Re:Changing times call for changing business model
on
Re-Inventing Hotwheels
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· Score: 1
Something to keep in mind: recently, the company that makes Legos had to shift it's thinking about their products, since they realized what they made had become too specialized, and was appealing to a narrower and narrower set of buyers (an alarming number of whom were way outside their original target range of younger than 16). They were watching their marketshare, and the number of toys they could sell, erode. There for a while it was nearly impossible to get a large generic set of Lego blocks at a retailer. Fortunately, those running the company realized this, and began to change the way they designed and marketed their products.
Re:Discarding too many people
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
This may be redundant, but programmers are not the only kind of people that computer-intensive companies need. If you can't define or understand a problem, then it's foolish to attempt to build a solution based on guesses and suppositions. The hardest part of any project, product, whatever, is deciding *what* to make, then figuring out how to make it.
Engineers don't always design, but they have to make designs work. Architects usually don't swing a hammer either, but must create a plan for those who do (and who must also creatively interpret what's been designed to make it work in the reality-space of physics and human needs).
Two things that come to mind are: 1) Assuming that information, a particular movie or file, will always be floating around out there somewhere is likely wrong. How many ancient texts survive in more than a fragment? How many examples of a 'you must destroy all copies of the heretical writings' purge are there in history? (lots) At the very least, one might not always have a T1 at their disposal.
2) A nice side-effect is that now, more than ever in human history, information is being preserved nearly everywhere. It will be much less likely that something like the burning of a single thing (the Library at Alexandria) will result in human knowledge being set back a century. We hope.
Ok, having every copy of Xena: Princess Warrior may not save humanity, but who knows how much having all the Bob Villa shows will help?!? Besides, how else will the Church of SpongeBob begin in 2165?
That's good to consider, but remember that anything a driver touches is an improvement from what came before. Without even checking, I'm certain that the local CarMax has no three-speed-on-the-column manual transmission cars without power brakes.
It's always been about understanding the technology you're using, at least with regard to basic principles of physics, whether it be a car or a missle launcher.
This discussion is a valid one to have, regardless of how many time's it's been brought up, because the aspects of what makes sound pleasing or interesting have little to do with a list of output-section distortion numbers.
It also has little to do with dollar-for-dollar comparisons of circuit cost. If an amplifier makes noises that sound better to the listener, then they are a better solution the one which has a less good sound quality.
Unless you're talking about car audio. Then, apparently, 43,000-watt amplifiers are only $200 at the local Car Audio Mart, and the buyers care little about output quality.
Sometimes a movie is beaten to death by groups of people who could not tell a story if they had a gun to their heads. Being financially astute is one thing, but the mistake the studios make time after time is taking foolish liberties, as committees, with scripts written by someone with the desire to tell a story.
Not to say that all scripts are priceless literature, but more are mangled than not, I'd suspect. Appealing to the lowest common denominator isn't usually the way to create something good.
Well, there's the one that got many of us involved: Akira. Very well-done film, story that makes sense to those who might not be familiar with the cultural landscape of anime, disturbingly cool music. Others?
Wings of Honneamise (likely not 'anime' per se, but still in the same neighborhood) Two current examples: SteamBoy - check out http://apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/toho/steambo y_large.html as well as Appleseed http://apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/a ppleseed_la rge.html
A co-worker had an idea that I like, but haven't yet tried. Each person would have a few items - laptop, cart with personal needs, etc. - and share generally-available things like chairs, work tables, larger computers, etc. The floorplan would be largely open, with lots of nooks, collaboration areas, a few closed offices, and tables. He preferred working that way, as a graphic designer.
I can see some limitations, but some aspects of this appeal to me. Would be difficult to surrender two computers and three monitors, though.
Public airwaves. The FCC licenses radio stations to use a public resource, the radio spectrum, for which the radio stations pay them a licensing fee.
This is a little too close to selling oil-exploration rights or diamond-mining rights for $1. It's a public resource, held in trust by the Federal Gov't.
