Take an iPhone and a HTC Kaiser, put them side by side, and see which one is more fun to use.
If you're anything like me, the iPhone absolutely crushes everything else out there in terms of design appeal.
You can say that shouldn't matter, that raw features are more important, but certainly it's hard to beat the enthusiasm surrounding the iPhone.
You can get a Chinese iPhone knockoff that allegedly runs Linux, and therefore has third party software development. It has a removable battery and works on any carrier, and if that pleases you, enjoy it. But I think the overwhelming majority of people will enormously prefer the real thing.
Play with the iPhone for a few minutes and you will see the colossal effort and massive numbers of man-hours that went into creating its software. Every second of those 2 1/2 years of development shows up on the screen.
Maybe some people go too far in their iPhone worship. But it really is an incredible device. Nobody's going to beat it unless they write a new OS from the ground up, and it would take years for that to happen.
Although I would have been a shade less rude to the man, I absolutely agree with your point that our society is tragically lacking in enthusiasm and verve and that Apple is a very nice exception to this rule.
Apple people love Apple. Of course being a company ran by humans and not saints, Apple is not perfect, but it's awfully good considering the alternatives.
In an amazingly joyless society, my only complaint is that I had to work on i-day and so I could not participate in the hoopla. I would have enjoyed it. And if you would not have, well, don't buy something like this on intro-day.
I will be purchasing my iPhone shortly but I went to visit it in the store yesterday. It really does live up to the hype. A very impressive device.
I have read elsewhere that you can pay $20 a month to upgrade your voice plan to unlimited data for the iPhone.
If you consider that for the somewhat similar HTC devices, they want $40/month for PDA data, and Blackberry plans are similarly expensive, the AT&T plan is excellent, actually a bit cheaper than I had dared to hope. I'd hoped for a realistic base price of $65 with unlimited data and similar numbers of voice minutes, and I was really expecting $75. As it happens, they undercut my most optimistic thoughts by $6. Not bad, not bad at all.
Yes in the case of a normal web application, graceful degradation will work and doesn't constitute much of a problem.
But for a game I think this is pretty interesting, since action should occur fluidly as things happen, not just when you press a button. As you move your mouse, for example, your opponent is going to track those motions and behave accordingly.
It seems like gestures, where you rub your finger continuously on the screen, might substitute for this. The problem is that we then get into the question of an API to read these gestures, which is precisely what developers are complaining about, that they cannot do so at this point. Furthermore, your ability to read the screen while making these gestures is reduced significantly.
Do mouse events fire under these circumstances? Clearly we are not going to know until we get our hands on an actual iPhone, or one of its successors.
Apple is great at producing great looking devices that also function well. Line up any of the competing MP3 players I've seen against the iPod. The scroll wheel is still a superior method of navigation over the fiddly buttons used by the competition. The look of the device is cleaner and more elegant. So we have a combination of form and function that seems just about impossible for most companies to get right.
Existing cellphones are hard to learn and use. I remember playing with a friend's Nokia 6600 series cellphone in the Philippines. She wanted me to find the virus in it and get rid of it. I had to be shown embarassingly many times which of the massive array of tiny buttons on the device pulled up the web browser. I loved the clear, bright display and hated the interface design. When I got a new cellphone, the unlabelled buttons baffled me and I had to have a younger guy demonstrate them - he had grown up with constant cellphone use, so he had memorized them. Another phone I used had about four different buttons that seemed like they should answer a call and only one that actually did.
These examples seem trivial, of course, but they affect millions of cellphone users, from right next door to halfway around the world. The cumulative frustration has found its way into the national - maybe even the global - psyche. This made us ready for a cellphone that did away with fiddly keys, had dedicated buttons for every function that were clearly and unambiguously marked, and yet performed all the functions we are used to having on phones.
In terms of ease of use and clarity, then, the iPhone definitely looks amazing compared to the competition. Since cellphones are such frustrating devices in general, it seems like simple common sense that there would be huge hype about a device that promises to take frustrating functions and make them dead-on simple.
Look at how amazingly effective the advertisements are. They are so simple, and really, unflashy! All they do is show you how to use the phone, in 30 second increments. One in particular, the second one on the site, runs you thought most of the basic functions in 30 seconds. After that, you know how to use the phone even if you've never seen it before.
I'm not going to say the iPhone is flawless; of course it will have a problem or two. But consider the amount of time it would take to run through a similar training video if you made it for even a basic Nokia phone, and you'll see the power of the iPhone concept and its execution.
The one I had trouble with was Bleak House. I thought the theme was interesting but much of the book was over-elaborate and tedious.
One thing I can certainly agree with is that different people have very different taste, and that's what makes the world go 'round.
What I don't like is that when English is taught, it's taught with writers who are very difficult to relate to. I think that fosters a dislike of reading and learning English in general, and I think that's a darn shame.
