Agreed. I don't even like the new versions of Opera hiding part of the URL on me. I like to see the messy URL with all of the 'crap' added to the end. I don't like the idea of the browser hiding it from me, and certainly don't like the idea of the browser hiding everything from me.
We know there have been issues in the past with people finding ways of making the URL look like the site you think you are on. Well, if you hide the URL bar, they don't even have to do that any more.
Configurable is good, it means that I can turn it on (for now?!), but if they really really want to add this, the default should be to show the URL bar and give someone the option to hide if it they so desire.
It would also be nice if they offered us some way of finding out what data they had for each of us too. I couldn't remember which email address I used to sign up (found out, and luckily I don't use that email address for anything else), I don't know if the credit card details they have for me are valid, if they have my address, name, etc. And I can't login to the network to find out.
A friend of mine once couldn't lock his car - the button on the key wouldn't lock the car. He tried various things like waiting for 30 minutes to see if the car would lock itself, etc.
Eventually he was talking to a friend on the phone telling her about his situation ('cos he couldn't leave the car unlocked), and she asked him if he tried turning the key in lock...!
So yes, gadgets do affect our common sense. We get used to using a gadget to do something that we forget how to do that action without the gadget. Are we fast becoming a race of needing a specific tool to do a specific job...?
I thought I read somewhere that Osama was killed a week ago, not on Sunday. They were waiting for official confirmation before releasing the information that he was killed....
Ditto. I tend to put some stuff in a drawer in case I need to refer back to it, but every once in a while I clear out the drawer of all the stuff that I never referred back to, which is all of it.
I was lucky that I had a year of household bills, as I did need them recently. Usually you are asked for stuff like bank statements, and you can just ask your bank to send them out when you need them.
Agreed. I have one email address that I use for my 'official' stuff, and my normal email address that my friends all use. (plus several more for spam dumps and various other things). I can use my Gmail to collate them all for me, so I don't need to check them all individually - I get them all to my phone. I also have Gmail setup so that I can email from any of these addresses too, so the recipient still gets an email from the address they have.
So yeah, let the Government host an email address for each person, and let them pick it up however they like. The main problem here, of course, is deciding on what the email address should be. Should it be @whatever (privacy issues), or @whatever (duplicate names, so who gets the real one and who gets the ones with numbers). Or @whatever, and then tell people what it is (either via a card, or on a social security card that has this number on the back, or some other means). That way, it's somewhat anonymous, but the Government has your email address linked to your social security number, so if you lose they you can easily recover it for you.
I do wonder, though, if the Government might then put something in place to detect if an email has been read, and what consequences this could have...
'Your Honour, we can see from our records that the accused read the email on October 27th of last year, so he was aware of the.....'
And could this lead to problems if you have GMail pick up the email for you, mark is as read on the server, and then filter it into spam for you?
Yeah, American's do a lot of their cooking by ratio instead of by weight. A typical cup measure (in metric) holds 250mls, and Tesco will gladly sell you a nice set of cup, 1/2 cup, 1/4 cup and 1/3 cup, all bound with a little ring. They are handy for some things.
The ratio method works well if you don't have a weighing scales, or don't want to worry about weighing stuff out. It's quick to take a cup measure and measure out 4 cups of flour very quickly, not as quick to measure out 700g of flour, say.
Also, as the cup is a measure of volume, not weight, then the conversion to weight it a bit awkward, as you have to know the conversion for each ingredient. 1 cup of flour does not weigh the same as 1 cup of wheat bran, for example (I think 1 cup of wheat bran weighs about 50g, whilst 1 cup of flours weights over 200g). So yeah, for us people who prefer our recipes in weights, the American cup-system is a bit annoying.
In my lifetime, most of the Imperial -> Metric conversion were done. I didn't learn imperial measurements in school, by then we were being taught metric (centimetres, decimetres, metres, etc). I did learn them from my mother, though, so I know that there are 16 ozs to the lb, and 14 lbs to the stone (a measurement most American don't know). While we learned metric, distances and speeds were all still in miles and miles per hour, and petrol was sold by the gallon (UK gallon, not US gallon - the UK one is bigger!).
