Heh, the issue of User Interfaces always makes me laugh at the incompetence of seemingly the entire world when it comes to User Interfaces (or the whole computing world in general).
So it's you against The World on the subject of how a UI ought to work. Hmm, I wonder who is more likely to be right.
1. The computer has no way of knowing, other than via user input, which information is important, and needs to be made viewable. I actually prefer to manually set the size and placement of my windows exactly the way I want them, because I know better than the computer does what I'm trying to accomplish.
2. You're complaining about an edge case. The vast majority of users will only ever use a computing system in their own native language. It doesn't matter to me that the Spanish term for "Save" doesn't start with 's'; in English, Ctrl+S maps nicely to "Save".
3. I am interested to know which UI widgets you feel are superfluous. Running through the common ones (text boxes, menus, radio buttons, sliders, et al) in my head, I find each one to have a reasonable logical and/or graphical justification for existing. So what confuses you?
4. I want a UI to react to my commands as quickly as possible. If I hit "page down", I want to see the next page now; I don't want to wait 2 seconds as the content smoothly scrolls to the new location. And if UIs were designed so that they did this, I suspect you'd be searching for the option to turn it back off as well.
"It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"
Oh please no.
I had a mandatory Computers class in 6th grade (and again in 7th and 8th grade, with the exact same lesson plan). Half of this class was rudimentary BASIC programming on a room full of TRS-80s, the ones with the integrated green monochrome displays--and this was circa 1990.
The other half of the class was a purported history of computing, the key facts of which I can still recite today (learning the same thing thrice causes it to stick). These facts are:
- Charles Babbage made a mechanical computer. - Then there were the UNIVAC and the ENIAC. - The term "bug" is due to an actual bug Ada Lovelace found inside a computer. - There are four kinds of computer: supercomputer, mainframe, minicomputer, and microcomputer. - RAM stands for "random access memory"; ROM stands for "read only memory". - Cray supercomputers are cool-looking. - 10 PRINT "FART!!! " - 20 GOTO 10 - RUN
I don't use my gamecube much because it's restricted to SDTV aspect ratio
I take it, then, that you either have a newer 'Cube from after the Digital A/V port was removed, or have a Digital A/V port but can't find the component cable adapter to hook it up to your TV with. The GameCube was capable of outputting in progressive and widescreen, but support for these features was not all that widespread.
The Wii should (I hope) be better in this regard; with other consoles touting the virtues of HD gaming, Nintendo really ought to support something better than NTSC video over S-Video.
THQ had a demonstration of some Wii titles the other day in New York City. IGN's photos of the event show games running off a Wii devkit, in true widescreen. This is promising.
The problem with touchscreen is that it only can do left-clicks, no right clicks.
Mac mouses have the same "problem", but we get the same effect by holding down a control key as we click. No reason the same could not be done with one of the DS's keys.
As for hover, that could be approximated too. The input routines could be designed such that moving the stylus across the touchscreen was equivalent to changing the mouse position, and to click the user would have to lift the stylus off the screen and then bring it down in the same place.
When will these companies learn to view the modern web with any sort of comfort you need, at the very least 640x480.
When will modern web designers learn to make pages that can be read comfortably (if not always exactly in line with their design strategies) at any resolution, no matter how low.
A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant or to what degree an implementation is compliant. It can only point out particular things that are broken.
Huh?
If the test suite points out zero particular things that are broken, then the implementation is compliant. If there are 5 out of 1000 things that are broken, it is almost compliant. If there are 300 out of 1000 things that are broken, it is partially compliant.
The only question here is of what scale to use when attempting to turn the results into a percentage.
C was designed to easily compile into efficient code for the CPU architectures of its time, the ones that ultimately evolved into our modern RISC processors. It's a minimalist language, a few scoops of syntactical sugar away from being ASM itself. CPU designers have made few, if any, design decisions that would give machine code compiled from C source a performance advantage over machine code compiled from any other procedural language.
If you want a real example of hardware being optimized for a particular language, check out some Forth machines.
Lazy parents. That's the problem, not violent content in games. If parents would actually PARENT their kids instead of being all self absorbed and/or just wanting to 'be their friend'. The vast majority of parents are lazy, do not want to take responsibility for their children's actions, and pay little if no attention to raising them properly.
Is it just me, or have "Lazy Parents" taken a number-two spot behind "Jews" on the Big List Of Convenient Scapegoats For Blaming All The Ills Of The World On?
It can't be that an entire generation (present company, of course, excluded, can't use ourselves as scapegoats) has suddenly forgotten how to raise children. No, in reality, I think when a child does something anti-social like shoot up his schoolmates, there's other issues at play beyond "parents never told him it was wrong to shoot people".
