Why would I want an all in one device? So when my video game console breaks, I can't watch cable or listen to music either? So that if I decide to take my gamecube over to a friend's house for a LAN game, my roommate can't watch a movie because I had to also take the DVD player?
Or maybe every time I want to listen to mp3's, I feel like dealing with an interface complicated enough to do not only that, but also record tv, download games, and make me a tuna fish sandwich.
It'll be great! Sony will come out with the playstation 6, but instead of just going out and buying a new console, I have to also pay for a new DVD player, DVR, and microwave, because it all comes together.
Yeah, let's just bundle everything together. We all know how well that works in the software world.
Straight from Apple and Steve Jobs; they don't make any money selling the tunes, it's just there to push iPods. Unless a company can manage to talk the record labels into a much better deal than apple got, at 99cents or less per song, there's not much of a profit to be made in the music itself.
Apple is saying that's one of the reasons that they're not too worried about all of these other companies starting their own services. The ones that don't have an accompanying product like the iPod (or oodles of cash to throw away (MS)) probably won't be able to eek an existence out of online music sales alone.
It's obviously a "carsole", a wonderful gaming system that straps across the steering wheel of your automobile, putting a screen right in front of you, and control buttons all along the wheel itself. No more will the morning commute be a boring waste of an hour and a half, now you can spend it collecting more pokemons while yelling at the guy that just cut you off. Better yet, when a Mario Kart game comes out for it, it will actually be connected to the steering and pedals of your car, for the ultimate in realistic driving simulation!
Very good point. Architecture is a profession, yet American Architects have to compete globally. And I think that's a good thing in most ways. (although why any foreign architect would want to build a building here and deal with all of the extra nonsense and short-sightedness that Americans tend to view buildings through is a mystery to me). And also, the AIA, the professional organization, is fairly weak and probably does more harm than good.
Interestingly enough, contractors get chosen based only on price, not on quality. In New Orleans, there is one particular contractor notorious for putting in an impossibly low bid for public projects, and then making up the difference by engaging in as many lawsuits as they can possibly weasel up. Not to mention that their construction quality sucks, and their lack of skill combined with all the lawsuits invariably puts projects way behind schedule. But the backwards ass policies of this city say the lowest bid has to be taken. I do realize how slow a state like Louisiana can be compared to most of the nation, but buildings have been around as long as human civilization. If some people still haven't figured them out, what chance does software, a brand new field, have of getting proper thought and consideration.
Re:Simulating an infirmity or handicap
on
Old Age Simulator
·
· Score: 2
I'm an architecture major, and I've talked with a few professors who for one reason or another had to spend an amount of time getting around in a wheelchair or caring for someone stuck in a wheelchair. And they've all said that it has been a really enlightning experience for them, and has affected the way they design. I'm not particularly eager to hurt myself, but I think going through a physically limiting experience would make me a better designer.
there are a fair number of 'egoless' architects. Unfortunately, they don't make any money. The profession is really a labor of love. If you want to make a decent amount of cash, you've got to be more flashy. The 'celebrity' architecture phenomena is the result of that. Just as many architects are bothered by that as buy into it, they're just out shouted by the loud buildings and designers.
Re:The pattern language book
on
Open Source Housing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You've touched on what is one of the most important criticisms of modernist architecture, and could even be used against a lot of contemporary work. Buildings are too often not designed around the way people lived, but around abstract architectural ideas. Modernist architecture is sort of the poster child for this, where you get all these smooth continuous planes and very careful compositions that you see photographed empty, because as soon as you throw in some people or move some furniture around, it all ceases to work. Le Corbusier actually was very concerned about how people lived, but rather than just observing and reacting to them, he wanted to create a whole new way for people to organize their lives, and tried to invent architecture that would force certain patterns onto them. None of his ideas were really implemented at the scales that he proposed, so it's hard to say for sure that his ideas were all failures, but the sort of haphazard adoption of different things that he said has caused a lot of problems. And for better or for worse, his work has had an amazing amount of influence on architecture since his time.
Yeah, that's the mildly pessimisstic (but probably more realistic) way to go about it. But I don't think it's a great solution in any sense other than monetary, or an entirely sustainable way to develop.
