Well today was fine. Up until the point when age-old technology failed me again.
I've got to hand it to those guys at IBM: simple green letters on a black background still produce some of the simplest, most dummy-user-friendly user-interfaces I've seen. All you do is move your cursor to the right spot, enter only valid data (the system manages to prevent just about any mistake a user might make, short of spillng coffee on his keyboard), press 'Enter', and you've just made a computer do what you wanted it to.
Try that on for size, Microsoft, Apple and Linux. AS/400 rocks when it comes to making stupid people work with a computer.
Well... that is of course until they see flashy wysiwyg word processors or dazzling graphics in the next game on a more popular (and desktop-oriented) platform.
What is it with user-interfaces that nobody ever gets them quite right? Just look at the known examples: they're all just demonstrations of a lack of ability to make a consequent choice.
Windows has all the thrills: graphically hot, context sensitivity all over the place, multi-language, all the software you can dream, compatibility assured and developers' tools that make any knowledgeable man get a mental erection. But all that is just it: there is just too much of Windows! Just try to open up Word, and find out different ways to do the same thing, like pasting some text: there is of course the customizable menu, a gazillion of toolbarbuttons, and he ever-present Ctrl-V. But rest assured: there's more! Now they've invented the 'ribbon', there is a multi-dimensional clipboard, you get a smarttag allowing you to alter the formatting after pasting,... Have you ever tried to tell a computer-dummy to always use the same way of doing it, just because they lack the flexibility to guess that they all do the same, but sometimes slightly different? Come on, Redmond: allowing the user to customize his experience is just not the same thing as creating an easy platform for anybody to use. My grandpa is just not capable of customizing. Well not his computer, anyway.
Mac? Beautiful at first: anybody can use a Mac. The one-button mouse was wonderful, really, as was the single-menu idea. But at a certain point, you have to come to more decisions: when you want all sorts of information at your fingertips (I know that used to be more of the competitor's slogan, but isn't that what they all want to do - but fail miserably?) you are going to need some buttons and keys, close to your fingers, that make it all run. Boing!
And closed source? Well, fortunately, noone cares ;-)
Linux, recently presented as an alternative for the dummy user, now with an automatic install, control panel stuff, all the zing and dang of any modern operating system, only with a better designed engine, supported by a world of geeks. Of course, if it were really that magnificent, we wouldn't need the geeks. How many people you know have recompiled their kernel? Written scripts to automate the toaster in beautiful languages like python? Decided which packages to install, and configured their unwilling hardware? Be for real: Linux is a wonderful system, usable by a lot of people, until something goes wrong (and believe me: it will).
Open source is wonderful, but who has ever really profited from it, apart from the initial cost for the OS?
And then there's the fairy godmother of OS-es: OS/400. No kidding: this thing is stable as hell, and in most views, pretty simple. Behind the scenes, there really are only three (3!) levels of directories, everything gets compiled the same way, some brilliant tricks, and very straightforward user-interface.
But what trouble it takes to make that user-interface! Computerlanguages from hell (RPG), indecipherable layouts of files, overkill on options and switches. Copying a file will do just fine on the command line, but there is just no way of debugging withot a fine-tuned development environment. Not with the complexity of today's software. Sometimes you just NEED a comlex UI. And AS/400 has it NOT.
So why the rant? I don't know. In the old days, when the server would have been next to me, I would probably have kicked it. Since it is now literaly miles away from me, I'll just have to spit my poison at it verbally. Take that, you swine!
20060731
20060723
Oil Pump
- Whoa! What the...
- Go right, go right!
- I can't do that here - just a second.
- Gosh, what is that noise?
And thus ended our romantic trip towards the now-mythical city of Metz. I have now learned that when the oil-pump of the servo-system ("Direction Assistée") on your steering wheel meets the oil-pump-graveyard, this renders your car virtually useless: as it seems, this causes your carburator to stop charging the battery (I know, it doesn't sound reasonable, but I'm explained that this is a fact of life in our type of vehicle).
So, not only will you have to use every muscle in your arms to steer, but you will also use up all that hard-earned electricity in you battery, says the technician.
Now, when I'm stranded with a broken car, 10 miles outside of my own country (and not a member of any Europ Assisstance or the likes), seeing three days of romantic fun (what kids?) being flushed through the oil-pump, I get depressed enough to believe this stuff, but honestly: isn't a car supposed to drive around on diesel?
