creat 1225

that

Wonderful! :-) by number

But it all starts as data entry. I think I'm trying to make the point that, if this initial data entry is a chore or an impossible task, innovation will be stiltified I think I just made up a word and the computer biz is stuck in the current morras of gazillions of bytes with no improvements to delivering computing services. All people do now is demand "faster" CPUs, as if that will solve all computing problems. to or to the the produces

But programmers are also users. A small percentage of beginning lusers will be the biz's bit gods of tomorrow. The interface cannot be designed to prevent further learning if the user gets curious. The user cannot become curious if s-he never sees that the black boxes have a door. This GUI poo is essentially a black box without a door. Keyboards are the keys to all the doors of all black boxes. The goal of all menus, including food lists in restaurants, is to itemize only the things you want the reader to choose. The menu never, ever gives a hint that there may be more ingredients in the back room to make something new.

Or they want to do a reprint. A person, who doesn't know the kind of container holding their prose, will have lost the prose forever. Now writings about what I ate for dinner last night won't be interesting five years from now but writings about experimental results, specs, errors and how they got fixed, how to get water from here to there may be. The writer needs to be learned enough at the time they entered the data to know how to store it.

themselves design

Internal data structures may be hidden, but the tradeoffs made when designing and implementing them have visible repercussions. Take a look at the GUIs. You can pretty much tell how they were designed; why and what kinds of tradeoffs were made. You can do similar deductions from taking a look at how an OS works through the day....at least I can; I'm buttuming most of you can.

It's like a pasture. If there's a pail in the middle of it and two feet of snow fall, the field looks uniformly level...except for a strange tiny little hill. All designs have those tiny little hillsno matter how much the implementer tries to hide it. Now, today's poo tries to build a 100' brick wall around the field so that nobody can get at that pail. With GUIs, the brick wall becomes invisible such that nobody who looks at it has a glimmer that the wall exists, let alone there's a pile of knowledge behind it.

I maintain that the only useful tool to open the doors to the field is a keyboard. The rat can only point at options that the screen presents and nothing else. A keyboard that has access to an editor that can open any file stored on the system and display the contents without any mbuttaging is all the tool any curious newbie needs to begin learning about contents of black boxes.

BAH

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