Re:Serious Question...
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't know, I hate flashy.
Here's an example: do "regular users" prefer the new look of WinXP, or the old one? My mother-in-law, in setting up a system for an elderly friend of hers, set the overall system to the Win95 look-and-feel, after I showed her how. She also had the very good idea of clearing off the desktop to a blank background, and putting the icons for 4 or 5 apps right there, so the newbie could avoid the start button altogether for now.
Anyway I hate the new fisher price look, and am grateful that they include the ability to rollback...which of course raises the spectre of using the same GUI for the next couple of decades and becoming an old fogie....
But I don't think the Win95-ish interface is that bad, frankly. The taskbar was actually a throwback to the earliest version of Windows that had the "running programs" all in one place, but that isn't that bad of a thing...running programs should look different from program launchers in my opinion. (That's a mistake I think OSX makes, kind of mixing the two)
Maybe I'm too short sighted about the future of GUIs, but I think th status quo is pretty decent. And for as long as Windows is the dominant desktop, the more Linux acts like it from the UI, the better, since learning new UIs is a pain. (Paradoxically, by making XP look all new and flashy, they may have done Linux a small favor, by opening people to the idea that it doesn't *have* to all look the same as it has for the past 7 years....)
My alma mater has a monument to this forthcoming breakthrough, placed by Roger W Babson (of Babson College). It's called the Gravity Stone and it's "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents" Kinda kooky stuff, check the link.
if my cellphone is barely on the 'net, why should my fridge be?
Yes, I know the USA is behind in creative additional uses of portable networked devices, but even then, the only really compelling apps, the only ones people pay for, are the ones that facilitate communication between people. Almost every other wireless app will be niche status for the foreseeable future.
this article says it well--what do people shell out for at Internet Cafes when they're on vacation? It's not online shopping or browsing...it's good ol' e-mail. The near future of cellphones is voice communications (duh), e-mail, and maybe sending pictures. It's not the chance to browse some tiny version of the web or order stocks.
So, I think the rather slow progress of handheld wireless networking has implications for networking beyond the PC. The technology for controlling your house appliances online has existed for a long time; still a minor niche. People don't want their fridge fiddling with their recipes...a much more promising technology there is putting standard barcodes on premade foods that your microwave can scan and know how long to cook, kind of a VCRPlus for food prep... anyway, we're a long way off from having all of society's hardware on the regular 'Net, though obviously cyberattacks have the potential to be more damaging as we rely on the 'Net more and more for information services.
fwd'ing based spamfiltering?
on
Spam Doesn't Work?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm in the process of building in a visual-tagging-only whitelist for my personal homebrew webmail sysytem, msgs from people I've ever mailed and/or with subjects I've written with are marked "likely not spam".
I wouldn't mind sending the rejects to a secondary filter, and then having it send the non-spam ones back to a special address I can pull together...so who offers a service like that?
You know, I'm kind of glad encryption hasn't made many inroads for regular communications of casual users. I find it really hard to be on the pro-crypto side of almost anything. (And then there's that USA Today Report on using Ebay for posted embedding messages in images...)
Then again, I've always had an underdeveloped sense of privacy. It's really never been a big concern of mine, security through obscurity (or maybe apathy...if someone wants to know enough to bother to ask I'll probably tell them)
Omega...heh. I quickly found that just sitting my tank there and spending all my cycles scanning and letting the enemy tank come to me got me very far in the game...and then of course I couldn't go any further, since I hadn't learned anything besides my one neat trick...an evolutionary deadend, so to speak.
Ditto this! The guys who run it are friends of my family...they were "lego maniacs" for the longest time (but it's a happily kid oriented store, not a hobbyist den (though I think NELUG (New England Lego Users Group) often display super cool huge works there))
That is a psychological problem, not an actual tool problem.
Umm, yes and no.