I wish there was more teaching of creative writing and less of literature. I'd rather spend time writing stuff people would like to read instead of writing pointless book reviews and analyses nobody will ever find even slightly interesting.
This bias definitely affects my views of "literary merit".
Is it not possible that Dickens appears better than Tom Clancy because the former reflects your political biases, and the latter does not?
Dickens has some interesting turns of phrase, which I guess make him a good writer to some people, but his books, like many "classics" are extremely difficult to wade through without a cattle prod (like grades) forcing you to do it.
I think P G Wodehouse is one of the greatest writers ever, because he's a superb entertainer and writes laugh out loud funny books, but few have the guts to praise a "mere" humorist, with easy to read, funny books. And yet I think the world would be much better if more people like P G existed and brought more laughter into our gray lives.
As a superb rebuttal to the idea of "literary merit", it is my pleasure to introduce P G Wodehouse' satire of same, "The Clicking of Cuthbert":
This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist, and, owing to the fact of his being in the country on a lecturing tour at the moment, there had been something of a boom in his works. The Wood Hills Literary Society had been studying them for weeks, and never since his first entrance into intellectual circles had Cuthbert Banks come nearer to throwing in the towel. Vladimir specialized in grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. It was tough going for a man whose deepest reading hitherto had been Vardon on the Push-Shot, and there can be no greater proof of the magic of love than the fact that Cuthbert stuck it without a cry. But the strain was terrible and I am inclined to think that he must have cracked, had it not been for the daily reports in the papers of the internecine strife which was proceeding so briskly in Russia. Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.
If there's anything to this at all, it seems more likely that they are coming out with a 3G model for European markets. Many have said that this is necessary for the phone to be competitive in Europe, where 3G is apparently already the norm, or close to it.
Heck, even in the Philippines, the least developed country in Asia, the two big cellphone companies are battling with each other to see who's the first to widely deploy 3G technology, and one is even trying to leapfrog into 3.5G as their 3G deployment is advancing.
When I travelled to the Philippines in February 2006, I noticed that expensive cellphones were a major status symbol, sort of like cars in the US. So I have no doubt that the iPhone would sell there despite its high price.
For the iPhone, the slightly different case design might just be the same case with a different antenna as required for 3G reception, which I seem to remember is more probematical than EDGE.
Certainly a second generation iPhone already going to manufacturing when we have not even seen the first one would be highly unusual, and unprecedented for a company that already has a product with this kind of buzz.
Personally, I think a fiction book is good if it's entertaining and bad if it's confusing, hard to follow or difficult to read.
There is real artistry in making a book clear, comprehensible and easy to follow. Why don't we celebrate that kind of artistry? It sounds to me like celebrating "literary value" is celebrating bad books which are not successful in conveying their ideas.
From your description it sounds to me like I should avoid works with this "literary value" since they are not necessarily well written or worth reading! Could you explain this a bit more clearly?
I think he's trying to take advantage of readers' affection for books. You could see that in the article, where a good number of people "adopted" them for $1 each.
But that's interesting because it proves his original point wrong, no? There are many people who care about books.
On the other hand, his article got mentioned on Slashdot and now everyone knows where to go for $1 books if they happen to live in his area. So it might be a brilliant publicity stunt that's worth about $20,000 ($1 x 20,000 books) to him.
The majority of these sites that I see are not at all targeted, unless for some strange reason someone's decided I have a fondness for gambling and herbal Viagra.
Wonderful women was original a directory of what I thought were cool pages created by women. Unfortunately I didn't have time to maintain it and let the domain expire.
So click on wonderfulwomen.com today and what do you see? Roommate searches, apartment searches and "popular categories". Nothing at all relating to the original topic, or anything you could conceivably search for through that domain.
If you want to use Slashdot terms, you could think of the site as a mashup - it's a different combination of someone else's work, done with the express permission of the someone else, namely NASA, whose photos are public domain. If you click on the photo for a description, you will find a link to the section of NASA's web site where different versions of the photo are available.
My theory is that sometimes people would prefer strict simplicity - go to the site, see a full screen image and come back again when you feel like another one.
If your site has no content on it, but relevant ads all over the place, the odds are pretty good that the person who navigated to your site will click on an ad. I own a few of these sites, leftovers from projects I never wound up pursuing, and see clickthrough rates of 20-50% each day, depending on random chance.
However, sites with no content get no positioning in search engines, so the problem is that you get maybe 3 hits a day and 1-2 clicks. Of course this is basically free money if there is even a tiny amount of traffic flowing to it. If you could aggregate a whole bunch of these domains, then there might be real potential in it, as the article shows.
What's sad is that I have many sites that contain genuinely useful information on the topics involved, and their clickthrough rates are microscopic. In fact, the low traffic sites which give users no opportunity but to click often have better revenues than my higher volume sites.
I don't like providing absolutely nothing to the person visiting my site, and I don't like the fact that there is no point to ever come back to the sites that have been designed in that style.
