The question of "why would anyone do this?" simply doesn't exist. It's only a question of "how do I do this?" and, even more importantly, "how far can I take it?"
Of course, eventually this leads to things like cloning carnivorous dinosaurs and destroying small planets, but that's what science fiction writers are supposed to worry about.
"Spirited Away" did well on DVD, partly because it won the Oscar for Best Animated as well as about a dozen other major and minor awards.
But it was never a bit hit in theatres, which is what really matters as far as counting profits is concerned. Most anime, as the submitter pointed out, isn't. I don't think we're a culture of "cartoons are for kids" any longer ("Shark Tale" was probably the first American animated hit targetted at older kids and teenagers).
But anime has two things working against it in this country. First, most theatrical releases are subtitled, not dubbed, and most Americans dislike watching films in other languages when we have so many English-language films to choose from instead. (Foreign language films in general do poorly at the box office here.) And second, they're just not widely promoted -- partly because the distributors know about the no-dub-no-sales factor.
...The iPod, in any incarnation, has three advantages going for it: style, ease of use, and iTunes integration. The iPod Shuffle is no exception. 256MB MP3 players are plenty common these days; Sony's competing with them, not with the iPod Shuffle. The only real similarity it has to the iPod is the form factor.
I know that iTunes integration is something only Apple can do, but if you can get the ease-of-use going, then you can at least sport Microsoft integration. And somehow, nobody gets the ease-of-use thing working. They keep thinking that they can beat Apple on price, which isn't really relevant now that Apple has a $100 iPod. Sure, you can make another MP3 player for $50 or $75, but it doesn't take long to compare features and decide the extra $25 or $50 is worth it.
Get it right, manufacturers -- your target is ease-of-use, not price or size. The iPod has proved that there are enough people who will pay for quality (and fashion, I'll admit it) to make it worth catering to them.
Assuming Google is developing a kind of search tool to index and organize all the public internet calendars in the world, who would want to use it?
I mean, say I load it up and search for "March 3, 2005". I'll probably get a couple of obscure religious and national holidays, then a few zillion pages of entries like "Math class @ 10:00 AM" and "Meeting with union 3-4PM" and "Don't forget the recycling bin!"
Well, that was useful. Nice to know how many people with calendaring software have math classes this morning; I'd never have found it if it weren't for you, Google!
Miss a TV show? Why DVR it when you can go to your computer, type "Battlestar" or "Babylon" to get the entire current archives, and for $3 (or $20 for the entire season), you can watch your movies *now*.
A column not too long ago (don't ask me to recall who or when or where) discussed this sort of thing in light of sites like "Homestar Runner". The case was that this is the future of video entertainment -- visit the show's web site and download and watch any episode you like, in any order, at any time, rather than wait for your favorite episode to reach syndication or buy the whole season on DVD.
The bandwidth, I think, is still the biggest problem, but that's just a matter of time and R&D. And the difference in quality from downloadable video vs. HDTV will, like the difference between MP3 and CD quality audio, keep the downloadable format from completely replacing TV broadcasts or DVD sales.
All we (and Apple) need is the device to do it, at a price point people can afford. That too is a matter of time -- iPods arrived costing, what, $400? $500? Now you can get a Mini for $200 and a Shuffle for even less.
I think Apple would like to sell just what it described in the article: a program that lets you download and view video on your computer, but supplemented by a small remote-controlled set-top device that streams it wirelessly to your television set, a la Airport Express. Video on an iPod-sized device is impractical by any measure, but video on your television set is a given -- but it has to be as easy to use as a DVD player. Fortunately, that sort of ease of use is Apple's specialty.
I perceive this as a certainty, not a possibility -- it's just a matter of when.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a forum where readers are occasionally allowed to disagree.:-)
To appreciate "Babylon 5", it perhaps helps to have been there when it first aired. This was ten years ago, when ST:TNG was an uncategorical success by any measure, ST:DS9 was well underway with plenty of funding, and studios were jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon left and right.
