Daily Archives: April 30, 2010

A computer for the PITS

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Apropos the iPad, I came on Jeff Raskin’s 1979 “Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer” in the Stanford archives. Here’s an excerpt:

This is an outline for a computer designed for the Person In The Street (or, to abbreviate: the PITS); one that will be truly pleasant to use, that will require the user to do nothing that will threaten his or her perverse delight in being able to say: "I don't know the first thing about computers," and one which will be profitable to sell, service and provide software for.

You might think that any number of computers have been designed with these criteria in mind, but not so. Any system which requires a user to ever see the interior, for any reason, does not meet these specifications. There must not be additional ROMS, RAMS, boards or accessories except those that can be understood by the PITS as a separate appliance. For example, an auxiliary printer can be sold, but a parallel interface cannot. As a rule of thumb, if an item does not stand on a table by itself, and if it does not have its own case, or if it does not look like a complete consumer item in [and] of itself, then it is taboo.

If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements.

Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo (unless to make servicing cheaper without imposing too large an initial cost). Billions of keys on the keyboard is taboo. Computerese is taboo. Large manuals, or many of them (large manuals are a sure sign of bad design) is taboo. Self- instructional programs are NOT taboo.

There must not be a plethora of configurations. It is better to offer a variety of case colors than to have variable amounts of memory. It is better to manufacture versions in Early American, Contemporary, and Louis XIV than to have any external wires beyond a power cord.

And you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord.

Any differences between models that do not have to be documented in a user's manual are OK. Any other differences are not.

Quote of the Day

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“The price you pay for being aware of your own existence is having to confront the inevitability of your own individual demise.

Death awareness is the price we pay for self awareness.”

Professor Gordon Gallup, commenting on the fact that although chimpanzees are one of the few species that pass his ‘mirror’ self-awareness test, they begin to lose that ability when they pass the age of 30 — about 15 years before death.

[Source.]

Facebook claims that 50k sites have already adopted ‘Like’ buttons

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From TechCrunch.

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

75 of those websites were Facebook’s launch partners, which included sites like CNN and the New York Times — everyone else handled the integration on their own, which Facebook has made very straightforward (it generally just involves copy-and-pasting a few lines of code). This growth is important, because as more sites integrate these social widgets, Facebook will increasingly own social interaction across the web.

We’ve also confirmed that Facebook met and surpassed Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that Facebook users would hit see the ‘Like’ button 1 billion times in its first 24 hours of existence. Not a bad start. Update: A Facebook spokesman has clarified that Zuckerberg was referring to the number of impressions the Like button had, not how many times people clicked the Like button.

Aside from the Like Button, Facebook’s other social plugins include an activity feed that displays your friends’ activity, a widget with recommended articles, and the Facepile, which shows you photos of your friends who also use the site you’re browsing.