Mr. DogIsMyCoprocessor is apparently unaware that SLASH'EM is already a finished, fully working game. Most open source software is "under development," that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. (Nethack has been under development forever as well; most of us consider that a good thing.)
Think (or at least learn something about the subject) before performing knee-jerk moderation, people.
You're not kidding. My wife's from Brazil, and the minimum monthly wage down there is about R$250 (Reals, which is equal to about $83 ) -- and books there sell for R$30 or so. So a Brazilian, spending all his income, would be able to purchase almost 3 books.
Um... your math is a bit screwed up. You should be dividing R$250 by R$30, giving 8-9 books per month. And, although I admittedly didn't buy any books while I was in Brazil, I rather doubt that that R$30 book is equivalent to the cheap supermarket paperback which is all you're going to get here for $5.
Of course, that makes the disparity 10:1 instead of 100:1. You're still right about the books being overpriced.
What's more, to most of the people I've talked to about Linux, ease of use is not even a factor so long as commercial games won't run on Linux. (No, I'm not talking about WineX or VMWare. I'm talking about native support.)
You're trying to tell me that the average user knows the difference between native support and windows emulation, and cares about which one the program uses? Give me a break. Nobody but/. posers actually cares what libraries their games use, as long as they work.
And your challenge is flawed -- asking college students is a ridiculously biased sample. Try asking real people. I bet that games only hit the list once in every four or five people.
Layouts like Dvorak address the top-row overloading and unbalanced left-right loads.
However, Dvorak is absolutely dreadful where the alternating left-right hands is concerned, which accounts for an awful lot of QWERTY's speed. The link I gave is a really just a more readable summary of the original, extremely lengthy paper. The point is addressed in depth in the original. (I believe that the original is linked in the straightdope article from the parent of my post.)
To add some real info (rather than just handwaving about the reasons), several studies have been done comparing qwerty to dvorak. For the most part, they tend to show that typing speed is pretty much equal between the two. Most of the anecdotal evidence says the same thing.
There is some evidence that the dvorak layout is better ergonomically -- people using it seem to have fewer problems with carpal tunnel and other typing-related injuries. I'm unaware of any controlled studies of this, however.
Re:Will receive email for work.
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
Just to give you an idea of what the delays will be like, Tom's Hardware did a comparison of processors from a 100MHz Pentium to a 3.06 GHz PIV. [link] The processor-heavy tasks (presumably roughly analogous to the "work units" that would be performed) seem to be somewhere in the vicinity of 50-100x slower on the Pentium 100 than on the PIV. Thus, if you assume that we would require the fastest systems to do 15 seconds of work, a slow system would require between 15 and 25 minutes of processor time. That gap is only going to increase, as the upper bound of processor speed is increasing faster than the lower bound is becoming obsolete.
If we assume that 1 minute is a tolerable wait on a low-end system, a high-end system will require 0.6 seconds per message -- in one day, the spammer will be able to send 144 thousand messages. The delay would not be a deterrent.
I tend to think that trying to find a balance is doomed to failure -- you would only succeed in reducing the utility of e-mail and spam would still continue.
My personal favorite solution: e-mail can have "stamps" attached that can be redeemed by the reciever (If the reciever doesn't redeem the stamp within a few days, then the sender pays nothing). By default, all incoming mail will be rejected if it doesn't have a stamp. Any addresses in a whitelist will be accepted regardless of whether it has a stamp. Thus, mailing lists and personal correspondance cost nothing, and spammers won't be able to afford to stay in business.
Of course, the real trouble is in finding a path in order to get people to start using one of these new systems. A standard has to be agreed upon, and support added to the popular mail clients, before any large number of people would migrate to it. The hard part is not drafting a new standard, it's providing a smooth upgrade path.
Re:Will receive email for work.
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with this is that it makes it impossible to use an older system in order to send e-mail -- anything difficult enough to cause an appreciable delay for a new system will take intolerably long on a low-end pentium or 486. There's no reason why e-mailing someone should require a new machine.
