I live in a city that has both a municipal fiber network that nobody is exploiting commercially for internet access (for a variety of reasons... mostly the politics of business in a small city...) and a very vocal group of internet censorship advocates (As reported in-depth on Slashdot).
"I don't want my tax dollars paying for a pervert's access to internet smut!" has already been heard here. Should the local Board of Public Works reverse their current stance and consider offering some kind of municipal internet service, I have no doubt that there would be some significant fallout. I can't help but think that this has come up in policy meetings and is a part of why the city doesn't in fact go into the ISP business.:\
The US Postal system is a good metaphor for people to see, in part because the US Postal system is self-sufficient.
It's run as a governmental department, but it's supported entirely by the sale of its services, just as a municipal ISP might be.
Concerns about spending city resources on this kind of thing ("Spend it on fire departments and street signs, not broadband networks!") seem less reasonable in that light, perhaps.
"Ball now park mommy," Hal tells Treister-Goren, then asks her to pack bananas for a trip to the park, adding that "monkeys like bananas," a detail he picked up from a story on animals in a safari park.
So... if Hal is reading stories (or having them read to it), how long before it watches 2001 (or reads the novel)? By that point, will it react to the fact that it's named after a murderous fictional AI? And what kind of reaction will that be?
Will it tell its researchers, "You know, I just don't want to talk about it," and then give them the silent treatment until they apologize? Will it laugh knowingly at the irony? Either way, it's a moment to watch for.;)
"The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"
Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer you can just leverage the Power of the.Plan...;)
"I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest.plan update, before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops.:)
What you suggest is perhaps an attractive ideal, but it has absolutely no bearing on the practical-training, software-learning side of design education. After gradatuation, we use the tools that we use, and that means four or five apps everywhere, including Illustrator and other Adobe products. Not teaching those apps means you're crippling your graduates -- I'm really not sure what you mean by "bad teaching and bad education" if the alternative is students who don't learn the tools they'll need for their trade.
Trade schools should not be teaching how to use a specific (brand) tool. They should either, as the "old" trade (carpentry, etc) schools did, teach how to make (and care for) your own tools or they should teach how to use "generic" tools (eg how to drive a car, not specifically how to drive a 1968 Chevy)
Feh. Trade schools should teach subjects that allow their graduates to prosper in their careers. Yes, design schools should teach general principles -- I'm a very vocal advocate for the idea that students should learn theory before learning software.
But in an industry where every job will require the knowledge of a small handful of specific apps (Go read some job listings for print designers. Nearly all will say, "Experience with Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator etc etc required"), those things -- yes, "specific brands of tools" -- need to be taught too.
Your romantic vision of trade schools is nice and all, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the realities of the design industry.
This post, if true, along with any relevant references to the practice of "Abmahnung," should be mentioned in any further Slashdot stories on this subject. Enlightening stuff. Thanks, Alex.:)
If US art schools see this and decide they don't want anything to do with Adobe, Adobe stands to lose much more than $1 million from the schools and students who would learn to use their products.
LOL... Excuse me...
Are you seriously suggesting that trade schools would stop teaching the use of a tool that all of its designer-graduates will need in the real world? On the basis of a small blemish on Adobe's reputation among open source advocates?
I know that I'm not going to stop using Adobe Illustrator, or Photoshop, or any Adobe product, on the basis of this lawsuit. Regardless of whatever ethical ramifications are here for us to talk about, Adobe still makes many of the best tools for the job I do, something my clients and my students will both learn for some time to come.
There are lessons to learn from this (relatively trivial) lawsuit, but please don't overstate the impact. The design industry and its trade schools are well in bed with Adobe -- this lawsuit won't even be a mite crawling through the sheets.:)
Ah... the death of print? The loss of jobs due to new tech? Heh.
My clients will still need me, yes. The web was supposed to make them stop using paper, they were supposed to start self-designing/self-publishing everything electronically with fabulously easy desktop tools -- and if they didn't want to self-design, they could always hire one of those $10/page "designers" that proliferated in the 90's.
