It seems to me that the arguement in the article is just further incentive to not buy CDs.
Which is exactly what the RIAA wants; they make far more off a download than a CD, at least on a per-track basis. Ringtones even more so. And for a lower quality product.
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough. But in a world of "one dollar, one vote", who's going to stop them?
I like many others have seen it coming and I have seen the governments ignoring it.
I don't think the Iraqis would say that the American and British governments, to name but two, have ignored it. Or did you think the carving up of that country's oil reserves (most of which is now contractually required to be sold to the west regardless of any competing bids from, say, China) was just a bonus feature of the invasion?
Coal is a more complex picture as the use of coal droppped off before stocks were used up. For example, in the UK we have exactly zero coal production left but we have massive reserves (300 years worth if we wanted to go back to coal generated power). So it's not enough to just look at the production levels.
Phishing isn't a problem for me; I simply ignore any unexpected email that has anything to do with money passwords or other stuff that has no business being in an unencrypted channel like email.
I do use SPF and other methods to turn away crap at the smtp server (I see by the readout on my screen that I'm currently getting 0.647 emails per second; maybe two of those in a day will look genuine enough to be accepted by the server) but default deny is functionally the same as saying you don't use email.
Not quite. Corporations exist to do the actions required of them by shareholders. It is a handy fiction that many CEOs maintain that their shareholders should be assumed to be greedy immoral bastards unless shown otherwise. This is often to allow them to accumulare large amounts of personal money by underhand means while keeping their conscience off their backs. In reality, shareholders are people and many do not in fact want their corporations to act solely for profit and nothing else. That's why so many company boards try to hide dubious actions.
Unfortunately many companies are mostly held by one or two major shareholders which concentrates power in the hands of a very few people. The "one dollar, one vote" system of shareholding means that if this small number of people are corrupt then the corporation becomes corrupt without ever having to actually take into consideration the desires of the mass of shareholders.
As a designer, what do your usability tests tell you?
That people react positively to the sight of a trail, and say they like them but when their usage is monitored they actually rarely use them.
It's like clients who ask for - nay, insist on - a CMS for their site. They love them. They pay extra for them. They never fucking use them! We even tell them: "look, you want a content management system; everyone does. But your site is pretty static; it would be cheaper to just pay us once a year to update the page that holds the staff biographies, because that's all you're ever going to change." But, oh no, they have to have it. Then a year later they phone up and ask if we could make some changes to the staff page. People, huh?
Which is why I end up making sites with trails and grumbling about it.
When designing UIs, what you find easy is only important if you're the only person using the app.
I'm not talking about when I'm designing; it was just a coincidence that I was typing up a site with breadcrumbs when the story appeared.
As a USER I find the current trend of having breadcrumbs inexplicable except insofar as it seems to go hand in hand with sites which are thrown together and then have some navigation trick stapled on in order to avoid the whole plan being totally unusable. In other words: as a USER my impression is that breadcrumbs are generally used by lazy designers to avoid actually thinking about their sites' designs and logic.
I recommen you pickup a book about HCI before shouting things you really don't have a fucking clue about.
Users don't learn what sites to like from a book. As a user I find breadcrumbs pointless. Sorry to have disturbed your dreamworld; go back to your books.
This sounds like the writing of someone who doesn't have a very large userbase for their site, or doesn't much care about providing the best browsing experience for those users.
Help! Help! I'm being attacked by a usability-fad-of-the-month nazi!
If I want to compare with other models, those breadcrumbs help me navigate to other laptops without going through the front page and the entire heirarchy.
I just press Alt-left-arrow and pick a different link; I don't even have to move my hand to the mouse.
Breadcrumbs are an indication that a site is badly designed (or that the PHB/client has seen them somewhere and thinks all "professional" sites have to have them).
Oddly enough I was putting breadcrumbs into a client's site when this story came up and I was just thinking "Jesus, breadcrumbs are a total waste of screen space. Why the hell do clients ask for them?" On the other hand, I've yet to find a use for Yahoo! either. Oh, well.
