No, my mother never had a Tivo or DVR, but she used DirecTV which I remembered in the past had a very reasonable UI, which later integrated with Tivo very easily. So I was surprised to see the latest DirecTV non-DVR UI that she had as it seemed like a big step backwards.

Yes it's still around, just not in my house anymore.

When Lucas was in charge, he just made up crap on the fly. I don't think with Disney in charge that they're going to be more protective of the lore and story lines than Lucas was.

That was before the terrorists won their war against us!

Right, the programmer only had the right to take the original unmodified GPL code, and had no rights to the modified code even if he was the one who made the modifications for hire.

Here's a scenario too. Company is creating software. One programmer decides on his own and without permission or legal advice to call it all open source code. Programmer drop in the GPLv2 copyright notice all over the place and the "Copying" file. Later programmer leaves with the source code and tells the authorities "it's ok, it's all open source!"

Not saying that this happened or not in this case, but that sort of scenario is happening in some places. If someone is being paid to write the code then it belongs to the employer. It doesn't matter whether or not the employer is in the software business. As such the programmer can not decide which license to usewithout explicit permission.

Claiming that something is open source is often just a way to get a lot of people on your side before they've seen the facts.

And the voters who elected him, and the constitution that allowed him to be elected, and the founding fathers who should have seen this coming but did nothing to stop it!

That was my review for Windows 98 when it came out. "It doesn't suck as much as I thought it would."

For the TVs and remotes, it does seem to me things have gotten worse. I loved my DirecTV/Tivo combo; so when my mother got rid of Dish and got DirecTV, I thought her UI would improve but it was just as bad and confused me too. The Tivo was just a lot more intuitive. But Tivo was a stand out anyway, all the competitors just have awful UIs.

The new UIs are considered a side issue, if a manufacturer makes a large screen TV then they are proud of that technology but the interface itself is only a last consideration and farmed out to third party teams probably. No one in marketing is insisting that they have the best user interface in the industry, it's likely not even crossing their minds. There may be pressure to have fewer buttons on the remote, or to have fewer words on the screen, and so forth.

My brother had worked with UI with a contracting company and a lot of the clients he worked with had requirements that involved a picture of exactly what every screen and option should look like down to the pixel. There was no leeway given, no opportunity to suggest a better design. The requirements are not necessarily even coming from experts in human-machine interaction but from the product managers instead.

Now you have to worry about televisions becoming too complicated to use. Set top box user interfaces are pretty lousy too. Smartphones are portable containers of horrible interfaces so that you can be frustrated and annoyed anywhere you go. So if you give up on the computer altogether, soon you find yourself giving up on lots of things.

Even ordering food at restaurants is hard now. Oganic, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, paleo, low carb, high carb, free range home schooled beef, etc. There's a place my friends go to where you fill out a form for the type of burger you want; it's not always clear what's going on, like what side is included and which cost extra. Dammit, just give me my burger already and don't make me choose which type of ketchup it has.

That's amazingly insightful.

"We Suck Less" should not be a product's motto.

I still don't know how to use Word. Luckily I don't have to. But I've dealt with enough user interfaces that I can muddle my way through them and eventually get something done. Occasionally I get something so screwed up that I can't recover (or I never even learn that there's a shortcut bar so never notice that it's missing). I've learned to think about all the stupid ways that stuff could be done. I switch between different UIs and operating systems all the time.

A key point though which distinguishes me from a senior citizen who can't figure out computers, is that I experiment. My mother is always worried about clicking on something unfamiliar, because she thinks that it may screw stuff up and it will be a big headache to try to sort it out. WHICH IS TRUE, because it does screw things up! Her mouse clicks aren't always accurate so she does click on the wrong things sometimes and it's a mess (I have this happen to me when I'm forced to use a touchpad on a laptop and end up accidentally clicking while trying to drag). So computers have taught her to beware of doing the wrong thing or she will be sorry! Computers are punishing the users and creating negative reinforcement.

Users are being conditioned to not experiment, but at the same time the interfaces are changing every few months!

I think every software team that creates a UI needs to hire a few 80 year olds for the QA group.

The interfaces do suck. I can help out my mother, not because I'm smarter, but because I've learned to deal with the idiocy that's out there and understand some of the obtuse terms being used. I deal with crappy stuff all day long, she doesn't.

Most recent example: her email lost her address book and send buttons. Basically that toolbar vanished. Don't know how it happened, probably some obscure key sequence she hit by mistake. So I have to go to the menu (this being Thunderbird it hasn't yet removed menus in the asinine way that Firefox did), find the way to change the view, look at which toolbars are active, click on "message" in my guess that these buttons were on the message toolbar and not the mail toolbar. Not hard but completely obtuse to someone not versed in how UIs are done.

Next problem in the same phone call: it wasn't showing all her email. 15 unread messages that it didn't seem to display or download. This one had me stumped actually for a bit. Turns out she had accidentally clicked on one of the filtering buttons at the top of the list. It is not at all obvious what has happened, or what these buttons do. But click on one and it only shows messages that match its filter (she had clicked the one to show only messages from those in her address book). Now if there should be ANY menu bar that should have to option to be disabled, it is that completely optional one, not the one containing the button to let you send a message.

To really make this hard, Mozilla is changing their UI all the time, without warning, without consulting with users, with devs thinking they know what's best for the entire world. Leave the UI alone, and stop being actively hostile to the user.

Thankfully, I've got TeamViewer which makes remote control easy. I recommend it. You need the other end to have broadband though or it'd be too slow.

"Peace through strength" sounds like straight up Orwell double-speak from 1984, except it's not being used in a fictitious setting.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
"I could have ended the war in the month. I could have made Vietnam look like a mud puddle"
"You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians."
"The only summit meeting that can succeed is the one that does not take place."

Domestically though, I think he'd have been better than Reagan.