Better no "innovation" than new ideas about how to protect the things they developed in the 80s.
What most huge software vendors are innovating is how to make people upgrade tho their old stuff still works. To invent a small change in a user interface is no big deal, but to invent some evil crap that will make everybody have to use it is -- like product activation, incompatible closed file formats, simply stopping supporting while being the only entity who could do support.
To say smth nice about Apple here, i like how the CapsLock key through magical design innovation becae the biggest key on their keyboards now!
Having seen thesophisticated anti-virus program Norton Anti-Virus 2004 in action on WinXP i cannot think that any worm you might catch could be worse than this.
For people who don't use Outlook but Thunderbird (which is a better approach to stop viruses i think) it scans all the mail files all the time, blocking even Thunderbird's access to them. And these mail files can be huge, as they are just plain text of all the messages. It makes everything so slow it is unbelievable.
If this Anti-Virus would now start to send email around automatically it would really be worse than a worm.
I cannot see how this piracy market is not innovative. Being there myself, i bought "Super Mario Bros" for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis). Somebody ripped the graphics, wrote a new game for a console that was never allowed to play Mario and put it into a real cartdridge. This console was never allowed to play Mario. -- Granted it is not as playable as the "real" Mario, but the music is great, it has some new elements and you cannot jump on enemies.
There was also a Pokémon game for the Sega and many such things for the Gameboy Advance.
When web site developers foolishly started using these proprietary tags, web site viewers realized that half the sites they were going to didn't work "properly" in Netscape, and Netscape lost marketshare.
MS was so clever to include all the "proprietary tags" of Netscape into their browser and added some more. (Except blink.) -- Strange how fast all this is forgotten.
Buit the professional web is boring. XHTML is harder to understand because it separates content and presentation. For most people, these two things are the same. And who wants a professional to make the look for your dog's homepage? All these XML, XHTML and whatever uber-compatible standards that are invented now move the web into the hands of professionals. So e-commerce on cellphones all the way. Who cares about that? I want animated GIFs and background patterns and ! A good thing that it will probably be supported by browsers forever.
I would agree that the Netscape-heritage HTML is horrible, but not because it is content and presentation at the same time, but because it is completely not logical. If for example the "bgcolor" attribute would work everywhere, not just in and some table tags, the web would be even more cool today. I mean more dogs and family trip photo albums that look really like something you would expect from a medium like the web.
If you don't like what Verisign is doing, get off the Internet.
It's still possible to remember IP adresses and port numbers instead of this name resolving. The DNS is probably the one service that has drawn evil to the net as nothing else.
If you look for a file that doesn't exist on your hard drive, you will get ads for MS Office, telling you that you can create your own files with that!
The situation in Germany is this: Stupid-ass politicians proudly say of themselves that they did something against Neo-Nazis by denying access to information located in another country, falling under completely different laws. The German public should think: Wow, no Nazis anymore, thanks Mr Büssow! In fact the Nazis are still around and the Germans should be the only ones not to know about it. That's sick.
Go to odem.org for more info about this (German language).
The thing is: if google purges pages from their results, nobody notices. There is no placeholder saying "not displayed result". There are instead gazillions of other results to spend time with.
If Burger King sells you a burger without sauce or whatever (always these metaphors, are they really needed?), you will notice that they betray, but with google it is not noticeable. And so all the "use something else if you don't like it" is not valid. Because, as a google user, you are not able to see that their product is flawed. It doesn't give you any reason to switch, because "it works".
And i wonder why there is so few criticism instead of this old-school libertarian crap about google. As nowadays, google is in fact the center of the web.
In the net, there may be no power structure built in technically, but they are created by usage of the medium.
And if you care more for quick response times and less about what's behind (like most people do), you will get something like AOL, disguised as a super geeky freaky technically cool thing.
Diversity needs to be preserved, google doees the opposite. And yes, it's their fault.
Sony is so arrogant it is sometimes even funny. I called their service line because the screen of my two year old, incredibly expensive Vaio notebook wasn't working anymore, obviously a hardware defect. I was connected with a service personal and asked how long the fixing would take, how much it would roughly cost and where to send this computer to.
I was told as my computer was two years old, any information they give to me will cost 20 Euros.
My answer was that first of all i think this is insane and secondly i do not have a credit card. I was told if i don't have a credit card then i should use somebody else's. I said this is impossible and was told that i would have to transfer the money to Sony in this case. After that (takes usually 2 to 3 days) he would be happy to answer my questions.
Remind you, the question was just how much a repair would cost and how long it would take.
When i tried to buy a notebook battery from them i was as well treated as if i had leprosy.
Because of this and other efforts to block access to information on the net, me and a friend of mine have set up a commercial info telephone.
For just some a minute we will read to you live on the phone all porn sites you ever want. We also describe pictures. No problem coz we make sure our internet connection is unfiltered!
