The mice and the 8 - week 9

Today I’m going to write about how ergonomics has affected the success or failure of IT products, I’m going to do it by two examples, a story of a well-designed product that revolutionized the IT industry forever and a poorly designed one that resulted in a disaster, a commercial disaster at least.

The Mouse

Very few things contributed to the commercial success of PCs and their operative systems as mice, both in business and domestic environment. Being a ''technical miracle'', the mouse allowed the user to move pointers on the desktop simply moving the device whit one hand, resulting in perfect coordination between the brain and the PC output on the monitor, something unseen before.   

After the first prototypes and milestones of mice development by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 (the “Wheels Mouse”) and Bill English in 1972 (the “Ball Mouse”), in 1973, PARC invented the very first desk-computer Alto and the potential for mice to be used in a commercial way. 

Since the 80’ mice imposed themselves on every computer and played a crucial role in making them ergonomic also for the common users who is usually reluctant at learning how to perform operations using command-line only OSs. 

Windows 8

An example of poor usability is Windows 8, it was a disaster, hopefully, no one died, but we can’t be sure about that. The problem wasn't that Microsoft's designers couldn't design a good operating system interface, it's that they designed two of them!

The designers of Windows 8 were probably thinking of doing a great thing engineering an OS with two separate environments/interfaces, one for keyboard/mouse and a second overlaid interface for touch screens. Windows 8 was meant to be a great tool to approach the coming (expected to come) transition to tablets so each of the two environments/interfaces had a separate Web browser, Control Panel, e-mail program and type of programs. It wasn’t possible to ignore either of the two, resulting in twice the learning, twice the confusion and halving the customer satisfaction.

Microsoft corrected the wrong approach with Windows 10 where the transition between traditional and touch environment is much better managed and ergonomic to use.

Sources:

Sutori: HISTORY OF COMPUTER MOUSE

https://www.sutori.com/story/history-of-computer-mouse--2yUFPn6vNQBstaaz2x4FTdsy

ZDNet: ​Saying goodbye to Windows 8: Where did it all go wrong?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/saying-goodbye-windows-8-where-did-it-all-go-wrong/

IT as in Italy, a trade in the darkness - week 8

Once my grandmother, class 1923, commenting on the job of the local car mechanic, told me: “you see my son, there are some trades that are in the dark, and those are the best to have”. What she meant was that while the performance of most of the professionals can be evaluated by most of the customers there are others where you can only trust their instructions and diagnosis. For example, everyone can rate the food made by a professional chef, can judge if the house has been nicely designed by the architect, complain about the details of the hairdresser job or even (!) not be happy with the doctor prescription because, well, a google search said differently, and who doesn’t know his own body right? In other words, my grandmother was appreciating how the mechanic was benefiting from a huge “information asymmetry” in his job, most of the customers can’t understand much about engines and could only trust him, and pay.

In an IT illiterate country, Italy, IT trades are definitely in the darkness in the above sense; writing a few lines of simple code or listing some directories using a command line is a sure way to astonish the most who are going to be impressed by the wizardry of such exotic skills.

Despite their rarity and importance for today economy, Italian IT professionals still don’t get the recognition, and the salary, they deserve or could have, at least if compared to colleagues in other European countries or other professions in Italy. A brain drain is happening of Italians IT professionals who, having the will and the knowledge of languages (non that common), decide to be expats.

Italy, since middle ages at least, is a corporativist country whit long and well-established professions perfectly capable to enforce a long list of privileges, as an example right now in certain regions young lawyers and university professors have been prioritized on the COVID vaccination list over the elderly and the more vulnerable. As another example Bolt and Uber are not a thing because of the Taxi leagues.

For the Italian standards, where you need a bachelor degree and a state exam to be a tourist tour guide, the IT professionals being the last arrived are not recognized or protected at all and of course this is well reflected also in the salary level below the one of the above taxi drivers.

In Italy there are bachelor and Master degrees in informatics, but they are almost never taught in English resulting in none international recognition. Other than that we have the usual international private accreditation, among those the CISCOs are the most looked for in the job market.

There are only four professional figure object of government certification: Chief Information Officer (CIO), ICT Security Manager, ICT Security Specialist, ICT Trainer. Interestingly enough two of those are security focused.

