This story will probably garner a few comments along the lines of, "What's the point?" The interesting thing to me in this case is that the usual geek response of "Because it's there" applies, but there's also a bit of the gaming spirit at work.
If Sony hadn't invested so much time and effort in DRM etc., the PSP would be a much easier hack. But because they installed all these roadblocks, the hobbyist community has had to work hard for each success.
In a way, it's like a well-balanced game. It's challenging to make progress, but when you do, it's satisfying because of the work you put into getting tangible results. A game that hands you all the solutions is not much fun, but a game that offers well-balanced challenges can be a good time for a long while. Seems that Sony unintentionally created a pretty sweet "game" with the restrictions built into the PSP itself. Even if you're not in on the actual hacking, it has been fun to watch the hackers steadily proceed to the next level, and the next.
I think you are spot-on. I just wanted to add that the article is wrong, and the sex scene is apparently present in the PS2 GTA as well. This doesn't change your point at all, since you still have to get the cheat codes off the net (and have a device with which to input them, so it's even more cumbersome). Just wanted to clarify the facts of the matter.
From TFA: Critics say the board's guidance is toothless and does little to help parents trying to protect impressionable children from questionable content.
It's like clockwork. After "Won't somebody please think of the children!" comes "Won't somebody please think of the parents!" After all, kids can't vote, so it's important that the demagoguery focus on the most politically valuable "victims."
My question is, what do the parents want? Of course the ratings are toothless. They're just a guide. The "Mature" rating tells parents that a game labeled "M" is considered by the ESRB to be potentially inappropriate for people under 17. The ESRB is basically saying: "If you're in doubt, and your kid is under 17, don't allow this game in your home." If a parent is really in conniptions over video-game sex, violence, whatever, then they only need to exert minimal effort to convert their fears into action.
For parents that care to be more nuanced and/or involved, there are strategy guides in every game store that present the content of games in great detail. And there's also gamefaqs.com, which is free and convenient. Parents don't have to be gamers to avoid being totally oblivious. Now, I certainly don't expect every parent to be this savvy from the get-go. But the parents who claim to give a shit could educate themselves with what I think is a reasonable amount of time and effort.
But no, let's legislate the fuck out of the video-game industry because Hillary Clinton is running for president.
Wow. The instant I made fun of somebody for modding my joke "Interesting," my original post got modded down into oblivion. I guess that'll teach me to complain.
Wow. Whoever modded this "Interesting" reeeeeeeeally thinks Microsoft is evil.
"Microsoft is encouraging people to throw away computers, huh? [stroking chin] Interesting... but how does this relate to their involvement in the JFK assassination? More research is needed..."
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Of course. Why do you think Windows XP is designed to make people throw their computers away? Microsoft has to make up lost ground after the Windows 2000 debacle.
I've used both CafePress and Zazzle to have T-shirts printed up with a logo on the front and a simple graphic on the back. The Zazzle T-shirt is of much higher quality. You get a larger area in which to print your graphic with Zazzle, and the Zazzle shirt is more comfortable because it doesn't have a big iron-on patch where the artwork is. The Zazzle shirts are a bit more expensive, though: about $2 more than comparable CafePress shirts.
Compared to CafePress, Zazzle makes it much harder to sell your stuff online in a self-contained space. I think this is where the missions of the two sites diverge. CafePress is basically a site designed to help you set up your little store to sell branded schwag. It is a portal for personal sites. Nobody goes to cafepress.com to shop; they end up on a specific CafePress store that has been linked from somebody else's site.
But Zazzle wants to be an entity unto itself, and it portrays itself as a clearinghouse for all sorts of printed artwork. If you want to make the items you design on Zazzle available to the public, you have to give Zazzle resale rights to the artwork in perpetuity, with the agreement that you will receive a 10% royalty on any items that are sold. Zazzle wants you to become part of their big community.
If you go to cafepress.com, you see a pitch that basically says, "We'll help you sell it yourself." If you go to zazzle.com, you see a pitch that says, "Look at the cool stuff Zazzle sells. Why not contribute?"
I prefer the quality of the printing process (again, I only have experience with T-shirts) on Zazzle, but I wish it had the selling flexibility of CafePress.
Now that makes a lot more sense. You must be right. It seems like an awful lot of desk real-estate for a function that's already performed reasonably well by Command/Alt-Tab, but hopefully advanced users would be able to remap those keys to macros.
Definitely. I wondered if the application icon labels on the key caps implied that the appropriate drivers wouldn't be written. The site's description is a little vague:
Additional block of keys on the left is meant for switching between programs or modes
I believe that another reply that said the keys are used to switch between apps (rather than when switching between apps) has the most plausible explanation.