After several years of ST:TNG, we get B5 -- a somewhat gritty, dirtier version of the future which resembles our present world a heck of a lot better than Roddenbery's universe. The aliens are more alien. The technology follows the known laws of physics (well, aside from hyperspace). And the effects? Well, they may look substandard today, but at the time that was cutting-edge CGI and it was being used on a weekly television program. In fact, JMS was proud of saying that his show would come in consistently under budget because of the cost savings over model-based special effects.
It was a breath of fresh air for sci-fi fans who were tired of the sanitized Star Trek universe and wanted something more realistic now. On top of that, it employed a multi-season story arc which, despite the kinks thrown in by actors leaving and the fifth season almost getting cancelled, worked incredibly well and was a radical approach to television. (To look at it another way, of course, is to say the departing actors and near-death of season 5 illustrates exactly why television shows usually approach each season open-ended.)
And what a story -- it looked like just aliens fighting it out diplomatically and Earth getting caught in the middle. Instead we get galactic-scale alien civilizations stretching millenia back into time, alien religious prophecies coming true, a conspiracy to take over Earth's government and implement fascism in its stead, telepaths running their own plan for controlling everything, all while this little tin can orbiting Epsilon 3 at the @$$-end of space is dealing with union strikes, budgetary constraints, refugees from alien wars, and the occasional drug bust.
Simply put, it was the kind of thing we knew we'd never see in Star Trek. DS9 came close to it (partly because it was, intentionally or not, borrowing heavily from JMS's ideas), but B5 was there first. Roddenberry's edict was basically that Starfleet and humanity in general appear pristine and perfect to project hope for the future; JMS declared that humans in the future would be just like humans today, and despite that (or because of it) we'd still grow to be masters of the galaxy in the millenia to come.
Oh, and there's also Ivanova. Regardless what you think about the acting, it's impossible not to like Ivanova.
Oh, and as a postscript: despite what I said about respecting others' opinions, and regardless of your experience in the field, if you think Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar is an ineffective actor, you're just not paying attention.
While the FireWire cable is gone, the USB 2.0 cable is still packaged, and all the current Macs support USB 2.0 at full speeds. So the FireWire cable is only necessary if you have an older machine or you're determined to have the fastest possible transfer speed all the time. (Note that "charging over USB 2.0" is one of the new features touted for the new iPods.)
You hate George Lucas but you are going to line his pockets all the same. Resistance is futile.
I went to see Episodes I and II separately, in the theaters, because I wanted to know what went on in 'em. But I only went once, and I never bought the DVDs. On the other hand, I went to see each of the Matrix films at least twice and paid handsomely for the DVDs as they came out.
I would guess Apple is doing this for two reasons. The first is to save money -- it's easier to offer a $50 drop in price if you're packaging the cable for $20 or whatever elsewhere.
Second is the upgrade factor. If you're upgrading an older iPod to a newer one, you already have some or all of the accessories. So it's possible that Apple's done some research, discovered several iPod fans are upgrading from older models, and decided to package the accessories separately for their benefit.
But as another poster pointed out, the music you "purchase" in iTMS or Napster is still not really yours, because you're still restricted by their DRM from doing a lot of things (protected by fair use) with the music you payed for
I have yet to find, in the course of normal use, a single thing that fair use protects that iTunes' DRM doesn't allow. You might as well complain that CDs are inherently restrictive, because I can't listen to them on a record player.
The problem with the sticker is that it stated that a particular theory was not a fact. If they hadn't mentioned evolution, it wouldn't have been a "religious" issue.
That's exactly it: "Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect."
Nobody would have bothered pointing out that, say the description of how a star is formed or why Germany started World War II or that the speed of light is relative is just a theory, not an absolute fact. Heck, even gravity is "only" a law, not a theorem. Most of what you learn in a worthwhile science textbook is theoretical.
