Yeah, I did know. Believe it or not, I've actually read Stoddard. I've also had the displeasure of seeing several episodes of COPs, and seen similar things up close once or twice.
And while the explicitly racist edge of it tends to be surpressed (heck, in some cases it's reversed!) it's the same mindset at work. Those that the system wishes to eat, it first dehumanises in the eyes of its servants. Whether it's 'bad guy' or 'untermensch' the functional content is the same - these people are below us, not fully human, and can be treated like animals. Well, actually in many cases worse than animals.
I've actually found that many of the people involved in treating their fellow humans as something less are just/frightfully/ careful to be nice to animals, actually. Not that I'm saying everyone that's nice to animals is bad to humans;) I can't stand cruelty to animals myself. But still, it's interesting to watch people try and imbue animals with rights at the same time they try to strip their human brothers and sisters of theirs.
Without having actually been to Russia, I met several Russians living in Sweden. ALL spoke English, as well as Russian and Swedish. I met several Russians at conferences. ALL spoke English well, as that's what is spoken at academic conferences worldwide and what most academic work is done in. One of my Swedish friends learned Russian, and took a two week trip to Russia. She was very frustrated, because the Russians all wanted to practice their English with her, rather than let her practice her Russian. (Which, I pointed out, should give her some sympathy for me, facing the same thing with the Swedes.)
English is the lingua franca, and the world, aside from the English-speaking parts, tends to bilingual at minimum. USians don't tend to get that unless they've done some travel (and I mean outside of America) but it's true. 'What does monolingual mean? English." A common joke all over Europe.
And, as has been pointed out several times already, the website is not 'in English.' It has an English and a Russian translation available. If your browser headers indicate Russian, it shows that. If it indicates anything else, it shows English. Like pretty much any European web-site does...
You'd have a good point, except your facts aren't correct. The website actually chooses language based on information from the browser. Many international sites do this. Go in with a russian browser and you get it in Russian. English, as the defacto international language, is the fallback if you don't appear to be Russian.
Again, this is standard in international websites - any well-designed european website does this, since most Europeans have English as a second language and reading (if not speaking) competency in it for just this purpose.
So there is no devious motive to be inferred from it appearing *to you* in English, except that your browser isn't Russian.
It doesn't take a hell of a lot for there to be consideration (think of the $1 contracts that are upheld). The money you pay is your consideration. The software (or access rights thereto) they provide is theirs. All it means is giving up something (ANYTHING!) you din't have to give up.
Exactly why software EULAs aren't valid contracts. The money - you already paid - the software - you already have. If you 'agree' to the EULA, you lose many rights you would otherwise have, but gain nothing at all.
Sweden, until rather recently, had one of the more enlightened copyright laws around. It explicitly required authorisation only for *commercial* reproduction. Making a copy of a cd, book, or whatever and giving it to your friends was never illegal.
Well, of course once the *AA found out about that they had a tizzy fit, and funnelled an unknown, but apparently substantial amount of money to Sweden, funding the Antipirat Byrån and some other organisations, as well as bribing lots of politicians. They haven't had the kind of success they've been hoping for, but they did manage to change the law to prohibit unauthorised non-commercial copying. A rather unpopular move with the voting public, I might add, which is increasingly resentful of the swedish politicians who have a pattern of voting in stuff that's unpopular with the citizenry but popular with wealthy foreign lobbyists. Politicians are traditionally held in VERY high regard in Sweden, and there's an overwhelming tradition of people trusting them, viewing them as experts, and assuming that if they do something like this they must know best. That tradition has been quickly eroding, by incidents like this. Before that law was hustled through in the back rooms, very few people were actively thinking about the issue. Afterwards, a significant movement started to form and demand that their liberty be restored.
Anyhow, they did manage to technically make filesharing illegal there, and there was a test case a few months back. It was reported that, basically, if the court didn't impose a fairly harsh sentence, the police would not enforce the law again. As I recall, the court did not go mad, and therefore it was widely assumed afterwards this was essentially a dead law. They can, of course, write someone up for it if they happen to see it, but they cannot, for instance, breach privacy laws to get your IP over such a minor offense, so in practice it's nearly unenforceable.