I remember road signs in miles (and sometimes you still see some of them that were never removed - ah, nostalgia!). And I remember when they were all replaces with distances in km. Speed limits were still in miles, so we all got used to converting from km back to miles (80km=50miles), so we could work out how long it would take us to get to our destination.
A few years ago (7 or 8), the switch was made to speed limits. Now, everyone thinks in distances in km and speeds in km/h - the two match, so the switch just clicked in our heads. We now didn't need to convert from km to miles to see how long it would take, 'cos we were thinking about speeds in km/h. The switch happened in our heads very quickly - you quickly get used to the feel of 50km/h (~30mph), 60km/h (~40mph), 80km/h (~50mph), 100km/h(~60mph), and 120km/h (~70mph). The actual differences are minutes - 120km/h is faster than 70mph (it's about 73 in reality), so motorway driving got faster (wu hoo!).
While the change took many years (distances were all changed about 15 years before the speed limits, if not more), it was easy to do. The logistical part was harder for the speed limits than for the distances, as all speed limits had to change countrywide at midnight on a particular date, while distance signs could be changed gradually.
I used to have a good feel for what a mile was, and not have a feel for a kilometre at all. Now, I have a feel for a kilometre, but I don't have a feel for a mile. In just a few short years.
In all, the switch is easy, when planned right.
I still know the imperial measurements, and how they convert to metric. When following a recipe, I prefer to follow it in metric rather than imperial, but the conversions are generally easy. A decision was made that 25g = 1oz for recipes - can't get easier than that. (In actuality, 1oz = 28.something g, but is rounded down to 25g for convenience).
There are some things that I still think of in imperial, but only because I don't use the values anywhere else, or don't really understand them. I fill my tyres to 31psi. To me, I don't really care what that means. I know that my tyres should be at 31psi, and the tyres on my bike should be between 40 and 50psi. It's just a number on a guage.
In other European countries, tyre pressure is in other units. They don't have psi there, so if I have to fill my tyres in, say, Germany, then I need to do a conversion. Until then, the gauge has psi and that other measure on it, and I just look at the one I'm used to.
So I have understand the reluctance of some people to change - they are used to looking at number and understanding what they mean. And they may feel that they would not get used to looking at the numbers to get a different meaning. But they would be surprised at how easy it is.
Here, the weather is in degrees C. During my life, it has always been degrees C. During my parents life, it was degrees F, so they had to get used to that change. For a number of years, the weather forecast was given it both units, typically degrees C first, then degrees F...
"Over Dublin today, temperature should reach about 22 C. That's 72 F."
Very simple - that way, people learn over time what both numbers mean. They become somewhat interchangeable, without having to do the calculation. Then, gradually, you drop one and leave the other.
To me, it makes more intuitive sense to talk about sub-freezing temperatures in terms of negative numbers. I know that 32F is freezing point, but it doesn't seem intuitive to me that 20F is indeed very cold. It does make sense that -7C is very cold, though.
That's what public/private keys are for, and digital signatures...
Having them for proving identity is one thing, forcing them on each and every connection and thus not allowing anyone to post anonymously is quite another. Privacy issues, yadda yadda.
Just trust that the big guys in charge are not going to do the wrong thing (ok, not likely, but try to think that way and you'll feel better), and remember that the amount of information flowing over the internet pipes is simply massive. Yes, they can use filtering and regular-expression-type searches to filter out your data, but firstly they have to want to filter out your data. And they really don't care if people are looking at pr0n (unless there are kids involved). Individuals don't matter to them, for the most part. Global trends do matter (especially to advertisers), but individuals don't.
Break the law, do stuff that you should do, and yes you might raise a red flag. But being a normal person (I assume!), what cause to they have to track anything you do?
You are insignificant. Remember that, and feel joy in it.
Personally, the only retouching I do on photos is to - remove dust - select 'automatically fix' to adjust brightness, contrast and colouring, which usually makes the picture look more real.
I don't remove blemishes - they are a part of the person. So is tooth colour. Or anything else. I want to remember the person for who they were, not for some idiolised version of who they were. (I have my dreams for that...em...)
Agreed - to my eyes, on the panasonic site, the picture on the left is much nicer than the one on the right. She's a very pretty girl anyway, and the post-processing removes a lot of that, and removes depth from the picture
(looks almost like her face has been squashed against a sheet of glass, which makes one wonder what she looks like when she pulls away from the glass again)
With all the controversy about size-0 and size-00 models and how they affect people's perceptions of themselves, isn't this just feeding the problem?
