7 ms·

It seems to me that the presence of a "bazillion knobs" is a bug in itself. A stable system can not depend on puny humans for its operation—nor should a design

It seems to me that the presence of a "bazillion knobs" is a bug in itself. A stable system can not depend on puny humans for its operation—nor should a design be able to blame puny humans for its failure.

ay 12y ago
Millions of people are using it today, one and a half decades after it was conceived. It's not perfect but nothing is. If you have examples of tech to compare with - please bring them in! EDIT: and yeah, a lot of knobs does sound like a bit of a poor design, but on the other hand, today, 1.5 decades later, I am grateful I can tweak some of the defaults! Again, if you know something knob-less that'd get flawlessly deployed in 15 years after it was designed - shout, would be very useful to try and learn from that success!
- tedunangst 12y ago
  The nearest comparison to IPv6 is DNSSEC. IPv6 has done a little better, but that's not saying much. Both suffer from massive over engineering, and lots of false starts and back pedaling over the years. Trying to solve too many problems, and therefore failing to solve the one problem that's of immediate concern.
  - ay 12y ago
    Oh, "same as" cases are indeed all over, e.g. the EUI-64 https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf I was looking for the example of the sparkly unicorn protocol from 2000 the people seem to evoke, which does not need any knobs and is available on every device to update some other protocol from 1970s. (I suppose the hard meta-question to protocol designers is: how do you make sure your children will not hate you for the protocol you have imposed on them today ?)
    - wbl 12y ago
      UTF-8 updating ASCII is probably the best example of this going well. And even then there was a terrible mistake made in the design of Korean encodings which had to be fixed.
      - taejo 12y ago
        What was the problem with Korean encodings?
        drdaeman 12y ago
        I have no experience with Korean and Unicode but, I guess, it's jamo composition? With it, there are two distinct and not-really-compatible (since anyone in real world practice rarely cares about Unicode normalization) ways to specify a single Hangul character. And that should make text processing a bit painful.
        jrochkind1 12y ago
        Anyone who writes software to deal with unicode really better care about unicode normalization! You are going to have all sorts of edge case bugs and unexpected behaviors if you don't, definitely not limited to Hangul. There are multiple un-normalized ways to write all sorts of on-screen glyphs, including Latin alphabet ones.
        taejo 12y ago
        I thought wbl meant something to do with the combination of Korean and UTF-8, whereas jamo composition is no more related to UTF-8 than any other unicode encoding.
        wbl 12y ago
        They moved the Korean encodings at one point in the early 1990's. Luckily this was before anyone used it, but it was still a big mess. I don't know why they had to move it.
      - ay 12y ago
  - sp332 12y ago
    False starts and backpedaling are also known as "iterating". It's disappointing that many of the planned features never got production-ready. But the protocol is now more likely to be implemented than ever before, which is the primary "feature" to which all others are secondary.
- tgflynn 12y ago
  I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless but there are reasons it replaced just about every other networking protocol in existence and simplicity and robustness probably had a lot to do with that. Of course hierarchical routing was a huge feature for the Internet but not necessarily compelling enough to drive out every other LAN protocol.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    That's a very bad example. Not only is IPv4 (especially TCP) full of knobs, but it was still in flux 15 years after it's conception.
  - josteink 12y ago
    > I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless I can tell you haven't tried creating/setting up your own router with NATing, separate subnets (secure, insecure), inbound and outbound VPNs, firewalling and traffic shaping. Or basically anything non-trivial with IP in general. The amount of knobs which you can (and must) set correctly for this thing to fly is enough to give an experienced engineer severe paranoia.
