The problem you describe is called "Reductionism", which most universities suffer from. Reductionism tries to divide human knowledge up into a bunch of unrelated pigeonhole categories, like Science, Art and Humanities.
HCI spans many categories, which makes it hard to fit into one pigeonhole. Which suggests that reductionist categorization is the wrong approach to education, not that the HCI people belong segregated with the humanities people.
It's the hard computer science people who need to get out of the department more often.
Corporate intrigue, radical psychics and reality-bending drugs all figure prominetly into The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. In a not too distant future the spiritual activity of interstellar colonists is controlled by P.P. Layouts, a company owned by Leo Bulero. Legally P.P. Layouts sells minituarized homes, accessories and dolls that colonists collect like gold. Coupled with the illegal drug Can-D (of which Bulero's company has a monopoly), it allows the colonists the group experience of inhabiting the minds of Perky Pat and her boyfriend. For this period of time, they are allowed to live out their earthly fantasies denied to them by the loneliness of space.
When Palmer Eldritch, an exiled businessman returns from a far away galaxy with a new (and legal) drug called Chew-Z, Bulero's monopoly is in grave danger. Chew-Z is a drug that claims to deliver eternal life. The book follows P.P. Layouts employee Barney Mayerson as he confronts questions of loyalty, judgement and love. His insecurities about his ex-wife and his own addictive personality thrust him in the middle of a mystery as to the true nature of Chew-Z and what it means for the future of the galaxy. Palmer Eldritch is omnipresent throughout the novel as the reader tries to figure out his intentions. The characters experience profound changes and hallucinations thoughout the book and the question of the true nature of god is addressed as well. The reader is left wondering if God just exists to make a few bucks.
The "demo" that Maxis released before The Sims shipped was SimShow, which animates the people in a window, and helps you develop your own skins. But it's more of a tool for previewing character skins and animations, than a demo.
A stripped down demo version of The Sims would have sucked, taken too much work, and severely delayed the release of the actual game.
Instead, Maxis released SimShow to introduce people to The Sims and kick start the skin industry before the game was released in March 2000.
Given the choice, Maxis thought it would be better for fans to have a simple useful tool for creating content that enriches the game, than yet another useless lobotimized game demo.
Of course the best place to see thousands of user-created Sims demos is The Sims Exchange, where players have uploaded more than 50,000 families.
You can view the houses and people on family web pages and albums with stories about them. And if you have the game, you can download and play with any of them.
-Don
How to defeat Windows XP Media Player Spyware
on
Netscape 6 is Spyware?
·
· Score: 1, Troll
There's a simple and effective way to defeat the Windows XP Media Player spyware, which records a list of all media files you've played. This also applies to older versions of Windows Media Player, as well.
It's a trivial fix, really. Windows Media Player records the list in a file. Just make the file read-only! Problem solved.
Here's the file name for Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows ME:
c:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows 98:
c:\Windows\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
The easiest way to find the file is to search your disk for "wmplibrary". Then right-click up the properties for that file and make it read-only.
This spying behavior has been around for a long time. I noticed it a year or so ago, and made the log file read-only. It's been working fine ever since, without writing a log.
You can see the log in the Windows Media Player by pressing the "Media Library" button and opening up the outlines. Just make sure to clear out the log first, before you make it read-only. When you delete an item from the log, it goes into "deleted items" folder. So make sure you finally clear out the "deleted items" section of the log.
I found the log file by using Igor Arsenin's "taskinfo" utility, that lets you see all the files any process has open.
Taskinfo is a great tool for figuring out what logs any Windows programs are keeping. Solid Russian engineering. Use it to spy on the spyware!
-Don
PS: I posted this before, but nobody replied if it worked or not. Has anyone else used this fix for defeating Windows Media Player? What other versions of Windows and Media Player does it work on?
Can anyone please suggest other tools like Taskinfo that are useful for rooting out spyware?
The Church of Scientology OWNS Sky Dayton
on
Wireless Mania
·
· Score: 2, Troll
Scientologists Reed Slatkin, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in American history, and Sky Dayton are co-founders of Earthlink, which is presently the third largest ISP in the USA.
I hope Sky Dayton's new company Boingo fails where other companies survive. I don't want the
Church of Scientology
running any wireless networks in my neighborhood, thank you.
There's a simple and effective way to defeat the Windows XP Media Player spyware, which records a list of all media files you've played. This also applies to older versions of Windows Media Player, as well.
It's a trivial fix, really. Windows Media Player records the list in a file. Just make the file read-only! Problem solved.
Here's the file name for Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows ME:
c:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows 98:
c:\Windows\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
The easiest way to find the file is to search your disk for "wmplibrary". Then right-click up the properties for that file and make it read-only.
