Quantumstate’s Blog

One of the challenges in designing a program is to provide a user friendly interface for the user. If the program is too complicated then it will not be used as much. This has sometimes led to a reduction in how much the program can be customised and configured to the way the user likes it.

The main problem is, of course, that there are different users, who will each have a different amount of experience and expertise. Basic users will be confused by too many options yet more advanced users will want to be able to change many of the details to the way they want.

This is where I think the advanced options become useful. This removes the complicated configuration possibilities away from the basic users who will probably never look at the advanced options. Yet for the more advanced user there can be huge possibilities within the advanced configuration to do whatever they like.

I think this is probably the best way to deal with the conflict of keeping things simple and allowing for more advanced things. Now the only problem is working out what is simple enough to keep in the basic options and what is advanced enough for the advanced options.

Piracy is becoming more widespread. There are many different things which are pirated via computers however I will just look at software. Open source software does also seem to be growing in popularity but more slowly than the growth of piracy.

Does piracy have a negative effect for open source software? I think it probably does. First we should look at what attracts people to open source software, what its benefits are.

First they will be attracted if the software is good. Firefox is a good example of an open source program which became popular because it was well made and better than Internet Explorer. People will recommend software to each other if they find it good.

The other major factor is that it is free. Free in the sense that it costs no money. Most users don’t know the difference between freeware and open source software. There will be a few idealistic people but these are a small minority.

I will ignore the quality for now because that isn’t really affected by piracy, at least not in the short term. In the long term lack of money could make a difference to quality but I will ignore this.

Piracy makes commercial software available for free. There is a small risk of being caught which will deter some people who don’t want to break the law, but it is not a very serious risk. So this removes one of the major advantages that open source software gives. So I would imagine that piracy is having a negative effect on open source software’s acceptance.

Recently in the UK there has been a problem because somebody in the government has lost some discs which contain personal data about 25 million people including bank details in some cases. The BBC news had a report on this and one of the things that struck me most were the background pictures.

They had clearly tried to do a general computer theme but it was interesting what they had managed to find. There was binary code of course, a nice picture of a circuit board with some chips that had 8-16 pins on them, which are not used anywhere within the computing industry at all. They weren’t even surface mounted chips. There was some interesting xml code which was a bit messy, lacking in appropriate line breaks and indents and the tags were pretty unintelligible and finally they had a nice matrix style scrolling code clip, the falling green text with good quality motion blur effects.

This was just the background to the text information that they were showing and the speech but it did make me th9ink about how poorly computers are represented in the media. Films seem to be especially bad, even when this is central to the film such as in swordfish, which is a film about a computer hacker.

Swordfish will give the unsuspecting viewer an interesting view of the way that hackers work and the limitations of what they can do. The hacker doesn’t seem to like compiling his code, since in the first part that they show him working he is told to crack some American high security thing in a minute and he just seems to keep typing constantly. I got the impression that he was just executing the commands as he went along.

Another interesting thing was that he was told to try and hack into a computer from the login screen. Unless a flaw had been specially designed to make it hackable it shouldn’t be too difficult to secure a login screen so that people would have to tamper with hardware to get it to work. This will lead people to believe that hackers can crack things which are just not possible.

Finally and probably the most blatant thing is the worm that the hacker creates. The worm is interesting because he seems to have programmed a cool 3D interface which shows some cubes sliding around as the worm tries to get the right configuration. He actually uses this on a bank computer, now I wonder what would have happened if the computer hadn’t had 3D graphics support? Nobody programs a 3D user interface for a worm. There just isn’t any point whatsoever.

I don’t really know what effect this has on the public but I would imagine that it would have some effect of influencing them.

Recently I heard a statistic about how many people there are in the UK due to people trafficking. The estimate was about 4000 which in a country of 60 million didn’t seem very significant. The fact that there are so many people who are effectively slaves in the UK is pretty bad but I don’t really want to post about that because for one thing I don’t really know enough about it.

I then thought about the size of the town which I live in, this is about 30 000. since there are 60 million people in the UK that is 1/2000 of the population. This means that if we had our fair share of these people from people trafficking there would be 2 in my town. Although my town has 30 000 people it doesn’t seem all that big. But it does contain a fairly large proportion of the country. But of course there are bigger towns and lots of small towns so when I looked it up it was about the 440th largest town in the country.

Looking at it this way makes the country seem quite a lot smaller. This is really a bit of deception though because 60 million people is a lot of people, the reason it seems smaller is because I have given my brain 2 smaller numbers which multiply to give the number and so individually they are not too big. 100 * 100 * 100 * 60 also gives 1 million but 100 people isn’t very much, I know well over 100 people.

I guess our brains just can’t really understand big numbers like this. They are just number to be represented in different ways. Some ways make our brain perceive the numbers as being bigger than they are while others make them seem smaller.