I'm guessing this raid will backfire horribly for those behind it. Unless I've horribly misunderstood the law there (and not just me, the pirate bay folks, who have significant legal respresentation and counsel available) hosting the torrent files themselves is still completely legal. If a court winds up agreeing with that assessment, the pirate bay should wind up getting everything returned along with an apology and a nice fat cheque. And I don't mean that in the sense I would in a similar circumstance in the US - it should happen but it never will - I mean it's very likely. The falsely accused are normally compensated for their trouble there. If that happens, it should be rather impossible for this to be spun away - it will become another police scandal coming at a time when the police have way too many already.
So far, every effort the *AA has made in Sweden has backfired in terms of public opinion. The more attention they draw to the issue, the more support for liberty seems to arise. Won't be surprised if that happens again, although I note today that the hacks at dn.se, the nations largest newspaper, are desperately trying to spin this the other way. But then again, they've been doing that all along...
Actually many Swedish (and other) bands encourage their fans to share their music.
It leads to larger crowds showing up for their gigs, and they get nearly nothing on record sales anyway.
There's so much wrong with what you just wrote, but I'll confine myself to one thing.
'Increased cost to commercial vendors' cannot in any way cause free software to 'fail.' The goal is NOT to support commercial vendors. We don't exclude them either, but we have no obligation or need to support them. They're on their own, and their success or failure is utterly irrelevant to ours.
The biggest changes were just to the font and to use square corners.
I'd say the biggest change is that it's now almost actual HTML.
At a quick glance, it looks like the only error is forgetting to encode the links properly.
Even if there are a few more than that, it's still a HUGE improvement over the steaming pile of something-that-vaguely-resembles-a-web-page-but-no t-really that slashdot has traditionally served.
What initial expression? That there is no such thing as human error?
Exactly.
That's a fundamental, and pernicious, false premise that any five-year old could see through.
Oh, it's a nice scam, I'm sure. Users make errors. We're human, you grok? We all make errors. The healthy thing to do is acknowledge them, learn from them, and not repeat them.
Oh, but then arrives the con man. The con man, as is the nature of that game, spins a flattering fantasy he knows his listeners will *want* to believe. "There's no such thing as user error. It's just bad design. The computer is supposed to do what you meant, not what you said." And for a fee, the con man will of course "fix" that nasty program that's actually responsible for all the "user error," right?
Only it's a lie. The computer can't possibly "do what you mean, not what you say." So, for example, the user deletes a file he didn't mean to delete. Woops! He might have learned from that experience, but not with the con man around. The user that made the error is piously assured he didn't do anything wrong, it was that blamed machine. The con man will make it better. So what does he do? Maybe he adds some code that says "Are you sure you want to delete foo (y/n)" the first time through this. Hey, this isn't so bad, it only adds one extra keystroke to the process, and it ensures that the bad computer will never again make the error of deleting a file you told it to delete, but didn't actually want to delete.
But that's not true. Pretty soon, the users just wind up building it into muscle memory that you always hit 'y' after giving the delete command, and we're back pretty much where we started. Sure enough, sooner or later someone makes an error and deletes a file that shouldn't have been deleted again. And here comes that con man, ready to make another profit on his snake oil.
So he adds a 'trashcan.' Now you can delete everything you want, and it's not final until the can is emptied. Great, except, well, of course, you still aren't where you promised to be. The computer still doesn't do what you mean, rather than what you tell it. I MEAN for it to delete, but it refuses to do so, insisting on moving to the trashcan instead. Now I dare say, the vast majority of the time a user presses the delete key they mean to delete the file - pressing the delete key when you intended to move it somewhere else has to be a pretty damn rare case. So, by your own standards, the new system is FURTHER from your goal than the very basic system you started with. And the users, again, just learn in many cases to append the 'emptying the trashcan' action to the 'delete' action, and so on top of burdening the vast majority of instances with additional, unecessary steps, you STILL haven't solved the original problem of users deleting files by mistake!