This spying behavior has been around for a long time. I noticed it a year or so ago, and made the log file read-only. It's been working fine ever since, without writing a log.
You can see the log in the Windows Media Player by pressing the "Media Library" button and opening up the outlines. Just make sure to clear out the log first, before you make it read-only. When you delete an item from the log, it goes into "deleted items" folder. So make sure you finally clear out the "deleted items" section of the log.
I found the log file by using Igor Arsenin's "taskinfo" utility, that lets you see all the files any process has open.
Taskinfo is a great tool for figuring out what logs any Windows programs are keeping. Solid Russian engineering. Use it to spy on the spyware!
The article in Scientific American you saw "like a bajzillion eons ago" was probably the one written about the research at Xerox PARC by Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991.
Parc Place was a Xerox PARC spinoff, that made a commercial product out of Smalltalk, which was originally developed at Xerox PARC long before Mark ran the lab. As far as I know, Parc Place didn't have much to do with Ubiquitous Computing -- they just sold a version of the SmallTalk programming language.
Speaking of pioneering influential Xerox PARC research, has anyone else noticed the striking similarities between Microsoft's ".NET" and Xerox PARC's "Portable Common Runtime"?
Narrowly focusing your attention on a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers totally misses the point and ignores the real meaning of Ubiquitous Computing, Calm Technology, or Pervasive Computing as it's being called these days.
The trivial, uninteresting detail that the system is currently implemented by a "dramatic" machine, a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers, hidden away in a server room somewhere out of sight, is the least important thing about the research, and totally misses the point.
But it's just fashionible to mention Linux in a newspaper article like that, to wind up the anti-microsoft kids, so you get slashdotted with lots of free publicity. Otherwise, slashdot would never carry an article about Ubiquitous Computing that didn't mention Linux.
For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.
There is much talk today about "thin clients," meaning lightweight Internet access devices costing only a few hundred dollars. But Ubiquitous Computing will see the creation of thin servers, costing only tens of dollars or less, that put a full Internet server into every household appliance and piece of office equipment. The next generation Internet protocol, IPv6[5], can address more than a thousand devices for every atom on the earth's surface[6]. We will need them all.
The information technology revolution, fifty years old, is an infant in the scale of human affairs. It is the culmination of the 350-year tradition of Descartes and Modernism, which created an explosion of technology that also threatens sometimes to bury human beings in its rubble. The characteristics of the modern PC are symptomatic of this entire trend: incredible power within a narrow technical domain, but also isolation from the world, difficulty of use, pulling of us into it and away from other people, distortions of wisdom by what can be digitally measured. This workshop is part of the antidote. Here we bring together many of the leading practitioners of the twenty-first century world-after-the-PC, a world after modernism, a world that is characterized by technology in its proper place, not dominating, but cooperating. A world fundamentally more spiritual, and more calming, than today. Here at this workshop we must avoid the academic tendency to fractionalize, to divide, to emphasize our differences. We are on a common mission: how to create technology that truly honors humans. The challenge dwarfs our disagreements.
Ten years ago I started on a journey I call Ubiquitous Computing (UC). I am pleased to see that many people at this workshop took some inspiration from UC, and it has been much improved by your many contributions. UC took its inspiration from an anthropological critique of the PC, which said that an isolating, desocializing, distancing technology would eventually change to accommodate human needs. UC tried to anticipate that change by a series of experiments of putting computers into the environment, starting with wall-sized screens, and moving to book-sized and pocket-sized interactive devices. Our focus was on invisibility, at disappearing the "computer" to let the pure human interaction come forward. I must admit to you, largely we failed. Oh, we learned a great deal about user interfaces, radio systems, hand-held design, pen systems, mobile networks, low-cost electronics, batteries, etc, and by the standards of technological excellence and impact we succeeded very well.
Ubiquitous computing is coming to pass, and our work is widely cited. But we did not succeed at creating the invisibility we craved. We did not because we did not appreciate the enormity of the challenge, primarily the challenge of a proper model of the human being for whom we were designing.
From the work of all of us here at this workshop, we are getting closer to understanding the right model of a human being, a model that would teach us how to put technology in the background, invisibly. From my own work, and from reading your work, I get this model: Consider a human being as a kind of iceberg. Above the water, sticking out into conscious attention, are those objects and thoughts of which we are currently aware. Below the surface, rooting those thoughts, is a much deeper foundation of tacit assumptions and knowledge. At every moment that we go about our conscious affairs, we are relying upon that deep tacit foundation. For example, as you read this text you are taking in whole words, perhaps even whole concepts. To do this you rely on a tacit base of visual processing, line perception, font perception, grammar, word senses, and so on. What is below the surface of the iceberg is the much larger part of what makes us smart, and makes us human. I call what is above the surface the "center". I call what is below the "periphery".
