This is a small nitpick, but while mutations are indeed random, the vast majority of speciation and evolution has been through sexual reproduction (meiosis) not through the kind of toxic-waste/alpha-particle random mutation out of comic books.
Meiosis is very good at jumbling genes around in ways that do new and unique things, sometimes beneficial, and sometimes not. The gene-jumbling has even been shown to be far far more likely to split on gene borders rather than mid-gene.
Changes through mutation are almost always lethal, while changes through meiosis rarely are. This goes a long way toward debunking the "tornado in a junkyard building a 747" analogy.
It's sad that someone modded your post down and the ridiculous GP post up =\
I'm no fan of the government running things, but the scare tactics, cries of "socialism", "death squads" etc. are so laughable they just hurt any attempt to propose an alternative where there is private competition for health care without government intervention.
I wish the "good" conservatives and republicans would speak up, and shout down the haters and hypocrites. We need good small-government ideas coming from the right, not mindless hate-filled partisan drivel.
I think the point is that it's impossible to avoid frightening imbeciles. What matters what a reasonable or average person would think of these e-mails. Not what a paranoid schizophrenic thinks of them.
Yeah, not a very compelling summary. The price is consistent for a person in the US with a playstation. Who cares what someone in Japan is paying in Yen for the same game?
The one really good thing about Facebook is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there, and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it. It's a very enticing way of improving privacy on the web, since you can actually authenticate+limit who sees the content very easily. The lack of spam is a nice side effect too.
The huge downside is that it's still a closed system. You can't make your own awesome video game and use Facebook for the authentication, unless you build it within Facebook's closed proprietary system with their tools.
It's too bad an open authentication system hasn't really taken off yet.
People don't consider the TLD to be most significant, and especially did not consider it so before any domain names used anything other than.com or maybe.edu/.net/.org.
Unless you happen to use both slashdot.com and slashdot.org (and.net, etc.), odds are you can almost always tab complete the name "sla" and avoid ever typing "com." or "co". The TLD is essentially totally insignificant, and would have to be typed every single time if the order were reversed.
Agreed though that compared to the rest of the path it IS backwards.
It's just like code - refactoring and removing old laws is vital. And laws that serve no purpose, aren't enforced, or cannot be enforced, should not stay on the books. The smallest set of rules is best, just as that government is best which governs least.
Laws are subjective, and the attitude of "let's try to cover every single detail imaginable!" is guaranteed to both leave loopholes as well as catch unintended targets in the overly-strict rules.
That's in addition to, of course, making laws so complex that both no one can know them and everyone is violating them. At least until we manage your hypothetical coding of every possible scenario ever into a computer, plus the reasoning for the computer to make judgements based on incomplete evidence. (which you could certainly argue human juries aren't that great at either)
This seems like the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Laws should be as simple as possible, leaving interpretation up to the judge and jury to determine whether a law was broken.
Perfect example is having a "no texting while driving law". And a "no cell phones without hands-free set" law. And a "no putting on makeup while driving law". And a "no eating hamburgers while driving law". And on, and on.
The law should just say something brief to the extent of "no distracted driving" that encompasses all of these.
Include "spirit of the law" text explaining the purpose of the law if necessary, to both avoid people getting away with obviously "wrong" things by finding some ridiculous loophole, and to avoid prosecutors trumping up ridiculous charges that clearly obviate the intent of the law.
I agree UAC is the correct direction, but the problem isn't the users. It's the legacy of poorly coded apps that "violate" UAC, because Windows is just now using UAC to enforce security measures that are common practice for apps on Unix OSes.
Hopefully once Vista and Windows7 have "fixed" all those bad habits and bad programs, UAC prompts will start to appear with a MUCH lower frequency, more comparable to how often you get SUDO prompts on the Mac or Linux.
UAC is a good effort, but still was probably not the best way to move to a new application security structure.
Some of the cloud services are quite compatible with vendor redundancy. When I looked into Amazon EC2 it was largely being billed as "extra" resources, not as your primary servers.
You could potentially have 3 cloud computing services, with a 3rd of your "servers" at each one, and a redundant load balancer setup that also crosses providers. This would also let you be sneaky and expand servers and bandwidth at whichever provider is cheapest at the time.
I'm just dreaming here, but I don't see any reason you couldn't do it. This only applies where you're providing the application of course, and not to hosted services like e-mail.
many MMO's I have participated in had lackluster markets due to poor UI
It's funny you say that -- I would actually say the opposite from playing WOW. The auction house in WOW is effectively a *single* source of all items non-NPC-purchaseable items.
