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NN/g Home  AskTog ReaderMail January, 2000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ask Tog, January, 2000Ask Tog Reader Mail
Giving Software Houses Permission to Sell Crap
Now, see? That's the real trouble with lawyers. Get one alone and most of the time they turn out to be really nice guys. It's only when they get together that they create great mischief. Makes it hard to do something about it. The scam to which Chris refers is astounding in its audacity. Essentially, the software houses are attempting to buy enough legislators that they can get passed a bill that will not only enable them to keep marketing dangerously defective software, but will prevent the press and individual users from blowing the whistle when they do so. While US citizens might assume this latter provision can't be enforced since we enjoy a First Amendment right to free speech, that would be an incorrect assumption: The provisions of the Bill of Rights pertain only to freedom from government restrictions. Our Founding Fathers never envisioned the bloated, amoral multinational corporations that threaten our personal freedom today.
Reputation managers are those feedback systems some web sites employ to enable users to publish their opinions. amazon.com has the simplest of systems, enabling both users and authors to speak out on individual books. Ebay has a more proper system, in that buyers' and sellers' opinions of each other are not just reported as a series of letters, but tabulated into a "score" that can easily drive a bad-faith user from the site entirely. Both these managers share one characteristic: They are reporting on "the little guy." Even though a book might be published by a major publishing house, no one is picking on Random House or Addison-Wesley, they are picking on Joe Blow or Jane MacGillicutty. While Random House or Addison-Wesley might be adversely affected if a book is panned, this country publishes around 10,000 books a year. A few bad reviews aren't going to affect the bottom line. A much more interesting experiment is etoys.com's reputation manager. Here, users can directly attack prized brand names of major corporations. This is a really powerful tool for consumers, since we crusty old-timers can find out from real-live kids which toys "rock" and which toys "suck." However, such scores could make a mess of etoys attempt to balance their inventory and it is not clear whether Corporate America is ready to let consumers "tell it like it is." I found that the incidence of reviews on etoys to be rather uneven. For example, two out of every three toys I checked on their "best sellers" list had reviews (most were glowing). However, I was unable to find even a single review on any of the "Holiday Clearance Sale" toys. (I did not examine each and every one, but I looked at enough to discern the pattern.) Coincidence? It could be, since these poor sellers may not have had many people interested in reviewing them. But it could also be that the reviews had been stripped off. (Nowhere could I find etoys' policy on its reputation manager.) If so, it brings the entire system into serious question. My prediction on reputation managers is that they will prove honest, forthright, and invaluable on sites that link you to "little guy" products and "little guy" merchants. Conversely, despite what etoys is apparently attempting to do, I expect that as soon as the reputations of brand names of major corporations come into play, the reputation manager will soon become disreputable as sites manipulate the information to their own—and their precious suppliers'—ends. In the end, consumers may have to continue to depend on independent voices, such as that of Consumer Reports, to get honest, factual information on the products of our increasingly corporate world. I would give you the URL of Consumer Reports' website, but it is a rip-off. Better to buy and save the magazine than to pay for the same information twice. (Reader Erik Neu points out that you can subscribe for $3.00 a month. So you can join, get the info you need, then cancel your membership.) The one way out would be a reputation manager that was not hosted by any one site, but which lay between you and the sites you visit. Such a manager could truly be independent. It would also help solve the problem of "scams," since the manager would let you know, independent of the site, that either the entire site or a product on it was a scam. Such a reputation database could be further extended to email, marking or filtering incoming spam that, prior to your logging on, has developed a reputation for being junk.
