You've got to be kidding. iOS attracts people who don't want an OS, they just want a predictable reaction to actions performed over and over again, no matter how time consuming. This is hardly my definition of a "power user".
At least he was just a grasping, greedy meglomanical fascist, and I didn't need to hear public proclamations of his sexual orientation or just how much he was going to pooch his family in his will when he kicks off. Now this. Honestly, you idiot, I don't care about any of your thoughts on any of these topics. You seems to think that because you're the world's most publicly rich gay man, that gives you cred. Pfft.
Animals by the thousands are being killed every hour to keep the meat machine going (I eat meat), so this shouldn't be a problem. What you need to do to guarantee a simple, virtually foolproof method of execution is a variation on a single bullet to the head. Russians have been doing that for years - no suffering or lingering, just ending the life by a shredding of the centre of everything that allows what we consider a person to be aware. The end. Hanging is a leftover from older methods of torture, the electric chair was a political decision, same as the gas chamber. Those two are positively absurd as machines to end human life - one is some sort of horror show to see how much torturing you can do via overloading the nervous system and frying the body, the other a variation on suffocation - generally considered to be one of the worst ways to go. The firing squad is a formalized lottery to protect the "blame" for the death by multiplying the possibility of failure and hoping the numbers crunch out right. The guillotine is a technology update on a reasonably sound principle which worked for years as a quick termination but sadly still has some notable failures. All of these are about methods of trying to make the notion of the state killing an individual somehow more "humane" or acceptable. Hypocrisy. Do I personally think the state should be killing people as policy? Nope. Just pointing out the obvious. One bullet to the brain will kill a person instantly.
Speaking as a born and bred Canuck, you are exactly right. Within a day, two messages came forth from the powers that be: it's not illegal to spock a fiver, and this, which I would categorize as a passive aggressive mother's request that you are welcome to keep practising your trombone but I've got this headache that shoots right up and through my temples. Just wait until your father gets home!
There seems to be a confusion of "freedom of speech" and the rights of a provider to decide for themselves what they wish to propagate. I certainly wouldn't suggest that anyone be "forced" to take down videos, but if a provider has a video showing someone being burned alive, if they decide that those two words are sufficient to convey the horror of the act without needing to show the act itself, I totally defend their right to withhold it. We're being assaulted on all sides by media reporting acts of violence more than ever before, and with more immediacy than history has ever seen. Beheading, lynching, torture, water boarding, all of those terrible things that humans have done to each other over it's entire history, have never been more available to see in graphic detail by so many. This used to be the lot of people who had to go fight, now the whole family can watch it. I'm not arguing for taking a step back, but I would like to point out that seeing a horrific video isn't going to suddenly open my eyes to the world's horror, and that government and media brainwashing of the masses is just as prevalent, if not moreso, than it was when I was a kid in the 70's. All they tend to do is desensitize the viewer. Blindly shrieking "freedom of speech!" doesn't make torture porn news reports more acceptable, nor does it mean that the average viewer is woefully undereducated in what is actually going on in the world.
Nothing's perfect, but it depends mightily on your line of work. I work in VFX where the age tends to be low and plugging into your music when you need to focus on your shot is extremely common. Otherwise it's more about being different from a warren of disconnected offices rather than always better or worse. I haven't worked from a sealed office in many many years and I don't miss it in the slightest. For the record, I'm not young.:-)
It's evolution - either it survives or it doesn't, users will cave or they won't. MS will bring back the start menu or they won't - this can be applied to pretty much everything. So yeah, vote with your wallet, that's *all* MS cares about, like any other corporation. If there's some seriously flawed security issues in the implementation, make it public so users enjoying the service can be informed. But a "hell no we won't go... ONLINE!" flashmob? Please. Let the natural order decide and if it grinds your gears all that much best to buy an apple orchard and keep the local kids out of it - better use of your time. I use steam all the time, a PS3 less so, I get some value from being connected, but it's nice to know if I wanted to I have offline mode with steam. MS will likely give me less choice so I probably won't invest.
