Yay, another article telling us a microsoft product is going to murder your children, drive us off the fiscal cliff, bomb Iran, and infect everyone else with AIDS... because it doesn't have a button where you'd want it. The horror.
Arguably, having buttons where you want them, that do what you want them to do, is a UI's purpose in life. If it can't manage that, We Have A Problem.
It's especially problematic because of the relative lack of useful under-the-hood-upgrades. Selling "Windows 7 Compulsory Tablet UI Edition" on devices that don't even have touchscreens is just a bad joke.
It could be argued that simplistic demonization of nuclear weapons is actually a whitewash tactic.
Yes, they are, by far, the most efficient examples of their genre; but the logic of "total war" had been grinding on with horrific civilian casualties for a few years by the time nukes were available. The people in charge of Allied air power(which, toward the end of WWII basically meant "American air power", since the US was the main allied nation not a smouldering heap of rubble) had already embraced the notion that enemy civilians were effectively military assets and to be bombed as such. HE and incendiaries are substantially more labor intensive and inefficient; but the step of indiscriminate bombing of population centers had already been taken. From then on, it was just a matter of doing it faster.
Given the, um, totally excellent, standards for handling of radioactive goodies that were adhered to by unpracticed people rushing like crazy and shielded by secrecy, declaring the whole thing a "national park" and forgetting about it is probably cheaper than rehabilitating the place....
I would suspect that corpses dehydrate somewhat faster on mars(with the lower atmospheric pressure, sublimation is more likely than on Everest) and dessicated husks probably erode a bit faster; but you could certainly do worse as modelling goes...
The thing about suicide missions most people aren't considering is body disposal. There must be an effective and sanitary means of handling the body. It would be nice if they could make soylent green, but at the very least there should be a device which would render a body as "gone" in a clean and sanitary manner.
Deathstills, clearly. A man's flesh is his own, his water belongs to the other astronauts.
Last thing I heard, there is still no sign of life on Mars, so shouldn't "tossing the body out of the window" be perfectly clean and sanitary, as long as you don't mind seeing eternally-preserved bodies outside?
We now know something about martian dust airflow, so you could probably get a rough calculation of how long it would take for a frozen corpse to be sandblasted beyond usable recognition...
I find that the teeny MEMs mics you can get these days are the best for stoking people with incipient paranoia. "Oh, sure, 3x3.5mm surface mount package, looks barely different from any other teeny IC, reasonably sensitive, they could be almost anywhere..."
Arguably, the stuff the abhuman scum over in advertising are pushing is a much more subtle and dangerous flavor than the traditional statist dystopian genre.
If you try hard enough, you can build a statist dystopia(y hello thar, GDR); but that sort of thing is staggeringly expensive. The tighter you want your surveillance to be, the bigger the capital and operational costs. If you aren't careful, you'll eventually collapse under your own weight, or have so many subjects pissed off at being poor that you just can't hire enough guns to keep them in line.
With commercially-supported(but eminently dual use) technologys, though, you can largely sidestep this problem. People buy their own radio-equipped microphone/camera modules, lovingly charge them every day, and pay the cell phone bill. They voluntarily buy the cable box because how else will the magic of football reach them? They sign up for the credit cards and the 'loyalty' cards, and so on and so forth. It still isn't free to build an apparatus for demanding the data from the private sector and crunching it; but the impressively vast and thorough mechanism for gathering and storing in convenient machine-readable format all sorts of cool invasive details is automatically provided, and running at a profit no less! All you have to do is put a few CALEA style mechanisms in place, and enjoy!
It will take a lot of data to break through the (conveniently not-at-all-self-serving) 'Just rub some dirt in it and don't be a pussy" school of sports medicine, I fear.
We also need some better numbers so that we can update the subdual damage rules for our preferred tabletop RPGs. Sure, for short campaigns, you can pretend that getting a cudgel to the face only deals 4D3 subdual damage; but by the time the character is level 20? We'll have to ensure that he has accrued the correct number of effects from the CTE effects table....
Do we really need a study to show that repeated hits to the head result in confusion, depression and dementia? If so, I'd like to sign up to be the guy on the research team that whacks this researcher on the head repeatedly so he can discover the effects.
I just want to help. Really I do.
If we want information on such minor questions as "how often repeated?", "Just how hard?", "Are the effects merely additive, or does one hit make the next more dangerous?", "Are hits with no clinicially observable effects safe or do they add up?".
