I firmly believe that when it comes to GUIs, change is almost always for the worse. One reason for this is that once a set of GUI conventions has become established, change is disconcerting--you now have to accustom yourself to the new "look" or to the new way that the GUI works. That inconvenience is rarely repaid by the alleged advantages of the change.
As an example, consider the difference between the Windows 2000 and XP desk tops. Just how is the XP desktop better than the older one? I sure couldn't see any advantage to it. Yet, if you were to use the darn thing (and not switch to the "classic" view), you'd have to figure out again how to do a bunch of stuff you already knew how to do before the interface changed. This is progress? Even at the detail level, the changes are silly and unhelpful. Look at those three-dimensional window title bars. Why is that bulgy look better than the less obtrusive flat title bar of the old Win 2K interface? What convenience or information is added by the 3D bulge? Or how about the XP icon for video options--it's a screen with a flat paintbrush on it instead of the 2K screen with a round paintbrush and ruler in front of it. The two look different enough that it takes me a couple of extra seconds to find that icon in the Control Panel whenever I'm forced to use the default XP interface. It's not that the new icon is better or worse than the old one--but why ever change a familiar, easy to recognize icon? It's done to create the illusion of progress, of course.
Making icons look "cooler" in successive iterations of software is one of my particular pet peeves. Whenever someone releases a new version of their software, they think that people won't believe they got their money's worth if the GUI looks the same--so they jazz up the icons. Usually, this means adding more detail, even though this violates the basic principle of the icon: that it should be simple and easy to recognize. In other words...icons should be iconic.
That brings me to another reason why software publishers change GUIs. From the article:
The increased complexity of today's computer systems is forcing change upon the GUI. As the number of features has exploded, users have been overwhelmed with layer after layer of icons, tool bars and menu options.
Excuse me, but if you've got "exploded" features, then you do not have a problem that can be solved by a revamped GUI--you have bloatware. Clean up the mess, and start over.
I haven't seen these new "ribbons" MS is talking about for LongVista, but even the name is dumb. Look, the people at Xerox Park gave us the foundation of a great GUI, and there's no reason to change that basic set of visual metaphors until there's a fundamental change in the mechanics of the computer/human interface. The requirements for a good GUI are well-understood: it should be as simple as possible, it should be consistent between applications, it should use easily recognized familiar symbols and conventions. It most definitely should not change from one moment to the next according to the notions of some guy in Redmond who thinks he can anticipate what I want to do.
Offtopic? I'm wounded. Deeply wounded. Or do people not know what a "Luddite" is? And you never have a Luddite sort of mood? And how can being a Luddite on/. ever be off-topic? Ah well. I guess I'll change my sig to all smiley faces, then people will stop taking me seriously.
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I guess I should have asked if Iron Python is still indent-sensitive.
But does the world really need yet another programming language? Arent' there enough of them around already? One might say the same of *ux distros, "emerging" standards, and anything that begins with the letter "X".
Because you explicitly asked for my opinion, I will dutifully irritate you. First, I must observe that merely correcting your punctuation would be a complete waste of time; your entire message is an unsalvageable waste of perfectly good electrons.
Were I forced to re-write your prose at gunpoint so that it meets minimally acceptable standards of clarity and grammatical construction, it might look like this:
I know nothing. I make the completely groundless assertion that "The Well" over-estimates its place in the order of things, and that its overly liberal policies permit its technically inadequate users to operate open SMT servers that relay spam.
To avoid the appearance of excessive negativism, I will say that your contribution's title possesses a certain unintentional lyricism. Perhaps If I had to Wildly Guess would make a good title for a collection of malapropisms uttered by our current Leader.
When I was in Germany in June, I had some of my emails home blocked by Comcast, with a notification that the ISP I was using had been blacklisted. The ISP in question was Deutsche Telekom (a.k.a. T Mobile in the US). Say what???!!! This lasted for about a day, then my email started going through again. I have no idea who at Comcast makes these decisions or how they make them, but it's completely nuts.
I couldn't care less if the IT department sees what's on my work machine--I never do anything I'd be ashamed of at work (except read Slashdot, of course). I'm much more bothered by the fact that Google keeps records of the searches I do at home that could potentially be connected to me.
I know a lot of you think the fact I'm worried about this must put me in the tinfoil hat class (actually, I am usually eveloped in my special invisible home-made Faraday cage). But I think there are sound reasons to be concerned about this. I used to blithely post my...er...somewhat unconventional political opinions (well, opinions on everything, actually) on the Interned under my true name. This was back in the late 80s, and the consequences of that indiscretion--plus other life experiences--have taught me the following:
If you make public any information, or even give it to a second party, do not depend on it disappearing. Ever. (Of course, you must consider Vomact's Exception to this principle--if you really need some old information, they won't be able to find the back-up.)
Information carelessly left around can be used against you.
Good intentions by the possessor of the information are of no value in protecting you (even if they have sworn to Do No Evil). If the information exists, a third party can acquire it methods ranging from by court order to simple theft.
Perhaps you're wondering why I would be worried that the government might go after me for my pr0n searches. Well, I'm not. I am concerned that some data mining might turn up some of my other interests, e.g., politics, explosives, and firearms. Of course, the latter two are merely theoretical in nature. Mostly.
How absolutely true. I once (early to mid 1990s) worked for a feeding-ledge "mini-supercomputer" company. From time to time, the CEO would announce the death of another of our competitors. There would be general rejoicing, a mock funeral, and lots of extra beer at the Friday-night bash. But I always had my doubts: is the death of a competitor necessarily a good thing? Sure, it could mean that they were incompetent, and you are going to get all the business they used to have. But if your competitors are falling off that ledge like pigeons with bird flu, it could also mean that there is no market for what you are trying to sell. Business doesn't have to be a zero-sum game; in fact, it's best if there are many winners, because that means there's a healthy market.