Apart from genuinely broken progress paradigms, I think users have the expectation that progress gives them a meaningful representation of 'time remaining'. That is really hard to determine, due to all the variables mentioned in this thread. I am in my xen space if I am 1. Reasonably warned ahead of time that the process might take as much as xx minutes, and 2. The indicator is actually giving me feedback that shit is happening, as opposed to "I'm stuck". Given the range of hardware and possible combinations of installed software, I don't think there's a problem at all if I get those two pieces of information.
This is basically that book, using lights instead of scent detection. I think the scent angle has more promise, doesn't need LOS, but then again you're at the mercy of air currents. Oh, and we're all doomed, m'kay?
It's a fun read, btw. While the characters are formulaic, Suarez is one of those rare authors that doesn't talk down to his audience when it comes to science.
You really think it means nothing that a CEO of a major corporation(and countless other CEOs and business leaders) do something like this? I know, not to you personally, obviously, but this is how trends and perceptions are started and propagated. The story is about how screwed RIM is, and I think this is a valid thing for them to be worried about. Sure, RIM might possibly survive as a hardcore business technology if they get their act together and focus on that rather than poorly attempting to be 'cool', but just because you're disdainful of 'shallow' features like social media(which for many businesses is increasingly critical) and whipping out your phone and showing a client an awesome new game/learning tool/organization tool and impressing the hell out of them, and also loosening up the atmosphere to boot, doesn't mean others do too. It's less about shame and more about staying current.
My speculation is, someone screwed up, big time. Arguing stealth as a reason for running into a friendly is like arguing a running back plowed into his teammate carrying the ball because he's supposed to be fast.
When I first saw ads for Paperwhite, I was sort of meh, I've been using my Transformer Prime/Razr to read books, my Kindle went to my wife. Why another gadget? This notice made me look again...and I'm betting I'll never find a reason to want to actually root it. Just the fact that root-ability is out there attracts a segment of the demographic. I'm thinking I want one of these now...
In the VFX community, you pretty much stray from 2.6 at your peril, and certainly 3.x is a no-fly option if you want to stay 'current' with the latest apps. It's incredibly frustrating, since the previous 'standard', if you could call it that, was TCL, and python is better on so many levels...but this has tainted it mightily.
You know, it's a little disappointing to see the snide comments suffixed with variations of 'my 8 year old could have done that'. It just shows an ignorance of the design process, which has nothing to do with the simplicity or complexity of the final result. I'm not a big fan of the final result - there's nothing wrong with expressing a love or hate for the direction - but please don't belittle the difficulty of the challenge of taking a very old, established identity and updating it after a quarter century of imprinting itself on the public consciousness. It's hard work. Not only do you have to distill numerous directions from the client and please yourself, but I can imagine navigating the labyrinth of MS approvals must have been a nightmare.
I think that compared to the complete misfire that is Win8, the new logo is a blinding success.
...because it's subjective. My story - I had a Xoom and bought a Kindle...and I started reading fiction again, which I had forsaken and just couldn't get into on the Xoom because of the form factor. Kindle was perfect, I loved e-ink and the closeness to print. Then I got a Transformer Prime...and I gave my Kindle to my wife! I use the Transformer for all reading - fiction, graphic, technical, pdfs... I simply liked the convenience of all-in-one. The form factor just got 'good enough' for me to put up with that little more weight to have all my stuff on one device. I would imagine the new Nexus 7 would fit that bill even moreso. No-one was more surprised than I - I really liked the Kindle, but the multi-use and lack of yet another device to lug around won me over. So, FWIW.
Btw I left Apple out of this since we don't touch that stuff in our house.:) I'm sure the ipad is a solid ereader.
The important thing is that there was something for people to whine about, and exclaim how much better they could have done it. I keep forgetting half of Slashdot 'culture' is about trying to upstage every living thing on the planet, as opposed to, oh I don't know, maybe just revelling in a major achievement for the human race?
Honestly, *every* company out there has people in positions of power that halt things that 'suck'. Gates killed the MS ebook reader in the cradle. The issue is whether they're right or wrong(in the context of making a profitable product). The only reason Jobs/Apple is being perceived any differently is the godlike aura cast around him by media and the Faithful and their incredible success.