It might work to allow the reciever to have a whitelist of addresses -- so that you only have to do the work if you are sending to someone you don't know. Still, I sure wouldn't want to have to let my computer crunch numbers for five minutes just to send an email to someone I had never contacted before.
However, as far as I can tell, this is really no different than the pay-per-email solution, but less straightforward.
Mod the parent up. Another link about the qwerty myth is here.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The "pay for email" approach would only work if it was possible to whitelist addresses who would then not have to pay. The mailing list problem then would not exist -- you simply require that anyone who signs up whitelists the mailing list address.
I believe I can be considered a hard-core Blender user (been using it for ~5 years), but I never attacked anyone. Of course, then again, I am also a developer.
You're right, of course, and I apologize. I should have said "some hardcore Blender users," as I was particularly referring to the subset of them that were claiming that anyone who's not an idiot can learn to use the thing in half an hour. I shouldn't generalize like that.
If they really made the interface that easy to use, the usefulness of Blender would be sacrificied.
You guys keep repeating this without any sort of evidence. How will the usefulness of blender be sacrificed by labeling icons and making text entry widgets that don't look exactly like buttons?
This is completely analogous to Windows users saying that Linux is needlessly cryptic, you realize?
No. It isn't. Linux follows well-defined, widely used standards. Blender's interface does the exact opposite. If I sit a Windows user down to a GTK+ application, they feel immediately comfortable. If you sit a user of another 3D modeling application down to Blender, they won't have a clue what to do.
As far as your "it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research" comment, the AC who responded is spot on. That statement is nonsense. If it's cryptic before you do research, it's still cryptic afterwards.
Fortunately, it sounds like they are working on an improved interface for a later release of Blender. It's rather interesting that even though the hardcore Blender users immediately personally attack anyone who complains about the interface, the developers are willing to acknowledge that there's a problem.
I'd believe it if you could name some things that are wrong with a standard interface that Blender does and are actually good. (For that matter, why don't you name some problems with standard interfaces in general?)
I'm not arguing the fact that an experienced user can use the thing efficiently. However, the hours that it took you and everyone else to get comfortable with the UI were a pointless waste, and have served to make many of Blender's target audience turn elsewhere. The greatest power of the GUI is to allow users to quickly understand the interface and transfer skills that they have learned elsewhere. A poor user interface throws all that out the window.
Many of the people here are claiming that the Blender interface is "minimal," and that it "gets out of the way and lets me work." That's bull. An interface that refuses to follow standards isn't getting out of the way; it's actively hindering the user. Minimal doesn't mean backwards, as some people seem to think.
Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then?
I certainly wouldn't cite them as examples of a good UI. They aren't quite as bad as Blender -- at least they're consistent, they don't flout UI standards, and come with comprehensive help; all of which I consider among the worst things Blender misses -- but they're not perfect.
The GUI versions of vim help a lot -- giving new users access to commands that they would otherwise have to guess or search through the help files for. Getting started with vi on a text terminal is rather difficult without a reference, and the more advanced functions are still difficult to find.
This is coming from a vim user. When I first got started, it took me quite some time to learn how to edit a text file usefully, and I still wouldn't call myself an expert. That initial learning curve should be much shorter.
Well, I can think of two reasons why the comparison isn't particularly great:
1) Nethack's interface may be difficult to learn, but it is not cryptic. The keystroke=command paradigm is kept consistent thoughout the game; the hard part is learning all the commands. There's a difference between the large number of commands in Nethack, and the flouting of user interface standards in Blender. Most of my complaints about the Blender interface would be solved if they had a sane menu system, and followed interface guidelines. I'm well aware of the fact that a 3D modeler is not an inherently easy thing to use, but the interface has no business making things worse.
2) There are actually alternative interfaces available for nethack, should one want to use them.
