If the definition of "comedy" being used is "includes wedgies", I think I'd rather not have any "comedy games", thanks.
Now, a game that aimed at a grown-up audience and had a sophisticated sense of humor, that I could get into. But "sophisticated" is not the first word that jumps to mind when I think of Lowe's portfolio, so that's probably too much to hope for.
Employers could foot the bill for training employees in skills that matter for their specific jobs. In exchange, employees would sign 2, 4, or 6-year contracts for long hours in low-paying jobs during which they can be fired but can't quit.
What you're describing isn't something new; it's called indentured servitude and it was a common form of employment in colonial North America. As we've become more attentive to the rights of the laborer, this and other forms of slavery (and being legally bound to a contract you can't get out of is certainly closer to slavery than free labor) have gone by the wayside.
I wouldn't mind seeing employer-funded education necessarily (though one wonders if that would result in the same bad consequences we've gotten from the employer-funded health care system). But indentured servitude should remain in the past, where it belongs.
It's just that now Google also has a local site hosted in China and adhering to China's censorship laws that people in China can use if they want unfettered access to Google without having to circumvent China's web filters every time they need to search for something.
How exactly does setting up an instance of the search engine that is "adhering to China's censorship laws" providing "unfettered access to Google"?
It may say Google there on the page, but it's certainly not the same thing that the rest of us think of when we think of Google.
Wait until your project grows to a point where you're not the only person working on it, and then come back and tell us if you still feel this way.
Keeping markup out of your code means that you can, for example, bring in a graphic designer to change the look and feel your site/app without requiring that they know Perl (or PHP, or whatever) -- very few designers know, or care, about programming. And it means that you can bring in other programmers to fix bugs/add features without worrying that their changes will muck up the UI.
If there was a public key repository where legitimate users placed a public key for decryption, and all legitmate email were sent encrypted with the corresponding private key, the authenticity of the email could be known...
Check out DomainKeys, it's exactly what you're asking for (without the limitation of a central key repository).
Considering that they never earned a profit as an independent operation and were spending $1.60 to ship $1 worth of groceries, it's probably safe to chalk them up with the dot-bombs, even if the Peapod brand is still around.
I launched into my typical rant, asking one of my roommates a rhetorical question: "why does the movie industry have to keep making remakes of everything? Why can't they make movies based off of original ideas?"
I used to feel the same way, until I started thinking about movies the same way I think about plays.
Sure, there are lots of original plays being staged every day. But there are also lots and lots and lots of what you might call "remakes". How many theater companies, from the smallest community theater to the largest Broadway troupe, launch new productions of plays by Neil Simon, Shakespeare, and Aeschylus every year? Lots.
They do so because they can re-mount an old play without closing off the chance to be creative. The actual words on the page are only a small part of what makes a play -- the actors' performances, the staging choices, and the director's vision all make each new production different than those that came before.
Probably the best example of how these factors can change the "experience" of a play is Orson Welles' work with the Mercury Theatre in the 1930s. Welles, as director, specialized in taking old plays and staging them in radical new ways. He turned Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example, into a political statement by changing the sets and costumes so it appeared to be taking place in Mussolini's Fascist state, rather than ancient Rome. He restaged Macbeth into a tale of voodoo by casting an all African-American cast (an incredible gesture in the 1930s) and setting it in the Caribbean. Welles took the same words that had been staged a million times before, and turned them into something new and fresh, just by how he went about presenting them.
So, given that this is all possible (encouraged, even!) in the theater, I actually have come around to the idea that movie remakes can be a Good Thing -- if they provide a fresh take on an old story. I might actually pay to see a "Revenge of the Nerds" remake, for example, if it was directed by Tim Burton, who might have a unique take on the story of outsiders struggling to be accepted. Wouldn't that be an interesting movie?
Of course, most Hollywood remakes are just attempts to grab at some cash, rather than putting a new spin on the material. But that's the fault of the creatively-challenged people who run Hollywood, not of the idea of remaking old movies itself.
Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.
IM? Most IM clients don't log messages by default, so things can't be easily searched or retrieved unless you know to turn on logging (assuming your client even allows that).
Wikis? Each wiki has its own arcane markup syntax, and the average user has better things to do than learn them.
Intranets? Somebody's gotta post stuff to the Intranet, or nobody will use it... and nobody wants to post stuff to an Intranet that nobody is using.
Web calendars? Slooooow.
Project management software? Using tools like Microsoft Project successfully requires a level of discipline and expertise that is beyond most people.
