Well, here's one more reason to consider homeschooling my kids. Or at least consider sending them to a private school where such devices can't (or are less likely to be) be eventually required by law.
I already have real reservations about confining my kids for six or more hours a day to a classroom filled only with people their own age, to suffer (mostly) uninspired teaching in regimented fashion, in exchange for dubious literacy. Now I have to worry about them being trained from their earliest years to accept a surveillance society, too.
I can't escape the feeling they could do vastly more productive and useful things with that time on their own. Spider Robinson wrote an excellent piece about this in today's Globe and Mail.
No, the real profit center is porn
on
Minitel Hits Twenty
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· Score: 3, Informative
Although directory lookups via Minitel are indeed popular, they're also free (and available via public Minitel terminals at any post office).
Few on Slashdot will be surprised to hear that the real money-maker (unfortunately, from my POV), is porn. Wherever you go in France you'll see posters that say "3615 {female name}" Entering that code at a Minitel terminal will connect you to the Minitel equivalent of a phone sex line. At least, I think that's what happens. I was in France as a Mormon missionary, so not surprisingly, I never tried it. But posters were literally everywhere, and you'd regularly hear radio ads for 3615 this and 3615 that.
While there are other uses for a 3615 prefix, cybersex was far and away the use most often advertised.
Please, let it store the password for my POP3 account without pestering me for it every time. Mozilla does this -- but only if you use the Master Password feature. So every time I want to check my mail, I get to choose: I can get prompted for the mail password, or the Master Password.
This is the single biggest reason I'm still using Outlook Express.
Here in Alberta, Canada we have VLTs (Video Lottery Terminals) that let you play a number of different card games and other assorted forms of gambling on a touch-screen terminal. They're a HUGE profit center for the pubs and bars that host them, and for the provincial government. If I were a VLT programmer of questionable moral character, it would be awfully tempting to code a backdoor triggered by some easter egg-type series of screen touches that would let me score a couple hundred dollars at each terminal.
Anybody ever heard of anything like this happening in real life? As an earlier poster said, if you kept your take down to a couple thousand a week, I think it would be pretty unlikely you'd get caught.
From Ms. Ian's reply: Fold one is that the record companies hold all the cards; if you want to be famous, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want huge success, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want worldwide success, you have to go the mainstream route. And until we see our first Internet & Live Shows Only artist sell a million CD's without a label deal, the major labels will be the only mainstream route available. Don't quote Grateful Dead statistics to me - they're the exception, not the rule.
Not so. Other artists besides the Grateful Dead have achieved worldwide success without selling their souls to the labels. The problem is, it takes serious talent.
The name that first comes to mind is Loreena McKennitt. For those who don't know, she's a harpist and a singer who primarily does Celtic/World music (that's an oversimplification -- listen to her stuff). She released her first two albums on her own label. They sold well enough that Warner Music offered her a deal. IIRC, she told them to get stuffed -- she was going to retain ownership of her music, period. Warner hemmed and hawed about it for awhile, and eventually signed a distribution-only deal with Loreena that saw her retain complete ownership rights, and the freedom to distribute her music on her own label's behalf.
The labels aren't stupid; they signed onto this deal because it made economic sense for them. It was obviously worthwhile for Warner: McKennitt's last studio album sold over 4 million copies worldwide. But the reason it made economic sense was that Loreena McKennitt's music was good enough that it created a serious buzz all on its own. She knew she didn't need the record labels; she was good enough that she could afford to hold out for a better deal. Perhaps she was just less greedy than some; I don't know (Ms. Ian's comments about each generation expecting more than their forebears seem relevant here). But Loreena now has worldwide recognition and ownership of her music.
The simple reason this happened is that McKennitt is a rare talent. That proven talent was in enough demand, sans label backing, that she could negotiate on a more even footing with a multinational like Warner.
But as Ms. Ian pointed out, this is pretty rare. Where does this leave the average artist when negotiating with a multinational label? Frankly, it leaves them right where I think they belong: with no negotiating power prior to having proven themselves. Think about it: why should the record companies take on all the risk and expense, and then hand over the majority of the fruits of their labours to the artist whom they created? I mean, do you really believe that Britney or your average boy band would even exist without the labels? These people are interchangeable -- they're commodities! They are the wholesale creation of their record labels. Anybody with a half-decent stage presence and half-decent voice can replace them. Likewise for damn near every major-label band in existence.
I suppose I see this as a merit system. The unsigned, semi-talented artist wants the whole enchilada -- fame, fortune, groupies. He/she can't earn that on his/her own merits, and so needs the manufactured hype of the record labels to acquire it. So this person makes a deal with the devil, so to speak -- signing away a lot of future considerations, in exchange for the label's best efforts to make them famous right now.
Contrast that with artists like McKennitt -- or for that matter, with Janis Ian who's now independent -- who was already making a living with her music because she was so very talented that her performances and music were just that memorable. Word of mouth did most of the rest.
Anyway: this is more rambling than I'd like it to be, because I'm posting on my lunch break so I don't have time to make this shorter, but I think you take my point: Janis Ian asserts that "record companies hold all the cards," but she's assuming an artist who's desperate for that worldwide fame. Such people do NOT have my sympathy if they sign their lives away to a record label for fame and fortune right now, rather than earn it like a handful of very talented musicians have done.