You failed to address the relevant point: Blender's UI is needlessly cryptic. Even assuming that you really can pick it up in half an hour like you claim (obviously false; I and many others have spent far more than half an hour trying to learn to use it), there is absolutely no reason to simply ignore the years of research and work on user interfaces. A well-designed interface would be just as powerful of the "power user", and still not be as opaque to the new user.
If you think that having a text entry widget that looks like a button is good user interface design, you're insane.
Maybe it works for the experienced user, but it's still a stellar example of bad UI design. Tiny buttons with cryptic icons, a GUI interface that works in an irritatingly nonstandard fasion, and so forth. Fixing these would go a long way towards making it accessible to new users, and would not hurt the experienced users one bit. Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.
For that matter, even had all the words in that statement been spelled correctly, "That someone jumped through all the hoops that Microsoft put up to keep their stronghold?" isn't any language that I speak. It's comprehensible, but just barely.
How do you figure that the federation was a threat to them? If it only takes a single cube to destroy virtually the entire fleet, couldn't the Borg deal with them when the time came?
Of course, First Contact and Voyager turned the Borg into a running gag, so maybe they really couldn't have taken the federation ten years later.
As I said, I only think it's OK to cap if they tell you about it up front. You can then make the informed decision as to whether you would like to go with a provider that caps bandwidth or not. I certainly would. you might not.
That said, they're not "making a killing." Bandwidth simply is not as cheap as you seem to think it is -- any business trying to get the same speed line to you take for granted with cable or DSL will pay several times as much as you do, because they don't have Grandma who only checks her email to subsidize them. Broadband internet is a commodity, low-margin business. If you and everyone else want a 24/7, fast, uncapped line, prices will have to go up.
Slashdot Mirror
As insightful as that was...
Mr. DogIsMyCoprocessor is apparently unaware that SLASH'EM is already a finished, fully working game. Most open source software is "under development," that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. (Nethack has been under development forever as well; most of us consider that a good thing.)
Think (or at least learn something about the subject) before performing knee-jerk moderation, people.
You're not kidding. My wife's from Brazil, and the minimum monthly wage down there is about R$250 (Reals, which is equal to about $83 ) -- and books there sell for R$30 or so. So a Brazilian, spending all his income, would be able to purchase almost 3 books.
... your math is a bit screwed up. You should be dividing R$250 by R$30, giving 8-9 books per month. And, although I admittedly didn't buy any books while I was in Brazil, I rather doubt that that R$30 book is equivalent to the cheap supermarket paperback which is all you're going to get here for $5.
Um
Of course, that makes the disparity 10:1 instead of 100:1. You're still right about the books being overpriced.
The government cannot change the laws of physics. Unless you are really paranoid.
Hello, user #582068! I see that you are new here. Welcome to Slashdot!
claimed the coffee was "defective" because it was so hot.
Funny. I would consider that a feature.
This is the most insightful post in the entire thread. Kudos.
So why not just stick with the whitelist, and not worry about the 'pay for mail' part?
You've never wanted to e-mail somebody who doesn't know you personally?
What's more, to most of the people I've talked to about Linux, ease of use is not even a factor so long as commercial games won't run on Linux. (No, I'm not talking about WineX or VMWare. I'm talking about native support.)
/. posers actually cares what libraries their games use, as long as they work.
You're trying to tell me that the average user knows the difference between native support and windows emulation, and cares about which one the program uses? Give me a break. Nobody but
And your challenge is flawed -- asking college students is a ridiculously biased sample. Try asking real people. I bet that games only hit the list once in every four or five people.
Layouts like Dvorak address the top-row overloading and unbalanced left-right loads.
However, Dvorak is absolutely dreadful where the alternating left-right hands is concerned, which accounts for an awful lot of QWERTY's speed. The link I gave is a really just a more readable summary of the original, extremely lengthy paper. The point is addressed in depth in the original. (I believe that the original is linked in the straightdope article from the parent of my post.)
To add some real info (rather than just handwaving about the reasons), several studies have been done comparing qwerty to dvorak. For the most part, they tend to show that typing speed is pretty much equal between the two. Most of the anecdotal evidence says the same thing.