Now there are some important characteristics of the center and periphery. First, the more the periphery is engaged, the smarter we are. No amount of conscious working out can replace the intuitions of the expert. The smartest people are the ones who have built up the thickest periphery, and can apply it quickly to new problems. A fully engaged periphery also goes by the name of "flow state", familiar to athletes. Second, we are constantly moving items into and out of the periphery. Millisecond by millisecond what was just periphery becomes center, and then back again. To move perception in and out quickly is a source of great power and comfort. Third, take the periphery away and we are crippled. Imagine looking at the world through narrow tubes taped to our eyes, blocking peripheral vision: you would stumble, and be constantly surprised, and tire quickly. Digital technology in the PC is like those tubes: it presents a view excessively stripped of periphery.
This model of center and periphery leads to a humble view of the role of technology in human affairs. The ineffable complexity of a given person's active iceberg dominates any situation. The role of technology is to fit in, and not just fit in with what is above the surface, but with what is below as well. In fact fitting with the periphery is far more important, because that is a thicker and richer domain by far than mere conscious attention, and it is also determinative of conscious attention.
"Calm Technology" is what I call the goal of creating technology that truly honors the full model of human beings. I like this name because it begins with a word, "calm", that points us inward to the domain where we are truly human, and only secondarily mentions technology. Unlike ubiquitous computing, "calm technology" does not name a method, but a goal. "Calm technology" stands in sharp contrast to the enfranticing PC of today.
When one follows the iceberg down below the surface, one finds not only tacit knowledge, but also the everyday environment. Part of what lies in the periphery is the situation around us, the physical (and cognitive and emotional) affordances of the everyday world. And this is why a workshop on cooperative buildings is at the cutting edge of twenty-first century life. Because it is our buildings that are the primary physical environment of everyday life.
Is most technology designed today to honor the periphery? Is most information technology encalming? Regretfully not. But in the domain of cooperative buildings, we find very smart and innovative thinkers who are taking this step. Many of you will not find the model I propose above new, because I got it in part from reading your papers. By expressing it to you, I want to move us towards agreement on our common challenge, so that at this workshop we stand on each others shoulders, not each others toes. Let us work together to create a twenty-first century of intense calm. Thank you.
Calm Technology is what I call the goal of creating technology that truly honors the full model of human beings. I like this name because it begins with a word, "calm", that points us inward to the domain where we are truly human, and only secondarily mentions technology. Unlike ubiquitous computing, calm technology does not name a method, but a goal. Calm technology stands in sharp contrast to the enfranticing PC of today.
Weiser comments on Dangling String: "Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive."
Pervasive computing is just another term for "Ubiquitous Computing", as described by the late Mark Weiser in 1988, when he was director of the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab.
Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
Mark Weiser is the father of ubiquitous computing; his web page contains links to many papers on the topic.
Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Virtual reality is primarily a horse power problem; ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.
Early work in Ubiquitous Computing
The initial incarnation of ubiquitous computing was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994. Several papers describe this work, and there are web pages for the Tabs and for the Boards (which are a commercial product now):
Ubicomp helped kick off the recent boom in mobile computing research, although it is not the same thing as mobile computing, nor a superset nor a subset.
Ubiquitous Computing has roots in many aspects of computing. In its current form, it was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. He describes it like this:
Early Work in Ubiquitous Computing
Ubiquitous Computing #1
Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.
Ubiquitous Computing #2
For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.
The way the number of males and females registering The Sims changed over time was interesting.
First mostly males were registering The Sims, as with most computer games. Then after a little while, there was a sudden jump in the number of females registering, which steadily grew more steeply than the number of males, for a long time.
One theory is that males are the early adoptors, who go out and buy games based on commercial advertising. The females see the males playing it, and try it themselves. Then they spread the word about it by recommendation person to person, instead of instantly responding to mass media advertising like the males.
The legal issues worked out nicely about the character skins like Justin Timberlake and Spiderman.
It turns out that Maxis is not legally responsible for any of the fans making and distributing their own images of celebrities and copyrighted characters. Maxis keeps their hands clean by creating their own original characters (which is much healthier for the franchise anyway, than shilling out product placements), and they always get permission for everything they distribute with the game.
The "celebrity visitor" skin in House Party was made with Drew Carey's permission and cooperation, but you have to go to the fan sites to find Justin Timberlake or Spider Man.
If you really want to know the underlying hidden agenda of The Sims, read Philip K Dick's short story "The Life and Times of Perky Pat", and novel "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
When you turn in your butterfly ballot with a vote for George W. Bush, it's rejected and you get a note back saying:
"You just accidentally voted for George W Bush! That was extremely foolish. But it doesn't matter because the outcome of the election is up to Enron and the Supreme Court."