We've already got prefabbed housing. That's pretty much what suburbia is. I guess people in general seem to like it, since it's continuing to grow at insane rates, despite its numerous problems.
The common suburban development consists of a few basic floor plans and personal customization involving the selection of a few of the details from a list in a catalog. What this article is suggesting seems to me to be an attempt to use technology to make more things customizable, but it isn't going to solve a lot of the big problems.
Architects tend to not like suburban development. The very idea of taking a prefabbed structure and replicating it in multiple places goes against one of the cornerstones of good architecture, which is responsiveness to the environment. Simple things like building orientation can have huge effects on the design. The thought of even spinning a building around on its site would be attrocioius to an architect concerned with energy efficiency, or sustainable design. I'm not sure what sort of technologies they were implying when they said they could manage different climates with one design. It seems like the wrong kind of problem to throw technology at. Good design would be a much cheaper and better solution to a lot of these problems. There are generations upon generations of buildings which had to deal with these problems before things like electricity. Technology caused us to forget the lessons learned there. Piling on more technology might not be the best answer.
I don't think many architects dream of some sort of perfect pre-fabbed house design that will solve all of our problems. I don't think they'd really want it anyways. It's hard enough making money in the profession as it is.
I think if I were the free network guys, I'd switch to another channel, but be sure to leave at least one access point broadcasting on channel 1. That way informed people could get decent free access on the alternate channel, and Starbucks gets to keep the crappy congested airwaves that they decided to co-op.
I don't think it's even that. I don't think a real fan would take the risk of ruining the experience by watching a small pixelated crappy sound version of the movie instead of waiting a week to see it on the big screen. I think instead people downloading it are kids who somehow think they're sticking it to the man by seeing it early. They think they're so incredibly cool for having done something that someone as rich as Lucas didn't want. Aren't they great.
Call me crazy, but shouldn't the fans, and not the creators decide what fandom is all about?
Will sports arenas try to throw people out for cheering for the visiting team? Will they decide that it's illegal for me to get a hometeam jersey printed up with my name on the back, instead of an actual player's name, because we should celebrate the game how it actually is, not how we'll enjoy it the best?
You'd have a hard case arguing that OSX doesn't have room for improvement speedwise, but it's this horrible thing that some people like to pretend that it is. Some of the blame goes to Apple, some goes to the application writers. Mac IE renders some stuff painfully slow. I don't know why. Like the article said, things like slashdot comments feel like they're taking all day. In reality, it's only 5 seconds, but we all know what sort of attention spans people have nowadays. There's a pretty new browser called Chimera that is early in development, and still has a limited feature set, but it renders things almost instantly, including slashdot comments. So there isn't some inherent problem within the OS that makes it impossible for your applications to function reasonably.
Not to sound too much like an apple apologist, but they've done quite a bit to get OSX to where it is so far, and the more I use it, the more I appreciate where it's advanced over OS9. I don't mind waiting a bit for things to improve. Just like I don't really mind anymore waiting 5 seconds for IE to throw together the comment threads. Most of us could benefit from learning a little patience.
Although I would surmize that it's apple's fault that they get judged so harshly. Seeing as steve jobs claims that every time someone in their company makes a sketch on a post-it note, they've created a new revolution in the world, people are justified in being extremely critical.
Go find a building with a large white exterior surface that gets direct sunlight, and stare at it on a sunny day. I think you'll find that it's plenty bright, often to the point of being rather uncomfortable to look at. Something that could tone that down might be nice.
PV doesn't have to effect the light that much. It's already possible to coat windows with solar panels. And you can still see through them readily. It's kind of like tinting them, only you're getting electricity as well.
Buildings in sunny places are often lighter colors for heat gain issues.
I'm studying architecture, and sustainability and enviromental design is starting to be a big thing in buildings. Solar Power is one of the major technologies that will make it all work. The biggest obstacles to widespread use in architecture are price and appearance. Both of these will be overcome, and I imagine that photovoltaics will be integrated into most building materials. Right now they're seperate pieces applied to a building, but I think they'll some how be integrated or sprayed onto more traditional (or at least more traditional looking) building materials, so their existance could be a non-issue, at least from a visual standpoint.