There is some evidence that the dvorak layout is better ergonomically -- people using it seem to have fewer problems with carpal tunnel and other typing-related injuries. I'm unaware of any controlled studies of this, however.
Just to give you an idea of what the delays will be like, Tom's Hardware did a comparison of processors from a 100MHz Pentium to a 3.06 GHz PIV. [link] The processor-heavy tasks (presumably roughly analogous to the "work units" that would be performed) seem to be somewhere in the vicinity of 50-100x slower on the Pentium 100 than on the PIV. Thus, if you assume that we would require the fastest systems to do 15 seconds of work, a slow system would require between 15 and 25 minutes of processor time. That gap is only going to increase, as the upper bound of processor speed is increasing faster than the lower bound is becoming obsolete.
If we assume that 1 minute is a tolerable wait on a low-end system, a high-end system will require 0.6 seconds per message -- in one day, the spammer will be able to send 144 thousand messages. The delay would not be a deterrent.
I tend to think that trying to find a balance is doomed to failure -- you would only succeed in reducing the utility of e-mail and spam would still continue.
My personal favorite solution: e-mail can have "stamps" attached that can be redeemed by the reciever (If the reciever doesn't redeem the stamp within a few days, then the sender pays nothing). By default, all incoming mail will be rejected if it doesn't have a stamp. Any addresses in a whitelist will be accepted regardless of whether it has a stamp. Thus, mailing lists and personal correspondance cost nothing, and spammers won't be able to afford to stay in business.
Of course, the real trouble is in finding a path in order to get people to start using one of these new systems. A standard has to be agreed upon, and support added to the popular mail clients, before any large number of people would migrate to it. The hard part is not drafting a new standard, it's providing a smooth upgrade path.
The problem with this is that it makes it impossible to use an older system in order to send e-mail -- anything difficult enough to cause an appreciable delay for a new system will take intolerably long on a low-end pentium or 486. There's no reason why e-mailing someone should require a new machine.
It might work to allow the reciever to have a whitelist of addresses -- so that you only have to do the work if you are sending to someone you don't know. Still, I sure wouldn't want to have to let my computer crunch numbers for five minutes just to send an email to someone I had never contacted before.
However, as far as I can tell, this is really no different than the pay-per-email solution, but less straightforward.
Mod the parent up. Another link about the qwerty myth is here.
The "pay for email" approach would only work if it was possible to whitelist addresses who would then not have to pay. The mailing list problem then would not exist -- you simply require that anyone who signs up whitelists the mailing list address.
IHBT == "I have been trolled." Primarily used by people attempting to discredit someone else's post by personal attack rather than reasoned debate.
No. You are a troll.
There should be a variant of Godwin's law that whoever throws the first "IHBT" loses the argument.
I believe I can be considered a hard-core Blender user (been using it for ~5 years), but I never attacked anyone. Of course, then again, I am also a developer.
You're right, of course, and I apologize. I should have said "some hardcore Blender users," as I was particularly referring to the subset of them that were claiming that anyone who's not an idiot can learn to use the thing in half an hour. I shouldn't generalize like that.
If they really made the interface that easy to use, the usefulness of Blender would be sacrificied.
You guys keep repeating this without any sort of evidence. How will the usefulness of blender be sacrificed by labeling icons and making text entry widgets that don't look exactly like buttons?
This is completely analogous to Windows users saying that Linux is needlessly cryptic, you realize?
No. It isn't. Linux follows well-defined, widely used standards. Blender's interface does the exact opposite. If I sit a Windows user down to a GTK+ application, they feel immediately comfortable. If you sit a user of another 3D modeling application down to Blender, they won't have a clue what to do.
As far as your "it isn't cryptic if you do a bit of research" comment, the AC who responded is spot on. That statement is nonsense. If it's cryptic before you do research, it's still cryptic afterwards.