When I read that headline, I thought it meant Microsoft released a malicious tool for removing (non-MS) software. I don't know if that's a result of my own prejudices or just the kind of thing I've come to expect from Slashdot headlines....
The thing that struck me while reading about iWork Pages was that they're really emphasizing the "great design, real easy" aspect of it, same as iLife always has. MS Word is about making great business documents; Pages is about making great-looking newsletters.
Additionally, Apple's got a long way to go before they can overtake MS in the business environment. Spreadsheets are mainly a business tool. Not much room in an Excel document for photos or sophisticated one-click text wrapping. (Yes, I know some people abuse Excel for documents it was never meant to process.) Home users who aren't bring their work home with them don't have much use for spreadsheets. Some, sure, but not much.
I don't think Apple is marketing iWork as an MS Office replacement--yet. There's too much functionality there for Apple to try and match it, and much of it is business-only. What they can do is take Office, pick out the multimedia-heavy apps, and make them prettier and easier to use.
The thing is, it's really got everything. Obviously it's targetted as a replacement--it assumes you've already got a keyboard, mouse and monitor that you can just unplug from your PC and plug into this. VGA? Got it. DVD burner option for the real "iDVD is SO cool" experience? Got it. Bluetooth and Airport support for the ultimate wireless experience? Got it. FireWire and/or USB2 for your iPod? Got both of those.
Want the peripherals? No problem, buy a one-piece iMac instead.
You'd think it junk because it's got so little, but in fact it's got EVERYTHING you need to make full use of iLife (and iWork) at a price that can make people really think about switching. I never, ever would have thought to build something like this. It's nice to see Apple is still on the cutting edge.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film.
How about "Fight Club"? Or "Me, Myself and Irene"? And those are just the first two that come to mind.... It's not as if split personalities are a new plot device where Hollywood is concerned, but it does require some uncommonly good acting and directing talent.
Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there
Define "up there". Hollywood CGI standards are not "Half Life 2" or "Doom3", it's Pixar and Dreamworks. In addition, remember that animation is still, for better or for worse, largely for G and PG stories in America.
There's no profit to be made in a movie that looks exactly like a game. Anybody could throw that together. What makes a movie unique is using real actors, real sets, and really expensive special effects -- not to mention real writers and real directors, which, let's face it, most games are sorely lacking.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
It's actually a compression algorithm. You know that computers store information as a series of ones and zeroes, right? Well, they just added a driver that writes only the ones, not the zeroes, instantly doubling the storage space.
After that, it's been a matter of building the drives with smaller and smaller pencils to write those ones side-by-side. When hard disks were first introduced, they used a standard #2 pencil sharpened down to the eraser, but eventually they moved to mechanical pencils, then realized they could use the mechanical pencil lead without the pencil at all.
Today, special microscopic pencils can be built one molecule at a time. The "eraser threshold" (currently the smallest one is 0.00003 centimeters in diameter) is a key factor in manufacturing drives.
I started teaching myself HTML almost as soon as Netscape 0.9 hit the FTP sites. The online guides were helpful, and View Source, as much then as now, was the best way to look at good and bad code and reverse-engineer it for my own purposes.
Once JavaScript was added to the Netscape browser, I began learning it in earnest. It was an ideal "gateway language" for me because it required no compilation, no debugger, nothing more than an OS-standard text editor and the free web browser I was using.
I could build scripts one line at a time, debugging them as I went without much incident. Then as I got the hang of it, I'd start using functions and subroutines, then external includes, objects, and all the other things that make "real" programming what it is.
HTML and JavaScript are still ideal, in my opinion, for teaching someone who doesn't know much about programming what you can do and what it should look like without taking a lot of time or software to produce results.
The industry is turning into an arena of untouchable behemoths and tiny indy groups who can't hope for decent sales, but can hope to get rich by being bought out and shut down by the large corporations.
Name one industry, just one, over ten years old that hasn't settled down into this selfsame pattern.
This sort of thing isn't a scandal; it's a script.
