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The method never justifies the product.
Posted on November 28th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy, Product Design.
What do these posts have in common?:
If you get it wrong, the voice comes on the line to tell you. Hey, since you know what I did wrong and you know what I meant to do, why not just fix it? If I dial a number and forget the “1″, just insert the 1 and connect the call. If I dial a number and include the “1″ when I didn’t need to, just delete the 1 and connect the call. Don’t make me have to look up in the book whether I need a 1 or not. (In the front of the phone book are tables showing which numbers need a “1″ and which don’t. I hate those tables.)
(Yes, I know there are weird technical/legal reasons for why I have to dial the phone in four different ways depending on whom I want to call. But it’s still wrong that these technical/legal reasons mean that the rules for dialing a telephone are impossibly complicated.)
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/27/1160055.aspx
Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to…
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.
Free as in speech, not as in beer
Posted on August 26th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy, Programming.
For some members of the open source movement, open source is the moral compass of the software industry. Richard Stallman would strongly disagree if you said “open source is about giving away software for free.” Rather, open source is about freedom–giving everyone the freedom to see how software works and use it without restrictions. At the heart of this is a broad intuitive idea that you can’t control ideas like they were physical products–that once someone gives me a piece of software, just like any real life object, it’s my right to see how it works and use it in any way I see fit.
Now, eight years after the term open source was first coined, we see two of the fruits of this movement–Linux and Firefox–gaining lots of public attention. On the other side, we see open source server technologies like Apache with an enormous foothold in the industry. Open source has gained traction, but does this mean that open source has succeeded in fulfilling a greater social mission?
No. Read on.
How should we participate in government?
Posted on April 24th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy, Politics.
Because of the nature of a blog, I will no longer attempt to focus on delivering organized thoughts, but rather I’ll just throw stuff out and leave the audience to piece it together.
At our recent university elections, we had slightly more than 50% turnout. That’s not a new pattern and it’s not surprising. In the U.S., about 60% of Americans voted in the last presidential election.
The evil Walmart empire - a thought expierment
Posted on April 11th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: Philosophy, Politics, Tim.
I had a fun conversation with my friend Barb over spring break concerning the labor abuses that Walmart is guilty of. It’s hard to dispute that Walmart has been caught in some abusive labor practices. Refusing to give employees more than 38 hours of work per week (to avoid paying full-time benefits), paying female employees less than the average, and abusing child labor are all hings that Walmart has been accused of. That’s bad.
But that got me thinking. Would these people be better off if they didn’t have a job with Walmart at all? I’m not sure. Dr. McDaniel was talking about RFID today in class (CSE 497c, Computer Security). Mostly, he was talking about the security implications of using RFID pervasively in society, in applications such as RFID passports and RFID inventory access. But the primary reason to use RFID in a setting such as Walmart is to decrease labor cost by using RFID scanners instead of humans scanning barcodes. RFID will be an extremely inexpensive way to drastically decrease the amount of employees needed to run the store. Walmart could decrease their costs, increase employee wage, and decrease the number of headcount. So there will be less labor abuses, but there will be less employees needed in general.
Is this a good thing or not? I’m still not sure. From an economic perspective, we’ve increased economic efficiency by reducing costs. Are people better off? The lower class certainly isn’t, since we’ve replaced low-paying, unskilled work with a technology replacement. In theory, however, if this method can increase GDP, we can compensate the lowest paid workers and still be better off in the long run. Will this happen in practice? I don’t know.