So here's an example I just put together that I'm hoping will combine the two approaches - provide something neat, but make sure that people have few paths out other than clicking on an ad. My hope is that some people might enjoy the simplicity of this one page site, as opposed to the more complex sites that you normally see with these images. It gives you a new (public domain) Hubble telescope image every day, with the image changing automatically at midnight Eastern time.
So let's give this a try, by debuting it right here on Slashdot. Come visit my humble Hubble site and we'll see what happens:-).
He did go to the Apple Shareholder meeting and report his views. He has a perfect right to do this. I have read many accounts of the meeting, and they all note that Jobs joked with the shareholders, to laughter and applause. The people who asked the probing questions were a tiny minority. On that basis, I believe his account to be accurate.
Eran's point, which I think is a valid one, is that Greenpeace wants to take credit for Apple's announcement, not Apple's actual attitude or accomplishments. Apple wrote a pretty impressive rebuttal which demonstrates they were taking many positive pro-environment steps while the competition was just putting up nice looking policy statements on their sites.
Concerning the options mess, I think more money is being spent trying to figure out what happened and trying to blame people than was actually lost by the company. Changing option dates is part of compensation and is legitimate as long as it was reported to shareholders. I don't think it should be counted as a serious problem unless the options had a significant impact on shareholders, which I do not believe they did. I think the total impact was $86m on a company making billions each year. This $86m was spread over a large number of employees. Considering Apple's performance I think they deserved the compensation and so I don't see any good reasons for the fuss.
I think that overall, Eran makes some interesting points and interesting research in his site and so it's well worth posting on Slashdot. Through the collaborative filtering of Slashdot comments, we get all sides soon enough.
Actually, it depends. If you're looking to buy something, the sponsored links can be the most useful ones.
If you're looking for information, they rarely are.
If enough people didn't click on sponsored links, Google would go bust and I don't think anyone wants that. So my practice is to click on the sponsored links if they are appropriate to what I'm trying to do.
Something you might not have noticed is that if reviews truly use ease of use and throughput as the most important factors, the most insecure products look better than more secure products.
Security is one of the few cases where we're supposed to pay more to inconvenience ourselves. I'd say most people outside of the small fraternity of computer security folk would really prefer the insecure product, until its consequences hit them.
If you want to shop without a card, buy your groceries at Wal*Mart (awful cheapo store), Whole Foods Market or Gelson's (both high-priced, upscale stores).
It's interesting that you can escape cards by going to the bottom of the market and the very top, but the mass market middle seems to love cards.
Unfortunately, where I live there is only one really nice grocery market, the Giant Eagle Market District (NOT Giant Eagle without the Market District), and it acts as you suggest - you need the card to avoid awful deals on many things.
I pay about $1 more per pound for Market District's fancy chicken than I do for Wal*Mart Perdue chicken, but the truth is that the chicken is of better quality, so I don't much care.
I pay about the same for my beef. In fact, I even pay less when they run a "buy one get one free" special with my card. And the beef is of significantly better quality.
So on the whole I pay about 10-20% more at Market District but I get about 30% better quality so I'm happy.
This indicates that even the overhead of the card and the FuelPerks program (save $ 0.10 per gallon for every $50 in groceries you buy) makes very little difference in the end because I still think I get a somewhat better value than I did at Wal*Mart, and service is also significantly better.
So maybe overall things aren't so bad.
I don't really care who knows what groceries I buy, anyway. Why should I care?
There have been articles written on the Giant Eagle card which essentially say that the data is collected, but never used for anything but checkout coupons (which of course don't require the data since they are usually keyed off what you buy in this session). Apparently they got some people at CMU to try and figure out how to use the data but they came out more or less empty.
I have never seen any kind of targeted marketing from Giant Eagle so it looks to me like they truly do use the data for essentially nothing.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone knows differently.
Generally speaking, it would seem to me that warmer temperatures would lead to longer growing seasons, which would lead to greater food supplies, not lesser.
As you are probably aware, we have extremely expensive agricultural support programmes because we grow too much food. If farmland productivity went down, perhaps there would be a better balance of supply and demand and we could quit wasting billions of dollars supporting agricultural prices and paying people not to farm.
But here is a question. We have recently had climactic variations that are many times greater than those being suggested by global warming. And yet, if we disregard the 2005 hurricane season(*), we don't seem to have had much in the way of increased storm activity to show for it. Our winters have probably been a good 10degF warmer than average for the past couple of years, nothing horrible has happened, and yet you guys are saying we're facing the apocalypse over a 1-2 degF change.
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound plausible to me.
When it seems like every five years or so some kind of fad comes into place and says we're all doomed, that there is going to be a giant ice age or global warming or all the species of the world are becoming extinct... and yet somehow it never seems to happen.
I have fundamentally lost faith in this idea that we are doomed, because we've cried wolf too many times, and the really crazy thing is that no matter what problem we face, it's always our industrial society that's to blame and the solution is always to quit our mechanized society and go beet farming.
