A silly question?

[Workingman]

Suff and I have probably got you so confused.......

A picture paints a thousand words.......

Imagine you are reading a magazine article about the Abominable Snowman and are told that more information is available at ww.unmuseum.org/yeti.htm (I have deliberately left a w from the normal www part of the address so as not to make a link from here)

So, you turn on your laptop and open Internet Explorer.

Here is mine with Google search set as my homepage and it is opened in a tab on the Tab Bar. I also have my Favorites Bar visible and the Address Bar stretches across the top.



Now, for you to get to the Abominable Snowman site you can do any of these:

Press the New Tab button



Or use the Ctrl T combination



Then type in the address



And there you are, done.

[Suff]

Yep, pictures speak thousands of words and can be understood.

I just haven't had the time, well I probably had the time but getting off my behind and doing something was too much.

I had a steerco meeting today and though I was crow bait. Funnily enough they took another month's delay in their stride and we might actually deliver something by mid May.. Anticipation for that was probably party to do with my lack of motivation....

That explains what I was talking about extremely well.

I guess that part of what we are saying is that you simply won't have all the addresses you want all the time. That is what search engines are for. I just checked my favourites (very easy in IE as it's just a folder). I have 575 links in 71 folders. I keep a lot of links which have probably expired by now. I do clean them out every 5 years or so but it is time consuming.

BTW, if you are on a page you want to bookmark, press Ctrl-D and it will ask you where you want to bookmark it. I do this for my sites that I got to occasionally.

There are now, quite literally, tens of millions of websites out there. For which we need to use search engines to refine the junk from the nuggets of gold. It is becoming increasingly hard to do that.

We were just talking about the Web and how it has changed the lives of people who work in IT (Over 6 pints of Guinness... ). We used to go on courses, we used to buy books and we used to use them to write programs and tools and utilities. Today we just search the web, someone has written the code already or something close enough that we can copy it. Someone has already seen the problem or solved the problem.

Such a wonderful resource.
Such a waste the way it is used....

[Workingman]

Yep, pictures speak thousands of words and can be understood...... That explains what I was talking about extremely well.

I looked back through the thread and confused myself.

I hope that Aggers comes back, he should eventually find what he was looking for.

[Aggers]

Suff and I have probably got you so confused.......

It doesn't take much to get me confused, Frank, particularly when it
comes to computers, so I do appreciate it when you guys assist me.
Thanks to you both I am now well sorted out on this particular point.

To be honest, I can't understand why they make these computers so
complicated. Why can't they make models which just do the basics ?
I often think that if it wasn't for Vocal Voices I would cancel my B.T.
Internet contract and just use my lap top and printer for 'Office work'.

[Workingman]

John, it is because those working in IT are, sort of, trapped in the old legacy IT bubble.

In the days when Unix and DOS were kings things were done in a certain way, and although the user interfaces have changed, a lot of the old underlying thinking remains very similar. It is one reason that there are so many ways of doing the same thing - more than one way to kill a cat.

Suff and I probably use more keyboard key combinations than most of you. For us they really are 'shortcuts' whereas many people use the mouse to either click a button to open a menu. From there it often becomes another click and another menu and so the cascade goes on.

For me, if someone was to create an operating system with today's thinking only, there would be no keyboard shortcuts. A mouse would have at least five buttons, possibly seven, and everything would be controlled from there. Every manufacturer would buy in to the system and everything would work the same regardless of who made it. Think cars and the right to left accelerator, brake and clutch system whether the car is left or right hand drive. All the handbooks would basically carry the same information.

It will not happen, for a number of reasons, so as new thinking and technological workings come along we will all have to learn how each manufacturer approaches them...... including the likes of me and Suff.

[Suff]

As WM says, this is a constant journey of learning.

One of the things you must be aware of on a computer is hotsposts and focus/state changes.

For instance the new tab area, next to the last (first if it is the only), tab, is a hotspot. You can see this because it is on it's own and seems to be something different. In IE, if you hover over the new tab area, it displays a blank document icon.

This leads into focus/state changes. Because interfaces are constantly moving to a "better" (define better, it's always what some person thinks will work for the majority of people), way of working, things constantly change and morph into something else.

So you have to look at everything, not just what you are working on. I use my peripheral vision a lot as I notice things change as I move the mouse around or as I work. I then move my attention to what has changed and have a good look to see what it is doing. Things are changing so quickly that there is really no time to read documents for this kind of update, you just have to experience it.

I've noticed this with Mrs S a lot. She becomes lost or confused because she's looking at one thing expecting it to do something when what has been done is somewhere else and the notification is actually slightly out of the field of view if you have narrowed your vision down.

I've been working with my Windows phone to learn the new way in which the interface works. One of the key things is the need to both swipe up and down and side to side. I find it works really well, is fast and is much more usable than the Android stuff. But, again, it's new, it has been designed for that kind of use and it needs to be learned....

