I noticed that the rattle on the GameCube seemed a little wimpy. (And had read that it was more significant a factor on the XBox, and put to good use in "Halo"). I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was a bit of a deliberate ergonomic decision on Nintendo's part. (Or maybe it just ties in to have a relatively smaller controller anyway.)
Ok, let's say that the destruction aspect of the tower isn't an issue, that the way this thing works means it could collapse in a (relatively) harmless way. I'm a little concerned with the whole idea of cheaply and easily getting things into orbit. Maybe I've read too much post-appocalypse Cyberpunk (spefically one of the stories in "mirrorshades") but it seems like there needs to be a *large* amount of regulation with what goes, because of what might be coming down... (like huge quantities of EMF blowing out pretty much everything electronic...)
AIM service does some things *right*
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've mostly used AIM, largely because that's what most people I wanted to chat with used. (And I'm really irritated at losing contact with some Trillian using buddies.)
I tried ICQ, but AIM does at least two things better:
* the ICQ UI is a horrendous mess. AIM has a good, simple UI. Cleaner in many ways then the Trillian version I used. And as the release new versions of the AIM client, whenever they change default behaviors (like minimizing to task bar vs system tray, etc) they're very good at letting users get the old behavior back in the options menu.
* I have never received AIM spam, but those two weeks of ICQ were nothing but teen porn ads. I'm not sure if its ICQ numbering scheme that makes it so spam prone, or something AIM does better
There are somethings AIM doesn't do, like my friend pointed out ICQ has a cool autolog of conversations feature, but overall, AIM is a
good little client, other clients could take a few pages from its usability book.
[trying to drag this ontopic while making an offtopic point]
In one sense, *everything* is very unique; even two things "of the same kind" will differ to some small degree. Graffiti and whatever WinCE uses (Jot?), and Xerox unistrokes are all "unique", but all similar; yet unistrokes is "more unique" since it doesn't easily map to the printed characters each stroke represents. So get off your high horse, it makes *perfect* sense to talk about this being "very unique".
Even more on topic: on the one hand, it's good when Linux proves itself in the embedded market. On the other hand, handhelds are *incredibly* UI driven relative to other platforms, and as far as I know those UIs tend to be propiertary one-offs. Only geeks will likely be in a position to appreciate the Linux-ness.
I concede several of your points. Also, I may be talking about the PocketPC of a year ago, they may have improved in some ways. (Though it is interesting that the difference between early Palms and late Palms is MUCH less significant than early and late CE)
I wish I remembered the details of the file issue; it was pretty damning, and it wasn't a particularly weird file format. It may have been trying to view the source of an HTML document, or something along those lines, but it really turned me off the OS, and I was seriously considering getting it, because the hardware was so nice.
Same with the synch button; are you certain the iPaq had a button on its cradle? I remember looking for reasons to like it, but its owner had little good to say about it, and I thought I would've noticed a synch button, since that's when I formulated my anti-auto-synch attitude.
The GPS app may indeed have been a port of a CE 3.0 app; kind of funny, because the rest of the app was pretty sick, and only the parts of the app that tied into the UI of the OS sucked.
Sorry if it was excessively FUD seeming. I still think Palm is such a better bet for Joe User for actual utility...
Yes, we both have brains. He was an experienced designer, I was an experienced software guy. The UI was just bad. I forget the exact task we were trying to do, but yes, it probably had to do with the registration of a file he had just synched over with his desktop. We attacked from both the open dialog of the app, and from the file explorer, and got nuthin.
The synching was crap. It may have improved, but he had mentioned that it tended to crash very, very badly, and that he had heard tht was a known problem. Also, from a higher level standpoint, I'd debate the wisdom of "you don't have to press a button to synch"...it sounds great from a marketing standpoint, but in practice, I'd rather have control of when data is transferred, not just hope the daemon has woken up and done what it needed to.
The crappy GPS app seemed to be using basic, lowlevel OS functionality for the dynamic toolbars, they looked more or less like the same thing under IE. I've seen a few apps that didn't handle the screen dimensions very well at all; enough so that I start to suspect the OS (a few years ago, you could argue Palm just did an end run around this issue by never having different resolutions, though recent PalmOS devices are getting there, I don't know the details of how they handle it.)
For every basic task, the Palm has a great UI, both for novices and experienced users. And for the non-basic tasks, it holds its own, with a large library of 3rd party software. The approach of scaling up from simplicity has worked a lot better than scaling down from the desktop.
Unfortunately, once you start using the "start button" etc, you'll find out that the Desktop metaphor has scaled very, very poorly.