Slow news day? Based on recent drop tests, apple apparently doesn't 'get' selling a reliable product that doesn't break at the first torture test, whereas Google does. Who the hell cares about a bunch of clumsy YouTube un boxers looking like... clumsy YouTube un boxers? This sort of non-news ends up being a chuckle at next year's big Google event as 'oh yeah, we made the box easier to open, too...'
It's always amused me that 'religious' gets immediately translated to 'family friendly'. Given the divisive bullshit being generally spouted, it couldn't be farther from the truth.
It's a gimmick, it's like 3D movies and internet-enabled television. While there might be a few success stories(Avatar, Hugo), there are mostly failures(most 3D movies and almost all 'smart' tv). That doesn't mean the success stories have no value, nor does it mean that there won't be more, but does the average reader want literature in the form of a reference work? Nope, just like the vast majority of movie goers don't want the hassle and extra expense of 3D, and the *extremely* vast majority of television buyers just want a great picture and shrug when someone tells them they can share their movie watching habits on twitter at the click of about 5 buttons. It's a format in search of an audience, and has been found wanting. It also complete ignores the fact that the entire point of literature is to chain together words in such an order that it can cause a universal reaction in an audience. All art seeks that universal experience. When you turn it into a wikipedia session, it might be interesting, but that doesn't make it either writing or popular.
This isn't intended to belittle any rare exceptions. It's just that, like evolution, the audience has voted. It's not thriving.
Yup. Geeks are the vast minority. People are happy with "good enough ". As mentioned elsewhere, the problem is the writing, and to be more accurate, which writers get the money. When you write a series proposal or bible, you damned well better have a phrase near the beginning along the lines of "think Battlestar Galactica meets The Smurfs " if you want to get green lit. Producers want a known entity that will guarantee profit, not something unknown or "new" that might challenge an audience. Or, god forbid, might take more than 4 episodes to be in the top 20.
But as a reality check, pointing out poor television is like shooting fish in a barrell. There's *always* been crap on tv. As far as quality shows, there's never been more amazing stuff on television, perhaps the early experimental days excepted. Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, American Horror Story (by the guys that did Glee, no less!), despite your personal opinion on these and other shows, they are quality stuff. The issue is the technology has created a world where it's insanely inexpensive to generate fodder about real life teen moms and fat people losing weight and delivering it to your living room for pennies a day (as part of a larger subscription package, of course). So, in a way, technology enabled this in the first place. That doesn't mean he's right, though, tv is broken, and will break further while the internet allows people to watch and pay for just what they want, when they want it. The current model can't hold up, and in fact networking the tv experience might just be a great thing for whatever tv evolves into. You will want that word of mouth information, from consumers like yourself, to guide your habits, just like I wouldn't dream of buying a coffeemaker without some googling first.
More about media attention than the two men...
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 2
...and there's nothing wrong with that. The point to me wasn't so much about 'who was better or more influential', it was clearly about the fact that mass media was utterly swamped, to the point of nausea on my part anyway, with Jobs 'retrospectives' and commentaries. Celebrating that this other man who so recently passed was in many ways more influential on the 'guts' of IT, ostensibly what the readers on slashdot would care more about, is neither disrespectful to Jobs or out of place in any way.
I thought all this was solved over a decade ago? The odd circumstances(incredibly high localized heat, feet and lower legs frequently unburned, the oily smoke on the ceiling but the room not properly catching fire, etc) was easily duplicated with dead animals and essentially showed that despite the water content in a mammal, it's the *fat* that acts as a fuel source. Essentially, the body behaves as a slow burning candle, with bones or other materials as the wick. All that's odd here is the ignition source, all the 'spooky and unexplained trappings' are good science. In the past, stoves, fireplaces, cancer sticks and other natural oddities such as sparks from a distant fire landing on someone who had recently or was in the process of dying was all you needed to take away the Geraldo angle and just make it a tragic story.
So the examiner failed to find a combustion source - stranger things happen on Castle every week errr...
This is more about whiney, cheap internet bitching than a serious business discussion. Just look at the games industry, it's like movies or writing - you invest years of blood and sweat and either you come out the other end virtually bankrupt (most common), or you rarely get a hit and actually get a decent profit. This doesn't mean the monster distributors don't gobble up much of it, but then without them, you're highly unlikely to be a hit. The Minecrafts are the exception to the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got to be kidding. iOS attracts people who don't want an OS, they just want a predictable reaction to actions performed over and over again, no matter how time consuming. This is hardly my definition of a "power user".