I think I'd make a terrible beet farmer and so I think I'll sit this one out. This mild winter has been very pleasant relative to the alternative. If we could get the year-round minimum temperature into the 60s I'd be happy. A warmer earth is a happier earth, I think. That's certainly what the last couple of winters have shown me.
D
(*) It appears that the unique situation of New Orleans is what made that season so catastrophic, including both political and technical factors. Stronger hurricanes have landed in Florida in other years and South Florida as a region is wealthier and more populous than ever. Hurricane Katrina, which was Cat 3 when it hit New Orleans, is a far from unprecedented phenomenon.
I'm not convinced that a world with warmer weather would be, overall, a worse world than one with the same or colder weather.
It seems like common sense that most of the climate in the United States would be far more comfortable under the warming conditions being discussed.
Humans are intelligent and I see no reason why we could not figure out ways to mitigate warming conditions in the places where they are harmful, enjoy them in places where they are beneficial, and still wind up better off overall. For example, if sea levels are increasing due to melting polar ice caps, why not remove some of that ice and take it to the desert, where it would be useful?
I would like to see some thinking along those lines, instead of people ringing their hands and insisting that the sky is falling. After all, if you are saying that global warming is coming, and it's our fault, you're asking us to cripple Western civilization to only partially mitigate the situation. Bjorn Lomborg famously said that if we did everything Kyoto proposed, we might affect the temperature by half a degree, at horrendous cost to our economy and society.
I, for one, don't want to make those sacrifices and "enjoy" the colder winters that would occur if the changes were made. I prefer the climate we have now to the climate we had a few years back, and if the warming trend continues I'm sure I will like the future climate even more.
I am, however, a little puzzled in that we've been having exceptionally mild winters recently, and yet they cannot be explained by the tiny oneDegF change we're allegedly going through during global warming. So it looks to me like something other than global warming is involved, and perhaps that phenomenon, whatever it is, needs to be better understood.
Whatever it is that's creating milder winters, let me place on record that I hope it continues for a long time to come.
D
(The author hates cold weather and believes that the worldwide minimum temperature should be approximately 65degF. He should just move to Florida, but he is stuck in a mid-30s cold spell. In spring. And you want to talk to him about spending billions to reduce the world's temperature? It is to laugh.)
I would say no, since the only alternative to running an application in a browser is to write a client application that people would have to install on their computers.
Nowadays, people are going to suspect it's spyware. It will be very hard to get people to install your application.
You have to furnish a version of it for every platform you need to support, which inevitably means Mac and Linux users get the short end of the stick.
You have to have a system in place to update it, which is entirely automatic with browser-based software.
And finally, it's going to be doing something that I've already made work just fine in a browser, so I don't see the point.
I used to agree with you, because JavaScript has been a huge swamp of errors and compatibility problems.
On the other hand...
Instant messaging implemented in JavaScript with polling done to the server is really pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Reporting new mail on the page, without requiring a refresh, is pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Showing who's on the system, in real time, is pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Perhaps most importantly, you can use remote javascript templates to make all three of these things happen with the same call, which makes the whole thing surprisingly smooth and efficient.
I agree with you that there are a lot of JavaScript-based functions that are just plain annoying. But there are things that you can do to really help improve the interactivity of your system, and I think those things are well worth doing.
D
Re:Okay, I'll be the first to ask.
on
Web 2.0 Under Siege
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is much harder to protect against than normal XSS. Why? Because the Ajax does not have to be executed from within the same domain.
Let's say someone wants to attack my site, amazing.com. I browse to their site, remarkable.com, and the exploit code gets loaded into my browser. Remarkable.com can post to amazing.com using AJAX and receive replies as though they were authenticated on my site, because the browser automatically sends the amazing.com cookies with it when accessing an amazing.com URL. It appears to the browser fundamentally as though I was in remarkable.com and then typed the amazing.com URL on to the address bar.
(Of course you could spoof the referer but not from an existing browser session so I think the referer can be relied on in this context.)
If this is so, then it could truly be a throbbing migraine to fix - you would have to use the HTTP referer field to verify that the site calling your Ajax code was valid.
Hope that helps. Not the cheeriest news this morning:-(, but hopefully Prototype will have some kind of fix, and life will go on.
From what I can see from reading the article and its comments, they divided your address book into pages and made the default to send the email.
So people would un-check most of the addresses in the first page, leaing only the ones they wanted to invite, and then hit submit.
This resulted in all of the address book BUT the un-checked entries on the first page would be sent an email.
So even if the software worked exactly as advertised, it might cause people to unintentionally spam many, many people, as it in fact has.
This might not be so bad, except for the message sent. It claims that you have a "private message", and has you click on a link to read it. Of course you have to sign up to Flickster in order to read the message. So you're suckered into signing up, to find your "private message" is just an invitation to join!