And none of the specialized services that have evolved to fill this niche (Basecamp, for example) have a mental model that's as easy to grasp as e-mail.
None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.
I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)
Re:Looks like somebody bought it...
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
LOL. These guys are probably sitting there wondering why 30% of women smack them in the face when they hand them their business cards...
It's a little old (circa 1999), but Salon's article "The name game" -- a look inside the "identity firms" that come up with so many of the weird names that are floating around these days -- is worth bringing up because it's just so freaking funny.
It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."
Still, at least Microsoft Bob was not a completely wasted effort - after all, you still have Rover the retriever to help you with searching in XP - and we all know that was worth waiting 10 years for...
That's funny, when I log into Windows Live Mail with Firefox 1.5 I always get this message:
If you're not using Internet Explorer 6.0: Using Internet Explorer versions 6.0 and higher will give you the best Windows Live Mail user experience with access to all functionality such as the reading pane and keyboard shortcuts.
Live Mail will let you log in using other browsers, but when you do, it locks you into the "classic" interface -- basically the static old Hotmail UI. If you want the shiny new Live UI you have to be using IE.
It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone.
I don't even know about that -- there's definitely a non-trivial market for cellphones with big, big buttons, for example, which implies that cellphones haven't exactly nailed the UI thing even for single task devices. Nokia has even started making this an explicit part of their marketing; see their new "Buttons for Humans" campaign for an example.
The GameCube controller was, in my opinion, absolutely spectacular. I don't understand why some people don't like it. The thing didn't have any awkward buttons.
Absolutely! I thought the Cube's controller was the best of its generation; the XBox controller was too chunky, and Nintendo did something with the Cube that neither MS or Sony did with their consoles' controllers: they made all the buttons distinguishable by feel.
That's an incredibly important thing. I can't count the number of times when I first got my PS2 that I would be playing a game, and the game would tell me "Push the X Button". Invariably I had to take my eyes off the screen and look at the controller to figure out which one of the identically sized buttons was "X". With the GC, that was never an issue; each button has its own shape, so you can find the right button without taking your eyes off the screen.
This may seem like a small thing, but it's the small things that make or break usability, and Nintendo got this one right.
Most poor children today are in fact super-nourished, growing up to be, on average, one inch taller and ten pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.
Blue shirts should be fine. We have however had some problems reported by staff wearing red shirts. They keep getting sent to die at the hands of aliens. Keep this in mind when planning your wardrobe.
Slashdot Mirror
If the definition of "comedy" being used is "includes wedgies", I think I'd rather not have any "comedy games", thanks.
Now, a game that aimed at a grown-up audience and had a sophisticated sense of humor, that I could get into. But "sophisticated" is not the first word that jumps to mind when I think of Lowe's portfolio, so that's probably too much to hope for.
Am I the only one who thinks that "The Comedy Breasts" would be a great name for a band?
What you're describing isn't something new; it's called indentured servitude and it was a common form of employment in colonial North America. As we've become more attentive to the rights of the laborer, this and other forms of slavery (and being legally bound to a contract you can't get out of is certainly closer to slavery than free labor) have gone by the wayside.
I wouldn't mind seeing employer-funded education necessarily (though one wonders if that would result in the same bad consequences we've gotten from the employer-funded health care system). But indentured servitude should remain in the past, where it belongs.
How exactly does setting up an instance of the search engine that is "adhering to China's censorship laws" providing "unfettered access to Google"?
It may say Google there on the page, but it's certainly not the same thing that the rest of us think of when we think of Google.
Wait until your project grows to a point where you're not the only person working on it, and then come back and tell us if you still feel this way.
Keeping markup out of your code means that you can, for example, bring in a graphic designer to change the look and feel your site/app without requiring that they know Perl (or PHP, or whatever) -- very few designers know, or care, about programming. And it means that you can bring in other programmers to fix bugs/add features without worrying that their changes will muck up the UI.
Check out DomainKeys, it's exactly what you're asking for (without the limitation of a central key repository).
There were actually two companies with that dumb business model -- Kozmo.com
and UrbanFetch -- both competing to see who could lose money the fastest.The only reason Peapod still exists is because they sold out to the international grocery giant Royal Ahold in 2001, for the princely price of $2.15 a share -- down from $18.50 at its 1997 IPO. Ahold's investment was the only thing that kept Peapod from folding.
Considering that they never earned a profit as an independent operation and were spending $1.60 to ship $1 worth of groceries, it's probably safe to chalk them up with the dot-bombs, even if the Peapod brand is still around.
I used to feel the same way, until I started thinking about movies the same way I think about plays.
