Reminds me [of] a customer that called our ISP to sign up. He asked if he could get the Internet on floppies instead of a CD because he didn't have a CDROM drive.
(Score:4, Funny)
Ha ha ha. Those STUPID newbie users. Ha ha ha. They don't have a CLUE how anything works. Ha ha ha. They don't deserve broadband. Ha ha ha.
(note: I have an iPod and rip all my music to mp3, but I do own quite a large collection of CDs)
I had an interesting experience the other day when I was reorganizing CDs on my shelves. I accidentaly dropped the recent Daft Punk album. Nothing broke, but a credit-card looking thing previously affixed to the CD case popped out. It had a serial number on it and the URL www.daftclub.com. I thought...cool, didn't see this when I bought it...and I browsed over to DaftClub where using the card + serial number I got access to special remixes, live recordings, and other media. I can't say all the media available was great, but it was a neat little experience to have access to mp3s and get to know the musicians a little better.
Now nothing technically prevents me from copying those tracks over on a P2P network. There's also very little to stop me from sharing my DaftClub # with anyone else.
But the point is that the music industry needs to be a bit more creative like this and give customers more than a plastic disc. A band is a lot more than the album/CD they put out, and some go through great lengths to express themselves through CD liners, posters, stickers, membership clubs (like DaftClub) and other things.
Sasha's new album also has the same thing. You can't get into the special members only area of his website without having purchased his album which comes with a serial code.
The US seems to be the other way round. Violence is ok, even in kid's movies, while a nipple can already be enough to qualify for an R rating.
I couldn't agree more with this observation. I sometimes don't understand Americans' intolerance for sexuality. I can only make the conclusion that sex is bad for US society, while guns and violence are a perfectly acceptable social artifact.
You can't change the headphones. At least on the model I tried (please correct me if that's changed now) you had to use the Apple in ear headphones, you couldn't just jack in your own. Not sure why this was the case, so I may be wrong here....
I just got a 20gb ipod the other week and brought it into work. A co-worker wanted to know what it sounded like on his spiffy seinheisser headphones and plugged them in. Worked fine (supposedly sounded great). My roommates have also borrowed/stolen my ipod for a few hours to play and used their own headphones. It's a regular headphone jack. I don't see why it wouldn't work. But then again I like the earbuds that come with it...sounds pretty good even though I prefer larger headphones.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should
...
I like text only web pages. Is that so wrong?
Just because you don't see a useful application, doesn't mean that no one else will.
I'm not saying that 3D is the next big thing. Far from it. In fact to a large extent I agree with your latter comment (text only web pages). I would even argue that the technical community can barely come up with decent 3D applications outside of a web browser, let alone in a web browser. Even a lot of games out don't really need 3D for decent playability...it's more for effect and keeping up with the times.
But I do think that having some standard for it would be beneficial, if only to give people more tools to do more interesting things. I can think of a few applications I have worked on that might have benefited from a 3D standard for data visualization. Uses were very limited to a few instances, but it would have helped. I don't worry too much about people overdoing it on web pages because as others have noted, a web page chock-full of unecessary crap will eventually have less visits. Web developers will learn their lesson one way or another, whether the hard or easy way.
Academics, especially professors, spend a good deal of their time brown-nosing and kissing other people's asses in the hopes of securing yet another research grant. Hence, the seemingly odd fascination for toilet paper, the uses of.
Witty, but Norman has very little need to brown-nose and kiss ass. People come to him for attention, not the other way around.
Law of supply and demand: Price of beer goes up, supply of beer goes up, but demand for beer goes down (college students, of course, being limited in budget). Compliments and substitutes: Price of pretzels goes down, demand for beer goes up.
While I see what you mean, I think you have this the wrong way about. Assuming that everything else is constant (ceterus paribus), price is a function of overall existing demand and supply, not the other way around. The price of beer will only go up/down if there are conditions that cause a shift in supply and/or demand.
Rather than try to retro-fit your example (which is a bit flawed to begin with) here's a simple page that I pulled off google that explains basic supply and demand.