It's snake oil, nothing more. I suppose I can see how the snake oil salesman thinks it's great when he's counting his money afterwards, but the users haven't been served in this, they've only been encouraged to shirk responsibility for their own actions and discouraged from actually *learning* how to avoid making mistakes.
It's not implementation specific. It has to do simply with your initial, false premise. The computer has no way of knowing 'what you mean' and barring technological advances beyond any but the wildest flights of fiction fantasy isn't likely to ever have a way of knowing that. Adding layer after layer of 'failsafes' - no matter how well implemented - is never going to make the machine a mind-reader.
Although, of course, telling users they aren't to blame when they goof can make you money, I'm sure. Con man may well be the oldest profession, it's certainly in the running, and shows no sign of going out of demand any time soon.
You keep going on and on and on about specific implementations.
You're the one that keeps trying to dodge by making it about implementation. You're, in fac
I see the forest fine. Why don't you try opening your eyes up for a change, maybe you could see it too?
I've been using computers a long time, very possibly since you were in diapers. The sheer bit-pushing power has advanced greatly, but there have been serious regression too, and much of that is the result of the "the user is an imbecile" philosophy you're espousing here.
Oh, I know, you claim that's not what you're saying. But what other conclusion could any reasonable person come to when told that if they push delete to move a file, and then are shocked and horrified that the file was *deleted* instead of moved, it's not their fault - it's the fault of that nasty programmer that programmed the computer to do what they user told it to do, instead of somehow divining what they really wanted it to do instead?
Yes, you think 'mere users' like me are absolute imbeciles, unable to meaningfully inform you of our needs, and certainly unable to realise that pushing the key marked 'delete' might actually result in something being deleted. You can deny it all you want, but you can't reconcile that denial with your initial expression of design philosophy in any credible way.
You've translated your personal frustrations with trashcan implementations
Nope. Once again, you're just reading what is convenient to sustain your worldview into the situation, regardless of it not fitting the facts at all. I've adapted to many different interfaces, and when I'm working with them I concentrate on the job at hand. I almost never get frustrated, even by the most moronic mechanisms. But I certainly can note when they ARE moronic, and why. And an evolution of interface designs where the same task goes from one operation, to two, to four, is one that even a 'mere user' imbecile like myself can see is moronic. My aging father who's afraid of changing anything on his computer lest he break something can see it's moronic, and he does get frustrated with it. The computer is backtalking him! The first time he saw that message, he thought he must have inadvertantly tried to delete a critical system file or something. I've had secretaries that only use the computer for email and word processing ask 'why does this thing think I'm an idiot? I mean, I know I'm not the smartest and all with these computers and stuff, but I think I know what 'delete' means.'
Oops, there I go again, destroying your worldview. Just repeat to yourself, users are imbeciles a few times, and hum a bit, then rewrite what I just wrote so it sounds suitably imbecilic so you can disregard it.
Wookie defense again. Just change the subject when you don't like what you're hearing. You sound like Bill Clinton, or half of the guys on my high school debate team... so proud of your ability to twist words and change subjects, and then you wonder why no one wants to listen to you anymore. Here's a clue - the point to conversation is generally the *substance* of the conversation, not a penis-measuring display concerned with who's the best bullshitter.
I initially replied to your post that claimed that "there is no such thing as "human error"" and went on to expound how any time the computer user appears to have made an error, the error was actually on the part of the programmer that failed to make the computer do what the user actually wanted, rather than what they commanded. That is bullshit from beginning to end, I called you on it rather gently, and you've been trying to dance around and change the subject and impune me personally instead of actually facing up to it ever since.
Projecting personal failings of all sorts on me for daring to disagree with you leads me to suspect some personal failings of your own. Whatever your motivation, designing software with the assumption that your users are all imbeciles is not only insulting and arrogant, it results in interfaces only imbeciles would want to use. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess that makes you feel smarter or something, but don't kid yourself it's good design. If you really make software that implements that philosophy instead of just spouting it off where impressionable young programmers can get infected with it... well either way it's sad. Knock it off. Find something useful to do instead.
