- Navigation
- Hot
- New
- Recent Comments
- Activity Feed
- Marketplace
- Members Directory
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
One of my USB drives glitched on Eject, so I wanted to clear it off, reformat it, and reload it. Hard to do nowadays... At least from the GUI. From the Command Line it was much easier.
So, I share that perspective with you. That being so, nonetheless, even the Command Line is a convenient user interface.
The first time that I saw a computer was 1962 or so. I was 12 or 13. The woman next door was a mathematician, a refugee from Castro's Cuba. She ran the data processing department for a hospital. To program her computer, she pulled off the front panel and changed the wires on a plug board.
One time, I was doing some low-level work, rewriting the same 20 or 30 lines in debug, and I said to myself, "I wish I had an editor." and I heard the voice of Obi-wan Kinobi: "Beware the Dark Side, Luke!"
I also have old tools. They look nice; they work well. The IBM 3270 did not look nice because the designers were not the users.
I came to technical writing through programming; but, like Tron, I fight for the users. So, it is easy for me to point out the programmers where their designs are counter-intuitive. Back in 2000, I stopped a group of SQL developers from putting "File Update" on the F1 key. It was fine for them; they needed it there. Once the system was live, the clericals were never going to need it. The clericals expected Help under F1.
That kind of glitch is typical of bad design. See here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/...
or just put "worst designs" in your search engine.
This Old House has 14 examples here:
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/photos/0...
programmers and techs generally spend one third of their time (my figure) on cosmetics as the work is inspected and approved by managers who do not understand it but judge on prettiness.
"All computers would be gray. All cars would be gray."
Gray computers- would not bother me. Gray cars- my car has been resprayed to suit my 'taste' in a custom color, my money my choice. Recall, Henry Ford said all cars should be black to keep costs down, he later found out that despite the plant manager's opinion, the customer is king,
'But no one else could.' ..run that program. So?
I do have to add that I have seen work made deliberately obscure to preserve the self importance (sometimes it is incompetence) of the designer.
(A friend of mine returned from Europe and complained about stupid Germans. "I never met a stupid German," I said. "That's because you never went to Germany," she replied. People are people everywhere.)
Fortran, Cobol, C, C+, C++, Java, Ruby, they are all just libraries of function calls to lower and lower levels of instructions. Ultimately, at the lowest level, every computer program is just one very, very long binary number.
Epistemologically, if not for Objects, we would be without Concepts and would have to discuss every program as a huge string of concretes.
Imagine if you could not say "Liberals are wrong." but would have to name each and every one of them and each and every one of their errors each and every time you wanted to discuss it.
2) My reference to the old Tektronix printers was a compliment to db. They were five years ahead of their time and are still ahead of inkjet printing. I wouldn't want to go back to those printers because the color laser printers are better now.
3) To me the beauty of a computer (or peripheral) is in how efficient and robust it is. I have plenty of old pieces of equipment that do the job that I buy on EBay.
Let me ask you how the world would look if we had no industrial designers. All computers would be gray. All cars would be gray. Instead of db's "pretty, user friendly I/O" we would be living in Stalingrad.
Moreover, bare bones functionality might argue against any coverings at all. Just keep everything dust-free and lubricated all the timeā¦ How would that work out?
Would you really trade your current computer for an IBM 3270 terminal?
BTW, I also started with Fortran, but since then, I learned Java and Ruby. You went into law. We all make career choices.
Load more comments...