Posts by Terry 6 5608 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Here on El Reg we get a 10 minute edit slot. Long enough to realise that what we wrote was ambiguous, or wrong. Or just porely speld, if wee bovah.
On Twitter they do threads, so the word limit is slightly mythical. But that means that delete and retrype doesn't work when yore spelling or you're punctuatshun let's you down. Because the the topic and thread gets even more jumbled than usual. A 10 minute edit slot would be useful.
That assumes that said students aren't introduced to something provided for them through an institutional license, by a teacher who has themselves grown up with that bit of kit. FOSS software always has the disadvantages that; no one is marketing it, no one has much of a track record of using it (a bit Catch 22) and more often than not it's emulating something that's already established.
I've used Inkscape for odd bits and bobs for years.
I can't remember what I used before and by and large it does all I could ever want for my limited uses.
But it does have idiosyncrasies that make using it a bit harder than need be. I can't compare to other s/w. Maybe they're the same.
Things like; the drawing space ("page") is by default a small rectangle within a larger one. Which has to be zoomed in to fill the programme window, but doesn't quite fill it. And it's default orientation is portrait, while my tablet is landscape. But changing the orientation is not obvious. (The option is buried under "File-Properties if my memory serves me correctly). The " resize page to selection" command is in edit, if my memory serves me correctly- but that changes the page size to a selected object, as far as I can see. You can't select the workspace and resize the page to fit that.
And tablet sensitivity is a default to "off" and even more difficult to locate ( luckily this only needs to be done once.)
These things need to be more obviously ( intuitively) located.
On the whole it's a brilliant job by these volunteer enthusiasts. But it does suffer that usability effect; developers are seldom the best designers. (Come to that, half the time neither are designers imo) What's obvious to them may not be so logical to the average software user.
The "where would you expect to find the page orientation command" type of question may not get asked.
Instead a good engineering decision is made that groups x feature with y, because they're of a class. But this may not be the way that the actual end user classifies these things..- maybe, arguably, it should be in edit. Just as maybe "select al in layer" could arguable be in the layers menu, ( Doesn't Photoshop Elements do that - anything to do with layers is in the layers menu, at least in my ageing version 9).
Which is not to take anything away from this brilliant product.
"Allow" and "deny" aren't actually shorter. Both are 2 syllable which is longer than a single syllable utterance.
Arguably, too, the syllables are harder to make. The "w" and "y" sound both require a bit more physical effort than "k" or "t"*. Normally I'd check this with my daughter, she's the expert. But currently she's reassigned to working on a NHS ward for the duration.
Before anyone poo poohs the idea of effort, humans tend to naturally and unconsciously avoid high effort sounds and words. We tend to use simple words with simple sounds in our speech. And since speech production is largely unconscious this is a hard one to change. (Think about it. You don't actively select which words you utter, normally)
This is the thing. I'd have no problem with this if it stood on a firm foundation. Words that are used negatively about minorities are best avoided. In reality though the descriptors black and white long predate their use for people who are. or are not, white. From before most white people were aware of "black" people. Black in quotes, because the skin colour was applied to the word rather than the other way round. "Black" people aren't mostly black. The word was applied to brown people, and probably by white people at that. Come to that, while white people are seen as white, a pasty pink colour would be a better description for the most part. And the pejorative use is more tied to the idea of daylight good, dark night bad than that of colour adjectives per se..
That definitely seems to be a deliberate tactic in some councils. I used to work in Hackney ( pre satnav) and there were certain buildings I couldn't get to in the car. I could see them, a mere 50 yds to the right* (say).. But the road would be a No right Turn. As would the next and the next and the next for a mile or two. Then there would suddenly be a compulsory left turn that took me back the way I'd come from, in a parallel road, And all the (now left) turnings, that would take me back to where I wanted to actually be would end with a compulsory Left turn, that would take me back down past all the roads I'd already passed........
I still wake up sweating from nightmares about this. Decades later.
*Before you wonder, there were double yellow lines everywhere, so I couldn't just park and walk either..
Yes and no. Judging by the pages of Private Eye there are definitely a fair number of councils where Cllr. Thingummy owns a development company, or his her spouse or their brother does. And said Cllr seems to be able to make sure that planning decisions to,say, build a block of ugly flats in front of a natural beauty spot get through despite much of the town protesting. Said Cllr usually getting re-elected because of membership of the party that is always in power......
There's a rub. Zoom have played fast and loose with their security and data harvesting to the point that reputable concerns are very wary of it. It was going to be a way to connect my wife and her colleagues with their classes for some face-to-face teaching and parent meetings during lockdown. But it's been prevented because of the poor security.