If you must kill a lawyers, please pass over Chris Sandberg, above. The user interface to Linux sucks since it isn't one; it's two. And two automatically sucks. On the other hand, Linux does have the bastards on the run, and I can't help but applaud that. (Besides, the interface to UNIX, all 27 of them, suck, too.) I didn't intend, when I sat down to answer these letters, to climb quite so high on my soapbox, but now that I'm up here... We face a grave and unprecedented situation today when it comes to intellectual property. Over the last 100 years the corporations have made it their business to squeeze all the little guys out and take over. Patent laws were intended to protect inventors; today, independent inventors are a thing of the past. Patents are owned by corporations. (Yes, I read about that guy who fought the auto companies over the delayed-action windshield wipers they just blatantly stole from him. But did you also read that the only way he could pursue them was to sell his rights to another big corporation with pockets deep enough for the fight?) Copyright used to be the life of the author + 50 years, allowing us writers to pass on our legacy to our children. Now, it's a blanket 135 years, because corporations don't die. And if you want to see your book in a bookstore, you don't publish it yourself, unless you are highly motivated. Instead, you go to a publisher, and they get 90%+ of the proceeds. Trademarks, of course, go hand in hand with being a corporation, not a little guy. Computer technology, while helping the corporations strengthen their stranglehold on intellectual property, have also been a fresh breeze of liberation. Jason has mentioned only the latest schism—Linux. Before that, there was the explosion of MP3 audio, which is scaring the bejesus out of the record industry. Before that, and for a long time, we've had the newsgroups, anathema to the corporate plan. Would it be healthy if all intellectual property rights were to disappear? Probably not. So much of what we enjoy today, from major motion pictures to the computer you are using, is the result of years of effort by hundreds of people, costing tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. But these bursts of freedom keep industry from grossly overcharging (even more than they are), knowing that if the price gets too high, people are going to download and burn their own copies, resulting in zero revenue. It's going to get really interesting when we truly have high-bandwidth internet connections and can download a two-hour "liberated" movie in one or two minutes. A couple years ago, the studios were charging $70 for film on VHS tape. Now it's $25 for a high-quaility DVD. Do I hear $10 for an HDTV DVD when I could download and burn it myself for $5? Last month, Jeff Kandt reported in Cursor Keys Cursed that the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines waffled on how cursor keys should act during a manual selection process. The Guidelines specified the proper selection rules, then suggested that if it acted a different—and decidedly brain-dead—way that somehow that would be all right too. In the ensuing time, we've tracked down the source of this aberrant behavior to which the Guidelines referred, namely, Apple's own "TextEdit." While most developers have had enough sense to not use this particular aspect of the code, at least two have: Eudora and Apple. I open the issue again because, if you are writing guidelines, you have an ethical obligation to write good guidelines. Writing defective ones just because your company currently has a piece of code with a bug in it doesn't fly. Apple has had several bugs in the Finder ever since 1983, but, until the latest Guidelines, none of us ever thought to make them into features. For example, the Guidelines, since the early 1980s, have always called for the Shift key to continue a selection, while the Command key (equivalent to Control on Windows machines) was to be used for discontinuous selections. Every application I know of on the Macintosh follows this guideline with the exception of the Finder, which uses the Shift key for discontinuous selections and does nothing with the Command key. For the last 16 years, Mac users have had to carry around two sets of rules for one of the most basic activities on the computer. 16 years! Why not just write it into the guidelines after all that time? Because it is a bug, not a feature. It would be equivalent to having a freeway between San Francisco and Chicago where you drove on the right, all except that 20 mile section near Kansas City where you drove on the left. It wouldn't matter if that freeway was open 500 years, the instructions for that freeway should never be, "drive on the side of the road where you see other cars going your way." And another thing: Just because it is an old bug doesn't mean it can be ignored. Every time there is a new release of the software, you should put back into the system every single screwup your users have been putting up with. Every one. And label them Priority One, because that's what they are. Be radical about reporting the bugs, but be gentle on your users in correcting them. For example, the Finder should not suddenly no longer allow users to use the Shift key for discontinous selection. Instead, the Command key should work also. That would overcome the kinds of errors users are making in pressing the Command key in vain, while not screwing up the behavior users have come to know and hate.
And another on the same subject:
Technology reviewers are not, in general, fattened cats surrounded by cool gear in high-tech workplaces, contrary to our image of same. Instead, they tend to be independent writers living from job to job, just trying to get by on a lot less money than most of us. That's one reason. The other is who they work for. Magazines have the same trouble as etoys and other similar websites will face: Their income comes primarily from the very people they are reviewing. Talk about conflict of interest! Put a copy of Consumer Reports alongside any technology magazine you want and look at the immediate a pervasive difference in tone. Consumer Reports expects the worst, and often finds it. Computer, Audio, and Video magazines expect the very best and are rarely disappointed. The web at least opens up the possibility of nonprofit, ad-free zine that could report the true facts on technology, one with a testing budget that would eventually rival Consumer Reports, but without the overhead of printing and distribution. Anyone want to put together a business plan?
I meant in no way to let Microsoft off the hook, only to hang a bunch of other rascals up there with them.
While I think the argument that a font or any other interface feature should be "stripped of features redundant" is specious, I have learned since first taking the position that sans serif fonts are bad, that a special case exists when said redundances are so badly distorted as to be unrecognizable. Such, I am informed, is the case with serifs on today's crude screens. Two font designers who have worked both in the world of newspapers and computers, Vlad V. Golovach and George Olsen, have taken the time to explain to me in exhaustive detail exactly why serifs don't work on low-resolution computer displays whereas they do in newspapers which, while notoriously bad, don't hold a candle to the crudeness of computer screens. (A third writer from UCLA, who shall remain nameless, seemed to share their opinion, but only imparted the direct information that I am a fool. This seemed only tangentially relevant and was, in any case, stale news.) These arguments have caused me to reverse my previous "serifs at all costs!" position until such time as we have high-resolution displays, at which point I will be back out in front of the serif parade once more. (Grasping at straws, I was even prepared to put forth the argument that the muddying effect of seris could be offset by anti-aliasing the font. But anti-aliasing softens the edges, and soft edges definitely reduce readability.) I would really like to see someone to do some serious large-scale studies of relative readability of various fonts, serif and sans, and then I would like to see those results codified in the form of standard, cross-platform, high-readability fonts. In the meantime, I'm concluding my discussion of fonts.