I mean: OK, so the diesel needs a little electricity to explode inside the engine (although there are some braincells that seem to remember that this is only necessary for classical gasoline - those braincells were probably actually physically present in the physics class), but have you seen the size of the batteries that go into the hood? If I compare this to the batteries that make a flashlight or ghettoblaster last for a week, these should basically render fuel useless for making a motor hum. I'm certain this habit of filling your tank with some liquid that supposedly makes the heart of a machine beat, is just a hilarious scam. I bet somebody is rolling on the floor of their UFO!
I'll tell you more: you have been at a gas station, you have seen the meter run (Euro's currently faster than liters), you have smelled the promise of explosion, read the non-smoking sign and inserted your bank card, but have you ever actually seen any fuel there, apart from the over-obvious rainbow glow in the puddles? The tubes are suspiciously black, and when pinching the handle, you get a sensation of flowing liquid, but are you sure that it is not just some recorded oil-pump-sounds that shape the illusion?
Cars exploding in movies: brilliant marketing.
If you look really well into the tank, you can actually see something that could be a small amount of water with detergent. I'm sure you could blow bubbles with it!
No, take it from the man who came back by train: there is no need for oil.
P.S.: fortunately, my beautiful friends helped me and my wife forget some of this tragedy by making us laugh at the Gentse Fieste. Thx Ward, Els and Stefaan!
- Go right, go right!
- I can't do that here - just a second.
- Gosh, what is that noise?
And thus ended our romantic trip towards the now-mythical city of Metz. I have now learned that when the oil-pump of the servo-system ("Direction Assistée") on your steering wheel meets the oil-pump-graveyard, this renders your car virtually useless: as it seems, this causes your carburator to stop charging the battery (I know, it doesn't sound reasonable, but I'm explained that this is a fact of life in our type of vehicle).
So, not only will you have to use every muscle in your arms to steer, but you will also use up all that hard-earned electricity in you battery, says the technician.
Now, when I'm stranded with a broken car, 10 miles outside of my own country (and not a member of any Europ Assisstance or the likes), seeing three days of romantic fun (what kids?) being flushed through the oil-pump, I get depressed enough to believe this stuff, but honestly: isn't a car supposed to drive around on diesel?
I mean: OK, so the diesel needs a little electricity to explode inside the engine (although there are some braincells that seem to remember that this is only necessary for classical gasoline - those braincells were probably actually physically present in the physics class), but have you seen the size of the batteries that go into the hood? If I compare this to the batteries that make a flashlight or ghettoblaster last for a week, these should basically render fuel useless for making a motor hum. I'm certain this habit of filling your tank with some liquid that supposedly makes the heart of a machine beat, is just a hilarious scam. I bet somebody is rolling on the floor of their UFO!
I'll tell you more: you have been at a gas station, you have seen the meter run (Euro's currently faster than liters), you have smelled the promise of explosion, read the non-smoking sign and inserted your bank card, but have you ever actually seen any fuel there, apart from the over-obvious rainbow glow in the puddles? The tubes are suspiciously black, and when pinching the handle, you get a sensation of flowing liquid, but are you sure that it is not just some recorded oil-pump-sounds that shape the illusion?
Cars exploding in movies: brilliant marketing.
If you look really well into the tank, you can actually see something that could be a small amount of water with detergent. I'm sure you could blow bubbles with it!
No, take it from the man who came back by train: there is no need for oil.
P.S.: fortunately, my beautiful friends helped me and my wife forget some of this tragedy by making us laugh at the Gentse Fieste. Thx Ward, Els and Stefaan!
20060715
Why ReDo
Whatever else they may be, computers are stupid.
I don't mean they are good for nothing - hell, they're good for keeping me employed for one - just that they're nothing but very well trained (and obviously somewhat more elaborate) ants. You tell the PC to go left, and regardles of brick walls, innocent bystanders or axe-carrying stepmothers being there, it will go left (assuming you somehow taught your computer how to go left).
You tell that machine to kill you and by all means it will try to shorten your life (sorry Asimov).
Now, I can live with that. It took me a while, but I've accepted the fact that computers are dumber than most people I know.
The real problem is in the communication: if only the stupid thing were able to understand what I mean when I'm trying to get it to do something. No really: how often haven't you been behind the wheel of one of these overgrown calculators, and yelled at it: that's not what I wanted you to do!
You know that you have typed a long document, with some pictures in it, right? Spent hours positioning the figures so they fit in the right pages, then you see spelling error somewhere, you correct it, and the son-of-a-chip does some unholiness to your layout? NOOOOOO! Or the one where you tried to set a picture as a background on your desktop, as big as possible without deformation? Have you tried googling when you are trying to remember this title of a book that you know you read last summer and was about sheep?
