NASA: "We need to take a minute or two away from flying vehicles filled with millions of tons of explosive liquids to lecture you about air safety. Cue the film, Biggles..."
Lately people (aka: script kiddies) seem to be losing the distinction between what is a language, and what is a framework
Many of the people developing frameworks have this problem as well.
They noodle about with run-time introspection and other crap to the point where the framework really stops resembling an implementation of a framework in a language and starts resembling it's own "special" language with "special" syntax and "special" keywords and "special" namespace conflicts that the original language never had.
After a few small dents, my powerbook had so much "character" that the Apple store decided that my 3-year Applecare warranty was just too plain and boring to be used with it anymore.
I also add that pets are furry and cuddly (and all the geeks on slashdot say "that's nice. Now shut up and go back to playing with your giggley-puff doll".) Won't lovable robots be just as sufficient and furry and cuddly pets?
In the mid 50's, a psychological researcher by the name of Harry Harlow, a pioneer in the study of attachment theory, did an experiment where he took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and put them in front of two different "artificial mothers": one made of wire that carried a bottle of milk, and one artificial mother made of cloth that didn't have a bottle. The infant monkeys vastly preferred the cloth cuddly mother "doll" over the wire mother "doll", even though the wire doll had a bottle and the cloth one didn't.
For more info on this (and to prove I'm not BS'ing), check it out here
I think it's a neat experiment what they're doing with the AIBO's, but in the end its still "Cloth doll vs. Wire doll".
Of course PowerPC is more interesting CPU than x86! Does x86 have anything like the assembly instruction "eieio"?
Linux hostility towards usability people
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 2
Unfortunately the linux development world is often extremely hostile towards usability people. Usability is largely viewed by many linux developers as a BS field of study. Practitioners of usability engineering are told that they are doing nothing more than simply whining or, in the words of one kernel hacker "I can't believe people actually get paid for criticizing the work of others." Usability problems won't go away in KDE or GNOME because they are not problems with the underlying technology (mostly) they are problems with the way that certain humans (i.e. programmers) think. Debugging people's opinions is a hell of a lot harder than debugging software.
"I don't get it. You know, I just don't get it. I missed the fucking point some place. The boat left and I wasn't on the boat. Explain it to me. Heavy Metal bands on trial because kids commit suicide? What's that about? Judas Priest on trial because "my kid bought the record,and listened to the lyrics,....." Well that's great! That sets a legal precedent. "
"Does that mean I can sue Dan Folgerburg for making me into a pussy in the mid-70's. Is that possible, huh? Huh?! " 'Your honor, between him and James Taylor, I didn't get a blow job 'till I was 27 years old. I was in Colorado wearing hiking boots eating granola. I want some fucking money right now!'
Despite what people say about Konqueror, you haven't really made it in the open source browser world until you have a fork like Pornzilla that's truly devoted to surfing the forgotten 20% of the traffic on the internet.
I installed MS Office on my iPod two weeks and Excel still doesn't work. No matter how many times I jog the dial. But I've got to admit, the talking paper clip really does have a beautiful singing voice.
It might be possible to work out a scheme using mouse acceleration to determine whether the user is shooting for the menubar at the top or a window. If there were certain characteristics of the mouse pointer accelerating towards the menubar that are different from those of a mouse pointer accelerating towards a window, it might be possible to use the differences in acceleration to make a distinction between the two situations and be able to apply the following focus to only when the pointer is meant to hit the window.
Of couse, this would probably require serious quantities of HCI experiments and a damn fine usability lab. Some AI work might also be necessary. But it is theoretically possible.
A while back, the wall street journal did an experiment they had group consisted of seasoned investment managers square off against chimpanzees who would select stocks by throwing a dart at a dartboard. 50% of the time, the chimpanzees picked better stocks.
The Harvard guys should get themselves a few good chimps and use their networked dartboard to serve up a website that well-informed chimp-picked stock tips. They can then sell ad space to financial
Hey, there have been crazy dot.com business schemes.
