Seriously. Are you people really getting so much spam every day that the "delete" button just doesn't do it for you?
Yes.
Not to mention that your argument is, of course, the oldest and dumbest of the "doh, I don't wanna see the problem, nanana" kind.
I mean, why should we do something about rape? Nobody I know got raped, so it can't be a huge problem. And seriously, are you being raped so often that just dealing with it doesn't do it for you? Really, now. Rape is just not thatpressing an issue to me. I can't see why/how it's such a huge issue for anyone else.
Well, sucker, it is. You might be living under a rock or in a box, but essentially everyone dealing with it day-to-day agrees that at least half of the SMTP traffic worldwide is spam. It is a huge problem. If it isn't for you: Be happy, and please step aside while the rest of us go and solve it.
Gates is doing what he's tremendously good at: Rehashing old stuff 5-10 years after it's been invented by someone else, talk about it in a way that journalists understand, and end up in their articles as a visionary.
I don't yet know whether abusing spam as an opportunity to force your own proprietary SMTP replacement on everyone pisses me off even more, or not.
Not today. Very much like the school kids can't afford cocain. If you are the sole supplier, and you get the stuff for virtually nothing, then there's no harm in hooking them early, to make sure nobody else comes along and snatches them up.
I see your point, and I do understand it. Now I've argued this before, but I don't tire of it because it's so important:
Familiarity
Yes, big issue. One of the biggest in UI design.
But
We're talking about familiarity with daily things, real-life environments here, not other UIs. This is where the "waste basket" and the "desktop" metaphors come from. You don't have to explain what a waste basket is, everyone knows already.
This is not true for the start button. There is nothing even close in the real world.
It is true for the dock. Think a bookshelf. Think the small table near the door. We put things we use next to each other into common places all the time.
The dock also satisfies several other UI criteria that the start menu blatantly violates:
* It is obvious and visible. As I said, MS research added an animated pointer to win95 because too many of their testes completely missed the start button.
* It uses big, friendly icons. An icon can transfer tons of information, much more than a word or two.
* It contains no needless information. I've always wondered what the point of sorting apps according to manufacturer was in windows. Does your mother care who wrote Word and who wrote The Sims?
* It does one thing, and doesn't mix unrelated stuff. This, incidently, is one of the major problems of the new Mac OS X dock, and of criticised.
There's probably more. The horrible mixing of applications and documents, for example. Nothing against a document-centric approach. But choose one and stick with it.
I haven't used the iGesture thing, but I do have the Touchstream at home. This is a full keyboard with the same functionality, i.e. it doubles as a touchpad.
The good:
Completely silent. No more klick-klack noises
Very comfortable, your fingers don't tire as easily because you don't have to actually press, just touch
You don't want to go back once you found how great it is to not have to lift the fingers away from the keyboard to move the mouse an inch. It makes much more of a difference then you believe
Linux support
The bad
It's expensive
It takes a while to get used to it. Quite a while.
You don't want to go back. Once you've used it, you want all your machines to come with one. Which for me means I'd have to buy 2 more. Doh.
The best part of it really are the gestures. Scrolling up and down through a text? Just rest 4 fingers and roll them up and down. Much more comfortable then using keys, not to even mention the mouse wheel (shudder). Select a text? Drop three fingers on the pad and just move them left/right, up/down.
Two more things that totally rock:
There are lots of different modes, depending on what kind of shortcuts you need most often. There are modes for Emacs, Photoshop, Maya, programming, gaming, etc.
You can program your own gestures. I've not yet done that, but wow.
Most people find the Start button very easy and useful.
Which data do you base that on?
Granted, my sample is small (a dozen, roughly), but nobody I asked liked the start menu or found it comfortable.
Most importantly, non-geeks (i.e. my mother and my sister) who I supplied with Linux machines using windowmaker (i.e. next-like approach to UI) have independently discovered that windows sucks. Or, in the words of my mother after she took a computer course where they used windows: "I'm glad you gave me this Linux thing. I didn't like that windows thing."