As it often happened in the last years, positive improvements in Italy comes from European Union actions. The “Next Generation EU” program is delivering a lot of money to countries capable to invest in the IT sector with a focus on cybersecurity issues and formation, not only business opportunities but also a new need for standards and recognition may arise from that.

A long way has to come for the IT professionals to gain in Italy the social recognition they may deserve considering the important role they can have to “update” the country and the public administration in particular; hopefully, my generation will play a role.

Sources:

Competenze e professionalità nel settore informatico: pubblicata la EN 16234-1 – Competences and trades in the IT sector

https://www.uni.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4831:competenze-e-professionalita-nel-settore-informatico-pubblicata-la-en-16234-1&catid=171&Itemid=2612

ISTAT – Italian National Statistics Institute

https://www.istat.it/en/

Real power doesn’t have to be exercised - week 7

There is very little to find online about Virginia Shea, Princeton alumna and “student of human nature all her life”. The “network manners guru” by the San Jose Mercury News has a husband, four cats but not a Wikipedia page on her name. Shea’s most important contribution to the conversation about the evolving cyberspace is the book “Netiquette”, 160 pages of length, published in May 1994, so well ahead of the social-media era but at a time when the human interaction on the web was already frequent enough to pose questions about to-dos and don’ts in the online communication; back then mostly via emails, mailing lists, newsgroups end so on.

The book Netiquette, featured in numerous publications, still actual in is purpose, is structured as a decalogue of “commandments” to follow for proper behaviour on the internet and, quite frankly, valid everywhere.

1.    Remember the Human

2.    Adhere to the same standards of behaviour online that you follow in real life

3.    Know where you are in cyberspace

4.    Respect other people's time and bandwidth

5.    Make yourself look good online

6.    Share expert knowledge

7.    Help keep flame wars under control

8.    Respect other people's privacy

9.    Don't abuse your power

10. Be forgiving of other people's mistakes

My favourite rule is “do not abuse your power”, being the “social power” dimension the one that in my opinion is among the ones to be most prone to be distorted in the cyberspace. That’s what the authoress as to say about the topic:

“Some people in cyberspace have more power than others. There are wizards in MUDs (multi-user dungeons), experts in every office, and system administrators in every system.”

“Knowing more than others, or having more power than they do, does not give you the right to take advantage of them. For example, sysadmins should never read private email.”

There is a peculiar figure in the cyberspace not present in the real world in the same fashion: the “forum moderator” or in its other declinations such as “Facebook group administrator” and so on… The human world is filled with people in charge of moderate and administrate others, but never like in the Net those figures had the power to annihilate others with a single click on the mouse.

Let’s think how easy can be for a moderator tho kick a “troll” out of a forum, how he can perform that without checks and balances, and then think of a bouncer job to take a dangerous intoxicated person out of a pub. How more difficult is the second task? How many things can get out of control and how easier the second action can evolve in legal litigation.

Group/forum moderator found for themselves to be much easier to abuse the use of authority over the healthy leadership of a group. This is clear seeing some once healthy forums destroyed by new “rulers” that overreaching with their will to impose themself actually destroyed the “vibes” and the functionality itself of the group.

All these issues can be trivial if we are talking about gaming forums but can become substantial if more important aspects of our social life are moving, and they are, online.

Source:

The core rules of netiquette, by Virginia Shea

http://albion.com/netiquette/

How to do right with copyleft - week 6

While the difference between copyright and copyleft seems to be intuitive at first glance, the comparison between strong copyleft, weak copyleft and even non-copyleft licenses is a bit more complex and deserves a few examples to be clarified; the choice between the different options in terms of copyleft licensing may substantially impact business ability in developing new products and if the case profit from them, let’s see how.

Strong copyleft licenses demand derived works to retain the license of the original licensed product, software cannot be made proprietary, the most common type of those licenses is GPL, the GNU General public License. GPL is good for the end-user, who is accorded several rights, but it has some business downsides mostly because it carries the requirement that the recipient of the software has to pass all the freedoms included by the strong copyleft license to the next end-user of the derivate product. For example, companies that work with the Linux kernel and distribute it are obligated to make source available to their users. This is frequently a problem when companies distribute modified GPL'ed software like the Linux kernel in embedded devices and neglect to make the source available. GPL licenses are today in decline, in favour of more permissive licensing.

