This is an example of social scientists challenging a 'law' of the social sciences, namely that there is no genetic reason why almost any reasonably large population of people should perform significantly better or worse than any other and any discrepency should be attributed to other socio-environmental factors.
Compare, for a moment, to the 'laws' of the physical sciences. These aren't necessarily completely accurate descriptions of the universe, but they are persistently true despite numerous challenges and the scientific community has essentially decided that they will disregard all but the most compelling challenges and that people who try to advance uncompelling challenges regarding these topics had better be prepared to be publicly shamed for it. If you look at the example of the CERN faster-than-light neutrino results where the team responsible essentially said that they got a strange result, please help them figure out how their instruments are malfunctioning, we still ended up with denunciations from all corners of the physics community.
Even though social scientists work in a field where it is difficult to be anywhere near as certain as physicists and thus they tend to shy away from the term 'law', but this is a law which is quite defensible. The history of challenges to this assertion is long and storied with very little utility arising from it; every claim of the genetic superiority of some populations over others in social matters has been handily discredited as not able to isolate genetic and social factors. When researchers try to isolate social factors, they are unable to identify genetic signals on the population level greater than the (admittedly strong) statistical noise. Compare that to the history of social engineering which uses bad research in this area to claim legitimacy and the atrocities they cause, and we have an example of a very poor risk/reward ratio. It is only fitting that social scientists should demand that people making these sorts of claims show due reverance to the political implications of their statements and back their assertions with highly compelling evidence. As many of the other comments to this article note, not only is this evidence not 'highly compelling', it is downright poor work and by this measure deserves the shaming it is receiving.
If you ask people 'do you like generally non-controversial policy X', they will support it in droves. The public's ability to understand how much things cost, how much they are willing to pay, and how they should prioritize their concerns is a completely different matter. I couldn't find it in three minutes of searching, but Pew had a poll a couple of years back where the only category the US respondants could agree on is cutting foreign aid to cut the defecit, which is only because the budget doesn't have a line item for 'waste and abuse' which seems to be how most people think we will get most of the way to making debt payments. When it comes to public policy, most voters seem to be deluded, but we are particularly gifted in the land of the free.
FROM SPAAAACE! Is the sort of thing which is apparently supposed to sound impressive, but rarely is. The ability to 'see' something from orbit is about as precise and interesting as saying that you can 'see' a shrub from a couple miles away while standing on the hill in Kansas, which is not much at all.
While I'm at it when something 'makes its own weather' it is about equally as impressive.
This isn't anything new, we have known for quite a long time that the biggest predictor of classroom success is "Can I align my desires with the expectations being placed on me enough to overcome my other impulses." By all accounts, boys have stronger impulses and over a period of decades have been socialized to be more oriented toward self-fulfilment than other-fulfilment. This is incongruous with classrooms and other current teaching heuristics which demand high levels of conformity and are rather intolerant of behavioral and interest diversity.
The answer is also nothing new. Education needs to change its curriculum and practices both to accommodate and to adjust the dispositions students possess from external sources. The problem is that education is among the most conservative institutions in our society and despite numerous efforts to change it, about the only things which have changed in education is a sharp reduction in corporal punishment and the desks now often face each other instead of the front of the room.
Actually, it is ridiculously terrible. All it shows is that geolocated timestamped messages can be searched, but either their search criteria was awful or there aren't enough people creating these things to draw any conclusions about a meaningful population. The fact that they then tried to draw state-level conclusions on this dataset shows a feeble grasp of statistics.
Most of the world is not going to care about this complete non-issue. I'm sure most/. readers wouldn't even know about it if Soulskill didn't keep bringing it up every few months. I have been hearing claims that GUIs are going to escape from the bonds of skeuomorphic design as people become more tech-savvy, but somehow we have to continue to tolerate the whining. Apple has always tried to appeal to the fountain-pen-never-used-on-the-desk market and has embraced that asthetic in its GUI decorations. If anything, this is an asthetic which is seeing a resurgence with the rise of 'hipsters' who want to make digital pictures look like 70s era polaroids. Non-skeuomorphic designs are available to replace pretty much everything on any of these devices, so if you want it so bad, go get it and incentivise people to cater to your whims, but please stop cluttering/. with this long, pretentious word.
Metaphor can be useful, but it can also cause problems. Here is a shot at a simple explanation without metaphor.
A version control system maintains a log of all changes that are made to the source code of a piece of software. When a problem arises in a piece of software, the version control system can help find out what code was changed, when it was changed, and who changed it. Without this information, tracking down the piece of code causing the new bug can take a lot longer. This log can also be used to undo changes which prove to be problematic.