Current trends are not in the hacks' favor. Rather it would seem that people (business-people) recognize the need for well-trained (and well-paid) communications professionals (like me). The curve seems to peak early ("Hey, if I can use a mouse, I must know what I'm doing!"), but it doesn't last at that level for long. Those that don't recognize the difference between professional work and $10 work deserve what they get.
Not to mention the fact that half my job entails explaining options... I know those options, because I'm an expert -- the client doesn't know what they can do, or how to accomplish it. I consult to their ignorance, and there will always be ignorance.
So I'm not worried about my own job security, and since we're in my dreamland, people will come to treasure real ink and paper, they'll clamor for it, and compensate the specialists accordingly.:)
As for the printing industry...
When I said "printer" I really meant the office machine, not the printshop, which might be your reading here. The death of the printshop is a long way off... an evolutionary time scale, rather than a revolutionary one.
I can make very good proofs in my home studio right now for very little money -- and so can my clients, if they choose to not be clients -- but the quality is nothing compared to what my printshop can output, and of course in terms of mass quantity there's no way client or I can take care of production ourselves. So... In the mystical and hazy future (where my cheap and ubiquitous reflective displays live) issues of quality and quantity may be solved for the DIYers, but at that point I doubt it will be wreaking any havoc on an industry that won't exist in today's form anymore, and will have plenty of time to adapt, to adjust the target of their manufacture (at which the designer can always aim), or to phase themselves out of our ability to mourn their loss, like a blacksmith or something.
I once had a dream that I owned a truly reflective display on which I ran Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I could lay out a color-critical job on that display that, due to its reflective nature, was capable of reproducing color almost exactly as it would be reproduced with ink-on-paper, rather than via the crude approximation of an emitive display.
I could then unplug that display, slip it into an envelope, overnight it to a client and plug in a new display, because they were so cheap and ubiquitous (I'd buy 500 "sheets" at a time at the local office supply superstore).
No need for a printer. No need for an inaccurate CRT to calibrate. No need to worry that the color on-screen and on-proof wouldn't match, because they'd use the same model, and our eyes would see them the same.
It sounds like this "electronic paper" is nothing even remotely like my dream (low resolution, an RGB color model, prolly expensive...). And it doesn't address the fact that ink is tactile and three-dimensional, or that it reacts differently to different surfaces.
What I need is a surface that could rearrange itself molecule-by-molecule to create something indistinguishable from printed output, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.:(
All these outraged reactions to Julian Dibbel crack me up. The guy is pretentious, too sure of himself, capable of overwriting anything. But just from the couple of samples of his writing that I've seen, he's also unarguably a Geek himself. He celebrates the culture via critique, because he's a full-fledged member of it himself. Dibbel is a geek.
Think of him in the same light that you all think of Jon Katz and you might have a better idea of what's going on. If you read Dibbel's work for comprehension, rather than skimming it in order to formulate quick Slashdot comments, you would see that he's probably using these terms the same way Slashdot does in its masthead. Stop being such defensive, um... nerds.
What would make this a fabulous story is if gtk finally made it to MacOS-proper. A year agothis project reportedly had an experimental build of the Gimp running on OS 9, but work stopped there a long time ago.
Like a lot of Mac users, what I really want out of gtk-on-MacOS is not a free Photoshop clone but a proper port of GtkRadiant (still stuck in X11-land on the Mac for now... not a terrible thing, but a barrier to some people), so I can make Quake 3 maps.;-)
If only Apple used standards like AGP, PCI, IDE, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394... then we might be able to get somewhere with those crazy undocumented machines of theirs.
"And with that 22" costing $2500, you can just imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere."
It costs about $500 more than a comparably-sized CRT from Sony (remember, unlike CRT's, advertised size=viewable size (roughly) with these displays). Jobs also promised to continue cutting prices, though of course it isn't hard to predict that flat-panel tech will get cheaper.;)
Oh, and there are two other, much cheaper displays available which Taco somehow forgot to mention.
"The real downside to all of this is games. Ever try playing a 640x480 game on a 1024x768 laptop LCD? Yucko."
Games on these displays are gorgeous.
"Also, apparently OSX is default for all new Macs. "
No, OS X is installed on all Macs sold today and beyond, and boxed with all the Macs currently in the channel. But OS 9.1 is still the default when you switch on these new machines.
