Interesting. In the UK, the word Nimrod is recognised (if at all) as a piece of classical music by the British composer Edward Elgar (from his work Enigma Variations)
1,881 karma · joined December 25, 2012
Their articles are well-written and thorough, but unfortunately much less widely-read than the misleading newspaper reports they often debunk.
This is my main gripe with Pinterest: the hostile and intrusive block on viewing the site unless you register first. This wasn't always the case. I'm guessing the permanent prompt to register turns many users away (I'm sure they're tracking this this to see how it's faring).
And pinterest isn't great for finding images of things that aren't "products".
Pinterest is a great resource for finding visual design inspiration, not just products. You'll find plenty of design examples no matter how broad or narrow your search: typography, graphic design, illustration, web design, mobile app design, book covers, comic book design, calligraphy, geometric patterns, packaging design, paper sculpture, origami - the list is endless. In fact, the site deliberately overwhelms you with related pins and pages that scroll forever to keep you browsing as long as possible.
If you are a designer or developer creating a web site or a mobile app, then you are missing out on lots of visual inspiration if you don't use Pinterest.
Europe's young adults living with parents - a country by country breakdown (2011)
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/mar/24/young-a...
You cannot always successfully transpose the content from a physical book to a smaller electronic device, at least not without re-designing the layout of the book.
Plain text books, such as fiction, are the most easily adaptable to smaller electonic displays. But many other books require a redesign to make them suitable for reading electronically. For example, the simple act of scanning a two-page spread with your eyes is difficult or impossible to do on mobile devices (and not very comfortable if done on a big monitor compared to holding a book or magazine in your hand).
So E-books will evolve, but physical books have a long shelf life ahead of them.
I know this isn't a popular opinion on Hacker News, but why should there be any tracking whatsoever when using an OS? Are people saying that they're perfectly fine for their Windows/Mac/Linux distribution to track everything they do? The apps they use? The sites they visit? Because that's basically what ChromeOS does. It even tracks the documents you print to your desktop printer (routed through Google's cloud print service).
You aren't even anonymous when you use ChromeOS - you must be signed into your Google account. Just as a reminder, your Google account = your name, your date of birth, your location and optional phone number. In other words, some of your most personal and private information all tied to the activity you conduct on ChromeOS.
Google states that it does not read the content of your emails in GMail (emails are scanned by computer), but you could argue that your browsing habits are just as private and personal. No such assurances on how they handle this data. Does Google disassociate the identity of the user from their activity? If not, then who sees this data at Google? How long is this data kept for? These are important questions, but you won't find answers in Google's privacy policy. (And you're unlikely to find many in the tech community asking Google about them either.)
I would never recommend an OS that tracked the activity of students so relentlessly, especially when many students are too young to understand the horrendous privacy implications of using ChromeOS. Other companies like Microsoft are rightfully criticised for their tracking in Windows 10, yet Google gets a completely free ride. It's just baffling.
I consider it unacceptable. Why does Google do this? Is it for the purpose of tracking users?
This feels like a common problem with URLs. More and more sites send you onto other links while apppending some identifier to the URL. I frequently come across links shared by friends and colleagues where I can immediately see the referral site that was the source of the link (even though the destination of the link is different). Presumably this is yet another layer to the endless (but rarely questioned) tracking that has become the norm on the web.
"The UK Government Digital Services shared the journey that led them from user needs to a government-wide policy on the use of ODF, and the extensive guidance on best practices for ODF usage they published last week."
Here is the link to that guidance
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidanc...
Google's privacy policy is not misleading but they omit some of the most important information you would expect to find in a privacy policy.
When you sign up for a Google account you give Google your name, date-of-birth (DOB), location and mobile phone number. This is some of your most private and personal details. If you're signed in to your Google account while you browse the web or use your Android phone (or you use the track-everything-you-do Chrome OS), then Google records your browing habits and activity against your account. In many cases, that also gives Google some very private and personal information about you. It's no exageration to say that they know more about your online habits than you know yourself.
Given that, Google omits in their privacy policy:
- how long they keep your activity data before it is erased. Is it 6 months? 12 months? Forever?
- whether they disassociate your identity from your browsing behaviour or web activity when they look at it (i.e is the data anonymised before Google's staff view it?)
- related to the above: who sees your data inside Google? Their Privacy Policy simply states "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations." This is too vague in my opinion particularly when you consider the gargantuan volumes of data Google collects about you.