I've been on teams burned on WinCVS merges that were just bad. I've used a few tools that would do their damndest to merge binary files with bad results. Even when it's not automated, merging is ugly, as my recent wrasslin' with Clearcase's merge tool attests to. (If it was more obvious which version was which, rather than 1 2 3 and an obscure drive name to guide me, it woulda been easier.)
It's a little bit pshychological as well...but both automated and my hand merges have the chance of error. I prefer locking. Smaller files can help a lot, for readability and avoding huge monolithic objects or subroutines. (see the "magic pushbutton" antipattern...)
Yeah, but Perl's not installed outta the box (well it is for Linux I suppose...but even then you don't boot into it), support for graphics is (relatively) obscure-- and I only did a bit of "bashing out text-only programs", I mostly loved the C=64, Apple II, and Atari 800XL for the graphics I could do, charcter or bitmap. And don't get me started on Perl's bless-ed excuse for OO...(ok, I probably have C++/Java concentric notions)
VB (I used to tool around on VB3, a nice balance of power and GUI simplicity) isn't a bad bet, maybe DarkBASIC as well? I dunno. Still, they ain't uniquitous like old school BASIC was. And you can learn to get past the need for line numbers (it blew my mind when I saw a magazine with AmigaBasic type-ins that had no line numbers! How could it work???)
A friend of mine has a kid who is way into 3D modelling software, seemed a pretty cool entry as well.
Another thing that has been lost is that computers no longer boot into BASIC...ok, stop laughing, I'm a little bit serious here. Home computers booting into BASIC, plus hobbyist magazines (some oriented at kids) I think were a great boon to budding programmers/designers in the early 1980s. While the Web has a huge host of new opportunites, it doesn't provide the ramp up the learning curve that BASIC did...it's relatively tough to make a decent graphical game with javascript/DHTML, and other languages are even more obscure for the total newbie.
Thinking in terms of Music Construction Set...SimTunes was a great, if somewhat obscure game. Maxis rebranded version of "Musical Bugs" by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai. (demo here?). The idea was you had a big blank grid, that you could paint with colored blocks. 4 "bugs" would walk over the grid, and when they passed a color would play the pitch (or percussionish noise, if that was the type of voice you set the bug to) corresponding to that color. Other blocks would warp or otherwise redirect the bugs. You could focus on making a cool picture, a cool sound (it really could be used as a 'poor man's sequencer') or both. Very powerful, with "kiddy" and "advanced" (but still pretty friendly) interface settings.
They released this 5 or 6 years ago, recently rereleased in a pack of Kid-oriented Sim games. The original was fairly cranky in its need for certain DirectX drivers (windows of course), I bought the rerelease but haven't yet installed it to see if they improved the driver situation.
A great creative musical toy...maybe better for kids/teens/adults with a smattering of musical experience. (They have some cool music theory embedded in there, like you can constrain the notes to the blues or other scale...)
Might as well burn some karma and give my experience with various systems:
RCS: primitive, but ok
CVS: hated it. hate, hate, hate automatic merges; don't trust 'em. And WinCVS...man, my Milton's Ant Farm had fewer bugs.
VSS: not bad, actually. I love file locking, it seems pretty easy to tag various milestone releases, a reasonably clean interface, and easy access to pretty much everything I want to do. Some quirks but nothing major, very usable.
ClearCase: jury's still out but so far I don't like. Very complex and proccess heavy; it's out to be the manager's buddy, not the engineer's. Everything has to be done in the context of a distict "activity" (plus we've had some trouble settling on rules for if a checkin automatically closes the said activity...) and concepts like "VOBs" and "Integration streams" and "development streams" are hard to keep your head around. And it's slow and generally process heavy.