That kind of thing might cause me to register but I suspect once I saw the phony "private message" I would close my browser window and never use Flickster again.
Slashdot Mirror
I would try a simple experiment.
Take an iPhone and a HTC Kaiser, put them side by side, and see which one is more fun to use.
If you're anything like me, the iPhone absolutely crushes everything else out there in terms of design appeal.
You can say that shouldn't matter, that raw features are more important, but certainly it's hard to beat the enthusiasm surrounding the iPhone.
You can get a Chinese iPhone knockoff that allegedly runs Linux, and therefore has third party software development. It has a removable battery and works on any carrier, and if that pleases you, enjoy it. But I think the overwhelming majority of people will enormously prefer the real thing.
Play with the iPhone for a few minutes and you will see the colossal effort and massive numbers of man-hours that went into creating its software. Every second of those 2 1/2 years of development shows up on the screen.
Maybe some people go too far in their iPhone worship. But it really is an incredible device. Nobody's going to beat it unless they write a new OS from the ground up, and it would take years for that to happen.
D
I'm just wondering, is there some reason you believe this to be a bad thing?
...
I mean, to me it just seems like the natural thing to do. If you have fans, try and hire them to sell the product. Simple and effective.
I think the real problem is that most businesses don't have fans
D
Although I would have been a shade less rude to the man, I absolutely agree with your point that our society is tragically lacking in enthusiasm and verve and that Apple is a very nice exception to this rule.
Apple people love Apple. Of course being a company ran by humans and not saints, Apple is not perfect, but it's awfully good considering the alternatives.
In an amazingly joyless society, my only complaint is that I had to work on i-day and so I could not participate in the hoopla. I would have enjoyed it. And if you would not have, well, don't buy something like this on intro-day.
I will be purchasing my iPhone shortly but I went to visit it in the store yesterday. It really does live up to the hype. A very impressive device.
D
I have read elsewhere that you can pay $20 a month to upgrade your voice plan to unlimited data for the iPhone.
If you consider that for the somewhat similar HTC devices, they want $40/month for PDA data, and Blackberry plans are similarly expensive, the AT&T plan is excellent, actually a bit cheaper than I had dared to hope. I'd hoped for a realistic base price of $65 with unlimited data and similar numbers of voice minutes, and I was really expecting $75. As it happens, they undercut my most optimistic thoughts by $6. Not bad, not bad at all.
D
Yes in the case of a normal web application, graceful degradation will work and doesn't constitute much of a problem.
But for a game I think this is pretty interesting, since action should occur fluidly as things happen, not just when you press a button. As you move your mouse, for example, your opponent is going to track those motions and behave accordingly.
It seems like gestures, where you rub your finger continuously on the screen, might substitute for this. The problem is that we then get into the question of an API to read these gestures, which is precisely what developers are complaining about, that they cannot do so at this point. Furthermore, your ability to read the screen while making these gestures is reduced significantly.
Do mouse events fire under these circumstances? Clearly we are not going to know until we get our hands on an actual iPhone, or one of its successors.
D
Apple is great at producing great looking devices that also function well. Line up any of the competing MP3 players I've seen against the iPod. The scroll wheel is still a superior method of navigation over the fiddly buttons used by the competition. The look of the device is cleaner and more elegant. So we have a combination of form and function that seems just about impossible for most companies to get right.
Existing cellphones are hard to learn and use. I remember playing with a friend's Nokia 6600 series cellphone in the Philippines. She wanted me to find the virus in it and get rid of it. I had to be shown embarassingly many times which of the massive array of tiny buttons on the device pulled up the web browser. I loved the clear, bright display and hated the interface design. When I got a new cellphone, the unlabelled buttons baffled me and I had to have a younger guy demonstrate them - he had grown up with constant cellphone use, so he had memorized them. Another phone I used had about four different buttons that seemed like they should answer a call and only one that actually did.
These examples seem trivial, of course, but they affect millions of cellphone users, from right next door to halfway around the world. The cumulative frustration has found its way into the national - maybe even the global - psyche. This made us ready for a cellphone that did away with fiddly keys, had dedicated buttons for every function that were clearly and unambiguously marked, and yet performed all the functions we are used to having on phones.
In terms of ease of use and clarity, then, the iPhone definitely looks amazing compared to the competition. Since cellphones are such frustrating devices in general, it seems like simple common sense that there would be huge hype about a device that promises to take frustrating functions and make them dead-on simple.
Look at how amazingly effective the advertisements are. They are so simple, and really, unflashy! All they do is show you how to use the phone, in 30 second increments. One in particular, the second one on the site, runs you thought most of the basic functions in 30 seconds. After that, you know how to use the phone even if you've never seen it before.
I'm not going to say the iPhone is flawless; of course it will have a problem or two. But consider the amount of time it would take to run through a similar training video if you made it for even a basic Nokia phone, and you'll see the power of the iPhone concept and its execution.