Real life has a MUCH worse UI. I have to check Best Buy, then Newegg, then Amazon, and who knows if a place 1 mile away from me actually has a better price! The game also lets me (through addons) see historical prices, price averages, and let's me trivially undercut competitors when selling goods.
I don't think anyone is claiming that a game market is identical to real life, but that shouldn't stop us from learning from it either.
I fully expected the Vista haters were baseless whiners using some decades-old legacy app. So I started using Vista *after* service pack 1 on a new Core2duo system. The experience has unfortunately been dismal.
UAC has a slew of problems, even if its goals are good. But most of all, the OS has seen no improvements for the end-user. All of the same bugs and annoying quirks from XP are still there, with new and bizarre bugs having been added for Vista. It truly is a downgrade from XP.
I'm still using it at home, but it's painful. They need to put some serious effort into the user interface bugs, usability, and desktop performance.
The snipe about Unix users using multiple desktops for ages is unwarranted. NT (and 9x?) has supported multiple desktops since the dawn of time via the Windows API
I disagree with your claim of virtual desktops being supported in Windows. I am always trying to use virtual desktops on XP and Vista. All of the available solutions are poor and frustrating. Some apps work some of the time, some don't. It's better than nothing, but it's very very weak support.
If you have found a good 3rd party virtual desktop app, please share a link with us. VirtuaWin is what I have been using in Vista, after going through several even-worse virtual desktop apps. SQL Management Studio is one of the apps that never seemed to work quite right, for example.
There's no excuse for Windows to not have an officially supported virtual desktop system. Even Macs were pretty far behind, but did finally put in Spaces a year or two back. That's still a decade after I was using virtual desktops in unix (and litestep on Windows).
Saying Windows users are noobs is no excuse, even if it were true. The number of "power" users of Windows is several times large than the total population of Mac and Unix users. With money to burn and such a large user base, it's very hard to justify how poor the Windows desktop experience is.
Some links down below talk about possible biological reasons a flu vaccine could increase *severity* of other flu strains. A post or two claim that selection bias isn't at work here, but fail to point to any evidence.
It could go either way of course, but I'm shocked that such an obvious question of selection bias hasn't been addressed directly while this latest "scare" is being plastered all over the news.
Several infectious disease experts and researchers have suggested the study work could be flawed. A commonly heard suggestion is that there was "selection bias" at work, meaning the type of people studied were not representative of the population in general and therefore the findings can't be generalized.
It also mentions that data from every country other than Canada fails to support the claim.
My first thought after hearing this "unpublished claim" was that there's heavy selection bias here. People who get flu shots are primarily people who have higher exposure to infectious diseases, such as hospital workers and teachers. If it's true for influenza (spurring them to get a shot) it would be true for H1N1 as well.
Without hearing anything to the contrary (and esp. PaddyM's link showing other researchers see selection bias in the Canada study) the "news" here is really:
People more likely to catch the flu are more likely to catch the flu.
I'm in the same boat as you, but don't confuse "having a monopoly on PC gaming" through proprietary lock-in with "the Windows OS is pretty good these days".
I'm stuck in windows for reasonably cheap gaming - got a new Dell with Vista recently. But any time I try to do anything other than double click my game, I end up frustrated. Even basic gaming has been broken with their attempts to implement security while fully maintaining backwards compatibility. (eg. installing patches and finding/using game saves/screenshots as a non-administrator)
It was a lot better in XP than Vista of course - Vista just new problems and managed to keep all of XP's problems too. Maybe I should just "upgrade" back to XP instead of complaining here =\
What's really being discussed here is learning a very very complicated application. The problem is being approached here with the assumption that all of the features should be there, and that the problem is people don't know about all 5,341 features available to them. The solution is to present those 5,341 features in many new and different ways - first the "Personalized Auto-randomly-rearranging menus", and next the Ribbon.
Another approach is to figure out how much space is really available for features such that they can be learned and used by the majority of your users. Focus on getting the most value for your feature-space. Yes, this means eliminating (or hiding in menus) the features that are rarely used or overly specialized. But it also means that those very important features that people want can be found and learned quickly.
Users are never going to learn 5,341 features no matter what combination of menus and ribbons and icons you arrange them in. Simplifying apps is the most important thing you can do for usability, and it is not an easy job.
OP made a specific point that's showed up a few times. The menu system uses words that are easy to browse very quickly.
The ribbon uses icons that are often difficult to decipher. You have to hover them one at a time, and wait for the tooltip to show up.