In saying this, I don't mean to imply that there aren't talented musicians out there that have a hard time making a living. My father was one -- an entertainer for 30 years. But I think what I am saying is that there are enough people out there of comparable talent that their relative value is a lot less than they think. It seems to me only appropriate that only the really exceptional talents can get onto the worldwide radar screen, so to speak, without having an enormous hype machine behind them that (justifiably, in my view) expects the lion's share of the profits in return.
Hee hee... I remember hearing, years ago, that a fed-up Jag owner had created bumper stickers that read "All parts falling off this car are of the finest English workmanship."
Bloody hell! Here in Calgary, AB, Canada I have 1.5Mbps down, 640Kbps up, for CDN$34.95 per month with a bought modem, $39.95 with a leased one. Cap is 5GB down, 1GB up.
That's DSL; the cable company pricing is similar, and the performance (I was a cable customer) is virtually identical -- it's theoretically 3Mbps down, but I never saw that. However, there's theoretically no bandwidth cap. That's with Shaw Cable, for the other Canadians reading this: YMMV with Rogers et. al.
Mind you, IIRC, Calgary and Edmonton were the first two cities in NA (maybe the world?) where you could get broadband at any residential address, so the competition has been going on longer, which affects the pricing, but MAN the prices quoted in the article are expensive!
That's not what I'm talking about
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 2
I'm talking about software that does things that haven't been done before. For instance, the place I work for has created "meeting productivity" software, and in doing so we've had to answer some difficult questions: how do you let people switch between Goals, Agenda Items, Task Assignments, a whiteboard for doodling or adding pictures, and an Attachments section where you can attach relevant docs like PowerPoint presentations, etc? Can we follow the tabbed-interface model, or can't we? Why or why not?
Furthermore: what should each of the above screens look like? How will people expect it to work? We've got no "prior art" to look at and say "well, the market leader does it this way, so we'll ape that." There IS no market leader, yet -- we're trying to create the market for this software; that's the whole point.
This is just a very simple example of the kinds of interface questions we have been dealing with. A new interaction model doesn't necessarily mean you're trying to create a confusing website.
And yet...
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not all useful sites need be "grayscale design," though. Just this morning, I was reading a new article by Don Norman (he of "The Design of Everyday Things" fame), wherein he acknowledges that the emotional impact of a design affects our ability to use it.
"Yahoo-style" design is great for a directory, where the volume of information is such that speed and "cleanliness" are paramount: nobody expects the White Pages (or the Yellow Pages) to evoke oohs and aahs for their design: we expect them to be efficient, no-nonsense directories. But the design of other types of sites (or other software, or hardware for that matter) can be more complex, especially if one is creating a new interaction model and has precious few (if any) precedents on which to base one's design.
When I served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we actually had something similar going in my mission (France Bordeaux), though of course not for the same length of time.
Missionaries always work two by two. You're usually transferred from one area to another every four to six months, which also means the guy you're working with changes every two months or so. In some areas where missions are geographically small, you might be transferred to the other side of town. In my mission, transfers were usually from one city to another.
However, you usually stay a bit longer with your first missionary companion (your "trainer"). There was a policy in place under our second mission president, where new missionaries would spend a week or two working in a different city, with a different companion, after they'd been with their trainers about a month. Mostly, this was so they could see that the grass *wasn't* greener on the other side of the fence. =) Some guys got impatient when they were assigned a trainer who'd been out for 22 months (out of a two year mission) and was slowing down a little bit. Most of them, by the halfway mark of their missions, were saying things like "I thought I knew so much more than he did... boy was I wrong!"
Maybe the motivation here is similar -- a morale issue?
It really depends on who you're targeting, and on what your content is. A personal homepage with a bunch of family pictures is going to have different requirements than a site where you're trying to show off your Flash skills in hopes of landing a new job.
Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is a highly regarded source of information on what makes people's browsing experiences enjoyable and worthwhile. Generally speaking, Jakob advocates designing sites so as to make the user's experience as painless and "friction-free" as possible; some specific recommendations would be to try and design your site so that it doesn't require specific browsers, resolutions, or plug-ins to operate properly. If you want to keep people's interest, page loading times should be under 10 seconds, which places limits on how big your graphics will be and how many of them you'll have on a page (somebody has already mentioned remembering people on 33.6 dialup connections).
On the other hand, I've seen some amazing sites that were pure eye-candy. In that case, having a specific browser and/or plugin (usually some version of Flash) was an absolute prerequisite, and nobody minds because the animations on such sites push the envelope of what can be done with current technology, so it's understood that the "latest-and-greatest" stuff is required to view them. Few if any of them are practical; they're just fun, so it's OK to break the rules.
You can check out the most recent weblog at jwz's DNA Lounge for a short, informative rant on this. It starts a little below where the link jumps to, beginning with "In 'impending doom' news...".
Give me a break. IF (and it's a big if) Valenti's vision becomes a reality, you will roll over and take it up the a** as soon as Phantom Menace or The Matrix becomes available as video-on-demand, IF (there's that word again) you have an "approved" computer. You'll rush out and buy one and enjoy it just like the rest of the world.
