Viewing profile — ConceptJunkie

There's going to be a huge realignment in white collar work in the next decade or two, and then there's the fact that college degrees themselves (except for maybe STEM), are becomi…

I'll look at math papers on Arxiv, etc., and browsing the titles will find maybe one in a hundred where I even know what it's talking about. I've been a math enthusiast since I was…

And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to …

I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. …

Roger Dean did some great artwork for computer games, etc., in the 1980s. I still have the poster of the cover of the game Barbarian that came with the game. Dean later recycled th…

Seeing the juggler, and lots of other gee-whiz stuff in 1986 inspired me to buy an Amiga 500 as my first computer in 1988. I got a lot of mileage out of that system, with its whopp…

The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long that we don't run out of them in 20 years or so. There fixed that for you.

I'm sorry, I can't do that, but here is the design for a stable quantum computing platform that should allow you to generate those keys yourself...

I feel like it's a rite of passage for a beginner programmer to have a recursive function generate a stack overflow.

DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.

If you were to quiz people who preferred the Windows 2000 look, you would more likely get detailed answers regarding the design language and functionality. If you were to quiz peop…

Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entir…

I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.

That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look li…

Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then y…

In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.

I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI ex…

Yeah, but I would still usually see Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh Win2k installation. Windows 2000 was peak UI, but it wasn't peak Windows. That was Windows 7. And Windo…

> Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click. That never changed.

For people complaining that "Start" isn't a great choice, perhaps there's something better, but I can't think of anything. You need a small word that implies, "Click here to do som…

> And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants. This pretty much describes _everything_ in Windows in the last …

That reminds me of that notorious story of the adventure game from the 90s where you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle.

I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answe…

Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM an…

> how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. .. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.