This keyboard looks like a great way to easily explore the capabilities of powerful apps especially for beginner users. But the 10-key area on the left for application, while it looks pretty sharp, worries me.
Would this keyboard require you to switch modes manually? Power users might jump between apps a lot when putting together, say, a music video in Final Cut or a pamphlet in InDesign. Am I going to have to hit the appropriate key every time I switch apps? This could get drudgerous pretty quickly.
Then again, someone who has their workflow down likely doesn't need OLEDs to remind them of keyboard shortcuts, so my complaint might be mootwrong target market. It still seems that the board would be more of a "killer app" type of thing if it were context-sensitive and didn't require prompting from the user.
This smells fishy to me. DVForge CEO Jack Campbell has a long, sordid history of dealing in bad faith with the Mac community and being... casual with the truth. He's also a publicity whore and seems awfully prone to legal woes if you buy his endless "I'm such a victim" sob stories. I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth without independent verification, and since the only source offered by the OP is Jack's own site, well...
His spotty history is well-document in a MacInTouch special report. I'm not saying the story is false, but I'd seek verification.
Inconsistent Metaphor?
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's an interesting idea, and kudos for pulling it off, but I do have a little constructive criticism. The hard drive seems minimally integrated into the piece -- there is a large neuron area where you cut the hole for the drive, but the actual aesthetics of the hard drive don't have much to do with the surroundings. It feels like a first draft in this respect.
Secondly, the fans baffle me. Given their distance from the drive, while they may be function in that they work, they're not functional in that they have no practical purpose. And how do they integrate with the "neuron" metaphor? Fans don't transmit information -- it seems that they were put there for the sake of having more things poke out for the back, but I think it would have more of an impact if the drive itself were more of a focus.
Again, this is intended as constructive criticism, stuff to think about for the next iteration. Congrats on completing the project. I hope there's more to come.
That's great news, but what about the other patents included in that same re-examination order? What's the status of "LABEL FOR SPOOLED WIRE PRODUCTS"? Will I finally be able to market my "METHOD TO IMPROVE PERI-ANAL HYGIENE AFTER A BOWEL MOVEMENT" without fear of legal reprisal? We need to know!
"He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers. 'You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were. You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value,' he said."
What if you went to a baseball game, and there were only open space -- holes, that is -- where the billboards usually were, and your beer cup had a hole where the "Budweiser" logo goes, and the peanuts were generic (with holes in them), and there were dogs with holes in their mouth and when they bark they shoot holes at you? I say, you'd somehow feel you didn't get a good value!
I think the OP is correct that other sites' offering of free video likely played somewhat into the decision to go free on CNN.com, but I doubt that was the primary motivation. More compelling is the theory that CNN saw an improving Web ad market and decided that the balance sheet finally worked out in their favor again. (I say "again" because cnn.com video was free once before, way back in the day.) Indeed, a big part of this story is that CNN was able to line up major sponsors for the free-video launch.
As for pressure from Fox, CNN has been losing in the TV ratings for some time, but the people at CNN (I worked there for a while) take great pride in the fact that the website has held its own and remains one of the most-visited news sources on the Internet. Foxnews.com, while definitely drawing a large audience, isn't even close to CNN.com, so the "pressure" on that front would be more of a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses deal for CNN.com than anything else.
MSNBC.com, however, is hardly a slouch when it comes to site traffic, and their free-video service has become very popular. If any significant pressure is being placed on CNN.com in the online space, it's from MSNBC rather than Fox.
And here's a link to the actual list. Also interesting is the historical chart of the TOP500 by manufacturer, which tells a story in itself -- the decline of Cray and rise of IBM and Hitachi, for one.
Apparently Dvorak developed a taste for being correct after the Mac-on-Intel news (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while), so he has shifted from total-crackpot mode to state-the-painfully-obvious mode. Or, rather, a combination of the two.
His main points:
- "Avalanche" is a textbook FUD salvo against BitTorrent. (MSFT TRICK ME? NO WAY) - While spyware can be distributed through BitTorrent, this doesn't mean BitTorrent is spyware. (WTF R U SURE, J.D.?) - "Avalanche" is vaporware. (F'REALZ? OMG!!)
The column isn't wrong, it's just a waste of bandwidth. I've read/. goatse trolls with more insight than Dvorak's piece.
Hate to break this to you: I'd have guessed the black-and-white was professional too.
Don't worry, my feelings are unhurt, and I agree that the B&W one looks "pro" (although the color photo looks quite good as well).