Yes, welcome to Slashdot, where we all love to hate the MPAA/RIAA, but we post glowing reviews of movies like FotR and cheer on the guys who are lining up for four months to see AotC.
We're voting with our wallets, people. I've spent WAY more money in the past year on MPAA-member products than I have in donations to the EFF or equivalent, and I'll bet that 99.5% of Slashdot readers have done the same.
What gives you the idea that spider silk is non-stretching? Au contraire, spider silk is very stretchy. University of Wyoming researchers found the gene for capture silk which, while also very sticky, can stretch up to 3 times its original length. That's a bit too far, and it would be REALLY tough to handle (how would you let go?).
Dragline silk, though (which is what I imagine we'd want for climbing) is what Nexia is producing. It's only 1/5th as stretchy as capture silk (see first link, above), which means it'll stretch to 1.4 times its original length -- plenty of "shock absorption" to keep you from getting cut in two.
And although Nexia doesn't say anything about abrasion resistance, they do say they're hoping to create fibers with specific properties for specific applications. I do agree that the fibers may need to be sheathed in something else (maybe even dragline silk would be too sticky -- who knows?), but I still think it'd be a vast improvement over what we carry today.
I want climbing ropes made out of spider silk! I think the smallest-diameter climbing rope is currently 9.5mm. Spider silk would be much lighter even at the same diameter; you could probably trust your life to a 3mm diameter (just guessing) spider silk rope, at dramatically lighter weight than is currently possible.
OTOH, can you imagine how freaky it would be to suspend your body weight from a rope so thin that you might not even be able to see the end of it?
I tried Ventura 7, which was the first version that Corel wrote pretty much from scratch. This was in early 1997. It was a bad experience.
First the good points:
- Ventura had the best user interface of any program I had used up to that time (this alone made me hang onto it longer than I should have).
- It included lots of drawing tools -- almost a mini-CorelDraw -- that worked right in the document editing window.
- It was almost endlessly customizeable, in terms of its buttons and menus -- the first program I ever saw that could do so to that extent. I could set it up any way I wanted to.
Now the bad points:
- It didn't work.
That's enough, really, isn't it?
Ventura broke constantly. It couldn't handle frames. It would sometimes drop characters when it printed files with it (every 'f' on a page would be missing, for instance. Not in the whole document -- just that one page). Sometimes, it would skip whole pages in its output.
Support was nonexistent. Yes, the newsgroup was great, but the Corel guys kept dropping hints about a patch that was coming out Real Soon Now(tm) that would solve all of our problems. (From those in the know, that patch was called "Version 8").
After it kept me in the office until 1:30 in the morning, for two nights in a row, trying to print a document that was LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED LOUSY PAGES, I gave up and switched to FrameMaker, and have never looked back.
I almost did look back, because FrameMaker had such a lousy UI compared to Ventura, and made complicated so many things that Ventura made easy, that I was ready to tear my hair out.
But Frame's saving grace was: it worked. It worked then, and it works now, and I've never dreamed of giving Ventura another chance. I use FrameMaker almost every day, and have produced documents ranging from 20 pages to almost 400 pages at last count, and FrameMaker has crashed on me maybe four times in four years. It's predictable. It does what it should. And with the addition of mif2go, I can produce HTML, WinHelp, or just about any other markup format as effortlessly as FrameMaker's native PDF support lets me produce Acrobat.
I've often wondered if they ever worked the bugs out of Ventura, but hey... once bitten, twice shy.
FrameMaker + mif2go = almost any output you like.
on
Writing Documentation
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Try FrameMaker 6.0 and mif2go if you want to produce HTML and PDF from the same set of master source files. I've used them with spectacular results, for docs ranging from 20 to 350 pages, including Table of Contents and Index. mif2go does help files, too -- WinHelp, MS HTMLHelp, JavaHelp, etc.
We have a user manual (350+ pages) and a demo document (~60 pages) that contains a subset of the stuff in the manual. We used to keep one copy of each document in PageMaker (hey, before I came along it was WordPerfect; give me a break!). This required constant, simultaneous editing of the almost-identical sections in both documents. It introduced errors and inconsistencies, and it effectively doubled my editing workload, since the sections we edited most often were the ones in the demo document. Worse, PM isn't suited to long-document problems like re-numbering sections. Any time we added a new section, I had to renumber, by hand, all sections that came after it, including cross-references to other sections (there are hundreds of these). I knew there had to be a better way.
Three years ago, I switched us over to FrameMaker. Now, I keep ONE set of master documents, from which I produce print, PDF, HTML and Help files for both the manual and the demo document.
Here's how it works:
Instead of one big file, I have 31 separate FrameMaker files, each of which corresponds to a section or chapter in the user manual. I have two "book files": one for the manual, which includes all 31 section files, and one for the demo document, which includes only three.
One of FrameMaker's most powerful features is its "conditional text," which lets you tag certain text for display only on certain conditions. In my case, I created three tags: ManualOnly, DemoOnly and Normal. Most text in all sections is Normal. But, some is ManualOnly and some is DemoOnly; for example, there's a completely different introductory subsection in the demo version of Section 1. That part is tagged DemoOnly; the intro subsection for the user manual is tagged ManualOnly, and the rest of Section 1 is tagged Normal.