Now instead of scanning a list of 10 words, you're taking 3 seconds per icon to just to read the tooltip word of what that 16x16 icon is supposed to represent.
Add in the fact that Windows is amazingly unreliable at showing tooltips. It might show up in a few more seconds. You might have to "unhover" and "rehover". It might just never show up, like attempting to hover the time to see the date in both XP and Vista.
This is the case throughout most of Vista's UI "improvements".
Moving to icons and buttons instead of menus as the primary interface is a Good Thing. But it requires that you improve the app to use significantly fewer buttons for the majority of core functionality. Taking the same overcomplicated menu system and cramming it into ribbons is a step backwards.
While there may be a good intention at the heart of the ribbon, it's still a bad user interface convention.
The correct way to go about this is to put buttons in the interface for the common functionality, and limit or remove excessive functionality that is rarely used.
The reality of Windows Vista 's feeble attempt at improving the user interface is that you still have to use the same menu and right click for the same basic features as before, except now the menu is completely hidden from the user unless they somehow know to press alt to access that basic functionality.
This is, of course, in addition to all of the existing user interface problems with having basic functionality hidden in the menu system.
"Hiding" the menu until you press alt is one of the worst user interface conventions in history. There at LEAST needs to be a button to show it. No amount of staring at the screen, hovering, and clicking will ever lead to you deciphering that hidden command. And even when you know it, it still forces you to mix keyboard and mouse for mouse commands.
This, in fact, proved that there are many more profitable books outside top 1000 (or however many), and that physical bookstores are missing out many sales due to it.
YES.
This is exactly why I've stopped using brick and mortar retailers almost entirely. They carry such a limited selection that it's often a wasted trip.
This goes for video rental stores once they consolidated (in my area) to a chain of "new release-only" stores. I switched to Netflix and have never been back, and have converted many friends to Netflix too.
Music stores, which in my area have never carried anything but the most popular overpriced crap. Now I buy from Amazon or direct from musicians' websites.
Groceries are one of the few markets left worth using brick and mortar stores for. Anything else is just a showroom for cheaper online stores, at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a small nitpick, but while mutations are indeed random, the vast majority of speciation and evolution has been through sexual reproduction (meiosis) not through the kind of toxic-waste/alpha-particle random mutation out of comic books.
Meiosis is very good at jumbling genes around in ways that do new and unique things, sometimes beneficial, and sometimes not. The gene-jumbling has even been shown to be far far more likely to split on gene borders rather than mid-gene.
Changes through mutation are almost always lethal, while changes through meiosis rarely are. This goes a long way toward debunking the "tornado in a junkyard building a 747" analogy.
You're basically talking about facebook. Sure, they don't actually validate you are who you say, but your social network does.
While facebook is quite popular, it's also quite popular for a small minority of internet activities.
It's sad that someone modded your post down and the ridiculous GP post up =\
I'm no fan of the government running things, but the scare tactics, cries of "socialism", "death squads" etc. are so laughable they just hurt any attempt to propose an alternative where there is private competition for health care without government intervention.
I wish the "good" conservatives and republicans would speak up, and shout down the haters and hypocrites. We need good small-government ideas coming from the right, not mindless hate-filled partisan drivel.
I think the point is that it's impossible to avoid frightening imbeciles. What matters what a reasonable or average person would think of these e-mails. Not what a paranoid schizophrenic thinks of them.
Yeah, not a very compelling summary. The price is consistent for a person in the US with a playstation. Who cares what someone in Japan is paying in Yen for the same game?
The one really good thing about Facebook is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there, and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it. It's a very enticing way of improving privacy on the web, since you can actually authenticate+limit who sees the content very easily. The lack of spam is a nice side effect too.
The huge downside is that it's still a closed system. You can't make your own awesome video game and use Facebook for the authentication, unless you build it within Facebook's closed proprietary system with their tools.
It's too bad an open authentication system hasn't really taken off yet.
People don't consider the TLD to be most significant, and especially did not consider it so before any domain names used anything other than .com or maybe .edu/.net/.org.
Unless you happen to use both slashdot.com and slashdot.org (and .net, etc.), odds are you can almost always tab complete the name "sla" and avoid ever typing "com." or "co". The TLD is essentially totally insignificant, and would have to be typed every single time if the order were reversed.
Agreed though that compared to the rest of the path it IS backwards.
It's just like code - refactoring and removing old laws is vital. And laws that serve no purpose, aren't enforced, or cannot be enforced, should not stay on the books. The smallest set of rules is best, just as that government is best which governs least.
