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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:
> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>
>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>
>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>
>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>
>>
> Shame that we can't agree.
Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything. The
world would be pretty dull if we did. :)
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 8/5/2015 6:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>
>> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>>
>>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>>
>>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>>
>>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>>
>>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>>
>>>
>> Shame that we can't agree.
>
> Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything. The
> world would be pretty dull if we did. :)
>
Don't worry it will soon be. :-P
--
Regards
Stephen
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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 19:06:20 +0100, Stephen wrote:
> On 8/5/2015 6:56 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:18:42 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> On 8/5/2015 5:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I hope that we can agree to disagree.
>>>>>
>>>>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>>>>
>>>> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>>>>
>>>> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Shame that we can't agree.
>>
>> Indeed it is, but that's OK, we don't have to agree on everything. The
>> world would be pretty dull if we did. :)
>>
>>
>
> Don't worry it will soon be. :-P
LOL
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 05/08/2015 05:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:07:28 +0100, Stephen wrote:
>> I rail against the "dumbing down" I see happening.
>
> It is't "dumbing down" - it's designing so it isn't rocket science.
>
> A fine distinction, but an important one. :)
Way back when, if you wanted to write computer programs, you practically
needed a PhD in electrical engineering, propositional logic, Boolean
algebra and what-not.
Then home computers with BASIC came along, and suddenly any idiot could type
PRINT 4.5 + 7.9
without having to know or care that the ASCII character codes for "4",
"." and "5" have to be converted from decimal to binary - and better
yet, into floating-point representation. And that to perform the
addition, you have to denormalise one operand so that they both have the
same exponent, and then add the mantissas, and then renormalise the
result. (And that addition almost certainly required more than one ADC
op-code, because the mantissa was definitely wider than 8 bits.) And
then transform that back to decimal, with some suitable number of places
of significance based on the actual width of the mantissa. And then
transform THAT back into ASCII codes. And then compute the correct
address in the framebuffer to write those code to make the VIC II
display the text on the screen.
No, you just type the damn thing, and it works.
Suddenly you didn't need to be a super-nerd to write computer programs.
(And you didn't have to memorise ASCII tables or VIC II register addresses.)
It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an
internal combustion engine actually works.
Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
details"? Where do you draw the line?
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On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:51:12 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
> details"? Where do you draw the line?
Back in the olden days, computing resources suffered from scarcity - you
had to be concerned about every byte of memory you used, and often
implementations of data structures included obscure bitfields in order to
conserve memory.
These days, computing resources *generally* are not considered scarce,
yet programmers generally behave as though they are, and implement code
in that way, at the expense of a user interaction model that users can
actually use.
There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into
consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really* important
(games), you get both high performance *and* good user interaction design
- at least in games that are successful. Game players have plenty of
choices for where to spend their time, and if a UI is too complex,
they'll move onto something that entertains rather than something that
frustrates them.
That's not "dumbing down," that's using intelligence to design a user
interaction model that users aren't going to run away screaming from.
It's smart business.
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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Am 06.08.2015 um 03:40 schrieb Jim Henderson:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:51:12 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
>> details"? Where do you draw the line?
>
> Back in the olden days, computing resources suffered from scarcity - you
> had to be concerned about every byte of memory you used, and often
> implementations of data structures included obscure bitfields in order to
> conserve memory.
>
> These days, computing resources *generally* are not considered scarce,
> yet programmers generally behave as though they are, and implement code
> in that way, at the expense of a user interaction model that users can
> actually use.
They do? Srsly?
Last time I was in the software development business, conserving
resources is exactly what programmers absolutely, positively /don't/
these days.
Except for, indeed, ...
> There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into
> consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really* important
> (games), you get both high performance *and* good user interaction design
> - at least in games that are successful. Game players have plenty of
> choices for where to spend their time, and if a UI is too complex,
> they'll move onto something that entertains rather than something that
> frustrates them.
... game developers.
(Them, and embedded systems developers.)
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On 8/5/2015 9:51 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
> It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an
> internal combustion engine actually works.
>
> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
> details"? Where do you draw the line?
I think that is the crux of the problem.
I don't have an answer.
--
Regards
Stephen
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> There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into
> consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really* important
> (games), you get both high performance *and* good user interaction design
> - at least in games that are successful. Game players have plenty of
> choices for where to spend their time, and if a UI is too complex,
> they'll move onto something that entertains rather than something that
> frustrates them.
What annoys me most (as a user) with game menu UIs, actually any UI that
involves different "screens", is when switches from one screen to
another takes more than an instant for no reason. In this day and age,
if my fingers are waiting for your code to catch up then you're doing it
wrong. Take Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3, the whole menu system is
*painful* to use, if it was instant then it would feel like a totally
different game to interact with and I'd be far more inclined to spend
more time with it.
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> I have a friend who knows someone at Microsoft involved in this - his
> comment (the friend of a friend) basically was "we disclose pretty much
> exactly what we do in the privacy policy - so I'm not sure what the
> problem is. How do you provide services like the ones in Cortana
> *without* gathering private information, and how do you disclose that
> without it sounding Orwellian?" While I'm not a fan of Microsoft, he's
> got a point. Google and Amazon also do the same thing, but there's no
> significant outcry over what they're doing (though arguably, there is
> some, particularly in Linux communities).
That's probably good enough justification for MS that the risk is low.
Most people use Apple and Google mobile products that harvest plenty of
data, it would be strange if all those people rejected Windows doing the
same.
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>> It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how an
>> internal combustion engine actually works.
>>
>> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant implementation
>> details"? Where do you draw the line?
I would say you provide the information to allow the user to do what is
expected in normal situations. In the past it was expected a car might
not start at some point, not anymore. Therefore there is no need for a
user to know how to diagnose an engine that won't start (beyond being
told there's no fuel left!).
Or take a photocopier. It's still expected that paper might get jammed
somewhere, so there is provision to explain to the user how to open the
correct panel/drawer to unjam the paper. The user doesn't need to know
how it works to do that.
If everyone took the time to learn how everything worked that they used
we'd have a world full of curious engineers and nobody with any time to
do other tasks :-)
> I think that is the crux of the problem.
> I don't have an answer.
The difficulty with software like MS Office it is used by a huge range
of people with very different requirements. My mum wants to type a
letter and struggles to change the line spacing to make it look right.
My gf wants to make a form in Word with boxes for people to check and
type in. I want a complex workbook in Excel with macros. Designing a UI
that works well for all those people cannot be easy.
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