Now, deciding what gets tagged how takes a bit of work, but once it's done it simplifies things greatly: I open the book file I want, set the display to "Normal" along with "ManualOnly" or "DemoOnly," depending on which book I want, and print. Or, I can save as PDF -- a feature built right into FrameMaker. Note that the sections are numbered differently in the demo document than they are in the manual. That's OK; Frame handles the renumbering automatically, and even renumbers any cross-references between sections as needed! It likewise generates the Table of Contents and Index for me, with page and section numbers as appropriate.
Now, that works fine for print and PDF. What about Help files?
This is where mif2go comes in. mif2go generates FrameMaker Interchange Files (MIFs) from your FrameMaker originals and converts them to WinHelp, JavaHelp, HTML, HTML Help, XHTML: you name it. mif2go is US$299, produced by a small outfit called Omni Systems. The price includes free tech support (email only) for a year, and they have been VERY responsive to email, usually responding within the day. The only comparable conversion product I know of for FrameMaker is WebWorks Publisher, which is produced by a self-important corp that charges three times as much for its software that, IMHO, works far less well than mif2go (and yes, I've tried both; a demo version of WebWorks even comes with FrameMaker 6.0).
Before mif2go, help file creation went like this:
export FrameMaker section files to RTF (with FrameMaker's lousy RTF filter), losing most of the markup in the process, such as cross-references.
use a HAT (Help Authoring Tool) like RoboHelp to re-format what didn't translate properly, and to replace all the missing links. This usually took about six weeks, and introduced inconsistencies (like spelling mistakes) from the original files. It also had an ugly format, and some tables in our original document just WOULDN'T work no matter what we tried.
Here's how it works now:
Choose File > Save Using Mif2Go.
Double-click the.hpj file that mif2go generates, to compile the help using the (free as in beer) Microsoft Help Compiler.
Done. Perfectly-formatted help files, in less than five minutes. HTML output is much the same.
I have yet to see anything with the combined power of these two. FrameMaker is available for Windows, Mac and a couple of flavours of Unix (though unfortunately not for Linux), which is a heck of a lot better than you can say for LaTeX, which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. For serious document work, give me WYSIWYG anytime: I can manage the layout -- even simple things like widows and orphans -- much more easily in a GUI than I can from a basic text editor.
And finally, FrameMaker is rock-solid. I use it every day, for serious work, and it has crashed maybe four times in the three years I've used it. I can't think of any other piece of Windows software that has been so reliable.
A word of warning: I've made this sound like a Great Thing, and it is. But it's not easy to begin with. FrameMaker has a pretty steep learning curve; it's been said that you can do anything to a text document with Frame, but nothing easily. However, your coding background will probably give you a great headstart. Some of the things, like the automatic renumbering of sections and cross-references I mentioned, will be much easier to set up, for example.
You might consider, in addition to the suggestions I made earlier, using the method Brian Kendig listed above. I'll repost the relevant bit here for your convenience:
> The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client
> screen out any email which contains any of
> these phrases:
> to be removed
> to be permanently removed
> to get removed
> to get off the list
> to get off this list
> to be taken off
> to remove yourself
> removal instructions
> remove in subject line
> "remove" in subject line
> remove in the subject
> "remove" in the subject
> 'remove' in the subject
> S.1618
> S. 1618
> This list by itself catches about 80% of the > spam I get.
Just make sure you put these filters AFTER the ones allowing your legal mailing lists through =)
Hopefully, these two methods in tandem should work for you.
I found a clever way to defeat most spam on the webpage of an avid cyclist; unfortunately I can't remember his name or enough information about him to run a Google search and give this method proper attribution. But here goes anyway:
The key to this method is to realize that most spam has a spoofed "To" address -- RARELY is it addressed directly to you. If you dig in the message headers, you'll usually found it was mailed (or CC'd) to a whole bunch of people at once, for obvious reasons. So you set up your mail filters thusly:
First, set up a filter allowing any "legal" mailing lists you're on to go to your Inbox.
Next, a filter to allow any mail sent directly to you (i.e. you@domain.com is in the To or CC lines) to go to your Inbox.
Finally, a filter that deletes everything else.
You'd be amazed how effective this is. Since setting this up, I only get maybe one spam message past this system every three or four months.
Mind you, I also have my email come in via Bigfoot, which has a pretty good spam filter itself. But this has nonetheless proven quite effective.
There's a lot more research being done on non-embryonic stem cells than the recent McGill announcement. See this overview of current research by Michael Fumento, writing in the National Post.
I'm the original submitter. Just to vindicate my otherwise-good name:
My suggested headline was "FF:TSW rendered in real time on NVIDIA Quadro."
I said nothing in the headline about.4fps. In fact, if you actually READ THE BODY of the submission, you'll notice that the rendering speed was SPELLED OUT (four-tenths of a second per frame) so people wouldn't get it wrong. The original Slashdot headline (which read.4fps) was the editor's modification and bad math, not mine.
Anyone who doesn't believe computer graphics can be 'real art' should check out the work of Vladimir Konstantinovic. Maybe start with The Sacrifice of Abraham. There are links to some of his other images there. You have never seen "computer art" like this. What was the comment someone made in the early posts on this thread, about starting by duplicating the old masters?
