I take your points, but I think you miss mine.
I don't value entertainment *that* highly (at £24 a day, or whatever). But for high-quality, ownership of an Episode or Season, I think it's a fairly reasonable price. Don't forget that people, by and large, are willing to pay quite large amounts per hour for ownership (look at sales of DVDs and VHSs)
Is your $4/24 four dollars a day or four dollars for every twenty-four hours you watch? There's the difference.
Not for first run free to air stuff. But for a permanent high-resolution (well, higher than analoug transmission/VHS) I think it's a reasonable price.
Consider, you pay, what, £4 - £5 for a 100 minute movie?
£80 for a season of Buffy on DVD?
And, when you watch "free" TV, you ARE paying for it. You pay via the constant innteruptions (aka adverts), cable bill, licence fee, the guide that tells you what's on etc.
I'd love to know how much advertisers pay per viewer - 'cos I'd happily pay a modest amount to watch a TV show sans adverts.
If I want music I'll either
a) buy it,
b) borrow it from a friend,
c) search for it.
What are the chances that the stranger I sit next to on the bus has the missing track from "The Beatles Jam With Elvis CD12" that I so desperatley want?
What's to stop someone renaming their old Britney Spears mp3s as "Next Boy Band Craze" and leeching for free?
Essentially, you might just walk into HMV buy the CDs you want and then return them under a spurious excuse.
I'd love to pay a fair price for music and, yes, the conventional method prevents me from doing this. But building a device to leech from everyone around me isn't the answer. Getting the people at the record companies to change their attitude would be a more useful project.
uuuhhhh - one slight problem with that. When you (through your elected officials) sold off the public airspace to the highest bidders, you told them they could do pretty much what they wanted.
But, hey, they paid you (well, really your elected officials) such a lot of money, that it must have been worth it. Right?
> This means that those commercials get aired again.
Very bad idea! What if the advert contains a time limited offer? A product that is no longer available? A product that has since been proven to cause cancer in chipmunks?
Much better that either
1) The adverts are contemporary and suitable for the region (ie Brits get British advert, Germans get German etc)
2) For a higher fee you get the program ad-free.
I figure that it takes about an hour (min) to get a half hour TV show, including searching, downloading etc.
On (UK) minimum wage that's ~£4. How much does an programme get per person currently in the terms of advertising money?
Well, an entire VHS season of Buffy is about £60 for 22 episodes. About £2.72 per episode. So, the question is, if you ignore tape manufacturing costs etc, how litte would the company have to charge to get people to download the ep from them rather than from Kazaa?
50p? I think less that £1 for a half hours entertainment is fairly reasonable and would cut down a whole slew of piracy. Remember, piracy occurs because it's cheaper and quicker to pirate than to go legit.
If you don't trust me to read what you send, why are you sending it?
It's not you I don't trust, it's the Internet. I use receipts to verify that the mail has actually arrived safely and/or that the mail box is being used.
I don't use 'em often, but when I do it's a useful feature.
I hate spam. I also hate having to go and check each individual program's webpage to see if they've updated. I hate having to use online price guides to see if what I want is cheap. I hate giving my email addy out to people who provide this service because they often get sold.
For a few selected parties, this could be a good idea. And it may just stop those stupid "MS will give you $200 if you forward this mail" twats.
What I do now is give my email address in the form of somecompany.tld@mydomain.tld - I've caught a few people out on their privacy policy and once an addy gets too much mail *poof* it's gone.
So, yeah, if someone could gaurantee that my addy is safe when I sign up for something that would be just dandy - for now I'll just keep track of who gets my address.
>Unless the DMA itself is sending out the spam (not likely), they have to make the list
>available to spammers. How else would the list work?
Marketer sends mail (with attached "To:" list) to account24234234@do-not-contact-list.[url].com
Progrm strips out any names contained in the To: list that are also on their "no email" list.
Marketing info gets sent only to those who haven't said they don't want it.
That's how it works in some companies I've worked for - if people have supplied their mailing info for warranties etc but don't want to receive marketing.
Of course, I doubt it would work for spam. Spammers won't use such a service.