To commemorate the completion of a major project, this company gave out T-shirts emblazoned with the new slogan: "Now Anything Can Happen!" I remember pointing out to a colleague that this was a curiously ambiguous slogan. He laughed at me and drained his plastic beer cup. On the following Monday, management announced the first layoff. It was a rapid downhill slide from then on.
I'm puzzled why Sun chose to make this jocular attack on HP by using figures of the founders. It would have been much more on target if they had pointed out how HP has changed from one of the most innovative and worker-friendly high tech companies in the world to a global marketing-oriented sweatshop whose operations revolve mainly around sticking its logos on stuff made in China. (I exempt the printer division, which still seems to be turning out good product.) The "new HP" has very little connection to the vision of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard--they'd be sad to see what has become of their brainchild. HP is is emblematic of devolution of the American high-tech corporations. Alas.
I was taught the correct pronunciation of Uranus was emphasizing the first syllable.
Went to school fairly recently, did you? (Well, for me, 20 years ago would be recent...). Though one must grant some grudging respect to this plucky revisionist euphemism that attempts to rescue The Planet That Dare not Speak its Name from non-verbal obscurity, it fails because the euphemism-- "urine-os" is scarcely preferable to the alternative it seeks to supplant. Indeed, it's just a new variant of the joke.
Nobody intelligent sniggers about the name of a planet. If you plan to disagree then it may be time to think a little more about what I just said: "Nobody intelligent sniggers about the name of a planet."
Gosh, I repeated what you said to myself a dozen times, yet I feel not the slightest qualm about sniggering in your no doubt stern--but alas, virtual, face. Could it be that I am not intelligent? Maybe...but I think it has more to do with recognizing an obvious ad hominem attack when I see one.
You sir, are clearly suffering from an excess of seriousness, and lack that sense of the absurd which is so essential in coping with today's world. I prescribe the following remedy that offers hope of a cure: find a DVD of of Jim Carrey's "Dumb and Dumber" and watch it over and over again until you are laughing uncontrollably.
Let me get this straight, instead of "your anus" you want the planet to be called "our anus"? How exactly is that an improvement?
I had blithely supposed that the the pronunciation I had in mind was pretty obvious, but apparently not: it would be "Oor-ah-nos", with stress on the second syllable. A slightly supercilious tone and an affected British accent would help carry it off.
Why? Well, first of all it's a lot of fun to argue about stuff like this--and I never could resist a good argument. It's too bad, though, that the astronomers turned this question into a pissing contest--shows they don't know how to have a proper argument. A vote, for cryin' out loud! Now if you want to see the fur fly with panache, call in the philosophers.
Seriously, there are some interesting astronomical questions that are brought up by this "is Pluto a planet?" debate. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, astronomers were expecting to find another planet, because there were some irregularities in the motions of the known planets that could only be explained by more mass out beyond Neptune. So when Tombaugh spotted Pluto, everyone shouted "hurray", the problem was solved, and we had nine planets. Only it wasn't quite solved--Pluto didn't have enough mass to really account for all the observed perturbations. Well, at least that's what I remember reading about Pluto...feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Eventually, I think astronomers--and normal human beings--will come to a consensus, and I believe that consensus will indeed confirm Pluto's debasement. Like the guy in one of the articles said, Pluto just isn't that big, so if it qualifies for planet-hood, then a lot of other rocks do too. Clearly, that would get too confusing--it was bad enough just having to remember nine planets...think of the children!
One thing that makes this such a productive argument is that it forces us to acknowledge that the solar system is a more complicated--and vastly more interesting--place than we thought. I think that's a good thing...even if it means the last true thing I learned in school has just gone down the tubes.
I'll tell you what, though--while we're cleaning up astronomical nomenclature, let's do something about The Unmentionable Planet--you know the one just this side of Neptune, which was discovered to have rings around it. Ever since that joke went around, no one has been able to say--or even think--the name without dissolving into a fit of hysterical laughter. My personal favorite solution is to Greek-ify the spelling and pronunciation a bit to render it harmless: maybe "Ouranos".
...and now with buphrenorphine. (See, for example this article).
The cycle seems to run like this: Drug A has been found to be "addicting" (for practical purposes, let's define this as "makes you feel really shitty if you stop taking it"), and it has been noticed that people enjoy themselves after taking it. Drug A is therefore declared by the media and government agencies as "evil". (Note that both conditions are necessary and sufficient for evilness: prescription medications that make you feel really shitty if you stop taking them (like certain anti-depressants) aren't evil--presumably because people suffer instead of feeling pleasure. Coffe and likker are OK even though they make some people feel good because they're not addicting (or so they say).
Ok, now we all know that a substance that makes people feel good and that makes them want to keep taking it is a social disaster that puts terrorism, plagues, famine and and the imminent fall of Western culture in the shade, so what do we do? There are, of course, many alternative approaches to this problem but one that has gained some favor is to adopt a new drug, "B" as the "cure" for problem A. This looks good because drug B isn't evil--it hasn't yet experienced the media frenzy that unshakeably convinces the populace that a drug is evil. So drug B is now prescribed for heroin addicts to "cure" them. In the case of Methadone, this was obviously silly because Methadone is just as addicting as heroin, and can make you feel quite nice. In other words, some Methadone patients may be -gasp- enjoying themselves! Methadone does have the advantage of lasting longer than heroin, so it can be handed out to heroin addicts on a once-daily basis, thereby controlling their dosage. But really, this is no different in principle from handing out a day's ration of, say, Dilaudid to the addict. It just looks better, and we all know that looks are all-important.