I'm sure Microsoft did some usability study of it before including it in Windows,
They did. The result of them was that they added the text "start" (in the first incarnation, it was just the windows logo) and then even included that animated "click here to start" arrow that you saw on windows 95 the first few times you launched it as a last-minute addition, because even their testers looked at the screen in confusion, trying to figure out how to get anything going.
But, to be fair, I'm certain you're an experienced UI expert. Please share your design insights with the rest of us so that the world can finally see a non-derivative UI.
I did that a few years ago. Ask google about me and the Gnome interface guidelines.
No, I'm not a UI expert. Yes, I have put considerable time, research and effort into understanding UI issues.
And no, next isn't even close. FWIW, next is very good, and I've been using afterstep/windowmaker for years. I can fire up everything I need in half the time it takes my windows buddies, and with a quarter the mouse movement/clicks. Yes, those are actual numbers, not wild guesses.
Here in Germany, I am an avid hater of cellphones. You can't drive on a train or bus without someones damn phone ringing, and every second business meeting is interrupted by calls.
But then I travelled to Tokio last year. Everyone there has a cell phone. Nevertheless, during my entire week I heard two rings, and both were from foreigners' phones. I also had to look very closely before I noticed people actually using them.
The difference is that the japanese extend basic courtesy towards other people. You keep your cellphone on silent, and you leave the room before you take a call. That and maybe 2-3 other basic rules make cellphones a non-problem.
The United States is going to protect its currency very heavily
ROTFL!
So that's why the US$ scores high on the easy-to-fake scale?
Compare to european currencies, both before and after the Euro, the US$ is cheap paper with green print on it. Maybe they should go and solve the problem at the root.
A police state can still be very nice to you. It just watches your every move, and investigates every crime with the utmost, shall we say, "care". It takes your fingerprints as a routine measure, and has laws so thick and convulted that no matter what you do, you are certain to break one. It also has policemen on every corner, two at intersections.
I've travelled to police states. They can be quite nice and friendly. It's still a bit frightening when the officer gets out of his car and waves the Kalashnikov around as a "make way" signal.
Because you'd think that they are smart enough to understand that when I go the extra mile and install software to block their ads, that it just might possibly mean I don't want to see them, and moreover, they annoy me. Last I checked, annoying customers is not a good way to make business.
Put them next to the spammers and have a few more bullets ready.
No, you can't. Show me. I'm certain this is not todays equivalent to my 2000 DM (~ $1000) machine from 20 years ago. For example, you have to take all peripherals into account, such as monitor and keyboard. Yes, you might keep that from your old machine, but it will distort the comparison.
Compare sames. Today, 17" is the standard monitor size, not the 14" or 15" you see in cheapo offers. Standard today is an adequate graphics card, not "no-name on-board 3D graphics".
and legislation mandating that providers block certain ports?
Ah, but that was the point. This port blocking is not government mandated. It's the choice of the individual ISP. I know because at the ISP I work for, I was the one suggesting that we block the windows netbios ports.
The difference is not between government-enforced trusted computing and government-enforced port blocking. It is between that and voluntary port blocking.
I bought my first computer in 1983. Total cost was about 2000 DM. Since then, I've bought quite a few machines. Speed and memory have exploded, but the price has been almost the same. In fact, if anything I would guess it has gone up, not down.
I wonder what insight the author has to claim that a 20-year trend will radically break during the next 7 years?
I've been following loads of discussions among ISPs, for example, who see nothing fundamentally wrong with limiting traffic to ports 25, 110 and 143. [...] do you think that the type of legislation and technological restrictions necessary to do this will differentiate between the grannies and the "clued" users?
Nice switch of the topic there, wonder if you noticed it yourself.
The one is ISPs protecting their own networks (and customers). Then you suddenly move to laws and legislation.
I'm sorry, but my private network can have all kinds of rules. If I don't like port 135-139 because 99.99% of the packets to it are malicious, and if I don't like port 25 because I want you to use my mailserver, and even if I don't like port 666 because I'm a fundamentalist xian who manually patched sendmail to ensure that it shall not accidentally generate a msg-id with the mark of the beast - well, whatever my problems, it's still my network, and if you don't like it, there are other ISPs you can use.