Government photo forgers: next time use antialiased text, or at least forge the pictures at a higher resolution, then scale it down to a smaller size to get rid of the seams and jaggies.
The SEC should enlist all those bozos who reply to Get Rich Quick spams, by starting their own pyramid scheme just to teach people not to respond to Get Rich Quick spams.
I saw Bill Gates give the keynote address at CES, and he demonstrated several interesting technologies including wireless web pads, tablets, and ".NET" services.
What he didn't mention is that Microsoft never invented those things -- they're simply exploiting the "Ubiquitous Computing" research developed by other people at Xerox PARC, MIT Media Lab, and many others places.
Our product
ConnectedTV,
which we demonstrated at CES,
is also inspired by the same
Ubiquitous Computing
research, as well as using other proven user interface techniques like pie menus.
Besides the personalized TV guide and universal remote control, it has many useful home control applications, as well. For an idea of where it's heading, please read some the literature.
We owe a lot to pioneering researchers like the late
Mark Weiser
(director of Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab),
and visionary writers like the late
Philip K Dick. May they forever continue to guide and inspire us from half-life.
-Don
"I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be."
The newer Palms and WinCE Pocket PCs have quite powerful IR, but some of the older ones aren't very powerful, or have the window in an inconvenient location (so you have to tilt it forward to point it at the TV).
We tested the m505 at CES, and I was able to operate the TV from quite a long distance away.
As with any IR control, it also has a lot to do with the angle from which you're facing the TV. Fluorescent lights also cause problems, but most people don't use those in their living room.
Of course ConectedTV is not limited to IR remote control. More and more handhelds support Bluetooth, 802.11b or have built-in cellular phones. It can be programmed to open URLs, send UDP packets, make XML remote procedure calls, query and control ".NET" services, etc.
It's also great for indexing all your music and controling your MP3 jukebox or computer. And the fact that you can operate it with one hand makes it great for watching porn.
ConnectedTV filters out all the channels and shows you don't want to watch, and brings the good ones to your attention, according to your personal preferences. So you can find just what you want, and don't have to put up with all the stupid spam and useless channels.
If you have a cell phone with a built-in Palm (or WinCE Pocket PC for that matter), and you misplace your remote control behind a couch cushion, you can just call it up and find it by the ring!
With a wireless RF connection, it's extremely useful for controling all kinds of home automation like lights, air conditioning, home theaters, alarms, security gates, etc. There was such a demand for this at the show, that we're also developing an extremely customizable, general purpose remote control product called "ConnectedHome", that enables you to program your own commands, behaviors, graphical skins and user interfaces.
For example, one of my hobbies is programming live video processing effects for parties (like interactive screen savers), and I can use it to remotely control all the effect parameters and switch between different modes, without messing up the nice full screen graphics with ugly user interface widgets.
One important thing about ConnectedTV is that it does not infringe on GemStar's obnoxious on-screen TV guide patent. It's much better to have the TV guide off of the screen and in your hand, so it doesn't distract from what you're currently watching.
That's one reason it's so inexpensive: just $30/year. TV Guide is $40/year, and it doesn't change the channels or filter spam. While ConnectedTV doesn't waste paper and postage, fill up your mailbox and garbage can, or bring anthrax spores into your living room.
Once you have a TV guide that you can hold in your hand and pass around, instead of taking over the TV screen, you will never want to go back to the slowly scrolling half-screen channel guide with that loud mouthed fakin' jamacian pseudo psychic.
If you read the rest of John Gilmore's web pages on toad.com, you'll find the answers to most of your questions. Assuming you're not blocked from reading toad.com's web pages by some service provider in between. That's why it's censorship.
Because Verio is censoring many other people's email beside John Gilmore's, and he is going to bat for them and trying to solve the problem, instead of simply switching service providers and ignoring the censorship.
David Levitt and I demonstrated "ConnectedTV" at CES for the first time.
ConnectedTV is an online service and Palm application that functions as a universal remote control with integrated personalized TV guide, spam filtering and intelligent categorization.
We designed the ConnectedTV interface so you can hold it in one hand and easily operate it with your thumb or finger. ConnectedTV features pie menus: a fun, fast and reliable selection technique that you can do with your fingers.
Pie menus are provably much more efficient than old fashioned buttons and pull-down menus. Just as The Sims lets you use pie menus to direct the lives of virtual people, now ConnectedTV lets you easily navigate your own personal entertainment schedule, and control your TV and other devices. Because selecting entertainment should be more like playing a video game than taking the Standardized Aptitude Test.
More information about ConnectedTV including screen snapshots are available at: http://www.Connected.TV
John Gilmore's problem is censorship, and the difference between him and Cathy C is how much of his own energy, time and money he's put into practically and legally fighting it.