Explaining how version control helps developers recognize conflicting commits is a specific example and likely lost on lay folk without quite a lot of explaining.
No time to dig up the figures, but I encourage folks to actually look at the useage rates of helium. The military is far and away the greatest consumer followed by medicine and commercial uses. Party baloons are a small fraction of use and loss of helium in the economy. This doesn't even mention how much helium is lost due to non-capture from hydrocarbon gas deposits simply because it isn't economical to do so. This is the same sort of small-minded thinking which makes people think that if we all just recycle our home waste and set the thermostat a few degrees lower than we will solve environmental problems. Please stop busying people with activities which reduce demand for actual solutions.
He is right, if we have Do Not Track legislation the economy is going to crash just like after recordable tapes destroyed the film industry and Napster eliminated all musicians.
Yeah, like those awesome sorted grids of icons which make finding that one thing you want dead simple.
Or those application docks which make it obvious to users how to open a second instance of an open application or switch between multiple open instances.
Perhaps you were referring to media library organizers which use a completely different set of metaphors and visual cues from the file system and are essentially incompatible making it less difficult when users want to interact with their file browser... somehow.
This is just a pet peeve of an editor and not of general interest. Skeuomorphic design isn't inherently evil for users, it's just that a lot of UI designers get annoyed when people ask for it and they can't try their less constrained designs. I sympathize with backlash against the plebian scum of the business world, but they are also their customers. This is an attempt to convince people that these designs are more objectively bad in order to have more firepower to resist them when they are requested.
Oh the ire of the to comment/not to comment controversy. Confusing uncommented code is frustrating, but so is confusing overcommented code. The no-comments side is trying to fight the very real specter of those programmers who think that writing big, bad code is acceptable if you comment the hell out of it. An overly complicated function with a lot of comments is now two problems, the code, and the maintenance of the in-source documentation of that code.
I will admit I think that ideological objection to comments is too extreme for my taste, but there is validity in their concerns. If you can't explain an entire function in a couple of lines, then that function is likely going to be difficult to maintain. If you write something hacky (which is sometimes legitimate, but don't let the youngins hear you say it) then you had better document the hell out of it. When there is the ability to choose the language for a project, consider how readable the code is going to be so that less effort needs to go into creating and maintaining the comments.
In the end, the argument shouldn't be to comment or not to comment, but how can we write code--including comments--which is easier to understand and maintain.
The problem might be that if it was defined it would be fairly obvious that the entire argument is hollow.
For those who missed the other posts, skeuomorphic designs are those which incorporate anachronistic aspects of other (usually previous) designs. The premise is that user interfaces which incorporate these concepts are 'on the rise' when it is fairly clear that they are an ever-present aspect of user design. The use of typewriter-style keyboards, the filing cabinet metaphor, the 10-key dial pad, the 'window'. Selling people something new has always been difficult, so incorporating aspects of what they already know into their interfaces is one way to reduce the shock for potential customers. Any perception of a 'rise' in this is simply a function of the lowering of restrictions to adding these features and the increased conservative non-technical consumer focus.
It's an all-too-common tactic to use fancy words to alter the initial perception of an idea allowing it to be accepted more easily. This applies to truely innovative ideas as well as complete bunk. I'd classify this in the latter pile.
In theory, consumers are supposed to benefit from patent protections by creating increased incentive to innovate. An Apple attorney would say that they spend a lot of money on R&D figuring out what is going to be appealing to consumers and they should have protections to ensure that they are appropriately rewarded for doing a good job at that. If their competitors were permitted to sit around and wait for success, and then produce a copy without having to pay that price, Apple would lose incentive to create these innovations, preventing these choices from even coming to market. Setting aside the generally wildly successful marketing campaigns pushed by Jobs which create rabid fans, they do have a bit of a point. Electronics design is generally abysmal, and while I would argue at length about many design choices Apple has made, I couldn't do it from a position that their competition has pioneered much in the way of alternatives. The emphasis on simplicity and coherent design are qualities which electronics firms continually fail to achieve.
You should be applauded as should everyone who, like you, remembers that the ultimate purpose of patent and copyright law is to improve outcomes for the consumer. Somewhere along the line, the conversation has switched from this purpose to a conversation of natural rights of creators. This results in rules which are written or interpreted as increasingly benificial to those seeking patent and copyright and increasingly harmful to the greater community. Finding the balance where we create appropriate incentives for those seeking to invent while also ensuring that the public gains the benefit of market competition isn't an easy thing to do, but it starts by ensuring that both sides of that balance are understood.