Laws are subjective, and the attitude of "let's try to cover every single detail imaginable!" is guaranteed to both leave loopholes as well as catch unintended targets in the overly-strict rules.
That's in addition to, of course, making laws so complex that both no one can know them and everyone is violating them. At least until we manage your hypothetical coding of every possible scenario ever into a computer, plus the reasoning for the computer to make judgements based on incomplete evidence. (which you could certainly argue human juries aren't that great at either)
This seems like the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Laws should be as simple as possible, leaving interpretation up to the judge and jury to determine whether a law was broken.
Perfect example is having a "no texting while driving law". And a "no cell phones without hands-free set" law. And a "no putting on makeup while driving law". And a "no eating hamburgers while driving law". And on, and on.
The law should just say something brief to the extent of "no distracted driving" that encompasses all of these.
Include "spirit of the law" text explaining the purpose of the law if necessary, to both avoid people getting away with obviously "wrong" things by finding some ridiculous loophole, and to avoid prosecutors trumping up ridiculous charges that clearly obviate the intent of the law.
I agree UAC is the correct direction, but the problem isn't the users. It's the legacy of poorly coded apps that "violate" UAC, because Windows is just now using UAC to enforce security measures that are common practice for apps on Unix OSes.
Hopefully once Vista and Windows7 have "fixed" all those bad habits and bad programs, UAC prompts will start to appear with a MUCH lower frequency, more comparable to how often you get SUDO prompts on the Mac or Linux.
UAC is a good effort, but still was probably not the best way to move to a new application security structure.
Some of the cloud services are quite compatible with vendor redundancy. When I looked into Amazon EC2 it was largely being billed as "extra" resources, not as your primary servers.
You could potentially have 3 cloud computing services, with a 3rd of your "servers" at each one, and a redundant load balancer setup that also crosses providers. This would also let you be sneaky and expand servers and bandwidth at whichever provider is cheapest at the time.
I'm just dreaming here, but I don't see any reason you couldn't do it. This only applies where you're providing the application of course, and not to hosted services like e-mail.
many MMO's I have participated in had lackluster markets due to poor UI
It's funny you say that -- I would actually say the opposite from playing WOW. The auction house in WOW is effectively a *single* source of all items non-NPC-purchaseable items.
Real life has a MUCH worse UI. I have to check Best Buy, then Newegg, then Amazon, and who knows if a place 1 mile away from me actually has a better price! The game also lets me (through addons) see historical prices, price averages, and let's me trivially undercut competitors when selling goods.
I don't think anyone is claiming that a game market is identical to real life, but that shouldn't stop us from learning from it either.
I fully expected the Vista haters were baseless whiners using some decades-old legacy app. So I started using Vista *after* service pack 1 on a new Core2duo system. The experience has unfortunately been dismal.
UAC has a slew of problems, even if its goals are good. But most of all, the OS has seen no improvements for the end-user. All of the same bugs and annoying quirks from XP are still there, with new and bizarre bugs having been added for Vista. It truly is a downgrade from XP.
I'm still using it at home, but it's painful. They need to put some serious effort into the user interface bugs, usability, and desktop performance.
The snipe about Unix users using multiple desktops for ages is unwarranted. NT (and 9x?) has supported multiple desktops since the dawn of time via the Windows API
I disagree with your claim of virtual desktops being supported in Windows. I am always trying to use virtual desktops on XP and Vista. All of the available solutions are poor and frustrating. Some apps work some of the time, some don't. It's better than nothing, but it's very very weak support.
If you have found a good 3rd party virtual desktop app, please share a link with us. VirtuaWin is what I have been using in Vista, after going through several even-worse virtual desktop apps. SQL Management Studio is one of the apps that never seemed to work quite right, for example.
There's no excuse for Windows to not have an officially supported virtual desktop system. Even Macs were pretty far behind, but did finally put in Spaces a year or two back. That's still a decade after I was using virtual desktops in unix (and litestep on Windows).
Saying Windows users are noobs is no excuse, even if it were true. The number of "power" users of Windows is several times large than the total population of Mac and Unix users. With money to burn and such a large user base, it's very hard to justify how poor the Windows desktop experience is.
Some links down below talk about possible biological reasons a flu vaccine could increase *severity* of other flu strains. A post or two claim that selection bias isn't at work here, but fail to point to any evidence.
It could go either way of course, but I'm shocked that such an obvious question of selection bias hasn't been addressed directly while this latest "scare" is being plastered all over the news.