Fortunately, it sounds like they are working on an improved interface for a later release of Blender. It's rather interesting that even though the hardcore Blender users immediately personally attack anyone who complains about the interface, the developers are willing to acknowledge that there's a problem.
Interfaces need to be non standard to be good.
I'd believe it if you could name some things that are wrong with a standard interface that Blender does and are actually good. (For that matter, why don't you name some problems with standard interfaces in general?)
I'm not arguing the fact that an experienced user can use the thing efficiently. However, the hours that it took you and everyone else to get comfortable with the UI were a pointless waste, and have served to make many of Blender's target audience turn elsewhere. The greatest power of the GUI is to allow users to quickly understand the interface and transfer skills that they have learned elsewhere. A poor user interface throws all that out the window.
Many of the people here are claiming that the Blender interface is "minimal," and that it "gets out of the way and lets me work." That's bull. An interface that refuses to follow standards isn't getting out of the way; it's actively hindering the user. Minimal doesn't mean backwards, as some people seem to think.
Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then?
I certainly wouldn't cite them as examples of a good UI. They aren't quite as bad as Blender -- at least they're consistent, they don't flout UI standards, and come with comprehensive help; all of which I consider among the worst things Blender misses -- but they're not perfect.
The GUI versions of vim help a lot -- giving new users access to commands that they would otherwise have to guess or search through the help files for. Getting started with vi on a text terminal is rather difficult without a reference, and the more advanced functions are still difficult to find.
This is coming from a vim user. When I first got started, it took me quite some time to learn how to edit a text file usefully, and I still wouldn't call myself an expert. That initial learning curve should be much shorter.
Well, I can think of two reasons why the comparison isn't particularly great:
:)
1) Nethack's interface may be difficult to learn, but it is not cryptic. The keystroke=command paradigm is kept consistent thoughout the game; the hard part is learning all the commands. There's a difference between the large number of commands in Nethack, and the flouting of user interface standards in Blender. Most of my complaints about the Blender interface would be solved if they had a sane menu system, and followed interface guidelines. I'm well aware of the fact that a 3D modeler is not an inherently easy thing to use, but the interface has no business making things worse.
2) There are actually alternative interfaces available for nethack, should one want to use them.
Point taken, though
You failed to address the relevant point: Blender's UI is needlessly cryptic. Even assuming that you really can pick it up in half an hour like you claim (obviously false; I and many others have spent far more than half an hour trying to learn to use it), there is absolutely no reason to simply ignore the years of research and work on user interfaces. A well-designed interface would be just as powerful of the "power user", and still not be as opaque to the new user.
If you think that having a text entry widget that looks like a button is good user interface design, you're insane.
Maybe it works for the experienced user, but it's still a stellar example of bad UI design. Tiny buttons with cryptic icons, a GUI interface that works in an irritatingly nonstandard fasion, and so forth. Fixing these would go a long way towards making it accessible to new users, and would not hurt the experienced users one bit. Given that the poor interface is by far the biggest complaint people have about Blender, you would think that some thought would be given to fixing it.
For that matter, even had all the words in that statement been spelled correctly, "That someone jumped through all the hoops that Microsoft put up to keep their stronghold?" isn't any language that I speak. It's comprehensible, but just barely.
How do you figure that the federation was a threat to them? If it only takes a single cube to destroy virtually the entire fleet, couldn't the Borg deal with them when the time came?
Of course, First Contact and Voyager turned the Borg into a running gag, so maybe they really couldn't have taken the federation ten years later.
As I said, I only think it's OK to cap if they tell you about it up front. You can then make the informed decision as to whether you would like to go with a provider that caps bandwidth or not. I certainly would. you might not.
That said, they're not "making a killing." Bandwidth simply is not as cheap as you seem to think it is -- any business trying to get the same speed line to you take for granted with cable or DSL will pay several times as much as you do, because they don't have Grandma who only checks her email to subsidize them. Broadband internet is a commodity, low-margin business. If you and everyone else want a 24/7, fast, uncapped line, prices will have to go up.