Vladimir does this stuff in his free time, using Xara, the best damn vector graphics package available. (yes, that's right, those are vector images). He actually works at a Russian TV station. Amazing, no?
Take a look at those numbers again, Brian. It says the BC provincial tax rate is ~50% of *the federal tax rate,* not 50% of a person's income.
I live in Alberta, which has the lowest personal tax rate in Canada, no provincial sales tax and we're moving to a 10.5% flat income tax rate next year. And I lived in Vancouver for two years, dealing with the differences. So I agree with you that BC taxes are too high. But to characterize them as 60% is just absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here's one more reason to consider homeschooling my kids. Or at least consider sending them to a private school where such devices can't (or are less likely to be) be eventually required by law.
I already have real reservations about confining my kids for six or more hours a day to a classroom filled only with people their own age, to suffer (mostly) uninspired teaching in regimented fashion, in exchange for dubious literacy. Now I have to worry about them being trained from their earliest years to accept a surveillance society, too.
I can't escape the feeling they could do vastly more productive and useful things with that time on their own. Spider Robinson wrote an excellent piece about this in today's Globe and Mail.
Although directory lookups via Minitel are indeed popular, they're also free (and available via public Minitel terminals at any post office).
Few on Slashdot will be surprised to hear that the real money-maker (unfortunately, from my POV), is porn. Wherever you go in France you'll see posters that say "3615 {female name}" Entering that code at a Minitel terminal will connect you to the Minitel equivalent of a phone sex line. At least, I think that's what happens. I was in France as a Mormon missionary, so not surprisingly, I never tried it. But posters were literally everywhere, and you'd regularly hear radio ads for 3615 this and 3615 that.
While there are other uses for a 3615 prefix, cybersex was far and away the use most often advertised.
Please, let it store the password for my POP3 account without pestering me for it every time. Mozilla does this -- but only if you use the Master Password feature. So every time I want to check my mail, I get to choose: I can get prompted for the mail password, or the Master Password.
This is the single biggest reason I'm still using Outlook Express.
Here in Alberta, Canada we have VLTs (Video Lottery Terminals) that let you play a number of different card games and other assorted forms of gambling on a touch-screen terminal. They're a HUGE profit center for the pubs and bars that host them, and for the provincial government. If I were a VLT programmer of questionable moral character, it would be awfully tempting to code a backdoor triggered by some easter egg-type series of screen touches that would let me score a couple hundred dollars at each terminal.
Anybody ever heard of anything like this happening in real life? As an earlier poster said, if you kept your take down to a couple thousand a week, I think it would be pretty unlikely you'd get caught.
From Ms. Ian's reply: Fold one is that the record companies hold all the cards; if you want to be famous, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want huge success, you have to go the mainstream route. If you want worldwide success, you have to go the mainstream route. And until we see our first Internet & Live Shows Only artist sell a million CD's without a label deal, the major labels will be the only mainstream route available. Don't quote Grateful Dead statistics to me - they're the exception, not the rule.
Not so. Other artists besides the Grateful Dead have achieved worldwide success without selling their souls to the labels. The problem is, it takes serious talent.
The name that first comes to mind is Loreena McKennitt. For those who don't know, she's a harpist and a singer who primarily does Celtic/World music (that's an oversimplification -- listen to her stuff). She released her first two albums on her own label. They sold well enough that Warner Music offered her a deal. IIRC, she told them to get stuffed -- she was going to retain ownership of her music, period. Warner hemmed and hawed about it for awhile, and eventually signed a distribution-only deal with Loreena that saw her retain complete ownership rights, and the freedom to distribute her music on her own label's behalf.
The labels aren't stupid; they signed onto this deal because it made economic sense for them. It was obviously worthwhile for Warner: McKennitt's last studio album sold over 4 million copies worldwide. But the reason it made economic sense was that Loreena McKennitt's music was good enough that it created a serious buzz all on its own. She knew she didn't need the record labels; she was good enough that she could afford to hold out for a better deal. Perhaps she was just less greedy than some; I don't know (Ms. Ian's comments about each generation expecting more than their forebears seem relevant here). But Loreena now has worldwide recognition and ownership of her music.
The simple reason this happened is that McKennitt is a rare talent. That proven talent was in enough demand, sans label backing, that she could negotiate on a more even footing with a multinational like Warner.
But as Ms. Ian pointed out, this is pretty rare. Where does this leave the average artist when negotiating with a multinational label? Frankly, it leaves them right where I think they belong: with no negotiating power prior to having proven themselves. Think about it: why should the record companies take on all the risk and expense, and then hand over the majority of the fruits of their labours to the artist whom they created? I mean, do you really believe that Britney or your average boy band would even exist without the labels? These people are interchangeable -- they're commodities! They are the wholesale creation of their record labels. Anybody with a half-decent stage presence and half-decent voice can replace them. Likewise for damn near every major-label band in existence.
I suppose I see this as a merit system. The unsigned, semi-talented artist wants the whole enchilada -- fame, fortune, groupies. He/she can't earn that on his/her own merits, and so needs the manufactured hype of the record labels to acquire it. So this person makes a deal with the devil, so to speak -- signing away a lot of future considerations, in exchange for the label's best efforts to make them famous right now.