Email phishing is on the rise. Big time. And unlike viruses, Trojan horses and spyware, phishing scams are completely platform-independent, affecting naive Windows, Mac and Linux users equally.
I've been working at an Illinois Target store for extra holiday $$$, and our stores screen for M-for-Mature video games automatically. Which is to say, when one is scanned at the register we're supposed to ask for a date of birth and the register calculates it to make sure they're legal. Minimal enforcement, but like cigarettes and alcohol, it depends on the seller's cooperation to enforce it.
What cracks me up is that we ONLY screen video games (well, that and certain OTC medicines). I frequently scan through CDs with "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" labels and R-rated movies, but the register could care less how old the purchaser is for them. So apparently it's okay to sell kids CDs with cop-killer lyrics or movies with violent content, but VIDEO GAMES with the same content is a no-go.
Proposed Fix: Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it
Edit -> Undo "You don't have anything to undo"
Edit -> Redo "You don't have anything to redo"
Edit -> Cut "You haven't selected any text to cut"
Edit -> Copy "You haven't selected any text to copy"
Edit -> Paste "You haven't copied any text to paste"
Great, one more way for my computer to treat me like a complete imbecile.
If an option is greyed out, it's usually because -- shocking -- you can't use it right now. This is Common Sense. If it's not Common Sense, it's because that application's UI designer made their menus too complicated to begin with, and in my experience software programmers who do that sort of thing would also make their pop-up help even more useless, something like: "This option is disabled because you can't use it right now."
Rule #1 in UI design: if you have to explain something to your user, you're doing it wrong. Or at least you're doing it inconsistently, which is the same thing in this business. I shouldn't need to wonder WHY an option is disabled, at if for some reason I should, it shouldn't be disabled at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The question of "why would anyone do this?" simply doesn't exist. It's only a question of "how do I do this?" and, even more importantly, "how far can I take it?"
Of course, eventually this leads to things like cloning carnivorous dinosaurs and destroying small planets, but that's what science fiction writers are supposed to worry about.
"Spirited Away" did well on DVD, partly because it won the Oscar for Best Animated as well as about a dozen other major and minor awards.
But it was never a bit hit in theatres, which is what really matters as far as counting profits is concerned. Most anime, as the submitter pointed out, isn't. I don't think we're a culture of "cartoons are for kids" any longer ("Shark Tale" was probably the first American animated hit targetted at older kids and teenagers).
But anime has two things working against it in this country. First, most theatrical releases are subtitled, not dubbed, and most Americans dislike watching films in other languages when we have so many English-language films to choose from instead. (Foreign language films in general do poorly at the box office here.) And second, they're just not widely promoted -- partly because the distributors know about the no-dub-no-sales factor.
...The iPod, in any incarnation, has three advantages going for it: style, ease of use, and iTunes integration. The iPod Shuffle is no exception. 256MB MP3 players are plenty common these days; Sony's competing with them, not with the iPod Shuffle. The only real similarity it has to the iPod is the form factor.
I know that iTunes integration is something only Apple can do, but if you can get the ease-of-use going, then you can at least sport Microsoft integration. And somehow, nobody gets the ease-of-use thing working. They keep thinking that they can beat Apple on price, which isn't really relevant now that Apple has a $100 iPod. Sure, you can make another MP3 player for $50 or $75, but it doesn't take long to compare features and decide the extra $25 or $50 is worth it.
Get it right, manufacturers -- your target is ease-of-use, not price or size. The iPod has proved that there are enough people who will pay for quality (and fashion, I'll admit it) to make it worth catering to them.
Assuming Google is developing a kind of search tool to index and organize all the public internet calendars in the world, who would want to use it?
I mean, say I load it up and search for "March 3, 2005". I'll probably get a couple of obscure religious and national holidays, then a few zillion pages of entries like "Math class @ 10:00 AM" and "Meeting with union 3-4PM" and "Don't forget the recycling bin!"
Well, that was useful. Nice to know how many people with calendaring software have math classes this morning; I'd never have found it if it weren't for you, Google!