All my friends use Palm (save this one guy). The trouble is they all use old PalmVs and the like, and see no need to upgrade; Palm has hurt itself by making a perfectly adequate product from its first few generations. (Like, once it added the backlight...)
I was playing with that one guy's iPaq, and even he couldn't explain how to use part of WinCE; specifically opening a document (I forget if we wanted to open it in pocket IE or whatever, but all the usual manipulations of the "filesystem" didn't do the trick, plus the "magic synching" sucked much ass), and then manipulating one of the menus of his GPS map program so that all the directional arrows were visible (not to mention dialog boxes that were scaled to be 3 times the width of the screen, so you had to scroll just to be able to hit OK)
I don't know about the future; it will be a race of Palm getting itself out of some technological corners its painted itself into, and hardware becoming powerful yet battery efficient enough for WinCE to make sense, with Microsoft making improvements to their basic organizer functionality.
There is palminfocenter.com for Palm rumors, but I haven't noticed anything about this teaser campaign there.
Someone else in this thread point out that the palm site has a "Shhh" link on their frontpage. Which is kind of funny, because when you click it, it has not just a add me to mailing list link but a set of "Spread the news." blanks, to enter your friends' email and first names. So they're not being as secretive about it as their e-mail teaser tried to imply.
Google has a history of doing a lot of things right, but I have my doubts about their new service: catalogs.google.com. It's a search engine for graphically scanned in versions of mail order catalogs! You type in sewing machine, say, and you get 3 views for each match: a scan of the catalog cover, a scan of the page, and a close up of the page, with the search terms highlighted in yellow.
It's so retrofuture weird! Like what someone on a C=64 in the 1980s might think a future of online shopping would look like...
A lot of CS graduates might have known this, but most have forgotten. A lot of us are "code-monkeys", but there's good code-monkeys (doing design as well as development) and bad code-monkeys (just doing grunt work to spec)
A lot of the stuff you've mentioned is pretty dang academic, and only comes in piecemeal to day to day applications, if at all.
I have an old Asimov edited collection called "More Soviet Science Fiction". One of the more striking elements was the "heading to the best of all possible worlds" feeling.
"Any thinking being from some other world that has been able to reach the Cosmos must be just as perfect and universal as the humans of our Earth, and hence just as beautiful. There can be no thinking monsters, no mushroom-men, no octopus-men! "
[...]
"You suggest that even if they look quite different from us, we may not think them ugly? But supposing they resemble us but have horns and elephant-like trunks?"
"A thinking being does not need horns and hence will not have them. The nose may be somewhat elongated to form a trunk, although a trunk too is unnecesary for a being with hands, and a human being must have hands [...]"
"You win"
The Heart of the Serpent, Ivan Yefremov...Subject: is the song that plays to awaken them from their cronosleep
It's kind of an interesting "hard scifi" story, the two groups end up learning how to communicate partially with an exchange of information about the Periodic Table (they breathe flourine instead of oxygen....other than that they're pretty much greyish star trek aliens, minus the ridges.)
At first I was going to write this in kind of a condescending way, but actually they're stuff holds up pretty well against ours, though it definately has trouble shaking towing the Soviet party line about a bright future through human social(ist) advancement.
emm eye bees?
Quick, call Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones!
Re:Forever War == Starship Troopers after Vietnam
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2
Yes, there are some who consider it a parody of the Starship Troopers mentality.
It has some very interesting "hard sci fi" bits, with speculation about what spaceflight and combat might *really* entail (in particular, what if we discovered a way to Warp long distances, but don't have a Star Trek way to bend gravity (watch those manuevers!) or Time Relativity (long time between planets, you have to plan ahead.)
Was Hypercard a video card or a programming language?
they don't know the user can disable 'em?
on
EU May Outlaw Cookies
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
But the sticky point about cookies is that they often store data without a users' explicit approval. The Commission has been debating whether individuals should have the last word (lawmakers call this the ``opt in'' method) on what bits of personal information are collected on them while online.
Jeez. We already have that. Almost every browser in the world offers the ability to decline all cookies. It may make using any dynamic website an impossible task, but the Commission's inability to realize that this option is already there speaks to their poor understanding of the technology.
Camping is kind of funny. I guess the idea is "if we were all campers, this game would suck, suck, suck for everyone". It's a classic Darwin model of co-operators vs people who go for a single advantage. If every cooperates life is much better, but it's not always easy to wean someone from going for a local advantage.