Don't like how you look in a photo? Don't bother learning to love yourself for who you are, just use our new cameras and our new digital mirrors, which all change your physical appearance to one that you prefer to look at, and you'll never need to know... (and 50% rebate on our rose-coloured glasses to boot)
nor in the format that I use most. I typically type a smiley as:-)
But it only has:)
Which, personally, I don't like. Maybe it's configurable/programmable. In which case, the boss needs to take care he doesn't piss his programmers off...
I know us customers generally mean nothing to businesses, but surely even ISPs can see that they are primarily there to allow us poor users to use their service to access to the big bad Internet. And by that, I mean _all_ of out. I'm paying my ISP for access to the sites _I_ want to access, not access to the sites that they, out of the goodness of their profits, they'll allow me to access.
Perhaps they can run this another way - 3 tiers. I pay for 8mb broadband, so I get 8mb to any site - after all, that's what _I'm_ paying them for. Or, I take their _free_ package, which is paid for by the corporations, and thus can only access (quickly) those that paid to allow me access - if I'm not paying, I can hardly complain. That way, everyone wins.
Or am I just making too much sense for these guys to comprehend?
While I can appreciate this sort of thing from an academic perspective (it's quite impressive, actually), I find the idea of this in the real world quite sickening. Not sure I like the idea of a vending machine putting me into a category based on how I look. Or based on anything, for that matter.
Why can't a vending machine just be a vending machine?
Me: "Hmmm - I think I'll have a mars bar" Vending Machine: "Are you sure? You look like you need a razor, a box of tampons, and a coke" Me: Fist-of-death
Android comes with support for H.264, which left hope that it would become the standard and be useful on android phones. Now it appears that Google are turning their back on it.
So if the effect persisted 6 months later, then those who had the current put in the 'bad' direction were left with slower running brains during those 6 months?!
This reminds me of the input method used on the Palm: Graffiti. With Graffiti, you had to learn how the Palm expected you to write the letters. Most was just uppercase versions of the letters, but some were quite different. It took a while to learn.
It's easy enough to learn, but there was a case reported of someone saying that handwriting of those people using Graffiti was suffering. Sometimes they'd write a Graffiti version of the letter they were writing, or somewhere between the letter and the graffiti version. Flow of handwriting was an issue, and stunted writing doesn't look clear.
I'm curious whether this method would cause a similar issue. It may not, as you are not writing with strokes that approximate the letters themselves, but will be interesting in the long run to see the effect.
If I had 2.2 on my phone, I'd download this when it's available to try it out. Unfortunately, I have an X10, and am still waiting for the 2.1 upgrade to be make available to me...:(
If not typing in a word processor, 2 spaces are required in order to make the text more legible. This follows for forums, HTML, text editors, comments in code, etc.
Yes, a Word Processor will space things out for you, but I, for one, will configure OO.org or Word with the '2 spaces' option. I don't like being reliant on technology to do stuff like this for me - personally, I feel that (certainly in some cases) it's dangerous. Extreme example - if a pilot always lands a plane on autopilot, then he's out of practise for when an emergency comes along.
I learned to type on a computer (a commodore 64, actually), and I learned to hit space twice. Now, when I hit a full stop (period, of you US guys), I automatically hit space twice before starting a new sentence. It's like automatically pressing the clutch before changing gears, or automatically putting the indicator on before turning the a corner - when you learn to do something, you do it automatically.
Yep, let the word processors adjust stuff automatically, but don't stop teaching the double-space. And don't stop using it either. If you get out of the habit of using it because your word processors will adjust the width of the space automatically, then you won't use it in place where this adjustment won't happen automatically.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I don't even like the new versions of Opera hiding part of the URL on me. I like to see the messy URL with all of the 'crap' added to the end. I don't like the idea of the browser hiding it from me, and certainly don't like the idea of the browser hiding everything from me.
We know there have been issues in the past with people finding ways of making the URL look like the site you think you are on. Well, if you hide the URL bar, they don't even have to do that any more.
Configurable is good, it means that I can turn it on (for now?!), but if they really really want to add this, the default should be to show the URL bar and give someone the option to hide if it they so desire.