This of course is the classical view of macroeconomics, which is probably what your professor was teaching.
(Oh, and she had one kind of sexy voice with a slight Irish accent)
Not to over-generalize, but I do notice that women tech support tend to handle "bad calls" a lot better than men. They're less likely to scoff and think customers are idiots. I'm sure you all can think of a variety of reasons why this is the case.
Hundreds of testers were surprised and dismayed that their entire working set of windows was lost when they renamed a bookmark and then tried to close the bookmark editor.
All were basically told to piss up a rope [mozilla.org] because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
Mod parent up... I just went through the bugzilla link and this is a great example of how some developers (not all, mind you) are totally clueless about usability.
Looking at the Javascript there is all sorts of conditionals depending on browser type.
Yes I agree with you -- browser sniffing is not a proper production solution (for public websites anyway). The solution I tend to use is to detect whether a browser supports some sort of functionality that I need. This makes it more browser compliant. For instance I often do checks for whether a browser supports the document.getElementById function before I start using all the Javascript DOM bindings. That way it's not dependent on a particular browser or version, but rather on the browser's support of DOM.
I've come across scripts that explicitly require IE5.5+, when in actuality they will work fine with any Gecko-based browser when the browser checks are removed.
Yeah the link does the cross-browser thing the wrong way, but looking at it again it wouldn't be too hard to modify it to get what you need. I've built the slider twice for several different projects (different companies) and I wish I could just send out the code, but that would violate all the proprietary legal stuff.
An alternative to draggable sliders could be a clickable table that fills in cells appropriately. With appropriate interaction cues (making a cell look like it's clickable) this would work just as well as a slider, and is more form compatible (easier to use as inline code).
I guess it's just a lost cause....
Nah...making sense of the madness is (or should be) what we're all about.:)
It would be best to have an "appliance server" that is capable of handling the communications to the devices and generating interfaces from standard libraries created for appliance control. Then we could have an extremely lightweight communications protocol for the appliances, as they would only have to go so far as to detail their features to the server, and it would construct an interface for them.
I would even go further than that. Rather than have a central server, I would say that each device would be aware of every other device, making "connections" (logical, since we're already physically connected) when necessary.
It would be nicer to just tell the system as a whole to "make toast and coffee" and have them all sort things out on their own (and report back results, obviously), rather than script everything out explicitly.
Of course I imagine my kitchen would still be messy as usual, automation or not, until someone rigs up a C3P0 to clean shit up for me.
....but I would much rather use a "nice" user interface any day. Buttons, Text, Combo Boxes? Sure. Sliders? Not really. Something more graphically-oriented (think letting your grandmother program her VCR)? Not without Flash (yuck).
And what's a "nice" user interface? A thick client that needs to be downloaded and installed? I don't think anyone wants to install an app that only specifically controls a small device. Pain in the ass and unnecessary.
As for sliders...that can be done graphically in HTML in a way that will work with (almost) all standard browsers, in any case more than those that support Flash. There are a lot more interactions in HTML than buttons, text, and combo boxes.
Furthermore, even if we were limited to text, combo, boxes, and buttons, I would guarantee that it would be better to push out a web app than opt for a "richer" client solution.
I whole-heartedly agree that people sometimes go too far on demanding web applications -- sometimes a thick client is much more appropriate -- but in this case I feel like the payoff doesn't warrant a full blown local applications simply to control a small device. Only when a toaster gets the functionality of say, a palmpilot or ipod, with non-trivial data transfer, then I would see the need for a richer client-side experience.
I highly suspect that even CSS1 is not fully implemented, but I could be wrong. But CSS2 sure ain't.
Here's a decent reference that I've been using lately. Not sure how often it's updated but it's not bad. The link I'm giving is for the syntax, but click on the other navigation at the top to check out other CSS support.
Mozilla isn't listed, but we can assume that Netscape == Mozilla.9x
why not just make a web page with a database full of the recipes... let me log in and customize what recipes i want, and then create my own pdf/ascii/doc of my CUSTOMIZED cookbook?