This distinction between implementation and concept is, at best, disingenuous. Some implementations are worse than others, yes (the Mac is only mildly annoying compared to the excruciating and insulting Windows version) but so what? They all suck.
Pardon me for attributing to you the modicum of intelligence to understand that a user interface with a default behaviour making the most common errors the most expensive to recover from is the absolute poorest possible design.
Ahem. Pardon me for attributing to you the modicum of intelligence required to understand that the computer is supposed to do what the user tells it to do, rather than second-guessing him at every turn, and that interfaces that deliberately make basic, simple tasks more complicated and time consuming are not examples of good interface design.
And I am not even for a moment going to give any credibility to your assertion that deleting a file you meant to move is a common error on any vaguely sane user interface. It might have been a problem in some very early GUIs, but there's no reason it should be, and adding a mandatory 'trashcan' is neither the only nor the best way to make sure it's not.
If I had known that you were yet another programmer who is pathalogically incapable...
And blah blah blah. I'm not a programmer. I'm just a lowly user who doesn't like programmers that assume this makes me an incredible idiot who pushes the delete key when he wants to move something. Just because I'm not a programmer doesn't mean I'm a moron. And I know a lot of people that are not programmers and also not morons.
IF a given interface is somehow constructed that deleting files you intended to move is a real problem, THAT problem needs to be looked at, rather than papered over with a bad metaphor.
Too bad for you that I've already debunked this specific criticism twice now.
Sadly for you, simply disagreeing does not constitute 'debunking.'
You know, back when I said that the vast majority of the computer using population already has plenty of exposure to the metaphor so it's connection to the physical world is no longer relevant.
And that's utterly besides the point. It doesn't make the interface any less confusing to new users having to learn the system, nor does it mean that the interface doesn't remain jarring and annoying to those that are quite familiar with how it works.
Intuitiveness is about relating to the user's personal experience, not about requiring real-world and digital interfaces to be identical.
Intuitiveness is a myth. Even the nipple is not fully intuitive, and certainly nothing afterwards is. This is the hubris of most modern interface designs - the delusion that the programmer can create an 'intuitive' interface. You can't. What you can do is make an interface that is functional and not unecessarily obtruse or difficult to master. Concentrate on making it easy for the user to control the computer and forget about this mirage of 'intuitiveness' and you'd design much more useful programs.
I'm not criticising the implementation, I'm criticising the entire concept.
If the user tells the computer to delete the file, the computer should DELETE THE FILE. Not move it to a 'trashcan' instead.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
Furthermore, the trashcan is a great example of an out of place metaphor. The computer 'trashcan' doesn't have enough in common with the real life trashcan to make the metaphor helpful or obvious. It's an ugly, annoying, kludge.
You know, there's something fundamentally wrong with your thinking here.
The 'trashcan' is one of the most annoying out of place metaphors in computers today. It does absolutely nothing but make me jump through hoops to get things done. Instead of deleting stuff once, now I have to delete it twice? My first response to this thing was 'what moron thought of this' and my opinion of it hasn't improved in the, what, around 20 years now since?
It's extremely annoying. The Mac made my one operation into two, then Windows made it into four. I remember the windows popup when you delete something that says 'are you sure you want to move these files to the trashcan?' NO, I DON'T want to move them to the trashcan, I want to delete them, you fsck! So, instead of simply deleting, I have to delete, confirm delete, empty trash, confirm empty trash. A simple operation is now four operations, just to get the same thing done. This is NOT an improvement. Quite the opposite.
When I push the delete button I want the damn thing deleted. I don't want to have to waste time dealing with a backtalking computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Any carbonated liquid will work. They use diet coke to make sure no one ruins the show by drinking all the fizzy.