Miss a TV show? Why DVR it when you can go to your computer, type "Battlestar" or "Babylon" to get the entire current archives, and for $3 (or $20 for the entire season), you can watch your movies *now*.
A column not too long ago (don't ask me to recall who or when or where) discussed this sort of thing in light of sites like "Homestar Runner". The case was that this is the future of video entertainment -- visit the show's web site and download and watch any episode you like, in any order, at any time, rather than wait for your favorite episode to reach syndication or buy the whole season on DVD.
The bandwidth, I think, is still the biggest problem, but that's just a matter of time and R&D. And the difference in quality from downloadable video vs. HDTV will, like the difference between MP3 and CD quality audio, keep the downloadable format from completely replacing TV broadcasts or DVD sales.
All we (and Apple) need is the device to do it, at a price point people can afford. That too is a matter of time -- iPods arrived costing, what, $400? $500? Now you can get a Mini for $200 and a Shuffle for even less.
I think Apple would like to sell just what it described in the article: a program that lets you download and view video on your computer, but supplemented by a small remote-controlled set-top device that streams it wirelessly to your television set, a la Airport Express. Video on an iPod-sized device is impractical by any measure, but video on your television set is a given -- but it has to be as easy to use as a DVD player. Fortunately, that sort of ease of use is Apple's specialty.
I perceive this as a certainty, not a possibility -- it's just a matter of when.
One glaring omission from the FAQ is "Why participate in this?" I guess if you have to ask why, there's no point in asking.
Finding new and interesting numbers is the mathematical equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest -- you do it because they are there.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a forum where readers are occasionally allowed to disagree. :-)
To appreciate "Babylon 5", it perhaps helps to have been there when it first aired. This was ten years ago, when ST:TNG was an uncategorical success by any measure, ST:DS9 was well underway with plenty of funding, and studios were jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon left and right.
After several years of ST:TNG, we get B5 -- a somewhat gritty, dirtier version of the future which resembles our present world a heck of a lot better than Roddenbery's universe. The aliens are more alien. The technology follows the known laws of physics (well, aside from hyperspace). And the effects? Well, they may look substandard today, but at the time that was cutting-edge CGI and it was being used on a weekly television program. In fact, JMS was proud of saying that his show would come in consistently under budget because of the cost savings over model-based special effects.
It was a breath of fresh air for sci-fi fans who were tired of the sanitized Star Trek universe and wanted something more realistic now. On top of that, it employed a multi-season story arc which, despite the kinks thrown in by actors leaving and the fifth season almost getting cancelled, worked incredibly well and was a radical approach to television. (To look at it another way, of course, is to say the departing actors and near-death of season 5 illustrates exactly why television shows usually approach each season open-ended.)
And what a story -- it looked like just aliens fighting it out diplomatically and Earth getting caught in the middle. Instead we get galactic-scale alien civilizations stretching millenia back into time, alien religious prophecies coming true, a conspiracy to take over Earth's government and implement fascism in its stead, telepaths running their own plan for controlling everything, all while this little tin can orbiting Epsilon 3 at the @$$-end of space is dealing with union strikes, budgetary constraints, refugees from alien wars, and the occasional drug bust.
Simply put, it was the kind of thing we knew we'd never see in Star Trek. DS9 came close to it (partly because it was, intentionally or not, borrowing heavily from JMS's ideas), but B5 was there first. Roddenberry's edict was basically that Starfleet and humanity in general appear pristine and perfect to project hope for the future; JMS declared that humans in the future would be just like humans today, and despite that (or because of it) we'd still grow to be masters of the galaxy in the millenia to come.
Oh, and there's also Ivanova. Regardless what you think about the acting, it's impossible not to like Ivanova.
Oh, and as a postscript: despite what I said about respecting others' opinions, and regardless of your experience in the field, if you think Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar is an ineffective actor, you're just not paying attention.
That'll teach me to read the article first....