Yes, and all uniformly formatted...
And open source the server-side code to do this...
Now that I think of it, if it becomes popular this thing will probably eat up some good bandwidth and server resources.
However, though my own tests, I've found that IE's standards compliance is lacking at best. The most particularly harmful oversight is the somewhat narrow subset of CSS2 that IE supports.
Yeah I find this to be true as well. For instance scrollable tables (tables that have their headers fixed) do not work in IE and require a javascript workaround. In Netscape it works fine, however.
But for some reason I just find IE easier to develop for when building more interactive web applications. First thing off the top of my head in support of the onscroll event, which for some reason Mozilla doesn't support even though it's a pretty useful event (I could be wrong in the most recent release). It's a pain in the ass to use a javascript workaround to simulate an onscroll.
When installed, it would provide support for some of the bad HTML IE loves so much.
I understand that IE has a history of supporting shite HTML, but IE's support of W3C standards is rather good. Also keep in mind that Mozilla still supports some of Netscape's "bad" tags and has some pretty kludgy support of the current DOM recommendation.
The nice thing about Mozilla, however, is how it handles this backwards compatibility by looking at the document type (html version, etc.). Old versions get rendered with "classic" (flawed) Netscape ways, and new versions get the latest and greatest rendering implementation.
Despite quirks on either side of the fence, it's almost gotten to the point that web developers can now work toward the common DOM standard.
Some of them flat out suck, and wind up producing terrorists.
Ok I think you're being a tad too subjective. I assume you're part of today's arguably dominant "civilization" -- that is, western civilization. Your criteria for "suckiness" can only be based on the fact that other societies disagree with the way things work in the West and are struggling to promote their own ideals both within areas of their influence and abroad.
That said, terrorist activities are obviously not the correct ways to promote ideals. My original point, however, is the fact that the US and other leading western countries in many ways created the conditions that forced other societies to resort to extreme measures such as terrorism. As someone who is a part of Western society I don't find anything wrong with others promoting an alternate way of life. True Islamic ideals are really quite compatible with the values that we all (should) aspire to. There is nothing inherently violent about Islam or about Islamic societies.
I read somewhere that early Islamic believers fully believed in the core of Christian and Judaist concepts but also believed that those who carried the flag and "implemented" these religions destroyed the original meaning. After a thousand years of Islam's existence I might even say that certain groups like the violent terrorist affiliated groups likely destroyed the original intentions of Islam.
The actions from the people in that region over the last few decades has certainly lent loads to the image that the whole region is nothing but a breeding ground for terrorists.
Ok, assuming that you are correct and the region is indeed a breeding ground for terrorists (I personally think you're wrong, but I'll play along), why do you suppose this is?
Slashdot Mirror
I bet it was Civ III. He probably died waiting for the computer players to churn out their moves.
Ha ha ha. Those STUPID newbie users. Ha ha ha. They don't have a CLUE how anything works. Ha ha ha. They don't deserve broadband. Ha ha ha.
What's your patentable idea?
I had an interesting experience the other day when I was reorganizing CDs on my shelves. I accidentaly dropped the recent Daft Punk album. Nothing broke, but a credit-card looking thing previously affixed to the CD case popped out. It had a serial number on it and the URL www.daftclub.com. I thought...cool, didn't see this when I bought it...and I browsed over to DaftClub where using the card + serial number I got access to special remixes, live recordings, and other media. I can't say all the media available was great, but it was a neat little experience to have access to mp3s and get to know the musicians a little better.
Now nothing technically prevents me from copying those tracks over on a P2P network. There's also very little to stop me from sharing my DaftClub # with anyone else.
But the point is that the music industry needs to be a bit more creative like this and give customers more than a plastic disc. A band is a lot more than the album/CD they put out, and some go through great lengths to express themselves through CD liners, posters, stickers, membership clubs (like DaftClub) and other things.