It has never been news that hits hard enough to produce immediate, observable, effects are a bad plan. That hits with no effect, or from which you appear to recover, are a very serious risk for degeneration in the mid to long term? That isn't immediately obvious.
Is it too early to set up a kickstarter to pay for the finger reattachment that one of these plucky alpha testers is going to earn himself?
"So, um, guys, I'm working on a project that will involve briefly generating an overpressure of up to 50 thousand PSI accompanied by a release of heat, probably not more than a dozen cycles within a one minute period. It's handheld. What 3d-printable thermoplastic would be best?"
Wouldn't a hardcore christian know about things like 'original sin' and(if catholic) 'concupiscence' or (if protestant) the necessity of salvation through grace? There are certainly variants of christianity that emphasize the redeemability of all people; but what flavors espouse the notion that the world isn't actually pretty full of malicious dickheads, albeit ones that might be redeemed?
As we all know, the human cerebral cortex is heavily wrinkled, allowing a very large sheet of neural network to fit inside the skull.
During the aging process, the wrinkles gradually diffuse through the skull, collecting on the skin surface, and leaving the cerebral cortex much less efficiently packed. This, obviously, is why old people are wrinkly and suffer cognitive decline. What theory could be simpler or more parsimonious?
My response to Microsoft dick move. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Medical institutions have no plan B.
Let enough doctors' iPads not be compatible with some crucial part of 'Plan A' and see if a Plan B doesn't start to materialize. Piss off enough 200,000 dollar a year MDs and the fifty to eighty a year IT peons figure out how to make shit change. Been there, seen it happen at a cozy little thousand employee company in Melbourne Florida just recently.
I'm guessing that 'doctor's iPads' are one of the reasons that MS is raising the price of CALs and various email/groupware/etc server licenses; but no mention of bumps to Win7/8 seats...
They don't have unlimited control over their clients(in particular, iDevices have left them flat footed at least until 'Surface' hits in volume, if not beyond); but they do have some leverage, and appear to be using it in a fairly logical way. This definitely isn't the time to be pushing the prices on endpoint OSes that are suffering; but(as long as access from other platforms isn't totally fucked, and at least for things like Exchange it isn't), there is a reasonably good chance that you can make up some of the difference just by bumping CALs and server license fees.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think that the USB connector is definitely the best of the (mostly bad) options. The bottom of the market in wall warts is fairly dreadful no matter what shape the connector is, and even people without access to a geek's-giant-bin-of-parts at least probably have a few of this flavor.
The one really unfortunate side effect(although probably unavoidable at this price point) of going with USB is that it means +5v input(maybe a hair higher, quite often lower if the supply is drooping) for a device that is supposed to be providing +5v output. Because they start with no headroom, absolutely anything they do short of 'eh, just connect the USB rail straight to input power, I'm sure it's fine' increases the risk of browning out USB slave devices connected to the pi.
In a device like the dockstar, this problem is skipped by going with 12v input, followed by DC-DC conversion in the little cluster of magnetics below the barrel jack. Since they start with 12, only rather nasty undercurrent, or seriously ghastly input, prevents putting out +5 for the slave devices. Of course, the DC-DC converter section isn't free and the rPI was aiming quite hard for a price point, so I imagine that they didn't have that luxury(and just burning the excess with a dumb regulator would be brutally wasteful at 12v, even 9 would get fairly toasty).
I'm not sure that the grandparent poster's distinction is drawn quite correctly; but I'd argue that it does fall somewhere near the truth. It isn't really the activity or passivity of the learning that differs; but the activity or passivity of the volition to seek out information according to some internal objective, vs. a willingness to attend to whatever information a nearby stimulus is providing.
That said, the distinction is only really sharp in somewhat extreme or rather contrived cases: 'Child who reads about stuff for fun vs. child who listens in class and delivers solid Bs, and doesn't touch a data source at all on vacations and weekends' type of thing. In situations where you don't necessarily know what you don't know, the 'active' learner will also function by seeking out people or reference material that know more than he does and listening to them, just as the 'passive' will(if it will be on the test, of course).
The other confounding factor is probably reading speed. People vary widely, surprisingly widely even within similar educational and social backgrounds, in how fast they can read. In my experience, it seems that people who can read atypically fast, substantially faster than 'normal' speaking pace, tend to find assorted 'multimedia enriched content', 'educational TV' and even informational radio rather galling unless used purely as background noise for a primary task.
People who read as, or more, slowly than a normal speaking speed, though, tend to enjoy audio and audiovisual information presentation much more. It seems sensible enough: without rather clever algorithms(which are rarely used for this purpose) you can't speed up audio without going all Alvin and the Chipmunks on it, and people don't. Text, though, (aside from messy typography questions which can make things more or less legible) is read at a pace controlled by the viewer, not the producer. If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.