Licenses with weak copyleft, are as the name entails are weekend kind of copyleft licenses where even fewer rights are accorded to the original owner, widely used in software libraries (collection of code used to create other programs). The main benefit of weak copyleft is that it allows better software integration requiring less compliance effort than in GPL. For example, the Mozilla Project uses this kind of license for the Firefox web-browser befitting of all the possible integration opportunity compared to a strong copyleft. Must be said that Firefox license was ruled as GPL-incompatible, which eventually caused the Mozilla project to re-license its code under a triple MPL, GPL and LGPL license. 

Non-copyleft licenses (also known as public domain licenses, BSD-style licenses, Permissive free software licenses, or “Copy centre licenses”) have seen a wide increase in use in the last years, they grant the most of freedom to software developers and so to the business ready to source from them. For example, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) uses a few open-source initiative for its software. The majority of Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project strives to adhere to the preferred license, there are exceptions, which are handled on a case-by-case basis.

 

Source:

CIO – ‘How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers’

https://www.cio.com/article/2400153/how-open-source-licenses-affect-your-business-and-your-developers.html

Shlomfish.org – ‘Types of Licences’

https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/open-source/foss-licences-wars/foss-licences-wars/types-of-licences.xhtml#:~:text=Examples%20of%20weak%20copyleft%20licences,reportedly%20a%20more%20complicated%20licence

Source.android.com – “Licenses”

https://source.android.com/setup/start/licenses

The pirate’s law - week 5

Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engstrom are respectively the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party and, the second, a Member of the European Parliament elected in the related list and sitting in “The Greens | European Free Alliance” parliamentary group. Despite the buccaneer flavoury name and the at times provocative attitude, the Pirate Party as proven to be capable of came out with many reasonable proposals and to be constructive in the approach, this is the case in “The Case For Copyrighting Reform”, a booklet with a self-explanatory title.

In “The Case For Copyrighting Reform” Falkvinge and Engstrom offer to the European public a six-point agenda of possible copyright legal framework reform also explaining why it is much needed. Following there is my opinion about the six proposals.

Moral rights should stay unchanged; this is one of the main, if not the main, good reasons why copyrights where introduced at the beginning, even Martin Luther found copies of his thesis changed but still under his misattributed name. Everyone should have his/her creations properly attributed and we also as the community benefit from a system where sources are properly referenced and trustworthy.

Free non-commercial sharing; here the pirates ask something but still come with a decent compromise, while saving the “bulk” of the copyright revenues in the for-profit sector, they still aim to free the final user, we the consumers, from the burden of caring and paying for the copyright legal framework.

20 years of commercial monopoly; yes and no, this other compromise leaves me uncertain, I would differentiate more the length of the monopoly by industry, this is probably the view of the authors as well who maybe have left this to the lawmaker’s discussions.

Registration after 5 years; this is a bit more of a technicality but sounds completely reasonable and needed, after all, even the ownership of land gets lost if not claimed…

Free sampling; again, a reasonable proposal but the evil stays in the details, the length and the extend of a “reasonable” sampling is difficult to tell and verify, this may lead to an increase in litigation and confusion. Maybe the benefits of this last point can be obtained already with the “free non-commercial sharing” proposal leaving the for-profit pay for what they use in their value chain.

A ban for DRM “Digital Rights Management”; finally, with this proposal, the pirate spirit comes out advocating for their freedom objective but at the same time not caring much about restricting other actor’s freedom. If on one side I agree that should “always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions” on the other side I think that authors should be also free to shape their works as better fit their marketing purposes, including discouraging “copying” even if legal. People in Port Royal would agree with me.

Source:

The Case for Copyright Reform, by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engstrom

 http://falkvinge.net/wp-content/uploads/large/The%20Case%20For%20Copyright%20Reform%20(2012)%20Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf

A retrospective of a forecast – week 4

“Challenges of the global information society” by Pekka Himanen is a review presented at the attention of the Finnish Parliament’s Committee for the Future in 2004. Himanen, born 19 October 1973, is a Finnish philosopher, researcher of the “information age”, published in 20 languages.