    - tgflynn 12y ago
      Actually I have done most of those things at one time or another. I'm not saying IPv4 is simple (especially if you want to do complex things with it) but it works well when configured correctly and is simple enough to be deployed in businesses of all sizes as well as home networks. I didn't get involved with networking much until shortly after most other protocols were rapidly disappearing but the fact that IPv4 replaced IPX, DECNET, AppleTalk, etc in only a few years time suggests that it probably wasn't that much of a nightmare to set up, even in it's early days. My concern with IPv6, based on this post, is that it may have lost some of the robustness and relative simplicity of IPv4. I mean layer 3 <-> layer 2 address mapping is fundamental to any network and if that's breaking with IPv6 it could be a pretty serious issue.
    - fulafel 12y ago
      IPv4 specs forbid NAT. VPN and firewalling are also counter to the spirit of IP, if not the letter. The internet was designed for end-to-end and works much better if you go along the grain on that.
api 12y ago
My philosophy for a long time has been "every tunable parameter is a design weakness, and every one that must be tuned is a bug." It's hard to achieve this in practice, but I keep it in mind as a goal.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  100% agreed. This is why I'm liking elementary OS so much. I still need to pop into the command line for some things, but the standard GUI software is less excessively configurable than most. They have an HIG and a small community of developers who actually pay attention to it. http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/avoid-configuration http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/avoi... That said, it's still Linux, and if you really need more flexibility you can always pull chunks out and replace them with the usual alternatives. As an example, here are the prefs for the built-in music player: http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png
  - Crito 12y ago
    > "but the standard GUI software is less excessively configurable than most." How configurable is it compared to GNOME? Less configurable than that is really just "not configurable".
    - wlesieutre 12y ago
      A lot of it is based on the GNOME core applications, so it's similar. I haven't used GNOME enough to say more than that. For the people who want extra options, there's elementary-tweaks, similar to gnome tweak tool. http://gfycat.com/UniqueInfamousCoypu http://gfycat.com/UniqueInfamousCoypu Since I put up a screenshot of elementary's music player already (http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png) that makes for a decent comparison. Here's Rhythmbox: http://www.gfycat.com/MenacingFreshIndianpalmsquirrel http://www.gfycat.com/MenacingFreshIndianpalmsquirrel How many users will want to change the file naming or folder hierarchy convention for their music library if they're managing them through a GUI application? Why is there a big list of "visible columns" checkboxes instead of setting that by right-clicking the columns? Does crossfade really need a whole tab for a checkbox and slider (and why does it need a checkbox when 0 seconds implies no fading)? Do people actually use crossfade anyway? I never have. In short, there's room to clean a lot of things up. Even if it's minor, doing it across the entire system makes things a lot nicer. Plus there are some additional system-wide standardization features that elementary is doing, which should prevent a lot of inconsistency from software from all reinventing the wheel in different ways: http://elementaryos.org/journal/contractor-not-sharing-service http://elementaryos.org/journal/contractor-not-sharing-servi... http://elementaryos.org/journal/hig-update-popovers-decorated-windows-and-source-lists http://elementaryos.org/journal/hig-update-popovers-decorate... It's still a pretty new project, but as a relative Linux newbie I'm still having an easy time with it despite the comparatively small community.