Let me put it another way: if I asked you for your name, DOB, mobile number and location and then recorded your online activity against that information, wouldn't you expect me to tell you who sees your data, whether that data is anonymised and how long I keep that data about you?
Naturally, this method of commenting raised the ire of many who accused the BBC of 'censoring' views. Now anyone can comment on BBC news articles and, in my view, the comment sections are of such low quality, they are completely unreadable.
So in a way, as a reader, I preferred the old practice of publishing a selection of comments (a bit like sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper), because what was published was varied, generally well-composed and of managable reading length. But as a user commenting I can see how frustrating it would be to repeatedly submit comments that were never selected for publication.
BBC News (bbc.co.uk/news) isn't really free to UK users but website vistors outside the UK don't pay (but they do get ads instead). Of course, the BBC's news coverage of the US is nowhere near as extensive as NYT. They don't cover the US arts/sports/food/tech scene etc. (It would be interesting to see the breakdown of subscribers to the NYT. Are they mainly US readers? Or are there international subscribers too?)
If you don't like the BBC, there's Al-Jazeera. I suspect many Americans distrust them, but I'm impressed by the scale of their international news coverage.
I'm guessing that most people check multiple news sources (even if you trust some sources less than others). Does anyone really rely on a single news provider nowadays?
This is why languages like Pascal (and it's descendents) use := as assignment.
There are contradictory opinions about sytnax among programmers. Many programmers don't like the example assignment syntax above, but then many programmers also say that syntax is a relatively minor aspect of learning a language (even though the syntax of a language shapes the way you think about solving problems).
And many programmers do avoid certain languages precisely because they dislike the sytnax.
Nikalus Wirth, who created Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon, had this to say about using the equal sign for assignment:
"A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957[a] and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let “=” denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x."
E-book pricing is a bit of a mess in the EU. Many countries have a reduced rate of VAT on print books, For example, in the UK it's 0%, in France it's 5.5%.
However, the EU deems e-books an electronic service and has ruled that they should be charged at the full rate of VAT, not the reduced rate applied to print books. It's pretty ridiculous really.
In fact, France and Luxembourg have been applying reduced VAT rates to e-books for some time leading to the EU Court of Justice to rule that they are in breach of EU rules and must apply the full rate of VAT to e-books. A very consumer-unfriendly policy.
E-books have taken their place alongside print but I don't think many people expected them to displace print books. Certainly not with the current crop of e-readers.
The projects submitted are often very impressive and show great skill and ingenuity. The 2014 award went to a 23 year old student called James Roberts who designed a inflatable incubator for prematurely-born babies:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29900968
If you want to be inspired, the archive of entries is well worth browsing:
Introducing the BBC micro:bit website in beta http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/6fb0dc17-4a70...
Accoring to the blog post, this initial beta launch is focusing on teaching material for teachers. There's an online simulator of the micro:bit that let's you start coding straight away. The currently available editors are Microsoft Block Editor and Microsoft Touch Develop Editor. Coming soon is Code Kingdoms JavaScript editor, and a Python editor from the Python Software Foundation.
We tend to gripe a lot about the BBC here in the UK (with justification sometimes), but this is a really excellent initiative that deserves a lot of praise. Only a public service broadcaster like the BBC could marshall together so many resources and collaborators for a project like this. I hope it's a great success.
"Snakes get closer to humans and cause more damage and more deaths than any other venomous animal, including spiders, scorpions and jellyfish.
Each year, up to five million people worldwide are estimated to be bitten by snakes. Out of those, around 100,000 die and 400,000 are left disabled or disfigured by their injuries.
But the numbers could be even larger - because many of the worst-affected countries don't keep data on snakebites and research into this problem is scarce."
Article: The amazing science behind fatal snake bites http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34214029
Here is a BBC blog post that provides some additional context:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/aa6274eb-818e...
The BBC have an open source library for building apps for TV based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript called TAL: TV Application Layer. It's designed to be deployed across HTML-based TV devices.
http://fmtvp.github.io/tal/getting-started/introducing-tal.h...
Apple's tvOS is likely to have much richer functionality since it's hosted on Apple's own hardware. However, an open standard for TV apps would be a good thing.
The BBCs TAL was released as open source in March 2013. But I don't know if it's gained wider traction in the industry.
A specific example relating to UX: I always point people to this gov.uk design guide as an excellent example of clear writing that is easy to understand. It's not perfect, but it avoids being too wordy and I think it's a good example to emulate
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/resour...