Of course, Methadone has acquired a definite tinge of evilness, and it's hard to establish a methadone program, and difficult to get into one because the possibility that some individuals may possibly be enjoying themselves troubles the conscience of the media and the politicians.
Now we have Buphrenorphine that is being embraced as the new "cure". Well guess what, addicts aren't going to stop being addicts because they need their daily fix of bupe, and --curses!-- some of them are smiling.
Personally, I think the whole business is silly. I do think there are some people who have a big problem with addiction, but I think the best way to help them is to do what the British have been doing for years, and just prescribe reasonable amounts of the stuff they crave. Maybe bupe will be a better drug, in that accidental or deliberate overdose may be less likely with this drug (it's partly self-limiting because beyond a certain dosage it stops working). But folks, none of these programs is going to work if we Americans don't get over the notion that feeling good by taking certain pharmaceuticals is ipso facto an evil thing.
Sounds like an excellent product. Perhaps there are reasons why you can't buy a media PC like this...for example "2) Records cable/terrestrial TV to HD like a TIVO/VCR" might cause apoplexy in some of the media barons who want to destroy everything that might threaten their hold on "intellectual property". Hmmm. Do they make TV cards that can handle HDTV?
Another application for such a media PC would be to play DVDs from multiple regions. I would like to play both US and European DVDs. Without a PC in the picture, I'd have to buy one of those expensive region-code-free DVD players. If I already had a media PC, I could just buy two DVD drives, one set for the US region, the other set for Europe. DVD drives are a lot cheaper than good DVD players--especially region-free ones.
No, you're confusing what might possibly be a good idea with reality: they're selling laptops, not laptops with textbooks on DVD. (Do these things even have a DVD reader?). $100 laptops and DVDs would be considerably cheaper than a bunch of textbooks for each child. Of course, selecting the textbooks to digitize would take some actual thought, hard work, and knowledge of the language and culture in which the material will be distributed. That's beyond the ken of those guys at MIT.
And how, precisely, will the $100 laptops further sex education among third world kids? Are you going to hand out a free DVD with sex education materials along with the laptops? If so, how would that be more effective than a teacher standing in front of a classroom presenting similar material? Or are you--horrors--talking about connecting them to the internet and telling them to Google "sex"?
When the Indian agency said there is a "conceptual vacuum in which the scheme is being propagated" they were being both perceptive and exceedingly kind. A more pungent translation would be, "This is a really dumb-ass idea conceived by some conceited rich do-gooders who don't know squat about education, and who are pushing it because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy."
How about donating $100 to every teacher in India? How about using the money to train more teachers? I may be a geek, but even I know that not every problem can be solved by a gadget.
I once found a friend in his garage, cleaning parts from his perpetually disassembled Harley in a pan of gasoline. He was happily humming to himself, puffing on a cigarette. When I pointed out the inadvisability of this practice, he sneered at me and said, "That's bullshit. Why, I could drop this cigarette into the pan, and it wouldn't light. Watch...". Luckily, I managed to persuade him to move the gasoline outside the garage before he proceeded with his demonstration. It took about 3 months for his eyebrows to grow back.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that sometimes you can throw burning objects into containers of gasoline without disastrous results. There are a lot of variables--like how much vapor has collected near the surface of the gas, how much oxygen is mixed with the vapor, how hot the cigarette is burning, how fast the cigarette moves through the critical region, and so forth. But good grief...common sense should tell you that gasoline is on the list of substances to be treated with respect.
Lithium, on the other hand, goes on the list of things I'm positively paranoid about. I don't want to have large quantities of the stuff near me--especially with me in a car. Aside from the fact that you have to very careful about the electrical design of anything using lithium batteries because failures are disastrous, lithium is a metal so reactive that it burns on contact with water. So what happens if you have a crash in the rain? Jeepers. I think Toyota made the right decision sticking with NiMH batteries for its hybrids.
Sorry, can't read TFA, uuungggh...can't get past the title no matter how much of a running start I get. Why do people keep saying "methodology" when they mean method? Though I've never found a use for the word myself, I suppose that methodology would be the study of methods. What's "agile" got to do with programming? Weasels are agile...so this is methodological advice given by weasels? Oh nooo...can't uncross my eyes--somebody take me to the emergency room!
I've been playing pretty much nothing but Everquest since it came out. (When was that...1998? 99?) I have bought and played a couple or three of the "Civilization" type games--mostly because my daughter likes them, and we play each other across the home LAN.
One reason I haven't bought any other games is that my playing time is self-limited; I have a life and intend to keep it. So I really only have time for one game in my schedule. That includes other MMORGs--I haven't switched to WoW or EQ2 (though I tried it briefly) because I can't play two of them, and I don't want to stop playing EQ because it's still fun.
Everybody says that MMORGs are all about leveling--and that's what I thought at one time. But that can't be true, because my main has been 70 for over a year, and it's still fun to play him. Part of the reason for that is that Sony keeps thinking of stuff to do--more interesting places to go in the EQ world, more artifacts, special abilities you can gain, and so forth. But I think the main reason is that I enjoy the social interaction of EQ. It feels good to be with a group of competent players...especially if they appreciate my sense of humor.
So I would say that from the bean-counter's perspective, MMORGs can look very good: once you've got a customer, you can keep him for a long time--and he'll keep paying those monthly fees and buy those expansion packs. I do think there's a limit to even a really good MMORG's life--but it's set more by the dynamics of the game's internal economics than by the innate appeal of the game. How do you avoid flooding the market with Swords of Ueberness, thereby requiring introduction of the Sword of Ueberness II? How long before everyone has one of those? How ridiculously high will the stats on the new one be? No-trade items seem artificial, but it's one of the main methods used by EQ now. If MMORG designers can ever solve the problem of inflation, there may one day be a MMORG that lives indefinitely. And then maybe we can fix the real-world economy...