EveryOnceInAWhileCopyEverythingToABackupDir: this is the one I usuaslly end up with when I'm on my own.
best book for old school computer games
on
High Score
·
· Score: 2
This is the first nostalgia videogame books I've seen that has a significant focus on the old computer games-- Raid on Bungeling Bay is a good example of an old fav of mine, stuff like Star Control 2, the old SSI Wargameas, all that stuff--with lots of boxart and behind-the-scenes design stuff and what have you. Other good books like Supercade, Phoenix, Arcade Fever, etc mostly focus on the consoles and the arcade.
I disagree....AIM is *the* best interface I've seen for Instant Messenging. Yes, out of the box it's a bit "excessively synergized" with a special home page, stock tickers, headlines, etc, but they have done an excellent job of making all that stuff easily "turn-offable" in the configuration. When they released a new version that probably made some behaviors easier for newbies (i.e. how minimizing, closing the window, and signing off/on are all linked) they made it easy to restore the old behavior that people may have gotten used to. The interface is feature rich (in terms of buddy icons, fonts, colors, the frickin smiley thing, blah blah etc) but the complexity is well hidden.
Compared to the old interface for ICQ, it's heavenly. I think they've really done their usability homework (my only gripe is that if I've cut and pasted some text from another someone else's talk, it copies the color and formatting, and the only way to get back to my default text is to cut and paste some of my own text...) Admittedly, I've only played with AIM, ICQ, Trillian, and Exodus, but AIM is the cleanest interface I've seen.
Isn't there some Simpsons' gag (maybe the one with "Poochie") about how they had to give up doing the animation at the same time as the voices, the animator hands were getting too tired?
Dang, in too much of a hurry to go through the registration crap (-1; Didn't Follow Link) but it makes me wonder if someone's feedback rating ties in to this; could leaving negative feedback go from being an "inconcenience to doing business" to a healthcare threatening situation??
I always thought it would be great to have a small lensed digital camera in my head. All I'd have to do is squint funny at something and boom, there's a picture. (Or maybe get a webcam-y thing streaming to some huuuge storage device...)
I think I got the idea from George R R Martin's Tuf Voyaging, with people who got the things installed in the position of a "third eye"
On the other hand, sometimes people who take two free of a hand in the design of a new home end up making mistakes that the cookie cutter patterns probably miss. My wife's family did that, ended up with very poor lighting conditions in some places, and other awkwardness in room layout and the like. I don't know who they worked with on the design or how good they are, but the danger is there.
"Getting stuff back", albeit stuff you would get even if you didn't contribute, is one strategy. (NPR kind of works on this idea). And maybe you contribute because the stuff you get back is better than if you didn't contribute.
Another possible reward: You play it like Grampa Simpson and say "I just want attention". Supposedly scifi geekdom has had the name "egoboo" (for ego boost) as the "currency" people get for making cool fandom stuff for free. You gain the respect of your peers, a little attention, a stronger place in the community, people listen to you more. I think Open Source banks on this to a certain extent as well...it also ties into the experience to put on your resume aspect.
Despite it being a terribly overused cliche, it is not a bad general principle. For an engineer to see beyond the mere engineering concerns is a positive thing.
You should learn when a cliche is around because it's useful and true, and when it's around just because it's around, and not become prejudice based on that.
Well, I was pretty happy with the results of a search on my name...happier than with Google in that once case, though that's but a single tiny datapoint.
In any case, it would be terrific to have a viable alternative to Google...despite Google's almost unnerving ability to do *so* many things Right, it is good to have somewhere to turn just in case something went wrong there. Not having a monoculture (which is what we're almost on the verge of with Google) is generally a good thing.
You would think considering Pat's company is in business to research this stuff, her comment would've answered more questions than it raised... She spoke, yet she said nothing.
She's the director of technology, not of marketing. It's astute that she's thinking out of the box of mere engineering, and acknowledging the huge hurdles beyond the technical challenges.
Besides, sometimes learning to ask the right questions is half the trick...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, I hate flashy.
