I've been following with great interest a series of articles centred around what has become one of the most ubiquitous features of modern OS design: the shutdown dialog.
Joel Spolsky started it all off with his review of Windows Vista's take on the feature, which looks like this:
He comes up with reasons for every single one of XP's shutdown options being superfluous and recommends a single log off button, named "b'bye".
When you click b'bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn't already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer.
Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don't bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.
Granted, Microsoft's new OS does take the idea of 'user choice' a little too far with "Switch User", "Log Off", "Lock", "Restart", "Sleep", "Hibernate" and "Shut Down" all listed in a bizarrely ordered menu, accessed from a little button next to other buttons which repeat the "Shut Down" and "Lock" options.
That said, I'm certain that this provision of user choice is more a result of bad design than of any particular desire to give users control over their machines. The fact is, I can think of defensible reasons for each of these options. The reason is, it's my computer and I'll do what I want with it.
The Apple approach
Arno came along to defend the concept of fewer options, citing his work at Apple. Apparently, Mac OS X only has "Restart", "Sleep" and "Shut Down" options. But Arno wasn't even happy with this.
How often do you need to manually set your computer to Sleep? I just close the lid of my MacBook and it goes to sleep: a simple mechanical, physical interaction: no need for a software command.
I'd always been somewhat wary of software engineers who 'decided' that a feature wasn't neccesary because you could bend down and press a physical button instead. Sure, in some situations it may well be true that there's already a mechanical way to perform a task, but — especially in the world of remote access — this cannot always be guaranteed. I believe that it's a battle between optimistic practicality, and what is 'right'. What is 'right' is that users should have full control of an OS that they are running.
I was, however, dismayed to learn that Arno doesn't agree with this, either.
Some will argue in fact that I sometimes go too far in my quest to simplify. I frequently argue that it is the job of the software designer to make choices on behalf of the user. That's what designing is all about.
I hate when software designers make choices on behalf of the user, unless they provide a way for the user to overrule that choice. It's what Microsoft does and, as I decided several months ago, it's infuriating.
Microsoft Mess
Speaking of Microsoft, Moishe Lettvin decided to jump on the bandwagon with a reply piece explaining to Joel how the Vista shutdown feature was designed.
It's a mess, to say the least, with a tangled mess of concurrent development on various badly-named trees of products. Microsoft is falling victim to Gates's and Ballmer's dream of complete software unity.
Allow me to quote Moishe:
In small programming projects, there's a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.
In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository — among other problems, the infrastructure just won't support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.
So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.
The end result of all this is what finally shipped: the lowest common denominator, the simplest and least controversial option.
This is backed up by the evidence given on Vista's wiki article as to just how many 'cool' new features were eventually scrubbed, leaving Vista as an operating system upgrade consisting of a new kernel, a new graphical theme and exponentiated system requirements.
As Joel says:
Every piece of evidence I've heard from developers inside Microsoft supports my theory that the company has become completely tangled up in bureaucracy, layers of management, meetings ad infinitum, and overstaffing. The only way Microsoft has managed to hire so many people has been by lowering their hiring standards significantly. In the early nineties Microsoft looked at IBM, especially the bloated OS/2 team, as a case study of what not to do; somehow in the fifteen year period from 1991 – 2006 they became the bloated monster that takes five years to ship an incoherent upgrade to their flagship product.
Bootnote
So I learnt a fair bit about two organisations, albeit nothing I didn't already suspect.
Microsoft is structured abysmally and is on the verge of some serious managerial difficulty (as evidenced by the nightmare that was Vista's development), and Apple employees are still arrogant as hell:
After all, Arno said:
This also goes to show that the design process at Apple is not exactly perfect either 🙂
He was overruled on some of his opinions, and therefore the design process is further away from being perfect? Sounds to me like a case of someone with a weighty idea, who considers his way as 'the' way.
For what it's worth, it also sounds like the dev process at Apple is fairly well balanced: at least it successfully weeded out some of Arno's heavy concepts of removing user control.
I love it when El Reg finds amusing items on Google Earth, like the levitating hyperspace aircraft carrier, the 50m-long German insect, flying cars in Aus or the now-famous naked rooftop sunbather (and the other one).
Now we have a plausible explanation for the lack of visible improvement in the UK's public transport infrastructure: The Cloaking Device.
Those of us who've been wondering where all of that cash the government poured into improving the UK's rail network actually went can take heart in the fact that, instead of squandering it on improved signalling and new track, Britain's rail operators actually used the money to develop the world's first stealth train.