At least he was just a grasping, greedy meglomanical fascist, and I didn't need to hear public proclamations of his sexual orientation or just how much he was going to pooch his family in his will when he kicks off. Now this.
Honestly, you idiot, I don't care about any of your thoughts on any of these topics. You seems to think that because you're the world's most publicly rich gay man, that gives you cred. Pfft.
Animals by the thousands are being killed every hour to keep the meat machine going (I eat meat), so this shouldn't be a problem. What you need to do to guarantee a simple, virtually foolproof method of execution is a variation on a single bullet to the head. Russians have been doing that for years - no suffering or lingering, just ending the life by a shredding of the centre of everything that allows what we consider a person to be aware. The end. Hanging is a leftover from older methods of torture, the electric chair was a political decision, same as the gas chamber. Those two are positively absurd as machines to end human life - one is some sort of horror show to see how much torturing you can do via overloading the nervous system and frying the body, the other a variation on suffocation - generally considered to be one of the worst ways to go. The firing squad is a formalized lottery to protect the "blame" for the death by multiplying the possibility of failure and hoping the numbers crunch out right. The guillotine is a technology update on a reasonably sound principle which worked for years as a quick termination but sadly still has some notable failures. All of these are about methods of trying to make the notion of the state killing an individual somehow more "humane" or acceptable. Hypocrisy.
Do I personally think the state should be killing people as policy? Nope. Just pointing out the obvious. One bullet to the brain will kill a person instantly.
Speaking as a born and bred Canuck, you are exactly right. Within a day, two messages came forth from the powers that be: it's not illegal to spock a fiver, and this, which I would categorize as a passive aggressive mother's request that you are welcome to keep practising your trombone but I've got this headache that shoots right up and through my temples. Just wait until your father gets home!
There seems to be a confusion of "freedom of speech" and the rights of a provider to decide for themselves what they wish to propagate. I certainly wouldn't suggest that anyone be "forced" to take down videos, but if a provider has a video showing someone being burned alive, if they decide that those two words are sufficient to convey the horror of the act without needing to show the act itself, I totally defend their right to withhold it. We're being assaulted on all sides by media reporting acts of violence more than ever before, and with more immediacy than history has ever seen. Beheading, lynching, torture, water boarding, all of those terrible things that humans have done to each other over it's entire history, have never been more available to see in graphic detail by so many. This used to be the lot of people who had to go fight, now the whole family can watch it. I'm not arguing for taking a step back, but I would like to point out that seeing a horrific video isn't going to suddenly open my eyes to the world's horror, and that government and media brainwashing of the masses is just as prevalent, if not moreso, than it was when I was a kid in the 70's. All they tend to do is desensitize the viewer. Blindly shrieking "freedom of speech!" doesn't make torture porn news reports more acceptable, nor does it mean that the average viewer is woefully undereducated in what is actually going on in the world.
Nothing's perfect, but it depends mightily on your line of work. I work in VFX where the age tends to be low and plugging into your music when you need to focus on your shot is extremely common. Otherwise it's more about being different from a warren of disconnected offices rather than always better or worse. I haven't worked from a sealed office in many many years and I don't miss it in the slightest. For the record, I'm not young. :-)
It's evolution - either it survives or it doesn't, users will cave or they won't. MS will bring back the start menu or they won't - this can be applied to pretty much everything. So yeah, vote with your wallet, that's *all* MS cares about, like any other corporation. If there's some seriously flawed security issues in the implementation, make it public so users enjoying the service can be informed. But a "hell no we won't go... ONLINE!" flashmob? Please. Let the natural order decide and if it grinds your gears all that much best to buy an apple orchard and keep the local kids out of it - better use of your time.
I use steam all the time, a PS3 less so, I get some value from being connected, but it's nice to know if I wanted to I have offline mode with steam. MS will likely give me less choice so I probably won't invest.