In 1988, a guy named Robert Tappan Morris had this crazy idea: take over people's computers but only use their spare cycles to (I believe) solve one hell of a math problem. Guess what happened next...
Yes, in this whole GNOME vs. KDE thing, what get's lost in the shuffle is that both groups of developers really don't have much of a background in usability design and both make a lot of GUI design faux pas on the basis of "Microsoft does it, so it has to be good". People who actually know about designing usable interfaces know that, contrary to popular belief in the linux community, Microsoft is one of the most profoundly incompetant companies on the planet when it comes to designing usable interfaces. They just keep doing so many stupid things. And they can get away with it for exactly the same reason they can get away with all those bugs and security holes: when you've got a monopoly and the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of dim-witted CEO's and IT managers, you can do close to anything you want.
Back to the GNOME and KDE, I seriously doubt that either most GNOME or KDE hackers know what Fitts' Law is, and many would say "bullshit" or "it's a matter of opinion" if you tried to intelligently explain it to them. In the current open source desktop movements, there's an amount of stupidity and unknowledgableness that would never be tolerated with something considered as sacred at "the kernel". It's a double standard, really.
Of course, the beauty of open source is that if something does something really really stupid, you can fork of their project and do your own non-stupid thing.
Self-shredding e-mail is cool. But messages that kill themselves if they contain the strings "Get Out of Debt" or "Penis Enlargment" would really kick ass.
What you are saying is so totally true. They do next to no support for the macs, they have no one who knows how to set them up, and often a mac is given considerably less RAM than a comperable windows machine. The IT people then they point to macs and say "These machines are not working. They suck." It's times like that I longed for a TOZT flamethrower... (Marathon reference for the cultural illiterates out there)
Zoltar: "Home Planet: these earthlings had a really crappy waiting room. The Nation Geographics were ten years old, they had no dish of candies on the coffee table, and from watching "Nick at Nite" we have determined that the next season of "I Love Lucy" you all have been waiting for is really going to suck. I suggest we destroy their planet now."
Slashdot Mirror
NASA: "We need to take a minute or two away from flying vehicles filled with millions of tons of explosive liquids to lecture you about air safety. Cue the film, Biggles..."
So buy latest Intel processor, jump up and down on it, and report back with your results.
Lately people (aka: script kiddies) seem to be losing the distinction between what is a language, and what is a framework
Many of the people developing frameworks have this problem as well.
They noodle about with run-time introspection and other crap to the point where the framework really stops resembling an implementation of a framework in a language and starts resembling it's own "special" language with "special" syntax and "special" keywords and "special" namespace conflicts that the original language never had.
I'm sure that in some states, 100 naked people in a store legally counts as an orgy.
Vista Riceboy Edition
After a few small dents, my powerbook had so much "character" that the Apple store decided that my 3-year Applecare warranty was just too plain and boring to be used with it anymore.
Here's a cool hack that someone did in applescript that illustrates why one would want to learn Applescript.
I suggest they rename their objective-c API from Cocoa to Cinnamon.
You can try to delete them, but if they are still being referenced they will never be purged from memory.
I agree with your point.
I also add that pets are furry and cuddly (and all the geeks on slashdot say "that's nice. Now shut up and go back to playing with your giggley-puff doll".) Won't lovable robots be just as sufficient and furry and cuddly pets?
In the mid 50's, a psychological researcher by the name of Harry Harlow, a pioneer in the study of attachment theory, did an experiment where he took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and put them in front of two different "artificial mothers": one made of wire that carried a bottle of milk, and one artificial mother made of cloth that didn't have a bottle. The infant monkeys vastly preferred the cloth cuddly mother "doll" over the wire mother "doll", even though the wire doll had a bottle and the cloth one didn't.
For more info on this (and to prove I'm not BS'ing), check it out here
I think it's a neat experiment what they're doing with the AIBO's, but in the end its still "Cloth doll vs. Wire doll".
Of course PowerPC is more interesting CPU than x86! Does x86 have anything like the assembly instruction "eieio"?