Yeah, I did know. Believe it or not, I've actually read Stoddard. I've also had the displeasure of seeing several episodes of COPs, and seen similar things up close once or twice.
/frightfully/ careful to be nice to animals, actually. Not that I'm saying everyone that's nice to animals is bad to humans ;) I can't stand cruelty to animals myself. But still, it's interesting to watch people try and imbue animals with rights at the same time they try to strip their human brothers and sisters of theirs.
And while the explicitly racist edge of it tends to be surpressed (heck, in some cases it's reversed!) it's the same mindset at work. Those that the system wishes to eat, it first dehumanises in the eyes of its servants. Whether it's 'bad guy' or 'untermensch' the functional content is the same - these people are below us, not fully human, and can be treated like animals. Well, actually in many cases worse than animals.
I've actually found that many of the people involved in treating their fellow humans as something less are just
Without having actually been to Russia, I met several Russians living in Sweden. ALL spoke English, as well as Russian and Swedish. I met several Russians at conferences. ALL spoke English well, as that's what is spoken at academic conferences worldwide and what most academic work is done in. One of my Swedish friends learned Russian, and took a two week trip to Russia. She was very frustrated, because the Russians all wanted to practice their English with her, rather than let her practice her Russian. (Which, I pointed out, should give her some sympathy for me, facing the same thing with the Swedes.)
English is the lingua franca, and the world, aside from the English-speaking parts, tends to bilingual at minimum. USians don't tend to get that unless they've done some travel (and I mean outside of America) but it's true. 'What does monolingual mean? English." A common joke all over Europe.
And, as has been pointed out several times already, the website is not 'in English.' It has an English and a Russian translation available. If your browser headers indicate Russian, it shows that. If it indicates anything else, it shows English. Like pretty much any European web-site does...
It's just todays politically correct way of saying untermensch.
That's the same site, you're just instructing it to quit autodetecting your language preferences and use Russian.
You get the same thing from the beginning if your browser indicates it's in russian.
You'd have a good point, except your facts aren't correct. The website actually chooses language based on information from the browser. Many international sites do this. Go in with a russian browser and you get it in Russian. English, as the defacto international language, is the fallback if you don't appear to be Russian.
Again, this is standard in international websites - any well-designed european website does this, since most Europeans have English as a second language and reading (if not speaking) competency in it for just this purpose.
So there is no devious motive to be inferred from it appearing *to you* in English, except that your browser isn't Russian.
Exactly why software EULAs aren't valid contracts. The money - you already paid - the software - you already have. If you 'agree' to the EULA, you lose many rights you would otherwise have, but gain nothing at all.
No, not really.
In order for them to have that 'choice' they would have to be able to infringe on everyone elses essential liberty, after all.
Sweden, until rather recently, had one of the more enlightened copyright laws around. It explicitly required authorisation only for *commercial* reproduction. Making a copy of a cd, book, or whatever and giving it to your friends was never illegal.
Well, of course once the *AA found out about that they had a tizzy fit, and funnelled an unknown, but apparently substantial amount of money to Sweden, funding the Antipirat Byrån and some other organisations, as well as bribing lots of politicians. They haven't had the kind of success they've been hoping for, but they did manage to change the law to prohibit unauthorised non-commercial copying. A rather unpopular move with the voting public, I might add, which is increasingly resentful of the swedish politicians who have a pattern of voting in stuff that's unpopular with the citizenry but popular with wealthy foreign lobbyists. Politicians are traditionally held in VERY high regard in Sweden, and there's an overwhelming tradition of people trusting them, viewing them as experts, and assuming that if they do something like this they must know best. That tradition has been quickly eroding, by incidents like this. Before that law was hustled through in the back rooms, very few people were actively thinking about the issue. Afterwards, a significant movement started to form and demand that their liberty be restored.
Anyhow, they did manage to technically make filesharing illegal there, and there was a test case a few months back. It was reported that, basically, if the court didn't impose a fairly harsh sentence, the police would not enforce the law again. As I recall, the court did not go mad, and therefore it was widely assumed afterwards this was essentially a dead law. They can, of course, write someone up for it if they happen to see it, but they cannot, for instance, breach privacy laws to get your IP over such a minor offense, so in practice it's nearly unenforceable.