This report lists the challenges Finland, as a European and welfare state country, may face in the awakening of the information society revolution; the focus is also expanded globally with ideas that do apply universally. In Himanen’s words: “The idea of the information society can be defined as a creative society that is based on interaction” and “What is most important to the information society is not new technology but a new way of doing things”; he does conclude that: “the most critical aspect in the development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society”

In the author reasoning, there is an attempt to describe what the future may look like, a relative future since the report has been presented in 2004. While most of the underlying reasoning is still valid, it is already possible to assess, 17 years later, if any of Himanen’s ideas have been proved true or wrong.

The document is quite long and extensive, it starts analyzing the global trends, both demographic/economic and cultural, related to the changes in the information society evolution, then switches to the possible development scenarios offering three possible exemplar models to assess problems and futurable possibilities: the Finnish model, the Silicon Valley model and the Singapore model.

Focus is given on the European model of welfare-state and innovative entrepreneurialism in its fundamental values: caring, confidence, communality, encouragement, freedom, creativity, courage, visionariness, balance and meaningfulness.

Himanen than goes in deep expressing four key concepts of healthy social development in the new information society, a creative economy, a creative welfare society, humanly meaningful development and a global culture. Of all the material produced, there are two takeaways, two predictions he made, that deserve special mention, one is proven right, one false.

The author forecasted a word of increasing economic inequalities among people and countries, the so-called “global divide”; if this is at a certain margin true for the inequality inside the society with equities and income more and more centralized in fewer hands (especially in the US) is on the other side proven wrong when looking at inequalities among countries, the last 20 years have seen the economic rise of third and developing countries while in Europe and most of the “first world” the performance has been, to say it mildly, not excellent. Poverty at a world level is at is historical lower level today.

Himanen can really surprise the reader when he seems to predict the spread of a “culture of emergency”. In the last 15 years, analyzing the political narratives in the US and in Europe we can realize that’s perfectly true today; the author external view, coming from the distant 2004, can help us to better assess our present in a less biased way.   

All considered Himanen’s work resonate coherent and extensive, a good starting point for a better understanding of how the global information society may influence our lives.

 

The document https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf

Siege to the fourth power – week 3

Newspapers represented an affordable, timely effective way to inform people around shared ideas, with no doubt they are one of the fundamental elements in the cradle of illuminism and modern democracy. The printed media have so many qualities that helped to improve human’s society but they also have the characteristic to require expensive organizations and can struggle to run a profit, hence they may end up being centralized in few hands of powerful oligarchs. The independence and the plurality of newspaper as always been an important issue in modern democracies. Even long-time established newspapers have always been prone to be influenced by the shareholders, political parties, companies paying for advertisement and the government itself in the case of state-owned ones.

The printed medium quickly became a powerful tool to influence masses opinion, we can safely consider them to be the first mass-medium that has been consciously used by the power for political purposes. In the last century, they start referring to the cast of journalists and their editors as the "fourth power" of the state. If someone thinks that radios, televisions and new social media have eclipsed the old fashioned printed papers in their political influence role can quickly be disproven pointing at how radio and television are filled in their talk-shows whit traditional newspaper journalists, who act as opinionmakers and how most of the social media political interaction is based on the re-sharing of contents from television talk-shows and newspapers themself, in their new digital form.

We can safely say that social media per se don’t pose a substantial threat on the ability of newspapers (and their patrons) to exercise the traditional influence in political dynamics, but maybe something else does, the blogs.

Blogs just as the traditional press can consist in the production of political contents and ideas of various quality and any extraction. Blogs differ from newspapers because they are inexpensive if not free to make and distribute, they don’t require an equity or a complex structure, only one person, the blogger, is enough to run one. Therefore, a blog can be independent as much as the blogger is, and today distributed for free on the Internet as long if their content is considered worthy to be shared by the users, the most valuable contents can become “viral”.

The case for a free blog to generate political influence and change is something already happening. The most famous example of a political blog is probably www.beppegrillo.it started by Beppe Grillo, a famous Italian comedian, in 2005. From his blog, Beppe Grillo was able to start the V-day protest movement, and subsequently, the “5 Stars” political party, scoring a quite remarkable 32% in the last Italian election. Interestingly in the first years of the “5 Stars” member were not allowed to communicate in any traditional media but restricted by the only use of the Internet, this rule is not applied anymore.

In a time of disintermediation of the social texture, blogs represent one of the possible challenges of the political power of the traditional press.

 

References

1.    https://www.beppegrillo.it/