D
The one I had trouble with was Bleak House. I thought the theme was interesting but much of the book was over-elaborate and tedious.
One thing I can certainly agree with is that different people have very different taste, and that's what makes the world go 'round.
What I don't like is that when English is taught, it's taught with writers who are very difficult to relate to. I think that fosters a dislike of reading and learning English in general, and I think that's a darn shame.
I wish there was more teaching of creative writing and less of literature. I'd rather spend time writing stuff people would like to read instead of writing pointless book reviews and analyses nobody will ever find even slightly interesting.
This bias definitely affects my views of "literary merit".
D
Dickens has some interesting turns of phrase, which I guess make him a good writer to some people, but his books, like many "classics" are extremely difficult to wade through without a cattle prod (like grades) forcing you to do it.
I think P G Wodehouse is one of the greatest writers ever, because he's a superb entertainer and writes laugh out loud funny books, but few have the guts to praise a "mere" humorist, with easy to read, funny books. And yet I think the world would be much better if more people like P G existed and brought more laughter into our gray lives.
As a superb rebuttal to the idea of "literary merit", it is my pleasure to introduce P G Wodehouse' satire of same, "The Clicking of Cuthbert":
http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/wodehouse/c
A taste:
D
If there's anything to this at all, it seems more likely that they are coming out with a 3G model for European markets. Many have said that this is necessary for the phone to be competitive in Europe, where 3G is apparently already the norm, or close to it.
Heck, even in the Philippines, the least developed country in Asia, the two big cellphone companies are battling with each other to see who's the first to widely deploy 3G technology, and one is even trying to leapfrog into 3.5G as their 3G deployment is advancing.
When I travelled to the Philippines in February 2006, I noticed that expensive cellphones were a major status symbol, sort of like cars in the US. So I have no doubt that the iPhone would sell there despite its high price.
For the iPhone, the slightly different case design might just be the same case with a different antenna as required for 3G reception, which I seem to remember is more probematical than EDGE.
Certainly a second generation iPhone already going to manufacturing when we have not even seen the first one would be highly unusual, and unprecedented for a company that already has a product with this kind of buzz.
D
Personally, I think a fiction book is good if it's entertaining and bad if it's confusing, hard to follow or difficult to read.
There is real artistry in making a book clear, comprehensible and easy to follow. Why don't we celebrate that kind of artistry? It sounds to me like celebrating "literary value" is celebrating bad books which are not successful in conveying their ideas.
From your description it sounds to me like I should avoid works with this "literary value" since they are not necessarily well written or worth reading! Could you explain this a bit more clearly?
D
I think he's trying to take advantage of readers' affection for books. You could see that in the article, where a good number of people "adopted" them for $1 each.
But that's interesting because it proves his original point wrong, no? There are many people who care about books.
On the other hand, his article got mentioned on Slashdot and now everyone knows where to go for $1 books if they happen to live in his area. So it might be a brilliant publicity stunt that's worth about $20,000 ($1 x 20,000 books) to him.
D
The majority of these sites that I see are not at all targeted, unless for some strange reason someone's decided I have a fondness for gambling and herbal Viagra.
For example here's a site I used to own:
http://wonderfulwomen.com/
Wonderful women was original a directory of what I thought were cool pages created by women. Unfortunately I didn't have time to maintain it and let the domain expire.
So click on wonderfulwomen.com today and what do you see? Roommate searches, apartment searches and "popular categories". Nothing at all relating to the original topic, or anything you could conceivably search for through that domain.
D
If you want to use Slashdot terms, you could think of the site as a mashup - it's a different combination of someone else's work, done with the express permission of the someone else, namely NASA, whose photos are public domain. If you click on the photo for a description, you will find a link to the section of NASA's web site where different versions of the photo are available.
My theory is that sometimes people would prefer strict simplicity - go to the site, see a full screen image and come back again when you feel like another one.
Only time (and clicks) will tell me if I'm right.
D
You can get them, and legitimately.
:-).
If your site has no content on it, but relevant ads all over the place, the odds are pretty good that the person who navigated to your site will click on an ad. I own a few of these sites, leftovers from projects I never wound up pursuing, and see clickthrough rates of 20-50% each day, depending on random chance.
However, sites with no content get no positioning in search engines, so the problem is that you get maybe 3 hits a day and 1-2 clicks. Of course this is basically free money if there is even a tiny amount of traffic flowing to it. If you could aggregate a whole bunch of these domains, then there might be real potential in it, as the article shows.
What's sad is that I have many sites that contain genuinely useful information on the topics involved, and their clickthrough rates are microscopic. In fact, the low traffic sites which give users no opportunity but to click often have better revenues than my higher volume sites.
I don't like providing absolutely nothing to the person visiting my site, and I don't like the fact that there is no point to ever come back to the sites that have been designed in that style.