Impressive stuff. The Eurostar in question is seen here decloaking as it approaches London's Waterloo station – presumably to avoid waiting passengers seeing it appear from thin air once at the platform. A quick bit of research by our black ops directorate revealed that the UK has in fact been operating stealth transport technology for some years, which explains why you never see a number 73 bus when you need one.
Nice.
Microsoft's new iPod-busting "Zune" player has attracted more criticism than praise lately: there's no denying that. The new player was launched on Wednesday in the US amidst much fanfare, going on sale for $249.99 at nearly 30,000 shops across the country with a European launch expected next year. The player comes in just one 30GB model but is available in a choice of black, white or brown.
It was designed to be used with its co-branded online "Marketplace" store where songs can be purchased for download, but the biggest problem here is that — thanks to the ever more ubiquitous DRM spy technology — tracks from other stores will not play on the Zune.
It's no big surprise, perhaps, that songs purchased on iTunes won't work on a Microsoft player as the giants continue to battle it out for market domination, but even songs bought from Microsoft's own MSN music store — which is being closed down soon — will not work on a Zune player. Users must buy and download music from the dedicated Zune music store, or rip their own CDs and copy them onto the player.
Where the Zune starts to win out is that it's a wireless device. According to El Reg:
The player comes with a Wi-Fi connection which will allow users to share music with other Zune users. Tracks may be shared with up to three other Zune owners, although shared songs will delete themselves after three days. Unlike the iPod, the Zune also includes an FM radio.
Anyway, Microsoft's other ceremonious launch is that of Windows Vista, the latest version of its flagship POS. The much-delayed package is being touted by company founder Bill Gates as "the most important new Microsoft release since Windows 95".
So, get this: the Zune is incompatible with Vista.
Yes, that's right. Whilst Microsoft fights to make Vista as cross-compatible with other stuff as it has to in order to avoid various lawsuits, inter-department communication apparently failed when it came to ensuring that the brand new media player would work with the brand new operating system.
Buried in the Zune website, Microsoft admits that the player is not compatible with Vista and gives no information as to when it will introduce a patch or update enabling the player to do so.
Instead, users are asked to "check back soon for updates".
Lame.
El Reg reports an exciting new concept in evolutionary biology: the magnetic crystalline nose shard.
Some years ago scientists at CALTECH (California Institute of Technology in Pasadena) discovered that humans possess a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone, located between your eyes, just behind the nose.
Magnetite is a magnetic mineral also possessed by homing pigeons, migratory salmon, dolphins, honeybees, and bats. Indeed, some bacteria even contain strands of magnetite that function, according to Dr Charles Walcott of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, "as tiny compass needles, allowing them [the bacteria] to orient themselves in the earth's magnetic field and swim down to their happy home in the mud".
It seems that magnetite helps direction finding in animals and helps migratory species migrate successfully by allowing them to draw upon the earth's magnetic fields. But scientists are not sure how they do this.
In any case, when it comes to humans, according to some experts, magnetite makes the ethmoid bone sensitive to the earth's magnetic field and helps your sense of direction.
Some, such as Dr Dennis J Walmsley and W Epps from the Department of Human Geography of the Australian National University in Canberra writing in Perceptual and Motor Skills as far back as in 1987, have even suggested that this "compass" was helpful in human evolution as it made migration and hunting easier.
Following this fascinating factoid, science journalist Marc McCutcheon entitled a book The Compass in Your Nose and Other Astonishing Facts.
Sidenote
I'd also like to take this opportunity to counter the oft-heard notion that "evolution is too unlikely to have actually occured".
Besides the fact that trying to dismiss an observed event as negligibly unlikely goes against so many established precedents of probability studies, there is a more fundamental and mathematical counter-argument. It goes something like this:
Sure, the chance in any particular second of time that a chemical reaction between acids will lead to the formation of the first life-giving protein is (and let's pick an arbitrarily high number) five billion to one. Fine. But, er, weren't there five billion seconds before that happened? And have there not been five billion since?
It's all too easy to shrug an event off as "negligibly unlikely" when it's occurred, until you come to realise that the sample space was immense. It's like when you meet someone you know in town and think it was an incredible co-incidence, but if you weigh that up with all the times when you didn't meet someone in town (every other minute of that same shopping trip, for starters) it's suddenly not so implausible that it happened just that once.
The University of Warwick (whose IT department is not dissimilar to our own at Nottingham) has suffered a major blow to its email system, The Register reports. A power outage temporarily downed its Novell GroupWise email system, permanently killing one of their boxes and affecting around 3,000 academic staff and critical services accounts.
