Just to offer a contrary opinion: mozilla has plenty of cash to play with-- but instead of using it to do stuff people care about, they keep blowing it on bold new initiatives and of course, the "CEO"s salary. They haven't done much over the years to make me feel like it's my special project that deserves my support, in point of fact they keep thumbing their nose at us "power users" and informing us we don't matter, because they're going after the great pinhead market, which admittedly always has the edge in numbers, but has no understanding of what's going on--
One of these days we're all going to get behind a fork instead of going after six different baby one's, and I sincerely hope we learn something from the rathole that mozilla.org has gone down.
Didn't Ryan Coogler actively solicit his fans to hit the rottentomatoes ratiings system? That would be the point the OP was trying to make.
Now myself, I couldn't care less about rottentomatoes rankings, and Black Panther is a decent movie (but it wasn't even the best of 2018-- try "Sorry to Bother You")-- the point here would be that crowd-sourced ranking (typically with anonymous accounts without verified IDs!) aren't actually worth anything. The only time they won't be gamed is if no one cares enough about them to do it.
Myself I watch a lot of Korean drama at random sites which might be gray-market for all I know, like gooddrama.to, and a bit of anime from places like animedao (I would like to like crunchyroll, but I prefer to
download rather than stream). And I pick up disks at the local library on occasion, and buy them via bn.com now and then.
There's more stuff out there than I can possibly deal with, and I feel no gap in my life for not keeping up with netflix/amazon. Hell, I've all but given up on youtube these days -- google's crap keeps locking-up Firefox.
(Last I looked Netflix has next to nothing as far as anime goes-- just a dozen offerings, and the only one I cared about was Mushishi.)
As long as a significant percentage of mac-heads will insist on getting screwdrivers blessed by the rainbow beachball itself, Apple will keep screwing them with non-standard -- I mean, elite, custom-designed-- products.
Your post summarized: stupid people get huffy when called out.
Let's try a quote from TFA:
Genetically modified foods are a nonpartisan issue, Fernbach said. "People on the right and the left both kind of hate GMO's," even though the majority of scientists consider them to be as safe for human consumption as conventionally grown ones.
"Genetic engineering is one of the most important technologies that is really changing the world in a dramatic way and has the potential to have tremendous benefits for human beings" Fernbach said. "And yet there is very strong opposition."
In one of their studies, 91 per cent of 1,000 American adults surveyed reported some level of opposition to GM foods.
The more extreme the opposition, Fernbach and his co-authors found, the less people knew about the science and genetics, but the more their "self-assessed" knowledge-- how much they thought they knew-- increased.
"If somebody is well calibrated, those two things should be pretty highly correlated: If I know how much I know, then if I know a little I should say I know a little, and if I know a lot I should say I know a lot," Fernbach explained. "Therefore there should be a high correlation between self-assessed and objective knowledge."
The Backfire Effect has been grossly over-sold. Even the original
evidence for it wasn't all that strong in the first place, and
attempts at confirming it haven't been doing so well:
If you like cheap irony: the widespread conviction that the Backfire
Effect is real is itself a sign of cognitive limitations-- people
really like that story, and won't let go of it.
It sounds like a nice feature to have, though my own experience is I can deal with different key-maps when switching applications-- e.g. firefox and emacs use Control w for radically different purposes, but I rarely confuse them.
On the other hand, if Firefox had user-defineable keymaps (which everything should have) I would switch it over to emacs-like key-bindings in a heart-beat.
And yet, I can web search the error message and figure out what the problem is most of the time, and very quickly,
Seriously? When I search on an error message I tend to find half of the hits are other people asking the same question I am, and the other half are out-dated answers to a similar question that I'm not actually trying to ask.
But then, this could be because I'm one of those idiots who tries to figure out things for myself first before I do web searches.
If you have a decade of experience, it usually only takes about 24 hours to learn a new language well enough to get shit done in it.