Contrast that with artists like McKennitt -- or for that matter, with Janis Ian who's now independent -- who was already making a living with her music because she was so very talented that her performances and music were just that memorable. Word of mouth did most of the rest.
Anyway: this is more rambling than I'd like it to be, because I'm posting on my lunch break so I don't have time to make this shorter, but I think you take my point: Janis Ian asserts that "record companies hold all the cards," but she's assuming an artist who's desperate for that worldwide fame. Such people do NOT have my sympathy if they sign their lives away to a record label for fame and fortune right now, rather than earn it like a handful of very talented musicians have done.
In saying this, I don't mean to imply that there aren't talented musicians out there that have a hard time making a living. My father was one -- an entertainer for 30 years. But I think what I am saying is that there are enough people out there of comparable talent that their relative value is a lot less than they think. It seems to me only appropriate that only the really exceptional talents can get onto the worldwide radar screen, so to speak, without having an enormous hype machine behind them that (justifiably, in my view) expects the lion's share of the profits in return.
Hmmm... this needs a '-1 Groaner' moderation option. Too bad. =)
Hee hee... I remember hearing, years ago, that a fed-up Jag owner had created bumper stickers that read "All parts falling off this car are of the finest English workmanship."
Bloody hell! Here in Calgary, AB, Canada I have 1.5Mbps down, 640Kbps up, for CDN$34.95 per month with a bought modem, $39.95 with a leased one. Cap is 5GB down, 1GB up.
That's DSL; the cable company pricing is similar, and the performance (I was a cable customer) is virtually identical -- it's theoretically 3Mbps down, but I never saw that. However, there's theoretically no bandwidth cap. That's with Shaw Cable, for the other Canadians reading this: YMMV with Rogers et. al.
Mind you, IIRC, Calgary and Edmonton were the first two cities in NA (maybe the world?) where you could get broadband at any residential address, so the competition has been going on longer, which affects the pricing, but MAN the prices quoted in the article are expensive!
Furthermore: what should each of the above screens look like? How will people expect it to work? We've got no "prior art" to look at and say "well, the market leader does it this way, so we'll ape that." There IS no market leader, yet -- we're trying to create the market for this software; that's the whole point.
This is just a very simple example of the kinds of interface questions we have been dealing with. A new interaction model doesn't necessarily mean you're trying to create a confusing website.
"Yahoo-style" design is great for a directory, where the volume of information is such that speed and "cleanliness" are paramount: nobody expects the White Pages (or the Yellow Pages) to evoke oohs and aahs for their design: we expect them to be efficient, no-nonsense directories. But the design of other types of sites (or other software, or hardware for that matter) can be more complex, especially if one is creating a new interaction model and has precious few (if any) precedents on which to base one's design.
When I served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we actually had something similar going in my mission (France Bordeaux), though of course not for the same length of time.
Missionaries always work two by two. You're usually transferred from one area to another every four to six months, which also means the guy you're working with changes every two months or so. In some areas where missions are geographically small, you might be transferred to the other side of town. In my mission, transfers were usually from one city to another.
However, you usually stay a bit longer with your first missionary companion (your "trainer"). There was a policy in place under our second mission president, where new missionaries would spend a week or two working in a different city, with a different companion, after they'd been with their trainers about a month. Mostly, this was so they could see that the grass *wasn't* greener on the other side of the fence. =) Some guys got impatient when they were assigned a trainer who'd been out for 22 months (out of a two year mission) and was slowing down a little bit. Most of them, by the halfway mark of their missions, were saying things like "I thought I knew so much more than he did... boy was I wrong!"
Maybe the motivation here is similar -- a morale issue?
It really depends on who you're targeting, and on what your content is. A personal homepage with a bunch of family pictures is going to have different requirements than a site where you're trying to show off your Flash skills in hopes of landing a new job.
Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is a highly regarded source of information on what makes people's browsing experiences enjoyable and worthwhile. Generally speaking, Jakob advocates designing sites so as to make the user's experience as painless and "friction-free" as possible; some specific recommendations would be to try and design your site so that it doesn't require specific browsers, resolutions, or plug-ins to operate properly. If you want to keep people's interest, page loading times should be under 10 seconds, which places limits on how big your graphics will be and how many of them you'll have on a page (somebody has already mentioned remembering people on 33.6 dialup connections).
On the other hand, I've seen some amazing sites that were pure eye-candy. In that case, having a specific browser and/or plugin (usually some version of Flash) was an absolute prerequisite, and nobody minds because the animations on such sites push the envelope of what can be done with current technology, so it's understood that the "latest-and-greatest" stuff is required to view them. Few if any of them are practical; they're just fun, so it's OK to break the rules.
Good luck!
You can check out the most recent weblog at jwz's DNA Lounge for a short, informative rant on this. It starts a little below where the link jumps to, beginning with "In 'impending doom' news...".
Give me a break. IF (and it's a big if) Valenti's vision becomes a reality, you will roll over and take it up the a** as soon as Phantom Menace or The Matrix becomes available as video-on-demand, IF (there's that word again) you have an "approved" computer. You'll rush out and buy one and enjoy it just like the rest of the world.
Yes, welcome to Slashdot, where we all love to hate the MPAA/RIAA, but we post glowing reviews of movies like FotR and cheer on the guys who are lining up for four months to see AotC.