We don't have a mechanism to make the executives responsible for the deception pay for it. Instead we force the shareholders, who've already been duped, to pay the penalty.
And then the shareholders, sufficiently outraged that the executives' malfeasance has cost them money instead of making them money, oust the villians and replace them with someone more honest.
The system doesn't always work this way, but it could.
No, it's called copyright infringement. I participate in it too, on occasion, but at least I'm honest about myself.
I wonder how much of what is considered 'pirated' is outside a sane copyright law(like 14 years.)?
Probably very little. When people hit the peer to peer networks, they look for works which are fresh in their minds, which likely means the most recent works to have been released. Nobody's downloading Casablanca; everybody's downloading Pirates of the Caribbean II. Nobody's downloading "Meet the Beatles"; everybody's downloading "NOW That's What I Call Music Volume 21".
when he says "we", he probably means only Nintendo. So, third parties may still be able to charge for their own monthly fees.
They might possibly be able to, but if they know what's good for them they'll follow Nintendo's lead on pricing.
The top-tier game titles on any Nintendo system have been heavily first-party, from the NES through to the GameCube and DS. It would be more than a little arrogant for a third-party publisher to charge a fee for what Nintendo's offering for free -- that would be saying their game is higher in value than Nintendo's, a proposition that practiced gamers are unlikely to find credible.
Network encryption on the DS is done in software, not hardware. Each title comes with its own code for managing the wifi connection.
The developers of Mario Kart DS were not able to implement anything more secure than WEP in that title without affecting playability. So that game does not support WPA and never will. It's not unreasonable, though, that later titles, once devs learn to make better use of the system -- or titles like the Opera browser in which frame-perfect network synchronization is not as critical -- may support additional forms of encryption.
Myself, I just locked down my wireless router to require WEP and only accept traffic from the MAC addresses of the wireless gear I own. It seems a fair compromise eto me.
How much clearer do you need it to be for you to understand?
You act like there's absolutely no room for interpretation in his statements. That is untrue. For one, he does not specify whether the games with no subscription fee will comprise ALL of the online service, or only part of it.
He also does not explain what he means by "hidden" costs. If access to leaderboards, for example, costs $1/month, how does one determine whether that cost is "hidden" or "upfront"? How early in the navigational process does the cost need to be mentioned to keep it from being "hidden"?
software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.
Example please? I doubt that an untrained noob programmer is capable of replicating a $100+ commercial software package like MS Office or Photoshop or What-Have-You 3.0. Hell, there's a lot of brilliant people working on projects like OpenOffice and The Gimp, and they've been at it for years, and they still aren't quite there yet.
Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all.
"The record companies are ALREADY screwing the artist up the ass, so it's okay if I do it too!" No.
Look at the price of blank CDs. Did you know that you have to pay a "piracy tax" for these? Yep.
Nope. Or at least, not run-of-the-mill CD-Rs sold in the United States. There's the "Music CD-Rs" that cost a lot more than "Data CD-Rs" and have the piracy levy built into the price, but nobody uses those.
Go ahead and go to court, but bring up the fact that an IP address is not a person. Since your IP is the only log they have of the download (even if they have the MAC, that'll only ID a computer, not a single person), you'll win in court.
No, you probably won't. The courts aren't immune to common sense; if they prove that a computer was used for piracy and you own that computer, they're going to assume that you are responsible for that piracy unless you present a compelling case for why you are not.
EB Games is listing the PS2 bundle at $19.99, and $29.99 for the PSP.
Thirty games for thirty dollars. Or less.
That means that the market price for retro/classic gaming is moving towards below $1/title. If this trend continues, it may not be much longer that Xbox Live Arcade can get away with charging a whole ten dollars for one 15-year-old game, and should put to rest the worries that the Nintendo Virtual Console pricing scheme will be high enough to discourage potential buyers.
How about this -- treat the airplane just like a movie theater: no outside food/drinks allowed. We need to dispense with the high gadgets and just say you can't bring anything on board except the clothes on your back.
Right, because no one ever smuggles contraband food or drinks into a movie theater.
And how would you feel if you went to the movies and then once it let out, you went to pick up your car from the mandatory valet parking only to find out that they misplaced it, and would bring it by if and when they ever find it again? People don't bring huge carry-ons into the cabin because they need two changes of clothing and a full toiletry kit during the flight; they do it because they don't trust the airline to have their checked luggage ready for them when they arrive.
I'd rather sacrifice my precious water bottle on a long flight than end up crashing into a building any day.