It's a vinyl disc, each side with parts for scratching, locked grooves, a ravy track and data track. You can record it on datasette and load it into your Atari or Commodore. There's a commodore side and an Atari side, each produced with the corresponding system. And the design is really sweet.
The interactivity is really great i'd say... Of course 1024 times better than any "interactive" music program ever done in director or similar evil macromedia software.
but a 3d environment with some kind of headset where you can _look_ around would probably be enough for me.
Maybe try connecting more monitors to your workstation, this is a fine enhancement i can recommend to anybody.
Or for the lovers of distorted text, check The Visual OS and autostereoscopic display from Heinrich Hertz Institute. I has at least some purpose to 3D by showing connections between programs.
Humans have a strong ability to visualise things spatially.
This is not true for most people. I have worked in a VR lab for some time and was witnessing studies about spatial perception that were conducted there.
Most test persons had quite good sense of space of some meters in front of them. After this short distance, the spatial perception usually gets very bad, let alone people that cannot see 3D at all.
3D has numerous problems, most of them are "things are behind others and you cannot see them". If you use 3D for files or other abstract things, you must know that you are most of the time reproducing the real world which is in many cases bad. Why shall i want to walk somewhere to get info or to fly up 20 meter high towers when i can press some keys or file a search query that gives me a one-dimensional list that is easy to overlook?
Humans have a much stronger ability to visualize things 2D than 3D. Even if you think that in your flat you have things organized in 3D, it's not true. You put things in shelves one besides another, or you make groups on the floor, or put them into drawers. You switch angle several times, but each hierarchical level is 2D.
Overviews are always 2D, it's an abstraction of 3D, and 1D text has the largest abstraction.
3D is great when you work with virtual real objects (architecture, industrial design, geolocial structures, driving simulation...) or when you want very rough information about something, like "there's a hell of a lot over there and few things over there, connected with the blue stuff over there".
It also looks cool in movies. But not for files, maps, lists, tasks, texts, archives...
Most people who build 3D environments just start with file systems because that's the only data structures they have at hand. I suggest to get so data that is more useful for 3D first. Like from a survey or location of oil under ground or fish population in the ocean or something...
The Heinrich-Hertz-Institute has released some detailed papers about projection technology like this a long time ago. Especially interesting is the proposal for an operating system using the stereoscopic image.
Slashdot Mirror
Better no "innovation" than new ideas about how to protect the things they developed in the 80s.
What most huge software vendors are innovating is how to make people upgrade tho their old stuff still works. To invent a small change in a user interface is no big deal, but to invent some evil crap that will make everybody have to use it is -- like product activation, incompatible closed file formats, simply stopping supporting while being the only entity who could do support.
To say smth nice about Apple here, i like how the CapsLock key through magical design innovation becae the biggest key on their keyboards now!
Having seen thesophisticated anti-virus program Norton Anti-Virus 2004 in action on WinXP i cannot think that any worm you might catch could be worse than this.
For people who don't use Outlook but Thunderbird (which is a better approach to stop viruses i think) it scans all the mail files all the time, blocking even Thunderbird's access to them. And these mail files can be huge, as they are just plain text of all the messages. It makes everything so slow it is unbelievable.
If this Anti-Virus would now start to send email around automatically it would really be worse than a worm.
I cannot see how this piracy market is not innovative. Being there myself, i bought "Super Mario Bros" for the Sega Megadrive (Genesis). Somebody ripped the graphics, wrote a new game for a console that was never allowed to play Mario and put it into a real cartdridge. This console was never allowed to play Mario. -- Granted it is not as playable as the "real" Mario, but the music is great, it has some new elements and you cannot jump on enemies.
There was also a Pokémon game for the Sega and many such things for the Gameboy Advance.
MS was so clever to include all the "proprietary tags" of Netscape into their browser and added some more. (Except blink.) -- Strange how fast all this is forgotten.
Buit the professional web is boring. XHTML is harder to understand because it separates content and presentation. For most people, these two things are the same. And who wants a professional to make the look for your dog's homepage? All these XML, XHTML and whatever uber-compatible standards that are invented now move the web into the hands of professionals. So e-commerce on cellphones all the way. Who cares about that? I want animated GIFs and background patterns and ! A good thing that it will probably be supported by browsers forever.
I would agree that the Netscape-heritage HTML is horrible, but not because it is content and presentation at the same time, but because it is completely not logical. If for example the "bgcolor" attribute would work everywhere, not just in and some table tags, the web would be even more cool today. I mean more dogs and family trip photo albums that look really like something you would expect from a medium like the web.
Of course you don't see the point if you never minimize your windows, coz it will be under them!
The Javascripts check to which sites you leave from the sitefinder.
If you don't like what Verisign is doing, get off the Internet.