I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.
Clearly, if you were dressing for success properly you wouldn't be scoffing at those prices. Perhaps you'd be interested in a motivational seminar, a penny-stock scam, or some usurious consumer credit?
Arguably, there are two operationally distinct branches of "dress for success". Among the not-totally-fucked, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-competition. This is the one where the guidelines are vague "western business casual"; but the intricacies of style are endless and you are being assigned a grade(that you don't get to see).
Among the lost and the damned, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-submission. Enforced compliance with a meaningless detail is just such a good reminder of where you are in the pile...
I'd say that they loathed everything about it and built accordingly:
The Web? If you put it up there, somebody probably has a cache even if you take it down. The Daily? Either the memory hole was a deliberate feature, or their developers somehow managed to miss some awfully basic lessons on content storage and organization. The Web? More or less works on anything with enough RAM for a browser. The Daily? Works with a single, blessed, app for a single platform. The Web? It isn't called 'the web' because linking is difficult... The Daily? Not so much.
I'm not on the 'zOMG, HTML5 4 lyfe! We should replace all native binaries with javascript that bit-bangs a canvas tag to provide the lousiest graphics performance since the introduction of the "2D accelerator" back in the day!' bandwagon; but I am deeply underimpressed by the fad of creating 'apps' that are little more than the platform's HTML engine wrapped in enough vendor-specific shitsauce that you can't call the result a webpage anymore. It appears to be for 'mobile' what building website menu structures entirely in Flash for no obvious reason whatsoever was to the web of old.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay, another article telling us a microsoft product is going to murder your children, drive us off the fiscal cliff, bomb Iran, and infect everyone else with AIDS... because it doesn't have a button where you'd want it. The horror.
Arguably, having buttons where you want them, that do what you want them to do, is a UI's purpose in life. If it can't manage that, We Have A Problem.
It's especially problematic because of the relative lack of useful under-the-hood-upgrades. Selling "Windows 7 Compulsory Tablet UI Edition" on devices that don't even have touchscreens is just a bad joke.
It could be argued that simplistic demonization of nuclear weapons is actually a whitewash tactic.
Yes, they are, by far, the most efficient examples of their genre; but the logic of "total war" had been grinding on with horrific civilian casualties for a few years by the time nukes were available. The people in charge of Allied air power(which, toward the end of WWII basically meant "American air power", since the US was the main allied nation not a smouldering heap of rubble) had already embraced the notion that enemy civilians were effectively military assets and to be bombed as such. HE and incendiaries are substantially more labor intensive and inefficient; but the step of indiscriminate bombing of population centers had already been taken. From then on, it was just a matter of doing it faster.
Given the, um, totally excellent, standards for handling of radioactive goodies that were adhered to by unpracticed people rushing like crazy and shielded by secrecy, declaring the whole thing a "national park" and forgetting about it is probably cheaper than rehabilitating the place....
I hope that Mr. Dent is always clever enough to pay cash...
I would suspect that corpses dehydrate somewhat faster on mars(with the lower atmospheric pressure, sublimation is more likely than on Everest) and dessicated husks probably erode a bit faster; but you could certainly do worse as modelling goes...
The thing about suicide missions most people aren't considering is body disposal. There must be an effective and sanitary means of handling the body. It would be nice if they could make soylent green, but at the very least there should be a device which would render a body as "gone" in a clean and sanitary manner.
Deathstills, clearly. A man's flesh is his own, his water belongs to the other astronauts.
Last thing I heard, there is still no sign of life on Mars, so shouldn't "tossing the body out of the window" be perfectly clean and sanitary, as long as you don't mind seeing eternally-preserved bodies outside?
We now know something about martian dust airflow, so you could probably get a rough calculation of how long it would take for a frozen corpse to be sandblasted beyond usable recognition...
I find that the teeny MEMs mics you can get these days are the best for stoking people with incipient paranoia. "Oh, sure, 3x3.5mm surface mount package, looks barely different from any other teeny IC, reasonably sensitive, they could be almost anywhere..."
Your world !! And you !! Suck it up and stop whining about pending patents that never go anywhere !! Would you rather MS patented it ??!!
They already have a very similar patent for use of the Kinect, not sure how the patent office let that one slide...
Arguably, the stuff the abhuman scum over in advertising are pushing is a much more subtle and dangerous flavor than the traditional statist dystopian genre.