How many people run their own mail servers these days? If the OP is using e-mail as an alternate authentication system, then what has been gained? Single sign-on also need not be single vendor as evidenced by OpenID (which, admittedly has its own concerns, but what system doesn't?).
This is a red herring. The OP already said that he or she uses the 'forgot password' feature in proxy of remembering these passwords. This is a de-facto single sign-on via the email authentication. Breach the e-mail and yo have breached the security in a single source. What's worse, now you have two independent routes where security can be breached, your e-mail and the other site. Additionally, since one frequent method employed in absense of single sign-in is to use similar passwords in multiple locations, that spreads out the problem even more.
This isn't a problem with Agile as much as it is a problem with organizational management. It seems that every new idea is simply a way to rebrand management's desires for more work and more control over the process. I can't tell you how many stories I have heard (omitting my personal experience) of shops which implemented structural paradigm 'X' (e.g. Agile, ITIL, Six Sigma) only to cherry-pick and misimplement and then later call the paradigm a failure when in reality the paradigm wasn't even attempted in anything like a reasonable way.
That said, Agile doesn't solve every problem and for many projects it isn't particularly appropriate. Agile works best when stakeholders are not dependable and you, developing something fairly straightforward, and your team has sufficient maturity and buy-in. That said, Agile does encourage practices which are applicable in almost every project, particularly writing smaller functions which work and saving optimization for later.
The death of the 'PC' has been hyped quite a bit, but it seems to usually involve small parts of the computing experience changing for sections of the population. Here is a quick runthrough of the state of the 'PC' as I see it.
The definition that I have always associated with 'PC' is its distinction from centralized computing. How much of the user's experience is being computed in a 'private' processor and how much is being foisted onto a server somewhere to be processed. While talk of a thin client revolution has been around for a couple of decades now, it has failed to materialize. The web, however, has done quite a lot to slowly and steadily steal computation for some tasks, particularly for retail consumers. The amount that you can do with just a web browser is staggering, growing, and becoming steadily more popular. The other front where the PC is beginning to lose ground to servers is in high performance computing. There has always been a server component in this sector, but as distributed technologies improve, the balance between PC and servers is shifting back toward servers, although it will probably be a while before the right disruptive technology comes about to replace it.
The biggest obstacle to centralized computing over personal computing is network connections. Fast enough, reliable connections are simply too expensive (if available at all) for moderately intensive computing at this time, but as networks continue to improve, this is a limitation which is going to continue to fall away over time.
Another definitional aspect for 'PC' seems to be terminal interfaces with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, which I will address in order. Keyboards, by leaps and bounds, are the fastest and least error prone way of inputting language into a computer. Voice input is still clunky at best and thumb keyboards are slow and often rely on error-ridden auto-completion. There may be a few exceptional people who aren't frustrated trying to write long-form using alternative input, but those are definitely the exception. The disruption for this technology doesn't appear to be anywhere even close to the horizon.
Mice, similarly, have proven time and time again to be the best device for interacting with a two-dimensional field. Here we have gaming to thank for case studies of attempts to use other devices, only to come back to a good mouse for the best interaction. The continuing dominance of mice, however, isn't as great as keyboards, as touch-screen technology could provide better interactivity for some very common usage scenarios. The problems that touch-screens have, are still numerous, however, including slow response times, imprecision, and difficulty in indicating different types of interactions (e.g. right-clicking). The biggest obstacle to touch-screens is that they are ergonomic nightmares when used with a keyboard, with users having to have two completely different orientations for keyboard and pointing work. Touchpads frequently encroach on traditional mice in this space to allow for compact laptops without having to manage accessories and it is from laptops that mice have had their greatest competition.
Monitors provide large screens, not uncommonly in multiples. Interacting with large amounts of data or viewing entertainment usually means a big monitor. Setting aside the ubiquity of monitors in living-rooms where we call them televisions, spreadsheets, one of the most ubiquitous--if perhaps controversial--applications used in offices just don't work well on small screens. Monitors can also ride the coattails of full-size keyboards.
Probably most telling is that even in the I, Crigley article, he says that the I/O problem that mobile devices have is likely to be at least partially addressed by docking stations, which are the traditional terminal.
The 'PC' could also be partially defined as the traditional desktop operating system. In this respect, MacOS, Gnome, KDE, Windows, and many others are all on the same boat. While 'death' is probably a vast overstatement, this is
So, the DOJ used to have code and no longer does? How much effort is it going to take to recreate this stolen code?
Seriously, folks. We need to start using more descriptive vocabulary to differentiate between 'taking something away from somebody' and 'duplicating something'. These have very different outcomes and should have different name space. 'Copy' is the term that I prefer.