Sure, there are lots of original plays being staged every day. But there are also lots and lots and lots of what you might call "remakes". How many theater companies, from the smallest community theater to the largest Broadway troupe, launch new productions of plays by Neil Simon, Shakespeare, and Aeschylus every year? Lots.
They do so because they can re-mount an old play without closing off the chance to be creative. The actual words on the page are only a small part of what makes a play -- the actors' performances, the staging choices, and the director's vision all make each new production different than those that came before.
Probably the best example of how these factors can change the "experience" of a play is Orson Welles' work with the Mercury Theatre in the 1930s. Welles, as director, specialized in taking old plays and staging them in radical new ways. He turned Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example, into a political statement by changing the sets and costumes so it appeared to be taking place in Mussolini's Fascist state, rather than ancient Rome. He restaged Macbeth into a tale of voodoo by casting an all African-American cast (an incredible gesture in the 1930s) and setting it in the Caribbean. Welles took the same words that had been staged a million times before, and turned them into something new and fresh, just by how he went about presenting them.
So, given that this is all possible (encouraged, even!) in the theater, I actually have come around to the idea that movie remakes can be a Good Thing -- if they provide a fresh take on an old story. I might actually pay to see a "Revenge of the Nerds" remake, for example, if it was directed by Tim Burton, who might have a unique take on the story of outsiders struggling to be accepted. Wouldn't that be an interesting movie?
Of course, most Hollywood remakes are just attempts to grab at some cash, rather than putting a new spin on the material. But that's the fault of the creatively-challenged people who run Hollywood, not of the idea of remaking old movies itself.
Absolutely! I find it scandalous how they didn't teach us in school about the Great Hobo Wars of the 1930s, for example.
Note to mods: before you mod me Offtopic, read the book :-)
Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.
None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.
I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)
LOL. These guys are probably sitting there wondering why 30% of women smack them in the face when they hand them their business cards...
It's a little old (circa 1999), but Salon's article "The name game" -- a look inside the "identity firms" that come up with so many of the weird names that are floating around these days -- is worth bringing up because it's just so freaking funny.
Read the whole thing, it's worth it.
Hey, Bob was a success for at least one person:
Who was the Microsoft project manager in charge of Microsoft Bob? A woman named Melinda French... who now has the married name Melinda French Gates.
That's funny, when I log into Windows Live Mail with Firefox 1.5 I always get this message:
Live Mail will let you log in using other browsers, but when you do, it locks you into the "classic" interface -- basically the static old Hotmail UI. If you want the shiny new Live UI you have to be using IE.
It's interesting how links in the comments have their domain listed right next to them, to foil this sort of thing, but links in the stories do not.
The assumption must have been that a Slashdot editor wouldn't do something like route links through a middleman. Bad assumption, it would appear...
I don't even know about that -- there's definitely a non-trivial market for cellphones with big, big buttons, for example, which implies that cellphones haven't exactly nailed the UI thing even for single task devices. Nokia has even started making this an explicit part of their marketing; see their new "Buttons for Humans" campaign for an example.
Absolutely! I thought the Cube's controller was the best of its generation; the XBox controller was too chunky, and Nintendo did something with the Cube that neither MS or Sony did with their consoles' controllers: they made all the buttons distinguishable by feel.
That's an incredibly important thing. I can't count the number of times when I first got my PS2 that I would be playing a game, and the game would tell me "Push the X Button". Invariably I had to take my eyes off the screen and look at the controller to figure out which one of the identically sized buttons was "X". With the GC, that was never an issue; each button has its own shape, so you can find the right button without taking your eyes off the screen.
This may seem like a small thing, but it's the small things that make or break usability, and Nintendo got this one right.
Yup: the upcoming vemacs will give you all the ease-of-use of vi and all the lean, mean svelteness of emacs.
Personally, I refer to it as 20 Mule Team BORAX (Bidirectional Object Reuse Atop XML).
20 Mule Team BORAX. Accept no substitutes!
Might be time to test those internal apps with the Firefox ActiveX plugin, if that's the only thing holding you back...
A security hole? In Sendmail? Now you're just talking crazy talk.
Tell that to somebody with perfect eyesight and impaired motor skills. There are a lot of dimensions to accessibility.
Thank God we have unbiased sources like the Heritage Foundation to warn us of the looming threat from the army of bionic poor people!
Blue shirts should be fine. We have however had some problems reported by staff wearing red shirts. They keep getting sent to die at the hands of aliens. Keep this in mind when planning your wardrobe.