Sasha's new album also has the same thing. You can't get into the special members only area of his website without having purchased his album which comes with a serial code.
I wish more artists would follow suit.
I couldn't agree more with this observation. I sometimes don't understand Americans' intolerance for sexuality. I can only make the conclusion that sex is bad for US society, while guns and violence are a perfectly acceptable social artifact.
I just got a 20gb ipod the other week and brought it into work. A co-worker wanted to know what it sounded like on his spiffy seinheisser headphones and plugged them in. Worked fine (supposedly sounded great). My roommates have also borrowed/stolen my ipod for a few hours to play and used their own headphones. It's a regular headphone jack. I don't see why it wouldn't work. But then again I like the earbuds that come with it...sounds pretty good even though I prefer larger headphones.
I like text only web pages. Is that so wrong?
Just because you don't see a useful application, doesn't mean that no one else will.
I'm not saying that 3D is the next big thing. Far from it. In fact to a large extent I agree with your latter comment (text only web pages). I would even argue that the technical community can barely come up with decent 3D applications outside of a web browser, let alone in a web browser. Even a lot of games out don't really need 3D for decent playability...it's more for effect and keeping up with the times.
But I do think that having some standard for it would be beneficial, if only to give people more tools to do more interesting things. I can think of a few applications I have worked on that might have benefited from a 3D standard for data visualization. Uses were very limited to a few instances, but it would have helped. I don't worry too much about people overdoing it on web pages because as others have noted, a web page chock-full of unecessary crap will eventually have less visits. Web developers will learn their lesson one way or another, whether the hard or easy way.
Witty, but Norman has very little need to brown-nose and kiss ass. People come to him for attention, not the other way around.
While I see what you mean, I think you have this the wrong way about. Assuming that everything else is constant (ceterus paribus), price is a function of overall existing demand and supply, not the other way around. The price of beer will only go up/down if there are conditions that cause a shift in supply and/or demand.
Rather than try to retro-fit your example (which is a bit flawed to begin with) here's a simple page that I pulled off google that explains basic supply and demand.
This of course is the classical view of macroeconomics, which is probably what your professor was teaching.
Not to over-generalize, but I do notice that women tech support tend to handle "bad calls" a lot better than men. They're less likely to scoff and think customers are idiots. I'm sure you all can think of a variety of reasons why this is the case.
Of course this isn't a hard rule...
Ben Franklin definitely started the first free lending library. At least he says so in his autobiography.
All were basically told to piss up a rope [mozilla.org] because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
Mod parent up... I just went through the bugzilla link and this is a great example of how some developers (not all, mind you) are totally clueless about usability.
Yes I agree with you -- browser sniffing is not a proper production solution (for public websites anyway). The solution I tend to use is to detect whether a browser supports some sort of functionality that I need. This makes it more browser compliant. For instance I often do checks for whether a browser supports the document.getElementById function before I start using all the Javascript DOM bindings. That way it's not dependent on a particular browser or version, but rather on the browser's support of DOM.
I've come across scripts that explicitly require IE5.5+, when in actuality they will work fine with any Gecko-based browser when the browser checks are removed.
Yeah the link does the cross-browser thing the wrong way, but looking at it again it wouldn't be too hard to modify it to get what you need. I've built the slider twice for several different projects (different companies) and I wish I could just send out the code, but that would violate all the proprietary legal stuff.
An alternative to draggable sliders could be a clickable table that fills in cells appropriately. With appropriate interaction cues (making a cell look like it's clickable) this would work just as well as a slider, and is more form compatible (easier to use as inline code).
I guess it's just a lost cause....
Nah...making sense of the madness is (or should be) what we're all about. :)
Don't know if it works under opera, but works fine under IE, Netscape 4, and Mozilla 1. The only problem is that it's absolutely positioned rather than inlined.
XFORMS will include sliders, but obviously no browser supports this yet (I could be wrong).
I would even go further than that. Rather than have a central server, I would say that each device would be aware of every other device, making "connections" (logical, since we're already physically connected) when necessary.
