Illotus (u/Illotus) - Readit News

Illotus commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

hedora · 8 months ago

Sadly, none of the links I tried work anymore. (Though the conversation in the comments where they have to explain how to open a ppt in powerpoint is internet gold!)

I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.

I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.

Illotus · 8 months ago

Looks like the links in the posts no longer work, but all the posts are readable and he goes through the work they did and why. They did a lot of usability testing for the ribbon. But anyways I have no horse in this race other than liking ribbon over 16x16 icons and menus, so no point in hashing this over.

Illotus commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

hedora · 8 months ago

That might have been true for the first five minutes of using the software (assuming the person had not yet used a CUA application before the first time they used office). After that, it was strictly worse.

CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Illotus · 8 months ago

Not really, it is much more discoverable for most people. If interested, MS UI lead has a blog about lot of the reasons for ribbon and on the research backing it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh

Illotus commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

SoftTalker · 8 months ago

Yeah that era of Office, pre-ribbon, was pretty nice as Office goes.

Illotus · 8 months ago

Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.

Illotus commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike

qwerty456127 · 8 months ago

> I wish companies would go back to building fast apps

It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties, capable do to almost everything the same today apps do in a similar manner on orders of magnitude less powerful hardware, often performing even faster.

The last time I expressed this, probably also here, somebody suggested the performance drop is the cost of modern security - vulnerability mitigations, cryptography etc.

Illotus · 8 months ago

My recollection is completely different, software was really slow on contemporary PCs in the 90s. Spinning disks, single core cpus, lot more swapping due to memory being so much more expensive.

Illotus commented on Software development topics I've changed my mind on chriskiehl.com/article/th... · Posted by u/belter

ryandrake · a year ago

Yea, I've always considered craftsmanship to be about paying attention to the details and making everything high quality--even the things that the end user will never see, but you know are there. The Steve Jobs quote sums it up nicely:

> "When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

Illotus · a year ago

If you look at back pieces of old classic furniture made during hand powered tools era, its mostly very roughly finished. Professionals rarely had time to spend dicking around with stuff that isn't visible.

Illotus commented on London saw a surprising benefit to ultra-low emissions zone: More active kids grist.org/cities/london-f... · Posted by u/colinprince

close04 · a year ago

> Cars doing 30mph outpace galloping horses

> Yet a cyclist who has no more protection than a pedestrian is supposed to share a road with 2+tonne vehicles of reinforced steel travelling at speeds

By speed alone, bikes are to pedestrians what cars are to bikes. A pedestrian will walk at 3-5km/h. A bike will be 5-7 times faster than that at 15-35km/h (especially since the advent of e-bikes which ignore assist requirements). Cars will be 1.5-4 times faster at 40-50km/h. Where I live I feel less safe as a pedestrian sharing the sidewalk with a bike lane than I feel on the bike sharing the street with cars (except car doors randomly opened in my path, that's what terrifies me). Not a day passes without a cyclist almost running me over when I cross on a green light, or because they try to squeeze around on the sidewalk at unsafely high speeds.

When it comes to protection, the usual killer is a strong hit on the head. You don't need too much speed to cause a fall. But despite cyclists riding and implicitly hitting the ground at higher speeds, protecting the old melon with a helmet is still seen as optional (embarrassing, unfashionable, uncomfortable). Cyclists take fewer precautions than drivers while exposing themselves to higher risks than pedestrians.

Can't tell you how many times I was asked why am I bothering with the helmet, "I'll get suntan stripes". In my circle of friends the only other one wearing a helmet for city riding (everyone wears it on the long roadbike rides) is one who has a lot of kids as is terrified of leaving them without a father. Everyone else rides as if the epitaph of "The other guy should have paid more attention" will give anyone consolation.

Illotus · a year ago

If only the speed was the big issue, but mostly it is the mass. Even with all the reckless cyclists there are very little fatalities where cyclist runs over pedestrian. Ultimately separating all groups would be the best, but heavy consequences for the heaviest road users is ultimately the solution.

Illotus commented on Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn decripto.org/en/arrest-of... · Posted by u/toss1

whimsicalism · a year ago

Precisely my point - moderated messaging in the modern era will ultimately be unenforceable.

Which is why I don’t see why certain services should be legally penalized just because they don’t happen to be E2E encrypted. Like if Telegram was instead e2e encrypted, why should that be legal if what they were previously doing wasn’t?

Illotus · a year ago

So essentially what you are saying that because we couldn't catch the smart criminals who use e2e encrypted services we shouldn't catch the dumb ones either?

Illotus commented on Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn decripto.org/en/arrest-of... · Posted by u/toss1

zo1 · a year ago

I'm more disturbed by the fact that on HN we have 0 devs confirming or denying this thing about FBs internals wrt encryption. We know there are many devs that work there that are also HN users. But I've yet to see one of them chime in on this discussion.

That should scare a lot of us.

Illotus · a year ago

I find it pretty ridiculous to assume that any dev would comment on the inner workings of their employers software in any way beyond what is publicly available anyway. I certainly wouldn't.

Illotus commented on US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect arstechnica.com/apple/202... · Posted by u/blueblueue

noirbot · 2 years ago

See, I feel like that's almost the exact opposite unless you assume Apple and its internal legal department is made up of the biggest idiots on the planet. If they were intending on just infringing this valid patent and trying to get away with it, then they've literally handed the world a paper trail that makes them look as bad as possible without a literal email being published in the newspaper from Tim Cook saying "Yea, just violate the patent".

With the history they have with Masimo, surely the more reasonable explanation is that they saw the tech, thought they could make something independently that was as good or better without infringing the patent, and hired off some of the Masimo folks to help with explicit instructions to try to avoid any overlap with their old patents?

Does Apple have some history of flagrantly violating patents I don't know about? If anything, other folks have pointed out that Apple specifically has done this to other people before, so they're keenly aware of the risks here. I just don't buy what seems to be the conventional wisdom of "haha big company is dumb as bricks". Risking getting a flagship product banned from sale seems deeply unlike Apple's business strategy in general, which makes everyone's assertions that this infringement was intentional, flagrant, and obvious to a layman seem like it must have some fault in it.

Illotus · 2 years ago

> See, I feel like that's almost the exact opposite unless you assume Apple and its internal legal department is made up of the biggest idiots on the planet. If they were intending on just infringing this valid patent and trying to get away with it, then they've literally handed the world a paper trail that makes them look as bad as possible without a literal email being published in the newspaper from Tim Cook saying "Yea, just violate the patent".

They don't really need to be idiots. They just need to trust that there is a reasonable chance that Masimo won't do anything about it and if they do, there is reasonable chance that Apple wins in court and if they don't there might be appeals and if not they might have come up with better non-infringing tech and if not then they can come to license agreement with Masimo. With that train of thought I think its pretty reasonable that Apple acted the way they acted.

Illotus commented on Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/starshadowx2

surgical_fire · 2 years ago

> This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history.

Good.

Intellectual Property is a mistake. If AI brings about its end, I welcome it.

Illotus · 2 years ago

Not really good if AI can run around it but to normal people it exists as before.