He co-founded the internet service provider Little Garden, that he originally ran in his basement. The official policy of Little Garden was that they would not censor communications. Now that Verio owns it, they have reniged on that policy, and they are now blocking the email of Little Garden's original customers, including John Gilmore's.
Other achievements that distinguish him are that he started the "alt" newsgroup hierarchy, and founded EFF. He consistently fights against censorship, investing millions of his own dollars to support free speech and fight government oppression.
Slashdot Mirror
HCI spans many categories, which makes it hard to fit into one pigeonhole. Which suggests that reductionist categorization is the wrong approach to education, not that the HCI people belong segregated with the humanities people.
It's the hard computer science people who need to get out of the department more often.
-Don
-Don
The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch
Corporate intrigue, radical psychics and reality-bending drugs all figure prominetly into The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. In a not too distant future the spiritual activity of interstellar colonists is controlled by P.P. Layouts, a company owned by Leo Bulero. Legally P.P. Layouts sells minituarized homes, accessories and dolls that colonists collect like gold. Coupled with the illegal drug Can-D (of which Bulero's company has a monopoly), it allows the colonists the group experience of inhabiting the minds of Perky Pat and her boyfriend. For this period of time, they are allowed to live out their earthly fantasies denied to them by the loneliness of space.
When Palmer Eldritch, an exiled businessman returns from a far away galaxy with a new (and legal) drug called Chew-Z, Bulero's monopoly is in grave danger. Chew-Z is a drug that claims to deliver eternal life. The book follows P.P. Layouts employee Barney Mayerson as he confronts questions of loyalty, judgement and love. His insecurities about his ex-wife and his own addictive personality thrust him in the middle of a mystery as to the true nature of Chew-Z and what it means for the future of the galaxy. Palmer Eldritch is omnipresent throughout the novel as the reader tries to figure out his intentions. The characters experience profound changes and hallucinations thoughout the book and the question of the true nature of god is addressed as well. The reader is left wondering if God just exists to make a few bucks.
"Perky Pat Paraphernalia" by Steve Young
A stripped down demo version of The Sims would have sucked, taken too much work, and severely delayed the release of the actual game. Instead, Maxis released SimShow to introduce people to The Sims and kick start the skin industry before the game was released in March 2000.
Given the choice, Maxis thought it would be better for fans to have a simple useful tool for creating content that enriches the game, than yet another useless lobotimized game demo.
Of course the best place to see thousands of user-created Sims demos is The Sims Exchange, where players have uploaded more than 50,000 families. You can view the houses and people on family web pages and albums with stories about them. And if you have the game, you can download and play with any of them.
-Don
It's a trivial fix, really. Windows Media Player records the list in a file. Just make the file read-only! Problem solved.
Here's the file name for Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows ME:
c:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows 98:
c:\Windows\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
The easiest way to find the file is to search your disk for "wmplibrary". Then right-click up the properties for that file and make it read-only.
This spying behavior has been around for a long time. I noticed it a year or so ago, and made the log file read-only. It's been working fine ever since, without writing a log.
You can see the log in the Windows Media Player by pressing the "Media Library" button and opening up the outlines. Just make sure to clear out the log first, before you make it read-only. When you delete an item from the log, it goes into "deleted items" folder. So make sure you finally clear out the "deleted items" section of the log.
I found the log file by using Igor Arsenin's "taskinfo" utility, that lets you see all the files any process has open. Taskinfo is a great tool for figuring out what logs any Windows programs are keeping. Solid Russian engineering. Use it to spy on the spyware!
-Don
PS: I posted this before, but nobody replied if it worked or not. Has anyone else used this fix for defeating Windows Media Player? What other versions of Windows and Media Player does it work on? Can anyone please suggest other tools like Taskinfo that are useful for rooting out spyware?
Scientologists Reed Slatkin, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in American history, and Sky Dayton are co-founders of Earthlink, which is presently the third largest ISP in the USA.
I hope Sky Dayton's new company Boingo fails where other companies survive. I don't want the Church of Scientology running any wireless networks in my neighborhood, thank you.
-Don
It's a trivial fix, really. Windows Media Player records the list in a file. Just make the file read-only! Problem solved.
Here's the file name for Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows ME:
c:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows 98:
c:\Windows\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
The easiest way to find the file is to search your disk for "wmplibrary". Then right-click up the properties for that file and make it read-only.
This spying behavior has been around for a long time. I noticed it a year or so ago, and made the log file read-only. It's been working fine ever since, without writing a log.
You can see the log in the Windows Media Player by pressing the "Media Library" button and opening up the outlines. Just make sure to clear out the log first, before you make it read-only. When you delete an item from the log, it goes into "deleted items" folder. So make sure you finally clear out the "deleted items" section of the log.