Seriously - this is a hugely underpowered console compared with the PS3 and XBox 360.
But it has more power than any other console in history apart from those two. I think it'll do just fine. Sure, there will be some game experiences available on the PS360 that just won't be possible on the Wii due to its comparatively lesser computing muscle, but because of the controller possibilities the inverse is also true.
At this point in time, it seems clear that the proper decision is to boycott these people. [...] otherwise, I'm going to "pirate" and do whatever it takes to not directly support these people anymore.
If you were serious about your boycott, you would not be "pirating" the RIAA product. You would simply not be consuming it at all.
Which may be good enough for most uses. If the floating-point representation of a monetary value is within 1/32768th of a dollar of its true value, then errors in rounding that value to the nearest cent are going to happen with much less frequency than when it may be as much as 1/128th of a dollar away from true (almost a cent in of itself).
Of course, there are still often better ways to handle such values. Such as fixed-precision decimal values.
I consider the NeXT boxes to have been more Workstation than Personal Computer.
Nobody ever bought a NeXT Cube as their home computer, except for supergeeks, and some regular geeks whose workplaces or schools were offloading surplus equipment.
If IBM had open-sourced OS/2 or given it away for free, then IBM could have wrestled the entire OS market from Microsoft.
Just like [Ff]ree Linux distributions have since wrested the entire OS market away from Microsoft?
No, computer buyers in the late 1980's were just like computer buyers today: they used whatever OS came preinstalled on their machine, and whatever OS ran their preferred applications. And if that combination was DOS 5.0 with Windows 3.1 and WordPerfect for Windows, that was what they dealt with, crashes and all.
Part of the reason RIAA is going after the free music databases is that they would like to sell you the sheet music for about $5 per song. Checkout MusicNotes.
What does MusicNotes have to do with the RIAA? Nothing.
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Heh, the issue of User Interfaces always makes me laugh at the incompetence of seemingly the entire world when it comes to User Interfaces (or the whole computing world in general).
So it's you against The World on the subject of how a UI ought to work. Hmm, I wonder who is more likely to be right.
1. The computer has no way of knowing, other than via user input, which information is important, and needs to be made viewable. I actually prefer to manually set the size and placement of my windows exactly the way I want them, because I know better than the computer does what I'm trying to accomplish.
2. You're complaining about an edge case. The vast majority of users will only ever use a computing system in their own native language. It doesn't matter to me that the Spanish term for "Save" doesn't start with 's'; in English, Ctrl+S maps nicely to "Save".
3. I am interested to know which UI widgets you feel are superfluous. Running through the common ones (text boxes, menus, radio buttons, sliders, et al) in my head, I find each one to have a reasonable logical and/or graphical justification for existing. So what confuses you?
4. I want a UI to react to my commands as quickly as possible. If I hit "page down", I want to see the next page now; I don't want to wait 2 seconds as the content smoothly scrolls to the new location. And if UIs were designed so that they did this, I suspect you'd be searching for the option to turn it back off as well.
"It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"
Oh please no.
I had a mandatory Computers class in 6th grade (and again in 7th and 8th grade, with the exact same lesson plan). Half of this class was rudimentary BASIC programming on a room full of TRS-80s, the ones with the integrated green monochrome displays--and this was circa 1990.
The other half of the class was a purported history of computing, the key facts of which I can still recite today (learning the same thing thrice causes it to stick). These facts are:
- Charles Babbage made a mechanical computer.
- Then there were the UNIVAC and the ENIAC.
- The term "bug" is due to an actual bug Ada Lovelace found inside a computer.
- There are four kinds of computer: supercomputer, mainframe, minicomputer, and microcomputer.
- RAM stands for "random access memory"; ROM stands for "read only memory".
- Cray supercomputers are cool-looking.
- 10 PRINT "FART!!! "
- 20 GOTO 10
- RUN
I don't use my gamecube much because it's restricted to SDTV aspect ratio
I take it, then, that you either have a newer 'Cube from after the Digital A/V port was removed, or have a Digital A/V port but can't find the component cable adapter to hook it up to your TV with. The GameCube was capable of outputting in progressive and widescreen, but support for these features was not all that widespread.
The Wii should (I hope) be better in this regard; with other consoles touting the virtues of HD gaming, Nintendo really ought to support something better than NTSC video over S-Video.
THQ had a demonstration of some Wii titles the other day in New York City. IGN's photos of the event show games running off a Wii devkit, in true widescreen. This is promising.
The problem with touchscreen is that it only can do left-clicks, no right clicks.