Meanwhile MS are advertising their service on TV a lot. And now this from Google.
This was my thought too. Smart devices are, by and large, consumer commodities. Consumers buy it for what it does. Not how it does it. They don't know the first thing about how a fridge makes stuff cold or a microwave makes it hot. This is not stupidity, this is not needing to know ( or not knowing they need to know). So, Have a smart device, plug in smart device, type in some letters, numbers and an annoying password, expect smart device to keep working until said smart device bites the dust or gets replaced with a newer shiny.
They do not expect the makers to be able to roll up and put a bullet into its head when it suits them.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not (just) low bidding that gives crapita etc. so many unjustifiable contracts. But also officials wanting to use a familiar name, and maybe contact team.
( I get a teacher pension. And to be fair, it's been unwieldy but they haven't been incompetent in this as far as I'm aware).
Mid 80s. Bought a second hand Renault 20. A bit of rust on the wing turned out to be following the line of a rubber seal on the inside that trapped moisture. i.e. rusted through.
Never trusted Renault since that piece of crappy design. That and the sealed beam headlights that costed a small ransom to replace when a bulb went.
A further irony. In the old days a panel would be pushed out where it was dented. A bit of paint and done.
Now it's repair garage assessor sucks in teeth. "That'll be a whole new sill, - can't push them out they're made with a double skin. That bumper will need replacing, then spray to match and shade in with that side panel. £2000 and I can fit you in two weeks on Wednesday, possibly.
And yes I've been through this a couple of times over the last few years. Daughters and wife scraping cars on concrete bollards or low level islands at petrol stations etc. (To be fair, impossible to see from inside the car).
Each time a bit of a scrape has turned out to be a major engineering task requiring three blokes who normally repair oil platforms and one who paints the Forth Bridge to repair it.
It's not all about you. (Nor even about me for that matter).
There's an aggressiveness about your assertions that is quite surprising - as if you are defending something.
However.
This is about what suits the vast generality of users.
What you do with your software ( if you create programmes at any level) is your business - up to the point where you want the ordinary member of the public to use it.
And then you need to match to ordinary human behaviour (needs) unless you are specifically designing for users who are different.
So, what you call "so called " needs are so called because the users do actually need that stuff.
And I use the terms "software" and "UI" quite generally - since I spent a great deal of time a few years ago working on a redraft with a professional who'd designed and drafted a really important data sharing application that was almost unusable - because she'd filled it full of jargon terms that either meant nothing to most users, or worse, meant something different. And then made completing it convoluted and confusing.
Variously
to have to have something,
a requirement, necessary duty, or obligation:
It is a requirement that a UI fits the expected behaviours held by the vast majority of users.
A developer has an obligation to meet the expected behaviours of those users ( unless there is a very good reason why not).
Obligation is rather subjective.
The fact that there are some exceptions does not, in the slightest, negate the point. People for the most part expect a response. Designing for the general user means you need to work to that standard.
And if, as a designer, you are not within that standard group you need to either find out how that group responds or gtfo of that line of work.
With caution. Vulnerable hourly paid staff may know which way the wind's blowing and want to be agreeable to whatever half-crazed inhuman piece of confusion the development team puts in front of them.
"Yes I really like the way the instruction says <move the slider switch to toggle on or off> with all the switches on the first page going to the left to be off and on the second page they go left to be on."
(And tbh I'm not sure I've exaggerated this).
Always. The spec designer has built in expectations ( assumptions) about what people want/need/expect/will do.
The people who write the interface will carry their own assumptions.
Possibly the testers have a shared understanding because ( see previous post) they were dragooned from a shared hallway or were recruited from the general public by a market research agency who generally get people many of whom are interested in that product. Especially if the "incentive" pay and the venue convenience aren't that great. it's amazing how often market researcher companies actually make getting on to do the research difficult - a big disincentive to the disinterested users.
I'd suggest the best testing would be done by the sort of user who thinks the screen is the computer and the big square box is just there to rest the computer on and connect things to.
Worst Pizza I've ever had was 25 years ago. Iin Edinburgh In an Italian restaurant. During the festival. Took 40 minutes to arrive. Topping was unrecognisable. Base was burnt. Waiter not interested. I marched into the kitchen and dumped it onto the pass, burnt side up. That got results.
That's not how humans function. We are designed to seek confirmation feed back. You ask for something, the other person says OK. They don't just hand it to you. If the computer screen doesn't say it's doing something, that implies it is not doing anything.