We're voting with our wallets, people. I've spent WAY more money in the past year on MPAA-member products than I have in donations to the EFF or equivalent, and I'll bet that 99.5% of Slashdot readers have done the same.
What gives you the idea that spider silk is non-stretching? Au contraire, spider silk is very stretchy. University of Wyoming researchers found the gene for capture silk which, while also very sticky, can stretch up to 3 times its original length. That's a bit too far, and it would be REALLY tough to handle (how would you let go?).
Dragline silk, though (which is what I imagine we'd want for climbing) is what Nexia is producing. It's only 1/5th as stretchy as capture silk (see first link, above), which means it'll stretch to 1.4 times its original length -- plenty of "shock absorption" to keep you from getting cut in two.
And although Nexia doesn't say anything about abrasion resistance, they do say they're hoping to create fibers with specific properties for specific applications. I do agree that the fibers may need to be sheathed in something else (maybe even dragline silk would be too sticky -- who knows?), but I still think it'd be a vast improvement over what we carry today.
I want climbing ropes made out of spider silk! I think the smallest-diameter climbing rope is currently 9.5mm. Spider silk would be much lighter even at the same diameter; you could probably trust your life to a 3mm diameter (just guessing) spider silk rope, at dramatically lighter weight than is currently possible.
OTOH, can you imagine how freaky it would be to suspend your body weight from a rope so thin that you might not even be able to see the end of it?
I tried Ventura 7, which was the first version that Corel wrote pretty much from scratch. This was in early 1997. It was a bad experience.
First the good points:
- Ventura had the best user interface of any program I had used up to that time (this alone made me hang onto it longer than I should have).
- It included lots of drawing tools -- almost a mini-CorelDraw -- that worked right in the document editing window.
- It was almost endlessly customizeable, in terms of its buttons and menus -- the first program I ever saw that could do so to that extent. I could set it up any way I wanted to.
Now the bad points:
- It didn't work.
That's enough, really, isn't it?
Ventura broke constantly. It couldn't handle frames. It would sometimes drop characters when it printed files with it (every 'f' on a page would be missing, for instance. Not in the whole document -- just that one page). Sometimes, it would skip whole pages in its output.
Support was nonexistent. Yes, the newsgroup was great, but the Corel guys kept dropping hints about a patch that was coming out Real Soon Now(tm) that would solve all of our problems. (From those in the know, that patch was called "Version 8").
After it kept me in the office until 1:30 in the morning, for two nights in a row, trying to print a document that was LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED LOUSY PAGES, I gave up and switched to FrameMaker, and have never looked back.
I almost did look back, because FrameMaker had such a lousy UI compared to Ventura, and made complicated so many things that Ventura made easy, that I was ready to tear my hair out.
But Frame's saving grace was: it worked. It worked then, and it works now, and I've never dreamed of giving Ventura another chance. I use FrameMaker almost every day, and have produced documents ranging from 20 pages to almost 400 pages at last count, and FrameMaker has crashed on me maybe four times in four years. It's predictable. It does what it should. And with the addition of mif2go, I can produce HTML, WinHelp, or just about any other markup format as effortlessly as FrameMaker's native PDF support lets me produce Acrobat.
I've often wondered if they ever worked the bugs out of Ventura, but hey... once bitten, twice shy.
Try FrameMaker 6.0 and mif2go if you want to produce HTML and PDF from the same set of master source files. I've used them with spectacular results, for docs ranging from 20 to 350 pages, including Table of Contents and Index. mif2go does help files, too -- WinHelp, MS HTMLHelp, JavaHelp, etc.
We have a user manual (350+ pages) and a demo document (~60 pages) that contains a subset of the stuff in the manual. We used to keep one copy of each document in PageMaker (hey, before I came along it was WordPerfect; give me a break!). This required constant, simultaneous editing of the almost-identical sections in both documents. It introduced errors and inconsistencies, and it effectively doubled my editing workload, since the sections we edited most often were the ones in the demo document. Worse, PM isn't suited to long-document problems like re-numbering sections. Any time we added a new section, I had to renumber, by hand, all sections that came after it, including cross-references to other sections (there are hundreds of these). I knew there had to be a better way.
Three years ago, I switched us over to FrameMaker. Now, I keep ONE set of master documents, from which I produce print, PDF, HTML and Help files for both the manual and the demo document.
Here's how it works:
Instead of one big file, I have 31 separate FrameMaker files, each of which corresponds to a section or chapter in the user manual. I have two "book files": one for the manual, which includes all 31 section files, and one for the demo document, which includes only three.
One of FrameMaker's most powerful features is its "conditional text," which lets you tag certain text for display only on certain conditions. In my case, I created three tags: ManualOnly, DemoOnly and Normal. Most text in all sections is Normal. But, some is ManualOnly and some is DemoOnly; for example, there's a completely different introductory subsection in the demo version of Section 1. That part is tagged DemoOnly; the intro subsection for the user manual is tagged ManualOnly, and the rest of Section 1 is tagged Normal. Now, deciding what gets tagged how takes a bit of work, but once it's done it simplifies things greatly: I open the book file I want, set the display to "Normal" along with "ManualOnly" or "DemoOnly," depending on which book I want, and print. Or, I can save as PDF -- a feature built right into FrameMaker. Note that the sections are numbered differently in the demo document than they are in the manual. That's OK; Frame handles the renumbering automatically, and even renumbers any cross-references between sections as needed! It likewise generates the Table of Contents and Index for me, with page and section numbers as appropriate.