It would be nicer to just tell the system as a whole to "make toast and coffee" and have them all sort things out on their own (and report back results, obviously), rather than script everything out explicitly.
Of course I imagine my kitchen would still be messy as usual, automation or not, until someone rigs up a C3P0 to clean shit up for me.
And what's a "nice" user interface? A thick client that needs to be downloaded and installed? I don't think anyone wants to install an app that only specifically controls a small device. Pain in the ass and unnecessary.
As for sliders...that can be done graphically in HTML in a way that will work with (almost) all standard browsers, in any case more than those that support Flash. There are a lot more interactions in HTML than buttons, text, and combo boxes.
Furthermore, even if we were limited to text, combo, boxes, and buttons, I would guarantee that it would be better to push out a web app than opt for a "richer" client solution.
I whole-heartedly agree that people sometimes go too far on demanding web applications -- sometimes a thick client is much more appropriate -- but in this case I feel like the payoff doesn't warrant a full blown local applications simply to control a small device. Only when a toaster gets the functionality of say, a palmpilot or ipod, with non-trivial data transfer, then I would see the need for a richer client-side experience.
Here's a decent reference that I've been using lately. Not sure how often it's updated but it's not bad. The link I'm giving is for the syntax, but click on the other navigation at the top to check out other CSS support.
Mozilla isn't listed, but we can assume that Netscape == Mozilla .9x
Ah, XML ... the be all and end all silver bullet for the web.
I believe these are starting points.
http://www.amk.ca/recipe/
http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=192
I'll take pot over open-source any day :)
Yes, and all uniformly formatted...
And open source the server-side code to do this...
Now that I think of it, if it becomes popular this thing will probably eat up some good bandwidth and server resources.
Yeah I find this to be true as well. For instance scrollable tables (tables that have their headers fixed) do not work in IE and require a javascript workaround. In Netscape it works fine, however.
But for some reason I just find IE easier to develop for when building more interactive web applications. First thing off the top of my head in support of the onscroll event, which for some reason Mozilla doesn't support even though it's a pretty useful event (I could be wrong in the most recent release). It's a pain in the ass to use a javascript workaround to simulate an onscroll.
I understand that IE has a history of supporting shite HTML, but IE's support of W3C standards is rather good. Also keep in mind that Mozilla still supports some of Netscape's "bad" tags and has some pretty kludgy support of the current DOM recommendation.
The nice thing about Mozilla, however, is how it handles this backwards compatibility by looking at the document type (html version, etc.). Old versions get rendered with "classic" (flawed) Netscape ways, and new versions get the latest and greatest rendering implementation.
Despite quirks on either side of the fence, it's almost gotten to the point that web developers can now work toward the common DOM standard.
Maybe a good number of people think that the football plays are lulls in the primary entertainment experience of cool ads.
Ok I think you're being a tad too subjective. I assume you're part of today's arguably dominant "civilization" -- that is, western civilization. Your criteria for "suckiness" can only be based on the fact that other societies disagree with the way things work in the West and are struggling to promote their own ideals both within areas of their influence and abroad.
That said, terrorist activities are obviously not the correct ways to promote ideals. My original point, however, is the fact that the US and other leading western countries in many ways created the conditions that forced other societies to resort to extreme measures such as terrorism. As someone who is a part of Western society I don't find anything wrong with others promoting an alternate way of life. True Islamic ideals are really quite compatible with the values that we all (should) aspire to. There is nothing inherently violent about Islam or about Islamic societies.
I read somewhere that early Islamic believers fully believed in the core of Christian and Judaist concepts but also believed that those who carried the flag and "implemented" these religions destroyed the original meaning. After a thousand years of Islam's existence I might even say that certain groups like the violent terrorist affiliated groups likely destroyed the original intentions of Islam.
Ok, assuming that you are correct and the region is indeed a breeding ground for terrorists (I personally think you're wrong, but I'll play along), why do you suppose this is?
Think about it.