Actually I used Yahoo. (which I think at the time was set to fallback to AltaVista) For a while, Yahoo has a built-in "value add", as any of its links were added by someone's reccommendation, and where therefore somewhat less likely to come up as 404s and be more ontopic than the keyword searches of the day. Google's Algorithm blew that out of the water. I haven't done much with its Category system either...
Yes, Google is far and away the best, but it's habit of ignoring common words, even in exact phrase matches, is annoying. "death to infidels" become a search for "death" and "infidels", you have to type "death +to infidels"
Also, I'm a little worried about everyone becoming dependent on one resource like this. Admittedly they seem to have a knack for figuring out the Right Thing, but monoculture is never a great idea in the modern world.
Yes, customers hate pay-per-use, and WILL pay premiums to avoid the feeling that "the meter is running" (--they don't neccesarily "do the math" based on realistic usage patterns.) This conflicts with business's strong desire for a steady, "perpetual" revenue stream.
One odd note in Polaroid's attempt to get new market with the i-zone cameras; they had some of the most sexual commercials I've seen in a long while. Serious PG-13+ stuff. I can't say I didn't like it, but I didn't buy their camera.
This is an annoyance, but I don't think it's such a dark conspiracy. Like others have pointed out, many programs play the "fight for the extension" game, especially for multimedia, and usually the last one in wins.
Of course it's silly how hard it is to "roll your own" file associations, you have to use this weird macro language.
I think smarter programs will always have a preferences screen that let you regrab the extensions. IrfanView is a good example of that. And well behaved programs won't keep trying to intrusively ask you if you want to use them instead.
It looks a LOT like 'Zoob', but with a better idea for a hinge/crosspiece, and with the lego compatability. My friends who run Waltham, MA's all-construction-toy The Construction Site haven't heard of it yet, but knowing them, they probably will have it in stock as soon as it's available to general retailers.
I've made MY decision. I've asked family to withdraw life-support if I'm ever badly brain-damaged. The most painful thing for me would be to go through life, remembering everything I could have been. Can you imagine knowing you had once been able to program, but now not been able to comprehend a mouse, or read even simple books?
If you were unable to comprehend a mouse, would you be able to know you had once been able to program?
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that the rattle on the GameCube seemed a little wimpy. (And had read that it was more significant a factor on the XBox, and put to good use in "Halo"). I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was a bit of a deliberate ergonomic decision on Nintendo's part. (Or maybe it just ties in to have a relatively smaller controller anyway.)
Ok, let's say that the destruction aspect of the tower isn't an issue, that the way this thing works means it could collapse in a (relatively) harmless way. I'm a little concerned with the whole idea of cheaply and easily getting things into orbit. Maybe I've read too much post-appocalypse Cyberpunk (spefically one of the stories in "mirrorshades") but it seems like there needs to be a *large* amount of regulation with what goes, because of what might be coming down... (like huge quantities of EMF blowing out pretty much everything electronic...)
I've mostly used AIM, largely because that's what most people I wanted to chat with used. (And I'm really irritated at losing contact with some Trillian using buddies.)
I tried ICQ, but AIM does at least two things better:
* the ICQ UI is a horrendous mess. AIM has a good, simple UI. Cleaner in many ways then the Trillian version I used. And as the release new versions of the AIM client, whenever they change default behaviors (like minimizing to task bar vs system tray, etc) they're very good at letting users get the old behavior back in the options menu.
* I have never received AIM spam, but those two weeks of ICQ were nothing but teen porn ads. I'm not sure if its ICQ numbering scheme that makes it so spam prone, or something AIM does better
There are somethings AIM doesn't do, like my friend pointed out ICQ has a cool autolog of conversations feature, but overall, AIM is a
good little client, other clients could take a few pages from its usability book.
[trying to drag this ontopic while making an offtopic point]
In one sense, *everything* is very unique; even two things "of the same kind" will differ to some small degree. Graffiti and whatever WinCE uses (Jot?), and Xerox unistrokes are all "unique", but all similar; yet unistrokes is "more unique" since it doesn't easily map to the printed characters each stroke represents. So get off your high horse, it makes *perfect* sense to talk about this being "very unique".
Even more on topic: on the one hand, it's good when Linux proves itself in the embedded market. On the other hand, handhelds are *incredibly* UI driven relative to other platforms, and as far as I know those UIs tend to be propiertary one-offs. Only geeks will likely be in a position to appreciate the Linux-ness.
I don't have anything of actual value to add to this discussion, except to ask...
Are you bi- curious?
Seriously, who came up with the domain name "attbi.com"? It might be vaguely easier to type, but sheesh.