Mac mouses have the same "problem", but we get the same effect by holding down a control key as we click. No reason the same could not be done with one of the DS's keys.
As for hover, that could be approximated too. The input routines could be designed such that moving the stylus across the touchscreen was equivalent to changing the mouse position, and to click the user would have to lift the stylus off the screen and then bring it down in the same place.
When will these companies learn to view the modern web with any sort of comfort you need, at the very least 640x480.
When will modern web designers learn to make pages that can be read comfortably (if not always exactly in line with their design strategies) at any resolution, no matter how low.
A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant or to what degree an implementation is compliant. It can only point out particular things that are broken.
Huh?
If the test suite points out zero particular things that are broken, then the implementation is compliant. If there are 5 out of 1000 things that are broken, it is almost compliant. If there are 300 out of 1000 things that are broken, it is partially compliant.
The only question here is of what scale to use when attempting to turn the results into a percentage.
Modern RISC machines are built to run C fast.
You've mixed up cause and effect here.
C was designed to easily compile into efficient code for the CPU architectures of its time, the ones that ultimately evolved into our modern RISC processors. It's a minimalist language, a few scoops of syntactical sugar away from being ASM itself. CPU designers have made few, if any, design decisions that would give machine code compiled from C source a performance advantage over machine code compiled from any other procedural language.
If you want a real example of hardware being optimized for a particular language, check out some Forth machines.
Lazy parents. That's the problem, not violent content in games. If parents would actually PARENT their kids instead of being all self absorbed and/or just wanting to 'be their friend'. The vast majority of parents are lazy, do not want to take responsibility for their children's actions, and pay little if no attention to raising them properly.
Is it just me, or have "Lazy Parents" taken a number-two spot behind "Jews" on the Big List Of Convenient Scapegoats For Blaming All The Ills Of The World On?
It can't be that an entire generation (present company, of course, excluded, can't use ourselves as scapegoats) has suddenly forgotten how to raise children. No, in reality, I think when a child does something anti-social like shoot up his schoolmates, there's other issues at play beyond "parents never told him it was wrong to shoot people".
We don't have a mechanism to make the executives responsible for the deception pay for it. Instead we force the shareholders, who've already been duped, to pay the penalty.
And then the shareholders, sufficiently outraged that the executives' malfeasance has cost them money instead of making them money, oust the villians and replace them with someone more honest.
The system doesn't always work this way, but it could.
It is called social disabdience.
No, it's called copyright infringement. I participate in it too, on occasion, but at least I'm honest about myself.
I wonder how much of what is considered 'pirated' is outside a sane copyright law(like 14 years.)?
Probably very little. When people hit the peer to peer networks, they look for works which are fresh in their minds, which likely means the most recent works to have been released. Nobody's downloading Casablanca; everybody's downloading Pirates of the Caribbean II. Nobody's downloading "Meet the Beatles"; everybody's downloading "NOW That's What I Call Music Volume 21".
It's not artistic license. It's about even powers of two
It's about using base-ten prefixes to describe base-two values. It's not "artistic" license, just the etymological kind.
when he says "we", he probably means only Nintendo. So, third parties may still be able to charge for their own monthly fees.
They might possibly be able to, but if they know what's good for them they'll follow Nintendo's lead on pricing.
The top-tier game titles on any Nintendo system have been heavily first-party, from the NES through to the GameCube and DS. It would be more than a little arrogant for a third-party publisher to charge a fee for what Nintendo's offering for free -- that would be saying their game is higher in value than Nintendo's, a proposition that practiced gamers are unlikely to find credible.
Network encryption on the DS is done in software, not hardware. Each title comes with its own code for managing the wifi connection.
The developers of Mario Kart DS were not able to implement anything more secure than WEP in that title without affecting playability. So that game does not support WPA and never will. It's not unreasonable, though, that later titles, once devs learn to make better use of the system -- or titles like the Opera browser in which frame-perfect network synchronization is not as critical -- may support additional forms of encryption.
Myself, I just locked down my wireless router to require WEP and only accept traffic from the MAC addresses of the wireless gear I own. It seems a fair compromise eto me.
How much clearer do you need it to be for you to understand?
You act like there's absolutely no room for interpretation in his statements. That is untrue. For one, he does not specify whether the games with no subscription fee will comprise ALL of the online service, or only part of it.
He also does not explain what he means by "hidden" costs. If access to leaderboards, for example, costs $1/month, how does one determine whether that cost is "hidden" or "upfront"? How early in the navigational process does the cost need to be mentioned to keep it from being "hidden"?
Nobody is born with an inate right to enjoy all episodes of "24" for free.