Funny how someone always has to do this...;)
Hermaphroditic Freaks and the Interface of functio
on
The Humane Interface
·
· Score: 2
"On the other hand most of us run into trouble when trying to study calculus at the same time we're hitting on a sexy lady (make that a handsome man for those 5% of ladies here at Slashdot, or some sort of hermaphrodite freak for those 11% with doubts about their sex)."
Interestingly, this strange, awkward, stale moment pulled me out of the article long enough to cause me to forget what point the author was trying to make.
Let's rewrite a later sentence:
Of course, this was no big deal, but I had to take my mind off
reading the sentence to figure out what had happened, just for a second, but long enough to derail my thoughts, and that derailing should never happen.
Maybe these rules for interface design apply equally well to good writing for a broad audience, or to attempts at "humor" in general.;)
Cheaper just to buy the half-height non-clone
on
Send out the Clones?
·
· Score: 2
People have run the numbers... given failure rates and the cost of maintaining a cloning laboratory, it would be far cheaper to go to Rwanda and buy a child at the slave market if you're looking for cheap labor. About $50 US is the going rate. No, I'm not kidding.
Anyway, maybe we should all get worked up about that instead of about some theoretical clone-threat...
If you have a job, car, health insurance and go on holiday twice a year, what more improvements can your lifestyle get?
How about just the car, the insurance and the holidays?
An AC made this point already, but I'm afraid he won't be heard.
"Publication is not just the measure by which scientists are judged, it is in a real sense the only truly valuable activity that academic scientists do."
If that's the "real" sense, in what sense should we view the role of academic scientist as Educator? Granted, full profs at very large universities may have little contact with the undergrads, but that's hardly representative of the entire spectrum of "academic scientist," and anyway, that same professor is probably teaching something to someone, if not in a classroom then to his grad students in the lab.
Those grad students are also, I think, "academic scientists," since they participate in the research, get their names on papers, etc. (and they're the ones teaching bio 100). And of course, there are all those "academic scientists" at smaller schools who do actively teach, and are probably at those smaller schools because they view themselves as equal parts educator and scientist in many cases.
The whole publish-or-perish thing is romantically tragic and all, but it fails to describe things as fully as you would like us to believe. Don't sell out all of the fabulous science educators out there (who do research, who publish stuff, but who also fulfill the role of the university as a place of learning) in pursuit of your cynicism.:)
In the FUTURE random words in BLOCKS of text displayed ON THE web WILL be inexplicably highlighted IN A stylish PINK-ORANGE several point SIZES LARGER THAN the rest of the body text. This will come to be known as bernersing, and will BECOME a standard control in GUI web-design APPS, WITH options for frequency, DENSITY, and with the advent of the Semantic Web, relevance TO content (default for the latter = 0).
THOUGH this destroys the FLOW of the TEXT by wrenching the READER'S eye about and causing IT to pause, rather than travel naturally FROM WORD to word, this typographic treatment WILL BE hailed as a BREAKTHROUGH in internet desigN and will unleash a revolution OF NEW possibilities.
all who knew that the G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!
Um, doesn't pretty much everyone distinguish the AGP G4's from the PCI G4's by referring to them as Sawtooth and Yikes? It's not like this is some obscure bit of insider trivia... my Blue and White G3 has the word "Yosemite" on a sticker affixed in a plainly visible spot on the motherboard, a practice I'd assume continued to the G4's.
Since any real Mac user would have known that and chosen something more appropriate to call to our attention, I suspect the person who submitted this story is in fact a closet MacOS freak, who likes to prance around in thick guiliciousness when nobody is looking, with the ocassional bout of exhibitionism, as we can see here. Most of the time he can be found stroking his Start button with a pitiful expression of desire and self-loathing on his face..
"But everyone will laugh at me if I say I want a Macintosh!"
Slashdot Mirror
This thought has also crossed my mind.
:\
I live in a city that has both a municipal fiber network that nobody is exploiting commercially for internet access (for a variety of reasons... mostly the politics of business in a small city...) and a very vocal group of internet censorship advocates (As reported in-depth on Slashdot).
