Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. The Awfulbar isn't an advantage if I'm navigating to, e.g., slashdot.org, or en.wikipedia.org, or nytimes.com. It is an advantage if I am going, say, here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica. I can type "dem" in the Awfulbar, and it will find it. If I can't remember the URL, I can also search by title, e.g., "economist blog politics".
What's really super-great is Chrome's Heinousbar, er, Omnibar, which searches one's history, bookmarks, and Google. I imagine that, for you, that's even worse.
Luckily, the world is large enough that we can both use software which works the way we want it to.
just out of curiousity, do any of you use a home page? What do you use it for?
On my personal web site, I have a page which contains links to sites I visit constantly. This way, I have a common set of bookmarks that I can use on my two machines at home and on my two machines at work.
Apparently, he saw Times New Roman used as the font for speech balloons in Microsoft Bob, which he thought was a terrible misuse of the font. So he designed a new font, Comic Sans, for those speech balloons. From the article:
Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program's interface, the typeface used to communicate the message.
Research which involves destroying embryos could save people's lives and prevent suffering. Apparently, you privilege the preservation of embryos which can't feel, suffer, or think over saving the lives or ending the suffering of people who unquestionably can. In order for an action to be unethical, someone has to be harmed. When destroying an embryo, there's no one who suffers or feels pain or is harmed in any way.
Your position doesn't sound terribly moral or ethical to me.
Seriously - you want me to believe that the simplest explanation is that sex, butterflies, and Picasso "just happened"???? I'm not there.
The phrase "simplest explanation" can have two meanings: the phrase which is easiest to understand and uses the smallest number of words, or it can mean the explanation which assumes the least. "God made everything" is certainly simple in the first sense, but it's absolutely not simple in the latter sense. God is an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent being existing outside of time and space, and, by the way, this being can't be detected by our senses or by scientific experiment. That's a mighty large assumption to make. In other words, it's faith.
What else is it? The mind is what the brain does. This should be obvious every time you drink alcohol: the chemical has an effect on the physical brain, which has certain effects on your consciousness.
Now, the brain is incredibly complicated, and none of this says that we will actually understand the brain completely. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker speculate that we may not be mentally equipped to understand how the physical brain gives rise to consciousness. That doesn't keep us from chipping away at the problems and leaving the mysteries for later.
It's astronomically unlikely that language would have sprung forth fully formed from natural selection's forehead in a single generation. Like any other adaptation, it was almost certainly a cumulative process - selection pressure caused the capacity for language to get better and better over a long time. So adaptation and use were basically simultaneous.
I try to put all that in the comments, like this Perl example:
# updateCustomerAccount( CUSTOMER, NEWINFO ) # CUSTOMER: a Foo::Customer object representing # the customer whose account is updated. # NEWINFO: a Foo::CustomerInfo object # containing the data to merge # # Updates a customer account for CUSTOMER using # the info NEWINFO. Returns the # Foo::CustomerAccount object, or undef if # a failure occurs.
sub updateCustomerAccount { my $customer = shift; my $newInfo = shift;
(snip...) }
Ideally, I'd like the ability to have a function prototype containing the variable names and expected types, but putting it in the comments is good enough (assuming I, or the person who wrote the code, actually puts this in the comments).
A pair of op-eds which ran last year, Richard Dawkins' in the Guardian and Daniel Dennett's in the New York Times.
A truly brilliant speech by the late, great Douglas Adams, which I'm going to quote from:
Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? -- because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?' but I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.
If he'd never written the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, he'd still be my hero for having the balls to say that in public.
Even worse, before OS X Macs had both Eject and Put Away menu items. If you Put Away a floppy, it would eject it and unmount it completely. If you Ejected a floppy, it would eject the disk but it would stay half-mounted, and eventually the OS might ask for it back with a global modal dialog which wouldn't go away until you put the disk back. This sucks if you work in print production and the floppy has already been handed back to the customer. Eject sounded like what I wanted to do; the phrase Put Away didn't mean anything to me. When I first started using a Mac I was always using Eject when I meant Put Away, with irritating results.