I'm guessing this raid will backfire horribly for those behind it. Unless I've horribly misunderstood the law there (and not just me, the pirate bay folks, who have significant legal respresentation and counsel available) hosting the torrent files themselves is still completely legal. If a court winds up agreeing with that assessment, the pirate bay should wind up getting everything returned along with an apology and a nice fat cheque. And I don't mean that in the sense I would in a similar circumstance in the US - it should happen but it never will - I mean it's very likely. The falsely accused are normally compensated for their trouble there. If that happens, it should be rather impossible for this to be spun away - it will become another police scandal coming at a time when the police have way too many already.
So far, every effort the *AA has made in Sweden has backfired in terms of public opinion. The more attention they draw to the issue, the more support for liberty seems to arise. Won't be surprised if that happens again, although I note today that the hacks at dn.se, the nations largest newspaper, are desperately trying to spin this the other way. But then again, they've been doing that all along...
Actually many Swedish (and other) bands encourage their fans to share their music. It leads to larger crowds showing up for their gigs, and they get nearly nothing on record sales anyway.
There's so much wrong with what you just wrote, but I'll confine myself to one thing.
'Increased cost to commercial vendors' cannot in any way cause free software to 'fail.' The goal is NOT to support commercial vendors. We don't exclude them either, but we have no obligation or need to support them. They're on their own, and their success or failure is utterly irrelevant to ours.
I'd say the biggest change is that it's now almost actual HTML.
At a quick glance, it looks like the only error is forgetting to encode the links properly.
Even if there are a few more than that, it's still a HUGE improvement over the steaming pile of something-that-vaguely-resembles-a-web-page-but-no t-really that slashdot has traditionally served.
Exactly.
That's a fundamental, and pernicious, false premise that any five-year old could see through.
Oh, it's a nice scam, I'm sure. Users make errors. We're human, you grok? We all make errors. The healthy thing to do is acknowledge them, learn from them, and not repeat them.
Oh, but then arrives the con man. The con man, as is the nature of that game, spins a flattering fantasy he knows his listeners will *want* to believe. "There's no such thing as user error. It's just bad design. The computer is supposed to do what you meant, not what you said." And for a fee, the con man will of course "fix" that nasty program that's actually responsible for all the "user error," right?
Only it's a lie. The computer can't possibly "do what you mean, not what you say." So, for example, the user deletes a file he didn't mean to delete. Woops! He might have learned from that experience, but not with the con man around. The user that made the error is piously assured he didn't do anything wrong, it was that blamed machine. The con man will make it better. So what does he do? Maybe he adds some code that says "Are you sure you want to delete foo (y/n)" the first time through this. Hey, this isn't so bad, it only adds one extra keystroke to the process, and it ensures that the bad computer will never again make the error of deleting a file you told it to delete, but didn't actually want to delete.
But that's not true. Pretty soon, the users just wind up building it into muscle memory that you always hit 'y' after giving the delete command, and we're back pretty much where we started. Sure enough, sooner or later someone makes an error and deletes a file that shouldn't have been deleted again. And here comes that con man, ready to make another profit on his snake oil.
So he adds a 'trashcan.' Now you can delete everything you want, and it's not final until the can is emptied. Great, except, well, of course, you still aren't where you promised to be. The computer still doesn't do what you mean, rather than what you tell it. I MEAN for it to delete, but it refuses to do so, insisting on moving to the trashcan instead. Now I dare say, the vast majority of the time a user presses the delete key they mean to delete the file - pressing the delete key when you intended to move it somewhere else has to be a pretty damn rare case. So, by your own standards, the new system is FURTHER from your goal than the very basic system you started with. And the users, again, just learn in many cases to append the 'emptying the trashcan' action to the 'delete' action, and so on top of burdening the vast majority of instances with additional, unecessary steps, you STILL haven't solved the original problem of users deleting files by mistake!