I concede several of your points. Also, I may be talking about the PocketPC of a year ago, they may have improved in some ways. (Though it is interesting that the difference between early Palms and late Palms is MUCH less significant than early and late CE)
I wish I remembered the details of the file issue; it was pretty damning, and it wasn't a particularly weird file format. It may have been trying to view the source of an HTML document, or something along those lines, but it really turned me off the OS, and I was seriously considering getting it, because the hardware was so nice.
Same with the synch button; are you certain the iPaq had a button on its cradle? I remember looking for reasons to like it, but its owner had little good to say about it, and I thought I would've noticed a synch button, since that's when I formulated my anti-auto-synch attitude.
The GPS app may indeed have been a port of a CE 3.0 app; kind of funny, because the rest of the app was pretty sick, and only the parts of the app that tied into the UI of the OS sucked.
Sorry if it was excessively FUD seeming. I still think Palm is such a better bet for Joe User for actual utility...
Yes, we both have brains. He was an experienced designer, I was an experienced software guy. The UI was just bad. I forget the exact task we were trying to do, but yes, it probably had to do with the registration of a file he had just synched over with his desktop. We attacked from both the open dialog of the app, and from the file explorer, and got nuthin.
The synching was crap. It may have improved, but he had mentioned that it tended to crash very, very badly, and that he had heard tht was a known problem. Also, from a higher level standpoint, I'd debate the wisdom of "you don't have to press a button to synch"...it sounds great from a marketing standpoint, but in practice, I'd rather have control of when data is transferred, not just hope the daemon has woken up and done what it needed to.
The crappy GPS app seemed to be using basic, lowlevel OS functionality for the dynamic toolbars, they looked more or less like the same thing under IE. I've seen a few apps that didn't handle the screen dimensions very well at all; enough so that I start to suspect the OS (a few years ago, you could argue Palm just did an end run around this issue by never having different resolutions, though recent PalmOS devices are getting there, I don't know the details of how they handle it.)
For every basic task, the Palm has a great UI, both for novices and experienced users. And for the non-basic tasks, it holds its own, with a large library of 3rd party software. The approach of scaling up from simplicity has worked a lot better than scaling down from the desktop.
Unfortunately, once you start using the "start button" etc, you'll find out that the Desktop metaphor has scaled very, very poorly.
All my friends use Palm (save this one guy). The trouble is they all use old PalmVs and the like, and see no need to upgrade; Palm has hurt itself by making a perfectly adequate product from its first few generations. (Like, once it added the backlight...)
I was playing with that one guy's iPaq, and even he couldn't explain how to use part of WinCE; specifically opening a document (I forget if we wanted to open it in pocket IE or whatever, but all the usual manipulations of the "filesystem" didn't do the trick, plus the "magic synching" sucked much ass), and then manipulating one of the menus of his GPS map program so that all the directional arrows were visible (not to mention dialog boxes that were scaled to be 3 times the width of the screen, so you had to scroll just to be able to hit OK)
I don't know about the future; it will be a race of Palm getting itself out of some technological corners its painted itself into, and hardware becoming powerful yet battery efficient enough for WinCE to make sense, with Microsoft making improvements to their basic organizer functionality.
There is palminfocenter.com for Palm rumors, but I haven't noticed anything about this teaser campaign there.
Someone else in this thread point out that the palm site has a "Shhh" link on their frontpage. Which is kind of funny, because when you click it, it has not just a add me to mailing list link but a set of "Spread the news." blanks, to enter your friends' email and first names. So they're not being as secretive about it as their e-mail teaser tried to imply.
Google has a history of doing a lot of things right, but I have my doubts about their new service: catalogs.google.com. It's a search engine for graphically scanned in versions of mail order catalogs! You type in sewing machine, say, and you get 3 views for each match: a scan of the catalog cover, a scan of the page, and a close up of the page, with the search terms highlighted in yellow.
It's so retrofuture weird! Like what someone on a C=64 in the 1980s might think a future of online shopping would look like...
A lot of CS graduates might have known this, but most have forgotten. A lot of us are "code-monkeys", but there's good code-monkeys (doing design as well as development) and bad code-monkeys (just doing grunt work to spec)
A lot of the stuff you've mentioned is pretty dang academic, and only comes in piecemeal to day to day applications, if at all.
I have an old Asimov edited collection called "More Soviet Science Fiction". One of the more striking elements was the "heading to the best of all possible worlds" feeling.