Since I don't mind fiddling with things to get my environment working the way I like, I have had great success with wmii, a tiling window manager which uses a very accessible runtime interface to allow for all sorts of scripting in a variety of languages. The normal usage of this sort of window manager is to use key commands to launch your apps. When windows get created they are automatically arranged either using scripted setups (like to arrange all of the sub-windows in GIMP) or to a default space where you can move them around, once again, using your keyboard. Development versions of wmii have a built-in dock which integrates into the information bar.
Do people honestly have doubt that distracted driving such as operating cell phones is not a risk to traffic safety? Seriously? Sure, every accident has a multitude of factors involved and how they count the number of accidents where something is 'a factor' is shameful (if you get in an accident and a bottle of wine in your trunk breaks, suddenly your accident was 'alcohol related'), but come on people, having a conversation with someone not in the vehicle is not something a significant proportion of the population should be attempting to do. Trying to type and read off of a screen is a liability to yourself and others in your vicinity. I know we are all above average drivers, but they aren't and we sure as hell don't trust them.
The problem that I have with all the new GUIs that are coming out it seems like it's all just change for the sake of change.
For this to be correct would suggest that what we already had was just fine and having to help people interact with previous-gen UIs on a regular basis tells me that it very seriously isn't. Windows XP, OSX, and Gnome 2 (not to exclude others I have less experience supporting) all have a slew of bizarre behaviors and ungrokable configuration layouts. If you want a very solid example of why these systems all fail your average user, take file management and the number of icons which exist on most peoples desktops. There is seemingly no end of problems for HCI designers to tackle.
Another issue which has changed a lot is a fundamental change in input method which has finally become prominent for many users: touch-screens. One of the great challenges of a touch screen is that even though people complained about Macs only having a single mouse button, touch-screens have to fake mouse buttons using tricks of touch duration and force, which are very poor. This makes several paradigms in design more difficult, and in particular it is difficult to do the click-drag which is at the center of a great many activities performed previously. When you see the changes in UIs such as Unity, Gnome 3, and the various mobile GUIs you can see efforts in this area.
So, while I think I have a bit of a handle on some of the problems trying to be fixed, I do have gripes about how they are trying to fix them:
Sorted grids of icons are a terrible way of organizing data so that it can be found. Yes, I understand that you can fit more icons on the screen if you do a grid, but it means that I have to do far more mental acrobatics to find anything once I have more than a few icons, so the only real usage case (wanting to display many elements) is the worst when actually using it. I have found a very strong correlation between people who are effective computer users and those that change their file browser settings to a proper list view (proper meaning not what Windows calls 'list', but what Windows calls 'details').
Unsearchable, fixed categorization is just maddening. Helping people override Gnome 2's program menu is something I have done far too many times to be reasonable. If I am someone's Windows computer and go into Control Panel and the user hasn't switched to 'classic view' tells me that the person using the computer doesn't come in here much. Recently I wanted to disable the Windows 7 edge of screen window docking feature and found it in the 'Ease of Access' control panel under 'Make My Mouse Easier to Use' and to top it off, to disable a feature I had to add a check to a box, which is totally out of paradigm. Making a series of choices among fewer options may seem like a good idea to reduce confusion, but it all falls apart if users can't relate to the organizational structure you have invented and if a user wants to invent his or her own structure it should be easy to do.
Automatically generated lists of 'recent' or 'frequently used' resources (like applications and documents) are unreliable and highly problematic. I frequently hear the cries of users who become accustomed to accessing a resource via these lists and then freak out when they don't know any other way of finding that resource if it disappears from the list for some reason. If people aren't accessing resources from a reliable source which only changes when they intend it to, then this will be a problem.
The OSX dock is a terrible idea and it is creeping into other UIs where it is even worse. The idea is definitely engaging in that a user who wants to open a frequently used application should just click the launcher for that application whether it is open or not, so just 'pin' a reference to the application manager. The problem comes when we want to then separate the act of initiating a new instance of an application or selecting a currently running instance. Now we have to have hoveri
Bandwidth capping is NOT the problem. There is a marginal cost curve associated with increased bandwidth use and it is only appropriate that this cost be reflected in the price we pay for our services. Without usage based fees, those who underutilize the service are subsidizing those who overutilize it (which I guess the latter would be highly overrepresented here at/.). The problem is lack of competition and effective regulation perpetuated by political overrepresentation of service providers. Please be willing to give up your internet subsidy and get in touch with your elected officials, friends, and family to let them know that their ISPs are screwed up and we could have faster, cheaper internet if we take back the reins.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an example of social scientists challenging a 'law' of the social sciences, namely that there is no genetic reason why almost any reasonably large population of people should perform significantly better or worse than any other and any discrepency should be attributed to other socio-environmental factors.