That's not the point, though. One of the critical problems here is that the photo labs aren't being forthright in how they make their judgment calls. If they want to come right out and say "no monochrome prints because they are too likely to be professional," fine. It's still a frustrating policy, but they are being forthright about it. But because the photo labs refuse to provide any explicit warnings to customers, the customers get nailed with a "gotcha" after sending in their pictures.
And while this may seem to you like a relatively clear-cut case aesthetically, the FA details that from the consumer's point of view, it's essentially a crapshoot what is going to get tagged. So consumers are sending in photos without any reliable guidelines as to whether they'll get the requested service. It's not illegal, but it is a pretty low way to do business. Whether you agree on a case-by-case basis with the "professional-looking" evaluation is not the issue; misleading the customer is the issue.
Adding insult to injury, the photofinishers refuse to give explicit guidelines as to what qualifies as "professional-looking" (in all likelihood there are no guidelines, of course). But an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune on this topic shows one customer's example of a photo rejected by Wal-Mart, alongside an equally good-looking photo that Wal-Mart, in its infinite wisdom, deemed amateurish enough to print.
To recap, more accurately: Steve said that he dropped out of college because it was too expensive, and it was the best thing that happened to him. He said that his "real education" didn't start until he took up classes again with a greater appreciation for their value in his life. He took calligraphy classes when peers were telling him that calligraphy had no relevance to career, but he gained a greater appreciation for elegance in ordinary things (sound familiar?). Etc.
This is not an anti-education message. In fact, it is a message strongly in favor of a liberal-arts education. In Steve's original college career, he was going through the motions -- going to college because that was the thing to do. When he started learning again, he was doing it out of a personal desire to learn, and with more genuine motivations. And he was taking classes to improve himself and his outlook, not just to get nuts-and-bolts information that would advance his career. Steve's saying that you have to invest yourself in learning and appreciate its value where you might not expect it.
Those of you who are oversimplifying this into a "street smarts" vs. "book smarts" thing have watched too much of The Apprentice. This was a speech about the personal value of learning and the importance of an open mind and broad perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
This story will probably garner a few comments along the lines of, "What's the point?" The interesting thing to me in this case is that the usual geek response of "Because it's there" applies, but there's also a bit of the gaming spirit at work.
If Sony hadn't invested so much time and effort in DRM etc., the PSP would be a much easier hack. But because they installed all these roadblocks, the hobbyist community has had to work hard for each success.
In a way, it's like a well-balanced game. It's challenging to make progress, but when you do, it's satisfying because of the work you put into getting tangible results. A game that hands you all the solutions is not much fun, but a game that offers well-balanced challenges can be a good time for a long while. Seems that Sony unintentionally created a pretty sweet "game" with the restrictions built into the PSP itself. Even if you're not in on the actual hacking, it has been fun to watch the hackers steadily proceed to the next level, and the next.
I think you are spot-on. I just wanted to add that the article is wrong, and the sex scene is apparently present in the PS2 GTA as well. This doesn't change your point at all, since you still have to get the cheat codes off the net (and have a device with which to input them, so it's even more cumbersome). Just wanted to clarify the facts of the matter.
From TFA: Critics say the board's guidance is toothless and does little to help parents trying to protect impressionable children from questionable content.
It's like clockwork. After "Won't somebody please think of the children!" comes "Won't somebody please think of the parents!" After all, kids can't vote, so it's important that the demagoguery focus on the most politically valuable "victims."
My question is, what do the parents want? Of course the ratings are toothless. They're just a guide. The "Mature" rating tells parents that a game labeled "M" is considered by the ESRB to be potentially inappropriate for people under 17. The ESRB is basically saying: "If you're in doubt, and your kid is under 17, don't allow this game in your home." If a parent is really in conniptions over video-game sex, violence, whatever, then they only need to exert minimal effort to convert their fears into action.
For parents that care to be more nuanced and/or involved, there are strategy guides in every game store that present the content of games in great detail. And there's also gamefaqs.com, which is free and convenient. Parents don't have to be gamers to avoid being totally oblivious. Now, I certainly don't expect every parent to be this savvy from the get-go. But the parents who claim to give a shit could educate themselves with what I think is a reasonable amount of time and effort.
But no, let's legislate the fuck out of the video-game industry because Hillary Clinton is running for president.
Wow. The instant I made fun of somebody for modding my joke "Interesting," my original post got modded down into oblivion. I guess that'll teach me to complain.
Hahaha -- that's actually pretty convincing! Well done.
Wow. Whoever modded this "Interesting" reeeeeeeeally thinks Microsoft is evil.