Microsoft engineers have always apparently had a hate-hate relationship with the mouse. From the beginning, their software has evidenced a concentration on the keyboard, such a heavy concentration that the mouse interface has sucked. Their prejudice has been accompanied by a total disregard (or, more likely ignorance of) Fitts' Law, resulting in an interface seemingly conceived to slow the mouse user down. With such a defective interface, it is little wonder that the MSDOS/WIndows nerds "discovered" that mice suck. Until Microsoft abandons its keyboard fixation and adds a true mouse interface, the keyboard, under Windows, will continue to be superior. You would have a similar situation in the real world if Ford had mounted the steering wheel behind the driver, instead of in front. Having to drive with your hand bent around behind you might well have proven so difficult that the other leading contender for steering automobiles, reins, might well have won. I suppose we should be grateful that Charles Simonyi, et. al, weren't alive back then.
You may add me to the list of nerds who used to bemoan the lack of a two-button mouse on the Mac. Now I have a Kensington two-button mouse on the Mac. Making it standard is long overdue. It's no longer 1981, when people were drawing Etch-A-Sketch art and writing half-page memos. Apple has, of course, always had a multi-button mouse. It's just that the other buttons—Command, Option, and Shift—were on the keyboard. Now, instead of adding a second button for use with pop-up menus, they've squandered the Control key. Foolish. As for hierarchical menus, it is true that a linear menu on a menu bar anchored to the top or bottom of the display (as is done on the Mac, but not on Windows) is significantly faster. On the other hand, the pop-up menus appearing now tend to be context-sensitive, rather than being simple substitutes for what might be found above. Such menus greatly expand the range of commands that can be offered the user, a necessity with today's complex applications. Looking forward, both Apple and Wintel should get their square-fingered paws on a Palm Pilot and figure out where pointing-device interfaces should already be. Even though Palm is somehow ignoring a lot of the middle-ground of gesture that lies between simple pointing and writing, the lilting freedom of direct, lightweight pointing is awesome. Vinyl Records and Vacuum Tubes
"Music power," I still maintain, is a scam. Continuous RMS is the only honest measure of an amplifier's output. True, music power does perhaps more accurately reflect what an amp might do in "real life," since normally the capacitors have a chance to charge back up between crescendos. However, there is no way the music trade would be so interested in pushing "music power" vs. RMS if "music power" came out to half the number of watts, instead of twice the number. And I will still insist that if it pulls 75 watts out of the wall, there's no way it's pushing 200 watts into the room. As for vinyl, while it may not by "lossy," it is most certainly "gainy": it gains wow, it gains flutter, and it gains tens of thousands of defects even before the first play. I would much rather accept the theoretical limitations of CDs than the glaringly obvious limitations of vinyl. I agree with you that DVDs are also a compromise, but surely you don't favor VHS over them. Perhaps you do favor Laserdisks. Laserdisks, however, are far from perfect and, perhaps more importantly, are dying. They are unlikely to achieve the kind of cult following that vinyl has, and when our current players die, we will be hardpressed to replace them. Fortunately, both CDs and today's DVDs will soon be supplanted. The two new DVD audio systems both have a high enough bit rate that they will effectively be lossless. On the video front, Pioneer has a new prototype HDTV DVD system using a purple—not blue—laser. It will be capable of storing four hours of HDTV quality video on a single DVD. Unless they screw it up, the disk's total capacity and transfer rate is sufficient to store high-definition video without visible artifacts. Finally, tube amplifiers: I also like the softness and warmth of tube amplification, but at what cost? Tubes, particularly power tubes, quickly lose their original specs. And these guys are selling their tubes for perhaps ten times the original prices. Am I expected to spend several hundred dollars a year just in normal maintenance on an amplifier in order to keep it up to spec? And what am I getting for my money? Lets take a look at the creme de la creme of tube amplifiers, the new McIntosh Limited Edition MC2000. According to McIntosh's ads, it offers "a monumentally-powerful 130 watt/channels" with a "minimalist .5%" total harmonic distortion. I can show you Radio Shack amplifiers with that much output and 1/10th the total harmonic distortion figure. And you won't have to sell your car to raise money for one. At the same time, it cannot be denied that tube amps have that "certain something." And, in all fairness, a reasonable amount of that extremely high total harmonic distortion figure is probably the "certain something" we're looking for—distortion isn't necessarily all bad. However, I maintain that you could build a solid-state amp that would mimic that softness and warmth, you could do it for a lot less money, and you could do it in a product with zero maintenance. This need for destructively-hot tube amplifiers is nothing but fashion. And then again, I must confess I drool every time I see a McIntosh. Always have. And I've had a love affair with tubes ever since I took apart my first radio back in the 1940s. I just don't like having to pay $50.00 for a $5.00 tube just because the other rubes don't know any better. If you know how I can get a McIntosh cheap, along with a couple boxes of tubes, be sure and let me know. As this reader soon attested, simulating a tube amplifier can be done:
In Defense of Traffic Engineers
And...