Well I was learning until some scumbag stole it out of my jacket pocket, over my head, on the TGV, whilst I was asleep. S/He might have thought I'd wonder if I dropped it or something else. Except for the fact that I was listening to music on it over my Bluetooth headset. I only noticed the problem when the signal started to break up and then was lost at CDG airport in Paris....... Buying another one, the journey will continue....

But the message is the same. Things are evolving. Always look, always interact with what is happening and search for answers when it does not seem to make sense.

BTW, Tabs are great to stop all that backwards/Forwards stuff with links. I don't click on links if I can avoid it, I right click on them and select to open in a new tab. There is a keyboard shortcut for this but I keep forgetting it...

[Workingman]

Ctrl Left mouse click opens links in new tabs.

So does Right mouse click and choose 'Open in new tab' from the menu...

So does clicking the scroll wheel when hovering over the link...

The peripheral vision thing is interesting. Mine is usually drawn to the status bar, which I always have visible in everything. If I hover over something with my mouse cursor I know that I am going to get a helpful (or not) little pop-up, but I am usually ahead of the game because the status bar is instant and more informative.

[Aggers]

You've lost me already, guys.

[Suff]

Aggers, it comes down to two or three key things.

We are in the steam age of computing. We won't even reach the jet age for another 20 to 30 years. So things are changing. Just consider the changes in your lifetime in transport and the physical accessibility of the world to ordinary people. Now multiply that by 10,000 and the changes we are yet to see in the world of the power of computers and the human/machine interface might be easier to understand.

We are also in the American railroad age of computing. There are huge blocks of "old money" controlling most of the system. However there are always new "start up's" with a totally new view on things which challenge the new order. So they change things to look different. To take WM's analogy, there were cars with pedals in different positions, motorcycles with left hand throttles and we have had at least 3 significant changes in typewriter key layout.

The main thing about technology changes is that, given time, they settle down into a few common standards eventually. This will take longer with computing because we keep changing the envelope. First teletype to talk to them, then keyboards and vdu, then WIMP (Windows, Mice, Icons and Pointers), now we have touch and we will eventually have gesture and voice when they finally get enough computing power to back it up. As this continues to evolve, the less popular methods will fall by the wayside. I'm sure a Stanley Steamer was a very reliable vehicle. But Internal Combustion simply killed all of that. Equally with computing.

The final piece is that we are massively limited by the sheer lack of power and lack of storage of our current computers. You might think that I'm being funny saying this, but reality is that our current computing power is ridiculously small for what we are trying to do. The closest we have come to this is SETI@Home where one program ran over millions of home computers to do the work that could not be done by thousands of massive servers. As quantum computing becomes a reality, I expect computing power not only to double and double again, but to increase a thousandfold. When that finally happens, then we will really have something we can work with and interact with. Reality is that true real time voice recognition and language translation requires many hundreds of times the computing power needed to model nuclear weapons behaviour during a nuclear explosion. We were doing that with 1980's technology and our current technology is thousands of times faster than that today.

So nothing will remain the same. Things will constantly change. The way of working will constantly change. The only thing which can get you through that is to be aware, to look for change and what it might mean and to spend small segments of time searching for information when you are lost. Trying to read it all is impossible and a waste of time anyway, it will all be changed in 5 years time. It is the basic grounding in concepts and possibilities which gives you the tools to work with computers in the long run. This is what Children do. They don't have expectations, they are used to learning by experimentation. As they learn, they build patterns of knowledge which they can apply to new situations.

The problem that you have is that your pattern of knowledge is totally different from what is needed today to keep up with the changes in technology. I know this as I had to do the same pattern shift in my late 20's and early 30's. It took a lot of time and hard work but it paid off and now I can absorb the changes and work with the changes as they occur. I rarely read manuals as it's a waste of my time generally. By the time I have read it someone else will be doing something else. I'd spend all my time learning things which I'd never use again.

That is the true difference in today and when you were growing up. The pace of change is so high that much of the learned knowledge is discardable. All that knowledge does is give you a primer for the next round of technology you are going to have to use. A pointer on the path to understanding. For example when Mrs S told me that her iPad was "broken" and I "needn't bother looking because #1 son has looked and he couldn't do anything", I picked it up, ignored her, pressed a few buttons and 30 seconds later it was rebooting and fixed. Because there are things you retain, like the probable keypresses which will trigger an action. Oh and how long you need to hold them for too.... Which is another story altogether....

[Aggers]

I agree with everything you say, Suff.

Since I retired everything seems to have changed, and most of the changes
are foreign to what was the norm during my working life. So, naturally it is
difficult, almost impossible, to come to terms with the comparatively alien
world I now live in. I would say that there has been many more changes in
my lifetime that in any other similar period in history. I do try hard to keep
abreast with things, but believe me, it's not easy.