It's snake oil, nothing more. I suppose I can see how the snake oil salesman thinks it's great when he's counting his money afterwards, but the users haven't been served in this, they've only been encouraged to shirk responsibility for their own actions and discouraged from actually *learning* how to avoid making mistakes.
It's not implementation specific. It has to do simply with your initial, false premise. The computer has no way of knowing 'what you mean' and barring technological advances beyond any but the wildest flights of fiction fantasy isn't likely to ever have a way of knowing that. Adding layer after layer of 'failsafes' - no matter how well implemented - is never going to make the machine a mind-reader.
Although, of course, telling users they aren't to blame when they goof can make you money, I'm sure. Con man may well be the oldest profession, it's certainly in the running, and shows no sign of going out of demand any time soon.
You're the one that keeps trying to dodge by making it about implementation. You're, in fac
I see the forest fine. Why don't you try opening your eyes up for a change, maybe you could see it too?
I've been using computers a long time, very possibly since you were in diapers. The sheer bit-pushing power has advanced greatly, but there have been serious regression too, and much of that is the result of the "the user is an imbecile" philosophy you're espousing here.
Oh, I know, you claim that's not what you're saying. But what other conclusion could any reasonable person come to when told that if they push delete to move a file, and then are shocked and horrified that the file was *deleted* instead of moved, it's not their fault - it's the fault of that nasty programmer that programmed the computer to do what they user told it to do, instead of somehow divining what they really wanted it to do instead?
Yes, you think 'mere users' like me are absolute imbeciles, unable to meaningfully inform you of our needs, and certainly unable to realise that pushing the key marked 'delete' might actually result in something being deleted. You can deny it all you want, but you can't reconcile that denial with your initial expression of design philosophy in any credible way.
Nope. Once again, you're just reading what is convenient to sustain your worldview into the situation, regardless of it not fitting the facts at all. I've adapted to many different interfaces, and when I'm working with them I concentrate on the job at hand. I almost never get frustrated, even by the most moronic mechanisms. But I certainly can note when they ARE moronic, and why. And an evolution of interface designs where the same task goes from one operation, to two, to four, is one that even a 'mere user' imbecile like myself can see is moronic. My aging father who's afraid of changing anything on his computer lest he break something can see it's moronic, and he does get frustrated with it. The computer is backtalking him! The first time he saw that message, he thought he must have inadvertantly tried to delete a critical system file or something. I've had secretaries that only use the computer for email and word processing ask 'why does this thing think I'm an idiot? I mean, I know I'm not the smartest and all with these computers and stuff, but I think I know what 'delete' means.'
Oops, there I go again, destroying your worldview. Just repeat to yourself, users are imbeciles a few times, and hum a bit, then rewrite what I just wrote so it sounds suitably imbecilic so you can disregard it.
...fools and there money soon are parted.
Wookie defense again. Just change the subject when you don't like what you're hearing. You sound like Bill Clinton, or half of the guys on my high school debate team... so proud of your ability to twist words and change subjects, and then you wonder why no one wants to listen to you anymore. Here's a clue - the point to conversation is generally the *substance* of the conversation, not a penis-measuring display concerned with who's the best bullshitter.
I initially replied to your post that claimed that "there is no such thing as "human error"" and went on to expound how any time the computer user appears to have made an error, the error was actually on the part of the programmer that failed to make the computer do what the user actually wanted, rather than what they commanded. That is bullshit from beginning to end, I called you on it rather gently, and you've been trying to dance around and change the subject and impune me personally instead of actually facing up to it ever since.
Projecting personal failings of all sorts on me for daring to disagree with you leads me to suspect some personal failings of your own. Whatever your motivation, designing software with the assumption that your users are all imbeciles is not only insulting and arrogant, it results in interfaces only imbeciles would want to use. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess that makes you feel smarter or something, but don't kid yourself it's good design. If you really make software that implements that philosophy instead of just spouting it off where impressionable young programmers can get infected with it... well either way it's sad. Knock it off. Find something useful to do instead.