So here's an example I just put together that I'm hoping will combine the two approaches - provide something neat, but make sure that people have few paths out other than clicking on an ad. My hope is that some people might enjoy the simplicity of this one page site, as opposed to the more complex sites that you normally see with these images. It gives you a new (public domain) Hubble telescope image every day, with the image changing automatically at midnight Eastern time.
So let's give this a try, by debuting it right here on Slashdot. Come visit my humble Hubble site and we'll see what happens
D
He did go to the Apple Shareholder meeting and report his views. He has a perfect right to do this. I have read many accounts of the meeting, and they all note that Jobs joked with the shareholders, to laughter and applause. The people who asked the probing questions were a tiny minority. On that basis, I believe his account to be accurate.
Eran's point, which I think is a valid one, is that Greenpeace wants to take credit for Apple's announcement, not Apple's actual attitude or accomplishments. Apple wrote a pretty impressive rebuttal which demonstrates they were taking many positive pro-environment steps while the competition was just putting up nice looking policy statements on their sites.
Concerning the options mess, I think more money is being spent trying to figure out what happened and trying to blame people than was actually lost by the company. Changing option dates is part of compensation and is legitimate as long as it was reported to shareholders. I don't think it should be counted as a serious problem unless the options had a significant impact on shareholders, which I do not believe they did. I think the total impact was $86m on a company making billions each year. This $86m was spread over a large number of employees. Considering Apple's performance I think they deserved the compensation and so I don't see any good reasons for the fuss.
I think that overall, Eran makes some interesting points and interesting research in his site and so it's well worth posting on Slashdot. Through the collaborative filtering of Slashdot comments, we get all sides soon enough.
D
True.
Although the article primarily mentioned thumbdrives, I was thinking about firewalls and other more intrusive types of security software.
D
Actually, it depends. If you're looking to buy something, the sponsored links can be the most useful ones.
If you're looking for information, they rarely are.
If enough people didn't click on sponsored links, Google would go bust and I don't think anyone wants that. So my practice is to click on the sponsored links if they are appropriate to what I'm trying to do.
D
Something you might not have noticed is that if reviews truly use ease of use and throughput as the most important factors, the most insecure products look better than more secure products.
Security is one of the few cases where we're supposed to pay more to inconvenience ourselves. I'd say most people outside of the small fraternity of computer security folk would really prefer the insecure product, until its consequences hit them.
D
If you want to shop without a card, buy your groceries at Wal*Mart (awful cheapo store), Whole Foods Market or Gelson's (both high-priced, upscale stores).
It's interesting that you can escape cards by going to the bottom of the market and the very top, but the mass market middle seems to love cards.
Unfortunately, where I live there is only one really nice grocery market, the Giant Eagle Market District (NOT Giant Eagle without the Market District), and it acts as you suggest - you need the card to avoid awful deals on many things.
I pay about $1 more per pound for Market District's fancy chicken than I do for Wal*Mart Perdue chicken, but the truth is that the chicken is of better quality, so I don't much care.
I pay about the same for my beef. In fact, I even pay less when they run a "buy one get one free" special with my card. And the beef is of significantly better quality.
So on the whole I pay about 10-20% more at Market District but I get about 30% better quality so I'm happy.
This indicates that even the overhead of the card and the FuelPerks program (save $ 0.10 per gallon for every $50 in groceries you buy) makes very little difference in the end because I still think I get a somewhat better value than I did at Wal*Mart, and service is also significantly better.
So maybe overall things aren't so bad.
I don't really care who knows what groceries I buy, anyway. Why should I care?
There have been articles written on the Giant Eagle card which essentially say that the data is collected, but never used for anything but checkout coupons (which of course don't require the data since they are usually keyed off what you buy in this session). Apparently they got some people at CMU to try and figure out how to use the data but they came out more or less empty.
I have never seen any kind of targeted marketing from Giant Eagle so it looks to me like they truly do use the data for essentially nothing.
I'd be curious to hear if anyone knows differently.
D
Generally speaking, it would seem to me that warmer temperatures would lead to longer growing seasons, which would lead to greater food supplies, not lesser.
... and yet somehow it never seems to happen.
As you are probably aware, we have extremely expensive agricultural support programmes because we grow too much food. If farmland productivity went down, perhaps there would be a better balance of supply and demand and we could quit wasting billions of dollars supporting agricultural prices and paying people not to farm.
But here is a question. We have recently had climactic variations that are many times greater than those being suggested by global warming. And yet, if we disregard the 2005 hurricane season(*), we don't seem to have had much in the way of increased storm activity to show for it. Our winters have probably been a good 10degF warmer than average for the past couple of years, nothing horrible has happened, and yet you guys are saying we're facing the apocalypse over a 1-2 degF change.
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound plausible to me.