Compare, for a moment, to the 'laws' of the physical sciences. These aren't necessarily completely accurate descriptions of the universe, but they are persistently true despite numerous challenges and the scientific community has essentially decided that they will disregard all but the most compelling challenges and that people who try to advance uncompelling challenges regarding these topics had better be prepared to be publicly shamed for it. If you look at the example of the CERN faster-than-light neutrino results where the team responsible essentially said that they got a strange result, please help them figure out how their instruments are malfunctioning, we still ended up with denunciations from all corners of the physics community.
Even though social scientists work in a field where it is difficult to be anywhere near as certain as physicists and thus they tend to shy away from the term 'law', but this is a law which is quite defensible. The history of challenges to this assertion is long and storied with very little utility arising from it; every claim of the genetic superiority of some populations over others in social matters has been handily discredited as not able to isolate genetic and social factors. When researchers try to isolate social factors, they are unable to identify genetic signals on the population level greater than the (admittedly strong) statistical noise. Compare that to the history of social engineering which uses bad research in this area to claim legitimacy and the atrocities they cause, and we have an example of a very poor risk/reward ratio. It is only fitting that social scientists should demand that people making these sorts of claims show due reverance to the political implications of their statements and back their assertions with highly compelling evidence. As many of the other comments to this article note, not only is this evidence not 'highly compelling', it is downright poor work and by this measure deserves the shaming it is receiving.
If you ask people 'do you like generally non-controversial policy X', they will support it in droves. The public's ability to understand how much things cost, how much they are willing to pay, and how they should prioritize their concerns is a completely different matter. I couldn't find it in three minutes of searching, but Pew had a poll a couple of years back where the only category the US respondants could agree on is cutting foreign aid to cut the defecit, which is only because the budget doesn't have a line item for 'waste and abuse' which seems to be how most people think we will get most of the way to making debt payments. When it comes to public policy, most voters seem to be deluded, but we are particularly gifted in the land of the free.
FROM SPAAAACE! Is the sort of thing which is apparently supposed to sound impressive, but rarely is. The ability to 'see' something from orbit is about as precise and interesting as saying that you can 'see' a shrub from a couple miles away while standing on the hill in Kansas, which is not much at all.
While I'm at it when something 'makes its own weather' it is about equally as impressive.
This isn't anything new, we have known for quite a long time that the biggest predictor of classroom success is "Can I align my desires with the expectations being placed on me enough to overcome my other impulses." By all accounts, boys have stronger impulses and over a period of decades have been socialized to be more oriented toward self-fulfilment than other-fulfilment. This is incongruous with classrooms and other current teaching heuristics which demand high levels of conformity and are rather intolerant of behavioral and interest diversity.
The answer is also nothing new. Education needs to change its curriculum and practices both to accommodate and to adjust the dispositions students possess from external sources. The problem is that education is among the most conservative institutions in our society and despite numerous efforts to change it, about the only things which have changed in education is a sharp reduction in corporal punishment and the desks now often face each other instead of the front of the room.
Actually, it is ridiculously terrible. All it shows is that geolocated timestamped messages can be searched, but either their search criteria was awful or there aren't enough people creating these things to draw any conclusions about a meaningful population. The fact that they then tried to draw state-level conclusions on this dataset shows a feeble grasp of statistics.
I have grown tired of being ruled by lizards.
Most of the world is not going to care about this complete non-issue. I'm sure most /. readers wouldn't even know about it if Soulskill didn't keep bringing it up every few months. I have been hearing claims that GUIs are going to escape from the bonds of skeuomorphic design as people become more tech-savvy, but somehow we have to continue to tolerate the whining. Apple has always tried to appeal to the fountain-pen-never-used-on-the-desk market and has embraced that asthetic in its GUI decorations. If anything, this is an asthetic which is seeing a resurgence with the rise of 'hipsters' who want to make digital pictures look like 70s era polaroids. Non-skeuomorphic designs are available to replace pretty much everything on any of these devices, so if you want it so bad, go get it and incentivise people to cater to your whims, but please stop cluttering /. with this long, pretentious word.
Metaphor can be useful, but it can also cause problems. Here is a shot at a simple explanation without metaphor.
A version control system maintains a log of all changes that are made to the source code of a piece of software. When a problem arises in a piece of software, the version control system can help find out what code was changed, when it was changed, and who changed it. Without this information, tracking down the piece of code causing the new bug can take a lot longer. This log can also be used to undo changes which prove to be problematic.
Explaining how version control helps developers recognize conflicting commits is a specific example and likely lost on lay folk without quite a lot of explaining.