Yeah, McNorton are not only the 800 pound gorillas of the antivirus market, but they're smelly and have poor social skills. I do have to run something though, because my home network supports normal users...well one normal--a.k.a. She Who Must Be Obeyed. If it wasn't for Macafee her box would be so alive with worms and viruses it would crawl around the house...sort of a mechanical pet nematode.
Recently, Mcapee has started popping little dialogs that look just like the "ready to download your latest antivirus signatures" alerts, but are really trying to sell me some more monkeys I don't want or need. Does anybody have any suggestions for non-irritant antivirus software? I don't mind paying, it's the obnoxious behavior I object to.
Suppose that literacy was universal in all of Europe ever since...oh...the year 500 AD. Suppose further that everyone was compelled by a law or religious tenet to keep a scrupulous and voluminous diary, and that these diaries have been preserved in vast libraries to the present day. How many people do you suppose would wander through those libraries, reading the diaries of people who were not famous or related to them? Darn few, I'd say.
Now why do you suppose that the massive amounts of prose that's being churned out by today's bloggers will be any more interesting to future generations than our hypothetical diaries? Who is going to care about your opinions or about your latest gadget a thousand years from now? Blogs give their authors a (mostly) unjustified sense of self-importance. I don't bother to read them now because there's just too much crap out there and too little of what's being written is of any importance whatever. I really doubt whether future generations will take notice.
I took a look at the first link (took a stab)...I am still seeing green after-images from the orange bars down both sides of the text. Having the bars jiggle around as my eyes move to read was not particularly amusing, either. Nine point text is just fine? What idiots. I'm 58 and my eyes aren't as sharp as they used to be...and that type looks just plain microscopic on my 1200 x 1600 21" LCD. Of course, when I kick up the type size by hitting CTRL + in Firefox, their oh-so-pretty layout looks like crapola. Sorry, not impressed.
I do have to agree that Nielson's writing is awful.
I couldn't disagree more with the original poster--I think it's an absolutely great web site. The layout is clean, simple and instantly comprehensible. The purpose of this page is to direct you to information about web design...so it gives links to articles and conferences. What else could you want? A bunch of animated screenshots of web pages that dance in circles around the text? --In fact, that's what popped into my head when the original poster mentioned "garish"!
As for your (parent) comment, I think that following conventions such as using dark type on a light background, blue underlined links and legible type is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a very good thing for web pages to follow conventions. A good user interface is always a consistent interface. This principle is what made the Macintosh such a success--nearly every program that ran on the Mac had a similar menu structure, the buttons looked alike and did what you expected, and so on. (I speak in the past tense because I haven't used a Mac in years.) I hate programs that use a glitzy unique interface just to be different; you would say they are establishing "brand" identity or something--I say that they are annoying the crap out of me by having to learn a new interface just for their stupid program. (This happens a lot in games.) In this case, doing things differently doesn't make the software cool--it makes the program look amateurish.
Now, I understand that the web isn't an operating system, or a set of related application programs. Web pages serve many different purposes, and what works for one page doesn't necessarily work for another. But I have seen many more examples of web pages that defeat themselves with their unique graphics or typographical layout than I've seen examples of successful web pages that depart radically from convention. The same general rules do apply to most web pages as apply to any user interface--make me feel at home, make it clear where I'm supposed to click to do what, let me recognize a link when I see one. The first rule about breaking rules is, "Have a good reason". Break the rules only when it makes your page more effective--don't break them just to be "different".
Why would any thinking person believe that nuclear weapons are a "bad idea"? While the period since 1945 hasn't exactly been free of wars, there has not been a single major war; World War III never happened. Yes, if you are in the middle of a firefight or on the receiving end of an explosive device--be it delivered by an advanced fighter-bomber flying at 10,000 feet or a beat up Toyota--then it's small comfort to note that you are in a minor war, an "insurgency", or an "asymmetric conflict". But it is incontrovertible that the megadeath slaughter of the world wars has not been repeated. Why? Because the invention of the nuclear weapons made war between states that have such weapons suicidal. War is no longer an extension of policy simply because no government will pursue a policy that leads to its own annihilation.
Powerful states do still have the option of attacking backward states that do not possess nuclear weapons, of course. Recently, the United States made this blindingly obvious when it attacked Iraq. Iraq was not attacked because it had "weapons of mass destruction", but precisely because it did not have such weapons--or at least not weapons that could possibly pose a threat to a superpower like the United States. (Iraq used "chemical agents" in its war against Iran; everyone knew this but certainly no one in Washington got hysterical about it. That's because gas was never a particularly good weapon, and certainly is not capable of the same scale of destruction as a thermonuclear bomb.)
The Iranians, not being fools, took the lesson to heart and are now building a nuclear deterrent as quickly as they can, while engaging in the necessary double-talk to palliate the pious official fiction that nuclear weapons are evil (in fact, the policy of every state on earth is that nuclear weapons are evil--when the enemy has them.)
But isn't Iran a "terrorist" state? And doesn't this mean that a nuclear Iran would be a particular threat? Nonsense. Iran is a state, and as such it has a fixed address. This means that if Iran bombs anyone, it can be bombed in return. And if we are speaking of thermonuclear bombs, then that is a decisive deterrent.
Consider the case of India and Pakistan. Both are nuclear powers, and share a tradition of profound hatred that goes back at least to the time when these states were formed. Yet, there has been no war between them since both developed nuclear weapons! This despite the fact that the Pakistani government is not exactly a model of a modern moderate and secular democracy.