When it seems like every five years or so some kind of fad comes into place and says we're all doomed, that there is going to be a giant ice age or global warming or all the species of the world are becoming extinct
I have fundamentally lost faith in this idea that we are doomed, because we've cried wolf too many times, and the really crazy thing is that no matter what problem we face, it's always our industrial society that's to blame and the solution is always to quit our mechanized society and go beet farming.
I think I'd make a terrible beet farmer and so I think I'll sit this one out. This mild winter has been very pleasant relative to the alternative. If we could get the year-round minimum temperature into the 60s I'd be happy. A warmer earth is a happier earth, I think. That's certainly what the last couple of winters have shown me.
D
(*) It appears that the unique situation of New Orleans is what made that season so catastrophic, including both political and technical factors. Stronger hurricanes have landed in Florida in other years and South Florida as a region is wealthier and more populous than ever. Hurricane Katrina, which was Cat 3 when it hit New Orleans, is a far from unprecedented phenomenon.
I'm not convinced that a world with warmer weather would be, overall, a worse world than one with the same or colder weather.
It seems like common sense that most of the climate in the United States would be far more comfortable under the warming conditions being discussed.
Humans are intelligent and I see no reason why we could not figure out ways to mitigate warming conditions in the places where they are harmful, enjoy them in places where they are beneficial, and still wind up better off overall. For example, if sea levels are increasing due to melting polar ice caps, why not remove some of that ice and take it to the desert, where it would be useful?
I would like to see some thinking along those lines, instead of people ringing their hands and insisting that the sky is falling. After all, if you are saying that global warming is coming, and it's our fault, you're asking us to cripple Western civilization to only partially mitigate the situation. Bjorn Lomborg famously said that if we did everything Kyoto proposed, we might affect the temperature by half a degree, at horrendous cost to our economy and society.
I, for one, don't want to make those sacrifices and "enjoy" the colder winters that would occur if the changes were made. I prefer the climate we have now to the climate we had a few years back, and if the warming trend continues I'm sure I will like the future climate even more.
I am, however, a little puzzled in that we've been having exceptionally mild winters recently, and yet they cannot be explained by the tiny oneDegF change we're allegedly going through during global warming. So it looks to me like something other than global warming is involved, and perhaps that phenomenon, whatever it is, needs to be better understood.
Whatever it is that's creating milder winters, let me place on record that I hope it continues for a long time to come.
D
(The author hates cold weather and believes that the worldwide minimum temperature should be approximately 65degF. He should just move to Florida, but he is stuck in a mid-30s cold spell. In spring. And you want to talk to him about spending billions to reduce the world's temperature? It is to laugh.)
I would say no, since the only alternative to running an application in a browser is to write a client application that people would have to install on their computers.
And finally, it's going to be doing something that I've already made work just fine in a browser, so I don't see the point.
What did I miss?
D
I used to agree with you, because JavaScript has been a huge swamp of errors and compatibility problems.
...
On the other hand
Instant messaging implemented in JavaScript with polling done to the server is really pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Reporting new mail on the page, without requiring a refresh, is pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Showing who's on the system, in real time, is pretty cool, and could not be done without JavaScript.
Perhaps most importantly, you can use remote javascript templates to make all three of these things happen with the same call, which makes the whole thing surprisingly smooth and efficient.
I agree with you that there are a lot of JavaScript-based functions that are just plain annoying. But there are things that you can do to really help improve the interactivity of your system, and I think those things are well worth doing.
D
This is much harder to protect against than normal XSS. Why? Because the Ajax does not have to be executed from within the same domain.
:-(, but hopefully Prototype will have some kind of fix, and life will go on.
Let's say someone wants to attack my site, amazing.com. I browse to their site, remarkable.com, and the exploit code gets loaded into my browser. Remarkable.com can post to amazing.com using AJAX and receive replies as though they were authenticated on my site, because the browser automatically sends the amazing.com cookies with it when accessing an amazing.com URL. It appears to the browser fundamentally as though I was in remarkable.com and then typed the amazing.com URL on to the address bar.
(Of course you could spoof the referer but not from an existing browser session so I think the referer can be relied on in this context.)
If this is so, then it could truly be a throbbing migraine to fix - you would have to use the HTTP referer field to verify that the site calling your Ajax code was valid.
Hope that helps. Not the cheeriest news this morning
D
From what I can see from reading the article and its comments, they divided your address book into pages and made the default to send the email.
So people would un-check most of the addresses in the first page, leaing only the ones they wanted to invite, and then hit submit.
This resulted in all of the address book BUT the un-checked entries on the first page would be sent an email.
So even if the software worked exactly as advertised, it might cause people to unintentionally spam many, many people, as it in fact has.
This might not be so bad, except for the message sent. It claims that you have a "private message", and has you click on a link to read it. Of course you have to sign up to Flickster in order to read the message. So you're suckered into signing up, to find your "private message" is just an invitation to join!
That kind of thing might cause me to register but I suspect once I saw the phony "private message" I would close my browser window and never use Flickster again.
D