(no need to mod this - just answering the guy's question)
It doesn't make good technology accessible. Look at something like a Palm Piolt. It is (for the conventional) user, impossible to modify the underlying OS or the UI. This is a GOOD thing. People should not mess with what they don't understand. Just because you have a body, it doesn't automatically follow that you know exactly what sort of drugs to take, what exercise regime to follow or how best to educate yourself.
Fine - let people configure their system to some degree. But when it comes to meddling with things that change the fundamental operation of their machine, leave it to those who understand what they are doing.
Considering that most non-geek/tech people barely see the need for palm pilots Yet how many see the need to scribble things down on post-it notes? How many carry around shopping lists?
The Palm Pilot has more functionality than Post-It Notes and filofaxes combined. But it does require a shift in the way we work, and a complicated shift at that.
Make the Palm Pilot as easy to use as paper and pen (or even easier!) and the problem goes away.
Also, will there be some sort of backlash against technology once it is integrated literally into the fabric of our lives? No. There may be some whinings from the same people who claim that climbing down from the trees was a bad idea, but these changes will happen too gradually to generate much protest. The analogue mobile phone debued in the early 1980s - today 2/3 of adults in the UK have a mobile! There is a little backlash (concern over saftey/costs/overwork) but the majority see the wonderful simplication (my address book is my phone!) while keeping the existing methodology.
Technology will creep along and get to a state where, if done correctly, could streamline our lives without having to change our working paradigms.
Part of the problem is advertising revenue. If you have to look at 5 pages, you have to look at 5 adverts.
Another, more journalistically useful, feature allows the editor to see which stories are actually being read. There have been studies (and I'll try and post the links later) which show how much people don't read on a website. If you can see that only 5% of people reading the first page bother reading all the way to the end of an article - you can generate some useful feedback to your writers. If everything is on one page, you don't know how much of the page is being read.
What's cool? Even Moore's Law eventually gets trumped by the laws of physics. In a few years, the current method of packing ever greater numbers of transistors onto a chip will hit a wall. But a technology called Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography may break that barrier. Intel estimates that EUVL chips will boast 400 million transistors -- about ten times more than the Pentium 4's 42 million.
I like this system because it allows users to decide what domains are valuable What if a company wants a domain name, but their competitor buys it up because the competitor has more cash?
McDonald's Cafe (est 1935) surely has as valid a claim to McDonalds.* as the American "meat"inabun company? Yet the big corporation can uses its cast financial clout to dispence with the competition.
Terry
Re:EEK! A COMPUTER! HIDE! RUN!
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 1
You can't write a letter on your CD player, and you can't browse the Internet on your gameboy. True - but you can do incredibly complicated things on them. "Legend of Zelda" is just as difficult as writing a letter - it's just difficult in a different way.
As for instant messanging, take a look at something like Trillian - all the features of the popular IM programs, none of the bloat. One of the things I love about Office 2k is the ability to hide the features that I never use; reducing the non-useful options is the first step to usability.
it's the fact that it is genuinely HARD to come up with an interface sufficiently generic to do all these things, yet still be comprehensible Actually, while is is tricky and requires a lot of user testing and feedback - it's not that hard when you consider the rewards. The main problem at the moment is people are more concerned with the "look and feel" and the general asthetics rather than if the interfaces maps to a users mental model of the program.
Does anyone else want to take part in a project to design a new interface for computers?
Yup! Could be a very interesting project. I think it would be wonderful to have a logically similar l&f interface that could map onto any application. KDE (from what little I've seen of it) does have a very buggy implementation of it - the control panel allows you to specify if your buttons should display Icons, text or both. Unfortunatles, not all buttons have text associated with them:-(
Terry
britguy
@ ottawa. com
Re:EEK! A COMPUTER! HIDE! RUN!
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 2
Hell, you'd have to be a complete moron to not understand the clock setting instructions on my 5 year old Sony VCR.
Sony, to their credit invest as much beleif in HF as Microsoft.
The trouble is getting Joe Dipshit to actually READ the friggin manual, it's not like it's particularly hard... (emphasis added)
There's the rub - it shouldn't be hard at all. Infact, why should I need to use a manual to do something as set the time. On my cheap watch I turn the bezel forward - the time moves forward. I turn the bezel back - the time moves backwards.