I've often suspected that computer human interfaces (UI) are designed by people who aren't very good with people. Then tested on people who like computers, ( which is why they do testing of them) not people.
If you really want to test an idea for a UI design ask a retired double-glazing salesman, a politician or a con man ( pretty much the same thing tbh) - they understand, intuitively, how people function or they fail at the job.
I'd have to agree. Once a test of proficiency becomes a gateway it ceases to serve its function, because all effort will be directed at the test, not the learning.. This starts at age 6 with early years settings required to reach various "early learning goals" irrespective of where the kids start from. Schools with lots of kids from deprived backgrounds/poor English skills ( which is mostly native English speakers with poor language models btw) etc. need to be brought up to the test level. And the only way to do that is to teach to the test. Then there's tests at 7 and so it goes. SATS at 11, GCSE, A level, even degrees. And driving tests of course. You learn to pass, not to drive.
My VM connection is (usually) brilliant.
VM customer service is variable and some aspects are grim to the point of hostility. Generally if you speak to someone sensible they will get problems sorted out. But at the policy level ugh. There's is the web site with a Help page that has a "Contact us" link that takes you to a FAQ page that directs you to the Help page.
Theirs s is the web mail page that won't let you mark several emails together as "Spam" saying that they are "newsletters" and you can only mark them as spam one at a time. There's are the filter rules that won't accept partial addresses, so that you can block bitcoin@spammerxyz.com but not b1tc0in@spammerxyz etc.(and by the way theirs is the service that is totally unable or unwilling to filter this shit)
Yes. And most of the variations are generic and known, which means that automated testing through the pathways ought to be sufficient to root out the commonly supplied machine combinations. particularly since the update should be designed to work robustly with these issues. And in theory it is, which is why most systems aren't wrecked most of the time. There may well be " 5 (bios) revisions just for this single manufacturer's laptop model" but the Microsoft update should be able to patch the OS without falling over minor BIOS changes, otherwise no update could ever be permitted because there would be so little chance that they work. In fact most do work fine most of the time. But many get caught by poor updates from time to time. This is not a matter of the number of different combinations of system. It's a matter of poor testing for direct function on mostly fairly standard items, irrespective of revision numbers. Update failures are seldom if ever reported as affecting small subsets of otherwise identical devices.
The excuse in the past, supported over the years by commentards here when I've said such things ( down voted lots) is that they can't test all the different combinations of stuff.( Upvoted much).
My response was always that most people aren't techies, so didn't customise their computers and used fairly standard set-ups - a handful of PC makers, with a handful of lines each- most of which were pretty similar, so they should have been able to pick up almost all of the many quite appalling errors before people's computers stopped working (down voted much).
But I stand by this. Any upgrade to Windows ought to be able to handle the hardware on all well known brands ( because they're well..... - so predictable) with all the standard graphics and sound cards (ditto), HDDs/SSDs and connectivity. If there's some obscure hardware out there it's for their manufacturers to ensure they provide MS with updated drivers etc. Dammit they churn this stuff out month after months. There shouldn't be any combination of commonly used hardware they don't know about- and they should even know how these devices interact with each other and the PCs. In fact they should be aware of the pitfalls while they write the stuff. Before it even gets turned into usable code.
Same here.
Desktop has a second internal drive with a partition just for images.
And an external USB harddrive ditto. And rotated with a second external one from time to time.
Because where computers are concerned there's no such thing as paranoia. Too much value on a rather fragile ecosystem.
are one of the dwindling group of Windows Mixed Reality users,
ftfy
One of the massive majority of Windows actual Reality users who saw no point to that pile of useless shit and were mildly inconvenienced by its existence making the Start menu and My Computer that bit more messy and disorganised ( or taking longer to knock it back into shape..)
This has been the aim of much of the IT industry for decades. The "walled garden".
They provide the users with a series of "apps" that they believe the users would really, really want ( because the marketing dept. told them that). With the aim of discouraging users looking elsewhere.
AOL might well have invented the idea- trying to keep hold of web surfers by creating their own internet.
Google pretty much relies on this. Android-Chrome-docs-mail-Drive (cloud storage)-etc.
Microsoft, which had accidentally got this, has been desperately trying to hold on to it, with varying degrees of success ever since.
Disagree. Those who are convinced that they are being conspired against will not believe the conspirators i.e. anyone who wants the things, because we're all in it .
Conspiricism is impervious to reason, because it mistrusts anyone who disagrees with it, on principle.
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