Plus, there is a difference between the grannies and the clued users. Clued users can set up VPNs or simply shift their applications to other ports.
Would Linux offer enough games for me now, if I were still in school or university? Definitely not, I was eating games for lunch at those times, and could hardly go a week without a new on.
Does Linux offer enough games for me today, where I work fulltime and have a bunch of other things to do as well (including my own game, see below) ? Absolutely yes. In fact, I have quite a few Linux games on my shelf that I haven't played half as much as I'd like to. (Dominions 2, Terminus, Mindrover)
FYI: The above mentioned machines are largely a myth. There probably was one or two at a time, and the rumour just doesn't die.
Disclaimer: I was in Tokyo last year. And yes, I asked people, including natives. I had promised a friend that I'd bring her a photo of one. The japanese do, in fact, sell lots of stuff via vending machines. No panties, though.
Standards are about things working the same not about being the same.
In fact, you see that every day. Both Apache and IIS implement the HTTP standard. There are, however, different vulnerabilities in these two implementations of the same standard.
The final paragraph of the article is probably the best:
Would NASA entertain a one-way policy for human Mars exploration? Probably not. But other, more adventurous space agencies in Europe or Asia might.
Most of asia has a culture where the individual is seen as part of the whole society, and measured by its contribution to same. China would certainly have no shortage of volunteers, and no PR problems with such a mission. Neither would Japan.
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
Absolutely. It's called saturation and we're closing in on it. So the marketing drones are in red alert to find something different to sell before the old business runs out.
Note the keyword "different". Also note that to marketing it means something entirely... uh, different, then to you and me. It's a bit like C++ and C - there is a new paradigm, a new approach, and some real technical differences. A lot of books get written, some people become famous, some rich, a few both. In the end, though, 90% of what you're actually writing doesn't change. It's still "i++;" and "exit 1/* fucking bug I can't find! */"
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. Are you people really getting so much spam every day that the "delete" button just doesn't do it for you?
Yes.
Not to mention that your argument is, of course, the oldest and dumbest of the "doh, I don't wanna see the problem, nanana" kind.
I mean, why should we do something about rape? Nobody I know got raped, so it can't be a huge problem. And seriously, are you being raped so often that just dealing with it doesn't do it for you?
Really, now. Rape is just not thatpressing an issue to me. I can't see why/how it's such a huge issue for anyone else.
Well, sucker, it is. You might be living under a rock or in a box, but essentially everyone dealing with it day-to-day agrees that at least half of the SMTP traffic worldwide is spam. It is a huge problem. If it isn't for you: Be happy, and please step aside while the rest of us go and solve it.
The queen has lost her mind. The downfall of the british empire is complete.
Gates is doing what he's tremendously good at: Rehashing old stuff 5-10 years after it's been invented by someone else, talk about it in a way that journalists understand, and end up in their articles as a visionary.
I don't yet know whether abusing spam as an opportunity to force your own proprietary SMTP replacement on everyone pisses me off even more, or not.
The Third World can't _afford_ Microsoft prices
Not today. Very much like the school kids can't afford cocain. If you are the sole supplier, and you get the stuff for virtually nothing, then there's no harm in hooking them early, to make sure nobody else comes along and snatches them up.
I see your point, and I do understand it. Now I've argued this before, but I don't tire of it because it's so important:
Familiarity
Yes, big issue. One of the biggest in UI design.
But
We're talking about familiarity with daily things, real-life environments here, not other UIs. This is where the "waste basket" and the "desktop" metaphors come from. You don't have to explain what a waste basket is, everyone knows already.
This is not true for the start button. There is nothing even close in the real world.
It is true for the dock. Think a bookshelf. Think the small table near the door. We put things we use next to each other into common places all the time.
The dock also satisfies several other UI criteria that the start menu blatantly violates:
* It is obvious and visible. As I said, MS research added an animated pointer to win95 because too many of their testes completely missed the start button.
* It uses big, friendly icons. An icon can transfer tons of information, much more than a word or two.
* It contains no needless information. I've always wondered what the point of sorting apps according to manufacturer was in windows. Does your mother care who wrote Word and who wrote The Sims?