I don't know: I am into computers, and they sure don't always understand me. Something must have gone wrong in the Darwinian evolution of software: they're mostly just getting faster at not getting the point. Worse: nobody seems to have a proper solution. I've seen attempts alright: endless dialog boxes asking whether I'm really absolutely sure I wanted to change the startpage of my browser, features that are so well hidden that you could not accidentally (or on purpose) use them, and finally: the Elvis of dreadful protectors, the Pele of foolproof-foolishness: the undo-button.
Every modern day application has it, and, fair is fair: what an invention! The guy who thought of it (let's call him Uncle Do) is brilliant: OK, fellows, we're not smart enough to create a program that is smart enough to understand what the user will want it to do, so... we build in an option to undo the last step, for all those cases when our program 'did it again'. Nobelprize for this man!
But then came in the software-engineers, and in no time, they managed to screw up a pefectly good idea: first, we make sure the user can undo more than one step. Well, in some programs we do this, in others not (so the user can be properly frustrated, because this will obviously be the time when she will need to undo two steps), or maybe we allow the user to undo up to five steps? Or make it depend upon the memory of the computer (so that when we are working with a big, important file, this functionality unexpectedly fails to work).
But wait: there's more! We can leave the definition of a 'step' to undo to the randomness of a monkey on a typewriter, or make undo work at such blazing lack of speed that the user will press undo six times only to find a lot more work undone than he had accounted for.
After all, don't forget: 'undo' is just another piece of software, so how could we expect it to understand what the user wants?
In steps Uncle Do, fairly wealthy by now, and suggests the inevitable: we need to be able to undo the undo.
Welcome to the wonderful world of software development.
I don't mean they are good for nothing - hell, they're good for keeping me employed for one - just that they're nothing but very well trained (and obviously somewhat more elaborate) ants. You tell the PC to go left, and regardles of brick walls, innocent bystanders or axe-carrying stepmothers being there, it will go left (assuming you somehow taught your computer how to go left).
You tell that machine to kill you and by all means it will try to shorten your life (sorry Asimov).
Now, I can live with that. It took me a while, but I've accepted the fact that computers are dumber than most people I know.
The real problem is in the communication: if only the stupid thing were able to understand what I mean when I'm trying to get it to do something. No really: how often haven't you been behind the wheel of one of these overgrown calculators, and yelled at it: that's not what I wanted you to do!
You know that you have typed a long document, with some pictures in it, right? Spent hours positioning the figures so they fit in the right pages, then you see spelling error somewhere, you correct it, and the son-of-a-chip does some unholiness to your layout? NOOOOOO! Or the one where you tried to set a picture as a background on your desktop, as big as possible without deformation? Have you tried googling when you are trying to remember this title of a book that you know you read last summer and was about sheep?
I don't know: I am into computers, and they sure don't always understand me. Something must have gone wrong in the Darwinian evolution of software: they're mostly just getting faster at not getting the point. Worse: nobody seems to have a proper solution. I've seen attempts alright: endless dialog boxes asking whether I'm really absolutely sure I wanted to change the startpage of my browser, features that are so well hidden that you could not accidentally (or on purpose) use them, and finally: the Elvis of dreadful protectors, the Pele of foolproof-foolishness: the undo-button.
Every modern day application has it, and, fair is fair: what an invention! The guy who thought of it (let's call him Uncle Do) is brilliant: OK, fellows, we're not smart enough to create a program that is smart enough to understand what the user will want it to do, so... we build in an option to undo the last step, for all those cases when our program 'did it again'. Nobelprize for this man!
But then came in the software-engineers, and in no time, they managed to screw up a pefectly good idea: first, we make sure the user can undo more than one step. Well, in some programs we do this, in others not (so the user can be properly frustrated, because this will obviously be the time when she will need to undo two steps), or maybe we allow the user to undo up to five steps? Or make it depend upon the memory of the computer (so that when we are working with a big, important file, this functionality unexpectedly fails to work).
But wait: there's more! We can leave the definition of a 'step' to undo to the randomness of a monkey on a typewriter, or make undo work at such blazing lack of speed that the user will press undo six times only to find a lot more work undone than he had accounted for.
After all, don't forget: 'undo' is just another piece of software, so how could we expect it to understand what the user wants?
In steps Uncle Do, fairly wealthy by now, and suggests the inevitable: we need to be able to undo the undo.
Welcome to the wonderful world of software development.
Abonneren op:
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