GUIs are good for some things, but their main problem is that they do not scale. What works OK for 10 files doesn’t work for 10,000 files. A good command line interface (not DOS) like Unix shells or cygwin is still vastly better for handling large and/or complicated tasks.

“If you want ‘awful’, they what you’re looking for is spelled F-O-R-T-R-A-N.”

Yeah, and in its day it was “good enough”, especially if you were a scientist and needed the NAG libraries.

Heresy!! Fortran is still a great language for what it was designed for – scientific/numerical computation. It’s simplicity makes it much easier to write code that runs efficiently. The language itself is still being developed, and is very different from that in use in the ’70s.

What that actually says is that there’s really no way to design an operating system that will provide absolutely optimal performance to tens, maybe hundreds of millions of users. It will serve many, perhaps most, very well, but there will always be a substantial set of users who are heavily under- or over-served.

In other words, a one-size-fits-all solution is neither possible nor desirable if the need is to service a vast population having an incalculable range of different needs and interests. And people should have the ability to select what works for them.

Wait – isn’t this where I came in?

llater,

llamas

Because if you’re a QWERTY touch typist you end up literally puking with frustration trying to use anything else. If I was learning from scratch, hunt-and-peck style, I expect ABC would be quicker (which is probably why the TomTom products default to the ABC layout for address entry). But I’d still have to be pretty obtuse to use anything other than QWERTY because it would rule out using a net cafe, a friend’s computer, a work-provided laptop, etc.

If you want to get a feeling for what it’s like to try a different layout, then go to France or Germany and use a net cafe.

“Answer – because it’s good enough – and often good enough is all you need.”

Anything is “good enough” if it’s the status quo – by definition. Rather like the Spike Milligan joke about whether he was paid a living wage or not. He was living, ergo it was a living wage.

“Windows is not ‘awful’. People who say that tend not to have had too much to do with what came before.”

I’m very familiar with computing back to the ’70s. I worked in the industry before Windows. Before DOS, in fact.

“If you want ‘awful’, they what you’re looking for is spelled F-O-R-T-R-A-N.”

Yeah, and in its day it was “good enough”, especially if you were a scientist and needed the NAG libraries.

No it wasn’t. Windows 1 and 2 were unspeakably, unusably crap.

Windows 3.0 was a quantum leap forward in user interfaces shipped with IBM-compatible Intel-based PCs by default to large corporates. It was inferior to already existing GUIs such as MacOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS, but none of these were shipped with IBM-compatible Intel-based PCs by default to large corporates.

Just like QWERTY, it was a standard that wasn’t much cop but that people adopted for external reasons – and that has remained the standard because the cost to most individual firm or agents of switching standards is far higher than the benefits they can derive.

If you can do that, you can get rich playing Blackjack. What are you doing here? Off to Vegas with you, Rainman.”

Thank you for allowing me the opprtunity to be gratuitously rude to you, Kay Tie. If you can get your head out of your arse I’m sure you will see that tape measures have metric units on one edge and imperial on the other.

Answer – because it’s good enough – and often good enough is all you need.

Windows is not ‘awful’. People who say that tend not to have had too much to do with what came before. If you want ‘awful’, they what you’re looking for is spelled F-O-R-T-R-A-N.

That will bring coals of fire down on my head, because there are those who claim, even today, that FORTRAN was the most-perfect langauge ever invented.

Windows was/is a quantum leap forward in user interfaces. Is it perfect? No. It’s just better than just-about anything else.

Exclamations that Windows is ‘awful’ are more expressions of tribal belief than they are sober assessments of its real impact on computing, technology and everyday life. For most of the things it does, Windows is so stunningly effective that claims of its ‘awfulness’ actually ring rather amusing and lacking in a proper sense of proportion.

llater,

llamas

I’m not after ‘perfect’, I’m after ‘much better’. Most things are better than QWERTY, but the barrier to adoption renders us with an awful solution (and, as keyboard layouts go, QWERTY is about as bad as it gets: actually designed to slow you down).