"Microsoft is encouraging people to throw away computers, huh? [stroking chin] Interesting... but how does this relate to their involvement in the JFK assassination? More research is needed..."
The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?
Of course. Why do you think Windows XP is designed to make people throw their computers away? Microsoft has to make up lost ground after the Windows 2000 debacle.
ETA of video iPod: September.
ETA of conspiracy theory explaining why the video iPod is the real reason that Apple switched to Intel: Any second now.
I've used both CafePress and Zazzle to have T-shirts printed up with a logo on the front and a simple graphic on the back. The Zazzle T-shirt is of much higher quality. You get a larger area in which to print your graphic with Zazzle, and the Zazzle shirt is more comfortable because it doesn't have a big iron-on patch where the artwork is. The Zazzle shirts are a bit more expensive, though: about $2 more than comparable CafePress shirts.
Compared to CafePress, Zazzle makes it much harder to sell your stuff online in a self-contained space. I think this is where the missions of the two sites diverge. CafePress is basically a site designed to help you set up your little store to sell branded schwag. It is a portal for personal sites. Nobody goes to cafepress.com to shop; they end up on a specific CafePress store that has been linked from somebody else's site.
But Zazzle wants to be an entity unto itself, and it portrays itself as a clearinghouse for all sorts of printed artwork. If you want to make the items you design on Zazzle available to the public, you have to give Zazzle resale rights to the artwork in perpetuity, with the agreement that you will receive a 10% royalty on any items that are sold. Zazzle wants you to become part of their big community.
If you go to cafepress.com, you see a pitch that basically says, "We'll help you sell it yourself." If you go to zazzle.com, you see a pitch that says, "Look at the cool stuff Zazzle sells. Why not contribute?"
I prefer the quality of the printing process (again, I only have experience with T-shirts) on Zazzle, but I wish it had the selling flexibility of CafePress.
You would use the appropriate key to switch apps.
Now that makes a lot more sense. You must be right. It seems like an awful lot of desk real-estate for a function that's already performed reasonably well by Command/Alt-Tab, but hopefully advanced users would be able to remap those keys to macros.
It's just a driver issue, right?
Definitely. I wondered if the application icon labels on the key caps implied that the appropriate drivers wouldn't be written. The site's description is a little vague:
Additional block of keys on the left is meant for switching between programs or modes
I believe that another reply that said the keys are used to switch between apps (rather than when switching between apps) has the most plausible explanation.
This keyboard looks like a great way to easily explore the capabilities of powerful apps especially for beginner users. But the 10-key area on the left for application, while it looks pretty sharp, worries me.
Would this keyboard require you to switch modes manually? Power users might jump between apps a lot when putting together, say, a music video in Final Cut or a pamphlet in InDesign. Am I going to have to hit the appropriate key every time I switch apps? This could get drudgerous pretty quickly.
Then again, someone who has their workflow down likely doesn't need OLEDs to remind them of keyboard shortcuts, so my complaint might be mootwrong target market. It still seems that the board would be more of a "killer app" type of thing if it were context-sensitive and didn't require prompting from the user.
As of Tiger:
Upper-left corner: Apple menu
Upper-right corner: Spotlight
Lower corners: User-configurable (Exposé, screen saver, etc.)
This smells fishy to me. DVForge CEO Jack Campbell has a long, sordid history of dealing in bad faith with the Mac community and being... casual with the truth. He's also a publicity whore and seems awfully prone to legal woes if you buy his endless "I'm such a victim" sob stories. I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth without independent verification, and since the only source offered by the OP is Jack's own site, well...
His spotty history is well-document in a MacInTouch special report. I'm not saying the story is false, but I'd seek verification.
It's an interesting idea, and kudos for pulling it off, but I do have a little constructive criticism. The hard drive seems minimally integrated into the piece -- there is a large neuron area where you cut the hole for the drive, but the actual aesthetics of the hard drive don't have much to do with the surroundings. It feels like a first draft in this respect.
Secondly, the fans baffle me. Given their distance from the drive, while they may be function in that they work, they're not functional in that they have no practical purpose. And how do they integrate with the "neuron" metaphor? Fans don't transmit information -- it seems that they were put there for the sake of having more things poke out for the back, but I think it would have more of an impact if the drive itself were more of a focus.
Again, this is intended as constructive criticism, stuff to think about for the next iteration. Congrats on completing the project. I hope there's more to come.
From the patent filing:
"BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
There are no drawings provided."
Thank God for small favors.
That's great news, but what about the other patents included in that same re-examination order? What's the status of "LABEL FOR SPOOLED WIRE PRODUCTS"? Will I finally be able to market my "METHOD TO IMPROVE PERI-ANAL HYGIENE AFTER A BOWEL MOVEMENT" without fear of legal reprisal? We need to know!