The PET 2001 was my first computer too, the 8k model, but I'd not say it was ugly. I wish my current machine looked so good and was a single unit! I learned to program from the manual (not something that's likely to happen on a moderm machine).
Name 5 reasons a private corporation should be held responsible for what should be basic US govermental foreign policy?
Er...they shouldn't? They should be held responsibile for their own policy which in this case is just as bad.
It's not Google's fault that our country is open to trading with a country with such a poor record
No, it's their fault that they are open to trading with a country with such a poor record.
They are merely doing what a responsible corporation does
No, they are doing what an irresponsible corporation does. Doing bad things for money does not make you responsible.
Google has shareholders, after all.
So what? If the shareholders want them to do somthing like this then the board should have the moral fibre to refuse until the shareholders insist, at which point they should, if they are decent human beings, resign en-mass. How complicated is that?
Having shareholders does not mean that either the shareholders automatically want you to act like an evil shit, nor that you must do so if they do want you to act that way. Corporations are just collections of people and people have responsibilities. Those responsibilities are to their fellow Man above their corporation, the law, or their country. That's sort of what America was supposed to be about, before the corporations bought it out. The US State department's policy, and Bush's for that matter, is simply the corporate policy which they were put in office to carry out; it is impossible and ridiculous to attempt to say that there is a division between the government's actions on China and those of the aristocracy of CEO's who do the same thing and tell the government to do likewise.
It's like saying that there is a difference between the government's actions in invading Iraq under the pretense of the "War on Terror" and the oil companies' raping of the Iraq oil-fields afterwards: it doesn't make sense as they're the same policy driven by the same people for the same purpose.
This is not a battle that Google can take on or win.
So they took it on and surrendered. Is that supposed to be an improvement?
"If we don't do it our competitors will" is a nice slogan. I bet it looked good hanging over the entrance to the engineering firm that maintained the furnaces at Auschwitz.
Yes: it can be accurate or definate, but never both and it's impossibile to tell which it is without checking it, by which time it will/may have changed. I call it "the uncertainty principle"!
I'm off now to remove all mention of Heisenberg from Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly what the RIAA wants; they make far more off a download than a CD, at least on a per-track basis. Ringtones even more so. And for a lower quality product.
TWW
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough. But in a world of "one dollar, one vote", who's going to stop them?
I don't think the Iraqis would say that the American and British governments, to name but two, have ignored it. Or did you think the carving up of that country's oil reserves (most of which is now contractually required to be sold to the west regardless of any competing bids from, say, China) was just a bonus feature of the invasion?
TWW
Coal is a more complex picture as the use of coal droppped off before stocks were used up. For example, in the UK we have exactly zero coal production left but we have massive reserves (300 years worth if we wanted to go back to coal generated power). So it's not enough to just look at the production levels.
TWW
I do use SPF and other methods to turn away crap at the smtp server (I see by the readout on my screen that I'm currently getting 0.647 emails per second; maybe two of those in a day will look genuine enough to be accepted by the server) but default deny is functionally the same as saying you don't use email.
TWW
TWW
Not quite. Corporations exist to do the actions required of them by shareholders. It is a handy fiction that many CEOs maintain that their shareholders should be assumed to be greedy immoral bastards unless shown otherwise. This is often to allow them to accumulare large amounts of personal money by underhand means while keeping their conscience off their backs. In reality, shareholders are people and many do not in fact want their corporations to act solely for profit and nothing else. That's why so many company boards try to hide dubious actions.
Unfortunately many companies are mostly held by one or two major shareholders which concentrates power in the hands of a very few people. The "one dollar, one vote" system of shareholding means that if this small number of people are corrupt then the corporation becomes corrupt without ever having to actually take into consideration the desires of the mass of shareholders.
So, how about sharing what company you work for?
My own.
