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Comments: 339 +- Technology: On the Humble Default on Wednesday June 24 2009, @12:48AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday June 24 2009, @12:48AM
from the ne-pas-décider-c'est-décider dept.
from the ne-pas-décider-c'est-décider dept.
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technology
Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."
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It's not my fault (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This race-to-the-first-post is getting tiresome. The Admins should modify their software: by default, every first post should be deleted, so that the 2nd post becomes 1st. Then, the 1st post should be deleted, so that the 2nd post becomes 1st. Then, the 1st post should be deleted, so that the 2nd post becomes 1st. Then...
That would simplify SlashDot and make it more user-friendly, making AJAX and other complex technologies virtually obsolete.
Re:It's not my fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
It's not default... (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot defaults (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the defaults on slashdot still require posters to manually type HTML codes for line breaks?
I always thought the misleading options on the posting form were a pretty funny newbie filter. Welcome to slashdot, RTFM.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh! I remember my first post. It was all neatly formatted, and then I pressed the Submit button, and it came out as a huge wall of text.
Ahh, good times.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdot defaults (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, because those things are evil, and soon result in huge piles of nested font tags and random stylesheet fragments everywhere.
Don't even ask what happens when someone pastes a word document into one, it makes me weep .
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And would it kill them to put in a WYSIWYG toolbar (tinyMCE, fckeditor, etc.)?
I don't know about Taco, but it might kill me. If we can't get away from JS editor toolbars on /., then they truly have taken over the world, I suppose.
I think a little manual markup is good for the soul, myself. Strictly IMHO.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot was written in the late 90s when there were no other web forums (or at least not many) and BBcode didn't exist (ah, good times!) Back then, everyone knew that to bold something you used <b>, not [b]. And Slashdot does have a post preview -- just some people choose not to use it :)
Frankly, I don't see what's so hard about using HTML in your posts. It's not any harder than something like BBcode (mostly just use angle brackets instead of square brackets). HTML is harder on the server side si
Look at our financial system (Score:5, Funny)
More and more are taking the choice to default than ever before.
tienanmen (Score:4, Funny)
tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen
here, they may look at it no more, talk freely
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
tienanmen
tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen
here, they may look at it no more, talk freely
Oh, everybody in China knows what Tiananmen Square is. It's a beautiful plaza in Beijing, not secret or forbidden at all. Nice tourist spot. Mao's mausoleum is right next door. You should go there sometime.
And in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, nothing at all happened. Why do you Westerners use that name as if it's some sort of forbidden thing?
Bollocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Default was first used in computer science in the 1960s because that is when computer science, as we knew it, began. It was picked up from common usage outside of computer science, and was general use well before then. Unfortunately I am old enough to remember it as a common term in the 1950s. For example the default land area for a house (at least in my part of the world) was a quarter of an acre and it used to be referred to as the default area.
Re:Bollocks (Score:4, Insightful)
It was picked up from common usage outside of computer science, and was general use well before then.
Phew, for a moment there I thought that before computer science was invented, everything came in random configuration.
This whole story is a waste of space. Slow news day I guess.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. The author implies that mechanical systems built before the 1960s came without built-in functionality or options. For an obvious example, take the toaster: since the dawn of the bread-toasting craze, it has included a "browning" control. This mechanical control, be it a knob, slider, or switch, had a base setting which was calibrated at the factory. This was its "default" position for optimum toasting. You could always change it up or down, as you desire, and return it back to its original se
Re:Bollocks (Score:4, Funny)
On the contrary, these houses had traded much of their living space for this thing called a yard. Not to be confused with the measurement, a yard was the area generally unused by the house left grassy.
Parent
Land Area (Score:3, Informative)
Each house is almost 11,000 square feet?
Land area means the land the house sits on, not only the house. A quarter acre is not really that large.
Re:Bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Bollocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the term has exactly the same meaning when talking about computers, you just need to put it in context and use it correctly. "Default" means "failure to act", so a loan "default" means you failed to make payments. When talking about computers, the proper term is "default configuration", which means you have not changed it (or failed to change it) from its factory settings.
Using "default" without qualification is ambiguous unless the context is expressely clear; you do not know if your boss bought the computer with a loan, for example. I bet that had you said "default configuration" instead of just "default", it would have sounded much less of a financial term, perhaps prompting him to ask you to explain what it was. However, I can see this working only from the beginning, when establishing context; as soon as he takes hold of a financial context, his concerns and bias will taint and load the term from then on.
-dZ.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Close. It actually comes from the Old French word "defaute", or latin "defalta" or "defallere", meaning a deficiency or failure: de (completely) + fallere (to fault or fail).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=default [etymonline.com]
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O27-default.html [encyclopedia.com]
-dZ.
Bah-loney (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bah-loney (Score:4, Funny)
"He's just writing for the sake of reading his own words."
That's default motivation for writing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If defaults are to be defined as a configurable initial state, then they've been around for a lot longer than he's claiming.
As far as I can see, his point is that only in the past half century humans have started to consider default as a valid configuration and engineers carefully tweaked the default to be what most of their customers needed.
Re:Bah-loney (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bah-loney (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bah-loney (Score:4, Funny)
Are apostrophes misused in French, too?
Parent
Default is way older (Score:5, Funny)
We might not have called it that, but default solutions and default products have been around since the invention of mass production. From then on, there was a "default" product, a standard product that works as the default if you didn't order something specifically different.
Hell, even the spanish inquisition had a default verdict.
Re:Default is way older (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, even the spanish inquisition had a default verdict.