Here's an example: do "regular users" prefer the new look of WinXP, or the old one? My mother-in-law, in setting up a system for an elderly friend of hers, set the overall system to the Win95 look-and-feel, after I showed her how. She also had the very good idea of clearing off the desktop to a blank background, and putting the icons for 4 or 5 apps right there, so the newbie could avoid the start button altogether for now.
Anyway I hate the new fisher price look, and am grateful that they include the ability to rollback...which of course raises the spectre of using the same GUI for the next couple of decades and becoming an old fogie....
But I don't think the Win95-ish interface is that bad, frankly. The taskbar was actually a throwback to the earliest version of Windows that had the "running programs" all in one place, but that isn't that bad of a thing...running programs should look different from program launchers in my opinion. (That's a mistake I think OSX makes, kind of mixing the two)
Maybe I'm too short sighted about the future of GUIs, but I think th status quo is pretty decent. And for as long as Windows is the dominant desktop, the more Linux acts like it from the UI, the better, since learning new UIs is a pain. (Paradoxically, by making XP look all new and flashy, they may have done Linux a small favor, by opening people to the idea that it doesn't *have* to all look the same as it has for the past 7 years....)
My alma mater has a monument to this forthcoming breakthrough, placed by Roger W Babson (of Babson College). It's called the Gravity Stone and it's "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents" Kinda kooky stuff, check the link.
Cookbooks tend to be better than average...the Perl and Java ones from O'Reilly are great, the PHP one I got from somewhere else was ok.
I tend to add a cookbook section to my Atari 2600 programming Tutorial, 2600 101
if my cellphone is barely on the 'net, why should my fridge be?
Yes, I know the USA is behind in creative additional uses of portable networked devices, but even then, the only really compelling apps, the only ones people pay for, are the ones that facilitate communication between people. Almost every other wireless app will be niche status for the foreseeable future.
this article says it well--what do people shell out for at Internet Cafes when they're on vacation? It's not online shopping or browsing...it's good ol' e-mail. The near future of cellphones is voice communications (duh), e-mail, and maybe sending pictures. It's not the chance to browse some tiny version of the web or order stocks.
So, I think the rather slow progress of handheld wireless networking has implications for networking beyond the PC. The technology for controlling your house appliances online has existed for a long time; still a minor niche. People don't want their fridge fiddling with their recipes...a much more promising technology there is putting standard barcodes on premade foods that your microwave can scan and know how long to cook, kind of a VCRPlus for food prep... anyway, we're a long way off from having all of society's hardware on the regular 'Net, though obviously cyberattacks have the potential to be more damaging as we rely on the 'Net more and more for information services.
I'm in the process of building in a visual-tagging-only whitelist for my personal homebrew webmail sysytem, msgs from people I've ever mailed and/or with subjects I've written with are marked "likely not spam".
I wouldn't mind sending the rejects to a secondary filter, and then having it send the non-spam ones back to a special address I can pull together...so who offers a service like that?
You know, I'm kind of glad encryption hasn't made many inroads for regular communications of casual users. I find it really hard to be on the pro-crypto side of almost anything. (And then there's that USA Today Report on using Ebay for posted embedding messages in images...)
Then again, I've always had an underdeveloped sense of privacy. It's really never been a big concern of mine, security through obscurity (or maybe apathy...if someone wants to know enough to bother to ask I'll probably tell them)
Omega...heh. I quickly found that just sitting my tank there and spending all my cycles scanning and letting the enemy tank come to me got me very far in the game...and then of course I couldn't go any further, since I hadn't learned anything besides my one neat trick...an evolutionary deadend, so to speak.
Ditto this! The guys who run it are friends of my family...they were "lego maniacs" for the longest time (but it's a happily kid oriented store, not a hobbyist den (though I think NELUG (New England Lego Users Group) often display super cool huge works there))
That is a psychological problem, not an actual tool problem.
Umm, yes and no.