This distinction between implementation and concept is, at best, disingenuous. Some implementations are worse than others, yes (the Mac is only mildly annoying compared to the excruciating and insulting Windows version) but so what? They all suck.
Ahem. Pardon me for attributing to you the modicum of intelligence required to understand that the computer is supposed to do what the user tells it to do, rather than second-guessing him at every turn, and that interfaces that deliberately make basic, simple tasks more complicated and time consuming are not examples of good interface design.
And I am not even for a moment going to give any credibility to your assertion that deleting a file you meant to move is a common error on any vaguely sane user interface. It might have been a problem in some very early GUIs, but there's no reason it should be, and adding a mandatory 'trashcan' is neither the only nor the best way to make sure it's not.
And blah blah blah. I'm not a programmer. I'm just a lowly user who doesn't like programmers that assume this makes me an incredible idiot who pushes the delete key when he wants to move something. Just because I'm not a programmer doesn't mean I'm a moron. And I know a lot of people that are not programmers and also not morons.
IF a given interface is somehow constructed that deleting files you intended to move is a real problem, THAT problem needs to be looked at, rather than papered over with a bad metaphor.
Sadly for you, simply disagreeing does not constitute 'debunking.'
And that's utterly besides the point. It doesn't make the interface any less confusing to new users having to learn the system, nor does it mean that the interface doesn't remain jarring and annoying to those that are quite familiar with how it works.
Intuitiveness is a myth. Even the nipple is not fully intuitive, and certainly nothing afterwards is. This is the hubris of most modern interface designs - the delusion that the programmer can create an 'intuitive' interface. You can't. What you can do is make an interface that is functional and not unecessarily obtruse or difficult to master. Concentrate on making it easy for the user to control the computer and forget about this mirage of 'intuitiveness' and you'd design much more useful programs.
You continue to not get it.
I'm not criticising the implementation, I'm criticising the entire concept.
If the user tells the computer to delete the file, the computer should DELETE THE FILE. Not move it to a 'trashcan' instead.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
Furthermore, the trashcan is a great example of an out of place metaphor. The computer 'trashcan' doesn't have enough in common with the real life trashcan to make the metaphor helpful or obvious. It's an ugly, annoying, kludge.
I understand that metaphor too. Are you familiar with the wookie defense? I think that's your game here.
Why would I waste my bandwidth downloading it?
You know folks, if people will quit BUYING this kind of schlock they'll eventually quit making it.
Are you telling me THAT will run on a SPARC? Or my Gentoo powered G4? Huh?
And they recommend a PIII/700 or better. Sure makes it sound like this would run fine on a fast PPC or SPARC machine, doesn't it?
Bet you it won't though.
I understand the metaphor. Doh.
It's still out of place, and the underlying mechanics are still regressive.
The computer is there to do what the user tells it to do. Not to argue, backtalk, and second guess his or her every move.
I'm sure they're a great company to deal with if you *want* to pay $100/month for all their bells and whistles.
Now try to get simple, reliable service out of them for a reasonable price.
You know, there's something fundamentally wrong with your thinking here.
The 'trashcan' is one of the most annoying out of place metaphors in computers today. It does absolutely nothing but make me jump through hoops to get things done. Instead of deleting stuff once, now I have to delete it twice? My first response to this thing was 'what moron thought of this' and my opinion of it hasn't improved in the, what, around 20 years now since?
It's extremely annoying. The Mac made my one operation into two, then Windows made it into four. I remember the windows popup when you delete something that says 'are you sure you want to move these files to the trashcan?' NO, I DON'T want to move them to the trashcan, I want to delete them, you fsck! So, instead of simply deleting, I have to delete, confirm delete, empty trash, confirm empty trash. A simple operation is now four operations, just to get the same thing done. This is NOT an improvement. Quite the opposite.
When I push the delete button I want the damn thing deleted. I don't want to have to waste time dealing with a backtalking computer.