On a larger level, I imagine urban areas becoming communities of buildings, all saturated with PV, generating all sorts of power. The buildings would on average generate more electricity than they need, and just release the extra into the local power grid. Instead of everyone getting their energy from a single provider, production would be distributed through all of the buildings, and energy would flow freely to where it was needed. A lot like the distributed internet systems we're starting to see now. There would most likely need to be some sort of external system for peak useages, and I'm sure heavier industrial buildings can require more energy than their buildings could provide, even with maximum PV use. But the advances in PV, along with the growing popularity of energy conserative design should make the power companies nervous
My favorite from a quick glance over their patents is number 80 on their list.
"Implementing Force Feedback Over the World Wide Web and Other Computer Networks ". Taking a fairly common feature, and saying it can work over a network. Any network. A quick skim through the patent listing didn't have any reference to a specific unique protocol or anything that they designed.
Are they talking about realtime streaming of force feedback data? Are they talking about embedding that stuff in webpages? If I have my computer shake my mouse a little bit every time an FTP connection fails, can they sue me? It makes no sense.
A piece of shareware is not information. It's a created product. The whole information is free thing is all well and good, but where do you draw the line? Just because something can be transmitted as just 1's and 0's, that means it's just information? We're not talking about some fundamental reality of nature that some corporation discovered and is trying to declare their own. A good piece of shareware is the end result of a lot of imagination, creativity, intelligence, and hard work. It's more than a pile of 1's and 0's, it's not something that everyone has a right to.
It makes a lot of sense to me that something that you create should be under your control. It might not be natural, but that doesn't mean it's bad.
I'm not talking about the law here. Laws are practically irrelevent to software piracy due to the anonyimity that the internet allows, and the fact that it's usual more trouble than it's worth to go after casual piracy.
If you're in posession of something you didn't earn, and that the rightful owner doesn't want you to have free of charge, you've stolen it. You're a thief.
So maybe the letter of a law makes a distinction, but that doesn't effect the ethics or morality of it.
This isn't about intellectual property though. It's about a product. Software is not a physical, tangible thing, but it still has been imagined, designed, produced, created, etc.
Everyone is pretending like they're in the developer's position, and saying that they haven't lost anything. That's comfortably convenient for them, because it makes them feel less guilt.
Look it it from the software pirate's view. He/she has gotten possession of a product without paying for it. They have taken something without the right to do so. That is theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe every time I want to listen to mp3's, I feel like dealing with an interface complicated enough to do not only that, but also record tv, download games, and make me a tuna fish sandwich.
It'll be great! Sony will come out with the playstation 6, but instead of just going out and buying a new console, I have to also pay for a new DVD player, DVR, and microwave, because it all comes together.
Yeah, let's just bundle everything together. We all know how well that works in the software world.
Apple is saying that's one of the reasons that they're not too worried about all of these other companies starting their own services. The ones that don't have an accompanying product like the iPod (or oodles of cash to throw away (MS)) probably won't be able to eek an existence out of online music sales alone.
It's obviously a "carsole", a wonderful gaming system that straps across the steering wheel of your automobile, putting a screen right in front of you, and control buttons all along the wheel itself. No more will the morning commute be a boring waste of an hour and a half, now you can spend it collecting more pokemons while yelling at the guy that just cut you off. Better yet, when a Mario Kart game comes out for it, it will actually be connected to the steering and pedals of your car, for the ultimate in realistic driving simulation!
But yeah, just an example to back up your post.
That's what the RIAA is for.
Interestingly enough, contractors get chosen based only on price, not on quality. In New Orleans, there is one particular contractor notorious for putting in an impossibly low bid for public projects, and then making up the difference by engaging in as many lawsuits as they can possibly weasel up. Not to mention that their construction quality sucks, and their lack of skill combined with all the lawsuits invariably puts projects way behind schedule. But the backwards ass policies of this city say the lowest bid has to be taken. I do realize how slow a state like Louisiana can be compared to most of the nation, but buildings have been around as long as human civilization. If some people still haven't figured them out, what chance does software, a brand new field, have of getting proper thought and consideration.