As I see it, the greatest danger inherent in nuclear proliferation is that as the number of countries that have such weapons becomes larger, the odds that a nuclear device will fall into the hands of a non-state organization (a.k.a. "terrorists") will increase. This risk is especially great in countries that do not have a sophisticated security apparatus, and that host such non-state actors within their borders. This would obviously be a most undesirable event, because the restraints that apply to states do not apply to non-state organizations. They have no return address, so to speak, so the threat of nuclear retaliation is no deterrent at all to such an organization.
I believe that the world would be far better served if we (and everyone else) stopped mouthing pious platitudes about the evils of nuclear weapons, and established some sensible policies to control them. The goal of such policies should be to make as certain as can be that only states will possess nuclear weapons, and that every such weapon can be accounted for. We need an agreement that would permit an international body to inspect the nuclear arsenals of all who possess such weapons. The goal of such supervision would be to make nuclear weapons traceable. We could then tell Iraq, "Go ahead and build all the nukes you want. But if any of those nukes ever goes off, prepare to lose a major city. And it doesn't matter whether you actually delivered the bomb yourselves, or you lost track of it and it wound up being used by some "freedom fighters"/"terrorists". You will be toast."
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I firmly believe that when it comes to GUIs, change is almost always for the worse. One reason for this is that once a set of GUI conventions has become established, change is disconcerting--you now have to accustom yourself to the new "look" or to the new way that the GUI works. That inconvenience is rarely repaid by the alleged advantages of the change.
As an example, consider the difference between the Windows 2000 and XP desk tops. Just how is the XP desktop better than the older one? I sure couldn't see any advantage to it. Yet, if you were to use the darn thing (and not switch to the "classic" view), you'd have to figure out again how to do a bunch of stuff you already knew how to do before the interface changed. This is progress? Even at the detail level, the changes are silly and unhelpful. Look at those three-dimensional window title bars. Why is that bulgy look better than the less obtrusive flat title bar of the old Win 2K interface? What convenience or information is added by the 3D bulge? Or how about the XP icon for video options--it's a screen with a flat paintbrush on it instead of the 2K screen with a round paintbrush and ruler in front of it. The two look different enough that it takes me a couple of extra seconds to find that icon in the Control Panel whenever I'm forced to use the default XP interface. It's not that the new icon is better or worse than the old one--but why ever change a familiar, easy to recognize icon? It's done to create the illusion of progress, of course.
Making icons look "cooler" in successive iterations of software is one of my particular pet peeves. Whenever someone releases a new version of their software, they think that people won't believe they got their money's worth if the GUI looks the same--so they jazz up the icons. Usually, this means adding more detail, even though this violates the basic principle of the icon: that it should be simple and easy to recognize. In other words...icons should be iconic.
That brings me to another reason why software publishers change GUIs. From the article:
Excuse me, but if you've got "exploded" features, then you do not have a problem that can be solved by a revamped GUI--you have bloatware. Clean up the mess, and start over.
I haven't seen these new "ribbons" MS is talking about for LongVista, but even the name is dumb. Look, the people at Xerox Park gave us the foundation of a great GUI, and there's no reason to change that basic set of visual metaphors until there's a fundamental change in the mechanics of the computer/human interface. The requirements for a good GUI are well-understood: it should be as simple as possible, it should be consistent between applications, it should use easily recognized familiar symbols and conventions. It most definitely should not change from one moment to the next according to the notions of some guy in Redmond who thinks he can anticipate what I want to do.
Actually, what we have here are members of the corporate elite mistaking themselves for politicians--i.e., the government. Or is that a mistake...
Offtopic? I'm wounded. Deeply wounded. Or do people not know what a "Luddite" is? And you never have a Luddite sort of mood? And how can being a Luddite on /. ever be off-topic? Ah well. I guess I'll change my sig to all smiley faces, then people will stop taking me seriously.
. I guess I should have asked if Iron Python is still indent-sensitive.
But does the world really need yet another programming language? Arent' there enough of them around already? One might say the same of *ux distros, "emerging" standards, and anything that begins with the letter "X".
Because you explicitly asked for my opinion, I will dutifully irritate you. First, I must observe that merely correcting your punctuation would be a complete waste of time; your entire message is an unsalvageable waste of perfectly good electrons.
Were I forced to re-write your prose at gunpoint so that it meets minimally acceptable standards of clarity and grammatical construction, it might look like this:
To avoid the appearance of excessive negativism, I will say that your contribution's title possesses a certain unintentional lyricism. Perhaps If I had to Wildly Guess would make a good title for a collection of malapropisms uttered by our current Leader.
Thank you for this opportunity to vent my spleen.
When I was in Germany in June, I had some of my emails home blocked by Comcast, with a notification that the ISP I was using had been blacklisted. The ISP in question was Deutsche Telekom (a.k.a. T Mobile in the US). Say what???!!! This lasted for about a day, then my email started going through again. I have no idea who at Comcast makes these decisions or how they make them, but it's completely nuts.
I couldn't care less if the IT department sees what's on my work machine--I never do anything I'd be ashamed of at work (except read Slashdot, of course). I'm much more bothered by the fact that Google keeps records of the searches I do at home that could potentially be connected to me.
I know a lot of you think the fact I'm worried about this must put me in the tinfoil hat class (actually, I am usually eveloped in my special invisible home-made Faraday cage). But I think there are sound reasons to be concerned about this. I used to blithely post my...er...somewhat unconventional political opinions (well, opinions on everything, actually) on the Interned under my true name. This was back in the late 80s, and the consequences of that indiscretion--plus other life experiences--have taught me the following:
Perhaps you're wondering why I would be worried that the government might go after me for my pr0n searches. Well, I'm not. I am concerned that some data mining might turn up some of my other interests, e.g., politics, explosives, and firearms. Of course, the latter two are merely theoretical in nature. Mostly.