I've been on teams burned on WinCVS merges that were just bad. I've used a few tools that would do their damndest to merge binary files with bad results. Even when it's not automated, merging is ugly, as my recent wrasslin' with Clearcase's merge tool attests to. (If it was more obvious which version was which, rather than 1 2 3 and an obscure drive name to guide me, it woulda been easier.)
It's a little bit pshychological as well...but both automated and my hand merges have the chance of error. I prefer locking. Smaller files can help a lot, for readability and avoding huge monolithic objects or subroutines. (see the "magic pushbutton" antipattern...)
Yeah, but Perl's not installed outta the box (well it is for Linux I suppose...but even then you don't boot into it), support for graphics is (relatively) obscure-- and I only did a bit of "bashing out text-only programs", I mostly loved the C=64, Apple II, and Atari 800XL for the graphics I could do, charcter or bitmap. And don't get me started on Perl's bless-ed excuse for OO...(ok, I probably have C++/Java concentric notions)
VB (I used to tool around on VB3, a nice balance of power and GUI simplicity) isn't a bad bet, maybe DarkBASIC as well? I dunno. Still, they ain't uniquitous like old school BASIC was. And you can learn to get past the need for line numbers (it blew my mind when I saw a magazine with AmigaBasic type-ins that had no line numbers! How could it work???)
A friend of mine has a kid who is way into 3D modelling software, seemed a pretty cool entry as well.
Another thing that has been lost is that computers no longer boot into BASIC...ok, stop laughing, I'm a little bit serious here. Home computers booting into BASIC, plus hobbyist magazines (some oriented at kids) I think were a great boon to budding programmers/designers in the early 1980s. While the Web has a huge host of new opportunites, it doesn't provide the ramp up the learning curve that BASIC did...it's relatively tough to make a decent graphical game with javascript/DHTML, and other languages are even more obscure for the total newbie.
Thinking in terms of Music Construction Set...SimTunes was a great, if somewhat obscure game. Maxis rebranded version of "Musical Bugs" by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai. (demo here?). The idea was you had a big blank grid, that you could paint with colored blocks. 4 "bugs" would walk over the grid, and when they passed a color would play the pitch (or percussionish noise, if that was the type of voice you set the bug to) corresponding to that color. Other blocks would warp or otherwise redirect the bugs. You could focus on making a cool picture, a cool sound (it really could be used as a 'poor man's sequencer') or both. Very powerful, with "kiddy" and "advanced" (but still pretty friendly) interface settings.
They released this 5 or 6 years ago, recently rereleased in a pack of Kid-oriented Sim games. The original was fairly cranky in its need for certain DirectX drivers (windows of course), I bought the rerelease but haven't yet installed it to see if they improved the driver situation.
A great creative musical toy...maybe better for kids/teens/adults with a smattering of musical experience. (They have some cool music theory embedded in there, like you can constrain the notes to the blues or other scale...)
Might as well burn some karma and give my experience with various systems:
RCS: primitive, but ok
CVS: hated it. hate, hate, hate automatic merges; don't trust 'em. And WinCVS...man, my Milton's Ant Farm had fewer bugs.
VSS: not bad, actually. I love file locking, it seems pretty easy to tag various milestone releases, a reasonably clean interface, and easy access to pretty much everything I want to do. Some quirks but nothing major, very usable.
ClearCase: jury's still out but so far I don't like. Very complex and proccess heavy; it's out to be the manager's buddy, not the engineer's. Everything has to be done in the context of a distict "activity" (plus we've had some trouble settling on rules for if a checkin automatically closes the said activity...) and concepts like "VOBs" and "Integration streams" and "development streams" are hard to keep your head around. And it's slow and generally process heavy.
EveryOnceInAWhileCopyEverythingToABackupDir: this is the one I usuaslly end up with when I'm on my own.