"Any thinking being from some other world that has been able to reach the Cosmos must be just as perfect and universal as the humans of our Earth, and hence just as beautiful. There can be no thinking monsters, no mushroom-men, no octopus-men! "
[...]
"You suggest that even if they look quite different from us, we may not think them ugly? But supposing they resemble us but have horns and elephant-like trunks?"
"A thinking being does not need horns and hence will not have them. The nose may be somewhat elongated to form a trunk, although a trunk too is unnecesary for a being with hands, and a human being must have hands [...]"
"You win"
The Heart of the Serpent, Ivan Yefremov...Subject: is the song that plays to awaken them from their cronosleep
It's kind of an interesting "hard scifi" story, the two groups end up learning how to communicate partially with an exchange of information about the Periodic Table (they breathe flourine instead of oxygen....other than that they're pretty much greyish star trek aliens, minus the ridges.)
At first I was going to write this in kind of a condescending way, but actually they're stuff holds up pretty well against ours, though it definately has trouble shaking towing the Soviet party line about a bright future through human social(ist) advancement.
emm eye bees?
Quick, call Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones!
Yes, there are some who consider it a parody of the Starship Troopers mentality.
It has some very interesting "hard sci fi" bits, with speculation about what spaceflight and combat might *really* entail (in particular, what if we discovered a way to Warp long distances, but don't have a Star Trek way to bend gravity (watch those manuevers!) or Time Relativity (long time between planets, you have to plan ahead.)
Was Hypercard a video card or a programming language?
But the sticky point about cookies is that they often store data without a users' explicit approval. The Commission has been debating whether individuals should have the last word (lawmakers call this the ``opt in'' method) on what bits of personal information are collected on them while online.
Jeez. We already have that. Almost every browser in the world offers the ability to decline all cookies. It may make using any dynamic website an impossible task, but the Commission's inability to realize that this option is already there speaks to their poor understanding of the technology.
Camping is kind of funny. I guess the idea is "if we were all campers, this game would suck, suck, suck for everyone". It's a classic Darwin model of co-operators vs people who go for a single advantage. If every cooperates life is much better, but it's not always easy to wean someone from going for a local advantage.
Actually I used Yahoo. (which I think at the time was set to fallback to AltaVista) For a while, Yahoo has a built-in "value add", as any of its links were added by someone's reccommendation, and where therefore somewhat less likely to come up as 404s and be more ontopic than the keyword searches of the day. Google's Algorithm blew that out of the water. I haven't done much with its Category system either...
Yes, Google is far and away the best, but it's habit of ignoring common words, even in exact phrase matches, is annoying. "death to infidels" become a search for "death" and "infidels", you have to type "death +to infidels"
Also, I'm a little worried about everyone becoming dependent on one resource like this. Admittedly they seem to have a knack for figuring out the Right Thing, but monoculture is never a great idea in the modern world.
Yes, customers hate pay-per-use, and WILL pay premiums to avoid the feeling that "the meter is running" (--they don't neccesarily "do the math" based on realistic usage patterns.) This conflicts with business's strong desire for a steady, "perpetual" revenue stream.
One odd note in Polaroid's attempt to get new market with the i-zone cameras; they had some of the most sexual commercials I've seen in a long while. Serious PG-13+ stuff. I can't say I didn't like it, but I didn't buy their camera.
This is an annoyance, but I don't think it's such a dark conspiracy. Like others have pointed out, many programs play the "fight for the extension" game, especially for multimedia, and usually the last one in wins.
Of course it's silly how hard it is to "roll your own" file associations, you have to use this weird macro language.
I think smarter programs will always have a preferences screen that let you regrab the extensions. IrfanView is a good example of that. And well behaved programs won't keep trying to intrusively ask you if you want to use them instead.
Project Phoenix??? You would think they could choose a more reasuring name for hydrogen powered aircraft, given people's perceptions!
Of course, by now it's also a bit of a cliché...
It looks a LOT like 'Zoob', but with a better idea for a hinge/crosspiece, and with the lego compatability. My friends who run Waltham, MA's all-construction-toy The Construction Site haven't heard of it yet, but knowing them, they probably will have it in stock as soon as it's available to general retailers.
I've made MY decision. I've asked family to withdraw life-support if I'm ever badly brain-damaged. The most painful thing for me would be to go through life, remembering everything I could have been. Can you imagine knowing you had once been able to program, but now not been able to comprehend a mouse, or read even simple books?
If you were unable to comprehend a mouse, would you be able to know you had once been able to program?
Slate.com's 'Explainer' had a pretty level-headed take on How Good Were the World Trade Center Pilots?