It's still possible to remember IP adresses and port numbers instead of this name resolving. The DNS is probably the one service that has drawn evil to the net as nothing else.
Prolly this guy's on a Mac and too lazy to say it. Coz on Mac Explorer there is no MSN search page.
If you look for a file that doesn't exist on your hard drive, you will get ads for MS Office, telling you that you can create your own files with that!
The situation in Germany is this: Stupid-ass politicians proudly say of themselves that they did something against Neo-Nazis by denying access to information located in another country, falling under completely different laws. The German public should think: Wow, no Nazis anymore, thanks Mr Büssow! In fact the Nazis are still around and the Germans should be the only ones not to know about it. That's sick.
Go to odem.org for more info about this (German language).The thing is: if google purges pages from their results, nobody notices. There is no placeholder saying "not displayed result". There are instead gazillions of other results to spend time with.
If Burger King sells you a burger without sauce or whatever (always these metaphors, are they really needed?), you will notice that they betray, but with google it is not noticeable. And so all the "use something else if you don't like it" is not valid. Because, as a google user, you are not able to see that their product is flawed. It doesn't give you any reason to switch, because "it works".
And i wonder why there is so few criticism instead of this old-school libertarian crap about google. As nowadays, google is in fact the center of the web.
In the net, there may be no power structure built in technically, but they are created by usage of the medium.
And if you care more for quick response times and less about what's behind (like most people do), you will get something like AOL, disguised as a super geeky freaky technically cool thing.
Diversity needs to be preserved, google doees the opposite. And yes, it's their fault.
Sony is so arrogant it is sometimes even funny. I called their service line because the screen of my two year old, incredibly expensive Vaio notebook wasn't working anymore, obviously a hardware defect. I was connected with a service personal and asked how long the fixing would take, how much it would roughly cost and where to send this computer to.
I was told as my computer was two years old, any information they give to me will cost 20 Euros.
My answer was that first of all i think this is insane and secondly i do not have a credit card. I was told if i don't have a credit card then i should use somebody else's. I said this is impossible and was told that i would have to transfer the money to Sony in this case. After that (takes usually 2 to 3 days) he would be happy to answer my questions.
Remind you, the question was just how much a repair would cost and how long it would take.
When i tried to buy a notebook battery from them i was as well treated as if i had leprosy.
I feel ashamed i ever gave Sony any money.
The place to be is micromusic.net.
Because of this and other efforts to block access to information on the net, me and a friend of mine have set up a commercial info telephone.
For just some a minute we will read to you live on the phone all porn sites you ever want. We also describe pictures. No problem coz we make sure our internet connection is unfiltered!
For details check this site: TeleTrust.Info or use the babelfished English version.
Nobody will be able to stop the flow of information!
My favorite piece of multimedia ever is The 8-Bit Construction Set by Beige Records.
It's a vinyl disc, each side with parts for scratching, locked grooves, a ravy track and data track. You can record it on datasette and load it into your Atari or Commodore. There's a commodore side and an Atari side, each produced with the corresponding system. And the design is really sweet.
The interactivity is really great i'd say ... Of course 1024 times better than any "interactive" music program ever done in director or similar evil macromedia software.
Or for the lovers of distorted text, check The Visual OS and autostereoscopic display from Heinrich Hertz Institute. I has at least some purpose to 3D by showing connections between programs.
Most test persons had quite good sense of space of some meters in front of them. After this short distance, the spatial perception usually gets very bad, let alone people that cannot see 3D at all.
3D has numerous problems, most of them are "things are behind others and you cannot see them". If you use 3D for files or other abstract things, you must know that you are most of the time reproducing the real world which is in many cases bad. Why shall i want to walk somewhere to get info or to fly up 20 meter high towers when i can press some keys or file a search query that gives me a one-dimensional list that is easy to overlook?
Humans have a much stronger ability to visualize things 2D than 3D. Even if you think that in your flat you have things organized in 3D, it's not true. You put things in shelves one besides another, or you make groups on the floor, or put them into drawers. You switch angle several times, but each hierarchical level is 2D.
Overviews are always 2D, it's an abstraction of 3D, and 1D text has the largest abstraction.
3D is great when you work with virtual real objects (architecture, industrial design, geolocial structures, driving simulation ...) or when you want very rough information about something, like "there's a hell of a lot over there and few things over there, connected with the blue stuff over there".
It also looks cool in movies. But not for files, maps, lists, tasks, texts, archives ...
Most people who build 3D environments just start with file systems because that's the only data structures they have at hand. I suggest to get so data that is more useful for 3D first. Like from a survey or location of oil under ground or fish population in the ocean or something ...
The Heinrich-Hertz-Institute has released some detailed papers about projection technology like this a long time ago. Especially interesting is the proposal for an operating system using the stereoscopic image.
The display
Something about the Operating System for the screen.
press release about all this.
It's from 1997 actually