Don't forget that their accounting practices, as well as the actual numbers involved in any particular incident, are very, very well hidden by contractual limitation as well as threat of removal from the music industry to those who pry into them.
A few musicians have gained access to these numbers, but only after court orders, and they have paid for that access with reduced attention by the label (in other words, they were, to some degree, de-emphazied and no longer supported with the same levels of publicity).
This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. That any musician knows exactly what they're due is a very naiive hope, at best.
Which is why people use the CMM to guide/force the creation of actual processes!!! Amazing how much difference it can make when a small collection of bright people begin building things with intention instead of simply reacting to whimsy.
QA can help a great deal. Makes me feel good to see it mentioned as helpful, so thank you for your comments. It can be a semi-thankless job at times, even with the benefits clear at the end of the line. -Met.
Good requirements will save a project, poorly-written or incomplete ones can bankrupt a company.
From the QA end of things, attempting to work with software that has no description outside a developer's head is nearly impossible. Yes, general usability is able to be studied, as is a general sweep through the overt customer needs, but getting into the basics of what the system is supposed to do depends on having that clearly defined before it's been built.
Note I said 'defined', not 'designed'. There's a huge difference between saying 'the software shall do this single explicit thing (because of this regulation, etc)' and 'put the blue box in the upper left corner'.
As with all things software, there's a balance between having every single aspect defined rigidly, and making it up as you go along. Getting that balance right requires creativity, careful thought, and a clear understanding of what the customer wants.
Where I live, we're just now getting the infrastructure put in for cable-based access. My chances of getting DSL are beyond slim-to-none, and sat.-based is too latency-rich.
Besides, it's only $16/month for a good dial-up account, and I have a laptop. When it's finally available later this year, it just means that I get to purchase more hardware and pay between $40 and $50 a month additionally for 'Net access.
When I need to download OS updates, laptop goes with me to work, or to Panera.
Nicely put. There is an amazing competition for attention in nearly everything we're exposed to, at least in Europe and North America. Watch television with the sound off sometime, just to revel in the lack of audible noise and be stunned by the visual cacophany.
No, I don't really need a computer interface that yells at me graphically all day to get work done. No beeping when mail arrives, no clicking every time my left mouse button is pressed, no flashing shouts of IMPORTANT THING HAPPENING HERE all the time. If all information rich environments were designed that way, it would be far to difficult to distinguish between a normal event, an urgent event, and the system's background processes. Planes would fall from the sky.
Anyway, enough of a tangent. Thanks for bringing it up! -Met.
Writing isn't often done best while immersed in that which is being written about. Contemplation, the space to imagine and build worlds in one's mind, is the key.
Sometimes playing with toys can get in the way of that.
It's easy to get drawn into the whole cycle of newer-better-faster-cooler, with musical instruments, computers, whatever. Can be very distracting to actually creating with those things!
If you've only seen cutsie animations done in Flash, you haven't seen much. The potential for Flash to be a user-interface language is substantial, and quite a few companies are doing fairly complex data-handling things with it.
Most of that is likely hidden in Web-based applications, used inside companies and school systems, though, not something most people would ever encounter while doinking around on the Web.
Well, until things like smart-dust and car parts all have a unique address. How many discrete items do you depend on in a given day? Imagine all of those being addressable in multiple ways.
Even still, it may take a little while to run out again...
Thank you for putting this together!! I ordered one monents after finding out it existed (95, I think), and have enjoyed it a great deal.
Any chance of another collection coming out like that? It would be a great library addition to have one for each year, and pick up the books of those writers one likes the most.
This may be somewhere in the plethora of replies, but here goes:
It's not about the fear of technology, or the lack of desire to learn new tools, but the level of impediment to the creative process. Sometimes the muse can be a reluctant partner, and wading through menu after menu turning options off and on, or looking for a way to get that damnable macro you invoked out of your document, can kill whatever idea inspired you to sit down in the first place.