Oh, and Windows is awful. If you deny that one more time, then I shall force you to say the words “Gordon Brown is not an awful Prime Minister, he’s just less than ideal.”

“Yet QWERTY is bloody awful, worse than all the rest, but we use it because it’s the one that everyone uses.”

Funny how many people can do so much with a tool that’s so ‘bloody awful’.

“Like Windows: sodding awful but we use it because it’s what everyone uses.”

Funny how so many people can do so much with a tool that’s so ‘sodding awful’.

“We are caught in a ’sub-optimal minimum’, where any changes make things worse before any later benefit is seen.”

Both the QWERTY and Windows examples quoted are not ‘awful’ – they are ‘less than ideal’, which is not quite the same thing. But the seearch for the perfect (in anything) will be both long and fruitless. In something so complex and multi-facted as a system of measurement, the search for perfection is likely counterpoductive in the ned, because one single, unified system that encompasses every possible field of human endeavour most-likely creates as much inefficiency as it saves.

llater,

llamas

No. I’ve never used a Dvorak keyboard. Even if I had, I still wouldn’t be using it, or any other keyboard. Yet QWERTY is bloody awful, worse than all the rest, but we use it because it’s the one that everyone uses. Like Windows: sodding awful but we use it because it’s what everyone uses. We are caught in a ‘sub-optimal minimum’, where any changes make things worse before any later benefit is seen.

“Imagine a tape measure with metric and imperial units on either edge.”

If you can do that, you can get rich playing Blackjack. What are you doing here? Off to Vegas with you, Rainman.

Explain the QWERTY keyboard then.

Presumably meaning that the Dvorak keyboard, supposed to be superior, is not voluntarily and enthusiastically adopted. But in fact the Dvorak keyboard is not superior, and so is not adopted, as specified.

“of changes in administrative procedures in both Member States”

This isn’t the EU forcing the change, it’s the British government adopting the change all by itself. Why? Who knows – but the switch to metric started long before Britain joined the EEC.

you say, ‘Great – so let’s record things at the national land registry using a single unit, perhaps one which is consistent with the way in which we record most other things’

But my point was that the *internal representation* of data is something you shouldn’t have to be bothered with. All you need to know is that you can enter data in whatever format you please and get it out in whatever format you need.

Like, as I said before, dates and date representations in large databases.

This should be getting *easier* not more difficult. Why the hell *ban* anything?

‘Great – so let’s record things at the national land registry using a single unit, perhaps one which is consistent with the way in which we record most other things – and then we can display the results for our own purposes in acres, square furlongs, double-decker-buses, football pitches, or whatever else we choose.’

I agree – with one minor alteration.

Let’s leave the national land registry alone, using the units it has used for centuries, and let’s display the results for our own purposes in hectares or megaPascals per microFarad, or whatever else we choose.

It’s not the units that make the problems – it’s the change, and especially the mandated, exclusive change.

I find it vaguely-amusing that many people who tout the ‘metric’ system over the ‘imperial’ system, since they never seem to have any substantial criticism to make, always end up making fun of the names of Imperial units. At least Imperial units, for the most part, are relatively content-neutral, unlike the ‘metric’ system, where virtually all units are named for dead, white, European males, and all the multipliers are based in ancient languages that nobody speaks anymore. As I said – a tool of cultural imperialism.

llater,

llamas

So far there has been little freedom in dual units. Partly through dogma, I’m sure, but also through weights-and-measures practicalities. A publican isn’t allowed to sell beer in 500ml glasses, even if he gives the price per pint information, because the glasses haven’t been certified with a crown mark and a line.

Mind you, I suspect the niggardly booze measurements came from the days when it was taxed to buggery and back and even the height of the meniscus was financially significant. With both the Left (“we must do something about alcohol!”) and the Right (“stop the hoodies drinking!”) unified in making booze expensive again, we’re going back to the grim ’70s.