No time to dig up the figures, but I encourage folks to actually look at the useage rates of helium. The military is far and away the greatest consumer followed by medicine and commercial uses. Party baloons are a small fraction of use and loss of helium in the economy. This doesn't even mention how much helium is lost due to non-capture from hydrocarbon gas deposits simply because it isn't economical to do so. This is the same sort of small-minded thinking which makes people think that if we all just recycle our home waste and set the thermostat a few degrees lower than we will solve environmental problems. Please stop busying people with activities which reduce demand for actual solutions.
He is right, if we have Do Not Track legislation the economy is going to crash just like after recordable tapes destroyed the film industry and Napster eliminated all musicians.
Yeah, like those awesome sorted grids of icons which make finding that one thing you want dead simple.
Or those application docks which make it obvious to users how to open a second instance of an open application or switch between multiple open instances.
Perhaps you were referring to media library organizers which use a completely different set of metaphors and visual cues from the file system and are essentially incompatible making it less difficult when users want to interact with their file browser... somehow.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/08/29/0138234/ask-slashdot-is-the-rise-of-skeuomorphic-user-interfaces-a-problem
This is just a pet peeve of an editor and not of general interest. Skeuomorphic design isn't inherently evil for users, it's just that a lot of UI designers get annoyed when people ask for it and they can't try their less constrained designs. I sympathize with backlash against the plebian scum of the business world, but they are also their customers. This is an attempt to convince people that these designs are more objectively bad in order to have more firepower to resist them when they are requested.
I guess even on /. computers are devices shrouded in mystery. Watch out before the Gibson gets hacked.
Oh the ire of the to comment/not to comment controversy. Confusing uncommented code is frustrating, but so is confusing overcommented code. The no-comments side is trying to fight the very real specter of those programmers who think that writing big, bad code is acceptable if you comment the hell out of it. An overly complicated function with a lot of comments is now two problems, the code, and the maintenance of the in-source documentation of that code.
I will admit I think that ideological objection to comments is too extreme for my taste, but there is validity in their concerns. If you can't explain an entire function in a couple of lines, then that function is likely going to be difficult to maintain. If you write something hacky (which is sometimes legitimate, but don't let the youngins hear you say it) then you had better document the hell out of it. When there is the ability to choose the language for a project, consider how readable the code is going to be so that less effort needs to go into creating and maintaining the comments.
In the end, the argument shouldn't be to comment or not to comment, but how can we write code--including comments--which is easier to understand and maintain.
The problem might be that if it was defined it would be fairly obvious that the entire argument is hollow.
For those who missed the other posts, skeuomorphic designs are those which incorporate anachronistic aspects of other (usually previous) designs. The premise is that user interfaces which incorporate these concepts are 'on the rise' when it is fairly clear that they are an ever-present aspect of user design. The use of typewriter-style keyboards, the filing cabinet metaphor, the 10-key dial pad, the 'window'. Selling people something new has always been difficult, so incorporating aspects of what they already know into their interfaces is one way to reduce the shock for potential customers. Any perception of a 'rise' in this is simply a function of the lowering of restrictions to adding these features and the increased conservative non-technical consumer focus.
It's an all-too-common tactic to use fancy words to alter the initial perception of an idea allowing it to be accepted more easily. This applies to truely innovative ideas as well as complete bunk. I'd classify this in the latter pile.
In theory, consumers are supposed to benefit from patent protections by creating increased incentive to innovate. An Apple attorney would say that they spend a lot of money on R&D figuring out what is going to be appealing to consumers and they should have protections to ensure that they are appropriately rewarded for doing a good job at that. If their competitors were permitted to sit around and wait for success, and then produce a copy without having to pay that price, Apple would lose incentive to create these innovations, preventing these choices from even coming to market. Setting aside the generally wildly successful marketing campaigns pushed by Jobs which create rabid fans, they do have a bit of a point. Electronics design is generally abysmal, and while I would argue at length about many design choices Apple has made, I couldn't do it from a position that their competition has pioneered much in the way of alternatives. The emphasis on simplicity and coherent design are qualities which electronics firms continually fail to achieve.
You should be applauded as should everyone who, like you, remembers that the ultimate purpose of patent and copyright law is to improve outcomes for the consumer. Somewhere along the line, the conversation has switched from this purpose to a conversation of natural rights of creators. This results in rules which are written or interpreted as increasingly benificial to those seeking patent and copyright and increasingly harmful to the greater community. Finding the balance where we create appropriate incentives for those seeking to invent while also ensuring that the public gains the benefit of market competition isn't an easy thing to do, but it starts by ensuring that both sides of that balance are understood.