Artists aren't Luddites, in general. They just look at tools more like tools, not an end to themselves. If every time I wanted to wash dishes I had to reset the vacuum cleaner, clean out the fridge, program the VCR, and change the seven lightbulbs in the hallway not very many dishes would be washed.
Sort of like needing a spoon, and your Swiss Army Knife unfolds everything at once.
I've used various text editors to write prose, along with Word and StarOffice, and prefer the simplicity of the basic editors. Formatting, if it needs to happen at all, can come after the words are all there.
Excellent story! Brought out a chortle on a late afternoon.
In the studio musician world, where very accomplished musicians attempt to please oft-daffy producers, several players I know of have a 'producer switch' - basically a switch of some kind affixed to the front of their bass, near the volume knob. When a producer has some vague displeasure with their playing ('play more, I don't know, yellow' or 'make it sound like Jaco'), they'll flip the switch and ask "how about now?" Usually makes the producer happy to have made a change, and they move on to complete the recording session.
I very much like the idea of a "More Magic" setting, though!!!
Usability has been sacrificed to designers run wild, marketing people with no idea how to present a clear message, and generally people with nothing to say. It's easy to hide lack of meaning behind bright colors & whatnot.
One great big Home Shopping Network is not what the WWW is destined to become, contrary to the efforts of a great many small minds. Tell your story well and clearly, regardless of commercial or other intent, and those you need to reach will find you. Amazon does so pretty well, as do Google, the Library of Congress, and a great many others. Clarity of message, a compelling story.
Whether this provides a path around totalitarian governments remains to be seen. Hopefully it will erode them from the inside, as a good flow of information should. The best sword against despots is truth, told to lots and lots of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Something to keep in mind: recently, the company that makes Legos had to shift it's thinking about their products, since they realized what they made had become too specialized, and was appealing to a narrower and narrower set of buyers (an alarming number of whom were way outside their original target range of younger than 16). They were watching their marketshare, and the number of toys they could sell, erode. There for a while it was nearly impossible to get a large generic set of Lego blocks at a retailer. Fortunately, those running the company realized this, and began to change the way they designed and marketed their products.
This may be redundant, but programmers are not the only kind of people that computer-intensive companies need. If you can't define or understand a problem, then it's foolish to attempt to build a solution based on guesses and suppositions. The hardest part of any project, product, whatever, is deciding *what* to make, then figuring out how to make it.
Engineers don't always design, but they have to make designs work. Architects usually don't swing a hammer either, but must create a plan for those who do (and who must also creatively interpret what's been designed to make it work in the reality-space of physics and human needs).
Two things that come to mind are:
1) Assuming that information, a particular movie or file, will always be floating around out there somewhere is likely wrong. How many ancient texts survive in more than a fragment? How many examples of a 'you must destroy all copies of the heretical writings' purge are there in history? (lots) At the very least, one might not always have a T1 at their disposal.
2) A nice side-effect is that now, more than ever in human history, information is being preserved nearly everywhere. It will be much less likely that something like the burning of a single thing (the Library at Alexandria) will result in human knowledge being set back a century. We hope.
Ok, having every copy of Xena: Princess Warrior may not save humanity, but who knows how much having all the Bob Villa shows will help?!? Besides, how else will the Church of SpongeBob begin in 2165?
You actually made me guffaw while sitting in my office! Not a normal thing, that. Well done.
That's good to consider, but remember that anything a driver touches is an improvement from what came before. Without even checking, I'm certain that the local CarMax has no three-speed-on-the-column manual transmission cars without power brakes.
It's always been about understanding the technology you're using, at least with regard to basic principles of physics, whether it be a car or a missle launcher.
This discussion is a valid one to have, regardless of how many time's it's been brought up, because the aspects of what makes sound pleasing or interesting have little to do with a list of output-section distortion numbers.
