If the user's computer is pwned, you can wait for the user to log in to their bank account, then blank the screen while you send yourself all their money.
Device rooting isn't only of interest to developers. It also allows anyone to bypass the arbitrary rules set by Apple/Google on what software you can run. That's of interest to the whole population, even those who only use the app stores because it increases competition with the app stores.
Microsoft did usability studies on real people to determine the ribbon interface is better. This is back in the days when software companies cared about objectively verifiable results.
No, they did not (or if they did, they didn't publish it). If I'm wrong, please give me some links because I'd genuinely love to see it.
Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.
A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.
Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.
I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.
Yeah, that's exactly it - there were all those history blogposts, full of very interesting stuff, but all about before the ribbon was in active use. (Pity about the image rot.) No usability studies of the ribbon itself.
Parts of those blog posts were unintentionally revealing of the groupthink of an enclosed bubble of people who couldn't see the wood for the trees. A great example is this piece about moving menu entries around so you couldn't build muscle memory, and had to take the time to look for what you wanted:
> First, remember that we're analyzing this with 20/20 hindsight... there was a lot of excitement (not just at Microsoft) about "auto-customization"... to present exactly the right UI for the person at hand. Now, it's easy to say that today people are generally against this idea... but we know that mainly through trying... the adaptive UI in Office 2000
As I recall it, the vast majority at the time - users, reviewers, UI/UX writers - considered its downsides to be completely obvious and were firmly against it. Its designers were apparently the only ones who needed 20/20 hindsight to see that.
> I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid
I agree, the historical research, and the work on identifying the problems, was very solid. But the massive criticisms of the ribbon suggest it was not an entirely successful attempt at a solution.
I've seen it said that there's no way Microsoft would have neglected to carry out major usability studies on such a major UI change, and that the fact that nothing's been published, after all the blogposts and talks beforehand, suggests they chose to bury a bad result. No idea whether there's any truth in that of course, but it does sound plausible.
As a techie with no horse in this race I've always found the ribbon very usable. It has a layered shortcut system that is much logical than the legacy one, it still supports the legacy shortcuts (Alt-d, f, f forever!) and the number of commands now easily accessible for sure is higher than with the old menus.
Only no, it’s not and everyone reviled it when it came out but we’ve been stuck with it ever since.
MS may have done usability studies earlier (say, when they cared about dethroning Lotus 123 and WordPerfect) but that war was long won when the ribbon UI came out, by then they only cared about milking the cash cow.
The Brazilian law, passed in September of last year, requires both online service providers and "terminal operating systems" to provide secure, auditable age verification. It is from a technical standpoint presumably not legal to install an arbitrary Linux distro in Brazil, but one can imagine a list of approved distros that meet government standards. For example, Red Hat and Ubuntu might implement age verification for the Brazilian market and be cleared for use in Brazil.
The real issue starts when OEMs, in order to comply with laws of this type, start releasing machines with locked-down boot firmware that cannot run any but an approved operating system.
I doubt it. This bill has extremely deep problems.
The constrain of a "real-time application programming interface" has no legislative priors and little concrete technical merit. This requirement on its face requires that all operating systems provide some level of guaranteed response time, as a real-time OS would. But what that guarantee is, is unspecified. Not to mentions the reasonably consistent part.
But, such a file may not necessarily exist. And given that the onus is from operating systems and not those running the operating system. The existence of a file (or lack there of), is not a sufficient guarantee.
Further, this provides only one bucket the law requires. The file(s) in question MUST be more nuanced with the law as it is written.
The real fuckery of this bill: it pretends to be privacy preserving and to protect minors, but the only people whose personal birth date information can be leaked by its implementaiton are minors.
There is real, but weak, evidence the Epstein gang were eating babies. A lot of past conspiracy theories are suddenly seeming more plausible in light of the Epstein files.
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