While the FireWire cable is gone, the USB 2.0 cable is still packaged, and all the current Macs support USB 2.0 at full speeds. So the FireWire cable is only necessary if you have an older machine or you're determined to have the fastest possible transfer speed all the time. (Note that "charging over USB 2.0" is one of the new features touted for the new iPods.)
You hate George Lucas but you are going to line his pockets all the same. Resistance is futile.
I went to see Episodes I and II separately, in the theaters, because I wanted to know what went on in 'em. But I only went once, and I never bought the DVDs. On the other hand, I went to see each of the Matrix films at least twice and paid handsomely for the DVDs as they came out.
I would guess Apple is doing this for two reasons. The first is to save money -- it's easier to offer a $50 drop in price if you're packaging the cable for $20 or whatever elsewhere.
Second is the upgrade factor. If you're upgrading an older iPod to a newer one, you already have some or all of the accessories. So it's possible that Apple's done some research, discovered several iPod fans are upgrading from older models, and decided to package the accessories separately for their benefit.
Just a theory of mine, but it makes sense.
But as another poster pointed out, the music you "purchase" in iTMS or Napster is still not really yours, because you're still restricted by their DRM from doing a lot of things (protected by fair use) with the music you payed for
I have yet to find, in the course of normal use, a single thing that fair use protects that iTunes' DRM doesn't allow. You might as well complain that CDs are inherently restrictive, because I can't listen to them on a record player.
Seriously: What is "Audible"? Never heard of that file format.
Audible.com is the #1 online source for downloadable audiobooks. As far as I know, it doesn't use its own format; that's just a journalistic gaffe.
The problem with the sticker is that it stated that a particular theory was not a fact. If they hadn't mentioned evolution, it wouldn't have been a "religious" issue.
That's exactly it: "Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect."
Nobody would have bothered pointing out that, say the description of how a star is formed or why Germany started World War II or that the speed of light is relative is just a theory, not an absolute fact. Heck, even gravity is "only" a law, not a theorem. Most of what you learn in a worthwhile science textbook is theoretical.
When I read that headline, I thought it meant Microsoft released a malicious tool for removing (non-MS) software. I don't know if that's a result of my own prejudices or just the kind of thing I've come to expect from Slashdot headlines....
The thing that struck me while reading about iWork Pages was that they're really emphasizing the "great design, real easy" aspect of it, same as iLife always has. MS Word is about making great business documents; Pages is about making great-looking newsletters.
Additionally, Apple's got a long way to go before they can overtake MS in the business environment. Spreadsheets are mainly a business tool. Not much room in an Excel document for photos or sophisticated one-click text wrapping. (Yes, I know some people abuse Excel for documents it was never meant to process.) Home users who aren't bring their work home with them don't have much use for spreadsheets. Some, sure, but not much.
I don't think Apple is marketing iWork as an MS Office replacement--yet. There's too much functionality there for Apple to try and match it, and much of it is business-only. What they can do is take Office, pick out the multimedia-heavy apps, and make them prettier and easier to use.
The thing is, it's really got everything. Obviously it's targetted as a replacement--it assumes you've already got a keyboard, mouse and monitor that you can just unplug from your PC and plug into this. VGA? Got it. DVD burner option for the real "iDVD is SO cool" experience? Got it. Bluetooth and Airport support for the ultimate wireless experience? Got it. FireWire and/or USB2 for your iPod? Got both of those.
Want the peripherals? No problem, buy a one-piece iMac instead.
You'd think it junk because it's got so little, but in fact it's got EVERYTHING you need to make full use of iLife (and iWork) at a price that can make people really think about switching. I never, ever would have thought to build something like this. It's nice to see Apple is still on the cutting edge.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film.
How about "Fight Club"? Or "Me, Myself and Irene"? And those are just the first two that come to mind.... It's not as if split personalities are a new plot device where Hollywood is concerned, but it does require some uncommonly good acting and directing talent.
Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there
Define "up there". Hollywood CGI standards are not "Half Life 2" or "Doom3", it's Pixar and Dreamworks. In addition, remember that animation is still, for better or for worse, largely for G and PG stories in America.
There's no profit to be made in a movie that looks exactly like a game. Anybody could throw that together. What makes a movie unique is using real actors, real sets, and really expensive special effects -- not to mention real writers and real directors, which, let's face it, most games are sorely lacking.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
It's actually a compression algorithm. You know that computers store information as a series of ones and zeroes, right? Well, they just added a driver that writes only the ones, not the zeroes, instantly doubling the storage space.
After that, it's been a matter of building the drives with smaller and smaller pencils to write those ones side-by-side. When hard disks were first introduced, they used a standard #2 pencil sharpened down to the eraser, but eventually they moved to mechanical pencils, then realized they could use the mechanical pencil lead without the pencil at all.
Today, special microscopic pencils can be built one molecule at a time. The "eraser threshold" (currently the smallest one is 0.00003 centimeters in diameter) is a key factor in manufacturing drives.
I started teaching myself HTML almost as soon as Netscape 0.9 hit the FTP sites. The online guides were helpful, and View Source, as much then as now, was the best way to look at good and bad code and reverse-engineer it for my own purposes.
Once JavaScript was added to the Netscape browser, I began learning it in earnest. It was an ideal "gateway language" for me because it required no compilation, no debugger, nothing more than an OS-standard text editor and the free web browser I was using.
I could build scripts one line at a time, debugging them as I went without much incident. Then as I got the hang of it, I'd start using functions and subroutines, then external includes, objects, and all the other things that make "real" programming what it is.
HTML and JavaScript are still ideal, in my opinion, for teaching someone who doesn't know much about programming what you can do and what it should look like without taking a lot of time or software to produce results.
The industry is turning into an arena of untouchable behemoths and tiny indy groups who can't hope for decent sales, but can hope to get rich by being bought out and shut down by the large corporations.
Name one industry, just one, over ten years old that hasn't settled down into this selfsame pattern.
This sort of thing isn't a scandal; it's a script.
Email phishing is on the rise. Big time. And unlike viruses, Trojan horses and spyware, phishing scams are completely platform-independent, affecting naive Windows, Mac and Linux users equally.
I've been working at an Illinois Target store for extra holiday $$$, and our stores screen for M-for-Mature video games automatically. Which is to say, when one is scanned at the register we're supposed to ask for a date of birth and the register calculates it to make sure they're legal. Minimal enforcement, but like cigarettes and alcohol, it depends on the seller's cooperation to enforce it.
What cracks me up is that we ONLY screen video games (well, that and certain OTC medicines). I frequently scan through CDs with "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" labels and R-rated movies, but the register could care less how old the purchaser is for them. So apparently it's okay to sell kids CDs with cop-killer lyrics or movies with violent content, but VIDEO GAMES with the same content is a no-go.
Proposed Fix: Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it
Edit -> Undo
"You don't have anything to undo"
Edit -> Redo
"You don't have anything to redo"
Edit -> Cut
"You haven't selected any text to cut"
Edit -> Copy
"You haven't selected any text to copy"
Edit -> Paste
"You haven't copied any text to paste"
Great, one more way for my computer to treat me like a complete imbecile.
If an option is greyed out, it's usually because -- shocking -- you can't use it right now. This is Common Sense. If it's not Common Sense, it's because that application's UI designer made their menus too complicated to begin with, and in my experience software programmers who do that sort of thing would also make their pop-up help even more useless, something like: "This option is disabled because you can't use it right now."
Rule #1 in UI design: if you have to explain something to your user, you're doing it wrong. Or at least you're doing it inconsistently, which is the same thing in this business. I shouldn't need to wonder WHY an option is disabled, at if for some reason I should, it shouldn't be disabled at all.
Alginate the Movie Industry
Alginate? You want to cover them in medical dressings? Or possibly make them thicker and more tasty....