I'm an architecture major, and I've talked with a few professors who for one reason or another had to spend an amount of time getting around in a wheelchair or caring for someone stuck in a wheelchair. And they've all said that it has been a really enlightning experience for them, and has affected the way they design. I'm not particularly eager to hurt myself, but I think going through a physically limiting experience would make me a better designer.
there are a fair number of 'egoless' architects. Unfortunately, they don't make any money. The profession is really a labor of love. If you want to make a decent amount of cash, you've got to be more flashy. The 'celebrity' architecture phenomena is the result of that. Just as many architects are bothered by that as buy into it, they're just out shouted by the loud buildings and designers.
You've touched on what is one of the most important criticisms of modernist architecture, and could even be used against a lot of contemporary work. Buildings are too often not designed around the way people lived, but around abstract architectural ideas. Modernist architecture is sort of the poster child for this, where you get all these smooth continuous planes and very careful compositions that you see photographed empty, because as soon as you throw in some people or move some furniture around, it all ceases to work. Le Corbusier actually was very concerned about how people lived, but rather than just observing and reacting to them, he wanted to create a whole new way for people to organize their lives, and tried to invent architecture that would force certain patterns onto them. None of his ideas were really implemented at the scales that he proposed, so it's hard to say for sure that his ideas were all failures, but the sort of haphazard adoption of different things that he said has caused a lot of problems. And for better or for worse, his work has had an amazing amount of influence on architecture since his time.
Yeah, that's the mildly pessimisstic (but probably more realistic) way to go about it. But I don't think it's a great solution in any sense other than monetary, or an entirely sustainable way to develop.
The common suburban development consists of a few basic floor plans and personal customization involving the selection of a few of the details from a list in a catalog. What this article is suggesting seems to me to be an attempt to use technology to make more things customizable, but it isn't going to solve a lot of the big problems.
Architects tend to not like suburban development. The very idea of taking a prefabbed structure and replicating it in multiple places goes against one of the cornerstones of good architecture, which is responsiveness to the environment. Simple things like building orientation can have huge effects on the design. The thought of even spinning a building around on its site would be attrocioius to an architect concerned with energy efficiency, or sustainable design. I'm not sure what sort of technologies they were implying when they said they could manage different climates with one design. It seems like the wrong kind of problem to throw technology at. Good design would be a much cheaper and better solution to a lot of these problems. There are generations upon generations of buildings which had to deal with these problems before things like electricity. Technology caused us to forget the lessons learned there. Piling on more technology might not be the best answer.
I don't think many architects dream of some sort of perfect pre-fabbed house design that will solve all of our problems. I don't think they'd really want it anyways. It's hard enough making money in the profession as it is.
The female contingent is apparently born with an innate understanding of the psychological effect you describe. Damn them.
I think if I were the free network guys, I'd switch to another channel, but be sure to leave at least one access point broadcasting on channel 1. That way informed people could get decent free access on the alternate channel, and Starbucks gets to keep the crappy congested airwaves that they decided to co-op.
I don't think it's even that. I don't think a real fan would take the risk of ruining the experience by watching a small pixelated crappy sound version of the movie instead of waiting a week to see it on the big screen. I think instead people downloading it are kids who somehow think they're sticking it to the man by seeing it early. They think they're so incredibly cool for having done something that someone as rich as Lucas didn't want. Aren't they great.
Call me crazy, but shouldn't the fans, and not the creators decide what fandom is all about?
Will sports arenas try to throw people out for cheering for the visiting team? Will they decide that it's illegal for me to get a hometeam jersey printed up with my name on the back, instead of an actual player's name, because we should celebrate the game how it actually is, not how we'll enjoy it the best?
It's silly.
The best of those rumor sites definately being crazyapplerumors.com
err..it's not this horrible thing yada yada...
even when I use the preview button, I get crap wrong.
You'd have a hard case arguing that OSX doesn't have room for improvement speedwise, but it's this horrible thing that some people like to pretend that it is. Some of the blame goes to Apple, some goes to the application writers. Mac IE renders some stuff painfully slow. I don't know why. Like the article said, things like slashdot comments feel like they're taking all day. In reality, it's only 5 seconds, but we all know what sort of attention spans people have nowadays. There's a pretty new browser called Chimera that is early in development, and still has a limited feature set, but it renders things almost instantly, including slashdot comments. So there isn't some inherent problem within the OS that makes it impossible for your applications to function reasonably.