In the aftermath, their IT guys are planning to fast-track their roll-out of Microsoft Exchange server since the GroupWise system has taken such a hit. A spokesman for Warwick's IT dept said, "Everything else was back up and running. It was obviously an inappropriate piece of software for us. It has been nothing but a headache since it was installed."
He says that rumours of a failing UPS system are "not entirely true", and claims that after the power failure, a backup generator failed to kick in, despite a successful test run just a week earlier.
A statement on the University's site explains:
Major problems have affected some parts of the GroupWise email system used by staff and research students. Two of the Staff Post Offices – STAFF2 and STAFF3 – have experienced failures which are currently being worked on.
In the case of the STAFF2 Post Office, the failure is serious enough that we are expecting a prolonged recovery period – sufficiently long that it will not be practical for those customers with email provided on that Post Office to wait for it to return to regain access to send and receive emails.
Warwick's IT services team has decided to use their Microsoft Exchange pilot program as a rescue boat for the lost email accounts, ahead of their plans to switch everybody over by… well, "soon". Naturally, the actual IT team have no comment, and told media that none of them were authorised to make any statements about the failure.
Also naturally, staff there are not happy and reserve no kind words for the IT team: "I'm really hacked off with GroupWise and I'm really hacked off that IT Services didn't listen to us years ago," said one 'heavy user'. "We told them that the system wouldn't be sustainable, and sadly we have been proved right."
The interesting thing about this story is how much it lines up with the incompetency of Nottingham's IT department, and the myriad problems encountered during their own migration from GroupWise to Exchange. The migration has so far run two years behind schedule and gone 200% over budget.
Hopefully, although at the start of the 2006 academic year many students were unable to access their email, the happenings at Warwick aren't a sign of more persistent troubles to come.
Ever since I installed Windows Live Messenger a month or so ago I've been unable to add contacts or be added as a contact by others. For a while I was modest enough to assume people had just lied about adding me, but then some more serious requirements for adding people came up and I realised that there was a problem.
Finally, after much searching, I came across this post on the Microsoft newsgroups (link courtesy of Google archiving, yay). Someone had the same problem as me, despite the results of my "research" (read: Googling) this evening seeming to imply that very few people have run into it.
Essentially it came down to an error in the cache that WLM saves in:
- C:\Documents and Settings[username]\Contacts
- C:\Documents and Settings[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts
I deleted both folders, and later found out I only really needed to delete the contactcoll.cache files but since the whole of both folders is just cache anyway, I hadn't lost any data.
Make sure Messenger is shut down and then try removing these folders on your PC. Just so you know, it's simply a contact cache, you won't lose anything by doing so.
After doing this, I found I was unable to sign-in to Messenger. But, lo and behold the same newsgroup thread had an answer for that, too: running this registry fix removed some broken policy file and set everything back to normal again.
Your particular problem must've been a problem in the contact cache, which doesn't surprise me as al [sic] the caches in WLM have been quite problematic since it was released.
I signed in and was immediately bombarded with five "add contact" request boxes that must have piled up over the month… one of which was serious and the others which I was just relieved to find had actually been sent after all. So, apologies to those whom I seemed to be ignoring by not accepting their add requests.
Bloody Microsoft…
You'd think that a human-built spaceship capable of blasting into orbit, staying into orbit, docking with a space station then coming home and landing in one piece (well, sometimes) would also be capable of telling the time properly.
But no, apparently not. NASA wants to make sure they're not late launching Discovery next December because it can't handle flying over New Year.
The Shuttle was never expected to be in orbit as one year gives way to another, so the computers aren't set up to switch to a new "Day One". To the Shuttle, January 1 is just day 366.
"The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover," space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale explained.
In itself, this wouldn't be a problem, but the computers on the ground work differently, and losing synch with mission control would probably be a Bad Thing.
The onboard computer could be reset, but this would mean that the Shuttle would be flying blind, without navigation updates or vehicle control. Although simulations of the date switch have gone well, understandably, NASA would prefer to avoid this scenario in the real world.
If the twelve-day mission doesn't get started before 18th December, there's a good chance it will be pushed back to January. To be honest this seems absolutely ridiculous. Who builds a computer that doesn't know the full date? Don't tell me the Shuttle Discovery is running Windows?
Back in September, I wondered if NASA was using stolen alien technology in the Shuttles because they have no idea how the batteries work. Not wanting to be overly insensitive, is it any wonder that the occasional orbiter falls from the sky in pieces?
Sidenote
Again not wanting to be insensitive, I couldn't help but wonder if the author of the image caption on that CNN article [previous hyperlink] really meant the following as it sounds:
Investigators bow their heads in prayer before moving human remains found in a debris field in Hemphill, Texas.