I found the log file by using Igor Arsenin's "taskinfo" utility, that lets you see all the files any process has open. Taskinfo is a great tool for figuring out what logs any Windows programs are keeping. Solid Russian engineering. Use it to spy on the spyware!
-Don
The article in Scientific American you saw "like a bajzillion eons ago" was probably the one written about the research at Xerox PARC by Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991.
Parc Place was a Xerox PARC spinoff, that made a commercial product out of Smalltalk, which was originally developed at Xerox PARC long before Mark ran the lab. As far as I know, Parc Place didn't have much to do with Ubiquitous Computing -- they just sold a version of the SmallTalk programming language.
Speaking of pioneering influential Xerox PARC research, has anyone else noticed the striking similarities between Microsoft's ".NET" and Xerox PARC's "Portable Common Runtime"?
-Don
The trivial, uninteresting detail that the system is currently implemented by a "dramatic" machine, a Beowulf cluster of Linux computers, hidden away in a server room somewhere out of sight, is the least important thing about the research, and totally misses the point.
But it's just fashionible to mention Linux in a newspaper article like that, to wind up the anti-microsoft kids, so you get slashdotted with lots of free publicity. Otherwise, slashdot would never carry an article about Ubiquitous Computing that didn't mention Linux.
Mark Weiser wrote the following definition of Ubiquitous Computing in 1988:
For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.
-Mark Weiser
====
-Don
There is much talk today about "thin clients," meaning lightweight Internet access devices costing only a few hundred dollars. But Ubiquitous Computing will see the creation of thin servers, costing only tens of dollars or less, that put a full Internet server into every household appliance and piece of office equipment. The next generation Internet protocol, IPv6[5], can address more than a thousand devices for every atom on the earth's surface[6]. We will need them all.
====
-Don
The Invisible Interface: Increasing the Power of the Environment through Calm Technology
Mark Weiser
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
Email: weiser@parc.xerox.com
The information technology revolution, fifty years old, is an infant in the scale of human affairs. It is the culmination of the 350-year tradition of Descartes and Modernism, which created an explosion of technology that also threatens sometimes to bury human beings in its rubble. The characteristics of the modern PC are symptomatic of this entire trend: incredible power within a narrow technical domain, but also isolation from the world, difficulty of use, pulling of us into it and away from other people, distortions of wisdom by what can be digitally measured. This workshop is part of the antidote. Here we bring together many of the leading practitioners of the twenty-first century world-after-the-PC, a world after modernism, a world that is characterized by technology in its proper place, not dominating, but cooperating. A world fundamentally more spiritual, and more calming, than today. Here at this workshop we must avoid the academic tendency to fractionalize, to divide, to emphasize our differences. We are on a common mission: how to create technology that truly honors humans. The challenge dwarfs our disagreements.
Ten years ago I started on a journey I call Ubiquitous Computing (UC). I am pleased to see that many people at this workshop took some inspiration from UC, and it has been much improved by your many contributions. UC took its inspiration from an anthropological critique of the PC, which said that an isolating, desocializing, distancing technology would eventually change to accommodate human needs. UC tried to anticipate that change by a series of experiments of putting computers into the environment, starting with wall-sized screens, and moving to book-sized and pocket-sized interactive devices. Our focus was on invisibility, at disappearing the "computer" to let the pure human interaction come forward. I must admit to you, largely we failed. Oh, we learned a great deal about user interfaces, radio systems, hand-held design, pen systems, mobile networks, low-cost electronics, batteries, etc, and by the standards of technological excellence and impact we succeeded very well.
Ubiquitous computing is coming to pass, and our work is widely cited. But we did not succeed at creating the invisibility we craved. We did not because we did not appreciate the enormity of the challenge, primarily the challenge of a proper model of the human being for whom we were designing.
From the work of all of us here at this workshop, we are getting closer to understanding the right model of a human being, a model that would teach us how to put technology in the background, invisibly. From my own work, and from reading your work, I get this model: Consider a human being as a kind of iceberg. Above the water, sticking out into conscious attention, are those objects and thoughts of which we are currently aware. Below the surface, rooting those thoughts, is a much deeper foundation of tacit assumptions and knowledge. At every moment that we go about our conscious affairs, we are relying upon that deep tacit foundation. For example, as you read this text you are taking in whole words, perhaps even whole concepts. To do this you rely on a tacit base of visual processing, line perception, font perception, grammar, word senses, and so on. What is below the surface of the iceberg is the much larger part of what makes us smart, and makes us human. I call what is above the surface the "center". I call what is below the "periphery".