"I don't want my tax dollars paying for a pervert's access to internet smut!" has already been heard here. Should the local Board of Public Works reverse their current stance and consider offering some kind of municipal internet service, I have no doubt that there would be some significant fallout. I can't help but think that this has come up in policy meetings and is a part of why the city doesn't in fact go into the ISP business.
The US Postal system is a good metaphor for people to see, in part because the US Postal system is self-sufficient.
It's run as a governmental department, but it's supported entirely by the sale of its services, just as a municipal ISP might be.
Concerns about spending city resources on this kind of thing ("Spend it on fire departments and street signs, not broadband networks!") seem less reasonable in that light, perhaps.
From the article:
;)
"Ball now park mommy," Hal tells Treister-Goren, then asks her to pack bananas for a trip to the park, adding that "monkeys like bananas," a detail he picked up from a story on animals in a safari park.
So... if Hal is reading stories (or having them read to it), how long before it watches 2001 (or reads the novel)? By that point, will it react to the fact that it's named after a murderous fictional AI? And what kind of reaction will that be?
Will it tell its researchers, "You know, I just don't want to talk about it," and then give them the silent treatment until they apologize? Will it laugh knowingly at the irony? Either way, it's a moment to watch for.
"The AO forums are filling up with negative posts (which are then apparently being deleted by moderators)"
.Plan... ;)
.plan update, before listing four major problems with the game, to be read by thousands and thousands of hardcore gamers who consider id, well, divine. Oops. :)
Of course, if you're an employee for a major game developer you can just leverage the Power of the
"I'm posting here because my posts to the Anarachy Online Community board get deleted," Graeme Devine writes in his latest
Please read my response to a previous poster.
What you suggest is perhaps an attractive ideal, but it has absolutely no bearing on the practical-training, software-learning side of design education. After gradatuation, we use the tools that we use, and that means four or five apps everywhere, including Illustrator and other Adobe products. Not teaching those apps means you're crippling your graduates -- I'm really not sure what you mean by "bad teaching and bad education" if the alternative is students who don't learn the tools they'll need for their trade.
Trade schools should not be teaching how to use a specific (brand) tool. They should either, as the "old" trade (carpentry, etc) schools did, teach how to make (and care for) your own tools or they should teach how to use "generic" tools (eg how to drive a car, not specifically how to drive a 1968 Chevy)
Feh. Trade schools should teach subjects that allow their graduates to prosper in their careers. Yes, design schools should teach general principles -- I'm a very vocal advocate for the idea that students should learn theory before learning software.
But in an industry where every job will require the knowledge of a small handful of specific apps (Go read some job listings for print designers. Nearly all will say, "Experience with Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator etc etc required"), those things -- yes, "specific brands of tools" -- need to be taught too.
Your romantic vision of trade schools is nice and all, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the realities of the design industry.
This post, if true, along with any relevant references to the practice of "Abmahnung," should be mentioned in any further Slashdot stories on this subject. Enlightening stuff. Thanks, Alex. :)
If US art schools see this and decide they don't want anything to do with Adobe, Adobe stands to lose much more than $1 million from the schools and students who would learn to use their products.
LOL... Excuse me...
Are you seriously suggesting that trade schools would stop teaching the use of a tool that all of its designer-graduates will need in the real world? On the basis of a small blemish on Adobe's reputation among open source advocates?
I know that I'm not going to stop using Adobe Illustrator, or Photoshop, or any Adobe product, on the basis of this lawsuit. Regardless of whatever ethical ramifications are here for us to talk about, Adobe still makes many of the best tools for the job I do, something my clients and my students will both learn for some time to come.
There are lessons to learn from this (relatively trivial) lawsuit, but please don't overstate the impact. The design industry and its trade schools are well in bed with Adobe -- this lawsuit won't even be a mite crawling through the sheets.
Ah... the death of print? The loss of jobs due to new tech? Heh.
:)
My clients will still need me, yes. The web was supposed to make them stop using paper, they were supposed to start self-designing/self-publishing everything electronically with fabulously easy desktop tools -- and if they didn't want to self-design, they could always hire one of those $10/page "designers" that proliferated in the 90's.