Why can't a VCR be that simple?
Re:EEK! A COMPUTER! HIDE! RUN!
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just the sort of bigoted ignorance of HCI/Human-Factors that are holding back computers (and Linux particularly).
How hard is it to operate a Gameboy? Cart in, switch flicked. That's it!
CD player - CD in, button pressed. Music!
I don't want to have to drop to a command line to do play my mp3s on my digital hifi. I don't want to even *see* my VCR flashing <blink>12:00</blink> at me - let alone figure out a poorly translated Japanese user manual and try and set the damn thing.
That's what they are talking about. People don't want to have to fight with their toys just to get them to work. Flick a switch and off they go.
The problem is, your user doesn't have a functional mental model of how the car works.
I know nothing really about synchromesh - what I do know is that pushing down the clutch (conveniently the pedal nearest the gearstick) the cogs move away from the gears allowing me to change them. I don't really understand anti-lock braking systems - I know the harder I press on the middle peddle, the harder the brakes press on the wheels.
The car is fairly intuitive iff you have a reasonable mental model. There are a few improvments that could certainly be made to its interface - but I would rather there was some intelligence life behind a ton of metal hurtling down the road. See, security through obscurity does work!
BTW - here in Britain, it is normal to drive a "stick-shift". You can get automatic cars, but they are rare; if you only have a licence for an automatic, you can't drive a manual transmission. There are also several makes of car which are manual but have an automatic clutch.
Slashdot Mirror
I take your points, but I think you miss mine.
I don't value entertainment *that* highly (at £24 a day, or whatever). But for high-quality, ownership of an Episode or Season, I think it's a fairly reasonable price. Don't forget that people, by and large, are willing to pay quite large amounts per hour for ownership (look at sales of DVDs and VHSs)
Is your $4/24 four dollars a day or four dollars for every twenty-four hours you watch? There's the difference.
Not for first run free to air stuff. But for a permanent high-resolution (well, higher than analoug transmission/VHS) I think it's a reasonable price.
Consider, you pay, what, £4 - £5 for a 100 minute movie?
£80 for a season of Buffy on DVD?
And, when you watch "free" TV, you ARE paying for it. You pay via the constant innteruptions (aka adverts), cable bill, licence fee, the guide that tells you what's on etc.
I'd love to know how much advertisers pay per viewer - 'cos I'd happily pay a modest amount to watch a TV show sans adverts.
If I want music I'll either
a) buy it,
b) borrow it from a friend,
c) search for it.
What are the chances that the stranger I sit next to on the bus has the missing track from "The Beatles Jam With Elvis CD12" that I so desperatley want?
What's to stop someone renaming their old Britney Spears mp3s as "Next Boy Band Craze" and leeching for free?
Essentially, you might just walk into HMV buy the CDs you want and then return them under a spurious excuse.
I'd love to pay a fair price for music and, yes, the conventional method prevents me from doing this. But building a device to leech from everyone around me isn't the answer. Getting the people at the record companies to change their attitude would be a more useful project.
uuuhhhh - one slight problem with that. When you (through your elected officials) sold off the public airspace to the highest bidders, you told them they could do pretty much what they wanted.
But, hey, they paid you (well, really your elected officials) such a lot of money, that it must have been worth it. Right?
My apologies for the misunderstanding. The moral of the story is not to post while cooking dinner.
As for the streaming issue, let's face it, if you stream it it can be saved. And, if it's popular, it will be.
> This means that those commercials get aired again.
Very bad idea! What if the advert contains a time limited offer? A product that is no longer available? A product that has since been proven to cause cancer in chipmunks?
Much better that either
1) The adverts are contemporary and suitable for the region (ie Brits get British advert, Germans get German etc)
2) For a higher fee you get the program ad-free.
I figure that it takes about an hour (min) to get a half hour TV show, including searching, downloading etc.
On (UK) minimum wage that's ~£4. How much does an programme get per person currently in the terms of advertising money?
Well, an entire VHS season of Buffy is about £60 for 22 episodes. About £2.72 per episode. So, the question is, if you ignore tape manufacturing costs etc, how litte would the company have to charge to get people to download the ep from them rather than from Kazaa?