Worst. Analogy. Ever. From TFA:
"He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers. 'You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were. You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value,' he said."
What if you went to a baseball game, and there were only open space -- holes, that is -- where the billboards usually were, and your beer cup had a hole where the "Budweiser" logo goes, and the peanuts were generic (with holes in them), and there were dogs with holes in their mouth and when they bark they shoot holes at you? I say, you'd somehow feel you didn't get a good value!
I think the OP is correct that other sites' offering of free video likely played somewhat into the decision to go free on CNN.com, but I doubt that was the primary motivation. More compelling is the theory that CNN saw an improving Web ad market and decided that the balance sheet finally worked out in their favor again. (I say "again" because cnn.com video was free once before, way back in the day.) Indeed, a big part of this story is that CNN was able to line up major sponsors for the free-video launch.
As for pressure from Fox, CNN has been losing in the TV ratings for some time, but the people at CNN (I worked there for a while) take great pride in the fact that the website has held its own and remains one of the most-visited news sources on the Internet. Foxnews.com, while definitely drawing a large audience, isn't even close to CNN.com, so the "pressure" on that front would be more of a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses deal for CNN.com than anything else.
MSNBC.com, however, is hardly a slouch when it comes to site traffic, and their free-video service has become very popular. If any significant pressure is being placed on CNN.com in the online space, it's from MSNBC rather than Fox.
Quite right -- my apologies.
And here's a link to the actual list. Also interesting is the historical chart of the TOP500 by manufacturer, which tells a story in itself -- the decline of Cray and rise of IBM and Hitachi, for one.
Apparently Dvorak developed a taste for being correct after the Mac-on-Intel news (even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while), so he has shifted from total-crackpot mode to state-the-painfully-obvious mode. Or, rather, a combination of the two.
/. goatse trolls with more insight than Dvorak's piece.
His main points:
- "Avalanche" is a textbook FUD salvo against BitTorrent. (MSFT TRICK ME? NO WAY)
- While spyware can be distributed through BitTorrent, this doesn't mean BitTorrent is spyware. (WTF R U SURE, J.D.?)
- "Avalanche" is vaporware. (F'REALZ? OMG!!)
The column isn't wrong, it's just a waste of bandwidth. I've read
Hate to break this to you: I'd have guessed the black-and-white was professional too.
Don't worry, my feelings are unhurt, and I agree that the B&W one looks "pro" (although the color photo looks quite good as well).
That's not the point, though. One of the critical problems here is that the photo labs aren't being forthright in how they make their judgment calls. If they want to come right out and say "no monochrome prints because they are too likely to be professional," fine. It's still a frustrating policy, but they are being forthright about it. But because the photo labs refuse to provide any explicit warnings to customers, the customers get nailed with a "gotcha" after sending in their pictures.
And while this may seem to you like a relatively clear-cut case aesthetically, the FA details that from the consumer's point of view, it's essentially a crapshoot what is going to get tagged. So consumers are sending in photos without any reliable guidelines as to whether they'll get the requested service. It's not illegal, but it is a pretty low way to do business. Whether you agree on a case-by-case basis with the "professional-looking" evaluation is not the issue; misleading the customer is the issue.
Adding insult to injury, the photofinishers refuse to give explicit guidelines as to what qualifies as "professional-looking" (in all likelihood there are no guidelines, of course). But an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune on this topic shows one customer's example of a photo rejected by Wal-Mart, alongside an equally good-looking photo that Wal-Mart, in its infinite wisdom, deemed amateurish enough to print.
To recap, more accurately: Steve said that he dropped out of college because it was too expensive, and it was the best thing that happened to him. He said that his "real education" didn't start until he took up classes again with a greater appreciation for their value in his life. He took calligraphy classes when peers were telling him that calligraphy had no relevance to career, but he gained a greater appreciation for elegance in ordinary things (sound familiar?). Etc.
This is not an anti-education message. In fact, it is a message strongly in favor of a liberal-arts education. In Steve's original college career, he was going through the motions -- going to college because that was the thing to do. When he started learning again, he was doing it out of a personal desire to learn, and with more genuine motivations. And he was taking classes to improve himself and his outlook, not just to get nuts-and-bolts information that would advance his career. Steve's saying that you have to invest yourself in learning and appreciate its value where you might not expect it.
Those of you who are oversimplifying this into a "street smarts" vs. "book smarts" thing have watched too much of The Apprentice. This was a speech about the personal value of learning and the importance of an open mind and broad perspective.