Ejecting a disk is much more sane now in OS X. The Eject menu item does just what you'd expect it to, and there's no Put Away menu item anymore. The icon of the trash can changes to an Eject button icon when you select a removable disk, making it more obvious what happens if you drag a disk to the trash.
My list of things that bug me about Macs has always been shorter than my list of things that bug me about Windows or Linux, but Macs are still more than capable of irritating the hell out of me.
Sure. If you want to point out that there is no way that I can absolutely prove that God does not exist, then I'll concede your point. But so what?
There's an assumption underlying your logic that a belief in God is just as valid as a denial of the existence of God. But that's only because a belief in a single creator God who interacts with the world and has an interest in our behavior in this lifetime is a very commonly held view in our culture. Suppose I were to say to you, "Those who absolutely deny the existence of Thor are just as blinkered as the pagans" or "Those who absolutely deny that, immediately after death, colored lights attempt to draw you into various planes of existence are just as blinkered as the Tibetan Buddhists." You'd look at me like I was insane. But the same logic applies - can you really prove to me that Thor doesn't exist?
There's a huge difference between making a statement which cannot possibly be proved and denying the truth of that statement. No, I can't prove absolutely that God doesn't exist. But the burden of proof is on the one who makes claims of existence for something which cannot be seen, touched, felt, or proved by experiments.
There's a different philosophy for free software that I think is also a mistake: expose every option that anyone would ever think is useful. It looks like the decision algorithm for putting something in Mozilla's Preferences dialog was based on whether someone, at some time, thought it might be useful. Ditto for putting something in the Sidebar (why would I want my address book in my browser's sidebar?). In general, Firefox's UI is much cleaner and simpler, and closer to the UNIX philosophy and the philosophy of most good applications: do one thing and do it well.
Actually, come to think of it, exposing every possible option is something that Microsoft likes to do, too - just use Outlook for five minutes and compare and contrast with a saner email app like Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
I do agree with your point about free software and Microsoft UIs - it's something I think to myself every time I use KDE or StarOffice.
... or is that the most ass-hat way to discover primes ever?
A C program (and a sane Perl script) would be more complicated in that it would require more lines of code, but it would require effort to produce an algorithm which is less efficient and less obfuscated than this one.
This has nothing to do with Perl as a language, and everything to do with irritation at people who code using pointlessly clever algorithms like that one.
I'd disagree that system testing won't find significant bugs, at least not in a large application or complex system. Even with good unit testing, a competent QA organization will test scenarios that the developers didn't think of, because that's their job. In addition, even if the components are all working to their individual requirements, QA will find bugs that expose design flaws.
I'd also say that having good functional specifications and requirements documents makes writing a test plan much easier for the QE, but doesn't make it a breeze - at least in commercial software development, where resources and time are scarce, QA is all about allocating testing time to make sure the important bugs are caught, and that takes skill.
But what do I know? I'm a black box QE, and I have a vested interest in convincing people that black box QA is important.
I know people don't hire older programmers, and being 27 this is something that's hainting me.
Where I work, there are QA people in their 20s and early 30s, but most of the developers are in their late 30s, 40s, or 50s. The hot-shit developers (the ones who drive the swanky cars and have "Senior" in their job title) are all in their late 40s or older. (For the record, I work for a company that makes desktop software mostly used by graphic designers).
Funny, but I spent a very long time using Linux, and got very used to (and religious about) focus follows mouse and select to copy/middle-click to paste. I've spent the last few years in a job where I use OS X and Windows all day, and it really isn't that hard to live without either.
The most productive system is one that you've gotten used to: you know its tricks, its ins and outs, and its shortcuts. Sounds like X11 is that system for you. For me, it's Mac OS X and, to a lesser extent, Windows XP + cygwin.
Damn straight. I'm not productive at all in a stock install of Windows XP, but give me an hour to tweak it and install cygwin, XEmacs, Firefox, and Perl, and let me copy my.bashrc from one of my other machines, and I'm happy.
One way that I deal with this in iTunes is to make a smart playlist that only includes songs I haven't listened to in the last X days.