He got his first car when he was 17, and it required a key to lock it...
Agreed.
It would also be nice if they offered us some way of finding out what data they had for each of us too. I couldn't remember which email address I used to sign up (found out, and luckily I don't use that email address for anything else), I don't know if the credit card details they have for me are valid, if they have my address, name, etc. And I can't login to the network to find out.
"...A program for U.S. PlayStation Network and Qriocity customers..."
Hopefully they will do the same for the rest of the world too.
A friend of mine once couldn't lock his car - the button on the key wouldn't lock the car. He tried various things like waiting for 30 minutes to see if the car would lock itself, etc.
Eventually he was talking to a friend on the phone telling her about his situation ('cos he couldn't leave the car unlocked), and she asked him if he tried turning the key in lock...!
So yes, gadgets do affect our common sense. We get used to using a gadget to do something that we forget how to do that action without the gadget. Are we fast becoming a race of needing a specific tool to do a specific job...?
I thought I read somewhere that Osama was killed a week ago, not on Sunday. They were waiting for official confirmation before releasing the information that he was killed....
Did I mis-read? Was I mis-informed?
Or is this tweet mis-matched to the event?
Ditto. I tend to put some stuff in a drawer in case I need to refer back to it, but every once in a while I clear out the drawer of all the stuff that I never referred back to, which is all of it.
I was lucky that I had a year of household bills, as I did need them recently. Usually you are asked for stuff like bank statements, and you can just ask your bank to send them out when you need them.
Agreed. I have one email address that I use for my 'official' stuff, and my normal email address that my friends all use. (plus several more for spam dumps and various other things). I can use my Gmail to collate them all for me, so I don't need to check them all individually - I get them all to my phone. I also have Gmail setup so that I can email from any of these addresses too, so the recipient still gets an email from the address they have.
So yeah, let the Government host an email address for each person, and let them pick it up however they like. The main problem here, of course, is deciding on what the email address should be. Should it be @whatever (privacy issues), or @whatever (duplicate names, so who gets the real one and who gets the ones with numbers). Or @whatever, and then tell people what it is (either via a card, or on a social security card that has this number on the back, or some other means). That way, it's somewhat anonymous, but the Government has your email address linked to your social security number, so if you lose they you can easily recover it for you.
I do wonder, though, if the Government might then put something in place to detect if an email has been read, and what consequences this could have...
'Your Honour, we can see from our records that the accused read the email on October 27th of last year, so he was aware of the .....'
And could this lead to problems if you have GMail pick up the email for you, mark is as read on the server, and then filter it into spam for you?
Yeah, American's do a lot of their cooking by ratio instead of by weight. A typical cup measure (in metric) holds 250mls, and Tesco will gladly sell you a nice set of cup, 1/2 cup, 1/4 cup and 1/3 cup, all bound with a little ring. They are handy for some things.
The ratio method works well if you don't have a weighing scales, or don't want to worry about weighing stuff out. It's quick to take a cup measure and measure out 4 cups of flour very quickly, not as quick to measure out 700g of flour, say.
Also, as the cup is a measure of volume, not weight, then the conversion to weight it a bit awkward, as you have to know the conversion for each ingredient. 1 cup of flour does not weigh the same as 1 cup of wheat bran, for example (I think 1 cup of wheat bran weighs about 50g, whilst 1 cup of flours weights over 200g). So yeah, for us people who prefer our recipes in weights, the American cup-system is a bit annoying.
But it's not an Imperial measurement! ;-)
In my lifetime, most of the Imperial -> Metric conversion were done. I didn't learn imperial measurements in school, by then we were being taught metric (centimetres, decimetres, metres, etc). I did learn them from my mother, though, so I know that there are 16 ozs to the lb, and 14 lbs to the stone (a measurement most American don't know). While we learned metric, distances and speeds were all still in miles and miles per hour, and petrol was sold by the gallon (UK gallon, not US gallon - the UK one is bigger!).
I remember road signs in miles (and sometimes you still see some of them that were never removed - ah, nostalgia!). And I remember when they were all replaces with distances in km. Speed limits were still in miles, so we all got used to converting from km back to miles (80km=50miles), so we could work out how long it would take us to get to our destination.