Yeah, that's what we tell people when we're trying to get hired, but it's a gross exaggeration. Every language is a little universe of it's own that takes time to understand-- in a well established language, just knowing what libraries exist already and how to use them can take years to begin to understand.
I used to like Wordstar a lot, beck before I switched over to emacs. Wordstar is a pretty excellent example of how to design software with a keyboard interface that accommodates both casual users and experts really well.
Whenever I get into conversations about UI design, I find myself have to explain things like Wordstar-- Wordperfect was another interesting one, though I never developed much facility with it.
A really good editor (e.g. emacs) makes it reasonably easy to move blocks of texts around without mousing-- I'd argue it takes slightly more effort to navigate to the begin and end points of the region of interest, but you're less likely to make mistakes on the boundaries, so it's pretty much a wash.
But then, emacs has mouse-oriented ways of doing these things too-- few of us are arguing those shouldn't exist, the point is (1) as an exercise, it may be useful to force yourself to avoid the mouse for a time, because once you've got the keyboard approach down you may find it better, at least for some purposes (2) lazy UI designers have increasingly given the keyboard approach short-shrift, making it a potential performance win to seek out software that hasn't been crippled by design for keyboard use.
I suppose some people use other techniques, like parking the mouse somewhere relative to where they last used it. I notice that I do tend to park the mouse off of the thing I'm typing in automatically.
Yes, this is one of the reasons I've always hated the older X windows style of focus-follows-mouse: when I'm typing, I don't want the mouse pointer in the way, so I move it to a corner, where the slightest table tab might accidentally bump it across the edge, suddenly disabling the window.
Click to focus is better because you can toss the pointer out-of-the-way and mostly stop worrying about it.
Anyway, an interesting analysis, though I'm not entirely convinced you've got the details right-- subjects like this are frustrating because we all end up doing quite a bit of guesswork though it seems like by now someone should really know for sure-- and worse, someone may actually know, it's just that none of us ever hear of the results of the research, so we go back to guessing and waving our hands.
Some tools require pointing devices. This is a hard requirement, not a superficial one. For instance, I do a significant amount of multimedia work.
Yes, but very little of what most people do most of the time actually falls into that category. Instead of hitting a couple of keys, you need to use a pointing device to find a region on the screen to click on, watching very carefully not to over or undershoot. What could be done in an "open loop" fashion (you watch what you're doing, but mostly just to catch mistakes) becomes a "closed loop" operation (you have to look just to get it to work).
The usual justification for this stuff is that having a big chunk of the screen dedicated to being one of the controls provides a visual reminder of it's existence, it reduces your need to memorize a command to perform the operation. But then, it also eats a lot of the screen, so there are various strategies to hide the graphical controls, grouped into menus, which you have to navigate through repeatedly even after you know where the controls are hidden away.
The thing is, back in the bad old keyboard days there were exceedingly similar strategies that were being developed to accommodate beginners without crippling experts, e.g. Wordstar's reminder menus that could be adjusted to become less intrusive as you needed them less.
And myself, even in the case of something like a graphics editor, I often wonder if the designs over-use the mouse just out of custom rather than necessity. Consider the old Autocad set-up which had a very useful way to type up commands by name as well as more GUI features...
This is widely known, or at least was 20-25 years ago when I started in IT. It used to be said that reaching for a mouse cost the user 2-3 seconds of productivity each time.
We've made great strides since those days. With our new touch screen interfaces we've succeeded in reducing productivity to near zero, making such measurements obsolete.
Yes, essentially-- the people doing UI design are grossly lazy about supporting any approach but the latest whizzy trend, and people like myself who favor keyboards are roughly two trends back.
Every now and then I make an effort to put the icewm window manager aside, and try out whatever the cool kids at gnome are pushing these days, but from my point of view it's always horribly broken in some very dumb ways-- like the window control menu still has keyboard alternates on it, but you can't open the menu pad with Alt-Space anymore, so what's the point exactly?