Now there are some important characteristics of the center and periphery. First, the more the periphery is engaged, the smarter we are. No amount of conscious working out can replace the intuitions of the expert. The smartest people are the ones who have built up the thickest periphery, and can apply it quickly to new problems. A fully engaged periphery also goes by the name of "flow state", familiar to athletes. Second, we are constantly moving items into and out of the periphery. Millisecond by millisecond what was just periphery becomes center, and then back again. To move perception in and out quickly is a source of great power and comfort. Third, take the periphery away and we are crippled. Imagine looking at the world through narrow tubes taped to our eyes, blocking peripheral vision: you would stumble, and be constantly surprised, and tire quickly. Digital technology in the PC is like those tubes: it presents a view excessively stripped of periphery.
This model of center and periphery leads to a humble view of the role of technology in human affairs. The ineffable complexity of a given person's active iceberg dominates any situation. The role of technology is to fit in, and not just fit in with what is above the surface, but with what is below as well. In fact fitting with the periphery is far more important, because that is a thicker and richer domain by far than mere conscious attention, and it is also determinative of conscious attention.
"Calm Technology" is what I call the goal of creating technology that truly honors the full model of human beings. I like this name because it begins with a word, "calm", that points us inward to the domain where we are truly human, and only secondarily mentions technology. Unlike ubiquitous computing, "calm technology" does not name a method, but a goal. "Calm technology" stands in sharp contrast to the enfranticing PC of today.
When one follows the iceberg down below the surface, one finds not only tacit knowledge, but also the everyday environment. Part of what lies in the periphery is the situation around us, the physical (and cognitive and emotional) affordances of the everyday world. And this is why a workshop on cooperative buildings is at the cutting edge of twenty-first century life. Because it is our buildings that are the primary physical environment of everyday life.
Is most technology designed today to honor the periphery? Is most information technology encalming? Regretfully not. But in the domain of cooperative buildings, we find very smart and innovative thinkers who are taking this step. Many of you will not find the model I propose above new, because I got it in part from reading your papers. By expressing it to you, I want to move us towards agreement on our common challenge, so that at this workshop we stand on each others shoulders, not each others toes. Let us work together to create a twenty-first century of intense calm. Thank you.
-Mark Weiser
====
-Don
Author: Jim Harris
Posted: 11/6/2000; 4:57:21 PM
Topic: Calm Technology
[Illustration of the Dangling String display]
Calm Technology is what I call the goal of creating technology that truly honors the full model of human beings. I like this name because it begins with a word, "calm", that points us inward to the domain where we are truly human, and only secondarily mentions technology. Unlike ubiquitous computing, calm technology does not name a method, but a goal. Calm technology stands in sharp contrast to the enfranticing PC of today.
More from Mark Weiser.
Weiser comments on Dangling String: "Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive."
Check out The Coming of Age of Calm Technology, by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown.
========
-Don
Ubiquitous Computing
Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
Mark Weiser is the father of ubiquitous computing; his web page contains links to many papers on the topic.
Two recent papers express elements of the ubiquitous computing philosophy: "Open House" (also in a MS Word version) , and "Designing Calm Technology".
What Ubiquitous Computing Isn't
Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Virtual reality is primarily a horse power problem; ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.
Early work in Ubiquitous Computing The initial incarnation of ubiquitous computing was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994. Several papers describe this work, and there are web pages for the Tabs and for the Boards (which are a commercial product now):
Ubicomp helped kick off the recent boom in mobile computing research, although it is not the same thing as mobile computing, nor a superset nor a subset.
Ubiquitous Computing has roots in many aspects of computing. In its current form, it was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. He describes it like this:
Early Work in Ubiquitous Computing
Ubiquitous Computing #1
Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.
Ubiquitous Computing #2
For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.
========
"Dedicated to the memory of Mark Weiser and Alan Turing"
-Don
First mostly males were registering The Sims, as with most computer games. Then after a little while, there was a sudden jump in the number of females registering, which steadily grew more steeply than the number of males, for a long time.
One theory is that males are the early adoptors, who go out and buy games based on commercial advertising. The females see the males playing it, and try it themselves. Then they spread the word about it by recommendation person to person, instead of instantly responding to mass media advertising like the males.
The legal issues worked out nicely about the character skins like Justin Timberlake and Spiderman. It turns out that Maxis is not legally responsible for any of the fans making and distributing their own images of celebrities and copyrighted characters. Maxis keeps their hands clean by creating their own original characters (which is much healthier for the franchise anyway, than shilling out product placements), and they always get permission for everything they distribute with the game.
The "celebrity visitor" skin in House Party was made with Drew Carey's permission and cooperation, but you have to go to the fan sites to find Justin Timberlake or Spider Man.
If you really want to know the underlying hidden agenda of The Sims, read Philip K Dick's short story "The Life and Times of Perky Pat", and novel "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
-Don
"You just accidentally voted for George W Bush! That was extremely foolish. But it doesn't matter because the outcome of the election is up to Enron and the Supreme Court."