Unfortunately, if you fast forward through a song, iTunes doesn't count it as played. This means songs you dislike will pop up even if they've popped up in the last X days.
So I make the smart playlist include only songs rated 3 stars or more; when a song I don't like pops up, I rate it as 2 or 1 stars and it stops showing up again.
Works as well as anything that doesn't include telepathy and AI to predict exactly what I want to hear at a given moment:)
Years ago, when I was a customer service peon, we telnetted in to a server to access customer information. At some point, they rolled out a reasonably well-done GUI app to replace it.
The surprising thing is how much people bitched about it. Non-geeks actually preferred the console app to the pointy-clicky one, partly because it was a change from what they were used to, and partly because what used to take a couple keystrokes now took three or four moues clicks.
Looking at the other posts, you'll get lots of good advice to make sure that the UI is easy to learn, doesn't require users to think too hard, and undergoes user testing and revision. But since this is presumably something that people will be using every day, make sure that people also have the ability to get their stuff done quickly: common stuff should be accessible quickly, and there should be keyboard shortcuts.
I was talking about free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Opening your source with a genuinely free license certainly doesn't prevent making money (e.g., Red Hat), but it does make it harder. Why would I spend several hundred dollars on Photoshop if I could just download the source and compile it myself?
My post was arguing against the idea that all completed software should be a public good. I'd argue that Microsoft has every right to sell Word without distributing the source code, but I'd also argue that software patents are being used as a club to restrict competition, not as a way of promoting innovation.
There is nothing "fundamental" about selling softwares---bunches of codes that can be copied at a fraction of a cent. There might be question whether a completed software becomes public good or private property, but that's far from being settled...
But there is something fundamental about selling your ideas and your labor. Those things are valuable to me, and I'm not necessarily going to give them away.
I love free software, and at some point I'd like to get to thank RMS personally for emacs and gcc. But software doesn't have to be free, and it has a value which comes from the smarts and the labor that goes into it. That software as great as Debian and apache and XEmacs and gcc and Firefox is all given away for free is pretty damn cool - but it's not that the software has no value; it's that some very smart people have been kind enough to give something valuable away for free.
But the only question about whether a piece of software is a public good or private property is for the people who created it. It's up to them whether they want to give it away, or try to get some money for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. The Awfulbar isn't an advantage if I'm navigating to, e.g., slashdot.org, or en.wikipedia.org, or nytimes.com. It is an advantage if I am going, say, here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica. I can type "dem" in the Awfulbar, and it will find it. If I can't remember the URL, I can also search by title, e.g., "economist blog politics". What's really super-great is Chrome's Heinousbar, er, Omnibar, which searches one's history, bookmarks, and Google. I imagine that, for you, that's even worse. Luckily, the world is large enough that we can both use software which works the way we want it to.
One box to find them
One box to bring them all
And on the desk to boot them
just out of curiousity, do any of you use a home page? What do you use it for? On my personal web site, I have a page which contains links to sites I visit constantly. This way, I have a common set of bookmarks that I can use on my two machines at home and on my two machines at work.
Here is a, uh, rather ambivalent look at Comic Sans by its designer, Vincent Connare.
Apparently, he saw Times New Roman used as the font for speech balloons in Microsoft Bob, which he thought was a terrible misuse of the font. So he designed a new font, Comic Sans, for those speech balloons. From the article:
... about this. Just in case he doesn't know that someone can buy a Mac and, you know, run Windows software on it.
Research which involves destroying embryos could save people's lives and prevent suffering. Apparently, you privilege the preservation of embryos which can't feel, suffer, or think over saving the lives or ending the suffering of people who unquestionably can. In order for an action to be unethical, someone has to be harmed. When destroying an embryo, there's no one who suffers or feels pain or is harmed in any way.
Your position doesn't sound terribly moral or ethical to me.
Seriously - you want me to believe that the simplest explanation is that sex, butterflies, and Picasso "just happened"???? I'm not there.