Not to sound too much like an apple apologist, but they've done quite a bit to get OSX to where it is so far, and the more I use it, the more I appreciate where it's advanced over OS9. I don't mind waiting a bit for things to improve. Just like I don't really mind anymore waiting 5 seconds for IE to throw together the comment threads. Most of us could benefit from learning a little patience.
Although I would surmize that it's apple's fault that they get judged so harshly. Seeing as steve jobs claims that every time someone in their company makes a sketch on a post-it note, they've created a new revolution in the world, people are justified in being extremely critical.
Go find a building with a large white exterior surface that gets direct sunlight, and stare at it on a sunny day. I think you'll find that it's plenty bright, often to the point of being rather uncomfortable to look at. Something that could tone that down might be nice.
PV doesn't have to effect the light that much. It's already possible to coat windows with solar panels. And you can still see through them readily. It's kind of like tinting them, only you're getting electricity as well.
Buildings in sunny places are often lighter colors for heat gain issues.
I'm studying architecture, and sustainability and enviromental design is starting to be a big thing in buildings. Solar Power is one of the major technologies that will make it all work. The biggest obstacles to widespread use in architecture are price and appearance. Both of these will be overcome, and I imagine that photovoltaics will be integrated into most building materials. Right now they're seperate pieces applied to a building, but I think they'll some how be integrated or sprayed onto more traditional (or at least more traditional looking) building materials, so their existance could be a non-issue, at least from a visual standpoint.
On a larger level, I imagine urban areas becoming communities of buildings, all saturated with PV, generating all sorts of power. The buildings would on average generate more electricity than they need, and just release the extra into the local power grid. Instead of everyone getting their energy from a single provider, production would be distributed through all of the buildings, and energy would flow freely to where it was needed. A lot like the distributed internet systems we're starting to see now. There would most likely need to be some sort of external system for peak useages, and I'm sure heavier industrial buildings can require more energy than their buildings could provide, even with maximum PV use. But the advances in PV, along with the growing popularity of energy conserative design should make the power companies nervous
My favorite from a quick glance over their patents is number 80 on their list.
"Implementing Force Feedback Over the World Wide Web and Other Computer Networks ". Taking a fairly common feature, and saying it can work over a network. Any network. A quick skim through the patent listing didn't have any reference to a specific unique protocol or anything that they designed.
Are they talking about realtime streaming of force feedback data? Are they talking about embedding that stuff in webpages? If I have my computer shake my mouse a little bit every time an FTP connection fails, can they sue me? It makes no sense.
If I discover a new comet, should any astronomer that wants to look at it through a telescope have to pay me royalties?
It's rediculous. And that's an example of something that doesn't effect human health (Unless the comet is going to smash into earth I guess).
I cannot see how this could be construed as anything other than choosing money over humanity. It's repulsive.
A piece of shareware is not information. It's a created product. The whole information is free thing is all well and good, but where do you draw the line? Just because something can be transmitted as just 1's and 0's, that means it's just information? We're not talking about some fundamental reality of nature that some corporation discovered and is trying to declare their own. A good piece of shareware is the end result of a lot of imagination, creativity, intelligence, and hard work. It's more than a pile of 1's and 0's, it's not something that everyone has a right to.
It makes a lot of sense to me that something that you create should be under your control. It might not be natural, but that doesn't mean it's bad.
I'm not talking about the law here. Laws are practically irrelevent to software piracy due to the anonyimity that the internet allows, and the fact that it's usual more trouble than it's worth to go after casual piracy.
If you're in posession of something you didn't earn, and that the rightful owner doesn't want you to have free of charge, you've stolen it. You're a thief.
So maybe the letter of a law makes a distinction, but that doesn't effect the ethics or morality of it.
This isn't about intellectual property though. It's about a product. Software is not a physical, tangible thing, but it still has been imagined, designed, produced, created, etc.
Everyone is pretending like they're in the developer's position, and saying that they haven't lost anything. That's comfortably convenient for them, because it makes them feel less guilt.
Look it it from the software pirate's view. He/she has gotten possession of a product without paying for it. They have taken something without the right to do so. That is theft.