50p? I think less that £1 for a half hours entertainment is fairly reasonable and would cut down a whole slew of piracy. Remember, piracy occurs because it's cheaper and quicker to pirate than to go legit.
A few years ago at Disney's EPCOT centre, I tried out the "Brain Skiing" game by Mind Drive. It was freakishly accurate.
e .h tml
CNN from 1996 (wow - needs a fast 486!)
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9609/18/mind.drive/
Another article about the company
http://www.abilitymagazine.com/seymour_minddriv
The company's website
http://www.other90.com/
If you don't trust me to read what you send, why are you sending it?
It's not you I don't trust, it's the Internet. I use receipts to verify that the mail has actually arrived safely and/or that the mail box is being used.
I don't use 'em often, but when I do it's a useful feature.
I hate spam. I also hate having to go and check each individual program's webpage to see if they've updated. I hate having to use online price guides to see if what I want is cheap. I hate giving my email addy out to people who provide this service because they often get sold.
For a few selected parties, this could be a good idea. And it may just stop those stupid "MS will give you $200 if you forward this mail" twats.
What I do now is give my email address in the form of somecompany.tld@mydomain.tld - I've caught a few people out on their privacy policy and once an addy gets too much mail *poof* it's gone.
So, yeah, if someone could gaurantee that my addy is safe when I sign up for something that would be just dandy - for now I'll just keep track of who gets my address.
Stupid Hollywood shit, I can't stand watching most films nowadays
Then don't watch films from Hollywood! There are pleanty of films from Britain, France, India etc. etc.
Broaden your horizons - don't just eat what the commercials force feed you.
>Unless the DMA itself is sending out the spam (not likely), they have to make the list
>available to spammers. How else would the list work?
Marketer sends mail (with attached "To:" list) to account24234234@do-not-contact-list.[url].com
Progrm strips out any names contained in the To: list that are also on their "no email" list.
Marketing info gets sent only to those who haven't said they don't want it.
That's how it works in some companies I've worked for - if people have supplied their mailing info for warranties etc but don't want to receive marketing.
Of course, I doubt it would work for spam. Spammers won't use such a service.
(no need to mod this - just answering the guy's question)
The original article is placed in the "oddly enough" category. A category featuring tales of see-through clothes, sex shops and bigamy.
Methinks they got the kid on work experience to file this one.
It doesn't make good technology accessible. Look at something like a Palm Piolt. It is (for the conventional) user, impossible to modify the underlying OS or the UI. This is a GOOD thing. People should not mess with what they don't understand. Just because you have a body, it doesn't automatically follow that you know exactly what sort of drugs to take, what exercise regime to follow or how best to educate yourself.
Fine - let people configure their system to some degree. But when it comes to meddling with things that change the fundamental operation of their machine, leave it to those who understand what they are doing.
Considering that most non-geek/tech people barely see the need for palm pilots
Yet how many see the need to scribble things down on post-it notes? How many carry around shopping lists?
The Palm Pilot has more functionality than Post-It Notes and filofaxes combined. But it does require a shift in the way we work, and a complicated shift at that.
Make the Palm Pilot as easy to use as paper and pen (or even easier!) and the problem goes away.
Also, will there be some sort of backlash against technology once it is integrated literally into the fabric of our lives?
No. There may be some whinings from the same people who claim that climbing down from the trees was a bad idea, but these changes will happen too gradually to generate much protest. The analogue mobile phone debued in the early 1980s - today 2/3 of adults in the UK have a mobile! There is a little backlash (concern over saftey/costs/overwork) but the majority see the wonderful simplication (my address book is my phone!) while keeping the existing methodology.
Technology will creep along and get to a state where, if done correctly, could streamline our lives without having to change our working paradigms.
Slashdot does display the year the article was published. Check your preferences.
Aug 3, (2000? 1999? was published in 1999
Part of the problem is advertising revenue. If you have to look at 5 pages, you have to look at 5 adverts.
Another, more journalistically useful, feature allows the editor to see which stories are actually being read. There have been studies (and I'll try and post the links later) which show how much people don't read on a website. If you can see that only 5% of people reading the first page bother reading all the way to the end of an article - you can generate some useful feedback to your writers. If everything is on one page, you don't know how much of the page is being read.