TWW
Indeed. Caves of Steel would be nice too.
Or even....a good version of Lord of the Rings. You know, without breakdancing wizards.
TWW
PageRank is ruined already.
TWW
That people react positively to the sight of a trail, and say they like them but when their usage is monitored they actually rarely use them.
It's like clients who ask for - nay, insist on - a CMS for their site. They love them. They pay extra for them. They never fucking use them! We even tell them: "look, you want a content management system; everyone does. But your site is pretty static; it would be cheaper to just pay us once a year to update the page that holds the staff biographies, because that's all you're ever going to change." But, oh no, they have to have it. Then a year later they phone up and ask if we could make some changes to the staff page. People, huh?
Which is why I end up making sites with trails and grumbling about it.
I'm not talking about when I'm designing; it was just a coincidence that I was typing up a site with breadcrumbs when the story appeared.
As a USER I find the current trend of having breadcrumbs inexplicable except insofar as it seems to go hand in hand with sites which are thrown together and then have some navigation trick stapled on in order to avoid the whole plan being totally unusable. In other words: as a USER my impression is that breadcrumbs are generally used by lazy designers to avoid actually thinking about their sites' designs and logic.
Sheesh.
TWW
Users don't learn what sites to like from a book. As a user I find breadcrumbs pointless. Sorry to have disturbed your dreamworld; go back to your books.
TWW
Help! Help! I'm being attacked by a usability-fad-of-the-month nazi!
TWW
I just press Alt-left-arrow and pick a different link; I don't even have to move my hand to the mouse.
Breadcrumbs are an indication that a site is badly designed (or that the PHB/client has seen them somewhere and thinks all "professional" sites have to have them).
TWW
TWW
If it's bad it's not progress; it's just change.
TWW
I sold mine, a decision I regret to this day.
TWW
Er...they shouldn't? They should be held responsibile for their own policy which in this case is just as bad.
It's not Google's fault that our country is open to trading with a country with such a poor record
No, it's their fault that they are open to trading with a country with such a poor record.
They are merely doing what a responsible corporation does
No, they are doing what an irresponsible corporation does. Doing bad things for money does not make you responsible.
Google has shareholders, after all.
So what? If the shareholders want them to do somthing like this then the board should have the moral fibre to refuse until the shareholders insist, at which point they should, if they are decent human beings, resign en-mass. How complicated is that?
Having shareholders does not mean that either the shareholders automatically want you to act like an evil shit, nor that you must do so if they do want you to act that way. Corporations are just collections of people and people have responsibilities. Those responsibilities are to their fellow Man above their corporation, the law, or their country. That's sort of what America was supposed to be about, before the corporations bought it out. The US State department's policy, and Bush's for that matter, is simply the corporate policy which they were put in office to carry out; it is impossible and ridiculous to attempt to say that there is a division between the government's actions on China and those of the aristocracy of CEO's who do the same thing and tell the government to do likewise.
It's like saying that there is a difference between the government's actions in invading Iraq under the pretense of the "War on Terror" and the oil companies' raping of the Iraq oil-fields afterwards: it doesn't make sense as they're the same policy driven by the same people for the same purpose.
TWW
No it didn't.
So they took it on and surrendered. Is that supposed to be an improvement?
"If we don't do it our competitors will" is a nice slogan. I bet it looked good hanging over the entrance to the engineering firm that maintained the furnaces at Auschwitz.
TWW
And the correct answer was: AMD!
Well, that's what they tell us!
TWW
Except, of course, if I check something in a newspaper and discover that it's right, I know it'll still be right tomorrow.
TWW
Yes: it can be accurate or definate, but never both and it's impossibile to tell which it is without checking it, by which time it will/may have changed. I call it "the uncertainty principle"!
I'm off now to remove all mention of Heisenberg from Wikipedia.
TWW
IQs have fallen at the same time as the education system has disintegrated into an "EVERYone gets a prize" certificate-fest. How odd...