So how about being "informative" and telling us what the rules for XP are?
How absolutely true. I once (early to mid 1990s) worked for a feeding-ledge "mini-supercomputer" company. From time to time, the CEO would announce the death of another of our competitors. There would be general rejoicing, a mock funeral, and lots of extra beer at the Friday-night bash. But I always had my doubts: is the death of a competitor necessarily a good thing? Sure, it could mean that they were incompetent, and you are going to get all the business they used to have. But if your competitors are falling off that ledge like pigeons with bird flu, it could also mean that there is no market for what you are trying to sell. Business doesn't have to be a zero-sum game; in fact, it's best if there are many winners, because that means there's a healthy market.
To commemorate the completion of a major project, this company gave out T-shirts emblazoned with the new slogan: "Now Anything Can Happen!" I remember pointing out to a colleague that this was a curiously ambiguous slogan. He laughed at me and drained his plastic beer cup. On the following Monday, management announced the first layoff. It was a rapid downhill slide from then on.
I'm puzzled why Sun chose to make this jocular attack on HP by using figures of the founders. It would have been much more on target if they had pointed out how HP has changed from one of the most innovative and worker-friendly high tech companies in the world to a global marketing-oriented sweatshop whose operations revolve mainly around sticking its logos on stuff made in China. (I exempt the printer division, which still seems to be turning out good product.) The "new HP" has very little connection to the vision of Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard--they'd be sad to see what has become of their brainchild. HP is is emblematic of devolution of the American high-tech corporations. Alas.
Went to school fairly recently, did you? (Well, for me, 20 years ago would be recent...). Though one must grant some grudging respect to this plucky revisionist euphemism that attempts to rescue The Planet That Dare not Speak its Name from non-verbal obscurity, it fails because the euphemism-- "urine-os" is scarcely preferable to the alternative it seeks to supplant. Indeed, it's just a new variant of the joke.
Gosh, I repeated what you said to myself a dozen times, yet I feel not the slightest qualm about sniggering in your no doubt stern--but alas, virtual, face. Could it be that I am not intelligent? Maybe...but I think it has more to do with recognizing an obvious ad hominem attack when I see one.
You sir, are clearly suffering from an excess of seriousness, and lack that sense of the absurd which is so essential in coping with today's world. I prescribe the following remedy that offers hope of a cure: find a DVD of of Jim Carrey's "Dumb and Dumber" and watch it over and over again until you are laughing uncontrollably.
I had blithely supposed that the the pronunciation I had in mind was pretty obvious, but apparently not: it would be "Oor-ah-nos", with stress on the second syllable. A slightly supercilious tone and an affected British accent would help carry it off.
Why? Well, first of all it's a lot of fun to argue about stuff like this--and I never could resist a good argument. It's too bad, though, that the astronomers turned this question into a pissing contest--shows they don't know how to have a proper argument. A vote, for cryin' out loud! Now if you want to see the fur fly with panache, call in the philosophers.
Seriously, there are some interesting astronomical questions that are brought up by this "is Pluto a planet?" debate. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, astronomers were expecting to find another planet, because there were some irregularities in the motions of the known planets that could only be explained by more mass out beyond Neptune. So when Tombaugh spotted Pluto, everyone shouted "hurray", the problem was solved, and we had nine planets. Only it wasn't quite solved--Pluto didn't have enough mass to really account for all the observed perturbations. Well, at least that's what I remember reading about Pluto...feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Eventually, I think astronomers--and normal human beings--will come to a consensus, and I believe that consensus will indeed confirm Pluto's debasement. Like the guy in one of the articles said, Pluto just isn't that big, so if it qualifies for planet-hood, then a lot of other rocks do too. Clearly, that would get too confusing--it was bad enough just having to remember nine planets...think of the children!
One thing that makes this such a productive argument is that it forces us to acknowledge that the solar system is a more complicated--and vastly more interesting--place than we thought. I think that's a good thing...even if it means the last true thing I learned in school has just gone down the tubes.
I'll tell you what, though--while we're cleaning up astronomical nomenclature, let's do something about The Unmentionable Planet--you know the one just this side of Neptune, which was discovered to have rings around it. Ever since that joke went around, no one has been able to say--or even think--the name without dissolving into a fit of hysterical laughter. My personal favorite solution is to Greek-ify the spelling and pronunciation a bit to render it harmless: maybe "Ouranos".
The cycle seems to run like this: Drug A has been found to be "addicting" (for practical purposes, let's define this as "makes you feel really shitty if you stop taking it"), and it has been noticed that people enjoy themselves after taking it. Drug A is therefore declared by the media and government agencies as "evil". (Note that both conditions are necessary and sufficient for evilness: prescription medications that make you feel really shitty if you stop taking them (like certain anti-depressants) aren't evil--presumably because people suffer instead of feeling pleasure. Coffe and likker are OK even though they make some people feel good because they're not addicting (or so they say).
Ok, now we all know that a substance that makes people feel good and that makes them want to keep taking it is a social disaster that puts terrorism, plagues, famine and and the imminent fall of Western culture in the shade, so what do we do? There are, of course, many alternative approaches to this problem but one that has gained some favor is to adopt a new drug, "B" as the "cure" for problem A. This looks good because drug B isn't evil--it hasn't yet experienced the media frenzy that unshakeably convinces the populace that a drug is evil. So drug B is now prescribed for heroin addicts to "cure" them. In the case of Methadone, this was obviously silly because Methadone is just as addicting as heroin, and can make you feel quite nice. In other words, some Methadone patients may be -gasp- enjoying themselves! Methadone does have the advantage of lasting longer than heroin, so it can be handed out to heroin addicts on a once-daily basis, thereby controlling their dosage. But really, this is no different in principle from handing out a day's ration of, say, Dilaudid to the addict. It just looks better, and we all know that looks are all-important.