A few years ago (7 or 8), the switch was made to speed limits. Now, everyone thinks in distances in km and speeds in km/h - the two match, so the switch just clicked in our heads. We now didn't need to convert from km to miles to see how long it would take, 'cos we were thinking about speeds in km/h. The switch happened in our heads very quickly - you quickly get used to the feel of 50km/h (~30mph), 60km/h (~40mph), 80km/h (~50mph), 100km/h(~60mph), and 120km/h (~70mph). The actual differences are minutes - 120km/h is faster than 70mph (it's about 73 in reality), so motorway driving got faster (wu hoo!).
While the change took many years (distances were all changed about 15 years before the speed limits, if not more), it was easy to do. The logistical part was harder for the speed limits than for the distances, as all speed limits had to change countrywide at midnight on a particular date, while distance signs could be changed gradually.
I used to have a good feel for what a mile was, and not have a feel for a kilometre at all. Now, I have a feel for a kilometre, but I don't have a feel for a mile. In just a few short years.
In all, the switch is easy, when planned right.
I still know the imperial measurements, and how they convert to metric. When following a recipe, I prefer to follow it in metric rather than imperial, but the conversions are generally easy. A decision was made that 25g = 1oz for recipes - can't get easier than that. (In actuality, 1oz = 28.something g, but is rounded down to 25g for convenience).
There are some things that I still think of in imperial, but only because I don't use the values anywhere else, or don't really understand them. I fill my tyres to 31psi. To me, I don't really care what that means. I know that my tyres should be at 31psi, and the tyres on my bike should be between 40 and 50psi. It's just a number on a guage.
In other European countries, tyre pressure is in other units. They don't have psi there, so if I have to fill my tyres in, say, Germany, then I need to do a conversion. Until then, the gauge has psi and that other measure on it, and I just look at the one I'm used to.
So I have understand the reluctance of some people to change - they are used to looking at number and understanding what they mean. And they may feel that they would not get used to looking at the numbers to get a different meaning. But they would be surprised at how easy it is.
Here, the weather is in degrees C. During my life, it has always been degrees C. During my parents life, it was degrees F, so they had to get used to that change. For a number of years, the weather forecast was given it both units, typically degrees C first, then degrees F...
"Over Dublin today, temperature should reach about 22 C. That's 72 F."
Very simple - that way, people learn over time what both numbers mean. They become somewhat interchangeable, without having to do the calculation. Then, gradually, you drop one and leave the other.
To me, it makes more intuitive sense to talk about sub-freezing temperatures in terms of negative numbers. I know that 32F is freezing point, but it doesn't seem intuitive to me that 20F is indeed very cold. It does make sense that -7C is very cold, though.
"If you don't know how to maintain true anonymity (I'm behind 7 proxies!)"
Each of which logs your every click...
That's what public/private keys are for, and digital signatures...
Having them for proving identity is one thing, forcing them on each and every connection and thus not allowing anyone to post anonymously is quite another. Privacy issues, yadda yadda.
Just trust that the big guys in charge are not going to do the wrong thing (ok, not likely, but try to think that way and you'll feel better), and remember that the amount of information flowing over the internet pipes is simply massive. Yes, they can use filtering and regular-expression-type searches to filter out your data, but firstly they have to want to filter out your data. And they really don't care if people are looking at pr0n (unless there are kids involved). Individuals don't matter to them, for the most part. Global trends do matter (especially to advertisers), but individuals don't.
Break the law, do stuff that you should do, and yes you might raise a red flag. But being a normal person (I assume!), what cause to they have to track anything you do?
You are insignificant. Remember that, and feel joy in it.
Personally, the only retouching I do on photos is to
- remove dust
- select 'automatically fix' to adjust brightness, contrast and colouring, which usually makes the picture look more real.
I don't remove blemishes - they are a part of the person. So is tooth colour. Or anything else. I want to remember the person for who they were, not for some idiolised version of who they were. (I have my dreams for that...em...)
Agreed - to my eyes, on the panasonic site, the picture on the left is much nicer than the one on the right. She's a very pretty girl anyway, and the post-processing removes a lot of that, and removes depth from the picture
(looks almost like her face has been squashed against a sheet of glass, which makes one wonder what she looks like when she pulls away from the glass again)
With all the controversy about size-0 and size-00 models and how they affect people's perceptions of themselves, isn't this just feeding the problem?