From that article:
Several infectious disease experts and researchers have suggested the study work could be flawed. A commonly heard suggestion is that there was "selection bias" at work, meaning the type of people studied were not representative of the population in general and therefore the findings can't be generalized.
It also mentions that data from every country other than Canada fails to support the claim.
My first thought after hearing this "unpublished claim" was that there's heavy selection bias here. People who get flu shots are primarily people who have higher exposure to infectious diseases, such as hospital workers and teachers. If it's true for influenza (spurring them to get a shot) it would be true for H1N1 as well.
Without hearing anything to the contrary (and esp. PaddyM's link showing other researchers see selection bias in the Canada study) the "news" here is really:
People more likely to catch the flu are more likely to catch the flu.
Stunning, isn't it?
I'm in the same boat as you, but don't confuse "having a monopoly on PC gaming" through proprietary lock-in with "the Windows OS is pretty good these days".
I'm stuck in windows for reasonably cheap gaming - got a new Dell with Vista recently. But any time I try to do anything other than double click my game, I end up frustrated. Even basic gaming has been broken with their attempts to implement security while fully maintaining backwards compatibility. (eg. installing patches and finding/using game saves/screenshots as a non-administrator)
It was a lot better in XP than Vista of course - Vista just new problems and managed to keep all of XP's problems too. Maybe I should just "upgrade" back to XP instead of complaining here =\
What's really being discussed here is learning a very very complicated application. The problem is being approached here with the assumption that all of the features should be there, and that the problem is people don't know about all 5,341 features available to them. The solution is to present those 5,341 features in many new and different ways - first the "Personalized Auto-randomly-rearranging menus", and next the Ribbon.
Another approach is to figure out how much space is really available for features such that they can be learned and used by the majority of your users. Focus on getting the most value for your feature-space. Yes, this means eliminating (or hiding in menus) the features that are rarely used or overly specialized. But it also means that those very important features that people want can be found and learned quickly.
Users are never going to learn 5,341 features no matter what combination of menus and ribbons and icons you arrange them in. Simplifying apps is the most important thing you can do for usability, and it is not an easy job.
OP made a specific point that's showed up a few times. The menu system uses words that are easy to browse very quickly.
The ribbon uses icons that are often difficult to decipher. You have to hover them one at a time, and wait for the tooltip to show up.
Now instead of scanning a list of 10 words, you're taking 3 seconds per icon to just to read the tooltip word of what that 16x16 icon is supposed to represent.
Add in the fact that Windows is amazingly unreliable at showing tooltips. It might show up in a few more seconds. You might have to "unhover" and "rehover". It might just never show up, like attempting to hover the time to see the date in both XP and Vista.
This is the case throughout most of Vista's UI "improvements".
Moving to icons and buttons instead of menus as the primary interface is a Good Thing. But it requires that you improve the app to use significantly fewer buttons for the majority of core functionality. Taking the same overcomplicated menu system and cramming it into ribbons is a step backwards.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you think the collapsed posts are censored? You know you can click those posts to expand them, right?
While there may be a good intention at the heart of the ribbon, it's still a bad user interface convention.
The correct way to go about this is to put buttons in the interface for the common functionality, and limit or remove excessive functionality that is rarely used.
The reality of Windows Vista 's feeble attempt at improving the user interface is that you still have to use the same menu and right click for the same basic features as before, except now the menu is completely hidden from the user unless they somehow know to press alt to access that basic functionality.
This is, of course, in addition to all of the existing user interface problems with having basic functionality hidden in the menu system.
"Hiding" the menu until you press alt is one of the worst user interface conventions in history. There at LEAST needs to be a button to show it. No amount of staring at the screen, hovering, and clicking will ever lead to you deciphering that hidden command. And even when you know it, it still forces you to mix keyboard and mouse for mouse commands.
Perhaps the GP post meant his comment to indicate the iPod is where the "pod" came from in "podcast".
This, in fact, proved that there are many more profitable books outside top 1000 (or however many), and that physical bookstores are missing out many sales due to it.
YES.
This is exactly why I've stopped using brick and mortar retailers almost entirely. They carry such a limited selection that it's often a wasted trip.
This goes for video rental stores once they consolidated (in my area) to a chain of "new release-only" stores. I switched to Netflix and have never been back, and have converted many friends to Netflix too.
Music stores, which in my area have never carried anything but the most popular overpriced crap. Now I buy from Amazon or direct from musicians' websites.
Groceries are one of the few markets left worth using brick and mortar stores for. Anything else is just a showroom for cheaper online stores, at this point.