The phrase "simplest explanation" can have two meanings: the phrase which is easiest to understand and uses the smallest number of words, or it can mean the explanation which assumes the least. "God made everything" is certainly simple in the first sense, but it's absolutely not simple in the latter sense. God is an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent being existing outside of time and space, and, by the way, this being can't be detected by our senses or by scientific experiment. That's a mighty large assumption to make. In other words, it's faith.
What else is it? The mind is what the brain does. This should be obvious every time you drink alcohol: the chemical has an effect on the physical brain, which has certain effects on your consciousness.
Now, the brain is incredibly complicated, and none of this says that we will actually understand the brain completely. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker speculate that we may not be mentally equipped to understand how the physical brain gives rise to consciousness. That doesn't keep us from chipping away at the problems and leaving the mysteries for later.
It's astronomically unlikely that language would have sprung forth fully formed from natural selection's forehead in a single generation. Like any other adaptation, it was almost certainly a cumulative process - selection pressure caused the capacity for language to get better and better over a long time. So adaptation and use were basically simultaneous.
A pair of op-eds which ran last year, Richard Dawkins' in the Guardian and Daniel Dennett's in the New York Times.
A truly brilliant speech by the late, great Douglas Adams, which I'm going to quote from: If he'd never written the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, he'd still be my hero for having the balls to say that in public.
Even worse, before OS X Macs had both Eject and Put Away menu items. If you Put Away a floppy, it would eject it and unmount it completely. If you Ejected a floppy, it would eject the disk but it would stay half-mounted, and eventually the OS might ask for it back with a global modal dialog which wouldn't go away until you put the disk back. This sucks if you work in print production and the floppy has already been handed back to the customer. Eject sounded like what I wanted to do; the phrase Put Away didn't mean anything to me. When I first started using a Mac I was always using Eject when I meant Put Away, with irritating results.
Ejecting a disk is much more sane now in OS X. The Eject menu item does just what you'd expect it to, and there's no Put Away menu item anymore. The icon of the trash can changes to an Eject button icon when you select a removable disk, making it more obvious what happens if you drag a disk to the trash.
My list of things that bug me about Macs has always been shorter than my list of things that bug me about Windows or Linux, but Macs are still more than capable of irritating the hell out of me.
Sure. If you want to point out that there is no way that I can absolutely prove that God does not exist, then I'll concede your point. But so what?
There's an assumption underlying your logic that a belief in God is just as valid as a denial of the existence of God. But that's only because a belief in a single creator God who interacts with the world and has an interest in our behavior in this lifetime is a very commonly held view in our culture. Suppose I were to say to you, "Those who absolutely deny the existence of Thor are just as blinkered as the pagans" or "Those who absolutely deny that, immediately after death, colored lights attempt to draw you into various planes of existence are just as blinkered as the Tibetan Buddhists." You'd look at me like I was insane. But the same logic applies - can you really prove to me that Thor doesn't exist?
There's a huge difference between making a statement which cannot possibly be proved and denying the truth of that statement. No, I can't prove absolutely that God doesn't exist. But the burden of proof is on the one who makes claims of existence for something which cannot be seen, touched, felt, or proved by experiments.
There's a different philosophy for free software that I think is also a mistake: expose every option that anyone would ever think is useful. It looks like the decision algorithm for putting something in Mozilla's Preferences dialog was based on whether someone, at some time, thought it might be useful. Ditto for putting something in the Sidebar (why would I want my address book in my browser's sidebar?). In general, Firefox's UI is much cleaner and simpler, and closer to the UNIX philosophy and the philosophy of most good applications: do one thing and do it well.
Actually, come to think of it, exposing every possible option is something that Microsoft likes to do, too - just use Outlook for five minutes and compare and contrast with a saner email app like Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
I do agree with your point about free software and Microsoft UIs - it's something I think to myself every time I use KDE or StarOffice.
... or is that the most ass-hat way to discover primes ever?
A C program (and a sane Perl script) would be more complicated in that it would require more lines of code, but it would require effort to produce an algorithm which is less efficient and less obfuscated than this one.
This has nothing to do with Perl as a language, and everything to do with irritation at people who code using pointlessly clever algorithms like that one.