Of course, Methadone has acquired a definite tinge of evilness, and it's hard to establish a methadone program, and difficult to get into one because the possibility that some individuals may possibly be enjoying themselves troubles the conscience of the media and the politicians.
Now we have Buphrenorphine that is being embraced as the new "cure". Well guess what, addicts aren't going to stop being addicts because they need their daily fix of bupe, and --curses!-- some of them are smiling.
Personally, I think the whole business is silly. I do think there are some people who have a big problem with addiction, but I think the best way to help them is to do what the British have been doing for years, and just prescribe reasonable amounts of the stuff they crave. Maybe bupe will be a better drug, in that accidental or deliberate overdose may be less likely with this drug (it's partly self-limiting because beyond a certain dosage it stops working). But folks, none of these programs is going to work if we Americans don't get over the notion that feeling good by taking certain pharmaceuticals is ipso facto an evil thing.
Sounds like an excellent product. Perhaps there are reasons why you can't buy a media PC like this...for example "2) Records cable/terrestrial TV to HD like a TIVO/VCR" might cause apoplexy in some of the media barons who want to destroy everything that might threaten their hold on "intellectual property". Hmmm. Do they make TV cards that can handle HDTV?
Another application for such a media PC would be to play DVDs from multiple regions. I would like to play both US and European DVDs. Without a PC in the picture, I'd have to buy one of those expensive region-code-free DVD players. If I already had a media PC, I could just buy two DVD drives, one set for the US region, the other set for Europe. DVD drives are a lot cheaper than good DVD players--especially region-free ones.
No, you're confusing what might possibly be a good idea with reality: they're selling laptops, not laptops with textbooks on DVD. (Do these things even have a DVD reader?). $100 laptops and DVDs would be considerably cheaper than a bunch of textbooks for each child. Of course, selecting the textbooks to digitize would take some actual thought, hard work, and knowledge of the language and culture in which the material will be distributed. That's beyond the ken of those guys at MIT.
And how, precisely, will the $100 laptops further sex education among third world kids? Are you going to hand out a free DVD with sex education materials along with the laptops? If so, how would that be more effective than a teacher standing in front of a classroom presenting similar material? Or are you--horrors--talking about connecting them to the internet and telling them to Google "sex"?
When the Indian agency said there is a "conceptual vacuum in which the scheme is being propagated" they were being both perceptive and exceedingly kind. A more pungent translation would be, "This is a really dumb-ass idea conceived by some conceited rich do-gooders who don't know squat about education, and who are pushing it because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy."
How about donating $100 to every teacher in India? How about using the money to train more teachers? I may be a geek, but even I know that not every problem can be solved by a gadget.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that sometimes you can throw burning objects into containers of gasoline without disastrous results. There are a lot of variables--like how much vapor has collected near the surface of the gas, how much oxygen is mixed with the vapor, how hot the cigarette is burning, how fast the cigarette moves through the critical region, and so forth. But good grief...common sense should tell you that gasoline is on the list of substances to be treated with respect.
Lithium, on the other hand, goes on the list of things I'm positively paranoid about. I don't want to have large quantities of the stuff near me--especially with me in a car. Aside from the fact that you have to very careful about the electrical design of anything using lithium batteries because failures are disastrous, lithium is a metal so reactive that it burns on contact with water. So what happens if you have a crash in the rain? Jeepers. I think Toyota made the right decision sticking with NiMH batteries for its hybrids.
Sorry, can't read TFA, uuungggh...can't get past the title no matter how much of a running start I get. Why do people keep saying "methodology" when they mean method? Though I've never found a use for the word myself, I suppose that methodology would be the study of methods. What's "agile" got to do with programming? Weasels are agile...so this is methodological advice given by weasels? Oh nooo...can't uncross my eyes--somebody take me to the emergency room!
Everybody says that MMORGs are all about leveling--and that's what I thought at one time. But that can't be true, because my main has been 70 for over a year, and it's still fun to play him. Part of the reason for that is that Sony keeps thinking of stuff to do--more interesting places to go in the EQ world, more artifacts, special abilities you can gain, and so forth. But I think the main reason is that I enjoy the social interaction of EQ. It feels good to be with a group of competent players...especially if they appreciate my sense of humor.
So I would say that from the bean-counter's perspective, MMORGs can look very good: once you've got a customer, you can keep him for a long time--and he'll keep paying those monthly fees and buy those expansion packs. I do think there's a limit to even a really good MMORG's life--but it's set more by the dynamics of the game's internal economics than by the innate appeal of the game. How do you avoid flooding the market with Swords of Ueberness, thereby requiring introduction of the Sword of Ueberness II? How long before everyone has one of those? How ridiculously high will the stats on the new one be? No-trade items seem artificial, but it's one of the main methods used by EQ now. If MMORG designers can ever solve the problem of inflation, there may one day be a MMORG that lives indefinitely. And then maybe we can fix the real-world economy...
Recently, Mcapee has started popping little dialogs that look just like the "ready to download your latest antivirus signatures" alerts, but are really trying to sell me some more monkeys I don't want or need. Does anybody have any suggestions for non-irritant antivirus software? I don't mind paying, it's the obnoxious behavior I object to.