How many people run their own mail servers these days? If the OP is using e-mail as an alternate authentication system, then what has been gained? Single sign-on also need not be single vendor as evidenced by OpenID (which, admittedly has its own concerns, but what system doesn't?).
This is a red herring. The OP already said that he or she uses the 'forgot password' feature in proxy of remembering these passwords. This is a de-facto single sign-on via the email authentication. Breach the e-mail and yo have breached the security in a single source. What's worse, now you have two independent routes where security can be breached, your e-mail and the other site. Additionally, since one frequent method employed in absense of single sign-in is to use similar passwords in multiple locations, that spreads out the problem even more.
This isn't a problem with Agile as much as it is a problem with organizational management. It seems that every new idea is simply a way to rebrand management's desires for more work and more control over the process. I can't tell you how many stories I have heard (omitting my personal experience) of shops which implemented structural paradigm 'X' (e.g. Agile, ITIL, Six Sigma) only to cherry-pick and misimplement and then later call the paradigm a failure when in reality the paradigm wasn't even attempted in anything like a reasonable way.
That said, Agile doesn't solve every problem and for many projects it isn't particularly appropriate. Agile works best when stakeholders are not dependable and you, developing something fairly straightforward, and your team has sufficient maturity and buy-in. That said, Agile does encourage practices which are applicable in almost every project, particularly writing smaller functions which work and saving optimization for later.
The death of the 'PC' has been hyped quite a bit, but it seems to usually involve small parts of the computing experience changing for sections of the population. Here is a quick runthrough of the state of the 'PC' as I see it.
The definition that I have always associated with 'PC' is its distinction from centralized computing. How much of the user's experience is being computed in a 'private' processor and how much is being foisted onto a server somewhere to be processed. While talk of a thin client revolution has been around for a couple of decades now, it has failed to materialize. The web, however, has done quite a lot to slowly and steadily steal computation for some tasks, particularly for retail consumers. The amount that you can do with just a web browser is staggering, growing, and becoming steadily more popular. The other front where the PC is beginning to lose ground to servers is in high performance computing. There has always been a server component in this sector, but as distributed technologies improve, the balance between PC and servers is shifting back toward servers, although it will probably be a while before the right disruptive technology comes about to replace it.
The biggest obstacle to centralized computing over personal computing is network connections. Fast enough, reliable connections are simply too expensive (if available at all) for moderately intensive computing at this time, but as networks continue to improve, this is a limitation which is going to continue to fall away over time.
Another definitional aspect for 'PC' seems to be terminal interfaces with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, which I will address in order. Keyboards, by leaps and bounds, are the fastest and least error prone way of inputting language into a computer. Voice input is still clunky at best and thumb keyboards are slow and often rely on error-ridden auto-completion. There may be a few exceptional people who aren't frustrated trying to write long-form using alternative input, but those are definitely the exception. The disruption for this technology doesn't appear to be anywhere even close to the horizon.
Mice, similarly, have proven time and time again to be the best device for interacting with a two-dimensional field. Here we have gaming to thank for case studies of attempts to use other devices, only to come back to a good mouse for the best interaction. The continuing dominance of mice, however, isn't as great as keyboards, as touch-screen technology could provide better interactivity for some very common usage scenarios. The problems that touch-screens have, are still numerous, however, including slow response times, imprecision, and difficulty in indicating different types of interactions (e.g. right-clicking). The biggest obstacle to touch-screens is that they are ergonomic nightmares when used with a keyboard, with users having to have two completely different orientations for keyboard and pointing work. Touchpads frequently encroach on traditional mice in this space to allow for compact laptops without having to manage accessories and it is from laptops that mice have had their greatest competition.
Monitors provide large screens, not uncommonly in multiples. Interacting with large amounts of data or viewing entertainment usually means a big monitor. Setting aside the ubiquity of monitors in living-rooms where we call them televisions, spreadsheets, one of the most ubiquitous--if perhaps controversial--applications used in offices just don't work well on small screens. Monitors can also ride the coattails of full-size keyboards.
Probably most telling is that even in the I, Crigley article, he says that the I/O problem that mobile devices have is likely to be at least partially addressed by docking stations, which are the traditional terminal.
The 'PC' could also be partially defined as the traditional desktop operating system. In this respect, MacOS, Gnome, KDE, Windows, and many others are all on the same boat. While 'death' is probably a vast overstatement, this is
So, the DOJ used to have code and no longer does? How much effort is it going to take to recreate this stolen code?
Seriously, folks. We need to start using more descriptive vocabulary to differentiate between 'taking something away from somebody' and 'duplicating something'. These have very different outcomes and should have different name space. 'Copy' is the term that I prefer.