I'd disagree that system testing won't find significant bugs, at least not in a large application or complex system. Even with good unit testing, a competent QA organization will test scenarios that the developers didn't think of, because that's their job. In addition, even if the components are all working to their individual requirements, QA will find bugs that expose design flaws.
I'd also say that having good functional specifications and requirements documents makes writing a test plan much easier for the QE, but doesn't make it a breeze - at least in commercial software development, where resources and time are scarce, QA is all about allocating testing time to make sure the important bugs are caught, and that takes skill.
But what do I know? I'm a black box QE, and I have a vested interest in convincing people that black box QA is important.
I know people don't hire older programmers, and being 27 this is something that's hainting me.
Where I work, there are QA people in their 20s and early 30s, but most of the developers are in their late 30s, 40s, or 50s. The hot-shit developers (the ones who drive the swanky cars and have "Senior" in their job title) are all in their late 40s or older. (For the record, I work for a company that makes desktop software mostly used by graphic designers).
Funny, but I spent a very long time using Linux, and got very used to (and religious about) focus follows mouse and select to copy/middle-click to paste. I've spent the last few years in a job where I use OS X and Windows all day, and it really isn't that hard to live without either.
The most productive system is one that you've gotten used to: you know its tricks, its ins and outs, and its shortcuts. Sounds like X11 is that system for you. For me, it's Mac OS X and, to a lesser extent, Windows XP + cygwin.
Damn straight. I'm not productive at all in a stock install of Windows XP, but give me an hour to tweak it and install cygwin, XEmacs, Firefox, and Perl, and let me copy my .bashrc from one of my other machines, and I'm happy.
One way that I deal with this in iTunes is to make a smart playlist that only includes songs I haven't listened to in the last X days.
:)
Unfortunately, if you fast forward through a song, iTunes doesn't count it as played. This means songs you dislike will pop up even if they've popped up in the last X days.
So I make the smart playlist include only songs rated 3 stars or more; when a song I don't like pops up, I rate it as 2 or 1 stars and it stops showing up again.
Works as well as anything that doesn't include telepathy and AI to predict exactly what I want to hear at a given moment
... not that there's anything wrong with that.
Years ago, when I was a customer service peon, we telnetted in to a server to access customer information. At some point, they rolled out a reasonably well-done GUI app to replace it.
The surprising thing is how much people bitched about it. Non-geeks actually preferred the console app to the pointy-clicky one, partly because it was a change from what they were used to, and partly because what used to take a couple keystrokes now took three or four moues clicks.
Looking at the other posts, you'll get lots of good advice to make sure that the UI is easy to learn, doesn't require users to think too hard, and undergoes user testing and revision. But since this is presumably something that people will be using every day, make sure that people also have the ability to get their stuff done quickly: common stuff should be accessible quickly, and there should be keyboard shortcuts.
I was talking about free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Opening your source with a genuinely free license certainly doesn't prevent making money (e.g., Red Hat), but it does make it harder. Why would I spend several hundred dollars on Photoshop if I could just download the source and compile it myself?
I agree with you 100% on patents.
My post was arguing against the idea that all completed software should be a public good. I'd argue that Microsoft has every right to sell Word without distributing the source code, but I'd also argue that software patents are being used as a club to restrict competition, not as a way of promoting innovation.
There is nothing "fundamental" about selling softwares---bunches of codes that can be copied at a fraction of a cent. There might be question whether a completed software becomes public good or private property, but that's far from being settled...
But there is something fundamental about selling your ideas and your labor. Those things are valuable to me, and I'm not necessarily going to give them away.
I love free software, and at some point I'd like to get to thank RMS personally for emacs and gcc. But software doesn't have to be free, and it has a value which comes from the smarts and the labor that goes into it. That software as great as Debian and apache and XEmacs and gcc and Firefox is all given away for free is pretty damn cool - but it's not that the software has no value; it's that some very smart people have been kind enough to give something valuable away for free.
But the only question about whether a piece of software is a public good or private property is for the people who created it. It's up to them whether they want to give it away, or try to get some money for it.