Apart from genuinely broken progress paradigms, I think users have the expectation that progress gives them a meaningful representation of 'time remaining'. That is really hard to determine, due to all the variables mentioned in this thread. I am in my xen space if I am 1. Reasonably warned ahead of time that the process might take as much as xx minutes, and 2. The indicator is actually giving me feedback that shit is happening, as opposed to "I'm stuck". Given the range of hardware and possible combinations of installed software, I don't think there's a problem at all if I get those two pieces of information.
DT
This is basically that book, using lights instead of scent detection. I think the scent angle has more promise, doesn't need LOS, but then again you're at the mercy of air currents. Oh, and we're all doomed, m'kay?
It's a fun read, btw. While the characters are formulaic, Suarez is one of those rare authors that doesn't talk down to his audience when it comes to science.
You really think it means nothing that a CEO of a major corporation(and countless other CEOs and business leaders) do something like this? I know, not to you personally, obviously, but this is how trends and perceptions are started and propagated. The story is about how screwed RIM is, and I think this is a valid thing for them to be worried about. Sure, RIM might possibly survive as a hardcore business technology if they get their act together and focus on that rather than poorly attempting to be 'cool', but just because you're disdainful of 'shallow' features like social media(which for many businesses is increasingly critical) and whipping out your phone and showing a client an awesome new game/learning tool/organization tool and impressing the hell out of them, and also loosening up the atmosphere to boot, doesn't mean others do too. It's less about shame and more about staying current.
My speculation is, someone screwed up, big time. Arguing stealth as a reason for running into a friendly is like arguing a running back plowed into his teammate carrying the ball because he's supposed to be fast.
When I first saw ads for Paperwhite, I was sort of meh, I've been using my Transformer Prime/Razr to read books, my Kindle went to my wife. Why another gadget? This notice made me look again...and I'm betting I'll never find a reason to want to actually root it. Just the fact that root-ability is out there attracts a segment of the demographic. I'm thinking I want one of these now...
In the VFX community, you pretty much stray from 2.6 at your peril, and certainly 3.x is a no-fly option if you want to stay 'current' with the latest apps. It's incredibly frustrating, since the previous 'standard', if you could call it that, was TCL, and python is better on so many levels...but this has tainted it mightily.
You know, it's a little disappointing to see the snide comments suffixed with variations of 'my 8 year old could have done that'. It just shows an ignorance of the design process, which has nothing to do with the simplicity or complexity of the final result. I'm not a big fan of the final result - there's nothing wrong with expressing a love or hate for the direction - but please don't belittle the difficulty of the challenge of taking a very old, established identity and updating it after a quarter century of imprinting itself on the public consciousness. It's hard work. Not only do you have to distill numerous directions from the client and please yourself, but I can imagine navigating the labyrinth of MS approvals must have been a nightmare.
I think that compared to the complete misfire that is Win8, the new logo is a blinding success.
...because it's subjective. My story - I had a Xoom and bought a Kindle...and I started reading fiction again, which I had forsaken and just couldn't get into on the Xoom because of the form factor. Kindle was perfect, I loved e-ink and the closeness to print. Then I got a Transformer Prime...and I gave my Kindle to my wife! I use the Transformer for all reading - fiction, graphic, technical, pdfs... I simply liked the convenience of all-in-one. The form factor just got 'good enough' for me to put up with that little more weight to have all my stuff on one device. I would imagine the new Nexus 7 would fit that bill even moreso. No-one was more surprised than I - I really liked the Kindle, but the multi-use and lack of yet another device to lug around won me over. So, FWIW.
Btw I left Apple out of this since we don't touch that stuff in our house. :) I'm sure the ipad is a solid ereader.
The important thing is that there was something for people to whine about, and exclaim how much better they could have done it. I keep forgetting half of Slashdot 'culture' is about trying to upstage every living thing on the planet, as opposed to, oh I don't know, maybe just revelling in a major achievement for the human race?
Honestly, *every* company out there has people in positions of power that halt things that 'suck'. Gates killed the MS ebook reader in the cradle. The issue is whether they're right or wrong(in the context of making a profitable product). The only reason Jobs/Apple is being perceived any differently is the godlike aura cast around him by media and the Faithful and their incredible success.
Slow news day? Based on recent drop tests, apple apparently doesn't 'get' selling a reliable product that doesn't break at the first torture test, whereas Google does. Who the hell cares about a bunch of clumsy YouTube un boxers looking like... clumsy YouTube un boxers? This sort of non-news ends up being a chuckle at next year's big Google event as 'oh yeah, we made the box easier to open, too...'