Bad example? If Fox doesn't want me to have access to all the episodes of "24", they shouldn't be beaming them into my home over public airwaves.
$25 is far too high a price for software of the complexity you describe; $.25 is more like it.
So you're saying a fair price for software development work is not 50 cents/hour, but rather 0.5 cents/hour. Sorry, no.
You could be earning $150 in a day (your 600 hits figure)
Yeah, if there were a 100% conversion rate on those clickthroughs. Which no ad will ever get.
software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.
Example please? I doubt that an untrained noob programmer is capable of replicating a $100+ commercial software package like MS Office or Photoshop or What-Have-You 3.0. Hell, there's a lot of brilliant people working on projects like OpenOffice and The Gimp, and they've been at it for years, and they still aren't quite there yet.
Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all.
"The record companies are ALREADY screwing the artist up the ass, so it's okay if I do it too!" No.
Look at the price of blank CDs. Did you know that you have to pay a "piracy tax" for these? Yep.
Nope. Or at least, not run-of-the-mill CD-Rs sold in the United States. There's the "Music CD-Rs" that cost a lot more than "Data CD-Rs" and have the piracy levy built into the price, but nobody uses those.
Go ahead and go to court, but bring up the fact that an IP address is not a person. Since your IP is the only log they have of the download (even if they have the MAC, that'll only ID a computer, not a single person), you'll win in court.
No, you probably won't. The courts aren't immune to common sense; if they prove that a computer was used for piracy and you own that computer, they're going to assume that you are responsible for that piracy unless you present a compelling case for why you are not.
EB Games is listing the PS2 bundle at $19.99, and $29.99 for the PSP.
Thirty games for thirty dollars. Or less.
That means that the market price for retro/classic gaming is moving towards below $1/title. If this trend continues, it may not be much longer that Xbox Live Arcade can get away with charging a whole ten dollars for one 15-year-old game, and should put to rest the worries that the Nintendo Virtual Console pricing scheme will be high enough to discourage potential buyers.
How about this -- treat the airplane just like a movie theater: no outside food/drinks allowed. We need to dispense with the high gadgets and just say you can't bring anything on board except the clothes on your back.
Right, because no one ever smuggles contraband food or drinks into a movie theater.
And how would you feel if you went to the movies and then once it let out, you went to pick up your car from the mandatory valet parking only to find out that they misplaced it, and would bring it by if and when they ever find it again? People don't bring huge carry-ons into the cabin because they need two changes of clothing and a full toiletry kit during the flight; they do it because they don't trust the airline to have their checked luggage ready for them when they arrive.
I'd rather sacrifice my precious water bottle on a long flight than end up crashing into a building any day.
That's a false dichotomy.
Seriously - this is a hugely underpowered console compared with the PS3 and XBox 360.
But it has more power than any other console in history apart from those two. I think it'll do just fine. Sure, there will be some game experiences available on the PS360 that just won't be possible on the Wii due to its comparatively lesser computing muscle, but because of the controller possibilities the inverse is also true.
At this point in time, it seems clear that the proper decision is to boycott these people. [...] otherwise, I'm going to "pirate" and do whatever it takes to not directly support these people anymore.
If you were serious about your boycott, you would not be "pirating" the RIAA product. You would simply not be consuming it at all.
using double, of course, only defers the problem.
Which may be good enough for most uses. If the floating-point representation of a monetary value is within 1/32768th of a dollar of its true value, then errors in rounding that value to the nearest cent are going to happen with much less frequency than when it may be as much as 1/128th of a dollar away from true (almost a cent in of itself).
Of course, there are still often better ways to handle such values. Such as fixed-precision decimal values.
I can't believe that NeXT isn't on the list.
I consider the NeXT boxes to have been more Workstation than Personal Computer.
Nobody ever bought a NeXT Cube as their home computer, except for supergeeks, and some regular geeks whose workplaces or schools were offloading surplus equipment.
If IBM had open-sourced OS/2 or given it away for free, then IBM could have wrestled the entire OS market from Microsoft.
Just like [Ff]ree Linux distributions have since wrested the entire OS market away from Microsoft?
No, computer buyers in the late 1980's were just like computer buyers today: they used whatever OS came preinstalled on their machine, and whatever OS ran their preferred applications. And if that combination was DOS 5.0 with Windows 3.1 and WordPerfect for Windows, that was what they dealt with, crashes and all.
Part of the reason RIAA is going after the free music databases is that they would like to sell you the sheet music for about $5 per song. Checkout MusicNotes.
What does MusicNotes have to do with the RIAA? Nothing.