A sad story:
Down in Australia they've been looking at updating their copyright laws to catch up to the digital age (read: to make the laws more favorable for an entertainment industry that refuses to adjust to the market), but seem to be doing so in a way that pretty much guarantees the opposite would occur. For example, one of the changes would effectively require search engines to ask permission of every web page they indexed.
It's one of those "sounds good in theory" ideas that is ridiculous in practice, and would pretty much make it impossible to have a search engine in Australia. Google has submitted their own take on this law, explaining why it would push Australia into "pre-internet" days.
This is the type of lawmaking that happens when lawmakers rely too much on a single industry (in this case, the entertainment industry) to detail the "problems" of the internet. It doesn't take into account what's really going on, or the fact that the complaining industry needs to learn how to adjust to the new technology — not beg for laws that hold back the technology.
When I decided I wanted to move to Australia rather than Spain after graduating, part of the reasoning was more advanced internet technology. Hopefully that decision wasn't premature… not that I've booked any plane tickets yet.
I've been a loyal fan of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica since the 2003 miniseries, and it just goes from strength to strength.
After a very "different" few episodes centred around a planetary settlement and subsequent enemy occupation (which sent the show's focus plummeting down from space), the stories following the inevitable "escape" have been incredibly well constructed.
The handling of the different social tensions between groups caught up in different areas of the occupation, and the issues of everyone coming back on board Galactica to the "norm" after a whole year is portrayed so delicately. Starbuck and Apollo have now joined the ranks of characters slowly making the steps they need to make themselves a little more like they used to be: Starbuck cut her hair and got over herself, and Apollo managed to lose all his weight.
(Although to be honest, that he could look to be in perfect form after dropping all that weight in such a short space of time is a little hard to believe, but at least they bothered with referencing it over several episodes rather than just saying "oh look, Apollo's normal again".)
Then there's the transition of Baltar to life living with the Cylons, giving him more connotations with the original show's human traitor and giving us more insight into the social structure and day-to-day life of the enemy, of which we have seen surprisingly little so far but not really realised it.
One of my main gripes about recent events is that the lines between old Boomer and new Sharon were being blurred, and the writers seemed to have semi-forgotten about Baltar's imaginary Number Six when the real deal came back. Couple this with the fact that there are only seven Cylon models anyway and you end up with a whole bunch of confusion.
But this was actually addressed by recognising that new Sharon isn't old Boomer and giving her a brand new call sign — none other than the original series' "Athena" — and by Baltar actually making specific dialogue to his imaginary Six as to still not knowing just what the heck she is. Suddenly everything fits in place.
Then, the "problem" that only seven of the supposed twelve Cylon models has ever been seen (something seemingly ignored last week when it was almost implied that only seven models even exist at all) was specifically addressed by adding an explicit air of mystery over the missing five.. and at the same time, tying this into Baltar's own story.
Top that all off with a cliffhanger that seems natural but somehow not "obvious", and it has all the makings of an episode which left me wanting to shout "I LOVE BSG" off the rooftops. And I do… hence this post.
Now that IE7 has been distributed via Windows Update to thousands upon thousands of Microsoft customers and fanboys alike all over the world, we're seeing a whole bunch of sites with layouts that break because they are written with hacks and workarounds designed for IE6.
The news comes from a survey carried out by usability consultancy Etre, who remind us that Microsoft still have a 80% share of the web market with their Windows-integrated Internet Explorer browser.
Ironically, it's the standards-compliant sites that have the most problems because they are used to having to implement special cases for IE6 which are now obsolete in IE7, some of which are now counterproductive. Non standards-compliant sites were designed as shoddy code to work with a shoddy renderer, which IE7 still provides in its Quirks Mode for compatibility.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the general lack of adherence to web standards among the FTSE 100 companies may have insulated them somewhat from IE7's various bugs and glitches.
IE7 tends to struggle most with standards-compliant sites – particularly those using hacks and filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6. Given that most sites aren't standards-compliant, however, we think our results are pretty representative.
Although this development would appear to be a shout-out in favour of not writing with proper web standards in mind, in fact it merely highlights the damage done by Microsoft's past infractions with its famously naughty Internet Explorer browser. They're fixing the product now but the damage is (for the most part) done, and it'll take some time to recover.
Hopefully we can all use this as a lesson to avoid this sort of a mess coming up in the future. Standards compliance is good, and ignoring it will come around to bite you in the ass eventually, even if it takes the improvement of a bad browser to do so.
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