DT
It's always amused me that 'religious' gets immediately translated to 'family friendly'. Given the divisive bullshit being generally spouted, it couldn't be farther from the truth.
Actually, there is a pretty good reason to call it a 'mistake'. You get more press.
It's a gimmick, it's like 3D movies and internet-enabled television. While there might be a few success stories(Avatar, Hugo), there are mostly failures(most 3D movies and almost all 'smart' tv). That doesn't mean the success stories have no value, nor does it mean that there won't be more, but does the average reader want literature in the form of a reference work? Nope, just like the vast majority of movie goers don't want the hassle and extra expense of 3D, and the *extremely* vast majority of television buyers just want a great picture and shrug when someone tells them they can share their movie watching habits on twitter at the click of about 5 buttons. It's a format in search of an audience, and has been found wanting. It also complete ignores the fact that the entire point of literature is to chain together words in such an order that it can cause a universal reaction in an audience. All art seeks that universal experience. When you turn it into a wikipedia session, it might be interesting, but that doesn't make it either writing or popular.
This isn't intended to belittle any rare exceptions. It's just that, like evolution, the audience has voted. It's not thriving.
Yup. Geeks are the vast minority. People are happy with "good enough ". As mentioned elsewhere, the problem is the writing, and to be more accurate, which writers get the money. When you write a series proposal or bible, you damned well better have a phrase near the beginning along the lines of "think Battlestar Galactica meets The Smurfs " if you want to get green lit. Producers want a known entity that will guarantee profit, not something unknown or "new" that might challenge an audience. Or, god forbid, might take more than 4 episodes to be in the top 20.
But as a reality check, pointing out poor television is like shooting fish in a barrell. There's *always* been crap on tv. As far as quality shows, there's never been more amazing stuff on television, perhaps the early experimental days excepted. Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, American Horror Story (by the guys that did Glee, no less!), despite your personal opinion on these and other shows, they are quality stuff. The issue is the technology has created a world where it's insanely inexpensive to generate fodder about real life teen moms and fat people losing weight and delivering it to your living room for pennies a day (as part of a larger subscription package, of course). So, in a way, technology enabled this in the first place. That doesn't mean he's right, though, tv is broken, and will break further while the internet allows people to watch and pay for just what they want, when they want it. The current model can't hold up, and in fact networking the tv experience might just be a great thing for whatever tv evolves into. You will want that word of mouth information, from consumers like yourself, to guide your habits, just like I wouldn't dream of buying a coffeemaker without some googling first.
...and there's nothing wrong with that. The point to me wasn't so much about 'who was better or more influential', it was clearly about the fact that mass media was utterly swamped, to the point of nausea on my part anyway, with Jobs 'retrospectives' and commentaries. Celebrating that this other man who so recently passed was in many ways more influential on the 'guts' of IT, ostensibly what the readers on slashdot would care more about, is neither disrespectful to Jobs or out of place in any way.
I thought all this was solved over a decade ago? The odd circumstances(incredibly high localized heat, feet and lower legs frequently unburned, the oily smoke on the ceiling but the room not properly catching fire, etc) was easily duplicated with dead animals and essentially showed that despite the water content in a mammal, it's the *fat* that acts as a fuel source. Essentially, the body behaves as a slow burning candle, with bones or other materials as the wick. All that's odd here is the ignition source, all the 'spooky and unexplained trappings' are good science. In the past, stoves, fireplaces, cancer sticks and other natural oddities such as sparks from a distant fire landing on someone who had recently or was in the process of dying was all you needed to take away the Geraldo angle and just make it a tragic story.
So the examiner failed to find a combustion source - stranger things happen on Castle every week errr...
This is more about whiney, cheap internet bitching than a serious business discussion. Just look at the games industry, it's like movies or writing - you invest years of blood and sweat and either you come out the other end virtually bankrupt (most common), or you rarely get a hit and actually get a decent profit. This doesn't mean the monster distributors don't gobble up much of it, but then without them, you're highly unlikely to be a hit. The Minecrafts are the exception to the rule.