Now why do you suppose that the massive amounts of prose that's being churned out by today's bloggers will be any more interesting to future generations than our hypothetical diaries? Who is going to care about your opinions or about your latest gadget a thousand years from now? Blogs give their authors a (mostly) unjustified sense of self-importance. I don't bother to read them now because there's just too much crap out there and too little of what's being written is of any importance whatever. I really doubt whether future generations will take notice.
I took a look at the first link (took a stab)...I am still seeing green after-images from the orange bars down both sides of the text. Having the bars jiggle around as my eyes move to read was not particularly amusing, either. Nine point text is just fine? What idiots. I'm 58 and my eyes aren't as sharp as they used to be...and that type looks just plain microscopic on my 1200 x 1600 21" LCD. Of course, when I kick up the type size by hitting CTRL + in Firefox, their oh-so-pretty layout looks like crapola. Sorry, not impressed.
I do have to agree that Nielson's writing is awful.
I couldn't disagree more with the original poster--I think it's an absolutely great web site. The layout is clean, simple and instantly comprehensible. The purpose of this page is to direct you to information about web design...so it gives links to articles and conferences. What else could you want? A bunch of animated screenshots of web pages that dance in circles around the text? --In fact, that's what popped into my head when the original poster mentioned "garish"!
As for your (parent) comment, I think that following conventions such as using dark type on a light background, blue underlined links and legible type is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a very good thing for web pages to follow conventions. A good user interface is always a consistent interface. This principle is what made the Macintosh such a success--nearly every program that ran on the Mac had a similar menu structure, the buttons looked alike and did what you expected, and so on. (I speak in the past tense because I haven't used a Mac in years.) I hate programs that use a glitzy unique interface just to be different; you would say they are establishing "brand" identity or something--I say that they are annoying the crap out of me by having to learn a new interface just for their stupid program. (This happens a lot in games.) In this case, doing things differently doesn't make the software cool--it makes the program look amateurish.
Now, I understand that the web isn't an operating system, or a set of related application programs. Web pages serve many different purposes, and what works for one page doesn't necessarily work for another. But I have seen many more examples of web pages that defeat themselves with their unique graphics or typographical layout than I've seen examples of successful web pages that depart radically from convention. The same general rules do apply to most web pages as apply to any user interface--make me feel at home, make it clear where I'm supposed to click to do what, let me recognize a link when I see one. The first rule about breaking rules is, "Have a good reason". Break the rules only when it makes your page more effective--don't break them just to be "different".
Why would any thinking person believe that nuclear weapons are a "bad idea"? While the period since 1945 hasn't exactly been free of wars, there has not been a single major war; World War III never happened. Yes, if you are in the middle of a firefight or on the receiving end of an explosive device--be it delivered by an advanced fighter-bomber flying at 10,000 feet or a beat up Toyota--then it's small comfort to note that you are in a minor war, an "insurgency", or an "asymmetric conflict". But it is incontrovertible that the megadeath slaughter of the world wars has not been repeated. Why? Because the invention of the nuclear weapons made war between states that have such weapons suicidal. War is no longer an extension of policy simply because no government will pursue a policy that leads to its own annihilation.
Powerful states do still have the option of attacking backward states that do not possess nuclear weapons, of course. Recently, the United States made this blindingly obvious when it attacked Iraq. Iraq was not attacked because it had "weapons of mass destruction", but precisely because it did not have such weapons--or at least not weapons that could possibly pose a threat to a superpower like the United States. (Iraq used "chemical agents" in its war against Iran; everyone knew this but certainly no one in Washington got hysterical about it. That's because gas was never a particularly good weapon, and certainly is not capable of the same scale of destruction as a thermonuclear bomb.)
The Iranians, not being fools, took the lesson to heart and are now building a nuclear deterrent as quickly as they can, while engaging in the necessary double-talk to palliate the pious official fiction that nuclear weapons are evil (in fact, the policy of every state on earth is that nuclear weapons are evil--when the enemy has them.)
But isn't Iran a "terrorist" state? And doesn't this mean that a nuclear Iran would be a particular threat? Nonsense. Iran is a state, and as such it has a fixed address. This means that if Iran bombs anyone, it can be bombed in return. And if we are speaking of thermonuclear bombs, then that is a decisive deterrent.
Consider the case of India and Pakistan. Both are nuclear powers, and share a tradition of profound hatred that goes back at least to the time when these states were formed. Yet, there has been no war between them since both developed nuclear weapons! This despite the fact that the Pakistani government is not exactly a model of a modern moderate and secular democracy.
As I see it, the greatest danger inherent in nuclear proliferation is that as the number of countries that have such weapons becomes larger, the odds that a nuclear device will fall into the hands of a non-state organization (a.k.a. "terrorists") will increase. This risk is especially great in countries that do not have a sophisticated security apparatus, and that host such non-state actors within their borders. This would obviously be a most undesirable event, because the restraints that apply to states do not apply to non-state organizations. They have no return address, so to speak, so the threat of nuclear retaliation is no deterrent at all to such an organization.
I believe that the world would be far better served if we (and everyone else) stopped mouthing pious platitudes about the evils of nuclear weapons, and established some sensible policies to control them. The goal of such policies should be to make as certain as can be that only states will possess nuclear weapons, and that every such weapon can be accounted for. We need an agreement that would permit an international body to inspect the nuclear arsenals of all who possess such weapons. The goal of such supervision would be to make nuclear weapons traceable. We could then tell Iraq, "Go ahead and build all the nukes you want. But if any of those nukes ever goes off, prepare to lose a major city. And it doesn't matter whether you actually delivered the bomb yourselves, or you lost track of it and it wound up being used by some "freedom fighters"/"terrorists". You will be toast."