* It does one thing, and doesn't mix unrelated stuff. This, incidently, is one of the major problems of the new Mac OS X dock, and of criticised.
There's probably more. The horrible mixing of applications and documents, for example. Nothing against a document-centric approach. But choose one and stick with it.
The good:
The bad
The best part of it really are the gestures. Scrolling up and down through a text? Just rest 4 fingers and roll them up and down. Much more comfortable then using keys, not to even mention the mouse wheel (shudder).
Select a text? Drop three fingers on the pad and just move them left/right, up/down.
Two more things that totally rock:
Most people find the Start button very easy and useful.
Which data do you base that on?
Granted, my sample is small (a dozen, roughly), but nobody I asked liked the start menu or found it comfortable.
Most importantly, non-geeks (i.e. my mother and my sister) who I supplied with Linux machines using windowmaker (i.e. next-like approach to UI) have independently discovered that windows sucks. Or, in the words of my mother after she took a computer course where they used windows: "I'm glad you gave me this Linux thing. I didn't like that windows thing."
I'm sure Microsoft did some usability study of it before including it in Windows,
They did. The result of them was that they added the text "start" (in the first incarnation, it was just the windows logo) and then even included that animated "click here to start" arrow that you saw on windows 95 the first few times you launched it as a last-minute addition, because even their testers looked at the screen in confusion, trying to figure out how to get anything going.
But, to be fair, I'm certain you're an experienced UI expert. Please share your design insights with the rest of us so that the world can finally see a non-derivative UI.
I did that a few years ago. Ask google about me and the Gnome interface guidelines.
No, I'm not a UI expert.
Yes, I have put considerable time, research and effort into understanding UI issues.
And no, next isn't even close. FWIW, next is very good, and I've been using afterstep/windowmaker for years. I can fire up everything I need in half the time it takes my windows buddies, and with a quarter the mouse movement/clicks. Yes, those are actual numbers, not wild guesses.
Do your homework. I have.
Cellphones are a matter of maturity. Here's why:
Here in Germany, I am an avid hater of cellphones. You can't drive on a train or bus without someones damn phone ringing, and every second business meeting is interrupted by calls.
But then I travelled to Tokio last year. Everyone there has a cell phone. Nevertheless, during my entire week I heard two rings, and both were from foreigners' phones.
I also had to look very closely before I noticed people actually using them.
The difference is that the japanese extend basic courtesy towards other people. You keep your cellphone on silent, and you leave the room before you take a call. That and maybe 2-3 other basic rules make cellphones a non-problem.
The United States is going to protect its currency very heavily
ROTFL!
So that's why the US$ scores high on the easy-to-fake scale?
Compare to european currencies, both before and after the Euro, the US$ is cheap paper with green print on it. Maybe they should go and solve the problem at the root.
The Launch button (similar to Windows' Start button) is a good place to begin.
That is where I stopped reading.
If you want to drag people away from the abomination that is windows, you have to offer something better instead of just copying the crap blindly.
You mix up police state and oppressive regimes.
A police state can still be very nice to you. It just watches your every move, and investigates every crime with the utmost, shall we say, "care". It takes your fingerprints as a routine measure, and has laws so thick and convulted that no matter what you do, you are certain to break one.
It also has policemen on every corner, two at intersections.
I've travelled to police states. They can be quite nice and friendly. It's still a bit frightening when the officer gets out of his car and waves the Kalashnikov around as a "make way" signal.
Why isn't that surprising?"
Because you'd think that they are smart enough to understand that when I go the extra mile and install software to block their ads, that it just might possibly mean I don't want to see them, and moreover, they annoy me. Last I checked, annoying customers is not a good way to make business.
Put them next to the spammers and have a few more bullets ready.
You can get a fine computer nowadays for $499.
No, you can't. Show me. I'm certain this is not todays equivalent to my 2000 DM (~ $1000) machine from 20 years ago.
For example, you have to take all peripherals into account, such as monitor and keyboard. Yes, you might keep that from your old machine, but it will distort the comparison.
