Jakob Nielsen and the Marauding Dinosaur
Wednesday January 3, 2007
in films |
Jakob Nielsen has been delivering articles to my inbox for some time now. Watching the Jurassic Park films over Christmas, I was reminded of his recent Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers. Nielsen has also seen Jurassic Park and notes the Unix system preferred by Richard Attenborough’s IT department:
In the film Jurassic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park’s security system to keep everyone from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the control terminal and utters the immortal words, “This is a Unix system. I know this.” And proceeds to (temporarily) save the day.
Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system. Yes, she could probably have used vi on the security terminal. But the specialized security system would have required some learning time — significant learning time if it were built on Unix, which has notoriously inconsistent user interface design and thus makes it harder to transfer skills from one application to the next.
Reading Dickens’ The Chimes for the first time, I found it the perfect companion piece to A Christmas Carol. Where Scrooge is whisked through time by his ghosts on the eve of Christmas, Trotty in The Chimes is taken on a similar journey on the brink of the New Year. He witnesses some disturbing visions of a bleak, and very possible, future suffered by those closest to him. Dickens makes his message clear throughout the story that none of us are immune to such futures, and that all should take heed to “correct, improve, and soften them”.
“The voice of Time,” said the Phantom, “cries to man, Advance! Time IS for his advancement and improvement; for his greater worth, his greater happiness, his better life; his progress onward to that goal within its knowledge and its view, and set there, in the period when Time and He began. Ages of darkness, wickedness, and violence, have come and gone: millions uncountable, have suffered, lived and died: to point the way Before him. Who seeks to turn him back, or stay him on his course, arrests a mighty engine which will strike the meddler dead; and be the fiercer and the wilder, ever, for its momentary check!”
How’s that for a New Year message? Mine’s a more modest Happy New Year!
I’ll be taking a break for a few days, but look out soon for The Thirteenth Tale, Ian Fleming, H.P. Lovecraft and my return to the world of the meme … thanks for reading and commenting!
Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.
Bram Stoker, Dracula.
In 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in the cinema. Francis Ford Coppola’s film claimed to be a faithful adaptation of the 1897 novel and so used the author’s name in the title to advertise this. Give or take some distracting acting styles, ranging from the totally bland (Keanu Reeves) to the completely over the top (Gary Oldman), the film is very close to the original novel. But do we really give a damn?
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