And when have I ever avoided being just plain silly? Besides, I've only blamed traffic engineers for the mischief traffic engineers have caused. They are hardly responsible for our unbridled love affair with love affairs that have resulted in the massive overcrowding responsible for most things wrong in our countries, including water shortages, energy prices, air pollution, etc. Nonetheless, their bone-headed moves have added to my general discomfort. Tapani, I think, pointed out the crux of the matter:
Such a viewpoint not only ignores the user completely in its focus "on the greater good," it leads to just the sort of patronizing attitude to which I'm objecting. Overpopulation is putting pressure on everyone to make life more restrictive, but where are the checks and balances? Where are the advocates for removing traffic lights in these planning sessions? Who is there in the engineering meetings to champion the changing of double-lines into broken lines? Several years ago, I read in the newspaper that, in a small town in the Midwest, they were removing a traffic light. They'd decided it was a great bother and they didn't need it. The story was circulated throughout the USA and probably the world. Why? Because it was a man-bites-dog story. It was unusual. It was unheard-of. When I visited Moscow a few years ago, I saw hundreds of controlled intersections, complete with lights. The Soviet Union, having to put its entire population to work, had liberally sprinkled such intersections throughout their major cities, but had never automated the lights. Instead, a worker would stand in an elevated phone booth overlooking the traffic and manually switch the lights. By the time I visited, the workers were gone and the lights were out. Strangely enough, the traffic moved just fine, and I experienced a sense of freedom I had almost forgotten. Traffic engineering has brought us the modern highway system, with its limited access cloverleafs. The roads are safe, fast (except for the effects of overpopulation), and a pleasure to drive. Traffic engineering has also brought us restrictive roadway markings and ridiculously long light cycles. It's time these engineers started thinking a little more about the suffering individual and a little less about "what's good for us." Alcatraz for Systems Engineers
When San Francisco's notorious Alcatraz Prison closed back in the 1960s, it was suggested a good future use would be as a sort of Ellis Island for migrating New Yorkers. Like New York's Ellis Island, that welcomed so many generations of immigrants, Alcatraz would be a place where hardened New Yorkers could learn to speak English and gradually acclimate to a softer, more polite society. Sadly, the plan never reached fruition. Perhaps it is time to revive it for a certain subset of systems engineers. Alcatraz could become a safe haven where these introverts could gradually, over time, be introduced to normal human beings, where they could learn in a safe, supportive environment exactly how destructive their cutsy little-boy vocabularies can be. They might be shown videotapes of Carl's niece cowering in fear. Or the woman who, early in the life of the Macintosh, saw the Mac system-failure bomb icon and ran screaming from the house, yelling for the neighbors to call 911. As for the old prison block, that might be as good place to house the college professors that allowed these individuals to graduate so plug-ignorant. The 10¢ Light Bulb that could have Saved a Ship
A few. Unlike the Titanic, with its 1200-something lives lost, only 51 people died aboard the Andrea Doria and Stockholm that summer night in 1956. However, I knew two of those people; they were the parents of a good friend. They were killed instantly when the Stockholm plunged into the Andrea Doria's side and his life was changed forever. People ignore human interface defects, no matter how serious the consequences may be. And when the consequences do occur, they blame whatever person happened to be at the controls at the time. Around fifteen years ago in San Francisco, and armored car driver drove off without locking the back door of the truck. The locals helped themselves to around $150,000 that fell off the truck. Another 10¢ lightbulb, tied to a switch on the back door could have prevented that one. Every single report I read on the event blamed the driver; no one blamed the idiots that didn't provide a door-ajar warning. The almost meltdown at Three Mile Island was a result of "human error." At least those people "got it"; that event caused a major shift at the Atomic Energy Commission and the realization of the importance of human factors. |
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Giving Software Houses 