Well, I didn't expect the spanish inquisition to come up in this context!
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
A good translation for default to other languages (Score:4, Interesting)
Non English speakers / translators!
Did you have trouble translating the word "default" into other languages? How difficult/easy was it to find a translation for "default" for user manuals in, say, jp or cn or fr?
Asking because I had trouble figuring out a good word for it in Hindi. Still not sure if we have the right word.
Do note that /. only allows ascii in posts.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Quite easy in Chinese. Since /. is too US-centric to tolerate Unicode, I'll just post the Unicode codepoints for these two characters: U+9ED8 and U+8BA4. Look them up in a Unicode table ;)
This Chinese word for "default", in a more literal translation, means "tacitly accepted/recognized". It has nothing to do with the financial meaning of the word "default", which translates to a completely different word in Chinese.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Don't most Indians speak English too?
About 10% of them do, which is enough to make them numerically the country with the second-most English speakers. Of those, about a third speak it as a third language. My experience tells me that about half (with a very wide margin of error) of Indian English speakers can read it well but not have a functional conversation with a native English speaker. About a third of the population is entirely illiterate.
I suspect English language skills correlate fairly well with computer literacy, since both are the
On the not so humble paean (Score:4, Insightful)
Does convoluted writing add credibility to your statement?
Does not knowing the slightest thing about cognitive psychology help you get attention?
Not in the rest of the world, but on /. it gets you to the front page.
A few examples (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
DEFAULTS(1) BSD General Commands Manual DEFAULTS(1)
NAME
defaults -- access the Mac OS X user defaults system
Default is for wimps... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Default is for wimps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Pre-1950 systems with configurable defaults. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to think of something prior to 1950 that had an overridable, configurable default. It's hard. Business telephone systems had some configurable defaults, but setting them up required physical wiring. The same was true of Plan 55-A Teletype message switching. IBM plugboard-wired tabulators didn't really have defaults as we think of them today. Machine tools had adjustable speeds and feeds, but no real defaults. Jacquard looms didn't have defaults. Linotypes didn't have defaults. Chain-programmed embroidery machines - no.
The closest thing I can think of was General Railway Signal's NX signaling system [nycsubway.org] for controlling railroad interlockings. This 1930s system may have been the first "user-friendly interface". An NX system controlled multiple switches and signals in an area (an "interlocking") preventing conflicts. Interlocked signal controls had been around for years, and they handled the safety issue, but before NX, it was the user's responsibility to figure out the desired path from A to B. With an NX system, you selected an "entry" point where a train was going to enter the interlocking, and all the reachable "exit" points would light up. The "reachable" logic took into account other trains that were in the interlocking area. When the operator selected an "exit", the NX system would pick a path between the entry and exit, routing around other trains or even track locked out of service.
A default "best" routing was hard-wired into the system, but the operator could override the default routing manually, by picking some intermediate point along the path as the "exit", then selecting that as an "entry" and picking the final "exit".
That's the oldest system I know of with a real "default" mechanism.
Bunch of Wank (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a default if it can't be configured.
This is bull (Score:5, Informative)
But if you are looking for another computer word that has made it into common usage, how about "reboot"? It's now used to describe starting anything over from scratch, especially in things like movies. For instance, the new Star Trek movie has been called a reboot by several movie critics.
I can imagine a time far in the future where "reboot" is listed in the dictionary with the etymology saying "origin unclear, borrowed from computer terminology". 95% of people will not know that it comes from the REpeating the action of BOOTstrapping a computer. Bootstrapping or booting a computer comes from the term "to lift oneself up by the bootstraps", which is impossible and refers to the apparent chicken and egg problem of a computer loading itself up with software.
LS
Methinks someone has been reading the Economist (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read The Economist, you may have noticed a recent review of the book "Nudge [amazon.com]".
I have more than a sneaking suspicion the original poster (and TFA) have been reading this as well.
Suffice it to say that the shallow commentary here pales in comparison to the jaunt through behavioural economics that the book provides. If you can get past it's focus on public policy and just absorb all the core information, the book provides good advice than you'd ever think existed on the art of defaults.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OK.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Insightful)
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
And in some countries, the default side of the road is the left, not the right! Some countries DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!! Believe it or not.
Back to computer defaults: It really, really pisses me off when software defaults to Letter size paper, Imperial (non-metric) measures, MDY dates, American spelling. Often WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING OR ASKING THE USER. And so 90% of people in the world (okay, 90% of the computers in other countries I have personally seen) are set up with these inappropriate settings. So print jobs are weirdly distorted, spelling is mysteriously "corrected", spreadsheet dates are scrambled. Etc, etc. All thanks to "User friendly" install defaults.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Like the light switch being in the OFF position when it's first installed. Not that you can see it, because the lights are off.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
On the right? Nonsense. They are on the side by the handle, opposite the hinges. And which way the door is hung depends on the configuration of the rooms.
Parent
Dunno... I didn't RTFA ;) (Score:3, Interesting)
So what are good defaults for configuration? I think of it as a form of compression.
The most common+safe+useful settings should be the default. The trouble is figuring out the right balance of safety and usability for your product or system.
It's not easy to get right, and that's why a lot of stuff is crappy or just mediocre[1]
For many things it doesn't have to be just "default vs ADVANCED mode with zillions of setting
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the beauty of a default: it'll just freaking work. Not ideally, but good enough to get you going and let you change it later on, at your own pace.
Wrong. That's hardware detection. And it's gotten so good I don't even have an xorg.conf anymore.