It also has little to do with dollar-for-dollar comparisons of circuit cost. If an amplifier makes noises that sound better to the listener, then they are a better solution the one which has a less good sound quality.
Unless you're talking about car audio. Then, apparently, 43,000-watt amplifiers are only $200 at the local Car Audio Mart, and the buyers care little about output quality.
Sometimes a movie is beaten to death by groups of people who could not tell a story if they had a gun to their heads. Being financially astute is one thing, but the mistake the studios make time after time is taking foolish liberties, as committees, with scripts written by someone with the desire to tell a story.
Not to say that all scripts are priceless literature, but more are mangled than not, I'd suspect. Appealing to the lowest common denominator isn't usually the way to create something good.
Well, there's the one that got many of us involved: Akira. Very well-done film, story that makes sense to those who might not be familiar with the cultural landscape of anime, disturbingly cool music.
o y_large.htmla ppleseed_la rge.html
Others?
Wings of Honneamise (likely not 'anime' per se, but still in the same neighborhood)
Two current examples:
SteamBoy - check out http://apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/toho/steamb
as well as Appleseed
http://apple.co.jp/quicktime/trailers/
A co-worker had an idea that I like, but haven't yet tried. Each person would have a few items - laptop, cart with personal needs, etc. - and share generally-available things like chairs, work tables, larger computers, etc. The floorplan would be largely open, with lots of nooks, collaboration areas, a few closed offices, and tables. He preferred working that way, as a graphic designer.
I can see some limitations, but some aspects of this appeal to me. Would be difficult to surrender two computers and three monitors, though.
Public airwaves. The FCC licenses radio stations to use a public resource, the radio spectrum, for which the radio stations pay them a licensing fee.
This is a little too close to selling oil-exploration rights or diamond-mining rights for $1. It's a public resource, held in trust by the Federal Gov't.
Don't forget that their accounting practices, as well as the actual numbers involved in any particular incident, are very, very well hidden by contractual limitation as well as threat of removal from the music industry to those who pry into them.
A few musicians have gained access to these numbers, but only after court orders, and they have paid for that access with reduced attention by the label (in other words, they were, to some degree, de-emphazied and no longer supported with the same levels of publicity).
This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. That any musician knows exactly what they're due is a very naiive hope, at best.
Which is why people use the CMM to guide/force the creation of actual processes!!! Amazing how much difference it can make when a small collection of bright people begin building things with intention instead of simply reacting to whimsy.
QA can help a great deal. Makes me feel good to see it mentioned as helpful, so thank you for your comments. It can be a semi-thankless job at times, even with the benefits clear at the end of the line.
-Met.
Good requirements will save a project, poorly-written or incomplete ones can bankrupt a company.
From the QA end of things, attempting to work with software that has no description outside a developer's head is nearly impossible. Yes, general usability is able to be studied, as is a general sweep through the overt customer needs, but getting into the basics of what the system is supposed to do depends on having that clearly defined before it's been built.
Note I said 'defined', not 'designed'. There's a huge difference between saying 'the software shall do this single explicit thing (because of this regulation, etc)' and 'put the blue box in the upper left corner'.
As with all things software, there's a balance between having every single aspect defined rigidly, and making it up as you go along. Getting that balance right requires creativity, careful thought, and a clear understanding of what the customer wants.
-Met.
Where I live, we're just now getting the infrastructure put in for cable-based access. My chances of getting DSL are beyond slim-to-none, and sat.-based is too latency-rich.
Besides, it's only $16/month for a good dial-up account, and I have a laptop. When it's finally available later this year, it just means that I get to purchase more hardware and pay between $40 and $50 a month additionally for 'Net access.
When I need to download OS updates, laptop goes with me to work, or to Panera.
Nah, the Throne's safely far away from New South Wales, I think.
Why would a knife one could put in a pocket be illegal? Swords I could understand, but a pocketknife?
Hope they don't find my copy of Catcher In The Rye.