Since I don't mind fiddling with things to get my environment working the way I like, I have had great success with wmii, a tiling window manager which uses a very accessible runtime interface to allow for all sorts of scripting in a variety of languages. The normal usage of this sort of window manager is to use key commands to launch your apps. When windows get created they are automatically arranged either using scripted setups (like to arrange all of the sub-windows in GIMP) or to a default space where you can move them around, once again, using your keyboard. Development versions of wmii have a built-in dock which integrates into the information bar.
Do people honestly have doubt that distracted driving such as operating cell phones is not a risk to traffic safety? Seriously? Sure, every accident has a multitude of factors involved and how they count the number of accidents where something is 'a factor' is shameful (if you get in an accident and a bottle of wine in your trunk breaks, suddenly your accident was 'alcohol related'), but come on people, having a conversation with someone not in the vehicle is not something a significant proportion of the population should be attempting to do. Trying to type and read off of a screen is a liability to yourself and others in your vicinity. I know we are all above average drivers, but they aren't and we sure as hell don't trust them.
The problem that I have with all the new GUIs that are coming out it seems like it's all just change for the sake of change.
For this to be correct would suggest that what we already had was just fine and having to help people interact with previous-gen UIs on a regular basis tells me that it very seriously isn't. Windows XP, OSX, and Gnome 2 (not to exclude others I have less experience supporting) all have a slew of bizarre behaviors and ungrokable configuration layouts. If you want a very solid example of why these systems all fail your average user, take file management and the number of icons which exist on most peoples desktops. There is seemingly no end of problems for HCI designers to tackle.
Another issue which has changed a lot is a fundamental change in input method which has finally become prominent for many users: touch-screens. One of the great challenges of a touch screen is that even though people complained about Macs only having a single mouse button, touch-screens have to fake mouse buttons using tricks of touch duration and force, which are very poor. This makes several paradigms in design more difficult, and in particular it is difficult to do the click-drag which is at the center of a great many activities performed previously. When you see the changes in UIs such as Unity, Gnome 3, and the various mobile GUIs you can see efforts in this area.
So, while I think I have a bit of a handle on some of the problems trying to be fixed, I do have gripes about how they are trying to fix them:
Sorted grids of icons are a terrible way of organizing data so that it can be found. Yes, I understand that you can fit more icons on the screen if you do a grid, but it means that I have to do far more mental acrobatics to find anything once I have more than a few icons, so the only real usage case (wanting to display many elements) is the worst when actually using it. I have found a very strong correlation between people who are effective computer users and those that change their file browser settings to a proper list view (proper meaning not what Windows calls 'list', but what Windows calls 'details').
Unsearchable, fixed categorization is just maddening. Helping people override Gnome 2's program menu is something I have done far too many times to be reasonable. If I am someone's Windows computer and go into Control Panel and the user hasn't switched to 'classic view' tells me that the person using the computer doesn't come in here much. Recently I wanted to disable the Windows 7 edge of screen window docking feature and found it in the 'Ease of Access' control panel under 'Make My Mouse Easier to Use' and to top it off, to disable a feature I had to add a check to a box, which is totally out of paradigm. Making a series of choices among fewer options may seem like a good idea to reduce confusion, but it all falls apart if users can't relate to the organizational structure you have invented and if a user wants to invent his or her own structure it should be easy to do.
Automatically generated lists of 'recent' or 'frequently used' resources (like applications and documents) are unreliable and highly problematic. I frequently hear the cries of users who become accustomed to accessing a resource via these lists and then freak out when they don't know any other way of finding that resource if it disappears from the list for some reason. If people aren't accessing resources from a reliable source which only changes when they intend it to, then this will be a problem.
The OSX dock is a terrible idea and it is creeping into other UIs where it is even worse. The idea is definitely engaging in that a user who wants to open a frequently used application should just click the launcher for that application whether it is open or not, so just 'pin' a reference to the application manager. The problem comes when we want to then separate the act of initiating a new instance of an application or selecting a currently running instance. Now we have to have hoveri
Bandwidth capping is NOT the problem. There is a marginal cost curve associated with increased bandwidth use and it is only appropriate that this cost be reflected in the price we pay for our services. Without usage based fees, those who underutilize the service are subsidizing those who overutilize it (which I guess the latter would be highly overrepresented here at /.). The problem is lack of competition and effective regulation perpetuated by political overrepresentation of service providers. Please be willing to give up your internet subsidy and get in touch with your elected officials, friends, and family to let them know that their ISPs are screwed up and we could have faster, cheaper internet if we take back the reins.