-Don
Government photo forgers: next time use antialiased text, or at least forge the pictures at a higher resolution, then scale it down to a smaller size to get rid of the seams and jaggies.
Other than that, it's a great anti-scam!
-Don
-Don
-Don
We were discussing user interface design for handheld computers, handwriting input and pie menus.
It feels great to have finally put pie menus into ConnectedTV on handheld Palm computers, after just talking about it for 10 years.
They're called "Finger Pies", because using the penis not necessary!
-Don
What he didn't mention is that Microsoft never invented those things -- they're simply exploiting the "Ubiquitous Computing" research developed by other people at Xerox PARC, MIT Media Lab, and many others places.
Our product ConnectedTV, which we demonstrated at CES, is also inspired by the same Ubiquitous Computing research, as well as using other proven user interface techniques like pie menus.
Besides the personalized TV guide and universal remote control, it has many useful home control applications, as well. For an idea of where it's heading, please read some the literature.
We owe a lot to pioneering researchers like the late Mark Weiser (director of Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab), and visionary writers like the late Philip K Dick. May they forever continue to guide and inspire us from half-life.
-Don
We tested the m505 at CES, and I was able to operate the TV from quite a long distance away. As with any IR control, it also has a lot to do with the angle from which you're facing the TV. Fluorescent lights also cause problems, but most people don't use those in their living room.
Of course ConectedTV is not limited to IR remote control. More and more handhelds support Bluetooth, 802.11b or have built-in cellular phones. It can be programmed to open URLs, send UDP packets, make XML remote procedure calls, query and control ".NET" services, etc.
It's also great for indexing all your music and controling your MP3 jukebox or computer. And the fact that you can operate it with one hand makes it great for watching porn.
ConnectedTV filters out all the channels and shows you don't want to watch, and brings the good ones to your attention, according to your personal preferences. So you can find just what you want, and don't have to put up with all the stupid spam and useless channels.
If you have a cell phone with a built-in Palm (or WinCE Pocket PC for that matter), and you misplace your remote control behind a couch cushion, you can just call it up and find it by the ring!
With a wireless RF connection, it's extremely useful for controling all kinds of home automation like lights, air conditioning, home theaters, alarms, security gates, etc. There was such a demand for this at the show, that we're also developing an extremely customizable, general purpose remote control product called "ConnectedHome", that enables you to program your own commands, behaviors, graphical skins and user interfaces.
For example, one of my hobbies is programming live video processing effects for parties (like interactive screen savers), and I can use it to remotely control all the effect parameters and switch between different modes, without messing up the nice full screen graphics with ugly user interface widgets.
One important thing about ConnectedTV is that it does not infringe on GemStar's obnoxious on-screen TV guide patent. It's much better to have the TV guide off of the screen and in your hand, so it doesn't distract from what you're currently watching.
That's one reason it's so inexpensive: just $30/year. TV Guide is $40/year, and it doesn't change the channels or filter spam. While ConnectedTV doesn't waste paper and postage, fill up your mailbox and garbage can, or bring anthrax spores into your living room.
Once you have a TV guide that you can hold in your hand and pass around, instead of taking over the TV screen, you will never want to go back to the slowly scrolling half-screen channel guide with that loud mouthed fakin' jamacian pseudo psychic.
-Don
More info and screen snapshots: http://www.Connected.TV
-Don
-Don
ConnectedTV is an online service and Palm application that functions as a universal remote control with integrated personalized TV guide, spam filtering and intelligent categorization.
We designed the ConnectedTV interface so you can hold it in one hand and easily operate it with your thumb or finger. ConnectedTV features pie menus: a fun, fast and reliable selection technique that you can do with your fingers.
Pie menus are provably much more efficient than old fashioned buttons and pull-down menus. Just as The Sims lets you use pie menus to direct the lives of virtual people, now ConnectedTV lets you easily navigate your own personal entertainment schedule, and control your TV and other devices. Because selecting entertainment should be more like playing a video game than taking the Standardized Aptitude Test.
More information about ConnectedTV including screen snapshots are available at: http://www.Connected.TV
-Don
Clue: how did George Bush get that big bruise on his face?
I didn't realize Snyders of Hanover had a factory in Kabul.
-Don
He co-founded the internet service provider Little Garden, that he originally ran in his basement. The official policy of Little Garden was that they would not censor communications. Now that Verio owns it, they have reniged on that policy, and they are now blocking the email of Little Garden's original customers, including John Gilmore's.
Other achievements that distinguish him are that he started the "alt" newsgroup hierarchy, and founded EFF. He consistently fights against censorship, investing millions of his own dollars to support free speech and fight government oppression.
-Don