Don't like how you look in a photo? Don't bother learning to love yourself for who you are, just use our new cameras and our new digital mirrors, which all change your physical appearance to one that you prefer to look at, and you'll never need to know... (and 50% rebate on our rose-coloured glasses to boot)
*sigh*
nor in the format that I use most. I typically type a smiley as :-)
But it only has :)
Which, personally, I don't like. Maybe it's configurable/programmable. In which case, the boss needs to take care he doesn't piss his programmers off...
I know us customers generally mean nothing to businesses, but surely even ISPs can see that they are primarily there to allow us poor users to use their service to access to the big bad Internet. And by that, I mean _all_ of out. I'm paying my ISP for access to the sites _I_ want to access, not access to the sites that they, out of the goodness of their profits, they'll allow me to access.
Perhaps they can run this another way - 3 tiers. I pay for 8mb broadband, so I get 8mb to any site - after all, that's what _I'm_ paying them for. Or, I take their _free_ package, which is paid for by the corporations, and thus can only access (quickly) those that paid to allow me access - if I'm not paying, I can hardly complain. That way, everyone wins.
Or am I just making too much sense for these guys to comprehend?
You mean like clippy from MS Office
"I see you are trying to buy a Mars bar? Would you like me to help?"
Press no!
"Really? Because I think you look a little dehydrated and could do with a coke too."
Press go away!
"Aww, come on, it's only a coke with that Mars bar. And it's a big coke, so maybe you'll want a Snickers too..."
*fist of death*
While I can appreciate this sort of thing from an academic perspective (it's quite impressive, actually), I find the idea of this in the real world quite sickening. Not sure I like the idea of a vending machine putting me into a category based on how I look. Or based on anything, for that matter.
Why can't a vending machine just be a vending machine?
Me: "Hmmm - I think I'll have a mars bar"
Vending Machine: "Are you sure? You look like you need a razor, a box of tampons, and a coke"
Me: Fist-of-death
I predict many years of having multiple browsers installed...
wait - I have multiple browsers installed...
So, I predict many years of, effectively, no difference to end users like me.
Android comes with support for H.264, which left hope that it would become the standard and be useful on android phones.
Now it appears that Google are turning their back on it.
pity.
So if the effect persisted 6 months later, then those who had the current put in the 'bad' direction were left with slower running brains during those 6 months?!
This reminds me of the input method used on the Palm: Graffiti. With Graffiti, you had to learn how the Palm expected you to write the letters. Most was just uppercase versions of the letters, but some were quite different. It took a while to learn.
It's easy enough to learn, but there was a case reported of someone saying that handwriting of those people using Graffiti was suffering. Sometimes they'd write a Graffiti version of the letter they were writing, or somewhere between the letter and the graffiti version. Flow of handwriting was an issue, and stunted writing doesn't look clear.
I'm curious whether this method would cause a similar issue. It may not, as you are not writing with strokes that approximate the letters themselves, but will be interesting in the long run to see the effect.
If I had 2.2 on my phone, I'd download this when it's available to try it out. Unfortunately, I have an X10, and am still waiting for the 2.1 upgrade to be make available to me... :(
T. (repost - wasn't logged in last time)
If not typing in a word processor, 2 spaces are required in order to make the text more legible. This follows for forums, HTML, text editors, comments in code, etc.
Yes, a Word Processor will space things out for you, but I, for one, will configure OO.org or Word with the '2 spaces' option. I don't like being reliant on technology to do stuff like this for me - personally, I feel that (certainly in some cases) it's dangerous. Extreme example - if a pilot always lands a plane on autopilot, then he's out of practise for when an emergency comes along.
I learned to type on a computer (a commodore 64, actually), and I learned to hit space twice. Now, when I hit a full stop (period, of you US guys), I automatically hit space twice before starting a new sentence. It's like automatically pressing the clutch before changing gears, or automatically putting the indicator on before turning the a corner - when you learn to do something, you do it automatically.
Yep, let the word processors adjust stuff automatically, but don't stop teaching the double-space. And don't stop using it either. If you get out of the habit of using it because your word processors will adjust the width of the space automatically, then you won't use it in place where this adjustment won't happen automatically.