This is the first nostalgia videogame books I've seen that has a significant focus on the old computer games-- Raid on Bungeling Bay is a good example of an old fav of mine, stuff like Star Control 2, the old SSI Wargameas, all that stuff--with lots of boxart and behind-the-scenes design stuff and what have you. Other good books like Supercade, Phoenix, Arcade Fever, etc mostly focus on the consoles and the arcade.
Yeah, what do you think of that low-calorie diet for reducing aging? Is it worth it? I never hear anyone trying it, unlike Atkins et al...
Heh, just as they're working on featherless chickens...maybe it's all a big conspiracy.
I disagree....AIM is *the* best interface I've seen for Instant Messenging. Yes, out of the box it's a bit "excessively synergized" with a special home page, stock tickers, headlines, etc, but they have done an excellent job of making all that stuff easily "turn-offable" in the configuration. When they released a new version that probably made some behaviors easier for newbies (i.e. how minimizing, closing the window, and signing off/on are all linked) they made it easy to restore the old behavior that people may have gotten used to. The interface is feature rich (in terms of buddy icons, fonts, colors, the frickin smiley thing, blah blah etc) but the complexity is well hidden.
Compared to the old interface for ICQ, it's heavenly. I think they've really done their usability homework (my only gripe is that if I've cut and pasted some text from another someone else's talk, it copies the color and formatting, and the only way to get back to my default text is to cut and paste some of my own text...) Admittedly, I've only played with AIM, ICQ, Trillian, and Exodus, but AIM is the cleanest interface I've seen.
Isn't there some Simpsons' gag (maybe the one with "Poochie") about how they had to give up doing the animation at the same time as the voices, the animator hands were getting too tired?
Dang, in too much of a hurry to go through the registration crap (-1; Didn't Follow Link) but it makes me wonder if someone's feedback rating ties in to this; could leaving negative feedback go from being an "inconcenience to doing business" to a healthcare threatening situation??
I always thought it would be great to have a small lensed digital camera in my head. All I'd have to do is squint funny at something and boom, there's a picture. (Or maybe get a webcam-y thing streaming to some huuuge storage device...)
I think I got the idea from George R R Martin's Tuf Voyaging, with people who got the things installed in the position of a "third eye"
On the other hand, sometimes people who take two free of a hand in the design of a new home end up making mistakes that the cookie cutter patterns probably miss. My wife's family did that, ended up with very poor lighting conditions in some places, and other awkwardness in room layout and the like. I don't know who they worked with on the design or how good they are, but the danger is there.
"Getting stuff back", albeit stuff you would get even if you didn't contribute, is one strategy. (NPR kind of works on this idea). And maybe you contribute because the stuff you get back is better than if you didn't contribute.
Another possible reward: You play it like Grampa Simpson and say "I just want attention". Supposedly scifi geekdom has had the name "egoboo" (for ego boost) as the "currency" people get for making cool fandom stuff for free. You gain the respect of your peers, a little attention, a stronger place in the community, people listen to you more. I think Open Source banks on this to a certain extent as well...it also ties into the experience to put on your resume aspect.
Despite it being a terribly overused cliche, it is not a bad general principle. For an engineer to see beyond the mere engineering concerns is a positive thing.
You should learn when a cliche is around because it's useful and true, and when it's around just because it's around, and not become prejudice based on that.
Well, I was pretty happy with the results of a search on my name...happier than with Google in that once case, though that's but a single tiny datapoint.
In any case, it would be terrific to have a viable alternative to Google...despite Google's almost unnerving ability to do *so* many things Right, it is good to have somewhere to turn just in case something went wrong there. Not having a monoculture (which is what we're almost on the verge of with Google) is generally a good thing.
You would think considering Pat's company is in business to research this stuff, her comment would've answered more questions than it raised... She spoke, yet she said nothing.
She's the director of technology, not of marketing. It's astute that she's thinking out of the box of mere engineering, and acknowledging the huge hurdles beyond the technical challenges.
Besides, sometimes learning to ask the right questions is half the trick...