Unfortunately the linux development world is often extremely hostile towards usability people. Usability is largely viewed by many linux developers as a BS field of study. Practitioners of usability engineering are told that they are doing nothing more than simply whining or, in the words of one kernel hacker "I can't believe people actually get paid for criticizing the work of others." Usability problems won't go away in KDE or GNOME because they are not problems with the underlying technology (mostly) they are problems with the way that certain humans (i.e. programmers) think. Debugging people's opinions is a hell of a lot harder than debugging software.
Shape them up. Get them straight. We need to go forward and move ahead. Try to detect spam. It's not too late to whip them. Whip them good.
Punch card coderse do it real slowly and in as many holes as possible.
To deal with this mail problem and not look like hypocrites, AOL will create a new proprietary mail protocol called ALPO (AOL + POP).
Despite what people say about Konqueror, you haven't really made it in the open source browser world until you have a fork like Pornzilla that's truly devoted to surfing the forgotten 20% of the traffic on the internet.
I installed MS Office on my iPod two weeks and Excel still doesn't work. No matter how many times I jog the dial. But I've got to admit, the talking paper clip really does have a beautiful singing voice.
It might be possible to work out a scheme using mouse acceleration to determine whether the user is shooting for the menubar at the top or a window. If there were certain characteristics of the mouse pointer accelerating towards the menubar that are different from those of a mouse pointer accelerating towards a window, it might be possible to use the differences in acceleration to make a distinction between the two situations and be able to apply the following focus to only when the pointer is meant to hit the window.
Of couse, this would probably require serious quantities of HCI experiments and a damn fine usability lab. Some AI work might also be necessary. But it is theoretically possible.
A while back, the wall street journal did an experiment they had group consisted of seasoned investment managers square off against chimpanzees who would select stocks by throwing a dart at a dartboard. 50% of the time, the chimpanzees picked better stocks.
The Harvard guys should get themselves a few good chimps and use their networked dartboard to serve up a website that well-informed chimp-picked stock tips. They can then sell ad space to financial
Hey, there have been crazy dot.com business schemes.
In 1988, a guy named Robert Tappan Morris had this crazy idea: take over people's computers but only use their spare cycles to (I believe) solve one hell of a math problem. Guess what happened next...
Yes, in this whole GNOME vs. KDE thing, what get's lost in the shuffle is that both groups of developers really don't have much of a background in usability design and both make a lot of GUI design faux pas on the basis of "Microsoft does it, so it has to be good". People who actually know about designing usable interfaces know that, contrary to popular belief in the linux community, Microsoft is one of the most profoundly incompetant companies on the planet when it comes to designing usable interfaces. They just keep doing so many stupid things. And they can get away with it for exactly the same reason they can get away with all those bugs and security holes: when you've got a monopoly and the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of dim-witted CEO's and IT managers, you can do close to anything you want.
Back to the GNOME and KDE, I seriously doubt that either most GNOME or KDE hackers know what Fitts' Law is, and many would say "bullshit" or "it's a matter of opinion" if you tried to intelligently explain it to them. In the current open source desktop movements, there's an amount of stupidity and unknowledgableness that would never be tolerated with something considered as sacred at "the kernel". It's a double standard, really.
Of course, the beauty of open source is that if something does something really really stupid, you can fork of their project and do your own non-stupid thing.
Self-shredding e-mail is cool. But messages that kill themselves if they contain the strings "Get Out of Debt" or "Penis Enlargment" would really kick ass.
What you are saying is so totally true. They do next to no support for the macs, they have no one who knows how to set them up, and often a mac is given considerably less RAM than a comperable windows machine. The IT people then they point to macs and say "These machines are not working. They suck." It's times like that I longed for a TOZT flamethrower... (Marathon reference for the cultural illiterates out there)
Zoltar: "Home Planet: these earthlings had a really crappy waiting room. The Nation Geographics were ten years old, they had no dish of candies on the coffee table, and from watching "Nick at Nite" we have determined that the next season of "I Love Lucy" you all have been waiting for is really going to suck. I suggest we destroy their planet now."