If you try hard enough, you can build a statist dystopia(y hello thar, GDR); but that sort of thing is staggeringly expensive. The tighter you want your surveillance to be, the bigger the capital and operational costs. If you aren't careful, you'll eventually collapse under your own weight, or have so many subjects pissed off at being poor that you just can't hire enough guns to keep them in line.
With commercially-supported(but eminently dual use) technologys, though, you can largely sidestep this problem. People buy their own radio-equipped microphone/camera modules, lovingly charge them every day, and pay the cell phone bill. They voluntarily buy the cable box because how else will the magic of football reach them? They sign up for the credit cards and the 'loyalty' cards, and so on and so forth. It still isn't free to build an apparatus for demanding the data from the private sector and crunching it; but the impressively vast and thorough mechanism for gathering and storing in convenient machine-readable format all sorts of cool invasive details is automatically provided, and running at a profit no less! All you have to do is put a few CALEA style mechanisms in place, and enjoy!
It will take a lot of data to break through the (conveniently not-at-all-self-serving) 'Just rub some dirt in it and don't be a pussy" school of sports medicine, I fear.
We also need some better numbers so that we can update the subdual damage rules for our preferred tabletop RPGs. Sure, for short campaigns, you can pretend that getting a cudgel to the face only deals 4D3 subdual damage; but by the time the character is level 20? We'll have to ensure that he has accrued the correct number of effects from the CTE effects table....
Going to be interesting to see if Belcher's brain had this disease, seeing as it was spread all over the parking lot.
One of his former colleagues shot himself in the chest instead, for precisely that reason...
Do we really need a study to show that repeated hits to the head result in confusion, depression and dementia? If so, I'd like to sign up to be the guy on the research team that whacks this researcher on the head repeatedly so he can discover the effects.
I just want to help. Really I do.
If we want information on such minor questions as "how often repeated?", "Just how hard?", "Are the effects merely additive, or does one hit make the next more dangerous?", "Are hits with no clinicially observable effects safe or do they add up?".
It has never been news that hits hard enough to produce immediate, observable, effects are a bad plan. That hits with no effect, or from which you appear to recover, are a very serious risk for degeneration in the mid to long term? That isn't immediately obvious.
Is it too early to set up a kickstarter to pay for the finger reattachment that one of these plucky alpha testers is going to earn himself?
"So, um, guys, I'm working on a project that will involve briefly generating an overpressure of up to 50 thousand PSI accompanied by a release of heat, probably not more than a dozen cycles within a one minute period. It's handheld. What 3d-printable thermoplastic would be best?"
Oh, I'm pretty sure that he is lying, but he isn't even bothering to pretend on the extortionate gouging part of the agenda...
Wouldn't a hardcore christian know about things like 'original sin' and(if catholic) 'concupiscence' or (if protestant) the necessity of salvation through grace? There are certainly variants of christianity that emphasize the redeemability of all people; but what flavors espouse the notion that the world isn't actually pretty full of malicious dickheads, albeit ones that might be redeemed?
As we all know, the human cerebral cortex is heavily wrinkled, allowing a very large sheet of neural network to fit inside the skull.
During the aging process, the wrinkles gradually diffuse through the skull, collecting on the skin surface, and leaving the cerebral cortex much less efficiently packed. This, obviously, is why old people are wrinkly and suffer cognitive decline. What theory could be simpler or more parsimonious?
My response to Microsoft dick move. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Medical institutions have no plan B.
Let enough doctors' iPads not be compatible with some crucial part of 'Plan A' and see if a Plan B doesn't start to materialize. Piss off enough 200,000 dollar a year MDs and the fifty to eighty a year IT peons figure out how to make shit change. Been there, seen it happen at a cozy little thousand employee company in Melbourne Florida just recently.
I'm guessing that 'doctor's iPads' are one of the reasons that MS is raising the price of CALs and various email/groupware/etc server licenses; but no mention of bumps to Win7/8 seats...
They don't have unlimited control over their clients(in particular, iDevices have left them flat footed at least until 'Surface' hits in volume, if not beyond); but they do have some leverage, and appear to be using it in a fairly logical way. This definitely isn't the time to be pushing the prices on endpoint OSes that are suffering; but(as long as access from other platforms isn't totally fucked, and at least for things like Exchange it isn't), there is a reasonably good chance that you can make up some of the difference just by bumping CALs and server license fees.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think that the USB connector is definitely the best of the (mostly bad) options. The bottom of the market in wall warts is fairly dreadful no matter what shape the connector is, and even people without access to a geek's-giant-bin-of-parts at least probably have a few of this flavor.