The problem isn't unregulated social media, the problem is lazy, disengaged, gullible, and frankly, stupid voters
Human beings are indeed very weak reeds, and yet some
institutions have succeeded in developing a fair degree of
reliability in spite of being contructed out of such weak reeds,
so it would seem that the way you connect us fallible nodes
together actually matters, social structures matter, and our
internet sites matter--
By the way, the model of the stupids vs the smarts doesn't
hold up very well if you look at the actual data-- nominally
smart people can actually be very stupid, which is something you
might've noticed by now if you were actually one of the smarts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well "yes", but that's a different question from "would it work?"
Yeah, those newfangled "lasers" will never work.
But most idiots.
Bulk of the actual scorn is reserved for "fratbros": fake geeks chasing a gold rush.
One of these days we're all going to get behind a fork instead of going after six different baby one's, and I sincerely hope we learn something from the rathole that mozilla.org has gone down.
Didn't Ryan Coogler actively solicit his fans to hit the rottentomatoes ratiings system? That would be the point the OP was trying to make.
Now myself, I couldn't care less about rottentomatoes rankings, and Black Panther is a decent movie (but it wasn't even the best of 2018-- try "Sorry to Bother You")-- the point here would be that crowd-sourced ranking (typically with anonymous accounts without verified IDs!) aren't actually worth anything. The only time they won't be gamed is if no one cares enough about them to do it.
Myself I watch a lot of Korean drama at random sites which might be gray-market for all I know, like gooddrama.to, and a bit of anime from places like animedao (I would like to like crunchyroll, but I prefer to download rather than stream). And I pick up disks at the local library on occasion, and buy them via bn.com now and then.
There's more stuff out there than I can possibly deal with, and I feel no gap in my life for not keeping up with netflix/amazon. Hell, I've all but given up on youtube these days -- google's crap keeps locking-up Firefox.
(Last I looked Netflix has next to nothing as far as anime goes-- just a dozen offerings, and the only one I cared about was Mushishi.)
And it would be cool if slashdot would learn something about markdown, but I guess figuring out unicode would be higher up the list.
I'm all for curmudgeons resisting change, but you can over do these things.
I ran a virgin firefox profile today, and I noted three "recommended stories" from Pocket, including a sponsored one from GoDaddy.
It sure would be nice if mozilla could learn to walk-the-walk...P>
As long as a significant percentage of mac-heads will insist on getting screwdrivers blessed by the rainbow beachball itself, Apple will keep screwing them with non-standard -- I mean, elite, custom-designed-- products.
Your post summarized: stupid people get huffy when called out.
Let's try a quote from TFA:
The Backfire Effect has been grossly over-sold. Even the original evidence for it wasn't all that strong in the first place, and attempts at confirming it haven't been doing so well:
If you like cheap irony: the widespread conviction that the Backfire Effect is real is itself a sign of cognitive limitations-- people really like that story, and won't let go of it.
You're telling him that it's actually happening, but not why it's happening.
At a guess: wind and solar being more diffuse energy sources end up being more labor intensive to set-up and manage.
Alternately, it could be a transient phenomena, a sign that the industry isn't mature yet.
On the other hand, if Firefox had user-defineable keymaps (which everything should have) I would switch it over to emacs-like key-bindings in a heart-beat.
As far as I'm concerned, emacs is the ultimate user-interface. The emacs project predates unix.
Seriously? When I search on an error message I tend to find half of the hits are other people asking the same question I am, and the other half are out-dated answers to a similar question that I'm not actually trying to ask.
But then, this could be because I'm one of those idiots who tries to figure out things for myself first before I do web searches.
Yeah, that's what we tell people when we're trying to get hired, but it's a gross exaggeration. Every language is a little universe of it's own that takes time to understand-- in a well established language, just knowing what libraries exist already and how to use them can take years to begin to understand.