I guess I was just blinded by the thought of all those 42s and the smell of brandy custard!
Shame on you moderators for modding me up without checking my mathematics!
What's cool? Even Moore's Law eventually gets trumped by the laws of physics. In a few years, the current method of packing ever greater numbers of transistors onto a chip will hit a wall. But a technology called Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography may break that barrier. Intel estimates that EUVL chips will boast 400 million transistors -- about ten times more than the Pentium 4's 42 million.
Sooooo...
(42 * 2)^n = 400
n = 3.3 lots of 18 months
3.3 * 18 = ~60 months
60 / 12 = 5 years
When's it coming? In three to five years.
Move along people... nothing to see...
I like this system because it allows users to decide what domains are valuable
What if a company wants a domain name, but their competitor buys it up because the competitor has more cash?
McDonald's Cafe (est 1935) surely has as valid a claim to McDonalds.* as the American "meat"inabun company? Yet the big corporation can uses its cast financial clout to dispence with the competition.
Terry
You can't write a letter on your CD player, and you can't browse the Internet on your gameboy.
:-(
True - but you can do incredibly complicated things on them. "Legend of Zelda" is just as difficult as writing a letter - it's just difficult in a different way.
As for instant messanging, take a look at something like Trillian - all the features of the popular IM programs, none of the bloat. One of the things I love about Office 2k is the ability to hide the features that I never use; reducing the non-useful options is the first step to usability.
it's the fact that it is genuinely HARD to come up with an interface sufficiently generic to do all these things, yet still be comprehensible
Actually, while is is tricky and requires a lot of user testing and feedback - it's not that hard when you consider the rewards. The main problem at the moment is people are more concerned with the "look and feel" and the general asthetics rather than if the interfaces maps to a users mental model of the program.
Does anyone else want to take part in a project to design a new interface for computers?
Yup! Could be a very interesting project. I think it would be wonderful to have a logically similar l&f interface that could map onto any application. KDE (from what little I've seen of it) does have a very buggy implementation of it - the control panel allows you to specify if your buttons should display Icons, text or both. Unfortunatles, not all buttons have text associated with them
Terry
britguy
@ ottawa. com
Hell, you'd have to be a complete moron to not understand the clock setting instructions on my 5 year old Sony VCR.
Sony, to their credit invest as much beleif in HF as Microsoft.
The trouble is getting Joe Dipshit to actually READ the friggin manual, it's not like it's particularly hard...
(emphasis added)
There's the rub - it shouldn't be hard at all. Infact, why should I need to use a manual to do something as set the time. On my cheap watch I turn the bezel forward - the time moves forward. I turn the bezel back - the time moves backwards.
Why can't a VCR be that simple?
Just the sort of bigoted ignorance of HCI/Human-Factors that are holding back computers (and Linux particularly).
How hard is it to operate a Gameboy? Cart in, switch flicked. That's it!
CD player - CD in, button pressed. Music!
I don't want to have to drop to a command line to do play my mp3s on my digital hifi. I don't want to even *see* my VCR flashing <blink>12:00</blink> at me - let alone figure out a poorly translated Japanese user manual and try and set the damn thing.
That's what they are talking about. People don't want to have to fight with their toys just to get them to work. Flick a switch and off they go.
Terry
For everyone with Lynx! Printer friendly version.
Wot? No ads?
Tryfen
Another good reason why everyone should drive on the left, like the British :-)
The problem is, your user doesn't have a functional mental model of how the car works.
I know nothing really about synchromesh - what I do know is that pushing down the clutch (conveniently the pedal nearest the gearstick) the cogs move away from the gears allowing me to change them. I don't really understand anti-lock braking systems - I know the harder I press on the middle peddle, the harder the brakes press on the wheels.
The car is fairly intuitive iff you have a reasonable mental model. There are a few improvments that could certainly be made to its interface - but I would rather there was some intelligence life behind a ton of metal hurtling down the road. See, security through obscurity does work!
BTW - here in Britain, it is normal to drive a "stick-shift". You can get automatic cars, but they are rare; if you only have a licence for an automatic, you can't drive a manual transmission. There are also several makes of car which are manual but have an automatic clutch.