Where is Asher's Mac Attack?

[Asher]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
You have this way of getting to people, Asher...

I'm the Jarkko Ruutu of Poly.

[KrazyHorse]

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ming
Because you dish it out far more than others do... and in most cases, people are all over you because you started it.

So enough of the crap... discuss the topic. You got a problem with the site, take it up via PM.

PMs with you are so boring as soon as you take the macho man position. It's so one-sided, I fire off a comment and you respond "blah blah blah", I bring it up online and you say "take it up via PM".

[KrazyHorse]

He even looks like a computer scientist...

[Wezil]

It's called dirty laundry. Best to keep it concealed.

[Ming]

See ya in a week Asher.

[Ming]

And I would highly recommend people get back on topic, or they can join Asher.

[Fve Crathva]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Furthermore, you have still not addressed my argument that familiarity is offset by the consistency and intuitiveness of the interface. Your only responses so far have been (in this order) ad hominem, "I know more than you therefore I'm correct", and repeating yourself.

A few years ago, I decided to change how I wrote my 's'es. I stopped writing them like you normally do--all curvey, with the final stroke heading left--and started writing them more like they're written in the KISS logo, like a lightning bolt. I did that for two reasons:

1. It's totally rad, man, and
2. It's more efficient.

Why is it more efficient? Because when writing left-to-right, you want each character to end on its right side, so that you leave the least distance between the end of one character, and the start of the next. I don't lift my pencil all the way off the paper when I write, so it's doubly important that I don't put a big slash through my letters when traversing from the end of one to the start of the next.

Most lowercase Latin letters flow from left to right. 'S' is one of the few that do not conform to the standard. The other letters are 'b', 'g', 'j', 'p', and 'y'. As I have improved my writing, my 'b's and 'p's developed such that I go all the way around the circle, thus causing my pencil to end the letters heading in the appropriate directions. With 'g's, I write them more like 'q's, but with a lighter tail. Similar with 'y's. With 'j's, I write them as a slash and tail, so I end up heading in the wrong direction, but at the same horizontal point as the letter started, so I don't go too far away from where I ought to be.

I spent a lot of time developing a pattern of chirography that was more consistent and efficient. For a long time before that, I wrote in a way many people would be familiar with, but I gave it up in favour of efficiency and consistency. As familiar as it was--it was, after all, as printing was taught to me--it slowed down my writing, and increased the hand movements required for me to inscribe characters. In the end, when I realised how I was making my writing more efficient, and when I applied similar techniques to my 's'es, it took almost no time to adapt my writing to the superior method. Familiarity can be changed. Efficiency and consistency, while they depend somewhat on familiarity, are less malleable.

SP

[-Jrabbit]

Of course, the key to the (hand)written word is whether it communicates. Presumably that which proved efficient for you was similarly legible for the reader. If (like my sister), you have an idiosyncratic hand that is difficult to read, the efficiency is strictly personal and nearly worthless to anyone else.

My point is that interfaces that work well for one person may be maddeningly weird to another. Designing for Windows users, for instance, is very different from designing for first-time computer users.

[Fve Crathva]

Oh **** no, I can't even read my own writing.

My point is that efficiency is at least somewhat quantifiable. While the person who isn't familiar with the efficient interface has a harder time using it, once he became familiar with it, it turns out to be easier to use than the inefficient interface.

SP

[-Jrabbit]

Well, that's a big part of the balancing act in design -- learning curve vs. long-term ease of use. That's why it's critical to insist on a firm list of project goals (feature lists, user requirements) before creating a new interface.

[Fve Crathva]

I don't really care, I was just making fun of Whaleboy.

SP

[Agathon]

Ha, ZDNet published some BS the other day saying that OS X could be hacked in less than 30 minutes.

What they didn't say was that the hackers had access to the actual machine - not hacking into it over the web.

So this guy from U of Wisconsin put a Mac Mini online and invited people to hack into it and change the web page it was serving. It was reported on /. and got heavy traffic and many attempts.

http://test.doit.wisc.edu/

No successful hacks.

Cry more Mac haters...

[Apocalypse]

If it was put on Fark, I am sure there would be a different story.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Apocalypse
If it was put on Fark, I am sure there would be a different story.

Yeah, probably nobody would pay any attention.