on the heals of all the criticism, mozilla has let loose milestone 17 and netscape has released the second “preview” of netscape 6. unfortunately, you shouldn’t bother with the netscape download and milestone 17 looks positive but is still probably not fit for daily consumption. sigh.
i can’t help it, and yes, i do slow down for car crashes:
“Not enough controversy on this list, so here goes.
Ready?
Tufte understands packing the data in. He lacks an understanding of people. Sometimes chart junk (his term) helps in the understanding of a chart by providing mnemonic aid to the symbols. Sometimes it helps motivate the reader. For most casual users of charts and graphs, less is better. For the professional statistician, such as Tufte, denser is better.
Tufte is often wrong about what constitutes good communication. Indeed, I am surprised he likes the Napoleon map so much because it has, in his terms, superfluous chart chunk – those drawings of soldiers. This is indeed an excellent graphic, but much of his work does not have this character.
Tufte is not the only statistician who has addressed the problems of representing graphical material. In my opinion, Bertin is the best.
Tufte preaches. I entered into a discussion with him about this once and tried to present some experimental data that one of my students had collected. he refused even to look at it. That is, it isn’t that he looked at the data and disagreed with the interpretation or even the collection– that would be permissible. No, he refused even to look.
Tufte is fun to read. Much of what he says is important and valuable. The problem is, you have to decide what to follow and what to ignore. Don’t follow all that he preaches — you will do your users a disservice.
Don”
note that this is not the first time tufte has been the subject of relatively high profile disrespectin’. this one’s courtesy of richard saul wurman:
“Well, I think he’s completely wrong. And he’s completely wrong because of who he is. First of all, his books are terrific. But they’re the books of an analytic historian. He is not a graphic designer. He is not an information architect. He doesn’t have any ideas about graphics and what’s going to happen in the future. He has documented the history of information design superbly and he’s done a very good analysis of it. But I think, since he doesn’t have creative ideas about the future, he can’t see how there will be amazing information displayed on the Internet, done by very creative people, in the very near future. Are we stumbling around now doing things? You bet. Because we’re finding our way. Much the same as when the movies first happened, when cinema first happened, they based it on old things, they made it look like stage plays. Well, we’re just getting over the point where we’re just putting diagrams on a screen. We’re not taking the appropriate way of using dynamic information. We’re using it to show off that we can spin things, and we’re showing off things because we can do it, and everybody is bragging to one another about some cute program. We are going to get over that show off stage very soon. We’re going to be able to show things, and will show things, accurately, clearly, and using the medium for what it is. I mean, if you or anybody else is going through the stage that many of us are of getting fast downloads and speeding up your equipment, it changes your whole relationship with what you can see and how you see it. And I think his reflection is on things as he’s looking backwards not forwards.”
ouch.
[don norman ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors post via xblog]
<oof>Concorde Bodies Found, Eyes on Black Box </oof>:
[via splorp]
while i don’t want to appear to be taking flagrant, cheap shots at microsoft, i can’t resist linking to salon’s article on the risks of taking microsoft up on its attempt to tric…errr…entice consumers to adopt windows me :
“…the public should beware of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant improvements, but for most users those improvements do not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me and give it a few great features, but it can’t
fundamentally make Me a better operating system than Windows 95, because of underlying technical flaws with the whole Windows operating environment.I know, because I spent more than a week struggling with a Windows Me upgrade before I gave up, reformatted my hard drive, installed a clean version of the operating system on my 550 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and reinstalled all of my applications. Now that my computer is finally operational
once again, I’m quite pleased with the results. But I doubt that other computer users will think that the new features are worth the hassle.”
Joel Spolsky writes a bit on microsoft’s passport ‘service’:
“Am I the only one who is terrified about Microsoft Passport? It seems to me like a fairly blatant attempt to build the world’s largest, richest consumer database, and then make fabulous profits mining it. It’s a terrifying threat to everyone’s personal privacy and it will make today’s “cookies” seem positively tame by comparison. The scariest thing is that Microsoft is advertising Passport as if it were a benefit to consumers, and people seem to be falling for it! By the time you’ve read this article, I can guarantee that I’ll scare you into turning off your Hotmail account and staying away from MSN web sites.”
perhaps not surprisingly, it seems to have hit a nerve or two
this anonymous response to a previous rant provides further evidence Joel actually writes and provokes – putting my mere appropriations to shame:
“It’s not just you…many of us at MS don’t even begin to understand what .NET is (and I even work on Passport, the shining example of a “web service”). Management spent nearly a year explaining how everyone needed to focus on NGWS and how we could all fit into the vision – without ever describing the goal. It was the proverbial answer in search of a question. All of a sudden it has a new name, seemingly an attempt to hide the fact that it still has no body. And to make things worse, they throw in a brand-new
programming language which is really nothing more but a copy of java which is unfinished, hasn’t been tested for five years, and lacks a large standard library.I’ve asked around how this new .NET plan differs from everything we’ve been working on the past two years and haven’t been given a decent answer.”
the edge has a moderately interesting piece by the principal research scientist in the robotics institute of carnegie mellon university, hans moravec :
“This path to machine intelligence, incremental, reactive, opportunistic and market-driven, does not require a long-range map, but has one in our own evolution. In the decades following the first universal robots, I expect a second generation with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability. They will have a
conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience, gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike, generation will abstract and reason from the world model. I expect the reasoning systems will be adopted from the traditional AI approach maligned earlier in this essay. The puddles will have reached the ripples.”
i don’t know – it seems like good old fashioned ai and robotics has been promising this type of thing for long. it was cool when i was a little ankle-biter reading isaac asimov, but really – we can’t even manage to produce a stable browser….
stating the obvious turned five yesterday and in celebration we get some great quotes form interviewees:
“My gut tells me that the word ‘push’ is going to be a minor footnote in future histories of the late 20th century boom in telecommunications. A quirky blip, ranking slightly higher than the blink tag, but lower than gopher.” — David Hudson, in the Publishers on Push special ”