Compare sames. Today, 17" is the standard monitor size, not the 14" or 15" you see in cheapo offers. Standard today is an adequate graphics card, not "no-name on-board 3D graphics".
and legislation mandating that providers block certain ports?
Ah, but that was the point.
This port blocking is not government mandated. It's the choice of the individual ISP. I know because at the ISP I work for, I was the one suggesting that we block the windows netbios ports.
The difference is not between government-enforced trusted computing and government-enforced port blocking. It is between that and voluntary port blocking.
Well, at least I think that "simply shifting applications" doesn't come at zero cost...
/etc/application.conf
No, it doesn't. You will have to spend about 20 seconds changing the port in
"[in 2010] the average PC, while it may cost $99"
That line alone discredits the article.
I bought my first computer in 1983. Total cost was about 2000 DM. Since then, I've bought quite a few machines. Speed and memory have exploded, but the price has been almost the same. In fact, if anything I would guess it has gone up, not down.
I wonder what insight the author has to claim that a 20-year trend will radically break during the next 7 years?
I've been following loads of discussions among ISPs, for example, who see nothing fundamentally wrong with limiting traffic to ports 25, 110 and 143. [...] do you think that the type of legislation and technological restrictions necessary to do this will differentiate between the grannies and the "clued" users?
Nice switch of the topic there, wonder if you noticed it yourself.
The one is ISPs protecting their own networks (and customers). Then you suddenly move to laws and legislation.
I'm sorry, but my private network can have all kinds of rules. If I don't like port 135-139 because 99.99% of the packets to it are malicious, and if I don't like port 25 because I want you to use my mailserver, and even if I don't like port 666 because I'm a fundamentalist xian who manually patched sendmail to ensure that it shall not accidentally generate a msg-id with the mark of the beast - well, whatever my problems, it's still my network, and if you don't like it, there are other ISPs you can use.
Plus, there is a difference between the grannies and the clued users. Clued users can set up VPNs or simply shift their applications to other ports.
What you want is out there. In a real world scenario, especially with constantly changing desktop machines, it is a nightmare to administrate.
I should know, I give talks about it. It's a great system. I don't think it'll work for the desktop machine of JDoe@aol.com, ever.
Depends on your target audience.
Would Linux offer enough games for me now, if I were still in school or university? Definitely not, I was eating games for lunch at those times, and could hardly go a week without a new on.
Does Linux offer enough games for me today, where I work fulltime and have a bunch of other things to do as well (including my own game, see below) ?
Absolutely yes. In fact, I have quite a few Linux games on my shelf that I haven't played half as much as I'd like to. (Dominions 2, Terminus, Mindrover)
FYI: The above mentioned machines are largely a myth. There probably was one or two at a time, and the rumour just doesn't die.
Disclaimer: I was in Tokyo last year. And yes, I asked people, including natives. I had promised a friend that I'd bring her a photo of one.
The japanese do, in fact, sell lots of stuff via vending machines. No panties, though.
Nice strawman.
Standards are about things working the same not about being the same.
In fact, you see that every day. Both Apache and IIS implement the HTTP standard. There are, however, different vulnerabilities in these two implementations of the same standard.
Isn't this another good argument against monopolies?
Yes, and the security community has been making it for at least 5 years. Good to see you've caught up, welcome to the party.
The final paragraph of the article is probably the best:
Would NASA entertain a one-way policy for human Mars exploration? Probably not. But other, more adventurous space agencies in Europe or Asia might.
Most of asia has a culture where the individual is seen as part of the whole society, and measured by its contribution to same.
China would certainly have no shortage of volunteers, and no PR problems with such a mission. Neither would Japan.
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"
/* fucking bug I can't find! */"
Absolutely. It's called saturation and we're closing in on it. So the marketing drones are in red alert to find something different to sell before the old business runs out.
Note the keyword "different". Also note that to marketing it means something entirely... uh, different, then to you and me.
It's a bit like C++ and C - there is a new paradigm, a new approach, and some real technical differences. A lot of books get written, some people become famous, some rich, a few both. In the end, though, 90% of what you're actually writing doesn't change. It's still "i++;" and "exit 1