Now, that works fine for print and PDF. What about Help files?
This is where mif2go comes in. mif2go generates FrameMaker Interchange Files (MIFs) from your FrameMaker originals and converts them to WinHelp, JavaHelp, HTML, HTML Help, XHTML: you name it. mif2go is US$299, produced by a small outfit called Omni Systems. The price includes free tech support (email only) for a year, and they have been VERY responsive to email, usually responding within the day. The only comparable conversion product I know of for FrameMaker is WebWorks Publisher, which is produced by a self-important corp that charges three times as much for its software that, IMHO, works far less well than mif2go (and yes, I've tried both; a demo version of WebWorks even comes with FrameMaker 6.0).
Before mif2go, help file creation went like this:
Here's how it works now:
Done. Perfectly-formatted help files, in less than five minutes. HTML output is much the same.
I have yet to see anything with the combined power of these two. FrameMaker is available for Windows, Mac and a couple of flavours of Unix (though unfortunately not for Linux), which is a heck of a lot better than you can say for LaTeX, which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. For serious document work, give me WYSIWYG anytime: I can manage the layout -- even simple things like widows and orphans -- much more easily in a GUI than I can from a basic text editor.
And finally, FrameMaker is rock-solid. I use it every day, for serious work, and it has crashed maybe four times in the three years I've used it. I can't think of any other piece of Windows software that has been so reliable.
A word of warning: I've made this sound like a Great Thing, and it is. But it's not easy to begin with. FrameMaker has a pretty steep learning curve; it's been said that you can do anything to a text document with Frame, but nothing easily. However, your coding background will probably give you a great headstart. Some of the things, like the automatic renumbering of sections and cross-references I mentioned, will be much easier to set up, for example.
Good luck -- and stay away from Word.
You might consider, in addition to the suggestions I made earlier, using the method Brian Kendig listed above. I'll repost the relevant bit here for your convenience:
> The way I avoid spam is to have my mail client
> screen out any email which contains any of
> these phrases:
> to be removed
> to be permanently removed
> to get removed
> to get off the list
> to get off this list
> to be taken off
> to remove yourself
> removal instructions
> remove in subject line
> "remove" in subject line
> remove in the subject
> "remove" in the subject
> 'remove' in the subject
> S.1618
> S. 1618
> This list by itself catches about 80% of the
> spam I get.
Just make sure you put these filters AFTER the ones allowing your legal mailing lists through =)
Hopefully, these two methods in tandem should work for you.
I found a clever way to defeat most spam on the webpage of an avid cyclist; unfortunately I can't remember his name or enough information about him to run a Google search and give this method proper attribution. But here goes anyway:
The key to this method is to realize that most spam has a spoofed "To" address -- RARELY is it addressed directly to you. If you dig in the message headers, you'll usually found it was mailed (or CC'd) to a whole bunch of people at once, for obvious reasons. So you set up your mail filters thusly:
First, set up a filter allowing any "legal" mailing lists you're on to go to your Inbox.
Next, a filter to allow any mail sent directly to you (i.e. you@domain.com is in the To or CC lines) to go to your Inbox.
Finally, a filter that deletes everything else.
You'd be amazed how effective this is. Since setting this up, I only get maybe one spam message past this system every three or four months.
Mind you, I also have my email come in via Bigfoot, which has a pretty good spam filter itself. But this has nonetheless proven quite effective.
There's a lot more research being done on non-embryonic stem cells than the recent McGill announcement. See this overview of current research by Michael Fumento, writing in the National Post.
I'm the original submitter. Just to vindicate my otherwise-good name:
.4fps. In fact, if you actually READ THE BODY of the submission, you'll notice that the rendering speed was SPELLED OUT (four-tenths of a second per frame) so people wouldn't get it wrong. The original Slashdot headline (which read .4fps) was the editor's modification and bad math, not mine.
:)
My suggested headline was "FF:TSW rendered in real time on NVIDIA Quadro."
I said nothing in the headline about
Just to clear that up.
Anyone who doesn't believe computer graphics can be 'real art' should check out the work of Vladimir Konstantinovic. Maybe start with The Sacrifice of Abraham. There are links to some of his other images there. You have never seen "computer art" like this. What was the comment someone made in the early posts on this thread, about starting by duplicating the old masters?
Vladimir does this stuff in his free time, using Xara, the best damn vector graphics package available. (yes, that's right, those are vector images). He actually works at a Russian TV station. Amazing, no?
Take a look at those numbers again, Brian. It says the BC provincial tax rate is ~50% of *the federal tax rate,* not 50% of a person's income.
I live in Alberta, which has the lowest personal tax rate in Canada, no provincial sales tax and we're moving to a 10.5% flat income tax rate next year. And I lived in Vancouver for two years, dealing with the differences. So I agree with you that BC taxes are too high. But to characterize them as 60% is just absurd.
Cheers,
Rikardon.