the commons and gives it to the individual. If the law deprives me of my natural ability to occupy a plot of land to grow my vegetables or take a fish from the river for my dinner, then it should compensate me adequately.
Think about it: property law deprives us all of the ability to feed ourselves. It does so in the recognition that from society's point of view, there are more productive ways of life than subsistence farming. To the individual with nothing to eat, subsistence farming would be very appealing, but we don't let them do it.
If you want people to value your opinion, wouldn't you be better quoting people other than yourself? I mean, you could quote Donald Knuth. Donald "Everything should be undoable" Knuth. Wikipedia is great, but limited, and one of the best things about it is the huge amount of undoability, but it's not unique to wikipedia. So yes, talk about your work, but talk also about how the principles tie in to the wider world.
Yes, there is. Part of the UI is to protect the users from inadvertent operations. That's part of why various destructive operations in programs have the "are you sure?" dialog box. The good ones also have a checkbox that says "Don't ask this again".
Unfortunately, the first time I delete a folder I get the warning "this will delete all contents" and I click "don't ask me this again", because it's a bunch of classwork for an old university course, or a local copy of the files from an old project repository at work, or just a pile of stupid joke JPEGs a friend emailed me. Clicking "don't ask this again" only guarantees that when I do finally accidentally delete a live folder, it won't make me stop and think about it. "Don't ask this again" is not a safety feature, it's pure user appeasement: imagine if the seat-belt warning in your car had a "don't ask again" option. Millions of people would be more comfortable during their daily commute, but the rise in fatality rates in car crashes would be non-negligible.....
Yup, an obscure hot-key combination is effectively a PIN code, and the Coca-Cola bubbles are basically a hidden keypad for pin entry. However, I suspect that the Coca-Cola machines implemented the bubble buttons as a virtual keypad and would be able to change the code just as they could if it used a physical keypad. If the hotkey combination is implemented in software like a PIN code and can be changed, then the obscurity is only a single layer of the protection. If it's a hard-wired code, that would be bad practice. (Disgruntled former employees, accidental leeks etc)
I would respectfully disagree. I would much prefer a way to unshoot my foot than be bothered by "proper precautions." Why does every action have to be so final? It's not like disk space is at a premium anymore. I know, that programming an undo is hard and tedious, but it's far more helpful than constantly putting up warnings that people learn to ignore.
Donald Knuth, is that you? Why don't you have a /. account yet?
No, it's not. Existing rm implementations have a -f flag. What if -f was removed because people are stupid and rm -rf / a lot?
The GP said "alias" (although the GGP didn't), which leads to an important distinction:
Using a flag for the "dangerous" feature makes it a more complicated operation than the "safe" version. If you alias the "dangerous" version (eg mapping "rm -f" to "del") you remove that complexity, and risk people using the dangerous version by default.
This leads back to the OP's question: can a feature be too easy to use? Yes; if another feature is more appropriate in the the given circumstance, and this feature is easier to use than the correct one, it is too easy.
In most circumstances it will be impossible to follow this rule for every function and use case of the software, though, so at some point you'll just have to accept a compromise....
Yes, but you're forgetting about "yes dear" syndrome. Humans have a remarkable ability to just say "yes" without thinking, just to keep their lives ticking over. It's a very passive word, because you don't have to specify a verb. If you have to say "do it", you accept responsibility. If you just have to say "yes", in your mind you're letting someone else take responsibility and you're just keeping out of their way.
"I was only following orders." is not usually a valid criminal defense, it just adds conspiracy charges.
If there's no law against it, it's not criminal. There are laws against manufacturing firearms without a license, so making one is criminal. But making a meat cleaver that can cut through something of the same size, weight and density as a human skull is not illegal. If you do so knowing it's going to be used to split a human skull, that's conspiracy, and criminal. If you do so think the guy is a butcher and wants to cut up sheep and pigs, but it later turns out the business cards were fake, you've not broken any laws.
A medical system that can deliver a potentially lethal dose of painkillers on the express command of a trained operator is acceptable if there is a clinical situation in which such a dose may be required. If someone later uses it for murder, the manufacturer can't be held liable.
Not software development. UI design. This is only a small part of the discipline but it is an important one. Letting people perform un-reversibly delete data without warning is generally considered a bad thing. This is why the trash can/recycle bin metaphor exists.
But it's a pretty week metaphor. The recycle bin needs managed, but management is mostly limited to "delete contents on logout" (which still results in accidental deletions in the long run) and "empty it now".
The metaphor is a result of the content-agnostic file structure we currently have. A content and context aware database file system could make the distinction between "word document that the user has been working on for days and isn't backed up anywhere" and "gif downloaded from lolcatz" and preserve the former for longer after the user requests a deletion.
The big problem with bug support isn't the cost of fixing the bugs, it's the overhead in finding and verifying, because more often than not what you've actually got is a user who's made a silly error and has immediately assumed it's a bug, reported it as such, provided insufficient detail and then is unwilling to really help you find out what's going because "I told the last guy everything. I haven't got time for this. Come back to me when you've fixed the problem." The strategy taken by many of the bespoke and specialist development houses I've had to deal with is to write costs into the contract for investigating false reports as support calls.
Handled well, this can increase your profits, while giving the customer the assurance of "free bug fixes forever", because you not only get the reliable income stream of user error ;-) , but you also get a constant stream of bug reports that are really change requests, and you get the opportunity to quote for constant improvement. And you can generously offer to waive the call costs if they approve the CR. If they weren't reporting "bugs" to you, you'd never find out about these opportunities.
Are you even able to see the crashing non sequitur in that?
It's not necessarily a non-sequitur. You may believe the two to be incomparable, but there is a strong argument against that. The human filter of perception is highly fault tolerent. You know what that last sentence means even though I misspelt the word "tolerant". You have no problem because there is no other likely interpretation of my sentence -- the meaning is unchanged. But the writer, or the coder, isn't restricted to meanings that are clear and ambiguous on the paper, because he already knows what it means -- he wrote it, after all. That known meaning can drastically alter his perception causing him to miss the error. I remember debugging someone's code years ago, and it took me all of five minutes to find the error, but it took at least 15 to convince the guy that wrote it that he'd inserted a single unneeded minus sign and turned 90 degrees clockwise instead of anticlockwise....
Is that one hundred thousand (US decimal) or is it one hundred (Germany)?
The German decimal notation wouldn't be strictly an integer though, would it...? And assuming the UK/US notation is not going to compromise the operation to the mainland Europe spec anyway. Document assumption, move on.