I used to like Wordstar a lot, beck before I switched over to emacs. Wordstar is a pretty excellent example of how to design software with a keyboard interface that accommodates both casual users and experts really well.
Whenever I get into conversations about UI design, I find myself have to explain things like Wordstar-- Wordperfect was another interesting one, though I never developed much facility with it.
A really good editor (e.g. emacs) makes it reasonably easy to move blocks of texts around without mousing-- I'd argue it takes slightly more effort to navigate to the begin and end points of the region of interest, but you're less likely to make mistakes on the boundaries, so it's pretty much a wash.
But then, emacs has mouse-oriented ways of doing these things too-- few of us are arguing those shouldn't exist, the point is (1) as an exercise, it may be useful to force yourself to avoid the mouse for a time, because once you've got the keyboard approach down you may find it better, at least for some purposes (2) lazy UI designers have increasingly given the keyboard approach short-shrift, making it a potential performance win to seek out software that hasn't been crippled by design for keyboard use.
Yes, this is one of the reasons I've always hated the older X windows style of focus-follows-mouse: when I'm typing, I don't want the mouse pointer in the way, so I move it to a corner, where the slightest table tab might accidentally bump it across the edge, suddenly disabling the window.
Click to focus is better because you can toss the pointer out-of-the-way and mostly stop worrying about it.
Anyway, an interesting analysis, though I'm not entirely convinced you've got the details right-- subjects like this are frustrating because we all end up doing quite a bit of guesswork though it seems like by now someone should really know for sure-- and worse, someone may actually know, it's just that none of us ever hear of the results of the research, so we go back to guessing and waving our hands.
Yes, but very little of what most people do most of the time actually falls into that category. Instead of hitting a couple of keys, you need to use a pointing device to find a region on the screen to click on, watching very carefully not to over or undershoot. What could be done in an "open loop" fashion (you watch what you're doing, but mostly just to catch mistakes) becomes a "closed loop" operation (you have to look just to get it to work).
The usual justification for this stuff is that having a big chunk of the screen dedicated to being one of the controls provides a visual reminder of it's existence, it reduces your need to memorize a command to perform the operation. But then, it also eats a lot of the screen, so there are various strategies to hide the graphical controls, grouped into menus, which you have to navigate through repeatedly even after you know where the controls are hidden away.
The thing is, back in the bad old keyboard days there were exceedingly similar strategies that were being developed to accommodate beginners without crippling experts, e.g. Wordstar's reminder menus that could be adjusted to become less intrusive as you needed them less.
And myself, even in the case of something like a graphics editor, I often wonder if the designs over-use the mouse just out of custom rather than necessity. Consider the old Autocad set-up which had a very useful way to type up commands by name as well as more GUI features...
We've made great strides since those days. With our new touch screen interfaces we've succeeded in reducing productivity to near zero, making such measurements obsolete.
Yes, essentially-- the people doing UI design are grossly lazy about supporting any approach but the latest whizzy trend, and people like myself who favor keyboards are roughly two trends back.
Every now and then I make an effort to put the icewm window manager aside, and try out whatever the cool kids at gnome are pushing these days, but from my point of view it's always horribly broken in some very dumb ways-- like the window control menu still has keyboard alternates on it, but you can't open the menu pad with Alt-Space anymore, so what's the point exactly?
I thought it just meant "marketing".
Of course, you've gotta respect the sales skills of a bunch of marketing wizards rebranding themselves as "data scientists".
Human beings are indeed very weak reeds, and yet some institutions have succeeded in developing a fair degree of reliability in spite of being contructed out of such weak reeds, so it would seem that the way you connect us fallible nodes together actually matters, social structures matter, and our internet sites matter--
By the way, the model of the stupids vs the smarts doesn't hold up very well if you look at the actual data-- nominally smart people can actually be very stupid, which is something you might've noticed by now if you were actually one of the smarts.