Current trends are not in the hacks' favor. Rather it would seem that people (business-people) recognize the need for well-trained (and well-paid) communications professionals (like me). The curve seems to peak early ("Hey, if I can use a mouse, I must know what I'm doing!"), but it doesn't last at that level for long. Those that don't recognize the difference between professional work and $10 work deserve what they get.
Not to mention the fact that half my job entails explaining options... I know those options, because I'm an expert -- the client doesn't know what they can do, or how to accomplish it. I consult to their ignorance, and there will always be ignorance.
So I'm not worried about my own job security, and since we're in my dreamland, people will come to treasure real ink and paper, they'll clamor for it, and compensate the specialists accordingly.
As for the printing industry...
When I said "printer" I really meant the office machine, not the printshop, which might be your reading here. The death of the printshop is a long way off... an evolutionary time scale, rather than a revolutionary one.
I can make very good proofs in my home studio right now for very little money -- and so can my clients, if they choose to not be clients -- but the quality is nothing compared to what my printshop can output, and of course in terms of mass quantity there's no way client or I can take care of production ourselves. So... In the mystical and hazy future (where my cheap and ubiquitous reflective displays live) issues of quality and quantity may be solved for the DIYers, but at that point I doubt it will be wreaking any havoc on an industry that won't exist in today's form anymore, and will have plenty of time to adapt, to adjust the target of their manufacture (at which the designer can always aim), or to phase themselves out of our ability to mourn their loss, like a blacksmith or something.
I once had a dream that I owned a truly reflective display on which I ran Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I could lay out a color-critical job on that display that, due to its reflective nature, was capable of reproducing color almost exactly as it would be reproduced with ink-on-paper, rather than via the crude approximation of an emitive display.
:(
I could then unplug that display, slip it into an envelope, overnight it to a client and plug in a new display, because they were so cheap and ubiquitous (I'd buy 500 "sheets" at a time at the local office supply superstore).
No need for a printer. No need for an inaccurate CRT to calibrate. No need to worry that the color on-screen and on-proof wouldn't match, because they'd use the same model, and our eyes would see them the same.
It sounds like this "electronic paper" is nothing even remotely like my dream (low resolution, an RGB color model, prolly expensive...). And it doesn't address the fact that ink is tactile and three-dimensional, or that it reacts differently to different surfaces.
What I need is a surface that could rearrange itself molecule-by-molecule to create something indistinguishable from printed output, but that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.
Via Slashdot, our accomplishments are:
;)
Broad, constitutionally-ambiguous restrictions on speech; pioneering library internet filters; the prosecution of swearing canoeists; Jeff Bates...
I always wonder what the rest of the country must think of us.
Sheesh.
All these outraged reactions to Julian Dibbel crack me up. The guy is pretentious, too sure of himself, capable of overwriting anything. But just from the couple of samples of his writing that I've seen, he's also unarguably a Geek himself. He celebrates the culture via critique, because he's a full-fledged member of it himself. Dibbel is a geek.
Think of him in the same light that you all think of Jon Katz and you might have a better idea of what's going on. If you read Dibbel's work for comprehension, rather than skimming it in order to formulate quick Slashdot comments, you would see that he's probably using these terms the same way Slashdot does in its masthead. Stop being such defensive, um... nerds.
What would make this a fabulous story is if gtk finally made it to MacOS-proper. A year ago this project reportedly had an experimental build of the Gimp running on OS 9, but work stopped there a long time ago.
Like a lot of Mac users, what I really want out of gtk-on-MacOS is not a free Photoshop clone but a proper port of GtkRadiant (still stuck in X11-land on the Mac for now... not a terrible thing, but a barrier to some people), so I can make Quake 3 maps.
It's always all about teh Quake...
"It's called 'information research' - look it up!"
It's called 'satire' - look it up!
If only Apple used standards like AGP, PCI, IDE, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394... then we might be able to get somewhere with those crazy undocumented machines of theirs.
I keep seeing posts claiming that new Macs cost $5000+ and that Apple hardware isn't compatible with anything, etc, etc.
;)
Most of the FUD is filtered by moderation... I'm actually surprised at how pro-Apple the general moderating trends seem to be around here.