The one really unfortunate side effect(although probably unavoidable at this price point) of going with USB is that it means +5v input(maybe a hair higher, quite often lower if the supply is drooping) for a device that is supposed to be providing +5v output. Because they start with no headroom, absolutely anything they do short of 'eh, just connect the USB rail straight to input power, I'm sure it's fine' increases the risk of browning out USB slave devices connected to the pi.
In a device like the dockstar, this problem is skipped by going with 12v input, followed by DC-DC conversion in the little cluster of magnetics below the barrel jack. Since they start with 12, only rather nasty undercurrent, or seriously ghastly input, prevents putting out +5 for the slave devices. Of course, the DC-DC converter section isn't free and the rPI was aiming quite hard for a price point, so I imagine that they didn't have that luxury(and just burning the excess with a dumb regulator would be brutally wasteful at 12v, even 9 would get fairly toasty).
I'm not sure that the grandparent poster's distinction is drawn quite correctly; but I'd argue that it does fall somewhere near the truth. It isn't really the activity or passivity of the learning that differs; but the activity or passivity of the volition to seek out information according to some internal objective, vs. a willingness to attend to whatever information a nearby stimulus is providing.
That said, the distinction is only really sharp in somewhat extreme or rather contrived cases: 'Child who reads about stuff for fun vs. child who listens in class and delivers solid Bs, and doesn't touch a data source at all on vacations and weekends' type of thing. In situations where you don't necessarily know what you don't know, the 'active' learner will also function by seeking out people or reference material that know more than he does and listening to them, just as the 'passive' will(if it will be on the test, of course).
The other confounding factor is probably reading speed. People vary widely, surprisingly widely even within similar educational and social backgrounds, in how fast they can read. In my experience, it seems that people who can read atypically fast, substantially faster than 'normal' speaking pace, tend to find assorted 'multimedia enriched content', 'educational TV' and even informational radio rather galling unless used purely as background noise for a primary task.
People who read as, or more, slowly than a normal speaking speed, though, tend to enjoy audio and audiovisual information presentation much more. It seems sensible enough: without rather clever algorithms(which are rarely used for this purpose) you can't speed up audio without going all Alvin and the Chipmunks on it, and people don't. Text, though, (aside from messy typography questions which can make things more or less legible) is read at a pace controlled by the viewer, not the producer. If you read quickly, audio and A/V will feel inefficient, because they are. If you read slowly(and don't suffer from any notable verbal-comprehension impediments), audio and A/V will feel engaging; because it is both faster than text and far more 'natural' and less fatiguing than an attempt at speed reading.
Did they, by any chance, cherish the belief that the 'tech' side of publishing could be solved merely by writing large checks to Adobe?
I love the GQ and Men's Health articles that show the outfits that you're supposed to wear. Suit - $3000, Shoes $750, watch - $8000. Yeah, sure.
Clearly, if you were dressing for success properly you wouldn't be scoffing at those prices. Perhaps you'd be interested in a motivational seminar, a penny-stock scam, or some usurious consumer credit?
Arguably, there are two operationally distinct branches of "dress for success". Among the not-totally-fucked, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-competition. This is the one where the guidelines are vague "western business casual"; but the intricacies of style are endless and you are being assigned a grade(that you don't get to see).
Among the lost and the damned, you have the variant that serves as fashion-as-submission. Enforced compliance with a meaningless detail is just such a good reminder of where you are in the pile...
Didn't understand it?
I'd say that they loathed everything about it and built accordingly:
The Web? If you put it up there, somebody probably has a cache even if you take it down. The Daily? Either the memory hole was a deliberate feature, or their developers somehow managed to miss some awfully basic lessons on content storage and organization. The Web? More or less works on anything with enough RAM for a browser. The Daily? Works with a single, blessed, app for a single platform. The Web? It isn't called 'the web' because linking is difficult... The Daily? Not so much.
I'm not on the 'zOMG, HTML5 4 lyfe! We should replace all native binaries with javascript that bit-bangs a canvas tag to provide the lousiest graphics performance since the introduction of the "2D accelerator" back in the day!' bandwagon; but I am deeply underimpressed by the fad of creating 'apps' that are little more than the platform's HTML engine wrapped in enough vendor-specific shitsauce that you can't call the result a webpage anymore. It appears to be for 'mobile' what building website menu structures entirely in Flash for no obvious reason whatsoever was to the web of old.