Here's a BBC science documentary from 2009 called The Cell that begins with the story of Van Leeuwenhoek. Unfortunately, this YouTube copy has been dimmed presumably to avoid a copyright takedown. It's a shame these documentaries languish in the BBC archives.
Narrator:"My starting point is September 1674 and the Royal Society of London. A mysterious satchel arrived in this club for gentleman scientists. It had taken five days to get here from Holland, across the North Sea by ship and then by horseback rider. The package came from a man who built the world's most powerful microscope, a microscope that revealed a hidden kingdom no-one had seen before..."
Dairy farmers in the UK were complaining that some supermarkets were paying them less for a litre of milk than what it cost them to produce the milk. After protests from farmers, those supermarkets - which included Aldi, Lidl, Asda (owned by Walmart), and Morrisons - agreed to pay more for the milk price.
The cost of milk is pretty cheap in the UK. Four pints (2.27 litres) of fresh (not UHT) semi-skimmed milk is usually 90p to £1 in most UK supermarkets (that'a approx €1.37 or $1.50)
"Dairy farmers are like any other business in that many can stand to be more efficient."
I don't know if farming practices are inefficient in the UK, but it's worth asking: what does efficiency mean when it comes to farming and animal welfare? I don't want to see dairy farmers go out of business or for milk to be imported. And I don't want to see more "zero grazing" farms where intensive indoor grazing is the norm and cows have little or no outdoor access. Intensive farming methods like this are already used in the UK and continental Europe and look set to grow. Perhaps it's really for us as consumers to ask: what price are we prepared to pay for milk?
Dismaland: inside Banksy’s dystopian playground
This is pretty standard in the UK. If you're a permanent employee, your annual leave allowance (e.g. 4-6 weeks of holiday) covers a period of one year. If you don't take that leave during the year, you lose it (you're unlikely to get paid for the untaken leave).
Some companies may allow you to carry over some of that leave to the next year (e.g. a week) or may allow you to "sell" or "buy" some extra leave. However, this normally needs to be done at the start of the annual leave year so requires some pre-planning on the employees part.
BBC Radio 3 in the UK streams classical music at 320kbs over the internet. (I'm not sure if international users get this high bitrate stream or a lower bitrate though.)
- Mismatched visual styles: when you tap the phone icon, you get a bar of three icons. Two are simple line icons (History and Contacts), the third is a detailed picture of a keyboard to denote keypad. A minor thing and easily fixed.
- Interface inconsistencies: I noticed that a large red X is used for closing a screen (which I like over the sometimes unclear Back button behaviour you get in Android). But at 3:16 in the video the Wallpaper screen has a 'close' button (with X) and below that in the tab bar is the larger red X for closing too. So you have two close functions on the same screen. You see the same duplication on the date and Time screen at 3:41. By the way, I think the way Windows Phone lets you change date and time is much nicer. It's a similar spinner approach to Plasma but less cluttered. Here's a video of it in action: https://youtu.be/kIsWgCX7qtE?t=54s
Also, the commands 'close', 'cancel' and 'delete' all tend to use the same X icon in many UIs so if there is no label for X, then it's meaning (and behaviour) should be consistent across the OS.
- Weather app: there is a 'hamburger' menu on the left and another slimmer hamburger menu on the right. They feel too similar visually. Presumably, the right-hand menu is equivalent to the overflow menu you find on Android. But are two menus needed here? Could they not all sit in one menu?
Obviously, this is a beta and these are relatively minor points. I can see some influence from Android, which is fine - there's no doubt that Google, Microsoft and Apple all study and are influenced by each others work. I just hope the OS stands up well as a unique UI rather than just a clone of bits from other OSes.
Overall, it looks quite polished for a version 1.0 and I hope the project succeeds. I would love to see an open source project take the lead in design/UX over existing projects.
I can understand why this happens even though the outcome is often an unfriendly UI. Imagine you're a developer who's spent time and effort contributing to an open source project. Naturally you'll have an opinion on the UX and what suits your preferences. Everyone else using or contributing will also have a strong opinion. The moment you try and delgate visual and interaction design to a small, dedicated team is the moment the whole project generates enormous resentment from the "community".
Plus, any attempt to (sincerely) improve or simplify an interface will always be met at some point with the charge of "dumbing down".
Open source and design have never had a good relationship. I wish it were otherwise, but I don't know how it could be made better.