Nicely put. There is an amazing competition for attention in nearly everything we're exposed to, at least in Europe and North America. Watch television with the sound off sometime, just to revel in the lack of audible noise and be stunned by the visual cacophany.
No, I don't really need a computer interface that yells at me graphically all day to get work done. No beeping when mail arrives, no clicking every time my left mouse button is pressed, no flashing shouts of IMPORTANT THING HAPPENING HERE all the time. If all information rich environments were designed that way, it would be far to difficult to distinguish between a normal event, an urgent event, and the system's background processes. Planes would fall from the sky.
Anyway, enough of a tangent. Thanks for bringing it up!
-Met.
Writing isn't often done best while immersed in that which is being written about. Contemplation, the space to imagine and build worlds in one's mind, is the key.
Sometimes playing with toys can get in the way of that.
It's easy to get drawn into the whole cycle of newer-better-faster-cooler, with musical instruments, computers, whatever. Can be very distracting to actually creating with those things!
I'm right there with you. Had to move the stacks of unread books, for fear they'd fall on either the cat or the child.
One example, that I'm involved with:
http://www.ieponline.net/
If you've only seen cutsie animations done in Flash, you haven't seen much. The potential for Flash to be a user-interface language is substantial, and quite a few companies are doing fairly complex data-handling things with it.
Most of that is likely hidden in Web-based applications, used inside companies and school systems, though, not something most people would ever encounter while doinking around on the Web.
Well, until things like smart-dust and car parts all have a unique address.
How many discrete items do you depend on in a given day? Imagine all of those being addressable in multiple ways.
Even still, it may take a little while to run out again...
Thank you for putting this together!! I ordered one monents after finding out it existed (95, I think), and have enjoyed it a great deal.
Any chance of another collection coming out like that? It would be a great library addition to have one for each year, and pick up the books of those writers one likes the most.
Cheers,
-Metropolitan
This may be somewhere in the plethora of replies, but here goes:
It's not about the fear of technology, or the lack of desire to learn new tools, but the level of impediment to the creative process. Sometimes the muse can be a reluctant partner, and wading through menu after menu turning options off and on, or looking for a way to get that damnable macro you invoked out of your document, can kill whatever idea inspired you to sit down in the first place.
Artists aren't Luddites, in general. They just look at tools more like tools, not an end to themselves. If every time I wanted to wash dishes I had to reset the vacuum cleaner, clean out the fridge, program the VCR, and change the seven lightbulbs in the hallway not very many dishes would be washed.
Sort of like needing a spoon, and your Swiss Army Knife unfolds everything at once.
I've used various text editors to write prose, along with Word and StarOffice, and prefer the simplicity of the basic editors. Formatting, if it needs to happen at all, can come after the words are all there.
-met.
Excellent story! Brought out a chortle on a late afternoon.
In the studio musician world, where very accomplished musicians attempt to please oft-daffy producers, several players I know of have a 'producer switch' - basically a switch of some kind affixed to the front of their bass, near the volume knob. When a producer has some vague displeasure with their playing ('play more, I don't know, yellow' or 'make it sound like Jaco'), they'll flip the switch and ask "how about now?" Usually makes the producer happy to have made a change, and they move on to complete the recording session.
I very much like the idea of a "More Magic" setting, though!!!
I know this will be modded low, but here goes:
Amen!!!
Usability has been sacrificed to designers run wild, marketing people with no idea how to present a clear message, and generally people with nothing to say. It's easy to hide lack of meaning behind bright colors & whatnot.
One great big Home Shopping Network is not what the WWW is destined to become, contrary to the efforts of a great many small minds. Tell your story well and clearly, regardless of commercial or other intent, and those you need to reach will find you. Amazon does so pretty well, as do Google, the Library of Congress, and a great many others. Clarity of message, a compelling story.
Whether this provides a path around totalitarian governments remains to be seen. Hopefully it will erode them from the inside, as a good flow of information should. The best sword against despots is truth, told to lots and lots of people.