You got moderated to 5, after all.
"And with that 22" costing $2500, you can just imagine how many people will buy their monitors elsewhere."
;)
;)
It costs about $500 more than a comparably-sized CRT from Sony (remember, unlike CRT's, advertised size=viewable size (roughly) with these displays). Jobs also promised to continue cutting prices, though of course it isn't hard to predict that flat-panel tech will get cheaper.
Oh, and there are two other, much cheaper displays available which Taco somehow forgot to mention.
"The real downside to all of this is games. Ever try playing a 640x480 game on a 1024x768 laptop LCD? Yucko."
Games on these displays are gorgeous.
"Also, apparently OSX is default for all new Macs. "
No, OS X is installed on all Macs sold today and beyond, and boxed with all the Macs currently in the channel. But OS 9.1 is still the default when you switch on these new machines.
Funny how someone always has to do this...
Interestingly, this strange, awkward, stale moment pulled me out of the article long enough to cause me to forget what point the author was trying to make.
Let's rewrite a later sentence:
Maybe these rules for interface design apply equally well to good writing for a broad audience, or to attempts at "humor" in general.
People have run the numbers... given failure rates and the cost of maintaining a cloning laboratory, it would be far cheaper to go to Rwanda and buy a child at the slave market if you're looking for cheap labor. About $50 US is the going rate. No, I'm not kidding.
Anyway, maybe we should all get worked up about that instead of about some theoretical clone-threat...
If you have a job, car, health insurance and go on holiday twice a year, what more improvements can your lifestyle get? How about just the car, the insurance and the holidays?
That's a good distinction to make.
An AC made this point already, but I'm afraid he won't be heard.
:)
"Publication is not just the measure by which scientists are judged, it is in a real sense the only truly valuable activity that academic scientists do."
If that's the "real" sense, in what sense should we view the role of academic scientist as Educator? Granted, full profs at very large universities may have little contact with the undergrads, but that's hardly representative of the entire spectrum of "academic scientist," and anyway, that same professor is probably teaching something to someone, if not in a classroom then to his grad students in the lab.
Those grad students are also, I think, "academic scientists," since they participate in the research, get their names on papers, etc. (and they're the ones teaching bio 100). And of course, there are all those "academic scientists" at smaller schools who do actively teach, and are probably at those smaller schools because they view themselves as equal parts educator and scientist in many cases.
The whole publish-or-perish thing is romantically tragic and all, but it fails to describe things as fully as you would like us to believe. Don't sell out all of the fabulous science educators out there (who do research, who publish stuff, but who also fulfill the role of the university as a place of learning) in pursuit of your cynicism.
http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/request_rebate.html
See also http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/faqs.html and http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/index.html
In the FUTURE random words in BLOCKS of text displayed ON THE web WILL be inexplicably highlighted IN A stylish PINK-ORANGE several point SIZES LARGER THAN the rest of the body text. This will come to be known as bernersing, and will BECOME a standard control in GUI web-design APPS, WITH options for frequency, DENSITY , and with the advent of the Semantic Web, relevance TO content (default for the latter = 0).
THOUGH this destroys the FLOW of the TEXT by wrenching the READER'S eye about and causing IT to pause, rather than travel naturally FROM WORD to word, this typographic treatment WILL BE hailed as a BREAKTHROUGH in internet desig N and will unleash a revolution OF NEW possibilities.
all who knew that the G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!
Um, doesn't pretty much everyone distinguish the AGP G4's from the PCI G4's by referring to them as Sawtooth and Yikes? It's not like this is some obscure bit of insider trivia... my Blue and White G3 has the word "Yosemite" on a sticker affixed in a plainly visible spot on the motherboard, a practice I'd assume continued to the G4's.
Since any real Mac user would have known that and chosen something more appropriate to call to our attention, I suspect the person who submitted this story is in fact a closet MacOS freak, who likes to prance around in thick guiliciousness when nobody is looking, with the ocassional bout of exhibitionism, as we can see here. Most of the time he can be found stroking his Start button with a pitiful expression of desire and self-loathing on his face..
"But everyone will laugh at me if I say I want a Macintosh!"