ay 12y ago

Millions of people are using it today, one and a half decades after it was conceived. It's not perfect but nothing is. If you have examples of tech to compare with - please bring them in! EDIT: and yeah, a lot of knobs does sound like a bit of a poor design, but on the other hand, today, 1.5 decades later, I am grateful I can tweak some of the defaults! Again, if you know something knob-less that'd get flawlessly deployed in 15 years after it was designed - shout, would be very useful to try and learn from that success!

tedunangst 12y ago
The nearest comparison to IPv6 is DNSSEC. IPv6 has done a little better, but that's not saying much. Both suffer from massive over engineering, and lots of false starts and back pedaling over the years. Trying to solve too many problems, and therefore failing to solve the one problem that's of immediate concern.
- ay 12y ago
  Oh, "same as" cases are indeed all over, e.g. the EUI-64 https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf I was looking for the example of the sparkly unicorn protocol from 2000 the people seem to evoke, which does not need any knobs and is available on every device to update some other protocol from 1970s. (I suppose the hard meta-question to protocol designers is: how do you make sure your children will not hate you for the protocol you have imposed on them today ?)
  - wbl 12y ago
    UTF-8 updating ASCII is probably the best example of this going well. And even then there was a terrible mistake made in the design of Korean encodings which had to be fixed.
    - taejo 12y ago
      What was the problem with Korean encodings?
      - drdaeman 12y ago
        I have no experience with Korean and Unicode but, I guess, it's jamo composition? With it, there are two distinct and not-really-compatible (since anyone in real world practice rarely cares about Unicode normalization) ways to specify a single Hangul character. And that should make text processing a bit painful.
        jrochkind1 12y ago
        Anyone who writes software to deal with unicode really better care about unicode normalization! You are going to have all sorts of edge case bugs and unexpected behaviors if you don't, definitely not limited to Hangul. There are multiple un-normalized ways to write all sorts of on-screen glyphs, including Latin alphabet ones.
        taejo 12y ago
        I thought wbl meant something to do with the combination of Korean and UTF-8, whereas jamo composition is no more related to UTF-8 than any other unicode encoding.
      - wbl 12y ago
        They moved the Korean encodings at one point in the early 1990's. Luckily this was before anyone used it, but it was still a big mess. I don't know why they had to move it.
    - ay 12y ago
- sp332 12y ago
  False starts and backpedaling are also known as "iterating". It's disappointing that many of the planned features never got production-ready. But the protocol is now more likely to be implemented than ever before, which is the primary "feature" to which all others are secondary.
tgflynn 12y ago
I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless but there are reasons it replaced just about every other networking protocol in existence and simplicity and robustness probably had a lot to do with that. Of course hierarchical routing was a huge feature for the Internet but not necessarily compelling enough to drive out every other LAN protocol.
- xorcist 12y ago
  That's a very bad example. Not only is IPv4 (especially TCP) full of knobs, but it was still in flux 15 years after it's conception.
- josteink 12y ago
  > I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless I can tell you haven't tried creating/setting up your own router with NATing, separate subnets (secure, insecure), inbound and outbound VPNs, firewalling and traffic shaping. Or basically anything non-trivial with IP in general. The amount of knobs which you can (and must) set correctly for this thing to fly is enough to give an experienced engineer severe paranoia.
  - tgflynn 12y ago
    Actually I have done most of those things at one time or another. I'm not saying IPv4 is simple (especially if you want to do complex things with it) but it works well when configured correctly and is simple enough to be deployed in businesses of all sizes as well as home networks. I didn't get involved with networking much until shortly after most other protocols were rapidly disappearing but the fact that IPv4 replaced IPX, DECNET, AppleTalk, etc in only a few years time suggests that it probably wasn't that much of a nightmare to set up, even in it's early days. My concern with IPv6, based on this post, is that it may have lost some of the robustness and relative simplicity of IPv4. I mean layer 3 <-> layer 2 address mapping is fundamental to any network and if that's breaking with IPv6 it could be a pretty serious issue.
  - fulafel 12y ago
    IPv4 specs forbid NAT. VPN and firewalling are also counter to the spirit of IP, if not the letter. The internet was designed for end-to-end and works much better if you go along the grain on that.

api 12y ago

My philosophy for a long time has been "every tunable parameter is a design weakness, and every one that must be tuned is a bug." It's hard to achieve this in practice, but I keep it in mind as a goal.

wlesieutre 12y ago
100% agreed. This is why I'm liking elementary OS so much. I still need to pop into the command line for some things, but the standard GUI software is less excessively configurable than most. They have an HIG and a small community of developers who actually pay attention to it. http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/avoid-configuration http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/avoi... That said, it's still Linux, and if you really need more flexibility you can always pull chunks out and replace them with the usual alternatives. As an example, here are the prefs for the built-in music player: http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png
- Crito 12y ago
  > "but the standard GUI software is less excessively configurable than most." How configurable is it compared to GNOME? Less configurable than that is really just "not configurable".
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    A lot of it is based on the GNOME core applications, so it's similar. I haven't used GNOME enough to say more than that. For the people who want extra options, there's elementary-tweaks, similar to gnome tweak tool. http://gfycat.com/UniqueInfamousCoypu http://gfycat.com/UniqueInfamousCoypu Since I put up a screenshot of elementary's music player already (http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png http://i.imgur.com/Py7TkTR.png) that makes for a decent comparison. Here's Rhythmbox: http://www.gfycat.com/MenacingFreshIndianpalmsquirrel http://www.gfycat.com/MenacingFreshIndianpalmsquirrel How many users will want to change the file naming or folder hierarchy convention for their music library if they're managing them through a GUI application? Why is there a big list of "visible columns" checkboxes instead of setting that by right-clicking the columns? Does crossfade really need a whole tab for a checkbox and slider (and why does it need a checkbox when 0 seconds implies no fading)? Do people actually use crossfade anyway? I never have. In short, there's room to clean a lot of things up. Even if it's minor, doing it across the entire system makes things a lot nicer. Plus there are some additional system-wide standardization features that elementary is doing, which should prevent a lot of inconsistency from software from all reinventing the wheel in different ways: http://elementaryos.org/journal/contractor-not-sharing-service http://elementaryos.org/journal/contractor-not-sharing-servi... http://elementaryos.org/journal/hig-update-popovers-decorated-windows-and-source-lists http://elementaryos.org/journal/hig-update-popovers-decorate... It's still a pretty new project, but as a relative Linux newbie I'm still having an easy time with it despite the comparatively small community.